The Age of Reason
If Americans believed in Saints, Benjamin Franklin would be among them. He exemplified so many virtues Americans have come to admire. People found him practical, earthy, witty, and above all, tolerant.
A few weeks before he died, Franklin responded to an inquiry concerning his religious faith. He said:
As to Jesus of Nazareth, … I have … some doubts as to his Divinity, tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence . . . of making his doctrines more respected and better observed.
Something of the current American spirit is in that quote. It is the spirit of Franklin’s time, the Age of Reason (1648-1789). Questions of dogma seemed unimportant, hardly worth fretting about. What was immensely more important was behavior. Do our beliefs make us more tolerant, more respectful of those who differ with us, more responsive to the true spirit of Jesus?
If that hatred of religious bigotry, coupled with a devotion to a tolerance of all religious opinions, has a familiar ring, it is because the attitudes of the Age of Reason are not a thing of the past. They live on today in the values of the Western world.
The Age of the Reformation proved again that faith and power are a potent brew. As long as Christians had access to power, they used it to compel conformity to the truth: Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. So men died for their faith, tens of thousands of them. Until something general but very deep in man awoke to revolt.
We call that revolt the Age of Reason, or as some prefer, the Enlightenment. The spirit of the Age of Reason was nothing less than an intellectual revolution, a whole new way of looking at God, the world, and one’s self. It was the birth of secularism.
The Middle Ages and the Reformation were centuries of faith in the sense that reason served faith, the mind obeyed authority. To a Catholic, it was church authority; to a Protestant, it was biblical authority. Either way, God’s word came first, not man’s thoughts. Man’s concern in this life was supposed to be his preparation for the next.
The Age of Reason rejected that. In place of faith, it set reason. Man’s primary concern was not the next life, but happiness and fulfillment in this world; and the mind of man, rather than faith, was the best guide to happiness – not emotions, or myths, or superstitions.
Let us endeavor to disperse those clouds of ignorance, those mists of darkness, which impede Man on his journey, … which prevent his marching through life with a firm and steady step. Let us try to inspire him … with respect for his own reason-with an inextinguishable love of truth … so that he may learn to know himself … and no longer be duped by an imagination that has been led astray by authority … so that he may learn to base his morals on his own nature, on his own wants, on the real advantage of society … so that he may learn to pursue his true happiness, by promoting that of others …in short, so that he may become a virtuous and rational being, who cannot fail to become happy.
Baron von Holbach
How did this new spirit take root and grow? Its seeds probably lie in the Reformation-era itself, in a movement historians call the Renaissance. The word means “rebirth” and refers to the recovery of the values of classical Greek and Roman civilization expressed in literature, politics and the arts.
Perhaps the best example of the rebirth of the classical spirit was Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467-1536). In a series of best-selling satires highlighted by In Praise of Folly, Erasmus ridiculed monasticism and scholasticism by the use of irony, wit, and enlightened common sense. Erasmus’s followers thought they heard a true reformer in him. He laid the egg, they said, that Luther hatched.
But, in 1524, a significant conflict between Luther and Erasmus erupted. In that year Erasmus’ Diatribe on Free Will appeared. It made clear the cardinal differences between the two men. Luther believed that the human will was enslaved, totally unable, apart from grace, to love or serve God. But Erasmus considered this a dangerous doctrine since it threatened to relieve man of his moral responsibility. What Luther regarded basic to biblical religion, Erasmus dismissed in the name of scholarship.
The differences in the Reformation and the Renaissance lie right there, in the view of man. The Reformers preached the original sin of man and looked upon the world as “fallen” from God’s intended place. The Renaissance had a positive estimate of human nature and the universe itself. This confidence in man and his powers flowered and filled the air with fragrance during the Enlightenment.
Another root of the Enlightenment runs through the century (1550-1650) of appalling religious conflicts: the English Civil War, the persecution of the French Huguenots, and the Thirty Years War in Germany. Common decency cried out against the power of fanatical clerics. More and more people felt only disgust at the burning or drowning of an elderly woman accused of witchcraft or heresy. Religious prejudice seemed like a far greater danger than atheism. So a thirst for tolerance and truths common to all men spread.
Please leave a thought or question on this reading in the comments below.
I never heard of the word heresy so I looked it up found out that it means opinion on religion and that’s why Girl you got on house arrest for the rest of his life pretty interesting
I learned a bunch of vocabulary. Soo… bigotry is intolerance towards those who have different ideas from you. Duped means deceive; trick. I also learned that Erasmus is a chicken. (jk)
There is a lot of vocabulary. It is interesting how Benjamin Franklin was considered a “saint”, and his views of the church. I think that Erasthmus was not a reformer because he wasn’t really a Christian.
when people tried to control everything they forget that you will always have a group of people that dont like it. and for some reason history and rationality take a back seat and war starts… again.
I learned what bigotry means.
I had to look up dogma (because I was confused and because it had dog in it) and it meant “a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.”
I had to look up fanatical and it means obsessivley concerned about something
i learned what bigotry means also i learned what witty means
same i learned a lot of vocabulary
I learned the meanings of several words and the religious views of Erasthmus, Martin Luther, and Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin didn’t care if people believed in Christ, yet he didn’t care to try to believe. He thought ill see what happens when I die. What I think of this is, it is not that smart because if you are wrong, you go to Hell. We already know he’s wrong, because the Bible tells us that Christ is the King and the only way to get to heaven.