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Since Carl Becker's book on the heavenly city of the philosophes, historians have recognized that the Enlightenment was motivated, by a secularized version of the biblical story - a fall from the Golden Age of the classical world into the darkness of superstitution and priestcraft, the gospel of Enlightenment and daring to think.
But Becker was not the first to recognize the paradoxically irrational commitment to reason among the philosophes. Two of the early critics of the revolution, Burke and Tocqueville, recognized the same.
Here is Burke drawing on what Michael Burleigh calls "the vocabulary of High Anglican disdain for the religious precursors of modern ideological 'fanatics'":
"The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from then, by easy progress, with spirit of persecution according to their means. . . . These Atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. . . . To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct, it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and life."
Tocqueville saw the revolution arising from the Enlightenment dreams of reason: "Above the real society . . . there was slowly built an imaginary society in which everything seemed simple and coordinated, uniform, equitable, and in accord with reason. Gradually the imagination of the crowd deserted the former to concentrate on the latter. One lost interest in what was, in order to think about what could be, and finally one lived mentally in that ideal city the writers had built."
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 03:57 PM
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