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The Age of Rationalism (1658-1789)

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The Age of Rationalism (1658-1789) THE AGE OF RATIONALISM (1658-1789) Volume IV of AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY From an Orthodox Christian Point of View Vladimir Moss @ Copyright, Vladimir Moss, 2020. All Rights Reserved It appears from all this that the person of the king is sacred, and that to attack him in any way is sacrilege. God has the kings anointed by the prophets with the holy unction in like manner as He has his bishops and altars anointed… Kings should be guarded as holy things, and whosoever neglects to protect them is worthy of death… The royal power is absolute… The prince need render account of his acts to no one. Bénigne Bossuet, Politics Taken from the Word of Scripture (1679). Over time, Christendom became a philosophical and historical concept, not an operational principle of strategy or international order. Henry Kissinger, World Order. The economic capital of the new civilization was Antwerp… its typical figure, the paymaster of princes, was the international financier. R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). The Wars of these Times are rather to be Waged with Gold than with Iron. William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England (1694). Lo, thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All. Alexander Pope, Dunciad. [A Tory is] one that believes God, not the people, to be the origin of all civil power. John Wesley. Monarchies conform best to human nature, and therefore constitute the most durable form of state. Gianbattista Vico. Since the day a popular assembly condemned Jesus Christ to death the Church has known that the rule of the majority can lead to any crime. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet. We have no government capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion… Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. American President John Adams. By God’s dispensation it has fallen to me to correct both the state and the clergy; I am to them both sovereign and patriarch; they have forgotten that in [pagan] antiquity these [roles] were combined… I have conquered an empire, but have never been able to conquer myself. Tsar Peter the Great. We became citizens of the world, but ceased in certain respects to be citizens of Russia. The fault is Peter’s. Nikolai Karamzin (1810). 2 The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual. Diderot, Encyclopedia. Liberty can consist only in the ability to do what everyone ought to desire, and in not being forced to do what should not be desired. Catherine the Great of Russia, Nakaz. If we can gain something by being honest, we will be it; and if we have to deceive, we shall be cheats. King Frederick the Great of Prussia. Whatever I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong; the best of all casuists is the conscience… Reason deceives us only too often and we have earned all too well the right to reject it, but conscience never deceives. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract. This right of opposition, mad though it is, is sacred. Diderot, Refutation of Helvétius. I love the cause of liberty, but the madness of the multitude is but one degree better than submission to the Tea Act. James Allen of Philadelphia. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again... Thomas Paine (1776). Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Amendment 1 of the American Constitution (1787). The State, it seems to me, is not made for religion, but religion for the State. Abbé Guillaume Raynal (1780). Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, preface. Poor human reason, when it trusts in itself, substitutes the strangest absurdities for the highest divine concepts. St. John Chrysostom. 3 INTRODUCTION 7 I. THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROGRAMME 8 1. THE SUN KING 9 2. THE RESTORATION OF THE ENGLISH MONARCHY 17 3. THE ROYAL SOCIETY AND THE BACONIAN VISION 29 4. THE PATRIARCHAL THEORY OF KINGSHIP 34 5. THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION 39 6. ISAAC NEWTON AND THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 48 7. JOHN LOCKE AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT 61 8. WAR, CALVINISM AND JEWISH BANKERS 73 9. THE PEACE OF UTRECHT 81 10. ENGLAND’S CONSERVATIVE ENLIGHTENMENT 87 11. FRANCE’S RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT 100 12. THE NEW GOLDEN AGE 107 13. THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION 110 14. THE RISE OF PRUSSIA 127 15. ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM: FREDERICK THE GREAT 131 16. HUME: THE IRRATIONALITY OF RATIONALISM 142 17. KANT: THE REAFFIRMATION OF WILL 153 18. KANT ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 158 19. HAMANN AND HERDER: THE DENIAL OF UNIVERSALISM 165 20. THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY 169 21. FREEMASONRY AND ECUMENISM 179 22. AMERICAN FREEMASONRY AND REVIVALISM 183 23. THE SEVEN YEARS WAR AND THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 189 24. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: (1) THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 202 25. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: (2) THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION 207 26. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: (3) THE BLACKS AND THE INDIANS 215 27. EAST MEETS WEST: (1) INDIA 222 4 28. EAST MEETS WEST: (2) ARABIA 227 29. EAST MEETS WEST: (3) CHINA AND JAPAN 231 30. TWO CONCEPTS OF FREEDOM 240 31. ROUSSEAU: PROPHET OF THE REVOLUTION 247 32. FROM VALLEY FORGE TO THE BASTILLE 266 II. RUSSIAN ABSOLUTISM 271 33. THE SCHISM OF THE OLD RITUALISTS 272 34. TSAR VERSUS PATRIARCH 283 35. THE MESSIAH IN TURKEY 296 36. THE OLD RITUALISTS REBEL 300 37. FROM HOLY RUS’ TO GREAT RUSSIA 307 38. PETER THE GREAT: (1) IMITATOR OF THE WEST 314 39. PETER THE GREAT: (2) ENLIGHTENER OF THE EAST 320 40. PETER THE GREAT: (3) OPPRESSOR OF THE CHURCH 326 41. THE PERSECUTIONS OF THE BALKAN ORTHODOX 341 42. BIRONOVSHCHINA: THE GERMAN PERSECUTION OF ORTHODOXY 353 43. HOLY BAPTISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 359 44. TSARITSA ELIZABETH 365 45. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (1) THE NOBILITY 372 46. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (2) UKRAINE AND TURKEY 380 47. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (3) POLAND 385 48. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (4) THE JEWS 393 49. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (5) THE PUGACHEV REBELLION 402 50. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (6) THE CHURCH AND THE FREEMASONS 407 CONCLUSION. THE DARK HEART OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 421 5 6 INTRODUCTION This book is the fourth volume in my series A Universal History from the Point of View of Orthodox Christianity. It traces the history of the Age of Reason or Enlightenment, when men ceased believing in the revealed wisdom of the past and began to look forward to a utopian future based exclusively on science and technology. Their optimism was based on a false understanding and use of reason, whose products were now considered to supersede completely all Biblical and Christian revelation. In fact, while the lower classes continued to believe in Christianity, the “educated” classes ceased to believe in it almost completely; the unreason of rationalism and scientism, - the false worship and radical misunderstanding of science’s nature and bounds, - became widespread and fashionable. However, this age was not religionless (no age is truly religionless), even among the educated classes: apart from the secular religions of humanism and scientism, they also increasingly confessed the religion of Freemasonry, which spread from England to most of Europe and America from the early eighteenth century, becoming the dominant faith of the French on the eve of the French revolution. The second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries was a time of extraordinary change in Europe. In Russia the Orthodox autocracy faltered and was transformed into a form of absolutism by Peter the Great. In England, meanwhile, the Divine Right monarchy of the Stuarts was transformed into the constitutional monarchy of William and Mary and the Hanovers. And Freemasonry was born in its organized form. Hardly less important was the rapid development of science and the scientific world-view propagated systematically and corporately for the first time by the Royal Society, which was founded immediately after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. The Enlightenment began in England in the first half of the eighteenth century and then acquired a more extreme expression among the French philosophers Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and others in the second half of the century. The Enlightenment was the third major turning-point in modern western history after the Humanist Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. No authority, whether pagan or patristic, scholastic or scriptural, was now immune from the ravages of unfettered and unenlightened reason. In the face of the assault of this new “enlightened” religion, Orthodox Russia faltered, but did not fall: if, from the time of Peter the Great, the noble class became largely westernized, absorbing the new ideas through a cluster of Masonic lodges, the common people remained faithful to Orthodoxy and worthy of the mercy of God.
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