Person

Voltaire

Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), the most famous writer of the French Enlightenment. He wrote plays, poems, histories, satires and thousands of letters, and he spent the second half of his life campaigning against the power of the Catholic Church in France. His best-known works are the satire Candide (1759), the Treatise on Toleration (1763) and the Philosophical Dictionary (1764).

Voltaire was a deist, not an atheist. He believed that the order of the universe shows a Creator, much as a clock shows a clockmaker, and he argued against the atheists of his own day. What he attacked was revealed religion: the authority of the Bible, the miracles, the creeds, and above all the church as an institution that persecuted dissenters. His famous line "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" was written to defend belief in God, not to mock it. See Deism for the movement and Deism vs the Christian God for the comparison.

Life

• 1694, born November 21 in Paris, the son of a lawyer. He was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand
• 1717-1718, held in the Bastille for about eleven months over satirical verses. He took the name Voltaire in 1718, after his release
• 1726-1728, imprisoned again briefly after a quarrel with the nobleman Guy-Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, then allowed to leave for England. There he met English writers and absorbed the thought of Isaac Newton and John Locke and the English deists
• 1733-1734, published his Letters Concerning the English Nation in London (1733), then in French as the Lettres philosophiques (1734). The book praised English religious toleration and science, and its last letter took issue with Pascal's Pensées. The French edition was condemned and publicly burned, and Voltaire left Paris
• 1734-1749, lived much of this time at Cirey in Champagne with the mathematician and physicist Émilie du Châtelet. Together they studied the Bible critically and worked on Newton's physics
• 1750-1753, at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, ending in a bitter quarrel
• 1755, settled at Les Délices, a house outside Geneva. In November the Lisbon earthquake struck, and he answered it with a poem
• 1759, published Candide. Late in 1758 he had bought an estate at Ferney, just inside France near the Swiss border, where he lived for most of his last twenty years
• 1761, rebuilt the church at Ferney and put on its front the inscription Deo erexit Voltaire, "Voltaire built this for God"
• 1762-1765, led the campaign to clear the name of Jean Calas
• 1778, returned to Paris in February to a hero's welcome, and died there on May 30. He was refused Christian burial in Paris, and his nephew had his body taken to the abbey of Scellières in Champagne and buried there. In 1791 the revolutionary government moved his remains to the Panthéon

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His deism

Voltaire's religion was natural religion: belief in one God, the Creator, known by reason from the order of the world, together with a moral law written on the conscience. He held this view for his whole adult life, and he defended it in two directions at once, against the church on one side and against the materialist atheists of the French Enlightenment on the other.

The watchmaker. His favourite image for the argument from design was the clock. In Les Cabales (1772) he wrote: "L'univers m'embarrasse, et je ne puis songer / Que cette horloge existe, et n'ait point d'horloger." Roughly: the universe puzzles me, and I cannot think that this clock exists and has no clockmaker. He had used the comparison as early as the 1730s. His admiration for Newton fed it: a universe running by precise mathematical law looked to him like the work of a supreme mathematician. See Teleological Arguments.

"If God did not exist." The famous line comes from his verse Épître à l'auteur du livre des Trois imposteurs (written in the late 1760s; editions date it 1769 or 1770), a reply to an anonymous atheist tract that called Moses, Jesus and Muhammad three impostors. The line in French is "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer." The verse around it calls belief in God "the bridle of the wicked, the hope of the just," and has God say that the avenger of the oppressed is in heaven. In the same verse he wrote that he had always distinguished religion from the miseries that superstition brought. The point is not that God is a useful fiction. It is that belief in a God who judges is so necessary to justice and social order that, even setting the proofs aside, people would need it. The Deism page calls this moral functionalism.

What he denied. Voltaire's God made the world and set its laws, but does not suspend them, did not reveal himself to one chosen nation, did not become incarnate, and does not need priests, sacraments or creeds. Whether this God hears prayer, and whether the soul survives death, Voltaire treated with growing doubt over his life.

"Écrasez l'infâme"

From the early 1760s Voltaire closed many of his private letters with the motto Écrasez l'infâme, "Crush the infamous thing," sometimes shortened to Écr. l'inf. The "infamous thing" was not God. It was fanaticism, superstition and persecution, and above all the Catholic Church as a power that enforced belief by law, censorship and punishment. The motto belongs to his campaign of the 1760s against what he saw as the church's cruelty, and it was aimed at the institution and its dogmas rather than at belief in a Creator.

Lisbon and Candide: the problem of evil

On the morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints' Day, an earthquake, a tsunami and fires destroyed much of Lisbon and killed tens of thousands of people. Estimates vary widely.

Voltaire answered within weeks with the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (written December 1755, published 1756). Its target was philosophical optimism: the view of Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds, and Alexander Pope's line "Whatever is, is right" in the Essay on Man. The poem's main points:

1. Lisbon was not more wicked than Paris or London. The ruin cannot be read as a punishment matched to the sins of its victims
2. "All is well" mocks the sufferer. Telling the dying that their pain serves a general good, or that the world could not have been better, is cold comfort and makes human beings cogs in a machine
3. Our reason cannot see the answer. Human knowledge is too limited to justify the ways of the universe, and honesty should say so

Jean-Jacques Rousseau replied in a letter of August 18, 1756, defending Providence and arguing that particular evils can serve the general good. Rousseau later believed Candide was Voltaire's answer to him.

Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759) carried the attack into satire. Its young hero is taught by the philosopher Pangloss that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and then suffers war, shipwreck, the Lisbon earthquake, the Inquisition and slavery while Pangloss keeps repeating the formula. The book ends with the famous advice that "we must cultivate our garden," a turn from speculation to useful work. See Problem of Evil, Theodicy and Leibniz.

Treatise on Toleration and the Calas affair

In March 1762 Jean Calas, a Protestant merchant of Toulouse, was tortured and broken on the wheel after a court convicted him of murdering his son Marc-Antoine, supposedly to stop him becoming a Catholic. The evidence pointed to suicide. Voltaire took up the case, gathered evidence, wrote pamphlets and pressed the family's appeal in Paris. The sentence was annulled in 1764, and in 1765 Calas was declared innocent after his death.

The Treatise on Toleration (1763) grew out of the case. It argued that persecution for religious belief is contrary to reason, to nature and to the example of Jesus, and that the state has no business compelling consciences. He later took up other victims of religious prosecution as well. These campaigns are the strongest part of his legacy.

The Philosophical Dictionary

The Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (1764, enlarged in later editions) was a small, cheap book of short alphabetical articles on religious and philosophical subjects. It used irony, dialogue and mock-innocent questions to undercut Christian doctrine, the history of the church and the Bible. It was condemned and burned in several places and became one of the most widely read anti-clerical books of the century.

His critique of revelation and the Bible

Voltaire wrote about the Bible for most of his life, in the Philosophical Dictionary, in the mock sermon Sermon des cinquante (early 1760s) and, near the end of his life, in La Bible enfin expliquée (1776), a running commentary on the whole Bible. His case against revelation, stated in its strongest form:

1. A universal God would not reveal himself to one small people. If God is the Creator of all, he would speak to all through reason and conscience, not choose a single nation and leave the rest of humanity in the dark for centuries
2. Miracles would make God inconsistent. God's laws are wise and fixed. A miracle would mean God breaking his own design, as though he had made the world badly and had to repair it
3. The biblical record is not credible. Its chronology, numbers and stories, he argued, conflict with each other and with what was known of ancient history, and Moses could not have written all of the books credited to him
4. The Bible's morality is unworthy of God. He dwelt on the violent episodes of the Old Testament, arguing that a just Creator could not have commanded them. Popular objections such as where Cain got his wife go back in part to him. See Cains Wife Objection
5. Dogma breeds cruelty. The more a church insists on doctrines no reason can verify, the more it must enforce them by force. The history of persecution, from the wars of religion to the case of Calas, was for Voltaire the proof
6. Christianity rests on the credulity of its first hearers. He presented the early church as a movement among the uneducated that later claimed authority it had not earned

The Christian assessment

Voltaire was brilliant, funny and often right about the abuses he attacked. The Christian response grants what is true in his case and answers the rest.

He was right about Calas. The torture and execution of an innocent man in the name of religion was a grave evil, and Christians should say so without hedging. But the case for religious toleration did not begin with Voltaire, and it was not only a secular case. Christian writers had already argued that faith cannot be compelled because it must be freely given, and the New Testament nowhere gives the church the sword. Voltaire's target was a church allied to state power, a thing the Gospels do not command. See Inquisition for the historical record on religious coercion.

Lisbon refutes optimism, not Christianity. Voltaire's poem attacked the claim that everything is already as good as it could be. The Bible does not make that claim. It describes a fallen world in which creation groans, and it denies directly the inference that disaster proves its victims were worse sinners than others:

Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them, think ye that they were offenders above all the men that dwell in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. (Luke 13:4-5, ASV)

Jesus rejects the same "Lisbon was punished for its sins" reasoning Voltaire rejected, and then turns the question from speculation to repentance. The Christian answer to suffering is not that all is well now, but that God has entered suffering in Christ and will set the world right. See Problem of Evil, Problem of Evil, Free Will Defense and Evidential Problem of Evil Defeater.

The problem of evil falls harder on his own God. A deist God designed a world that includes earthquakes, set it running, and does nothing. He offers no redemption, no promise of restoration and no presence with the sufferer. If Lisbon counts against the Christian God, who claims to have acted to defeat evil, it counts more heavily against the clockmaker who only watches.

"Invent him" concedes too much and too little. Voltaire meant the line to defend belief in God. But a God valued chiefly because society needs a judge sounds like a useful projection, the charge Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud later pressed against religion as a whole. Christianity does not rest its case on usefulness. It rests on a public event:

inasmuch as he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead. (Acts 17:31, ASV)

The judge Voltaire thought society needs is, on Christian terms, real, and the evidence offered for him is the resurrection. See Minimal Facts Argument.

Creation speaks, but not to the guilty conscience. Christians agree with Voltaire that the heavens show a Maker:

The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament showeth his handiwork. (Psalm 19:1, ASV)

But the clock shows power and intelligence. It does not say whether a guilty person can be forgiven or what God intends for the world. That is why Christianity holds that general revelation needs special revelation to complete it. Voltaire's charge that a universal God would not speak through one people overlooks the biblical claim that God chose Israel for the sake of all nations, as the promise to Abraham (Genesis 12:3) states. See General Revelation and Natural Theology.

A God who can make laws can act. Voltaire's objection that miracles would make God inconsistent assumes a miracle is a repair of a faulty machine. On the Christian view a miracle is a personal act of the Lawgiver for a purpose, such as signalling a revelation or raising Jesus, not a correction of a design error. Whether one happened is a question of evidence. See Argument from Miracles and Miracles.

On the biblical charges, the codex answers them at length: Higher Criticism and Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch on authorship; Bible Contradictions Objection Defeater on alleged contradictions; Canaanite Conquest Objection Defeater on the conquest narratives. His moral objections, like Paine's, judge the Bible by standards of justice and the worth of the victim that the biblical tradition did much to supply. See Moral Argument.

The deathbed and the legends

Several stories about Voltaire's last months circulate widely. They need to be separated.

The deathbed. In February 1778, believing he was dying, he wrote a short statement, dated February 28, that he died adoring God, loving his friends, not hating his enemies, and detesting superstition. Around the same time he received the priest Abbé Gaultier, made a confession, and signed a statement of submission to the Catholic Church. Christian writers have often treated that statement as a recantation, while his admirers have read it as a formality to secure Christian burial. The Paris clergy judged it insufficient, and he was buried quietly at Scellières instead. Accounts of his final days in May differ on whether he received the last rites, and accounts of a terrified, despairing death circulated in later Christian literature, and accounts of a calm one were given by his friends. The evidence is partisan on both sides, and the codex does not take a position on what Voltaire believed at the end. The often-repeated reply that he refused to renounce the devil because "this is no time to make new enemies" is poorly sourced and is best treated as a legend.

The Bible society story. A popular claim says that Voltaire predicted the Bible would be forgotten within a hundred years, and that within that time his house in Geneva became the headquarters of a Bible society, or that his printing press printed Bibles. The prediction is not found in Voltaire's writings in that form, and appears to trace to a nineteenth-century paraphrase. The house claim is at best much exaggerated. An 1836 report by a British clergyman described a room at Les Délices being used as a store for Bibles and religious tracts, but the Geneva Bible Society that the modern version names was founded only in 1917 and never occupied the house. The story should not be used as evidence for anything.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

• Nicholas Cronk, The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Open Library
• Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques (1733). Open Library
• Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance: a treatise on tolerance (1763). Open Library
• Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, portatif (1764). Open Library
• Voltaire, Les cabales: oeuvre pacifique (1772). Open Library
• Voltaire, La Bible enfin expliquée (1776). Open Library

See also

• Deism, the movement Voltaire led in France
• Deism vs the Christian God, the side-by-side comparison of the clockmaker God and the God who acts
• Thomas Paine, the English-speaking deist who carried a similar critique of the Bible to ordinary readers
• Leibniz, whose "best of all possible worlds" Voltaire satirized in Candide
• Problem of Evil, the objection the Lisbon poem made famous
• Theodicy, the attempt to justify God in the face of evil
• Jean Meslier, the atheist priest whom Voltaire presented to the public as a deist
• David Hume, his contemporary, whose critique of the design argument cut against Voltaire's deism as well as against Christianity
• Blaise Pascal, whose Pensées Voltaire criticized in the Lettres philosophiques
• Secular Humanism, the later movement that claims Voltaire as an ancestor