The Age of Voltaire: The Story of Civilization, Volume IX

by Will Durant

When the individual is freed from these compulsions—as in absolute rule, war, or a crowd—he tends to revert to lawlessness and immorality; and in “most nations morality is now nothing more than a collection of the … precepts dictated by the powerful to secure their authority and to be unjust with impunity.”

In order to love mankind we must expect little from them.… Every man, so long as his passions do not obscure his reason, will always be more indulgent in proportion as he is more enlightened.…

They condemned the Jews not for charging interest on loans but for having begotten Christianity. They dethroned Jehovah as a monster of cruelty, a god of war, the first of the genocides. They laughed at original sin, and the God who had to send himself down to earth as his son, to be scourged and crucified to appease the anger of himself as Father piqued by a woman’s desire for apples or knowledge.

Gibbon related that the philosophes of Paris “laughed at the cautious skepticism of Hume, preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt.”

“To say that the soul will feel, think, enjoy, and suffer after the death of the body is to pretend that a clock shivered into a thousand pieces will continue to strike the hour … and mark the progress of time.”

“If we go back to the beginning we can always find that ignorance and fear have created gods; fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit has adorned or disfigured them; weakness worships them, credulity keeps them alive, custom respects them, tyranny supports them to … serve its own ends.”

The majestic order and regularity of the universe do not suggest to him any supreme intelligence; they are due to natural causes operating mechanically, and require no attribution to a deity who would himself be more inexplicable than the world.

by concentrating human thought upon individual salvation in another world, Christianity deadened civic feeling in this one, leaving men insensitive to the misery of their fellows, and to the injustices committed by oppressive groups and governments.

As for the clergy, let them shift for themselves. Church and state should be strictly separate; religious groups should be treated as voluntary associations, enjoying toleration but no state support; and a wise government will prevent any one religion from intolerance or persecution.

It was natural that he should question the Christian creed, for a religion is intended to quiet rather than excite the intellect, and Voltaire was intellect incarnate, unquiet and unappeased.

Voltaire contradicted himself endlessly because he lived long and wrote much; his opinions were the fluent vision of his mounting years.

that matter should think is no greater miracle than it would be for an immaterial mind to act upon a material body. The soul is merely the life of the body, and dies with it. There is no other divine revelation than nature itself; this is enough, and inexhaustible.

There may be some good in religion, but an intelligent man does not need it as a support to morality; too often, in history, it has been used by priests to bemuse the public mind while kings picked the public pocket.

He called himself a deist, but he was rather a theist: that is, his God was not an impersonal force more or less identical with nature, but a conscious intelligence designing and ruling the world.

He found much that he could accept in non-Christian religions, especially in Confucianism (which was not a religion); but very little in Christian theology pleased him. “I have two hundred volumes on this subject, and, what is worse, I have read them. It is like going the rounds of a lunatic asylum.”

Meditative men, lazy men, men shrinking from the challenges and responsibilities of life, crept into monasteries and infected one another with neurotic dreams of women, devils, and gods. Learned councils assembled to debate whether one absurdity or another should become part of the infallible creed.

consider the various Christian interpretations of the Eucharist: the Catholics profess that they eat God and not bread, the Lutherans eat both God and bread, the Calvinists eat bread but not God;

as he enlarged his experience of human passions he came to admit that no moral code could successfully withstand the primitive force of the individualistic instincts unless it was buttressed by popular belief that the code had its source and sanction in an all-seeing, rewarding, and punishing God.

“Laws watch over known crimes, religion over secret crimes.”

We are obliged to hold intercourse and transact business and mix up in life with knaves possessing little or no reflection, with a vast number of persons addicted to brutality, intoxication, and rapine. You may, if you please, preach to them that the soul of man is mortal. As for myself, I shall be sure to thunder in their ears that if they rob me they will inevitably be damned.

this Supreme Intelligence is known to us only in his existence, not in his nature. “Miserable mortal! If I cannot understand my own intelligence, if I cannot know by what I am animated, how can I have any acquaintance with that ineffable intelligence which visibly presides over the universe?

Voltaire is without question the most brilliant writer that ever lived.

Perhaps he hated too much, but we must remember the provocation; we must imagine ourselves back in an age when men were burned at the stake, or broken on the wheel, for deviating from orthodoxy. We can appreciate Christianity better today than he could then, because he fought with some success to moderate its dogmas and violence.

We can feel the power and splendor of the Old Testament, the beauty and elevation of the New, because we are free to think of them as the labor and inspiration of fallible men. We can be grateful for the ethics of Christ, because he no longer threatens us with hell, nor curses the men and cities that will not hear him.

We can accept a hundred legends as profound symbols or illuminating allegories, because we are no longer required to accept their literal truth. We have learned to sympathize with that which we once loved and had to leave, as we retain a tender memory for the loves of our youth. And to whom, more than to any other one man, do we owe this precious and epochal liberation? To Voltaire.

when a religion consents to reason it begins to die.

Despite all the suppression that Jansenism had suffered, that austere doctrine, the gloomy outcome of Paul’s hardening of Christ’s more gentle Christianity, had captured large sections of the French middle class,

Heaven and utopia are the rival buckets that hover over the well of fate: when one goes down the other goes up; hope draws up one or the other in turn. Perhaps when both buckets come up empty a civilization loses heart and begins to die.

The philosophes rejected nationalism and patriotism on the ground that these emotions narrowed the conceptions of humanity and moral obligation and made it easier for kings to lead their people into war. The article “Patrie” in the Dictionnaire philosophique condemned patriotism as incorporated egotism.

the question whether a moral code unsupported by religion could maintain social order remained unsolved. It is still with us; we live in that critical experiment.

The growth of toleration resulted chiefly from the decline of religious belief; it is easier to be tolerant when we are indifferent.

The Reformation, though it sanctioned intolerance, generated so many sects (several of them strong enough to defend themselves) that intolerance seldom dared go beyond words.

The growing strength of the nationalist state made it more independent of religious unity as a means of maintaining social order. The spread of acquaintance with different civilizations and cults weakened the confidence of each faith in its monopoly of God. Above all, the advances of science made it difficult for religious dogma to proceed to barbarities like the trials of the Inguisition and the executions for witchcraft.

we end as we began, by perceiving that it was the philosophers and the theologians, not the warriors and diplomats, who were fighting the crucial battle of the eighteenth century, and that we were justified in calling hat period the Age of Voltaire.

Because of them our religions can free themselves more and more from a dulling superstition and a sadistic theology, can turn their backs upon obscurantism and persecution, and can recognize the need for mutual sympathy in the diverse tentatives of our ignorance and our hope.

When we cease to honor Voltaire we shall be unworthy of freedom.