Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Enlightenment was seen as a period when people used the light of reason and science to free themselves from the shackles of religious beliefs.For example, Henry Steele Commager said, 'the men of the Enlightenment … are the first fully to emancipate themselves from religious superstition and to understand the nature of man in the light of science and reason'. 1 Similarly, Peter Gay stated that there was a unified Enlightenment whose proponents rejected the religious beliefs they grew up with while being on a mission to develop 'a naturalistic world view, a secular ethical system, and above all a triumphant scientific method'. 2 Moreover, the deists were seen as major proponents of secularism, naturalism, and the scientific method.Gay asserted that the deists living in England had a very important role in the Enlightenment mission of developing a secular and scientific worldview because they were 'the first men in modern times to set out on this mission … they redrew the religious map of Europe'. 3 In the decades since Gay's time, his view of a unified Enlightenment has been widely challenged.This challenge was initiated by Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich in their 1982 book, The Enlightenment in National Context.Porter and Teich, and other scholars who follow them, say that the Enlightenment took many different forms in different national contexts and that in many countries religious belief was seen as compatible with 'the light of science and reason'.The idea that there was a singular, unified Enlightenment has been rejected by many scholars in favour of the idea that there was a 'family of Enlightenments', or many different Enlightenments in different countries.4 Jonathan Israel disagrees with the idea of seeing the Enlightenment as a family of Enlightenments.He agrees that there was a moderate Enlightenment whose proponents were motivated by their religious beliefs.However, he argues that there was a much more important and more secular Radical Enlightenment.Israel maintains that the proponents of the Radical Enlightenment were the progenitors of the modern world because they, unlike the proponents of the moderate Enlightenment, advocated equality, comprehensive freedom of thought, 1 Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY:
Source: The Heythrop Journal
DOI: 10.1111/heyj.14368
Author: Joseph Waligore
Institution: University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,760
OpenAlex ID: W4402574596