by Voltaire
Against the horrors of religious cruelty and the emptiness of religious apologia, Voltaire proposes—what, exactly? Burton Raffel, the more daring of the two new translators, takes that most familiar ending, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” and translates it not as “We must cultivate our garden” but, startlingly, as “We need to work our fields.” (Raffel is a translator who doesn’t mind shocking his readers—his version of “The Red and the Black” was one long provocation.) His change of the book’s famous moral is obviously meant, in one way, to protect Voltaire from the charge of Petit Trianonism. After so much suffering, cultivating our garden seems too … cultivated. (“Crush the horror! Crush the horror!” Voltaire’s friend D’Alembert wrote to him once. “That is easily said when one is a hundred leagues from the bastards and the fanatics, when one has an independent income of a hundred thousand livres!”)
But Raffel is wrong, surely, in thinking that by cultivating one’s garden Voltaire meant anything save cultivating one’s garden. By “garden” Voltaire meant a garden, not a field—not the land and task to which we are chained by nature but the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, “We must cultivate our garden,” is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action. In the aftermath of the tsunami, William Safire argued that this “surge of generosity” actually “refutes Voltaire’s cynicism,” as expressed in Candide. Yet American charity is not a refutation of Voltaire’s cynicism; it is Voltaire’s cynicism, an expression of the Enlightenment tradition of individual responsibility that he promoted. Voltaire was a gardener and believed in gardens, even if other people were gardening them. His residual optimism lies in that alone.
The horror that Voltaire wanted crushed, cruelty in the name of God and civilization, was a specific and contingent thing. His satire of optimism is in this sense an optimistic book—optimistic not only in its gaiety, which implies the possibility of seeing things as they are, but also in its argument. Voltaire did not believe that there was any justice or balance in the world, but he believed that bad ideas made people bad. The villains in the book are not, as in Samuel Johnson’s exactly contemporary and parallel Rasselas, the fatality of the world and the mortality of man. The villains are the villains: Jesuits and Inquisitors and English judges and Muslim clerics and fanatics of all kinds. If they went away, life would be much better. He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
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Though Candide seems to retreat from a confrontation with human cruelty to an enclosed garden, its publication marked Voltaire’s, and his age’s, moral development away from a passive Deism and toward a faith in liberal meliorism. Voltaire went on to a series of confrontations with the consequences of human cruelty that, two hundred-odd years later, remain stirring in their courage and perseverance. It is in the years after the publication of the supposedly cynical and even quietist Candide that he began the campaigns against persecution—and, more broadly, against torture and cruelty in punishment—from which, as Davidson says, most civilized societies can trace their liberation from organized cruelty and state killing.
Voltaire was no mere petition signer; he was intensely engaged with individual cases, and deserves credit for exposing at least two horrible judicial murders. He first took on the case of Jean Calas, a Protestant in Normandy who was wrongly accused of murdering his own son (it seems likely that the son committed suicide) to keep him from converting to Roman Catholicism. Calas was executed: publicly tortured by a judicial lynch mob of priests and local officials, and then broken on the wheel. Voltaire, after years of work, was able to show that Calas’s execution had been a frame-up, and even managed to get official recompense for his family. He did the same thing, at greater personal risk, in the case of the teen-age Chevalier de La Barre, who had been accused by the Catholic authorities of desecrating a statue of the Crucifixion, under the influence of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique. Voltaire could not save his life—La Barre was tortured, and sentenced to have his tongue cut out, before he was killed and burned, along with Voltaire’s book—but his writings helped make certain that La Barre was the last man to be murdered in France for blasphemy.
As though these crusades were not enough for an old man who was still busy writing plays and arguing with his neighbors about leases and noises, he also tried to demonstrate the possibilities of a garden-centered life by creating his own light industry at Ferney. He took several dozen Protestant watch-making refugees and supplied them with venture capital to start a watch factory in the village of Ferney. The thing should have gone the way of most virtuous communal schemes devised by well-meaning literary people—but it was a huge success, making as much as six hundred thousand pounds a year, and supplying watches to the Empress of Russia. (Voltaire turned out to be a brilliant salesman, using his high connections to force watches on people on consignment, and then blandly sending them bills.) It was a proof that one could do well by doing good. Ferney watches became the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream of the later Enlightenment, a luxury good that was also a sign of progressive values.
Of course, in the light of later horrors, the horror that Voltaire wanted to crush doesn’t seem a horror at all. It was a half-aware, corrupt, guilty, placating horror, which watched nervously as he was fêted. His enemies were local lynch mobs, not centralized terror. A Nazi or Soviet regime would have crushed him, horribly, and everyone else with him. The argument has even been made that Voltaire’s rejection of moral order and God helped lead to the later horrors. But unless one believes, against all the evidence, that faith in God keeps one from cruelty, this is a bum rap. There are absolutist and totalitarian elements in the Enlightenment, of the kind that Burke and Berlin alike opposed: the desire to rip up the calendar of the past and start over implies murdering whoever isn’t with the program. This wasn’t Voltaire’s spirit by a mile. There couldn’t be a better model of an improvisatory, anti-authoritarian intelligence, whose whole creed rests on individual acts and case-by-case considerations. He believed in the English model of trade and toleration, not the Jacobin model of ideology and intemperance. His intolerance of religion was nothing like religious intolerance; it was directed at institutions, not individuals. Even his notorious attacks on Judaism are largely of this kind. Like Gibbon, what he objects to in the Old Testament is the spirit of zealous intolerance it gave to the New; about the worst thing that he could say of the Jews is that they reminded him of Jesuits. Voltaire’s spirit was one of tolerant cosmopolitanism, even though he didn’t have the insight to see that one challenge for the cosmopolitan spirit would be how well it tolerated those who had no wish to be cosmopolitan.
It is still bracing, at a time when the extreme deference we pay to faith has made any attack on religious beliefs unacceptable, to hear Voltaire on Jesuits and Muslims alike—to hear him howl with indignation at the madness and malignance of religion—and to be reminded that that freethinking, which inspired Twain and Mencken, has almost vanished from our world. (There is, after all, as much of Voltaire in American life as in French life. Benjamin Franklin went to him for a blessing, and got it.)
Voltaire made a good end. No Frenchman can keep away from Paris forever. When he was eighty-four, he made the trip back at last; although there was no official “pardon” (there had never been an official condemnation), he thought it unlikely that the authorities would try to do anything to him. Seeing how old he was, the Church sent emissaries to try to get him to recant. Voltaire had the priests in, and perhaps even entertained the idea of confessing—partly because he always liked toying with priests, partly because he was genuinely afraid of being thrown into a common grave, as happened to the unshriven. But finally he sighed on his deathbed, told the priest who had arrived one last time to urge on him the virtues of Jesus, “Sir, do not speak to me any more about that man and let me die in peace,” and tur
ned away. The priests, furious, and knowing that it was against the law both to bury an unsacralized body and to move it, cruelly insisted that his body could be taken from Paris to a quiet burial only if the corpse was dressed up in clothes and the pretense made that Voltaire was still alive. The joke, on them, was that he was.
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† From The New Yorker (March 7, 2005): 74–81. © Condé Nast. Reprinted by permission.
W. H. BARBER
[The Question of Optimism]†
Having proved itself still capable of attracting readers and giving them pleasure two hundred years after its first appearance, Candide may be felt to have achieved literary immortality. The appeal of such enduring works of art must obviously in a sense be timeless, but that does not mean that they are not better understood, and so more enjoyed, by those who are able to replace them in the historical context from which they sprang, to comprehend something of their meaning for the author and his contemporaries, to see how they are related to the preoccupations and the attitudes of their age. And this is especially true of a work of satire, intended by its author to be a weapon in a contemporary clash of ideas, ultimately to influence the course of events by its impact on men’s minds. It remains for us, then, to look at Candide externally from this historical standpoint, and to say something, in particular, of the history of eighteenth-century ‘optimism,’ and of the development of Voltaire’s own attitude on the subject.
The problem of divine justice or theodicy, of reconciling the existence of evil and suffering with the goodness and omnipotence of God, is one that clearly is of permanent concern not only to Christian theology but also to all believers in a creator rationally conceived as a Supreme Being. And it was a problem which became particularly acute in Western Europe about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The renewed confidence in the powers of human reason which characterizes so much of European thought in the seventeenth century, from Descartes onwards, contributed to this in two main ways. In the first place, as it led philosophers like Descartes himself, Spinoza and Leibniz to conceive vast metaphysical systems in which every known feature of the universe was (ideally, at any rate) rationally accounted for and fitted into a comprehensive and coherent intellectual scheme, so also religious thinkers were impelled to emphasize the rationality of Christianity, to attempt to win or regain the allegiance of the now growing number of sceptics and freethinkers by demonstrating that Christian beliefs were entirely compatible with reason. In such an attempt, the problem of evil clearly constituted a major issue.
Secondly, the new rationalism was beginning to bear fruit where man’s understanding of the world was concerned. New instruments like the telescope and the microscope, new mathematical techniques, a new awareness of the importance of experiment and observation, were making possible for the first time some scientific understanding of natural phenomena. Where formerly it had been assumed that, since the Fall, the world was predominantly given over to chaos and corruption, regularity and even purpose now began to be descried in the workings of nature. It seemed plausible to compare the universe to a watch, the most complex and delicately constructed machine of the age—a machine in which every part functioned regularly and purposefully, in accordance with the intentions of the watchmaker. If the arrangements of the Divine Watchmaker, however, proved accessible to human reason in such matters as the law of gravitation or the principles of optics (to quote the discoveries of Newton alone), the presumption seemed to follow that rational purpose pervaded every feature of the universe; and here too the problem arose as to how the existence of such manifest blemishes as evil and suffering could be reconciled with the necessary perfection of the divine scheme.
It is these two approaches to the problem, different in origin and emphasis but similar in their rationalism, which underlay respectively the two most influential and widely discussed formulations of the ‘optimistic’ solution, those of Leibniz and of Alexander Pope.
Leibniz’s purpose in his Essais de Théodicée (1710: written in French) was essentially to defend the rationality of God and His creation against an attack which, in his eyes, was a potential danger to religion and to man’s confidence in the divine purposes. The French Huguenot scholar and philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a critical rather than a constructive thinker, had frequently emphasized the limitations of the human reason by drawing attention to philosophical paradoxes which appeared to admit of no rational solution; and one of these, in his view, was the problem of evil. In the articles ‘Manichéens’ and ‘Pauliciens’ of his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) he argued that the explanation propounded by the ancient Manichean heresy, namely that the world was the plaything of opposing gods, one good, one evil, was in fact the solution of the problem most in keeping with the facts, however illogical and incompatible with our notions of God it might be:
Qui n’admirera et qui ne déplorera la destinée de notre raison: voilà les Manichéens qui avec une hypothèse tout-à-fait absurde et contradictoire expliquent les expériences cent fois mieux que ne font les orthodoxes, avec la supposition si juste, si nécessaire, si uniquement véritable d’un premier principe infiniment bon et tout-puissant [‘Pauliciens,’ note E].
Leibniz’s book is a systematic discussion of Bayle’s views, and in it he propounds an answer to the problem of evil which is in harmony with his own wider metaphysical thinking and also supports the claims of rational theology. He sees God as subject, like man, to the laws of reason: even God cannot make two and two add up to anything but four, nor create a spherical cube. Hence, when God is considered as deciding upon the creation of the world, Leibniz envisages him as having a choice only between possible worlds, that is, forms of creation which do not violate the laws of reason, which do not involve logical contradiction. And among such possible worlds God in His infinite goodness has inevitably chosen the best. This ‘best of all possible worlds,’ however, necessarily contains imperfections, and hence evil. While many evils are justifiable and even valuable as a means to good (e.g. the protective and warning function of much physical pain), other evils are merely the inevitable result of the imperfections inseparable from the status of created beings; man has limited power, limited knowledge: ‘Il y a une imperfection originale dans la créature avant le péché, parce que la créature est limitée essentiellement: d’où vient qu’elle ne saurait tout savoir, et qu’elle se peut tromper et faire d’autres fautes’ (Théodicée, I, §20). Evil of this sort is thus presented by Leibniz not as a positive force, but rather as something negative and privative; not anything willed by God, but an imperfection arising inevitably from the nature of things, and to which man must consequently reconcile himself. The fact of evil is not denied, but its presence in God’s creation is morally justified and rationally accounted for.
The second version of the philosophy of optimism is linked with the name of Alexander Pope, not because he himself was an original thinker (he chiefly echoes the views of his contemporary, Bolingbroke, and the earlier English philosopher, Shaftesbury), but because he succeeded, in his Essay on Man (1733), in crystallizing and giving memorable expression to ideas on the subject which reflected the outlook of many contemporaries. It had become a common practice for Christian apologists to invoke the new scientific discoveries as evidence: that the marvels of the universe bear witness to God’s existence and His providence is the theme of such works as the Rev. W. Derham’s Physico-Theology (1713) and Astro-Theology (1715), both of which were frequently reprinted and translated into French, and of the Abbé Pluche’s equally successful Spectacle de la nature (1732). The discovery of order and purpose in the world of nature led less orthodox thinkers, however, to conclusions incompatible with the Christian doctrine of original sin. If scientific investigation revealed the working of universal laws, the existence of rational purpose, in every phenomenon so far scrutinized, it seemed likely that greater knowledge would display the ultimate regularity and purposiveness of everything in the universe: that wha
tever now appeared as random, imperfect, evil, would be revealed as playing its necessary part in the universal order. Man’s capacity for comprehending this order, it was argued, is inevitably limited by his own quite restricted part in it, but the universe as a whole is perfect, the unblemished product of the divine wisdom and omnipotence, and it is merely human ignorance which makes us see imperfection and evil in it. Such are the views Pope advances in the First Epistle of his Essay on Man:
Cease then, nor order imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heav’n bestows on thee.
Submit. —In this or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing power,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
The distinction between this view and that of Leibniz is thus a wide one. Leibniz, starting from a theological standpoint, admits the reality of evil but sees it as an inevitable ingredient even in the best of all possible worlds. Pope on the other hand, adopting an approach which was of scientific inspiration, proclaims that evil is a mere illusion, a consequence of human ignorance. And the moral which the two writers drew from their conclusions similarly differed, for while Leibniz wished by his vindication of the ways of God to men to counteract the despair and helplessness which Manicheism might provoke, and to encourage men to collaborate actively with God in the working out of His purposes, Pope seems to preach only passive submission to a Providence which, if universally rational and ultimately beneficent, is also beyond man’s limited comprehension.