The Age of Enlightenment was a period in which Europe experienced radical changes in the intellectual sense with the changes brought about by the Renaissance and the Reformation. Before the Age of Enlightenment, both the common people and the ruling classes in Europe believed in superstitious beliefs such as magic and sorcery. The thinkers and writers who emerged in the Age of Enlightenment were harshly critical of the dominant ideas and endeavoured to replace these ideas with a more modern and rational understanding. In European history, the Age of Enlightenment played an important role in Europe’s emphasis on reason and science. The revolutions and civil wars that occurred after the Age of Enlightenment contributed to Europe’s prioritisation of modern science and reason.
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The different economic structures of different social groups in Europe led to different intellectual endeavors. The Renaissance and Reformation emerged at a time when superstitious beliefs were widespread in every field.
Superstition was not only prevalent among peasants. They were also widespread among rulers. Kings were collecting relics. Some rulers practiced rituals related to magic and witchcraft.
Such beliefs went hand in hand with ignorance about the real causes of the evils that afflicted the population. Sudden deaths were common and, given the level of knowledge, the causes were often not understood. The ignorance of doctors was such that what they prescribed as cures made the disease worse, not better.
An outbreak of plague or scarlet fever could wipe out a quarter or more of a town’s population. Devastating crop failures, once every decade or so, were to be expected for the majority of people. A fire could destroy an entire street or a whole city.
The only long-term solution to any of these problems was a clear understanding of the natural causes behind unnatural phenomena. But science was not yet completely divorced from superstition. Chemistry, the science of separating and combining natural substances, was intertwined with alchemy, the belief that base metals could be turned into gold. Astronomy, the science of the movements of the stars and planets to determine dates and plan ocean voyages, was tied to astrology, a belief system that sought to predict events.
Europe was trying to survive in an environment dominated by such a mindset. However, over time, science began to separate itself from superstitious beliefs. It was the scientific work of important scientists that contributed to this separation.
The scientific work of these scientists began to be taken more into account thanks to the innovations created by the Renaissance and the Reformation. Thus, a period of enlightenment began to take place in Europe. Copernicus, a Polish monk, proposed in 1543 that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun.
When Copernicus’ errors in calculating the motions of the planets were realized, a problem arose. It took another half century for this problem to be solved mathematically by Kepler, namely, that the calculations would be correct if it was accepted that the planets moved in an elliptical orbit rather than a circular one. But Kepler’s own views were also magical by today’s standards.
He believed that the distance of the planets from each other and from the sun was not an expression of physical forces, but of qualities inherent in the numerical series. Kepler had reverted to the Platonic or even Pythagorean notion that there was a universal pattern in different parts of reality, older and at least more mystical than the world painted by Aristotle.
Neo-Platonism was influential until the second half of the 17th century. In 1609, using the newly invented telescope, Galileo made a major contribution to the acceptance of Copernicus’ conception of the universe by discovering that the moon had craters and mountains.
This showed that the moon was not made of a completely different material than the earth, as the Aristotle-Ptolemy thesis claimed. Galileo also developed elements of the new physics by showing how bodies move, contrary to Aristotle’s view. But these developments were not yet enough for a comprehensive enlightenment in Europe.
Galileo accepted that the universe was finite and did not accept Kepler’s view that the planets moved elliptically. Up to this point, Galileo was still a prisoner of the old ideas. Soon he would be tried by the Inquisition, forced to reject the Copernican system and kept under house arrest until his death, becoming a prisoner in another sense.
The debates on physics and astronomy were intertwined with the general ideological debates of the time. In 1543, Copernicus was able to publish his views without fear of prosecution by the Catholic Church to which he belonged. While the Catholic Church based the reform of the calendar on calculations based on Copernicus’ model, some of the harshest criticism came from Melanchthon, a disciple of Luther.
But the Counter-Reformation had changed the course of events. Aristotle and Aquinas had taught that everything and everyone had its place in the order of things. There was a definite hierarchy of heavenly bodies and an equally immutable hierarchy on earth. This was the perfect worldview not only for kings and those who wanted to overthrow the Reformation, but also for those who wanted to subordinate the rebellious middle and lower classes to the old feudal order.
From such a point of view, the Copernican worldview was as destructive as that of Luther or Calvin. In 1600, Giardano Bruno was burned at the stake for asserting that the worlds were infinite. The ideological climate of Catholic states worked against further scientific research.
Upon hearing of Galileo’s trial, the French mathematician and philosopher Descartes concealed findings that would later eclipse those of Newton. It is not surprising that the center of scientific progress shifted to the Dutch Republic and post-revolutionary England.
This development was made up of social groups that wanted to improve the knowledge of Protestantism’s popular base of artisans and small merchants, even if that knowledge was only reading and writing to read the Bible. The spread of Protestantism was accompanied by efforts to promote literacy, and once people could read and write, new worlds of thought opened up before them.
Moreover, the fact that the old orthodoxy was being challenged opened people’s minds to other challenges. This was most clearly seen during the English Revolution. The Presbyterians, who challenged the bishops and the king, could not do so without a rollback of censorship. But on the other hand, this allowed those with a whole range of other religious views to express them freely. Amidst the cacophony of religious prophecies and scriptural interpretations, for the first time people were able to openly express their doubts about it all.
The conservative political theorist Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan, a thoroughly materialist work that challenged the notion of religious miracles. During the Restoration, Hobbes feared that he would be burned at the stake for his ideas that went against accepted religious beliefs. But in fact he was given a pension by the king and the society he founded became the Royal Socitey.
Science was increasingly becoming synonymous with increased control over the natural world, which bore fruit in agriculture, commerce, industry and military activity. This did not mean that the battle against superstition had been won. In the advanced industrialized countries, large numbers of people believed in magic and sorcery.
The most radical intellectual challenge to accepted ideas took place in the aftermath of the Dutch and English revolutions. Elsewhere in Europe, more intellectually alert sections of the middle and upper classes began to think that their society was flawed and sought to change it by changing thinking. This was an attack on prejudice and superstition that had far more lasting effects than the Renaissance and Reformation. The result was a movement of thought known as the Enlightenment.
The thinkers and writers who initiated and developed the Age of Enlightenment believed in the power of rational understanding based on empirical knowledge. This had to be applied to the world, even if it meant challenging existing myths and established beliefs. Such an approach meant challenging much of the ideology and institutions of existing European societies.
Another influence was that of philosophers such as Descartes in France, Spinoza in the Netherlands and Leibniz in southwest Germany. They were convinced that the world could be fully understood from a few irresistible principles of reason, a belief that had developed in the 18th century based on Newton’s success in developing fundamental laws in physics.
Another influence came from a quite different tradition started in England by John Locke. Locke insisted that knowledge comes not from the innate ideas of the rationalists, but from empirical observation of things that already exist. Locke was as politically conservative as Leibniz. He reflected the views of the English gentleman landowners and merchants. Their aims had been realized once the English kings had agreed to rule with an upper-class parliament.
But as the 18th century progressed, in France and Germany, increasingly radical conclusions were drawn from the English empiricist approach. Thus in France, Voltaire and Montesquieu were great admirers of Locke and concluded from his writings that the countries of continental Europe could be reformed along the lines of England. A conservative doctrine in England could become a destructive doctrine across the English Channel.
Enlightenment thinkers were not revolutionaries. They were dissident intellectuals who saw the upper classes as their sponsors. They pinned their hopes not on the destruction of society but on its rehabilitation by winning the war of ideas.
However, no matter how reluctant they were to take a radical stance, Enlightenment thinkers challenged some of the basic foundations of the societies in which they lived. These were not easily amenable to reform, and powerful interests saw any questioning as a profound betrayal. Many of these thinkers suffered as a result.
Voltaire was beaten by an aristocratic thug; he was briefly imprisoned in the Bastille and felt obliged to live away from Paris for many years. Diderot was imprisoned in the castle of Vincennes near Paris. Rousseau spent the rest of his life in Switzerland, out of the reach of the French authorities.
The Church was particularly hostile to any questioning of established ideas. In southern Europe, the Counter-Reformation viciously crushed any opposition until the second half of the 18th century. In Spain, between 1700 and 1746, 700 auto da fe, the burning alive of heretics, took place. In France, Protestants could be held captive in galleys and tortured.
By challenging such things, thinkers raised fundamental questions about how society is organized, even if they were hesitant to provide full answers. Voltaire’s Candide implied that no state in Europe could meet the needs of the people. Rousseau, though he did not seem to have much faith in the masses, began his Social Contract with this revolutionary thought: ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains’.
The philosophers d ‘Holbach and Helvetius attempted a thoroughly materialist analysis of nature and society, rejecting any notion of God. The naturalist Buffon put forward an almost evolutionary theory of animal species and insisted on the uniqueness of the human species, attributing the differences between races to climatic conditions.
The Scotsmen Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith saw human societies progressing through the stages of hunting, animal husbandry and agriculture, thus laying the foundations for a materialist understanding of social development. Enlightenment intellectuals sought to understand human beings and their institutions as no one had done before.
There is also truth in the hegemonic nature of their ideas, as they dominated intellectual debate throughout Europe and everywhere put the proponents of other views on the defensive. They were listened to by everyone, even those at the top, who wanted the kind of economically successful, ‘modern’ society they saw in Britain, rather than the economically stagnant, antiquated societies of continental Europe. At various points, the governments of Austria, Russia, Portugal and Poland tried to carry out reforms that were in line with Enlightenment thinking.
Between 1759 and 1765 the rulers of Portugal, France, Spain, Naples and Parma expelled the Jesuits and, under pressure from Catholic rulers, the pope banned the Jesuit order in Europe.
Enlightenment thinkers very successfully challenged the thinking of intellectuals, including ruling class intellectuals, and this was a much more far-reaching challenge than the challenge of the Reformation two centuries earlier. By the 1780s, the works of Voltaire and Rousseau were ‘addressed to an enormous audience.
Undoubtedly, the Age of Enlightenment had radically changed the European mindset. However, changing ideas was not the same as changing society. This was Another period of revolutions and civil wars was needed to bring about change.