In his writings, Voltaire challenges the authority of Christian philosophers, such as Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm, and Saint Thomas, and instead proposes drawing from the heritage of classical antiquity to guide thought in eloquence, philosophy, and even in religious matters.
While free-thinking weakened the truths of faith in people's minds, hearts gave themselves over without restraint to their inclinations.
Continually, the loves of the Olympian gods and the heroes of antiquity were played out on the stages of the court and of princes; the lessons of the theater were put into practice in conduct. This is what was done in Rome, Athens, Florence, in the glorious ages of Augustus, Pericles, and the Medicis.
These intrigues of which Voltaire speaks produced the shameful and fatal effects that the most violent and cruel of passions produces in all ages.
"It was then," he says, "that poisoning began to be common in France. This crime, by a singular fatality, infested France at the time of glory and pleasures which softened manners, just as it crept into ancient Rome in the finest days of the Republic."
After citing a long list of nobles and men of letters prosecuted for this crime, he adds: "Love was the first source of these horrible adventures. This crime became so common that it was necessary to establish a tribunal exclusively charged with dealing with it: it was named the Chamber of Poisons."
For Voltaire, taste, judgment, the manner of appreciating the simplest things as well as the most important have no other rule than the principles of his classical education. Let us cite a few more examples. Regarding pulpit eloquence, he says:
"Perhaps it would be desirable to banish the custom of preaching on a text. Indeed, to speak at length on a quotation of one or two lines, to labor to compose an entire discourse on this line, such work seems a game unworthy of the gravity of this ministry. The text becomes a kind of motto or rather an enigma which the discourse develops."
The modern practice of preaching on an isolated text is unknown to the Holy Fathers. With the Renaissance, the Ciceronian harangue was taken as the model for Christian discourse. The homily was disdained by the great orators. Too often, the pulpit became a tribune, and the word of God the word of man. However, to preserve a religious stamp on the discourse, the text was kept, which, following Voltaire's remark, is hardly more than a kind of motto or enigma.
This observation seems correct to us; but the reason Voltaire gives for his criticism is curious. Instead of saying: The Fathers of the Church did not do this, he says, as a true Renaissance man: "Never did the Greeks and Romans know this practice." It is very probable that if the Greeks and Romans had known it, Voltaire would have found it good.
If the ancients are the masters of eloquence, they are also the masters of philosophy.
For Voltaire, Christian philosophers are non-existent. Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm, Saint Thomas himself, do not exist. "From Plato," he says, "to Locke, there is nothing: no one in that interval explained the operations of our soul."
In eloquence, in philosophy, let us therefore seek our models in classical antiquity. It is not enough that it should also be our rule in matters of religion.
"It is dreadful," Voltaire continues, "that the Christian Church has always been torn by quarrels, and that blood has flowed for so many centuries from hands that carried the God of peace: this fury was unknown to paganism. The religion of the pagans consisted only in morality and festivals. Morality, which is common to men of all times and places, and festivals, which were only rejoicings, could not trouble mankind. The dogmatic spirit brought among men the fury of religious wars."
The conclusion is evident; paganism is more favorable to the happiness of humanity and the peace of nations than Christianity. A child of Voltaire, the Revolution would strive to put into practice the oracles of its father. Meanwhile, Voltaire, who does not dare, like Quintus Nautius, to preach openly a return to polytheism, invites nations to shake off the yoke of the Gospel and embrace the religion of nature.
Such is the aim of the poem on natural law. This work is merely the profession of a vague deism, without positive authority, without real influence on conduct, and similar, trait for trait, to that of the pagan philosophers, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, all the admired masters of Voltaire. It is moreover an edict of persecution against all positive religion, given that, says Condorcet, religion is only mentioned there to combat intolerance. This work, which thirty years later would have seemed an almost religious book, was burned by order of the Parliament of Paris, which was beginning to be alarmed by the progress of reason!
Now, the religion of nature, or rather the philosophical paganism sung by Voltaire, consists not only in the apotheosis of reason, but also in the apotheosis of the flesh. A faithful disciple of his masters, Voltaire, after having deified pride, deifies the senses by singing of voluptuousness. His fugitive poems, his Tales, Candide, La Pucelle, will remain as the shameful monuments of the worship rendered by this chief of men of letters to the most abject sensualism.
To give more authority to his word on this point, what Voltaire teaches he practices. His life is but a long adoration of Venus. We will not sully our pen by retracing this continuous series of infamies, which began upon leaving college and prolonged until decrepitude. Let it suffice for us to indicate the manner in which Voltaire and his friends practiced the natural law. After saying that, in imitation of Horace, they supped at the King of Prussia's in a hall painted with all the most abominable pagan impurities, Voltaire adds:
"A newcomer who might have heard us, seeing these paintings, would have thought he was hearing the seven sages of Greece in a brothel... Never in any place in the world was there such free talk of all the superstitions of men, and never were they treated with more jokes and contempt. God was respected; but all those who had deceived men in His name were not spared... Neither women nor priests ever entered the palace; Frederick lived without a court, without a council, without worship."
Voltaire left the temple of Priapus only to enter that of Cnidus or Lesbos. One of his numerous friends, the famous Marquise du Châtelet, practiced the religion of nature with him, to which her classical studies had admirably disposed her.
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"She possessed," says Voltaire, "Latin like M. Dacier. She knew by heart the most beautiful passages of Horace, Virgil, and Lucretius. All the philosophical works of Cicero were familiar to her. She was not content with Bossuet's universal history; she was indignant that it turned almost entirely on a nation as contemptible as that of the Jews."
If universal history had turned entirely on the Greeks and Romans, all would have been well!
After having sung the two fundamental dogmas of polytheism, Voltaire openly declares himself a disciple of this religion. At the end of a dialogue of revolting impiety, he makes his profession of faith in these terms:
"I am of the religion of all men, that of Socrates, Plato, Aristides, Cicero, Cato, Titus, Trajan, Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, Jesus... I will detest the infamous superstition, and I will be attached to the true religion until the last breath of my life."
The religion of beautiful antiquity, sung, professed, and practiced by Voltaire, soon made numerous proselytes among the lettered classes.
"Voltaire," says La Harpe, "saw succeed those who, nourished in prejudices, had rejected the truth, a new generation which asked only to receive it, and which grew up being instructed by his writings. He did not see, it is true, the shameful remnants of the barbarism he so reproached us for disappear entirely, but at least he saw them attacked from all sides and had to hope with us for their annihilation."
The enthusiasm of these young college philosophers for pagan antiquity went as far as madness. One of the best known, the president of the Berlin Academy, Maupertuis, had the project of creating a city.
Source: La révolution – Mgr Gaume – Tome 5