A Cultural Watershed: The Enlightenment
A Cultural Watershed: The Enlightenment
The movement that is now generally known as “the Enlightenment” ushered in a period of considerable uncertainty for Christianity in western Europe and north America. Although the Enlightenment presented itself as a global rational movement, it was actually strongly Eurocentric, developing ideas that emerged in England, Scotland, France, and Germany during the eighteenth century. So how did this “Age of Reason” come about? What factors led to this growing interest in human reason as a source of reliable knowledge about the world, God, and ourselves?
By 1700, western Europe was exhausted by seemingly endless wars of religion, such as the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), caused social disintegration and economic hardship. A yearning for peace led to a new emphasis on toleration and growing impatience with religious disputes. John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued for the need to tolerate at least some degree of diversity in religion, rather than allowing it to become the cause of conflict. Locke’s ideas chimed in with the anti-dogmatic mood of an age that was tired and disillusioned with religious controversies.
Wearied with religious arguments and the social conflicts they created, many leading western European thinkers of the eighteenth century came to believe that civil peace and religious toleration should be based on a non-dogmatic faith – such as Deism, a movement that developed in the late seventeenth century. Drawing on the scientific research of Isaac Newton (1643–1727), this broad movement argued that the universe was like a vast machine, rationally designed and constructed by an intelligent creator. Deism minimized the supernatural dimensions of faith and presented Christianity essentially as a rational and moral religion, easily harmonized with human reason. God was the creator of the kind of regular, ordered universe that Newtonian mechanics had uncovered.
The phrase “Age of Reason,” often used as a synonym for the Enlightenment, is a little misleading. It implies that reason had been hitherto ignored or marginalized. As we saw in an earlier chapter (pp. 101–2), the Middle Ages can quite legitimately be thought of as an “Age of Reason.” A defining characteristic of the Enlightenment is its emphasis on the ability of human reason to penetrate the mysteries of the world. Humanity is able to think for itself, without the need for any assistance from God. Unaided human reason is able to make sense of the world – including those aspects of that the world traditionally reserved for theologians.
In recent years, scholars have become increasingly aware of the many forms that human rationality takes and how these are linked with their historical contexts. Different cultures and periods in history developed their own understandings of rationality, which were linked with their specific contexts. Yet the Enlightenment seemed unaware of the historical situation of its notions of rationality. While the Enlightenment advocated what it genuinely believed to be a universal concept of rationality, this is now seen as an eighteenth-century Eurocentric approach to the question.
The frequent use of the singular term “Enlightenment” in both scholarly and popular writings also needs comment. Recent research has suggested that this movement is better understood as a “family of Enlightenments,” sharing a common commitment to a core of ideas and values, yet demonstrating diversity at other points. The English, German, and French Enlightenments took quite distinct forms and emphasized different ideas. The idea that the Enlightenment was characterized by a definite single set of ideas has proved very difficult to sustain historically. It is perhaps better to think of the movement as “an attitude of mind” rather than as a “coherent set of beliefs.”
The Enlightenment is of major importance to historical theology, not least because it offered a rational and historical critique of traditional Christian doctrines – a trend probably most associated with the “Quest of the Historical Jesus,” which has its roots in the early Enlightenment. We shall return to this later in this chapter.