August 5, 2025 • 19 mins
Explore the multifaceted concept of "light" during the Enlightenment, revealing its deep roots in religious and theological discourse rather than solely secular reason. Scholars emphasize that Enlightenment thought, particularly the metaphor of "light," emerged from intense religious debates and was compatible with—or even conducive to—religious belief, challenging traditional narratives of outright hostility between faith and reason. The sources further discuss how the notion of "enlightenment" was contested and interpreted in diverse ways by various groups, including anti-philosophes and Freemasons, reflecting ongoing debates about human improvement, the nature of knowledge, and societal progress. Ultimately, these texts highlight the complex and often intertwined relationship between religion and what we term the Enlightenment, demonstrating that the era's intellectual advancements were not a clean break from the past but rather a continuation and reinterpretation of existing traditions.
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You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Let-There-Enlightenment-Religious-Rationality/dp/1421426013?&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=a209fe8515dc2def3f7b86c77711d542&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're tackling a really
big one, the Enlightenment. You know, that period we usually
think of is this huge break from the past.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Right, the story goes suddenly Reason bursts onto the scene,
shattering all that old religious darkness and superstition, a clean sweep.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Exactly like flipping a switch from night to day. But well,
that neat picture, it might not be the whole.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Story, not even close. Actually, today we're diving into a
book called Let There Be Enlightenment, The Religious and Mystical
Sources of Rationality, edited by Anton M. Madison and Dan Edelstein, and.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Our mission really is to unpack what this book and
recent scholarship are telling us that the relationship between faith
and reason back then was much more tangled, much more
intertwined than we usually assume.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, the book shows the Enlightenment wasn't just sort of
compatible with religious beliefs sometimes, but as one scholar puts it,
it was often conducive to it actually helped it along
in some ways.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
So think of this as revisiting history with let's say,
fresh eyes, like finding hidden notes in the margins of
an old manuscript. We're going on a journey to uncover
some surprising connections.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Okay, so let's start with that traditional view. It's often
described as this uh Manichean contest, you know, good versus evil.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Light versus darkness.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Pretty much, historians like Paul Hazard, Peter Gay, they painted
this picture of the religionnaires, the religious folks, locked in
battle with the philosophies, the new thinkers, the forces of
light against quote Christian obscurity.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
And you immediately think of names like Voltaire, Didero, dolbat Elometri.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, and they did criticize the church, challenge scripture, attack
the clergy, especially in France. That definitely fueled anti clericalism.
It makes the reason versus religion story seem well, pretty straightforward.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
But this is where the book introduces what it calls
the revisionist turn. It gets more complicated.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
A lot more complicated. Scholars are finding that the gap
between faith and reason, well, it was not nearly as
wide as we've been told.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Get this, Even the arguments against God or the soul's immortality,
the stuff we strongly associate with the philosophs.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Right, the really radical.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Stuff, It often came out of the orthodox Catholic culture.
These thinkers actually grew up in Alan.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Charles Korus talks about this, So the very tools used
to critique religion were sometimes forged within that religious tradition itself.
It's kind of ironic, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
It really is. And this rethinking isn't just about France.
Jonathan Sheehan's work mentioned in the book talks about a
religious enlightenment. He argues it crossed religious and national borders.
It was maybe the first intellectual development common across Western
and Central Europe's different religions, not just a French thing
at all.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Exactly. It pushes back against seeing it as purely secular
or solely French. And there's another concept the book brings up, resacralization.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Resaculization, what's that about.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It's the idea that while some things were becoming less
explicitly religious, like the monarchy through debates like the Jansenist
versus Jesuit ones in France, which did lead to some.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Laicization, making things less church controlled, right, but at.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The same time, other temporal things, secular institutions ideas started
taking on the kind of legitimizing role that religion used
to have. So the idea that religion just vanished or
declined massively is actually pretty problematic. It was more of
a shift or reshaping.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Okay. So if it wasn't this sudden secular dawn, where
did the Enlightenment's central idea, the light itself actually come from?
Does the book trace it back?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Oh? Absolutely, And this is fascinating. The book argues that
the core metaphor, Lumier's off claring light, has really deep religious.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Roots, deeper than the eighteenth century way deeper.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Think biblical narratives Genesis, let there be Light, proverbs talking
about God's eternal light. In that context, human reason wasn't
seen as opposed to God, but as a God given faculty,
a tool to actually recognize God's existence in truth.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Wow. So the light metaphor itself starts in a religious
context precisely.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
And the book suggests that if you really want to
find the origins of the big Enlightenment shift's attitudes towards authority, tolerance,
freedom of conscience, you need to look back to the
Reformation and Counter Reformation, all.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Those intense religious debates and conflicts.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Exactly they created these tectonic shifts in how people thought
about truth and who gets to define it. It forced
new ways of thinking about living together despite disagreements.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Which leads to this idea of elite secularity right William J.
Bowman's concept.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yes, this is where the educated elites, especially after the
horrible wars of religion, started to see religious belief or
non belief as a choice, maybe one choice among many.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
A pragmatic move.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Very much so, accepting a certain level of pluralism became
necessary for political stability, for economic prosperity. It wasn't necessarily
about philosophical purity. It was about making society work.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
So who were the key figures bridging these older ideas
and the new Enlightenment thinking.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
The book mentioned some of light it does, and some
might surprise you. Francis Bacon, for example, we think of
him as a pioneer of the scientific method, right.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Very empirical, rational.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
But the philosophists often ignored his strong religious background, including
his ties to millinery traditions ideas about the end times.
Bacon essentially took that older framework about a coming millennium
and transformed it into a more optimistic, human driven, utopian vision.
That optimism became a cornerstone of the Enlightenment. His push
(05:30):
for scientific knowledge was partly fueled by interpretations of scripture.
Believe it or not.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Okay, that's unexpected. But then there's John names Kamenius. He
sounds really important in the book's narrative. A profit of
the Age of Light.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah, Comenius is fascinating. His big works, like Violeusis the
Way of Light, mapped out this grand vision of human history.
He saw it as a gradual spread of communication, unfolding
in stages, almost like the six days of Creation in Genesis,
leading too, leading to a final seventh age, an age
of universal light. He called it the Sabbath of the Church,
(06:01):
a time of global understanding and harmony.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Sounds idealistic. Did he think I would just make it happen?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well, here's the crucial bit the book highlights comedians. Didn't
think it would be purely supernatural. He believed it required
God's blessing on human agency. It needed the assiduous labor,
the hard work of learned people, of institutions, collating knowledge,
spreading education.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
So human effort was key.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Absolutely. He was even interested in popular prophets of his time,
thinking they hinted at maybe a third faculty of the soul,
something beyond just senses and reason capable of grasping deeper
mysterious things.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
And the book even connects someone like Didrow, a central
Enlightenment figure too. Mysticism that seems counterintuitive.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
It does, isn't it. But in works like Lerev. D'alenbert,
Dalenbert's Dream Ditto apparently appropriated the taboo rhetoric of mysticism.
He used it to explore ideas that question free will,
questioned pure rationality. He even collected these ideas back to Quietism,
an earlier spiritual movement focused on passivity and surrender to God.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
It just keeps getting more complex. These clear lines we
draw seemed to blur constantly when you look closely.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Which brings us to the question the book poses, what
kind of light? Because it turns out lumier or lumier
in the plural wasn't one simple thing. It was a
deeply disputed term.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Meaning it had different meanings for different people exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
It had secular meaning, sure, but also strong religious ones.
In Christian theology, natural light luminatural was that God given
faculty you mention, letting human's glimpse divine truth. Even Tart
talked about reason as the faculty for perceiving clear and
distinct ideas, echoing this a bit, But.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Then Lumier's plural came to mean something else, right.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
It evolved, especially after the quarrel of the Ancients and
the moderns, to mean the growing sum of human knowledge,
collective knowledge acquired lights. John Locke's empiricism, the idea that
knowledge comes from experience, from sensation and perception, really boosted
this view of knowledge as something progressive, something humanity builds
over time, and.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
That feeds into the idea autonomous reason, doesn't it using
your own understanding precisely?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Think of Kant's famous motto sapara odd dare to know,
use your reason independently. And for thinkers like Baron Dolbach,
this wasn't just an intellectual exercise. It was tied to
political emancipation. House Deralbach argued that breaking free from religious
authorities who deliberately kept nations deprived of lights was essential
(08:34):
for political freedom. Ignorance bred servitude, in his view.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
But here's another twist. The book points out the idea
of letting individuals reach their own conclusions. Yeah, that started
in religion.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yes, the principle of individual conscience, of figuring things out
for yourself was originally formulated in religious debates, Pierre Bale
arguing for religious toleration based on people following the dictates
of their own consciences. So intellectual and spiritual autonomy were
linked from early on.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Okay, so we have natural light, acquired lights, autonomous reason.
But there were also debates about false lights and superior lights.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Absolutely, the tension between reason and revelation was huge. Some
like Leibnists, try it hard to reconcile them to show
they could work together.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
But others didn't agree.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
No, you had footiists, thinkers like Montanne Pascal even bail
in some moods who stressed the limits of human reason.
They argued we need superior lights, meaning divine revelation, because
reason alone can't grasp ultimate truths.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And Christian critics, the anti philosophs.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
They hammered this point home. They argued natural light was
insufficient to enlighten mankind completely. It needed the supplement of revelation.
One writer, Verne, used the metaphor of a double torch.
Reason and faith both needed to truly see the way.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So the meaning and source of light were constantly debated.
It wasn't a monolithic concept.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Not at all, and the book does a great job
showing this through what it calls Enlightenments many faces. It
looks at how different group understood and used this idea of.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Light, including the literal aspect street lights.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yes, it connects the metaphor to the physical reality. The
eighteenth century saw an explosion in public elimination. Paris had
thousands of street lanterns. It was an unprecedented age of elimination.
More than just practical, then it became a powerful visual symbol.
Humans could literally dispel darkness on their own through ingenuity
and technology. There were treatises on efficient street lighting, innovations
(10:32):
like the rever Bear lantern, detailed schedules for lighting the city.
It was a very visible sign of progress.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
But then there's the inner light.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Completely different focus, totally different think of the Quakers. Early
figures like William Ames emphasized direct divine inspiration and inward
light of Christ within each person. This led them to
reject external church authority and try to reclaim what they
saw as primitive Christianity. It was about inner experience and
moral work. Christ's resurrection for them happened within, and the.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Book connects this to the Collegiance, and even Spinosa.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, it draws some interesting parallels. The Collegians, a Dutch
group Spinoza was friendly with, also talked about an inner light,
but maybe with a more naturalistic, almost Cartesian flavor, identifying
it more with rational understanding. Spinosa built on this. He
believes salvation came simply from living justly and kindly, justice
and loving kindness. He saw the Spirit of Christ as
(11:29):
this inner moral guide. Crucially, he argued that whether prophetic
light was literally true or not was irrelevant as long
as it inspired good behavior.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Which explains his plea for toleration exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
He famously said that in every church there are very
many honorable men who worship God with justice and charity,
focus on the ethics, not the dogma.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
It's amazing how these threads connect. But the book also
shows that even traditionalists like Scholastics were part of this
conversation about light.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yes, the enduring Scholastic life light. This refers to figures,
often mendicant friars like Dominicans and Franciscans, who defended Aristotelian
philosophy against the novators the new thinkers like Descartes.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
They weren't just rejecting the news.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Not entirely, they promoted what they called lumin unitivum, the
light of unity, arguing scholasticism provided a coherent, unifying framework.
They made a distinction. There's the natural light of reason,
our human ability to know, and the light of faith.
Faith could help reason guide it, but it didn't provide reasons,
basic principles.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
So integrate, don't replace.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Pretty much, they thought modern science should perfect an adorn Aristotle,
not overthrow him. They warned against the arrogance of moderns
who acted like they alone enjoy the mid day light
of truth. It's a call for intellectual humility. Really, then
you have.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
The Anglican Enlightenment in England. How did they see light?
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Their focus was quite different, much more pragmatic, more political,
you could say. After the Restoration in sixteen sixty, Anglican
clergy defended the Church of England as a kind of
civil religion, influenced by Hobbes perhaps, but emphasizing the positive
role of the church and maintaining state power and social order.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Religion as a tool for governance.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Essentially, yes, they argued, it was the only sure foundation
of order, capable of molding minds of men into a
quiet and peaceable frame, fostering self restraint virtue, things they
felt mere laws or classical philosophy couldn't achieve as effectively.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
They even looked at history to justify this.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah, using comparative history to argue that priesthoods were essential
in all great civilizations, going back to Canaanabele, and someone
like William Warburton in his Divine Legation defended Christianity on
secular premises, arguing even pagan mystery cults had social utility
and teaching virtue. It's a fascinating blend of tradition and
pragmatic justification.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
What about Freemasonry? They often pop up in Enlightenment discussions.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
They do, and the book notes their relationship with the
Enlightenment was complex, sometimes seen as radical, sometimes conservative, But
the key point here is the virtually non existent distinction
between reason and religiosity. In their own stories about light,
their genealogies.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Of light, they saw them as intertwined deeply.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
They created these triumphalist histories, tracing Enlightenment back through ages,
blending philosophy and religion. Their international network formed a kind
of cosmopolitan accord, a new kind of congregascio fidelium, a
congregation of the faithful united by shared ideals and knowledge
rather than specific dogma.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
And even the anti philosophs and the materialists had their
own ideas about the origin of light.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Right Figures like Burget, often just labeled counter enlightenment, were
actually using Enlightenment tools like locking in ideas about knowledge
or natural history. Their argument wasn't against reason itself, but
against reason unguided by revelation, which they thought led to
moral chaos, and.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
The materialists, paradoxically, they looked to the past too.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Some did. Jean Maptis Boye d Arjent, for instance, believed
the purest philosophical illumination was in an original natural religion,
arguing humanity started out monotheistic. He used the perspective of
a fictional Chinese traveler, a very Enlightenment literary device, to
critique European religious squabbles.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
It seemed everyone had their own genealogy.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Of light exactly, and then you have illuminism with figures
like Louis Claude de Saint Martin. The philosoph inconue blending
mysticism and enlightenment ideas, believing true knowledge comes from within.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Which loops back to Dinero again it does.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
The book revisits Larae of de d'Al ambert to show
how Deitero explored the dream state as an epistemological terrain,
a way to understand how we know things. He questioned
fixed notions of self. Seeing the self as mutable and
assemblage of particles, rationality becomes just one possible state of.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Being, challenging the core idea of a stable rational individual.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Deeply, and the book connects this to the earlier Quietest controversy,
where ideas about surrendering the self to God, a kind
of annihilation of personal will, seem to resonate rangely with
Didero's materialist ideas about the fluid, non fixed nature of
the self.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
So, despite all this focus on light and progress, the
book acknowledges a darker side.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
It does not everyone was purely optimistic. Even key philosophs
like Condilac, Ditto and Grim became restless, even skeptical about
how far enlightenment could actually spread. Grim noted that the
progress of light is limited. It hardly reaches the Folbourgs,
the poorer districts.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
A sense of limitation, maybe even pessimism.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, Graham even worried that despite progress, the world might
be plunged into times of darkness. Again, the light wasn't guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
To last, and this feeds into how we should understand
the counter Enlightenment, not just as opposition.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
The book suggests seeing it more as part of the
ongoing battle over what constitutes true light, true truth. It
uses a great example James Gilray's seventeen ninety Engrieving Smelling
out a rat?
Speaker 1 (16:55):
What did the show?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
It depicts truth holding a torch, exposing radicals hidden in
a dark cave labeled Jacobinism. It perfectly illustrates how the
metaphor of light as truth and publicity was weaponized politically
during the French Revolution.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
So it was about defining which light was the.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
True one exactly, And in Germany you had figures like
Friedrich Carlvon Moser. He embraced enlightenment, but also warned about
too much or too rapid and enlightenment. He started making
distinctions between true and false enlightenment.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
So the term counter enlightenment itself is maybe misleading.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
The book argues, it's complex and evolving. It's increasingly seen
not just as a rejection, but as encompassing a variety
of efforts at clarifying what is involved. In efforts at enlightenment,
people were grappling with the implications, the potential downsides, the
different paths Enlightenment could take.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Okay, So wrapping this all up, what's the big picture
from let there be Enlightenment?
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Well, the main thing is that the simple story reason,
good religion, bad, clean break just doesn't hold up. The
Enlightenment was far richer, messier, and more.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Complex, and the central idea the light wasn't secular in origin.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Not at all. It was deeply rooted in religious traditions,
and its meaning was constantly debated and reinterpreted by everyone, mystics, rationalists,
orthodox believers, materialists, conservatives, radicals. It was really a period
of competing genealogies of light.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
So the key takeaway for you listening to this is
maybe about questioning simple narratives.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
I think so in our own information saturated age, seeing
how ideas historically intertwined, how complex these debates were, is
really valuable. It helps us navigate today's complex issues with
more nuance rather than just accepting easy answers.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And it leaves us with a thought, doesn't it If
the Enlightenment wasn't this purely secular event, but more of
a contest between different kinds of illumination. What does that
say about how we define progress or truth now right?
Speaker 2 (18:50):
How do we today try to figure out the true
lights from the false ones and our own ongoing search
for knowledge and understanding. It's a question the Enlightenment wrestled
with and one we're still grappling with today. Something to
definitely think about.
Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're tackling a really
big one, the Enlightenment. You know, that period we usually
think of is this huge break from the past.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Right, the story goes suddenly Reason bursts onto the scene,
shattering all that old religious darkness and superstition, a clean sweep.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Exactly like flipping a switch from night to day. But well,
that neat picture, it might not be the whole.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Story, not even close. Actually, today we're diving into a
book called Let There Be Enlightenment, The Religious and Mystical
Sources of Rationality, edited by Anton M. Madison and Dan Edelstein, and.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Our mission really is to unpack what this book and
recent scholarship are telling us that the relationship between faith
and reason back then was much more tangled, much more
intertwined than we usually assume.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, the book shows the Enlightenment wasn't just sort of
compatible with religious beliefs sometimes, but as one scholar puts it,
it was often conducive to it actually helped it along
in some ways.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
So think of this as revisiting history with let's say,
fresh eyes, like finding hidden notes in the margins of
an old manuscript. We're going on a journey to uncover
some surprising connections.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Okay, so let's start with that traditional view. It's often
described as this uh Manichean contest, you know, good versus evil.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Light versus darkness.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Pretty much, historians like Paul Hazard, Peter Gay, they painted
this picture of the religionnaires, the religious folks, locked in
battle with the philosophies, the new thinkers, the forces of
light against quote Christian obscurity.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
And you immediately think of names like Voltaire, Didero, dolbat Elometri.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, and they did criticize the church, challenge scripture, attack
the clergy, especially in France. That definitely fueled anti clericalism.
It makes the reason versus religion story seem well, pretty straightforward.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
But this is where the book introduces what it calls
the revisionist turn. It gets more complicated.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
A lot more complicated. Scholars are finding that the gap
between faith and reason, well, it was not nearly as
wide as we've been told.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Get this, Even the arguments against God or the soul's immortality,
the stuff we strongly associate with the philosophs.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Right, the really radical.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Stuff, It often came out of the orthodox Catholic culture.
These thinkers actually grew up in Alan.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Charles Korus talks about this, So the very tools used
to critique religion were sometimes forged within that religious tradition itself.
It's kind of ironic, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
It really is. And this rethinking isn't just about France.
Jonathan Sheehan's work mentioned in the book talks about a
religious enlightenment. He argues it crossed religious and national borders.
It was maybe the first intellectual development common across Western
and Central Europe's different religions, not just a French thing
at all.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Exactly. It pushes back against seeing it as purely secular
or solely French. And there's another concept the book brings up, resacralization.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Resaculization, what's that about.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It's the idea that while some things were becoming less
explicitly religious, like the monarchy through debates like the Jansenist
versus Jesuit ones in France, which did lead to some.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Laicization, making things less church controlled, right, but at.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The same time, other temporal things, secular institutions ideas started
taking on the kind of legitimizing role that religion used
to have. So the idea that religion just vanished or
declined massively is actually pretty problematic. It was more of
a shift or reshaping.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Okay. So if it wasn't this sudden secular dawn, where
did the Enlightenment's central idea, the light itself actually come from?
Does the book trace it back?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Oh? Absolutely, And this is fascinating. The book argues that
the core metaphor, Lumier's off claring light, has really deep religious.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Roots, deeper than the eighteenth century way deeper.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Think biblical narratives Genesis, let there be Light, proverbs talking
about God's eternal light. In that context, human reason wasn't
seen as opposed to God, but as a God given faculty,
a tool to actually recognize God's existence in truth.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Wow. So the light metaphor itself starts in a religious
context precisely.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
And the book suggests that if you really want to
find the origins of the big Enlightenment shift's attitudes towards authority, tolerance,
freedom of conscience, you need to look back to the
Reformation and Counter Reformation, all.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Those intense religious debates and conflicts.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Exactly they created these tectonic shifts in how people thought
about truth and who gets to define it. It forced
new ways of thinking about living together despite disagreements.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Which leads to this idea of elite secularity right William J.
Bowman's concept.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yes, this is where the educated elites, especially after the
horrible wars of religion, started to see religious belief or
non belief as a choice, maybe one choice among many.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
A pragmatic move.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Very much so, accepting a certain level of pluralism became
necessary for political stability, for economic prosperity. It wasn't necessarily
about philosophical purity. It was about making society work.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
So who were the key figures bridging these older ideas
and the new Enlightenment thinking.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
The book mentioned some of light it does, and some
might surprise you. Francis Bacon, for example, we think of
him as a pioneer of the scientific method, right.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Very empirical, rational.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
But the philosophists often ignored his strong religious background, including
his ties to millinery traditions ideas about the end times.
Bacon essentially took that older framework about a coming millennium
and transformed it into a more optimistic, human driven, utopian vision.
That optimism became a cornerstone of the Enlightenment. His push
(05:30):
for scientific knowledge was partly fueled by interpretations of scripture.
Believe it or not.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Okay, that's unexpected. But then there's John names Kamenius. He
sounds really important in the book's narrative. A profit of
the Age of Light.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah, Comenius is fascinating. His big works, like Violeusis the
Way of Light, mapped out this grand vision of human history.
He saw it as a gradual spread of communication, unfolding
in stages, almost like the six days of Creation in Genesis,
leading too, leading to a final seventh age, an age
of universal light. He called it the Sabbath of the Church,
(06:01):
a time of global understanding and harmony.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Sounds idealistic. Did he think I would just make it happen?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well, here's the crucial bit the book highlights comedians. Didn't
think it would be purely supernatural. He believed it required
God's blessing on human agency. It needed the assiduous labor,
the hard work of learned people, of institutions, collating knowledge,
spreading education.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
So human effort was key.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Absolutely. He was even interested in popular prophets of his time,
thinking they hinted at maybe a third faculty of the soul,
something beyond just senses and reason capable of grasping deeper
mysterious things.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
And the book even connects someone like Didrow, a central
Enlightenment figure too. Mysticism that seems counterintuitive.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
It does, isn't it. But in works like Lerev. D'alenbert,
Dalenbert's Dream Ditto apparently appropriated the taboo rhetoric of mysticism.
He used it to explore ideas that question free will,
questioned pure rationality. He even collected these ideas back to Quietism,
an earlier spiritual movement focused on passivity and surrender to God.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
It just keeps getting more complex. These clear lines we
draw seemed to blur constantly when you look closely.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Which brings us to the question the book poses, what
kind of light? Because it turns out lumier or lumier
in the plural wasn't one simple thing. It was a
deeply disputed term.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Meaning it had different meanings for different people exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
It had secular meaning, sure, but also strong religious ones.
In Christian theology, natural light luminatural was that God given
faculty you mention, letting human's glimpse divine truth. Even Tart
talked about reason as the faculty for perceiving clear and
distinct ideas, echoing this a bit, But.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Then Lumier's plural came to mean something else, right.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
It evolved, especially after the quarrel of the Ancients and
the moderns, to mean the growing sum of human knowledge,
collective knowledge acquired lights. John Locke's empiricism, the idea that
knowledge comes from experience, from sensation and perception, really boosted
this view of knowledge as something progressive, something humanity builds
over time, and.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
That feeds into the idea autonomous reason, doesn't it using
your own understanding precisely?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Think of Kant's famous motto sapara odd dare to know,
use your reason independently. And for thinkers like Baron Dolbach,
this wasn't just an intellectual exercise. It was tied to
political emancipation. House Deralbach argued that breaking free from religious
authorities who deliberately kept nations deprived of lights was essential
(08:34):
for political freedom. Ignorance bred servitude, in his view.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
But here's another twist. The book points out the idea
of letting individuals reach their own conclusions. Yeah, that started
in religion.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yes, the principle of individual conscience, of figuring things out
for yourself was originally formulated in religious debates, Pierre Bale
arguing for religious toleration based on people following the dictates
of their own consciences. So intellectual and spiritual autonomy were
linked from early on.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Okay, so we have natural light, acquired lights, autonomous reason.
But there were also debates about false lights and superior lights.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Absolutely, the tension between reason and revelation was huge. Some
like Leibnists, try it hard to reconcile them to show
they could work together.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
But others didn't agree.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
No, you had footiists, thinkers like Montanne Pascal even bail
in some moods who stressed the limits of human reason.
They argued we need superior lights, meaning divine revelation, because
reason alone can't grasp ultimate truths.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
And Christian critics, the anti philosophs.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
They hammered this point home. They argued natural light was
insufficient to enlighten mankind completely. It needed the supplement of revelation.
One writer, Verne, used the metaphor of a double torch.
Reason and faith both needed to truly see the way.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So the meaning and source of light were constantly debated.
It wasn't a monolithic concept.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Not at all, and the book does a great job
showing this through what it calls Enlightenments many faces. It
looks at how different group understood and used this idea of.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Light, including the literal aspect street lights.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yes, it connects the metaphor to the physical reality. The
eighteenth century saw an explosion in public elimination. Paris had
thousands of street lanterns. It was an unprecedented age of elimination.
More than just practical, then it became a powerful visual symbol.
Humans could literally dispel darkness on their own through ingenuity
and technology. There were treatises on efficient street lighting, innovations
(10:32):
like the rever Bear lantern, detailed schedules for lighting the city.
It was a very visible sign of progress.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
But then there's the inner light.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Completely different focus, totally different think of the Quakers. Early
figures like William Ames emphasized direct divine inspiration and inward
light of Christ within each person. This led them to
reject external church authority and try to reclaim what they
saw as primitive Christianity. It was about inner experience and
moral work. Christ's resurrection for them happened within, and the.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Book connects this to the Collegiance, and even Spinosa.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, it draws some interesting parallels. The Collegians, a Dutch
group Spinoza was friendly with, also talked about an inner light,
but maybe with a more naturalistic, almost Cartesian flavor, identifying
it more with rational understanding. Spinosa built on this. He
believes salvation came simply from living justly and kindly, justice
and loving kindness. He saw the Spirit of Christ as
(11:29):
this inner moral guide. Crucially, he argued that whether prophetic
light was literally true or not was irrelevant as long
as it inspired good behavior.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Which explains his plea for toleration exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
He famously said that in every church there are very
many honorable men who worship God with justice and charity,
focus on the ethics, not the dogma.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
It's amazing how these threads connect. But the book also
shows that even traditionalists like Scholastics were part of this
conversation about light.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yes, the enduring Scholastic life light. This refers to figures,
often mendicant friars like Dominicans and Franciscans, who defended Aristotelian
philosophy against the novators the new thinkers like Descartes.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
They weren't just rejecting the news.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Not entirely, they promoted what they called lumin unitivum, the
light of unity, arguing scholasticism provided a coherent, unifying framework.
They made a distinction. There's the natural light of reason,
our human ability to know, and the light of faith.
Faith could help reason guide it, but it didn't provide reasons,
basic principles.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
So integrate, don't replace.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Pretty much, they thought modern science should perfect an adorn Aristotle,
not overthrow him. They warned against the arrogance of moderns
who acted like they alone enjoy the mid day light
of truth. It's a call for intellectual humility. Really, then
you have.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
The Anglican Enlightenment in England. How did they see light?
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Their focus was quite different, much more pragmatic, more political,
you could say. After the Restoration in sixteen sixty, Anglican
clergy defended the Church of England as a kind of
civil religion, influenced by Hobbes perhaps, but emphasizing the positive
role of the church and maintaining state power and social order.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Religion as a tool for governance.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Essentially, yes, they argued, it was the only sure foundation
of order, capable of molding minds of men into a
quiet and peaceable frame, fostering self restraint virtue, things they
felt mere laws or classical philosophy couldn't achieve as effectively.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
They even looked at history to justify this.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah, using comparative history to argue that priesthoods were essential
in all great civilizations, going back to Canaanabele, and someone
like William Warburton in his Divine Legation defended Christianity on
secular premises, arguing even pagan mystery cults had social utility
and teaching virtue. It's a fascinating blend of tradition and
pragmatic justification.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
What about Freemasonry? They often pop up in Enlightenment discussions.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
They do, and the book notes their relationship with the
Enlightenment was complex, sometimes seen as radical, sometimes conservative, But
the key point here is the virtually non existent distinction
between reason and religiosity. In their own stories about light,
their genealogies.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Of light, they saw them as intertwined deeply.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
They created these triumphalist histories, tracing Enlightenment back through ages,
blending philosophy and religion. Their international network formed a kind
of cosmopolitan accord, a new kind of congregascio fidelium, a
congregation of the faithful united by shared ideals and knowledge
rather than specific dogma.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
And even the anti philosophs and the materialists had their
own ideas about the origin of light.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Right Figures like Burget, often just labeled counter enlightenment, were
actually using Enlightenment tools like locking in ideas about knowledge
or natural history. Their argument wasn't against reason itself, but
against reason unguided by revelation, which they thought led to
moral chaos, and.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
The materialists, paradoxically, they looked to the past too.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Some did. Jean Maptis Boye d Arjent, for instance, believed
the purest philosophical illumination was in an original natural religion,
arguing humanity started out monotheistic. He used the perspective of
a fictional Chinese traveler, a very Enlightenment literary device, to
critique European religious squabbles.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
It seemed everyone had their own genealogy.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Of light exactly, and then you have illuminism with figures
like Louis Claude de Saint Martin. The philosoph inconue blending
mysticism and enlightenment ideas, believing true knowledge comes from within.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Which loops back to Dinero again it does.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
The book revisits Larae of de d'Al ambert to show
how Deitero explored the dream state as an epistemological terrain,
a way to understand how we know things. He questioned
fixed notions of self. Seeing the self as mutable and
assemblage of particles, rationality becomes just one possible state of.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Being, challenging the core idea of a stable rational individual.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Deeply, and the book connects this to the earlier Quietest controversy,
where ideas about surrendering the self to God, a kind
of annihilation of personal will, seem to resonate rangely with
Didero's materialist ideas about the fluid, non fixed nature of
the self.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
So, despite all this focus on light and progress, the
book acknowledges a darker side.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
It does not everyone was purely optimistic. Even key philosophs
like Condilac, Ditto and Grim became restless, even skeptical about
how far enlightenment could actually spread. Grim noted that the
progress of light is limited. It hardly reaches the Folbourgs,
the poorer districts.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
A sense of limitation, maybe even pessimism.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, Graham even worried that despite progress, the world might
be plunged into times of darkness. Again, the light wasn't guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
To last, and this feeds into how we should understand
the counter Enlightenment, not just as opposition.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
The book suggests seeing it more as part of the
ongoing battle over what constitutes true light, true truth. It
uses a great example James Gilray's seventeen ninety Engrieving Smelling
out a rat?
Speaker 1 (16:55):
What did the show?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
It depicts truth holding a torch, exposing radicals hidden in
a dark cave labeled Jacobinism. It perfectly illustrates how the
metaphor of light as truth and publicity was weaponized politically
during the French Revolution.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
So it was about defining which light was the.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
True one exactly, And in Germany you had figures like
Friedrich Carlvon Moser. He embraced enlightenment, but also warned about
too much or too rapid and enlightenment. He started making
distinctions between true and false enlightenment.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
So the term counter enlightenment itself is maybe misleading.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
The book argues, it's complex and evolving. It's increasingly seen
not just as a rejection, but as encompassing a variety
of efforts at clarifying what is involved. In efforts at enlightenment,
people were grappling with the implications, the potential downsides, the
different paths Enlightenment could take.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Okay, So wrapping this all up, what's the big picture
from let there be Enlightenment?
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Well, the main thing is that the simple story reason,
good religion, bad, clean break just doesn't hold up. The
Enlightenment was far richer, messier, and more.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Complex, and the central idea the light wasn't secular in origin.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Not at all. It was deeply rooted in religious traditions,
and its meaning was constantly debated and reinterpreted by everyone, mystics, rationalists,
orthodox believers, materialists, conservatives, radicals. It was really a period
of competing genealogies of light.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
So the key takeaway for you listening to this is
maybe about questioning simple narratives.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
I think so in our own information saturated age, seeing
how ideas historically intertwined, how complex these debates were, is
really valuable. It helps us navigate today's complex issues with
more nuance rather than just accepting easy answers.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And it leaves us with a thought, doesn't it If
the Enlightenment wasn't this purely secular event, but more of
a contest between different kinds of illumination. What does that
say about how we define progress or truth now right?
Speaker 2 (18:50):
How do we today try to figure out the true
lights from the false ones and our own ongoing search
for knowledge and understanding. It's a question the Enlightenment wrestled
with and one we're still grappling with today. Something to
definitely think about.
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