THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

1 8s THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
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."30
Let it not be supposed from all this that Voltaire was quite without
81
"sion. He decisively rejects atheism; 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. 83
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
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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
Essai sur Us Moeurs, part ii, ch. g; in Morley 322.
^Selected Works, 63.
XJ1. The Sage and the Atheist, chs. 9 and 10.
**
Voltaire in His Letters* p. 81.