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Philosophical Dictionary

Voltaire · philosophical dictionary, 1764·7 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version7 hrs → 50 sec
  • A magistrate begs the Church to let him remarry. In the 1764 note on Adultery, a forty-year-old French magistrate whose wife disgraced him with a priest petitions his own Church for divorce, since God permits remarriage in Matthew 19:9 but Rome's canon law does not.
  • Voltaire refutes the porter parable on atheism. A Jesuit compared an atheist to a porter who says 'my master is not here' and a pagan to one who invents a criminal master; Voltaire corrects him: a true atheist porter would say 'I have no master' at all, since he denies the god exists rather than slanders him.
  • A Scythian shepherd out-argues a Greek theologian. In the entry GOD, the priest Logomacos interrogates old Dondindac, praying in his barn with his wife, five sons, and five daughters. Dondindac's answer to why he prays: 'it is right to worship the Supreme Being from whom we hold everything,' delivered in what the theologian calls 'barbarous Scythian jargon.'
  • Forty-four French priests condemned Joan of Arc to burn. Voltaire notes she was tried for wearing a man's suit as pretext, and that chroniclers admit she went to the stake 'with cries and tears,' not the fearless martyr later histories invented.
  • Two religions fight; thirty religions coexist, Voltaire argues. In TOLERANCE he writes that with two faiths in a country 'they will cut each other's throat,' but with thirty 'they will dwell in peace,' pointing to the Ottoman sultan governing Guebres, Banians, and multiple Christian sects without incident.
  • The dictionary closes by mock-submitting to the Inquisition. After ending on the unanswered question 'Why do we exist? why is there anything?', the book's final section sarcastically refers all its 'errors' to 'the infallible judgment of the Holy Inquisition of Rome, Florence, Madrid, Lisbon.'
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it got Voltaire's book burned by the Paris Parlement and banned by Rome within months, and its entry-by-entry case for religious tolerance shaped the language European states still use to justify it.

An alphabetical demolition of Church, state, and superstition, entry by entry, where a magistrate begs Rome for divorce and a shepherd out-argues a theologian.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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