Philosophical Letters

(Letters Concerning the English Nation)

Voltaire

• Editorial: Dover Publications
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486143163
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy of Religion

Best known for his philosophical novel Candide, Voltaire ranked among the leading intellectuals of the Enlightenment period. His two-and-a-half-year sojourn in England left a profound impression, and these letters—written as though explaining English society to a French friend—focus on the country's religion and politics, with commentaries on Quakers, the Church of England, Presbyterians, Anti-Trinitarians, Parliament, the government, and commerce. They also include essays on Locke, Descartes, and Newton. Voltaire was much influenced by English tolerance, and his observations on the subject sounded a revolutionary note among European readers that resonated for long afterward. First published in English in 1733, Philosophical Letters was condemned by the French government as `likely to inspire a license of thought most dangerous to religion and civil order.` It remains a landmark of the Age of Reason.

VOLTAIRE

[François Marie Arouet]

PHILOSOPHICAL LETTERS

LETTER ONE

ON THE QUAKERS

Since it seemed to me that the doctrine and history of so extraordinary a group as the Quakers deserved the curiosity of a thinking man, I went, in order to instruct myself, to visit one of the most famous Quakers in England, a man who, after thirty years in trade, had been able to set a limit to his fortune and to his desires, and had retired into the country near London. I sought him out in his retreat; it was a house small but well built, unornamented and decent throughout. The Quaker himself ³ was a fresh-looking old man who had never had an illness because he had always been a stranger to the passions and to intemperance. I have never in my life seen anyone with more noble, or more engaging, an air.

He was dressed, like all those of his religion, in a coat without pleats in the side, and without buttons on either pockets or sleeves, and he wore a large hat with the brim turned down like those of our clergy. He received me with his hat on his head, and advanced toward me without the slightest hint of a bow; but there was more politeness in the openness and humanity of his expression than there is in the habit of drawing one leg behind the other, and of carrying in the hand what was made to cover the head.

“Friend,” said he, “I see that thou art a stranger here; if I can be of any usefulness to thee, thou hast only to speak.”

“Sir,” said I, bending my body and sliding one foot toward him, according to our custom, “I flatter myself that my honest curiosity will not displease you, and that you will be so kind as to do me the honor of instructing me in your religion.”

“The people of thy country,” he replied, “make too many bows and compliments, but I have never yet seen one with such curiosity as thine. Come in, and let us first dine together.”

I uttered a few more poor compliments, for one does not unmake one’s habits all at once; and after a healthful and frugal repast which began and ended with a prayer to God, I set out interrogating my man. I began with the question that good Catholics have more than once asked of Huguenots: “My dear sir, have you been baptized?”

“No,” said he, “and neither have my fellow Quakers.”

“Zounds!” cried I. “Then you are not Christians?”

“My son,” he answered gently, “do not swear. We are Christians and try to be good ones; but we do not think that Christianity consists in throwing cold water on the head, with a little seasoning.”

“Good God!” cried I, outraged by this impiousness. “Have you forgotten, then, that Jesus Christ was baptized by John?”

“Friend,” said the benign Quaker, “once more no swearing. Christ received baptism from John, but he baptized no one; we are the disciples not of John but of Christ.”

“Gracious!” said I. “In an Inquisition country what a fire they would make of you, poor man. Do, for God’s sake, let me baptize you and make a Christian out of you.”

“If indulging thy weakness called only for that, we would do it willingly,” was his grave answer. “We condemn no one for taking part in the ceremony of baptism, but we believe that those who profess a religion altogether holy and altogether spiritual must abstain as much as they can from Jewish rituals.”

“That’s a strange one,” I exclaimed. “Jewish rituals?”

“Yes, my son,” he continued, “and so much so that many Jews even today practice the baptism of John. Consult the ancient authors; they will teach thee that John only renewed an old practice which had been followed, among the Hebrew, long before his time, as the pilgrimage to Mecca had been among the Ishmaelites. Jesus consented to be baptized by John just as he submitted to circumcision, but circumcision and ceremonial washing were later to be done away with by the baptism of Christ, that baptism of the spirit, that ablution of the soul that saves mankind. Thus the forerunner John said, ‘I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.’⁴ Thus the great apostle of the Gentiles, Paul, wrote to the Corinthians, ‘Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel.’ ⁵ And Paul never did baptize any with water except two persons,⁶ and that in spite of himself. He circumcised his disciple Timothy, and likewise the other apostles circumcised all who desired it. Art thou circumcised?” he added.

I replied that I had not had that honor.

“Very well, friend,” said he, “thou art a Christian without being circumcised, and I without being baptized.”

There was my holy man taking specious advantage of three or four passages of Holy Writ that seemed to favor his sect, and forgetting, in the best of faith, a hundred passages that crushed it. I took care not to dispute anything he said, for there’s no arguing with an Enthusiast. Better not take it into one’s head to tell a lover the faults of his mistress, or a litigant the weakness of his cause—or to talk sense to a fanatic. And so I went on to other questions.

“With regard to the communion,” said I, “what are your customs?”

“We haven’t any,” said he.

“What, no communion?”

“No. None but the communion of hearts.”

Once more he quoted Scripture. He made me a fine sermon against the communion, and took on a tone of inspiration in proving to me that all the sacraments were merely human inventions , and that the word sacrament itself is not once to be found in the Gospel.

“Pardon my ignorance,” he said. “I have not presented thee with a hundredth part of the proofs of my religion, but thou mayst find them in the exposition of our faith written by Robert Barclay,⁷ one of the best books that ever came from the hand of man. Our enemies agree that it is highly dangerous, and that testifies to the honesty of its thought.”

I promised to read this book, and my Quaker believed me already converted.

Later he explained to me briefly some of the peculiarities that expose this sect to the scorn of others.

“Confess,” said he, “that it was all thou couldst do to keep from laughing when I replied to all thy courtesy in the second person singular and with my hat on. Yet thou seemst too well educated not to know that in the time of Christ no nation fell into the absurdity of substituting the plural for the singular. To Augustus Caesar one said, I love thee, I beg thee, I thank thee; he did not even allow anyone to call him Mister, Dominus. It was not till long after his day that people thought of addressing one another as you instead of thou, as if they came in pairs, and of usurping the impertinent titles of Lordship, Eminence, Holiness, which earthworms give to other earthworms in assuring them that they are, with profound respect and infamous falsity, their most humble and most obedient servants. It is in order to be more on our guard against this vile commerce of lies and flattery that we say thou to both kings and cobblers, and that we bow to no one, having nothing but kindness for men, and respect only for the laws.

“Our clothing too is a little different from that of other men, as a continual reminder to ourselves not to resemble them. Others wear the signs of their rank and dignity; we wear those of Christian humility. We turn away from gay parties, from shows, from gambling, for we should be much to be pitied if we filled with such frivolity those hearts that God should dwell in. We never swear, not even in court, feeling as we do that the name of the Most High should not be bandied about in the wretched contests of mankind. When it is necessary for us to appear before a magistrate in the affairs of others (for we ourselves do not carry on lawsuits) we affirm the truth with a yes or a no, and the judges accept our word, though so many Christians forswear themselves on the very Gospel. If we never go to war, it is not that we fear death—on the contrary, we bless the moment that unites us with the Being of Beings—but it’s that we are not wolves or tigers or watchdogs, but men and Christians. Our Lord, who has commanded us to love our enemies and to endure without complaint, certainly does not wish us to cross the sea and cut the throats of our brothers because some murderers dressed in red, and wearing hats two feet high, are enlisting citizens by making a noise with two little sticks on the tightly stretched skin of an ass. And when, after battles won, all London glitters with lights, when the sky blazes with fireworks, and the air resounds with the noise of thanksgiving, of bells, of organs, and of cannon, we mourn in silence over these murders, the cause of public gaiety.”

LETTER TWO

ON THE QUAKERS

Such, in substance, was the conversation I had with that extraordinary man; but I was even more surprised when on the following Sunday he took me to the church of the Quakers. They have several chapels in London; the one I visited is near the famous pillar called the Monument. When I went in with my guide, the congregation had already assembled. There were about four hundred men in the church, and three hundred women; the women hid their faces with their fans, and the men were wearing their broad hats. All were seated, all in profound silence; I passed through the midst of them without causing a single person to look up at me. This silence lasted a quarter of an hour. Finally one of them rose, took off his hat, and after making some faces and heaving some sighs, began to intone, half through his mouth and half through his nose, a rigmarole which was taken, he thought, from the Gospel, and which was utterly meaningless to him and to everybody else. When this contortionist had finished his fine monologue, and the meeting had broken up with everyone both edified and in a stupor, I asked my companion why the more intelligent among them put up with such nonsense.

“We are obliged to tolerate it,” he replied, “for it is impossible for us to know whether a man who rises to speak will be moved by the Spirit or by madness. Not knowing, we patiently listen to everything. We even allow women to speak. Often two or three of our devout females find themselves inspired at the same time, and then what a splendid noise there is in the house of the Lord!”

“Haven’t you any priests?” I asked.

“No, friend,” said the Quaker, “and we do very well without them. God forbid that we should presume to ordain anyone to receive the Holy Ghost on Sunday to the exclusion of the rest of the faithful. By God’s grace we are the only ones on earth to have no priests. Would you deprive us of so happy a distinction? Why should we abandon our child to hired nurses when we have milk of our own to give it? Those hirelings would soon dominate our household and tyrannize over mother and child. Our Lord said, ‘Freely ye have received; freely give.’ ⁸ Shall we, after this command, bargain for the Gospel, put up the Holy Ghost for sale, and turn a Christian meeting-place into a market? We do not give money to men dressed in black to take care of our poor, bury our dead, and preach to the faithful; these sacred duties are too dear to us to be passed to the shoulders of others.

“But how can you tell,” said I insistently, “whether it is the Spirit of God that moves you in your speeches?”

“Whosoever prays that God enlighten him,” he replied, “and then declares the Gospel truths that move him, may be sure that he has been inspired by God.”

Whereupon he overwhelmed me with quotations from Scripture proving, so he said, that there is no such thing as Christianity without an immediate revelation. And he added these remarkable words:

“When thou movest one of thy limbs, does thine own power move it? Certainly not, for the same member often acts involuntarily. It is He who created thy body, then, who gives motion to this clay. And what of the ideas thy soul receives? Is it thou who forms them? Even less so, for they come in spite of thee. So it is the Creator of thy soul who gives thee thine ideas. But as he has left thy heart free, he gives thy mind such ideas as thy heart deserves. Thou livest in God; thou actest, thou thinkest in God; and so thou hast only to open thine eyes to that light which enlightens all men, and thou shalt see the truth and make it to be seen.”

“Ah, it’s the purest Father Malebranche!” I exclaimed.

“I know thy Malebranche,” said he. “He was a bit of a Quaker, but not enough of one.”⁹

Those are the most important things I have learned about the doctrine of the Quakers. In the next letter you shall have their history, which you will find even more singular than their doctrine.

LETTER THREE

ON THE QUAKERS

You have already seen that the Quakers date from Jesus Christ, who was, according to them, the first Quaker.¹ Religion, they say, was corrupted almost immediately after his death, and remained in corruption some sixteen hundred years; but there were always a few Quakers hidden away in the world, who carefully fostered the sacred flame that was extinct wherever they were not, until finally the light spread to England in the year 1642.¹⁰

It was in the days when three or four sects were tearing Great Britain apart with wars undertaken in the name of God, that one George Fox, of the county of Leicester, son of a silk-weaver, took it into his head to preach like a true Apostle, according to him—that is, without knowing how to read or write.¹¹ He was a young man of twenty-five, of irreproachable habits, and mad in a saintly way. Clothed in leather from head to foot, he went from village to village, shouting against war and the clergy. If he had only preached against the military, he would have had nothing to fear; but he attacked churchmen: he was promptly sent to prison. When they led him be- ¹ Voltaire’s main source of information for this chapter is William Sewel, The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers (1722). He makes some borrowings from Gerard Croese, Historia Quakeriana (1695), and he may have seen William Penn’s A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers (1694). fore the justice of the peace at Derby, he presented himself with his leather cap on his head. An officer gave him a smart box on the ear, saying,

“You beggar, don’t you know enough to be bareheaded in the presence of his honor?”

Fox turned the other cheek, and begged the officer to hit him again for the love of God. The Derby justice tried to get him to take oath before being questioned.

“Friend,” said he to the justice, “thou must know that I never take the name of the Lord in vain.”

Hearing himself thee’d and thou’d by this man, the justice sent him to the Bedlam of Derby to be whipped. Praising God along the way, George Fox went to his lunatic asylum, where the sentence of the magistrate was rigorously carried out.¹² Those who inflicted on him the penance of the whip were much surprised when he begged them to flog him some more with a birch for the good of his soul. These gentlemen needed no begging, and Fox had his double dose, for which he thanked them cordially. He began to preach to them; first they laughed, then they listened, and, since the disease of Enthusiasm is catching, several were converted, and those who had whipped him became his first disciples.

Released from prison, he wandered about the country with a dozen proselytes, still preaching against the clergy, and having himself whipped from time to time. One day, having been set in the pillory,¹³ he harangued the crowd so forcefully that he converted some fifty of his audience, and roused so much sympathy in the others that they freed him uproariously, sought out the Anglican clergyman through whose influence Fox had been condemned to stand, and pilloried him in his place.

He had the cheek to convert some of Cromwell’s soldiers, whereupon they quit the service and refused to take the oath.¹⁴ Cromwell wanted nothing to do with a sect whose members would not fight, as Sixtus the Fifth augured ill of a sect dove non si chiavava.¹⁵ He took advantage of his power to persecute these newcomers; the prisons were filled with them. But persecution seldom has any other effect than to make new p...