History of the Christian Church: The Enlightenment

Although somewhat arbitrary, the English (1688) and French (1789) revolutions are frequently used as convenient beginning and ending points for the Enlightenment. Centered primarily in England, Scotland and France, the Enlightenment was a diverse, international movement that soon spread over much of Europe and the American colonies. Enlightenment intellectuals included academics as well as journalists, writers or government officials active in public life. They met together in salons to discuss issues, published articles in newspapers and journals, wrote books and corresponded through letters. Above all, they were concerned to apply reason to problems of the day.

It has been customary to define the Enlightenment in terms of its supposed obsession with reason and universal truths. On this view, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries together comprise the Age of Reason, and René Descartes (1596-1650), with his agenda for a comprehensive system for certain knowledge through rigorous deduction from indubitable premises, is said to epitomize the Enlightenment ideal. But recent scholarship has emphasized the significance of other seventeenth-century thinkers such as G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716), Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and Robert Boyle (1627-1691). In fact, Descartes's early rationalism was largely abandoned by eighteenth-century thinkers in favor of more empiricist approaches stemming from Bacon and Locke. Many Enlightenment thinkers were actually somewhat skeptical about reason. Thus many historians restrict the Age of Reason to the seventeenth century and identify the Enlightenment itself with eighteenth-century intellectual movements.