Voltaire: A Sketch of His Life and Works

Chapter 35: Heaven

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About This Book

The volume sketches the subject’s life from childhood and education through episodes of imprisonment, exile, foreign sojourns, and domestic retreats, charting the production of major writings and the circumstances of his later years while offering contemporary tributes and character assessments. It pairs the biographical narrative with curated selections of his prose and verse that illustrate recurring concerns: history and politics, war and population, critiques of religious authority and superstition, satire and moral reflection, and brief detached aphorisms. Together the sketches and extracts portray a public career devoted to reason, toleration, and literary engagement.

Heaven

Kon.: What is meant by “the heaven and the earth: mount up to heaven, be worthy of heaven”?

Cu Su.: ’Tis but stupidity, there is no heaven; each planet is surrounded by its atmosphere, and rolls in space around its sun. Each sun is the centre of several planets which travel continually around it. There is no up nor down, ascension nor descent. You perceive that if the inhabitants of the moon said that some one ascended to the earth, that one must render himself worthy of earth, he would talk nonsense. We do so likewise when we say we must be worthy of heaven; it is as if we said we must be worthy of air, worthy of the constellation of the Dragon, worthy of space.—Catéchisme chinois.