The crystallization of counter-enlightenment and philosophe identities: theological controversy and catholic enlightenment in pre-revolutionary France

Church History, Dec, 2008 by Jeffrey D. Burson

In short, the philosophical, theological, and sociocultural permeability of the first half of the eighteenth century makes it difficult to distinguish Radical Enlightenment from Moderate Enlightenment from Counter-Enlightenment until the 1750s. The questions, then, that my work addresses are the often uniquely French contingencies of the 1750s by which both Counter-Enlightenment and philosophe identity formation occurred. Israel does recognize that the Counter-Enlightenment often unintentionally played directly into the hands of the most radical writers, but he insists that this has much to do with their "faith-based hostility to philosophy"; (8) on the contrary, it is here argued that the Counter-Enlightenment was often a child of the very same moderate center, but an offspring beset by an identity crisis of its own creation. Passionately fearful of unbelief after the 1750s especially, and endlessly divided against themselves, Counter-Enlightenment partisans and apologists often argued for the social utility and rationality of church history and mystery while retrospectively condemning the epistemological bases for such arguments vested in the theological enlightenment of the early eighteenth century that had rhetorically synthesized certain Lockean and Cartesian principles.

Israel's work reminds us that advancing toward a more nuanced consensus that is attuned to the plurality of religious and secular Enlightenment discourses in France, and indeed Europe as a whole, necessitates a willingness to eschew reification. For example, though anticlericalism was a salient common denominator of the Enlightenment, and all Enlightenment writers were attuned to the voice of nature and deeply suspicious of the tendency for corrupt priesthoods to usurp and falsify God's voice in sectarian religions, not all Enlightenment writers throughout the eighteenth century believed that the voice of God was synonymous with the voice of nature. My own research into the intersection of religion and Enlightenment in France reveals the existence (pre-1750s) of a plurality of Enlightenments, often bisecting national boundaries or scholarly categories like "Radical," "Moderate," or "Counter-Enlightenment." Some were more or less deistic, most were anticlerical in some sense, but most were also not intrinsically anti-Christian (anticlericalism does not equal anti-Christian--if it did, Erasmus and nearly every European writer as early as the Renaissance would have to be considered anti-Christian). Some Enlightenment discourses were more materialistic, while others wanted a purification of revealed religion more susceptible to natural science and reason, and not precisely the metaphysical abolition of revelation entirely. In short, legitimate and creatively enervating differences of scholarly opinion prevail on these matters, and rushing to define Enlightenment as inherently anticlerical, inherently modern, primarily deistic, or materialistic, and therefore anti-Catholic, is merely another form of reification in defiance of the fluid and nuanced discourses of early eighteenth-century France revealed in the sources themselves.