Voltaire on the Wars of Catholics and Protestants

In his article "Climate" from the Philosophical Dictionary (1764), Voltaire argues that the weather, the natural environment, and of course other causes greatly influence religious beliefs in different countries and regions. They influence the creed behind the religion, and they also influence the way the religion is practiced in its daily details.

He gives this nutshell summary of the Thirty Years' War — it is so frivolous and glib about a horrendous historical period that it is funny again:

"What cause detached the north of Germany, Denmark, three-quarters of Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, Ireland, from the Roman communion? Poverty. Indulgences and deliverance from purgatory were sold too dear to souls whose bodies had at that time very little money. The prelates, the monks devoured a province's whole revenue. People took a cheaper religion. At last, after twenty civil wars, people believed that the Pope's religion was very good for great lords, and the reformed religion for citizens."

From: Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary. H.I. Woolf, ed. New York: Knopf, 1924
via Hanover Historical Texts Project

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In French:

Quelle cause a détaché le nord de l’Allemagne, le Danemark, les trois quarts de la Suisse, la Hollande, l’Angleterre, l’Écosse, l’Irlande, de la communion romaine ?... la pauvreté. On vendait trop cher les indulgences et la délivrance du purgatoire à des âmes dont les corps avaient alors très-peu d’argent. Les prélats, les moines, engloutissaient tout le revenu d’une province. On prit une religion à meilleur marché. Enfin, après vingt guerres civiles, on a cru que la religion du pape était fort bonne pour les grands seigneurs, et la réformée pour les citoyens. 

From: Voltaire, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, Vol. 18. Garnier, 1878 (pp. vii-xi).
via Wikisource

Voltaire on the Worth of the Pyramids

Although the great, sober-minded reference works of the Enlightenment era, the 'dictionaries' of pre-Revolutionary France, are unknown territory to me, I enjoy two of the satirical dictionaries that arose then and centuries afterward: Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, published in 1911 in the United States, and Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, first published in 1764 in Geneva. (Being a sort of liber non grata in the French skeptic's native country.)

It's as refreshing as ever, by the way, to read books that are meant to be enjoyed by the reader.

And I'm naive — i.e., my standards might not be high — but I was charmed, surprised, and pleased by this passage in one of Voltaire's articles (which is related to the debate about whether contemporary culture is equally good as, better, or far worse than, the literature and other culture of the Romans and Greeks):

"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 wished 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 such a statue such as those which our sculptors form today." ¹ °

These condemnations of ancient Chinese and Egyptian inspiration evidently aren't logically watertight. Perhaps pharaohs and emperors and other patrons, who were the ones at whose whim some of the ancient art and architecture survive into the present day, had a rather pedestrian aesthetic and perhaps their guidelines were metaphorical straight-jackets. Their legacy is no realistic reflection on the potential of ancient Chinese and Egyptians on the whole.

'Nankow Pass: Gate of the Great Wall'
in China, its Marvel and Mystery
T. Hodgson Liddell, New York: J. Lane Co. (1910)
via Wikimedia Commons

*

But I like Voltaire's skepticism of the pyramids' purpose. (And his reduction of e.g. the Great Wall of China to the embodiment of 'a great patience in the peoples.') I grew up reading about Ancient Egypt, watching televised documentaries, exploring the dynasties in school and briefly in university; all, reverentially. Less rosily, I was taught or told as an urban legend, if I remember correctly, that the Great Wall of China was built so brutally that the bones of the workers are trapped within the stones — a mirror of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the country where I grew up, where (in the 19th century) around a thousand Chinese guest workers were killed by dynamite as well as by other dangers and privations.* But what good did building the pyramids, the mastabas and the Sphinx achieve? Is uncritical admiration for them out of keeping with our respect for democratic principles and the rights of the individual? (It's true, of course, that Egyptians who were oppressed 4,000 or more years ago would have fared no better if our generation were perfectly skeptical and enlightened about the monumental building initiatives of their day.) Perhaps our thoughtless amazement at the monuments of ancient Egypt is a clue that we are more attracted to pharaonical, and other, dictatorships than we'd like to think.


1 Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, "Ancients and Moderns"
Selected and Translated by H. I. Woolf
Mineola, NY: Dover Publications (2010), pp. 18-19

° Original French:
Les Chinois, plus de deux cents ans avant notre ère vulgaire, contruisirent cette grande muraille qui n'a pu les sauver de l'invasion des Tartares. Les Égyptiens, trois mille ans auparavant, avaient surchargé la terre de leurs étonnantes pyramides, qui avaient environ quatre-vingt-dix mille pieds carrés de base. Personne ne doute que si on voulait entreprendre aujourd'hui ces inutiles ouvrages, on n'en vînt aisément à bout en prodiguant beaucoup d'argent. La grande muraille de la Chine est un monument de la crainte; les pyramides sont des monuments de la vanité et de la superstition. Les unes et les autres attestent une grande patience dans les peuples, mais aucun génie supérieur. Ni les Chinois, ni les Égyptiens n'auraient pu faire seulement une statue telle que nos sculpteurs en forment aujourd'hui.
From: Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. VII, Paris: Furne et Cie. (1947), p. 102
[Google Books]

* "A quiz for Joe Oliver: How many died building CPR?" [Globe and Mail]
by Michael Babad, January 10, 2012

On the Urgent Vitality of Books

"Vous les méprisez les livres [. . .]; mais songez que tout l'univers connu n'est gouverné que par des livres,

You despise books, but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books, writes Voltaire, speaking of the Veda, Koran, and Confucius's proverbs. I like this idea of books ruling the world: constitutions and declarations of independence, university textbooks, a driver's instruction manual, municipal bylaws, and even the phone book. It's certainly easier to argue their effects than to quantify what effect J.K. Rowling or Mo Yan have had on the world.

*

Si vous avez un procès, votre bien, votre honneur, votre vie même dépend de l'interprétation d'un livre que vous ne lisez jamais. [. . .]  mais il en est des livres comme des hommes, le très-petit nombre joue un grand rôle, le reste est confondu dans la foule.

In a lawsuit or criminal process, your property, your honor, perhaps your life, depends on the interpretation of a book which you never read. It is, however, with books as with men, a very small number play a great part, the rest are confounded with the multitude.

The Friday Miscellany: The Dis-Consolations of Philosophy

Books currently lying at the head of my bed, from easiest to hardest to finish for me.

Towers in the Mist, Elizabeth Goudge
First Published: 1938

A historical novel set in the time of Elizabeth I. If it's at all like the author's other books, it will delve into religion and superstition, the hidden depths of the human character, and the beauties and past of the English landscape. I think that "mysticism" is a fitting term for her worldview. What is fascinating in her modern novels, for instance the children's book Linnets and Valerians, is that they depict the twilight of the old British rural microcosm before the onset of American-style modernity. Her great flaws are that she is prone to kitsch and unremitting in her endeavour to "[find] tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing." Aside from that, she is an astoundingly good writer. I've reached Chapter 2.

Elizabeth-Goudge.com (Biography, list of works)
"Poetry, childhood, memory" (Blog entry on Elizabeth Goudge's writing)

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Micromégas, Voltaire
First Published: 1752

[The following is written in French because I want to use the language more often; hopefully this will not bother anyone. Apologies in advance for grammatical and other errors.]
Une courte histoire philosophique qui raconte, j'imagine, la vie d'un géant qui habite une planète de l'étoile Sirius. Le serviable Voltaire, dans une succession de paragraphes qui fourmille de chiffres et de précisions autant que cet oeuvre de Jules Verne qui s'appelle De la terre à la lune (un livre que j'ai lu fidèlement jusqu'à la fin — malgré le fait que ni les obus, ni les clubs scientifiques qui ne sont que de pompeux assemblés d'hommes qui n'ont rien de mieux à faire, m'intéressent beaucoup — mais qui m'a trahi en me laissant confuse et énervée par cette fin qui n'est pas une fin du tout), nous dit qu'il a huit lieues de longueur. Je souhaite passer plein d'heures heureuses en restant assidûment ignorante des implications philosophiques, et en me réjouissant au lieu de cela de l'imagination fort vive de Voltaire, au niveau le moins intellectuel que possible. À ce moment, je suis à la deuxième page (formidable, n'est-ce pas?).

Micromégas (Liens aux textes électroniques du livre)
Voltaire (Biography and list of works)
Voltaire's Page (Link to biographies, works, etc.)

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Haydn, Rosemary Hughes
First Published: 1950

A biography of the composer, which begins at the beginning — in the true "I was born of poor but honest parents . . ." vein — and properly trots through, as far as I can tell, to the end. It is accessibly written, well researched, and academic; and, as in duty bound for the sake of the reader, the author gently attempts to put herself in the shoes of Haydn, infuse humour and sympathy, and depict the ambient time and place. My quibble with this approach is that it is fairly unoriginal and too careful. What I particularly like about our copy, a nice beige clothbound edition, is the very brief notes and underlinings that my great-aunt pencilled in. I'm on the third chapter.

JSTOR: Haydn (First page of a review in the journal Music & Letters, 1950)

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Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, Dava Sobel
First Published: 1995

A pleasantly written and detailed account of the search for a trustworthy way of determining one's location at sea, which consumed the attention of the eighteenth-century scientific establishment and the monarchs who patronized it, until the clockmaker John Harrison finally achieved it by inventing a reliable chronometer. (The required mathematical feats much resemble the ones that Cyrus Harding performs to find the latitude and longitude of Verne's Mysterious Island.) It's also a commentary on the intriguing and fanciful dead ends that scientific research pursues before a lone and embattled figure discovers a way out of the labyrinth. Among the anecdotes, the tale of Sir Clowdisley (I'd always seen it as Cloudsley) Shovell, the admiral whose fleet was wrecked and whose men were worse than decimated on the Scilly Islands in 1707, is in my view scarcely inferior to that of Coriolanus or any other Shakespearean tragic hero. Lastly and incidentally, Dava Sobel's style, and my quibbles regarding it, resembles that of Rosemary Hughes.

Dava Sobel (Website of the author)
"The Longitude Problem" (Author's article on same subject)
NYT Books: Longitude (Review, viz. synopsis)

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Philosophie der Geschichte, G.W.F. Hegel
First Published: 1837

Hegel is, I've found, a forgiving philosopher. He has been my bedtime reading for a while, not because he is easier to read than other authors, but because in a drowsy state I am often more focused and less likely to (metaphorically speaking) chuck away a book in exasperation and do something fun instead. By this means I read all of Shakespeare's plays, except for King John, by the age of eighteen (but I still have no idea what Henry IV is about).

So the first six pages of Hegel's introduction to Philosophie der Geschichte went swimmingly, but then I recognized that it was gibberish to me after all. Now I'm on the eighth page. It's true that the structure of the introduction is clear enough; he classifies the ways one can write a historical work — reporting events, philosophizing about the events, presenting the events in the context of a country or a theme, etc. But this classification is not very helpful, except in making one think (about the purpose of historiography, I suppose), because it is imposed on reality, not integral to it; other people find other categories far more useful, and I don't know if Hegel's are authoritative.

In his History of Western Philosophy, it is evident that Bertrand Russell doesn't have much use for Hegel. (One problem is, I think, that Russell succumbs to the fallacy of blaming everyone from Plato to — well, Hegel, for the 20th-century rise of fascism. Not blaming, exactly, but interpreting their ideas as proto-fascism.) As far as the Philosophie der Geschichte is concerned, he begins by explaining that Hegel divides German history as falling into three periods, where Charlemagne and the Reformation are the watershed events. Then Hegel names these periods the Kingdoms of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Russell's comment, admittedly with reason, is this:

It seems a little odd that the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost should have begun with the bloody and utterly abominable atrocities committed in suppressing the Peasants' War, but Hegel, naturally, does not mention so trivial an accident. Instead, he goes off, as might be expected, into praises of Machiavelli.

Quotation from History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell (London: Unwin, 1984), p.708