Voltaire and Blake: Against Religion

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how both Voltaire's "Candide and William Blake's "The Songs of Innocence and Experience" contain aspects of anti-religious sentiments. It explains how both epics are also quasi-historical; they provide a commentary on the prevailing times, and both works also provide a view into Blake and Voltaire's personal opinions and leanings.

From the Paper:

"Candide is several novels rolled into one. It involves romance, graphic violence, sexuality, philosophy, religious persecution and international intrigue. The narrative however, provides for one distinct thesis. Those who live real lives must forgo philosophy for pragmatism. The protagonist, Candide, starts out as a commoner in the home of a nobleman (Pangloss). To make a long story extremely short, he undergoes an Odyssean odyssey (Homer and Hull, 1978) and ends up tending a small farm, finally content in the life of a commoner. During his travails and travels, he comes across pillars of Catholicism and Protestantism. Both are primarily the antagonists in the narrative. They are the very embodiment of evil and the opposite of how they present themselves. Voltaire casts the religious in the role of hypocrites, exposing their hypocrisies at every turn. The only soft spot he spares is for the Anabaptists (in the form of the character of Jacques) "who generally eschew the typical religious trappings for realism, which makes him kind and generous "the good Jacques ran to his aid ?" (p. 118, Voltaire)."

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