Trying to Understand 3: Enlightenment

Summary: The Enlightenment took another step toward subjectivism by sacrificing God as the source and foundation of truth. The focus of the Enlightenment was the ability for human reason to create ordered society. This focus preserved the ideals of truth, reason, and virtue. However, it began the modernistic and post-modernistic rejection of ideals by throwing out what the Philosophes considered the superstition of religious beliefs and practices.

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Nominalism continued to be a problem, in the Catholic Church and among Protestant denominations as the Reformation continued. Superstition continued to seize hold of many Catholics, despite the renewals enacted by the Council of Trent. Charlatans promising miracles and wonders continued to take people's money and their devotion, though much less prevalently than before the Council. Nominalism among Protestant denominations did not usually take the form of superstition, but it had an even greater effect. Religious truth was suddenly up for grabs. The various denominations held opposing views, and even violently opposed each other. Martin Luther fought against Zwingli, who taught for the first time that Christ was only symbolically present in the Eucharist. Anabaptists battled against the idea of infant baptism while other denominations continued to accept the practice. Observers of the chaos began to wonder if theological truth was possible at all.

Desire to nail down objective truth led some seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers to reject religion and instead embrace only empirical knowledge. Enlightenment thinkers made human knowledge and reasoning into a god. Nothing was considered outside the reach of scientific or rational inquiry. Whatever was not explainable by the human mind was not considered real. Additionally, the "Philosophes" of the Enlightenment believed that all knowledge was derived from sense-experience and from the ability to examine our experiences through reasonable reflection.

For the "philosophe," reason was not only a tool for finding Truth. It was the central principle of life. P.N. Furbank's biography of Diderot points out that Diderot's Encylopedie explains that a philosophe took civil society as his god and saw reason the same way that Christians see grace (23).

To be fair, I must acknowledge that the Enlightenment was not only a response to nominalism. It was also in part a reaction against the intellectual tradition that grew out of the Middle Ages that was centered on the use of knowing the authorities on a subject. It became a matter of pride for the intellectuals of this tradition not to think for yourself, but to know what the geniuses of the field have "always taught." Even before the Enlightenment, Sir Francis Bacon criticized this intellectual tradition as pompous and empty. He believed that intellectuals should only be praised for being able to think for themselves. Enlightenment Philosophes took criticisms like Bacon's even further, and cast into doubt nearly all knowledge that was obtained through tradition - especially in the area of religion. Diderot wrote an essay called "Letter of a Deaf and Blind Man" in which he presents the problem that an intelligent blind man can speak intelligently about mirrors despite lacking accurate personal experience. His perceptions may be completely false, but he may not realize that he is in error, and those who listen to him may not realize his error either because of his eloquent speech. Diderot draws the parallel to theologians, who are blind about life but are able to eloquently speak about it and convince others that their teachers are true (Furbank 60).

It doesn't take too much imagination to see a parallel between the Enlightenment's rejection of established authorities and the Protestant rejection of the authority of the Church. The Protestant Reformation left finding theological truth up to each individual. The Enlightenment left finding all truth up to the individual.

Furthermore, once the Protestant Reformation let go of the Holy Spirit's voice through the Church as the anchor of truth, it wasn't a large step for the Enlightenment intelligentsia to let go of God as the source of truth. Diderot decided to organize his Encyclopedia with humanity as the organizing principle. "Encyclopedia" means "circle of knowledge," signifying that truth has no beginning and no end. Diderot claimed that any system of knowledge or scheme of classification must be arbitrary because the universe merely offers various manifestations of truth that can be approached from various points of view (Furbank 130). Humanity was a logical scheme since human life and society makes use of truth in order to perfect society. Diderot's choices was very pragmatic, but his philosophical rationalization appears very subjectivist. Of course, his thinking is only the logical conclusion of denying God as the beginning and end of truth.

Partial Truth The Enlightenment served the world by reclaiming the tradition of using human reason and scientific method to discover the truth, as the Catholic Church has always encouraged as evidenced by great scientists such as Saint Albert the Great. It put emphasis once again on classic Greek scholars such as Aristotle, the philosopher favored by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Enlightenment philosophers reclaimed traditional Catholic ideas such as natural law, human dignity, and natural rights, which had been neglected or even rejected by Solo Scriptura-believing Protestants. Finally, the Enlightenment's criticism of the overemphasis on memorizing authorities was probably valid. There is nothing wrong with appealing to the experts who have already done the rigorous work of truth finding for you. However, even the authorities could be wrong, and true scholarship means applying the rigors of truth finding for yourself.

However, the Enlightenment placed their hope in the wrong place. I find it interesting that the common assumption is that the Philosophes became atheist because human intelligence somehow finally "outgrew" God. The truth is that Voltaire, Diderot, and many other Enlightenment philosophers rejected God for personal reasons that had nothing to do with intelligence. For example, Diderot was locked in a monastery by his father to keep him from marrying below his station. His brother also joined a monastery and died there, presumably from the poor living conditions of the austere life (Furbank 30). Ironically, while the Philosophes tended to view religion in opposition to true thought, in rejecting God they also rejected the intellectual tradition that developed many of their main ideas. Philosophes replaced God with civil society - the expectation that human reason and virtue could create a perfect society. This false optimism fed Victorian values. Modernism formed after World War II in reaction against the unrealistic ideals of the Victorian era.

[Furbank, P.N. Diderot A Critical Biography. New York: Alfred A Knopf, Inc.l, 1992.]