The Enlightenment & God
Note: For detailed information about the Enlightenment, refer to my https://enlightenmentdeism.com/ site.
Introduction
Many spiritual teachers think that if our civilization is to evolve in a more spiritual direction that we need to understand our culture’s past. We particularly need to understand the modern period (from about 1550 to 1950). For example, Ken Wilber thinks that to solve the environmental crisis and other modern problems, we need to synthesize the earlier modern period and the present. He thinks these two periods have different ways of thinking. Wilber emphasizes that reconciling these two ways of thinking “is still the critical dilemma in the world today.”[i] In another place, he emphasizes this reconciliation even more and gives it a spiritual spin, saying it isn’t “a minor side issue…[but is the] battle at the heart of the West’s attempt to awaken.”[ii] James Redfield is so concerned with understanding the modern period, he makes this understanding the second insight of his best seller, The Celestine Prophecy. Redfield says that “before we in the west can understand where we are, and what is going to occur next, we must understand what has really been happening” in the modern period.[iii]
It is not surprising that these two and other spiritual teachers would concern themselves with the modern period because they believe that God or the Universal Mind is evolving in history and that the modern period is one of the most important periods in history.
I agree with these spiritual teachers that it is vital that we as a civilization understand what happened in the modern period so that we can move forward. The most important part of the modern period is the Enlightenment. It lasted from about 1688 to 1793. Its major figures included Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant. To understand the modern period, it is essential that we get an accurate understanding of the Enlightenment.
Unfortunately, too many spiritual teachers have only a very superficial understanding of the Enlightenment. They do not understand that many scholarly commentators on the period distort the period to advance their own agenda. I spent many years intensively reading the original writings of the Enlightenment thinkers. I discovered that they were considerably different than they were usually presented, and they actually shared many of the most important foundational ideas of the New Agers. They put God and following God’s will at the center of their philosophy. They thought that God cared for us and showered us with his goodness. The most important thing was that rather than working through the Catholic Church as the Catholics thought or through the Bible as the Protestants thought, the Enlightenment thinkers thought that God exercised his providential care for us through nature. Nature was a force of God and was God’s servant. God was benevolent, and so we were meant to enjoy this world, not just suffer through it on our way to heaven. From these foundational beliefs, the other values commonly associated with the period, democracy, love of science, capitalism, criticism, and reasonableness all flowed.
Common misconception about the enlightenment
The widespread cultural consensus is that the time of Locke, Voltaire, and Kant was the “Age of Reason.” According to this consensus, the eighteenth century valued reason and science because they made us independent, autonomous beings who could master nature. Reason was thought to be so powerful that it could one day understand the essence of reality. During this time, people advocated democracy, criticized authority, and were optimistic about the future. The Enlightenment God was merely a clockmaker who created the world machine, but then he withdrew from it to let it run by itself. As God was absent from the world, man was free to master nature and be in total control of his own fate. In this way, the common understanding of the Enlightenment “knows” that the eighteenth century was a major step toward secularization because during this period Western culture stopped being concerned with God, and instead, it emphasized reason, science, and man’s autonomy.
This is the picture that most people have of the Enlightenment. The scholarly secondary literature reinforces this view of the period. Peter Gay in his popular book about the period said that the Enlightenment figures were “modern secular philosophers” who “insisted on man’s essential autonomy” in the pursuit of modernity.[iv] Ernst Cassirer maintained that the Enlightenment figures “venerated reason and science as man’s highest faculty.”[v] Cassirer thought that because there was nothing in nature “impenetrable to intellect” this “explained the almost unlimited power which scientific knowledge gains over all the thought of the Enlightenment.”[vi] Isaiah Berlin said that the Enlightenment figures maintained that if philosophy would just follow the way of natural science, “human omniscience was thought to be attainable.”[vii] Carl L. Becker said that the Enlightenment “lost that sense of intimate intercourse with God”[viii] because God had “withdrawn from the affairs of men into the shadowy places where absolute being dwells.”[ix] For this reason, Becker declared that the Enlightenment figures denied that miracles ever happened.[x] These comments are from some of the best-known scholarly literature about the period. Many other commentaries paint a similar picture of the Enlightenment as the age of reason in which God and religious feeling were superfluous.
Because of such a widespread cultural consensus, every educated person “knows” that the Enlightenment figures emphasized reason, science, and individualism because they were breaking away from God and religion. Nevertheless, after reading the writings of Enlightenment figures themselves, I could not fit what these Enlightenment figures were saying with the popular understanding of the period.
european enlightenment figures
John Locke
The English philosopher John Locke valued reason, saying that “Reason must be our last Judge and Guide in every Thing.”[xi] In this passage, Locke seems to fit the common understanding of the Enlightenment. But after reading more of Locke’s works, I was surprised to discover that he did not see reason as an autonomous faculty that merely calculated a way to achieve some end. Nor did he think that reason could understand the essence of nature. Thus, he did not think of reason the way people in the Enlightenment were supposed to think of it.
To begin with, Locke thought that reason was given to us by God so that he can communicate with us: “Reason is natural Revelation, whereby the eternal Father of Light, and Fountain of all Knowledge communicates to Mankind that portion of Truth, which he has laid within the reach of their natural Faculties.”[xii] Second, he thought that reason demonstrated our moral duty with as much certainty as reason demonstrated mathematical propositions.[xiii] Third, Locke denied that reason could know everything and penetrate into the depths of nature. In actuality, Locke’s whole philosophy was based on curbing the human pretension to knowledge because he thought that we were very limited creatures with few ways to gain knowledge.
Locke even compared our epistemic situation to being in a dark closet with only a few, very small openings to the outside world:
External and internal Sensation, are the only passages that I can find, of Knowledge, to the Understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the Windows by which light is let into this dark Room. For, methinks, the Understanding is not much unlike a Closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible Resemblances, or Ideas of things without.[xiv]
Thus, Locke thought that reason or the understanding was extremely limited and could barely understand anything about the world. This dark view of our ability to understand the world was very far from the omnipotence of reason that the Enlightenment thinkers were supposed to believe in. Not only was Locke’s view of reason not what I was expecting, Locke’s view of God was also much different than I anticipated.
Because God made us out of nothing, Locke maintained that we should always be obedient to God’s will and observe the limits that God had prescribed for us:
Ultimately, all obligation leads back to God and we are bound to show ourselves obedient to the authority of His will because both our being and our work depend on His will, since we have received these from Him, and so we are bound to observe the limits He prescribes. . . . we owe our body, soul and life — whatever we are, whatever we have, and even whatever we can be — to Him and to Him alone, it is proper that we live according to the precept of His will. God has created us out of nothing and, if He pleases will reduce us again to nothing: we are, therefore, subject to Him in perfect justice and by utmost necessity.[xv]
In short, for Locke, God created us from nothing, and so we owed him everything. Thus, it was right that we obey God all the time. Similarly, Locke believed that God performed miracles, and Locke thought that God had revealed himself in Jesus Christ and the Bible.[xvi] This theocentrism was important for Locke’s philosophy. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke asserted that we have natural rights because we are God’s property.
Thus, Locke’s political philosophy is based on God:
For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not another’s pleasure. And being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.[xvii]
This idea that God made us equal, and so we have to respect one another’s rights, had important political ramifications as it was the philosophical foundation of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson echoed Locke’s idea when Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men were endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
So, for Locke, reason came from God, and it showed us how to follow God and do our moral duty. Locke denied reason was omnipotent or that it could know the essence of nature. Locke believed in miracles, and he maintained that humanity was very intimately connected to God. This was a far different picture of the Enlightenment than either the common understanding or that given by the secondary literature.
At first, I thought that Locke might have been extraordinary in some way. He was from the very beginning of the Enlightenment; maybe this would explain why he did not agree with the cultural consensus’ understanding of the period’s views. But after reading more Enlightenment figures, I saw that Locke’s views about reason and God were typical of the period.
Voltaire
Voltaire is often considered the most representative of Enlightenment figures. His witty attacks on the hypocritical pretensions of the Church and his defense of humanity defined the period. Surely, I thought, he must have had a high opinion of reason and be unconcerned with God. But after reading many of his works, it turns out that Voltaire thought we were more intimately related to God than Locke did. Voltaire did not have the Christian view of God because Voltaire despised a god who was intolerant and encouraged hatred and persecution. But Voltaire had what is nowadays called a very spiritual view of the universe. It is spiritual in the sense that Voltaire saw himself as intimately related to God, but Voltaire did not approve of the religious institutions and their conception of God or their attempt to claim a monopoly on people’s relationship with God.
Voltaire did not have the view of reason that I thought he would have; he did not say it was an omnipotent calculating tool that made us self-sufficient masters of the world. Instead, he said that God gave reason to us.[xviii] Voltaire also said that our reason was a portion of the universal reason, and our intelligence was an emanation of God’s intelligence.[xix] Furthermore, Voltaire stressed the limitations of reason. Indeed, he compared humans to mice in an immense building: our understanding was so limited that we could never hope to know the first principles of the universe.
Voltaire said,
It seems improbable, that the first principles of things will ever be thoroughly known. The mice living in a few little holes of an immense building do not know if the building is eternal, who is the architect, or why the architect built it. They try to preserve their lives, to people their holes, and to escape the destructive animals which pursue them. We are the mice; and the divine architect who built this universe has not yet, so far as I know, told His secret to any of us.[xx]
In thinking we were like mice, he was very similar to Locke who compared our epistemic situation to being locked in a dark closet. Both had a very deep pessimism about our capacity to understand the world.
Because Voltaire thought that reason was very limited, he declared that it did not govern our lives; he believed that instinct and the heart, not reason, governed our actions. He said that “instinct more than reason, conducts human life.”[xxi] Indeed he thought “we are governed by instinct.”[xxii] Besides instinct, the heart also animated our lives. He said Heaven “bestowed on every man a heart to animate it.”[xxiii] Because he did not stress reason but instincts and the heart, he thought it was an “insane idea” for any person to try to become “wholly reasonable.”[xxiv] So, he clearly did not fit the cultural consensus which maintains that the Enlightenment glorified reason.
Besides agreeing with Locke that the power of reason was very limited, Voltaire also agreed with Locke about God’s importance. Not only did Voltaire think that all nature cried out that God exists,[xxv] he also thought that “all nature, all which exists, is the grace of God.”[xxvi] Most amazingly, Voltaire maintained that everything we do occurs in God and that God gives us our very ideas. He agreed with the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche that we actually lived in God and experienced all our sensations in God. Voltaire said, “Malebranche is right that we are in God, and that we see all in God; like St. Paul says.”[xxvii] Voltaire further said “that this means that God gives us all our ideas.”[xxviii] Indeed, it meant more than God gives us our ideas, it meant that God also directs all our movements.
For Voltaire, not only did “God make all the ideas in my head, but likewise he makes the movement in all my body. Everything is thus an action of God on creatures.”[xxix] Voltaire quite often made this claim that everything we supposedly did was really God’s action on us. In another work, he said that “God is everywhere, that God penetrates everywhere, and that God gives movement and life to all.”[xxx] In yet another place, Voltaire said “whatever is or occurs is in God, and conversely, that God is in all that is or occurs.”[xxxi] Voltaire says this is true because man is so powerless and God is so powerful.
Voltaire said:
But as one reflects on the infinite power of the Supreme Being, author of all, and one can clearly see that man is the author of nothing, one can easily conceive that God, who gives man thoughts, is able to give and conserve that being which He deigns to chose.[xxxii]
Voltaire’s view of God is so far from a distant clockmaker God that God gives us our ideas and is the cause of all our movement. A more intimate view of God is hard to conceive.
Voltaire definitely was not a Christian; in fact, he abhorred Christianity and wanted to erase that “infamy” from the earth. Nevertheless, he was more theocentric than most Christians because he really believed we did all things in God and that God was the cause of our very thoughts and movements. Voltaire also valued reason (although he thought it was very limited in its ability to understand the world), and he thought that reason itself discovered the need and the way to be religious. In this way he espoused a rational spirituality that was different from either the traditional Christian emphasis on faith or the secular humanists’ emphasis on science.
While the common understanding of the Enlightenment sees Voltaire as a modern secularist, considering his emphasis on God and how our thoughts and actions come from God, this is a very inaccurate understanding of Voltaire.
Immanuel Kant
While Locke and Voltaire did not espouse “typical” Enlightenment views, neither does the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant said that reason was “the ultimate touchstone of truth.”[xxxiii] Furthermore, in an essay entitled “What is Enlightenment?” Kant defined the Enlightenment as daring to think for oneself and coming out of a self-imposed tutelage. Because of positions like these, modern scholars often assert that Kant emphasized autonomous reason: a reason which recognized nothing higher than itself and which saw itself as the ultimate standard. After studying more of his works, however, a different picture of Kant’s philosophy emerged: like Locke and Voltaire, he was very religious; God, not reason, was the foundation of his philosophy.
Kant emphasized God in many of his works. Kant was quite explicit that the purpose of his philosophical project was limiting knowledge to allow room for faith.[xxxiv] Kant even asserted that without God’s continuing preservation, all beings and all worldly things would simply cease existing. For Kant, God’s continual action was needed to preserve all beings and things in existence; if God stopped doing this vital act, the things of the world would simply fall into nothingness. Kant said that “Creation and conservation are one and the same act.”
He said.
Further, God’s omnipresence is an innermost presence. That is, God conserves what is substantial, the very inwardness of substances. For it is just this which is necessary for the duration of substances. If God did not unceasingly actuate this inwardness and essential substantiality, then things in the world would all have to cease to be.[xxxv]
So, God was not a distant creator, but one who activated the very substantiality of everything. The world was not independent of God, but desperately in need of His active and constant preservation. Consonant with this emphasis on God’s activity in the world, Kant also believed in God’s ability to do miracles.[xxxvi]
Kant had a much different view of nature than modern secularists have. Unlike modern secularists, Kant believed that nature was the way that God worked in the world. Kant thought that nature was controlled by God and that God impressed his purposes upon nature. Nature was a manifestation of God’s activity in the world because there was a wise governing agency behind nature. Kant remarked that “we must not on the other hand overlook teleology, which indicates the foresight of a wise agency governing nature.”[xxxvii] Kant discussed nature and providence in many of his works and often equated them.
Kant thought that the world revealed that there was design in nature and that nature cared for humans. One example he mentioned was how nature cared for humans living near the Arctic Circle by providing them with food and driftwood.
Kant said:
Evidence of design in nature emerges even more clearly, when we realize that the shores of the Arctic Ocean are inhabited not only by fur-bearing animals, but also by seals, walruses, and whales, whose flesh provides food and whose fat provides warmth for the inhabitants. Nature’s care arouses most admiration, however, by carrying driftwood to these treeless regions without anyone knowing exactly where it came from. For if they did not have this material, the natives would not be able to construct either boats or weapons, or dwellings in which to live.[xxxviii]
This was not the only way that Kant thought nature showed its care for human beings. He thought that the very way humans populated the globe revealed the design of nature.[xxxix] And he thought that humans were designed and prodded by nature to develop all their capabilities.[xl] So, nature is philosophically prior to reason because it has a purpose that we as humans must follow. Here it is important to emphasize that Kant believed that God made nature and works through nature, so when we are following nature, we are following God.
As God was prior to humans because he created and preserved us, so too was God’s handmaiden nature prior to us. This had important implications for Kant’s view of reason because nature was philosophically prior to reason as nature gave us reason and meant us to use it. In a 1784 work that was written in his mature period, Kant said that nature intended us to reason because it made us different than all the other animals. They were all governed by instinct, but we were not. We had been given reason to guide our actions.
Kant said:
Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence and that he should not partake of any other happiness or perfection than that which he has produced for himself without instinct and by his own reason. For nature does nothing unnecessarily and is not extravagant in the means employed to reach its ends. Nature gave man reason, and freedom of will based on reason, and this in itself was a clear indication of nature’s intention as regards his endowments.[xli]
For Kant, nature had intended that we reason because nature had made us the only animals who were not governed by instinct. When we reason, we are following the purposes of God and nature, not being self-sufficient rulers of the universe. Reason was not the foundation of Kant’s philosophy, God and nature were.
Not only is reason not the basis of his philosophy, the kind of reason Kant discussed was not instrumental, calculating reason. First of all, Kant believed that reason led us to God. He said that “reason leads us to God as the holy lawgiver.”[xlii] Kant also said that our reason tells us to strive toward God.[xliii] Second, Kant thought that it was through reason that we realized that being morally good pleased God.[xliv] Third, Kant was also quite explicit that when he discussed reason in terms of doing our moral duty, he was not talking about calculating, instrumental reason. He said that morality does not come from “technical practical reason . . . but the moral-practical [reason] which prescribes right to man.”[xlv] Kant also says that “God is the object toward which our morally legislative reason bids us strive.”[xlvi] Kant’s view of reason is far from the calculating, instrumental reason that many commentators say dominated the Enlightenment.
Kant, like Locke and Voltaire, also did not think that reason was omnipotent or omniscient. He thought that reason had a very limited ability to understand reality. He believed that philosophers were continually creating mediocre philosophical systems because they would not face reason’s limitations. The whole purpose of his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason, was demonstrating how little reason could know and attacking reason’s pretensions of claiming to know what it could not possibly know. Kant even declared that the purpose of his philosophical project was limiting knowledge to allow room for faith.[xlvii]
American Enlightenment figures
Locke, Voltaire, and Kant were three of the most important Enlightenment figures. They were from different countries. Furthermore, Locke was from the early part of the Enlightenment, Voltaire the middle part, and Kant from the later part of the period. Nevertheless, their views on reason and God were very different from the common understanding of the period. All three of these Enlightenment figures thought reason was very limited and they all thought God was intimately involved in our daily life. Could the common understanding of the Enlightenment be so wrong? Or was there something special about these three figures to cause them to have different views from most Enlightenment thinkers?
To find out if this was true, I started reading other major Enlightenment figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith. Surely, I thought, a hardheaded American who said a penny saved is a penny earned and the developer of capitalism would not base their philosophy on God. I was wrong. It turned out that these Enlightenment figures were very similar to Locke, Voltaire, and Kant. They too emphasized God and God’s power, not self-sufficient reason.
Benjamin franklin
Benjamin Franklin seemed to be the most popular person in the Enlightenment; in many ways he is the most representative figure of the period, more than Voltaire, Newton, Kant or Hume. When Franklin was in France, John Adams, the future American President, said Franklin’s reputation was better than Newton’s, Voltaire’s or Frederick the Great’s: “there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen who was not familiar with it [his name] and who did not consider him as a friend of human kind. When they spoke of him they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.”[xlviii]
Franklin often thought of God and prayed to him. Franklin believed we needed God’s help in our endeavors and that we were dependent on God. He even rewrote the Lord’s Prayer and made some significant changes in it to emphasize our dependency on God. The traditional version of the prayer asks God to “Give us this Day our daily Bread.” But Franklin thought this was presumptuous as it implied that we have a right to this bread and does not fully acknowledge our dependency on God. Franklin said that the prayer by saying “Give us what is ours, seems to put in a Claim of Right, and contain too little of the grateful Acknowledgment and Sense of Dependance that becomes Creatures who live on the daily Bounty of their Creator.” So Franklin changed the line to “Provide for us this Day, as thou hast hitherto daily done.”[xlix]
In explaining his philosophy, Franklin said we have to totally submit to God’s will with the confidence that whatever God did was for our own good: “Is there any Duty in Religion more generally agreed on, or more justly required by God, than a perfect Submission to his Will in all Things? Can any Disposition of Mind, either please him more, or become us better, than that of being satisfied with all he gives, and content with all he takes away? None, certainly . . . we may be confident whatever he does is for our Good.”[l] Because whatever God did was for our good, Franklin thought we should adore God. Not only should we adore God, we should rapturously adore God: “With Adoration think, with Rapture gaze, / And hear all Nature chant her Maker’s Praise.”[li] This concern for God was often repeated in Franklin’s writings.
Franklin was adamantly against the view that God never intervened in the world. Franklin declared that a God who just made nature and never intervened in it was a useless idol. Such a God had “no greater Power than an idol of Wood or Stone; nor can there be any more Reason for praying to him or worshipping” him. A non-intervening God was a deity who had stopped being God. “You unGod him, . . . if he has nothing to do,” Franklin said. He maintained it was absurd and actually did violence to our reason to think the most powerful being would not intervene in this world. It was “an Absurdity, which when considered or but barely seen, cannot be swallowed without doing the greatest Violence to common Reason, and all the Faculties of the Understanding.”[lii] With this concept of God, it is not surprising that Franklin believed that God had often miraculously intervened to help the Americans during their revolution.[liii]
Franklin also had a view of reason like Locke’s, Voltaire’s, and Kant’s: he thought humans were very fallible people who were full of “Ignorance and Error.”[liv] Franklin thought reason was very liable to error, and thus it could not understand the essence of reality. Because reason was weak and humans could not be confident their opinions were correct, Franklin emphasized toleration. “In the present weak state of human Nature,” he wrote, “surrounded as we are on all sides with Ignorance and Error, it little becomes poor fallible Man to be positive and dogmatical in his Opinions.”[lv]
Adam smith
The Scottish thinker Adam Smith laid the philosophical foundations of capitalism. Surely, I thought, this hard-headed economist must be concerned only with money and not with God. But I was wrong. Smith had a conception of God and nature very much like the other Enlightenment thinkers I have discussed so far. To begin with, Smith was certain that God existed and providentially cared for us. He said that “every part of nature, when attentively surveyed, equally demonstrates the providential care of its Author, and we may admire the wisdom and goodness of God.”[lvi] He was so certain God existed and that we should obey him, he considered it absurd and impious to question God’s existence.[lvii] Like Kant, he thought that God worked though nature. Moreover, Smith thought that nature had designed us to live in society. Nature had even given us a desire to please others so that our social life would be easier. “Nature,” he said, “when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren.”[lviii] Capitalism was based on his belief that God had so harmoniously arranged the world that an individual’s selfishness benefitted society. So the invisible guiding hand of capitalism was God’s hand.[lix] Like Locke, Voltaire, Kant, and Franklin, God was the foundation of Smith’s philosophy.
Like the other Enlightenment figures, Smith did not glorify reason. For example, he thought that reason was too weak to make us do our moral duty. He thought we were moral because of sympathy, a sentiment “which Providence undoubtedly intended to be the governing principle of human nature.”[lx] So Smith thought sympathy, not reason, was the governing principle of our lives.
summary of enlightenment figures
None of the five thinkers I had read fit the stereotype of the Enlightenment. Possibly the major figures of the Enlightenment did not have typical Enlightenment views. Maybe the common understanding of the period did not apply to the some of the period’s major figures but only to its lesser figures. So I started reading them too. I was flummoxed to find out that they thought also did not agree with the common understanding of the period.
English Deists
The English Deists, such as Matthew Tindal, Anthony Collins, and Charles Gildon, deeply influenced Franklin, Diderot, Voltaire, and many other important thinkers during the eighteenth century. They are forgotten nowadays but their view of God was the Enlightenment’s view of God. The modern understanding of the Deists maintains that they considered God a shadowy, distant figure; the Deists supposedly believed in a God who was a clock maker because he never intervened in the world after he made it. Unfortunately, the English Deists did not fit this picture. They saw their lives as intimately related to God, and almost all of them believed God performed miracles. They all had God as the foundation of their philosophy and their lives. [For more on the English Deists and their view of God and miracles refer to the Deism and Miracles page.]
They also had a much different view of reason than I thought they would have: they thought it was given to us by God to communicate with him. “Can we lay too great a stress on reason,” Matthew Tindal remarked, “when we consider ’tis only by virtue of it God can hold communication with man?”[lxi] Tindal was sure that God gave us reason for a religious purpose: to discover the will of God. “Reason was giv’n men to bring them to knowledge of God’s Will,” Tindal said.[lxii] Two English Deists, Thomas Woolston and Anthony Collins, even linked reason with Jesus. Woolston boldly identified reason with Jesus by saying reason was Jesus’s mystical name: “Jesus or right reason and truth, which are his mystical names.”[lxiii] Collins, who was influential in Franklin’s turn to Deism, also identified reason with Jesus. “Justin Martyr tells us,” Collins wrote, “that Christ, the first-begotten of God, is nothing else but Reason, of which all mankind are Particles.”[lxiv] With this identification of reason with Jesus, these influential Enlightenment figures were far from seeing reason as purely a calculating tool. Furthermore, these figures were far from alone in making these type of identifications.
Reason also revealed that morality is conducive to our own happiness. “God has given you that very Reason which you Desire, which by its Essence excludes all Transgression, for you can commit no offence against God, your Neighbor, or yourself, but what is at the same time, as great against your own Reason,” Charles Gildon wrote. “For Reason demonstrates the Excellence of Virtue, and the destructive Nature of Vice; it shows one conducive to our Happiness, and proves the other to be its Bane in so plain a manner, and so evidently, that there is no Man so weak, or blind but is capable of seeing it.”[lxv] One of these Deists also made some interesting comments about reason. Charles Gildon linked reason with ecstasy: “In short,” he said, “all that is great, all that is truly transporting, lasting, and divine we owe to the Discovery of our Reason.”[lxvi]
One of the most important of the Deist free thinkers, Anthony Collins, even declared that free-thinking was motivated by religious purposes: he said he used his reason to question things because the Bible commanded it. “the Holy Scriptures, agreeably to reason and to the design of our blessed savior of establishing his religion throughout the whole universe, imply everywhere and press in many places the duty of free-thinking.”[lxvii] Anthony Collins linked the downfall of the devil’s power with using reason or free-thinking: “Free-thinking is upon experience the only proper means to destroy the Devil’s Kingdom among Men; whose Dominion and Power are ever more or less extensive, as Free-thinking is discourag’d or allow’d.”[lxviii]
Collins, like many other Deists, thought there was a religious foundation to his free-thinking.
In their own words: the Original writings of enlightenment thinkers
The Enlightenment figures I was reading were all emphasizing God or a providential nature, and the limits of reason. After reading the primary texts for a long time, it became clear that the popular understanding of the Enlightenment differed radically from the picture of the Enlightenment these texts presented. This great discrepancy between the common understanding of the period and the texts interested me. Why was there such a widespread misunderstanding of this period? Of course, few people have time to read many of the original works of the Enlightenment thinkers themselves. Instead, they rely on commentators for their understanding of the period. If the original texts were so different from the secondary literature, it meant these commentators were misrepresenting the period. I thought of Adorno and Horkheimer’s widely read book The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this book, they maintained that the Enlightenment, far from being a liberating movement, was primarily characterized by a totalitarian, dominating logic which negated everything but autonomous reason and calculating utilitarianism.[lxix] Many scholars have built their critique of the Enlightenment on this interpretation of the period. The problem with Adorno and Horkheimer’s interpretation is that they have not read many of the texts of the Enlightenment thinkers themselves (they often seem to read only a small canonical portion of Kant’s works). Because of their ignorance of the period, they mistakenly equate the Enlightenment with the modern philosophical movement of positivism.[lxx] Positivism does seem to have all the negative features Adorno and Horkheimer ascribe to the Enlightenment. However, it is naïve scholarship for them to assume that the Enlightenment is the same as positivism. Locke, Voltaire, Franklin, Smith, and the Deists would all have been horrified at the positions the positivists take.[lxxi] These Enlightenment thinkers were very modest about the claims of reason, were very emotional and caring people, and were sure God was the basis of our lives. The Enlightenment thinkers, unlike the positivists, were not advocates of cold, calculating reason. But, of course, it is much easier for Adorno and Horkheimer to just equate the Enlightenment with positivism than to actually read the Enlightenment thinkers themselves.
Perspectives on the Common Interpretations of the Enlightenment
After intensively studying the Enlightenment works and the secondary literature for many years, I concluded there was a widespread misunderstanding of the period because many commentators benefitted from misrepresenting the period. It furthered their agendas to misrepresent the Enlightenment because these commentators were advancing their own vision of how Western civilization should change and how individuals in it should live. These commentators fall into five distinct groups. Each of these groups has their own tradition, philosophical worldview, and agenda they are promoting by misrepresenting the period. These five groups are the Enlightenment’s Christian opponents, its Romantic opponents, the contemporary Marxist-Leftists and Postmodernists, the feminists, and finally the secularists– those humanists, scientists, and analytical philosophers who claim to be the heirs of the Enlightenment. All these groups advance their own agendas by misinterpreting the period. Because these ideological interpretations of the Enlightenment dominate much of the discussion of the period, it seems wise to point out why these commentators would want to misrepresent the period.
the eighteenth-century Christian perspective
The first group to falsely characterize the Enlightenment were the eighteenth-century Christians. They accused the Enlightenment thinkers of being irreligious atheists. The Christians made this charge, not because the Enlightenment thinkers were irreligious or atheists, but because many Enlightenment thinkers presented an alternative to orthodox Christianity. Many Enlightenment thinkers believed in natural religion, or a rational spirituality based on nature and reason. This rational spirituality was based on a new view of God which emphasized his fairness, not his power. They believed a good God would never have inflicted original sin on us, predestined some of us to hell, or promised salvation only to the Christians. Most of them emphasized reason over faith in the Church or Bible. They thought God wanted us to do morally good actions, not perform meaningless rituals or mouth approved confessional creeds. In this way, they were attacking many of the main views of orthodox Christianity and setting up a rival: rational spirituality.
One must see that the Christians had an ideological investment in characterizing the Enlightenment thinkers as atheists: the Christians did not desire the Enlightenment’s rational spirituality to be a rival to orthodox Christianity. If the Christians painted the Enlightenment thinkers as atheists instead of followers of natural religion or rational spirituality, then the Christians could maintain there was no religious alternative to orthodox Christianity; therefore, they had a reason to say a person was either an orthodox Christian or an atheist.
The Enlightenment’s Christian opponents not only had an ideological agenda driving their attacks during the Enlightenment, they had one afterwards as well. Many Christians, especially the Catholics, blamed the excesses of the French Revolution on the Enlightenment. These Christians charged that the Enlightenment, by supposedly worshipping godless reason and disobeying the proper social authorities, had reached its logical conclusion in the French Revolution’s turmoil and bloodshed. These opponents described the Enlightenment thinkers as irreligious to advance their own conservative agenda which emphasized obedience to the established social and spiritual authorities. Modern Christians still advance a similar misrepresentation of the Enlightenment.
the Romantics perspective
The second group to falsely characterize the Enlightenment were the Romantics. The thinkers and artists of the Romantic movement said the Enlightenment figures were cold, unfeeling, abstract thinkers. Romanticism was a movement of people dissatisfied with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on moderation and succeeding in the world, and in many ways the Romantics defined themselves in opposition to the Enlightenment. To make the Romantics’ over-emphasis on emotion, alienation, and melancholy appealing, the Romantics painted the Enlightenment figures as cold, unfeeling people who worshipped abstract, calculating reason. The Enlightenment thinkers were not like this, but the Romantics knew they could gain social status by denigrating their opponents.
the Marxist-Leftist perspective
The third group to falsely characterize the Enlightenment are the Marxist-Leftists. This group, which includes Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, and other Postmodernists, wants to denigrate the Enlightenment as part of its attack on the modern world and the capitalist system. They want to see both capitalism and the Enlightenment as being dominated by technocratic, bureaucratic reason which ultimately leads to the Holocaust. If the Enlightenment and capitalism is portrayed in this way, then the Marxist-Leftist alternative to the present system appears much more credible.
The fourth group to falsely characterize the Enlightenment are the feminists. They accuse the Enlightenment of being dominated by autonomous males who were cut off from nature and their feelings. Because the feminists concur with the Marxist-Leftists that our modern society is built on Enlightenment foundations, the feminists then indict modern society as being fundamentally anti-female and call for its radical restructuring. Misrepresenting the Enlightenment helps make their case that our society needs to be radically changed.
the secularist perspective
The fifth group to falsely characterize the Enlightenment are the secularists– scientists, skeptics, humanists, and analytical philosophers. They see themselves as upholding the Enlightenment values of reason, free inquiry, humaneness, and science. In many ways, these thinkers present the most insidious obstruction to clearly understanding the Enlightenment because they praise the period while misrepresenting it. They project their values onto the period, acting as if the Enlightenment thinkers believed the same things they do.
It is true that Enlightenment figures valued reason, free inquiry, humaneness, and science, but these were not the only qualities they valued. By emphasizing only these values, the secularists miss the deeper thought structure behind these values. They miss the belief in God, providence, and nature which were the foundation of the Enlightenment’s other values. The secularists, to claim a longer, more noble heritage for themselves and to glorify their own projects by associating them with the Enlightenment, ignore the deepest beliefs of the Enlightenment thinkers. These secularists ignore the Enlightenment’s beliefs in God, providence, and nature because these values do not fit the secularists’ worldview.
These secularists include the vast majority of philosophy professors at American colleges and universities. These philosophers are almost exclusively interested in current philosophical problems and they teach only those Enlightenment philosophers– Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant– who were concerned with these problems. Most of the Enlightenment’s most popular philosophers, such as Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, and the Deists, are simply ignored. Because of this unfortunate tendency, many people get the mistaken impression that Kant was the culmination of the Enlightenment, or that Hume was a major break from the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason. Both of these claims are not true: Kant was virtually ignored in the Enlightenment, and Hume was deeply embedded in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition which did not emphasize reason and instead emphasized instinct, moral sense, and common sense.
The most successful example of this secularist misinterpretation of the Enlightenment is Peter Gay’s book The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism. By concentrating on a small flock of Parisian thinkers, Gay portrays the Enlightenment as very radical and irreligious. For example, Gay says of the Enlightenment thinkers: “they were on the side of science against piety.”[lxxii] While true of some French thinkers, this statement falsely projects something currently true– a split between science and religion– onto the Enlightenment period. During that time period, however, the split between science and religion had not yet developed. The most important scientists, such as Franklin, Newton, von Haller, and Linneaus, were very religious and considered their scientific work as a way of understanding God’s work. This false projection is illustrative of the major tendency of Gay’s book: claiming the Enlightenment thinkers were basically the forerunners of current irreligious secularism. Gay’s many scholarly critics such as James Leith[lxxiii] and Robert Darnton[lxxiv] are right in saying Gay misinterprets the Enlightenment to advance his own ideological agenda– seeing the Enlightenment as fundamentally similar to contemporary secularism.
These five groups all propagate a common understanding of the Enlightenment: it advocated autonomous reason with little or no sense of the sacred. It is hard to swim against such a powerful current. I would be loathe to do it except the original texts of the Enlightenment thinkers are so different from this common understanding. These texts show a much different Enlightenment than the common consensus and when one reads them one becomes convinced that our modern understanding of the period grossly distorts it.
Conclusion
After intensive reading, I came to the conclusion that the basic worldview of the Enlightenment maintained that all people depended on God and we should praise and love him. They thought that God wanted us to be happy in this world as well as the next one. Their deity was not the harsh, wrathful God that Calvin or the Hebrew Bible emphasized, but a God that was fair and kind to all people. Furthermore, this caring, beneficent God worked through nature because nature was God’s way of dispensing providence to all his creatures. There was no conflict between science and religion because science was seen as the way to understand how God works through nature. Because God wanted us to be happy, we should enjoy the world, make money, have good sex, and criticize institutions such as the Catholic Church which taught otherwise. We should also help other people, respect their rights, and look forward to the progress we as a species were going to achieve.
Copyrighted 2009
footnotes
[i] Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, 2nd edition (Boston: Shambhala, 2007), p. 435.
[ii] Wilber, p. 451.
[iii] James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy, (New York: Warner Books, 1993), p. 21.
[iv]Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1969), pp. 24, 398, & 502.
[v] Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), p. xi.
[vi]Cassirer, p. 45.
[vii]Isaiah Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New York: New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1956), p. 14.
[viii]Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1922), pp. 36-37.
[ix]Carl L. Becker, pp. 36-37.
[x]Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), p. 31.
[xi]John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 704. Italics in the original.
[xii]Locke, p. 698. Italics in the original.
[xiii]Locke, p. 549.
[xiv] Locke, pp. 162-163. Italics in the original.
[xv]John Locke, Essays on Natural Law, ed. W. von Lyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 183.
[xvi]John Locke, “A Discourse of Miracles,” in The Reasonableness of Christianity with a Discourse of Miracles (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), pp. 79-86.
[xvii]John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Book I, Chapter II, Section 6, as reprinted in Classics of Moral and Political Theory, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), p. 739.
[xviii]Voltaire, The Ignorant Philosopher, in The Best Known Works of Voltaire (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1927), p. 459.
[xix]Voltaire, as cited in E.D. James, “The Concept of Emanation in the Later Philosophy of Voltaire,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,” 284 (1991), p. 207.
[xx]Voltaire, to Frederick the Great, Aug. 26, 1736, in Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (London: Routledge and Sons, 1927), p. 26.
[xxi]Voltaire, as cited in Henry Vyverberg, Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 37
[xxii]Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary, Vol. 10 of The Works of Voltaire (Paris: E. R. Du Mont, 1901), p. 241.
[xxiii]Voltaire, The Lisbon Earthquake and Other Poems, Vol. 36 of the Works of Voltaire, p. 244. This was originally two lines from a poem with the second line beginning with the word “to.”
[xxiv]Voltaire, cited in Charles Frankel, The Faith of Reason: The Idea of Progress in the French Enlightenment (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), p. 76.
[xxv]Crane Brinton, ed., The Portable Age of Reason Reader (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd., 1956), p. 367.
[xxvi]Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie Garnier Freres, n.d.), p. 292.
[xxvii]Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie Garnier Freres, n.d.), p. 300.
[xxviii]Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie Garnier Freres, n.d.), p. 300.
[xxix]Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie Garnier Freres, n.d.), p. 300.
[xxx]E.D. James, “The Concept of Emanation in the Later Philosophy of Voltaire,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 284 (1991), p. 307.
[xxxi]Voltaire, “Tout en Dieu: Commentaire sure Malebranche,” as cited in E.D. James, p. 203.
[xxxii]Voltaire, as cited in Herbert Dieckmann, Le Philosophe: Texts and Interpretations (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1948), p. 39.
[xxxiii]Immanuel Kant, “What is Orientation in Thinking?” in The Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings of Moral Philosophy, trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 304.
[xxxiv]Immanuel Kant, (B.xxx) Preface to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), p. 29.
[xxxv]Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Theology, p. 149.
[xxxvi]Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Theology, pp. 147 and 154-6 and Kant, Philosophical Correspondence 1759-99, ed. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 82.
[xxxvii]Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant, Political Writings, p. 109.
[xxxviii]Ibid., pp. 109-10.
[xxxix]Ibid. pp. 109-10.
[xl]Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant, Political Writings, pp. 44-5.
[xli]Kant, “Ideas for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant, Political Writings, p. 43. Italics in the original.
[xlii]Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 113.
[xliii]Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 142.
[xliv]Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 164-5.
[xlv]Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, trans. Eckart Forster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 212.
[xlvi]Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 142.
[xlvii]Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), p. 29.
[xlviii] John Adams, as quoted in Richard E. Amacher, Franklin’s Wit and Folly: The Bagatelles (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 5-6.
[xlix]Benjamin Franklin, “A New Version of the Lord’s Prayer,” in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 15, ed. William Willcox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 301-3.
[l]Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” 1757, reprinted in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 7, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 78.
[li]Ibid., “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” Vol. 3, p. 451.
[lii]Benjamin Franklin, “On the Providence of God in the Government of the World,” in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 1, pp. 267-9.
[liii]See the next chapter of this book.
[liv]Benjamin Franklin, “Dialogue between Two Presbyterians,” in Koch, p. 118.
[lv]Benjamin Franklin, “Dialogue between Two Presbyterians,” in Koch, p. 118.
[lvi]Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1982), pp. 105-6.
[lvii]Ibid., p. 305.
[lviii]Ibid., p. 116.
[lix]See the end of chapter two and the middle of chapter four of this book.
[lx]Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, reprinted in L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed., British Moralists, Vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1965), p. 334.
[lxi]Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation, reprinted in E. Graham Waring, ed., Deism and Natural Religion (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1967), p. 147.
[lxii]Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation (1730; reprint, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1967), p. 6.
[lxiii]Thomas Woolston, Discourses on the Miracles, in Waring, p. 74.
[lxiv]Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Free-thinking (1713; reprint, New York: Garland Press, 1978), p. 124.
[lxv]Gildon, pp. 107-8. Italics in the original.
[lxvi]Charles Gildon, The Deist’s Manual: Or, A Rational Enquiry into the Christian Religion (1705; reprint, New York: Garland Press, 1976), pp. 108-9.
[lxvii]Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Free-Thinking, in Waring, p. 60.
[lxviii]Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Free-Thinking, (New York: Garland Press, 1713, 1978), p. 27.
[lxix] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1991), p. 6 and passim.
[lxx]Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1991), pp. 7, 16, 23, 25-7, 30-1, 40, 91, and passim.
[lxxi]Kant, on the other hand, does have some parts of his philosophy which would could be considered similar to the ideas of positivism.
[lxxii]Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1966), p. 397.
[lxxiii]James A. Leith, “Peter Gay’s Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 5, no. 1 (Fall 1971): 157-171.
[lxxiv]Robert Darnton, “In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas,” Journal of Modern History 43, no. 1 (March 1971): 113-132.
spiritual critiques 