Enlightenment & Religion

12 Key excerpts on "Enlightenment & Religion"

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  A Political Philosophy

  Arguments for Conservatism

  • Roger Scruton(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  7 Religion and Enlightenment

  Enlightenment, according to Kant, means ‘the liberation of man from his self-imposed minority’, the final assumption of a majority that is Reason’s right and due.59 Enlightenment is a tendency that is both inherent in Western civilization, and also constantly liable to be eclipsed by the human need for darkness. We are happier in Plato’s cave than on the pinnacles above it, and the extreme form of Enlightenment – the scientism that chases all shadows away – is also a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars. None the less, Enlightenment, of however mitigated a kind, is our recourse in every spiritual conflict, and in the encounter with Islam it has once again assumed its eighteenth-century character, as the distinguishing mark of our civilization.

  Thinkers of the Enlightenment attacked religious doctrine, covertly assuming that religious behaviour is a result of religious belief, and will cease when the belief is refuted. And most religious beliefs are extremely easy to refute, or at any rate to put radically in question. Perhaps the sole exception to that generalization is the belief in the God of the philosophers, the ‘love that moves the sun and the other stars’, as Dante described Him, who enjoys the dubious benefit of hydra-like medieval arguments which spring two new heads for every one that has been logic-ed off. Even those arguments, however, began to look shaky in the wake of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion , and although Kant claimed to be defending faith against superstition, his writings – even Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone – leave the reader with the uncomfortable thought that maybe superstition is all that there is.

  The Enlightenment View of Religion

  The Enlightenment saw religion as founded in the belief in transcendental or supernatural beings, who are more powerful than we are, and who hold our destiny in their hands. In time, according to the Enlightenment view, people came to see the untenability of theological pluralism and settled down to believing in one God, whose wisdom, power and goodness set him so far above and beyond the world that he could be reached only by the via negativa

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  Western Civilization: A Global and Comparative Approach

  Volume II: Since 1600

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3

  The Enlightenment, 1715–1789

       

  The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that prevailed in Europe from the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 to the beginning of the French Revolution of 1789. While the Enlightenment primarily centered on France, it drew representatives and adherents from throughout Europe. The French thinkers associated with the Enlightenment were known as philosophes . During the eighteenth century, educated Europeans sincerely believed that their civilization had entered a new, more enlightened age, to which they contributed through learning, writing, and ideas that broke in significant ways with the past. New ideas and philosophical approaches did much to define and shape the age and its history. A complicated set of changing political and social circumstances contributed to a general reassessment of the role of the state and the goals of society.

  Enlightenment thinkers attempted to make philosophy meaningful in the context of the political and social realities that they sought to change. They frequently disagreed about philosophical issues, as well as in their views on politics, religion, and society. But in general the philosophes and other thinkers associated with the Enlightenment elevated reason over religion and superstition; valued education and learning over ignorance or uninformed belief; argued for religious tolerance over bigotry and intolerance; advocated humane treatment of people, including criminals; and championed freedom of speech and freedom of the press over censorship. They generally believed that society and human beings could be improved on the basis of common sense, reason, and education. They tended to believe that a natural law existed that was accessible to humanity and could serve as a guideline in all human endeavors. Finally, a growing number of European thinkers rejected the Christian religion and challenged the authority of the Christian churches that had done so much to shape the history of the preceding centuries and of European civilization in general.

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  Eighteenth-Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism

  Reconceiving the Philosophy of Religion

  • Louise Hickman(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Both those on the defence and those on the attack adopted the same reading of history. The philosophy of religion is understood as a child of the Enlightenment using secular scientific ways of arguing for the purpose of justifying belief. What underpins this narrative is a particular understanding of Enlightenment, either as one project of secularisation or as a movement that contains a secular materialistic programme from which the philosophy of religion in its current form appeared. Determining what this Enlightenment might have been in the past becomes, therefore, essential for imagining the nature of philosophy of religion in the future.

  Enlightenments and their projects: how enlightenment has been defined

  The first use of the term ‘Enlightenment’ is usually attributed to Kant and tends to refer to Western European thought from 1688 to the French Revolution in 1789, and it is typically seen to advance a commitment to human reason as an objective source of knowledge, a faith in the empiricism of the new science and a rejection of religious tradition, scholasticism, faith-based religious claims and the social-political establishment. It often tends to be viewed as an anti-theological, secular movement that gives rise to a distinctly a-theological conception of reason substantially different from what came before.

  This understanding of it and of the philosophy of religion to which it is believed to give rise has much to do with Peter Gay’s long-dominant construal of the Enlightenment as a singular ‘project’ in the shape of a unified trend towards a secular world view. His The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1967) depicted the Enlightenment as a largely uniform anti-Christian movement, and this portrayal had a long-lasting impact for decades afterwards.6 Gay’s Enlightenment was distinctly French: an age in which the anti-clerical philosophes

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  Christianity: The Biography

  • Ian J. Shaw(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Zondervan Academic

    (Publisher)

  15. ENLIGHTENMENT

  Lifeline

  1695 – Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity published

  1711 – Ziegenbalg completes translation of Bible into Tamil 1713 – papal condemnation of Jansenist teaching 1724 – Catholic missionaries expelled from China 1734–5 – Awakening at Northampton, Massachusetts 1738 – John Wesley’s heart ‘strangely warmed’ 1742 – Cambuslang and Kilsyth revivals

  1751 – publication of the Encyclopédie

  1773 – pope dissolves Jesuit order 1783 – Yi Seung-hun baptized in Beijing and returns to Korea

  1802 – Paley’s Natural Theology published

  ‘Enlightenment’ refers to a decisive moment of understanding or maturity in a person’s development, associated with a cultural rite of passage or a decisive turn in life. Adults often search for such enlightenment earnestly. Joseph Wright’s painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) captures the fascination and fear associated with the remarkable advances in science in eighteenth-century Europe. It depicts a natural philosopher’s experiment surrounded by onlookers, some of whom watch in eager curiosity, while others half-look or turn away in horror. In a darkened room, the light falls on the spectators’ faces

  in a way that is normally associated with religious illumination, but which here evokes the dawn of a new age of scientific understanding. The Enlightenment was an optimistic age, one of supreme confidence in human reason: it had a profound impact on politics and society, literature and philosophy. Theology and church life could not escape untouched. Enlightenment influence was felt in distant colonies and mission fields.

  During the Enlightenment, natural philosophy (science) began to challenge theology as a route to ‘gnosis’. Although many scientific leaders held profound Christian beliefs, gradually the basis of authority shifted from revelation to reason. The universe was to be comprehended in material terms. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) laid a foundation with empiricism, stressing the faithful collection and recording of data from which theories and models were extrapolated.

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  The Handy Philosophy Answer Book

  • Naomi Zack(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Visible Ink Press

    (Publisher)

  What was Enlightenment philosophy?

  Enlightenment philosophy was written during the time associated with the Enlightenment, which occurred roughly around the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment was an historical period in which the ideas of philosophers played dominant cultural roles, in contrast to the importance of religion during the medieval period, or the importance of science and technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  What was the Enlightenment?

  The Enlightenment was known to its contemporaries and future generations as The Age of Reason. The Enlightenment went beyond intellectual activity to affect painting, literature, architecture, religion, the sciences, and, of course, politics, culminating in the American Revolution (1775–1783) and the French Revolution (1789–1799). While there were common Enlightenment intellectual themes, conditions in different nations produced distinctive types of thought. Also, there was a marked development of ideas from the first half of the 1700s to the second half, principally because of the major social and political changes preceding and accompanying the American and French Revolutions.

  What were the common themes of the Enlightenment?

  The common themes were a set of values that included the following:

  1. Imbuing all other values was the importance of reason and its uses to discover ideal forms of human nature and society.
  2. The belief in the natural goodness of man, which was to be rediscovered by the reform of corrupt institutions.
  3. An overall secularity and downplaying of traditional Christian transcendence.
  4. A new aesthetic and ethics based on the goodness of nature.
  5. Perhaps most important, a great faith in progress or the belief that the present is better than the past and that the future will be better than the present.

  Nevertheless, none of the paramount Enlightenment thinkers simply played out these themes in direct ways. They almost all used reason or rational thought—together with a fair amount of wit—to propound and develop their ideas. The ideas themselves, though, sometimes had unforeseen consequences. That is, often the Enlightenment geniuses went too far, or were not able to fully think things through. As a result, skepticism, pessimism, and romantic madness took over when the ideas of progress and the ideals of human reason ran out.

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  Understanding Mental Health and Mental Illness

  An Exploration of the Past, Present, and Future

  • Paul H. Jenkins(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  THE ENLIGHTENMENT

  The Enlightenment took place in Europe roughly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It grew out of the Renaissance and brought the changes of that era to a new level in regard to the knowledge, beliefs, and practices in politics, economics, philosophy, religion, medicine, art, and literature. As usual in this book, we cannot review all the achievements and consequences of the time but will focus instead on their influence on the conception of, and to some extent, practices regarding mental health and mental illness.

  At the end of the Renaissance, courageous people had struck blows for a more objective, realistic view of humanity and the universe. Their names are well known: Galileo, Copernicus, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Paracelsus, Bacon, and many others. They brought the Western world to a turning point, away from superstition and reliance on authority, and toward objectivity and empirical observation. The Western world, in particular, was experiencing profound changes to how people thought about themselves and their place in the world. The achievements of the Enlightenment represented a much more complete break with the ideological realities of the past, especially those of the Middle Ages. As noted in the last chapter, the humanists of the Renaissance had promoted human confidence in their own intellectual abilities, while the Reformation had undermined the authority of the Catholic Church. The Enlightenment continued to move humanity solidly toward the modern world of empirical science, secular society, representative government, and the overall primacy of human-centered psychology, values, and personal interests in all things affecting people.

  The first major contribution to this movement in regard to psychology was the development of a more rational, mechanistic view of human thought and action. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) asserted that sense perceptions were the only source of psychological activity. He emphasized that these perceptions were associated in the order they were perceived (temporal), thus forming chains of ideas and beliefs, which lead to behavior. He also linked this process to biology, asserting that these perceptions and their organizing processes were driven by the underlying desire to stay alive, pursue pleasure, and avoid pain – in other words, a species-based but individualized self-interest. Philosophers like John Locke (1632–1704) differentiated between external perceptions (sights and sounds) and internal perceptual experiences (impulses and feelings). Others, such as George Berkeley (1685–1754) and David Hume (1711–1776), took this idea further to assert that although it was true that all real knowledge must come from objective data (empiricism), it was also true that everything we know about the world comes through the filter of our subjective experience, and thus, absolute knowledge is impossible. This conclusion would set the foundation for later thinkers to doubt all knowledge, stressing that all truth is individual, subjective, and thus relativistic. But before we get too deep into philosophy, it is important to announce that finally, in the seventeenth century, psychiatry emerged as a medical specialty, a full two centuries before psychology would do the same.

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  Theologies of the 21st Century

  Trends in Contemporary Theology

  • Smith(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wipf and Stock

    (Publisher)

  1

  The Enlightenment

  The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 , in which Protestants and Catholics were declared equal before the law, marked the opening of a new age which disestablished religion as the authoritative spiritual symbol in Western civilization in favor of human reason.1 From that point on, scholars challenged the Church’s authority as archaic and its answers to scientific problems as absurd. They declared that Church pronouncements were insufficient proof for origins of creation or even for ethical issues. A much better gauge of these things was to be found in logical and empirical philosophy and what might be discovered by scientific methodology. While this shift did not happen overnight, it took place inexorably over the decades.

  Background to the Enlightenment

  Fourteenth century Italy witnessed the emergence of a group of philosophers and theologians who were devout Roman Catholics, but believed that God could best be worshiped by celebrating his creation and, especially, human beings who are the apex of that creation. They averred that the biblical recognition of humankind as the image of God meant that humans have an innate creative ability which manifests itself in music, scientific discovery, painting and sculpture, and other intellectual pursuits.

  These “humanists” as they were called, seeking to bring their theories to full blossom, reached back to the glory days of Greece and Rome, seeking to reproduce the best of these periods and exceed them. It was not many decades before this “rebirth” gradually spread into France, Spain, and the other European nations. Nor did the Church attempt to repress these efforts. Wealthy and high ranking churchmen—including successive popes—competed with other princes to sponsor the finest artists and writers, such as Donatello, Botticelli, Rabelais, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Cervantes, to name only a few.

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  American Philosophy: The Basics

  • Nancy Stanlick(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Enlightenment thinking in Europe and America affected all realms of human inquiry and interest from science to religion and from ethics to politics. The effects of Enlightenment rationality should not be understated. Without Enlightenment, there would have been no America.

  WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?

  Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century German philosopher and one of the chief expositors of Enlightenment rationality, explained what is alternately called “The Age of Reason” in his brief essay, “What is Enlightenment?” (1784). For Kant, Enlightenment is the emancipation of humanity from ignorance, error, and intellectual immaturity. It is characterized by confidence in human reason, trust in human autonomy, and belief in human dignity.

  The rise of Modern science granted people the ability to solve problems through rational means and it allowed them to see that the world was much different from what they thought. Revolutionary events in science had occurred with Copernicus’ rejection of the geocentric theory turning Aristotelian science upside down. The traditional view was that the Earth was the center of the universe and mankind was the ultimate creation on it. Being the “chosen” creation on the planet at the center of the universe, human beings were taught by the authority of the Church that everything was created for them, by God, and that the meaning of it all centered on humans, God, and salvation. The heliocentric theory challenged all that.

  Scientific discoveries of various kinds sent a significant shock through Western society. Faith in the truth and authority of the past was weakened by exploration of lands and contact with people previously unknown to Europeans. Europeans were beginning to realize that their ways were not the only ways and that there were people around the world who did not look, act, or think like Europeans. More exposure to difference and diversity in thoughts, people, religions, practices, governments, and societies began to challenge the way things were and led people to revolt against the status quo in science, religion, ethics, politics, and other realms.

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  Theology and the Enlightenment

  A Critical Enquiry into Enlightenment Theology and Its Reception

  • Paul Avis(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  History of European Ideas 1.2 (1981), pp. 103–21.

  6 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in id., Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967), ch. 4.

  7 Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); cf. Anthony J. La Vopa, ‘A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israel’s Enlightenment’, Historical Journal 52 (2009), pp. 717–38 (a demolition of aspects of Israel’s first two volumes: Radical Enlightenment (2001) and (mainly) Enlightenment Contested (2006)).

  8 Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter (eds), Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1. The editors introduce a note of confusion at this point (pp. 1–2). After saying that atheists certainly existed, they immediately give Voltaire as an example of someone who wanted to eradicate religion, as though he were an atheist. That is not so: Voltaire hated Roman Catholic priestcraft, dogma and persecution, but as a pious deist he had a place for religion and was far from being an atheist.

  9 Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment: An Evaluation of Its Assumptions, Attitudes and Values (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 106.

  10 James Simpson, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019).

  11 Roy Porter in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 1, ‘The Enlightenment in England’, at p. 6.

  12 David Fergusson and Mark Elliott (eds), The History of Scottish Theology, Volume II: From the Early Enlightenment to the Late Victorian Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); T. J. Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015); Ulrich L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (eds), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010); Ulrich L. Lehner, ‘Catholic Theology and the Enlightenment’, in Lewis Ayres, Medi Ann Volpe and Thomas L. Humphries, Jr. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), ch. 35; Michael Printy, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jeffrey D. Burson, Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France

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  The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Routledge Revivals)

  The Christian Burgess and the Enlightenment

  • Lucien Goldmann(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  II The Enlightenment and Christian Belief

  It is both easy and difficult to speak of the relation between the Enlightenment and Christianity. The task is comparatively simple because for the socio-phenomenological analysis we have Groethuysen’s excellent Entstehung der bürgerlichen Welt- und Lebensanschauung in Frankreich . Although this was intended as no more than the prolegomenon to a work that was left unfinished at the author’s death, it carried the analysis of the conflict to an advanced point. The difficulty comes from the fact that it is not easy to fix the position of the Enlightenment in the development of the individualist world vision in terms of social history.

  In my study of Pascal I wrote that there are three important stages in the history of French rationalism and that each of them assigned a qualitatively different place to the practical application of theory. I suggested that these stages are characterized by the terms in which each of them conceived the relation between rational thought and action.

  To Descartes this was no problem at all: rational thought, in his view, automatically entails correct action, and the philosopher need concern himself only with the problem of the proper use of his reason.

  Valéry, writing during one of the gravest crises of bourgeois society, found the connection between reason and action a major, insoluble problem. For him reason occupies a position of supreme importance, but possesses purely intellectual power and has almost no influence on the outside world, which the thinker can master in its sensible appearances only through poetry.

  The Enlightenment stands between these stages of rationalism. It is characterized by its view of reason as the decisive weapon in the practical struggle against despotism, superstition, privilege, ancien regime

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  Revival: Ethical Principles in Theory and Practice (1930)

  An Essay in Moral Philosophy

  • Hans Driesch(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  IVRELIGION AS THE AIM OF ENLIGHTENMENT

  RELIGIOUS Enlightenment is the highest form of Enlightenment, and I propose to conclude this work by discussing it and setting it up as the goal of endeavour.

  The fact is that enlightenment and religion are so far from being incompatible that the religious state can be described as the last goal of all true Enlightenment. We need not hesitate to describe this ultimate aim of Enlightenment by the words of that old thinker who spoke of amor intellectualis dei : for this is our approximate meaning.

  1THE RELIGIOUS STATE, RELIGION, AND METAPHYSICS

  The religious state is a feeling, and like every feeling it is the conscious expression of a state of the unconscious soul. Now every feeling has an object for kernel: we are afraid of something , we hope for something , and we are pleased about something . Now the religious state is a feeling of surrender and of joyful repose in the consciousness of perfect security in the power of another. Dependence must not be the sole characteristic; the feelings of a slave towards his master were certainly no religious feelings. The primitives have fear before their god and nothing more, and their religious feelings are incomplete and admit of improvement.

  Thus all religious feelings have an intellectual kernel, a kernel of knowledge. This kernel may be apprehended vaguely, or clearly and distinctly. Religious feelings are the more perfect, the more clearly and distinctly the kernel of knowledge is apprehended upon which they are based. Such knowledge is given by Enlightenment. In this sense Buddhism is the most perfect religion. If we consider the religious state from its emotional aspect, its kernel is found to be Religion or religious belief; apart from this state, it is a metaphysical assumption having subjectively a high degree of probability.

  Belief, or metaphysical assumption, has for its sphere the doctrine of the totality and the evolution of the world. It is supposed throughout that I, as psycho-physical person, am initiated into this totality and evolution.

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  The Enlightenment and religion

  The myths of modernity

  • S. Barnett(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Poor Bayle, we may add, wrote so incisively that he had to be made to fit into such a tradition. As we have seen, it is very difficult to argue that Enlightenment thinkers came to their conclusions entirely without the influence of the Christian society in which they lived. Yet to argue that Christianity exerted decisive or fundamental influence upon characteristic elements of Enlightenment thought by means of certain relatively elite theological texts is just as problematic. Part of any solution to such a potential impasse lies in the direction taken by Munck in his The Enlightenment (2000), in which he demonstrates that our understanding of the Enlightenment can be enriched from the vantage point of more ordinary people. In particular, Munck demonstrates how mistaken is the common claim that the Enlightenment, as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon, affected only a very tiny minority, instead illustrating how major elements of its aspirations were shared by the middling sort. 33 The elite and the written record Most of the research into Enlightenment thought is based primarily on printed records. The eighteenth-century boom in publishing has meant that we have a rich legacy to mull over, yet, in reality, it represents some of the thoughts of only a tiny fraction of the population. We therefore have massive, even overwhelming gaps in the historical record. In arriving at understandings of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century, however, historians have paid little explicit attention to this problem. The ‘rise of irreligion’ thesis – the foundation of traditional Enlightenment studies – is thus based on a tiny sample of writers and an assumption about the thought of many more individuals not represented in the historical record. Consequently, this chapter proceeds from the premise that historians have for long been analysing and reporting on the illusion, the ostensible appearance, of a growth of non-Christian or heretical thinking

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