Rehabilitating the enlightenment?
Hartle, Ann
The Enlightement: History of an Idea by Vincenzo Ferrone, trans.
Elisabetta Tarantino (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)
Western civilization, we are told, has entered a
post-Enlightenment, postmodern, and post-Christian era. The horrors of
the twentieth century--totalitarianism, the Holocaust, two world
wars--have destroyed every illusion about the ability of autonomous
human reason to transform the world into the heavenly city of the
eighteenth-century philosophers. A post-Enlightenment era must be a
postmodern and post-Christian era because the origins of the
Enlightenment are to be found in the sixteenth century: the meaning of
the Enlightenment is inseparable from the meaning of modernity as such.
The Protestant Reformation had destroyed the unity of Christendom, and
modern philosophy had turned from the contemplation of reality to the
Cartesian "subject," freeing philosophy from its status as
handmaiden to theology.
Ferrone's book is a defense of the Enlightenment, not for the
sake of Western civilization, but for the sake of the European Union.
"The new united Europe that is on the rise," he says,
"badly needs to find again its authentic roots" in the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment. To make this defense, he must argue
against the view that sees in the Enlightenment the cause of the French
Revolution with its Reign of Terror, the horror that foreshadowed the
unspeakable atrocities of our own day. Because philosophers such as
Hegel, Horkheimer, and Adorno argue that there is indeed a necessary
connection between the Enlightenment and the Terror, Ferrone must argue
for the separation of the historical understanding from the
philosophical understanding of the Enlightenment. Somehow, by giving a
historical account, with all the complexities, contingencies, and
discontinuities of the eighteenth century, the inevitability of the
connection between the Enlightenment and the Terror, he believes, will
begin to fade from sight, and the Enlightenment can be seen as a
relatively innocuous "cultural revolution," a kind of
reformation of the Old Regime.
But, contrary to Ferrone, it is impossible to separate the
historical from the philosophical precisely in the case of the
Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an "idea." (The subtitle
of the book is History of an Idea) In fact, it is a new idea. What is an
idea? An idea in the modern sense is not the way in which the mind is
conformed to reality, the way in which the mind is "measured"
by what actually is, or the adequation of the intellect to being. On the
contrary, an idea is a production of the mind itself. The Enlightenment
is a new idea of how things ought to be. As Ferrone insists,
philosophers of the Enlightenment wanted to "change our
reality" and "to change the world through ideas." The
Enlightenment is the project of making the world conform to its own
idea, to the "dreams" of the philosophers.
The philosophers, then, on account of their "moral
superiority," constituted a "new elite," a "new
aristocracy," replacing all traditional elites. This new
intellectual elite was "determined to change the way people
thought" and thus to change the world order. The Enlightenment was
"the laboratory of modernity." History was, in effect, the
laboratory of the philosophers.
Ferrone argues that the unifying principle and defining trait of
the Enlightenment is the idea of "the emancipation of man through
man." The Enlightenment was an "emancipation project"
intended to create a "new civilization" grounded in the
autonomy and centrality of man. First and foremost, then, it is the
emancipation from religion and the elimination of transcendence in favor
an "entirely immanent standpoint." Voltaire, for example, saw
no need for a religious foundation based on revelation in order to
establish the new universal morality. Jesus Christ was a great and
admirable man, but only a man.
Yet, most Enlightenment philosophers did recognize the need for
religion as a support for the social bond. Christianity is to be
replaced by a new universal and natural religion that is purely
instrumental. Rousseau's civil religion, for example, has no
doctrines except toleration and sociability. It is designed to support
the "general will," not to create a community of worship of a
transcendent God. Religious sentiment and belief must remain hidden in
one's heart. Christianity becomes a private matter never to appear
in public life.
Ferrone, I believe, does not realize that civil religion cannot be
a real bond among men, because the sacred cannot be a human invention
and the natural divisions among men cannot be overcome by a "new
idea." Civil religion cannot replace tradition, which permeates
everyday life with the sacred. Tradition is not an idea or a system of
ideas, but a fundamental orientation of the whole person, his beliefs,
sensibilities, sympathies. Kant's Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone, with its elimination of every trace of traditional
Christianity, offers no possibility of real community.
As Francis Slade has shown, Christianity cannot live in the privacy
of the heart: it is the religion of publicness because it is the
religion of truth, truth that is accessible to all men, regardless of
education and social class. Eamon Duffy, in The Stripping of the Altars,
insists on "the social homogeneity of late medieval religion."
As he demonstrates: "Rich and poor, simple and sophisticate could
kneel side by side, using the same prayers and sharing the same
hopes." In spite of the differences of sophistication about the
faith, "they did not have a different religion." The social
bond of medieval Europe was not found in an idea but in worship, in the
Eucharist. The loftiest theologian was at one with the least educated
laborer. In that sense there were no "elites."
C.S. Lewis gives us a concrete example of what this actually means
by recounting his own experience. He disliked going to church on
Sundays; he disliked the hymns, which he considered to be fifth-rate
poems set to sixth-rate music. "But as I went on I saw the great
merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different
outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just
began peeling off. I realized that the hymns were, nevertheless, being
sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in
the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren't fit to clean
those boots." Natural and conventional differences are not erased,
but they become insignificant in the presence of the reality of the
Incarnation.
Ferrone does not accept the connection between the Enlightenment
and the Reign of Terror, for he does not see that when reason is
detached from truth, the public truth of Revelation, and becomes the
"dream" of an intellectual elite intent on conforming reality
to its immanent standpoint, there are no longer any limits on what is
possible. Reason, unrestrained by anything outside itself, leads to the
Terror, the absolute power of the State, and totalitarianism, for there
is no effective check on human power.
The Enlightenment inevitably gives way to
"postmodernism," the rejection of the reality of truth and the
realization that reason is only a mask for the will to power. Autonomous
reason, that is, reason detached from any public measure, must
eventually give up any pretense to universality and become nothing more
than justification for the rule of the strong over the weak. Because the
public measure of truth, the Revelation of the Bible, has been replaced
by autonomous reason, Christianity is all but dead in Europe. Religion
is private, the churches are empty, and the state is aggressively
secular. At the same time, the Islamic population has increased
dramatically, while "multiculturalism" and "political
correctness" dominate public discourse.
In the face of this dire situation, Ferrone dismisses the efforts
of the Catholic Church to salvage what is good in the idea of the
Enlightenment. The philosopher Jiirgen Habermas, who argues for the
viability of Enlightenment rationality, and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
(later Pope Benedict XVI) engaged in a dialogue in which both agreed on
the need for a postsecular society with religion occupying a central
position. In 1996, Pope John Paul II held a three-day seminar at which
eminent scholars, philosophers, and theologians discussed both the
merits of the Enlightenment and the consequences of denying the role of
God in history, such as the rise of totalitarianism. In the words of one
of the participants, theologian Robert Spaemann, "only religion can
save the Enlightenment... because religion understands the Enlightenment
better than the latter understands itself." But for Ferrone, the
Catholic Church is "an unwanted third party" in the debate
over the value of the Enlightenment.
Whatever the merits of the Catholic Church's attempts to come
to terms with modernity, it seems clear that Enlightenment rationality
cannot provide the foundation for European unity. Even Rousseau
understood that a secular society is ultimately impossible. Because it
is union in the divine, the Church is the only possible multicultural
society.
In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI returned to the university at
Regensburg, where he had taught in the faculty of theology, to deliver
an address on the harmony of faith and reason. In the course of that
address, he mentioned a discussion that had taken place in 1391 between
the Byzantine emperor and a Persian scholar. The pope quoted the
emperor's statement concerning the relationship between religion
and violence: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and
there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to
spread by the sword the faith he preached." The emperor proceeded
to explain that violence in spreading the faith is
"unreasonable" and is therefore contrary to God's nature.
Reaction to news of the pope's address was marked by riots in
Europe and the murder of an Italian nun who had dedicated her life to
serving the poor in Africa.
While Ferrone is worrying about the unity of Europe (which now can
be only economic), Europe is aborting itself out of existence and, at
the same time, attempting to absorb a new wave of more than a million
Muslims fleeing the conflicts in the Middle East or seeking a better
economic situation. Meanwhile, we witness the beheading of twenty-one
young Coptic Christians by ISIS on the shores of the Mediterranean and
the warning to Rome: "We are coming!"
Remarkably, Ferrone never discusses the threat of militant Islam to
the Enlightenment ethos that he wants to preserve and to the unity of
Europe that he wants to promote. He never discusses the fact that the
Muslim populations have no desire to assimilate, want to live under
sharia law, and, in some instances, demand that it be recognized in the
secular courts. Because he does not acknowledge that Western
civilization is essentially Christian, he never faces the most
fundamental problem: Islam's refusal to embrace the kind of union
of faith and reason achieved in the Christian Middle Ages.
The "authentic roots" of European civilization are to be
found not in the autonomous reason of the Enlightenment of the
eighteenth century but in that union of faith and reason initiated
almost two thousand years ago, and not in an idea but in the reality of
a living Tradition. In 732, when the civilization of Christendom was on
the verge of entering the period of the Middle Ages that saw the birth
of the great cities and the great universities of a vibrant culture,
Charles Martel stemmed the Muslim advance into France at the battle of
Tours. In this post-Christian era, militant Islam seems to have little
to fear from what it alone persists in calling "the land of the
Cross."
Ann Hartle is professor of philosophy at Emory University and the
author of Montaigne and the Origins of Modern Philosophy. She is
currently working on a book on recovering civility.