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The Enlightenment
Paul Brians
Washington State University, 1998
Although the intellectual movement called "The
Enlightenment" is usually associated with the 18th century,
its roots in fact go back much further. But before we
explore those roots, we need to define the term. This is one
of those rare historical movements which in fact named
itself. Certain thinkers and writers, primarily in London
and Paris, believed that they were more enlightened than
their compatriots and set out to enlighten them.
They believed that human reason could be used to
combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a
better world. Their principal targets were religion
(embodied in France in the Catholic Church) and the
domination of society by a hereditary aristocracy.
Background in Antiquity
To understand why this movement became so
influential in the 18th century, it is important to go back in
time. We could choose almost any starting point, but let us
begin with the recovery of Aristotelian logic by Thomas
Aquinas in the 13th century. In his hands the logical
procedures so carefully laid out by the ancient Greek
philosopher Aristotle were used to defend the dogmas of
Christianity; and for the next couple of centuries, other
thinkers pursued these goals to shore up every aspect of
faith with logic. These thinkers were sometimes called
"schoolmen" (more formally, "scholastics,") and Voltaire
frequently refers to them as "doctors," by which he means
"doctors of theology."
Unfortunately for the Catholic Church, the tools of
logic could not be confined to the uses it preferred. After
all, they had been developed in Athens, in a pagan culture
which had turned them on its own traditional beliefs. It
was only a matter of time before later Europeans would do
the same.
The Renaissance Humanists
In the 14th and 15th century (1300-1499) there
emerged in Italy and France a group of thinkers known as
the "humanists." The term did not then have the anti-
religious associations it has in contemporary political
debate. Almost all of them were practicing Catholics. They
argued that the proper worship of God involved admiration
of his creation, and in particular of that crown of creation:
humanity. By celebrating the human race and its capacities
they argued they were worshipping God more
appropriately than gloomy priests and monks who harped
on original sin and continuously called upon people to
confess and humble themselves before the Almighty.
Indeed, some of them claimed that humans were like God,
created not only in his image, but with a share of his
creative power. The painter, the architect, the musician,
and the scholar, by exercising their intellectual powers,
were fulfilling divine purposes.
This celebration of human capacity, though it was
mixed in the Renaissance with elements of gloom and
superstition (witchcraft trials flourished in this period as
they never had during the Middle Ages), was to bestow a
powerful legacy on Europeans. The goal of Renaissance
humanists was to recapture some of the pride, breadth of
spirit, and creativity of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to
replicate their successes and go beyond them. Europeans
developed the belief that tradition could and should be
used to promote change. By cleaning and sharpening the
tools of antiquity, they could reshape their own time.
Galileo Galilei, for instance, was to use the same sort
of logic the schoolmen had used—reinforced with
observation—to argue in 1632 for the Copernican notion
that the earth rotates on its axis beneath the unmoving sun.
The Church, and most particularly the Holy Inquisition,
objected that the Bible clearly stated that the sun moved
through the sky and denounced Galileo's teachings, forcing
him to recant (take back) what he had written and
preventing him from teaching further. The Church's
triumph was a pyrrhic victory, for though it could silence
Galileo, it could not prevent the advance of science
(though most of those advances would take place in
Protestant northern Europe, out of the reach of the pope
and his Inquisition).
But before Galileo's time, in the 16th century (1500-
1599), various humanists had begun to ask dangerous
questions. François Rabelais, a French monk and physician
influenced by Protestantism, but spurred on by his own
rebelliousness, challenged the Church's authority in his
Gargantua and Pantagruel, ridiculing many religious
doctrines as absurd.
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne, in a much more quiet and
modest but ultimately more subversive way, asked a single
question over and over again in his Essays: "What do I
know?" By this he meant that we have no right to impose
on others dogmas which rest on cultural habit rather than
absolute truth. Powerfully influenced by the discovery of
thriving non-Christian cultures in places as far off as
Brazil, he argued that morals may be to some degree
relative. Who are Europeans to insist that Brazilian
cannibals who merely consume dead human flesh instead
of wasting it are morally inferior to Europeans who
persecute and oppress those of whom they disapprove?
This shift toward cultural relativism, though it was
based on scant understanding of the newly discovered
peoples, was to continue to have a profound effect on
European thought to the present day. Indeed, it is one of
the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. Just as their
predecessors had used the tools of antiquity to gain
unprecedented freedom of inquiry, the Enlightenment
thinkers used the examples of other cultures to gain the
freedom to reshape not only their philosophies, but their
societies. It was becoming clear that there was nothing
inevitable about the European patterns of thought and
