Voltaire's Artifact of the Enlightenment

It is a prop for Voltaire's histories, such as his Age of Louis XIV, published in 1751 and positi angiotensin-converting enzymed in the clever postmortem of religion as chief marker of culture. The worldly progeny of the Thirty Years War may be perceived as a corrective to previous heathenish inadequacies, but Candide does not look toward a utopian proximo; the hero b atomic number 18ly achieves the insight that cultivation of a garden is as worthy a human pursuit as perpetual war. Viewed in the context of the (mainly) nationalist-secular Seven Years' War (French and Indian War in America, 1756-63), Candide reaches meaning not as social reformer tract but as a secular evaluate of faith and its institutions and--significantly--of secular institutions and traditions of faith that support them. There are no heroes in Candide; its title character lacks that stature, though he is a clever and lucky enough survivor to come up at a degree of thoughtfulness.

It is a commonplace that Candide represents a direct satire of the views of the philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), whose systemic and inflexible articulations of optimism, hence lordly faith in divine providence, in the face of recurrent and intolerable horrors of human experience, is personified in the figure of Candide's tutor Pangloss. Voltaire's " cerise" attack on Leibniz's "notorious" (Hampshire 142) doctrine of optimism can from one point of view be characterized as an instance in which the present age, like each age preceding it, seems undecided of showing its di

Pomeau, Ren? Henry. "Voltaire." Britannica 2001 Deluxe adaptation CD. 2001 ed.

--- [Boswell.e]. Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1904. Ed. James Lynch, from the two-volume 1904 Oxford edition. .

Holmes, Richard. "Voltaire's Grin." New York Review of Books 30 November 1995: 49-55.

That was in 1759, the date of publication of Rasselas, a year after the look of Candide. Johnson's attitude toward Voltaire does not appear to have improved with time.

Voltaire, for his part, exposit Johnson as a "superstitious dog" (Boswell.e). Boswell, a beaten(prenominal) of Voltaire, Hume, and Johnson who visited Voltaire in Switzerland, seems to have wanted nothing so such(prenominal) as for Johnson and Voltaire to be professionally and personally reconciled. In an chronicle of his travels in 1763, Boswell cites Johnson's characterization of Voltaire as the Prussian King Frederick's stenographer (secretary-cum-ghost writer); Voltaire and Johnson do seem to have agreed on Frederick's literary skill. However, by the late 1760s, Johnson was equating Voltaire with Rousseau--"one of the worst of men . . . and it is a shame that he is protected in this outlandish" (Boswell 132). This was well after both(prenominal) Rasselas and Candide and well into the high careers of both Voltaire and Johnson. Asked whether Rousseau, then abiding in London, were "as bad a man as Voltaire," Johnson replied, "Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of detestation between them" (Boswell 132).

Clark, Kenneth. Civilisation. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

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