The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Tindal ranged with no tender mercy through all the fantasies of theology. He asked why God should have given his revelation to one small people, the Jews, had let it remain their exclusive possession for four thousand years, and then had sent his son to them with another revelation that after seventeen hundred years was still confined to a minority of the human race. What sort of god could this be who used such clumsy methods with such tardy and inadequate results? What ogre of a god was this who punished Adam and Eve for seeking knowledge, and then punished all their posterity merely for being born? We are told that the absurdities in the Bible are due to God’s adapting his speech to the language and ideas of his hearers. What nonsense! Why could he not speak the simple truth to them intelligibly? Why should he have used priests as his intermediaries instead of speaking directly to every man’s soul? Why should he have allowed his specially revealed religion to become an engine of persecution, terror, and strife, leaving men no better morally, after centuries of this dispensation, than before?—making them, indeed, more fierce and cruel than under the pagan cults! Is there not a finer morality in Confucius or Cicero than in the Christianity of history? The real revelation is in Nature herself, and in man’s God-given reason; the real God is the God that Newton revealed, the designer of a marvelous world operating majestically according to invariable law; and the real morality is the life of reason in harmony with nature. “Whoever so regulates his natural appetites as will conduce most to the exercise of his reason, the health of his body, and the pleasures of his senses taken and considered together (since herein his happiness consists) may be certain he can never offend his Maker, who, as he governs all things according to their natures can’t but expect his rational creatures should act according to their natures.”20 This is the true morality, this is the true Christianity, “as old as the creation.”

  Conyers Middleton carried on the attack from the historical angle. Graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge, he took holy orders, and, while dealing blow after blow at orthodox belief, continued the external practices of Christian worship. He wrote some of the best prose of his time, and his Life of Cicero (1741), though it borrowed heavily from its predecessors, remains to this day an admirable biography. He pleased his fellow clergymen when he sent to England Letters from Rome (1729), showing in scholarly detail the residue of pagan rites in Catholic ritual—incense, holy water, relics, miracles, votive offerings and lights set up before sacred shrines, and the Pontifex Maximus of antiquity become the Supreme Pontiff of Rome. Protestant England applauded, but it soon discovered that Middleton’s penchant for history could trouble Protestant as well as Catholic theology. When Daniel Waterland defended, against Tindal, the literal truth and inspiration of the Bible, Middleton in a Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731) warned the Protestant divines that to insist on all the legends of the Bible as actual history was suicidal; sooner or later the progress of knowledge would discredit such fables and compel Christian apologists to retreat shamefacedly to some more modest stand. Then Middleton resorted to an argument that betrayed the effect which his study of history had had upon his religious faith: even if Christian theology is incredible, a good citizen will support Christianity and the Christian Church as a bulwark of social order, providing admirable deterrents to the barbarism latent in mankind.21

  Finally, Middleton issued his most substantial work, A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers Which Are Supposed to Have Existed in the Christian Church through Successive Ages (1748)—a book that Hume later ranked as superior to his own contemporary essay “Of Miracles” (1748). He began by acknowledging the authority of the miracles ascribed in the canonical New Testament to Christ or his apostles; he proposed to show only that the miracles attributed to the Fathers, saints, and martyrs of the Church, after the first Christian century, were undeserving of belief; merely to relate those stories sufficed to reveal their absurdity. Some Fathers of the Church had sanctioned such tales while knowing them to be false; and Middleton quoted Mosheim, the learned ecclesiastical historian, as intimating his fear that “those who search with any attention into the writings of the greatest and most holy doctors of the fourth century will find them all, without exception, disposed to deceive and to lie whenever the interest of religion requires it.”22

  There were many defects in Middleton’s book. He forgot that he too had recommended wholesale deception in support of Christianity, and he ignored the possibility that some strange experiences, like the exorcism of “diabolical possession,” or St. Anthony’s hearing the Devil at his door, were due to the power of suggestion or imagination, and may have seemed truly miraculous to those who honestly reported them. In any case the effect of the Free Inquiry was to throw back upon the miracles of the Old Testament, then of the New, the same methods of criticism that Middleton had applied to the patristic period; and his Catholic opponents were quite right in contending that his arguments would weaken the whole supernatural substructure of Christian belief. Perhaps Middleton had intended it so. But he kept his ecclesiastical preferments to the end.

  The conversion of Bolingbroke to deism was a secret and a contagion in the aristocracy. In writings cautiously kept from publication during his life he directed his scornful invective against almost all philosophers except Bacon and Locke. He termed Plato the father of theological mendacity, St. Paul a fanatical visionary, Leibniz a “chimerical quack.”23 He called metaphysicians “learned lunatics,” and described as “pneumatical [windy] madmen” all who thought soul and body distinct.24 He laughed at the Old Testament as a farrago of nonsense and lies.25 He professed belief in God, but rejected the remainder of the Christian creed. All knowledge is relative and uncertain. “We ought always to be unbelieving.… In religion, government, and philosophy we ought to distrust everything that is established.”26He put behind him the last consolation of the skeptic—the belief in progress; all societies go through cycles “from generation to corruption, and from corruption to generation.”27

  In 1744 Bolingbroke inherited the family estate at Battersea, and left France to spend there the concluding years of his struggle against disease and despair. His former friends deserted him as his political influence fell and his temper rose. The death of his second wife (1750) ended his interest in human affairs; “I become every year more and more isolated in this world”28—the nemesis of selfishness. In 1751 he was seized with cancer spreading from the face. He dictated a pious will, but refused to let any clergyman attend him.29 He died on December 12 after six months of agony, without hope for himself or mankind. Already the decline of religious belief was begetting the pessimism that would be the secret malady of the modern soul.

  III. THE RELIGIOUS REBUTTAL

  The defenders of Christianity did not meet the deistic attack in any spirit of resignation to defeat; on the contrary, they fought back with as hearty a vigor, as extensive a learning, as virulent a style as anything in Tindal, Middleton, or Bolingbroke. The weaker apologists, like Bishop Chandler of Lichfield and Bishop Newton of London, relied on trite arguments—that the Jews were fervently expecting a Messiah when Christ came, and that many Jewish prophecies had been fulfilled by his career; or, like Bishops Sherlock of London and Pearce of Rochester, they appealed to the multiple testimony for the resurrection of Christ. Sherlock and others insisted that the evidence for the Christian miracles was overwhelming, and sufficed to uphold the divinity of Christ and Christianity. To reject a well-attested event because it contradicts our experience, said Sherlock, is a very risky procedure; on the same basis the inhabitants of the tropics refused to believe in the reality of ice. When we assume that things cannot be otherwise than we have known them to be, “we outrun the information of our senses, and the conclusion stands on prejudice, not on reason.”30 Despite our wide but really narrow experience, we cannot be sure that a man may not rise from the dead. Consider how many marvels now accepted as routine events in our lives were once held to be inconceivable!

  George Berkeley, who had made his mark in phil
osophy in the years 1709–13, sent from Rhode Island his contribution to the debate in Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher (1733), a dialogue sparkling with bold thought and sprightly style. Alciphron describes himself as a freethinker who has progressed from Latitudinarianism to deism to atheism; now he rejects all religion as a deception practiced upon the people by priests and magistrates; he refuses to believe in anything but the senses, the passions, and the appetites. Euphranor, voicing Berkeley, warns the deists that their doctrine leads to atheism, and that atheism will lead to the collapse of morality. There may be a few good atheists, but will not their doctrine, if accepted by the masses, issue in libertinism and lawlessness? These skeptics of religion should be skeptics of science too, for many statements of scientists—as in higher mathematics—are quite beyond the evidence of our senses or the reach of our understanding. Certainly the doctrine of the Trinity is no more incomprehensible than the square root of minus one.

  William Warburton was not the man to rest his faith or his ecclesiastical revenues upon so frail a base as Berkeley’s surds. Trained as a lawyer, ordained an Anglican priest, he fought his way through the theological jungle with all the alert resourcefulness of the legal mind. Perhaps he was fitter for the army than for either the bar or the cloth; he relished battle, and could hardly sleep at night if he had not slain some adversary during the day. He described his life as “a warfare upon earth; that is to say, with bigots and libertines, against whom I have denounced eternal war, like Hannibal against Rome, at the altar.”31 His darts ranged far and wide, and when they ran out of foes they slaughtered friends. He gave succinct descriptions of his contemporaries: Johnson, a malign and insolent bully; Garrick, whose “sense, when he deviates into it, is more like nonsense”; Smollett, a “vagabond Scot” who “writes nonsense ten thousand strong”; Voltaire, a “scoundrel” wallowing in “the dirtiest sink of freethinking.”32

  His immense two-volume masterpiece appeared in 1737–41 as The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist. Its argument was original and unique: The belief in a future state of reward and punishment is (as many deists agreed) indispensable to social order; but Moses succeeded in organizing Jewish life to prosperity and morality without that belief; this miracle can be explained only by the divine guidance of Moses and the Jews; therefore the mission and laws of Moses were divine, and the Bible is the word of God. Warburton felt that this demonstration fell “very little short of mathematical certainty.”33 His theological colleagues were not quite happy over his view that God had guided the Jews through 613 laws and four thousand years without letting them know that their souls were immortal. But the lusty author had filled his pages with such learned disquisitions—on the nature of morality, on the necessary alliance of Church and state, on the mystery religions and rituals of antiquity, on the origin of writing, on the meaning of hieroglyphics, on Egyptian chronology, on the date of the Book of Job, and on the errors of freethinkers, antiquaries, scholars, historians, Socinians, Turks, and Jews—that all England gasped at the weight and reach of his erudition. Warburton advanced from battle to battle—against Crousaz, Theobald, Bolingbroke, Middleton, Wesley, Hume—to the lucrative and comfortable bishopric of Gloucester.

  Joseph Butler was less tough of fiber but of finer grain: a man of great gentleness, modesty, and benevolence, who suffered deeply from his realization that the religion which had helped to wean European civilization from barbarism was facing a trial for its life. He was shocked by the popularity of Hobbesian materialism in the upper classes. When (1747) he was offered the archbishopric of Canterbury—the ecclesiastical primacy of England—he refused it on the ground that “it was too late for him to try to support a falling Church.”34 In 1751 he expressed his dismay at “the general decay of religion in this nation.… The influence of it is more and more wearing out in the minds of men.… The number of those who profess themselves unbelievers increases, and with their numbers their zeal.”35 As if he felt that a people might suffer a spiritual amnesia through the abandonment of its religious and moral heritage, he surprised his friend Dean Tucker by asking might not a nation, as well as an individual, go mad?

  Nevertheless he gave his life to seeking an intellectual rehabilitation of Christian belief. When he was still a young priest of thirty-four he published Fifteen Sermons (1726), in which he modified Hobbes’s pessimistic analysis of human nature by claiming that man, though in many ways naturally vicious, is also by nature a social and moral being, with an inborn sense of right and wrong. Butler argued that the nobler elements in the constitution of man owe their origin to God, whose voice they are; and on this basis he built a general theory of divine design as permeating the world. Caroline liked the argument, and in 1736 Butler was appointed “clerk of the closet” to the Queen.

  In that year he issued what remained for a century the chief buttress of Christian argument against unbelief—The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature. The preface revealed the mood of the time:

  It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if in the present age this were an agreed point among all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.36

  Intended as an answer to the deists, the Analogy assumed the existence of God. The “natural religion” of the deists had accepted the “God of Nature,” the great designer and artificer of the world, but it had rejected, as quite incompatible with that lofty conception, the apparently unjust God of the Bible. Butler proposed to show that there are in nature as many signs of injustice and cruelty as in the Jehovah of the Old Testament; that there is no contradiction between the God of Nature and the God of Revelation; and that those who accepted the one deity should logically accept the other. The good clerk of the closet seems never to have dreamed that some hardy skeptics might conclude from his argument (as James Mill did) that neither of these two gods deserved to be worshiped by civilized men.

  That both gods existed, and were one, Butler argued from probability. Our minds are imperfect, and subject to every manner of error; we can never have certainty, whether about God or about nature; it is enough to have probability; and probability supports the beliefs in God and immortality. The soul is clearly superior to the body, for the bodily organs are the tools and servants of the soul. The soul, as obviously the essence of man, need not perish with the body; probably, at death, it seeks other instruments in a higher stage. Is it not conformable to nature that an organism should be transformed from a lower to a finer form—as creeping things become winged ones, as the chrysalis changes into a butterfly? And another analogy makes it probable that in the life of the soul after the death of the body there will be rewards and punishments—always assuming the existence of God. For just as we punish criminals for their offenses against society, so does nature, in most cases, punish men for the evils they do; but since there are many instances in which vice meets with no evident penalty, and virtue no visible reward, in this life, it is incredible that God will not restore, in another life, a juster relationship between conduct and fate. Our conscience, or moral sense, could have come to us only from a just God.

  Butler’s arguments are now of interest chiefly as illustrating a stage in the evolution of the modern mind. As against the deists they had considerable point: those who accepted the evidence of divine design in nature had no reason to reject the Bible because of the cruel God revealed in the Old Testament, for the God of Nature is quite as cruel. It was a highly original way to defend Christianity; Butler apparently did not suspect that his argument might lead not to Christianity but to something more desperate than atheism—to Thomas Henry Huxley’s conclusion that the ultimate forces in or behind the universe are unm
oral, and run harshly counter to that sense of right and wrong upon which Butler, like Kant, based so much of his theology. In any case the Analogy marked an advance if only in its good temper; here was no odium theologicum, no unctuous vituperation, but an earnest attempt to be courteous even to those who seemed to be destroying the most precious hopes of mankind. Queen Caroline hailed the book as the best defense yet made of the Christian creed. Dying, she recommended Butler for ecclesiastical advancement; George II made him bishop of Bristol, then dean of St. Paul’s, finally bishop of Durham. There Butler set an example to his peers by living simply, and giving much of his income to the poor.

  His Analogy left so many openings to unbelief that many churchmen advised an end to debate, and preferred to rest their faith on religious needs and sentiments beyond the shafts of reason. So Henry Dodwell’s Christianity Not Founded on Argument (1742) rejected reasoning in spiritual concerns; it is no guide to truth, much less to happiness, but is merely an enervating dance of pros and cons; no man ever builds his faith upon such fluid foundations. The arguments of Clarke, Warburton, Butler, and other Christian defenders, said Dodwell, had shaken more religious belief than they had reinforced; there might have been no atheism if the Boyle lecturers had not annually refuted it. Christ did not argue; he taught as one having authority. Look at any really religious person, and you will find an inner conviction, not an intellectual conclusion. For the simple soul faith must be an accepted tradition; for the mature spirit it must be a direct feeling of a supernatural reality.