The Treatise on Toleration was followed up with a Niagara of pamphlets, histories, dialogues, letters, catechisms, diatribes, squibs, sermons, verses, tales, fables, commentaries and essays, under Voltaire’s own name and under a hundred pseudonyms—“the most astonishing pell-mell of propaganda ever put out by one man.”73 Never was philosophy phrased so clearly, and with such life; Voltaire writes so well that one does not realize that he is writing philosophy. He said of himself, overmodestly, “I express myself clearly enough: I am like the little brooks, which are transparent because they are not deep.”74 And so he was read; soon everybody, even the clergy, had his pamphlets; of some of them 300,000 copies were sold, though readers were far fewer then than now; nothing like it had ever been seen in the history of literature. “Big books,” he said, “are out of fashion.” And so he sent forth his little soldiers, week after week, month after month, resolute and tireless, surprising the world with the fertility of his thought and the magnificent energy of his seventy years. As Helvetius put it, Voltaire had crossed the Rubicon, and stood before Rome.75
He began with a “higher criticism” of the authenticity and reliability of the Bible; he takes much of his material from Spinoza, more of it from the English Deists, most of it from the Critical Dictionary of Bayle (1647–1706); but how brilliant and fiery their material becomes in his hands! One pamphlet is called “The Questions of Zapata,” a candidate for the priesthood; Zapata asks, innocently, “How shall we proceed to show that the Jews, whom we burn by the hundred, were for four thousand years the chosen people of God?”76—and he goes on with questions which lay bare the inconsistencies of narrative and chronology in the Old Testament. “When two Councils anathematize each other, as has often happened, which of them is infallible?” At last, “Zapata, receiving no answer, took to preaching God in all simplicity. He announced to men the common Father, the rewarder, punisher, and pardoner. He extricated the truth from the lies and separated religion from fanaticism; he taught and practised virtue. He was gentle, kindly, and modest; and he was burned at Valladolid in the year of grace 1631.”77
Under the article on “Prophecy” in the Philosophic Dictionary, he quotes Rabbin Isaac’s Bulwark of Faith against the application of Hebrew prophecies to Jesus, and then goes on, ironically: “Thus these blind interpreters of their own religion and their own language, combated with the Church, and obstinately maintained that this prophecy cannot in any manner regard Jesus Christ.”78 Those were dangerous days, in which one was compelled to say what one meant without saying it, and the shortest line to one’s purpose was anything but straight. Voltaire likes to trace Christian dogmas and rites to Greece, Egypt and India, and thinks that these adaptations were not the least cause of the success of Christianity in the ancient world. Under the article on “Religion” he asks, slyly, “After our own holy religion, which doubtless is the only good one, what religion would be the least objectionable?”—and he proceeds to describe a faith and worship directly opposed to the Catholicism of his day. “Christianity must be divine,” he says, in one of his most unmeasured sallies, “since it has lasted 1,700 years despite the fact that it is so full of villainy and nonsense.”79 He shows how almost all ancient peoples had similar myths, and hastily concludes that the myths are thereby proved to have been the inventions of priests: “the first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.” However, it is not religion itself which he attributes to the priests, but theology. It is slight differences in theology that have caused so many bitter disputes and religious wars. “It is not the ordinary people . . . who have raised these ridiculous and fatal quarrels, the sources of so many horrors . . . . Men fed by your labors in a comfortable idleness, enriched by your sweat and your misery, struggled for partisans and slaves; they inspired you with a destructive fanaticism, that they might be your masters; they made you superstitious not that you might fear God but that you might fear them.”80
Let it not be supposed from all this that Voltaire was quite without religion. He decisively rejects atheism;81 so much so that some of the Encyclopedists turned against him, saying, “Voltaire is a bigot, he believes in God.” In “The Ignorant Philosopher” he reasons towards Spinozist pantheism, but then recoils from it as almost atheism. He writes to Diderot:
I confess that I am not at all of the opinion of Saunderson, who denies a God because he was born sightless. I am, perhaps, mistaken; but in his place I should recognize a great Intelligence who had given me so many substitutes for sight; and perceiving, on reflection, the wonderful relations between all things, I should have suspected a Workman infinitely able. If it is very presumptuous to divine what He is, and why He has made everything that exists, so it seems to me very presumptuous to deny that He exists. I am exceedingly anxious to meet and talk with you, whether you think yourself one of His works, or a particle drawn, of necessity, from eternal and necessary matter. Whatever you are, you are a worthy part of that great whole which I do not understand.82
To Holbach he points out that the very title of his book, the System of Nature, indicates a divine organizing intelligence. On the other hand he stoutly denies miracles and the supernatural efficacy of prayer:
I was at the gate of the convent when Sister Fessue said to Sister Confite: “Providence takes a visible care of me; you know how I love my sparrow; he would have been dead if I had not said nine Ave-Marias to obtain his cure.” . . . A metaphysician said to her: “Sister, there is nothing so good as Ave-Marias, especially when a girl pronounces them in Latin in the suburbs of Paris; but I cannot believe that God has occupied himself so much with your sparrow, pretty as it is; I pray you to believe that he has other things to attend to. . . .” Sister Fessue: “Sir, this discourse savors of heresy. My confessor . . . will infer that you do not believe in Providence.” Metaphysician: “I believe in a general Providence, dear Sister, which has laid down from all eternity the law which governs all things, like light from the sun; but I believe not that a particular Providence changes the economy of the world for your sparrow.”83
“His Sacred Majesty, Chance, decides everything.”84 True prayer lies not in asking for a violation of natural law but in the acceptance of natural law as the unchangeable will of God.85
Similarly, he denies free will.86 As to the soul he is an agnostic: “Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.”87 Being an old man, he would like to believe in immortality, but he finds it difficult.
Nobody thinks of giving an immortal soul to the flea; why then to an elephant, or a monkey, or my valet?88 . . . A child dies in its mother’s womb, just at the moment when it has received a soul. Will it rise again foetus, or boy, or man? To rise again—to be the same person that you were—you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; for it is memory that makes your identity. If your memory be lost, how will you be the same man?89 . . . Why do mankind flatter themselves that they alone are gifted with a spiritual and immortal principle? . . . Perhaps from their inordinate vanity. I am persuaded that if a peacock could speak he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail.90