The Philosophy of Voltaire - Collected Works: Treatise On Tolerance, Philosophical Dictionary, Candide, Letters on England, Plato's Dream, Dialogues, The Study of Nature, Ancient Faith and Fable…. Вольтер
haughty prætorians who considered themselves the masters of the emperors. He made an entire separation between the gown and the sword. The depositories of the laws, kept down under military power, were only jurists in chains. The provinces of the empire were governed upon a new system.
The grand object of Constantine was to be master in everything; he was so in the Church, as well as in the State. We behold him convoking and opening the Council of Nice; advancing into the midst of the assembled fathers, covered over with jewels, and with the diadem on his head, seating himself in the highest place, and banishing unconcernedly sometimes Arius and sometimes Athanasius. He put himself at the head of Christianity without being a Christian; for at that time baptism was essential to any person's becoming one; he was only a catechumen. The usage of waiting for the approach of death before immersing in the water of regeneration, was beginning to decline with respect to private individuals. If Constantine, by delaying his baptism till near the point of death, entertained the notion that he might commit every act with impunity in the hope of a complete expiation, it was unfortunate for the human race that such an opinion should have ever suggested itself to the mind of a man in possession of uncontrolled power.
CONTRADICTIONS.
SECTION I.
The more we see of the world, the more we see it abounding in contradictions and inconsistencies. To begin with the Grand Turk: he orders every head that he dislikes struck off, and can very rarely preserve his own. If we pass from the Grand Turk to the Holy Father, he confirms the election of emperors, and has kings among his vassals; but he is not so powerful as a duke of Savoy. He expedites orders for America and Africa, yet could not withhold the slightest of its privileges from the republic of Lucca. The emperor is the king of the Romans; but the right of their king consists in holding the pope's stirrup, and handing the water to him at mass. The English serve their monarch upon their knees, but they depose, imprison, and behead him.
Men who make a vow of poverty, gain in consequence an income of about two hundred thousand crowns; and, in virtue of their vow of humility, they become absolute sovereigns. The plurality of benefices with care of souls is severely denounced at Rome, yet every day it despatches a bull to some German, to enable him to hold five or six bishoprics at once. The reason, we are told, is that the German bishops have no cure of souls. The chancellor of France is the first person in the State, but he cannot sit at table with the king, at least he could not till lately, although a colonel, who is scarcely perhaps a gentleman—gentil-homme—may enjoy that distinction. The wife of a provincial governor is a queen in the province, but merely a citizen's wife at court.
Persons convicted of the crime of nonconformity are publicly roasted, and in all our colleges the second eclogue of Virgil is explained with great gravity, including Corydon's declarations of love to the beautiful Alexis; and it is remarked to the boys that, although Alexis be fair and Amyntas brown, yet Amyntas may still deserve the preference.
If an unfortunate philosopher, without intending the least harm, takes it into his head that the earth turns round, or to imagine that light comes from the sun, or to suppose that matter may contain some other properties than those with which we are acquainted, he is cried down as a blasphemer, and a disturber of the public peace; and yet there are translations in usum Delphini of the "Tusculan Questions" of Cicero, and of Lucretius, which are two complete courses of irreligion.
Courts of justice no longer believe that persons are possessed by devils, and laugh at sorcerers; but Gauffredi and Grandier were burned for sorcery; and one-half of a parliament wanted to sentence to the stake a monk accused of having bewitched a girl of eighteen by breathing upon her.
The skeptical philosopher Bayle was persecuted, even in Holland. La Motte le Vayer, more of a skeptic, but less of a philosopher, was preceptor of the king Louis XIV., and of the king's brother. Gourville was hanged in effigy at Paris, while French minister in Germany.
The celebrated atheist Spinoza lived and died in peace. Vanini, who had merely written against Aristotle, was burned as an atheist; he has, in consequence, obtained the honor of making one article in the histories of the learned, and in all the dictionaries, which, in fact, constitute immense repositories of lies, mixed up with a very small portion of truth. Open these books, and you will there find not merely that Vanini publicly taught atheism in his writings, but that twelve professors of his sect went with him to Naples with the intention of everywhere making proselytes. Afterwards, open the books of Vanini, and you will be astonished to find in them nothing but proofs of the existence of God. Read the following passage, taken from his "Amphitheatrum," a work equally unknown and condemned; "God is His own original and boundary, without end and without beginning, requiring neither the one nor the other, and father of all beginning and end; He ever exists, but not in time; to Him there has been no past, and will be no future; He reigns everywhere, without being in any place; immovable without rest, rapid without motion; He is all, and out of all; He is in all, without being enclosed; out of everything, without being excluded from anything; good, but without quality; entire, but without parts; immutable, while changing the whole universe; His will is His power; absolute, there is nothing of Him of what is merely possible; all in Him is real; He is the first, the middle, and the last; finally, although constituting all, He is above all beings, out of them, within them, beyond them, before them, and after them." It was after such a profession of faith that Vanini was declared an atheist. Upon what grounds was he condemned? Simply upon the deposition of a man named Francon. In vain did his books depose in favor of him; a single enemy deprived him of life, and stigmatized his name throughout Europe.
The little book called "Cymbalum Mundi," which is merely a cold imitation of Lucian, and which has not the slightest or remotest reference to Christianity, was condemned to be burned. But Rabelais was printed "cum privilegio"; and a free course was allowed to the "Turkish Spy," and even to the "Persian Letters"; that volatile, ingenious, and daring work, in which there is one whole letter in favor of suicide; another in which we find these words: "If we suppose such a thing as religion;" a third, in which it is expressly said that "the bishops have no other functions than dispensing with the observance of the laws"; and, finally, another in which the pope is said to be a magician, who makes people believe that three are one, and that the bread we eat is not bread, etc.
The Abbé St. Pierre, a man who could frequently deceive himself, but who never wrote without a view to the public good, and whose works were called by Cardinal Dubois, "The dreams of an honest citizen"; the Abbé St. Pierre, I say, was unanimously expelled from the French Academy for having, in some political work, preferred the establishment of councils under the regency to that of secretaries of state under Louis XIV.; and for saying that towards the close of that glorious reign the finances were wretchedly conducted. The author of the "Persian Letters" has not mentioned Louis XIV. in his book, except to say that he was a magician who could make his subjects believe that paper was money; that he liked no government but that of Turkey; that he preferred a man who handed him a napkin to a man who gained him battles; that he had conferred a pension on a man who had run away two leagues, and a government upon another who had run away four; that he was overwhelmed with poverty, although it is said, in the same letter, that his finances are inexhaustible. Observe, then, I repeat, all that this writer, in the only work then known to be his, has said of Louis XIV., the patron of the French Academy. We may add, too, as a climax of contradiction, that that society admitted him as a member for having turned them into ridicule; for, of all the books by which the public have been entertained at the expense of the society, there is not one in which it has been treated more disrespectfully than in the "Persian Letters." See that letter wherein he says, "The members of this body have no other business than incessantly to chatter; panegyric comes and takes its place as it were spontaneously in their eternal gabble," etc. After having thus treated this society, they praise him, on his introduction, for his skill in drawing likenesses.
Were I disposed to continue the research into the contraries to be found in the empire of letters, I might give the history of every man of learning or wit;