The Paradoxes of Modernity: Rational Religion and Mythical Science in the Novels of Cyrano de Bergerac

Abstract

Whether the seventeenth-century French writer Cyrano de Bergerac can be considered to be a philosopher or not is debatable1, and continues to be debated.2 It is evident from his work that he has an extensive knowledge of the philosophic thought of the period and an intense interest in the unfolding of the ‘new philosophy’, the prelude to the ‘new science’.3 At the same time, his colourful writing in which he blends myth and imagination with reasoned argument makes it hard to determine what his own views actually were.