But Voltaire – baptized into the Catholic Church and educated by the Jesuits, whom he publicly lambasted as power-hungry pedophiles, but privately saluted for their learning – did not take up the cause out of any sympathy for Protestantism. That September, as he was busy preparing his case, a letter arrived which addressed him as ‘Antichrist’. The title was one appropriate to his often-sulphureous reputation.
Voltaire, a gaunt, short man with a wide, mocking smile, had something of the look of a devil. His grin, though, was only the half of it. Even more shocking to devout opinion – Protestant no less than Catholic – was the dawning realization that Europe’s most celebrated writer, a man whom even his enemies could not help but admire, viewed Christianity with a hatred that bordered on fixation. For decades he had veiled it, knowing just how far he could go, skillful like no other in deploying irony, the private joke, the knowing wink.
Voltaire continued to publish works against the Church anonymously under the guise of a member of the Catholic Church, nobody was fooled. He mocked Christians for their god who could be eaten in a morsel of pastry, their scriptures rife with the most glaring contradictions and idiocies, their inquisitions, and scaffolds, and internecine wars, was too recognizably the work of Voltaire to be mistaken for that of anyone else.
Voltaire hailed as Antichrist in a letter, not by an opponent, but by an admirer: a philosopher and notorious free-thinker named Denis Diderot.
To be a philosopher was to thrill to the possibility that a new age of freedom was advancing. The demons of superstition and unwarranted privilege were being cast out. People that had been walking in darkness had seen a great light. The world was being born again. Voltaire himself, in his more somber moments, worried that the malign hold of priestcraft might never be loosened; but in general he inclined to a cheerier take. His age was a siècle des lumières: ‘an age of enlightenment’. For the first time since the reign of Constantine, the commanding heights of European culture had been wrested from Christian intellectuals.
Voltaire complained that the two great reformers (Luther and Calvin) had only scotched the papacy, not killed it, echoed any number of Protestant radicals.
Voltaire, as a young man, had spent time in England. There, he had seen for himself how faith, in the transformative potency of enlightenment, from aristocratic salons to the meeting halls of Quakers, had resulted in what appeared to him an enviable degree of tolerance. ‘If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.’
Voltaire, though, as he surveyed this religious landscape with an amused condescension, did not rest content with it. The impact of Calas’ execution was precisely that it served to jolt him out of any complacency.
Christian sects were incorrigible. They would always persecute one another, given only half a chance. The ideal, then, was a religion that could transcend their mutual hatreds. The wise man, Voltaire wrote in the midst of his campaign to exonerate Calas, knows such a religion not only to exist, but to be ‘the most ancient and the most widespread’ of any in the world. The man who practises it does not quibble over points of doctrine. He knows that he has received no divine revelations. He worships a just God, but one whose acts are beyond human comprehension. ‘He has his brethren from Beijing to Cayenne, and he reckons all the wise his brothers.’
Yet this, of course, was merely to proclaim another sect – and, what was more, one with some very familiar pretensions.
The dream of a universal religion was nothing if not catholic. Ever since the time of Luther, attempts by Christians to repair the torn fabric of Christendom had served only to shred it further.
The charges that Voltaire levelled against Christianity – that it was bigoted, that it was superstitious, that its scriptures were rife with contradictions – were none of them original to him. All had been honed, over the course of two centuries and more, by pious Christians.
Voltaire’s God, like the Quakers’, like the Collegiants’, like Spinoza’s, was a deity whose contempt for sectarian wrangling owed everything to sectarian wrangling. ‘Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, that is the very foolish daughter of a wise and intelligent mother.’
Voltaire’s dream of a brotherhood of man, even as it cast Christianity as something fractious, parochial, murderous, could not help but betray its Christian roots. Just as Paul had proclaimed that there was neither Jew nor Greek in Christ Jesus, so – in a future blessed with full enlightenment – was there destined to be neither Jew nor Christian nor Muslim. Their every difference would be dissolved. Humanity would be as one.
The Treatise of the Three Imposters, or The Spirit of Spinoza –was a book very much of its time. Nevertheless, its solution to the rival understandings of religion was shocking even to critics of religion.
Christ, far from being ‘the voice of God’, as Spinoza had argued, had been a charlatan: a sly seller of false dreams. His disciples had been imbeciles, his miracles trickery. There was no need for Christians to argue over scripture. The Bible was nothing but a spider’s web of lies. Yet the authors of the Treatise, although they certainly aspired to heal the divisions between Protestants and Catholics by demonstrating that Christianity itself was nothing but a fraud, did not rest content with that ambition. They remained sufficiently Christian that they wished to bring light to the entire world. Jews and Muslims too were dupes. Jesus ranked alongside Moses and Muhammad as one of three imposters.
All religion was a hoax.
Even Voltaire was shocked. No less committed than any priest to the truth of his own understanding of God, he viewed the blasphemies of the Treatise as blatant atheism, and quite as pernicious as superstition. Briefly taking a break from mocking Christians for their sectarian rivalries, he wrote a poem warning his readers not to trust the model of enlightenment being peddled by underground radicals. The Treatise itself was an imposture. Some sense of the divine was needed, or else society would fall apart. ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’
But what kind of God? By the time that Voltaire came to pen his celebrated aperçu, he had achieved a stunning victory in his campaign to have Jean Calas pardoned.
The exoneration of Calas, an innocent man tortured to death before a mocking and bloodthirsty crowd, had not merely been a triumph for the cause of enlightenment, but a defeat for Christianity. ‘It is philosophy alone that is responsible for this victory.
Yet this was not necessarily how it appeared to Christians. There were many Catholics who saluted Voltaire’s intervention. Had there not been, his campaign would never have succeeded – for there were hardly enough philosophes in France to sway the country on their own.
Voltaire, when he sketched a portrait of Calas broken on the wheel, could not help but evoke in the imaginings of his readers the image of Christ on the cross. The standards by which he judged Christianity, and condemned it for its faults, were not universal. They were not shared by philosophers across the world. They were not common from Beijing to Cayenne.
They were distinctively, peculiarly Christian.
Even the most radical philosophes might on occasion betray an awareness of this. In 1762, during the first throes of the Calas affair, Diderot wrote admiringly of Voltaire’s readiness to deploy his genius in the cause of the persecuted family. ‘For what are the Calas to him? What is it that can interest him in them? What reason has he to suspend labors he loves, to occupy himself in their defence?’ Atheist though he was, Diderot was too honest not to acknowledge the likeliest answer. ‘If there were a Christ, I assure you that Voltaire would be saved.’
The evolution of the concept of human rights, mediated as it had been since the Reformation by Protestant jurists and philosophes, had come to obscure its original authors. It derived, not from ancient Greece or Rome, but from the period of history condemned by all right-thinking revolutionaries as a lost millennium, in which any hint of enlightenment had at once been snuffed out by monkish, book-burning fanatics. It was an inheritance from the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages.
Source: Dominion