Critical Voltaire of the theology of history

Abstract

Theology tries to systematize and list what the revelation and faith bring to the believer about the issue of the meaning of history, pilgrimage through humanity’s time, thought as a whole. It emphasizes not so much the knowledge, but the spiritual state of happiness to which mankind must rise before the end of life on earth. Modern theorists don´t accept the theological proposal and they have the ambition of decentralizing the traditionally ordained history, by a Christocentric worldview. The historian, exempting himself from the faction, assumes rational discourse about human´s trajectory by a new interpretive framework core: the idea of ​​humanity. Voltaire presents himself as the legitimate representative of this perspective. History, under the Voltairean prism, is placed as a problem and not as a dogmatical object, with characteristics of a final acquisition. The historical problem is to understand the current world and mankind inserted therein. The purpose of the present work was to bring, therefore, the theological proposal for history and its critique, developed by Voltaire, in order to highlight the originality of modern approach to the historical phenomenon.