Voltaire and Frederick the Great—whose court Voltaire had left for good three years earlier—first debated their differences over the problem of predestination versus free will in 1738. Here, Voltaire's Brahmin humorously echoes the German philosopher Leibniz and his unbreakable chain of causal links, much in vogue in Berlin, to jolt a Jesuit priest and shake up how some of us view prayers.1
THE JESUIT
It's apparently through the prayers of St. Francis Xavier that you have reached such a happy old age? A hundred and eighty years! That's worthy of the biblical age of the patriarchs.
THE BRAHMIN
My master, Fonfouca, lived three hundred years. It's the average life span for us. I have great esteem for Francis Xavier, but his prayers could never have disturbed the order of the universe, and had he even had the gift of prolonging the life of a fly an instant more than the chain of fate had determined, this globe we are on would be completely different from what you see today.
THE JESUIT
You have a strange opinion of future contingencies. So you do not know that man has free will, and that our will accounts for everything that happens on this earth? I can assure you that the Jesuits, for their part alone, have made considerable changes.
THE BRAHMIN
I do not doubt the knowledge and power of the reverend Jesuit fathers. They make up a highly estimable part of this world, but I do not believe them the sovereigns of it. Every man, every being, whether Jesuit or Brahmin, is a part of the universe. He obeys his destiny and does not command it. What accounts for Genghis Khan's conquest of Asia? To the hour his father awoke one day in sleeping with his wife, to something a Tartar said a few years earlier. I myself, for example, just as you see me, am one of the principle causes of the deplorable death of your good King Henri IV, and you see me still afflicted by it.
THE JESUIT
Your Reverence must be joking. You, the cause of the assassination of Henri IV!
THE BRAHMIN
Alas! Yes. It was in the year 983,000 of the revolution of Saturn, which comes to the year 1550 of your era. I was young and foolish. I took it into my head to start a little walk with my left foot rather than the right, along the Malabar Coast, and from that, evidently, followed the death of Henri IV.
THE JESUIT
How so, I beg you? Because we, who were accused of playing all sides in this affair, had no part in it.
THE BRAHMIN
Here is how destiny arranged the thing. In advancing with my left foot, as I had the honor of telling you, I unfortunately made my friend, Eriban, a Persian merchant, fall into the water, where he drowned. He had a very pretty wife who married an Armenian merchant. She had a daughter who married a Greek. The daughter of this Greek settled in France and married the father of Ravaillac. If all that hadn't happened, you can sense that the affairs of the houses of France and Austria would have turned out differently. The whole system of Europe would have changed.2 The wars between Germany and Turkey would have had other results, and these results would have had a bearing on Persia, and Persia on India. So you see that all that depended on my left foot, which was linked to all the other events in the universe, past, present and future.
THE JESUIT
I will propose this argument to one of our father theologians, and I will bring you his solution.
THE BRAHMIN
While waiting, I will also tell you that the servant of the grandfather of the founder of the Order of the Feuillants (since I have read your histories) was also one of the necessary causes of the death of Henri IV, and of all the accidents this death triggered.
THE JESUIT
That servant was quite a woman.
THE BRAHMIN
Not at all. She was an idiot her master got with child. It made Mme. de La Barrière die of chagrin. The lady who succeeded her, as your chronicles tell it, was the grandmother of the blessed Jean de La Barrière, who founded the Order of the Feuillants. Ravaillac was a monk in their order. He absorbed certain doctrines there, very much in vogue, as you know. This doctrine persuaded him that it would be a holy deed to assassinate the best king in the world. The rest is history.
THE JESUIT
Despite your left foot and the servant of the grandfather of the founder of the Feuillants, I will still believe that the horrid act of Ravaillac was a future contingent that could easily not have happened because, after all, men have free will.
THE BRAHMIN
I don't know what you understand by free will. I attach no meaning to these words. To be free is to do as one wishes, and not to wish what one wishes. All I know is that Ravaillac voluntarily committed the crime he was destined to commit by unchangeable laws. This crime was a link in the great chain of destinies.
THE JESUIT
You can talk as you like, the things of this world are not as linked together as you think. What importance, for example, do you attribute this useless conversation we are having together on the banks of the Indian Ocean?
THE BRAHMIN
What you and I are saying does not account for much, no doubt, but if you were not here, the entire machinery of the world would be something other from what it is.
THE JESUIT
Your Brahmin Reverence is now advancing one mighty paradox.
THE BRAHMIN
Your Ignacian Paternity will believe as he wishes. But certainly we would not be having this conversation if you had not come to India. You would not have made this voyage had your St. Ignatius de Loyola not been wounded in the Battle of Pamplona, and if a king of Portugal had not stubbornly persisted in getting the Cape of Good Hope circumnavigated. This King of Portugal, did he not, with the help of a compass, change the face of the world? But first, a Neapolitan had to invent the compass. And now tell me that everything is not eternally dependent on a steadfast order that unites everything that arises by invisible and indissoluble links; everything that acts, that suffers and dies on this globe.
THE JESUIT
Hey! Then what becomes of future contingents?
THE BRAHMIN
They will become whatever they can. But the order established by an eternal, all-powerful hand must subsist forever.
THE JESUIT
To hear you, one should then never pray to God?
THE BRAHMIN
One should worship him. But what do you mean by praying to him?
THE JESUIT
What everyone means by it. That he favor our desires and satisfy our needs.
THE BRAHMIN
I see. You would like to see a gardener obtain sunshine at the hour God had destined for rain from all eternity and that a navigator obtain an easterly wind when a westerly wind is necessary to refresh the earth and seas. Father, to pray is to submit oneself. Good evening. Destiny calls me to my lady Brahmin.
THE JESUIT
And my free will urges me to go give a lesson to a young pupil.