THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

VOLTAIRE 181
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
77
at Valladolid in the year of grace i63i."
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
7 TC
*In Sainte-Beuve, ii, 146.
In Pellissier, 101.
^Selected Works, p. 26. Voltaire himself was something of an anti-Semite, chiefly
because of his not quite admirable dealings with the financiers.
"Ibid., 26-35- "IX, 21.