Philosophical Dictionary

Overview

About four hundred pages in the enlarged editions, an alphabet of short, sharp articles, from Abraham to Virtue, first published anonymously in 1764 as a pocket book. Voltaire uses the dictionary form to attack religious intolerance, biblical literalism, superstition, torture and the abuse of authority, and to argue for toleration, natural religion and common sense.

Entries on Fanaticism, Tolerance, Torture, Soul, Miracles and Liberty of Thought are among the most read. It was banned in Geneva, Paris and Rome.

What happens

The Bible under examination. Entries on Abraham, Adam, Genesis, Moses, the Flood and Solomon read the scriptures as history and find them full of contradictions, borrowings from older peoples, and morals no modern man would accept, in a tone of innocent inquiry.

Fanaticism and superstition. Voltaire defines fanaticism as superstition become murderous, surveys the massacres of religious history from the Jews to St Bartholomew’s Day, and finds that philosophy alone has ever cured it.

Tolerance and liberty of thought. The articles on Tolerance argue that since we are all formed of error, we must pardon one another’s follies, and a dialogue between an English lord and a Portuguese inquisitor shows what liberty of thought looks like from each side.

Torture and justice. Written in the years of the Calas and Sirven affairs, the entries on Torture, Crimes and Laws attack a judicial system that broke suspects to obtain confessions and burned men for singing songs.

God, the soul and miracles. Voltaire argues for a God known by reason from the order of nature, confesses that no one knows what the soul is, and asks why miracles always happened long ago and far away.

Man and society. Entries on Equality, Luxury, Laws, Fatherland, War and Virtue turn from religion to politics, arguing that men are equal in nature and unequal in society, and that virtue is doing good to one’s neighbour rather than believing correctly.

How to read it

Read the dictionary form as the point, an alphabet a reader could open anywhere, designed to be carried, passed on and hidden where the great Encyclopédie could not be.

Pay close attention to the tone of innocent inquiry in the biblical entries, and to how ridicule works against institutions that relied on being taken seriously.

Notice that Voltaire argues for natural religion and not atheism, and use the entries on God and Soul to see where he parts from Diderot and Holbach.

Consider the book’s fate, burned with the body of a young man executed for blasphemy, and read it as an exhibit in the case it argues.

Read this dictionary alongside Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration to compare a philosopher’s argument for toleration with a satirist’s, and to decide which has done more to make it a habit.

Questions it raises

• Is ridicule a legitimate argument against belief, and does Voltaire persuade or only entertain those already persuaded?
• Why does Voltaire hold to a God known by reason while attacking every religion that claims to know Him, and is his deism a conviction or a prudence?
• Does the definition of fanaticism as murderous superstition explain the massacres it lists, or only name them?
• How does the dictionary’s treatment of the Jews, which is often contemptuous, sit with its plea for tolerance, and what does the contradiction reveal about the Enlightenment?
• What did the burning of the book with the Chevalier de La Barre change about how it was read?
• Is the entry on Tolerance a first law of nature, as it claims, or an achievement that had to be argued into existence, and by books like this one?