The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library) Read online

  The historian Josephus confesses, in his answer to Appian, that the Jews had only recently had any intercourse with other nations: “We inhabit,” says he, “a country distant from the sea; we do not apply ourselves to commerce, nor have we any communication with other peoples. Is it to be wondered at that our nation, dwelling so far from the sea, and affecting never to write, have been so little known?”

  Here it will probably be asked how Josephus could say that his nation affected never to write anything, when they had twenty-two canonical books, without reckoning the Targum by Onkelos. But it must be considered that twenty-two small volumes were not much when compared with the multitude of books preserved in the library of Alexandria, half of which were burned in Caesar’s war.

  It is certain that the Jews had written and read very little; that they were profoundly ignorant of astronomy, geometry, geography, and physics; that they knew nothing of the history of other nations; and that it was only in Alexandria that they at last began to acquire some learning. Their language was a barbarous mixture of ancient Phoenician and corrupted Chaldee; it was so poor that several moods were wanting in the conjugation of their verbs.

  Moreover, as they communicated neither their books nor the titles of them to any foreigner, no one on earth except themselves had ever heard of Adam, or Eve, or Abel, or Cain, or Noah. Abraham alone was, in course of time, known to the Oriental nations; but no ancient people admitted Abraham, or Ibrahim, was the root of the Jewish nation.

  Such are the secrets of Providence, that the father and mother of the human race have ever been totally unknown to their descendants; so that the names of Adam and Eve are to be found in no ancient author, either of Greece, of Rome, of Persia, or of Syria, nor even among the Arabs, until near the time of Mohammed. It was God’s pleasure that the origin of the great family of the world should be concealed from all but the smallest and most unfortunate part of that family.

  How is it that Adam and Eve have been unknown to all their children? How could it be that neither in Egypt nor in Babylon was any trace—any tradition—of our first parents to be found? Why were they not mentioned by Orpheus, by Linus, or by Thamyris? For if they had said but one word of them, it would undoubtedly have been caught by Hesiod and even more surely by Homer, who speak of everything except the authors of the human race. Clement of Alexandria, who collected so many ancient records, would not have failed to quote any passage in which mention had been made of Adam and Eve. Eusebius, in his Universal History, has examined even the most doubtful testimonies, and would assuredly have made the most of the smallest allusion, or appearance of an allusion, to our first parents. It is, then, established that they were always utterly unknown to the nations.

  We do not see the name of Noah or of Adam in any of the ancient dynasties of Egypt; they are not to be found among the Chaldaeans; in a word, the whole earth has been silent respecting them. It must be owned that such a silence is unparalleled. Every people has attributed to itself some imaginary origin, yet none has approached the true one. We cannot comprehend how the father of all nations has so long been unknown, while in the natural course of things his name should have been carried from mouth to mouth to the farthest comers of the earth.

  Let us humble ourselves to the decrees of that Providence which has permitted so astonishing an oblivion. All was mysterious and concealed in the nation guided by God Himself, which prepared the way for Christianity, and was the wild olive on which the fruitful one has been grafted. That the names of the authors of mankind should be unknown to mankind is a mystery of the highest order.

  I will venture to affirm that it has required a miracle thus to shut the eyes and ears of all nations—to destroy every monument, every memorial of their first father. What would Caesar, Antony, Crassus, Pompey, Cicero, Marcellus, or Metellus have thought, if a poor Jew, while selling them balm, had said, “We all descend from one father, named Adam.” All the Roman senate would have cried, “Show us our genealogical tree.” Then the Jew would have displayed his ten generations, down to the time of Noah, and the secret of the universal deluge. The senate would have asked him how many persons were in the ark to feed all the animals for ten whole months, and during the following year in which no food would be produced? The peddler would have said, “We were eight—Noah and his wife, their three sons, Shem, Ham, and Jauphet, and their wives. All this family descended in a direct line from Adam.”

  Cicero, would, doubtless, have inquired for the great monuments, the indisputable testimonies which Noah and his children had left of our common father. “After the deluge,” he would have said, “the whole world would have resounded with the names of Adam and Noah, one the father, the other the restorer of every race. These names would have been in every mouth as soon as men could speak, on every parchment as soon as they could write, on the door of every house as soon as they could build, on every temple, on every statue. You mean to tell us that you knew so great a secret, yet concealed it from us?” The Jew would have answered: “It is because we are pure and you are impure.” The Roman senate would have laughed and the Jew would have been whipped. So much are men attached to their prejudices!

  ADULTERY

  (A memorial, written by a magistrate, about the year 1764.)

  A principal magistrate of a town in France is so unfortunate as to have a wife who was debauched by a priest before her marriage, and whose scandalous acts have since covered her with shame. He has, however, contented himself with a quiet separation. This man, who is forty years old, healthy, and of a pleasing appearance, needs a woman. He is too scrupulous to seek to seduce the wife of another; he even fears to contract an illicit intimacy with a girl or a widow. In this state of sorrow and perplexity he addresses the following complaints to the Church, of which he is a member:

  “My wife is guilty, and it is I who am punished. A woman is necessary to the comfort of my life—nay, even to the preservation of my virtue; yet she is refused me by the Church, which forbids me to marry an honest woman. The civil law of the present day, which is, unhappily, founded on the canon law, deprives me of the. rights of humanity. The Church compels me to seek either pleasures which it reprobates, or shameful consolations which it condemns; it would force me into guilt.

  “If I survey the peoples of the earth, I see none except Roman Catholics who do not recognize divorce and second marriage as a natural right. What inversion of order, then, has made it a virtue in Catholics to suffer adultery and a duty to live without wives when their wives have thus shamefully injured them? Why is a cankered tie indissoluble, notwithstanding the great maxim adopted by the code, Quicquid ligatur dissolubile est? A separation of person and property is granted me, but not a divorce. The law takes from me my wife, and leaves something called sacrament! I no longer enjoy matrimony, but still I am married! What contradiction! What slavery! Under what laws have we been born!

  “What makes it even stranger is that this law of the Church is directly contrary to the words which it believes to have been pronounced by Jesus Christ: ‘Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery.* (Matt. 19:9.)

  “I have no wish here to inquire whether the pontiffs of Rome have a right to violate at pleasure the law of Him whom they regard as their Master, whether when a kingdom wants an heir, it is allowable to repudiate the woman who is incapable of giving one; nor whether a turbulent wife, one attacked by lunacy, or one guilty of murder, should not be divorced as well as an adulteress; I confine myself to what concerns my own sad situation. God permits me to marry again, but the bishop of Rome forbids me.

  “Divorce was customary among Catholics under all the emperors, as well as in all the dismembered states of the Roman Empire. Almost all those kings of France who are called of the first line, repudiated their wives and took fresh ones. At length came one Gregory IX, an enemy to emperors and kings, who, by a decree, made the bonds of marriage indissoluble; and his decretal became the law of Europe. Hence, when a k
ing wished to repudiate an adulterous wife, according to the law of Jesus Christ, he could not do so without seeking some ridiculous pretext. St. Louis was obliged, in order to effect his unfortunate divorce from Eleanora of Guienne, to allege a relationship which did not exist; and Henry IV, to repudiate Margaret of Valois, brought forward a still more unfounded pretence—a want of consent. Thus a lawful divorce could not be obtained without false hood.

  “What! may a sovereign abdicate his crown, and shall he not without the pope’s permission abdicate his faithless wife? And is it possible that men, enlightened in other things, have so long submitted to this absurd and abject slavery?

  “Let our priests and our monks abstain from women, if it must be so; they have my consent. It is detrimental to the progress of population and a misfortune for them; but they deserve that misfortune which they have contrived for themselves. They are the victims of the popes, who in them wish to possess slaves—soldiers without family or country, living for the Church; but I, a magistrate, who serve the state the whole day long, have need of a woman at night; and the Church has no right to deprive me of a possession allowed me by the Deity. The apostles were married, Joseph was married, and I wish to be married. If I, an Alsatian, am dependent on a priest who lives at Rome and has the barbarous power to deprive me of a wife, he may as well make me a eunuch to sing Miserere in his chapel.”

  ANCIENTS AND MODERNS

  The great dispute between the ancients and the moderns is not yet settled; it has been on the table since the silver age succeeded the golden age. Mankind has always maintained that the good old times were much better than the present day. Nestor, in the Iliad, wishing to insinuate himself as a wise conciliator into the minds of Achilles and Agamemnon, starts by saying to them—“I lived formerly with better men than you; no, I have never seen and I shall never see such great personages as Dryas, Cenaeus, Exadius, Polyphemus, equals to the gods, etc.”

  Posterity has avenged Achilles for the poor compliment paid him by Nestor; now vainly praised by those who only praise antiquity. Nobody knows Dryas any longer; we have hardly heard of Exadius, or of Cenaeus; and as for Polyphemus, equal to the gods, he has not too good a reputation, unless the possession of a big eye in one’s forehead, or the eating of men raw, partakes of divinity.

  Lucretius does not hesitate to say that nature has degenerated (lib. II. v. 1159 ) . Antiquity is full of eulogies of another more remote antiquity. Horace combats this prejudice with as much finesse as force in his beautiful Epistle to Augustus (Epist. I. liv. ii. ) . “Must our poems, then,” he says, “be like our wines, of which the oldest are always preferred?”

  The learned and ingenious Fontenelle expresses himself on this subject as follows:

  “The whole question of pre-eminence as between the ancients and the modems, once it is well understood, is reduced to knowing whether the trees which formerly were in our countryside were bigger than those of today In the event that they were, Homer, Plato, Demosthenes cannot be equaled in these latter centuries; but if our trees are as great as those of olden times, then we can equal Homer, Plato and Demosthenes.

  “Let us throw light on this paradox. If the ancients had more intelligence than we have, it is because the brains of those times were better ordered, formed of firmer or more delicate fibers, filled with more animal spirits; but in what way were the brains of those times better ordered? The trees also would in that case have been bigger and more beautiful; for if nature was then younger and more vigorous, the trees, as well as men’s brains, would have necessarily felt this vigor and this youth.” (“Digression on the Ancients and the Modems,” vol. 4, 1742 edition.)

  With the illustrious academician’s permission, that is not at all the state of the question. It is not a matter of knowing whether nature has been able to produce in our day as great geniuses and as good works as those of Greek and Latin antiquity; but to know whether we have them in fact. Without a doubt it is not impossible for there to be as big oaks in the forest of Chantilli as in the forest of Dodona; but supposing that the oaks of Dodona had spoken, it would be quite clear that they had a great advantage over ours, which in all probability will never speak.

  Nature is not bizarre; but it is possible that she gave the Athenians a country and a sky more suitable than Westphalia and the Limousin for forming certain geniuses. Further, it is possible that the government of Athens, by seconding the climate, put into Demosthenes’ head something that the air of Climart and La Grenouillère and the government of Cardinal de Richelieu did not put into the heads of Omer Talon and Jerome Bignon.

  This dispute is therefore a question of fact. Was antiquity more fecund in great monuments of all kinds, up to the time of Plutarch, than modem centuries have been from the century of the Medicis up to Louis XIV inclusive?

  The Chinese, more than two hundred years before our era, constructed that great wall which was not able to save them from the invasion of the Tartars. The Egyptians, three thousand years before, had overloaded the earth with their astonishing pyramids, which had a base of about ninety thousand square feet. Nobody doubts that, if one wishes to undertake today these useless works, one could easily succeed by a lavish expenditure of money. The great wall of China is a monument to fear; the pyramids are monuments to vanity and superstition. Both bear witness to a great patience in the peoples, but to no superior genius. Neither the Chinese nor the Egyptians would have been able to make even a statue such as those which our sculptors form today.

  Sir William Temple, who has made it his business to disparage all the moderns, claims that in architecture they have nothing comparable to the temples of Greece and Rome: but, English as he was, he must agree that the Church of St. Peter is incomparably more beautiful than was the Capitol.

  It is curious with what assurance he maintains that there is nothing new in our astronomy, nothing in the knowledge of the human body, unless perhaps, he says, the circulation of the blood. Love of his own opinion, founded on his vast self-esteem, makes him forget the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter, the five moons and the ring of Saturn, the rotation of the sun an its axis, the calculated position of three thousand stars, the laws given by Kepler and Newton for the heavenly orbs, the causes of the precession of the equinoxes, and a hundred other pieces of knowledge of which the ancients did not suspect even the possibility.

  The discoveries in anatomy are as great in number. A new universe in little, discovered by the microscope, was completely discounted by Sir William; he closed his eyes to the marvels of his contemporaries, and opened them only to admire ancient ignorance.

  He goes so far as to pity us for having nothing left of the magic of the Indians, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians; and by this magic he understands a profound knowledge of nature, whereby they produced miracles: but he does not cite one miracle, because in fact there never were any. “What has become,” he asks, “of the charms of that music which so often enchanted man and beast, the fishes, the birds, the snakes, and changed their nature?”

  This enemy of his century really believes the fable of Orpheus, and has not apparently heard either the beautiful music of Italy, or even that of France, which in truth does not charm snakes, but does charm the ears of connoisseurs.

  What is still more strange is that, having all his life cultivated belles-lettres, he does not reason better about our good authors than about our philosophers. He looks on Rabelais as a great man. He cites the “Amours des Gaules” as one of our best works. He was, however, a scholar, a courtier, a man of much wit, an ambassador, a man who had reflected profoundly on all he had seen. He possessed great knowledge: a prejudice sufficed to spoil all this merit.

  Euripides has his beauties, and Sophocles has even more; but their defects are still greater. One dares say that the beautiful scenes of Corneille and the touching tragedies of Racine surpass the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides as much as these two Greeks surpass Thespis. Racine was quite conscious of his great superiority over Euripides; but he praised the Greek
poet in order to humiliate Perrault.

  Molière, in his best plays, is as superior to the pure but cold Terence, and to the droll Aristophanes, as to Dancourt the buffoon.

  There are therefore spheres in which the modems are far superior to the ancients, and others, very few in number, in which we are their inferiors. It is to this that the whole dispute is reduced.

  ANNALS

  How many nations have long existed, and still exist, without annals. There were none in all America, that is, in one-half of our globe, excepting those of Mexico and Peru, which are not very ancient. Besides, knotted cords are a sort of books which cannot enter into very minute details. Three-fourths of Africa never had annals; and, at the present day, in the most learned nations, in those which have even used and abused the art of writing the most, ninety-nine out of a hundred persons may be regarded as not knowing anything that happened there further back than four generations, and as ignorant almost of the names of their great-grandfathers. Such is the case with nearly all the inhabitants of towns and villages, very few families holding titles of their possessions. When a litigation arises respecting the limits of a field or a meadow, the judges decide according to the testimony of the old men; and possession constitutes the title. Some great events are transmitted from father to son, and are entirely altered in passing from mouth to mouth. They have no other annals.