9 - The rise of modern paganism? Religion and the Enlightenment

Summary

The greatest number still believe that the Enlightenment is concerned with almost nothing but religion.

(Johann Pezzl)

When all prejudice and superstition has been banished, the question arises: Now what? What is the truth which the Enlightenment has disseminated in place of these prejudices and superstitions?

(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel)

I knew a real theologian once…He knew the Brahmins, the Chaldeans…the Syrians, the Egyptians, as well as he knew the Jews; he was familiar with the various readings of the Bible…The more he grew truly learned, the more he distrusted everything he knew. As long as he lived, he was forebearing; and at his death, he confessed he had squandered his life uselessly.

(Voltaire)

As we have seen, ‘Enlightenment’ is a term which has been defined in many different ways both by contemporaries and by later historians. But nowhere is the divergence between contemporary and later definitions wider than in the area of religion. Until recently, few historians would have echoed Johann Pezzl's contemporary judgement on the centrality of religious issues to the Enlightenment. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, many conservative historians saw the Enlightenment as a time characterised by deliberate efforts to undermine religious belief and organisations. Some went so far as to link anti-religious attitudes fostered by the Enlightenment with the outbreak of the French Revolution itself in 1789 (see Chapter 10). This is a view taken also by many modern historians. It is Peter Gay who significantly subtitles one volume of his synthetic study of the Enlightenment as the ‘rise of modern paganism’. Similarly, Keith Thomas has seen the eighteenth century as a time of ‘disenchantment of the world’, meaning the collapse of a way of seeing the world as full of magical or spiritual powers and forces organising a mysterious cosmos.