Part 4 of 4
TransformationsDiscussions 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 infame 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'infame" 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:I.360), and in 1791 Paulinus a Sanc to 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 Ezour-vedam'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'infame," 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
A New Manuscript: BN Fonds Francais 19117In the meanwhile, no one seems to have noticed the existence, in the Bibliotheque Nationale, of a third manuscript of the EzV. The catalogue: Ancien Saint-Germain Francais III. Nos. 18677-20064 du Fonds Francais (by L Auvray and H. Omont, Paris: Leroux, 1900), has the following entry: "19117, 'Zozur Bedo'; traduction francaise du YADJOUR VEDA,4c livre des Vedas. En huit livres. XVIIe-XVIIIe. Papier. ) 58 pages. 208 sur 205 millimetres. Cartonne. (Saint-Germain, Harlay 515.)." This is, indeed, another copy of the EzV, in eight books.
The manuscripts of the Harlay family were donated, by Achille IV de Harlay (died 23 July 1717) to Louis-Germain de Chauvelin (1685-1762), on 11 August 1716. The condition attached to the donation said that the manuscripts should stay with de Chauvelin and his male descendants until one of them died without further male descendants "revetus de charge de judicature." [Google translate: load bearing judicature.] At that time
the manuscripts were to become the property of the Benedictines of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Chauvelin not only
allowed the members of the [Benedictine] Order to use the materials while he still held the usufruct; he also enriched the collection with documents which were his own full property.
On 19 March 1755 he decided to transfer the collection to Saint-Germain, together with those manuscripts of which he himself was the owner. The manuscripts were transferred from the castle of Grosbois to the abbey.
They remained a special fund while deposited there, until they were transferred, together with the other manuscripts of Saint-Germain, to the Bibliotheque Nationale, in 1865. There the entire collection was integrated into the "Troisieme Serie" of the Fonds Francais: manuscripts 15370 to 20064.
These data do not entirely solve the problem of the origin of the third EzV manuscript.
The donation of 11 August 1716 was accompanied by a catalogue which is, however, lost, with the result that it is no longer possible to ascertain which particular manuscripts were added to the collection by de Chauvelin. We can only presume that the EzV did not belong to the original collection of 1716, and that it was one of the latest additions; it is no. 515 in a collection of altogether 519 items. But, even then,
the third EzV manuscript must have belonged to the collection by 1755, five years before Maudave brought his copy to Europe.The principal problem that remains unsolved in all this is that in two handwritten catalogues at the Bibliotheque Nationale, manuscript "Harlay 515" is described as "Melanges cont. 110. pieces": in the "Catalogue des manuscrits de Monsieur** [Chauvelin]",91 and in the "Catalogue des mss. de la bibliotheque de feu Mre Achilles de Harlay, premier president du Parlement de Paris, passes depuis dans la bibliotheque de feu messire Louis- Germain Chauvelin, ancien garde des sceaux, et actuellement dans la bibliotheque de l'abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Pres, a Paris, 1762."92 [Google translate: Catalog of mss. of the library of the late Mre Achilles de Harlay, first Speaker of Parliament of Paris, since passed in the library of the late Messire Louis-Germain Chauvelin, former Keeper of the Seals, and currently in the library of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in Paris, 1762.]
Even assuming that the EzV manuscript did belong to the private collection of Louis-Germain de Chauvelin on 19 March 1755, it is no longer possible to investigate how and when he acquired it.
The important fact is that it is the oldest EzV manuscript in Europe, even though no one ever took notice of it. It also shows that the terminus ante quem [Google translate: term before he] for the composition of the EzV, which until now was 1759 -- the time when Maudave left India --, has to be advanced with at least five years and possibly by more than that.-- Ezourvedam: A French Veda of the Eighteenth Century, Edited with an Introduction by Ludo Rocher
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'infame" and that he tried to destabilize through an avalanche of articles, pamphlets, and books.
History Versus PropagandaFor 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 "infame" 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.
Veidam Versus ShastahThe 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 Holwell 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 polices], 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."
TABLE 4. FIRST SECTION OF HOLWELL'S SHASTAH WITH TWO DIFFERING TRANSLATIONS BY VOLTAIRE IN HIS FIRST HOMELlE (1768) AND THE FRAGMENS SUR L'INDE (1774)Holwell, vol. 2, p. 31
"God is ONE. -- Creator of all that is. --
God is like a perfect sphere, without beginning or end. --
God rules and governs all creation by a general [b]providence resulting from first determined and fixed principles. --
Thou shalt not make inquiry in to the essence and nature of the existence of the ETERNAL ONE, nor by what laws he governs. --
An inquiry into either is vain, and criminal. --
It is enough, that day by day, and night by night, thou seest in h is works, his wisdom, power, and his mercy. --
Benefit thereby."
Voltaire 1768:6.311
God is one; he has formed all that is.
He resembles a perfect sphere without beginning or end.
He governs everything by a general wisdom.
You shall not seek his essence and his nature,
this enterprise would be vain and criminal.
It is enough for you to admire day and night his works, his wisdom, his power, his goodness.
Be happy in worshipping him.
Voltaire 1774:143 [a]
God is the one who always was; he created all that is.
A perfect sphere, without beginning or end, is his feeble image.
God animates and governs all creation by the general providence of his unchanging and eternal principles.
Do not probe the nature of the existence of him who always was:
such inquiry is vain and criminal.
It is enough that day by day and night by night his works announce to you his wisdom, his power, and his mercy.
Benefit thereby.
a. For this translation in the 1774 Fragmem 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 Homelies he used the 1767 edition of Holwell's book and not, as Hawley argued (1974:154), the text in the Annual Register.
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.
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'encyclopedie 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. I72).
The Indian CradleToward 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 1894:29.2°3). 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
End of 4 of 4 of chapter 1: voltaire's veda
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 Langles, 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 non biblical 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 Orientalism envisaged by an outspoken admirer of Voltaire's view, Louis-Mathieu Langles, the founding director of modern Orientalism's first institution, the Ecole Speciale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris.