Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

CONDEMNING THE ARCHITECT

Regarding nature as though it were a proof of God’s goodness and providence; interpreting history in honor of divine reason; as a constant testimonial to an ethical world order and ethical ultimate purpose; explaining all one’s own experiences in the way pious folk have done for long enough, as though everything were providence, a sign, intended, and sent for the salvation of the soul: now all that is over, it has conscience against it, every sensitive conscience sees it as indecent, dishonest, a pack of lies, feminism, weakness, cowardice—this severity makes us good Europeans if anything does, and heir to Europe’s most protracted and bravest self-overcoming!

—Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Modern philosophy was full of them: good Europeans determined to be tough. They lived in cosmopolitan space. Bayle had pressing reasons for changing countries; Voltaire looked long and hard before retreating to something like his own. Schopenhauer was a German who read Indian philosophy, Hume a Scot who succeeded in Parisian society. They talked about myth with wit and detachment. All used their forms of rootless internationalism to make claims about the world. They’d been around, seen what variety one could reach in days of slow post and rough roads, and they were not impressed. Voltaire described it through the eyes of Candide, who crossed the globe in search of something better than the pettiness and cruelty of his native Westphalia. Except for a brief excursion into fantasy that leaves him bored and longing, the picture his experience presented was relentless. The universalism of this comer of Enlightenment is bleak. Human fate and human nature are pretty much the same wherever one looks. Alas.

Nietzsche’s fervor was out of date. They didn’t need his encouragement in order to face facts with open eyes. Rejecting the notion of Providence as something quite literally indecent began, at the latest, when Bayle’s Dictionary was published in 1697. The analogies he used to describe the God of the orthodox could make a believer long for the bland and tasteful assertions of nonexistence that later atheists came to offer. Better to have no God at all than to have one like this.

That there is something problematic about any possible version of the project considered in the previous chapter is hardly news. The wish to displace God that is contained in every attempt to re-create the world is the very essence of the sin of pride. It’s pride that can lead to rebellion caused by the contemplation of all the evil in Creation. If God failed to get it right, why don’t we do without Him and take over the job ourselves? The urge to humility is a product of acquiescence, if not terror: we agree not to understand why there is evil. Dostoevsky saw this clearly. But even those who view humility as an old-fashioned, slavish virtue have a simpler problem with the wish to be God. We are so conspicuously lacking in His major virtues, benevolence and omnipotence, that even imitation is probably out of reach.

So this is one set of facts that was faced long ago. Religious attacks against humanism are older than the Renaissance, but their pious wrath was misdirected. Even the proudest of early Renaissance thinkers knew we had limits, and Enlightenment thinkers agreed. The wish to be God will not bring us anything but trouble.

Yet the urge to leave Him in His heaven, as if all were right with the world, is no solution either. Any form of theodicy—including the assertion that God’s ways are beyond understanding—involves some form of bad faith. This is what Kant saw when he said that such assertions require no refutation but the feeling for morality. The other set of facts that seem to cry for recognition concern the utter irrationality of the real. This chapter discusses a group of writers who rejected all attempts to seek transcendence and insisted on staying with the appearances. You might call them empiricists, were it not for the ways this discussion casts the division of philosophers into rationalists and empiricists in doubt. You could also divide them according to directions in time. Those in the last chapter looked to the past, as a source of explanation, and then to the future, as a source of hope. Those in the present chapter focused on what Schopenhauer called the small dark cloud of the present. However we divide them, we will see that the group here considered was determined to insist that things are indeed what they seem. If the distinction is not quite contiguous with the distinction between empiricists and rationalists, it shows much of what’s at stake in the latter. Appearance gives us a world of misery. Reason gives us the grounds for it, along with ideas that might show it redeemed. The arguments between them concern what to take more seriously: the stark and painful awareness that we have for a moment when confronted with any form of evil; or the ideas and explanations that allow us to transcend it.

This chapter considers one figure central to the current philosophical canon and three on its fringes. Each could be called a good European determined to reject every reference to Providence as a sign of cowardice. Each demanded that we face appearances, and argued that if we begin from the facts and forge ahead without self-deception, we will end by way of theory with gnosticism at the very best. I’ll begin by examining Bayle, who scandalized early modern Europe by arguing that Manichaeism is the most reasonable explanation of the data. Therefore, he hastened to add, it makes sense to reject reason altogether. Bayle was greatly admired by David Hume, who honed Bayle’s arguments into his devastating critique of the argument from design. Next to Hume’s hypotheses, Manichaeism is tame. Did the world bear witness to a wise and magnificent Creator? Did it really? Wouldn’t facts suggest instead the workings of an infant deity, practicing world making and producing models he could throw away? Perhaps a senile deity who’s finally lost his touch? Hume’s discussion of the problem of evil is, I shall argue, the centerpiece of his attack on human reason in general, and it was powerful enough to give Kant nightmares.

Those who demand that we confront appearances without illusion will care about describing details, one after another, with an eye for the example that often takes more literary than philosophical skill.1 So I include two thinkers who are neither summits of philosophical nor literary achievement, but who cannot be ignored by either discipline—if neither discipline quite knows what to do with them. Voltaire has a place both as central figure of the Enlightenment and as one who first cried loudly against it. His poem “The Lisbon Earthquake” is baroque, perhaps maudlin, but its passion and rage make the case against the equation of intelligibility and hope—the cardinal assumption of the Enlightenment. Four years later, Candide made the same point with bitter humor. By any means, Voltaire wished to convince us that philosophy is vain. It may even be cruel. For all its attempts to make sense of the vanity and cruelty in our lives only mock those lives themselves. The Marquis de Sade took this position to its outer limit. His work presented an argument from design in reverse: wherever you look, you see miracles of horror. Moral and natural evil merge in his vision because God Himself—should He be out there—is just what Descartes feared, an utterly malevolent genius. Adorno and Horkheimer were right to place Sade at a crucial point in the history of philosophy, wrong about his ancestry. Sade’s work, I will argue, is less a logical extension of Kant’s vision than a logical extension of Hume’s. One claim should be clear at the close of this chapter. If the problem of evil dominated eighteenth-century thought, it was not from naïveté. No twentieth-century dismissal of its discussion compares in force or profanity with the critics who were there at the time.

RAW MATERIAL: BAYLE’S DICTIONARY

It doesn’t look like philosophy. It is lewd, loud, long, rambling, and very, very funny. It never sticks to a point. It interrupts itself with endless digression. It often seems blithely ad hominem, offering disquisitions that cannot decide whether they are biographies of persons whose names are now forgotten or argument about questions that still perplex us. But Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary is breathtakingly sharp, often unanswerable, and full of the air of excitement which is all that gives life to intellectual debate, and that can be sensed centuries later, in what has become another world. No wonder Voltaire called him “the immortal Bayle,” and devoted more than half the entry ostensibly devoted to “The Philosopher” in his own Philosophical Dictionary to a discussion of Bayle himself. Voltaire was not alone in his estimation. Bayle’s Dictionary was called the most-read book of the eighteenth century and the arsenal of the Enlightenment (Gay 1, 1:293). Whether or not the philosophers who revered him were faithful to his intentions, they happily raided Bayle’s book for theoretical ammunition.

If you believe that history is nothing but a record of crimes and misfortunes, you might think it sufficient to list them. Bayle’s own experience contained more than enough. He was born to a Protestant pastor in southern France at a time when French Protestants were subject to severe persecution. Seventeenth-century Europe believed that reliance on the Inquisition had caused Spain’s decline as a major power, so France turned to gentler forms of religious repression. Restricting access to education, holding of offices, and economic advancement to Catholics was substituted for the auto-da-fé. Dismayed Protestants who tried to leave for more hospitable countries like Prussia or the Netherlands were sent to the galleys, if male, and to the prisons, if female, for the rest of their miserable lives. Among those who succeeded in fleeing was the self-taught Pierre Bayle, who, safe in Rotterdam, produced page after page that would have been banned anywhere but the Netherlands. He nevertheless published anonymously, a very common practice, to avoid the sort of thing that happened when his cover was eventually blown. His brother in France was arrested in his stead and presumably tortured to death in the prison where he perished five months later. Scholars hold this to be the signal event in Bayle’s life, undermining any possible belief in a just God who rewards the righteous and punishes the vile.

Though he was happy to write about others’ life stories, he was silent about his own. How to measure the effect of such experiences on one’s general view of experience itself is in any case an open question. He did not think one needed to have seen much in order to observe the joy with which nations celebrate the massacres their soldiers commit. His descriptions of the festivities surrounding military victories are particularly brutal. Such scenes are, for Bayle, hard data, and one needn’t even change the details to find his description contemporary. Bayle, like Hume, turned skeptic from commitments to appearances. His article “Manicheans” held these criteria of inquiry to be self-evident:

Every theory has need of two things in order to be considered a good one: first, its ideas must be distinct; and second, it must account for experience. (Bayle 1, 145)

Good theories must account for experience, and Bayle used all his irony in a backhanded plea for what he called a posteriori arguments. What must be accounted for is experience that’s oddly mixed. The problem of evil arises through contemplation of the mixture of happiness and virtue with wickedness and pain that experience makes evident. If this description of experience is indisputable, inference to the best explanation gives you Manichaeism. The view that the universe is ruled by two principles—call them God and Satan—locked in constant struggle for domination is less an explanation of experience than a reflection of it. But Bayle never thought that explanations run deep. His “Pyrrho” argued that the view that all things are comprehensible was the only really wise one. Manichaeism makes most sense of ordinary experience, if sense is what you want to make. As we will see, it also provides the strongest reason for giving up the attempt. Therefore, Bayle added, in one of his beautifully ambiguous passages, it is fortunate that Augustine, “so well versed in all the arts of controversy” (Bayle 1, 144), decided to abandon Manichaeism, since he could have defended it so well.

If Bayle had rested there, it would have been bad enough, but he wasn’t content to point out the data. Rather, he recast the classical statement of the problem of evil that his readers knew from Lactantius and Epicurus.

God is either willing to remove evil and cannot; or he can and is unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able to do so; or else he is both willing and able. If he is willing and not able, he must then be weak, which cannot be affirmed of God. If he is able and not willing, he must be envious, which is also contrary to the nature of God. If he is neither willing nor able, he must be both envious and weak, and consequently not be God. If he is both willing and able—the only possibility that agrees with the nature of God—then where does evil come from? (Bayle 1, 169)

Let’s put this argument into schematic form. The problem of evil occurs when you try to maintain three propositions that don’t fit together.

1. Evil exists.
2. God is benevolent.
3. God is omnipotent.

Bend and maul and move them as you will, they cannot be held in union. One of them has to go.

For Bayle, the first claim was description too apparent to call into question. So he left it alone, without bothering to defend it by amassing much evidence. Examples like human joy in contemplating massive murder were offered merely as reminders. “Manicheans” generalized such examples with the laconic indication that Bayle knew whereof he spoke:

Travel gives continual lessons of this. Monuments to human misery and wickedness are found everywhere—prisons, hospitals, gallows, and beggars. Here you see the ruins of a flourishing city; in other places you cannot even find the ruins. (Bayle 1, 146)

Bayle added a few quotations from the Romans, but his haphazard reference to the classics suggests he did not believe these claims to need proof. The second and third claims, however, result not from a posteriori but from a priori reflection. They proceed from hypothesis or faith, and Bayle went to work on undermining them. His book brings life to references that are today familiar to few but historians of theology, for it shows what was at stake in differences between Socinians and Arminians, or other apparently obscure forms of heresy. Living in the middle of the most violent of such debates, Bayle recast them as a matter of how to combine the three propositions above. If you drop benevolence, you’re left with one heresy; drop omnipotence, you’re stuck with another. The alternatives are so maddening that one almost begins to understand the temptation to burn one’s opponent over a particularly tenacious assertion of one of them. Everyone was desperate to make sense of the world. Without those two premises, one could take one’s sense from Manichaeism; but theology ruled out this option.

Bayle was particularly brilliant in showing how traditional attempts to solve the problem of evil abandon belief in God’s benevolence. His first analogy opens a window on the terror implicit in orthodox religion.

If you say that God has permitted sin in order to manifest his wisdom, which shines forth more in the midst of the disorders that man’s wickedness produces every day than it would in a state of innocence, you will be answered that this is to compare God either to a father who allows his children to break their legs so he can show everyone his great skill in mending their broken bones, or to a king who allows seditions and disorders to develop in his kingdom so that he can gain glory by overcoming them. (Bayle 1, 176)

A father who lets his children break their legs so he can show his skill at healing. This is the God in whom we put our trust? Does the doctrine of a Being whose justice, wisdom, and mercy are shown in His redeeming only some of the creatures He allowed to fall into mortal sin really suggest something better? Bayle ran through other attempts to combine our urge to assert God’s goodness with our certain knowledge of what’s bad in the world. There’s the argument that we need to feel pain in order to feel pleasure. Bayle thought this was nonsense, contradicting all that Scripture, reason, and experience have to teach us. Did Adam and Eve need pain to feel the joys of paradise before they fell from it? Does logic ground the claim that we cannot experience one of two contradictories without the other? Does experience really show that pleasure becomes insipid if it lasts long—or is this just the sort of thing we say for comfort because it usually doesn’t?

These attempts, Bayle knew, were relatively feeble. Augustine was the real challenge. After making short work of other solutions, Bayle opened his fire on the free will defense. The first premise of that defense is that natural evil, starting with Adam’s mortality, is always punishment for moral evil.

Then it is not God who is the cause of moral evil; but he is the cause of physical evil, that is to say, the punishment of moral evil—punishment which, far from being incompatible with the supremely good principle, necessarily flows from one of God’s Attributes, I mean that of justice, which is no less essential to man than God’s goodness. (Bayle 1, 149)

For very many centuries, this argument seemed unexceptionable. The premise that natural evil is punishment was accepted without blinking, and still persists in whatever premodern relics of consciousness survive in many of us. As we saw when considering Leibniz, what elicited question was something else. If God invented natural evil as fair punishment for moral evil, why did He invent moral evil? Augustine’s answer seemed both moving and sane. God doesn’t will moral evil, but He has to permit it, for it’s a necessary condition of the greatest gift He ever gave us. God gave us respect, and the chance to become worthy of it. In giving us free will, He gave us something ennobling. We are not beasts or machines but beings made in His image. To be real freedom, it must be freedom to err. And we did.

Much of Leibniz’s Theodicy attempted to renew Augustine’s answer against Bayle’s onslaught. How God’s foreknowledge is meant to be compatible with freedom, and which conception of necessity eludes objections, are questions that occupied church fathers and still interest Leibniz scholars today. Their very subtlety, for Bayle, is a sign of fear and enervation, for it seeks to evade retorts of any common sense.

Those who say that God permitted sin because he could not have prevented it without destroying the free will that he had given to man, and which was the best present he made to them, expose themselves greatly. The reason they give is lovely. It has a je ne sais quoi, an indefinable something, that is dazzling. It has grandeur. But in the end it can be opposed by arguments more easily opposed by all men, and based more on common sense and the ideas of order. (Bayle 1, 177)

The free will defense works with both flattery and pathos. It plays with our desire to appear in God’s image, along with our need to find meaning in the world. But if it was meant to preserve the belief in God’s goodness, Bayle thought the free will defense begs every question. Once common sense steps back from its own vanity, its response is quite simple. Next to gifts like these, the Trojan horse looks benign. Here Bayle was explicit: who wouldn’t load his enemies with gifts sure to bring about their ruin? Bayle didn’t stop with this question but saved his lewdest analogy for this argument.

There is no good mother who, having given her daughters permission to go to a dance, would not revoke that permission if she were assured that they would succumb to temptations and lose their virginity there. And any mother who, knowing for sure that this would come to pass, allowed them to go to the dance and was satisfied with exhorting them to be virtuous and with threatening to disown them if they were no longer virgins when they returned home, would, at the very least, bring upon herself the just charge that she loved neither her daughters nor chastity. (Bayle 1, 177–78)

Bayle was clearly delighted with the metaphor and played with it for several pages. He knew, of course, that it would seem outrageous. In the second edition he added yet another footnote, which looks intended to soothe at least the Protestants among his readers. These should consider his remark about the wanton mother as giving Catholic critics a taste of their own medicine. Hadn’t Jesuits compared the God of the Calvinists to arbitrary human tyrants like Caligula and Tiberius? Why shouldn’t they be answered in kind? It’s a clever retort, for it adds another layer of equivocation and puzzlement. You think my God is cruel? Take a good look at yours. Can anyone maintain a consistent assertion of God’s benevolence? To excuse His apparent lack of love for us by appealing to his alleged respect will in the end be very feeble.

It would be in vain for [the mother] to try to justify herself by saying that she had not wished to restrain the freedom of her daughters or to indicate that she distrusted them. She would be told that this type of behavior was preposterous and was more indicative of a provoked, cruel stepmother than of a mother. (Bayle 1, 178)

Traditional belief is said to play on childhood fantasy. We want a world ordered by wise and loving parents who fulfill the needs we’re not aware of, guard the interests we do not see. This is, after all, the promise of Providence:2 God knows more than you do, and arranges events to work for that long-term interest you are not foresighted or mature enough to perceive. Bayle moved from children’s dreams of safe landing to their most dreadful apparitions. Supposing God were not a sage and nurturing father, but one who let you fall to the bottom for his own narcissistic needs? Supposing God were not a protective and loving mother, but one who allowed you to ruin yourself forever—perhaps out of envy? Does any attempt to maintain God’s benevolence by claiming He was only trying to offer us presents provide a better picture? Bayle elaborated various options for God’s defense, adapting his analogies to traditional theological positions on God’s foreknowledge. He concluded with a position he ascribed to common sense. If God even suspected we could so abuse our freedom as to cause our eternal damnation, He should have kept His gifts to Himself.

The consequences of belief in God’s omnipotence are thus terrifying. Bayle’s metaphors were meant to show how much we lose if we lose benevolence. But supposing we go the other route, maintaining our belief in God’s benevolence and softening our demands for His omnipotence? Bayle tried to show that such a solution is equally repugnant to theology and to common sense. Suppose God cannot do or know as much as we thought. Suppose He knows less about the consequences of His actions than the average human being. Was God not quite certain that Adam and Eve would fall? Here Bayle returned to his favorite analogy.

If this mother went to the ball, and if she should see and hear through a window that one of her girls was defending herself only weakly in the corner of a study against the demands of a young lover; if she should see that her daughter was but a step away from giving in to the desires of her tempter, and if she would not go to her aid and rescue her from that trap, would we not rightly say that she would be acting like a cruel stepmother and that she would be quite capable of selling her daughter’s honor? … There are no people so little experienced who, without seeing what goes on in the heart, cannot tell by signs when a woman is ready to yield, if they should happen to see through a window how she defends herself when her fall is imminent. (Bayle 1, 181)

The idea that God didn’t know we would abuse His gift turns the Lord of Hosts into a pitiful slave—with less Menschenkenntnis than a moderately experienced voyeur.

The willingness to soften traditional claims of God’s omnipotence leads to a God who is unworthy of our worship, in very short order. Bayle also thought it led straight to Manichaeism after all. For if God is too benevolent to have caused all the evil in the world, something else did. That nothing comes from nothing is, for Bayle, a first rule of thought. Some source must be responsible for evil. If it isn’t God, it must be a power whose strength is equivalent. In the end he thought the choice to be merely one between more and less reasonable versions of Manichaeism. For a Christianity that maintains God’s benevolence must give up His omnipotence. But this is Manichaeism around the edges, pushed to incoherence. Far better to split the difference, Bayle argued, and locate good and evil principles in two different substances rather than combining them in one. One way or another, there is evil power. Better to call it Satan than to call it God Himself.

According to you, the sole principle, which you admit, desired from all eternity that man should sin, and that the first sin should be contagious, that it should ceaselessly and endlessly produce all imaginable crimes over the entire face of the earth. In consequence of which he prepared all the misfortunes that can be conceived for the human race in this lifetime—plague, war, famine, pain, trouble—and after this life a hell in which almost all men will be eternally tormented in such a way that makes our hair stand on end when we read descriptions of it. (Bayle 1, 185)

The vision of the orthodox makes God appear a monster. Bayle argued that Calvinism would have created more converts to Manichaeism than anything earlier theologians accomplished. Wouldn’t reason prefer two warring substances to the Calvinist God? A Being who makes the torments of hell eternal, restricts the number of those who escape them to a tiny minority, and determines who gets what without regard to merit, makes Manichaeism look positively sunny. Here we should note that Bayle belonged to Calvinist churches for most of his life. The question of the sincerity of his religious beliefs is one we’ll discuss shortly, but his writing suggests that hell is part of the world he inhabits. It is one part of the argument for his final conclusion.

For what’s left to reject? The first of his premises, that evil exists, is a matter of observation. Bayle thought nobody willing to face experience could call evil into doubt. Drop the second premise, God’s benevolence, and you’re left with a nightmare. Drop the third, God’s omnipotence, and you’re left with Manichaeism—covertly or not. If the rejection of any of these claims is unacceptable, the only recourse is to reject that very reason which insists on making sense of them. The urge to combine the claims of common sense and reason with the claims of faith is entirely reasonable. Still it cannot be met. Between reason and faith, one must simply choose. Bayle thought the choice was clear. He compared reason to a corrosive powder that begins by attacking the infected flesh of a wound but goes on to destroy living flesh and bone. Though reason begins by refuting error, it soon leads us astray. The confusion and contradiction left in its wake bring immediate misery and produce neither truth nor virtue. Faith, by contrast, might just possibly save.

The problem of evil is not Bayle’s only argument against the value of human reason, merely his strongest. His “Pyrrho” offered other grounds for abandoning the intellect, for all but minor technical purposes. One is especially extraordinary and leads us back to the problem of evil after all. Bayle thought that the new philosophy—that is, Cartesianism—put final touches on skepticism. For it showed that objects of our senses are not what they seem. Bodies are utterly different from the way they appear. Appearance gives us qualities like heat, smells, and color; Cartesian science tells us that all these are but “modifications of the soul.” It is true, Bayle continued, that Cartesianism asserts the real existence of primary properties, extension and motion. But here (you can almost see Bayle smiling) it’s on shaky ground. For its only proof of the existence of bodies is that without them, God would be a deceiver. If nothing corresponded to the secondary qualities we experience, God would have given us ideas of real objects without anything to back them. But

[e]ver since the beginning of the world, all mankind, except perhaps one out of two hundred millions, has firmly believed that bodies are colored, and this is an error. I ask, does God deceive mankind with regard to colors? If he deceives them about this, what prevents him from doing so with regard to extension? (Bayle 1, 198)

Bayle used Descartes’s work to provide more grounds for doubt. If Descartes is right, he’s given us reasons to believe that God is a deceiver after all. The epistemological apparatus with which He equipped us does not pick out extension without a long chain of reasons. What we experience, day after day, are bright colors, sharp tastes, strong smells. Now we know all that to be mere illusion, and continue to perceive them nonetheless. If God could deceive us about secondary qualities, why not primary qualities? Why not anything?

Earlier skeptics merely worried about the gap between appearance and reality; Descartes wrote it into physics. What’s a bent stick in the water next to seventeenth-century optics? We saw Leibniz, among others, turn the spectacular discoveries of early modern science into grounds for faith in the increasing powers of human reason. Bayle saw them as one more ground for despair. Refusing to let up, he attacked the Cartesians from the other direction. When pushed to the limit, Descartes chose voluntarism: part of the privilege of being God is just the privilege of not having to act in accord with human reason. God’s fundamental choices, like the laws of mathematics or ethics, are products of His will. They require and receive no other grounding. Bayle thought that this belief undercut the Cartesian’s own foundation. For the more you insist on God’s incomprehensibility, the more you allow that He could be and do anything. In particular: couldn’t He be a deceiver?

What did Bayle want? He used extraordinary skill to undercut all traditional positions, while refraining from arguing a positive view of his own. Perhaps he knew how easily he would find objections to any view he might construct. His stated conclusion is to refrain from argument altogether. He told readers to look not toward reason but toward faith. Some scholars think this advice was merely prudential—in regard both to his own immediate interests and to those of his readers. Bayle claimed to defend a Christian skeptical tradition, with arguments only directed to refuting rationalist theology. But it’s argued that he made such claims simply to stay out of jail. On this view all his professions of faith amounted to pure subterfuge. Rather than clearing the ground for leaps of faith, he undermined it entirely.

This view of Bayle influenced Voltaire and Hume. It’s the view implied less by his claims than by the tone in which he stated them. Unlike great fideists like Pascal or Kierkegaard, Bayle betrayed no shred of religious emotion. Where he showed passion, it was passion for irony. He simply took too much pleasure in pointing out the obscene behavior of King David, or the futile and tortuous idiocies of traditional theodicy. (Nowhere else is the claim that faith requires crucifixion of the intellect more resonant than in Bayle.) This tone, as much as any particular content, was inherited by Voltaire and Hume, whose standpoints toward religion were considerably less ambiguous.

Yet significant modern scholars take Bayle at his word. There are grounds for viewing him as the believer he said he was. Elisabeth Labrousse, for instance, insists on the importance of context. Bayle wrote at a time when terrible wars of religion had been succeeded by nothing better than severe persecution. Personal experience of the latter, she argues, moved him to condemn every form of religious fanaticism, and to advocate degrees of religious toleration in advance of his time. Accordingly, his arguments against orthodox theology were designed to show that we can never know the truth of any significant religious questions. This is an argument for tolerance. For if knowledge is impossible, each should be allowed to choose faith according to conscience. On this view, Bayle was a Christian philosopher who destroyed every intelligible form of Christian theology. Humiliation of human reason was preparation not just for faith but for religious humility and political moderation.3

It’s a question we may never settle. Most interesting is that, for present purposes, we have no need to settle it. Bayle may have been an atheist or a Christian fideist. It has even been argued that he was a secret Jew or a survivor of the Albigensian massacres. The content of his religious belief is irrelevant. Skeptical arguments like Bayle’s can lead you either way: to reject God in general, and any religion in particular, in rage or disgust; or to embrace them in a leap of faith taken in desperation or ecstasy. For the more fundamental question at issue is not skepticism about religion but skepticism about human reason. Each of the three Western religions has both rationalist and fideist traditions; each can be taken up or rejected on either ground. The problem of evil cannot determine your religious standpoint, nor is it determined by that standpoint. This will become clearest when we turn to Hume, who took Bayle’s arguments as the strongest case for rejecting God. Perhaps Bayle didn’t take them that way but meant just what he said, intending to persuade us to reject argument altogether in favor of blind faith. Either response is possible. You can retain your faith in God, while acknowledging that faith to be at odds with reason and experience; you can reject that faith altogether. What you cannot retain is your wholehearted faith in human reason. After Bayle lacerated the latter on the problem of evil, it demanded a restoration of deepest proportions.

VOLTAIRE’S DESTINIES

Voltaire would not be the one to provide it. Where he does defend reason, he makes Pangloss look skeptical. Let us glance at his tale Zadig; or, Destiny, written twelve years before Candide; or, Optimism. As a character, Zadig bears less resemblance to Candide than to Job. He’s described as the best and the wisest of men. Zadig is no callow disciple, but—by virtue of his own evident abilities—the treasured adviser of kings as well as gangsters from Babylon to Egypt. But as with the hero of Voltaire’s more famous story, Zadig’s improbable adventures take him across much of the globe, suspended amid more reversals of fortune than you can count. “So at last I am happy!” Zadig exclaims, when his virtues have brought him to some new position that leaves him powerful, useful, and beloved. He is always mistaken, for the greatest good fortune is quickly followed by exile, or slavery, or the narrowest escape from a miserable death. All these things take place through mechanisms that seem inexplicable. Zadig’s righteous actions lead to his downfall, the wickedness of others leads to their happiness, and many events happen merely at random. Most of the elements of Candide are in place: worldwide wandering, and the hope of reunion with a distant beloved as the motor behind the hero’s travels and travails. Like Candide’s, Zadig’s experience reveals murder, greed, and ideological warfare to be the motor that drives most of the rest of the world. Both books describe a search for the cunning of reason. Like Candide, Zadig echoed Bayle almost verbatim: “Is it necessary that there should always be crimes and misfortunes?”

Unlike Candide, Zadig gets an answer. He asks the question of the angel who appears at the end of the story. The angel answers with an account that resembles the world according to Leibniz. The universe in its immense diversity was necessarily created by supreme wisdom.

There is no chance; all is test, or punishment, or reward, or foreseeing…. Frail mortal, cease to argue against what you must worship. (Voltaire 1, 169)

The angel, however, can do things Leibniz cannot, and as representative of Providence proceeds to enact the logic of the world. Leibniz refused to give any details. In asking for a little evidence that this world is the best of all possible ones, Bayle was, he thought, too demanding. So Leibniz wrote that Bayle’s request for a detailed exposition of how evil is compatible with the best possible world-schema is “asking too much”:

It is sufficient for me to point out that there is nothing to prevent the connection of a certain individual evil with what is the best on the whole. (Leibniz, 214; my emphasis)

Formally, of course, Leibniz was quite right. Here as elsewhere, his answers show the limits of the formal—as none other than Bertrand Russell complained.4 Unlike Leibniz, Zadig’s angel has power, in both practical and theoretical realms. He burns down the house of a particularly generous host and drowns the attractive youth who was a virtuous widow’s only consolation. When Zadig protests in outrage, the angel reveals the truth behind appearances. An immense treasure lay buried under the house, which the owner could find only after his home was in ruins. Had the drowned boy lived, he would have murdered his aunt the next year, and Zadig himself in the following one. Zadig’s virtues gave him privileged access to truths that are hidden from the rest of us. When angels descend to give explanations, you needn’t your take sufficient reasons on faith. Zadig himself, moreover, is completely rewarded for his fortitude. Despite the tricks of rivals he is crowned king of Babylon, acclaimed as the bravest and wisest of its citizens, and given the hand of the beautiful and virtuous queen who loved him from a distance throughout the years.

Here Zadig may remind us of the epilogue to Job, an ending so crass that biblical scholars usually dismiss it as a late addition to satisfy the orthodox. As reward for his troubles, Job’s possessions are restored with high interest: the Lord gives him 14,000 sheep to replace the original 7,000 burned up by lightning, 6,000 camels to make good on the 3,000 plundered by the Chaldeans. This can sound like Parisian satire, but Zadig itself is not. Voltaire is perfectly deadpan:

The empire enjoyed peace, glory and abundance, it was the earth’s finest century, it was governed by justice and love. Men blessed Zadig, and Zadig blessed heaven. (Voltaire 1, 172)

In 1747 the world seemed to be in order. To be sure, the ending of Candide is no less a fairy tale: all the battered characters reassembled from the ends of the earth to join forces in a garden. But if the ending of Candide served to mock aspirations of optimists like Leibniz and Rousseau, the ending of Zadig only confirmed them.

What happened between Zadig and Candide? The data are virtually identical, yet the reader is left with nearly opposite conclusions. The crimes and misfortunes explained and redeemed in the former tale are left hanging in the latter. If Candide contains a voice of wisdom, it’s that of the Manichaean Martin who concludes that the world exists to drive us mad. The shift in Voltaire’s views has been explained as a result of shifts in his personal affairs. Voltaire had achieved fortune and power, friendship and love. But in 1749, the remarkable woman with whom he had happily lived died giving birth to another man’s child. A few years later, his sojourn at the Prussian court in Potsdam ended in a violent quarrel with Frederick the Great. Pointing out such facts may be ad hominem, but Voltaire couldn’t have minded. He would be the first to insist that immediate surroundings influence general worldviews.

The pleasure of complaining and exaggerating is so great that at the slightest scratch you cry out that the world runs over with blood. Have you been deceived? Then all men are perjurers. A melancholy soul who has suffered some injustice sees the universe covered with the damned, as a young voluptuary, having supper with his lady after the opera, can’t imagine that there are unfortunate men. (Voltaire 6, 381)

The claim that we map our moods onto the cosmos, and call them worldviews, is repeated in tales like “The World as It Is” and Candide.5 But the change in Voltaire’s views wasn’t produced simply by a change in his fortunes. To begin with, things weren’t all that bad. It was after Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake that Rousseau commented on the mismatch between the blessings that the world bestowed on Voltaire and Voltaire’s gratitude toward the world. From Rousseau’s perspective, Voltaire had every reason to sound like Pangloss.⁶ And this wasn’t simply envy, for Rousseau wasn’t simply wrong. Voltaire had a remarkable capacity to repulse the arrows of outrageous fortune, recovering from bad luck almost as quickly as Candide recovered from the blows of the Bulgur regiment. In writing that episode, Voltaire was surely thinking of his own bad treatment at the hands of the Prussian soldier-king. But even after the forced flight from Sans Souci, and the death of his one true love, Voltaire wrote that his life was so happy he was almost ashamed.

Thus no ordinary autobiographical inferences can explain the shift in his views. And neither can any other simple view of the relations between experience and theory. If Voltaire was faithful to any tradition, it’s the one that began with Bayle. Both hold that clear-eyed description of reality should precede any speculation about it. Candide’s blind speculation showed that he never learned to think for himself. He sees the world through the lessons of Pangloss, whose fame as the world’s greatest philosopher derived from being the tutor on call in a Westphalian castle. Candide gains a measure of wisdom when, guided by the skeptical Martin, he rejects speculation entirely in favor of hard and simple labor. And one claim of “The Lisbon Earthquake” is that cold observation—of mangled bodies and children’s cries—is enough by itself to prove philosophy vain.

The reader might conclude that Voltaire got older and wiser, counted up the number of evils in the world, and grew correspondingly skeptical about making any sense of them. Such a conclusion suggests that the description of experience in later pieces like Candide or “The Lisbon Earthquake” will be harder, more brutal, than the description available earlier. Now Candide’s description of the Seven Years’ War is a perfect echo of Bayle.

Nothing could have been so fine, so brisk, so brilliant, so well-drilled as the two armies. The trumpets, the fifes, the oboes, the drums, and the cannon produced such a harmony as was never heard in hell. First the cannons battered down about six thousand men on each side; then volleys of musket fire removed from the best of worlds about nine or ten thousand rascals who were cluttering up its surface…. Finally, while the two kings in their respective camps celebrated the victory by having Te Deums sung, Candide undertook to do his reasoning of cause and effect elsewhere. (Voltaire 5, 20)

But Candide’s exaggerated scenes of horror are not very different from those Voltaire offered earlier. Zadig can “visualize men as they really are, insects devouring one another on a little atom of mud” (Voltaire 2, 129). And a tale written one year later, emphatically named “The World as It Is,” describes a traveler entrusted with reporting the state of the world to an angel who must decide whether the world should be destroyed. The litany of war and blood and betrayal is much the same as that we encounter in later works. The denouement is laconic. The angel decides that if all is not good, it is at least passable. Destroying a city because of its sins makes no more sense than destroying an artwork because it is not exclusively composed of jewels and gold. If Voltaire came to view matters differently, it’s not for a difference in what he had seen.

Is the picture of experience available in these tales realistic? If Candide belongs to a genre, it seems to be satire. Realism, at least, looks inappropriate. The events of the tale, and the speed at which they follow one another, do more than merely defy probability. The rapid succession of apparent deaths and miraculous recoveries, unexpected revelations, fabulous wealth, unbearable torments, is all so impossible it doesn’t even try to obtain the reader’s confidence. We are left free to reflect on Voltaire’s intentions in writing the piece, since we can’t be meant to pay certain kinds of attention to the story itself. In street conversation, calling one description of the world more realistic than another is a covert way of declaring your allegiance to pessimism. The subtitle of Candide is or, Optimism. Voltaire made no commitments, juggling the triad optimism/pessimism/realism like so many balls in the air. The utter absurdity of the combinations of events that befall Candide’s characters is matched only by the utter veracity of the events themselves. The characters may be invented, but what they experience is not—down to the stories of the six deposed kings in Venice whose appearance is so funny that Candide himself thinks he is watching a masquerade. The book begins with the Seven Years’ War, in which people really were butchered for no reason whatsoever. The Inquisition really did burn strangers in the name of God. European conquerors really did murder millions of native inhabitants in the search for gold. African slaves really were mutilated in the colonies of such enlightened countries as Holland, and progressive countries like England really executed their officers for failing to win crucial battles. Women really are raped as a matter of course in wartime. No less genuine are the minor examples of evil cataloged in Candide: an aristocracy so graceless and idiotic that it would rather murder and die than abandon its notions of privilege; the ordinary sorts of theft and betrayal that abound in the book; natural events like the earthquake at Lisbon, and especially the scene just before it, in which the tale’s first genuinely good soul drowns in the storm survived by an unprincipled thug.

This is all just to say: Candide is short, compressed, and satirical, but it isn’t for that reason false. As a description of reality, it’s remarkably accurate. Any good European could have drawn up a similar list of atrocities by reading a newspaper. Voltaire refrained from creating the literary depth and texture that lead us to empathize with characters, or show indignation on their behalf, to create a report that is all the more chilling. He thereby anticipated modern media, providing a series of short takes on human misery across the globe. Like modern media reporting whatever crimes come their way, whatever their sources, Voltaire claimed to be impartial. Like modern media, he reveled in documenting the same crimes committed by rival princes and churches, civilized and savage peoples. Voltaire’s age, like ours, was full of a sense of its universality: travel and commerce gave peoples unprecedented access to one another. The Enlightenment fed eagerly on accounts, both real and invented, of the mores of other continents. Was Candide a mockery of such accounts or simply a continuation of them? Either way, the lesson it draws seems clear. If there’s common humanity to be found in diversity, it’s one of common crime and misfortune.

So much for description. Indeed, Voltaire’s description of reality in the earlier, more cheerful works is so similar to the description in the later and bleaker ones that it seems he took description to be relatively straightforward. At issue is what we make of it. Voltaire was aware that we incline to complain. A central claim of Candide, in fact, is that we all enjoy believing our own troubles are the worst. The old woman whose rough wisdom is for Cunegonde what Martin’s tutorials are for Candide proposes this way of passing time during the voyage from the Old to the New World:

Have some fun, get each passenger to tell you his story; and if there’s not a single one who has not often cursed his life, who has not often said to himself that he was the unhappiest of men, you can throw me into the sea headfirst. (Voltaire 5, 41)

Cunegonde takes up the wager and persuades everyone on shipboard to tell his adventures. Afterward she agrees that the old woman was right. Such exercises in comparative suffering abound in the book.7 Pangloss and Cunegonde’s brother the Baron receive twenty lashes a day from a bullwhip for fighting over who suffered the greater injustice, and continue to do it nonetheless. Long before twentieth-century society began to regard victimization as a source of rights, Voltaire portrayed six deposed kings at a carnival, each vying for the honor of being more miserable than the rest. This scene marks how far humankind has come by the end of Candide. The problem of evil began with one single and majestic Job, in a text that never permits us to question the claim that he is the unhappiest of men. Were it not for Job’s case, the world might be in order—or so it is implied. By mid–eighteenth century, misfortune was multiplied. Not even literal royalty gave one a claim to nobility, or majesty, or even solemnity. Lost glory only increased the wretchedness as well as the ridiculousness of one’s plight.

It’s an audacious reading, but I’m going to risk it: Voltaire was fighting his own tendency to be complacent. He knew, first, that he’d been blessed by fortune. He knew, second, that we all tend to complain. For Voltaire, this could sometimes be a virtue. The sharpest claim in the Lisbon poem is that our complaints stem from the nobler sorts of emotions that human beings can feel—not from vanity or pride. Pope, along with more traditional defenders of the cosmic order, had alleged the latter. He even called anyone who questioned that order “Vile worm!”—a particularly cruel epithet not merely in its immediate evaluation of humanity but in its implicit reminder of what will become of us all. Voltaire’s subtitles are signposts; “The Lisbon Earthquake” is subtitled “An Inquiry into the Maxim, ‘Whatever is, is right.’” In its preface Voltaire asserts his “love and admiration” for “the illustrious Pope,” whom he earlier translated and tried to imitate. He says that he still agrees with him. So Voltaire writes that he

acknowledges with all mankind that there is evil as well as good on the earth; he owns that no philosopher has ever been able to explain the nature of moral and physical evil. He asserts that Bayle, the greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote, has only taught us to doubt, and that he combats himself; he owns that man’s understanding is as weak as his life is miserable. (Voltaire 3, preface)

All this and more he shared with any reading of Pope. He thought that Pope failed not in understanding or observation but in compassion. It’s generosity and sympathy, not arrogance or presumption, that lead us to cry out against natural evil. The doctrines of Leibniz and Pope merely add mockery to misery.

If when Lisbon, Moquinxa, Tetuan and other cities were swallowed up with a great number of their inhabitants in the month of November, 1755, philosophers had cried out to the wretches who with difficulty escaped from the ruins ‘all this is productive of general good; the heirs of those who have perished will increase their fortune; masons will earn money by rebuilding the houses, beasts will feed on the carcasses buried under the ruins; it is necessary effect of necessary causes; your particular misfortune is nothing, it contributes to universal good’, such a harangue would have doubtless been cruel as the earthquake was fatal, and all that the author of the poem on the destruction of Lisbon has said amounts only to this. (Ibid., my emphasis)

Those who point out the ways in which the world is not the best at least acknowledge the pain of others, even if they cannot alleviate it. To allege that they act from less savory motives is simply wrong.

Voltaire went still further. Not only did Pope’s view fail to console us; it left us forlorn. If evil is necessary, we have all the more reason to despair. For this sort of optimism crushes hope for a better world.8 The poem ended by calling hope our only happiness on earth. Voltaire left the object of such hope suitably ambiguous. Whether happiness depended on the hope of heaven, or the possibility of improvement in the world below, was not a matter he wished to address. As a committed anti-Christian, he probably meant the latter, though he couldn’t have put it in print.⁹ But perhaps Voltaire too held the hope of another life to be all that keeps us from despairing in this one.

In sum: Voltaire’s description of reality in Candide was congruent not just with that of Pope, and quite possibly that of Leibniz, but with his own works across time. They show little disagreement over the facts about the world, and even over the capacities of current theories to order them. What’s at stake is not the truth or falsity of particular claims, or even the truth or falsity of one’s most general theoretical commitments. At moments Voltaire seems to simply maintain that unvarnished experience is prior to any theories attempting to order it. But Voltaire, like Pope, was not a metaphysician, so he can’t quite be an empiricist either. Empiricism and rationalism are too crude and too general to delineate the positions available in the effort to decide the place of experience in our worldviews. The issue is not whether one looks at experience, but the distance from which one sees.

Francis Bacon claimed that scientific progress began when scientists began to look at experience. But modern historians of science point out that if you start from experience without theoretical presuppositions, you are more likely to discover Aristotle’s mechanics than Galileo’s.10 Kant attributed the revolutions in modern science to Copernicus’s courage to contradict the testimony of the senses (Kant 3, Bxxii). The ideology that encourages us to stop looking at old books and start looking at the world has long been under fire. But even when unobstructed perception of experience is the one thing that will help us, the question is one of focus. (Those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope weren’t simply obtuse. Why should that perspective be privileged?) How close should one stand? Voltaire’s critique of Pope was a nascent critique of the ideal of objectivity. Viewed from the heavens, Pope may well be right. Looked at from sufficient height and distance, our troubles may be small and compatible with a universe where everything is ordered for the best. But after quoting Pope’s Essay on Man, Voltaire defends our right to another perspective.

Don’t you find great comfort in Lord Shaftesbury’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. (Voltaire 6, 121–22)

We miserable little animals have the right to wonder about our misery. Voltaire didn’t stop there: a God who fails to do so but simply watches it from a distance, like the majestic and disinterested God of Deism, is a God who should be faulted for His lack of humanity—in the absence of a better word.

Given how loathsome Voltaire was to Rousseau, in particular, it’s odd to view him as a champion of kindness. But their one-sided exchange on the earthquake at Lisbon leaves no other choice. In his writing on Lisbon, Rousseau blamed the victims. In his writing on Lisbon, Voltaire heard them cry. When is lack of compassion a philosophical reproach? Voltaire’s philosophical poem says little more to Pope, the master of philosophical poetry, than this: there are circumstances in which writing poetry can be barbarism.

One thread uniting all the writers discussed in this chapter is a sharp and brittle humor that formed a curious counterpart to their cheerless description of appearances. Perhaps they felt they could afford it, as the passionate seekers of order behind the appearances could not. Perhaps they simply needed it more. For all the glitter, and the cosmopolitan wit, Voltaire seemed to be torn. Part of him found the principle of sufficient reason to be entirely self-evident. He saw its traces within his own life, which at points along the way looked as multiply blessed as Zadig’s. Along the way, to be sure. The belief that there’s a reason for everything that happens can be variously parsed. For all that he played with it, Voltaire was no more careless in interpreting the principle of sufficient reason than Leibniz himself, and possibly less. Leibniz never gave a consistent reading of the claim he called his great principle. When he said that nothing ever happens without a reason, he left the reader bewildered, for he never adequately marked the distinction between final and efficient causes, and he may even have deliberately equivocated between them.11 Voltaire was fascinated by improbable causal chains. He was clearly drawn to belief in destiny, half sister to Providence, and returned to address it throughout his work. The sequence of adventures that leads Candide into Cunegonde’s arms after the disaster at Lisbon is the sort of thing that prevents readers from taking the story seriously. When it has a happy ending, it’s less likely to be called literature than cartoon or farce. But recall Kant’s discussion of lying to assassins. Just such improbabilities, when they go wrong, are what make something tragic. (Oedipus arriving at the crossroads a quarter of an hour later would have led to a simple epic. Juliet’s waking a quarter of an hour earlier would have left her adventures a place in the annals of Harlequin romance.) Second: no matter what their outcome, improbable chains form the fabric of history. Voltaire’s Dictionary devoted an entry to the subject. The king of Naples owed his crown, and possibly his existence, to a series of events that began with a petty quarrel between two ladies-in-waiting. After this example Voltaire concluded:

Examine the situations of all the nations in the universe: they are thus founded on a sequence of facts which seem to have no connection and which are connected in everything. In this immense machine, all is wheels, pulleys, cords, springs. (Voltaire 6, 164)

Voltaire held these networks of chains to be no less at bottom of the natural order than of human history. All his work emphasized the sort of crazy contingency inhabiting the world which seems so utterly fortuitous that it surely cannot be.

Or can it? My suggestion that destiny is Providence’s poor relation was deliberately evasive. Voltaire, in the end, was not. The clearest difference between the earlier and the later writings is Voltaire’s later insistence on distinguishing between reasons and causes. Works like Zadig and the Dictionary see wisdom behind all those incredible chains of events. Works like “The Lisbon Earthquake” and Candide do not. Voltaire was still tempted to seek the hand of Providence behind all improbability. But he was merciless with his reader as with himself. Candide, in particular, builds up our expectations of finding meaning in history only to dash them. Again and again, it creates hopes for the discovery of Providence: the Grand Inquisitor who ordered the hanging of Pangloss is slain by Candide; the Dutch pirate who robs him is drowned with his treasures in a sea battle. But Voltaire raised hopes just to mock them, for innocents die just as easily, and plenty of evils go unpunished. There is no order to be found here at all. What’s left of sufficient reason is the barest sort of efficient causality detailed at length when Pangloss explains the genealogy of his syphilis.

Pangloss’s illness is a denial of Providence, not simply agnosticism about it. (Perhaps a vindictively Voltairean deity would say that the pompous doctor had it coming to him, but such a reading seems forced.) The syphilis example is no accident. Consider Voltaire’s Dictionary entry “Love”:

Most of the animals that copulate taste pleasure only through a single sense; and when that appetite is satisfied, all is extinguished. No animal, besides yourself, knows embraces; your whole body is susceptible; your lips especially enjoy a pleasure that nothing wearies, and this pleasure belongs to your species alone; finally, you can give yourself to love at all times while animals have only a definite period. If you reflect on these advantages, you will say, with the Earl of Rochester: “Love would make a nation of atheists worship the Divinity”. (Voltaire 6, 74)

Voltaire went on to describe in detail the wonders of erotic love, and the advantages it gives us over other species. Love develops talents of body and mind from material provided by nature. The ways in which inclination and art combine to make erotic love the glory of human life should make us bow our heads in grateful awe. Until we consider: if animals never know the pleasures of love, they are equally unaware of its pains. Syphilis is the means through which “nature has poisoned the pleasures of love and the sources of life”—and thereby our efforts to find order in them.

If one could ever accuse nature of despising its work, thwarting its plan, acting against its design, it would be in this instance. Is this the best of all possible worlds? Very well! lf Caesar, Antony, Octavius never had this disease, wasn’t it possible to prevent Francis I from dying of it? No, people say, things were so ordained for the best: I want to believe it, but it is sad for those to whom Rabelais dedicated his book. (Voltaire 6, 75)

Here in prose is the movement Candide would provide in fable. Voltaire offered evidence for the argument from design to move his readers close to tears. Just when we’re ready to sing those psalms that Kant thought would put King David to shame, Voltaire shuts our mouths. This is no attempt to make us look foolish. On the contrary: Voltaire would hardly pull this trick so often were he not struggling with himself. In the passage just quoted, he was explicit: I want to believe it. Here it refers to the whole complex of eighteenth-century optimism that looks at ordinary wonders, calls the order they reveal a miracle, and infers straight to the best explanation of an ordinary wonder-working God. Human hands and eyes served as standard Deist examples of things whose structure is so marvelous that they must have been planned. Voltaire adds the lips. What better proof of a Designer who’d arranged things for the advantage of His chosen species? But before you can linger on the ordinary wonder of a kiss, Voltaire reminds you of its frequent outcome.

For the eighteenth century, belief in Providence was essential to any form of religion. In the Dictionary entry “Theism,” Voltaire acknowledged that no difficulties in the notion of Providence will shake a theist’s faith, for they will always remain difficulties, not disproofs.12 Without insight into the nature of a world to come—in this life or another—the idea of a just, rewarding God cannot be disproved. The core of this idea is needed for any religion to consider itself rational. In asserting a clear and certain link between moral and natural evils, the idea of Providence denies the notion of grace as well as that of atheism. Both grace and atheism leave the connection of virtue and happiness up to chance. Reason demands that the connection be systematic. Systematic connection between what you do and what befalls you is at least as important for Deism as for any form of Christianity. If the link between virtue and reward were accidental, the watch wouldn’t work—to use another favorite Deist metaphor. What watchmaker would design a mechanism in which the wheels and cogs turned randomly one way, then sometimes another, without any warning whatsoever?

Both love and Lisbon belie the existence of Providence, for they belie a connection between natural and moral evil. Now Voltaire believes that moral evils are by far the greater problem. On December 16, 1755, he wrote to a Protestant pastor:

I pity the Portuguese, like you, but men do still more harm to each other on their little molehill than nature does to them. Our wars massacre more men than are swallowed up by earthquakes. If we had to fear only the Lisbon adventure in this world, we should still be tolerably well off. (Voltaire 7, vol. 4)

In Candide itself, the earthquake is less horrible than the subsequent auto-da-fé staged by the Inquisition to avert further disaster. And it’s striking that the one Christian myth to which Voltaire wished to cling was the myth of the Fall. He held the notion of original sin to be a truer reflection of human experience than the optimistic doctrines of Pope or the Socinians.13 It’s a thought that Voltaire expressed in the earlier as well as the later work: what men do to each other is far worse than anything nature does to them. He did not need Rousseau to remind him that we’d have enough to do in eradicating those moral evils that are within our power to alter, without worrying about the natural evils that are not. Nor should we forget that, for all his irritating failures of tone, Voltaire spent an estimable amount of his time on the business of eradicating moral evils, in long and repeated campaigns against abuses of power that give him claim to be called the first modern politically engaged intellectual. Nevertheless. If the spread of moral evil is what most leads us to despair, the absence of any connection between moral evils and natural ones is what may drive us mad. What people can bear is finite. Even Job, whose patience became proverbial, curses his birth when disease strikes his body. When natural evils befall us, moral evils seem to multiply, and even the righteous among us may lose confidence about being able to struggle with them.

There’s no doubt that the denial of systematic connections between moral and natural evils contains progressive elements. The syphilis example shows this especially well. For puritanical cultures in Voltaire’s time as in ours, sexually transmitted diseases were indeed proof of Providence. Those who had sinned by sleeping with whoever was off-limits didn’t have to wait until the next world to witness the reality of divine justice. Now in denying that syphilis has meaning, Voltaire denied that sex is a sin.

This pestilence is not like so many other maladies that are the consequences of our excesses. It was not introduced into the world by debauchery; it was born in islands where men lived in innocence, and has spread from there throughout the old world. (Voltaire 6, 75)

But the lessons Voltaire drew show why Madame de Staël accused him of “diabolical gaiety.” Suppose you applaud his refusal to connect moral and natural evils, for you share Voltaire’s refusal to view fornication as an evil. Suppose you incline to share the view that it is, on the contrary, the sort of good that ought to turn us into theists. Is the world any brighter for consisting of simple causal chains that do not reward and punish, but blindly allow such good to be followed by such evil? (Voltaire doesn’t even begin to meditate on the subject of broken hearts, perhaps because he held them to belong to the category of nonnatural evils that could, with some effort, be avoided.) At Candide’s first reunion with Pangloss, he draws back from the pox-ridden pedant in terror. Having returned to his senses,

he asked about the cause and effect, the sufficient reason which had
reduced Pangloss to his present pitiful state.
—Alas, said he, it was love; love, the consolation of the human race, the preservative of the universe, the soul of all sensitive beings, love, gentle love.
—Unhappy man, said Candide, I too have had some experience of this love, the sovereign of hearts, the soul of our souls; and it never got me anything but a single kiss and twenty kicks in the rear. How could this lovely cause produce in you such a disgusting effect? Pangloss replied as follows.—My dear Candide! You knew Paquette, that pretty maidservant to our august Baroness. In her arms I tasted the delights of paradise, which directly caused these torments of hell, from which I am now suffering. (Voltaire 5, 23)

Pangloss traces the sources of his syphilis in a long genealogy of efficient causes that foils every effort to seek final ones. He is interrupted by Candide, who reasonably asks whether the devil is behind the whole thing. Pangloss thinks not. He is still undeterred from launching into another discourse explaining why syphilis is necessary in this best of all possible worlds, though it “strikes at and defeats the greatest end of nature itself.” At the close of the chapter they set sail for Lisbon. Does the reader want more?

Candide is, among other things, a roman à clef, and there is no lack of speculation seeking keys. Martin the Manichaean must be based on Bayle, but some have argued about whether Leibniz or Pope should bear the burden of having modeled for Pangloss. Leibniz’s defenders claimed that Voltaire could not have set his sights on the sophisticated system of the master but must have been attacking one of its simple-headed popularizers like Pope. Partisans of Pope, by contrast, were sure that Pangloss was expounding not the rich and ambiguous lessons of the Essay on Man but only the dry and dogmatic Theodicy. I suspect that Voltaire was out for both, and with them, the very possibility that words can help us with the problem of evil. Words of any kind.

Who else makes an appearance? The earnest young man without name or fortune who gives the tale its title might well be Rousseau. His travels, his worldview, and his infuriating naïveté all suggest it. Moreover, the virtues of Cunegonde are evident only to Candide. Unable to deserve his trust and incapable of writing a letter, she’s a good sketch of how the philosophes regarded Rousseau’s mistress Thérèse Levasseur. If Rousseau was the protagonist’s model, the author is unexpectedly kind to him at the end, allowing him not only peace but a measure of wisdom. It takes time, but Candide is capable of learning.

Just what does he learn? After all Voltaire’s didactic clarity when attacking his opponents, he left his own positive view quite a blur. Any reading of Voltaire’s conclusion must include an answer to the question: How big is your garden? Initially we’re inclined to view it as small. The injunction to cultivate our gardens thus seems part of a vision of life that is grim. Martin’s conclusion—“Let us work without reasoning, it is the only way to make life endurable”—seems to be Voltaire’s own. Life is a choice between “the convulsions of anxiety and the lethargy of boredom.” Cultivating your garden is a way of averting three great evils—boredom, vice, and need—but it will not yield more positive fruit. The hopes for something better are the hopes of clumsy youth. Great love and passion become a dull and ugly marriage. The pursuit of understanding leads to the judgment that the world exists to drive us mad. The search for a new world reveals the vices of the old. Those enlightened nations for whose rights the French bourgeoisie yearned show no more humanity than those still under the burdens of absolutism. Wealth, and experience, and even high culture end in misery and boredom. What’s left is the claim that a bit of human decency, and hard work to dull the painful memory of better hopes, are the best we can expect from the world. Most of us were raised to call this sort of vision mature.

So Candide, as stick-figure precursor of the bildungsroman, is read as a proof or a plea for such visions. If you do not begin with such a vision, however, you needn’t read Candide as confirming it. It’s possible to sketch a reading of the book that is well-nigh utopian. To see this we must focus on the question of description. The problem with optimism is not that it misdescribes experience. As we saw, the optimist’s catalog of the furniture of the universe may be no different from anyone else’s. For he claims not that this world is so much to write home about, but that any other world would be worse. He thus denies both the necessity and the possibility of making any improvements on experience. Leibniz made this point most clearly, telling us that if we understood how God made the world, we could not even wish that anything in it were different. As Voltaire emphasized, calling such a doctrine optimistic is highly misleading; it seems, rather, to destroy every chance for hope.

Candide, by contrast, contains scathing critiques of the church, the aristocracy, imperialism, and war. These were all objects of Voltaire’s attacks in other parts of his work, where he sought to make real changes in the lives of real human beings. Thus the work can be read as radical demand that we stop viewing the present state of reality as determined by Providence; that we stop describing it as the best world in the service of making it a better one. For we saw that Voltaire held moral evils to be more numerous, more important, and more tractable than natural ones. Candide’s irony is at least as much directed against established political institutions as against established metaphysics. And Candide’s education is designed to make him something close to the critical, self-made bourgeois liberal who is the Enlightenment’s ideal hero. His childhood in the castle trained him to never think for himself—thus representing the self-incurred immaturity that Kant thought Enlightenment’s antithesis (Voltaire 5, 61). At its beginning, the hero has no doubt about the sources of authority. In the all-encompassing anthill of a Westphalian barony, aristocratic birth and the philosophical system of Pangloss give meaning and order to life as a whole. The book takes aim at everything that combined to make such authority function, climaxing with the six kings whose only claim to attention is the assertion of their powerlessness. By the close of the book, authority comes from human hands; labor is the only real basis of order or respect. The book shifts from examining the sources of human happiness to creating them. Voltaire seized the moment when the human stopped being spectator of a vast, all-encompassing universe and began to be producer of the world. So Candide can be viewed as description of the path from feudal to modern order.

To expand such a view, one would need to decide that the garden we are meant to tend is quite extensive. Peter Gay believes that Voltaire’s garden was all of Europe. One reason to agree with him is the presence of classical Enlightenment virtues in the group that forms Candide’s last tableau. Far from being traditional heroes, the members of this garden society are emphatically imperfect: a bastard, a whore, a renegade priest, a half-breed servant, a professor with the pox. It’s the unsung and outcast who will take up their own destiny, constructing new social order with their hands. Their garden is unguarded. It could be sacked or ruined like so many others. Voltaire’s message thus cannot be a call to retreat behind smaller borders, to lead your life without regard for the wider world, trading space for peace and certainty. Since the very same group tried to do just that in their Westphalian beginnings, they cannot be meant to embrace provincial isolation in the end. Candide is a meditation on the futility of guarantees. After reading it, we should be aware of the fragility of anything that looks stable.

Candide as realistically utopian? It’s a possible reading, but its author leaves us wondering. For his utopianism, if it is such, is less realistic than dry. When can irony support hope, and when does it undermine it? Voltaire’s rhetoric is antiheroic, again and again. Even worse, he left us this comment on the chances for radical change:

If you could unsettle the destiny of one fly, there would be no reason on earth why you couldn’t fashion the fate of all other flies, all the animals, mankind, and nature; finally you would find yourself more powerful than God. (Voltaire 6, 235)

It’s a thought left to underline the suggestions that concluded the previous chapter. Today Alfonso will strike us as respectful, even modest. But any wish to improve Creation may overstep our bounds. The fact that this didn’t stop Voltaire from trying made his life the more admirable. It may have left him without anything to stand on.

Reason, in particular, seems to be in shreds. Over and over, Voltaire underlined two claims. As an instrument of truth, reason leads us astray, for it is inattentive to the claims of the world. As an instrument of action, reason leads us nowhere at all, for it’s too weak to move anyone to anything. Reason, in short, is both false and feeble. What human beings need, and use, is something else. In a splendid commentary on natural law Candide tries to save himself from cannibals by appealing to universal principles of humanity. His guide Cacambo knows better and rescues them by appealing both to pragmatism and to thirst for the right sort of blood. The cannibals are directed to go out and eat a real Jesuit. They “found this discourse perfectly reasonable,” and Voltaire’s readers are left to wonder. Whence his reputation as paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker? For his aim at the most central of Enlightenment beliefs was as straight as it’s clear: reason can’t explain the world, and reason can’t help us to navigate it.

At the same time he blocked the most immediate avenue of escape, that which was historically taken in response to perceived Enlightenment weaknesses. If reason is too weak to help us, perhaps sentiment or passion is not? Now Voltaire thought that we are moved by passions, and some of them are even good ones. It’s not the search for truth or wisdom but the search for Cunegonde that literally and figuratively keeps Candide going. But passions are more often base than benign, and even benign passions bring little but disappointment in their train. Candide’s desire can never reach its object. He is doomed to disaffection, from the first kick that follows the kiss behind the screen to the deeper pain of realization when he finally finds her. She is desirable because she is absent and so long as she’s absent. When regained, Cunegonde is an ugly shrew whom Candide no longer desires. Her former charms are replaced by the most pedestrian form of seduction: she’s become an excellent pastry cook. Candide’s decision to marry her anyway is motivated not by love, and barely by obligation. He’s moved, rather, by his own injured pride on learning that her brother still finds the marriage beneath their rank. Candide’s search for Cunegonde might easily have ended in the sort of tragedy that leaves hopes for passion itself intact. That, at least, is the promise of romanticism. Instead, it fizzles out in the despair of the everyday which corrodes even that.

Voltaire’s attack on hopes for any sort of wholeness was positively savage. His characters’ very bodies belie order and harmony. Pangloss loses “merely” an eye and an ear; the old woman loses a buttock. Imperfection and irregularity are part of the universe. Nothing matches the harmonious pattern that poets and metaphysicians wish to impose. Voltaire underlined this with mismatches awash with cosmic excess. The Grand Inquisitor sends those who don’t like bacon to the flames as suspected Marranos, but shares his mistress with a Jew. Priests who hand out the harshest of punishments for dissipation debauch themselves regularly with boys and with girls. Willingly or not, every woman is a prostitute. The caricatures are not arbitrary. By the time we have run through them, we incline to abandon every search for ideals—be they persons or more abstract sorts of object—along with every search for sense and system.

THE IMPOTENCE OF REASON: DAVID HUME

Kant’s insights into the history of philosophy were as deep as his insights into philosophy itself. Some of his remarks about what’s at stake in his predecessors’ work are so deep and so sharp that they obviate libraries full of later commentary. His comments about Rousseau and Newton were brief and illuminating. Here is what the Critique of Practical Reason says about Hume:

[H]e desired, as is well known, nothing more than that a merely subjectively necessary concept of cause, i.e. habit, be assumed in place of all objective meaning of necessity in the causal concept; he did this in order to deny to reason any judgement concerning God, freedom, and immortality; and he knew very well how to draw conclusions with complete cogency when once the principles were conceded. (Kant 6, A13)

The remark has received little attention, and is likely to be puzzling. Hume’s attack on the notion of cause is the heart of his work, but the causal relation usually mentioned is that which takes place between billiard balls. What did Kant think it had to do with God?

Though there is evidence enough in earlier works like the Enquiry and the Natural History of Religion, it is Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that shows how these questions connect.14 Hume’s friends judged the Dialogues to be the best thing he ever wrote, and it’s easy to agree. The Dialogues are one of the more precise and devastating examples of human reasoning in modern thought. Hume went to great lengths to ensure that it would be published posthumously, and his last extant letter, written to Adam Smith two days before his death, was full of concern for it. Hume overestimated neither the value of the Dialogues nor their potential for wreaking havoc. To begin to grasp the latter, consider this letter from Smith:

A single, and as I thought, a very harmless Sheet of paper which I happened to write concerning the death of our late friend, Mr. Hume, brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain. (Quoted in Mossner, 605)

Smith’s letter describing Hume’s pagan cheerfulness in the face of his approaching death was indeed harmless next to the work whose publication was his friend’s last wish.

The Dialogues take aim at the natural religion that was the Enlightenment’s best hope. The previous century had suffered one war of religion after another. Slaughtering your neighbor to save his eternal soul, or any rate your own, had been the order of business from the farthest corner of Prussia to Europe’s southern coasts. It was held in check by sullen and tenuous agreements. Natural religion was meant to do away with the misery caused by revealed religion, serving as a force for unity instead of division. It would contain just those truths that could be grounded by naked reason unaided by revelation. Hence it could be shared universally, independent of accidents of birth. Natural religion comes as naturally to the common man as it does to the scholar, and is as evident in Paris as in Constantinople.

Natural religion offered hope not merely as an object that all could agree on, but as an ideology that sprang from the best in us. Traditional religion, it was claimed, led to fear and hatred because it stemmed from fear and hatred. Primitive man was fixed in terror before the forces of nature and needed to be controlled by terror in turn. With a new age dawning, brighter forces were assembled. Natural religion could lead to better outcomes, for it grew from better soil. Awe and gratitude at the wonders of Creation were the motives for worshiping the Deist God. And as anyone could be led to such gratitude by the clear light of reason, so anyone could, with some training, be governed by it.

Natural religion was no tepid, instrumental compromise but a breath of air and promise. All the grim apparatus of the northern Calvinism on which Hume was raised was to be dismantled by conviction in the fit between human and divine justice. All the wild articles of faith, from Real Presence to reliquaries, with which southern Catholicism had overwhelmed reason, were to be replaced by those truths any baby could see. The impulse to natural religion was more reverent than pragmatic, a far cry from the attitude that Diderot described as the English tendency to believe in God un peu. Real worship and wonder, as distinct from superstition, were not opposed to reason but derived from it. Rousseau’s classic defense of natural religion, the “Creed of the Savoyard Vicar,” argued this clearly, but it was even better displayed by Voltaire.

The one safe haven in Candide’s travels is the kingdom of Eldorado, a good place to view Enlightenment daydreams about the shape of the state of nature. Travelers are welcomed with the twelve-course meals a Parisian chef would make in South America, children play with precious stones as if they were marbles, palaces of scientific learning exist in place of courts, and the king’s remarks all sound witty—even in translation. Candide and his guide marvel over all the evils that are absent in Eldorado.

What is this country then, they said one to another, unknown to the rest of the world, and where nature itself is so different from our own? This probably is the country where everything is for the best. (Voltaire 5, 54)

But one thing remains unchanged even in Eldorado, as Candide and Cacambo learn when they meet the kingdom’s wisest man.

The conversation was a long one; it turned on the form of the government, the national customs, on women, public shows, the arts. At last Candide, whose taste always ran to metaphysics, told Cacambo to ask if the country had any religion.

The old man grew a bit red.—How’s that? He said. Can you have any doubt of it? Do you suppose we are altogether thankless scoundrels?

Cacambo asked meekly what was the religion of Eldorado. The old man flushed again.

—Can there be two religions? He asked. I suppose our religion is the same as everyone’s, we worship God from morning to evening.

—Then you worship a single deity? Said Cacambo, who acted throughout as interpreter of the questions of Candide.

—It’s obvious, said the old man, that there aren’t two or three or four of them. I must say the people of your world ask very remarkable questions.

Candide could not weary of putting questions to this good old man; he wanted to know how the people of Eldorado prayed to God.

—We don’t pray to him at all, said the good and respectable sage; we have nothing to ask Him for, since everything we need has already been granted; we thank God continually. (Voltaire 5, 56)

Voltaire’s stance of choice is ceaseless irreverence. If he holds this much natural religion to be self-evident for anyone who isn’t a “thankless scoundrel,” its sources must run very deep.

It would be misleading to call the argument from design the foundation of natural religion, for this suggests that the argument could, in principle, be detached from it. Rather, the argument from design is so nearly the heart of natural religion that it is hard to imagine the one without the other. Nor did the eighteenth century experience the argument as argument. Until Hume, it seemed a self-evident statement of fact. It’s a statement so common as to be almost vulgar, as Hume implied when letting Demea, spokesman for the orthodox, demand a priori proofs of God’s existence. Should we leave such a crucial matter to the vagaries of mere experience? Hume offered the orthodox a critique of their favorite proofs of God, but he didn’t really care about them. A priori proofs are not only easy to demolish; they never moved anyone but metaphysicians anyway. The interesting target is the claim that experience itself presents so many proofs of God’s presence and goodness that we need no complex reasoning to establish them. For, says Philo, Hume’s spokesman in the Dialogues, the problem is not that the argument from design is an inferior sort of argument, since it’s based not on reason but on vulgar experience. It’s not even a good argument from experience—as only a great empiricist could show.

The argument from design requires one quick inference. It’s based on the testimony of what we seem to plainly see: a natural order of such fineness and complexity that it cannot have developed by accident. We needn’t look to the heavens to find instances of such order. The parts of our own bodies will do just as well. Nor need we understand much natural law to admire the workmanship with which the universe was constructed. Kant’s best example was the preservation of life through the changing of the seasons.

No one can have such a good conceit of his insight as to wish to assert definitely that, for example, the most admirable conservation of the species in the plant and animal kingdoms, whereby each new generation re-presents, every spring, its original, anew and undiminished, with all the inner perfection of mechanism and (as in the plant kingdom) even with their delicate beauty of color, without the forces of inorganic nature, otherwise so destructive, in the bad weather of autumn and winter being able to harm their seed at all in this respect—no one, I say, will assert that this is a mere result of natural laws; no one, indeed, can claim to comprehend whether or not the direct influence of the Creator is required on each occasion. (Kant 9, A116)

Kant’s theoretical insight that the argument from design depends on a brief, fallacious inference did not change his sight. When he looked at a flower blooming after a long Prussian winter, what he saw was a miracle. If all the complexity of his speculative reservations cannot prevent Kant from seeing something so simple, and simply self-evident, how much more convincing it must have appeared to those untouched by speculation. Once more, design served to unite people regardless of fortune or estate. Scholar and simpleton, Catholic and Protestant could all be moved to common devotion by the common sense of wonder at common experience.

Hume began by denying all that.

Even in this day, and in Europe, ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent Creator of the world; he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant; He will not hold out his hand, and bid you contemplate the suppleness and variety of joints in his fingers, their bending all one way, the counterpoise which they receive from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of his hand, with all the other circumstances, which render that member fit for the use, to which it was destined. To these he has long been accustomed; and he beholds them with listlessness and unconcern. He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one; the fall and bruise of such another; the excessive drought of this season; the cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate operation of providence. And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments—for it. (Hume 3, 153)

Common wonders are too common to cause reverence. It is melancholy, not the brighter emotions, that throws us on our knees (ibid., 143). Natural religion was meant to be religion stripped of superstition; Hume says it is moved by the same sorts of fear and trembling that lead to darker varieties of worship. Fear that the argument from design might be false is more likely to make us pray than conviction that it’s true. We are frightened by mischance and accident, examples of disorder, and rush to ward off their blows. This movement is as natural, superstitious, and vulgar as the movements of any old-fashioned idolator. Or as Kant put it: we praise the order of the universe in the hope that God is listening and will reward us by making it run the way we want.

These sorts of claims concern psychology. Deep psychology, insofar as they’re true, but psychology nonetheless. For most philosophers, psychological insights are ways of weakening one’s prey rather than dispatching it. Hume’s real arguments are elsewhere. Like the very careful, methodical, and solid builder he held the universe to be lacking, Hume deconstructed every brick and every beam with which the argument from design is composed.

The argument rests on an inference from effect to cause. Such an effect (an ordered universe) must have an appropriate cause (an ordering First Cause). If you want to block that inference, one place to begin would be the mysteries in the notion of causation. What does causation come to? We think we have a clear idea of one thing’s really causing another. Once we start to ponder, all clarity evaporates. No ordinary rules of logic tell us that events need causes. Why ever not suppose that something came from nothing? The claim that every event must have a cause—one way of reading the principle of sufficient reason—is not itself a claim of reason. Nor does experience give us grounds for it. For where does experience present us with causes? When one billiard ball hits another, we see two round objects, but nothing between them that counts as a relation. If they hit often enough, with similar results, we see constant conjunction, but this is not the relation we sought.

Kant said that Hume’s notion of causality lacks a notion of dignity. Today we would call it deflated. If causality is no more than constant conjunction, the very aura surrounding all ideas of First Cause will start to fade. But Hume had no need to rely on aura and rhetoric. If there is, in the end, nothing more to the concept of cause than constant conjunction, there must at least be constant conjunction. Otherwise causality evaporates entirely. The conjunction had better be constant, for otherwise there’s no testimony to the presence of causes at all.

Here Hume’s conclusions almost draw themselves. When the event under discussion is sui generis—say, the Creation of the universe—there is no basis whatsoever for attributing causes. Our conviction that it has one should dissolve, for what can be said about causes of events that only happened once? When the meaning of cause has been shown to be constant conjunction, we do not, in such a case, entirely know what we’re talking about. Note that this argument is different from Hume’s argument on induction. The latter undermines our certainty that like causes have like effects. The former seeks to undermine belief that every event has some cause or another. Hume undermined the foundations of both these claims to make his point. Bent on demolition of the entire structure of natural religion, he took any tool at hand. However impressive the argument based on the problems with induction may be, it is less devastating than that based on the unclarity in the notion of causality itself. Inductive evidence is always problematic, and nothing here would be good inductive evidence anyway. This is bad but not decisive. For defenders of the faith might return from such arguments armed with a notion of cause they claimed was deeper or more intrinsic than that presented in mere empirical sequences. Hume’s prior argument against every other notion of causality left tradition no place to retreat. All he allowed was the observation of humdrum recurring constant conjunctions. Cause without constant conjunction is a name without sense.

Hume sought to show that, in this instance, only unthinking anthropomorphism makes us think it has some sense. The natural religion that tried to undo magic thinking turns out to be as rife with it as any other. When we make the argument from design, we put ourselves in God’s shoes. If we were making an object, especially a very large one, we’d require intention and foresight. And once we were finished, we’d like to be praised for our judgment and skill. But

[w]isdom, thought, design, knowledge—these we justly ascribe to him—because these words are honorable among men, and we have no other language or other conceptions by which we can express our adoration of him. (Hume 3, 44)

There we are, wildly, projecting. We have no evidence whatsoever that God is like us at all.

The reminder that we do not know God’s nature would be neither new nor impressive. The Dialogues make us experience our lack of knowledge by suggesting other options. Our belief in the austere benign wisdom of the Lord of natural religion is based on anthropomorphic wishful thinking. We imagine a Creator as we’d like to imagine ourselves, or at least our fathers or sovereigns. Once we stop viewing such a hypothesis as a self-evident product of reason, what other alternatives arise? The Natural History shocked readers by depicting Christianity as merely one religious alternative among others. Hume had compared the moral effects of monotheism and polytheism and concluded that the latter was healthier. It promoted tolerance rather than fanaticism, gallant virtues like courage and activity rather than monkish virtues like humility and passivity. Hume argued that the very similarity of pagan gods to humans is itself an advantage. Where the gods are viewed as only somewhat superior to frail mortals, they can function as role models. Imitatio Dei is easier when the object is closer to hand. Even the sins ascribed to pagan gods are worthier of imitation than those with which monotheism must cope. What are lust and adultery next to the cruelty and vengeance ascribed to the Christian god of love?

Polytheism, therefore, is more compatible with the demands of practical reason. The Natural Religion suggested that it also makes more theoretical sense. There, however, Hume relied on the absurder articles of faith required, in particular, by Catholicism. He described the innocent heathen’s view of the doctrine of the Real Presence to suggest that mythological religions do less violence to intellect. Later he attacked most any form of conventional worship by suggesting that all ascribe to God “the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause” (Hume 3, 128). But traditional dogma was an easy target in England. The Dialogues were bolder. They proceeded to show that the natural religion allegedly founded on common sense is in fact less reasonable than other hypotheses. As myths go, monotheism is not only less salutory but less scientific than alternatives. Natural inductive procedures will lead us to polytheism.

Suppose we accept the claim Hume called the experimental principle: like effects prove like causes. That principle is generally problematic, but in this case it’s no use at all. For the effect to be explained has no class for comparison. We compare the Creation of the world to our own creation of artifacts as a result of that relentless anthropomorphism which leads us to see faces in the moon. The argument from design has no more force than that. Suppose we also grant the premise that it takes to be a matter of observation: the natural world presents evidence of order. Without a series of worlds and their causes to compare and draw conclusions from, we must rely on speculation. Which hypotheses make most sense?

If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter, who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we entertain, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out: Much labor lost: Many fruitless trials made; And a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making. (Hume 3, 69)

In fact, Hume concluded, the ship analogy leads straight to polytheism. If something as fine as a schooner cannot be produced by one man alone but requires a whole crew of them, why not suppose that several deities assembled to fabricate the world? If we’re being anthropomorphic, why not do it right?

And while we’re considering similarities of cause, Hume suggests we consider similarities of effect and reevaluate the suggestion that the universe resembles an artifact to begin with. Deists compared the world to a watch or a ship, but isn’t it more like a vegetable? When we look at the world as a whole, it seems more organic than mechanical. Mightn’t it have been generated organically? Suppose a comet were the seed of a world. After it has been fully ripened by passing from star to star, it is finally tossed into the unformed elements and sprouts into a new system. And if the world is organic, why shouldn’t it be an animal? lf it were, we might suppose that

a comet is the egg of this animal; and in like manner as an ostrich lays its egg in the sand, which, without any farther care, hatches the egg, and produces a new animal; so … (Hume 3, 79)

Here Demea interrupts Philo’s speculations in vexation. The implicit comparison of the Lord of Creation to an ostrich is too much to bear. What data, he asks, does anyone have for such wild and arbitrary conclusions? None whatsoever, replies Philo cheerfully; that’s just the point. Data are what you have when you have scientific procedures based on causal analyses and inductive evidence. None of this is present for events that happen only once. There everything rests on speculation. And if we’re going to be speculative, no hypothesis is wilder than another. A planet inhabited entirely by spiders (and why shouldn’t there be one?) will conclude that the universe is spun like a web from the bowels of an infinite spider.

Why an orderly system may not be spun from the belly as well as from the brain, it will be difficult to give a satisfactory reason. (Hume 3, 83)

Even before reaching his discussion of human affairs, Hume hinted that he had yet better cards in his hand. If his discussion showed that even the appearances of order in the world permit no inferences about its cause, it is harmless compared to his discussion of the appearances of disorder. If we’re considering the world as organic phenomenon, doesn’t it resemble a feeble embryo, or a rotten carcass, as much as anything whole? lf we view it as artifact, does it look like the work of a master? Couldn’t it, rather, be the production of a doddering old deity, who should have retired before leaving such embarrassing last work? Or the first attempt of some infant deity, who afterward abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance? As soon as we admit that God is finite, such hypotheses are allowable. And if we call Him infinite, we’d do better to say nothing at all. Through most of the Dialogues these remain dark hints. Hume himself was tempted by a notion of the order and beauty in the natural world. The Dialogues did little to question it, though they provide convincing epistemological strictures on what we’re permitted to conclude from it. To be sure, Hume diverged from the common view that Newton and others provided new evidence for the argument from design. The new astronomical discoveries prove the immense grandeur of the world, but Hume could use this for his own fire as well. For the larger and grander the universe appears, the less it resembles a human artifact. And it was on such resemblance that the argument from design hung.

More exactly, it hung on the claim that the universe is a good artifact. It needn’t be the best one; Hume left it to his continental colleagues to knock down straw men. Cleanthes, the attractive thinker who’s given the task of defending natural religion, is always quite sensible. He admits that the world isn’t perfect; he simply points out that it’s good, in a way that can hardly be accident. The universe, he allows, isn’t exactly like a house.

But is the whole adjustment of means to ends in a house and the universe so slight a resemblance? The economy of final causes? The order, proportion, and arrangement of every part? Steps of a stair are plainly contrived that human legs may use them in mounting; and this inference is certain and infallible. (Hume 3, 47)

The simile was introduced in discussion of the original inference: is there enough evidence to conclude from effect to its cause? But there Hume reserved his description of the effect. Once he began to challenge the Deist description, he was almost invincible. Description of the natural world made the argument from design a reasonable inference, if inference were possible. Even Philo is drawn to it, and says he requires all his metaphysical subtlety to elude it. But once we begin to describe the human world, we’re at a loss to explain how the argument ever found a hearing. For here, says Philo, I triumph.

Did I show you a house or palace, where there was not one apartment convenient or agreeable; where the windows, doors, fires, passages, stairs, and the whole economy of the building were the source of noise, confusion, fatigue, darkness, and the extremes of heat and cold; you would certainly blame the contrivance, without any further examination. The architect would in vain display his subtilty, and prove to you, that if this door or that window were altered, greater ills would ensue. What he says may be strictly true: The alteration of one particular, while the other parts of the building remain, may only augment the inconveniences. But still you would assert in general, that, if the architect had had skill and good intentions, he might have formed such a plan of the whole, and might have adjusted the parts in such a manner, as would have remedied all or most of these inconveniences. His ignorance, or even your own ignorance of such a plan, will never convince you of the impossibility of it. If you find many inconveniences and deformities in the building, you will always, without entering into any detail, condemn the architect. (Hume 3, 106)

We’ve entered the modern world. For all Bayle’s obscenity, or Voltaire’s patent rage, a touch of awe endured. God remained a sovereign against whom one might with reason rebel. He had not yet become a contractor whom one might decide to fire. Apart from infrequent exceptions like the Lisbon earthquake, the eighteenth century extolled His workmanship as a matter of course, convinced that all its qualities were evident on its face. Hume suggested that we look more closely. The roof leaks. The stairs slope. The windows jam. Make your own inventory.

Hume’s use of the dialogue allowed him some distance, and he used it to greatest advantage. The placid rhetoric that can be annoying elsewhere is here entirely convincing. The bourgeois everydayness of his metaphor and the calm of his description leave behind a persuasive chill. For Hume himself never ranted about the miseries of life nor inveighed against atrocities. He was, notoriously, cheerful. Hume’s description of the quality of the world to be judged thus functions as report. He simply recorded the general view. It’s no accident that the section devoted to proving the universality of human misery begins with the testimony of the orthodox.

Were a stranger to drop, on a sudden, into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of ills, an hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malfactors and debtors, a field of battle strewn with carcasses, a fleet floundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures—whither should I conduct him? To a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow. (Hume 3, 98)

We have heard this before, in more or less elegant terms. That is Hume’s point. Here he put it in the mouth of the dour Demea, while Philo need play but a supporting role. As Demea intones the “great and melancholy truth” of the misery of life, Philo adds that it’s universal, and hardly confined to the orthodox. Pagans asserted it no less often than Christians; on no point was there ever more agreement between the learned and the vulgar. As Demea recites the standard catalog of woes, Philo adds new ones. When Demea describes the terror with which the strong prey on the weak in every corner of the planet, Philo reminds us that the weak torment the strong. What about mosquitoes? The great chain of being is composed of infinite gradations of enemies, each seeking the others’ destruction from above and below. When Demea recalls peculiarly human capacities to overcome natural enemies, Philo recalls the peculiarly human capacities for self-made suffering. Only the human adds to his real enemies the pain of imaginary ones who blast his life with superstitious terrors. Only the human invents guilt, by inventing demons who turn his own pleasures into crimes. Only the human has nightmares.—At Philo’s prodding, Demea lets loose. It’s a perfect duet. Think of war and oppression. Think of sickness and death. And speaking of sickness: is the body more dismal than the soul? Count up human emotions. Think of shame, rage, despair. Does joy last as long? Take such pitch? Seize our memory?

Apart from the reminder of mosquitoes, and just possibly of guilt, Hume’s litany is standard fare. He even thinks that the modern age has become less melancholy. This makes it all the harder to answer. If this judgment of human life is so widely accepted, whence the wide acceptance of the argument from design? The argument depends on the view of Creation as gift. Such a wonderful artifact testifies to a wonderful benefactor, whom none but thankless scoundrels would scruple to praise. Hume places this assumption next to all the timeworn portraits of the gift itself. In what respect—he concluded ever so elegantly—do the benevolence and mercy of this donor resemble benevolence and mercy of men?

After using the assumptions of traditional religion to undermine itself, Hume turned to the natural. Orthodoxy avowed that contemplation of sin and suffering must lead us to faith. Hume asked us to contemplate them a little longer, and consider whether worship is the proper response. Natural religion bid us observe the machinery of the universe and consider whether it could have arisen without intention. Hume asked us to state what, exactly, the purpose of this strange machinery might be. If it points to intention, it points at most to several: how else could storms ruin those harvests the sun nourished, or the sun destroy that growth so gently fostered by the rains? Here the reasonable inference runs straight to polytheism, a plurality of gods whose purposes are cross-purposes. Each has his own province, and none is entirely reliable. “Today he protects, tomorrow he abandons us” (Hume 3, 139). Wouldn’t such a system more nearly fit that experience and reason which natural religion invokes? The sensible rationalist can argue that appearances are mixed; the world presents neither simply pleasure nor pain. Very well, then, a mixed group of deities is the best explanation of their causes. For what experience gives us is just enough to save conviction that there is some benevolence and wisdom in the forces of nature, if we are convinced of it already. But could experience—as we all observe it—lead to such a conviction alone?

Hume’s prose exudes a ghostly sort of calm that conceals the ferocity of his attack. By taking on the attributes of reasonableness, he undermines all the interests of reason. Both traditional and natural religion relied on an implicit challenge: if you don’t like this world, could you design a better one? Not a fairy tale, a world. A thing with constraints. Where different parts must fit together, different claims must be adjudicated, different interests reconciled. Pushed to the limit, defenders of faith argued that God too has His. Within the limits of reason, could you make a better plan?

Hume might choose to reject the question as outside his field of competence. You needn’t study engineering to see that a building is a disaster, nor know how to fix it in order to condemn the one who constructed it. He was hired, after all, to bring you peace of mind. But Hume took the challenge. Perhaps he was Alfonso’s heir. Hundreds of years later, he was prepared for the consequences. A better design? Nothing’s simpler. It won’t yield a palace, still less a castle in the air, just an ordinary dwelling-house built with goodwill and foresight. In the earlier Dialogues Hume gave imagination free play, inventing one cosmological fantasy after the next. In the last sections he sought the mediocrity of instrumental rationality, commonsense homespun planning. What factors do good designers need to take into account? With magisterial equanimity Hume claimed that all evils of the world depend on four circumstances. All appear to human reason to be, with good planning, entirely avoidable. A good designer would contrive better means to his ends.

The first circumstance that introduces evil is the mechanism that uses pain as a spur to action, and indeed to preservation itself. All theodicies remind us of the economy of pain. But why not design a universe in which we felt nothing but degrees of pleasure? If you were hungry, the mechanisms that drive you to nourish yourself could lead the intensity of your happiness to decrease. This would lead you toward that food which, once ingested, would send you back to ecstasy. If we can be free of pain for an hour, why not for a lifetime? Does reason require that motivation be unpleasant? Couldn’t a finer mechanism be devised?

Defenders of order like Leibniz and Pope urged the necessity of general law, which Hume named as the second cause of evil. As things now stand, demands for improvement might demand breaks in natural law. Here Leibniz had been particularly indignant. Should God suspend the law of gravity to spare annoyance to the owner of a costly vase? His theoretical qualms about natural law notwithstanding, Hume knew that a predictable world has obvious advantages. A really perfect builder might, to be sure, have designed general laws that always worked to everyone’s advantage. But perhaps a world in which gravity both worked to keep us from flying off into space and was suspended to protect our artworks would be a fable, not a world. Hume therefore didn’t propose it but reminded us of our own. His examples are far more trenchant than those of Leibniz. Perhaps exquisitely regular general laws control the secret springs of the universe, but we have yet to find them. Apart from a few recent discoveries about things like gravity, what we notice in life is the prevalence of accident. The more we reflect, the more we are bound to be struck by the power of contingency as determining force in human affairs. It’s the sway of irregularity, not the scope of regularity, that seems ever more clear. If life is so dependent on the accidental, why couldn’t the accidents be happy?

A fleet, whose purposes were always salutory, might always meet with a fair wind; Good princes enjoy sound health and long life; Persons born to power and authority be framed with good tempers and virtuous dispositions. A few events such as these, regularly and wisely conducted, would change the face of the world; and yet would no more seem to disturb the course of nature or confound human conduct than the present economy of things. (Hume 3, 108)

Hume never requested utopia, or proposed radical change. His suggestions were as modest as they were consequential. How much evil is caused by some contingency so small that its very superfluity is heart-breaking? Contractors whose neglect of modern building codes caused such loss of life in the 1999 Turkish earthquake were not excused by the fact that earthquakes are rare. Wouldn’t a good designer create a universe less vulnerable to accident? Or ensure that the ones that occurred were benign?

Hume makes similar work of natural religion’s claims about God’s generosity. Early on, Cleanthes had extolled it. How much of Creation is superfluous! Take another look at our bodies, those Deist marvels of design. Though we could have survived without it, God gave us not just one eye but two. Not to mention two ears. Nature, to be sure, was designed with the frugality needed to fit the requirements of Ockham’s razor. But instances like these show repeated proof of the munificence of God’s design. He could have made us, but made us less than we are. Instead he showered us not only with proofs of His existence but His affection as well.

Hume begged to differ. The third circumstance that leads to evil is the fact that nature is so very stingy. When distributing properties, its Author seemed to have given each species the bare minimum needed to survive. Animals who are swift are proportionally frail. Animals who can reason have no bodily defense. Wouldn’t an affectionate parent have given us a little something in reserve? With the knowledge of all we have to cope with, couldn’t the resources for coping have been extended just a bit? Traditional religion was quick to remind us that we are not alone in the universe. Job’s friends, as we saw, mentioned the long hours God spends taking care of His other creatures and warned us against demanding too great a share of His attention. Anticipating such objections, Hume was relentless. Is God’s power so limited? His resources so finite? The set of properties available for distribution among His species so small? Then He’d have done better to produce fewer creatures, to ensure that each had more faculties available for securing happiness. It’s a reckless builder who undertakes projects beyond his means. Conscientious ones know how to estimate and never embark upon ostentatious edifices before calculating their stocks. Here the tiles don’t reach the baseboard; the pipes won’t carry the sewage. Once more, you decide: goodwill or competence? In this builder, one of them is conspicuously absent.

In order to cure most of the ills of human life, I require not that man should have the wings of the eagle, the swiftness of the stag, the force of the ox, the arms of the lion, the scales of the crocodile or rhinoceros; much less do I demand the sagacity of an angel or cherubim. I am contented to take an increase in one single power or faculty of his soul. Let him be endowed with a greater propensity to industry and labor; a more vigorous spring and activity of mind; a more constant bent to business and application. (Hume 3, 110)

Hume’s choice of diligence as the attribute he would give us had he been in charge of design may not suit your taste. His claim that most moral as well as natural evils arise from idleness bears the scent of the environment in which he was raised. Still his general point is hard to dispute. Let us renounce fantasies of perfection, suppress the longing for something rare: better judgment, finer taste, greater friendship, truer love. Isn’t it hard to be thrown into a world so wanting without some modest, prosaic addition to our powers?

Just in case he’d overlooked something in the first three circumstances that produced our evils, Hume added a fourth: the workmanship of the great machine of nature was never accurately adjusted. You can see that some purpose was intended by most of its parts, but the builder seems to have been in such a hurry to finish the job that he rushed through construction before completing the final touches. Winds may be required for nature to function, but how often do they become hurricanes? Passions are surely useful, but how often do they break their bounds? Everything in the universe may have its advantage, but everything seems to bring disadvantage by occurring in the wrong proportions. Would a good designer rush through a task without checking his measurements?

Hume had said it in the Enquiry: humankind worked long and hard to save the honor of the gods at the cost of denying the reality of the evil and disorder surrounding us (Hume 2, 107). His recommendation was evident enough. It is not entirely clear to which end our industry should be directed. Hume seems to have found diligence to be as close to an end in itself as he was willing to name, for at least it prevents the laziness that breeds trouble. The Natural History concluded with a warning against higher hopes, for they make way for crueler disappointments, as great joy is likely to produce the deeper melancholy.

And, in general, no course of life has such safety (for happiness is not to be dreamed of) as the temperate and moderate, which maintains, as far as possible, a mediocrity, and a kind of insensibility, in every thing.
(Hume 3, 184)

Presumably Hume’s advice would be to cultivate a smallish garden, since idle hands are the devil’s workshop. He would offer no grounds for cultivating this plot but the fact that it’s the one you were born on, and it nourished your parents adequately enough. Such industry may bring some advantage; toiling on behalf of the gods will not.

Hume’s rejection of religion will strike us as clear and biting, although earlier readers were reluctant to acknowledge it.15 Hume never went so far as to call himself an atheist. Though Kemp Smith questioned the content of Hume’s late, eviscerated theism, he reminded us that Hume’s method was that of Bayle. Both were more interested in undermining everyone else’s conclusions than in establishing any of their own. This is skepticism at its greatest, rather than anything you can identify as metaphysics. Between the demands imposed by the form of skeptical argument itself, eighteenth-century conventions imposed by censorship, and Hume’s own lack of conviction in the value of sincerity,¹⁶ it may be impossible to determine his religious beliefs.

What is here most important: it doesn’t matter. The content of Hume’s religious beliefs has only biographical interest. Hume himself, in an argument that he originally intended to be the last page of the Dialogues, made a claim as shocking as any other in the book: differences between atheism and theism themselves are only differences in degree and tone. In the history of the problem of evil, Hume’s relation to God is as unimportant as Bayle’s. My own conviction is that Bayle was the skeptical fideist he claimed to be while Hume was not. You may judge them differently. But even more than in Bayle’s case, it is reason, not God, that was the primary target of Hume’s work. All his care and zeal in attacking the latter had the former in view from the start. Human reason, said Hume, can find no ground why a universe could not be designed without those four circumstances that lead to all its evils. (All four, mind you. Hume left it to his readers to add: at least one?) If after reading Hume you want to praise the design of Creation, and worship its Designer, Hume would be the last to stop you. He never believed that most people were moved by reason anyway.

Nor did he seem to hold that they should be. For his very reasonable explication of the circumstances giving rise to the world’s evils showed that human reason leads you wrong. If you follow human reason, you expect the world to be one way. If you open your eyes, you see that it’s another. For those wishing to get about with a measure of safety (Hume’s word, see above), which instrument recommends itself? The customs and habits that guided generations of mediocre but tolerable lives before you, or a compass that, fixed on an unknown object, always seems to indicate the wrong direction?

The injunction Be reasonable! has come to mean Decrease your expectations. The demand that we be realistic became a demand that we prepare for disappointment. How this came to pass is worth study on its own. Here I wish merely to note it, and to note that Hume happily acceded to both demands. With this conception of reasonableness, Hume sought the overthrow of all notions of reason. He was perfectly open in stating this; it’s explicit in the elegant harangue with which Philo begins part 1 of the book.

Let us become thoroughly sensible of the weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason; Let us duly consider its uncertainty and needless contrarieties; even in subjects of common life and practice…. When these topics are displayed in their full light, as they are by some philosophers and almost all divines; who can retain such confidence in this frail faculty of reason? (Hume 3, 33)

Hume displayed reason’s helplessness time after time. His first book, the Treatise of Human Nature, described reason as “perfectly inert,” “wholly inactive,” and “utterly impotent” (Hume 1, 457–58). It cannot penetrate common mysteries, like the existence of causes, that seem to be self-evident; it cannot establish banal truths about things like sunrises on which our lives depend. But all those are worries with which one can cope. A British gentleman can dispel them with a glass of sherry and a game of sheshbesh. It’s on the problem of evil that reason truly stumbles, and skepticism truly triumphs. For here reason is not merely in trouble but in pain. However it tries to reduce them, its expectations are all wrong. Nothing in the world turns out to correspond to the assumptions of what appears, in the end, an absurd little faculty, whose purpose is as murky as, say, the human appendix. (Just another little shot at the Deist’s favorite set of objects. For what purpose does this organ exist?) The world could have been designed so much more reasonably, in any sense of the word: more humane, more systematic, more receptive to law. The fact that it wasn’t is the source of daily suffering caused by everything from bad temper to tyranny. Should reason hang its head in shame? Condemn the world that leaves no place for its ventures, and withdraw to something otherworldly?

Wherever it turns, it will be no use in approaching the problem of evil. That problem can still be abandoned. If you wish to maintain God’s existence and benevolence, you may continue to do so on faith, without anything that looks like a reason. Then explanation is not your overriding interest anyway, and appearances of evil become something secondary. Or you may retain the framework of the problem, but as something unanswerable: for reason, evil becomes thoroughly opaque. Either evils are close to illusion, in which case there is no problem, or reason is utterly helpless, in which case there is no answer.

One sort of answer might seem to be left open by the structure of the Dialogues themselves. This would be to better divide the world’s evils into natural and moral ones, and apportion responsibility accordingly. It’s the solution we saw in Rousseau, and it would be tried in later eras by lesser figures. At first it seems not only to help us out of fundamental difficulties but also to avoid the embarrassing contradiction to which Hume’s work points. As he made clear, the only thing that the eighteenth century found more obvious than the argument from design was the view that life was miserable. The only way to try to maintain both convictions at once would be to restrict the argument from design to admiration for the natural world. The defects in the moral world might then be dismissed with a reference to our own mortal failings, and the claim that even good designers have their limits.—It’s a valiant, if guilt-tinged, effort, but the good Europeans knew better. Attempts to maintain hard distinctions between natural and moral evils did not succeed. Hume himself began by dividing them. The first nine books of the Dialogues focus on the natural world. All he needed were books 10 and 11 to destroy our faith in the design of the human one. Yet he knew as well as others that nothing remains in place. Fleets on good missions founder in the ocean; good princes die young. And where are mosquitoes and syphilis to be ordered? The eighteenth century was no more certain about its ability to distinguish the natural from the unnatural than we are. They were beginning to test limits.

END OF THE TUNNEL: THE MARQUIS DE SADE

Sade longed to be more criminal than he was. Indeed, he longed to be more criminal than was conceivable. For he often noted, with a mixture of rage and pleasure, that true crimes against nature are impossible. If the impulse to crime is natural, mustn’t nature cooperate in any urge to its own destruction? There may be a way around this objection, and Sade sought it without rest. His Juliette, like the emperor Tiberius, wishes that all of humankind had a single neck so she could slash it; his books strain to outdo themselves in imagining one thing worse than the last. Frustrated with the finite joys of torture, murder, and betrayal, one character seeks a crime whose effects would be eternal, causing

a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a disturbance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt. (Sade 1, 57)

Her friend Juliette proposes that she try her hand

at moral crime, the crime one commits in writing.

Most commentators have waded through the 1,190 pages of Juliette to pick out this sentence as central: Sade was clearly speaking in his own voice. And though he may not have acted out many of his other fantasies, he surely succeeded in this. His writings are criminal. It’s not accident or prudishness that led people to ban them. They titillate and repel in ways you shouldn’t be titillated and repelled. They appeal to the meanest and worst of desires: whether you react with disgust or with boredom, you are implicated as voyeur of acts that should not see the light of day. The question of whether they actually cause anyone to imitate them is one best left to some other form of investigation. But if you actually get through all ten volumes of Juliette, you will be left with a set of images foul enough to make you wish you’d stopped halfway. Justine, comparatively restrained as well as shorter, is more readable, but all the more depressing. For even if you’re used to thinking about Job and his descendants, the spectacle of that much tortured innocence may grind you down. Tell yourself that Sade exaggerates: this is cartoon, parody, cheap fairy tale in reverse. Forget the maddening rejoinder made by Horkheimer and Adorno: only the exaggerated is true. After finishing one of Sade’s novels, you can feel imagination itself as indictment. If such stuff could be invented, something in the human soul is so vile that it’s easy to share Sade’s expression of the very strongest answer to the problem we will see the eighteenth century raise often:

[D]isgust with life becomes so strong in the soul that there is not a single man who would want to live again, even if such an offer were made on the day of his death. (Quoted in Klossowski, 82)

Sade wanted his reader to suffer. We may not agree with de Beauvoir, who came close to suggesting that being subject to a Sadean villain’s endless speeches is almost as unpleasant as falling into his hands. Still this is writing that is meant to cause pain. We react to it with the same ambivalence Sade had the good taste to feel toward himself. On the one hand, he dreamed of criminality so infinite it would outlast him. Few writers’ dreams came so true. Sustained fascination with his works, and the use of his name as the signpost for all of humanity’s worst urges provide a kind of immortality that is seldom granted. On the other hand, his last will and testament recorded self-loathing so great that it spared no attention to detail: his body should be buried without ceremony in a specified ditch:

The ditch covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn, in order that the spot may become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men save nevertheless for those few who in their goodness have loved me until the last, and of whom I carry away a sweet remembrance with me to the grave. (Sade 1, 157)

Perhaps the pain his works cause is so great as to demand repression. It’s repression, at any rate, that dominates much of the Sade literature. He’s defended as an honest reporter, willing to say out loud what others did or dreamed in secret. As successor to the Encyclopedists and precursor to Freud, Sade is said to have continued the project of demasking central to Enlightenment. The lords and ladies of the old regime really did bleed the people white for their own debauched pleasures; Sade, as political critic—and didn’t he put himself in the service of the Revolution?—merely recorded it, with a little polemical hyperbole. When they weren’t restricted to Europeans, the criminals were even less restrained. Paulhan remarks that European literature didn’t hesitate to esteem a work that makes Sade’s crimes look paltry. De Las Casas’s Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies recorded the slow torture of victims not in fantasy but in fact, and in numbers totaling not hundreds but millions. Blanchot reminds us that whatever the conquistadores did in the New World could be surpassed by God Himself in the world to come. Sade often regretted that enlightened theologians had done away with hell, for only hell contained the resources to prolong choice victims’ agonies, but not even he dwelt on the consignment of unbaptized infants to it, which some Christian sects took as a matter of course.

Sade himself played with the posture of authenticity’s apostle. His works contain passages styling him as inside critic of the French aristocracy as well as a sort of Kraft-Ebbing avant la lettre. For the first, take the footnote that accompanies Saint-Fond’s declaration: If I thought gold flowed in their veins, I’d have every one of the people bled to death.

There, by such tokens you may recognize them, those monsters that abounded under the ancien regime and personified it. We have not promised to portray them as beauties, but authentically; we shall keep our word. (Sade 2, 234)

And to portray himself as a bold researcher venturing into uncharted depths, he occasionally provided exclamations like these:

Oh my friends, how am I to describe the horrors we witnessed? Describe them I must, however, they are aberrances of the human heart I am exposing, and I am bound to expose every nook and cranny. (Sade 2, 1046)

But there are plenty of reasons not to take Sade at his word. Among others, he was a liar. That he was a passionate and subtle liar, if seldom a very convincing one, is clear from his denial that he authored his best work, Justine. How could he be the author of a book in which all the philosophers are villains, when he himself was a philosopher (Sade 1, 153)? Sade’s characters spend so much time justifying lies and betrayal that we’d be as naive as Justine herself if we simply believed him. This is a writer who played with all categories of concealment. And viewing him as a particularly daring exposer overlooks his writings’ normative thrust. Critics who call him a fighter for freedom, enemy of guilt, privilege, and mediocrity, or a lover of everything from the concrete in itself to the abstractness of transgression in general ignore half the content of his work. For those who didn’t make it to the end of Juliette: Sade’s heroes celebrate torturing to death their own children, and anybody else’s they can get their hands on, as means to a better orgasm. He tried very hard to stop at nothing. Our willingness to aestheticize Sade may itself have limits. I am not certain, for example, that the late twentieth century would have tolerated a Sade industry among German intellectuals as easily as it tolerated a French one.

Finding the object of all this rage is probably hopeless, and may involve more straying into the psychobiographical than my interests include. But one object requires more attention than it has received. We must take at least one of Sade’s own claims at face value: he was a philosopher. Not a great philosopher, but an original one. For the philosopher, even descriptive writing has normative force. If your only desire is to reveal the world, you will seek models such as Isaac Newton or Jane Austen. (Whether even they succeeded in being purely descriptive is, of course, another question.) But Sade very clearly believed that his descriptions had consequences. Consider more carefully his disavowal of the authorship of Justine. All the philosophical personages in that book, he wrote, are villains to the core. Whereas

[e]veryone acquainted with me will certify that I consider philosophy my profession and my glory…. And can anyone for an instant, save he suppose me mad, can anyone, I say, suppose for one minute that I could bring myself to present what I hold to be the noblest of all callings under colors so loathsome and in a shape so execrable? What would you say of him who were deliberately to go befoul in the mire the costume he was fondest of and in which he thought he struck the finest figure? (Sade 1, 153)

One could say, of course, that befouling things of which one is fond is a particularly Sadean pastime. But the note continues with clearer clues.

On the contrary, all the villains I have described are devout because the devout are all villains and all philosophers are decent folk, because most decent folk are philosophers.

Let us leave the truth-value of such claims to others and take a look at their function. As a means of persuading anticlerical tribunals to release you from prison, they are probably worth trying, though nobody seemed to believe him. Like the thunderbolt that forms the final event in Justine itself, the argument invites a more natural interpretation. Sade could not be the author of a work in which all the philosophers are villains? The old regime claimed that philosophy leads to villainy, and used this claim as ground for censorship throughout Europe and beyond. Sade didn’t merely confirm the worst fear of traditional authorities; he rubbed their noses in it. For he was willing not only to accept the consequences of philosophy—the deliberate dispassionate questioning of the foundations of established ideology—but to positively revel in them. Does philosophy lead to villainy? Justine’s sequel Juliette is far less guarded. One of its most wicked creatures is described like this:

A very lofty intelligence, I have never known her peer for an enemy to prejudices, and I have never known a woman to carry philosophy so far. (Sade 2, 273)

Toward the story’s beginning Juliette begs a more experienced criminal for instruction.

Will you be my guide in this delicious journey? Will you hold aloft the lamp of philosophy to light the way? (Sade 2, 180)

Whatever else the lamp of philosophy illuminated in Sade’s world, religious beliefs were first in line. In the passage quoted from the “Note,” the opposite of philosophical is devout. Here Sade was conventional. There can be no stable agreement between philosophy and religion, for the two are fundamentally at war. The Deism of which the Enlightenment was so enamored is a coward’s compromise. When examined coolly, the truths of religion cannot be supported by reason or experience.

Enlightened thinkers had devoted more than a century to rationalizing religion. What remained was the natural religion whose central truth was some form of the argument from design. As if the argument hadn’t suffered enough in the hands of Hume, it became primary target of Sade’s twin novels Justine and Juliette. Those novels contain an argument. (Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that their flaws as literary productions are due to the fact that they consist of an argument.) It is mercilessly simple, and often simply crude, but to be certain we don’t miss it, Sade gave the novels subtitles. Justine’s is The Misfortunes of Virtue; Juliette’s The Prosperities of Vice. The plot, or the argument, is just this. Two orphaned sisters must make their way in the world. The elder chooses a path of increasing crime, which brings her every sort of happiness. The younger grips onto faith and morals all the harder for the fact that they bring her nothing but torment. After many years of separation they meet by accident and compare notes. Initially they fail to recognize each other, and this should be no surprise. Justine is on her way to be executed for a crime she not only never committed, but risked her life trying to prevent. Juliette radiates the casual confidence of those blessed by fortune, in the form of health, beauty, vast wealth, and a lover no less devoted than he is noble and powerful. She asks the poor girl to tell her life’s story.

“To recount you the story of my life, Madame”, this lovely one in distress said to the Countess, “Is to offer you the most striking example of innocence oppressed, is to accuse the hand of heaven, is to bear complaint against the Supreme Being’s will, is, in a sense, to rebel against his sacred designs … I dare not …” Tears gathered in this interesting girl’s eyes, and after having given vent to them for a moment, she began her recitation. (Sade 1, 468)

And Sade commenced the story, that is, to do just the thing Justine does not dare. If it’s crime he sought by writing, it’s a crime against heaven: to tell Justine’s story is to rebel against sacred design.

There is no better way to see this than to put Sade in the company of his contemporaries. Robert Darnton drew attention to a rich body of eighteenth-century literature that straddled and defied borders between philosophy and pornography. Because both were banned by the censors, both were referred to in the vast illegal book trade as “philosophical books.” This is more than merely piquant. As Darnton has shown, philosophy and pornography performed subversive functions. The fact that exigencies of law grouped them together served to radicalize each one. To judge from the bedroom conversation portrayed there, the theories of d’Holbach or Diderot worked as eighteenth-century aphrodisiacs, as did any sort of attack on the Catholic Church. All these signaled challenge to order and rejection of restraint which are generally erotic. One can imagine cynical reasons to blend philosophy and porn: a dull philosopher might hope to market his long-winded materialism, a sharp pornographer to evade the censor by burying his smut in speeches few have patience to read to the end. But these are twentieth-century surmises, full of built-in dissociation. Darnton shows, rather, that “muckraking journalism, social commentary, political polemics, bawdy anti-clericalism, utopian fantasies, theoretical speculations, and raw pornography—all cohabited promiscuously under the same label, livres philosophiques.”

This blend, he argues, could undermine the old regime in part because it mixed reason and rhetoric to produce a heady demand for more freedom in general, extending to a larger group the pleasures of this world now enjoyed by the upper classes. The fewer the number of the illiterate, the fewer the number of those willing to defer their rewards to another life. Moreover, the spectacle of heartlessly debauched aristocracy and clergy—a standard trope in this literature—was willfully seditious. In an era still inclined to believe that kings had divine rights, any work revealing just how earthy their feet had become is sure to undermine. Unmasking authority and debasing the sacred are political acts. Varying theoretical demonstration with obscene example is an obvious form of illustration. The tales of corruption described in, for example, Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry look like a historical version of a Sade novel. Here aristocrats live to rob the people for a moment of pleasure. They are happy to take vast sums from the national treasury for a whore employed for a night, or a golden carriage never even used that often. Everyone seems to be pimping for others, or using refinements of sexual technique to manipulate matters of state. What, but a bit of violence, did Sade add to this standard genre?

Something very crucial: in Sade’s novels, God does it too. The subversion in the earlier literature was in fact succinctly limited. Its goals are the moderate Deism and bourgeoise republicanism that most of the Enlightenment shared. Voltaire used erotic examples to further such aims, and Rousseau carried them to the brink of metaphysics. Both appealed to a vision of the natural that was obscured by centuries of superstition. Once humankind was freed of the ideologies formed by clergy and aristocracy, the natural light of reason could show Deism and republicanism to be true. To be true here means to be part of, or to follow from, nature itself. The misery caused by enslaving a free and sound human being was hardly seen as worse than that caused by forcing the intellect to accept doctrines as unnatural as transubstantiation or divine right.

For most eighteenth-century pornography, sexual repression was part of the same violence that both reason and nature opposed. It was produced by those forces that upheld superstition and absolutism, and it led to similar unhappiness. Liberation could be all of one piece, for it was a matter of expressing all the natural desires that had been frustrated by history and tradition. Once they were free to be expressed, the result would be a general web of pleasure and harmony. “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains” could as easily serve as a demand for open marriage as for bourgeois rights. In themselves, reason and nature are as much in tune in the bedroom as they are in the rest of the cosmos. Only ancient prejudice prevents both from coming to their rights—and to each other.

Recall that Voltaire saw human erotic life as an argument for theism—if only it didn’t sometimes lead to syphilis. Syphilis is a quirk of nature, albeit one, like earthquakes, that is neither as rare nor as harmless as it should be. Erotic love itself, abstracted from such consequences, was proof of the argument from design. While Voltaire imagined sex as a pillar of natural religion, Rousseau imagined it as the basis of civil society. For erotic love provides the only link between us that is natural as well as reasonable—in principle if not in practice. The desire for another’s pleasure as a part of your own is the paradigm of the bond that could tie members of society together as contracts cannot.

Rousseau recorded reading the philosophical pornography so popular in his day, and Voltaire even wrote some of it. What we know of their views is easy to combine with the epigraph of the most famous of such novels, Thérèse philosophe.

Voluptuousness and philosophy produce the happiness of the sensible man. He embraces voluptuousness by taste. He loves philosophy by reason. (Quoted in Darnton, 100)

This is a story with a happy ending. In learning to become a philosopher, the heroine Thérèse gets an education in pleasure, overcoming her fear of pregnancy as well as convention to find happiness in the bed of her enlightened count. Sade described it as charming, indeed as the only work that linked luxuriousness and impiety to provide the idea of an immoral book (ibid., 89). One wonders whether Justine’s choice of “Thérèse” as nom de guerre was made with this book in mind. If so, it is no accident that in Sade’s work not Justine but her sister becomes a philosopher. Justine never learns anything, and the nature she confronts is one whose lessons are brutal. If the occasional touch of pain to be found in other authors confirms Sade’s claims that some urge to this sort of thing is natural, none of the earlier philosophical pornography comes even close to resembling Sade. Darnton is right to think we can learn from reading it, but one of the things we learn is that Sade is new.

Sade’s own awareness of his relation to tradition was signaled in the letter he wrote to his wife upon learning that the volume of Rousseau he’d requested from prison had been denied.

To refuse me Jean-Jacques’ Confessions, now there’s an excellent thing, above all after having sent me Lucretius and the dialogues of Voltaire; that demonstrates great judiciousness, profound discernment in your spiritual guides. Alas, they do me too much honor in reckoning that the writings of a deist can be dangerous to me; would that I were still at that stage … while Rousseau may represent a threat for dull-witted bigots of your species, he is a salutory author for me. Jean-Jacques is to me what The Imitation of Christ is to you. (Sade 1, 134)

Sade was perfectly correct. As we saw, all of Rousseau’s work was a paean to the glory of Creation. Kant thought it answered Alfonso and justified God. When stripped of the chaos and corruption human beings created in the course of their history, the world in itself is as good as God saw it to be on the day that He made it. Philosophy, and whatever political conclusions are to follow from it, strip away appearances to reveal something better and truer behind them. Though experienced as radical by the established order, Rousseau’s work never threatened the notion of order in general. (On the contrary.) Sade’s did.

His is a world of violence and split. The insistence on disharmony already seen in Voltaire was carried to every limit Sade could imagine. Human bodies are more brutally and deliberately dismembered than they were in Candide; when there is symmetry in the world at all, it’s the grisly sort of parody of his geometrically structured orgies. For earlier writers, sex itself could be testimony to everything the Enlightenment held dear: the harmony between individual desires and the true interests of society, the unity of thought and emotion. Sade tore all that apart. It was not only personal taste that fueled his endless praise of sodomy as the perfect erotic act. He was often explicit in explaining why: he viewed it as the antiteleological exercise par excellence. Sodomy was celebrated because it is sterile; it leads to nothing, and were it practiced more widely, it would counter humanity’s own interest in self-preservation. All the more reason to promote it.

Choosing a pornographic vehicle for philosophical argument was thus a natural and established move. It sold well, and it sold for reasons besides prurient ones. If the eighteenth century was obsessed with determining what’s natural, sex must reflect all its terms. Let’s take a closer look at the argument Sade offered. Next to the points he wants to make about materialism and morality one line stands out, particularly in Justine and Juliette. The former draws it clearly in three different beginnings the novel contains: epigraph, dedication, and preface. All build on deception that should have fooled no one. The epigraph recalls the treacherous properties of lightning:

O thou my friend! The prosperity of Crime is like unto the lightning, whose traitorous brilliancies embellish the atmosphere but for an instant, in order to hurl into death’s very depths the luckless one they have dazzled. (Sade 1, 453)

For those who know the ending, the sentence is radiant with irony. It’s Justine, as virtuous as she’s hapless, who will be struck by lightning, an event Sade subjected to multiple interpretation. It’s a sure clue that the stated point of the book is a lie. For, as he wrote in the dedication,

The scheme of this novel (yet, ’tis less a novel than one might suppose) is doubtless new; the victory gained by Virtue over Vice, the rewarding of good, the punishment of evil, such is the usual scheme in other work of this species: ah! The lesson cannot be too often dinned in our ears! (Sade 1, 455)

Sade wanted nothing to do with lessons so trite. His message was not the usual one, for he had loftier goals in view. Rather than presenting virtue triumphant, he sought to show it in despair. For only when love of virtue is disconnected from all questions of reward can it be seen as sublime. Such revelation is particularly needed by those of us who live in corrupted ages. If we expect virtue to be rewarded, we may easily abandon it when it’s not. If we know in advance how often it is illrequited, we’ll be prepared to meet adversity with the virtue that is its own reward. Were he telling the truth here, he could almost pass for Kant.

So the first sentence of Justine proper is this one:

The very masterpiece of philosophy would be to develop the means Providence employs to arrive at the ends she designs for man, and from this construction to deduce some rules of conduct acquainting this wretched two-footed individual with the manner wherein he must proceed along life’s thorny path. (Sade 1, 457)

To trace the design of Providence and draw conclusions for our conduct from it: this was Sade’s stated goal. The two were always connected. Sade disavowed (by simultaneously proposing) the more villainous conclusions one can draw from theodicy. The spectacle of evil rewarded by good tempts individual virtue and even seems to have the sanction of heaven. For true theodicy shows how everything happens for the best:

[W]ill they not say, as did the angel Jesrad in Zadig, that there is no evil whereof some good is not born? And will they not declare, that this being the case, they can give themselves over to evil since, indeed, it is but one of the fashions of producing good? (Ibid.)

This is not the quietism sometimes feared as result of theodicy but something even worse. If even evil has its purpose, every crime you commit is a brick in the wall of providential design. This is cynicism far beyond the indifference expressed as Whatever is, is right, and Sade proclaimed his intention to reject it. Doing this required an even greater degree of cynicism. Sade’s real goal was buried, not very deeply, in the words of Justine quoted above. To tell her story is to rebel against Heaven, for it’s Heaven that designed a world where so much virtue is rewarded with so much misery.

The book opens by claiming to be less literature than philosophy. If it’s a novel, it’s a bildungsroman manqué. Its heroine should make Candide look savvy: she learns absolutely nothing. The world presents her with lessons any idiot could master, but she’s incapable of getting an education. Justine begins her journeys by resolving to maintain the virtue of her childhood and her trust that Providence will reward her for it. She ends where she began, though her trust was betrayed without limit. She has a penchant for saving the lives of villains who rape, torture, and enslave her in return, while subjecting her to speeches about the absurdity of gratitude. By the third or fourth episode, the reader is almost tempted to cry out a warning to the unsuspecting ingenue. It would be useless—not because this is fiction, but because Justine is inured to experience, imprisoned in faith. It’s no surprise that her faith is betrayed by one swine after another, for they are all of them agents of the great Betrayer. She puts her trust in Providence to reward her virtue with a world that deserves virtue like hers. And every time she offers thanks for Heaven’s designs, they are shown to be treacherous.

Justine doesn’t lack for teachers willing to enlighten her. The first of these is Dubois, a woman she meets in the prison where they’re awaiting execution—Justine for a theft she refused to commit. Dubois saves them both by burning down the prison in an act of arson that costs many lives, then offers to take Justine under her wing to a career of further crime. When Justine refuses, avowing that Providence will reward her adherence to “the thorns of virtue,” Dubois urges: “[B]ecome better acquainted with your Providence, my child.” It will land her on a dung heap, but that isn’t all. Providence is a tool invented by the rich to lull those whom they oppress into silent endurance. The rich have no need of virtue or faith, for their desires are met without them.

But we, Thérèse, we whom the barbaric Providence you are mad enough to idolize, has condemned to slink in the dust of humiliation as doth the serpent in the grass, we who are beheld with disdain only because we are poor … you would have it that, while this class dominating us has to itself all the blessings of fortune, we reserve for ourselves naught but pain. (Sade 1, 482)

Justine admits she was tempted. On this argument, Providence is either a tool invented for oppression or itself an instrument of injustice. If it isn’t a fraud, it serves fraudulent interests. But she falters for only a moment before rejecting such thoughts as sophistries, and affirming her commitment to virtue. She isn’t allowed to keep it for an instant, for she’s immediately abused by a gang of bandits, who leave her no choice but to join them. Theoretical refutation is increasingly superfluous. Life itself refutes Providence, in long chains of suffering without sense and without end.

Sade’s means are rather heavy-handed for adult literature; they draw on the resources of fairy tale. For like very primitive fairy tales, this work is didactic, and its author was at pains to make his lessons clear. The connection between reward and virtue is never in fact just random. Justine cannot do a good deed without being immediately punished for it. When she stops to give alms to a crippled old woman, that old woman, not so crippled after all, attacks the benefactress and steals her every sou. Rarely does Justine get off so lightly. Having defended her virginity against a troop of bandits, she loses it to the count whom she saved from the gang’s clutches. Having nursed a wounded traveler back to life, she is led to the lonely château where he works to death those women whom he doesn’t destroy by more gruesome means. Here Justine interrupts her account to her sister.

“But how can I abuse your patience by relating these new horrors? Have I not already more than soiled your imagination with infamous recitations?”

“Yes, Thérèse—”

puts in Juliette’s lover, who sits captivated, with Juliette, by the narrative.

“Yes, we insist upon these details, you veil them with a decency that removes all their edge of horror. You may not fully apprehend how these tableaux help toward the development of the human spirit; our backwardness in this branch of learning may very well be due to the stupid restraint of those who venture to write upon such matters.” (Sade 1, 670)

So Sade obliges with details.

If her virtue is always punished, her faith is always mocked. The next form of torment always begins when she is on her knees thanking God for deliverance from the last one. Justine’s hopes are always raised to be dashed again more surely. But when her trust in Providence falters, it’s only for an instant, and she kneels to beg forgiveness for it later. Early on she prays to Heaven to reveal its design. If she could understand her guilt, she could accept her suffering; otherwise, she fears, she will begin to rebel (Sade 1, 575). There she is answered by the assertion of accident. She is captive in a monastery where the clergy rape and torment a large group of women according to elaborate protocol that mirrors the rites of a religious order. Periodically, a new woman is kidnapped, and a veteran retired to make room for her; those retired are never seen again. An older victim explains to Justine that caprice is all that governs their fate. No behavior can be prescribed, no future predicted. Docile women may be dispatched as quickly as rebellious ones, the most beautiful as slowly as the most indifferent. Whimsy and aberration form the monks’ only law. Their arbitrary decrees, of course, are meant as example. What are these divines doing but imitating the Lord? Justine knows she is stubborn; the conclusions she refuses to draw come from the very best addresses.

[It is] as if Providence had assumed the task of demonstrating to me the inutility of virtue…. Baleful lessons which however did not correct me, no, I wavered not; lessons which, should I once again escape from the blade poised above my head, will not prevent me from forever remaining the slave of my heart’s Divinity. (Sade 1, 621)

How many fools are so proud of their commitment to ignorance?

The insight she seeks into God’s design is never granted. In its place is no end of instruction on the nature of moral order. The arguments she hears are bad parodies of those that were in circulation. For example: the orthodox hold evil to be compatible with the claim that this world is a good one, for Providence works through it, converting everything to good purpose. In that case, why not turn criminal and become an agent of Heaven? (Sade 1, 695). Or how about this: Nature cares equally for all of its creatures; it’s pride and folly to say that she takes the interests of one more to heart than another. This has been standard fare ever since Job’s friends argued that complaints about cosmic injustice were narcissistic. Why not go one step further and argue that it’s only human pride which makes murder into crime? For the murderer just turns the mass of flesh that today appears as a person into tomorrow’s clump of earthworms. Does nature care more about one than the other? (Sade 1, 519). Along with a priori forms of persuasion her would-be tutors offer empirical ones. Virtue and vice are merely matters of opinion and geography. Justine is scorned as hopelessly provincial. Her insistence on maintaining virtue is just writing schoolgirl manners into the world as a whole. A little travel, a little history should convince her that virtue and vice are but schemes for getting along in the world. Juliette explicates this with encyclopedic parody. Every philosophical disquisition on some ordinary virtue is followed by a catalog of anthropological revelation. After one ogre is depicted eating his guests, the monster declaims against hospitality and offers two pages of scientifically illustrated relativism to back his view. Some of the examples Sade offers: the Egyptian government killed any foreigner found along its border. The blacks of Loango are even less welcoming, for they refuse to allow a stranger to be buried on their soil. To this day Arabs sell into slavery all survivors of ships wrecked on their coasts. Sade’s lists are sometimes accompanied by footnotes. Is this a parody of the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism embodied by Diderot or just a rejoinder to it? It really doesn’t matter whether any particular claim is true. The general point is quite clear: virtue and vice are but custom and habit. That being the case, why not adopt customs best adjusted to the world?

All attempts to teach her prove unavailing. As time continues, Justine begins to attribute the awful lessons life has offered to Providence itself. When the cruelest of her tormentors receives yet greater wealth, she begins to learn irony:

This was the new piece of evidence Providence had prepared for me. This was the latest manner in which it wished to convince me that prosperity belongs to crime and indigence to virtue. (Sade 1, 686)

But belief in Providence is never based on evidence. As we saw when considering Hegel, it’s usually developed in spite of it. Efforts to fathom the cunning of reason prove too great for Justine, so when her pleas for understanding remain unheeded, she decides to live without it. Didn’t faith preach blind surrender to the will of the Lord? More than once she avows her attempt to imitate the life of Jesus, or finds consolation in the thought that her torments are not as severe as those of her savior. In truth she meets life with a Nazarene innocence, so the reader is unsurprised when her final torture involves multiple rape on a thornstudded cross. Jesus exists to console the believer: not only because his death will serve as salvation, but because his torments are so great as to make the rest of us look lucky. In depicting Justine’s ever-increasing suffering, Sade sought not only to attack the Father, but to compete with the Son as well.

Juliette, by contrast, is all that’s unholy. She is also quick to learn. (Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom had defined the word whores as “the only authentic philosophers” [Sade 1, 208].) The further Juliette sinks into crime, the more the world rewards her. If she loses a fortune, it’s only to gain a larger one; if she pushes a loyal friend into a volcano, it’s only to find one more powerful and devoted. At thirty, her body is just the lovelier for all its adventures, her soul the more tranquil for being in harmony with nature. She and her lover rescue her hapless sister from the executioner’s hands and take her to their château. There Justine ends her days—struck through by a bolt of lightning.

No less. On the very slim chance that we might have missed his message, Sade concluded by letting Providence speak in its own voice. A thunderbolt finishes Justine, and both novels, but everything else about the endings is different. In Justine, lightning strikes the heroine inside the house where her sister has found joy in nursing her back to health and happiness. Upon awaking from her swoon, the latter decides to retire to a convent to atone for her sins. Juliette reads the lightning as eye-opening warning. If Heaven treated innocent Justine so cruelly, what awful punishment must await her libertine sister! And here she utters a variation on the statement that Sade used as epigraph:

O thou my friend! The prosperity of Crime is but an ordeal to which Providence would expose virtue, it is like unto the lightning, whose traitorous brilliancies but for an instant embellish the atmosphere, in order to hurl into death’s very deeps the luckless one they have dazzled. And there, before our very eyes, is the example of it. (Sade 1, 742)

But there is, of course, a more straightforward interpretation, and the ending of Justine is stretched beyond the limits of creative hermeneutics. Sade must have expected a certain cultural literacy from his readers. What does tradition infer from bolts of lightning? It’s far more likely to come to the conclusions drawn at the end of Juliette, where lightning strikes Justine on the lane outside the château. There she was sent by Juliette and her friends, who had debated whether

to immolate her in the course of diverse orgies. “My friends,” said [Noirceuil] to that joyous society, “In cases like the present one I have often found it extremely instructive to allow Nature to take her own course. There is, you have noticed, a storm brewing in the sky; let us entrust this personage to the elements. I shall embrace the true faith if they spare her.” (Sade 2, 1190)

Heaven sends its calling card to answer such a threat. Justine is immolated immediately, and Sade could not resist a last low blow. Inspecting the fallen victim, one of the villains sees the hand of Providence in the fact that her body is not so disfigured as to preclude an opportunity for necrophilia—which he seizes, of course, on the spot. Providence itself has ratified all their principles, and nothing remains but the last edifying assessments.

“Come, good friends, let us all rejoice together, from all this I see nothing but happiness accruing to all save only virtue—but we would perhaps not dare say so were it a novel we were writing.”

“Why dread publishing it,” said Juliette, “When the truth itself, and the truth alone, lays bare the secrets of Nature, however mankind may tremble before those revelations. Philosophy must never shrink from speaking out.” (Ibid.)

Justine’s voice is no longer around to be heard. It will be hard to find a replacement.

While his goals were those of the philosopher, Sade chose the form of the novel. One thing this allowed him was multiplicity of voice. He was free to try out positions without committing himself to any of them. His beliefs about God, in particular, seemed a matter of flux. Was He merely absent entirely, or positively malevolent? Was the evil in the world due to random bad luck or the result of deliberate intention? Sade’s own uncertainty on the subject is often expressed in nearly incoherent exclamations: “Yes, vain illusion, how my soul detests you!” The reader cannot miss the fact that Sade’s works are full of dialogues with a being whose existential status is murky. Juliette, it’s been noted, “deifies sin. Her libertinage is as marked by Catholicism as the nun’s ecstasy is by paganism” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 106). Bataille, less lucidly, described Sade’s works as prayer books. Certainly if Sade was an atheist, he was a God-obsessed one. His expressions of atheism occurred in his moments of optimism. For any alternative is much worse. Dubois, who tries to tutor Justine, explains:

“I believe,” this dangerous woman answered, “that if there were a God there would be less evil on earth; I believe that since evil exists, these disorders are either expressly ordained by God, and there you have a barbarous fellow, or he is incapable of preventing them and right away you have a feeble God; in either case, an abominable being, a being whose lightning I should defy and whose laws contemn. Ah, Thérèse! Is not atheism preferable to the one and the other of these extremes?” (Sade 1, 698)

Indeed it is. For the alternative to God’s absence is His presence. If He should be known by His works, what must we infer about His nature? Sade took the standard litanies that had been brewing since Bayle and drew conclusions no predecessor had dared to draw. Klossowski notes the presence of gnostic themes throughout Sade’s writings. These can also be found in his view that Creation bears the seed of a curse, and in the thoroughgoing hatred of the body that none of Sade’s tributes to pleasure ever hides (Klossowski, 100). But most gnostics admitted at least two powers. Where Sade believed that a higher force existed, it was a force of unremitting evil. Such a being must be

very vindictive, very barbarous, very unjust, very cruel … more cruel than any mortal because acting without any motives a mortal might have. (Sade 2, 397)

Human criminals are usually merely base. They act to advance their own banal interests, to increase their fortunes or, at worst, their power. But God is omnipotent. What needs can be served by the steady trampling over weaker beings that fills the universe? Sheer lust for cruelty is all that explains it—which is why some take refuge in the mystery of grace. The conclusions Sade drew were foreshadowed in more than one tradition. Nietzsche described Greek gods watching human suffering as we watch tragedy at the theater. Nor can one stop at Calvinists and pagans. Can’t we trace features of a Sadean hero in the Being portrayed in the prologue to Job, who allows His righteous servant to be tortured for the sake of …?

Sade’s most radical theological proposal is made by the minister Saint-Fond. He points out that the standard arguments of Juliette and her friend Clairwil all beg the question. For their arguments against God’s existence are tied to traditional assumptions: if there is a God, His primary attribute will be benevolence. This is the foundation of their arguments against absurdities found in notions of hell. Its purpose can only be sheerly vindictive, since it’s too remote to serve as warning, too eternal to serve as corrective. Saint-Fond dares them to be more radical: why not reject the assumption that God is benevolent? He commences with a marvelous mirror of the Deism that had claimed to reject superstition in favor of philosophy, a priori argument in favor of straight and simple observation. Saint-Fond is a man who prides himself on large-scale theft, so it is fitting that his intellectual weapons are stolen:

More of a philosopher than you, Clairwil, I do not have to apply, as you seem obliged to do, either to that rogue Jesus or to that insipid novel, the Holy Scripture, in order to demonstrate my system; my study of the universe alone provides me with weapons to oppose you … I raise up my eyes to the universe: I see evil, disorder, crime reigning as despots everywhere. My gaze descends, and it bends upon that most interesting of this universe’s creatures. I behold him likewise devoured by vices, by contradictions, by infamies; what ideas result from this examination … there exists a God; some hand or other has necessarily created all that I see, but has not created it save for evil; evil is his essence; and all that he causes us to commit is indispensable to his plans. (Sade 2, 399)

How can evil be essential to these interests? Saint-Fond has answers for everything. Evil is increased when it encounters more evil, hence is moved to create itself infinitely. He toys with a bit of hasty metaphysics, in the form of something called maleficent molecules, to support this claim. His own life gives example of whatever truth it may contain. The worst sort of evil makes its victims accomplice to crime. So he forces lovers to torture their beloved, signing their souls over to the devil before being murdered themselves. Similarly, he dispatches other objections to his system. Doesn’t the presence of some good in the world suggest at least a cosmos that’s mixed? Rubbish, he returns, what’s called good is merely feeble, and feebleness is an evil itself. By 1797 readers were used to reading catalogs of descriptions that undermine views of the world as benign; Juliette was published exactly one hundred years after Bayle. Here Sade needed do little more than drive it home, through a God who berates humankind for misreading the evidence. Didn’t His world give clear enough indication of His designs? Couldn’t they discover what sort of behavior would accord with His intentions? So Saint-Fond’s God speaks:

Did not the perpetual miseries with which I inundate the universe convince you that I love only disorder, and that to please me one must emulate me? … In what aspect of my conduct have you noticed benevolence? Is it in sending you plagues, blights, civil wars, earthquakes, tempests? Fool! why did you not imitate my ways? Why did you resist those passions I put into you for no reason other than to prove to you how great is the necessity for evil? (Sade 2, 399)

Saint-Fond’s statement of the relations between natural and moral evils is a crude one, and for that reason instructive. His dark Creator taunts us for misinterpretation, but His assumptions about those relations are conventional. The natural world is a clue to its Creator’s intentions for the moral one. Like the best religious traditions, it forms an example for imitation; like philosophical searches for foundation, it offers support for any decision we might make on our own. Recall Justine’s first sentence: the masterpiece of philosophy would be to show the means Providence uses to arrive at the ends she derives for us, and to deduce from those some rules for conduct.17

Sade’s work became a synonym for radical moral evil taken past limits anyone else imagined. I have suggested that his ambitions were fulfilled. His attack on God was reckless beyond measure. His portrait of Justine gave the lie to the gospel’s claim to have portrayed, in Jesus, the case of greatest sorrow. And his torment of human reason itself was thereby more brutal than anything anyone else had achieved. Like any great criminal, he managed to implicate all the rest of us in the fascination for his work that shows no sign of abating. So much for broad outlines; his details too give him claim to preeminence. Next to a Sadean orgy, the trysts portrayed in the standard pornography of his day are models of comportment.

The success of Sade’s attempt to portray moral evil more extreme than anything imagined before him should not blind us to the conventional ways in which he tied it to natural evil. More exactly, he left conventional ties unbroken, and with them the hopes for harmony that the rest of his century still held. Providence is the attempt to give just form to destiny—whatever it is that befalls you in return for whatever it is you’ve done. It takes the form of interpretation, and vulgar readings seek to show how every natural event is reward for a moral one. Justine and Juliette meet the world with traditional assumptions and spend their lives constructing just such vulgar readings. They differ, of course, in their constructions. Tutored by experience and the wicked Saint-Fond, Juliette concludes that Providence wants evil behavior, since that’s what it rewards. Tutored by convention, Justine has nothing to fall back on but the conventional assurance that Providence’s ways are mysterious. Sade caricatures their fates for pedagogical purposes, for the randomness of real life can leave us confused. But one needn’t view the relations between moral and natural evils to be as simple or straightforward as the simple and straightforward sisters. The eighteenth century’s obsession with determining the natural, and deriving guidance for our conduct that conforms to it, reflects a desire to be in tune with the world. Perhaps the desire grew in proportion to the fear that humankind was growing increasingly distant from nature. My point is that Sade, for all that he loved to rip through things, never embraced this particular split.

Much to the contrary: he longed to hear his echo in the world, to see his reflection in the structure of nature. Despite all bravado, Sade wasn’t really inclined to set himself against the powers that be. He had neither the gallantry nor the guts of Don Juan, and he didn’t believe that hell was waiting. But one way or another, he felt the need to prove it, to show morality and nature in endless reflection. If there is a God, He wants creatures in His own sadistic image. If there is simply blind nature, it had better be all of a piece. Sade never failed to draw a consequence:

Murderers are in nature as are war, famine, and cholera; they are one of the means Nature disposes of, like all the hostile forces she pits against us … we cannot flog or burn or brand or hang cholera or famine, whereas we can do all of these things to a man; that is why he is wrong. (Sade 2, 777)

This could be a massive way of exculpating the human—if it weren’t part of a massive indictment of nature. Most important is the unspoken demand that they conform to each other’s image. To call this narcissistic is in order if you admit the existence of transcendental narcissism. Most philosophers posit selves that mirror the world. Leibniz rescued final causes from Spinozan critique, and attributed purpose not only to humans but to the units that compose the universe. Hume’s little bundles of selves reflect the little bundles of objects they lack the conditions to perceive. Not even Kant could entirely suppress the longing for harmony between the self and the world, but he did manage to withstand it.

This is as good a point as any to face the claim that Sade and Kant are kindred souls. The charge was made famous in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and it’s tempting to simply dismiss it: while both Kant and Sade can show extremes of self-torment, there’s all the difference in the world between those who extend it to others and those who don’t. The Dialectic of Enlightenment’s outline of similarities proceeds less by argument than by innuendo. The “cold law” of Kant and Moses does not proclaim feeling and knows neither love nor the stake (Adorno and Horkheimer, 114). Would it be more or less Sadean if we added the stake? Is the coldness that links Sade to Königsberg and Sinai something we’d rather replace by the heat of passion? In Sade’s terms or Rousseau’s? Sade and Kant are linked because both traffic in formal structures. Perhaps one ought to add Bach as well, and denounce him for tormenting harmony by subjecting it to the precision of rule.

If there is an argument in addition to an atmosphere, it isn’t a good one. True, Adorno and Horkheimer are right to note that Sade’s villains are more attracted by the idea of crime than by the sensations it causes. Juliette is encouraged to repeat in cold blood the crime she committed in passion, so as to strike at the heart of virtue. She and her cohorts are often portrayed in acts that overcome both sentiment and disgust. This is clearly an attempt to overcome the merely human. Their pleasure comes from transgression, and transgression requires obstacles. The heroes of books like Thérèse philosophe want to abolish precisely the obstacles to pleasure that Sade finds erotic. In all this self-overcoming and mastery one may see parody of Kant but not kinship with him. For The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Kant’s reason has no substantial goals; hence no argument against murder can be derived from it. Its authors conclude that Kant shares the same room as Sade.

Only the hastiest reading of Kant’s work could miss his attack on instrumental conceptions of reason. These, he argued, are merely pragmatic and empirical, while the real task of reason is precisely to set ends. The Dialectic of Enlightenment views reason as an old pocket calculator, not even complex enough to function as a good model of instrumental reason. This is so far from Kant’s view that no claim based on it can be successful in attacking him. Yet even a more accurate description of Kant’s notion of reason must acknowledge one of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims: Kant’s moral law has no basis in the structure of reality. It rests instead on what he calls the fact of reason. This means that reason justifies itself. Kant would not justify morality on instrumental grounds, so he offers no arguments to persuade us to be moral. Rather, he says, it’s a fact of reason that we should be. But as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, facts do not help us when they’re not there.

Neither, however, do emotions. By way of comparison, consider the following:

Let us chuse any inanimate object, such as an oak or an elm; and let us suppose, that by the dropping of its seed it produces a sapling below it, which springing up by degrees, at last overtops and destroys the parent tree: I ask, if in this instance there be wanting any relation, which is discoverable in parricide or ingratitude? Is not the one tree the cause of the other’s existence; and the latter the cause of the destruction of the former, in the same manner as when a child murders a parent? (Hume 1, 467)

Sade’s readers know that only a little obscenity is missing to draw one of his favorite conclusions. The biological act that sometimes leads to conception creates no obligations. Since it’s undertaken only for reasons of pleasure, it cannot be a source of relations between the parties involved. Any such relation must result from mutual inclination, not the brute accident of kinship. For reason finds no path from the one to the other. If inclination may lead you to cherish your child or your parent, it may just as easily lead you to destroy them. So Sade was particularly fond of accompanying incest with murder. Of course he knew that even without reason, custom and habit erect taboos against both. (Without the pleasure of violating taboos, he would find little cause to engage in them.) But as he argued, in the course of encouraging a girl to abuse her mother,

[i]f, by chance, you should hear some inner voice speaking to you—whether it is custom that inspires these announcements, whether it is your character’s moral effect that produces these twinges—unhesitatingly, remorselessly throttle those absurd sentiments … local sentiments, the fruit of geographical accident, climate, which nature repudiates and reason disavows always! (Sade 1, 354)

Sade’s reason, like Hume’s, is the tool of the skeptic. Good at unmasking other people’s views, it is perfectly inept at everything else. Hume wished to humiliate reason by demonstrating its myriad weaknesses. It is unable to establish the simplest truths. Only habit can show that events have causes, or that killing your father is a crime. Reason’s expectations of the world lead to disorientation and error. Anticipating an order in the world that it cannot affect, reason prevents us from seeing the world as it is and acting accordingly. Reason is the compass that keeps steering us wrong—if it’s capable of steering at all.

While Hume undertook to humiliate reason, Sade sought to torture it. The exaggeration that marks Juliette and Justine is meant not only for didactic purposes. The reader would get Sade’s point were it made with a lighter hand. Hume coolly said that reason cannot comprehend why the world was constructed with so many evils. Kant argued that reason cannot stand it. In showing a world where crime always pays while virtue always suffers, Sade rakes reason over coals.

Since medieval times, rationalists used faith in reason and the argument from design to support one another. If God gave us reason, He meant us to use it. Early rationalists used this teleological strategy to dismiss their orthodox critics. But skeptics brought arguments that were harder to answer. Hume let design and reason cancel each other out. Eyes and hands may bear witness to creation. But if reason does nothing but lead us astray, we possess at least one organ that’s distinctly counterpurposive—put in the world to work against us. Another ground to suspect that we live in a world without purpose is another blow against the argument from design. Sade went much further, taking up the fear Descartes only hinted at. An evil God might be a deceiver, who endowed us with a faculty He intended to be treacherous. What if reason were meant to lead us astray—to turn us into Justines, for example, naive enough to serve as prey (Sade 2, 39)?18

From Hume’s humiliation of reason it’s but a short step to punishment. But the question of whether Hume or Kant deserves more blame for having led to Sade is less important than asking which view will be better equipped to deal with Sade. Justine can be read as the empiricist’s warning. Look what happens to those who refuse to take their cues from experience, who try to impose principles on a world that resists them. Far better to proceed in the other direction. Let experience dictate your view of the world and give you rules for acting within it. This is the message that Hume-inspired Edmund Burke drew from the Terror, and it’s one you might draw from violent upheaval in general. Sade makes sure that you cannot draw it through him. For he was far more aware of the consequences implicit in modern experience. You cannot take refuge in custom and habit when custom and habit have been undermined. Having used up the tools of Enlightenment skepticism to discredit traditional positions, Hume was left with no resources he hadn’t helped to destroy. The traditions we drew on have no basis but history and accident. It will do no good to say that history and accident let us muddle through this far and can therefore be trusted to keep us going. For the upheaval that makes up the modern is the very act of questioning whether history and accident are the sort of things that should count as justification. Hume’s brilliant attacks on religion demand we conclude that they shouldn’t. His dual solution—prescribing for the mass of humanity those crutches the wise few can forgo—is bound to appear cynical. And cynicism is ultimately unstable. To undercut our faith in traditional experience with one hand, and urge us to rely on it with the other, is a solution you need not be Sade to reject.

Far better to be wholehearted in accepting disjuncture, if you’ve got to accept it at all. As we will see in chapter 4, this is one way to follow Kant. Maintaining the gap between reason and nature is not without cost, but Sade’s work provides a glimpse of another alternative. The price of closing gaps between the moral and the natural is even higher than that of retaining them. The only challenge Sade found to nature’s ends is the end of nature as a whole. Some of his works imagine a final state where nature itself is overcome in a massive act of self-destruction. If nature leads to its own obliteration, you may, of course, decide to view annihilation itself as a natural goal. This may be a consistent defense of the unity of nature and purpose. But it’s hardly a source of solace.

SCHOPENHAUER: THE WORLD AS TRIBUNAL

Consider Schopenhauer as exclamation point. He was out of touch with his times, a century he saw scrambling to get rid of Kant and drink to Leibniz (Schopenhauer 1:510). Kant gave metaphysical expression to crisis and fracture. Those following him sought to heal it. Old models of Providence could not survive attacks like those of Hume and Sade. Struggling to articulate those attacks, the late eighteenth century showed its awareness that those models had broken down. The nineteenth century, by contrast, struggled to find a replacement for them. In the process, thinkers tried everything from history to economics to biology. No wonder Schopenhauer felt out of place. In an age bent on inventing whole sciences to detect signs of progress, his vision of a cosmic trend toward self-destruction was bound to be ignored.

Schopenhauer’s dry elegance masks a despair so thoroughgoing that it may even remain untimely for darker epochs. In all of his writings,

[l]ife presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desireable the object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions, when we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by them. Accordingly happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. (Schopenhauer, 2:573)

His work was devoted to showing that suffering is the essence of existence. Only the form of the pain is a matter of accident. Our lives move between pain and boredom; we are pushed toward the one in an effort to avoid the other. These elements of reality are so fundamental that we even project them into that afterworld in which Schopenhauer had no faith.

[A]fter man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom. (Schopenhauer, 1:312)

Schopenhauer was casual about the means he used to establish his claims. He was happy to blend empirical observation and a priori argument, happiest of all when he could present some perverse contradiction built into the nature of things. He was convinced that all these support him.

He was well aware of those who preceded him. Though his plans to translate Hume’s Dialogues came to naught, he was full of praise for Voltaire. His gratitude toward his predecessors was matched by his lack of mercy toward the views he opposed. He called Rousseau’s work the superficial philosophy of a Protestant pastor (Schopenhauer, 2:585). Everything was fuel for his fire. To anyone who viewed the sexual impulse as a sign of harmony between human and natural purposes, he offered alternatives. He maintained that the sexual impulse is “the real lord of the world.” But he thought that even satisfied passion brings more unhappiness than its opposite, for the will of the individual and that of the species show not unity but conflict (Schopenhauer, 2:555 ff.). Those who seek salvation by denying nature only confirm Schopenhauer more directly. Hatred of body and matter and all that’s bound to this world proves his views: the universe is so ruled by suffering that Christianity cannot even represent itself except through a symbol of torture. After refusing “to give out Jewish mythology as philosophy,” he turned to optimists who attack the Christian view that the world is a vale of tears. Schopenhauer found them simply laughable. Leibniz’s view had no merit besides having given rise to “the immortal Candide”; the Theodicy is so palpably sophistical that it ought to be negated. So Schopenhauer, his tongue only half in cheek, presented an argument that this world is the worst of all possible. For a world slightly worse would cease to exist. The earthquake at Lisbon was but a “small, playful hint” at the destructive forces of nature; scientists know how easily some small change of heat or motion could bring the world to an end (Schopenhauer 2, 582 ff.). Existence is so precarious that any number of changes could render it entirely impossible.

Consequently the world is as bad as it can possibly be, if it is to exist at all. Q.E.D. (Schopenhauer 2, 584)

Uncharacteristically, he forgot to add that this fact itself is fresh proof of life’s perversity. For if this is how things are, why should there be something rather than nothing at all? Why shouldn’t the universe go directly to the annihilation toward which it tends, and spare us all the torture on the way? Life is a battle we are certain to lose, for it consists in a struggle for existence that is destined to fail. Presumably, the long slow torment that precedes our deaths was Schopenhauer’s substitute for hell.

Schopenhauer prided himself on being the first true atheist in German philosophy, and scorned his contemporaries’ attempts to substitute a world spirit for a bankrupt deity. Yet he never abandoned a notion of cosmic justice. As in Sade, this remained when every other convention was violated. The first of Nietzsche’s good Europeans, Schopenhauer had no trouble rejecting a notion of Providence. What remains is Providence reversed.

If we want to know what human beings, morally considered, are worth as a whole and in general, let us consider their fate as a whole and in general. This fate is want, wretchedness, misery, lamentation and death. Eternal justice prevails; if they were not as a whole contemptible, their fate as a whole would not be so melancholy. In this sense we can say that the world itself is the tribunal of the world. If we could lay all the misery of the world in one pan of the scales, and all its guilt in the other, the pointer would surely show them to be in equilibrium. (Schopenhauer, 1:352)

Moral and natural evils are perfectly balanced. The scales of justice remain when the judge is entirely absent: the world itself is tribunal of the world.

Belief in Providence presumes that we are innocent long after we’ve begun to look very suspicious. It does so by offering hope for an order behind appearances that will right the wrongs the appearances present. Rather than simply denying appearances, belief in Providence is belief that there’s reason behind them. What looks like chance will be shown to make sense. Schopenhauer proposed something similar. We know that human lives consist of chains of misery. Could that much punishment be accidental? He was persuaded of eternal justice. What looks like its absence is but superficial appearance. He admitted that wicked people lead lives of pleasure, while good ones often suffer without vengeance or end. Schopenhauer set out to provide them with comfort. Unlike others, he offered no hope for redemption. Rather, he argued that their innocence, like individuality itself, was merely illusion. In reality, he thought tormentor and tormented are one. This is consolation so black it begins to be funny. Are you dismayed by a world full of innocent suffering? Don’t despair: it’s not so innocent. Of what is everyone guilty? There he turned to the poets: our greatest offense is having been born. How can life not be criminal, when it’s always followed by capital punishment?

If we are infinitely deserving of the infinite misery that is our lot, then suicide is too good for us. Consequently Schopenhauer argued against it. Suicide contains an element of affirmation. One who takes his life rebels against the conditions he’s been given, by refusing to live amid permanent pain. Thus suicide is still expression of will, for it remains an act of protest against the world as it is. Confronted by suffering, the suicide refuses to seize an opportunity:

Suffering approaches, and as such, offers the possibility of a denial of the will; but he rejects it by destroying the will’s phenomenon, the body, so that the will may remain unbroken. (Schopenhauer, 1:399)

Instead of suicide Schopenhauer recommended practices that destroy the will itself. He praised the Indian mystic who, after extirpating all other desire, is finally directed not to lie down too often under the same tree, lest he acquire a preference for it rather than another. Willing brings pain. In a conclusion more masochistic than coherent, Schopenhauer urged slow destruction of desire rather than the immediate self-destruction that kills the body but not the soul.

Every fulfillment of our wishes won from the world is only like the alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he may starve again tomorrow. Resignation, on the other hand, is like the inherited estate; it frees its owner from all care and anxiety forever. (Schopenhauer, 1:390)

Such a standpoint expresses the kind of decadence only rich men’s sons enjoy. But this criticism cannot be devastating when literal decadence, as in decay, is at issue. Schopenhauer’s position refutes itself as little as Sade’s does. The categorical imperative has nothing to say against resolute nihilism. Would a world built on such principles incline to self-destruct? No doubt about it. What lets us assume we can let matters rest there? For Schopenhauer as for Sade, destruction was the only desirable goal.

We are left to conclude that what’s in need of justification is life itself.19 This makes the problem of evil most urgent for those who insist that it has no solution. Chapter 1 considered the wish to change some piece of the world, in order to justify the world as a whole. I argued that such wishes cannot be contained. The thinkers considered in this chapter opposed theoretical attempts to change the world: philosophy, in this sense, leaves everything as it is. They were also dedicated to destroying ordinary belief in God. The shift of focus from God to reason showed that traditional theodicy was not the real object of attention, nor did shifting focus dissolve the problem. The conclusion that life, not God, is in need of defense, will seem very tempting—even if we can imagine no other defense of life than the living of it.

The wish to be God seems to require no refutation, and nothing will seem further from contemporary concerns. You are unlikely to share the tame and confident Deism of the eighteenth century. You may even view it as akin to cowardice, the response of those who cannot bear to imagine a world without a kind, all-seeing father. I have argued that eighteenth-century thinkers could bear a great deal. They subjected both Creator and Creation to ever-increasing fire and found their weapons in facts provided by life itself. Bayle used examples to show that human history consists of crime and misfortune. Though he used them for added emphasis, Schopenhauer thought examples superfluous: birth itself was crime and misfortune at once. If the arguments condemning Creation were increasingly brutal, descriptions of the Creator were worse. Bayle pictured God as a father who lets his child break his bones so as to show his skill at healing, then decided not to picture Him at all. Hume gave us pictures to arouse scorn and derision: God as ostrich, dumb shipwright, vain doddering fool. Sade’s visions can cause terror. God is a vampire, an evil genius whose goal is to deceive us and to set a bad example. Against such images, the twentieth century looks dull and pale.

If modern philosophers continued to be engaged with theodicy, it was not out of innocence. They could imagine even darker scenarios than we managed to put into practice. Earlier thinkers were no more gullible than you are. Those occupied with theodicy knew every objection to it. Theodicy is never blind to critiques of God’s goodness; it arises in response to them. Leibniz began writing about it in order to answer Bayle. Job’s friends kept their mouths shut until Job began to curse. Theodicy is rarely naive. Is it for all that superstitious? Philosophers often return to things they should have transcended. Even knowing they know nothing is not always guarantee of wisdom on that score. Socrates was a symbol of skepticism toward traditional religion, and the Athenians put him to death for it. But Hegel reminds us that the last thing he did before dying was to offer the god Aesclepius a sacrificial cock (Hegel 7, 1:116).