The Philosophy of Voltaire - Collected Works: Treatise On Tolerance, Philosophical Dictionary, Candide, Letters on England, Plato's Dream, Dialogues, The Study of Nature, Ancient Faith and Fable…. Вольтер
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sense. But what is it that we call believing?
A Turk comes and says to me, "I believe that the angel Gabriel often descended from the empyrean, to bring Mahomet leaves of the Koran, written on blue vellum."
Well, Mustapha, and on what does thy shaven head found its belief of this incredible thing?
"On this: That there are the greatest probabilities that I have not been deceived in the relation of these improbable prodigies; that Abubeker, the father-in-law, Ali, the son-in-law, Aisha, or Aisse, the daughter, Omar, and Osman, certified the truth of the fact in the presence of fifty thousand men—gathered together all the leaves, read them to the faithful, and attested that not a word had been altered.
"That we have never had but one Koran, which has never been contradicted by another Koran. That God has never permitted the least alteration to be made in this book.
"That its doctrine and precepts are the perfection of reason. Its doctrine consists in the unity of God, for Whom we must live and die; in the immortality of the soul; the eternal rewards of the just and punishments of the wicked; and the mission of our great prophet Mahomet, proved by victories.
"Its precepts are: To be just and valiant; to give alms to the poor; to abstain from that enormous number of women whom the Eastern princes, and in particular the petty Jewish kings, took to themselves without scruple; to renounce the good wines of Engaddi and Tadmor, which those drunken Hebrews have so praised in their books; to pray to God five times a day, etc.
"This sublime religion has been confirmed by the miracle of all others the finest, the most constant, and best verified in the history of the world; that Mahomet, persecuted by the gross and absurd scholastic magistrates who decreed his arrest, and obliged to quit his country, returned victorious; that he made his imbecile and sanguinary enemies his footstool; that he all his life fought the battles of the Lord; that with a small number he always triumphed over the greater number; that he and his successors have converted one-half of the earth; and that, with God's help, we shall one day convert the other half."
Nothing can be arrayed in more dazzling colors. Yet Mustapha, while believing so firmly, always feels some small shadows of doubt arising in his soul when he hears any difficulties started respecting the visits of the angel Gabriel; the sura or chapter brought from heaven to declare that the great prophet was not a cuckold; or the mare Borak, which carried him in one night from Mecca to Jerusalem. Mustapha stammers; he makes very bad answers, at which he blushes; yet he not only tells you that he believes, but would also persuade you to believe. You press Mustapha; he still gapes and stares, and at last goes away to wash himself in honor of Allah, beginning his ablution at the elbow and ending with the forefinger.
Is Mustapha really persuaded—convinced of all that he has told us? Is he perfectly sure that Mahomet was sent by God, as he is sure that the city of Stamboul exists? as he is sure that the Empress Catherine II. sent a fleet from the remotest seas of the North to land troops in Peloponnesus—a thing as astonishing as the journey from Mecca to Jerusalem in one night—and that this fleet destroyed that of the Ottomans in the Dardanelles?
The truth is that Mustapha believes what he does not believe. He has been accustomed to pronounce, with his mollah, certain words which he takes for ideas. To believe is very often to doubt.
"Why do you believe that?" says Harpagon. "I believe it because I believe it," answers Master Jacques; and most men might return the same answer.
Believe me fully, my dear reader, when I say one must not believe too easily. But what shall we say of those who would persuade others of what they themselves do not believe? and what of the monsters who persecute their brethren in the humble and rational doctrine of doubt and self-distrust?
BETHSHEMESH.
Of the Fifty Thousand and Seventy Jews Struck with Sudden Death for Having Looked Upon the Ark; of the Five Golden Emeroids Paid by the Philistines; and of Dr. Kennicott's Incredulity.
Men of the world will perhaps be astonished to find this word the subject of an article; but we here address only the learned and ask their instruction.
Bethshemesh was a village belonging to God's people, situated, according to commentators, two miles north of Jerusalem. The Phœnicians having, in Samuel's time, beaten the Jews, and taken from them their Ark of alliance in the battle, in which they killed thirty thousand of their men, were severely punished for it by the Lord:
"Percussit eos in secretiori parte natium, et ebullierunt villæ et agri.... et nati sunt mures, et facta est confusio mortis magna in civitate." Literally: "He struck them in the most secret part of the buttocks; and the fields and the farmhouses were troubled.... and there sprung up mice; and there was a great confusion of death in the city."
The prophets of the Phœnicians, or Philistines, having informed them that they could deliver themselves from the scourge only by giving to the Lord five golden mice and five golden emeroids, and sending him back the Jewish Ark, they fulfilled this order, and, according to the express command of their prophets sent back the Ark with the mice and emeroids on a wagon drawn by two cows, with each a sucking calf and without a driver.
These two cows of themselves took the Ark straight to Bethshemesh. The men of Bethshemesh approached the Ark in order to look at it, which liberty was punished yet more severely than the profanation by the Phœnicians had been. The Lord struck with sudden death seventy men of the people, and fifty thousand of the populace.
The reverend Doctor Kennicott, an Irishman, printed in 1768 a French commentary on this occurrence and dedicated it to the bishop of Oxford. At the head of this commentary he entitles himself Doctor of Divinity, member of the Royal Society of London, of the Palatine Academy, of the Academy of Göttingen, and of the Academy of Inscriptions at Paris. All that I know of the matter is that he is not of the Academy of Inscriptions at Paris. Perhaps he is one of its correspondents. His vast erudition may have deceived him, but titles are distinct from things.
He informs the public that his pamphlet is sold at Paris by Saillant and Molini, at Rome by Monaldini, at Venice by Pasquali, at Florence by Cambiagi, at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey, at The Hague by Gosse, at Leyden by Jaquau, and in London by Beckett, who receives subscriptions.
In this pamphlet he pretends to prove that the Scripture text has been corrupted. Here we must be permitted to differ with him. Nearly all Bibles agree in these expressions: seventy men of the people and fifty thousand of the populace—"De populo septuaginta viros, et quinquaginta millia plebis." The reverend Doctor Kennicott says to the right reverend the lord bishop of Oxford that formerly there were strong prejudices in favor of the Hebrew text, but that for seventeen years his lordship and himself have been freed from their prejudices, after the deliberate and attentive perusal of this chapter.
In this we differ from Dr. Kennicott, and the more we read this chapter the more we reverence the ways of the Lord, which are not our ways. It is impossible, says Kennicott, for the candid reader not to feel astonished and affected at the contemplation of fifty thousand men destroyed in one village—men, too, employed in gathering the harvest.
This does, it is true, suppose a hundred thousand persons, at least, in that village, but should the doctor forget that the Lord had promised Abraham that his posterity should be as numerous as the sands of the sea?
The Jews and the Christians, adds he, have not scrupled to express their repugnance to attach faith to this destruction of fifty thousand and seventy men.
We answer that we are Christians and have no repugnance to attach faith to whatever is in the Holy Scriptures. We answer, with the reverend Father Calmet, that "if we were to reject whatever is extraordinary and beyond the reach of our conception we must reject the whole Bible." We are persuaded that the Jews, being under the guidance of God himself, could experience no events but such as were stamped with the