REVIEW: Rethinking the Enlightenment – Joseph Stuart (Sophia Institute Press, 2020)

With a title like Rethinking the Enlightenment, one would expect a book with some pretty hot takes about that period of history most reactionaries recognize as an unmitigated ideological disaster. The self-satisfied tone of Voltaire’s letters, and the overtly humanist writings of Rousseau, each couched in not-so-thinly veiled anti-religiosity, made the correspondence of the era take on a characteristically Reddit vibe. And as we know, this unfortunately drew particularly lethal results for the country that once flew the Fleur-de-lis.

Across the continent, liberalizing views on politics, social hierarchy, sciences, and art wormed their ways into Catholic strongholds, to mixed but largely negative results. Although the secular sphere still maintains the Enlightenment to have been a period of great scientific and social progress, despite the rivers of blood that traversed France at the end of the century, post-liberals tend to recognize it for what it was. There were certainly advances in specific aspects of the natural sciences, but this came at the cost of being able to properly contextualize them within the scope of human experience.

So when Sophia Institute Press publishes a book by a noted Catholic scholar on the subject, and when the book invites us to rethink our position on it, we could presume it to be about one of two things: either it’ll be a reactionary take, presuming its audience to be working already from the secular narrative, or it’ll be a post-reactionary take, inviting the illiberal right to reexamine what we thought we knew about this century of scientific revolution. The result, unfortunately, is that it is neither of these things. Author Joseph Stuart instead chooses to play a reaffirmation of the generic secular narrative, although with perhaps more details and more obscure figures thrown into the mix.

Stuart breaks down the Enlightenment into three distinct aspects: conflictual, Catholic, and practical. The former of these is what we tend to think of when we consider the intellectual movement: the assault upon religious institutions, questioning of traditional monarchical political theory, and the embrace of early-Modern philosophy—an effort predominately spearheaded by the French, and who would reap the whirlwind of those efforts at the end of the same century. What he refers to as the Catholic enlightenment is that aspect of the movement which operated within the Church itself, particularly among religious orders and clergy. And for the practical side of things, he turns to those who broadly ignored the coffee houses and the novelties, who got swept up in the spirit of the age, and who characterized the low-level pragmatism that dominated the Anglo-American ethos.

Conflictual Enlightenment

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire dominate the first section of Rethinking the Enlightenment, and understandably so. Stuart, however, begins his narrative with the famous murder and martyrdom of the Carmelite sisters during the Reign of Terror. He marks it as the end point of an arc he traces from Rousseau’s spontaneous decision to begin publishing his mistaken beliefs about human nature, through Voltaire’s fiery eruption of discourse across France, and finally the Revolution itself.

Stuart’s treatment of the men is even-handed and largely apologetic, which isn’t much of a surprise considering the angle of the book. This is given special attention to the manner in which Stuart defends political entrenchment of religious pluralism, as he goes to great lengths to illustrate the persecution of Protestants in France as a result of King Louis XIV revoking the Edict of Nantes. “One might almost be tempted to say these people needed an Enlightenment,” he remarks, after providing a facile account of Catholics and Protestants mutually accusing each others’ theologies of inherent violence.¹ The Church’s position has traditionally been one of acknowledging the reality of religious pluralism, and recognizing that it may do more harm than good to rectify it with political action. This is a far cry from promoting it as an intrinsic good in and of itself, despite the attitude of a rather significant fifth column within the Church’s ranks.

This attitude, however, fits in with Stuart’s liberal sentiments. No mention is made of any hand the Protestants had in their own errors, as all action made against them by the Church in France is framed as entirely the result of unjust persecution by Catholics. History, of course, is not so simple. The Huguenots were never so blameless as secular memory seeks to depict them, at least when their misfortunes suffice to fill secular liberalism’s anti-Catholic narrative.

Along similar lines of reasoning, he sites St. Robert Bellarmine’s defense of monarchy, referring to it as “efficient for reaching certain goals,” which “nevertheless obscured other truths about the nature of the human person and of politics and contributed to the persecution of the Protestants in France.”² The absurdity required to pitch the Doctor’s treatises on political theory as little more than excuses to torture Protestants borders on intellectual dementia, but again, among secular history, this particularly low-effort take is rather common. To see it repeated here, in a book ostensibly in defense of Christianity and the Church, is what makes it noteworthy.

Stuart spends a chapter detailing the Calas affair as well, both what it was in addition to what Voltaire turned it into. The murder of a young man in his parent’s home was spun into a narrative involving religious intolerance that engulfed half of Europe, due largely to Voltaire’s writing. Stuart notes:

Voltaire’s campaign for justice marked an important moment not just during the Enlightenment but for our own time as well: Voltaire broke new ground in the use of public opinion as a source of authority independent of the political and ecclesiastical authorities of the day.³

The rightness or wrongness of this action is irrelevant for our purposes here; rather, Stuart’s trust in the media apparatus, and his tacit acceptance of liberal democracy’s legitimacy—evidenced by the presumption of public opinion as an independent authority—again bring us back to where the author is coming from. Rather than inviting us to rethink the Enlightenment and what it brought to Christendom, we’re getting the same false narratives about it that we were pitched in school, only in greater detail.

But perhaps I’m being overly cynical. This section of the book is, after all, about where the Enlightenment butted up against the Church, and in that country that suffered the most for the conflict. Perhaps he will reframe his argument in the future sections. Not so!

Catholic Enlightenment

Catholic Enlighteners promoted social charity over mysticism, critical thought over blind obedience, rational devotion over emotional exuberance, local church governance over papal centralization, the modern Newton over the ancient Aristotle in physical science, and freedom of scholarship over suppression of new ideas. Their views revealed an optimism about human nature, reason, and improvement of life in this world.⁴

There’s an element of reductive narration going on with such an explanation, but this at least fully states Stuart’s position. The Enlightenment did present a break with the traditions of the past, and approached most charitably, it marked an attempt to rectify aspects of prior worship and philosophy that had either grown stagnant or otherwise lapsed into superstition.

This mimics, to some degree, the transition the Church underwent in the 20^th century, a comparison Stuart makes himself:

This meant that the papacy and some Catholic Enlighteners tended to favor a cultural strategy over a political one. They did not seek so much to respond to Protestant challenges (as earlier generations had done) as to engage the emerging modern world on its own terms through history, art, and culture. The Catholic Enlightenment was a religious movement with cultural goals resembling some of those of the New Evangelization as urged by Pope John Paul II in the late twentieth century.⁵

This certainly seems to be the case even without Stuart’s assessment, but his comparison to the evangelization efforts of the Church under St. John Paul II’s pontificate is strikingly apt. It made great strides in bringing about the fall of Soviet Communism. But all of its optimism in meeting the world where it was at the time, his pontificate—like much of the post-conciliar history of the Church—carved yet another step into the decline of the Church’s presence and integrity across the West. A similar decline, though less obvious, was clearly at work during the Enlightenment.

Stuart comments on this without referring to it as a decline. Rather, the Enlightenment presented a reaction against the Baroque, he claims, and it was against nearly every sphere that the baroque touched: music, art, philosophy, and religion being the most impacted. As he explains:

Baroque spirituality flourished well into the eighteenth century, but Catholic Enlighteners believed its excesses promoted superstition and superficiality. They believed that moral integrity, practicality, and simplicity in worship are more conducive to godliness than elaborate communal rituals. The Mass and the Eucharist needed to take clear precedence over saints, relics, and processions.⁶

He goes on to reference Lodovico Antonio Muratori, who “distinguished between the boundaries of the natural and the supernatural” and “did not like them mixed.”⁷ This apparent separation between the natural and supernatural is a key theme of how Stuart characterizes the Enlightenment, and one he rightly draws back to the materialist dualism of Rene Descartes toward the end of the same chapter. However, rather than a mere intellectual exercise conducted for the sake of clarity, the separation between natural and supernatural—particularly in the wake of Cartesianism—turns into an open divorce between the two. The ramifications of this typically lead toward a thoroughly de-sacramentalized and eventually an utterly secularized understanding of the world. In the case of the Enlightenment, for far too many, this is exactly what happened.

Just as Decartes could never satisfy the question of how a soul, if it is to be of a wholly different substance than physical matter, is to interact with the body, so too can we see the problem of how the supernatural, if it is to be wholly separated from the natural, is to interact with the physical world. We can interject attempts to say “well, clearly God can just do it somehow,” but this falls into a trap of superstition greater even than the ones Enlightenment Christianity apparently sought to rectify. Religious belief gets reduced to a simple matter of blind faith, the sort of caricature of faith that the New Atheists of two centuries thence would come to lampoon. This belief contributed to the intense privatization of faith that characterized the Enlightenment—a period which, we should remember, followed only a generation or so after the conclusion of the most violent and bloody warfare Europe would ever wage until the guns opened fire in 1914.

That the Thirty Years War was so wrapped up in religious zeal, and that the Reformation had both exposed existing chasms while driving additional ones into the soul of European identity, cannot be ignored. The efforts of Enlightenment thinkers to privatize religious belief seems an exercise in attempting to preserve a tenuous peace in both intellectual life and public affairs, to say nothing of the political ramifications. Sensible as it may seem, the results nonetheless speak for themselves: the secularization of the public square has had consequences just as dire, if not arguably more so, than the religious wars waged with saber, canister and shell. We’ll return to this point shortly.

The Galileo Problem

As he continues, Stuart mentions in passing the Galileo affair—a series of events etched into most of our memories after years of secular schooling depicted the man as a suffering soul for scientific inquiry, persecuted in an age of ruthless intellectual intolerance. If only that were so! This is the second mention of Galileo in such context in the book, and it’s enough to tip his hand.

Those familiar with the Galileo affair already know that it was not so much Galileo’s ideas that had him very nearly excommunicated and subjected to a particularly lavish house arrest. It was his shoddy scholarship and self-important politicking against none other than the pope, who asked only that he finish the legwork necessary to make the heliocentric model he proposed be consistent. But Galileo couldn’t make it completely consistent—certainly not to the degree that the Ptolemaic system was.

Heliocentrism was not some forbidden subject whispered about in the dark recesses of lonely corridors and backrooms of universities; it was indeed entertained and talked about freely throughout most of academic Europe. But it was discussed as a mere possibility because nobody could prove it, and Galileo couldn’t do it either. It wouldn’t be until Kepler’s calculations resulted in a model accurate, consistent, and detailed enough to replace Ptolemy’s that the Church’s position on heliocentrism shifted. Galileo was jumping the gun, and he was punished for openly and unreasonably flaunting the teachings of the Church, and often right in the faces of the magistrates duty-bound to prevent such posturing. For Stuart to overlook all of this, and to stick to the tired secular falsehood that Galileo was some martyr for science, is absurd; he’s clearly an accomplished and thorough historical scholar, which means this can only be done to service a particular narrative.

Stuart does remark on some of this, but curiously, leaves out a few important details:

The Inquisition in Rome has convicted Galileo—a believing Catholic—as “vehemently suspect of heresy” in 1633 for asserting as fact—in apparent contradiction to Scripture—that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe. Historians agree today that Galileo had not actually proved his scientific claim with the evidence available to him at the time. We also know that while the sun is the center of our solar system, it is certainly not the center of the universe, as Galileo claimed. Nevertheless, poor decisions were certainly made in the Galileo case, including by Galileo.⁸

Why the heretical claim was so important, why he was accused of it in the first place, and why, as he mentions later, even “Catholic states outside of Italy” saw the condemnation as “an abuse of power and refused to cooperate in enforcing it”⁹ are questions left completely unasked. All of these are important factors to consider in the Galileo case. Even at its time, it was something of a spectacle rich in potential for anti-Church propaganda, particularly when the lethal effects of the Protestant Reformation were still blatantly apparent. The heretical sun worshiping cults that had popped up in the sixteenth century (consider the case of Giordano Bruno), the anti-Papist narratives that Protestants of all various heresies could profit from, and Galileo’s own unreasonable and ostentatious stubbornness all contributed to a perfect storm of disinformation and destabilization. That this occurred on the eve of the Enlightenment, at the dawn of the early-modern period, is a striking example of history’s providential character.

Although Galileo’s presence in the book is limited to a few brief mentions, this is worth the analysis because his legacy is something of a litmus test for scholars of early modernity. At this point in time, they are no doubt aware of the myths surrounding the condemnation of Galileo; the only question is whether or not they will tacitly endorse them. Endorsing these false narratives indicates a defense for a broken and dishonest conception of liberalism; rejecting them tends to indicate the opposite.

Practical Enlightenment

The last leg of Stuart’s analysis is the consideration of what he refers to as the Practical Enlightenment, which was characterized by the expansion of the secular sphere into dominance across society. He writes:

That [secularism] could conflict with Christianity was obvious, as seen notably in France with the Carmelites. The Conflictual Enlightenment was both real and dangerous, from a Christian point of view. But the expansion of the secular did not have to conflict. It might run parallel to Christian culture: sometimes benign, sometimes helpful, and sometimes threatening, but not usually presenting a universal metaphysical clash. I call this secular development the “Practical Enlightenment.”¹⁰

He offers more pragmatic elaboration soon afterward, explaining,

This was the Enlightenment of the practical people who especially thrived among the growing middle class of the English-speaking world. They believed one could improve human life in little, practical ways by innovation, experiment, and making “useful knowledge” widely accessible.¹¹

This approach essentially sinks the whole book, and it brings into the open what has been addressed just earlier in this review. The secularized public square, especially when characterized by liberalism, is not a neutral playing ground. Perhaps it appeared to be the case to certain elements of increasingly secularized Protestant sects at the time—as Stuart notes with reference to Anglicanism¹². It’s possible some Catholics believed it as well. But even during the Enlightenment’s beginnings, the Church was on guard against appeals to “truth” outside the doors of its own institution. That doesn’t mean it rejected such appeals or claims wholesale, but only that it was rightfully weary of those who rejected the Church’s authority yet claimed some elevated or secret knowledge. Gnosticism, as a method, dies hard.

With all this in mind, Stuart moves on to use Benjamin Franklin as his chief example of the practical, secularized Enlightener. Worth mentioning is a biographical note that brings Stuart’s approach into focus:

Many years later, on another trip to England and barley surviving a shipwreck, Benjamin Franklin wrote to tell his wife how, when he and his companions made it to shore, they heard a bell ringing for church. “We went thither immediately,” Franklin wrote, “and with hearts full of gratitude, returned sincere thanks to God for the mercies we had received: were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint; but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a lighthouse.” This was the practical and pious side of Franklin.¹³

Practical and pious? Quite the opposite, in fact, as his remark about substituting lighthouses for chapels comes across with more of Franklin’s characteristic irony than Stuart seems willing to admit. Our author at least properly refers to him as a deist—not even a Christian—yet largely fails to note that Franklin’s own disdain for ritual and ceremony compared to that of Voltaire’s. And Voltaire, as Stuart even admits, went to his grave adamantly refusing the Sacraments.

And this characterizes Stuart’s whole approach throughout the book. When confronted with the most audacious thinkers of the Enlightenment, Stuart attempts to read as charitably as possible into their words and works. But there is a difference between charity and delusion. Franklin was no friend of the Church. Neither was Voltaire. This comes across as grasping at straws and attempting to engage in dialogue with forces of the Enlightenment whose minds are already decided.

Stuart’s tendency to flatten Christianity doesn’t help his case, either; he seems to characterize its position in the eighteenth century as broadly competing sects of worship who were otherwise in agreement with one another. Aside from such a view’s historical illiteracy, it reeks of a faux-ecumenism so characteristic of more liberal sensibilities. This is because it draws attention to the religious tensions of the time even as it dismisses the depths to which these sects vehemently abhorred one another. Framing eighteenth century Christianity in such terms may be done in the interests of emphasizing the growth and formulation of the liberal-secular public square, but it skews expressions of what was going on both inside and outside of the Church. This is particularly true as he spends the several chapters detailing the life of John Wesley and the spread of Methodism, which in the interests of brevity, I’ll refrain from approaching here.

The Political Problem

If Stuart’s book is any indication, the unfortunate reality seems to be that the Enlightenment cannot be defended without resorting to the poisoned bias of early modernity. Despite his attempts to pitch the movement as a positive one, the Enlightenment maintained the same liberalizing, revolutionary energy within the Church as it had outside of it. This leaves the reader somewhat perplexed: okay, a certain liberalization of the Church may have been necessary in particular areas, the reader might acknowledge, but that isn’t what we saw happen. What we saw instead was a Church retreat even further from the political sphere, embrace certain liberalized elements of the culture, and within a generation, receive one of the greatest persecutions of Catholics that had occurred since the Anglican reformation.

One could try to argue that these events aren’t related to one another, but it’s difficult not to see a correlation between the integrity of the Church, its presence in the culture, and the safety of its adherents. The Enlightenment sparked a surge of activity across may disciplines of study, but where it conflicted with the Church was the realm of politics—chiefly, what to do about religious pluralism. As mentioned before, the Church’s answer to this was the same as its answer at Westphalia: the Church admitted that lacked the political power to solve this crisis as it sometimes had before. A different solution was required, and that solution began at Trent and bore out over the following century.

The Enlightenment, however, took the results of this pluralism and repackaged it as though it was intrinsically good. Enlightenment thinkers took on a liberal belief on the possibility of government’s neutrality in the tenuous peace between competing religions, in part because the public square itself had been pragmatically transformed into such a place. Stuart notes this himself, when he comments that “questions answerable through empirical knowledge were more suitable for polite conversation because they did not necessarily threaten someone’s highest allegiances or deepest fears.”¹⁴

This unspoken but polite withdrawal was undertaken for logistical and pragmatic reasons. It didn’t mean that a solution to the question of religious pluralism had been found. Indeed, as the errors of modernity run roughshod over society today, it can be gathered that the last three centuries have left us with no positive answer to religious pluralism. Christians, broadly speaking, find themselves grouped into a single basket despite their deep theological and liturgical differences only because the newer, unspoken religion of secular liberalism offers such a jarring, penetrating, and dangerous counterpoint.

On matters of metaphysics and theology, there must be a consensus. Without it, you’re left with a strongly and obviously stratified society split across the divide of who holds power. All societies operate according to some form of hierarchy, despite the egalitarian efforts of the more radical Enlightenment-inspired liberal reformers and revolutionaries. Hindsight, however, has offered us the benefit of recognizing that liberalism’s implementation of hierarchy is purposefully kept out of the spotlight. This ensures not a genuine meritocracy, as we’re sold, but a plutocracy of oligarchs who circle their wagons. The longer the charade is maintained, the more divorced from reality the language of the regime becomes.

Once all of this is recognized, then honest dialogue about liberalism and the Enlightenment can take place. Throughout Rethinking the Enlightenment, however, it is quite obvious that Stuart does not consider liberalism in these terms. He believes its own good press. He doesn’t seem to recognize that the incongruity between what liberalism is and what it purports to be isn’t some accident on the part of the actors involved, but rather that it is hardwired into the belief system itself. Perhaps one must make such a mistake if one is to write apologia for the Enlightenment, I don’t know, but it contorts and prevents honest engagement.

Conclusion

Readers of The Pillarist and its predecessor will no doubt have a good idea of my own thoughts on the Enlightenment. With this in mind, I should have been expected to be a perfect target to rethink my position; after all, offering a stirring defense of the period seems like it should constitute a hot take among reactionaries. Unfortunately, while the defense was stirring, it lacked power.

Stuart’s book is very well written, enjoyable, and passes by quickly but informatively. His scholarship, except where he’s pushing obvious narratives, seems on point. But the main crux of his argument, that the Enlightenment wasn’t really a bad thing, that there was a lot that western civilization learned from the exercise, and that it was proper for the Church to be reduced somewhat in civil society—none of it seems remotely appropriate to posit. Even as he suggests these themes, his own scholarship gives the impression of contradiction. No defender of the Enlightenment can get around the century of revolution that followed it, to say nothing of guillotines of Paris. Perhaps the Church deserved its persecution. From a certain providential perspective, this could always be argued, but that’s obviously not what Stuart refers to when he draws attention to the “weaknesses and internal divisions within Christian culture”.¹⁵

There is a certain grim enthusiasm to be found among the Church’s martyrs, no doubt, but Catholicism is no death cult. A secondary task of the Church is to transform the world through evangelization; implicitly then, rather than a so-called separation of Church from state, Catholic political theory has always favored systems under which political systems operate with a de facto foundation in Catholic thought. Rather than advancing such an idea, even if not within the political sphere, the Enlightenment marked a collapse of these efforts in Catholic territories.

“Know that it hated Me before it hated you,” Christ reminds us in St. John’s Gospel; all those that persecute His bride seek very obviously to persecute Him. This is as true historically as it is today. What dialogue there is to exist with the world and the Church should always consider what the world is, not merely what it is offering. Many Catholic Enlighteners maintained this, but many did not. The results of these forces at work both inside and outside of the Church speak, I think, for themselves.

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174.

288.

3109.

4142.

5143.

6146.

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8188.

9188-189.

10262.

11263.

12259-261.

13258.

14155-156.

15347.