“Dare to Know” The medieval man considered religion above all else, with life composed and ordered by God. His duty was to accept the Word, live accordingly, and reach salvation. As the seventeenth century matured, man’s ideas and theories began to mature and change. Certain men, “philosophes,” began to confront the medieval man’s way of thinking. Instead of relying on societal tradition, philosophes such as Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Denis Diderot, and Immanuel Kant challenged their contemporaries to use reason in their individual lives and religion to go beyond what had normally been accepted as fact. This Age of Enlightenment lasted throughout the eighteenth-century, but the facts of and the debate about this monumental shift in public thought continues to be studied today.
Many modern historians claim different interpretations of the Enlightenment, its actors, and its components. Writing from the perspective of the twentieth-century, Carl L. Becker ably describes the intellectual scene leading up to the Enlightenment in his book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. “Intelligence was essential, since God had endowed men with it. But the function of intelligence was strictly limited.” Man did not question his origin or what would …show more content…
“The philosophes were nearer the Middle Ages, less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval Christian thought, than they quite realized or we have commonly supposed.” Becker also goes on to argue that before the seventeenth century, there existed a rational climate of opinion, but the Age of Enlightenment brought with it a factual climate of opinion. Becker’s title points to two things: the medieval man’s engrained notions of Heaven and the salvation needed to get there, and eighteenth-century thought patterns that helped to enlighten Europeans, who would reconstruct a Heavenly City of different
Many modern historians claim different interpretations of the Enlightenment, its actors, and its components. Writing from the perspective of the twentieth-century, Carl L. Becker ably describes the intellectual scene leading up to the Enlightenment in his book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. “Intelligence was essential, since God had endowed men with it. But the function of intelligence was strictly limited.” Man did not question his origin or what would …show more content…
“The philosophes were nearer the Middle Ages, less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval Christian thought, than they quite realized or we have commonly supposed.” Becker also goes on to argue that before the seventeenth century, there existed a rational climate of opinion, but the Age of Enlightenment brought with it a factual climate of opinion. Becker’s title points to two things: the medieval man’s engrained notions of Heaven and the salvation needed to get there, and eighteenth-century thought patterns that helped to enlighten Europeans, who would reconstruct a Heavenly City of different