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Voltaire: History Unexemplary and en Philosophe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

M. A. Fitzsimons
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Extract

The victims of the wars of religion and persecution had their revenge in the growth of a temper indifferent to the claims of particular churches. There were others too who, adopting ancient materialisms, rationalism or the outlook of physical science, rejected theology and abandoned religion altogether. For both, the Enlightenment meant a polemic against the Christian churches, as well as Judaism, and the articulation of new beliefs. Since religions touched in different degrees all spheres of life, the battleground included philosophy, morality and history. Superstition and persecution were the themes of Enlightened church history. God's hand, if there was a God, might direct history in some ultimate way, but not by direct intervention. As there was no “sacred history,” the meaning of history or, at any rate, a way of looking at history, had to be sought anew. After the first quarter of the eighteenth century, this task attracted a remarkable and numerous response, to which the Romantic period added the dense and challenging Idealist philosophies of history. The philosophes, the gurus of Enlightenment, presented history's meaning as not in the past but to come, as salvation from the irrational and the brutal, presented it with a clarity as misleading as it was persuasive.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , October 1978 , pp. 447 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1978

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References

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