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Merker: Creating Two Enlightenments from One Christendom
Christianity, as developed by the Catholic Church, was founded on the reason of Plato and Co. as well as the saving sacrifice of Christ. With the recovery of Aristotle’s realism it turned out that things were not so simple. And that was just the start.
As the second Millennium progressed, the Renaissance humanists, while Christian, obtained an access and familiarity with texts of other religions and philosophies.
Christianity started to appear as one of many ancient religions… [with its] truth and “wisdom”… diluted by a willingness to recognize genuine value in other traditions.
Scholars started to discover errors and discrepancies in the various sacred texts, and the Donation of Constantine, the basis of papal power, was exposed as a forgery. It began to seem that the Christian faith was a product of history. And then began the wars of religion, from the German Peasants’ War beginning in 1524 to the Thirty Years War ending in 1648. Not to mention Gutenberg and his press in ____.
Renaissance thinking developed the idea of the “dignity of man” and the notion of mankind occupying a middle ground between the divine and the animals. Instead of mankind in a state of sin needing the salvation of Christ, it seemed that humans were capable of an ascent of the soul towards divinity, drawing on individual and cultural “works of creativity.” Maybe mankind could understand the world by deciphering the Creator’s “book of nature,” the “rational order and harmony which has been imposed on [the world] by God”.
Then there was the dramatic expansion of the scope and possibilities of the world by the age of discovery, and the skeptic movement in the mid 16th century and “the uncertainty of all claims to knowledge, from science to religion.
The uncertainty of skepticism could be resolved by a resort to faith. Or a corpus of knowledge.
[Thus] Western philosophy acquired a long-term goal and agenda; that of arriving at a basis of certainty from which to overcome the crisis of skeptical doubt.
Thus we come into the age of Euclid, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Gassendi.
But then came Newton, whose “mechanics created a ‘god-free zone’” from our domestic experience on Earth “to the ends of the solar system and beyond”. And he inspired thinkers to vault out of physical mechanism to the question of “human affairs, relations, and institutions”, in other words, a “science of man.” It gave rise to the concepts that we are squabbling over to this very day: “social contract”, “human nature”, “common sense of mankind”, “natural laws.”
On the Continent, this thinking led to the idea of revolution. Thus Robespierre, “convinced of the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration… creating a new people.” And all who have followed him were able “to weather its failure with their revolutionary faith intact.”
But there was another strain in the Enlightenment, the “British” one. And the contrast can be understood by a comparison of Liberty and Equality.
In the British concept, Liberty is the right “to be left alone by government, to live life as they had always lived it.” In the Continental version liberté “stood opposed to tradition… It became identified with the dynamic of emancipatory overthrow… [of] an entire way of life.
In the British concept, Equality refers to the “ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen,” and nobody, “the king in particular, is ‘above the law’”. In the French concept egalité means that “social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.” Equal treatment under the law versus “substantive equality.”
Thus the West arrived at a post-Christian culture “divided down the middle by an ideational watershed.”
On the one hand there is a more concrete, every-day, and reformist Enlightenment of the British Isles and America… and on the other, a more abstract emancipatory and revolutionary Enlightenment[.]
Building a life between these clashing ideologies is “a risky enterprise” as we can see in the aftermath of the Two Enlightenments.
More to come.
| Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:19:04 GMT |
Merker: Beginning of the Modern
At the beginning of the last millennium, writes Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise, Europe believed in a simple faith.
[It was an] attempt to promote Christianity as the exclusive and all-encompassing framework for the conduct of human affairs and the fount of final answers to all human questions.
In the First Millennium Christianity picked up Greek philosophy and its primacy of “reason.”
Epistemological primacy of reason, such as Plato and his Theory of Forms.
Moral efficacy of reason, that to know what is right leads directly to acting right.
Ontological primacy of reason, where “nature is held to be pervaded by a universal reason.”
That fitted well into the world of Christian theology, and “a long line of Christian thinkers saw reason as the handmaid of the faith” helping make its doctrines intelligible to the intelligent.
But then came the rediscovery of Aristotle, in the century from 1125-1250, “driven by translations from Arabic and Greek manuscripts in Spain and Sicily.” And that put the cat among the pigeons. Aristotelian empiricism tended to challenge the notion of Christianity as the “repository of ultimate and all-encompassing truth” and its comfortable relationship with Platonism.
It led to a war at the University of Paris between the Faculty of Theology and the Faculty of Arts. The theologists “attempted to control the Aristotelian studies in the Faculty of Arts.” It ended with the Bishop of Paris in 1277 forbidding the philosophers from disagreeing with the theologians. It drove philosophy underground for a century or so.
In Islam, in the 11th Century, “Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers helped Islamic orthodoxy put and end to the philosophical activity that threatened its doctrinal commitments.” No such luck in Christendom.
Christian orthodoxy… never succeeded in stamping out the philosophical ferment stimulated by the reception of Aristotle.
Instead the “reception of Aristotle” began the long process that separated reason from faith, philosophy from theology, natural philosophy from metaphysics, and science from philosophy.
Naturally, the Church tried to put a stop to this, with philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for heresy in 1600 and the 1633 arrest and trial of Galileo. But it failed, and theology diminished in importance, and inquisitive minds started to go their own way to answer unanswered questions.
For Merker, the Protestant Reformation represents the definitive end of the medieval hope for a “Comprehensive Christian Culture.” Now Christians would practice their faith in denominations, and scholarship detached itself from the Christian framework.
But it wasn’t until Newton and the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that Christianity itself came under attack.
More to come.
| Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:39:47 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Anyone who raises the subject of race is a racist. The one who talks about race the longest is the racist.
When a political movement achieves its objectives it doesn’t go home.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: The Human Rubble from the Rulers' Failures
