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That demand for certainty cuts against the foundations of our very civilization.
From this era of challenges, two strong new ideas emerged: first, human beings are capable of exploring the world and bettering their material condition in it; second, each human being is free and endowed with natural rights.
chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”
Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors.”7
Bacon instead sought purpose in “extend[ing] more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man.” Bacon wanted to turn the pursuit of knowledge toward “the benefit and use of men . . . for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.”
Bacon, the good of man lay not in the search for God or the pursuit of a virtuous telos, but in the quest to better the material state of man. Morality would surely follow in the wake of man’s technological progress and increased scientific knowledge.
“I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose the least ground for doubt, in order to ascertain whether after that there remained aught in my belief that was wholly indubitable.”
Both Bacon and Descartes, while discarding the teleology of the ancients, maintained faith in the Bible and in God. But they also laid the groundwork for the rise of Deism—and in time, for the fall of religion itself. By cutting final causes from science, by separating God from the natural world, the modern scientific project would eventually remove religion and purpose from the domain of reason—a project that both Bacon and Descartes would have abhorred.
Marsilius saw that the Catholic Church’s power could threaten secular authorities—and that those secular authorities could then turn on the Church.
Machiavelli believed that those who proclaimed that the state could be governed in accordance with virtue were merely lying for the sake of convenience. His cynical suggestion: that states be governed in accordance with virtù, a mix of cruelty and kindness generating both fear and love. The goal of such governance: to prevent utopian schemes designed to instill virtue in the citizenry through the power of the
Machiavelli proposed that human beings are not driven by reason—thereby tacitly rejecting the ancient notion of Aristotelian virtue—but that they were instead driven by passion.
In pursuit of that egalitarian vision, Luther discarded the notion of sanctuary from the secular law: “It is intolerable that in canon law, the freedom, person, and goods of the clergy should be given this exemption, as if the layman were not exactly as spiritual, and as good Christians, as they, or did not equally belong to the church.”
Grotius extended the concept of human rights further than that: he stated that human beings also had rights to do things—the right to act in pursuit of justice by capturing criminals,
Men’s first right, then, was the right to self-preservation. Hierarchies disappear in this regime of natural rights—large, small, smart, stupid, we are all equal in our right to survive.
Locke believed that sovereignty resided in the individual. Locke—a deeply religious Christian—believed in both natural law discoverable by reason and Hobbesian natural right inherent in human existence.
Natural rights, according to Locke, were those rights that sprang from exercise of natural law: a right to property, since we had a corresponding duty not to steal; a right to life, since we had a duty not to kill; a right to liberty, since we had a duty not to oppress.
For Hobbes, the state of nature made life nasty, brutish, and short; for Locke, the state of nature was a place of “men living according to reason, without a common superior on earth, to judge between them.”
According to Locke, then, the formation of a government requires the exercise of consent—or, alternatively, the behavior of the government in accordance with natural law, for example a government’s willingness to protect natural rights. The goal
Most important for American history, Locke openly recognized a right to rebel against a government that violated the rights of its citizens.
Smith posited that the government had but three fundamental duties: preservation of life; preservation of liberty through administration of justice; and funding for public goods.
Thomas Jefferson attempted to enshrine the brilliance of his philosophical forebears in our founding document; in 1825, he explained, “it was intended to be an expression of the American mind. . . . All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”
Jefferson originally worked from a draft of George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was far more specific: “all men are born equally free and independent.”30 Jefferson merely compressed these ideas into the pithier “all men are created equal.”
The vitality of religion was a precondition for a healthy society. No wonder the founders placed such heavy emphasis on freedom of worship.
The founding philosophy acknowledges the possibility of individual purpose.
That purpose is supplied by a Judeo-Christian tradition of meaning and value, and a Greek tradition of reason.
The only thing, according to Adams, that would turn reason toward good, was a societal inculcation of good, and a general pursuit of knowledge itself: “My humble opinion is, that knowledge, upon the whole, promotes virtue and happiness.”37
Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wondered at the fact that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly united . . . Thus the most democratic country on earth is found to be, above all, the one where men in our day have most perfected the art of pursuing the object of their common desires in common and have applied this new science to the most objects.”
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.40
The founding was rife with self-contradiction: that great exponent of liberty, Jefferson, a man who called slavery “a cruel war against human nature,” was a slaveholder and the father of six children by a slave, Sally Hemings; Madison, another slaveholder, said that slavery based on “mere distinction of colour” was “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”
Now, I have argued that the founding philosophy was based on both secular reason and religious morality, that modernity was built on these twin poles, cultivated and perfected through the fires of religious warfare and secular argument.
But advocates for the so-called Enlightenment offer a different theory. They suggest that the philosophy of the modern West—the philosophy of individual rights, particularly—sprang from rejection of religion and embrace of reason.
suggests that belief in Judeo-Christian values and God Himself was at best an obstruction to modern Western civilization.
argue that the Enlightenment only became the Enlightenment by killing God and discarding the idea of an objectively discoverable purpose.
If it weren’t, Enlightenment could have sprung up anywhere, at any time; perhaps it should have arisen earlier in societies without the barriers of Greek telos and Judeo-Christian religion. It didn’t.
It didn’t, because the philosophy of individual rights, springing from the Biblical beliefs that individual human beings are created in God’s image and that individual virtue matters, were key to the Enlightenment.
Most important, Judeo-Christian thought and Greek thought both held in common the belief in purpose.
the Enlightenment had its upside—the glories of American founding philosophy and Western classical liberalism, both of which were direct outgrowths of Athens and Jerusalem—and it had its downside.
First, the drive against religion sprang from the dissolution of Catholic dominance; that dissolution created religious schisms and vacuums that all too often invited brutal violence.
Second, atheism and agnosticism saw a dramatic upswing among intellectuals thanks to the rise in religious fundamentalism: both Lutheranism and Calvinism were, at least in part, responses to the perceived secularization of the Catholic Church.
Religion did become more of an obstacle to secular learning as Catholic homogeneity receded.
Finally, the fragmentation of control by the Catholic Church led to more room to breathe for dissenters. The Peace of Westphalia was explicitly designed to promote more religious freedom for minority religions—and that also allowed new, agnostic philosophies to flourish.
“Machiavelli wants to give Renaissance humanism a hard face: to deflate its esteem for classical rhetoric, to attack its adherence to philosophical tradition, to unsettle its accommodation with Christianity, to refute its belief in the virtues of the classical gentleman, and to remind it of the value and glory of the military.”2
Hobbes applied the standards of rigorous logic to religious revelation itself—and found revelation wanting.
He also discards the Aristotelian telos: “For there is no such Finis ultimus, (utmost aim,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Moral Philosophers. . . . Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter.”
the search for meaning cannot be found in seeking final causes; nature contains no such information.
In a state of nature, “nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice.”5 If moral relativism began anywhere, it began in Hobbes.
His crime involved his declarations that the Bible did not mention immortality, that God might take physical form in the universe, and that the immortal soul might not actually be immortal, but mere life-force.
“instead of God’s Word, they are beginning to worship likeness and images, that is, paper and ink.”
He declared that Moses did not write the Torah; he stated that the Torah had been written centuries later by another figure. He dismissed miracles, the text of the Bible, and its commandments. As
“religion is manifested not in charity, but in spreading contention among men and in fostering the bitterest hatred, under the false guise of zeal in God’s cause and a burning enthusiasm.”
