What was the Enlightenment? Two images come to mind. One, a positive one, is of a period when people in Western Europe became less bigoted, more secular-minded, more modern and sensible. In other words, it was time when people finally wised up and became more like us. 

A more negative image also exists. The Enlightenment was a movement of cocksure intellectuals who tried to reduce everything to reason, who believed that society could be quickly remade and significantly improved under the right leadership. These naive rationalists can be blamed for the excesses of the French Revolution, which was reason run wild. 

For the purposes of discussion I will adopt the definition of Peter Gay: the Enlightment was a movement that rejected Christianity as a basis for society and morality. 

For centuries, Christianity had provided a spiritual home for thinkers, activists, mystics, and hypocrites; a wide variety of causes and interests had linked themselves with it, causes and interests that not only differed from one another but were actually incompatible. So why the change around 1700? Why did Christianity lose its grip on influential people at this time? 

Several reasons suggest themselves: 

One such element, I think, was the reduced prestige of the Christian churches in the seventeenth century, and a loss of morale within the clergy, both Catholic and Protestant. 

The humane and tolerant French essayist Montaigne is our best example of a man who, as early as the 16th century, began to doubt whether complete religious certainty was possible, or even desireable. 

In the mid-seventeenth century, when the Thirty Years' War brought Europe to the abyss, and Civil War threatened England with chaos, rulers and their supporters concluded that if society (and privilege) were to survive, the battle for absolute righteousness had to end. 

The solution adopted was a live and let live policy. Thirty Years War ended by the treaty of Westphalia, which settled the religious problems of Germany on the principle of cuius regio, cuius religio, "whoever rules a country can establish his religion in it." Rulers would no longer meddle in the religious affairs of their neighbors. 

At the same time each individual ruler was strengthened, since the church came almost entirely under governmental supervision. Thus dangerous enthusiasm within a country, with its potential for subversion, could be, and was, stamped out. 

Inevitably, the established churches of the later seventeenth century came to be staffed by careerists whose job it was to maintain order, and not by those who were determined to reach the New Jerusalem. 

Even the Scottish church, which had once been full of fire-breathing avatars of John Knox, was in the 18th century teaching "that whoever could please God must resemble him in goodness and benevolence, and those who had it not must affect it by politeness and good manners." [Elizabeth Mure, quoted by Gay, 342]. 

When order and good manners became the goal of religion, could the end of witch-hunting be far behind? 

A third factor in the coming of the Enlightenment was the growing popularity of a scientific ideology among intellectuals. The discoveries and the theories of the early modern period did inspire some people to a greater faith in the ability of human beings, or rather men, to control and appropriate the earth. 

The earlier Christian attitude had stressed the fallibility and helplessness of man without divine guidance and protection. 

Science, meaning Aristotle, told men much the same thing: Earth was the refuse pit of the universe, the deadest part of world, far inferior to the perfect heavens. He, too, taught the reality of spirits, good and evil, and their power. 

But in the seventeenth century, some men, including Bacon and Galileo, saw the earth not as a cesspit, but as a fertile treasure box capable of being anipulated and plundered by those who understood nature. 

Brian Easlea has suggested that this exploitative attitude toward the world took the steam out of witch-hunting, as men confident of their ability to appropriate the earth ceased to fear either spirits or women. 

Whether Easlea is right or not, the new confidence was there. This confidence was an essential element of the Enlightenment. All the elements I have been speaking of came together first in the freer societies of Holland and England. Narrow religious bigotry was recognized as undesirable and counter-productive. Although both countries had established churches and restrictions on dissenters, by the standards of the time, they were remarkably tolerant. The openess of intellectual life does much to explain the scientific leadership of the two countries in the seventeenth century. 

In England, the two most prominent figures were Newton and Locke. Each of them, without perhaps meaning to, promoted a further divergence between the scientifically minded and orthodox Christianity. The work of Newton showed a god who was a designer, perhaps a mechanic, who was contracturally bound once he had built his machine, to allow it to run in a predictable way. Man could understand God's laws, and need not read them from the Scriptures. 

John Locke also argued in favor of the ability of man to learn and progress in understanding. Unlike previous philosophers, he thought humans came into the world with an essentially empty mind, a clean slate or tabula rasa, but one capable of unlimited learning through experience. 

Locke considered himself a good Christian still, but his God was reasonable rather than awesome. In 1695, he wrote a book called Reasonableness of Christianity. 

The next year a self-proclaimed follower of Locke, John Toland, took the next step. He published a book called Christianity not Mysterious, in which he said that whatever was mysterious, or not rational, about Christianity had to be rejected. A very radical view -- Locke appalled -- but Toland was showing the way for the deists of the future. 

England was not the center of the movement called the Enlightenment. That is because there was not enough resistance to this trend to make a movement necessary. The movement of enlightened philosophers or philosophes originated in France. 

France in the early eighteenth century was a country of paradox. It had just gone through a period of military and artistic glory, but now dogged by debt, failure and a governmental system that did not work. The church was perhaps the least inspiring aspect of the whole establishment. 

In the second quarter of the century, some intellectuals looked to England as a better model for the future. 

Voltaire's Letters on England or Philosophical letters of 1734 an early, witty manifesto of the Enlightenment. Voltaire did not present the English as perfect, but he showed them as being smart enough to know a good thing when they saw it. 

• They had thirty religions, and this variety spared them both despotism and civil war; 
• Men of all faiths, even Jews, were allowed to contribute to the good of the country, and worship money in the London Stock Exchange. 
• Government was moderate 
• Taxation fair 
• Society willing to recognize talent wherever found. 

But what were they for? 

• Most philosophes opposed Christianity in part because they believed the pleasures of this life were perfectly all right. 
• They believed in pragmatism. 
• They believed in education. 
• The philosophes thought of themselves as being on the side of science, experimental practical science, against willful ignorance. 

Look at the article on Foundations in our book of readings: an entire social critique, by no means neutral scholarship. And a work of audacious confidence. 

It has been estimated that in France the audience for Enlightened literature never exceeded 30,000. But this was an aristocratic society, and that could be enough, if enough of them were receptive. 

By the mid-18th c. the best elements, including many churchmen, had ben seduced. As the philosophes grew in influence and moral power, many of the clergy found themselves agreeing with their ideas of tolerance, of a natural and reasonable religion. They, too, wanted to be considered enlightened. 

Like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment was a cultural end-run by a small, very eloquent group of intellectuals around the stale establishment of their time. The difference is that the philosophes were more radical than the Renaissance men. Many of them ditched Christianity, as openly as was prudent, and all argued confidently that humans had the ability to alter society in a basic manner. 

Conservative forces had begun to rally well before the French Revolution. For instance, Methodism in England. Despite reaction, and a great reservoir of both popular and elite conservatism, the Enlightenment was on a roll after 1760. In the later third of the 18th century, the ideas of the philosophes would affect not only the ideology of the state but the very aspirations of those who ruled. 

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