François Marie Arouet—better known as VOLTAIRE (1694–1778)—was a superstar in eighteenth-century Europe and for a time one of its most read and translated authors. His plays were performed across the continent, and his view of world history was so influential that the Russian Czar, upon reading Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs, sent an embassy to China to verify some of its claims. This chapter will highlight a little known side of this multifaceted man. Though current histories of Orientalism barely mention him,1 Voltaire played an important role in the genesis of modern Orientalism. Since some of Voltaire’s sources and his particular approach are deeply connected with the missionary discovery of Asian religions and mission literature, relevant facets of this missionary basis will first have to be examined in some detail. In Voltaire’s time, much of Asia was still called “the East Indies,” and the focus of previous scholarly discussion on India proper and on religions that are today associated with the Indian subcontinent must be widened in order to understand eighteenth-century views and images. The influence and staying power of old ideas have hitherto been underestimated. Not just the study of the Orient in Voltaire’s time but even modern Orientalism is shaped by earlier impressions and approaches in profound and sometimes pernicious ways. It is a mistake to regard—in the manner of Schwab (1950), de Jong (1987), and many others—the onset of modern Orientalism as a clean break from a “nonscientific” past. As the examples of William Jones (App 2009) and Anquetil-Duperron (see Chapter 7) show, the pioneers of modern Orientalism raised the curtains and set a new stage; but much of the stage set seems recycled from earlier productions, and many actors in this play wear costumes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries while expressing ideas that fit those times. The lack of appreciation regarding some of the crucial underpinnings of Voltaire’s venture—particularly of missionary approaches and sources—gave rise to misunderstandings not only concerning his use of India-related sources but also the role he played in the genesis of modern Orientalism. Hence, the first task will be to discuss in some detail a number of facets of the missionary discovery of Asian religions that came to influence Voltaire’s views and sources.
Partly due to the summary dismissal of missionary portrayals of Asian religions as biased, some of the basic events of the missionary discovery of these religions are still ignored even by today’s Orientalists. It is, for example, a fact that the first systematic exploration of non-Islamic Asian religions happened not in India or some other land at a manageable distance from continental Europe but at the very end of the world as it was known at the time, namely, in sixteenth-century Japan. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Catholic missionaries had settled in India and subsequently in various parts of Southeast Asia; but these were regions where even knowledge of the local vernacular did not yet entail access to sacred literature. Besides, the heathen cults were regarded as works of the devil to be exterminated rather than studied. In Japan, by contrast, the need for study arose from the fiasco of St. Francis Xavier’s Jesuit mission.2 FRANCIS XAVIER (1506–1552) and his Jesuit companions had arrived in the summer of 1549 in Japan with high hopes and accompanied by Anjirō, a Japanese man of modest education who served as their interpreter. He had translated “God” as “Dainichi” (the Sun-Buddha, the principal Buddha venerated by the Shingon sect of Buddhism), “heaven” and “paradise” as jōdo (the Pure Land of Buddhism), and “Christianity” as buppō (the Buddha dharma or Buddhist law); consequently, the Japanese were convinced that the Jesuits were Buddhist sectarian reformers from India. They had indeed come to Japan from Goa in India, and the Japanese (whose world at the time ended in India alias “Tenjiku”) consistently called Xavier and his companions “Indians” (“Tenjiku’s” or “Tenjikujin”) (App 1997a:55–58). The Japanese Shingon priests were so delighted with their new cousins from India that the Jesuits became suspicious; but even after Francis Xavier’s departure toward the end of 1551, the missionaries were still viewed as a bunch of zealous Buddhist sectarians. The document that supposedly proves their most notable success, the donation of a “church” (in reality, a Buddhist monastery) by the regent of Yamaguchi, became an object of widespread interest in Europe as it was printed in various letter collections all over the continent and became the first document in Chinese characters to be printed in Europe (Schurhammer 1928:26–27; App 1997b:236). The confrontation of the crucial portion of the published Portuguese rendering with my translation of the original Japanese text in Table 1 illustrates the heart of the problem: the Japanese regarded the missionaries as Buddhist bonzes intent on promulgating the Buddha dharma, whereas the Jesuit missionaries believed that the donation of a Buddhist temple signaled acceptance of their stated aim of producing Christian saints.3
TABLE 1. EDICT OF THE DUKE OF YAMAGUCHI TRANSLATED FROM JAPANESE AND PORTUGUESE
English translation of Japanese text (actual content of edict) |
Translation of published Portuguese text (how missionaries translated edict) |
The bonzesa who have come here from the Western regions may, for the purpose of promulgating the Buddhist law, establish their monastic community [at the Buddhist monastery of the Great Way]. |
[The Duke] accords the great Dai, Way of Heaven, to the fathers of the occident who have come to preach the law that produces Saints in conformity with their wish until the end of the world. |
a The term “bonze” (from Jap. bōzu) has been in use since the sixteenth century for Buddhist priests or monks (originally of Japan or China, but later increasingly as a generic term). In this book we will also encounter such equivalents as “heshang” for China, “lama” for Tibet, and “talapoin” for Southeast Asia.
Only in 1551, when Francis Xavier was getting ready to leave Japan in order to convert the Chinese, did the missionaries begin to use the word “Deus” instead of “Dainichi” (App 1997b:241–42). Their fiasco triggered a “language reform” that consisted in figuring out which terms were Buddhist, what they signified, and which were safe for use in a Christian context. This could only be achieved by some degree of systematic study and with the help of native informers familiar with Buddhist doctrine and texts. By 1556, eight years after the beginning of the Japan mission, the first report about the country’s religions was sent via Goa to Europe, where it arrived in 1558 (Bourdon 1993:261).4 This Sumario de los errores (Summary of Errors) contained a first survey of Japanese religions including Shinto and listed eight sects of Japanese Buddhism. They were all identified as belonging to “bupō” (Buddha dharma) and associated with a founder called Shaka (Shakyamuni Buddha) (Ruiz-de-Medina 1990:655–67). The Sumario also furnished information about the clergies of these sects, the texts they used, and some of their doctrines including a topic that was to have extraordinary repercussions well into Voltaire’s time: the distinction between two significations of Buddhist doctrines, an exoteric or outer one for the simple-minded people and an esoteric or inner one for the philosophers and literati (pp. 666–67). The esoteric teaching, which was associated with Zen Buddhism and its use of meditation and kōans, was said to lead to the realization that there is nothing beyond life and death and that “all is nothing” (p. 666). This is an early seed of the European misconception of an esoteric “cult of nothingness”5 with a secret teaching that later turned into the legend about the Buddha’s deathbed confession (see Chapter 3).
When the Jesuit Alessandro VALIGNANO (1539–1606) visited Japan for the first time between 1579 and 1582, he quickly realized that the study of the native language and religions was of paramount importance. He reported, “The first thing that I addressed and ordered after arriving in Japan . . . was that the European brothers study [the language] with great care and that a grammar and vocabulary of Japanese be produced” (Schütte 1951:321). Valignano promoted the admission of Japanese novices and, helped by P. Luis Frois who translated his words into Japanese, in 1580–81 held a course of intensive instruction for both European and Japanese novices (Schütte 1958:84–85). One of Valignano’s eight new novices, the middle-aged Japanese doctor Paulo Yōhō, was knowledgeable about Japanese religions and provided information about Buddhism to both Valignano and the novices. Together with his son Vicente Tōin, Paulo helped Valignano craft a catechism whose overall structure interests us here. Since Valignano had studied Francis Xavier’s fiasco and realized the importance of clearly separating truth from error, he decided to write a catechism and devote the first of its two books to the sects and religions of the Japanese in order to build a firm basis for their refutation through rational argumentation (Valignano 1586:3–76). It is a detailed presentation and critique of (mostly Buddhist) Japanese religious doctrine and shows how much knowledge the Jesuits had accumulated since the days of Francis Xavier. The catechism’s second book then treats of Christian life and its basis in the Ten Commandments and other doctrines.
An interesting and influential observation that Valignano made at the beginning of the first part was that, in spite of the multitude of sects in Japan and the confusing doctrines of Buddhism, there was a key that facilitated understanding all of them. This key was the distinction between an “outer” or provisional teaching for the common people (Jap. gonkyō) and the “inner” or true teaching for the clergy (Jap. jikkyō) (p. 4v).6 Valignano’s entire presentation of doctrines and sects is based on this “gon-jitsu” distinction, which he, of course, decries as “fallacious, mendacious, and deceptive” (fallax, mendax, hominum deceptrix) (p. 34v).
Without going into more detail, we note that this catechism is proof that Buddhism was already quite intensively studied by Westerners in the sixteenth century with the help of native experts. For his reform of the Jesuit Japan mission, Valignano even researched and copied some features of the organizational structure of Zen monasteries. Such study continued in the following decades until the expulsion of all missionaries from Japan in the early seventeenth century, and among its major fruits was a Japanese-Portuguese dictionary with about 32,000 entries (Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam, 1603; Jap. Nippo jisho). In this dictionary, all Buddhist terms are identified by the marker “Bup,” for buppō (Buddhism)—which proves how aware the missionaries were of Buddhism’s identity as a religion. This dictionary alone should lay forever to rest all claims that Buddhism was not perceived as a religion by Westerners before the nineteenth century. It is easy, however, to overestimate the influence of such mission documents since many of them soon ended up in dusty mission archives. While reports such as the Sumario de los errores got relatively little public exposure, Valignano’s catechism enjoyed the opposite fate. Its first edition, printed in Lisbon in 1586, is exceedingly rare, but the work was included almost unchanged in Antonio Possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta of 1593, a major textbook for generations of Jesuits and for Europe’s educated class (Possevino 1593:459–529; Mühlberger 2001:137–38). At the time, this was just about the most powerful megaphone anyone could wish for, and all the Jesuit protagonists in this chapter heard the message.
When Matteo RICCI (1552–1610) arrived in China in the summer of 1582 and began to learn Chinese, he benefited from a special introduction to Asian religions since Valignano, who was also in Macao at the time, made him copy the conclusions (“Risolutioni”) that he had drawn from his three-year stay in Japan (Schütte 1958:63). But when Ricci in the same year moved with another Italian missionary, Michele Ruggieri,7 to Canton and then to Zhaoqing in South China, history seemed to repeat itself with a vengeance: the two Jesuits adopted the title and vestments of the Chinese seng—that is, they identified themselves and dressed as ordained Buddhist bonzes. Even their Ten Commandments in Chinese contained Buddhist terms; for example, the third commandment read that on holidays it was forbidden to work and one had to go to the Buddhist temple (si) in order to recite the sutras (jing) and worship the Master of Heaven (tianzhu, the Lord of devas).8 Ruggieri’s and Ricci’s first Chinese catechism, the Tianzhu shilu of 1584—the first book printed by Europeans in China—also brimmed with Buddhist terms and was signed by “the bonzes from India” (tianzhuguo seng) (Ricci 1942:198). The doorplate of the Jesuit’s residence and church read “Hermit-flower [Buddhist] temple” (xianhuasi), while the plate displayed prominently inside the church read “Pure Land of the West” (xilai jingdu).9 As can be seen in the report about the inscriptions on the Jesuit residence and church of Zhaoqing (Figure 1),10 Ruggieri translated “hermit” (xian), a term with Daoist connotations, by the Italian “santi” (saints), and the Buddhist temple (si) became an “ecclesia” (church). Even more interesting is his transformation of the Buddhist paradise or “Pure Land of the West” into “from the West came the purest fathers.”11 This presumably referred to the biblical patriarchs, but it is not excluded that a double-entrendre (Jesuit fathers from the West) was intended.
Nine years later, in 1592, when Ricci was translating the four Confucian classics, he decided to abandon his identity as a Buddhist bonze (seng); and during a visit in Macao, he asked his superior Valignano for permission also to shed his bonze’s robe, begging bowl, and sutra recitation implements. The Christian churches were renamed from si to tang (a more neutral word meaning “hall”), and in 1594 the final step in this rebranding process was taken when Ricci received Valignano’s permission to present himself and dress up as a Chinese literatus (Duteil 1994:85–86). It was the year when Ricci finished his translation of the four Confucian classics, the books that any Chinese wishing to reach the higher ranks of society had to study. In Ricci’s view, these books contained unmistakable vestiges of ancient monotheism. In his journals he wrote,
Of all the pagan sects known to Europe, I know of no people who fell into fewer errors in the early stages of their antiquity than did the Chinese. From the very beginning of their history it is recorded in their writings that they recognized and worshipped one supreme being whom they called the King of Heaven, or designated by some other name indicating his rule over heaven and earth. . . . They also taught that the light of reason came from heaven and that the dictates of reason should be hearkened to in every human action. (Gallagher 1953:93)
Figure 1. Inscriptions for the Jesuit residence and church in Zhaoqing, 1584.
The Jesuit language reform in China took a different direction from the earlier one in Japan; instead of intensively studying the Buddhist and Daoist competition in order to defeat it, Ricci and his companions focused on cozying up to the Confucians. On November 4, 1595, Ricci wrote to the Jesuit Father General Acquaviva: “I have noted down many terms and phrases [of the Chinese classics] in harmony with our faith, for instance, ‘the unity of God,’ ‘the immortality of the soul,’ the glory of the blessed,’ and the like’’ (Ricci 1985:14). Ricci intended to identify appropriate terms in the Confucian classics to give the Christian dogma a Mandarin dress and to illustrate his view that the Chinese had successfully safeguarded an extremely ancient knowledge of God. The portions of Ruggieri and Ricci’s old “Buddhist” catechism dealing with God’s revelation and requiring faith rather than reason were removed, while topics such as the “goodness of human nature” that appealed to Confucians were added (p. 15). Ricci systematically substituted Buddhist terminology with phrases from the Chinese classics. But rather than as a revision of his earlier “Buddhist” catechism, Ricci’s True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven should be regarded as a new work reflecting his view of China’s ancient theology. It was crafted in the mold of the first part of Valignano’s catechism of 1586, and exactly ten years after the publication of that work, Ricci’s supervisor Valignano examined and approved Ricci’s new text for use in China. It was not a catechism in the traditional sense but a praeparatio evangelica: a way to entice the rationalist upper crust of Chinese society and to refute the “superstitious” and “foreign” forms of Chinese religion (such as Daoism and Buddhism) by logical argument while interpreting “original” Confucianism as a kind of Old Testament to Christianity. Ricci’s “catechism” was thus not yet the Good News itself but a first step toward it. It argued that Chinese religion had once been thoroughly monotheistic and that this primeval monotheism had later degenerated through the influence of Daoism and Buddhism. In Ricci’s view Christianity was nothing other than the fulfillment of China’s Ur-monotheism.
Ricci decided to cast this preparatory treatise in Renaissance fashion as a dialogue between a Western and a Chinese scholar who discuss various aspects of Chinese religion. Ricci’s Western scholar analyzes Daoist, Buddhist, and Neoconfucianist beliefs and practices and proceeds to demolish them by rational argument, thus exposing their inconsistency and irrationality. When Ricci’s work was completed and his new manuscript began to circulate in preparation for the printing, the old “Buddhist” catechism was no longer used.
When the first copies of Ricci’s True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven arrived in Japan, one of Valignano’s erstwhile novices, João RODRIGUES (1561–1633), studied it with much interest. Having arrived in Japan in 1577 at the young age of 16, he had at the turn of the seventeenth century already spent a quarter-century in the Far East and had become the best foreign speaker, reader, and writer of Japanese in the Jesuit mission. He had become not only procurator of the Japan mission but also court interpreter for Japan’s autocratic ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu. When Valignano left Japan for the last time in 1603, Rodrigues was just putting the finishing touches on his remarkable Japanese grammar Arte da Lingoa de Iapam, which was first printed in 1604 (Cooper 1994:228). Like any educated Japanese of the time, Rodrigues had also studied classical Chinese and sprinkled his grammar with examples from Confucius’s Analects. The depth of his knowledge of Japanese language and religion is apparent in his advice on letter writing style, which includes an introduction to the various kinds and degrees of Buddhist clergy and the correct ways of addressing them (Rodrigues 1604:199r–201r). His grammar also features a masterly treatise on Japanese poetry that is “the first comprehensive description of Far Eastern literature by any European” and includes a section on the translation of Chinese poetry into Japanese (Cooper 1994:229–30). Rodrigues was very much interested in the origins of Asian religions and peoples, and for this a firm grasp of chronology was needed. The third part of his grammar (Rodrigues 1604:232v–239r) contains Rodrigues’s chronological tables based on both Western and Far-Eastern sources.12 In the section on Chinese chronology, Rodrigues made the first known attempt to relate Japanese, Chinese, and Western chronologies. His aim was to position the founders of China’s three major religions (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism) in the framework of biblical history and its accepted chronological sequence (pp. 235r–236r).
After being forced out of Japan in 1610, he spent the rest of his life in China. He thus lived a total of thirty-three years in Japan and twenty-three in China. Even though his name is seldom if ever mentioned in books about the discovery of Oriental religions, it is clear that, during his fifty-six years in Asia, he became by far the most knowledgeable Westerner of his time about the religions of Japan and China. Even in his late teens, he had the chance of participating in Valignano’s lecture series leading to the 1586 catechism and was instructed by Japanese experts on Buddhism.13 When Ricci’s Chinese books made their way to Japan, Rodrigues thus was one of the few people capable of studying and criticizing them.14 He noticed a number of “grave things”:
These things arose on account of the lack of knowledge at that time and the Fathers’ ways of speaking and the conformity (as in their ignorance they saw it) of our holy religion with the literati sect, which is diabolical and intrinsically atheistic, and also contains fundamental and essential errors against the faith. (Cooper 1981:277)
Rodrigues’s early doubts about Ricci’s view of Confucianism as a vestige of primeval monotheism were reinforced when he spent two entire years (June 1613–June 1615) traveling in China “deeply investigating all these sects, which I had already diligently studied in Japan” (p. 314). His “three sects of philosophers” are Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, which Rodrigues not only studied in books but also through extensive field research: “To this end I passed through most of China and visited all our houses and residences, as well as many other places where our men had never been so far” (p. 314). The catechism that Rodrigues compiled (pp. 306, 315), a detailed atlas of Asia with tables of longitudes and distances (pp. 302–3), and a small report (p. 321) as well as a voluminous treatise (pp. 310, 277) about Far Eastern religions seem to be lost. However, some of their content survived. Maps and other geographical materials by Rodrigues were used without attribution by his ambitious fellow Jesuit Martino Martini,15 and his reports about Asia’s religions formed a principal source of Niccolò Longobardi’s famous essay that was written in the early 1620s but published in 1701 at the height of the “Chinese Rites” controversy raging in Voltaire’s youth.16 A number of Rodrigues’s letters from China survived and are of considerable help in our reconstruction of the basic direction of his argument.
Contradicting Ricci, Rodrigues maintained that all reigning religions of China, including Confucianism, were fundamentally atheist and thus incompatible with Christianity. Influenced by what he had learned about the provisional (outer) and true (inner) teachings of Buddhism in Japan (the gonjitsu dichotomy underlying the first part of Valignano’s catechism), Rodrigues detected the same two types of doctrines in all China’s religions (pp. 311–12). According to Rodrigues, Ricci’s problems were a result of his failure to understand this fundamental distinction and of his ignorance about the inner teachings:
Until I entered China, our Fathers of China knew practically nothing about this [distinction between exoteric and esoteric teachings] and about the speculative doctrine. They knew only about the civil and popular doctrine, for there was nobody to explain it to them and enlighten them. The above-mentioned Fr. Matteo Ricci worked a great deal in this field and did what he could, but, for reasons only known to Our Lord, he was misled in this matter. All these three sects of China are totally atheistic in their speculative teaching, denying the providence of the world. They teach everlasting matter, or chaos, and like the doctrine of Melissus, they believe the universe to contain nothing but one substance. (pp. 311–12)
The disappearance of Rodrigues’s religion report is very likely due to his fierce opposition to a Ricci-style accommodation with Confucianism that was the central bone of contention in the controversy about Chinese Rites that filled so many book shelves from the mid-seventeenth century onward. The whole question of the acceptability of Confucian rites depended on Confucianism’s pedigree. If it could be traced to monotheism, as Ricci thought it could, then its ancient rites posed hardly a problem. But if Rodrigues was right and Confucianism’s inner doctrine was pure atheism (complete with eternity of matter, lack of a creator God, and absence of providence), then any rite connected to such a religion was to be condemned.
In his letters from China and some of his printed works, Rodrigues identified all three major religions of China as descendants of ancient heathen cults of the Middle East. While Ricci viewed Confucianism as a child of original monotheism and the Chinese literati as relatively free from heathen superstition prior to the influence of Daoism and Buddhism, Rodrigues envisioned a very different pedigree reaching back to Chaldean diviners:
There does not seem to be any other kingdom in the whole world that has so many [superstitions] as this kingdom [of China], for it appears that all the ancient superstitions that ever existed have gathered here, and even modern superstitions as well. The sect of Chaldean diviners flourishes here. The Jesuits call it here the Literati Sect of China. Like them it philosophizes with odd and even numbers up to ten and with hieroglyphic symbols and various mathematical figures, and with the principal Chaldean deities, Light and Darkness, and these two deities are called the Virtue of Heaven and the Evil of Earth. This sect has thrived in China for nearly four thousand years, and it seems to have originated from Babylon when those people came to populate this kingdom. (p. 239)17
Daoism, by contrast, was identified as “the sect of the Magicians and Persian evil wizards” that “seems to be a branch of the ancient Zoroaster” and Buddhism as “the sect of the ancient Indian gymnosophists” that spread all over Asia but had Egyptian roots since it professes “a part of the doctrine of the Egyptians” (p. 238). This may well be the earliest example of an Egyptian genealogy for Buddhism—an idea that had a great career in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Chapters 2, 3, and 4). For Rodrigues, all three Chinese religions thus had their roots in the Middle East: Confucianism in Mesopotamia, Daoism in Persia, and Buddhism in Egypt.
Since no one except Noah and his family had survived the great deluge, all three religions could not but have their ultimate origin with someone on the ark. The usual suspect was Ham, the son of Noah who had seen his father naked while drunk and whose son Canaan had been cursed by Noah (Genesis 9:25). According to Rodrigues, the Chinese people were descendants of Belus who “is the same as Nimrod, the grandson of Ham” who began to reign just after the confusion of tongues in Babel. The Chinese settled in their land after traveling “from the Tower of Babel straight after the Confusion of Tongues” and were “the first to develop . . . astrology and other mathematical arts and other liberal and mechanical arts” (Rodrigues 2001:355). Especially the “science of judicial astrology” that Chinese Confucians still practice “after the fashion of the Chaldeans with figures of odd and even numbers” was “spread throughout the world by Ham, son of Noah” (p. 356). All this led Rodrigues to the expected conclusion:
According to this and the other errors that they [the Chinese] have held since then concerning God, the creation of the universe, spiritual substances, and the soul of man, as well as inevitable fate, the Chinese seem to be descendants of Ham, because he held similar errors and taught them to his descendants, who then took them with them when they set off to populate the world. (p. 356)
But how did such knowledge reach China? As Noah’s descendants dispersed to populate the world after the Confusion of Tongues in Babylon, “the wiser families” according to Rodrigues took along such knowledge (and possibly also books) and proceeded to spread them throughout the world. In some places this knowledge was lost, but in others (like China) it was preserved (p. 378). If the transmission of genuine religion extended from God via Adam, Seth, and Enoch to Noah, how about the antediluvian transmission of false religion?
In addition to this astrological truth acquired through experience by the good sons of Seth, the wicked sons of Cain invented many conceits, innumerable superstitions, and errors. . . . they would commit many evil deeds and offences against God with the encouragement of the devil, to whom they had given themselves. For as it is written about him [Ham] and Cain, they were the first idolaters in the world and inventors of the magical arts. As he was evilly inclined, Ham, the son of Noah, was much given to this magical and judicial art, which he learnt from Cain’s descendants before the Flood. (p. 378)
While the Chinese had safeguarded some useful scientific knowledge and the use of writing (p. 331) from the good transmission and thus had possibly managed to develop the world’s earliest true writing system (p. 350), their religions, including Confucianism, unfortunately carried the strong imprint of Ham and the evil transmission. Rodrigues knew little about India, which he had only briefly visited on the way to Japan as a teenager. For him India’s naked philosophers or gymnosophists and the Brahmans were all “disciples of Shaka’s doctrine” (p. 360), and since Shaka (Shakyamuni Buddha) had “lived long before them,” it was from him that they had learned such mistaken doctrines as that of a multitude of worlds (p. 360)—one of the views, nota bene, that around this time (1600) landed Giordano Bruno on the stake. Rodrigues thus regarded all three religions of China as descendants of the Hamite line that ultimately goes back to Cain, the slayer of his brother Abel. Though Buddhism was transmitted via India and reached China later than Confucianism and Daoism, it had the same ultimate root and atheist core. As we will see in Chapter 3, Rodrigues’s vision of an underlying unity of Asian religions had a great future in the eighteenth century.
While Rodrigues fought against the ancient theology of Ricci and other Jesuits in China, a similar battle unfolded on the Indian subcontinent. In India, too, missionaries who were convinced that India’s ancient religion belonged to the evil transmission fought against colleagues who believed that India had once been strictly monotheistic. The latter saw it as a land of pure primeval monotheism that, alas, had in time become clouded by the fumes of Brahmanic superstition.18 The most famous Jesuit in India to hold the latter view was Roberto DE NOBILI (1577–1656), who was later falsely accused of having authored Voltaire’s Ezour-vedam. The real authors of the Ezourvedam, French Jesuit missionaries in India,19 were also partisans of Indian Urmonotheism—and so was their contemporary and critic in France, Voltaire.
One of Voltaire’s favorite teachers at the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand in Paris was Father René Joseph DE TOURNEMINE (1661–1739), the chief editor of the journal Mémoires de Trévoux. Father Tournemine had been involved in the controversy about the Chinese Rites that culminated in 1700 with the banning of several books on China at the Sorbonne. This so-called Querelle des rites had been accompanied by the publication of reams of pamphlets and books and is a striking example of public attention to oriental issues in Voltaire’s youth and of their impact on the established religion in Europe (Étiemble 1966; Pinot 1971; Cummins 1993).
On the losing side of the rites controversy, which came to a peak one century after Ricci in Voltaire’s school years, were those who agreed with his idea that the ancient Chinese had from remote antiquity venerated God and abandoned pure monotheism only much later under the influence of Persian magic (Daoism) and Indian idolatry (Buddhism). They liked to evoke Ricci’s statement about having read with his own eyes in Chinese books that the ancient Chinese had worshipped a single supreme God. In order to explain how this pure ancient religion had degenerated into idolatry, they cited Ricci’s story about the dispatch in the year 65 C.E. of a Chinese embassy to the West in search of the true faith (Trigault 1617:120–21). Instead of bringing back the good news of Jesus, the story went, the Chinese ambassadors had stopped short on the way and returned infected with the idolatrous teachings of an Indian impostor called Fo (Buddha). In the following centuries, this doctrine had reportedly contaminated the whole of East Asia and turned people away from original monotheism. Since Ricci’s story20 was told in one of the seventeenth century’s most widely translated and read books about Asia, Nicolas Trigault’s edition of Ricci’s History of the Christian Expedition to the Kingdom of China (first published in Latin in 1615), it had an enormous influence on the European perception of Asia’s religious history.
Ricci’s extremist successors, the so-called Jesuit figurists (see Chapter 5), sought to locate the ancient monotheistic creed of the Chinese not just in Confucian texts but also in the Daoist Daodejing (Book of the Way and Its Power) and of course in the book that some believed to be the oldest extant book of the world, the Yijing (or I-ching; Book of Changes). These figurists included the French China missionaries Joachim Bouvet (1656–1730), the correspondent of Leibniz, and younger Jesuit colleagues like Joseph-Henri Prémare (1666–1736) and Jean-Francois Foucquet (1665–1741), the man to whom Voltaire later falsely attributed the translation of his own “Chinese catechism.”21 The Jesuits of the Ricci camp thought that since genuine monotheism had existed in a relatively pure state at least until the time of Confucius, their role as missionaries essentially consisted in reawakening the old faith, documenting its “prophecies” regarding Christ, identifying its goal and fulfillment as Christianity, and eradicating the causes of religious degeneration such as idolatry, magic, and superstition. Ritual vestiges of ancient monotheism were naturally exempted from the purge and subject to “accommodation.”
By contrast, the extremists in the victorious opposite camp of the Chinese Rites controversy held that—regardless of possible vestiges of monotheism and prediluvian science—divine revelation came exclusively through the channels of Abraham and Moses, that is, the Hebrew tradition, and was fulfilled in Christianity. This meant that the Old and New Testaments were the sole genuine records of divine revelation and that all unconnected rites and practices were to be condemned. From this exclusivist perspective, the sacred scriptures of other nations could only contain fragments of divine wisdom if they had either plagiarized Judeo-Christian texts or aped their teachers and doctrines.
But China was not the only country whose religious pedigree was questioned. As early as the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) had pored over the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistos and oracular texts reputed to contain vestiges of pre-Judaic monotheism. In those days the focus of interest was mostly on Egypt, which (at least in heathen circles) had long been regarded as the cradle of humankind. After the discovery of the Americas (“West Indies”) (1492) and the exploration of the “East Indies” following Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of Africa and arrival in India (1498), the possibility of finding pre-Mosaic texts containing vestiges of God’s revelation in other civilized regions had to be considered seriously. Following the lead of Epiphanius, who had first identified the Brahmans as descendants of Abraham and Keturah (Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo 1797:63), Guillaume Postel (1510–81) speculated in his interesting book De originibus (On the Origins) that the Indian Brahmans (“Abrahmanes”) are direct descendants of Abraham (Postel 1553b:68–69). Postel was the first to suggest that India might harbor extremely ancient scriptures that could finally bring “absolute clarity” to the Mosaic narrative (p. 72). He thought that India was a land in which “infinite treasures of history and antediluvian books are hidden” and surmised that Enoch’s books could be found there (p. 72). Though his idea was not exactly orthodox, Postel clearly stayed within the biblical framework since Enoch is one of the antediluvian heroes praised in the Bible and revered in Christianity as a pre-Judaic “pagan saint.”22 However, the emphasis on antediluvian texts by Enoch and possibly even older figures such as Seth, the good son of Adam, could also be interpreted as an attack on Mosaic authority and the Old Testament. At any rate, Postel postulated two Abrahamic transmissions: a familiar one in the Middle East and an alternative one to the “sons of the Orient” (p. 64) who were none other than the Indian Brahmans. Though it remained unclear what texts and doctrines this oriental lineage of Abraham had actually transmitted or produced, the tantalizing possibility remained in the air that a kind of alternative (and possibly more ancient) Old Testament could exist in India.
Postel’s Abrahamic Brahmans soon became the object of criticism, for example, in Henry Lord’s A Discoverie of the Sect of the Banians, which asserted that the Indians had never heard of Abraham (Lord 1630:71–72). Despite the criticism, in Voltaire’s time there were still supporters of this rather effective way of incorporating the Indians (and other Asians linked to them) into the biblical lineage. One of them was Isaac Newton,23 who wrote in his famous Chronology that was studied by Voltaire,
This religion of the Persian empire was composed partly of the institutions of the Chaldaeans, in which Zoroastres was well skilled, and partly of the institutions of the ancient Brachmans; who are supposed to derive even their name from the Abrahamans, or sons of Abraham, born of his second wife Keturah, instructed by their father in the worship of ONE GOD without images, and sent into the east, where Hystaspes was instructed by their successors. (Newton 1964:5.247)
Another supporter of Postel’s hypothesis was the Jesuit Jean Venant BOUCHET (1655–1732), one of the major contributors to the large collection of Jesuit mission letters entitled Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, which was required reading for men like Voltaire, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Constantin-François Volney, William Jones, and anyone interested in Asia and its religions. The India part of this collection contains a total of nine letters by Bouchet. By far the most famous and influential ones are those to the bishop of Avranches, Pierre-Daniel Huët (1630–1721). Huët’s Demonstratio evangelica of 1678 attempted to prove the unbeatable antiquity of the Old Testament by asserting that all pagan gods derive from Moses (and occasionally other Hebrew patriarchs) or from Moses’s wife or sister. D. P. Walker (1972:216) wrote of being “lulled into a coma by the monotony of ‘Vulcanus idem ac Moses. Typhon idem ac Moses . . . Zoroastres idem ac Moses . . . Apollo idem ac Moses. Pan idem ac Moses . . .’.”24 Huët’s purpose was not the coma of his readers but the fortification of his (and some readers’) wobbling faith in the trustworthiness of Moses. The onslaught could not be ignored: there were, of course, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) with his theory of pre-Adamites (1655) and Baruch de Spinoza (1632–77) with his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), who both attacked the Old Testament’s value as a textual source. But hardly less dangerous were assertions by the likes of Martino MARTINI (1614–1661), the Jesuit missionary who shocked Europe by his report that Chinese historical records reached back to antediluvian times (Martini 1658; Collani 2000). Huët’s herculean effort had filled his house with so many books that it ended up collapsing, and Bouchet’s letters from India may have been designed to prevent Huët’s precarious faith (Walker 1972:219) from suffering the same fate. Additionally, these letters mark the onset of a gradual shift from interest in China—which had dominated the second half of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth century—to the focus on India promoted by Voltaire that fed the orientalist revolution described in this book.
Voltaire’s Sermon des cinquante, the earliest print of which has been backdated to 1749,25 is something like a prayer book of a society of fifty “pious and reasonable learned people” who meet every Sunday, pray together, and then listen to a sermon before dining and collecting money for the poor. If one replaces “dining” by “breaking bread,” one immediately gets Voltaire’s point: this is the Sunday service of his religion for “reasonable learned people.” After the initial prayer to the one unborn and undying God who rewards good and punishes evil, the president of the society begins his sermon as follows:
My brothers, religion is the secret voice of God who speaks to all human beings; it must unite them all, not divide them. Thus any religion that belongs only to a single people is false. Ours is in principle the religion of the entire universe; because we venerate a Supreme Being, like all nations do; we practice the justice which all nations teach, and we reject all the lies that the peoples accuse each other of. In agreement with them about the principle that unites them, we differ from them with regard to everything that makes them fight. The point that unites all people of all times must necessarily be the unique core of truth, and the points in which they differ, the standards of lie: religion must be in accordance with morality, and it must be universal like morality. Thus any religion that offends morality is necessarily false. It is under this double perspective of perversity and falsity that in this discourse we will examine the books of the Hebrews and those who have succeeded to them. (Voltaire 1749:4–5)
This pamphlet is Voltaire’s deist manifesto, whose beginning already indicates that it entails a harsh indictment against Jewish and Christian exclusivism. It is an impassioned plea against the sects of Moses and Jesus and all their superstitions, divisions, hatred, persecutions, and brutality, and ends with a call to return to a pure, united religion:
Oh my brothers! can one commit such outrages against mankind? Have not our fathers already relieved the people from transsubstantiation, the veneration of creatures and bones of the dead, and from oral confession, indulgences, exorcisms, false miracles, and ridiculous images? Have not the people become accustomed to be deprived of such superstition? One must have the courage to take some further steps. The people are not as idiotic as one might think. They will easily accept a wise and simple cult of a unique God that, we are told, the sons of Noah professed and all the sages of antiquity practiced, as all scholars in China accept. (p. 26)
Voltaire was a convinced deist, and the deists’ creed was thoroughly inclusive: not just those born into a certain region or era or religion had received God’s revelation but all humankind. True religion thus had to be natural religion, that is, the religion that God had poured into the heart of every human being. For this religion, the concept of universal consent was crucial, as the beginning of Voltaire’s sermon shows: all nations and men belong to God’s axis of good. Voltaire was not only in search of a universal history but also of a universal religion; and as soon as he embarked on his quest for a universal history during the 1740s, he also began to examine the religions of the world, particularly those of ancient Asia. Thanks to the writings of Ricci and his successors, he found that in China a pure veneration of God without any superstition and accompanied by excellent morality had once existed. However, as in other countries, this initial purity had become adversely affected through priestcraft and “the superstition of the bonzes” (Pomeau 1995:158). Voltaire was not interested in a simple extension of the biblical narrative to other countries, as was the case with the figurists in China or Father Bouchet in India who sought a link to a “good” son of Noah. That would have been tantamount to letting the Jews and their exclusivist divinity continue monopolizing human origins. For him it was not a question of the transmission of exclusively revealed truths or of the plagiarism of sacred scriptures in the sole possession of one people. Voltaire’s eye was set on a true universal religion, a pure theism forming the root of all creeds. Already in a pamphlet of 1742 he had written,
Deism is a religion that is present in all religions; it is a metal that alloys with all others and whose veins run underground to the four corners of the world. This mine is more exposed, more dug in China; everywhere else it is hidden and the secret is only in the hands of the adepts. There is no land with more adepts than England. (p. 159)
One of these “adepts” was Edward HERBERT, Baron of Cherbury (c. 1600–1655), who had built his central argument on “universal consent,” that is, a common (monotheist) denominator to all religions of past and present. Voltaire thought that a pure, uncluttered monotheism suited to the taste of modern deists had existed in the remote past and that traces of it could be found in the most ancient cultures. Like his teacher Tournemine, Voltaire had with much interest studied the observations of Thomas HYDE (1636–1703) on the religion of Persia (1700) and found himself in agreement with the English scholar’s argument that monotheism had anciently existed everywhere and left vestiges in the form of texts, myths, and rituals far older than those of Judaism. Of course he was also interested in such vestiges because they offered a chance to undermine biblical authority and its monopoly on ancient history. Was God less intolerant, cruel, and vindictive in texts other than the Old Testament—texts that were potentially much older than the scribblings of Moses and far less offensive to a modern deist who believed in God’s universal revelation in the form of natural law for all rather than a secret communication to an individual or tribe?
Voltaire’s search for vestiges of ancient monotheism thus formed part and parcel of his quest for a universal history that began in earnest in the 1740s. “Universal histories” such as the pioneering work by Jacques-Bénigne BOSSUET (1627–1704) tended to begin with the creation of the world in 4004 B.C.E. (Bossuet 1681:7) and to feature events such as Enoch’s miraculous ascension in 3017 B.C.E. (pp. 8–9) and the universal deluge of 2348 B.C.E. For Bossuet, the time up to 1491 B.C.E., when Moses wrote down God’s law, was “the period of natural law [Loy de Nature] when people had only natural reason [la raison naturelle] and the traditions of their ancestors to govern themselves” (pp. 17–18). From Bossuet’s perspective, the histories and religions of all people were rooted in the events described in the Old Testament. Bossuet was well informed about the Chinese and had a hand in the campaign to condemn the Chinese Rites as idolatrous; indeed, it was through his offices that a “Letter to the Pope about the Chinese idolatries and superstitions” was printed (Hazard 1961:197). He was incensed that the Jesuits had dared to write of a “Chinese church” and thundered, “Strange kind of church without faith, without promise, without covenant, without sacraments, without the slightest sign of divine testimony. . . . After all, this is nothing but a confused pile of atheism, politics, irreligion, idolatry, magic, divination, and spells!” (p. 197). In the first edition of his universal history, Bossuet simply ignored this pile of refuse. But when he published the third edition of his history in 1700, at the height of the Chinese Rites controversy, he was forced to add alternative year numbers from the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. The Jesuit China missionaries had long made use of Septuagint chronology because it added 959 years to the world’s age and thus guaranteed that the starting shot of biblical history rang before that of the Chinese annals. Thus Bossuet’s pupil, the French royal heir apparent, and his numerous other readers needed to be informed that there was a second biblically supported date for the world’s creation, namely, 4963 B.C.E. Bossuet’s twelve epochs of world history, which so beautifully show his biblical and Mediterranean bias (1. creation; 2. deluge; 3. Abraham; 4. Moses; 5. Troy; 6. Salomo; 7. Romulus and Rome; 8. Cyrus; 9. Scipio and Carthago; 10. Jesus; 11. Constantine; 12. Charlemagne), thus all received a second, alternative date. As Kaegi (1938:82) aptly put it, these double numbers exposed “a small crack in the royal edifice that within a few decades deepened and eventually led to its collapse.” But Bossuet’s universal history was not the only one that featured a staunchly biblical narrative of origins. Even some more recent works such as the gigantic English An Universal History from the Earliest Accounts to the Present whose publication began in 1730 featured chapters titled “From the Creation to the Flood” and “From the Deluge to the Birth of Abraham” (Sale et al. 1747:1.1–153).
When Voltaire in the early 1740s set out to write his Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII (which in the following will simply be called Essai), he intended not to supplant Bossuet’s history but rather to supplement it; but it irked him no end that a few rather insignificant nations around the Mediterranean Sea had hijacked the early history of humankind. In the introduction to the first fragments for his new beginning of universal history, Voltaire wrote,
Until now, the majority of Universal Histories treated other peoples as if they did not exist at all. Greece and the Romans have seized all of our attention, and when the famous Bossuet says a word about the Mohammedans, he speaks of them only as an inundation of barbarians, even though many of these nations possessed useful arts that we inherited from them. . . . We are neither just nor wise to ignore them. (Voltaire 1745:8)
While getting ready to remedy this state of affairs, Voltaire wanted to collect what his predecessors had neglected (p. 5) in order to furnish a truly universal history of “the customs of man and the revolutions of the human spirit” (p. 5). The first draft chapters of this new history dealt not with Adam and creation but with China and India, which pointed to a looming revolution in Europe’s perception of origins. Voltaire’s central and most influential work is without any doubt the Essai. With regard to his view of Asian religions and to the development of his vision of India and its religions, the Essai is most interesting because its different editions reflect different stages of Voltaire’s outlook. We will thus focus on this central text of Voltaire and adduce other works as needed. Table 2 lists the stages of the Essai’s genesis with brief remarks about the relevance for our inquiry.
TABLE 2. VOLTAIRE’S ESSAI SUR LES MOEURS AND ASIAN RELIGIONS
1745 |
The 1745 fragments (later used in the Essai) published in the Mercure de France contain an introduction and the first two chapters on China and India which reflect Voltaire’s early view of Asian religions and literature. |
1756 |
The first edition of the Essai sur les moeurs contains many changes and additions to the 1745 texts on China and India reflecting Voltaire’s intensive study of missionary and travel literature before his encounter with the Ezour-vedam. Apart from the China and India chapters, ch. 120 on Japan contains information about Voltaire’s view of India and its sacred literature. |
1761 |
The second edition of the Essai sur les moeurs reflects Voltaire’s study of the Ezour-vedam and contains—apart from a new chapter on the Brahmans, the Veda, and the Ezour-vedam—also many interesting revisions and additions. The Indies part of the Japan chapter now forms a separate chapter (ch. 139) and contains some revisions and additions. |
1765 |
Voltaire’s La philosophie de l’histoire (published separately under the pseudonym of Abbé Bazin but in 1769 incorporated into the Essai sur les moeurs) contains Voltaire’s views on the early history of religion and contains a chapter on “Bram, Abram, Abraham” and one each on India and China. (Voltaire’s 1767 La défense de mon oncle is a defense against a critic of the La philosophie de l’histoire and, besides adding some relevant information, represents the apex of Ezour-vedam influence) |
1769 |
The third edition of the Essai sur les moeurs newly features the 1765 La philosophie de l’histoire as Introduction to the Essai. The Essai itself also contains numerous passages reflecting Voltaire’s study of Holwell’s Interesting historical events and its fragments of the Chartah Bhade. |
1775 |
For collective editions of his works, Voltaire revised his Essai text three more times and added some polemics (Pomeau 1963:xviii); these revisions are of little importance to our inquiry. |
Voltaire’s admiration of India is often described in the context of his purported shift from a similar but earlier admiration of China. In the eyes of Wilhelm Halbfass, this transition from infatuation with China to indomania happened in 1760 on contact with the Ezour-vedam:
China at first appeared much more attractive and important than India in Voltaire’s eyes, and he played an active role in helping to idealize the “practical philosophy” and civic institutions of the Chinese. However, after studying the manuscript of the Ezourvedam which the Chevalier de Maudave had given him in 1760, he became convinced that the world’s oldest culture and most pristine religious thought was to be found in India and not in China. (Halbfass 1990:57)
However, Daniel Hawley detected some admiration for India already in the 1756 version of Voltaire’s Essai. But in support of his thesis that until the encounter with the Ezour-vedam Voltaire’s India was the “exotic India” of Bababec and the Fakirs (1750), Hawley states that “before 1756 the majority of references to India in the Essai were no more than exotic details” (1974:166). A closer look at Voltaire’s 1745 Essai chapters on China and India, however, results in a completely different picture.
Since Voltaire took the revolutionary step of beginning his universal history not with the creation story and Adam but rather with a chapter on China, questions of chronology were of great importance. Voltaire used information furnished by the learned Father Antoine Gaubil of the Jesuit China mission to characterize the accuracy of Chinese historiography as “indisputable” because it is “the only one based on astronomical observations” (Voltaire 1745:9). As we have seen, Bossuet (1681:17–18) had Moses write down God’s law in 1491 B.C.E. or, if one used the Septuagint-based calculation, in 2450 B.C.E. At the beginning of Voltaire’s China chapter of 1745, Gaubil’s information is used to show that China’s first king reigned twenty-five centuries before Christ. The fact that he already united fifteen kingdoms, Voltaire wrote, “proves that several centuries earlier this region was very populated, governed, and partitioned in numerous sovereign countries” (p. 11). Voltaire adduced China’s gigantic population and towns, the Great Wall, its ancient use of paper and printing, and many other facts to convince his readers of both the antiquity and excellence of Chinese civilization (pp. 11–18). But near the end of his litany comes the surprising statement that there is one thing that might merit more attention than all China’s mentioned achievements: “that from time immemorial they partition the month in weeks of seven days” (p. 18). This statement persisted unrevised through all subsequent editions of the Essai, but an explanation added in the 1769 version clarifies its significance: “The Indians used this; Chaldea modeled its method on it and passed it on to the small country of Judea; but it was not adopted in Greece” (Voltaire 1829:15.268).26 The fact that Voltaire paid so much attention to this and mentioned it once more in his India chapter of 1745 (“their weeks always had seven days,” Voltaire 1745:29) indicates that already in 1745 Voltaire was determined to use ancient India and China to destabilize biblical authority. The idea that the basic scheme of the Old Testament’s creation story, the tale of seven days, was derived from far older peoples further east was a direct attack on Judeo-Christianity.
While Judea clearly was no more in competition for the oldest human culture, Voltaire was at this point still vacillating between India and China. Yet there were already signs that India was about to gain the upper hand. Voltaire mentioned that the ancient Greeks had traveled to India for instruction in the sciences and that the Arabs had adopted Indian numbers; but what most attracted his interest was the report that the Chinese emperor treasured Indian antiquities: “Perhaps the ancient Indian medals, which the Chinese make such a fuss about, are proof that the arts were cultivated in India before they became known to the Chinese” (p. 8). Regarding the other competitor, Egypt, Voltaire argued,
If one had to decide between the Indies and Egypt, I would think that the sciences are much older in the Indies; my conjecture is based on the fact that the land of the Indies is much easier to inhabit than that in the vicinity of the Nile River whose inundations doubtlessly deterred the first colonizers until they tamed this river by digging canals; besides, the soil of the Indies shows a much more varied fertility and must have stimulated human curiosity and industry to a greater degree. (p. 29)
Even though Voltaire as early as 1745 suspected that the earliest human civilization was in India, his idealization of China held up as he added to the above quotation that in India “the science of government and of morals does not seem to have been as sophisticated as with the Chinese” (p. 29). But the question of origins was far from solved in Voltaire’s mind. Eleven years later, in the 1756 version, he was to replace this last sentence about Chinese sophistication with the following:
Some have believed that the human race originated from Hindustan, arguing that the weakest animal had to be born in the mildest climate; but all origin is veiled for us. Who is able to say that there were no insects, no grass, no trees in our climates when they were present in the orient? (p. 30)
This argument about insects points to Voltaire’s belief that human beings of different races could, just like insects, have originated anywhere on the globe. In the 1761 version, he added a long paragraph in which he mocked Bibleinspired monogenetic ideas, including that of the Ezour-vedam. Voltaire’s dismissive attitude toward the Ezour-vedam is at odds with the kind of admiration and complete trust that Halbfass’s and Hawley’s narratives make readers expect. Voltaire’s trenchant critique of the Ezour-vedam tale of Adimo (here misprinted Damo but later corrected) clearly shows his unwillingness to replace biblical monogenesis with an Indian equivalent:
All these considerations [about the fertility and easy life in India] seem to strengthen the old idea that mankind was born in a land where nature did everything for men and left them with almost nothing to do; but this only proves that the Indians are indigenous, and it does not prove at all that other kinds of people came from these regions. The whites, negroes, reds, Laplanders, Samoyedes, and Albinos certainly do not stem from the same land. The difference between all these species is as marked as that between a greyhound and a mullet; thus, only a badly instructed and pigheaded Brahman would pretend that all humans descend from the Indian Damo and his wife. (Voltaire 1761:1.44)
Returning to the 1745 India chapter after this foretaste of Voltaire’s critical attitude toward the Ezour-vedam and his rejection of any monogenetic conception of origin, we note that in 1745, too, Indian religion was harshly criticized. From 1745 to the end of his life, Voltaire used the term “Bracmanes” or “Brachmanes” for the ancient clergy of India and “Bramins” for their modern successors. In 1745, he accused both the “Bonzes” (Buddhist clergy) and Brachmanes of fostering superstition, believing in metempsychosis or transmigration of souls and thus “spreading mindless stupidity [abrutissement] together with error” (Voltaire 1745:30): “Some of them are deceitful, others fanatic, and several of them are both;” and all “still prod, whenever they can, widows to immolate themselves on the body of their husbands” (p. 30).
We have already encountered several avatars of the idea that priests believe in a secret “inner” doctrine while misleading the people with “outer” lies and superstitious practices. This idea did not originate in the missions but already forms the basis of Plutarch’s portrayal of Egyptian priests in his Isis and Osiris and runs like a thread via Lactantius, Augustine’s City of God, and many other texts to the eighteenth century with its Jesuit figurists, John Toland’s Letters to Serena (1704), and Ramsay’s Voyages de Cyrus (1728) to Voltaire’s Essai. We will see in Chapters 2, 3, and 5 that one of these avatars, the Buddha’s deathbed confession story, played an important role throughout the eighteenth century. Of course, the conception of an “inner” doctrine appreciated by the elite and an “outer” one for the ignorant masses was also fundamental for Ricci and other missionaries who portrayed Chinese or Indian religions in this manner and produced the reading material that inspired Voltaire. Thus, it is by no means surprising that he adopted this very scheme in his 1745 portrait of Indian and Chinese religions. With regard to the Indians, Voltaire wrote,
These Brahmins, who maintain the populace in the most stupid idolatry nevertheless have in their hands one of the most ancient books of the world, written by one of their earliest sages, in which only one Supreme Being is recognized. They preserve with great care this testimony that condemns them. (Voltaire 1745:30)
As Pomeau (1995:161) pointed out, Voltaire here probably amalgamated information about two Indian books from a letter of January 30, 1709, by Father Lalane included in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses collection. The first concerns a book called Panjangan that proves the Indian recognition of one supreme being. Very much in the tracks of his Jesuit colleagues in China, Father Lalane wrote,
Based on the evidence from several of their books, it seems evident to me that they [the Indians] formerly had quite distinct knowledge of the true God. This is easy to see from the beginning of a book called Panjangan whose text I have translated word for word: “I venerate this Being that is subject neither to change nor anxiety [inquiétude]; this Being whose nature is indivisible; this Being whose simplicity does not admit of any composition of qualities; this Being who is the origin and the cause of all beings and who surpasses all in excellence; this Being who is the support of the universe and the source of the three-fold power.” (Le Gobien 1781–83:11.219)27
The second refers to the Veda, which Father Lalane described as follows:
The most ancient books, which contained a purer doctrine and were written in a very ancient language, were gradually neglected, and the use of this language has entirely disappeared. This is certain with regard to the book of religion called Vedam, which the scholars of the land understand no more; they limit themselves to reading it and to learning certain passages by heart, which they then pronounce in a mysterious manner to dupe the people more easily. (p. 220)
For Voltaire’s China the same distinction applied. On one hand, he was enchanted with China’s “morality, this obedience to the laws joined to the veneration of a supreme Being” that “form the religion of China, of its emperors and scholars [lettrés]” (Voltaire 1745:22). In the 1745 Essai fragments, Confucius is said to have “established” this religion “which consists in being just and benevolent [bienfaisant]” (p. 22) and conveyed “the sanest ideas about the Divinity that the human spirit can form without revelation” (p. 23). As Voltaire did not believe in any divine revelation other than the laws of nature, reason, and the moral principles in everyone’s heart, it is clear that in 1745 he regarded this idealized Confucianism as the model of a religion. On the other hand, China also had its superstitions for the masses. Sects like the cult of “Laokium” (Laozi; Daoism) that “believe in evil spirits and magic spells [enchantements]” and “the superstition of the Bonzes” who “offer the most ridiculous cult” to the Idol Fo (Buddha) (p. 23) are certainly not to the liking of the “magistrates and scholars who are altogether separate from the people.” But these members of the elite who “nourish themselves with a purer substance” nevertheless insist that superstitious sects “be tolerated in China for use of the vulgar people, like coarse food apt to feed them” (p. 25). In Voltaire’s religion there was no tolerance for intolerance.
Unlike the scattered chapters published in 1745, the 1756 Essai was the first complete version that Voltaire submitted to the public. It resounded, as we will see in Chapter 7, not only throughout Europe but even elicited an interesting echo in far-away India.
The most striking change in the Essai’s India chapter is found at its end where Voltaire eliminated two passages that were cited above. The first is about the bonzes and brachmanes who spread mindless stupidity and are deceitful, fanatic, or both; and the second is about the brahmins who maintain the populace in the most stupid idolatry even though they safeguard a book that recognizes a supreme being. In place of such critique, Voltaire in 1756 almost justifies the Brahmins:
It would still be difficult to reconcile the sublime ideas which the brahmins preserve about the supreme being with their garrulous mythology [mythologie fabuleuse] if history would not show us similar contradictions with the Greeks and Romans. (Voltaire 1756:1.32)
What had happened in the eleven years between 1745 and 1756? How did the Brahmins get rid of their superstitions, fanaticism, and evil instigation of the ritual suicide of widows (sati)? And how did the “most stupid idolatry” get transformed into a “garrulous” or “fabulous” mythology whose contradictions are not worse than those of the Greeks and Romans? A partial answer is not found in the India and China chapters at the beginning of the 1756 Essai but rather way back in chapter 120, “On Japan.” For some reason, in this unlikely place Voltaire included new information on India, and here he also mentions a lesson learned through experience:
It is true that one must read almost all reports that arrive from faraway lands with a spirit of doubt. People are busier sending us goods from the coasts of Malabar than truths. A particular case is often portrayed as a general custom. (Voltaire 1756:3.203)
Voltaire was now informed about some of the most striking features of Asian religions. He saw “almost all peoples steeped in the opinion that their gods have frequently joined us on earth”: Vishnu had gone through nine incarnations, and the god of the Siamese, Sammonocodom (Buddha), reportedly took human form no less than 150 times (p. 204). Voltaire noted that the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans had very similar ideas, and he sought to interpret this “error” amiably and monotheistically:
Such a rash, ridiculous, and universal error nevertheless comes from a reasonable feeling that is at the bottom of all hearts. One feels naturally one’s dependence on a supreme being; and the error which always joins truth has almost everywhere caused people to regard the gods as lords who came at times to visit and reform their domains. (p. 205)
Another characteristic common to many religions is identified as atonement: “Man has always felt the need for clemency. This is the origin of the frightening penances to which the bonzes, brahmins, and fakirs subject themselves” (p. 205). For the Indian cult of the lingam, he also found Mediterranean counterparts in “the procession of the phallum of the Egyptians and the priapus of the Romans” (p. 205). Voltaire thought it “probable that this custom was introduced in times of simplicity and that at first people only thought of honoring the divinity through the symbol of the life it gave to us” (p. 205). These interpretations show how eager Voltaire was to find vestiges of monotheism even in ideas and cults that not so long ago would have elicited harsh words of condemnation or ridicule. Now he not only tried to interpret them as signs of ancient monotheism but also pointed to an ancient source:
Would you believe that among so many extravagant opinions and bizarre superstitions these Indian heathens all recognize, as we do, an infinitely perfect being? Whom they call the being of beings, the sovereign being, invisible, incomprehensible, formless, creator, and preserver, just and merciful, who deigns to impart himself to the people to guide them to eternal happiness? These ideas are contained in the Vedam, which is the book of the ancient brachmanes. They are spread in modern books of the brahmins. (p. 206)
Voltaire then hints at the source of this information: “A learned Danish missionary on the coast of Tranquebar” who “cites several passages and several prayer formulae that seem to come from straightest reason and purest holiness.” Had he finally found an alternative to the Jewish Old Testament? While in 1756 he had quoted only the first five words of a single prayer from a book called Varabadu—“O sovereign of all beings, etc.” (p. 206)—the 1761 Essai features the whole prayer; and though the source is not further identified, it appears that Voltaire got all this information from the book published in 1724 by Mathurin Veyssière de LA CROZE (1661–1739) that will be analyzed in the next chapter.
Voltaire already appears to have used La Croze’s book when writing his brief 1745 portrayal of the cult of Fo or Foe (Ch. Buddha) that described its Indian origin around 1000 B.C.E. and its popularity in most of Asia (Voltaire mentions Japan, China, Tartary, Siam, and Tibet; 1745:23–25). Such information was found in La Croze’s survey of “Indian idolatry” (1724:424–519) that contained an early synthesis of ancient and contemporary information about phenomena that we today associate with Buddhism. But it also featured much information on Indian religion that Voltaire used for the 1756 version of his Essai. La Croze, a former Benedictine monk who had converted to Protestantism, had read early accounts of the sacred scriptures of India, the Vedas, and his status as Prussia’s royal librarian helped him get access to a treasure trove of recent information on India’s religions. These were the unpublished manuscripts of the German Lutheran missionary Bartholomäus ZIEGENBALG (1682–1719), who in 1706 had arrived in South India as India’s first Protestant missionary and spent thirteen years in the Danish enclave of Tranquebar on India’s southeastern coast (Tamil Nadu). Just two months after his arrival, Ziegenbalg proclaimed in a letter what was to become the tenor of his extensive studies of Hinduism: “They have many hundreds of gods yet recognize only a single divine Being as the origin of all gods and all other things” (Bergen 1708:19).28 This assertion of ancient Indian monotheism was not only repeated and documented in Ziegenbalg’s manuscripts but also found its way into two of Voltaire’s major sources, namely, La Croze (1724) and Niecamp (1745).
Near the beginning of La Croze’s investigation about the “idolatry of the Indies,” Voltaire read that “in spite of the grossest idolatry, the existence of the infinitely perfect Being is so well established with them [the Indians] that there is no room for doubt that they have preserved this knowledge since their first establishment in the Indies” (La Croze 1724:425). Calling the Indians “one of the oldest people on earth,” La Croze thought it “a very probable fact that in ancient times they had a quite distinct knowledge of the true God and that they offered an inner cult [culte interieur] to him which was not mixed with any profanation” (p. 426). To find out more about this, La Croze suggested, one would have to get access to the Vedam, “which is the collection of the ancient sacred scriptures of the Brachmanes” (p. 427). In the Vedam “in all likelihood one would find the antiquities [Antiquitez] which the superstitiously proud Brahmins conceal from the people of India whom they regard as profane” (p. 427). Consequently, the Brahmins (the modern successors of the ancient Brachmanes) introduce ordinary people only to “the exterior of religion enveloped in legends [fables] that are at least as extravagant as those of Greek paganism” (p. 428). According to La Croze, the Vedam, which can be read only by Brahmins who are its guardians, “enjoys the same authority with these idolaters as the Sacred Writ does with us” (p. 447). Always following Ziegenbalg’s and his fellow missionaries’ manuscripts, La Croze quoted a passage “from one of the [Indian] books” about God whom the Indians call “Barabara Vástou, that is, the Being of Beings” (p. 452).29 La Croze did not identify this book, but Voltaire must have been so impressed by the information about the monotheistic Vedas that, in the 1756 Essai, he jumped to the conclusion (Voltaire 1756:3.206): “These ideas are contained in the Vedam, which is the book of the ancient brachmanes.”30 In fact, the ideas mentioned by Voltaire—“the being of beings, the sovereign being, invisible, incomprehensible, formless, creator, and preserver, just and merciful, who deigns to impart himself to the people to guide them to eternal happiness”—were culled in almost identical sequence from a longer passage in La Croze, which reads as follows (words taken over by Voltaire are italicized):
The infinitely perfect Being is known to all these gentile pagans. They call it in their language Barabara Vástou, that is, the Being of Beings. Here is how they describe it in one of their books. “The Sovereign Being is invisible and incomprehensible, immobile and without shape or exterior form. Nobody has ever seen it; time has not included it: his essence fills all things, and all things have their origin from him. All power, all wisdom, all knowledge [science], all sanctity, and all truth are in him. He is infinitely good, just, and merciful. It is he who has created all, preserves all, and who enjoys to be among men in order to guide them to eternal happiness, the happiness that consists in loving and serving him.” (La Croze 1724:452)
With regard to the lingam cult Voltaire also followed La Croze and indirectly Ziegenbalg. La Croze had explained that “the lingum . . . is a symbolic representation of God . . . but only represents God as he materializes himself in creation,” (p. 455) while Voltaire speculated that this cult “was introduced in times of simplicity and that at first people only thought of honoring the divinity through the symbol of the life it gave to us” (Voltaire 1756:3.205).
At this point, Voltaire leaned toward India as the earliest human civilization (1756:1.30) and believed that the most ancient text of this civilization was called Vedam and contained a simple and pure monotheism. So he must have been elated when a reader of his 1756 Essai, Louis-Laurent de Féderbe, Chevalier (later Comte) DE MAUDAVE (1725–77), wrote to him from India two or three years after publication of the Essai. Maudave had left in May 1757 for India and in 1758 participated in the capture of Fort St. David and the siege of Madras (Rocher 1984:77). While stationed in South India, Maudave had gotten hold of French translations from the Veda31 and decided to write a letter to Voltaire. Having read the Japan chapter of the 1756 Essai, he knew how interested Voltaire was in finding documentation for ancient Indian monotheism through the Vedam. In the margin of a page of his Ezour-vedam manuscript (which he later passed on to Voltaire), Maudave scribbled next to two prayers to God: “Copy these prayers in the letter to M. de Voltaire” (p. 80).32 Though these prayers are not found in the extant fragment of Maudave’s letter, it is likely that Maudave included them in order to document the existence of pure monotheism in the Vedam. The second major point of Voltaire’s 1756 Essai that Maudave addressed in his letter was the cult of the lingam.33 In his discussion, Maudave quoted the Ezour-vedam as textual witness and offered to send Voltaire a replica of a linga and a copy of the Ezour-vedam (Rocher 1984:48).
Maudave’s letter to Voltaire described the Ezour-vedam as a dialogue written by the author of the Vedas: “This Dialogue presupposes that Chumontou is the author of the Vedams, that he wrote them to countervail the empty superstitions that spread among men and, above all, to halt the unfortunate progress of idolatry” (p. 49). Maudave also specifically mentioned the author of the text’s French translation: “Its author is Father Martin, the former Jesuit missionary at Pondichéry” (p. 49). Since this missionary had died in Rome in 1716, Maudave must have thought that the translation from the Sanskrit original was about fifty years old. This missionary connection clearly disturbed Maudave. First of all, a strange agreement with Christian doctrine made Maudave suspicious about the quality of the translation. More than that, he let Voltaire know that his doubts were specifically connected with the tendency of the translator’s Jesuit order to find traces of their own faith in just about every part of the world—in Chinese books, in Mexico, and even among the savages of South America (p. 80)! Maudave had carefully studied the Jesuit letters including those of Calmette that announced the dispatch of the four Vedas to Paris and wrote the following about their content to Voltaire:
This body of the religion and regulations of the country is divided in four books. There is one at the Royal Library. The first contains the history of the gods. The second the dogmas. The third the morals. The fourth the civil and religious rites. They are written in this mysterious language which is here discussed and which is called the Samscrout. (Ms 1765, Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, 118v)
hat puzzled Maudave above all was that this information about the content of the Vedas was in total contradiction with what he saw in the Ezourvedam. He wrote to Voltaire that the Ezour-vedam was a dialogue between two Brahmes, one of whom “believes in the religion of the Indies” while the other “defends the unity of God” (p. 122r). Maudave thought “this dialogue assumes that Chumontou is the author of the Vedams and that he wrote them to remedy the vain superstitions that spread among men and above all to stop the unfortunate progress of idolatry” (p. 122r). The Chumontou of the Ezour-vedam was both a fierce critic of rites and seemed to be the author of the Vedams. Maudave observed, “Here there is a very manifest contradiction since one book of the Vedams contains all the religious rites of which the cult of God forms a part” (p. 122v).
Maudave felt a problem that bothered many who read the Ezour-vedam and that will be explained in Chapter 7: somehow Chumontou seemed to be both the author of the Veda and its critic. At any rate, what Maudave knew about the content of the Veda must have made him think that the Ezourvedam was not the real Veda. He was suspicious of some kind of foul play and continued:
In spite of this [contradiction], I admit that the manuscript is quite singular. But I find in it propositions about the unity of God and the creation of the universe that are too direct and too conforming to our sacred scriptures to have complete trust in the fidelity of the translation. If you have some interest in seeing this manuscript, I will have it copied and will send it to you. (p. 122v)
Maudave thus expressed his doubts about the authenticity of the Ezourvedam, the quality of Father Martin’s translation, and the general tendency of Jesuits to find in texts exactly what they needed to find. Though by his own admission Maudave lacked the knowledge necessary to explain “the foundations of Indian religion” and wrote to Voltaire that the subject “had roused my curiosity only intermittently,” he expressed his disapproval of Jesuit accommodation strategy and let the patriarch of Ferney know that “the abominable superstitions of these peoples arouse my indignation” (Rocher 1984:79). Maudave knew of Voltaire’s strong interest in the Veda, and in this letter he both maintained that it must have been translated from Sanskrit and found that this text did not at all match his idea of the four Vedas. The depth of Maudave’s doubts about the Ezour-vedam’s quality of translation and possibly its authenticity was such that he offered to have a copy made for Voltaire only if he was at all interested in the manuscript (p. 48).
On the occasion of Maudave’s visit to Voltaire in late September or early October 1760, Voltaire received the Ezour-vedam along with an additional text called Cormo-Vedam.34 During the winter he studied the manuscript, and in the following spring, he reported that he had found a way to “make good use of it” (Voltaire 1980:6.287). He had decided to include a new chapter about “the Brachmanes, the Vedam, and the Ezourvedam” in the Essai’s 1761 edition and wrote this chapter during the summer of 1761. He then had a copy of Maudave’s texts made and on August 14 sent the original Maudave manuscripts to the Royal Library in Paris (Sinner 1771:128–29).
In 1762 Voltaire’s nephew, Abbé Vincent Mignot, mentioned the Ezourvedam in two of his five papers read at the Royal Academy of Inscriptions about the ancient philosophers of India. He thought that India had been inhabited earlier than Egypt but traced both the Indian and Egyptian religions back to the plain of Shinar (Sennaar) near the landing spot of Noah’s ark (Mignot 1768:122, 144). For Mignot the Ezour-vedam proved the early presence of monotheism in ancient India; in support of this view, he quoted one of its prayers: “You are the savior, the father, and the lord of the world; you see everything, you know everything, you rule over everything” (p. 263; transl. Rocher 1984:7). But some readers of the Ezour-vedam manuscript also noted a number of strange passages that betrayed a Western author. For example, Anquetil-Duperron35 remarked that Chumontou “does no more than to confront them [Indian legends] with the doubts of a philosopher who cannot be held to represent the religion of India” (Rocher 1984:8–9) and detected some passages that clearly stemmed from a European.36 But as early as 1762, Abbé Mignot made the connection betweeen the Ezour-vedam and the monotheistic “gnanigöl.”37 In one of his papers on the ancient philosophers of India, he described these Indians as modern successors of the ancient Brachmans. They are “intimately convinced of God’s oneness” and are regarded as “the sages and saints of India” who “openly reject the cult of idols and all superstitious practices of the nation in order to worship only God whom they call ‘Being of beings’ [l’être des êtres]” (Mignot 1768:218–19). In 1771 Anquetil-Duperron published his opinion that the text’s author was one of these “Ganigueuls” or “gnanigöl” described by Ziegenbalg and La Croze (Anquetil-Duperron 1771:1.lxxxv), and this opinion was later supported in the preface to the Ezour-vedam’s first printed edition of 1778 where Sainte-Croix informed the readers:
Everywhere in the Ezour-Védam we find the principal articles of the doctrine of the Ganigueuls . . . and therefore one cannot doubt that it was a philosopher of this sect who composed this work. A man immersed in the darkness of idolatry reports, under the name of Biache, the most accepted fables of India and exposes the entire system of popular theology of this country. The philosopher Chumontou rejects this mythology as contrary to good sense, or because he has not read of it in the ancient books, and expounds the fabulous accounts in a moral sense. . . . Responding to the questions of Biache, the Ganigueul philosopher explains the doctrine of the unity of God, creation, the nature of the soul, the dogma of punishment and reward in a future state, the cult appropriate for the supreme being, the duties of all states, etc. (Sainte-Croix 1778:1.146–47)
The association of these Gnanigöl with the Ezour-vedam will be discussed in Chapters 2 and 7; here I just note that anybody familiar with the arguments of deists and their opponents will immediately recognize the themes mentioned in this last phrase as central to the debate about Christianity. Though Sainte-Croix did not ascribe the text to a missionary, he regarded this teaching as quite different from that of the Vedam and explained that “Chumontou pretends to teach the Vedam by establishing his own system, and he does not bother to prove if it is really conform to the doctrine of that sacred book” (1.149). Such doubts led to the following conclusion about the text’s authorship and age: “This work which contains the exposition of the principles of the philosophy of the Ganigueuls, as opposed to the actual beliefs of Indian people, can certainly not be very old” (1.150). In his footnotes to the text of the Ezour-vedam, Sainte-Croix also added various critical remarks; for example, an argument of Chumontou is dismissed in the editor’s note by “Nothing more arbitrary and worse reasoned than this” (1.211), and exclamations such as “bad reasoning” (1.284) or “funny cosmography!” (1.254) pepper the notes. Furthermore, Sainte-Croix omitted some passages from the Ezour-vedam text because of his conviction that they were interpolations written by a European (1.267; 2.163).
Four years after the Ezour-vedam’s 1778 publication, Sonnerat (1782:1.215) described it as “definitely not one of the four Vedams” and as “a book of controversy, written by a missionary of Masulipatam” who “tried to reduce everything to the Christian religion” (Rocher 1984:13). In 1784, Gottfried Less wrote that the text reminds us of the Bible, must be based on that source, and is distinctly European and specifically French both in content and expression (pp. 15–16). Barely eight years after the Ezour-vedam’s publication and Voltaire’s death, August Hennings claimed that “today no one believes any longer in the authenticity of the Ezurvedam” (p. 16). Although this statement is exaggerated,38 it shows that harboring doubts about the text was normal among men who were far less skeptical and discerning about historical sources than Voltaire and had no inkling of Maudave’s reservations before he brought this manuscript to Europe. Like Maudave in the late 1750s, these readers tended to become suspicious as soon as they studied the text with some attention.
The Ezour-vedam is set up as a conversation between Chumontou (Sumantu) and Biache (Vyāsa). Like Ricci’s Western scholar, Chumontou presents himself as a reformer who wants to restore primeval monotheism to its pristine purity. The interlocutor Biache represents the degeneration of primeval purity into idolatry, polytheism, and priestcraft. Many of the themes discussed in the Ezour-vedam show such a strong Christian slant that one readily understands why Maudave wrote to Voltaire from India that he found the manuscript strange because it reminded him so much of the Bible and conformed so suspiciously to Jesuit mission strategy. A good example is the following explanation by Chumontou about the difference between man and animal that could hardly be more un-Indian:
In creating man, God has created everything for his use. The animals have been created to serve him. Trees, plants, fruit, the different foodstuffs and in the end everything on earth has been made to cater to his needs. The distress and pain that animals feel is inseparable from their state since they are made to serve man; but they are not a [karmic] effect or consequence of sin. Here is why: the punishment of sin is eternal in its nature but the distress that animals feel is only temporary. Trees, etc., do not have a soul and are thus incapable of committing sins. However vile and despicable man may be, he has a soul and is always endowed with reason. He has a propensity for sin, commits it, and after death he reaps eternal punishment. Likewise with virtue: a good man practices it during his life; and the moment of death is the happy instant when he begins to taste the fruit [of virtue] and to enjoy it in all eternity. (Sainte-Croix 1778:2.9–11)
Even a person like Maudave—who admitted at the end of his letter to Voltaire that he was more interested in the political situation of the country and in commerce (Rocher 1984:79)—must have felt skeptical when reading such an obviously Christian view of man’s relation to animals and of soul, hell, and paradise along with such an unequivocal refutation of rebirth and karma. But what would a man like Voltaire, the famous critic of the Jesuits and one of the most discerning and mischievous readers of religious texts of his time, see in this text?
If Maudave “was puzzled by the French Ezour-vedam to the point of doubting its authenticity” (Rocher 1984:80), Voltaire’s reaction on receiving the text from Maudave in the fall of 1760 is even more puzzling. We do not know what Maudave told him during his visit, but there is no doubt that he had informed Voltaire in writing (1) that the translator of the text was the Jesuit Pierre Martin (who had died in 1716) and (2) that he had doubts about the accuracy of the translation because of Jesuit involvement. However, shortly after Maudave’s visit, Voltaire wrote in a letter that he was going to establish contact with the Indian translator (“my brahmin”) and joked that he hoped that this Brahmin would be more reasonable than the professors at the Sorbonne (Voltaire 1980:6.20; October 10, 1760). Four months later, when he had thoroughly studied the text and expressed his confidence that he could “make good use of it,” he described the translator as a “Brahmin of great esprit” who knows French very well (6.287; February 22, 1761) and who produced “a faithful translation” (6.298; March 3, 1761). In July 1761, at the time when he had decided to add a new chapter to the Essai about the Ezourvedam and then to present his copy of the manuscript to the Royal Library in Paris, he claimed that Maudave had received the Ezour-vedam from a Brahmin who was a correspondent of the French Compagnie des Indes and had translated it (6.470; July 1761). After sending the manuscript to the Royal Library, Voltaire for the first time located this Brahmin translator in Benares, the center of Brahman orthodoxy (6.602; October 1, 1761). He repeated this last version until he encountered Holwell’s work and learned that the Shastah was far older than the Vedam and its commentary, the Ezour-vedam. As we will see in Chapter 6, Holwell claimed that the Vedam contained the relatively corrupt teaching of South India, whereas his Shastah was expounded by the orthodox Brahmins of Benares in the north. In 1769, after having read this, Voltaire once more changed his translator story. Since (according to Holwell) Benares and Northern India are the home of the ancient Shastah and Southern India that of the far younger Vedam, Voltaire came up with a new narrative: the man who had translated the Ezour-vedam from the sacred Sanskrit language into French was now suddenly no more an orthodox successor to the oldest Brachman tradition from Benares but rather a mysterious “old man, 100 years of age” who was “arch-priest [grand prêtre] on the island of Seringham [Chérignan] of Arcate province” in South India—a man “respected for his incorruptible virtue” who “knew French and rendered great services to the Compagnie des Indes” (Voltaire 1769:2.68).39 One would expect such a rare creature—an eminent old Brahmin heading a huge clergy who wrote perfect French and rendered great services to the colonial administration—to turn up somewhere in the French colonial records; but Rocher (1984:28) failed to find any trace of this man, even though, according to Voltaire, he had been a witness for the chevalier Jacques François Law in his conflict with Joseph François Dupleix.
What are we to make of this? Today we know, thanks to the efforts of many scholars, that Voltaire’s Ezour-vedam was definitely authored by one or several French Jesuits in India, and Ludo Rocher has convincingly argued that the text was never translated from Sanskrit but written in French and then partially translated into Sanskrit (Rocher 1984: 57–60). Consequently, there never was a translator from Sanskrit to French—which also makes it extremely unlikely that any Brahmin, whether from Benares in the north or Chérignan (Seringham) in the south, ever gave this French manuscript to Maudave. Whether Maudave was “a close friend of one of the principal brahmins” and how old and wise that man was appear equally irrelevant. Voltaire’s story of the Brahmin translator appears to be entirely fictional and also squarely contradicts the only relevant independent evidence, Maudave’s letter to Voltaire, which (rightly or wrongly; see Chapter 7) named a long-dead French Jesuit as translator and imputed Jesuit tampering with the text. Since it is unlikely that Maudave would arbitrarily change such central elements of his story when he met Voltaire, the inevitable conclusion is that Voltaire created a narrative to serve a particular agenda and changed that story when the need arose.
In this light it is doubly surprising that Voltaire has hitherto almost unanimously been accused of uncritical trust in tainted sources. Raymond Schwab, who rightly credited Voltaire with the “launch of India,” took him severely to task: “Voltaire, as usual, was simplifying and . . . poses no questions of authenticity; never has a mind been less bothered by critique, never has critique been more hasty: as long as a text was not of semitic origin, he saw no reason to discuss its value” (Schwab 1950:146).
Schwab, an ardent Christian himself, reveled in the irony that “the main weapon of his [Voltaire’s] arsenal,” the supposedly very ancient Ezour-vedam, was unmasked by Ellis (1822) as a modern Jesuit creation (Schwab 1950:168). Leslie Willson’s book about the creation of an idealized image of India in romantic Germany also hails Voltaire as a pioneer who affirmed the probability that “the Persians, the Egyptians, the Greeks themselves, and perhaps the Chinese originally received their wisdom from Hindustan” and derides him for his trust in fake texts (1964:25). Likewise, Alex Aronson’s Europe Looks at India lauds him for his pioneering role in claiming “that India was once the cradle of civilization” (1946:20) but scolds him as superficial and ignorant: “Voltaire was not what we could call today a profound writer. He could hide, with a cleverness which seems to us incredible today, his own ignorance as well as the utter stupidity of the sources from which he gathered his information about India” (p. 16). More recent publications tend to rely on Daniel S. Hawley’s groundbreaking study “L’Inde de Voltaire” of 1974, which states that it was Voltaire “who launched the India craze [la mode de l’Inde] in France” (1974:173) and describes his involvement with India in four phases (p. 140): an initial phase of exoticism (before 1760); a second phase under the spell of the Ezour-vedam (1761–66); a third phase influenced by Holwell (1767–69); and a final blossoming of Voltaire’s India (1770–78). Like virtually all recent authors, Hawley takes it as a fact that Voltaire was blindly trusting spurious sources,40 especially the Ezour-vedam—“unfortunately . . . only a literary hoax” (p. 144)—and Holwell, whose work is described as a “twaddle [galimatias] of puranic, vedic, and even Persian traditions without resemblance to any Indian cosmogony” (p. 146). Though Hawley took some note of Voltaire’s manipulation of such sources, he was utterly convinced that “Voltaire trusted his Ezour-Vedam” and other supposedly ancient texts (p. 153).
While such criticisms certainly have some justification, we must ask what exactly Voltaire meant by “making good use” of the Ezour-vedam and how he portrayed the text over time. Immediately after Maudave’s visit, Voltaire was already fully aware that the two texts that he had received were not the Veda itself but rather commentaries. In his letter to Jean le Rond d’Alembert (who had introduced Maudave to him), Voltaire remarked with his customary dose of sarcasm that Maudave gave him “commentaries of the Vedam which are every bit as good as others, and a god that is every bit as good as another one. It is the phallum” (Voltaire 1980:6.14; October 8, 1760). A few months later, when Voltaire knew what use he was going to make of the manuscript, he portrayed the Ezour-vedam not as a simple commentary but as “the Gospel of the ancient brachmanes” and “the most curious and most ancient book that we possess, except for the Old Testament whose sanctity, truth, and antiquity you know” (6.289; February 24, 1761). Since his addressee was, of course, familiar with Voltaire’s scathing critique of the sanctity, truth, and antiquity of the Old Testament, we can imagine what his friend thought about this Indian gospel. In July of the same year, Voltaire promised to donate the Ezour-vedam manuscript to the Royal Library and informed librarian Jean-Augustin Capperonnier that this “commentary of the Vedam is for the Indians what the Sader is for the Guèbres”—that is, an important foundational religious text—and that it was “in all likelihood older than the expedition of Alexander” (6.470; July 13, 1761). But inflation soon struck also in this respect: in mid-September, when he sent his new Essai chapter to the Marquise Deffand, he called the Ezour-vedam “possibly the oldest book in the world” (6.579; September 16, 1761), and two weeks later he dated it to “several centuries before Pythagoras.” Boasting that “it will be the only treasure that will survive of our Compagnie des Indes,” he even claimed that the Royal Library regarded his “very authentic” Ezour-vedam manuscript as “the most precious monument it possesses” (6.602–3; October 1, 1761)!
The new fourth chapter of the 1761 Essai, “On the Brachmanes; of the Vedam; and the Ezourvedam,” begins with Voltaire’s influential assertion about the antiquity of Indian culture and religion:
If India, of which the entire earth is dependent and which alone is not in need of anybody, must, on account of this very fact, be the most anciently civilized region, then it must also have had the most ancient form of religion. It is very likely that for a long time this religion was the same as that of the Chinese government and consisted only in a pure cult of a supreme Being, free of any superstition and fanaticism. (Voltaire 1761:49)
This oldest religion of the world was “founded by the Bracmanes” and subsequently “established in China by its first kings” (p. 49). Voltaire portrayed this religion as if it were his own: since it was built on “universal reason” (p. 50), it “had to be simple and reasonable,” which was easy enough since “it is so natural to believe in a unitary God, to venerate him, and to feel at the bottom of one’s heart that one must be just” (p. 49). Long before Alexander’s India adventure, this pure, original monotheism began to degenerate when the cult of God “became a job” and the divinities multiplied; but even under the reign of polytheism and popular superstition, a “supreme God was always acknowledged” (p. 50) and is still venerated today (p. 51).
Luckily, an authentic record of India’s ancient pure monotheism had fallen precisely into the hands of the person whose religion resembled it most:
I have in my hands the translation of one of the most ancient manuscripts in the world; it is not the Vedam which in India is so much talked about and which has not yet been communicated to any scholar of Europe, but rather the Ezourvedam, the ancient commentary by Chumontou on the vedam, the sacred book which was given by God to humans, as the Brahmins pretend. This commentary has been redacted by a very erudite Brahmin who has rendered many services to our Compagnie des Indes; he has translated it himself from the sacred language into French. (pp. 52–53)
To prove his point, Voltaire in the 1761 Essai for the first time published eight “quotations” from the Ezour-vedam.41 In view of his privileged access to the text and his assurances about the authenticity and age of the Ezour-vedam, one would expect faithful quotations from the sacred scripture. But already Voltaire’s first two “quotations” (which he used again in several other works) prove such expectations wrong. The first ends with “etc.”; though it might seem otherwise because of the table-form arrangement shown, Voltaire presents both passages as continuous quotations from the Ezour-vedam that supposedly furnish “the very words of the Veidam” rather than those of two interlocutors. In the juxtaposition in Table 3, text omitted by Voltaire is shown on gray, and added or changed text is underlined.
Some of Voltaire’s numerous omissions are clearly related to his presentation of this creation account as continuous quotations from the Vedam. In the Ezour-vedam text, however, Chumontou does not quote anything but simply responds to Biache’s questions. To maintain his fiction, Voltaire had to omit not only the questions but also phrases (for example, those before the “four different ages”) that clearly show this text to be part of a conversation. The Ezour-vedam “quotation” beginning with “At the time when God alone existed” shows that he systematically misled his readers: the text that Voltaire presents as a continuous quotation from the Ezour-vedam actually shrinks eight pages of the Sainte-Croix edition (1778:1.189–96) to a fraction of their original volume. Some of Voltaire’s additional changes are stylistic; but the majority is clearly related to content that Voltaire chose to omit or add for a variety of reasons. For example, he cut the Ezour-vedam’s explanation that after the creation of time, water, and earth, “the earth was completely submerged” and omitted God’s order “that the water retract on one side and that the earth become stable and solid” (1.189–90). This passage did not please Voltaire who opposed theories of universal flood and models of earth formation that involved total submersion in water.42 Likewise, Voltaire did not like the idea that God created three worlds, which is why he eliminated the information about the superior, inferior, and central world. The idea of monogenesis and primitive man’s god-given wisdom also bothered him (Voltaire 1969:59.121); thus, he omitted the Ezour-vedam’s “In creating him he endowed him with extraordinary knowledge and put him on earth in order to be the principle and origin of all other men.” The presentation of Adimo as father of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu and of their birth from his navel and flanks certainly fit the agenda of the Ezour-vedam’s Jesuit author(s) who wanted to highlight the absurdity of Indian mythology; but this was very much contrary to Voltaire’s intention of presenting the wisdom of the Vedam as somewhat conforming to a deist’s ideal of rationality. Therefore, he drastically demoted Adimo from father of India’s three supreme gods to father of “Brama who was the legislator of nations and the father of the brahmins.”
This pattern of Voltaire’s editorial policy is repeated in much of the rest of his “quotations” from the Ezour-vedam. A passage that explains the origin of the four Indian castes is falsely portrayed by Voltaire not as Chumontou’s commentary but as “one of the most singular pieces from the Vedam” (Voltaire 1761:54)—but, singular or not, Voltaire decided to omit about half of the Ezour-vedam’s text (which, of course, was no Vedic quotation at all). Another flagrant example is Voltaire’s fifth excerpt (p. 55), which is a hodgepodge from the Ezour-vedam’s sixth and seventh chapters (Sainte-Croix 1778:1.222–26) presented as a continuous citation from the Vedam. Voltaire introduces this as follows:
TABLE 3. VOLTAIRE’S EDITION OF THE EZOUR-VEDAM’S CREATION ACCOUNT
The Vedam continues and says: “The supreme Being has neither body nor form,” and the Ezourvedam adds: “All those who ascribe him feet and hands are insane.” Chumontou then cites the following words of the Vedam: . . . (p. 55)
However, in the text of the Ezour-vedam all this forms part of Chumontou’s conversation. Once again, Voltaire’s transmutation forced him to eliminate all phrases proving that Chumontou was not citing the Veda but simply talking to Biache. Thus, he had to delete statements like “That’s what the Vedam teaches. The sun which you have divinized is no more than a body” (Sainte-Croix 1778:1.226). More than half of the Ezour-vedam’s text (pp. 222–27) in this supposedly continuous quotation suffered the same fate. Instead of a faithful presentation of “Vedic” text, Voltaire’s readers thus got a blatantly tendentious pastiche of conversation fragments taken from two different chapters of a “commentary” containing not a single genuine quotation from the Veda.
In contrast to the Ezour-vedam, which in Voltaire’s 1761 Essai was massaged until it fit Voltaire’s idea of ancient monotheism and could please a deist, the “Cormorédam” (which is a misprint for Cormovédam) is severely criticized as a product of degeneration. This second text that Voltaire received from Maudave was presumably also donated to the French national library. In his 1761 Essai, Voltaire describes it as follows:
The Brahmins degenerated more and more. Their Cormorédam, which is their ritual, is a bunch of superstitious ceremonies that make anybody who is not born on the banks of the Ganges or Indus laugh—or rather, anyone who, not being a philosophe, is surprised about the stupidities of other peoples and not amazed at those of his own country. As soon as an infant is born, one must recite the word Oum over him to prevent his being unhappy forever; one must rub his tongue with consecrated flour, say prayers over him, and pronounce at each prayer the name of a divinity. Subsequently one must put the infant outside on the third day of the moon and turn his head toward the north. The minute detail is immense. It is a hodgepodge of all the lunacies with which the senseless study of judicial astronomy could inspire ingenious but extravagant and deceitful scholars. The entire life of a Brahmin is devoted to such superstitious ceremonies. There is one for each day of the year. (Voltaire 1761:57)43
It is possible that Maudave gave Voltaire a copy of the manuscript described by Ellis (1822:19) as follows: “This manuscript [No. 2] is a quarto volume bound in black leather. It contains that part of the “Zozochi Kormo Bédo,” which treats on the Sandhya, &c. the whole of the Ezour Védam . . . and the supplement of the Ezour Védam. All in French only without the Sanscrit.” However, Voltaire’s description of the Cormo Veidam has a perfect match in another Pondicherry text, the “Zozochi Kormo Bédo,” whose first part is entitled “Rite of the Ezour Vedam” (Castets 1935:26–27). According to the Jesuit Jean Castets, this part features detailed descriptions of rites (including those required at the birth of a male child) as well as long lists of prescribed/auspicious or prohibited/inauspicious activities on particular days of the year (pp. 28–32).
Bowing to Voltaire’s will, the Ezour-vedam thus became a monument of a protodeist’s monotheistic Ur-religion (primeval religion), while the CormoVedam had the role of representing what India’s deceitful clergy is catering to the superstitious masses. Voltaire’s commentary shows to what degree he identified with the reformer Chumontou:
The ancient purity of the religion of the first Bracmanes survived only with some of their philosophers; and they do not make the effort to instruct a people that does not want to be taught and does not merit it either. Disabusing it would even carry a risk; the ignorant Brahmins would rise up, and the women attached to their temples and their little superstitious practices would cry heresy. Whoever wants to teach reason to his fellow citizens is persecuted unless he is the strongest; and it almost invariably happens that the strongest redoubles the chains of ignorance instead of breaking them. (Voltaire 1761:59)
In the years between the publication of the 1761 Essai and the Homélies of 1767, Voltaire continued to exploit the Ezour-vedam for his purposes. Chapter 13 of the Défense de mon oncle (1767) is the last statement of his views before the effect of Holwell set in. Here the Ezour-vedam is called “the most precious manuscript of the Orient” that “indisputably is from the time when the ancient religion of the gymnosophists began to be corrupted” and represents “apart from our sacred scriptures the most respectable monument of faith in the unity of God” (Voltaire 1894:27.164). Voltaire once more presented the first two of his sanitized quotations from the Ezour-vedam and defended his absurd argument from the Philosophie de l’histoire (1765) that the Ezour-vedam had to stem from the period before Alexander because its place names are not Greek-influenced.
Discussions of Voltaire’s view of the Ezour-vedam have hitherto been marred by the assumption that Voltaire’s propaganda campaign for the Ezour-vedam implied his unquestioning trust in the text’s authenticity. Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo was already of this opinion when he wrote in 1791: “Does he [Voltaire] know what is in the book? Does he know its author? Has he read the book? Did he make sure that it is an authentic book?” (Rocher 1984:16). If Voltaire made such a fuss about this text and regarded it as such a powerful weapon against biblical authority, so the argument went, he must have believed it genuine. But Voltaire was certainly a much more discerning reader of religious texts than young Maudave and a better informed critic of the Jesuits to boot. His selection of a few fragments of the Ezour-vedam and his very invasive editing of them lead one almost to suspect that he sensed Jesuit involvement and perhaps even relished the thought of surreptitiously perverting their fundamental intention. The student and enemy of the Jesuits, it turns out, had a missionary agenda of his own. He, too, was eager to advocate ancient monotheism and to denounce its later degeneration. But for him such degeneration included not just the theology of the “stupid Brahmins” but rather the infâme itself: Judeo-Christianity, complete with its cruel God, deluded prophets, plagiarized texts, degenerate clergy, intolerant worldview, and parochial conception of history.
Voltaire’s “transformations” as well as his remarks about the Ezourvedam indicate a cynical rather than a credulous stance and may reflect Father Bouchet’s view that “even lies serve us to make truth known” (Le Gobien 1781–83:12.238). As mentioned above, Voltaire mocked the text’s story about the first man Adimo already in 1761 by calling it the tale of a “badly instructed and pigheaded Brahmin” (Voltaire 1761:44). In the Ezour-vedam chapter of his 1761 Essai, Voltaire showed his hand when writing of St. Ambrose’s method:
Perhaps it is one of these exaggerations that one indulges in sometimes to make one’s fellow citizens ashamed of their mess; one praises the bracmanes in order to correct the [Christian] monks: and if Saint Ambrose had lived in India, he probably would have praised the monks to put shame on the bracmanes. (p. 51)44
Voltaire’s use of short and heavily edited excerpts of the Ezour-vedam certainly seems designed to employ Chumontou’s religion as a whip to chastise Europe’s conventional Christians. The Ezour-vedam was far from an ideal candidate as an Old Testament for Voltaire’s religion; judging from the very few (and heavily edited) excerpts that he presented of this supposedly extremely important and unique source, it would seem that, for Voltaire’s taste, it simply contained too much rubbish. He wrote that in spite of their sublime morality, “the ancient brahmins were without any doubt just as terrible metaphysicians and ridiculous theologians as the Chaldeans and Persians and all the nations west of China” (Voltaire 1767:318). In his view, the Chinese should have done a bit better; but Confucius was too prosaic, the Chinese emperor’s “Adore God and be just” (p. 319) admirable but no substitute for a gospel, and the Yijing ancient but full of superstition. But it so happened that the Ezour-vedam—which, as already Maudave had noted, reflected the Jesuit agenda of emphasizing primeval monotheism and its subsequent degeneration—fell into Voltaire’s hands just when he needed it most, that is, when the battle against “l’infâme” heated up and he was eager to get whatever ammunition against biblical authority that he could lay his hands on. Since the Ezour-vedam was still unpublished,45 he could cherry-pick and massage the text at will to suit his purpose. When even his short, edited extracts proved unsatisfactory, Voltaire did not shy away from cruder methods in pursuit of his goals. For example, in the “Defense of my uncle” of 1767,46 he quoted the Ezour-vedam to the effect that each world age ends in a deluge in which everything is submerged (Voltaire 1894:27.165). But a few pages later, he brazenly stated:
There are even those who pretend that the Indians mentioned a universal deluge before that of Deucalion. It is said that several brachmanes believed that the earth had experienced three deluges. Nothing of that is said in the Ezour-Veidam nor in the Cormo-Veidam which I have read with great attention; but several missionaries who were sent to India agree that the brahmins recognize several deluges. (27.183)
It had certainly not escaped Voltaire’s “great attention” that the Ezourvedam contains no less than four passages47 that unequivocally speak of universal deluges and that he had quoted one of them repeatedly since the 1761 Essai—even in the very book containing this denial! Sainte-Croix was so incensed about this blatant contradiction and Voltaire’s custom of “suppressing some details that in his eyes did not do enough honor to the Indian work” that he denounced this whopper in a detailed “clarification” (Sainte-Croix 1778:2.203–6). Since Voltaire had sanitized the deluge quotation so carefully and used it several times, it certainly was not a “copyist’s mistake” (as Sainte-Croix politely suggested). Rather, it is an example of Voltaire’s “making good use” of the text on St. Ambrose’s line. Had he been such an ardent believer in the Ezour-vedam’s authenticity, he would without any doubt have been eager to supply the curious public with more (and more accurate) quotations from this most valuable text of antiquity.
Exactly in the year when Voltaire received his Ezour-vedam manuscript, James Macpherson’s famous forgery of the poems of Ossian (1760) made its appearance. Though these two texts had a similar fate and share some characteristics, the Ezour-vedam does not belong in the category of literary hoaxes. In fact, it exhibits many characteristics of a genre of missionary literature cultivated by the Jesuits in Asia. Exactly like the Western scholar in Ricci’s catechism, Chumontou in the Ezour-vedam explains that pure monotheism once reigned in the land and needs to be restored now. The first step toward such a restoration consists in the careful examination of the teachings that had clouded and perverted the original creed and in their refutation on rational grounds—exactly what the Ezour-vedam tries to do. The Evora fragments of Japan mentioned above48 show that detailed presentations of native religions and their dogmas, rites, myths, and terminology were employed in the education of missionaries and catechists. They presented the best strategies to demolish them rationally in order to prepare the ground for the presentation of genuine (that is, Christian) truth. Since the early days of the Japan mission, explanations about the reasons for various natural phenomena and news about geography and history were used as effective means to prove the superiority of the missionaries’ knowledge of the here-and-now (and by implication, their knowledge of the remote past and future as well as heaven and hell). The Ezour-vedam also appears to use fictional dialogues about local religions and the world at large for the education of native catechists and missionaries (see Chapter 7).
Sonnerat showed an intuition of this when he characterized the Ezourvedam in 1782 as “a book of controversy written . . . by a missionary” (Sonnerat 1782:1.360), and in 1791 Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo stated that “the book in question is more likely a Christian catechism than a Brahmanic book” (1791:316). Paulinus’s opinion was based on his experience as a missionary and especially his perusal of the Pondicherry manuscripts and was far more informed than that of his critics.49 Since questions related to the genesis and authorship of the Ezour-vedam will be discussed in Chapter 7, the focus is here on Voltaire’s role in its rise to fame. Whatever the intentions of its authors were, it was Voltaire who almost single-handedly transformed some missionary jottings from the South Indian boondocks into the “world’s oldest text,” the Royal Library’s “most precious document,” and (as a well-earned bonus for the promoter) into the Old Testament of his deism! So far, there is no evidence of any influence of this text before Maudave and Voltaire. But soon after Maudave’s manuscript got into Voltaire’s hands, the Ezourvedam’s brilliant career began. For Voltaire it was, for a few years, a potent weapon to undermine biblical authority and to attack divine partiality for Judeo-Christianity. It was no Jesuit missionary but rather Voltaire, the missionary of deism, who trumpeted extraordinary claims into the world about the Ezour-vedam’s authenticity, antiquity, and supreme value. Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo saw this quite clearly when in 1791 he called the Ezourvedam “the notorious gift from the most learned prince of philosophers, Voltaire”—a poisoned gift “that found its way into the Royal library in Paris, or rather which he pressed upon them to use it as the foundation for his own philosophical superstructure” (Rocher 1984:16). It was a calculated move on the Indian flank of Voltaire’s war against “l’infâme,” and as we will see in the remainder of this book, it was rather successful in inciting European enthusiasm for India as the cradle of civilization and preparing the ground for “indomania.”50 Further boosted by virulent orthodox reactions near the end of the eighteenth century, Voltaire’s “Indian” campaign ended up playing a crucial role in raising the kind of questions about origins and ancient religions that played at least as important a role in the establishment of state-supported, university-based Orientalism as did the much-touted colonialism and imperialism. Rather than thirst for political and economic power, what was primarily at work here was ideological power: the power of Europe’s long-established worldview and religious ideology that Voltaire provocatively labeled “l’infâme” and that he tried to destabilize through an avalanche of articles, pamphlets, and books.
For Europeans, the first chapters of the Old Testament had for many centuries conclusively explained the origin of the world and of humankind, including its achievements such as language, religion, and civilization. Such certainties gradually came to be undermined not only through critique of the Bible by the likes of Baruch de Spinoza, Richard Simon, and Pierre Bayle but also through discoveries about our earth and its inhabitants. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the time was ripe for an overall reassessment, which is what Voltaire undertook in La philosophie de l’histoire of 1765.51 The work begins with an examination of the geological history of the earth that includes Voltaire’s theory of fossils, his rejection of the idea that the whole earth was once covered by water, and his critique of the theory by Buffon and others that the earth had anciently been hot and luminous (Voltaire 1969:59.39).52 Voltaire drew an overall picture that was diametrically opposed to the biblical scenario. His chapter on “The Savages” provides a glimpse of a chronology that pulverizes all biblical limits. Voltaire regarded the human race as immeasurably old, thought it “very likely that man has been rustic for thousands of centuries,” and was convinced that that all nations were once savages roaming the forests (p. 112). “Without any doubt,” he stated, early man spoke “for a very long time no language” and communicated only by “shouts and gestures” (p. 113).
Religion, too, began only “after a great many centuries” when “some societies had been established” and “some kind of religion, a sort of gross cult” formed (p. 99). “All peoples were thus what the inhabitants of several southern coasts of Africa, some islanders, and half of the Americans are today. These people have not the slightest idea of any unitary God” (p. 100). Ignorant of the reasons for good and bad events, people began to appease unknown powers and venerate all kinds of beings until they came up with the idea of a single Master or Lord (pp. 100–101). According to Voltaire, the recognition of a punishing and rewarding creator God was thus a very late development in human history (p. 100). It first arose in temperate regions like India, China, and Mesopotamia that had long been densely populated while the rest of the globe still was almost deserted (p. 97). In Voltaire’s view, “the Indians around the Ganges River were possibly the earliest humans forming a people” (p. 145), and he regarded Indian civilization as substantially older than its Egyptian (p. 159), Greek (p. 146), and probably even Chinese (p. 146) counterparts. The three regions with the earliest mass population also produced the oldest writing systems and sacred texts. According to Voltaire, who praised the Chinese religion as “simple, wise, august, free from all superstition and barbarism” (p. 155), the Indian religion was still the least known:
We know almost nothing of the ancient brahmanic rites that are preserved today. [The brahmins] communicate little about the Sanskrit books that they still possess in this ancient sacred language; for a long time, their Veidams remained as unknown as the Zend of the Persians and the five Kings of China. (p. 149)
Voltaire’s portrayal of the history of religion in 1765 was deeply influenced by David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) and stands in marked contrast to his “propaganda mode” output. Propaganda is, of course, not absent in the Philosophy of History, but the tone is rather sober:
A stroke of luck has brought an ancient book of the brahmans to the library in Paris: the Ezour-Veidam that was written before the expedition of Alexander to India, with a ritual of all ancient rites of the brachmanes with the title Cormo-Veidam. This manuscript, translated by a brahman, is not really the Veidam itself, but a summary of the opinions and the rites contained in this law. . . . [The author] certainly does not flatter his sect; he does not attempt to disguise his superstitions, to give them some plausibility through forced explanations, or to excuse them via allegories. He describes the most extravagant laws with the simplicity of candor. Here the human spirit appears in all its misery. (pp. 149–50)
In Voltaire’s “historical mode,” the world’s “oldest religion” was not pure monotheism but rather a primitive cult by people wholly ignorant of a unitary God—a cult designed to appease unknown powers. Monotheism was a comparatively late phenomenon that possibly first arose in India and was possibly documented in the still unknown Veidam. In Ambrosian “propaganda mode,” by contrast, this late development in India acquired disproportionate importance since, appropriately massaged and edited, even a flawed and relatively recent text like the Ezour-vedam could serve to show that far younger religions such as Judaism and Christianity had borrowed central doctrines and rites from India and to portray the Bible as a late and derivative product. This view undermined claims of a Hebrew “chosen people” and contradicted the vision of a God partial to a single people—a God who continually interferes in history by teaching, guiding, and indulging a group of uncivilized, stubborn peasants and nomads around the eastern Mediterranean.
However, by 1765 Voltaire’s propaganda campaign began to show signs of stress, as he had to struggle on two fronts. On one hand, he was fighting against biblical authority and was in need of monotheistic religions, rites, and especially sacred scriptures that were old and flexible enough to serve as Ambrosian whips for Judaism and Christianity. The second front had opened among Voltaire’s erstwhile sympathizers and friends in Paris who were resolutely materialist and atheist (see Chapter 8). Their view of the history of humankind and of primitive religion was rather similar to the first chapters of Voltaire’s Philosophy of History, but they regarded Voltaire’s insistence on a punishing and rewarding creator God and on inspired scriptures, whether from Israel or India, as a ridiculous and an old-fashioned obsession. On both fronts Voltaire felt the need for historical evidence in the form of ancient texts proving the widespread presence of pure monotheism and excellent morality. If a good creator God had, like a supreme mechanic, fashioned a world as he intended it to remain, that is, a world without any need for further intervention and maintenance, then the religion and morality he had endowed humanity with needed somehow to show up in history. Like his fellow English deists, Voltaire was thus keen to find signs of “universal consent” in different civilizations, particularly ancient and important ones. Had not all of them come to believe in monotheism? Did they not all follow identical, universal rules of morality and justice? And were they not all devoted to the reign of universal reason and the ideal of tolerance? Or, in starker terms, could history not be forced to cough up a decent proof (or at least support) of Voltaire’s own religion? Voltaire’s vision of humanity’s very slow progress from total primitivity to a semblance of civilization squarely contradicted his championship of a purely monotheistic Ur-religion, but this does not seem to have overly bothered him; the “Ambrosian” use of India and the Ezour-vedam in his propaganda war against the “infâme” apparently did not affect this level-headed acceptance of humanity’s slow progress from primitivity to some kind of rationality and eventually to the watchmaker argument or some other “proof” of the existence of a creator God. Faced with French Catholics who supported and justified the execution of innocent men like Jean Calas, Voltaire was not too picky about countermeasures. His unrelenting effort to promote India as the cradle of civilization formed part of this battle, and—as in most wars—the ends tended to justify the means.
The editors of the Annual Register of 1766 published part of Voltaire’s Philosophy of History in English translation, and in that very issue Voltaire discovered lengthy excerpts from a text that soon was to replace the Ezour-vedam in his propaganda war: the so-called Shastah of Bramah contained in John Zephaniah Holwell’s Interesting historical events (see Chapter 6). The review of Holwell’s book mentioned that he had spent thirty years in Bengal and procured “many curious manuscripts relating to the philosophical and religious principles of the Gentoos, particularly two correct copies of their Bible, called the Shasta” (Burke 1767:306–7). Having lost both the originals and his translation at the capture of Calcutta in 1756, Holwell “recovered some MSS. by accident” during his last eight months in Bengal. This enabled him to repair his loss “in some degree” and to present the hitherto best account “of the religion of the Gentoos, both in its original simplicity, and its present corruption” (p. 307). After an outline of the content of the Shastah’s creation story and Holwell’s genealogy of Indian sacred literature (pp. 317–19), the Annual Register’s anonymous reviewer (Edmund Burke) included the entirety of Holwell’s translation from the Shastah (pp. 310–16) along with his lengthy report of the burning of a widow (pp. 317–19).
Daniel Hawley argued that Voltaire had “blind faith in what Holwell asserted” (Hawley 1974:161) and that his “enthusiasm for Holwell became more and more marked each time he cited him” (p. 161). In the terminal phase of Voltaire’s infatuation with India, according to Hawley, Voltaire’s trust in Holwell’s and Alexander Dow’s translations from Indian texts was so complete that he compared doubts about them to the skepticism and stupid disbelief that greeted Newton’s experiments in Paris: “That Voltaire would put Newton’s experiments and the books of Dow and Holwell on the same level cannot but astonish us and must convince us of the great importance that Voltaire attached to the veracity of his sources” (p. 162).
Even Voltaire’s decision to overlook Dow’s devastating critique of Hol-well and to pass silently over the grave differences between Dow’s and Holwell’s portrayals of Indian religion were interpreted by Hawley as proofs of Voltaire’s complete trust in his sources:
Leaving aside the contradictions between the two Englishmen, Voltaire’s attitude toward the work by Dow is exactly identical to his judgment about the work by Holwell: blind faith and frank admiration. After having quoted some passages from Dow’s Bedang shaster, Voltaire notes, “Such is this catechism, the most beautiful monument of all antiquity!” (p. 162)
The question of Voltaire’s attitude toward his sources is, of course, also crucial for any judgment about his particular use of them. Hawley noted that Voltaire’s three major sources (the Ezour-vedam, Holwell’s Shastah, and Dow’s Bedang shasta) “gave so very different accounts of the first creation” (p. 164) that Voltaire’s indiscriminate praise poses a problem. How could a man as critical as Voltaire proclaim complete trust in sources that so blatantly contradicted each other? If Voltaire simply “made use of India rather than studying it” (p. 139), what were his motives? Hawley identified four major goals of Voltaire:
The attack of Voltaire focuses on four problems: the chronology of the sacred scriptures; the election of the Jews by Jehovah according to which they alone know the divine revelation; the true origin of our religious traditions; and the genesis and diffusion of our mythology which involves the problematization of the historical importance of the Jews. (Hawley 1974:140–41)
This portrayal again relies on the question of Voltaire’s evaluation of his sources since, for Hawley, Voltaire’s admiration of “the sublime character of Indian philosophy and morality” forms the basis for the “justification and verification of his new interpretation of the historical value of the Judeo-Christian tradition which, according to him, is but an insipid imitation of Indian wisdom” (p. 140).
But if Voltaire’s use of the Ezour-vedam has made us suspicious, we might as well ask to what degree he trusted Holwell’s revelations. Voltaire first mentioned this new source in the Homily on Atheism (Voltaire 1768:293–316), which is an early effort on his second front. After stating flatly that “we must begin with the existence of a God” and that this “subject has been treated by all nations” (p. 293), Voltaire lectures his atheist readership that “this supreme artisan who has created the world and us” is “our master” and “our benefactor” because “our life is a benefit, since we all love our life, however miserable it might get” (p. 298). Thus, “one must recognize a God who remunerates and avenges, or no God at all.” For Voltaire there was no middle ground: “either there is no God, or God is just” (p. 303). To support his radical theism, Voltaire always used the argument of universal consent: “all civilized people [peuples policés], Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Persians, Chaldeans, Phoenicians: all recognized a supreme God” (p. 311). And it is exactly here that the sacred literature of such people as Holwell’s ancient Indians came in handy. Voltaire wrote,
The Indians who boast of being the oldest society of the universe still have their ancient books that according to their claim were written 4,866 years ago. According to them, the angel Brama or Abrama, the envoy of God and minister of the supreme Being, dictated this book in the Sanskrit language. This sacred book is called Chatabad, and it is much more ancient than even the Vedam that since such a long time is the sacred book on the banks of the Ganges. These two volumes [the Chatabad and the Vedam], which are the law of all sects of the brahmans, [and] the Ezour-Vedam which is the commentary of the Vedam, never mention anything other than a unique God. (p. 310).
As an illustration of universal consent on monotheism, Voltaire presented the first section of his newly found “oldest” text, Holwell’s Chartah Bhade Shastah, which “was written one thousand years before the Vedam” and “treats of God and his attributes” (pp. 310–11). But, as seen in Table 4, already Voltaire’s first quotation from this oldest testament shows that he had not abandoned his efforts to improve on supposedly genuine ancient texts.
As with the Ezour-vedam, Voltaire molded the text to suit his views; but since Holwell’s text had already appeared in print, the changes needed to be a bit more subtle. Voltaire did not like that the God of Holwell’s Shastah rules the world by providence and replaced “providence” by “general wisdom.” As he was intent on proving the existence of God to atheists, he transformed the Shastah’s prohibition to inquire into “the essence and nature of the existence of the Eternal One” into one that concerned only “his essence and his nature.” As a Newtonian, he was—unlike Holwell—in favor of exploring the laws of nature; thus, the prohibition to inquire “by what laws he governs” was not acceptable to him and had to be eliminated. Since Voltaire missed God’s goodness in Holwell’s Shastah text and firmly believed in divine punishment and reward, he replaced Holwell’s “mercy” by “goodness.” Finally, Voltaire’s religion focused not on base self-benefit but rather on devoted worship of God and excellent morality—which may be why Holwell’s “benefit thereby” was supplanted by “Be happy in worshipping him.”
In 1774 Voltaire published another translation of this text (see the right column of Table 4). It was destined for a different public, and Voltaire had heard that a French translation of Holwell’s Shastah had in the meantime appeared in Amsterdam (Holwell 1768).53 Voltaire’s new translation proves that the changes in his first translations were not due to the level of his knowledge of English. Rather, as is also evident from many letters containing very different portrayals of particular events depending on the addressee, Voltaire was extremely adept at tailoring information to fit specific needs (Stackelberg 2006:21–32). As if to prove this last point, Voltaire published one more translation in 1776 that again edits out the Shastah’s prohibition to inquire about God’s existence.
TABLE 4. FIRST SECTION OF HOLWELL’S SHASTAH WITH TWO DIFFERING TRANSLATIONS BY VOLTAIRE IN HIS FIRST HOMÉLIE (1768) AND THE FRAGMENS SUR L’INDE (1774)
a For this translation in the 1774 Fragmens sur l’Inde, Voltaire used the text of the 1766 Annual Register (p. 310) whose first paragraph differs from Holwell’s 1767 edition. It reads: “God is the one that ever was, creator of all that is.” (see Chapter 6). In his Lettres chinoises of 1776 he once more sang the praises of “the Shasta-bad, the most ancient book of Hindustan and of the entire world” and included another translation modeled on that of 1768; he also eliminated the prohibition to inquire about the existence of God (Voltaire 1895:30.149–50).
b Voltaire’s translation shows that for this translation of the Homélies he used the 1767 edition of Holwell’s book and not, as Hawley argued (197¢154), the text in the Annual Register.
After his discovery of Holwell’s Shastah, Voltaire’s interest in the Ezourvedam abruptly ceased. It had done its duty and was rather unceremoniously dismissed before it was even published. The article on the Ezour-vedam in Voltaire’s Questions sur l’encyclopédie of 1771 is exceedingly short (Voltaire 1775:4.255–56); in fact, almost the only information it offers is a joke about Adimo and his wife. Voltaire, whose critique of such monogenetic tales invented by pigheaded Brahmins has already been mentioned, asked the reader whether the Jews had copied their Adam and Eve story from the Indians or the Indians their Adimo story from the Jews—only to add sarcastically a third possibility: “Or can one say that both have originally invented it and that the beautiful minds have met?” (pp. 256). While the Ezour-vedam passed into oblivion because the Veda is only “a recent law given to the brachmanes 1,500 years after the first law called shasta or shasta-bad” (Voltaire 1775:1.52), Voltaire turned into an ardent champion of Holwell’s Shastah whenever the argument required it. In his letter to Bailly of December 15, 1775, he calls the fragments of the Shastah that were “written about 5,000 years ago” nothing less than “the only monument of some antiquity that is extant on earth” (Bailly 1777:3).
In his campaign for Indian origins, Voltaire in the 1770s kept evoking the perfect accord of two excellent Englishmen who both had studied Sanskrit, spent decades in India, and supposedly translated the same extremely ancient Indian text called Shastah or Shastah-bad. However, the two gentlemen in question, John Zephaniah HOLWELL (1711–98) and Alexander Dow (1735/6–76), never claimed that they knew Sanskrit; in fact, Dow unequivocally states at the beginning of his “Dissertation concerning the customs, manners, language, and religion of the Hindoos” of 1768 that he originally intended to acquire “some knowledge in the Shanscrita language” but soon found that his time in India “would be too short to acquire the Shanscrita,” which is why he decided to inform himself “through the medium of the Persian language, and through the vulgar tongue of the Hindoos” about the mythology and philosophy of the Brahmins (Dow 1770:xxi). Dow even explained his procedure: he “procured some of the principal Shasters, and his pundit explained to him, as many passages of those curious books, as served to give him a general idea of the doctrine which they contain” (p. xxii). Dow’s “most beautiful monument of antiquity” (Voltaire 1774:172) was thus by no means a “translation” from the “sacred Sanskrit language,” as Voltaire claimed.
In fact, the two English gentlemen whose “translations” replaced the Ezour-vedam as the world’s oldest book were so much at odds about Indian religion that Dow felt “obliged to differ almost in every particular concerning the religion of the Hindoos, from that gentleman [Holwell]” (Dow 1770:xxx). These differences, consistently papered over by Voltaire, also extend to the crucial “oldest text of the world” (see chapter 6). Holwell usually called it Shastah or Shasta-bad and portrayed it as a single text, far older and more authentic than the Vedas, of which he supposedly had salvaged and translated some fragments. Dow, by contrast, stressed that there are many Shasters since that word simply “signifies Knowledge”:
There are many Shasters among the Hindoos, so that those writers who affirmed, that there was but one Shaster in India, which, like the Bible of the Christians, or Koran of the followers of Mahommed, contained the first principles of the Brahmin faith, have deceived themselves and the public. (p. xl)
This critique is without any doubt directed at Holwell; but Dow does not help his case when later in his dissertation he explains that “the most orthodox, as well as the most ancient” of the “two great religious sects” of the Hindoos are “the followers of the doctrine of the Bedang” (p. xl) and then presents “extracts literally translated from the original Shaster, which goes by the name of Bedang” (p. xli). If the reader is not confused by now, he or she should be. Not so, apparently at least, Voltaire who—in spite of Dow’s wholesale critique of Holwell and their totally different creation accounts—happily continued to assert that both Englishmen had translated the same text. He even turned Dow’s dire view of Holwell on its head, claiming without any foundation that Dow had “recognized the faithfulness of [Holwell’s] translation” and noting that Dow’s “avowal carries even more weight since the two differ with regard to some other articles” (Voltaire 1774:143). These “other articles,” he explains in a passage that proves how closely he had read both texts, include the dispute “about the way of pronouncing shasta-bad or shastra-beda, and if beda signifies science or book” (p. 172).
Toward the end of his life, in the Lettres chinoises, indiennes et tartares of 1776, Voltaire recapitulated his view of Indian sacred literature. The oldest source, “written in the sacred language during the present world-age [iogue] by a king on the banks of the Ganges named Brama,” is the holy Shasta-bad translated by Holwell and Dow; it is 5,000 years old. As much as 1,500 years later “another brachmane who, however, was not king” proclaimed the “new law of the Veidam” (Voltaire 1895:40.154). What Voltaire had long regarded as the world’s most valuable and ancient sacred text, the Veda, was now presented as a much later product, a “new law” that Voltaire butchered as follows:
This Veidam is the most boring hodgepodge [fatras] that I have ever read. Imagine the Golden Legend, the Conformities of St. Francis of Assisi,54 the Spiritual Exercises by St. Ignace, and the Sermons of Menot [1506] all put together, and you will still only have a faint idea of the impertinence of the Veidam. (p. 154)55
The Ezour-vedam, which Voltaire had long showered with praise as a commentary of the Veda that supposedly contained genuine Vedic quotations, was now elegantly moved to the realm of enlightened philosophy:
The Ezour-Veidam is a completely different thing. It is the work of a true sage who powerfully rises up against the stupidities of the brachmanes of his time. This Ezour-Veidam was written some time before Alexander’s invasion. It is a dispute of philosophy against Indian theology; but I bet that the Ezour-Veidam receives no credit at all in its country and that the Veidam is regarded as a heavenly book. (p. 154)
But neither India’s philosophy nor its ancient theology managed to live up to Voltaire’s idea without considerable help. Although Voltaire praised Dow’s text as the “catechism” of India and “the most beautiful monument of all antiquity” (p. 172), he sanitized it in his usual manner (pp. 168–71) and concluded: “You can traverse all nations of the universe, and there will not be a single one whose history does not begin with fables worthy of the four sons of Aymon and Robert-the-devil” (p. 191). Holwell’s Shasta-bad, the Ezour-vedam’s successor as “India’s and the whole world’s oldest book” (Voltaire 1895:30.149), also received its share of criticism.
Already in 1771, while Voltaire continued to trumpet the wonders of the Shasta-bad, he slipped an insidious couple of questions into his discussion of Indian sacred doctrine (Voltaire 2006:352): “How could God provide a second law in his Veidam? Was his first one [in the Shasta-bad] therefore no good?” A year later he targeted Holwell’s Shasta-bad when he joked about “novels [romans] about the origin of evil” whose “extreme merit” is that “there never was a commandment that one must believe them” (Voltaire 1894:29.203). Thus, even Holwell—the man who according to Voltaire “had not only learned the language of the modern brahmins but also that of the ancient bracmanes, who has since written such precious treatises about India and who translated sublime pieces from the oldest books in the sacred language, books older than those of Sanchuniathon of Phoenicia, Mercury of Egypt, and the first legislators of China”—even the heroic Holwell “cannot be trusted blindly” (Voltaire 1774:72). And in an aside that reveals for a moment his true opinion about Holwell’s Shasta-bad, Voltaire mischievously added, “But at any rate he has demonstrated to us that 5,000 years ago the people living on the Ganges [Gangarides] wrote a mythology, whether good or bad” (p. 72).56
However Voltaire evaluated such “oldest texts of the world,” his conviction that India is the world’s oldest civilization did not budge even when Jean Sylvain Bailly challenged it in a series of letters. They were published in 1777, one year before Voltaire’s death, in Bailly’s Letters on the origin of the sciences and of the peoples of Asia. Insisting that Holwell is “truth and simplicity in person” (Bailly 1777:4) Voltaire used Holwell’s Shastah to support his rejection of Bailly’s argument for the Siberian origins of humankind. Whatever arguments Bailly pressed upon him, Voltaire politely but firmly clung to his idea and declined to change his view of India as the cradle of civilization (pp. 9–14). It was this opinion of his that, hammered into public consciousness through a ream of books and pamphlets, played a seminal role in turning the European public’s gaze toward India and its religious literature. Voltaire’s influence is conspicuous in several figures studied in this book. Joseph de Guignes, Anquetil-Duperron, Gaston Laurent Coeurdoux, Volney, Louis-Mathieu Langlès, and William Jones were all readers of Voltaire and reacted to his views in one way or another. Countless quotations from his books and numerous reactions to his views show that his propaganda campaign was, for his time and purpose, a smashing success. Even in the nineteenth century, long after the Ezour-vedam’s publication by Sainte-Croix, there are instances where Voltaire’s doctored “quotations” from the Ezour-vedam rather than the correct text were used (Fortia d’Urban 1807:289–89). His propaganda, as well as the reaction it created among Christians (including, for example, Johann Gottfried Herder, Thomas Maurice, and Joseph Priestley), was instrumental in promoting interest in India and its ancient texts. Whether these texts, in retrospect, are regarded as genuine or not, this interest fertilized the soil for the phenomenon that Thomas Trautmann aptly labeled “indomania” and for the “new Orientalism” it helped foster. Discoveries of Asian sources promising Bible-independent insight into the history of humanity (and generally into questions of origin) were intimately linked to a crisis of biblical authority and an upheaval of Europe’s long-dominant worldview. While the Bible’s explanatory power was still intact, many of these questions neither arose nor required a new answer. But as a string of nonbiblical texts were touted as “the world’s oldest”—the Chinese Yijing in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century’s Ezour-vedam of Voltaire, Shasta-bad of Holwell, Desatir of William Jones,57 and Zend Avesta as well as Oupnek’hat of Anquetil-Duperron—the solid study of Asian languages and literatures became ever more pressing. Voltaire’s Indian campaign was an important force in the momentous shift of focus away from the biblical area toward India that prepared the ground for the modern, Bible-independent Oriental-ism envisaged by an outspoken admirer of Voltaire’s view, Louis-Mathieu Langlès, the founding director of modern Orientalism’s first institution, the École Spéciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris.58
