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!
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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.
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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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