Part 19

I am a puny part of the great whole. Yes; but all animals condemned to live, All sentient things, born by the same stern law, Suffer like me, and like me also die.

The vulture fastens on his timid prey, And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs: All’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while An eagle tears the vulture into shreds; The eagle is transfixed by shaft of man; The man, prone in the dust of battlefield, Mingling his blood with dying fellow-men, Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds. Thus the whole world in every member groans: All born for torment and for mutual death. And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say The ills of each make up the good of all! What blessedness! And as, with quaking voice, Mortal and pitiful, ye cry, “All’s well,” The universe belies you, and your heart Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit.

All dead and living things are locked in strife. Confess it freely--evil stalks the land, Its secret principle unknown to us. Can it be from the author of all good? Are we condemned to weep by tyrant law Of black Typhon or barbarous Ahriman?[75] These odious monsters, whom a trembling world Made gods, my spirit utterly rejects.

But how conceive a God supremely good, Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves, Yet scatters evil with as large a hand? What eye can pierce the depth of his designs? From that all-perfect Being came not ill: And came it from no other, for he’s lord: Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth! O wondrous mingling of diversities! A God came down to lift our stricken race: He visited the earth, and changed it not! One sophist says he had not power to change; “He had,” another cries, “but willed it not: In time he will, no doubt.” And, while they prate, The hidden thunders, belched from underground, Fling wide the ruins of a hundred towns Across the smiling face of Portugal. God either smites the inborn guilt of man, Or, arbitrary lord of space and time, Devoid alike of pity and of wrath, Pursues the cold designs he has conceived. Or else this formless stuff, recalcitrant, Bears in itself inalienable faults; Or else God tries us, and this mortal life Is but the passage to eternal spheres. ’Tis transitory pain we suffer here, And death its merciful deliverance. Yet, when this dreadful passage has been made, Who will contend he has deserved the crown? Whatever side we take we needs must groan; We nothing know, and everything must fear. Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it; The human race demands a word of God. ’Tis his alone to illustrate his work, Console the weary, and illume the wise. Without him man, to doubt and error doomed, Finds not a reed that he may lean upon. From Leibnitz learn we not by what unseen Bonds, in this best of all imagined worlds, Endless disorder, chaos of distress, Must mix our little pleasures thus with pain; Nor why the guiltless suffer all this woe In common with the most abhorrent guilt. ’Tis mockery to tell me all is well. Like learned doctors, nothing do I know. Plato has said that men did once have wings And bodies proof against all mortal ill; That pain and death were strangers to their world. How have we fallen from that high estate! Man crawls and dies: all is but born to die: The world’s the empire of destructiveness. This frail construction of quick nerves and bones Cannot sustain the shock of elements; This temporary blend of blood and dust Was put together only to dissolve; This prompt and vivid sentiment of nerve Was made for pain, the minister of death: Thus in my ear does nature’s message run. Plato and Epicurus I reject, And turn more hopefully to learned Bayle. With even poised scale Bayle bids me doubt. He, wise and great enough to need no creed, Has slain all systems--combats even himself: Like that blind conqueror of Philistines, He sinks beneath the ruin he has wrought.[76] What is the verdict of the vastest mind? Silence: the book of fate is closed to us. Man is a stranger to his own research; He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes. Tormented atoms in a bed of mud, Devoured by death, a mockery of fate. But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes, Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars, Our being mingles with the infinite; Ourselves we never see, or come to know. This world, this theatre of pride and wrong, Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness. With plaints and groans they follow up the quest, To die reluctant, or be born again. At fitful moments in our pain-racked life The hand of pleasure wipes away our tears; But pleasure passes like a fleeting shade, And leaves a legacy of pain and loss. The past for us is but a fond regret, The present grim, unless the future’s clear. If thought must end in darkness of the tomb, All will be well one day--so runs our hope. All _now_ is well, is but an idle dream. The wise deceive me: God alone is right. With lowly sighing, subject in my pain, I do not fling myself ’gainst Providence. Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone, The sunny ways of pleasure’s genial rule; The times have changed, and, taught by growing age, And sharing of the frailty of mankind, Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom, I can but suffer, and will not repine.

A caliph once, when his last hour had come, This prayer addressed to him he reverenced: “To thee, sole and all-powerful king, I bear What thou dost lack in thy immensity-- Evil and ignorance, distress and sin.” He might have added one thing further--hope.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Probably adopting a name which is known to have existed among his mother’s ancestors. But it is curious that “Voltaire” is an anagram of his name--Arouet l (e) j (eune)--if u be read as v and j as i.

[2] The condition of Toulouse will be best understood from a description of these processions which Voltaire gives elsewhere. In front walked the shoemakers, bearing the authentic head of a prince of Peloponnesus, who had been Bishop of Toulouse _during the lifetime_ of Christ. After them came the slaters, carrying the bones of the fourteen thousand children slain by Herod; the old-clothes dealers, with a piece of the dress of the Virgin Mary; and the tailors, with the relics of St. Peter and St. Paul.--J. M.

[3] I know only two instances in history of fathers being charged with killing their children on account of religion. The first is the case of the father of St. Barbara, or Ste. Barbe. He had had two windows made in his bath-room. Barbara, in his absence, had a third made, to honour the Holy Trinity. She made the sign of the cross on the marble columns _with the tip of her finger_, and it was deeply engraved on the stone. Her son came angrily upon her, sword in hand; but she escaped through a mountain, which opened to receive her. The father went round the mountain and caught her. She was stripped and flogged, but God clothed her in a white cloud. In the end her father cut off her head. So says the _Flower of the Saints_.

The second case is that of Prince Hermenegild. He rebelled against his father, the king, gave him battle (in 584), and was beaten and killed by an officer. As his father was an Arian, he was regarded as a martyr.

[4] Voltaire nobly conceals his work. It was he who, from his exile near Geneva, sent for young Calas, made searching inquiries in Toulouse, and instructed the Parisian lawyers to appeal. He enlisted the interest of English and French visitors at Geneva, and there was “a rivalry in generosity between the two nations.” After a long struggle with the Toulouse authorities the sentence was reversed at Paris amid general enthusiasm. The King very generously pensioned the widow and the other victims.--J. M.

[5] Thanks to Voltaire and to the progress of Rationalism at Paris, she was received with the greatest enthusiasm and generosity.--J. M.

[6] In ancient Rome the _devoti_ were those who devoted themselves to the good of the Republic.

[7] The Catholic Church did not discover the infallibility of the Pope until 1870, since which date his lips have remained, officially, closed.--J. M.

[8] A thrust at the Jesuits.--J. M.

[9] The Catholic League for the suppression of Protestantism in France, in the second half of the sixteenth century, led to much war and bloodshed.--J. M.

[10] In his treatise _Dieu et les Hommes_ Voltaire, after a very incomplete survey of history, puts the number of victims of religious wars and quarrels at 9,468,800.--J. M.

[11] To marry within certain degrees of kindred, etc.--J. M.

[12] An exaggerated account of the Ulster rebellion.--J. M.

[13] This position could be held in a modified form in regard to ancient Greece. See E. S. P. Haynes’s work, _Religious Persecution_.--J. M.

[14] The Jews had no right to inflict death after Judæa had become a Roman province, but the authorities at times overlooked these punishments of blasphemy.

[15] Ch. 25. Voltaire has in this followed ecclesiastical custom. The word in Suetonius is not “Christo,” but “Chresto,” and therefore the passage reads, in English: “Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome for their constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus.” As Chrestus was not an uncommon name at Rome, there is no need to apply the passage to Christ in any way.--J. M.

[16] The passage of Tacitus (_Annals_, xv., 44) is very generally rejected as an interpolation.--J. M.

[17] I omit many of the lengthy notes, in which Voltaire, with veiled irony and a bland pretence of orthodoxy--for the reason of which see the Introduction,--throws doubt on the persecutions. The freer scholarship of the nineteenth century has so far justified his scepticism that few are now interested in the fairy tales of the early “persecutions.” There was only one general repression of the Christians, under Diocletian. See the latest editions of Gibbon, and Robertson’s _Short History of Christianity_ (pp. 130-140).--J. M.

[18] Voltaire’s irony and pretence of orthodoxy must again, as in so many places, be taken into account. You do not, as a French commentator says, incur death in French law for throwing a piece of wood into the Rhone.--J. M.

[19] A beautiful youth loved by the Emperor Hadrian.--J. M.

[20] If they had been content to preach and write, they would probably have been left in peace; but the refusal to take the oaths, in a constitution in which much use was made of oaths, exposed them to suspicion. The refusal to take part publicly in the feasts in honour of the emperors was a sort of crime at a time when the empire was constantly stirred by revolutions. The insults they offered to the established cult were punished with severity and barbarism, and it was an age of rough and violent ways.

[21] _The Deaths of the Persecutors_, ch. iii.--a very untrustworthy work. It is doubtful if Lactantius wrote it. There was no general persecution under Domitian, but certain high officials suffered, like the rest of Rome, from his excessive suspicion.--J. M.

[22] Voltaire, who knew only the late history of Egypt, gives a lengthy note to explain his disdain. Archæological research has altered all that.--J. M.

[23] Not wholly unknown. We know that the mother of Galerius, an ignorant peasant, was stung by the insults of Christian officers in the palace, and inflamed her son, who persuaded Diocletian to take action. The action was mild at first; but Christians tore down the imperial edict, and the palace was twice set on fire. Then Diocletian yielded.--J. M.

[24] The persecution under Diocletian began in 303.--J. M.

[25] The Jesuit Busenbaum, edited by the Jesuit La Croix, says that “it is lawful to kill a prince excommunicated by the Pope, in whatever country he may be found, because the universe belongs to the Pope, and he who accepts this commission does a charitable deed.” This proposition, drawn up in the antechambers of hell, has done more than anything to raise France against the Jesuits. [They were expelled from France in 1767.--J. M.]. They endeavoured to justify themselves by pointing out that the same conclusions are found in St. Thomas and other Dominicans. As a matter of fact, St. Thomas of Aquin, the “angelic doctor” and “interpreter of the divine will”--such are his titles,--says that an apostate prince loses his right to the crown, and should no longer be obeyed (Bk. II., Part II., quest. xii.); that the Church may punish him with death; that the Emperor Julian was tolerated only because the Christians were weak (same passage); that it is right to kill any heretic (same place, questions xi. and xii.); that those are laudable who free a people from a tyrannical prince, etc. We must admit that Gerson, Chancellor of the University, went farther than St. Thomas, and the Franciscan Jean Petit much farther than Gerson.

[26] It was not defined by the Church until 1854.--J. M.

[27] This section is somewhat abridged, as much of it is better developed in preceding works.--J. M.

[28] Voltaire’s eagerness to show the tolerance of the Jews is purely paradoxical and ironical. His sole object in this section is to expose the crudities of the Old Testament, under the cloak of orthodox theological reasoning. Hence he omits the savage laws of _Deuteronomy_ against foreign cults.--J. M.

[29] It may be useful to recall that, as earlier pages show, Voltaire did not believe in the “next world.” Much of the phrasing of this part is, when it is not ironical, merely an _argumentum ad hominem_.--J. M.

[30] See that excellent work, _The Manual of the Inquisition_.

[31] This horrible doctrine must not wholly be relegated to the eighteenth century and the Middle Ages. It is still solemn Catholic doctrine, defined by the Vatican Council in 1870, that no atheist or agnostic, whether in good or bad faith, can be saved.--J. M.

[32] Daughter of the Emperor Diocletian. Not executed by Christians.--J. M.

[33] The homily is supposed to have been delivered in London.--J. M.

[34] Greece threw off the Turkish yoke in 1827.--J. M.

[35] In the Greek, Latin, and modern Bibles it is “firmament.” In the Hebrew text it is “expanse,” though other passages show that it refers to the solid vault or firmament of the Babylonians.--J. M.

[36] The Rev. Professor Sayce regards _Job_ as a piece of north Arabian or Edomite literature, borrowed by the Jews.--J. M.

[37] Ninety years old (_Genesis_ xvii., 17).--J. M.

[38] A shaft at the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.--J. M.

[39] See the _Acts of St. Thecla_, written in the first century by a disciple of St. Paul, and recognised as authentic by Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Gregory of Nazianzum, St. Ambrose, etc.

[40] Spurious _Acts of the Apostle_ xxi.

[41] 1 _Corinthians_ ix., 4, 5, and 7.

[42] _Thessalonians_ iv., 16 and 17.

[43] _Acts_ xxi.

[44] Matthew gives five thousand men and five loaves in chapter xiv., and four thousand men and five loaves in chapter xv. Apparently, they are two different miracles, which makes in all nine thousand men and at least nine thousand women. If you add nine thousand children, the total number of diners amounts to twenty-seven thousand--which is considerable.

[45] A pun of which the point is lost in English. The French phrase, to make a man “swallow the gudgeon,” means to “gull” a man. Voltaire turns the “two little fishes” of the gospel into gudgeons to accommodate his joke.--J. M.

[46] In France, an abbey of which the “abbot” was a kind of absentee landlord. He lived at Paris, with the title and revenue, and left the work to a sub-abbot.--J. M.

[47] The indictment is too severe. The later years of Constantine were marked by silly extravagance, but not debauch. The execution of his father-in-law was justified. His (partial) acceptance of Christianity was earlier than Voltaire supposes, and there is no serious ground for suggesting large payments of money. But it is now beyond question that he put his brother-in-law (Licinius) to death treacherously, had his wife, son, and nephew murdered, and greatly degenerated in later life.--J. M.

[48] No; in the Senate.--J. M.

[49] _Matthew_ xx., 23.

[50] _Matthew_ xx., 26 and 27.

[51] All Christians believe that Jesus was born in a stable, between an ox and an ass. There is, however, no mention of this in the gospels. It was imagined by Justin, and is mentioned by Lactantius, or at least the author of a bad Latin poem on the passions, which is attributed to Lactantius.

[52]

A time by fate appointed was to come, When sea, and earth, and all the realm of heaven Should flame, and ruin seize the world’s great mass.

J. M.

[53] See _Revelation_, Justin, and Tertullian.

[54] In Voltaire’s time, naturally, the relative priority of Indian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian civilisations was quite unknown, and his idea of their relations to each other cannot hold to-day.--J. M.

[55] The famous “Dies iræ,” sung in Catholic funeral services to-day in England.--J. M.

[56] Justin and Tertullian.

[57] _Apostolic Constitutions_, Bk. II., ch. lvii.

[58] _Apostolic Constitutions_, VIII., vi.

[59] See the _History of the Church of Constantinople and Alexandria_, in the Bodleian Library.

[60] _Recognitions_ of St. Clement, Bk. IX., Nos. 32-35.

[61] The pun is lost to readers of the English Bible. In French, as in Syro-Chaldaic and Greek and (approximately) Latin, “Peter” and “rock” are the same word. We have it in “salt-petre.”--J. M.

[62] More than a million species, on modern estimates.--J. M.

[63] As is well known, the word “virgin” is a wilful mistranslation of the text of _Isaiah_. “Girl” is the correct translation.--J. M.

[64] The _kerubim_ (or “cherubim”) of the Old Testament are the winged bulls of the ancient Babylonians, of which there are two fine specimens in the British Museum.--J. M.

[65] Had Voltaire known what the modern archæologist has discovered, he would have added that the age of iron did not even dawn until some centuries after this supposed episode; and iron was not used in the East until about six centuries afterwards.--J. M.

[66] The number recognised in the Church of Rome.--J. M.

[67] The author was thinking, apparently, of Pope Alexander VI. [Note by Voltaire.]

[68] The tortures of the Inquisition.--J. M.

[69] Since the words “it” and “he” are both expressed by the French word “il,” it is not clear whether Voltaire would have spoken of his supreme being as “it” or “he.” I interpret his feeling as carefully as the context permits.--J. M.

[70] Leibnitz taught that material things never acted on each other; the only cause was God. The leaf fell from the tree, when the wind blew, because God had pre-established that coincidence, or harmony, of movements.--J. M.

[71] The allusion is to priests, in their coloured vestments, singing masses for a successful war.--J. M.

[72] Voltaire always candidly faces the problem of evil, and admits that it is inconsistent with infinite power and goodness. In another treatise he makes the bold observation that, since morality is merely a social law regulating the relations of men, it has no application to his isolated “great being.”--J. M.

[73] Well-known Jews in mediæval history.--J. M.

[74] “Sub Deo justo nemo miser nisi mereatur [Under a just God no one is miserable who has not deserved misery.]”--_St. Augustine._

[75] The Egyptian and Persian principles of evil. The problem is discussed in the preceding essay.--J. M.

[76] In a lengthy note Voltaire explains that Bayle never questioned Providence, and that the scepticism in which he follows Bayle is in regard to the source of evil. It will be seen from earlier pages, however, that Voltaire does not ascribe infinite power to his God. The words “all-perfect” and “almighty,” which occur in this poem, are poetic phrases.--J. M.

Transcriber’s Notes

Minor punctuation and spelling errors have been silently corrected and, except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, especially in dialogue, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

Page 107: “Ah, my brethren, the Holy Sprit” changed to “Ah, my brethren, the Holy Spirit”.

Page 115: “those who scruple to commnicate with foreign religions” changed to “those who scruple to communicate with foreign religions”.

Page 136: “patriach of the west” changed to “patriarch of the west”.