by Joseph T. Stuart, Sophia Institute Press (2020), 387 pp
The “portrait” began to establish itself as a literary genre, especially in French literature, from about 1650 onwards. French writers of the 17th century
— “le Grand Siècle” — such as Molière and La Bruyère excelled in this form of a painting-in-words of a person. In the eighteenth century the portrait contained more of the psychology of the individual, while in the 19th century it found its place in the novel, especially in the works of Balzac.
Joseph T. Stuart’s
Rethinking the Enlightenment is a refreshing read for a number of reasons. Not least among these is that this analysis of “faith in the Age of Reason” (as its subtitle reads) contains a series of “portraits” of very different personalities who reflect varying attitudes or positions taken to the Enlightenment and to the Christian faith and to the relationship between them.