The Enlightenment
by Anthony Kenny, SPCK, 144pp, £7.99
When did the Age of Enlightenment begin? There is no Wittenberg-type moment, so Sir Anthony Kenny proposes April 16, 1746. The Battle of Culloden was “the last rally in Britain of those institutions that the Enlightenment saw as the forces of darkness” – Catholicism, that is, and absolute rule.
The Age of Enlightenment drew to a close, Kenny estimates, in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame on December 2, 1804, when Napoleon crowned himself emperor in the presence of Pius VII.
Like other books in the series of “Very Brief Histories” from SPCK, The Enlightenment comes in two parts: History and Legacy. The History section quickly evolves into a beguiling miniature parade of Enlightenment heroes: Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, the Encyclopédistes, d’Holbach (a full-blown atheist-materialist who, in the words of Diderot, “rained bombs on the house of the Lord”), Franklin (discoverer of the Gulf Stream – I never knew), Gibbon and so on – with each holding aloft for inspection a celebrated work, such as The Spirit of the Laws; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; and Candide.
En route, there are some wonderful nuggets of information, such as Parliament voting Jeremy Bentham the huge sum of £23,000 in compensation for his work on the unrealistic “panopticon” prison scheme, or the fact that Voltaire occasionally received the sacraments at Verney, to the scandal of his philosophe friends.
And, of course, along came Calvinist-Catholic-Calvinist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, landing in the Enlightenment nest like “a gigantic cuckoo”, arguing that reason turns people inwards, isolating them from others and natural pity for their fate.
Kenny’s chapter on how Hume and Adam Smith rejected reason as a possible source of ethical behaviour is fascinating. Our moral faculties are, Smith thought, vice-regents that God has set up within us. Meanwhile, how impressive were the achievements in science of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, a Parisian lawyer and the father of modern chemistry? Lavoisier was guillotined in 1794. Kenny relates examples of the Enlightenment eating its own, acknowledging the misfortune without ever really grappling with whether this indicated some inherent flaw.
Similarly, an attempt to disassociate the Enlightenment from Marxism and the horrors that ensued – and blame it all on Kant – sounds like special pleading.
The World Wars were also, it seems, the product of the Counter-Enlightenment alone. (Kenny does, however, acknowledge the blind spot of the Enlightened ones when it came to slavery.)
The Enlightenment is not an overt exercise in Church-bashing. Kenny is a former priest who trained at the Venerable English College in Rome. In What I Believe (2007), he explained why he is now an agnostic.
Nevertheless, the Church, inevitably, does not emerge very well from these pages, forever taking the side of absolutism, resisting the onward march of science and persecuting dissidents. One philosophe after another assembles the arguments that would have the Church banished from the house of human reason. “Superstition,” wrote Voltaire, “is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: the crazy daughter of a wise mother.” The vexed question, though, was where religion ended and superstition began.
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Kenny himself groans at the coming of the Oxford Movement and the First Vatican Council. He rightly insists on the role of the Enlightenment in establishing the primacy of freedom of conscience, including within the Church, where abysmal failures cannot be wished away.
Some of his sideways digs at Christianity, though, are slightly ridiculous, such as the notion that the improvements in travel during the Enlightenment aided reactionary missionaries to spread their message.
Equally, scholars such as Rodney Stark and James Hannam might pour scorn on the assumption that the age of reason, science and capitalism only began when the Middle Ages were long in the past – with Stark, no doubt, producing from his pocket his list of the scientific “stars” of the 17th century, stacked with Catholics, many of them priests.
Kenny divides his analysis of the legacy of the Enlightenment into four parts: religious, yes, but also cultural, political and ethical. Where the latter is concerned, I’m not so sure the Enlightenment emerges with a clean bill of health. The ethical systems one can construct from the resources of reason are multiple and some are very nasty indeed with no ultimate arbiter to dismiss them.
As a very short introduction to a vast topic, The Enlightenment works a treat, thanks to the author’s flair for marshalling all he knows into succinct, lucid, eloquent prose. The book’s publicity calls him “one of our greatest living philosophers”. I am not qualified to comment, but reading this, one feels like a novice skater who has taken the hand of an expert, to be whisked across the ice, feeling secure if somewhat breathless.
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