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The Enlightenment?

By Peter Sellick - posted Monday, 1 October 2007


I have been trying to discover the first person to describe the philosophical, theological and scientific movements in the 16th and 17th century as the “Enlightenment”. After all, the word carries so much freight. It implies that before this event, human beings existed in a time of darkness, ignorance and superstition.

The term “Middle Ages” is another freighted name that implies that these were the ages between the light of Greek philosophy and the aforementioned Enlightenment. I suspect that the first person, presumably a historian, who used these terms, was of a secular persuasion who identified the influence of the Church with darkness and ignorance and the new age of rationalism with light and knowledge. If any reader has insight into how these terms came about I would be glad to know.

An uncritical and positive view of the Enlightenment is orthodoxy at Australian secular universities to the extent that few have departments of theology even though the history of the West is unintelligible without such knowledge. Even so, history departments throughout the land teach Medieval history in the absence of any teaching that carries a sympathetic view of the central place of Christian theology in the societies studied.

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The Enlightenment is a bit like the Christmas scene in which shepherds jostle with wise men in the manger. This scene is an amalgam of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, the shepherds being derived from Luke and the wise men from Matthew - who does not mention how many there were. Without an examination of the separate gospels there is no reason to doubt the version reproduced in thousands of tableaus in shop windows and churches throughout the land. Likewise, our idea of the Enlightenment is a convenient gloss of the real thing. Giving it a name seduces us into thinking that it was one event.

For example, the Enlightenment is associated with the rise of natural science. Hitherto natural science was impossible because of the dominance of Aristotle who held that there was purpose in natural events. An apple fell to the ground because it was the nature of apples to do so. There was thus no reason to investigate further. In astronomy the orbits of the planets have to be perfect circles because they existed in the divine sphere and hence obeyed the dictates of perfection. It was Kepler who, in 1605 with the use of the astronomical data of Tycho Brahe deduced the elliptical orbits thus breaking with Aristotle. Francis Bacon dethroned Aristotelian teleology with his book Novum Orgranum in 1620. So the scientific revolution was already well underway before the publication of Descartes’ Discourse on Method in 1639.

Descartes is acknowledged as the person who stood at the beginning of the modern age because he produced a method of rational thinking that owed nothing to any authority except that of the thinking subject. The story goes that Descartes, a devout Catholic, was much worried by the theology of Ockham who said that if God were truly free He could have made any universe he wished and he could reverse any decision at will. The resultant uncertainty about life in general prompted Descartes to produce a method of knowing that was iron clad. He determined to put aside all of his knowledge and to accept no proposition or idea from any other person but to only rely on those ideas that seemed to him clear and distinct. The only ideas that were certain apart from these unitary concepts were the reality of the thinking self and the existence of God which he thought were innate.

The English philosopher John Locke took Descartes radical scepticism but gave it a more empirical twist, there were no innate ideas, the mind was a clean slate upon which experience wrote. Certainty, like for Descartes, was achievable for formal knowledge that was understood to be as near mathematical as possible. Knowledge of the essence of things could never be certain because we could only have sensible knowledge of them. However formal propositions like two plus two equals four were certain.

An example of the importation of this epistemology into theology may be found in Samuel Clarke’s first Boyle lecture given in 1705 at St Paul’s London. In this lecture Clarke attempted to prove the existence and the attributes of God using only formal ideas that did not depend upon evidence in the world. The result is a sterile set of syllogisms that produced a God who had nothing to do with the God of the Bible and who certainly was not know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Clarke thus earned himself a place in the backwaters of theology.

The irony is that all of the early Enlightenment philosophers and scientists (including Hooke, Boyle and Newton) in England were Christians who spent much time and effort arguing for the existence of God and the human soul against the atheists, the Deists and Spinozists. They saw themselves as the protectors of orthodox Christianity.

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In retrospect the church could have well done without their efforts because they arrived at a God who existed only in their own minds, was difficult to integrate into the liturgy of the Church, was a stranger to one and a half thousand years of Christian theology and had little to do with the event of the cross. Such a view of God lies at the heart of modern atheism.

Clarke’s later work Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity in which he attempted to dismantle Trinitarian thought demonstrated the poverty of Locke’s epistemological theory. One result of this was that it atomised not only community into individuals but also ideas which were understood as corpuscles occupying the mind. Complex ideas could only be understood after they had been reduced to their component simple, clear and distinct ideas.

This reductive method is clear in Scripture Doctrine which consisted of lists of biblical quotations (1250 of them) arranged according to their relevance to the Trinity. Rich biblical narrative was reduced to points of data. We find a similar tendency in Newton’s published work, particularly in his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms that consists of little more than lists of dates and events devoid of unifying narrative.

The problem was that there was no sharp distinction between natural science and philosophy. The early scientists, involved as they were in investigating the world as mechanism, assumed that God was a part of that mechanism. As such, evidence could be found in the world for his existence and creative activity.

Such was the fame of people like Newton and Locke that their amateurish theological assumptions held sway, and continue to influence popular thought, despite the fact that the methods of Descartes and Locke were demolished by later philosophies of Hume and Kant.

It is obvious that for the discipline of theology the Enlightenment would be better termed the Endarkenment because we lost so much understanding. The natural sciences and not beholden to Descartes and Locke. Radical scepticism had been explored by the Greeks and was certainly not a new thing. Newton himself stated that he stood on the shoulders of giants. His law of gravitation relied on Kepler. So much for autocratic epistemology!

The most damaging heritage from Descartes and Locke is modern liberalism. Although they thought that the individual could arrive at certain truth, the fact was that the system did not work. It is not clear, for example, how Locke would have decided whether to follow the Duke of Monmouth or Charles II from his rational method. Certainty proved illusory. This meant that instead of certain and universal knowledge that was timeless and true in all contexts, what you got was subjectivity.

This produced a-historical personalities insulated from the wisdom and knowledge of the past, especially the Christian past. This meant that there could be no shared understanding of what constitutes the good either for the self or for the community. Indeed, since every person had to act according to his own dictates there could be no such thing as real community: the only way society could be held together was by social contract.

This is the heritage of the modern age that continues to fragment the societies of the West. For Augustine all truth was grounded in God. For the modern person the only ground for truth is the self. Justice can only be upheld by a community. In the modern age, although the judicial system continues to rule, most language about justice has been subverted by the language of human rights: an invention of Locke who could only think in terms of the individual. Rights are thought to be attached to the individual and to have nothing to do with an accepted common good. This language continues the fragmentation of human community.

Because no common idea of the good or of what constitutes virtue may be allowed, public life has been hollowed out. There is a horror of being seen to be making a decision on moral grounds or of valuing virtue. For that would imply that one has an idea of what constitutes the common good.

In this atmosphere there is no alternative but for our politicians to be purely pragmatic. The arguments for legalising prostitution and abortion cannot be based on a shared attitude to the exploitation of women or the murder of the unborn: the only arguments that are heard are the absurdities of human rights language and of harm minimisation.

The effect of liberalism in the Church is to disown the particular heritage of the Christian tradition and take refuge in general talk about spiritual needs: again everything is reduced to the individual. The idea that the Church exists as an alternative community in opposition to the dehumanising forces that are at large in the world is lost. As liberal Christianity becomes more and more irrelevant and its congregations continue to shrink, it becomes more desperate and dilutes Christian particularity more and more so that it may appeal to the world at large. The result is that the Church mimics the world and loses its message of radical freedom in Christ.

The Enlightenment is an example of us reasoning ourselves to freedom. Locke has become the philosopher of liberation par excellence. But the Christian tradition witnesses to the fact that we cannot liberate ourselves, the human condition is such that the bonds that imprison us cannot be released from the inside. It takes an event in history, our murder of the royal man, the man who is most human, for the scales to fall from our eyes. This is the event that sets us free.

The craze for talk about the postmodern age has lessened in the past few years. Part of that talk was about deconstructing narratives so that their political colours were apparent. It is my contention that we need deconstruction of the Enlightenment narrative to reveal what it is: a consistent polemic against the Church that has robbed us of the key narrative that formed us. It is only in the absence of that narrative that the bloody 20th century could have happened.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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