Voltaire on England's Protector and on Relief From Remorse

Newton, Emilie du Chatelet (the Muse) and Voltaire
Frontispiece from Elémens de la philosophie de Newton (ca. 1738)
via Wikimedia Commons

Because I have already 'spammed' the Lighthouse blog with Voltaire quotations, I thought that I would vary the entertainment and offer the quotations here instead.

For whichever reason, I adore Voltaire's one-sided feud with the historical figure of Oliver Cromwell. One of the French philosopher's greatest flaws from a philosophical standpoint is, in my view, his belittling attitude toward every foreign religion. But I did enjoy this paragraph:

Nearly all the officers of his army were enthusiasts who carried the New Testament at their saddle-bow: in the army as in the parliament men spoke only of making Babylon fall, of establishing the religion in Jerusalem, of shattering the colossus. Among so many madmen Cromwell ceased to be mad

"Cromwell I" in Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, H.I. Woolf, ed. and transl. (New York: Knopf, 1924) [Hanover College]

I also found the first sentence of Voltaire's essay on "Expiation" deeply touching and poetic, as I believe he calculatingly intended it should be.

Maybe the most beautiful institution of antiquity is that solemn ceremony which repressed crimes by warning that they must be punished, and which calmed the despair of the guilty by making them atone for their transgressions by penitences. 

It wasn't the punishment part that struck me, but of course the part about healing the harm that has been inflicted on one's soul, through true expiation.

(Side note: I don't sympathize with Voltaire's adulation of Sir Isaac Newton. Bertrand Russell — if I remember rightly — and my father both believed that Newton was a bit of a jerk, and I've read nothing that persuades me otherwise. The illustration above is also pretty saccharine. I wonder if Voltaire was smoking something whenever he read or wrote of the Englishman.)