ALBERTO SOLÓRZANO NÍGER - Valparaíso, Chile
Francisco María Arouet, universally acquaintance under VOLTAIRE'S anagram, was born November of 1694, 21 in Paris. Their father had been notary of Chátelet and he enjoyed a very ample economic position. Margarita d·Aumard, her mother, was a distinguished woman, of vivacious and ingenious character, although of quite slight customs, like she was used in the society of her time.
The childhood and Voltaire's youth were developed under the patronage and their godfather's protection, Francisco of Castagner, father of Cháteauneuf who, nevertheless its ecclesiastical condition, belonged the renowned society of ingenious, sceptical and libertine that had like center to the Japanese famous courtesan of Lenclos. Under so essential influences it was being formed the young Voltaire's spirit. Their natural one satirical received in that means such a stimulus that was a paragon of mordacity and naturalness at the little time, from genius malicious and lacking scruples.
To the ten years it entered in San Luis' School the Big one, directed by the Jesuit, where it studied with remarkable profit the humanities of their time. He revealed literary conditions so brilliant that their professors, in spite of their rebellious and irreligious character, watched over for seven year-old space their intellectual formation, omening him a brilliant future in the letters. In the school it began very solid friendships with children of powerful families of the nobility that then were him useful in their multiple questions with the authorities.
The years that continued to their exit of the Jesuit school were particularly turbulent. Their father tried to make it follow the career of laws, and I eat Voltaire it lost the time in living rooms and theaters, it put it low the French ambassador's whip in The Hague, in page's quality. It made such calaveradas that was returned to their father there who, desperate, thought of extreme measures y it finished putting it of amanuensis in the Procurator's office.
Meanwhile, the father of Cháteauneuf, his padrino, lo guided for other more pleasing paths to his temperament and his genius. It introduced it with determination in the Society of the Temper, species of literary and political mentidero of high flight, where all had to elegance to be sceptical, ingenious, without moral scruples, neither religious and, overalls, mordants. Voltaire could deploy all the force of his graceful character there, cultivating the dramatic poetry and beginning with more success.
Indeed, as a result of a poetic competition in the one that was not favored, began to write compositions of that character, against colleagues at the beginning, then against characters of the Court, finally against the own regent of the Kingdom. To the 20 years, after many reprimands and of an exile of Paris, Voltaire entered in the Hem, where it was contained by space of eleven months. There wrote other works of smaller flight, their famous poem The Henriada. Reconciled with the authorities, although not very sure of falling again low penal sanctions, trip during three years for diverse castles of France, where it is received as the gentleman of the letters that is, and then for Belgium and Holland, where notices and meditates seriously, for the first time, about the benefits of the trade.
Of turn to their country in 1722, is devoted entirely to the theater and the muses with success, although with economic benefit. It inherits of their father a thousand two hundred pounds of rent, enjoys two pensions of the court, it is so dear, as feared. The glory and the fortune are reconciled forever with him. Then the unfortunate incident takes place with el caballero of Rohán, of which comes out imprisoned beaten Voltaire, humiliated, and finally exiled a Inglaterra.
This trip is capital in the history of Voltaire's ideas; mediated the year of 1716. In England the poet is received with all the honors by the insular intellectuality. It cultivates the letters and the society, but studies and adheres to the empiricism de Locke, to the deism of the librepensadores and Newton physics. They were three years of intense and I fecundate learning that they matured Voltaire's thought, giving him a doctrinal stability and a philosophical orientation that until then it lacked. Product of these studies and of such relationships, they were the Philosophical Letters, one of the capital works, in their gender, written in French. He also wrote there, although it published in France, their tragedy Brutus and their well-known History of XII Carlos.
At the beginning of the year 1729 in that Voltaire is reinstated to the Parisian society, the time of the publicist's intellectual maturity begins. Reconciled with the court, put in business, not completely advisable, applauded and feared, writes and it represents several tragedies and countless epistles and madrigals.
The secret publication of its Philosophical Letters questions it once again and takes refuge in the castle and in the arms of the marquise of Chátelet, ingenious, learned and passionate woman that will be its lover and its guardian angel for thirteen year-old space.
For her writes several philosophy works and numerous literary rehearsals, especially the Rehearsal on the customs, with which the philosophy of the history begins. But, neither the empeñosas madame administrations Chátelet, neither the works written in relief of the king, neither the favor of the Pompadour, were able to incline the spirit of the court toward him; and Voltaire should leave of France toward Prussia, June of 1750, 18 but exile, neither retained, what hurt more his vanity. In Potsdam it was received, as if it was a semidiós, por the cultured and liberal Federico the Big one; it filled it of honors and of money to full hands, it transformed it into the center of a society of writers, science men and statesmen and it treated him of similar to equally. But Voltaire has an incorrigible character and he complains with all those that form the circle áulico.
The king Prussian tires of so much meanness, and when Voltaire carries to an extreme his satires and his insults against Maupertuis, president of the Academy of Sciences of Berlin and one of the sages, more considered of his time, he receives a scornful authorization so that he abandons the German court.
Three years Voltaire passed in Berlin, where his prestige became universal. didn't write any work of importance there, although made print all the previous ones, even the forbidden ones in France and especially their Century of XIV Luis. But their experience of the world and their scientific knowledge were enlarged vastly to the contact with the sages and the writers that sat down to the great Federico's table. Their antireligious conviction was secured and was necessary. To the sixty years was a sceptical patriarch and mordant that had the Europe learned slope of their feather, but to whose side nobody felt sure.
Closed for him the doors of the two only courts where could live, Voltaire decides to settle in Switzerland. He buys the lands of Ferney, border with Geneva, although French, and in them settles forever. This happens in 1755, and during twenty-three years the glorious old man works in his retirement, he enjoys in him and in him it reigns. While assists their interests and is in charge of of the small world that boils to their surroundings, writes without rest: tragedies, poems, polemic ensayos, páginas and of literary critic. It rehabilitates the memory of Creeks, protests against the torture applied the gentleman of it Sweeps Him, pleads for the liberation of the servants from the Jura, it combats the brutal penal legislation of their time and the continuous abuses of the autoridades. Y above everything it maintains an epistolary correspondence without example, maybe the finest, personal and valuable in Voltaire's written work.
Loaded with glory and of ailments, Voltaire was allowed to convince and February of 1778, 10 entered en París after 27 years of absence; the greeting that made him the capital of France was superlative: an apotheosis, a frenzy; noblemen and plebeian, official institutions and private circles, competed in surrendering him honors. The Academy named him its director, in the Comedy it was crowned. To close this victorious arch they were one day Franklin and Voltaire, the parents of the American and French revolution. But the death asechaba amid so many applauses and ceremonies. After two months of painful enfermedad, Voltaire it dies May 30 1778.
Transcendency of Voltaire's ideas
We have already aimed that Voltaire was not a systematic thinker. Its passion for the letters and its satirical vein prevented him to stick to al campo of the abstract speculation and to fix its reflection in an aspect of the knowledge. And if this typical representative of a time that it liked to be denominated itself “of the philosophy”, philosopher was not, what was it then?; was his weakness the epic poetry and the dramatic theater; their genius showed in the slight poetries, the epigram and the epistolary gender; its true intellectual transcendency, for what weighs in the history of the ideas, is for its novel conception of the history.
The popularity that enjoyed in their time like writer doesn't keep relationship with the almost absolute forgetfulness in that you/they have fallen his productions; the phenomenon has its explanation: it was not a creator of characters, neither a renovating of literary methods, stuck to the goods in vogue and it respected the effective cánones conscientiously in their time; interpreted the pleasure of their contemporaries that you/they leaned for the pompous thing, the rhetorical thing, the pseudo-classic thing. For that reason, the characters of their dramas and tragedies lack human heat, of true vital resonance.
As poet it was elegant, I fry, academic calculador y; it returned their view to the old authors, because he disliked Shakespeare's messy brilliant idea. Him está en the line of Corneille and of Racine without arriving to their height. However, their poems and tragedies liked their contemporaries because of that their satirical spirit infiltrated in them giving them an incidental interest that no longer resonates in us with determination. If Voltaire had lived in our time he had been a brilliant journalist.
If its influence in the letters has declined, if you grieve bill in the history of the philosophy like a passionate and polemic utterer of the deism, on the other hand, its contribution to the historical thought is capital. El rebirth it had upgraded the forms historiográficas of the old ones. The annals, invented by Tucídides and high to classic gender for Tito Livio, they had been adopted by the humanist ones and they still governed in Voltaire's youth. It was looked for in the historical story nothing else that composition and architecture, when more aesthetic emotion.
The learned current that begins with the Benedictine of San Mauro and too much hit to the small fact was with the bolandistas, to the documental minutiae. None of these attitudes satisfied Voltaire. He didn't want an external historia puramente, neither a heap of unconnected data; saw the history of a state, as an organic group whose intimate relationships had what to show. For that reason left the history of the wars, the story of the court events and of the diplomatic conflicts, to investigate the march of the finances, of the trade, of the religion, of the art, etc, in a word, of the civilization.
Another serious contribution, in the field histórico, su political and national impartiality. It is not forced to see in the France a paragon of virtues and in the rest towns, a collection of rascals. All that agrees with their political ideal, applauds it where wants it is noticed. Its absolute lack of respect for all the authorities, makes it an ideal critic. The Philosophical Dictionary is a patent test that not the cohíben, neither the parents of the Church, neither the kings, neither the revered authors, neither the sacred books; on the contrary, delights in pointing out the absurdities, the stupidities and the ridicules that the historia sagrada is plagued.
It feels true voluptuousness in demonstrating that “two two are four”, although another thing the exegetas and more authorized theologians say. Lastly Voltaire needs to compare the different towns and the different times, obtaining with it really graphic and hit upon effects. Its Rehearsal on the customs is plentiful in this class of successes. Of the situation of the Jews in Rome, says: “He looked him at them con los same eyes with which we see to the black ones.”
To the assemblies of the primitive Christian, it compares them with those that carried out in their time the Quakers. And in front of the descriptions desmesuradas that of the facts of the town elegido hace the Bible, puts the reduced extension of the Palestine and the poverty of its scarce inhabitants' resources.
The history for Voltaire is not only description or confirmation of the facts, but interpretation and teaching. To this position he gave him the name of philosophy of the history that still lasts.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY OF VOLTAIRE
The book that is given to all you, appeared in Ginebra for the first time by the middle of 1764 and in anonymous form. Their publication unchained a true storm of hates…, and of interests. Se the reissue Happened, and although Voltaire denied reiteradamente his paternity, nobody called you to deceit. The Philosophical Dictionary is image intelectual de its author.
Without defined architecture, they go taking in him the topics more a propósito to demonstrate the errors and the fanaticism of the church, constituting the group a learned and kind breviary dedicated to clean the brain of the men of the theological spider's webs. A central idea goes basting the different matters: the that there are a God computer and a natural virtue: the Reason that, transformed into Goddess, they will revere and they will entertain during the French revolution.
The idea of a work like the one that offers to the public nació en here Federico's gathering the Big one in 1752, received their first form in 1764, I eat it has already been said, and it was being increased in the successive editions, until acquiring their definitive expression in 1770. To this edition it corresponds the version that we will give next.
ABBOT: - Abbot father means. If you end up being it, you lend a service to the State, you make the best thing that can make el hombre, to give life to a being that thinks; it is necessary at once of being father something divine; but if you are only an abbot so that they clip you, to take a small golilla, a short layer and to expect a simple benefit, you don't deserve abbot's name.
The old monks gave this name to the superior that was chosen; the abbot was his spiritual father; the same names, with the course of the time, mean very different things. In the oldest times, the spiritual abbot was a poor person that was to the front of other many poor, but then the poor spiritual parents ended up enjoying two hundred and four hundred thousand pounds of rent; at the moment there are poor spiritual parents in Germany that you/they have to their orders a regiment of guards.
The poor person that makes oath of being poor, and that for consequence of this vote it ends up being sovereign, it is intolerable. The laws protest against this abuse, the religion is indignated, and the true poor that lack dress and of food, they rush to the sky screams of indignation from the door of abbot's palace. But I hear that the abbots from Italy reply, of Germany, of Flanders, of Burgundy, asking: “Why must we accumulate goods and homes?, why must we be princes, when yes they are it the bishops?; the bishops poor originariamente was as us, have they risen and have they gotten rich, has one of them ended up being superior to the kings; we will imitate him, because, up to where we can”
You have a lot of reason; you can invade the world that belongs to the strongest or the weakest that takes possession of him. You knew how to take advantage of the times of ignorance, of superstition and of insanity, to rob us of our goods and to tramp us and to put on weight with the substance of the unfortunate ones. But tremble cuando llegue the day in that it lights to the world the light of the reason and of the truth.
ABBEY: - Abbey is a religious community directed by an abbot or an abbess. The word abbot, abbas in Latin and in Greek, abba in Syrian and in Chaldaic, it comes from the voice Hebrew ab that father means. The Jewish doctors adopted for pride that denomination; for that reason Jesus said to his pupils: “You don't call father to any man in the world, because you don't have more than a father, and it is the one that is in the skies.”
Although San Jerónimo became furious against the friars of its time, in spite of prohibiting it the Mr., they gave and they received abbot's title, the sixth Council of Paris decided that, being the abbots spiritual parents and engendering for the Mr. spiritual children, there was reason to call them abbots.
After having published the one referred ordinance, if some deserved abbot's title, undoubtedly San Benito that in the year 529 were founded in Mount Casino was (destroyed by action of the war February 17 1944), his wise and discreet rule, white and burden. According to the Pope's opinion San Gregorio, all the Benedictine that die in Mount Casino will survive. It doesn't should, because, to surprise us that this religious count in their order sixteen thousand sainted saints. The same Benedictine suppose that notices them the vicinity of their death a night noise that they call San Benito's blow.
It should be believed that this sacred abbot won't forget to request to God the salvation of his pupils. On Saturday May of 543, 21 eve of the Domingo of Passion, day in that San Benito died, two religious, one of those that were in the monastery and the other one far from there, they had the same vision: they were appeared a long road, upholstered and lit by infinity of axes that extended toward the East and it arrived from the monastery, until the sky. A venerable character was presented, asking them who it was the one that had to go by that road, and the monks answered him that they didn't know it. Then, the venerable character made them know that for that road the Abbot Benito would go back to the sky
The religious order that assured the eternal salvation expanded very soon to other nations whose sovereigns were persuaded that it was convenient to protect an institution that assured them a place in the Paradise, and they could get the pardon of their injustices and crimes just by making donations in favor of the churches of the order.
In the king's Gestes Dagoberto, founder of the abbey of San Dionisio, located near Paris, you refiere, que cuando this prince died, it was condemned in the opinion of God, and that a sacred hermit that Juan called himself and he lived in the costs of the sea of Italy, he saw his soul loved in a boat, and that several devils milled it to blows driving her toward Sicily, where they should precipitate it in the abysses of the mount Etna; and that suddenly San Dionisio appeared in a preceded luminous globe of rays and of thunders, it put in precipitate flight to the wicked spirits, it pulled up the soul to those that had taken possession of her and it overcame it to the sky in victory.
Carlos Martel, on the contrary, it was condemned in body and soul to have given to their commanders abbeys in recompense of their services. Those, although they were lay, they used abbot's title, as well as married women obtained the title of abbesses later, and they possessed abbeys until the single youths. The sacred bishop from Lyon, called Eucher, being given to the sentence, it was snatched in spirit and driven by an angel to the hell, where saw Carlos Martel, and knew for the angel that the saints that said prince gave to the churches had sentenced him to burn eternally in body and soul.
San Eucher participated the revelation that had Bonifacio, obispo of Mainz, and to Fulrad, first chaplain of Pipino the Brief one, requesting them that they opened Carlos' sepulcher Martel to see if was its cadaver there. They opened the sepulcher and they saw that the bottom was burnt, and that a great snake left him among a cloud of stinking smoke.
Bonifacio wrote Pipino detailedly the Brief one and to Charlemagne all those details of the father's condemnation, and when Louis from Germania, in 858, took possession of some ecclesiastical goods, the bishops that met in the assembly of Crecy reminded him in a letter all the details of this terrible history, adding that they knew it for reference of old men worthy of credit that you/they were ocular witness.
San Bernardo that was the first abbot of Clervaux, had in 1115 la revelation that they would survive all those that received the habit of his own hands. The Urban Pope II, in the bull published in the year 1092, it granted to the abbey of Mount Casino the headquarters of all the monasteries, because in this place the monastic religion “it flowed of the venerable Benito's breast, as of a paradise spring.”
The emperor Lotario, confirmed this prerogative by means of a privilege of the year 1137, in which gave to the monastery of Mount Casino the pre-eminence of power and of glory on all the convents that existed or that they were founded in the whole universe, sending that the abbots and the friars of the whole Christendom honor him and they revere him.
Pascual II, in the bull that I publish in the year 1113, directed to the abbot of Mount Casino, it was expressed in the following terms: “We decree that so much vos, as your successors, for the superiority that you have on all the abbots, has seat in all the assemblies of bishops or of princes and that you give your opinion or your advice before all those of your order”. there being you daring the abbot of Cluny to be described as the abbots' abbot in the Council that took place in Rome in the year 1116, the Pope's chancellor decided that that distinction only corresponded to the abbot of Mount Casino, and el de Cluny had to be satisfied with obtaining the title of abad del cardinal that got after Calixto II whose title later claimed the abbot from the Trinidad of Vendome and some other ones.
The Pope XXII Juan, in 1326, granted the abbot of Mount Casino bishop's title whose functions carried out up to 1367 in that Urban V believed that it should deprive him of similar dignity, and from then on it is entitled “Patriarch of Santa Religion, abbot of the sacred monastery of Mount Casino, Chancellor and Great Chaplain of the Roman Empire, Abbot of the Abbots, Boss of the Benedictine Hierarchy, Colateral Chancellor of the Kingdom of Sicily, Count and Governor of Bell and Prince of Peace”; lives with their descendants' great part in the small village of San German, located in the skirt of Mount Casino, in a roomy building, in the one that all the travelers, from the Pope until the last beggar, find room, food and treatment, according to its age and condition.
In 1638 they gave hospitality there to San Ignacio, but they installed him in a house located to six hundred steps of the abbey toward the occident; there it was where it forged the project of their celebrated institute, what induced to say a un dominico that Ignacio lived some months in that Montaña surrendered to the view, and that, as another Moses, he edited the second charts of the religious laws that are not worth less than the first ones.
To tell the truth, the founder of the Jesuit was not received by the Benedictine with so much indulgence, as it was it San Benito when it arrived to Mount Casino, when the hermit San Martin gave him the place that occupied and he retired to the Mont-Marsique. La relaxation of the customs that has reigned always in the world, and also in the clergy, it infused San Basilio the project in the century IV, of gathering under a rule common to the loners that you/they were dispersed in the deserts so that they were held oneself law. Charlemagne, in a writing that he edited on what will propose to the Parliament in the year 811, is expressed this way: “We want to know the duties of the clergymen in order to not demanding them more than lo que les it is allowed, and so that they don't request us more than what we should grant them.
We request them that they explain to us with what a clarity it is what they call “to leave the world”, and we can distinguish those that leave it, of those that remain in him in what; if this difference only consists in that don't take weapons and in that don't marry openly; left si ha the world the one that doesn't cease never of increasing their goods for all kinds of means, promising the Paradise, threatening the hell, using the blessed name of God or of the saints to convince to the incautious ones that they should come off of their goods, depriving from them to their legitimate heirs; if has left the world the one that surrenders to the passion of acquiring until the end of buying, by means of the money to false witness to get the other people's goods, and the one that lawyers and cruel provosts that are interested in their business looks for and that they don't have fear of God.”
To be judged of the customs of the clergymen by the speech that the year 1493 directed to their brothers the abbot Trithemo: “You, the abbots that you are ignorant and enemies of the science of the salvation that days pass integers surrendered to unchaste pleasures, to the intoxication and the game, what do you count you will give to God and your founder, San Benito?. did This same abbot sustain to continuación que it belongs of right the third part of the goods from the Christian to San Benito's order, and that if this doesn't possess them, it is because they steal them to him. “The order is so poor at the present time-the mentioned abbot says - that only possesses a hundred million rent gold.”
Trithemo doesn't say to who they should belong the other two parts of the goods of the Christendom, but I eat in its time fifteen thousand abbeys of Benedictine they only existed, without counting the small convents of this order, and in the XVII century, they ended up being thirty and seven thousand, it is certain, following a proportion rule that that sacred order should possess, at the present time the third two parts and mediates of the goods of the Christian, if it had not impeded it the fateful progresses of the heresy during the last centuries.
By virtue of the Concordat taken place in the year 1515, among León X and Francisco I, this granted benefits to almost all the abbeys of France, and almost all you commend them the the clipped seculars obtained. This procedure, almost unknown in England, made say burlesquely, in 1694 to the doctor Gregori: “The good father imagines that we have gone back at the fabulous times, in those that it was allowed to tell a un friar all that was wanted”.
To the Jewish therapists the monks happened in Egypt that they called idiotai: idoit, meant then solitary, but very soon they formed a corporation that indicates just the opposite of what means the word with which they qualified them. Each corporation of friars chose its superior, because all the elections were verified by plurality of votes in the first times of the Church. They made an effort the men then to acquire the primitive freedom of the human nature, trying to avoid the obstacles and the slavery that are inseparable in the big empires.
All the religious societies were chosen father or abbot, although the Gospel says: “You don't call to anybody your father”. Neither the abbots, neither the monks, were priests in the first centuries. In groups they went to the immediate village to hear mass; these groups ended up being very considered; as one says, it ended up existing more than sixty thousand monks in Egipto. San Basilio that first it was monje y later Bishop of Caesarean operation, in Capadocia, edited a code for all the monks, in the century IV. San Basilio's rule was adopted in East and in West; other monks were hardly known, and these got rich everywhere, they interfered in all the profane matters and they contributed to the revolutions that exploded in the Empire.
This only order was only known, until the century VI in that San Benito instituted a new power in Mount Casino. San Gregorio the Big one, asegura en their Dialogues that Dios le granted the special privilege that all the Benedictine that died in Mount Casino would survive; as consequence of this, the Urban Pope II, in 1092, it published a bull in which declared to the abbot of Mount Casino, all the abbots' of the world boss. Pascual II granted him the abbots' abbot's el título. As it was already said, Patriarch of the Santa Religion, colateral Chancellor of the Kingdom of Sicily, is titled Governor from the Campania, Prince of the Paz,etc, etc. All those titles anything would mean, if it had not sustained them a fabulous wealth.
A long time ago I received a letter from one of my correspondents from Germany that begins in the following way: “The abbots princes of Rempter, Elvaugen, Eudertl, Murbach, Beylesgaden, Corvey and the other abbots that are not princes, enjoy among all of nine hundred thousand florins of rent that are equal to two millions fifty thousand French pounds, what I deduce that Jesus Christ didn't enjoy the comforts of the life that they take”. I should not pass in silence that, in 1575, he intended in Enrique's Town council II, king from France, to erect in you commend secular all the abbeys of monks, and to grant these you commend the employees of the court and the officials of the army; but I eat soon after they excommunicated this king and died murdered, was not carried out that project.
The count of Argenson, Secretary of the Guerra, projected in 1750, to establish pensions about the benefits in favor of the Gentlemen of the military order of San Luís. This project was easy, fair and useful, but for the same thing neither ended up being carried out. However, in the reign of XIV Luís, the princess of Conti possessed the abbey of San Dionisio; before this reign, the seculars possessed benefits, and the duke of Sully that was Huguenot, it possessed an abbey.
Hugo's father Capeto was rich, to be owner of abbeys, and him llamaban “Hugo, the Abbot”. these were also granted to the queens so that they financed its personal expenses. Orgina, mother of Luís of Overseas, abandoned her son because this removed him the abbey of Santa María of Laon, to be given it to her wife, Gesberga.
There were examples of everything; everybody who could took advantage of the uses, of the innovations, of the repealed laws, of the false or legitimate titles, of the past, of the present or of the future, to take possession of the earthly goods, leaving many times to the poor humble friars with the empty hands and in many cases, perishing of hunger and of misery, but always… for the biggest glory of God.
