A WIDE CANVAS
ENLIGHTENMENT- EURO STYLE!
The term 'enlightenment' is used in Indian philosophical circles only for the state of spiritual wisdom, such as the venerable Buddha attained. The very name Buddha means 'the Enlightened'. It is not used lightly.
In European history, this term is used in a less lofty fashion,to designate a period of about 150 years from around 1650 to 1780 when the intellectual and cultural traditions of Europe, beginning in France , underwent a drastic change, altering the face and fate of the earth for ever!
Martin Luther had not only rebelled against and undermined the authority of the Roman Catholic Church; he had opened the floodgates of open enquiry and reason in all spheres. Hitherto, society was based on authority enforced by institutions. The Catholic Church controlled all aspects of life- not just religion and philosophy, but politics, sciences and every other conceivable subject.
Martin Luther had given them the courage to question authority and shown them how. Reason, individual thinking and intellectual analysis became the watchwords.
Engraving from the French Encyclopedie, edited by Denis Diderot(1751-72) which said: if you know something, communicate; if not, search for it! The picture shows Truth standing at the top centre, surrounded by light.
Thinkers and cultural leaders met in all sorts of places like salons and coffee houses and discussed serious subjects.
A meeting in a French salon!
The spirit caught on in England too, and travelled to Germany. The leading lights of the period were: Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, Adam Smith. Philosophy, mathematics, politics, economics, the sciences- no aspect of life was spared from the gaze of reason, and in no field were old authority and institutions accepted without question. Such intense intellectual ferment and expectations reached dizzying heights, culminating in the French Revolution 1787-99, though the results were disappointing. But the period had effects beyond France, and much beyond the century. It laid the foundation for the modern world.
The Renaissance had opened the eyes of Europe to the ancient wisdom of Greece, which became the foundation of modern European thought: Socratic insight equating knowledge with virtue, Aristotelian view of the cosmos, Euclidean geometry, Pythagorean theories, Ptolemy's astronomy, Plato's ideas about the planets, Neoplatonists' ideas about the Sun, Hermetic esoteric theories, etc. Above all the ancient Greek wisdom made them aware of spirituality not dependent on church dogmas- or even Christianity: they rediscovered insights which had been suppressed by the church for nearly a thousand years! Thus did humanism emerge as an alternative to Christianity.
The trend was really started by Petrarch who rejected the emphasis of the church on dogma, logic and theology, and returned to the ancient masters Homer, Plato, Virgil, Cicero.
Petrarch, (1304-1374) Italian poet and humanist who opened the eyes of Europe to the ancient Greek and Roman literature.
Picture from Wikimedia Commons.
Church had equated learning with mastery of dogma and theology; Petrarch opened their eyes to literature as such- what was called litterae humaniores- humanitarian literature, which engaged not with abstract questions of theology but with man's emotional and intellectual involvement with the world around him, and with his own consciousness. This led to a non-Christian view of spirituality, based essentially on Platonic insights.In a sense, Plato may be considered the author of the idea "spiritual but not religious"!
Martin Luther carried it forward and confronted the Catholic church squarely: he questioned the way they had added dogma to the New Testament and demanded a return to the "word", rejecting theories about it . He also questioned the need for clergy to interpret it. He said New Testament itself would guide people, and every Christian could be considered a member of the clergy! (Biblical theology as against Scholastic theology) But once the accretions to 'word' were questioned, it did not take long for people to question the 'word' itself, under the spur of rationalistic inquiry!
The Catholic church reacted through Counter Reformation.But it could not stop the process of the split in the monolithic church, which split into numerous branches and started quarrelling among themselves. Then the philosophical and scientific revolutions removed the centrality of religious idea itself from people's mind and thought.
Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes are the two philosophers who led in the new direction. The discovery of the New World had endowed Bacon with the idea of power through knowledge! Knowledge need not be pursued for abstract pleasures, but for concrete results in the material world! This required a study of particulars, not just abstract theories! The role of religious (Christian) revelation in explaining the world was seriously undermined.
Francis Bacon From Wikimedia Commons
But there were so many theories about the world? How to determine truth objectively? Descartes came up with his solution: Cogito, ergo sum : I think, therefore I am! The subject is real; his doubts indicate his imperfections; so logically there must be a perfect state! The thinking subject was one, but the world thought about was different. In man the two met as mind and body.
The human reason was the foundation of our knowledge of God which for Descartes was a logical necessity. But he also said that once God created the world, he let the world function as a machine! The world was therefore a mechanism, not an organism- it was not a living system! All subsequent science and rational thought is built on this foundation, which is a complete negation of all the ancient insights! This is the basic philosophy ruling mainstream science even today!
.jpg)
Rene Descartes. From Wikimedia Commons.
Then the scientists took over. Copernicus had rejected the idea of the earth as the centre of the cosmos, but it had come towards the end of his life. It raised many problems but these were addressed by Kepler .
Johannes Kepler, German mathematician. From Wikimedia Commons.
Kepler believed in the central place of the sun in the universe, and was a follower of Plato and Pythagoras, not Aristotle. He explained the elliptical shapes of the planetary orbits, and showed that they were based on precise mathematical proportions, and their speed varied from their distance to the sun. Galileo's observations through the telescope confirmed all these new insights. Galileo was punished by the Pope with house arrest for the rest of his life, but it really marked the beginning of the end of the dominance of Christianity in Europe.By showing church's cosmology to be false, it gradually led to the rejection of Christian theology as a whole: both the Catholic emphasis on the authority of the church and its sacraments, and the Protestant emphasis on the Bible as the literal truth. Later, it assumed the form of Christianity V. Science, and then the more general (but blind) Religon V Science debate.
Isaac Newton combined the insights of Copernicus, Kepler , Descartes and Galileo into a sparkling synthesis. Newton was a believer in God, but he conceived of God as a great architect, who had designed the world rather like a clock! It obeyed regular laws - gravity, inertia, etc- but it was impersonal! But the world still required the occasional intervention of God for its stability, though God was no more a grand old bearded figure, sitting on a throne! The old Christian world had completely disappeared! Poet Alexander Pope sang about it in these celebrated lines:
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in the night;
God said: "Let Newton be," and all was light.
Isaac Newton. From Wikimedia Commons.
It was now the turn of the philosophers! Following science, they questioned the need for philosophy to be aligned to theology, and treated philosophy as a pure rational quest! All the major philosophers of the period like Comte, Mill, Marx, Spencer, Huxley and Nietzsche attacked traditional Christianity and its idea of God. They were joined by Voltaire, Diderot, Hume and Holbach, each with his own reason!They pointed out the differences in the church doctrines and used them to reject the validity of all. Rousseau alone was a bit different: while rejecting church and its theology and philosophy, he still felt that man could be mystically connected to nature.
.jpg)
Jean Jacques Rousseau. From Wikimedia Commons.
The net result was that organised Christianity ceased to be an intellectual or aesthetic or even moral force among the educated. Christianity became one among the many 'ideas' in which one may believe now, instead of 'the faith' that it was!
Thus the European enlightenment which began as a humanistic enterprise ended up as a secular ( ie non-religious) view of life! It is this which rules the mainstream , though this is being increasingly challenged by a higher form of science now!
NOTE:
I am indebted to so many books and authors for the ideas presented here. I humbly and unreservedly aknowledge all of them, though I cannot name them all (shame on me), as this has been a long process. But one author I cannot fail to name is Richard Tarnas and his very illuminating book "The Passion of the Western Mind", Ballantine Books, New York,1993.This is basic reading for anyone to understand the way our modern world has been shaped.
I have taken all the pictures from Wikimedia Commons in the Public Domain. Thanks to them, we are able to see the master minds who shaped the modern world. We could not find their pictures even in our textbooks!
The Renaissance had opened the eyes of Europe to the ancient wisdom of Greece, which became the foundation of modern European thought: Socratic insight equating knowledge with virtue, Aristotelian view of the cosmos, Euclidean geometry, Pythagorean theories, Ptolemy's astronomy, Plato's ideas about the planets, Neoplatonists' ideas about the Sun, Hermetic esoteric theories, etc. Above all the ancient Greek wisdom made them aware of spirituality not dependent on church dogmas- or even Christianity: they rediscovered insights which had been suppressed by the church for nearly a thousand years! Thus did humanism emerge as an alternative to Christianity.
The trend was really started by Petrarch who rejected the emphasis of the church on dogma, logic and theology, and returned to the ancient masters Homer, Plato, Virgil, Cicero.
Petrarch, (1304-1374) Italian poet and humanist who opened the eyes of Europe to the ancient Greek and Roman literature.
Picture from Wikimedia Commons.
Church had equated learning with mastery of dogma and theology; Petrarch opened their eyes to literature as such- what was called litterae humaniores- humanitarian literature, which engaged not with abstract questions of theology but with man's emotional and intellectual involvement with the world around him, and with his own consciousness. This led to a non-Christian view of spirituality, based essentially on Platonic insights.In a sense, Plato may be considered the author of the idea "spiritual but not religious"!
Martin Luther carried it forward and confronted the Catholic church squarely: he questioned the way they had added dogma to the New Testament and demanded a return to the "word", rejecting theories about it . He also questioned the need for clergy to interpret it. He said New Testament itself would guide people, and every Christian could be considered a member of the clergy! (Biblical theology as against Scholastic theology) But once the accretions to 'word' were questioned, it did not take long for people to question the 'word' itself, under the spur of rationalistic inquiry!
The Catholic church reacted through Counter Reformation.But it could not stop the process of the split in the monolithic church, which split into numerous branches and started quarrelling among themselves. Then the philosophical and scientific revolutions removed the centrality of religious idea itself from people's mind and thought.
Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes are the two philosophers who led in the new direction. The discovery of the New World had endowed Bacon with the idea of power through knowledge! Knowledge need not be pursued for abstract pleasures, but for concrete results in the material world! This required a study of particulars, not just abstract theories! The role of religious (Christian) revelation in explaining the world was seriously undermined.
But there were so many theories about the world? How to determine truth objectively? Descartes came up with his solution: Cogito, ergo sum : I think, therefore I am! The subject is real; his doubts indicate his imperfections; so logically there must be a perfect state! The thinking subject was one, but the world thought about was different. In man the two met as mind and body.
The human reason was the foundation of our knowledge of God which for Descartes was a logical necessity. But he also said that once God created the world, he let the world function as a machine! The world was therefore a mechanism, not an organism- it was not a living system! All subsequent science and rational thought is built on this foundation, which is a complete negation of all the ancient insights! This is the basic philosophy ruling mainstream science even today!
Then the scientists took over. Copernicus had rejected the idea of the earth as the centre of the cosmos, but it had come towards the end of his life. It raised many problems but these were addressed by Kepler .
Johannes Kepler, German mathematician. From Wikimedia Commons.
Kepler believed in the central place of the sun in the universe, and was a follower of Plato and Pythagoras, not Aristotle. He explained the elliptical shapes of the planetary orbits, and showed that they were based on precise mathematical proportions, and their speed varied from their distance to the sun. Galileo's observations through the telescope confirmed all these new insights. Galileo was punished by the Pope with house arrest for the rest of his life, but it really marked the beginning of the end of the dominance of Christianity in Europe.By showing church's cosmology to be false, it gradually led to the rejection of Christian theology as a whole: both the Catholic emphasis on the authority of the church and its sacraments, and the Protestant emphasis on the Bible as the literal truth. Later, it assumed the form of Christianity V. Science, and then the more general (but blind) Religon V Science debate.
Isaac Newton combined the insights of Copernicus, Kepler , Descartes and Galileo into a sparkling synthesis. Newton was a believer in God, but he conceived of God as a great architect, who had designed the world rather like a clock! It obeyed regular laws - gravity, inertia, etc- but it was impersonal! But the world still required the occasional intervention of God for its stability, though God was no more a grand old bearded figure, sitting on a throne! The old Christian world had completely disappeared! Poet Alexander Pope sang about it in these celebrated lines:
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in the night;
God said: "Let Newton be," and all was light.
It was now the turn of the philosophers! Following science, they questioned the need for philosophy to be aligned to theology, and treated philosophy as a pure rational quest! All the major philosophers of the period like Comte, Mill, Marx, Spencer, Huxley and Nietzsche attacked traditional Christianity and its idea of God. They were joined by Voltaire, Diderot, Hume and Holbach, each with his own reason!They pointed out the differences in the church doctrines and used them to reject the validity of all. Rousseau alone was a bit different: while rejecting church and its theology and philosophy, he still felt that man could be mystically connected to nature.
The net result was that organised Christianity ceased to be an intellectual or aesthetic or even moral force among the educated. Christianity became one among the many 'ideas' in which one may believe now, instead of 'the faith' that it was!
Thus the European enlightenment which began as a humanistic enterprise ended up as a secular ( ie non-religious) view of life! It is this which rules the mainstream , though this is being increasingly challenged by a higher form of science now!
NOTE:
I am indebted to so many books and authors for the ideas presented here. I humbly and unreservedly aknowledge all of them, though I cannot name them all (shame on me), as this has been a long process. But one author I cannot fail to name is Richard Tarnas and his very illuminating book "The Passion of the Western Mind", Ballantine Books, New York,1993.This is basic reading for anyone to understand the way our modern world has been shaped.
I have taken all the pictures from Wikimedia Commons in the Public Domain. Thanks to them, we are able to see the master minds who shaped the modern world. We could not find their pictures even in our textbooks!
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