Following the age that witnessed Robert Fludd’s attempt to assert a sophiological vision of the created world, a variety of materialist epistemologies, hastened by Cartesian metaphysics and Baconian empiricism (among other factors), began to secure dominance in all fields of intellectual inquiry. This was even the case in some areas of theology, and religious tracts such as John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) and Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) paved the way for rationalist approaches to religion perhaps most fully realized in the deism Immanuel Kant articulated in his influential Religion within the Limits of Bare Reason (1793). The triumph of rationalism, at least at the cultural level, contributed to the rise of secularization in the way the life of faith was effectively privatized and the marketplace of ideas became a forum for philosophical, economic, and scientific debate, leaving religion to look on from the gallery. As Kate Rigby has argued, “the disenchanted world of modern science was one from which the divine had largely been expelled.” Such a development was not without profound psychological and epistemological ruptures. One such rupture, and hardly one of the more extreme, was central to the utter madness that attended the French Revolution and came to flower in the Reign of Terror. A mind-numbing violence made palatable and efficient through the technological advances of science (e.g. the guillotine) and justified by reason then initiated a series of secularist revolutions, the violence of which—augmented by exponentially growing technological advances—“dwarfs the horrors of all earlier ages.” The rationality of the revolutionary ethos, rendered absurd in the Culte de la Raison, rather than reason (ratio) and the promise of liberté, egalité, fraternité, instead—quite literally—willed to posterity a legacy of terror. Indeed, the Bolshevik Revolution sought to “transcend [a telling metaphor] the narrow confines of the French Revolution” and its Enlightenment aims and, furthermore, championed “humanity’s final victory over nature, and its spread throughout the cosmos.” Most revolutions following that of 1789 disclose the same kind of hubris.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 17:51:39 +0000