Perhaps modern seems like a peculiar term to use for the period from around 1600 to 1800. Surprisingly, perhaps, it was in the 1580s that the term modern came to refer to “present times,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Anicet Lemmonier’s 1812 painting shows a gathering of distinguished guests in the drawing-room of French hostess Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (1699-1777). Such salons were influential in the development of Enlightenment ideas.

References to the Enlightenment abound. Here is a succinct statement from Catholic.org by Gary Potter in 2006. This might be a surprising source, given the long history of challenges exchanged by Enlightenment ideas and ideals and the Catholic Church:

Most intellectual movements are given their name by men who study them. The Enlightenment is peculiar in that it named itself. This happened when certain thinkers and writers, ones who lived and worked mainly in France and England, saw themselves as “enlightened” in comparison with most other men, and, setting out to enlighten the others, said that is what they were doing. Many of the men of whom we speak were trained as mathematicians or scientists. When they spoke of themselves as enlightened, what they meant was that by the light of reason they had freed themselves from ignorance and superstition, which is to say, orthodox religion, and had thereby come to understand that the hierarchically-based, political-social order then prevailing nearly everywhere was bound to be oppressive or downright tyrannical insofar as both those at society’s summit and those lower down in it saw the order as being willed by God.

It is significant that many of the “enlightened” were trained as mathematicians or scientists. It was on account of their training that they were led to suppose that through the observation of nature they could, by the use of reason, discern laws which governed, or ought to govern, the life of society as they did nature itself. This is to say, they held that by the use of human reason alone men could arrive at truth—the truth about everything, or everything that mattered, in this world. Later, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this notion would give rise to such pseudo-sciences as psychology and sociology, which pretended that the workings of the human mind, movements of the human spirit, and every kind of relation men have with one another could be quantified, measured, understood, and controlled like physical phenomena and the properties of material objects, but that is another story.

Practically speaking, the views of the “enlightened” put them at odds with the two institutions which in fact governed the life of society at the time, the Church and hereditary monarchy. (Potter, 2006)

Here is another quote that highlights the particular nature of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a “European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.

Inevitably, the method of reason was applied to religion itself. The product of a search for a natural—rational—religion was Deism, which, although never an organized cult or movement, conflicted with Christianity for two centuries, especially in England and France. For the Deist, a very few religious truths sufficed, and they were truths felt to be manifest to all rational beings: the existence of one God, often conceived of as architect or mechanician, the existence of a system of rewards and punishments administered by that God, and the obligation of humans to virtue and piety. Beyond the natural religion of the Deists lay the more radical products of the application of reason to religion: skepticism, atheism, and materialism. (Duignan, 2019)

New views of good government, the rights of individuals, and the social order were espoused by a number of writers principally in England and France. As a result, the traditional understanding of government and established institutions such as the church were questioned from the perspective of “enlightened” reason, which was believed to be able to solve longstanding social problems. These new ways of thinking were especially geared to the common “man” in a broad way to appeal to a rising middle class that was becoming more literate. The thought leaders who opened the way included David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke, who each in their own way laid important planks in the Enlightenment foundation.

Foremost was the notion of a firm belief in the power of human reason, such as with the case of the inception of the scientific revolution. Nature offered laws that could be studied and recognized for their truth, casting suspicion on the burden of tradition and preexisting authority. This break with the old established system led Hume’s effort to sever ties with previous philosophies that were not supported by reason that required independence from past authority and the freedom to reason autonomously. Kant echoed this intellectual independence from political and religious precedent of crown and church with the exclamation “Dare to know!” These thinkers also drew on Locke’s belief in the perfectibility of humans, honoring the role of education to assist in perfecting humanity’s goodness and potential (O’Grady, 2018).

Enlightenment thinkers wished to bring about the orderly organizing of all categories of knowledge. The empirical approach of scientific methodology would yield in natural laws in all areas of human inquiry and endeavor, in both the natural sphere and human affairs such as law, economics, and politics. Such new views were understandably upsetting to the status quo of the aristocratic and ruling class in government and church. Efforts to promote egalitarianism and the common good, political checks and balances on authority, and other reforms to undermine absolute and arbitrary power were met naturally with disdain. The response by the English monarch George III was to impose greater control over his subjects domestically and in the colonies.

The Response of the Catholic Church to the Enlightenment

The tradition from which the Enlightenment arose, and which it challenged, was the Catholic Church. Not only was the Catholic Church being accosted by groups of Protestants, each of which had a view of their relationship with God that challenged the church, but it was also being attacked by the belief in “reason.” An exemplar of this conflict was between the Church and Galileo. If the earth circles around the sun, then how can the statement in the Christian Bible be true that “the sun stood still” for Josiah (Joshua 10:12)? As we have already learned, the challenges to orthodox beliefs were punished by the Inquisition in its many forms across many centuries.

Although the scientists we discuss in this module were deep believers in God, their views of God likely deviated from the Orthodox view—including those of Newton, whose deeply felt Unitarian views were religious but nonorthodox. A Unitarian view is that God is “one,” not the trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

 British Empiricism and Locke’s Tabula Rasa

John Locke’s Kit-cat portrait by Godfrey Kneller,
National Portrait Gallery, London.

In his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke (1632–1714) argued that all human learning and knowledge is derived from experience (Locke, 1788).

A towering figure in a larger philosophical and scientific movement known as empiricism, Locke referred to the unformed human infant as a tabula rasa, which is Latin for “blank slate.” This was a radical departure from the prevailing belief in the innate superiority of certain individuals in society, which had provided one of the main justifications for royal and aristocratic privilege and power over their social “inferiors” (Locke, 1788).

If, as Locke argued, we are all equally unformed at birth, then presumably such inequalities and differences might be eliminated through the proper upbringing and education. The wide influence of this new perspective can be seen in our own Declaration of Independence (1776), which states in its preamble that “all men are created equal.” This view continues to provide the impetus and assumptive framework for much of our current educational system, through which, it is believed, we can correct and overcome social inequalities based on class and race.

Rise of the Autonomous Self

Seismic shifts in the realms of science, changing political realities, philosophical discourse, literature, and various social domains brought a shift in the understanding and place of the individual in society:

• Revolutions in science leading to the de-centering of God as a first cause and an elevation in the status of humans in ordering their lives and destinies, no longer thought of as subject to divine will or the fates;
• A recognition of the rights of subjects to challenge and set limits to the authority of monarchs inaugurating a new era of legal rights for the governed;
• The construction of literary figures whose actions and fortunes as a protagonist follow a story line from beginning to end; and
• A new way of speaking of people as individual actors capable of living and working in ways that were independent from the community, the collective and the place one held in the social order was emerging.

It was becoming possible to think and speak of oneself not only as part of a “we” or an “us,” but as an autonomous person, an “I of myself.” New futures, new possibilities. and new paths lay before those with this new perception of the self.

Looking ahead, individuals such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Andrew Carnegie, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and others gave the world a range of accomplishments as they pursued their individual goals and dreams. These individuals not only stood on the shoulders of others but also forged new horizons by virtue of their vision, motivation, ingenuity, and persistence. In such a milieu, literary heroes rose up written about by Horatio Alger (1832–1899), who wrote stories for young readers about boys who came from humble backgrounds but rose to middle-class security by their virtues of hard work, honesty, and determination. Such was the development of a new category of mythic figures who arose from low station, and were therefore significantly unlike past heroes of the Gilgamesh epic, the Odyssey, Beowulf, King Arthur, or even Shakespeare.