I do not believe that the Enlightenment could have taken off at the beginning of the seventeenth century if the Reformation had not taken place at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The reformers encouraged their followers to doubt everything that they thought they knew about the faith that had been thrust on them and to read the scriptures for themselves. Reading in their own language and with their mentors preconceptions, as well as their own, they believed that it was God himself who was guiding them.
A Disastrous Delusion
That dozens of different and differing denominations were born of this spiritual free for all, made a mockery of the belief that the truth leads to unity, and that the hundreds of conflicting sects that would follow was the work of the Holy Spirit. The pure faith that they sort was as delusory as the pure reason that the followers of the Enlightenment sort over two hundred years later. Once again their followers were urged to cast off received wisdom, doubt everything, and seek the truth with a pure and unsullied reason. Just as the searchers for religious truth at the Reformation ended up with, at best, fragments of the truth, so also did the searchers for philosophical truth at the Enlightenment.
If, instead of rushing into print with new books on philosophy, compiling encyclopaedias, and defining words in their new dictionaries, they had read the contemporary dramatists, poets and novelists, they might have realised that their pure faith was as illusory as the pure faith of their Protestant predecessors.
Pure Blind Reason
Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage”. His plays perfectly exemplify how fickle arrogant human beings are, ruled from within the nether regions of their personalities by irrational forces that neutralise, negate and nullify the powers of pure reason. Is this not the essence of tragedy? The Poet John Donne put it this way:
“Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue”
The novelists relentlessly describe the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ that destroys the good judgment and best behaviours of all of us, that makes society into little more than a fair, a ‘Vanity Fair’. It is here where our posing, posturing and pretence tries to hide the real drives and urges, the genuine motives and motivating forces that the psychiatrist and psychologist would uncover when the enlightenment had run its course. But at the time the great philosophers and thinkers of the enlightenment were far too high and mighty to believe that their pure reason could be influenced by what mere dramatists, poets, and novelists scribbled about.
The Enlightenment and the Church
The sort of high intellectualism that characterised the Enlightenment appealed to the leadership in the Church because it did nothing to condemn the high stoical moral spirituality to which it aspired, while simultaneously pouring cold water on any forms of mystical theology languishing in the aftermath of the condemnation of Quietism. What was not seeable, measurable, or definable simply had no meaning. If it could not be subjected to the clear analysis of pure reason then it simply did not exist. It had no existence except in the misty minds of those who spent their time in a world of fatuity and fancy. That is why they had no more time for the Romantics with their fascination for the ‘Numinous’ than they did for Mystics and their fascination for the Transcendent.
In future, although the Church was not taken over by the principles of the Enlightenment, it was influenced by them in many ways. For instance, from then on and down to the present day all attempts at ecclesiastical renewal have been predominantly intellectual, taking the form of Scholastic theology, predominantly Thomism. They would look down benignly and with tolerance at the multiplicity of pick and mix spiritualities, provided they did not lead to the mystical theology that experience had taught them began in mist and ended in schism.
Mind the Gap
However, one extremely valuable byproduct of the Enlightenment, in the light of what I have said, was to prove extremely beneficial to contemporary spirituality. It encouraged biblical scholars of different Christian denominations to develop a critical analysis of the Bible that did bear fruit for the whole of Christendom. It certainly enabled Catholic scholars to develop an amazingly rich Catholic Biblical Theology that bore fruit for instance at the Second Vatican Council, although their more traditional brethren who held the reins of power did all they could to prevent it filtering down to the man and woman in the pew.
A new younger generation of clerical and religious students found this new rich Catholic Biblical theology helpful and personally inspiring. But it was not only stopped at the top and blocked at the bottom by senior clerics and religious superiors, it was certainly one of the reasons why there was a mass exodus of young priests and religious in the 1960s and 1970s. Looking back it can be seen that the gap which opened up by their departure was soon filled by far lesser evangelists, with their own personal and idiosyncratic interpretations of the Gospels, or simply entirely new Gospels made from the latest fads and fashions of the contemporary world . They are not the stuff that dreams are made of, but modern nightmares that are being realized in the daylight, where they can be seen for what they are, at least by those with the ‘sensus fidelium’.
Cogito ergo sum or Amo ergo sum
With hindsight the French Philosopher, Descartes, came to be seen as the father founder of the Enlightenment with his well-known dictum, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ – ‘I think therefore I am’. This was the embryonic realization from which his theory of knowledge would grow to encompass every aspect of his teaching. If we are to have a new Christian enlightenment that will propel us into the future with the traditional Spirituality of the past, then may I suggest it should be inspired by a new Christian dictum that parallels the dictum of Descartes. Not ‘Cogito ergo sum’ but rather ‘Amo ergo sum’ – ‘I love therefore I am’.
I love above all else the God of Love who created me for that purpose, and I love in the most powerful and effective way possible, because I love him from within his own body and blood made flesh and blood in Jesus Christ. The scale and therefore the success of my loving of God will be determined by the measure of my union with Christ, in, with and through whom the quality of my relationship with God will be determined.
If this is to be the starting point of our return to the God-given spirituality that Jesus Christ introduced into the early Church through his Apostles, then why wait a moment longer before taking the steps to introduce it into our lives. That is why I will shortly give my full attention to the form of meditation to which I have already referred. This is the of meditation that exclusively puts the spotlight on the loving and adorable person of Jesus Christ, who is alone The Way, The Truth, and The Life.
David Torkington’s latest book, The Primacy of Loving, the Spirituality of the Heart is now available. I would be grateful for a review on Amazon or any preferred outlet