Justified True Belief

(●) The wit who made unbelief fashionable in Europe, and who spent his last years getting innocent men off the wheel. + Almost nobody in the eighteenth century was read by more people, and almost nobody has been more thoroughly misremembered. Voltaire is filed in most memories as the atheist of the Enlightenment, the man who wanted religion abolished. He was neither. He believed in God, argued for God in print against the atheists of his own circle, built a church with his own money and put his name on the front of it, and reckoned in print that he would rather his debtor, his lawyer and his judge believed in God. What he wanted destroyed was something narrower and, to him, unmistakable: the machinery by which a church backed by a state could imprison, torture and kill people over what they believed. He called it l’infâme, the infamous thing, and for the last twenty years of his life he signed his letters to friends with the words Écrasez l’infâme, crush it. He is on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons, and the second is the harder one. The first is that he wrote the objections. The mockery of miracles, the moral indictment of the Old Testament, the argument that a God of all nations cannot have handed a saving message to one small people in one corner of the Roman east, the protest that no good God would let a city fall on its worshippers on a holy day: these did not begin with Voltaire, but he is the one who put them into a French so quick and funny that they got into the bloodstream of Europe and never left. Almost every objection a Christian meets in a coffee shop today was in print, in his hand, before 1770. The second reason is that he was often right about the thing in front of him. In 1762 the parliament of Toulouse broke a Protestant merchant of sixty-three named Jean Calas on the wheel for a murder he had not committed. Both of those terms will come back, and both need unpacking. A French parliament was not a legislature but a high court of law, a bench of judges who tried the great criminal cases of their region. Breaking on the wheel meant tying a man down in a public square and shattering his arms and legs with an iron bar, blow by blow, before the body was displayed on a wheel. That is what a court did to an elderly cloth merchant on the strength of a rumour, and it was Voltaire, not the bishops, who spent three years and a great deal of money getting the verdict reversed. That is an uncomfortable fact and it belongs at the front of his story rather than buried in it.

(●) 1694 AD: Born in Paris as François-Marie Arouet, a notary’s son, and handed to the Jesuits to be made into a lawyer. + He was born in Paris in November 1694, the youngest surviving child of François Arouet, a prosperous notary who handled the money of important families, and Marie Marguerite Daumard, who died while he was still a small boy. He was sickly enough at birth that nobody expected him to live out the week, and he outlived nearly everyone who knew him. At ten he was sent to the Collège Louis-le-Grand, the best school in France and a Jesuit one. A note about the word: the Jesuits are the Society of Jesus, a Catholic order founded in the sixteenth century by Ignatius of Loyola, and by 1704 they ran much of the education of Catholic Europe. They gave him seven years of Latin, rhetoric, and the discipline of arguing a case from both sides on the stage of the school theatre, and he never pretended otherwise. Decades later, at the height of his war on the church, he wrote to an old schoolmate about those teachers with real warmth. The training was the weapon; he simply turned it around. His father wanted a lawyer, and paid for the training, and got instead a boy who kept slipping off to the salons to read out verses. A salon was simply a drawing room where a hostess gathered writers and wits on a fixed day of the week, and for a young man with a gift for rhyme it was the whole world: the place where a reputation could be made in an evening and lost in a couplet. There is a family story that the elder Arouet complained he had two sons, both fools, one in prose and one in verse. Voltaire never took a brief in his life.

(●) 1717 AD: Eleven months in the Bastille for satirical verses, and he came out with a new name. + France after the death of Louis XIV was governed by a regent, Philippe d’Orléans, and Paris was full of anonymous verses about him. Some of the nastiest were attributed to the young Arouet. He denied writing them, which may even have been true, and in May 1717 he was shut in the Bastille anyway, without charge and without trial, on a lettre de cachet: a sealed royal order that could imprison a subject indefinitely at the king’s pleasure. No accusation had to be stated and no court had to agree. He was twenty-two, and he was there for nearly a year. He wrote his way through it. When he came out he had a tragedy nearly finished, Œdipe, and when it was staged in 1718 the playbill carried a name nobody had seen before: Arouet de Voltaire. Where he got the word is still argued over, and the neatest suggestion is that it is an anagram of AROVET L I, Arouet the younger, with the letters u and j read as v and i in the fashion of the time. He kept it for sixty years and dropped the family name entirely. The lesson of the Bastille was not that he should be careful. It was that the state could take a man’s liberty for a piece of paper, and that a piece of paper was therefore worth a great deal.

(●) 1726 AD: A nobleman’s servants beat him in the street, France jailed the victim, and exile in England showed him a country that let men worship as they liked. + The quarrel was petty and the consequences were not. The chevalier de Rohan, of one of the great families of France, mocked Voltaire’s change of name in public; Voltaire answered him in kind, in front of witnesses, and got the better of it. A few days later, while Voltaire was at dinner, Rohan’s footmen dragged him into the street and beat him with sticks while their master watched from a carriage. Voltaire wanted a duel. A commoner does not get one from a Rohan. He got another lettre de cachet instead, went back into the Bastille on 17 April 1726, and was released a fortnight later on condition that he leave the country. He crossed to England in May and stayed two and a half years, and it remade him. He learned the language well enough to write in it. He met Pope, Swift and Congreve. He was in England when Isaac Newton was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1727 with the pomp a country gives a king, and the contrast with France, where a mathematician was a servant of the court, stayed with him for life. He went to Quaker meetings and asked questions, and what struck him was not the theology but the arithmetic of the thing: London had dozens of sects, they traded on the same exchange all week, and nobody was burning anybody. That observation became a sentence he would repeat for the rest of his life in one form or another. If a country has one religion, it will be a tyranny; if it has two, they will cut each other’s throats; if it has thirty, they will live in peace.

(●) 1734 AD: His book about England was burned by order of the Paris parliament, and he spent the next fifteen years in the country with the mathematician Émilie du Châtelet. + The Lettres philosophiques reached France in 1734, having appeared in London the year before as Letters Concerning the English Nation. On the surface it is a cheerful traveller’s report on English Quakers, English commerce, English inoculation against smallpox, English theatre, Locke and Newton. Underneath it is a comparison, and every page of the comparison goes against France. The Paris parliament, another of those high courts of law, had it publicly burned and issued an order for his arrest. He ran, and the refuge was a chateau at Cirey in Champagne belonging to Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the marquise du Châtelet. She was twenty-seven, married, and one of the finest mathematical minds in France; her translation of Newton’s Principia into French, finished as she was dying, is still the standard French version. For fifteen years they lived and worked together at Cirey in a new wing built to hold a laboratory, a private theatre, and a library of twenty-one thousand books. He wrote his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton there in 1738, which did more than any other book to persuade the French to give up Descartes’ physics for Newton’s, and he said openly that she had taught him the mathematics. She died in September 1749, days after giving birth, and he was undone by it. For a while he simply drifted. In 1750 he took a salaried post at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, which began as the mutual admiration of two very clever men and ended, as these things tended to end with Voltaire, in a spectacular quarrel; when he left in 1753 Frederick’s agents detained him for five weeks at Frankfurt over a book of the king’s poetry. So at fifty-eight, the most famous writer in Europe had no country that would have him. He bought his way into one, settling first near Geneva and then, in 1759, at Ferney, an estate on French soil close enough to the Swiss border that he could be across it in an hour if the police came.

(●) 1755 AD: An earthquake destroyed Lisbon on a holy day, and he stopped being able to say that all is well. + On the morning of 1 November 1755, All Saints’ Day, three shocks and then a wave and then fire destroyed Lisbon while the churches were full. Tens of thousands died. Europe had been comfortably repeating, for half a century, a philosophical formula it had got from Leibniz and from Pope’s Essay on Man: that this is the best of all possible worlds, that partial evil is universal good, that whatever is, is right. Voltaire had said something close to it himself in his younger and sunnier verse. He could not say it now. Within weeks he had written the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, and it is not a satire. It is a man standing in front of a heap of bodies and asking the philosophers to come and look. Rousseau wrote back the following summer arguing that the fault was human, since it was men who had built a city of six-storey houses on that spot, and Voltaire, who liked Rousseau less every year, went away and turned the whole quarrel into a story. Candide came out in January 1759 and was banned in Geneva and in Paris before February was over, which did nothing but sell it; Rome added it to the Index of prohibited books three years later. In a hundred pages a boy is expelled, conscripted, flogged, shipwrecked, caught in the Lisbon earthquake, sentenced by the Inquisition, robbed, and shown a slave in Surinam with one hand and one leg who explains that this is the price of the sugar Europeans eat, and through all of it his tutor Pangloss keeps proving that everything is for the best. Voltaire wrote it, by his own account, in a matter of days. It has never been out of print since.

(●) 1762 AD: Toulouse broke an innocent Protestant on the wheel, and the satirist spent three years as his advocate. + Marc-Antoine Calas, the eldest son of a Protestant cloth merchant in Toulouse, was found hanged in his father’s shop in October 1761. Suicide carried a horrifying penalty for the body of the dead man: he was put on trial after his death, and if convicted his corpse was dragged face down on a hurdle through the streets, hung up by the feet, and thrown out with the refuse, and his goods were forfeited. Rather than let that be done to their son, the family said at first that he had been found dead, then told the truth, and the change of story was all the city needed. A rumour went round that the young man had been about to convert to Catholicism and that his father had killed him to prevent it. There was no evidence of any intention to convert and none of a murder. The parliament of Toulouse condemned Jean Calas on 9 March 1762, and on the tenth, at sixty-three, he was tortured, broken on the wheel and strangled, protesting his innocence to the end. His family was scattered and ruined. Voltaire heard of it at Ferney and at first assumed the man was guilty. He then did what almost nobody in France was doing: he interviewed the surviving family, obtained the trial documents, hired lawyers, wrote to ministers and to every correspondent he had in Europe, and paid for it himself. He also wrote the Treatise on Toleration in 1763 and hung the whole argument on this one dead cloth merchant. In March 1765 the king’s council quashed the judgment and declared Jean Calas innocent. It had taken three years. Then he did it again. He took up the Sirven family, Protestants condemned in absentia on a similar charge, and got them cleared in 1771. He took up the case of the chevalier de La Barre, a boy of twenty tortured and beheaded at Abbeville in July 1766 for failing to remove his hat before a religious procession and for owning irreligious books, one of which was Voltaire’s own Philosophical Dictionary, burned with the body. That one he could not win, and it haunted him. The Ferney years were the strangest and the best of his life. He drained marshes, built houses, brought in watchmakers from Geneva and turned the village into a manufacturing town, ran a farm, fed a stream of visitors from all over Europe, and wrote for fourteen hours a day. In 1760 he pulled down the decayed parish church on his land and built a new one at his own expense, finished the next year, with an inscription across the front that has been read as a joke and as a creed and is probably both: DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE MDCCLXI, Voltaire erected this to God, 1761. The explanation reported of him ever since is that his was the only church in the world dedicated to God rather than to a saint, and that he would rather build for the master than for the servants.

(●) 1778 AD: Paris crowned him in the spring, and by summer his family had to smuggle his body out of the city to bury it. + He had not seen Paris in twenty-eight years. In February 1778, at eighty-three, he came back for the staging of his last tragedy, Irène, and the city lost its head over him. Crowds followed his carriage. At the Comédie-Française they crowned a bust of him on the stage in front of him while the audience stood. Benjamin Franklin, then in Paris seeking help for the American war, brought his grandson to be blessed by him in the middle of February, and Voltaire laid his hands on the boy and said, in English, God and liberty. He mentioned it himself in a letter a few days later, so the scene is his own testimony and not a legend. The excitement, and the work he insisted on doing, finished him. He fell ill in the spring and died on 30 May 1778. What happened about his soul in those months is documented and is also messy. On 2 March, ill and expecting to die, he signed a short declaration in front of a priest named Gaultier, with his nephew the abbé Mignot and the marquis de Villevieille as witnesses, saying that he died in the Catholic religion in which he was born, hoping that the divine mercy would pardon his faults, and that if he had scandalised the church he asked pardon of God and of it. That is a real document. When the end actually came in May, the clergy of Paris pressed for something fuller, a signed retraction of his writings, and did not get it, and so the parish refused him burial. Mignot moved fast. He had the body dressed, put upright in a carriage and driven out of Paris by night to the abbey of Scellières in Champagne, where he was abbot, and buried before the order forbidding it arrived. Thirteen years later the Revolution dug him up. On 11 July 1791 it carried him through Paris to the Pantheon, the church of Sainte-Geneviève that the new government had just turned into a burial place for the men it meant to honour, behind a crowd said to number in the hundreds of thousands. One thing that did not happen is the story most often told about him. The tale of a Voltaire screaming on his deathbed, begging for a priest and cursing God, took shape in the years after he died and was spread through the nineteenth century in tracts written to frighten young men out of unbelief. The people actually in the room, including his secretary Wagnière and his doctors, describe a hard death from illness and old age. A biography that needs to invent a bad death for its subject has already lost the argument.

What He Taught

(T1) The order of the world argues a maker, and atheism explains nothing. + Pick up a watch in a field. You do not conclude that the springs and the escapement fell into that arrangement by luck, because you know what kind of thing produces that kind of arrangement. Voltaire used the image constantly, and in a late poem he put it as flatly as it can be put: the universe troubles him, and he cannot bring himself to think that this clock exists and has no clockmaker. Behind the image is a position with a name. Voltaire was a deist, and it is worth being exact about the word, since it is often used today to mean nothing more than vague religiosity. A deist in the eighteenth century held that reason alone establishes one God who made and ordered the world, and that this God is known through the world he made rather than through any sacred book, prophet or priesthood. Deism is a positive doctrine, not a hesitation. Voltaire held it for sixty years and argued for it in print. He argued for it hardest against his own friends. The Paris circle around Diderot and the baron d’Holbach had moved on to a thoroughgoing materialism, the view that matter in motion is all there is, and Voltaire thought this was silly and said so in the Philosophical Dictionary. He sets out his own reasons, then hands the floor to the atheists and lets them calculate the odds that blind motion could arrange six planets where we find them, and then answers in two moves: motion alone cannot produce understanding, and by the atheists’ own arithmetic the odds are stacked the other way. He also thought the doctrine was socially poisonous, and put it in the coarse practical way he liked, asking whether a man who has lent out his money really wants his debtor, his lawyer and his judge to be atheists. This is the point at which a Christian reader has to be careful not to claim him as an ally. Voltaire’s Eternal Geometer, as he calls him in the same article, arranges and is silent. Ask where he is, or what he is made of, and Voltaire answers three times in a row that he has no idea, and that all he knows is that one must worship him and be just. A God who can be inferred from the machinery, and about whom nothing further can be said, is a long way from a Father who speaks.

(Q) "When we see a beautiful machine, we say that there is a good engineer, and that this engineer has excellent judgment. The world is assuredly an admirable machine; therefore there is in the world an admirable intelligence, wherever it may be. This argument is old, and none the worse for that." + Source: Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, article "Atheism," section I, under the heading "Of Modern Atheists. Reasons of the Worshippers of God" (H. I. Woolf translation). This is Voltaire putting his own case, a few lines after asking his atheist friends whether they really want their debtor and their judge to be unbelievers, and a few pages before he sets out the atheists’ case at full strength and answers it (T1). The last sentence is characteristic of him: he knows the design argument is ancient, he knows his opponents will say so, and he gets there first.

(T2) True religion is worship and justice, and it needs no doctrine, no priest and no mystery. + Ask a man at Ferney what Voltaire believed and he could have told you in about fifteen seconds, which was rather the point. There is a God who made the world, who is good and just, who rewards and punishes. Human beings owe him worship, and they owe each other decency. Everything else that has ever been preached from a pulpit is decoration at best and a racket at worst. He set this out in the short article "Theist" in the Philosophical Dictionary, and it reads like a portrait of himself. His theist does not know how God punishes or pardons, and does not claim to; difficulties about providence do not shake him, because a difficulty is not a proof; he joins no sect, counts every wise man as a brother from Peking to Cayenne, laughs at pilgrimages in both directions, and helps the poor. Voltaire thought this was the oldest religion in the world and the only one that could be held by everyone, since it asks nobody to believe anything that a shepherd in China could not work out from the sky over his head. A Christian will want to say two things about this at once, and both are true. The first is that a great deal of it is right: the prophets say bluntly that God is not interested in ceremony from people who oppress the poor, and one of the shortest summaries of religion in the Bible sounds startlingly like Voltaire’s. "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8). The second is that Voltaire has quietly turned a summary into a limit. Micah is telling a nation what its God, who has spoken to it, requires; Voltaire is announcing in advance that this is all that can ever be required, because nothing further can ever be known. That second move is not a discovery. It is an assumption, and it is the assumption doing all the work in everything he wrote against Christianity.

(Q) "He believes that religion does not consist either in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic, or in vain display, but in worship and justice. The doing of good, there is his service; being submissive to God, there is his doctrine." + Source: Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, article "Theist" (H. I. Woolf translation). The whole article runs to three short paragraphs, and these two sentences are the middle of it; it ends a few lines later with the theist laughing at pilgrimages to Loreto and to Mecca while he helps the needy and defends the oppressed. Written by a man who was at that moment paying for the defence of a Protestant family he had never met, the line about doing good is not as cheap as it looks (T2).

(T3) A religion given to one people at one time cannot be the religion of the God of all people. + This is the argument underneath all the mockery, and it is worth separating from the mockery, because the jokes are famous and the argument is not. Voltaire’s reasoning runs like this. God made everyone. If he had a saving message, it would be available to everyone, everywhere, at all times, which means it would have to be the kind of thing anyone can work out: that there is a God, and that we should be just. Now look at what the revealed religions actually claim. They claim that the decisive thing happened once, in one small province, in one language, and that the rest of the human race depends on hearing a report of it. A message like that reaches Peru fifteen centuries late. Therefore, he concludes, it cannot be from God; and what looks like revelation is a national story that later got promoted. Everything else follows from that. Since revelation is out on principle, the sacred books can only be human books, and Voltaire read them the way a hostile lawyer reads a contract, looking for what will not stand up. He hunted the Old Testament for cruelty and absurdity in the Sermon of the Fifty and, at eighty-one, in The Bible At Last Explained. He turned miracles into a running joke and argued in the Questions on Miracles that a miracle would be God correcting his own work. Then he drew the practical conclusion that made him dangerous. It comes in the eleventh of those letters on miracles, and it is worth having in a plain rendering of the French: certainly, whoever has the right to make you absurd has the right to make you unjust. Read that slowly, because his whole campaign is folded into it. Get a man to say he believes what he cannot understand, on the ground that he was told to, and you have got him to do what he knows is wrong on the same ground. The wheel at Toulouse was his proof. (The popular English version, that anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities, is not his. It first turns up in 1914, in a short story that put the words into an imagined Voltaire’s mouth, and it has been quoted as his ever since.) The Christian reply is not that the objection is weak. It is that the first move begs the question. Voltaire lays down in advance that God would only ever act universally and abstractly, and then finds that Christianity does not fit. But the claim Christians make is precisely that God has chosen to act at particular times and places, on the way to everyone: one man called out of Ur, one nation, one carpenter, and then a message carried outward by people who were sent. Whether that happened is a question about evidence and history. Voltaire settled it beforehand with a definition.

(Q) "My brethren, religion is the secret voice of God speaking to men. It ought to unite men, not divide them; hence every religion that belongs to one people only is false." + Source: Voltaire, The Sermon of the Fifty, opening of the discourse (Joseph McCabe translation, 1912). The Sermon of the Fifty was published anonymously around 1762 and framed as a discourse delivered to a private society of fifty cultivated, pious and reasonable people who have met every Sunday for a year in a large commercial town, to pray, to hear one of their number preach, and to dine and take up a collection for the poor. The framing is a device, but the form is not a joke: it is a sermon, complete with an opening prayer, and its subject is why the Bible cannot be the word of God (T3).

(T4) No one may be imprisoned, tortured or killed for an opinion. + This is the one he is right about, and few writers of any century have pressed a moral case this hard or spent so much of their own money making it stick. The Treatise on Toleration of 1763 is his best book of argument, and its method is worth noticing. It does not open with a principle. It opens with a dead man, sets out the Calas trial in detail, and only then works outward: through what the Greeks and Romans actually did about competing religions, through the persecutions the early Christians suffered, through the question of whether Jesus taught intolerance, and out to the conclusion. Along the way he does what a lawyer does and takes the other side seriously, conceding that a state may act against a group that is genuinely tearing the country apart, and then showing that this is not remotely what happened at Toulouse. His most effective page is a change of scale. Imagine, he says, this small globe travelling in space among many others, and a five-foot creature on it telling his neighbours that of nine hundred million such creatures, his anthill alone is dear to God and all the others are damned for ever. Ask who the fool is who talks like that, and the answer is the man in the mirror. From there he presses the question that any believer who has ever attended a funeral has felt: do we really know the full range of God’s mercies, and is it the business of atoms of a moment to settle the eternal fate of everyone else in advance? Christians should notice which text he never has to argue against, because there is not one. He argues against the Inquisition’s manuals, against the parliament of Toulouse, against the dragoons sent to convert Protestants by billeting. That last one is worth spelling out, since the word hides what was done: soldiers were quartered in a Protestant family’s house, at that family’s expense, and left there to behave as they pleased until the household agreed to become Catholic. He does not argue against Jesus, who told his disciples that his kingdom does not come with fighting (John 18:36), who rebuked the two of them who wanted to call fire down on a village that would not receive him (Luke 9:54–56), and who told a parable about a field where the weeds are not to be pulled up early for fear of taking the wheat with them (Matthew 13:29–30). Voltaire aimed at the machinery, and the machinery had been built against the grain of its own book.

(Q) "Why, you say, is the Turk, the Chinese, or the Jew my brother? Assuredly; are we not all children of the same father, creatures of the same God?" + Source: Voltaire, Treatise on Toleration, chapter 22, "Of universal toleration" (Joseph McCabe translation, 1912, where the chapter is numbered XIX). The chapter opens by saying that it takes no great eloquence to prove that Christians ought to tolerate one another, and then immediately widens the circle past Christendom altogether. The argument he uses to widen it is a Christian one, and he knows it: one Father, one creation, therefore brothers (T4).

(T5) This is not the best of all possible worlds, and no system explains away a child in the rubble. + Optimism, in the eighteenth-century sense, is not cheerfulness. It is a technical position, and it comes from Leibniz: since God is perfectly good and perfectly wise, and since he chose to make this world out of all the worlds he could have made, this world must be the best available arrangement, and every evil in it must be a necessary part of a whole that is better with it than without it. Alexander Pope put the doctrine into English couplets that everybody could recite. Whatever is, is right. Voltaire had helped popularise that mood and then watched tens of thousands die in a city at worship on All Saints’ Day. His answer came in two forms. The Poem on the Lisbon Disaster is the serious one, and it is not an attack on God. It is an attack on an explanation, and specifically on the comfort of explaining a catastrophe to people standing in it. He asks whether the children crushed on their mothers’ breasts had run up a debt, and whether Lisbon had really been more wicked than London or Paris. Then Candide made the same case by wearing the doctrine out: Pangloss keeps proving that all is for the best while the world does its worst to him, and the joke stops being funny about halfway through, which is the design. Two things ought to be said about where this leaves him. The first is that his objection is not the modern one. He does not conclude that there is no God; the poem says outright that he will not fling himself against providence, and it ends with a caliph on his deathbed offering God everything a God cannot have, to which Voltaire adds the one thing the caliph had forgotten, which is hope. What he concludes is that the system-builders are bluffing and that human beings do not know. The second is that Christian thinking has largely conceded his point about the method. A theodicy, which is the technical name for an attempt to justify God’s ways given the evil in the world, that works by explaining what each particular horror was for is not a theodicy anyone should want. Job’s comforters do that, and the book ends with God angry at them and not at Job (Job 42:7).

(Q) "What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived / That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast? / Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice / Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid? / In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss." + Source: Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or an examination of the axiom "all is well" (Joseph McCabe translation, 1912). Written within weeks of the earthquake of 1 November 1755 and published the following year. The poem is addressed to the philosophers rather than to God, and its charge is that a doctrine which can absorb tens of thousands of deaths without flinching is not a comfort but an anaesthetic (T5).

(Q) "Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it; / The human race demands a word of God." + Source: Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (Joseph McCabe translation, 1912). Late in the poem, after he has run through every available explanation of suffering and rejected all of them, this is where the reasoning stops. The man who spent his life arguing that God has not spoken and cannot have spoken writes that the human race requires exactly that, and the two lines just before it say that without God man, doomed to doubt and error, finds not a reed he may lean upon. He never resolved it. It may be the most interesting sentence he wrote about religion, and Christian readers have kept coming back to it ever since.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He won the toleration argument with a Christian argument, against Christians who had stopped making it. + The uncomfortable thing about the Treatise on Toleration is how little of it is new. Tertullian, writing to a Roman governor around AD 212, told him that it is not the business of religion to coerce religion, since a sacrifice wanted by God is a willing one. Lactantius, writing as the last imperial persecution was burning itself out, said that religion cannot be imposed and that there is nothing so much a matter of free will. The English Baptist Thomas Helwys published a book in 1612 telling King James to his face that the king has no authority over the conscience of his subjects, and went to prison for it. Roger Williams founded the colony of Providence in 1636 on the same argument and defended it in print eight years later. John Locke published his Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689, and Voltaire read Locke in England and put him with Newton among the very few moderns he admired without reserve. What Voltaire did was take an argument Christians had made, on Christian grounds, and turn it on a Christendom that had quietly filed it away. He did it in prose that farmers and duchesses both read, and he attached it to real names, real trials and real corpses, which is why it worked when the treatises had not. His method is worth studying by anyone who has to make a moral case in public: one dead man, fully documented, and then the principle. That the case had to be made from outside was a judgment on the church, and honest Christians said so at the time. It was not only a French failing, either: Wesley’s Methodists had been stoned by mobs in English towns in the years just before, with magistrates looking on. Nor is the record one church’s to carry alone. Geneva burned Servetus, England kept penal laws against Catholics and dissenters, Lutheran states expelled the Reformed, and Catholic France had spent eighty years dragooning Protestants. Voltaire hit the nearest target because it was nearest.

(†) He pressed two questions, the history of the Gospels and the problem of evil, and Christian work has been shaped by both ever since. + Voltaire struck at two places, and Christian work in the two and a half centuries since has been shaped by both blows. The first was the historical question: whether the Gospels are the sort of documents that can carry the weight put on them. The English answer had begun before him. Nathaniel Lardner spent thirty years on The Credibility of the Gospel History, published between 1727 and 1757, collecting every early reference to the Christian writings he could find, and William Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity in 1794 turned that material into a case a jury could follow, resting it on the willingness of the first witnesses to suffer for what they claimed to have seen. That whole line of work, running down through the historical arguments Christians still make about the resurrection, is an answer to Voltaire’s question even where it does not name him. The second was the problem of evil, and here the influence runs the other way: he changed what counts as an acceptable answer. After Candide it became much harder for a Christian writer to answer suffering with a diagram, and much more common to answer it the way Scripture mostly does, with a person and a promise rather than a system. Twentieth-century work on the problem, from Austin Farrer to Alvin Plantinga’s free will defence to the argument that this world is a place where souls are made rather than a finished product, is arguing on ground Voltaire cleared. He would have enjoyed that more than the Christian answers to his history. He also left one gift he did not intend. Because he wrote so much and so specifically against Scripture, and because he wrote it in a French everyone could read, he forced the questions out of the seminaries and into public. A church that has to explain itself in the open, to people who are not obliged to be polite, is generally in better condition than one that does not. Peter tells Christians to be ready to give a reason for their hope to anyone who asks (1 Peter 3:15), and Voltaire spent sixty years asking.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who never speaks, a rule that rules out revelation before looking, mockery in place of weighing, and the ugly pages he wrote about the Jews. + Four things. The first three are places where his reasoning and the Christian claim genuinely collide, and the fourth is a debt of his own: not something other people later did with his books, but pages he wrote in his own hand. - A God who arranges and is silent. Voltaire’s Eternal Geometer can be inferred from the machinery and asked nothing further. Where is he, what is he, does he care, has he done anything about us: no idea, no idea, no idea. The Christian claim is the opposite one, that the maker has broken the silence and did so in stages over centuries before doing it in person. "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world" (Hebrews 1:1–2). Voltaire agreed there is a Geometer. He denied that the Geometer has ever said anything, and it is a strange position to hold about a person. - A rule that decides the case before hearing it. His central argument requires that a true religion be universal and therefore abstract (T3). Grant that and Christianity is refuted without opening a single document. But Christians do not claim that God prefers abstractions; they claim that he called one man, made one nation, came as one man, and sent messengers outward, so that particularity is the method and not an embarrassment. Paul told the Athenians that God made every nation from one man and set their times and places so that they might seek him (Acts 17:26–27), which grants Voltaire his universal God and denies his conclusion. - Ridicule where weighing was needed. Voltaire was a brilliant advocate when he had documents, as the Calas file shows. He did not extend that method to the Gospels. The Sermon of the Fifty, the Examination of Lord Bolingbroke and The Bible At Last Explained hunt for absurdities and pass over the historical questions that serious men were arguing all around him. His habit is to take on the weakest available version of a Christian claim rather than the strongest, and the strongest were in print and in his second language: Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion came out in London in 1736 and is the most careful answer the deists ever got. A man who insisted on evidence in a criminal court and settled a historical question by mockery has a case to answer. - What he wrote about the Jews. The Philosophical Dictionary contains an article, "Jews," whose contempt is hard to read, and it is not an isolated page. Scholars disagree about how to read it, some taking it as an attack on the Old Testament’s claims dressed as an attack on a people, others taking it as the beginning of a secular form of hatred that outlived every theological form. That argument can be left open, because the plain fact does not depend on settling it: the man whose whole public case was that no group may be despised for its religion wrote pages despising one. Scripture is emphatic in the other direction about that particular people. "As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:28–29). None of that cancels the wheel at Toulouse. It is possible to hold both: that Voltaire got the church to stop doing something it should never have done, and that he seldom dealt fairly with what the church actually claimed.