The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism

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Summary: An Erudite Synthesis of the Enlightenment
Review:
Peter Gay is an important intellectual historian and in his lengthy work "The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism" he summarizes the ideas of the great philosophers and how they changed the world. This book is a work of great erudition, of synthesis and he begins with the relationship between the philosophers of the 18th century and those of the classical period. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, active in the late seventeenth through the middle of the eighteenth century, had an affection for the Greek and Roman era, but felt the recent discoveries in science, the search for empirical fact, had allowed their own era to supercede the work of the great classical philosophers.
While the classicists inspired the philosophers of the Enlightenment, theis new breed of thinkers were generally contemptuous of religion and they sought to confront, to challenge and to overturn the philosophical concepts of the Hebrew and Christian thinkers who they viewed as their rhetorical adversaries in the battle beaten reason and faith.
Gay is an engaging writer with a gift for synthesizing a raft of material. Here he neatly summarizes the philosophical historians work: "...the philosophes wrote history with rage and with partisanship, and their very passion allowed them to penetrate into regions hitherto inaccessible to historical explorers. Yet it also made them condescending and oddly parochial: their sense of the past merged all too readily with their sense of the present." Although the philosophes view of history was critical, pessimistic, they saw the world "divided between ascetic superstitious enemies of the flesh, and men who affirmed life, the body, knowledge, and generosity; between mythmakers and realists, priests and philosophers."
Gay's book neatly depicts an age, the conflicts between enlightenment thinkers and the past, their areas of agreement and disagreement and, their battles with the weakened Christianity of the day. He points out how te philosophers used the scholarship and erudition of the Catholic orders against them. "The Enlightenment" is not a history of philosophy, summarizing the work of each major philosopher, but a history of the way that the ideas and the debate developed in the period. In this volume, he writes of Voltaire, Hume, Smith, Bentham, Gibbon, Diderot, Montsequieu, Lessing, Locke, Holbach, Rousseau and finally, Jefferson and Franklin, intertwining them in a consistent narrative. He concludes the book with a helpful bibliographical essay which will help point those of us who want to do further reading in the right direction. Elegantly written, in clear, crisp prose, "The Enlightenment" is a detailed and nuanced account of the men and ideas that gave us the gift - and curse - of modernity.


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Summary: Rarely has a book been so enlightening
Review: As an intellectual history, "The Rise of Modern Paganism" has few peers. Peter Gay makes sense of a dizzying array of thinkers and their (often dissimilar or even opposing) thoughts. He shows, in prose both clear and elegant, that the Enlightenment was more a phenomenon than a program, albeit a phenomenon tied together by a love of inquiry and intellectual exploration.

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Summary: Engrossing and detailed
Review: Peter Gay needs no introduction, but I still feel that this work needs to be lauded for what it manages to achieve: it provides an exhaustively detailed socio-cultural account of the enlightenment that is as enjoyable as it is informative. The main slant of this work, namely that the 18th century enlightenment was a reprisal/continuation/adoration of classical (hence Pagan) culture is coherent and functions as a solid structure to this work. Highly recommended.

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Summary: excellent book!
Review: The Enlightenment has met many critics nowadays, which even make people overlook the positive worth of the enlightenment to modren society. This great book can help readers make a comprehensive and positive view to the enlightenment. I recommend it !

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Summary: Crush the Infamy!
Review: Unlike the reformation there was no counter-enlightenment. The Church was ineffectual in mounting an offense against a movement whose claim was that she was an out-moded relic, not to be listened to in a modern, technological world. How do you fight the charge that you are irrelevant without admitting irrelevancy? How do you fight the disease without spreading it? And as Peter Gay shows, the philosophes needed no help in spreading the word. They were a brilliant collection of Scientists, Philosophers and writers spread out over the west for almost three generations. They included such luminaries as Voltaire, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, J. J. Rousseau and so on, even to this country (we recognize two philosophes, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin on our currency). They were involved in a conspiracy (literally) to change their world. And to give you some idea how successful they were, the first generation lived in a world ruled exclusively by hereditary monarchy; the last lived to see both the French and American revolutions and the beginnings of democracy.

The philosophes taught a cheerful kind of self-reliance. Salvation was not to be found in the heavens above, but in the human race. They fought to replace barbaric institutions with new modes of thought that would inspire, not oppress, the human spirit. New modes of government (democracy). New methods of tending the sick (see Foucault's "Birth of the Clinic") and the insane (see Foucault's "Madness and Civilization"). New modes of punishing offenders (see Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"). New modes of thought. To examine our existing institutions we need not go back to the Middle Ages (the term "Middle Ages" is an example of enlightenment newspeak: the Middle ages designates nothing more than period the West lay fallow between the death of ancient paganism and it rebirth in the "Renaissance." It is a way of saying that while the Church ruled Europe, nothing of consequence happened) except as a point of contrast. They changed everything.

We have an odd relation to these philosophes. We recognize them as simplistic, overbearing, overconfident and, in many ways, flat out wrong. We also recognize them as the founding fathers of our world. They assured us, get rid of religion and wars would cease from the world, that religion (or rather specific religions e.g. Christianity) was the source of bigotry on the earth. So we did as they suggested and the wars just got bigger, the auto-de-fe's were replaced by concentration camps and the savagery they told us would disappear simply grew when the institutions built to contain them were dismantled.

They seemed to believe that we could have the results of Christian morality, without Christianity, if we simply replace religion with reason. The problem is that Christianity is a religion with a specific content and reason has no content at all. When you make the move you end up with a categorical imperative that we can debate the validity of, but is no real morality as it is effective only over individuals who accept its terms. And not all individual will understand the argument, much less accept the terms of it. The morality of reason preaches only to it own converts, leaving the rest to their own devices. The philosophes proved to be social tinkerers and we are their experiment.

Gay's book is beautifully written, wonderfully detailed and very, very long (I refer here to the two volume set), but it brings you into touch with those amazing individuals, their struggle together, and amongst themselves, the varying social climates in which they lived (Germay was different from France which was different again from England), their resentment towards the establishment, followed by their becoming the establishment. I could barely put it down.