A More Enlightened View of the Enlightenment

Joseph T. Stuart shows us that the relationship between the Enlightenment and Christianity was not strictly one of opposition and conflict. Rather, the Enlightenment was a general program and set of ideas that influenced all sectors of life, including religion itself.

Rethinking the Enlightenment: Faith in the Age of Reason, by Joseph T. Stuart (351 pages, Ignatius Press, 2020)

It’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing history in adversarial terms, and—what is closely related to this—of thinking about historical periods, movements, and people in an overly abstract or monolithic way. A cowboys-and-Indians approach makes for good copy but leaves a lot of truth out. Thus, we find that the great cultural movement known as the Enlightenment comes down badly with many conservatives, who see it as the destroyer of religious values and the origin of everything bad in the modern world. But this ignores the fact that the Enlightenment was a large and multifaceted movement, peopled by a variety of different thinkers, some of them at cross-purposes. Many readers will be aware that there existed a “counter-Enlightenment” that fought against many of the claims of the “secular Enlightenment.” That is not, however, the focus of Professor Joseph T. Stuart in his stunning book Rethinking the Enlightenment. Rather, what Stuart argues is that the Enlightenment itself had a religious component, that the Enlightenment was itself a “source of religious inspiration,” and that Christians responded to and participated in the Enlightenment in a number of ways.

Stuart’s personable text leaves the morass of abstraction behind, depicting “the interaction of two cultures, two lived realities and two overlapping ways of life” ranging from women scholars in Italy to Protestant evangelists in England. The book encompasses with deftness intellectual, social, and political history, a good deal of which will be entirely new to readers because it lies outside official “narratives.”

In Stuart’s analysis, there were three different types of Enlightenment and three different responses to it. One might either conflict with the Enlightenment, engage it, or retreat from it—retreat being meant here in a spiritual sense, as one retires from worldly concerns in prayer and meditation. In any sociocultural movement there are inevitably some elements that one can embrace and other elements that one should shun. The Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, martyred by the French Revolutionary regime, represent an extreme case of deliberate conflict with the spirit of the age.

On the other hand, groups of Christians realized that there were aspects of Enlightenment culture that could be fruitfully appropriated and engaged with. In our own day, no less than Pope Benedict XVI remarked that the Enlightenment, for all that it critiqued Christianity, was itself undeniably a product of Christian culture. It has not been sufficiently noticed that one of the previous popes who bore the name Benedict was known precisely for his engagement with Enlightenment culture. This was Pope Benedict XIV, known as the “Enlightenment Pope.” Benedict’s cultural accomplishments were innumerable in Stuart’s telling. He furthered scientific study (including anatomy and dissections) and tried to bring reason to bear on matters like the “science of the saints,” including verification of miracles, thus defending the faith from skeptical attacks while also purifying it from superstition.

In fact, one of the ways that Catholic practice during this period reflected Enlightenment ideas was in an emphasis on informing faith more carefully with reason. Thus, the Enlightenment forms a notable period in the annals of faith-reason dialogue in the church. As Stuart argues, Counterreformation and Baroque Catholicism had a strong mystical side, but this could slide into a kind of fideistic zeal that ignored the role of reason in religion. Enlightenment Catholicism strove to rearticulate proper distinctions between things, notably between faith and reason and spirit and matter (with an assist from Descartes’ philosophy). Participants in the Catholic Enlightenment also sought to reconcile faith with culture and, among other achievements, promoted the advancement of women in professions; Benedict XIV himself created some of the first professorships for women. These accomplishments within the church and society would be far-reaching indeed.

In this way, Stuart shows us that the relationship between the Enlightenment and Christianity was not strictly one of opposition and conflict. Rather, the Enlightenment was a general program and set of ideas that influenced all sectors of life, including religion itself. Part of his thesis is that “early modernity not only combated Christianity, it also enabled it.” There was thus an exchange between faith and the Enlightenment, whose aims he sums up in the broadest sense as “the merits of science, practical improvements, and polite interaction,” the latter facilitated by “increasing networks of communication” comparable to those of our digital age.

Because of the influence of the Enlightenment on religion, and vice versa, the 18^th century deserves to be called, in Stuart’s words, the “’Age of Benevolence’ as much as the ‘Age of Reason,’ the ‘Age of the Holy Spirit’ as much as the ‘Age of Revolution.’” A fresh view, to say the least!

Further, Stuart reveals a darker truth that many believers might not so readily acknowledge: that the antireligious side of the Enlightenment was enabled by the behavior of Christians themselves. For example, Catholic leaders in France used ecclesiastical might to persecute the Protestant Huguenots, stripping them of their civil liberties and routing them from the country. Meanwhile Catholics, as Stuart recounts, “even used up valuable time, energy, and good will struggling to vanquish other Catholics,” such as the Jesuits and the Jansenists. Such outrages and waste added fuel to philosophes’ disdain for doctrinal religion and for church influence in government and society. As Stuart sees it, “the conflict between the Enlightenment and Christianity was rooted significantly in conflict between Christians.”

While we rail against the corrosive effects of secularism, it’s well to consider that secularism can come from within the church as well as from without. When church leaders use ecclesiastical power as a political weapon or become too enamored of temporal power and control, this is secularism, and it surely played a role in hastening the antireligious side of the Enlightenment. Sometimes Christians and believers are their own worst enemies.

With hindsight we can be bold to say that it was the non-Enlightenment that was in many ways damaging the faith; the Enlightenment itself became an opening for the faith. That is part of the story, at least—the less-known part that Stuart sings passionately in this book.

However, it’s not my intention to discuss the book’s riches in depth, only to signal its existence to all imaginative conservatives. It’s a wise writer who can bring out multiple sides and much-needed context to a period of history that too often dissolves into cliché and pat simplifications. Joseph T. Stuart is such a writer, and his book comes at its subject from a truly (if I may say so) enlightened Christian humanist perspective. Although Stuart is not the first to write about the “Christian Enlightenment,” his book is surely well poised to bring the idea to a broad audience. It also serves as a corrective to one-sided views of the Enlightenment, whether laudatory or condemnatory, that one finds on the secular or religious side. Perhaps Stuart’s most important reminder is that the “light” that enlightens this particular Enlightenment is Christ himself.

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The featured image is “A READING OF VOLTAIRE’S TRAGEDY “L’ORPHELINE DE LA CHINE” IN THE SALON OF MADAME GEOFFRIN” (circa 1812) by Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.