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VOLTAIRE
Well, Everything is Well*
I beg of you gentlemen, explain for me this phrase, all is well, I don’t
understand it.
Does it mean, everything is arranged, everything is ordered, and according to
the laws of moving bodies? I understand, I agree.
Or do you mean by it that everyone is well off, that he has the means of
living well, that nobody suffers? You know how false that is.
Is it your idea that the lamentable calamities which afflict the earth are good,
in relation to God, and please him? I don’t believe this horrible idea, nor do you.
So please, explain this phrase all is well. Plato the philosopher deigned to
allow God the freedom of creating five worlds, for the reason, as he said, that
there are only five regular bodies in geometry: the tetrahedron, cube, hexahedron,
dodecahedron and icosahedron. 1 But why restrict divine power this way? Why
not allow him the sphere, which is even more regular, and even the cone, the
pyramid with various faces, the cylinder, and so on?
God chose, according to Plato, the best of possible worlds. This concept has
been embraced by various Christian philosophers, though it seems repugnant to
the doctrine of original sin; for our globe, after that transgression, is no longer
the best of globes; it was before, and could be again, but now plenty of people
think it the worst of worlds instead of the best.
Leibniz, in his Theodicy, took the part of Plato. Many a reader has
complained of being able to understand one no more than the other. For our part,
having read both of them more than once, we avow our ignorance, according to
our custom; and since the Evangelist has revealed nothing to us on this score, 2
we remain without regret in our shadows.
Leibniz, who speaks of everything, has spoken of original sin as well; and as
every man with a system gets into his scheme everything that contradicts it, he
imagined that man’s disobedience to God, and the shocking evils which ensued,
were integral parts of the best of worlds, necessary ingredients of the highest
possible felicity. Calla calla señor don Carlos; todo che se haze es por su ben. 3
What! to be driven out of a delightful garden where one could have lived
forever if one hadn’t eaten an apple! What! to give birth in anguish to miserable
and sinful children, who will suffer everything themselves and make everyone
else suffer! What! to experience every sickness, feel every grief, die in anguish,
and then in recompense to be roasted for eternity! This fate is really the best
thing possible? It’s not too good for us; and how can it be good for God?
Leibniz sensed there was nothing to be said in reply; and so he made big fat
books in which he confused himself.
A denial that evil exists: it can be made in jest, by a Lucullus 4 in good health,
who is eating a fine dinner with his friends and his mistress in the hall of Apollo;
but let him stick his head out the window, he’ll see miserable people; let him
catch a fever, he’ll be miserable himself.
I don’t like to quote-it’s a prickly job at best, for one leaves out what
precedes and follows one’s chosen passage, and thus lies exposed to a thousand
complaints. But I must cite Lactantius, father of the church, who in Chapter XIII
of his treatise On the Wrath of God makes epicurus talk in this fashion: 5
Either God wants to remove evil from the world and cannot; or he can and
does not want to; or he cannot and does not want to, either one; or else,
finally, he wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, that is impotence,
which is contrary to the nature of God; if he can and does not want to, that is
malice, which is contrary to his nature; if he neither wants to nor can (and
this is the only one of the alternatives that is consistent with all the attributes
of God), then where does all the evil of the world come from?
The argument is pressing; and Lactantius gets out of it very awkwardly, by
saying that God wishes the evil but that he has given us the wisdom to acquire
good. The answer, it must be confessed, is less potent than the objection, for it
supposes that God could give wisdom only by producing evil; and thus, what a
pleasant wisdom we have!
The origin of evil has always been a pit of which nobody could see the
bottom. This is what reduced so many philosophers and legislators to posisting
two principles, one good and the other bad. Typhon was the bad principle for the
Egyptians, Arimane for the Persians. 6 As is known, the Machinees adopted this
theology; but as they never ahd conversations with either the good principle or
the bad, one needn’t take it on their word.
Among the absurdities with which the world is choked, and which one can
include among our evils, it is not a trifling achievement to have predicated a pair
of all-powerful beings fighting over which of the two should put himself into the
world, and making a treaty like Molière’s two doctors: let me have the emetic,
and you can have the bleeding cup. 7
After the Platonists, Basilides pretended in the first centuries of the church
that God had allotted the making of our world to his latest angels and that they,
not being very skilful, made things as we see them. This theological fable
crumbles to dust before the terrible objection that it is not the nature of an
omnipotent, omniscient Deity to have a world built by architects who don’t know
their trade.
Simon, 8 who felt the force of this objection, tried to forestall it by saying that
the angel who supervised the workshop is damned for botching his work; but
burning that angel does us no good.
The Greek story about Pandora meets the objection no better. The box in shich
all the evils are hidden, and at the bottom of which rests hope, is a charming
allegory; but this Pandora was made by Vulcan only to be revenged on
Prometheus, who had formed man from clay. 9
The Indians have not succeeded either. God, having created man, gave him a
drug to keep him healthy forever; the man loaded the drug on his donkey, the
donkey got thirsty, the serpent told him of a spring, and while he was drinking,
the serpent took the drug for himself.
The Syrians imagined that when man and woman were created in the
fourth heaven, they decided to eat a cake instead of ambrosia which was their
natural diet. The ambrosia they could exhale through their pores; but after eating
the cake, they had to go to the toilet. Man and woman together asked an angel
where were the facilities. –Look ye, says the angel, see that little planet down
there, no bigger than a minute, some sixty million leagues from here? That’s the
privy for the whole universe; now get there right away. –So they went, and were
left there; and that’s why, ever since, our world has been what it is.
Of course you can ask the Syrians why God let man eat the cake and
allowed such a swarm of evils to follow him from his doing so.
I pass quickly from this fourth heaven to Lord Bolingbroke, to keep from
being bored. This man, who no doubt had a great genius, gave the celebrated
Pope his idea for “all is well,” which can be found word for word in the
posthumous works of Lord Bolingbroke, and which Lord Shaftsbury had
formerly inserted in his Characteristics. Read in Shaftsbury the chapter on
Moralists, and you’ll find these words:
Much is alleged in answer to show why Nature errs, and how she came thus
impotent and erring from an unerring hand. But I deny she errs. . . . ‘Tis from
this order of inferior and superior things that we admire the world’s beauty,
founded thus on contrarieties, whilst from such various and disagreeing
principles a universal concord is established. . . . The vegetables by their
death sustain the animals, and animal bodies dissolved enrich the earth, and
raise again the vegetable world. . . . The central powers, which hold the
lasting orbs in their just poise and movement, must not be controlled to save
a fleeting form, and rescue from the precipice a puny animal, whose brittle
frame, however protected, must of itself soon dissolve.
Bolingbroke, Shaftsbury, and Pope, who gave their ideas a shape, resolve the
question no better than their predecessors; their all is well means nothing but that
all is directed by unchangeable law. Who doesn’t know that? You teach us
nothing when you tell us, what every little child knows, that flies are born to be
eaten by spiders, spiders by swallows, swallows by shrikes, shrikes by eagles,
eagles to be killed by men, men to kill one another, and to be eaten by worms
and then by devils –at least a thousand of them for every one who meets another
fate.
There, now, is an order, neat and regular, among the animals of every
species; there is order everywhere. When a stone forms in my bladder, it’s an
admirable mechanism; various chalky deposits assemble in my blood, pass
through my kidneys, descend the urethra, and deposit themselves in my bladder,
assembling there an excellent demonstration of Newtonian attraction. 10 The
pebble forms, grows, I suffer pains a thousand times worse than death, through
the most elegant arrangement in the world. A surgeon, having perfected the art
invented by Tubal Cain, 11 comes to stick a sliver of sharp steel through my
perinaeum; he grasps the stone in his pincers, it breaks under the pressure by a
necessary mechanism, and by the same necessity I die in horrible torments. All
this is well, it is all the evident consequences of unalterable physical principles, I
agree; and I knew it just as well as you did.
If we were insentient beings, there would be nothing to say to this physics.
But that’s not the question; we ask you if there are not sensible evils, and if there
are, where they come from. Pope says in his Fourth Epistle, There are no evils;
and if there are private evils, they compose the universal good. 12
This implies a remarkable definition of private, including the stone, the gout,
all the crimes, all the sufferings of mankind, death, and damnation.
The fall of man is the plaster we put on all these individual maladies of soul
and body which make up the general health. Shaftsbury and Bolingbroke dared
to attack original sin directly; Pope doesn’t talk about it; but it is clear that their
system undermines the very foundations of the Christian religion, and explains
nothing at all.
Yet this system has since won the approval of several theologians who
cheerfully accept contradictions; and in fact one shouldn’t grudge anyone the
consolation of accounting as he can for the flood of evils that overwhelm us. It’s
only fair to let men who are desperately sick eat whatever they want. Some have
gone so far as to pretend that the system is consoling. God, says Pope,
Sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero parish, or a sparrow fall;
Atoms or systems into ruins hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
Essay on Man, 1. 87-90
Here, I confess, is a pleasant consolation; don’t you find great comfort in
Lord Shaftsbury’s remark that God isn’t going to disturb his eternal laws for a
miserable little animal like man? But you must grant this miserable little animal
the right to exclaim humbly and to seek, as he exclaims, why these eternal laws
are not made for the well-being of each individual.
This system of all is well represents the author of all nature as a potent,
malicious king, who never worries if his designs mena death for four or five
hundred thousand of his subjects, and poverty and tears for the rest, as long as
they gratify him.
Far from consoling, the best of all possible worlds doctrine is a doctrine of
despair for those who embrace it. The question of good and evil remains an
insoluble chaos for those who seek in good faith for an answer; it’s a joke only
for those who debate over it, they are slave-laborers who play with their chains.
As for thoughtless people, they are like fish carried from a river to a tank; they
don’t suspect that they are there only to be eaten next Friday. Just so, we too
know nothing at all, by our unaided powers, of the causes of our destiny.
Let us put, at the end of almost all these chapters of metaphysics, the two
letters that Roman judges used when they could not understand a case: NL, non
liquet, it’s not clear. Let us above all impose silence on the rascals who, even as
they are overwhelmed, like the rest of us, by the sheer weight of human calamity,
add to it the furious rage of calumny. Let us confound their execrable impostures
by appealing to faith and Providence.
Some logicians have pretended that it isn’t in the nature of the Being of all
beings that things should be pother than they are. It’s an audacious assertion; I
don’t know enough even to dare examine it.
NOTES
* Voltaire’s essay appeared under the title “Bien, Tout est Bien” as an entry in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764). This large
collection of Voltaire’s miscellaneous thoughts had been many years in the gathering; it contained mostly articles of religious or
philosophical interest, with of course, a strong leaning toward skeptical rationalism. Translated by Robert M. Adams.
1. In Plato’s Timaeus, for reasons that the present editor understands no better than Voltaire, these five
geometrical forms are said to be the building blocks of the universe.
2. The Evangelist is no doubt St. John, who wrote the book of Revelation. Short of divine inspiration neither
Plato nor Leibniz can be understood.
3. The first eight paragraphs of the article as printed in the text were compressed in a later edition ito the
following passages:
“It made a great noise in the schools and even among thinking people, when Leibniz, paraphrasing
Palto, constructed his edifice of the best of all possible worlds and imagined that everything was for the best.
He asserted, in the north of Germany, that God could only make a single world. Plato had allowed Him at
least the liberty of making five, because there are only five solid regular bodies: tetrahedron, or pyramid
with three faces and an equal base: cube, hexahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. But as our world
isn’t in the shape of any one of those five bodies of Plato, one ought to allow God a sixth way of building it.
“Let’s leave the divine Plato there. Leibniz, who was certainly a better geometrician and a more profound
metaphysician, did the human race this service, of letting us see that we should be very contented, and that
God could not do any more for us; that he had necessarily chosen, among all the possible options, the best
one conceivable.
“’What happens to original sin?’ they asked him. ‘let it look after itself,’ said Leibniz and his friends;
but in public he wrote that original sin necessarily entered into the best of possible worlds.”
The earlier version is printed in the text because it makes livelier reading. The quotation in Spanish
means “Peace, peace señor don Carlos; everything which is being done is for your good” : it no doubt comes
from one of a dozen or so dramas inspired by the insanity and death of unhappy Don Carlos, prince of
Asturias and son of Phillip II (1545-68).
4. Lucullus was a famous Roman gourmand who retired from the ungrateful demands of public service to
cultivate the richer possibilities of food and drink.
5. Epicurus is the Greek philosopher who placed the true end of life in pleasure; Lactantius, a Church father
known as “the Christian Cicero,” wrote his treatise On the Wrath of God in the early fourth century.
Voltaire’s skepticism was more erudite that the faith of most true believers.
6. Typhon, a mythical monstrous deity usually represented asa crocodile, was held responsible for the death
and dismemberment of his brother the good Osiris; Arimane was the principle of darkness in the Zoroastrian
philosophy, who opposes Mazda or Ormuzd, the god of light.
7. The Moliere play in question is L’Amour Medecin. Basilides was a subtle Alexandrian Christian of the
second century, and a celebrated gnostic.
8. Voltaire’s knowledge of that shadowy figure Simon the Samaritan probably came from Irenaeus’s treatise
Against the Heretics, 1.23.
9. Promethus’s stupid brother Epimetheus opened the box that Zeus gave Pandora –with deplorable results,
to be read in the world around us.
10. I.e., the law of gravity (very loosely speaking).
11. Tubal Cain was the world’s first metal worker, Genesis 4.22.
12. The passage Voltaire paraphrases partially and inaccurately must be this one:
“What makes all physical or moral ill?/ There deviates nature, and here wanders will./ God sends not ill;
if rightly understood, /Or partial ill is universal good, /Or change admits, or nature lets it fall, /Short, and but
rare, till man improved it all” (Essay on Man 4.111-16).
Work Cited:
Voltaire. Candide. Trans. Robert M. Adams. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1991. Print.