Enlightenment Literature

11 Key excerpts on "Enlightenment Literature"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Theology and the Enlightenment

  A Critical Enquiry into Enlightenment Theology and Its Reception

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

    (Publisher)

  The Enlightenment lit up many dark corners of eighteenth-century European and American civilization. It spread knowledge, explanation and understanding in the realms of science, history, philosophy, religion and society. It upheld canons of justice, liberty and tolerance, where church and state had failed to do so. It allowed people to think of society not as a divinely ordained static, hierarchical order, but in terms of moral, educational and material improvement and it provided the tools to bring this about. It defended the claims of reason to probe areas of ecclesiastical and monarchical privilege that had been fenced off from such investigation. It gave birth to the critical-historical method in theology, especially in biblical scholarship. In England it provided the matrix for the unprecedented novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne and for the poetry of (the Roman Catholics) John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and also of Thomas Gray, the Dissenters Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge, the music of Henry Purcell and Georg Frideric Handel. It enriched Christian discourse in the hands of, among many others, Samuel Johnson, William Law, John Wesley, Joseph Butler, Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke – all certainly Enlightenment figures. It gave us the gem of catalogued natural observation in Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne (1789). 15 While the French spoke of les lumières and the Germans of der Aufklärung, the term ‘Enlightenment’ was not applied to eighteenth-century English thought until the following century. But it has deservedly stuck. These Anglican writers were all robustly rational, though there was far more to them than the reasoning faculty

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy

  • Aaron Garrett, Aaron Garrett(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Enlightenment conjoined ideas, public aspirations, and social change in a novel way. Simply put, never before did so many writers openly promote the expansion of readership. Never before did so many writers set out to critique received wisdoms, augment human knowledge, ameliorate individual lives, and enhance the collective well-being of mankind by means of Reason and in the name of civil liberty. The light-spreading metaphor that accompanied many open declarations of this set of intentions drew from the previous century’s “natural light of Reason,” but its future-orientation, critical daring, and social-political reforming ambitions were new.

  Moreover, the Enlightenment – we shall dwell on both critiques and justifications for this use of the definite article – was novel in its cosmopolitan, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic modes of conversation. Human interactions, correspondences, quotations, and above all translations were crucial for its development, self-understanding, and argumentative nature. As Silvia Sebastiani shows in Chapter 24 of this volume, the “unresolved tension between uniformity and diversity, regularity and singularity” is “constitutive of the Enlightenme nt itself.” The present chapter suggests that Enlightenment localities and the quest for universality, modified through processes of reception and translation, enabled the transformation of both European (or the partially synonymous “modern,” and eventually “Western”) and national forms of awareness.

  Terminology developed alongside the theoretical and practical agendas. Pierre Bayle used the term “siècle éclairé” as early as 1684, and his contemporary Bernard de Fontenelle habitually referred to “les lumières.” These became standard idioms by the early eighteenth century (Roger 1968: 167ff.). In Britain, “our enlightened age” cropped up in the mid-eighteenth century, parallel to the growing awareness of its crucial difference from previous “enlightened ages” in its multiplicity of participants, critical spirit, public commitment, and distinctly modern discourse of liberty. British writers did not use the noun “Enlightenment” itself until well into the nineteenth century (Porter 2001: 5), but the vocabulary of “improvement,” “progress,” and “refinement,” in the “arts and sciences” as well as in politics and economy, was firmly linked to “our enlightened age” (for a representative periodical survey see Anon. 1769, Critical

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  A Modern Introduction to Theology

  New Questions for Old Beliefs

  • Philip Kennedy(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  4 the enlightenment

  The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?

  Psalm 27

  A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. Thomas Jefferson

  The Enlightenment was a multifaceted movement that began in Europe during the seventeenth century and grew rapidly throughout the eighteenth. It reached its zenith around the end of the eighteenth century. It was both a distinct period of western history and a project to improve people’s lives. The Enlightenment was simultaneously an intellectual earthquake in the life of Europe; a wide-ranging cultural transformation; a naked challenge to the authority of the Church; and a resolute rejection of feudal social pecking orders. It was a time of dizzying philosophical and religious debate; of striking scientific accomplishment; and of dramatic political upheaval. It generated ideas that spawned a violent revolution in England’s American colonies in the 1770s, and the French Revolution that erupted in 1789. Western societies enjoy many of their current political practices and intellectual habits precisely because of the Enlightenment, and it is the influence of the Enlightenment on western societies that distinguishes them from others.

  The fundamental ethos of the Enlightenment is captured in an amalgam of four wonderful words: revolution, freedom, reason and criticism. The Enlightenment was a revolution against the arbitrary exercise of authority by monarchs and the Church. It called for people to think and act freely for themselves without immature and unthinking subservience to the tutelage of priests and pastors. It championed the exercise of human reason as a superlative tool for securing knowledge, rather than appeal to divine revelation or the Bible. And it subjected every aspect of social, political and religious life to relentless criticism or analysis. Broadly speaking, its proponents would not accept any proposition or doctrine as true simply on the basis of a self-styled authoritative pronouncement. In this, the Enlightenment spurned the overarching principle of hierarchical authority that governed the Church and educational institutions throughout the Middle Ages.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Reading Between the Lines

  A Christian Guide to Literature

  • Gene Edward Veith Jr.(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Crossway

    (Publisher)

  T  E  N

  THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTICISM: The Literature of Nature and the Self

     

  B eginning with the eighteenth century and continuing into our own time, Western culture has been hurtling away from the Biblical view of life. The alternatives have come in quick succession. At first, each new worldview addressed the issues of its day and had a certain plau sibility; but in time each has proven partial, unbalanced, and humanly disastrous. Each is soon answered by a new secular view of the world, which itself is soon challenged. The history of thought since the eigh teenth century can well be summarized in the words of Scripture: “The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him” (Proverbs 18:17).

  Nevertheless, even the exploded worldviews of the past continue to shape people’s thinking. The typical man on the street may know nothing of intellectual history and may have never heard of utilitari anism, pantheism, or existentialism. Yet he may very well live out these belief systems more consistently than the philosophers who formulated them.1 To understand the crazy quilt of contemporary thought, one must know the alternative ways of thinking, and perhaps the best way to do so is through literature. History, philosophy, and concrete human life come together in literature. In an author’s imagination, abstract ideas find expression in tangible forms, so that we can see more clearly their human implications.

  Surveying the literature of these times also demonstrates the strength and wholeness of the Christian perspective. Each new move ment attacks Christianity for a different reason. Each seizes upon some one truth (which Christians might agree with) and tries to build a whole view of life around it to the exclusion of the more complex real ity described by Scripture. They have taken Christ’s seamless garment, ripped it apart, and then tried to clothe themselves with the pieces.2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Urban Enlightenment and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay

  Transatlantic Retrospects

  • R. Squibbs(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Characters of Jean de la Bruyère, an innovative book which charted a literary path that the English essay serials would extend in new directions, makes its application to the periodical essay all the more apposite.

  Urban Enlightenment

  What, then, did readers expect to find in periodical essays, and especially in collections like the British Essayists ? This is where what I call urban Enlightenment comes in. In the simplest terms, the variety of Enlightenment advanced by these essays is urban because of where they were originally published; more substantively, it advocates casual reading and conversation as socially and morally enriching practices. The philosophy of urban Enlightenment is predicated on social self- awareness: the realization that everything that citizens do on a daily basis impacts the quality of life of everyone around them. The periodical essay at once promotes and embodies this philosophical position. Ten of the 12 serials in the British Essayists were London-based; the Mirror and Lounger recorded life in Edinburgh. The major American serials in this mode came from Philadelphia, Manhattan and Boston. With their population density, concentration of wealth and the relative anonymity they afforded, cities appeared to these writers as dynamic registers of social and cultural change. At an even more basic level, there were simply more things of cultural interest to write about in major cities like London, Edinburgh and Manhattan than there were in smaller ones like Bristol, Glasgow and Baltimore. Large cities were hubs of commerce and bustling sites of theaters, taverns, coffeehouses and other public attractions; Samuel Johnson famously declared to Boswell that ‘[w]hen a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford’.29 Less famously, Johnson also told Boswell that ‘if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists.’30

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Sex and Sexuality in Europe, 1100-1750

  The Devil's Roast

  • Andrew Mansfield(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1688 (Ibid., p. 886). These works and others from across Europe saw a new emphasis on trying to unravel the human condition. On the one hand:

  enlightenment connotes the rather vague, and still unfolding, process of “modernity”, the intellectual, political, and economic development (some would say decline) that has characterised societies in Europe and the Americas since the eighteenth century, and that has gradually spread beyond them. On the other hand, however, the Enlightenment is used to refer to the historical movement that gripped Europe and the Americas in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth – a cultural, intellectual, and perhaps social movement – that generated a number of key modern values (e.g. religious tolerance, individual rights, democracy, equality, the pursuit of earthly happiness), as well as the philosophical concepts that made it possible to articulate and justify those values.

  (McMahon, 2007 , p. 602)2

  In Anthony Pagden’s opinion the Enlightenment is more important than the ‘Renaissance’ and the ‘Reformation’ – which both irreversibly transformed culture – because it provided humanity with the notion of what it meant to be modern, i.e. tolerant, open-minded and enlightened (Pagden, 2013 , p. vii). The Enlightenment was different from the Renaissance and the Reformation in that it was attempting to overturn the past and was keenly aware of its ‘own place in history; through a critical philosophical movement’. There was an ‘open-ended, continuing progression, subject to constant scrutiny and re-evaluation’ with a ‘clear sense of direction’. It was not rescuing the ‘hallowed past’ but it was overturning every kind of dogma and prejudice to free humanity by creating an enlightened civilisation (Ibid., pp. 10–11). For Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the Enlightenment was concerned with enabling the ‘still infantile person’ to grow beyond ‘self-incurred minority’. It was to escape its time as a child restrained by society, the Church, convention and prejudice which offered the appearance of learning but which did not allow the individual to think for themselves. The Enlightenment dared people to know, and in Pagden’s view the Enlightenment ‘project’ was about discovering human nature, more than simply applying ‘unfettered reason’ (Ibid., pp. 16–17). To achieve this, philosophers must understand the passions to develop a ‘science of man’ and replace the theological view.3

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Enlightenment and Revolution

  • Paschalis M. Kitromilides(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER EIGHT The Enlightenment as Social Criticism

  THE WILL TO criticism was the defining characteristic of the Enlightenment. The conscious pursuit of criticism can be seen as the underlying mental attitude that reconciled the diverse outlooks that made up the Enlightenment. Criticism and doubt toward established beliefs and accepted authority represented the most daring manifestations of the early Enlightenment in a period of “crisis for the European conscience.”1 Later on, social criticism and the vision of social reconstruction that activated it was what made Rousseau, and his opponents among the philosophes, representatives of the same intellectual movement.2

  The sharpest edge of Enlightenment criticism was directed against conventional Christianity, the Church, and the censorship imposed by it. Christianity constituted the rival set of beliefs that fostered uncritical faith and by extension, in the eyes of the Enlightenment, superstition. It symbolized, that is, everything that the Enlightenment was fighting against. In this ideological confrontation, the Church and the various mechanisms of censorship formed the formidable structure of organized power that stood in the way of the progress of the Enlightenment, by taking advantage, according to its opponents, of prejudices that were hypnotizing the human spirit. For this reason, the Church strove to strangle the movement that was threatening to rend the veil of ignorance and had, ever since the period of the Renaissance in European culture, persecuted those who labored in the interests of the progress of knowledge. The struggle between the Enlightenment and the Church can thus be seen as the fundamental ideological fissure in European society during the eighteenth century. As the most prominent exponent of the crusade against obscurantism and intolerance, which the “enlightened” conscience associated with the Church, Voltaire, for all his recantations and philosophical ambiguities, remained the most representative figure of the Enlightenment, a shining beacon to his supporters and a scapegoat for his opponents.3

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Events That Formed the Modern World

  From the European Renaissance through the War on Terror [5 volumes]

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  The conviction that humanity is progressing along rational lines also led to the establishment of strictly patriarchal conceptions of marriage and family that became embedded in the revisions of national law that “enlightened” despots, such as Frederick the Great of Prussia, promulgated in their kingdoms. Frederick’s revision of law was hailed as an embodiment of Enlightenment ideals. In the section on the “familystate,” Frederick outlined the family structure that would prevail in Prussia: “Hence it follows, judging by the sole light of reason, that the husband is master of his own household, and head of his family. And as the wife enters into it of her own accord, she is in some measure subject to his power.”

  The wife is seen not as an individual, but as the husband’s “assistant” in the family. Such changes in the law, based on Enlightenment principles, can be seen at their strictest in the law code promulgated by Napoleon, which designates men as the only political and legal “persons” in the empire and substantially limits the rights of women, some of which, such as inheritance of land, they had previously enjoyed during the so-called Dark Ages.

  The belief in the ability of rational men to construct rational structures, ones governed by immutable and universal laws, led to changes not only in legal codes and government but also in the fine arts, literature, and music. The rejection of the baroque as an artistic style that emphasized the artificial and the decorative elements in art and music and the adoption of neoclassicism as a “natural” and “rational” style constituted a significant step in the development of Enlightenment ideals. The eighteenth century witnessed the development of strict laws of musical composition, as well as of artistic style, that emphasized proportion, balance, and simplicity, in contrast to the florid and exuberantly complex decorative style of the baroque. It was also the era in which the modern novel was developed, a literary genre bounded by strict rules even though novelists tended to chafe against the restrictions of the form. Poetry and drama were also made to conform to “rational” strictures; the poetry and drama of the ancient world, in particular of Greece in the fifth century B.C. , became the literary model, just as fifth-century architectural styles became the model for the designers of châteaux and manor houses in Europe and of public buildings and universities in America.

  The Enlightenment was above all an intellectual movement. Despite its popularity among the learned community, the precepts of the movement did not always translate smoothly into practical political activity. In many ways, the political and social tensions of postrevolutionary Europe illustrate the problems inherent in applying Enlightenment ideology to actual events. The French Revolution was claimed by its proponents to be a direct outgrowth of the Enlightenment: it was a movement that based its principles on Lockean and Rousseauian models of the social contract; it proclaimed the rights of the individual; it rejected the authority of the established Church. Even its mode of execution—the guillotine—was considered to be rational, humane, and a product of advanced technology (as well as being efficient). The supporters of the French Revolution were initially empowered by its success. Authors, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who defended the actions of the French revolutionaries could justify further political radicalism (such as Wollstonecraft’s defense of the rights of women) as being the rational outcome of the Enlightenment program.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Rewriting the Self

  Histories from the Middle Ages to the Present

  • Roy Porter(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part II ENLIGHTENMENT

  Passage contains an image

  4 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND THE FORMATION OF THE EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT SELF

  Jane Shaw

  One of the great stories—perhaps the great story—of the modern West is that of the rise of the rational self and a corresponding decline in religious belief. Some three hundred years ago, in that period from approximately the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, it is said that reason came to triumph. As the new philosophy and developing scientific methods began to take hold, an understanding of man as rational, autonomous and in control of the universe emerged In this world-view, revelation, the mystical, belief in miracles and the supernatural all came to be rejected in favour of an understanding of the world as operating by observable laws of nature. It is the story of the rise of rational man. Intellectual historians of the mid-twentieth century, such as Paul Hazard, wrote of this time that:

  The most widely accepted notions, such as deriving proofs of God’s existence from universal consent, the historical basis of miracles, were openly called in question. The Divine was relegated to a vague and impenetrable heaven somewhere up in the skies. Man and man alone was the standard by which all things were measured. He was his own raison d’être. His interests were paramount.

  The intellectual history of the rise of the rational self, as represented by Hazard, is essentially and necessarily built on a study of the philosophical and theological texts of a small, educated elite. More recently, social historians have turned their attention to ‘popular’ religious culture which they have presumed to be different and separate from the intellectual culture of the elite. They have, for the most part, retained the notion that such an Enlightenment self came to predominate, and that it came to predominate initially among the elite. They have therefore generally suggested that the ideas of the elite won out, a sharp division between elite and popular occurred and such elite ideas eventually trickled down to the masses, who either accepted them unquestioningly or ignored them and went about their ‘superstitious’ religious practices regardless. We receive a picture of events whereby such an elite Enlightenment self was formed in splendid intellectual isolation, and yet nevertheless came to predominate. Thus in social histories of religious and popular culture at this time, the notion of an enlightened, rational self is kept intact, while religious belief and practice are relegated to the world of the masses—the lower orders, women and all ‘irrational’ others. In short, neither intellectual nor social historians have given any place to religious experience or practice in the formation

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  A History of Western Thought

  From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century

  • Nils Gilje, Gunnar Skirbekk(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Under Louis XIV (1638–1715), the absolute monarchy was firmly established in France: the national assembly was dissolved; the noblemen were, to a great degree, reduced to civil servants and courtiers of the king; and the government became centralized. But Louis XIV finally was overtaken by political difficulties at the end of his reign, and in the wake of this, political debate developed. Political discussion in France was awakened as people reacted against the government’s mismanagement. They criticized absolutism for not being sufficiently effective and rational. But these critics did not demand another form of government. They wanted a more enlightened and effective absolute monarchy. At that time, France did not have viable institutions dating from before the absolute monarchy that could ‘sustain the criticism’. It was thus difficult to attain moderation and to make the government more effective with the help of relatively representative institutions, like the British parliament. A change had to come in the form of a political upheaval. This upheaval came in 1789 with the French Revolution.

  The French did not only lack political institutions. The tradition of political theory had been largely severed. As a result, the French, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, imported British ideas on a grand scale. The ideals were Locke and Newton – the new liberalism and the new science. The French thinkers of the Enlightenment took the British form of government as their model. The French intelligentsia were Anglophiles (‘admirers of the English’). Voltaire visited Britain in the 1720s, and Montesquieu came in the 1730s.

  The Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was thus connected with social changes and with scientific progress: important scientific societies, like the Royal Society in Britain, were established already by the middle of the seventeenth century. Simultaneously, scientific journals and other publications promoting enlightenment appeared. Large collections of works on all aspects of the knowledge of the day were published (such as the French Encyclopédie ). There was a corresponding modernization of universities throughout the eighteenth century, especially the German universities at the end of this period.1 There was a renewal of academic development in the universities, where, among other subjects, the humanistic disciplines were developing most markedly (cf. Ch. 16 ). By the end of the century, a new intellectual era had emerged. As the twentieth century approached, the scientization of society set in with increasing strength – not only in business and administration, but also in ideas and attitudes. In spite of the many and always changing opposing forces, the programme of the Enlightenment continued to move forward.

  The political debate in France during the eighteenth century had its source in the literary salons of the urban middle class. In this elegant setting politics, philosophy, and literature easily mingled. This debate, perhaps, did not lead to much that was new and original. It was largely a matter of old ideas being applied to new contexts. But when old ideas are thus applied, they often acquire a different implication. Here, too, British political thought, which at this time was rather conservative in Britain itself, functioned as a critique of society under the absolute monarchy of France. Thus, the idea of a natural law that was above the king, and that ascribed certain inviolable rights to the individual, served stability and social conservatism in Britain. But in the context of French absolutism, this idea functioned as a critique of the regime. And while it was meaningful to talk about such rights in Britain – because they existed there – the idea of such rights became abstract, speculative, and removed from reality in the French setting. The French imported Locke’s concept of human rights without having the practical political experience of the British. The notion of human rights was simultaneously radical, an attack on the absolute monarchy, and speculative, without a concrete political anchoring. The French version of the British ideas was often bitter and critical – not marked by the British mixture of down-to-earth conservatism and common sense reformism.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The History and Theory of Rhetoric

  An Introduction

  • James A. Herrick(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The old European classical order was giving way to new orientations in Western rhetorical studies. Vico’s theories, for instance, are so novel and profound that scholars are still trying to fathom their implications. Nevertheless, rhetoric scholars of the period also reflect more traditional concerns such as invention and delivery, often with a nationalistic impulse behind their efforts. Thomas Sheridan, for instance, sought to enhance the status of the English language and consequently traditional British institutions. Hugh Blair and Lord Kames intended to heighten appreciation for British literature, Richard Whately to strengthen the English Church, and George Campbell to appropriate the insights of Scottish and English philosophy for understanding persuasion. A concern for the British nation’s development and welfare thus marks much of British Enlightenment rhetorical theory. Britain’s status as a rising world empire seemed to demand the recognition of its language and institutions as equal in force to those of Europe. Even the advancement of British Protestantism required rhetorically skilled preachers.

  This is not to say that the Enlightenment period represents a complete break with earlier rhetorical scholarship. Campbell’s “scientific” interest in the rhetoric of the human mind, with each faculty speaking its own language, reminds us of Plato’s speculations about a complex psyche in which each part employs its own rhetoric. Recall that in Phaedrus Plato defines rhetoric as the “art of influencing the soul [psyche : mind] through words.” Still, Campbell’s treatment of rhetoric’s relationship to the mind differs from Plato’s in some important respects. Whately’s treatment of rhetoric as centered on matters of argument is clearly rooted in a much older conception of rhetoric in which inventional concerns and skill in argument dominated, while the Belletristic Movement’s interest in the power of beautiful language finds classical parallels in both Gorgias and Longinus.

  Thus, the eighteenth century finds rhetoric again moved to the forefront of educational and scholarly concerns, a place it occupied many times during the course of Western history. But, as Warnick argues, in several important instances rhetoric’s role shifts from producing public discourse to enhancing its consumption, from discovering knowledge to managing the discoveries of other disciplines, and from an external focus on public problems to an internal focus on the mind and imagination. Nevertheless, the wide range of ways in which rhetoric was discussed—including Edgeworth’s satirical treatment—the many concerns it was asked to address, and the energy that was expended in its development and dissemination, all suggest the relevance of an ancient discipline to an age in which discovery and change were hallmarks of intellectual life.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book