Merker: Creating Two Enlightenments from One Christendom
it's a risky enterprise
Christianity as developed by the Catholic Church, writes Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise, was founded on two bases: the reason of Plato & Co. and the saving sacrifice of Christ. With the recovery of Aristotle’s realism it turned out that things were not so simple. And that was just the start.
As the second Millennium progressed, the Renaissance humanists, while Christian, obtained an access and familiarity with texts of other religions and philosophies.
Christianity started to appear as one of many ancient religions… [with its] truth and “wisdom”… diluted by a willingness to recognize genuine value in other traditions.
Scholars started to discover errors and discrepancies in the various sacred texts, and the Donation of Constantine, the basis of papal power, was exposed as a forgery. It began to seem that the Christian faith was a product of history. And then began the wars of religion, from the German Peasants’ War beginning in 1524 to the Thirty Years War ending in 1648. Not to mention Gutenberg and his press in 1440.
Renaissance thinking developed the idea of the “dignity of man” and the notion of mankind occupying a middle ground between the divine and the animals. Instead of mankind in a state of sin needing the salvation of Christ, it seemed that humans were capable of an ascent of the soul towards divinity, drawing on individual and cultural “works of creativity.” Maybe mankind could understand the world by deciphering the Creator’s “book of nature,” the “rational order and harmony which has been imposed on [the world] by God”.
Then there was the dramatic expansion of the scope and possibilities of the world by the age of discovery, and the skeptic movement in the mid 16th century and “the uncertainty of all claims to knowledge, from science to religion.
The uncertainty of skepticism could be resolved by a resort to faith. Or a corpus of knowledge.
[Thus] Western philosophy acquired a long-term goal and agenda; that of arriving at a basis of certainty from which to overcome the crisis of skeptical doubt.
Thus we come into the age of Euclid, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Gassendi.
But then came Newton, whose “mechanics created a ‘god-free zone’” from our domestic experience on Earth “to the ends of the solar system and beyond”. And he inspired thinkers to vault out of physical mechanism to the question of “human affairs, relations, and institutions”, in other words, a “science of man.” It gave rise to the concepts that we are squabbling over to this very day: “social contract”, “human nature”, “common sense of mankind”, “natural laws.”
On the Continent, this thinking led to the idea of revolution. Thus Robespierre, “convinced of the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration… creating a new people.” And all who have followed him were able “to weather its failure with their revolutionary faith intact.”
But there was another strain in the Enlightenment, the “British” one. And the contrast can be understood by a comparison of Liberty and Equality.
In the British concept, Liberty is the right “to be left alone by government, to live life as they had always lived it.” In the Continental version liberté “stood opposed to tradition… It became identified with the dynamic of emancipatory overthrow… [of] an entire way of life.
In the British concept, Equality refers to the “ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen,” and nobody, “the king in particular, is ‘above the law’”. In the French concept egalité means that “social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.” Equal treatment under the law versus “substantive equality.”
Thus the West arrived at a post-Christian culture “divided down the middle by an ideational watershed.”
On the one hand there is a more concrete, every-day, and reformist Enlightenment of the British Isles and America… and on the other, a more abstract emancipatory and revolutionary Enlightenment[.]
Building a life between these clashing ideologies is “a risky enterprise” as we can see in the aftermath of the Two Enlightenments.
More to come.