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Enlightenment Attitudes Towards Religion

By: Lisa

Enlightenment Attitudes Towards Religion Scientific and philosophical inventions during the eighteenth century brought about a new strain of minds. Their impulsive forces of rational and ground shifted the spiritual disposition of the elite from partisans to intellectuals. They argued that there was no godly criterion of morality, no hereafter to deviate humanity from secular concerns ( The Western Experience, pg. 657 ) . They were groups who sought to displace the authorization of faith. Driven by ground, enlightenment minds of course opposed superstitious notion and attempted to replace spiritual mysticism with philosophical criterions and scientific preparations. Their displacement of focal point highlighted fear for the Creator and moral instructions of the Bible. By extinguishing superstitious notion they hoped to bolster the Christian faith ( The Western Experience, pg. 660 ) . Two doctrines of the new enlightened position of faith were acceptance and free thought, both of which sustained the religion of the educated elite. However, these doctrines displaced the authorization of faith in society ( The Western Experience, pg. 660 ) . Never once more would the instructions of Christianity be so readily accepted. Gallic critic Pierre Bayle put forth the construct of spiritual tolerance in his Critical and Historical Dictionary. Typical of an enlightenment mind, Bayle put the claims of faith to the trial of critical ground. He concluded that many of Christianity s sacred traditions were myth and its history nil more than phantasy and persecution. He besides professed that importance ballad in an single s morality and non their credo ( The Western Experience, pg. 660 ) . Dennis Diderot echoes this sentiment in his encyclopaedic definition of the term irreligious saying that morality is the cosmopolitan jurisprudence that the finger of God has engraved on all our Black Marias, and that accordingly we should non confound immortality and irreligiousness. Mortality can be without faith ; and faith, possibly, even exits often with immortality ( Course Pak, Chapter 2, pg. 157 ) . Furthe

r Diderot sites the Fathers of a council of Toledo in his definition of intolerance where they state do no violence of any kind to people in order to lead them back to faith, for God is merciful or severe to whomever he chooses (Course Pak, Chapter 2, pg. 156). By siting the fathers, Diderot masterfully escapes censorship while fighting the churches belligerence with its own words. Catholic Habsurg emperor Joseph II championed the philosophy of tolerance in 1781 in the Edict of Toleration. The Edict granted Jews and Catholics the same religious and civil rights, this was the first time such an act was condoned by a Catholic Habsburg ruler. In addition it also tried to limit the power of the Catholic Church by ordering the dissolution of numerous monasteries which were useless and corrupt. (The Western Experience, pg. 660). While tolerance proved to be an important concept of the enlightenment, deism was indeed the primary religious doctrine. Voltaire, one of the Enlightenment s most prolific writers was an outspoken champion of deism, which unites religion and reason. In his best seller The Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote, in theology we find man s insanity in all its plenitude and goes on to say organized religion is not simply false but pernicious (The Western Experience, pg. 660). Deism was his alternative to the false world that organized religion fostered. It recognized God as the creator but held that the world once created functions according to natural laws without interference by God. (The Western Experience, pg. 660). Deists professed that religion should be a matter of private contemplation rather than public display. Ultimately, they believed humanity functions on its own in an ordered universe, without threat of damnation or the hope of eternal salvation (The Western Experience, pg. 661). The Age of Enlightenment spawned a new era of thinking. Its quest for the rhyme and reason of what is and why birthed a new intellectual freedom. Perhaps the most sensitive subject, which it questioned, was that of religion. For centuries it had gone unscathed by the changing world. Suddenly it became something that could no longer be passively accepted it was something to be evaluated and analyzed.