The Irreverent Moralist by Alvin Bernstein Voltaire, history's most renowned freethinker and the guru of the Age of Enlightenment, was a multitalented genius, a Renaissance man thriving two hundred years after the reputed height of the Renaissance. He was a dramatist, poet, novelist, historian, biblical scholar, a general essayist, a thinker and commentator on a host of issues. He was also canny in business, one of the first to be enriched by literary activity. He was a progressive landed proprietor and humane to his tenants. He was busy almost until his last breath, an embodiment of the work ethic. What rendered unity to his varied activities was his profound sense of justice, his care for the happiness of mankind and his hatred of cruelty no matter how sacrosanct the source. Voltaire did have faults. He was arrogant and conceited and, to use an American expression, he was "stuck on himself." However, he lived on a high moral plane and courageously risked the wrath of his bigoted enemies. He provided evidence that morality is safer in the hands of freethinkers than in the embrace of religiosity. Voltaire, born in Paris in 1694, was by his twenties a noted dramatist and poet. He had strong connections in aristocratical circles despite his own bourgeois origin. To his chagrin, this was of dubious help after a verbal confrontation with a brainless aristocrat, the Chevalier de Rohan, whose lackeys beat Voltaire. He was imprisoned in the Bastille but successfully bargained for his freedom by agreeing to exile in England. This humiliating episode revealed the diseased state of 18th-century French society. The caste-like French aristocracy often protected its members against social inferiors regardless of justice. It was composed of both long-established aristocrats and those more recently created. The latter were often old bourgeois families who had bought their way into the establishment. The former, the long-established aristocratic families, at times assumed a racial feeling about their status, considering themselves descendants of the fifth- century Germanic conquerors of Celtic Gaul. Both groups had a near monopoly of the most important government offices and both were exempt from nearly all direct taxation. The peasants and much of the middle classes bore this burden. Discriminatory taxation reduced work incentive, a crime in the eyes of Voltaire, our freethinking workaholic. Middle-class individuals were tempted to stop working after accumulating a modicum of wealth and would thereafter show scorn for business enterprise. As Voltaire wrote: "The merchant, by dint of hearing his profession despised on all occasions, at last is fool enough to blush at his condition." 1 There was thus a clash in the French middle-class mind between the aristocratical ideal of leisure and the work ethic. Throughout his life, Voltaire sought to make the latter paramount. In the meantime, what part was being played by the absolute monarchs of France, Louis XV (1715-1774) and Louis XVI (1774- 1792)? Hardly any part at all, is the answer. Both were too weak and inert to govern vigorously. Their passivity helped pave the way for revolution. Voltaire's exile in England lasted two years, 1726-1728, a watershed in his life and in that of France. He found in England what his mind cherished, and he became the chief transmitter of English values into France. His book in praise of England, Philosophical Letters or Letters Concerning the English Nation, was published in 1734. It was promptly burned by the Paris hangman. During this period, England was becoming an advanced commercial and capitalistic nation, enjoying far more economic freedom than France. The aristocrats of England paid taxes. They involved themselves in agricultural improvement and commercial endeavor. They were not unaware of their rank, but many of them resembled the English bourgeoisie more closely than our typical image of an aristocrat. England was also advanced in civil rights, such as freedom of press, assembly and religion. Voltaire was especially impressed by the degree of religious toleration in England. This ensemble of economic progress and human rights found expression in English philosophy, which was also transmitted to France by Voltaire and other like-minded individuals. It became the basis of the French Enlightenment, which blossomed after 1750. These thinkers were stimulated by Newton, John Locke, and a coterie of English freethinkers. John Locke, however, was the principal stimulant. Locke advocated that which is generally taken for granted in the 20th century. He maintained that our knowledge comes from experience, either from sensation or from reflections on the operations of the mind. He denied innate ideas. He proclaimed the ascendancy of the external world, the ascendancy of the variety of sensations confronting the mind, or soul. He used the terms mind and soul interchangeably. He did not attribute any spiritual aspect to the soul. He made the soul closer to our scientific idea of the brain, and not something possessing a spiritual quality. He expelled spirituality from the mind or soul. The spiritual God survived, but not the spiritual soul. To many people, such a concept was shocking. Descartes, whose philosophy was official in early 18th-century France, gave the spiritual soul high status. Voltaire, however, accepted Locke's soul-reducing approach. Voltaire was effervescently reactive to the external world; hence the soul's lack of sanctity mattered little to him. He was spirited without being spiritual. Locke's empiricism implied an individualistic approach to activity and thinking. If the experience of one individual is separate from the experience of another individual, then why should not each individual interpret his own experience apart from collective intervention? Why should there not be toleration of both secular and religious ideas? Voltaire, for whom action invariably followed thought, preached the cause of toleration at considerable personal risk. He barricaded himself against bigots by living far away from Paris and close to the Genevan border. His property there, "Ferney," was a refuge for the religiously oppressed. We should bear in mind that the 18th century, called the Age of Enlightenment in the history textbooks, was more accurately an effort at enlightenment than an actuality. There was brutal intolerance in France, where Protestants and other nonconformists were at times sent to the galleys or even broken on the wheel. The Austrian Empire stressed Catholic conformity until the reign of the rationalist Joseph II, 1780-1790. Many Lutherans and others migrated from the Palatinate in Germany to Pennsylvania for religious as well as economic reasons. Thus Voltaire's plate was full as he fought intolerance. Voltaire was an eminent historian and Bible critic. His histories and biblical criticisms are replete with the enormities committed in the name of religion. He made it difficult to deny that the most horrid conflicts and cruelties were goaded into being by religious differences. We misunderstand the 20th century when we characterize it as being predominantly one of secular violence. It seems that the seeds of religious violence continue to lurk in the underbrush. A current example is the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs, who have so conveniently given up their communism in favor of their ancestral Orthodox Christianity. Voltaire never stated that the very nature of religion is evil in and of itself. He regarded belief in God and in an afterlife of rewards and punishments as requisites of ethical behavior. Fundamental to this attitude was his deep fear of the lower classes as distinct from the middle classes or bourgeoisie. Voltaire was convinced that the lower classes must fear God in order to be ethical. His religious outlook was, therefore, utilitarian rather than spiritual. A religious outlook simply designed to maintain ethics is a slim reed indeed, a desiccated branch amputated from the tree of religion and spirituality. Yet it is a stepping-stone toward a full secular outlook in which moral judgments have nothing to do with religious and spiritual abstractions. It is obvious that Voltaire made only a very meager concession to religion. He was a secularist at heart. He endowed the secular attitude with respectability. Half the population of France was secular not very long after Voltaire's death in 1778. Millions in other countries became overt or covert secularists in the 19th century. It is small wonder that Voltaire and like-minded writers are still condemned in reactionary circles. Their writings have shown by implication that one may indeed be moral while disattached from religion, that one may be just as happy or even happier outside the security net of religion as within it. To Voltaire, the key to comparative happiness was work. The 18th- century aristocracy and higher clergy in France did little work beyond the mental pressure involved in seeking privileges. They were thus vulnerable to the repressed hatred of the working portion of the French nation. They heeded no warnings and many of them endured bestial vengeance during the French revolution. They had largely their own stupid, obdurate selves to blame. Voltaire associated his call to work with a scornful contempt for metaphysics. Work and common sense were what appealed to him. This is revealed at the end of his novel Candide. In reaction to a metaphysical assault by his mentor, Pangloss, the hero, Candide, says: "That is well said, but we must cultivate our garden." 2 Voltaire, so highly civilized, was still hounded by savagery 36 years after his death. I quote: "One night in May, 1814, Voltaire's bones were removed from the lead coffin in the Pantheon and thrown into a sack by a number of young reactionary fanatics. In the dark of the night, they rode to the Barrière de la Gare, where there was a dumping ground. Other members of the conspiracy who were waiting had dug a deep hole into which the remains disappeared without a trace forever." 3 There is rarely a cease-fire in the battle between good and evil. Alvin Bernstein is a scholar and former teacher of European history. He is retired and living in Paradise, California. Footnotes 1. Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, p 40, Bobbs-Merrill, 1961. 2. Voltaire, Candide, Signet Classics, 1961. 3. Georg Brandes, Voltaire, Vol. II, pp 360-361. Tudor Publishing, 1930. Bibliography: Recommended reading in English: Voltaire, Candide, translated by Donald M. Frame, Signet Classics, New York, 1961. Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1961. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1962. Georg Brandes, Voltaire, Two Volumes, Tudor Publishing, New York, 1930. John Morley, Voltaire, MacMillan, London, 1923.