The Enlightenment: An Interpretation

When I received the book I was happy to see the good quality of cover and paper but unfortunately, it smelled awkward. The odor is strong and disturbing in a way that I cannot take it out on the bus and read it. That is the only downside to my order.

A magnificent, thorough, and long book (419 pages), impeccably documented, the first volume of two. A "must read" for anyone interested in the Enlightenment. The "cheerleaders" of the Enlightenment, from all over Europe, called themselves the philosophes. For a preview, read the 25 page beginning, "Overture." BOOK ONE: THE APPEAL TO ANTIQUITY CHAPTER ONE: The Useful and Beloved Past 1. Hebrews and Hellenes: As the philosophes of the Enlightenment saw it, the world was divided into two irreconcilable patterns of life: superstition versus the affirmation of life; mythmakers versus realists; priests versus philosophers. The historical writings of the Enlightenment were all part of their comprehensive effort to secure rational control over the world and freedom from the pervasive domination of myth. The most glaring and notorious defect of the Enlightenment was its unsympathetic, often brutal, estimate of Christianity. 2. A Congenial Sense and Spirit: Rome belonged to every educated man Classic antiquity was inescapable, therefore, some of the philosophes' seemingly pagan ideas were simply the property of thinking men in their time. The philosophes identified with their favorite ancient philosophers, especially Cicero, who had contempt for the fear of death, contempt for superstition, and admiration for sturdy pagan self-reliance. Modern historians no longer think of Christianity as a complete swamp, but the reliance of the Enlightenment on ancient classicism has withstood two centuries of criticism. 3. The Search for Paganism: From Identification to Identity: The philosophes had been born into a Christian world. They knew their Bible, their catechism, their articles of faith, their apologetics, retained many of their Christian friends, and even had clergy in their families. Gibbons was not without anxiety when he wrote his notorious chapters on the origin of Christianity in "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The German philosophes were reluctant to completely abandon the religion of the past. Diderot, the most ebullient of the French philosophes was driven and harassed by doubts. In a letter to his mistress, he cursed the atheism he accepted as true that "reduced their love to a blind encounter of atoms." Even David Hume, whose good cheer was celebrated, had to brood and struggle his way into paganism. CHAPTER TWO: The First Enlightenment 1. Greece: From Myth to Reason: The philosophes' historical thought was closely tied and deeply, if unconsciously, indebted to the Renaissance. Pious historians during the Renaissance and in the 17th century aided secularization by refining techniques of research, throwing doubt on extravagant tales of Hebrew prophets or Christian saints. The Old Testament, which had served countless generations as authoritative was in decline. The philosophes used it as neither authoritative nor historical, but as an incriminating document. Petrarch removed the label "Dark Ages

Peter Gay is an important intellectual historian and in his lengthy work "The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism" he summarizes the ideas of the great philosophers and how they changed the world. This book is a work of great erudition, of synthesis and he begins with the relationship between the philosophers of the 18th century and those of the classical period. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, active in the late seventeenth through the middle of the eighteenth century, had an affection for the Greek and Roman era, but felt the recent discoveries in science, the search for empirical fact, had allowed their own era to supercede the work of the great classical philosophers. While the classicists inspired the philosophers of the Enlightenment, theis new breed of thinkers were generally contemptuous of religion and they sought to confront, to challenge and to overturn the philosophical concepts of the Hebrew and Christian thinkers who they viewed as their rhetorical adversaries in the battle beaten reason and faith. Gay is an engaging writer with a gift for synthesizing a raft of material. Here he neatly summarizes the philosophical historians work: "...the philosophes wrote history with rage and with partisanship, and their very passion allowed them to penetrate into regions hitherto inaccessible to historical explorers. Yet it also made them condescending and oddly parochial: their sense of the past merged all too readily with their sense of the present." Although the philosophes view of history was critical, pessimistic, they saw the world "divided between ascetic superstitious enemies of the flesh, and men who affirmed life, the body, knowledge, and generosity; between mythmakers and realists, priests and philosophers." Gay's book neatly depicts an age, the conflicts between enlightenment thinkers and the past, their areas of agreement and disagreement and, their battles with the weakened Christianity of the day. He points out how te philosophers used the scholarship and erudition of the Catholic orders against them. "The Enlightenment" is not a history of philosophy, summarizing the work of each major philosopher, but a history of the way that the ideas and the debate developed in the period. In this volume, he writes of Voltaire, Hume, Smith, Bentham, Gibbon, Diderot, Montsequieu, Lessing, Locke, Holbach, Rousseau and finally, Jefferson and Franklin, intertwining them in a consistent narrative. He concludes the book with a helpful bibliographical essay which will help point those of us who want to do further reading in the right direction. Elegantly written, in clear, crisp prose, "The Enlightenment" is a detailed and nuanced account of the men and ideas that gave us the gift - and curse - of modernity.

Peter Gay needs no introduction, but I still feel that this work needs to be lauded for what it manages to achieve: it provides an exhaustively detailed socio-cultural account of the enlightenment that is as enjoyable as it is informative. The main slant of this work, namely that the 18th century enlightenment was a reprisal/continuation/adoration of classical (hence Pagan) culture is coherent and functions as a solid structure to this work. Highly recommended.

As an intellectual history, "The Rise of Modern Paganism" has few peers. Peter Gay makes sense of a dizzying array of thinkers and their (often dissimilar or even opposing) thoughts. He shows, in prose both clear and elegant, that the Enlightenment was more a phenomenon than a program, albeit a phenomenon tied together by a love of inquiry and intellectual exploration.

Unlike the reformation there was no counter-enlightenment. The Church was ineffectual in mounting an offense against a movement whose claim was that she was an out-moded relic, not to be listened to in a modern, technological world. How do you fight the charge that you are irrelevant without admitting irrelevancy? How do you fight the disease without spreading it? And as Peter Gay shows, the philosophes needed no help in spreading the word. They were a brilliant collection of Scientists, Philosophers and writers spread out over the west for almost three generations. They included such luminaries as Voltaire, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, J. J. Rousseau and so on, even to this country (we recognize two philosophes, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin on our currency). They were involved in a conspiracy (literally) to change their world. And to give you some idea how successful they were, the first generation lived in a world ruled exclusively by hereditary monarchy; the last lived to see both the French and American revolutions and the beginnings of democracy.The philosophes taught a cheerful kind of self-reliance. Salvation was not to be found in the heavens above, but in the human race. They fought to replace barbaric institutions with new modes of thought that would inspire, not oppress, the human spirit. New modes of government (democracy). New methods of tending the sick (see Foucault's "Birth of the Clinic") and the insane (see Foucault's "Madness and Civilization"). New modes of punishing offenders (see Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"). New modes of thought. To examine our existing institutions we need not go back to the Middle Ages (the term "Middle Ages" is an example of enlightenment newspeak: the Middle ages designates nothing more than period the West lay fallow between the death of ancient paganism and it rebirth in the "Renaissance." It is a way of saying that while the Church ruled Europe, nothing of consequence happened) except as a point of contrast. They changed everything.We have an odd relation to these philosophes. We recognize them as simplistic, overbearing, overconfident and, in many ways, flat out wrong. We also recognize them as the founding fathers of our world. They assured us, get rid of religion and wars would cease from the world, that religion (or rather specific religions e.g. Christianity) was the source of bigotry on the earth. So we did as they suggested and the wars just got bigger, the auto-de-fe's were replaced by concentration camps and the savagery they told us would disappear simply grew when the institutions built to contain them were dismantled. They seemed to believe that we could have the results of Christian morality, without Christianity, if we simply replace religion with reason. The problem is that Christianity is a religion with a specific content and reason has no content at all. When you make the move you end up with a categor