The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library)

by Francois Voltaire

  BISHOP

  Samuel Omik, a native of Basel, was a very amiable young man, as you know, and one who had his New Testament by heart in both Greek and German. When he was twenty his parents sent him on a journey. He was commissioned to carry some books to the coadjutor of Paris, at the time of the Fronde. When he arrived at the door of the archbishop’s residence, the Swiss servant told him that Monseigneur saw nobody. “Comrade,” said Ornik, “you are very rude to your compatriots. The apostles let everyone approach them, and Jesus Christ desired that people should suffer all little children to come unto him. I have nothing to ask of your master; on the contrary, I have brought him something.”

  “Come inside, then,” said the Swiss.

  He waited for an hour in an outer chamber. As he was very naive, he began a conversation with a servant who was very fond of telling all he knew of his master. “He must be extremely rich,” said Ornik, “to have this crowd of pages and flunkeys whom I see running about the house.”

  “I don’t know what his income is,” answered the other, “but I heard it said that he is already two million in debt.”

  “But who is the lady who has just come out of that room?”

  “That is Madame de Pomèreu, one of his mistresses.”

  “She is really very pretty; but I have not read that the apostles had any such company of a morning in their bedrooms. Ah! I think monsieur is going to give audience.”

  “Say ‘His Highness, Monseigneur.’”

  “Willingly.” Omik saluted His Highness, presented his books, and was received with a very gracious smile. The archbishop said four words to him, then climbed into his coach, escorted by fifty horsemen. In climbing, Monseigneur let fall a sheath. Ornik was quite astonished that Monseigneur carried so large an ink-horn in his pocket. “Don’t you see that’s his dagger?” said the chatterbox. “Everyone carries a dagger when he goes to parliament.”

  “That’s a nice way of officiating,” said Ornik; and he went off very astonished.

  He traversed France, learning as he went from town to town; and thence passed into Italy. When he was in the Pope’s territory, he met one of those bishops whose income runs to a thousand crowns, walking on foot. Ornik was very polite; he offered him a place in his carriage. “You are doubtless on your way to comfort some sick man, Monseigneur?”

  “Sir, I am on my way to my master’s.”

  “Your master? I suppose you mean Jesus Christ?”

  “Oh no, sir. I mean Cardinal Azolin. I am his almoner. He pays me very poorly, but he has promised to place me in the service of Donna Olimpia, the favorite sister-in-law di nostro signore.”

  “What! you are in the pay of a cardinal? But don’t you know that there were no cardinals in the time of Jesus Christ and St. John?”

  “Is it possible?” cried the Italian prelate.

  “Nothing could be truer. You have read it in the Gospels.”

  “I have never read the Gospels,” answered the bishop; “all I know is Our Lady’s office.”

  “I tell you there were neither cardinals nor bishops, and when there were bishops, the priests were very nearly their equals; at least according to what Jerome says in several places.”

  “Holy Virgin,” said the Italian. “I knew nothing about It: and the popes?”

  “There were not any popes any more than cardinals.”

  The good bishop crossed himself; he thought he was with an evil spirit, and jumped out of the carriage.

  BOOKS

  You despise books, you whose whole life is devoted to the vanities of ambition and the search for pleasure, or plunged in idleness; but you should realize that the whole of the known world, with the exception of the savage races, is governed by books alone. The whole of Africa, including Ethiopia and Nigritia, obeys the Koran after having submitted to the Christian gospels. China is ruled by the moral book of Confucius; a greater part of India by the Vedas. Persia was governed for centuries by the books of one of the Zoroasters.

  If you have a law suit, your goods, your honor, your very life depend on the interpretation of a book which you never read.

  Robert the Devil, the Four Sons of Aymon, the Imaginings of Mr. Oufle, are books too. But it is with books as with men: the few play great parts, while the rest are lost in the crowd.

  Who leads mankind in civilized countries? Those who know how to read and write. You do not know either Hippocrates, Boerhaave or Sydenham, but you put your body in the hands of those who have read them. You abandon your soul to those who are paid to read the Bible, although there are not fifty among them who have read it through with care.

  To such an extent do books govern the world, that those who rule today in the city of the Scipios and the Catos have willed that their books of law should be theirs alone. In these books is their power. They have made it a crime of lèse-majesté for their subjects to look into them without express permission. In other countries it has been forbidden to think in writing without letters patent.

  There are nations among whom thought is regarded purely as an object of commerce. The operations of tho human mind are valued there only at two sous the sheet. Whether the bookseller wishes a license for Rabelais on the Church Fathers, the magistrate grants the license without regard to the book’s contents.

  In another country, the liberty of explaining oneself by books is one of the most sacred prerogatives. Print all that you like, under pain of boring, or of being punished if you take too great an advantage of your natural right.

  Before the admirable invention of printing, books were rarer and more expensive than precious stones. There were almost no books among the barbarian nations until Charlemagne, and from him to the French king Charles V, surnamed “the wise”—and from this Charles right down to François I—there was an extreme dearth.

  The Arabs alone had books from the eighth century of our era to the thirteenth. China was filled with them when we did not know how to read or write.

  Copyists were actively employed in the Roman Empire from the time of the Scipios down to the barbarians’ invasions. The Greeks were great transcribers of books in the days of Amyntas, Philip, and Alexander; and they continued this practice extensively in Alexandria. The craft is rather unrewarding. The merchants always paid authors and copyists very badly. It took two years of assiduous labor for a copyist to transcribe the Bible fairly on vellum. What time and what trouble was spent in copying correctly, in Greek and Latin, the works of Origen, of Clement of Alexandria, and of all those other authors who are called “fathers.”

  The poems of Homer were so little known for so long a time that Pisistratus was the first who arranged, and had them transcribed in Athens, about five hundred years before the Christian era.

  Today there are not perhaps a dozen copies of the Vedas or of the Zend-Avesta in the whole of the East.

  You would not have found a single book in the whole of Russia in 1700, with the exception of some Missals and a few Bibles in the hand of brandy-drunken priests.

  Today people complain of a surfeit of books. But it is not for readers to complain. The remedy is easy; nothing forces anyone to read. Nor have the authors any more reason to complain. Those who make up the crowd must not cry that they are being crushed. Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one read profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

  What multiplies books, despite the law of not multiplying beings unnecessarily, is that books produce books. A new history of France or Spain is fabricated from several previously printed volumes, without anything new having been added. All dictionaries are made from dictionaries; almost all new geography books are repetitions of geography books. The Summa of St. Thomas has produced two thousand fat volumes of theology, and the same family of little worms that have fed upon the mother continue to feed upon the children.

  CHARACTER

  (From the Greek word impression, engraving. It is what nature has graved in us.)
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  Can one change one’s character? Yes, if one changes one’s body. It is possible for a man to be born a mischief-maker of tough and violent character, and, as a result of being stricken with apoplexy in his old age, to become a foolish, tearful child, timid and peaceable. His body has changed. But as long as his nerves, his blood and his marrow remain the same, his nature will not change any more than will a wolf’s and a marten’s instinct.

  Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us.

  If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect.

  We cannot give ourselves tastes or talents; why should we be able to give ourselves qualities?

  If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing.

  Should you wish to change a man’s character completely, purge him daily with diluents until you have killed him. Charles XII, in his suppurative fever on the road to Bender, was no longer the same man. He was as tractable as a child.

  If I have a crooked nose and two cat’s eyes, I can hide them with a mask. Can I do more with the character which nature has given me?

  A man who was naturally violent and impetuous presented himself before François I, King of France, to complain of an injustice. The prince’s countenance, the respectful bearing of the courtiers, the very place in which he found himself, made a powerful impression on this man. Mechanically he lowered his eyes, his rough voice softened, he presented his petition humbly; one would have thought him as gentle as were the courtiers themselves, whom he found so disconcerting. But François I understood physiognomy, he easily discovered in the lowered eyes, still burning with somber fire, in the strained facial muscles and the compressed lips, that this man was not as gentle as he was forced to appear. This man followed the king to Pavia, was captured with him, and put in the same prison in Madrid. François I’s majesty no longer made the same impression on him; he grew familiar with the object of his respect. One day when he was pulling off the king’s boots—and pulling them off badly—the king, embittered by his misfortune, became angry; whereupon my man sent the king about his business, and threw his boots out of the window.

  Sixtus V was born petulant, stubborn, haughty, impetuous, vindictive, and arrogant. This character, however, seemed softened during the trials of his novitiate, and he began to enjoy a certain credit in his order. Then he flew into a passion with a guard, and battered him with his fist. As an inquisitor at Venice, he performed his duties insolently. Behold him a cardinal—he is possessed dalla rabbia papale. This passionate desire triumphs over his nature: he buries his person and his character in obscurity; he apes the humble and the dying man. Then he is elected Pope, and this moment gives back all its long-curbed elasticity to the spring which politics have bent. He is the haughtiest and most despotic of sovereigns.

  Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.

  (Horace, Epistolae, 1, 10?

  Drive away nature, it returns at the gallop.

  (Destouches, Glorieux, Act 3, Sc. 5)

  Religion, morality put a brake on a nature’s strength; they cannot destroy it. The drunkard in a cloister, reduced to a half-setier of cider at each meal, will no longer get drunk, but he will always like wine.

  Age enfeebles character; it is a tree that produces only degenerate fruit, but the fruit is always of the same nature; the tree is knotted and covered with moss, it becomes worm-eaten, but it is always an oak or a pear tree. If one could change one’s character, one would give oneself a character; one would be master of nature. But can one give oneself anything? Do we not receive everything? Try to arouse an indolent man to sustained activity; try to freeze with apathy the boiling soul of an impetuous fellow; or try to inspire someone who has neither ear nor taste with a taste for music and poetry, and you will no more succeed than if you undertook to give sight to a man born blind. We perfect, we soften, we conceal what nature has put in us, but we ourselves do not put in anything at all.

  Someone says to a farmer: “You have too many fish in this pond, they will not prosper; there are too many cattle in your meadows, grass is lacking, and they will grow thin.” After this exhortation it happens that the pike eat half my man’s carp, and the wolves half of his sheep, while the rest grow fat. Will he not congratulate himself on his economy? This countryman is yourself: one of your passions has devoured the others, and you think that you have triumphed over yourself. Do not most of us resemble that old general of ninety who, having come on some young officers who were having a bit of fun with some girls, said to them angrily: “Gentlemen, is that the example I give you?”

  CLIMATE

  Climate influences religion in respect to ceremonies and usages. A legislator could have experienced no difficulty in inducing the Indians to bathe in the Ganges at certain phases of the moon; they find it a great pleasure. Had anyone proposed a like bath to the people who live on the banks of the Dwina, near Archangel, he would have been stoned. Forbid pork to an Arab, who after eating this species of animal food (the most miserable and disgusting in his own country) would be affected by leprosy, he will obey you with joy; prohibit it to a Westphalian, and he will be tempted to knock you down. Abstinence from wine is a good precept of religion in Arabia, where orange, lemon, ana lime waters are necessary to health. Mahomet would not have forbidden wine in Switzerland, especially before going to battle.

  There are usages that are merely fanciful. Why did the priests of Egypt devise circumcision? It was not for the sake of health. Cambyses, who treated as they deserved both them and their bull Apis, the courtiers of Cambyses, and his soldiers, enjoyed perfectly good health without having lost their foreskins. Climate does not affect a priest’s genitals. One offered one’s prepuce to Isis, probably on the same principle as the firstlings of the fruits of the earth were everywhere offered. It was typical of an offering of the first fruits of life.

  Religions have always turned on two pivots—forms of observance and creed. Forms and ceremonies depend much on climate; faith not at all. A doctrine will be received with equal facility under the equator or neat the pole. It will be afterwards equally rejected at Batavia and the Orcades, while it will be maintained, unguibus et rostro-with tooth and nail—at Salamanca. This depends not on sun and atmosphere, but solely upon opinion, that fickle empress of the world.

  Certain libations of wine will naturally be enjoyed in a country abounding in vineyards; and it would never occur to any legislator to institute sacred mysteries, which could not be celebrated without wine, in such a country as Norway.

  It will be expressly commanded to burn incense in the court of a temple where beasts are killed in honor of the Divinity, and for the priests’ supper. This slaughterhouse, called a temple, would be a place of abominable infection, if it were not continually purified; and without the use of aromatics, the religion of the ancients would have introduced the plague. The interior of the temple was even festooned with flowers to sweeten the air.

  The cow will not be sacrificed in the burning territory of the Indian peninsula, because it supplies the necessary article of milk, and is very rare in arid and barren districts, and because its flesh, being dry and tough, and yielding but little nourishment, would afford the Brahmins poor cheer. On the contrary, the cow will be considered sacred, in consequence of its rareness and utility.

  The temple of Jupiter Ammon, where the heat is excessive, will be entered only with bare feet. To perform his devotions at Copenhagen, a man must be well shod.

  It is not thus with doctrine. Polytheism has been believed in all climates; and it is equally easy for a Crim Tartar and an inhabitant of Mecca to acknowledge one single incommunicable God, neither begotten nor begetting. It is by doctrine, more than by rites, that a religion extends from one climate to another. The doctrine of the unity of God passed rapidly from Medina to Mount Caucasus. Climate,
then, yields to opinion.

  The Arabs said to the Turks: “We practiced the ceremony of circumcision in Arabia without very well knowing why. It was an ancient usage of the priests of Egypt to offer to Oshiret, or Osiris, a small portion of what they considered most valuable. We had adopted this custom three thousand years before we became Ma hometans. You will become circumcised like us; you will bind yourself to sleep with one of your wives every Friday, and to give two and a half per cent of your income annually to the poor. We drink nothing but water and sherbet; all intoxicating liquors are forbidden us. In Arabia they are pernicious. You will embrace the same regimen, although you are passionately fond of wine, and although it is often a necessity on the banks of the Phasis and the Araxes. In short, if you wish to go to heaven, and to be well-placed there, you will take the road through Mecca.”

  The inhabitants of the northern Caucasus subject themselves to these laws, and adopt completely a religion which was never framed for them.

  In Egypt the emblematical worship of animals succeeded to the doctrines of Thaut. The gods of the Romans afterwards shared Egypt with the dogs, the cats, and the crocodiles. To the Roman religion succeeded Christianity. That was completely banished by Mohammedanism, which will perhaps be superseded by some new religion.

  In all these changes climate has effected nothing; government has done everything. We are here considering only secondary causes, without raising our unhallowed eyes to that Providence which directs them. The Christian religion, which received its birth in Syria, and grew up towards its fullness of stature in Alexandria, now inhabits those countries where Teutat and Irminsul, Freya and Odin, were formerly adored.

  There are some nations whose religion is the result neither of climate nor government. What cause detached the north of Germany, Denmark, three parts of Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, and Ireland, from the Romish communion? Poverty. Indulgences, and deliverance from purgatory for the souls of those whose bodies were at that time in possession of very little money, were sold too dear. The prelates and monks absorbed the whole revenue of a province. People adopted a cheaper religion. In short, after numerous civil wars, it was concluded that the pope’s religion was a good one for nobles, and the reformed one for citizens. Time will show whether the religion of the Greeks or of the Turks will prevail on the coasts of the Euxine and Aegean seas.