And in this earlier mood he rejects also the view that belief in immortality is necessary for morality: the ancient Hebrews were without it, just when they were the “chosen people”; and Spinoza was a paragon of morality.
In later days he changed his mind. He came to feel that belief in God has little moral value unless accompanied by belief in an immortality of punishment and reward. Perhaps, “for the common people (la canaille) a rewarding and avenging God” is necessary. Bayle had asked, If a society of atheists could subsist?—Voltaire answers, “Yes, if they are also philosophers.91 But men are seldom philosophers; “if there is a hamlet, to be good it must have a religion.”92 “I want my lawyer, my tailor, and my wife to believe in God,” says “A” in “A, B, C”; “so, I imagine, I shall be less robbed and less deceived.” “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.”93 “I begin to put more store on happiness and life than on truth”;94—a remarkable anticipation, in the midst of the Enlightenment, of the very doctrine with which Immanuel Kant was later to combat the Enlightenment. He defends himself gently against his friends the atheists; he addresses Holbach in the article on “God” in the Dictionary:
You yourself say that belief in God . . . has kept some men from crime; this alone suffices me. When this belief prevents even ten assassinations, ten calumnies, I hold that all the world should embrace it. Religion, you say, has produced countless misfortunes; say rather the superstition which reigns on our unhappy globe. This is the cruelest enemy of the pure worship due to the Supreme Being. Let us detest this monster which has always torn the bosom of its mother; those who combat it are the benefactors of the human race; it is a serpent which chokes religion in its embrace; we must crush its head without wounding the mother whom it devours.
This distinction between superstition and religion is fundamental with him. He accepts gladly the theology of the Sermon on the Mount, and acclaims Jesus in tributes which could hardly be matched even with the pages of saintly ecstasy. He pictures Christ among the sages, weeping over the crimes that have been committed in his name. At last he built his own church, with the dedication, “Deo erexit Voltaire”; the only church in Europe, he said, that was erected to God. He addresses to God a magnificent prayer; and in the article “Theist” he expounds his faith finally and clearly:
The theist is a man firmly persuaded of the existence of a supreme being as good as he is powerful, who has formed all things . . .; who punishes, without cruelty, all crimes, and recompenses with goodness all virtuous actions . . . . Reunited in this principle with the rest of the universe, he does not join any of the sects which all contradict one another. His religion is the most ancient and the most widespread; for the simple worship of a God preceded all the systems of the world. He speaks a language which all peoples understand, while they do not understand one another. He has brothers from Pekin to Cayenne, and he counts all the sages for his fellows. He believes that religion consists neither in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic, nor in vain shows, but in worship and in justice. To do good is his worship, to submit to God is his creed. The Mohammedan cries out to him, “Beware if you fail to make the pilgrimage to Mecca!”—the priest says to him, “Curses on you if you do not make the trip to Notre Dame de Lorette!” He laughs at Lorette and at Mecca: but he succors the indigent and defends the oppressed.
IX. Voltaire and Rousseau
Voltaire was so engrossed in the struggle against ecclesiastical tyranny that during the later decades of his life he was compelled almost to withdraw from the war on political corruption and oppression. “Politics is not in my line: I have always confined myself to doing my little best to make men less foolish and more honorable.” He knew how complex a matter political philosophy can become, and he shed his certainties as he grew. “I am tired of all these people who govern states from the recesses of their garrets”;95 “these legislators who rule the world at two cents a sheet; . . . unable to govern their wives or their households they take great pleasure in regulating the universe.”96 It is impossible to settle these matters with simple and general formulae, or by dividing all people into fools and knaves on the one hand, and on the other, ourselves. “Truth has not the name of a party”; and he writes to Vauvenargues: “It is the duty of a man like you to have preferences, but not exclusions.”97
Being rich, he inclines towards conservatism, for no worse reason than that which impels the hungry man to call for a change. His panacea is the spread of property: ownership gives personality and an uplifting pride. “The spirit of property doubles a man’s strength. It is certain that the possessor of an estate will cultivate his own inheritance better than that of another.”98
He refuses to excite himself about forms of government. Theoretically he prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographical situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general “men are rarely worthy to govern themselves.” Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. But differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development. “Which is better,” he asks, “a monarchy or a republic?”—and he replies: “For four thousand years this question has been tossed about. Ask the rich for an answer—they all want aristocracy. Ask the people—they want democracy. Only the monarchs want monarchy. How then has it come about that almost the entire earth is governed by monarchs? Ask the rats who proposed to hang a bell about the neck of the cat.”99 But when a correspondent argues that monarchy is the best form of government he answers: “Provided Marcus Aurelius is monarch; for otherwise, what difference does it make to a poor man whether he is devoured by a lion or by a hundred rats?”100
Likewise, he is almost indifferent to nationalities, like a traveled man; he has hardly any patriotism in the usual sense of that word. Patriotism commonly means, he says, that one hates every country but one’s own. If a man wishes his country to prosper, but never at the expense of other countries, he is at the same time an intelligent patriot and a citizen of the universe.101 Like a “good European” he praises England’s literature and Prussia’s king while France is at war with both England and Prussia. So long as nations make a practice of war, he says, there is not much to choose among them.
For he hates war above all else. “War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not color his crime with the pretext of justice.”102 “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”103 He has a terrible “General Reflection on Man,” at the end of the article on “Man” in the Dictionary:
Twenty years are required to bring man from the state of a plant, in which he exists in the womb of his mother, and from the state of an animal, which is his condition in infancy, to a state in which the maturity of reason begins to make itself felt. Thirty centuries are necessary in which to discover even a little of his structure. An eternity would be required to know anything of his soul. But one moment suffices in which to kill him.