Treatise on Toleration by Voltaire

Author:Voltaire
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241236635
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

The Only Circumstances in which Intolerance is Legally Justified

If a government is not to have a right to punish human errors, those errors must not be crimes. They are crimes only when they are detrimental to society, and they damage society as soon as they inspire fanaticism. Therefore, in order to deserve toleration, people must begin by avoiding fanaticism.

If a few young Jesuits knew that the Church disapproved of them, that the Jansenists were condemned by a papal bull (and are therefore also disapproved of) and if they began to set fire to a house belonging to the priests of the Oratory1 because Quesnel2 was a Jansenist, it is clear that it would be necessary to punish those Jesuits.

Likewise, if they preached criminal advice or if their institution were in breach of the laws of the kingdom, there would be no objection to dissolving their congregation and abolishing the Jesuits in order to turn them into good citizens. To abolish them would be ultimately a purely imaginary evil and a real benefit to them, for what could be wrong with wearing a short coat instead of a cassock or being free rather than a slave? Whole regiments are demobilized in peacetime and no one objects to that; why do the Jesuits complain so loudly when they are reformed for the sake of peace in the Church?3

If the Franciscans were motivated by religious zeal in favour of the Virgin Mary and went to demolish a church that belonged to the Dominicans because they believed that Mary was born in original sin, one would then have to treat the Franciscans more or less like the Jesuits.

One would say the same thing about the Lutherans and Calvinists. They might well say: ‘We follow the guidance of our conscience and it is better to obey God rather than men.4 We are the genuine Christian flock and we should exterminate the wolves.’ It is evident, however, that they are wolves themselves.

One of the most remarkable examples of fanaticism was a small sect in Denmark, whose guiding principle was the best in the world. Those people wished to gain eternal life for their fellow citizens, but the consequences of their principle were very peculiar. They knew that all young children who die before they are baptized are damned, and that those who are lucky enough to die immediately after being baptized enjoy eternal happiness in Heaven. They therefore set out to cut the throat of every newly baptized boy or girl that they could find. Without doubt they thereby conferred on them the greatest possible benefit. At one and the same time, they protected them from original sin, from the miseries of this life and from eternal Hell, and sent them infallibly to Heaven.5 But people like that did not appreciate that it is not permissible to do some small evil deed in order to gain a great good, that they had no right over the lives of these children, and that most fathers and mothers

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