The Bridge of Criticism

Back in 1970, the historian Peter Gay wrote a brilliant little book entitled The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues Among Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire on the Enlightenment. Gay chose these three figures to discuss among themselves the meaning of the Enlightenment because Gibbon had at one time mused that he might write a dialogue (trialogue?) in which these three "mutually acknowledge" the inherent risks involved in thinking critically about religion in public. Gay's book takes up this topic and many others--including the often overlooked Enlightenment roots of Romanticism. At one point in the conversation, Voltaire confesses that "...the more I read the Romantics, the more I find myself in them--certainly in the English Romantics, less so in the French, in the Germans not at all" (p. 113).