Welcome back! In the previous reflection, I discussed ways in which various leaders of Christendom—scientists, philosophers, and even theologians themselves—turned away from traditional Christianity and even from Reformational Christianity to try to find new ways of defining the values by which Christendom, in its modern form, would live. In this reflection, I’d like now to make a transition to the outcome of that development, and an event called the Enlightenment. This event, taking place during the 18th century and centered especially on France and a group of philosophers, often simply called the Philosophs, the French word for “philosophers”—this event, the Enlightenment, as it’s known, is understood throughout the West, the modern West, as a turning-point as it truly was in the history of modern Western civilization.

Students go to high school, and college students are taught that the Enlightenment was a movement that replaced religious understandings of civilization and the purpose of human life with secular ones. This is all very true, but the term “Enlightenment” itself is dubious. It is very doubtful; it is very suspect; it is very incongruous for anyone who identifies as a Christian, and it is certainly a break from all definitions of the truth, of light, of knowledge, of well-being, of beliefs and values previous to the 18th century. So in this reflection I’m going to look especially at the Enlightenment as a concept, and then I’m going to discuss a little bit another problematic term introduced during this time that has very much shaped our modern understanding of history and what Western civilization really is in modern times.

I’m drawing here from a chapter in my forthcoming book, The Age of Utopia, a chapter that deals with the entire Enlightenment, 18th century period, and culminates in the French Revolution. It’s one of my longest chapters in that book, and I do not have time to go through all of it here. I’m only going to look at one section within that chapter, one that deals especially with the concept of history, historical time, because during this so-called Enlightenment, a totally new, radically different understanding of history and of the progressive development in history of Western civilization began to emerge. And it didn’t just emerge, but it was actually cultivated by the aforementioned Philosophs, those who had embraced Deism or, in some cases, even atheism, rejecting Christianity to create a new civilization that would define itself against traditional Christianity and historic Christendom.

So to get started, let me just look for a moment at the word “Enlightenment” itself. This was a word that was used in various forms throughout the 18th century by the secular humanists who looked to the saeculum to a neutral space in this world as an end in itself rather than to the kingdom of heaven that the Gospel had revealed as the ultimate and true meaning and purpose for human existence and life and fulfillment. The saeculum, of course, represented a re-orientation of the goals of Christendom and, as I’ve argued, represented therefore a disorientation of traditional Christendom from the kingdom of heaven, or paradise, to this world, or utopia.

Then Enlightenment, then, became a concept introduced and advanced and propagated by advocates for this new secular humanism, this new secular understanding of human civilization in the West. But they were drawing, of course, from traditional Christianity and its imagery, its photic imagery, its imagery centered upon light and images and symbols of light. It doesn’t take a Christian to realize that light had always been at the center of the gospels and traditional Christianity’s way of explaining reality. Jesus Christ was said to be the Light of the world, who in John’s gospel comes into the world and the world does not comprehend it and the world does not overcome it, and the light shines forth.

This imagery of light runs through especially the Gospel of John, but it’s found throughout the New Testament and was taken up by the early Church which, we’re told, was said to be the light of the world, according to Matthew’s gospel. Jesus Christ, of course, is the light of the world, its source, its soul, and ultimate source of all truth and meaning, but when Jesus Christ created a Church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church—that sacramentally and liturgically continued to live in this world and bring the presence of the incarnate God, by the Holy Spirit, into the world, then Church became the Light of the world, and all light was therefore understood to depend upon the Church and the ministry of the Church to bring the light of God into this world.

Well, all of this of course was very well developed over the course of some 1700 [years], from Pentecost all the way up to the eve of the 18th century, but when Christianity became disreputable among the intellectual leadership of Europe and America and Russia in the late 17th century, following especially and initiated by the disastrous and brutal wars of Western religion and the obvious inability of especially Protestant but even Roman Catholic theologians and Church leaders to reach agreements about doctrines—because of this, Christianity lost its respect among the intellectual leadership, who began to look for alternatives, which we explored in a previous reflection, the most important alternative being Deism, a belief that, yes, there is a god, but that god has nothing to do with this world. That god might be in a sense light, but the light is only manifested, only experienced in a humanity that’s endowed with reason and that’s separate from god, for there is no heavenly immanence in the Deistic cosmos. Now man is the only light, or rather his reason is the only light for the world.

So what the Deists began to do—and this was taken up by their leaders in the 18th century, leaders that I mentioned last time such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom were joined all sorts of other leaders—Denis Diderot, who was virtually an atheist actually, rather than being a Deist; and others as well—I’ll talk here about a famous English Deist named Edward Gibbon. Another famous American Deist was Thomas Jefferson. The Deists began to argue—and they were more or less supported by those who tended more toward atheism like Diderot—that only the human reason, only human natural reasoning provides light; divine revelation, the incarnate presence of God in this world, sacramentally and liturgically—none of this has any validity in establishing what is called the light of truth.

So they borrowed from traditional Christianity as they addressed a traditional Christian civilization, for of course the vast majority of the members of Christendom remained Christians, baptized as infants, raised in local parish churches, whether Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox, and continued to live under Christian monarchies or republics, wherever they might be, even in the case of Louis XIV’s France and his successors or the post-Glorious Revolution constitutional monarchy of England or the increasingly secularized New England in America or in Peter the Great’s and Catherine the Great’s Russia of the 18th century. Most people remained Christians, but the Enlightened—so-called “Enlightened”—secularized humanistic elite, they began to address this population and to try to transform its beliefs from religious and Christian beliefs into secular and utopian ones.

So they used the language of enlightenment to do so; they used that photic imagery that had been developed, introduced by the New Testament and then developed by the Church over the centuries; and they did this because it was effective, and in their effort to anti-evangelize Christendom—for this is what they were doing: they sought to eliminate the role of the Gospel in Christendom so that it could be replaced by a secular humanism as the source of all beliefs and values—as they did this, they appropriated the enlightenment imagery of traditional Christianity. And for that reason I myself, in my own writing and work, try to avoid the word “enlightenment” because it is so obviously a deceptive one on the part of these secular humanists.

There’s one other thing I want to just kind of comment on here, too, and that concerns history, and this is kind of the other main point I want to make in this reflection. During this 18th century, a radically new understanding of history— of linear history—was introduced by these same Deists who were driving the secular humanism forward. Here I’m talking about linear history; I’m not talking about… I’ve spent a lot of time in this podcast, especially in its first part, the first millennium, talking about the sanctification of the calendar, how liturgical and sacramental traditional Christianity took the natural calendar, its daily, weekly, and annual cycles, and transformed them spiritually, according to the spiritual, this transformational imperative I’ve often talked about; transformed them into an experience of the kingdom of heaven or paradise, all the feast days, the hours throughout the day, the different days of the week, especially the Lord’s day of Sunday but also the fasting day of Friday. These were all sanctified, examples of sanctified time, but here I’m talking about linear history, the sequence of years unfolding in a linear direction.

Now Christians had, from early times, developed a concept of a linear progression of time, that history moves in a direction that is salvific. This, of course, they had inherited from the Jews, who also shared in some ways a linear understanding of time, waiting for the Messiah as they were doing, and many of them today continue to do. Christians, of course, understood that the Messiah had come, in the person of the Christ, Jesus Christ, and the fullness of time, in Paul says in I think it’s Galatians 5:5—the fullness of time had been reached when Christ was born of a woman. So as a result of this, Christianity, traditional Christianity, as the source of Christendom’s early culture, from Pentecost forward, claimed that time had been fulfilled, that the movement of linear time had been fulfilled in the Incarnation. When God became man, when divinity entered into history, the historical experience of linear time had reached its fulfillment.

That meant, then, that in the experience of this fulfillment, in the experience of paradise, of the kingdom of heaven in this world, abiding here—in that experience, then, Christendom had a stable culture, a stable understanding of the basis of its civilization, and it continued, century after century, in that stability, awaiting the coming, the second coming of Christ, that would bring an end to this fullness of time. But there was nothing left to add. Once God became human, once he established his Church, his body in this world, there was nothing to add to human civilization. There was nothing more that was needed. Certainly, utopia was not needed, because paradise was already present in this world.

Well, when traditional Christianity and that incarnational understanding of linear history dissolves in the aftermath of the wars of Western religion and had already begun to dissolve in the experience of penitential pessimism during the period following the Papal Reformation, and especially attention to which was brought by Petrarch and other humanists of the Italian Renaissance, when this traditional understanding of paradise dissolved, an alternative was needed for it. This is what Christendom needed as a civilization with a supporting culture; it needed a way of looking toward the transformation of the world, and if the world was not to be transformed by the presence of the kingdom of heaven in it, then it needed to look to new ways of transforming the world, ways that became basically secular, ways that looked primarily to the neutral saeculum and this world as an end in itself.

Well, we’ve discussed some of this already, and from here on out in the podcast, I will be discussing more and more what became the ideological ways in the modern world to realize this transformation of the world, this secular transformation. We’ll be talking a lot about revolution; I won’t get to the French Revolution in this particular reflection, but we’ll be talking about it, and my new book coming out actually culminates in the experience of the Russian Revolution.

But to return to the basic point I’m trying to make here, historical consciousness for understanding was changed as a result of secular humanism, and as a result of the collapse of confidence in Reformational Christianity. And now what we find in the 18th century especially are efforts to define a new concept of history, one that would replace the incarnational model that had been developed in Christendom for centuries, and replace it with one that did not accept the stability of civilization but looked to the future to achieve that stability, because when a paradisaical understanding of history dissolves, as it did now, an alternative utopian one can only make sense if it’s projected into the future, if it’s projected into a not-yet-accomplished future, and this is exactly what began to happen in the 18th century and which motivates the French Revolution and in fact results in such horrible bloodshed during the course of it. I will say nothing here about subsequent revolutions like the Russian one.

So the 18th century, then, a new understanding of history was sought, and this is the origin of another key term in our modern vocabulary, modern secular vocabulary, as members of a modern post-Christian Christendom. Listeners will remember that I believe strongly—I think it can be argued very strongly—that we still live in Christendom; Christendom can’t go away from the West: the West is Christendom. But the secularism of Christendom, creating a post-Christian Christendom, which lives by utopian rather than paradisaical values, this is something that’s definitely happened, and it began happening in earnest during the 18th century, called by many the “Enlightenment.”

So how did this happen? Well, it started to happen as far back as the Renaissance, when Petrarch himself, who plays such an important role in my forthcoming book because he was the father of secular humanism and he had something to say about almost everything that the early part one of the book deals with—Petrarch had actually condemned or dismissed the millennium that preceded his own time, basically the period from the conversion of Constantine up until Petrarch’s time, from the 300s to the 1300s. He dismissed this as a period of what he called Tenebrae, in Latin, and that word means “darkness.” He saw the entire history of Christendom for that first millennium as a history of darkness because, from his 14th century pessimistically encultured civilization, he felt that there was no opportunity for transformation, for a transformation of this world in a glorious sense of perfection and joy, and he, living within that context, projected it into the future, from the present into the future, and he looked toward a time when a higher level of civilization would emerge. This is why he supported revolutionaries like Rienzo so desperately, and this of course would motivate the Italian humanists of the Quattrocento and beyond.

The 18th century Deists and Philosophs picked up on this. They picked up on this image of darkness, and they used that image of darkness to promote a term called the Dark Ages. Now, that term is used differently by different historians, and no serious professional historian today would use it unself-consciously. But for many, the Dark Ages came to be the period when Christianity influenced the culture of Christendom. It was seen, following Petrarch’s model, or intuition, that the coming of Christianity brought darkness to culture and civilization, and only an escape from traditional Christianity and a rejection of it altogether in its Reformational form after the wars of Western religion in the 17th and 18th centuries, this alone would bring light from that darkness and replace darkness with light. And it was very important for these Philosophs of the 18th century—Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, and, we’ll see, Edward Gibbon—to show how that darkness came over the world, over civilization, over the West, and how it needed to be eradicated.

And so it was at this time, then, that a new model of history is introduced to replace the incarnational model that had been in place for so many centuries. This new model was a tripartite model, and it used three particular periods in a kind of a general way to make sense of linear history. The early period was called the Ancient Period, the period before the rise of Christianity. The middle period was called the Medieval Period, which is what “medieval” means in Latin. The middle period followed the Ancient Period; sometimes the Ancient Period was called the Classical Period. I call it the Period of Pagandom. But this second period was this so-called Medieval Period, and of course it says a lot about the Western prejudice, the Western myopia here that the so-called Middle Ages, the Medieval Period, began when Rome fell to the barbarians in the fifth century and didn’t come to an end until Petrarch and the humanists of a thousand years later in the 14th century began developing a new system of beliefs and values, namely, secular humanism. But this is what the “Middle Ages” was understood to be, and then there’s a third and final period, and that’s the Modern Period.

Now, to this day, any study of history at college—and, of course, many Americans and Canadians and Europeans and Australians are required to take university core classes, general education classes that include Western civilization of this story—are taught that there are these three periods: There’s the Ancient, the Medieval, and the Modern. And certainly when I went through professional historiography and its study, they were still in place; they were still in place, even as culturally limited and relative as they are in comparison to other civilizations, not only found in Africa or Asia, but even in Eastern Europe in the case of Russia or Greece which in the Orthodox tradition don’t even see this because there was no fall of Rome in the Eastern Church, and there was no Renaissance either. So it’s meaningless in those areas of historiography.

But what I want to get to is how this really profoundly alters our conception of what the modern West is, and, more and more, in advocating this anti-evangelism, this replacing of the light of the Gospel of the Church with an alternative light that is secular humanism, the Philosophs of the 18th century propagated this tripartite model of history to explain how we today are moving toward the fulfillment of the transformational imperative in its secular form. Again, paradise is not even relevant in their understanding of things; there is no kingdom of heaven; there is no heavenly immanence; man does not participate in the life of God; the sacramental life of the Church was roundly dismissed; the liturgical services were mocked by the Deists and the Enlightenment leaders. And instead of an experience of paradise in this world, they argued that utopia was something that the world had to move toward in order to fulfill its transformational imperative, but it would only happen in the future.

So the modern age, then, is the age that puts definitely behind itself the illusion and superstition of traditional Christianity and looks toward, in a secular form, the achievement and completion of modernity, of the modern project, the modern period. And it’s always the case that, if one looks at the value system built into this tripartite model of history, this utopian—I would call it the utopian model of history—it’s full of value judgments. There’s a kind of an almost golden age of the Classical Period, when one can find in the Greeks and Romans and other examples of ancient pagan civilization good worldly values and achievements. Then there’s the Medieval Period, which is dismissed as superstitious and benighted, one that just simply comes between two other periods, and the more than a thousand years of a Medieval Period are meaningless on their own terms. Their very name comes from being in the middle, being between two other, valuable, stages of civilization. And then after the Medieval Period is finally—and happily, according to Petrarch and his followers—over with, then there’s the Modern Period, which restores much of the Ancient, Classical Period, the good stuff from it, and builds on it with modern science, philosophy, technology, statecraft, and so forth.

Now, I just want to end this reflection, having provided hopefully a critique of the very term “Enlightenment,” a term which I don’t think Christians have any business using in their discussion of history without subverting their very faith in Christ, the Light of the world, because this period of history of the 18th century was so adamantly and so self-consciously and explicitly anti-evangelical, anti-Christian in its view of things. And secondly now, this tripartite utopian model of history, which also subverts, not so much directly, traditional Christianity, but any understanding of Christendom as a civilization with a supporting culture that directs its members towards the heavenly transformation of the world rather than the secular transformation of the world. Having discussed these two terms, which are the product of the 18th century so-called “Enlightenment,” I want to just end by bringing attention to the one writer and Philosoph who did more than any other to perpetuate and kind of consolidate and argue these views, and that is Edward Gibbon.

Edward Gibbon wrote a very famous history called The Decline and Fall… or The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And this is a very, very famous work. It’s a work that emerged in the 18th century. Gibbon was an Englishman, and he wrote this work to try to provide a model for his generation to think of itself living through a rejection of traditional Christianity, which Gibbon himself did, and also a jettisoning of a traditional incarnational model of history in favor of a modern utopian one, a tripartite one.

So in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, six volumes long, Gibbon talks about how Christianity, when it came to infiltrate and influence the Roman Empire, not only after Constantine but even before it, Gibbon always brings attention to what he considers to be negative consequences to this, and the greatness of the Roman Empire as he conceives it in its pagan form is lost once Christianity takes over. This is a really remarkable thing, because most people before Gibbon’s time and even since Gibbon’s time would be forced to concede that infanticide, killing little girls when they were born because one doesn’t want female children and there’s no God to tell them to do otherwise, that this ended because Christianity came into the world, because Christendom arose, and many other things as well. The bloodsports of the pagan arena, for instance, were brought to an end on Constantine’s orders and by practice once Christianity became the culture, or rather it became an influence over the culture of Rome.

Gibbon doesn’t talk too much about these things. He talks more about the weaknesses of the Roman military under the influence of the peace-loving Christianity. He talks about the horrible behavior of Byzantine emperors, which readers of my books and listeners of my podcasts should be well aware of because it washorrible so much of the time, and he talks about what he considers to be the superstition of people in Christendom who believe in the kingdom of heaven, who live for it, and consider liturgical and sacramental life to be real and significant in this world.

So in his work, Gibbon just goes six volumes long with some of the greatest eloquence of any English writer ever. This is one of the best, most eloquent and artfully beautiful history books ever written, certainly until its time. Gibbon makes the argument that a new understanding of history and of Western Christendom altogether is needed. But, as some historians have noted, it was very ideological in character; it had a very kind of tendentious perspective or a kind of purpose.

And I will end by quoting one of those historians who himself is very much a modern historian; I mean, he wasn’t a Christian reactionary or something; he was just a professional historian who finally kind of noticed this in the early 20th century. His name is Carl Becker. He wrote a very brilliant book, more like an essay than a book, called The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century [Philosophers], in which he exposed the very religious—not Christian for sure, because they were anti-Christian—but the very religiously motivated goals of the 18th century Philosophs during the so-called Enlightenment.

And what he writes about Gibbon’s kind of contribution to this project, this anti-evangelism, is very interesting. It brings attention to the fact that, as eloquent as he is, he’s obsessed with this desire to discredit Christian civilization altogether and in particular Byzantium, which, of course, is a big part of the history of the West, because today very few people learn anything about Byzantium, about the Roman Empire in its Christian form—the word “Byzantium” was never used there; it was just the Roman Empire—centered on Constantinople for a millennium. Very few people in the West learn very much about this Eastern Christian civilization and quickly and easily dismiss it, thinking only about Western Christendom. Well, this is what Becker said about Gibbon and Gibbon’s kind of manner of telling the story.

In the pages (Becker wrote) of The Decline and Fall, we seem to be taking a long journey, but all the time we remain in one place. We sit with Gibbon in the ruins of the Capitol.

Gibbon had conceived his whole project by sitting on the ruins of the Capitol in ancient Rome itself, that section of Rome called the Capitol, where, by the way, Petrarch had himself reflected on the darkness of Western civilization because they liked this idea of the ruins of pagandom there, in front of these modern humanists, and they kind of dreamily think what could have been, had those ruins continued to be not ruins but the center of civilization.

It is from the ruins of the Capitol that we perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal, shadowy world. We do not enter the Middle Ages or relive a span of human experience; still we sit in the ruins of the Capitol, becoming cramped and half-numb, listening all this long, stationary time to our unwearied guide as he narrates for us in a melancholy and falling cadence the disaster that mankind has suffered: the defeat inflicted by the forces of evil on the human spirit. The Decline and Fall is a history, yes, but something more than a history: a memorial oration. Gibbon is commemorating the death of ancient civilization. He has described for the so-called instruction of future ages the triumph of barbarism and religion.

So this was Carl Becker’s brilliant reflection on the character of this famous and beautifully written six-volume history, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Join me next time when I, having skipped over so much of the 18th century, covered in my book but I don’t have time to cover it in the podcast, the rise of absolutist monarchies—Catherine the Great is part of that story—the palace life of Versailles, the growing restlessness of the Sans-culottes and the revolutionary forces of France, and then finally the whole history and story of the French Revolution and its anti-Christian, primarily anti-Roman Catholic character. Join me next time when I reappear on the other side of the 18th century with the coming of Romanticism in the early 19th century.