Age of Enlightenment¶
The Age of Enlightenment, hailed as the triumphant "Age of Reason", promised to liberate humanity through pure intellect, ushering in unending progress, universal happiness, and moral clarity, all derived solely from logic and science. Spanning the 17th and 18th centuries across Europe, it exalted reason, empiricism, and individual rights as the antidotes to ignorance, tyranny, and superstition. Visionaries like Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, and Newton proclaimed reason the ultimate arbiter, poised to decode the cosmos and perfect society. But judged by its own lofty benchmarks -- rational morality, societal harmony, and empirical truth -- the Enlightenment stands exposed as a catastrophic failure, a house of cards that collapsed under its own hubris, spawning the very chaos, relativism, and barbarism it swore to eradicate.
Objective truth isn't forged in the crucible of human logic but revealed personally by the Spirit of Truth, God Himself. The Enlightenment's idolatry of reason flips this divine order, crowning humans as self-luminary gods, in direct defiance of Christ. Genuine enlightenment flows not from self but from union with Christ, the eternal Logos.
John 8:12
Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.
History and Critique¶
Unfolding from late-17th-century England to the 1789 French Revolution, the Enlightenment bubbled with optimism, propelled by breakthroughs in science and philosophy. Yet, as Archpriest Gregory Hallam dissects in Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment, it sprouted humanism from Renaissance and Reformation roots, yielding deism -- a tepid faith with an absentee "clockmaker" God who winds up the universe and bows out, abandoning enchantment, revelation, and sacraments as pre-rational nonsense.
This "rational" ethic infected Europe, igniting revolutions and empires laced with anti-Christian venom. France's Revolution devolved into guillotine terror, branding the Church an enemy. Britain's deism smothered vibrant faith, barely offset by heart-centered Methodism. Hallam exposes the fragmentation: mind versus heart, reason clashing with faith -- a false binary that poisons the mind and soul.
Isolated by Ottoman chains and Russian upheavals, ancient Christianity engaged the Enlightenment posthumously, unmasking its secular sleight-of-hand that swapped sacred mystery for diluted rationalism, birthing atheism. Hume's evidence obsession torpedoed reason's throne, ushering scientism. But Orthodoxy rejects the split: knowledge blooms in prayerful synergy of mind and heart.
Limits of Rationalism¶
The Enlightenment's boast -- unaided reason seizing ultimate truth -- implodes on inspection, flunking its own rational rigor. Reason can't corral creation, much less its Creator. Math, reason's crown jewel, hinges on irrationals like π (endless, unresolved) or √2 (square diagonal). Fractals boast "impossible" feats: bounded space in boundless bounds, mirroring nature's clouds, trees, cells via chaos theory, eluding rational grasp. The world is clearly not contained in rationalism.
If math and matter defy total reason, how dare it cage God, architect of logic, space, time? Enlightenment rationalism posits a clockwork cosmos where God (if any) bows to human logic, akin to Calvin's rigid predestination -- yet Scripture unveils a God delighting in one's repentance, shattering mechanistic molds.
Luke 15:7
I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
Logic and reason are mere tools of consciousness, not autonomous; they spring from Christ's revealed Truth. Without this anchor, knowledge spirals into delusion or endless regress -- "turtles all the way down." Postmodern "deconstructions" nail rationalism's hubris but fail the test of honesty by ditching truth for relativist power plays.
Orthodoxy counters with hesychasm: the mind plunging into heart via prayer, fusing reason with revelation; as Hallam paints it: mind heeds the Spirit's whisper, meeting Christ pre-comprehension, alchemizing knowledge, harmonizing faith with reason, heart with mind -- sans Enlightenment strife.
Enlightenment Nihilism¶
By its own metrics of rational progress and moral elevation, the Enlightenment failed spectacularly, birthing nihilism -- wholesale dismissal of objective ethics, beauty, meaning -- and a modern hellscape of despair. Despite promises of harmony, it sired blood-soaked revolutions, world wars, genocides, totalitarian nightmares (Nazism, Communism), ecological ruin, and psychic plagues like depression epidemics. Universities peddle "your truth" relativism, warping beauty into fad and morality into dominance, fueling a meaning crisis that mocks suffering and purpose.
Matthew 7:16
Know them by their fruits.
Internal rot doomed the enlightenment project: jettisoning Aristotelian telos (human purpose), reason became means-minus-ends, per Hume's is/ought chasm; Kant's duty ethic flopped in yielding concrete morals; Hume's desire-based utility couldn't justify justice; Kierkegaard's ethical leap lacked rationale. This birthed emotivism: morals as manipulative feels without standards. Nietzsche lambasted its cowardice -- toppling dogmas but erecting new "metanarratives" that stifled freedom. Frankfurt School decried technical triumphs without moral growth, enabling industrialized horrors like Auschwitz.
In the end, the church triumphs: Christ, Truth embodied, re-unites God to man, revealing creation and making truth knowable. Beauty, goodness, and truth all call us to return to Him.
John 14:5
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
Enlightenment's "light"? A fraudulent flicker, dooming modernity. Yet Christ's light is eternal, redeeming all. Hallam nails it: Unleash Orthodox Christianity on the West, the fullness of the Christian faith, and watch this sham evaporate.