The Eighteenth century is often hailed as the dawning of the modern era.  The Enlightenment, that century?s movement by which philosophers came to reject the Church in favor of the new concept of natural law, is credited with inspiring the famous revolutions that birthed today's democratic republics.  But as Carl Becker pointed out in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, the thinkers of the Enlightenment were not as mentally liberated as popularly believed and in their excitement to free man from the suppression of Christianity, they fell victim to the same ignorance they fought.

During the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton proved that Nature, far from being a mystical device by which God punished or rewarded man, was in fact ruled by rationally discernable laws.  Eighteenth century thinkers like Hume, Jefferson, and Locke adapted Newton's findings into a comprehensive philosophy based on the workings of the now-logical natural world.  So high was their opinion of natural law that they attempted to revise society so that it, like nature itself, might be "balanced" and ruled by these laws.

Early on this new concept existed peacefully with the old, and philosophers were content to assume that God must have been an engineer to have designed a world operating so seamlessly.  But as time went on the intellectuals became dissatisfied with this dichotomy; if God created a world that could perpetually sustain itself by basic logical laws, what need was there for God to exist now?

For many, the answer was that he did not.  God became merely a "Prime Mover" or "Great Contriver" who had designed the perfect world and then left.  With the disappearance of God, the philosophers came to reject both the Church and the Holy Bible, both of which they saw as keeping the rational beings of the universe in a state of servitude through the concept of Original Sin.  As Becker puts it, "Renunciation of the traditional [Christian] revelation was the very condition of being truly enlightened."

For the Enlightenment philosophers, a perfect world was within reach.  They sought to free humans from the notions that they were inherently evil and that they must lead a life of prayer and sacrifice in order to be saved.  They hoped to cause in each man a celebration of reason, as it was Newton's ability to reason that first unlocked the mysteries of the universe.  With this accomplished, they could then build a society based on the natural laws, particularly the natural law of self-interest.  They believed that each man, doing what is best for himself, would never fall victim to the tyranny of kings or popes.  The philosophy of the Enlightenment thus became one with a purpose, and that purpose was revolution.

In America they succeeded.  In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson writes of, "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and of men being, "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights."  These words, sometimes misconstrued as proof of the Founders' love for Christianity, were in fact written by a man who may not have believed in God to begin with.  And though this aspect of Jefferson was probably well-known to his peers, it was devoutly kept a secret from his followers.

This contradiction is where Enlightenment philosophy unravels.  Though Jefferson and his contemporaries no doubt believed that natural law was superior to Christian dogma, they proved reluctant to state this openly.  When challenged, they usually took just the opposite tact.  Benjamin Franklin renounced atheistic writings from his youth, calling a mechanical theory of the universe, "not very useful."  Hume tried to have the best of both worlds by claiming that because a good Christian thinks, he must then be a skeptic.  For these men, atheism or deism were beliefs too extreme to be made vocal, as support for their revolutions rested heavily on men who were unable or unwilling to desert the traditional Christian faith.

But merely hiding their philosophy from the masses was not the only fault of the philosophers.  As rational thinkers, they were well aware that they could not pull the Christian rug out from under society without first weaving a suitable replacement, as social chaos would certainly ensue.  The Enlightenment philosophers thus began the construction of an elaborate myth, the purpose of which was to show the common man the supremacy of natural law.  Though their goals were commendable, in practice the thinkers differed little from the Christian clergy.

The Christians interpreted history so as to 'prove' that times and places that believed in Christ fared better than others, a tactic which the philosophers soon adopted.  They pointed to the pre-Christian Roman republic as the pinnacle of balanced government.  In Essai sur les moeurs, Voltaire attributes society's decline into the Dark Ages to the Church's rise to power, and claims that the brief periods of thought man enjoyed occurred when the Church let its guard down.  Though there is value in the words of Voltaire and his contemporaries, there are just as many inaccuracies.  The Roman republic was fueled by slavery; the Church saved Western Civilization during the Dark Ages.  Enlightenment thinkers are almost ungrateful, for it was only by the effort of Christians like Boethius and Columban that the ancient works of Plato and Aristotle (of whom they are so fond) managed to survive the Dark Ages.

Philosophers criticized the Christian myth of the Creation and its model of perfection, the Garden of Eden.  But philosophers were not saints, and they too constructed their own perfection myth.  For them, the American Indian espoused the ideals of Enlightenment philosophy.  He lived close to nature, had no concept of monarchy or Original Sin, and lived in a balance with the rest of the world.  Philosophers held up the American Indian as proof that utopia without Christianity was indeed possible.  But in doing so they implied that Europeans had in some way been corrupted, that they were no longer pure of thought.  In short, the philosophers created their own Original Sin for European man to free himself from.  More importantly, the thinkers chose to overlook that American Indians warred, kept slaves, and were victim to all the same human elements as their European counterparts.

Being human is nothing to be ashamed of, however.  As Jean-Jacques Rousseau pointed out in The Social Contract, humans are capable of great things when they band together and create a society.  Rousseau's book is a ripe example of Enlightenment thinking.  Certainly, it inspired a revolution.  Modern copies even go so far as to include pictures of the Bastille on the cover.  Like its American cousin, the French Revolution fed on Enlightenment concepts of balance and natural law as described in the writings of Rousseau.

In the Contract, Rousseau defines the "sovereign" as a being created by the union of people.  Its will is the general will, and in order to achieve its goals it conceives a government.  The interaction between the people and the government should be a balanced and rational one, Rousseau writes. When one party violates the terms of the contract, it becomes null and void.  These ideas lent themselves easily to the Americans and French, who viewed their rulers in London and Paris as having made gratuitously unreasonable demands.

The Contract also takes part in the Enlightenment trend of adoration for the Roman republic.  Rousseau devotes nearly five chapters to the discussion of ancient Rome, which he claims had a supremely balanced tribunate that acted solely on the general will.  And while the Roman discussion and natural law-based theories are certainly characteristics of Enlightenment writing, the book's eighteenth century origins are most evident in its chapters on Christianity, which Rousseau strategically reserves until the end so as not to offend Christian readers early on. Rousseau writes that, "Christianity preaches only servitude and submission.  Its spirit is too favourable to tyranny for tyranny not to take advantage of it."

By the time of the Enlightenment, the Church had outgrown its usefulness to society.  It is thanks to thinkers like Rousseau, Hume, and Jefferson that the influence of the Church was stemmed.  And, though today we live in a freer world than they, it is only because they managed to alter our cultural ignorance, not destroy it.

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