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Enlightenment
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The central theme of the Enlightenment is the effort to humanize religion. All philosophes rejected original sin. Here Pascal became a problem for them. For Pascal used their method of analytic logic to prove the existence of original sin and the utter inability of the unaided human reason o solve the problem without accepting the authority of faith. How do you explain the "double nature" of mankind? It becomes intelligible only through the doctrine of the fall of man. Pascal haunted Voltaire all his life. The cruel laughter of the Candide could not suppress the problem of evil.
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The Enlightenment was the philosophical and literary counterpart to the rise of natural science. It sought to apply methods of rational inquiry to religion, ethics, politics, and psychology. Most forms of religious authority--creeds, miracles, sacraments Scriptures, clergy, and ecstatic or mystical experience--were challenged by the Enlightenment, which claimed to accept only the authority of reason. The Enlightenment went through many phases, presenting varied stances toward Christianity. The Enlightenment was anti-Christian in the Jesuit reductions, the French Revolution, and in Deism's critique of Christianity. On the positive side, the United States' constitutional settlement which guaranteed religious freedom drew significantly from the ideas of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers.
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Long recognized as more than the writings of a dozen or so philosophes, the Enlightenment created a new secular culture populated by the literate and the affluent. Enamoured of British institutions, Continental Europeans turned to the imported masonic lodges and found in them a new forum that was constitutionally constructed and logically egalitarian. Originating in the Middle Ages, when stone-masons joined together to preserve their professional secrets and to protect their wages, the English and Scottish lodges had by the eighteenth century discarded their guild origins and become an international phenomenon that gave men and eventually some women a place to vote, speak, discuss and debate. Margaret Jacob argues that the hundreds of masonic lodges founded in eighteenth-century Europe were among the most important enclaves in which modern civil society was formed. In France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain men and women freemasons sought to create a moral and social order based upon reason and virtue, and dedicated to the principles of liberty and equality. A forum where philosophers met with men of commerce, government, and the professions, the masonic lodge created new forms of self-government in microcosm, complete with constitutions and laws, elections, and representatives.
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Perhaps the best way to grasp the Enlightenment project clearly is to identify what these thinkers were rejecting. They saw their societies as emerging from the darkness of superstition, ignorance, and intolerance -- much of that associated with the Medieval Catholic Church and with Feudal monarchy. In place of poetic mysteries and corporate authority, these new writers supported individual endeavor and innovation. For humankind to advance... people had to develop their powers of reason and leave behind their reliance on emotion and the special aura of superstitious belief. What lay ahead was a world of shared human action and thought (relying on reason, which provided a universal, cross-cultural, shared foundation). From that would come universal peace and prosperity and the opening of the competition for power and social prominence to the talented, rather than to those privileged by birth and station.
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The precursors of the Enlightenment can be traced to the 17th century and earlier. They include the philosophical rationalists René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, the political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and various skeptical thinkers in France such as Pierre Bayle. Equally important... were the self-confidence engendered by new discoveries in science—by Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo, for example—and the spirit of cultural relativism encouraged by the exploration of the non-European world.
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The value of Enlightenment cannot be compared with any other things. If Enlightenment is attained, one will become the best existence in the world. Once Enlightened, it makes oneself exist permanently and when he is born again in the future, his outstanding origin will make him a Tathagata or a Great King with great power.
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Enlightenment