Becoming Enlightened

 

The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was a vast intellectual movement that took place during the 17^th and 18^th centuries and that profoundly influenced how people (particularly intellectuals) perceived both the world and humanity.  As a way of perceiving, the Enlightenment was manifested in art, politics, religion, education, science, and economics.  The movement advocated rationality—the use of reason—as a means to discover knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics.  Believing that the world had for too long suffered in ignorance, superstition, and tyranny, Enlightenment thinkers urged to use of reason to move humanity out of fear and irrationality. 

 

Throughout the 1500s and 1600s, Europe had been ravaged by religious wars.  After so much suffering caused by religious sectarianism, there was an upheaval which overturned the notions of mysticism and faith in individual revelation as the primary source of knowledge and wisdom.  By using reason, human beings could discover knowledge for themselves.  Creation was not perceived as being mysterious and unknowable.  Thus the Enlightenment was an age of optimism, believing that progress was inevitable.

 

Sir Isaac Newton became the great hero of the Enlightenment.  Using scientific observation and experimentation, Newton popularized the notion that there were “natural laws” that governed the universe—and that by using reason individuals could discover these laws.  The Enlightenment stressed that the world was comprehensible and orderly.  As a religious philosophy, deism stressed that the Creator could best be perceived by studying creation—not through centuries-old revelations.  God was perceived as the divine and benevolent clockmaker.

 

In his 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant stated:

 

            Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.  Immaturity is the

incapacity to use one’s own understanding without guidance of another.  Such

immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of

determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by

another.

 

In his Age of Reason (1794), Paine stated:

 

            I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.