Tartuffe, Frankenstein, and Candide -- Nature and Science vs. Religion Moliere's comedic play "Tartuffe," Mary Shelley's science fiction Romantic-era novel Frankenstein, and Voltaire's allegorical political satire Candide, all function as Enlightenment or scientific critiques of the authors' contemporary religious and societal mores. These works all uphold rationalism as the 'natural' or most beneficial state of human belief, in contrast to primitive and absolute trust in religious creed. However, all three works additionally suggest that 'natural' human instinct and trust in common sense and sensibility is also required for living a full human life, as well as a rigorously rational and scientific apprehension of nature.

For instance, Moliere's "Tartuffe" portrays a religious hypocrite in the form of the title character, a man who makes his living by sponging off of the family of a bourgeois gentleman. However, it is not the most academically educated characters that disabuse the householder of his notion that Tartuffe is a pious man. Rather, it is the natural and instinctive reason and commonsensical impulses of the man's wife and the lower class maid who first see through Tartuffe's use of fear to manipulate the man out of his hard-won earnings and ingrate his way into the home, pockets,...

Voltaire, in contrast to Moliere, is more inclined to use philosophical as well as narrative rationalism to prove Pangloss wrong. For example, rather than simply have the minor characters make fun of Pangloss, Moliere also depicts the absurdity of the teacher's rhetorical and intellectual maneuverings to justify his ideas, as the characters frequently engage in arguments about moral philosophy while they suffer horrific perils. The native belief of those of faith in goodness and religion is undercut by the Pope's fathering a child and by the evils of the Spanish inquisition, but also by Pangloss' sloppy intellectual logic when he justifies every event as happening 'for the best.' Thus, in Voltaire, nature and natural common sense defeats intellectual as well as self-interested deceit and artifice, while in Moliere, merely natural common sense defeats Tartuffe's insincere philosophy. Neo-Classical intellectual rigor, and the…