1649–1789

The Age of Reason: the scientific revolution, Newton’s world-machine and the crisis of faith (1649–1789)

Shelley: the Reformation argued about salvation, the Enlightenment rejected all supernatural religion; respect for science and reason replaced Christian faith as the cornerstone of Western culture. Shelley sees the roots of the age in the Renaissance, in weariness of the wars of religion (1550–1650), in English freedom and in the new science from Copernicus to Newton (the Principia, 1687), whose world-machine gave rise to the belief that man will find truth through the senses and reason. The view of man changes: instead of an enslaved sinner in need of grace, a rational being who needs common sense.

Key points

• Spirit of the age: Franklin, doubting Jesus’s divinity, saw no harm in a belief with good results; for the age conduct, not dogma, mattered
• Spirit of the age: Baron d’Holbach urged dispelling the “clouds of ignorance”; per Williams interests and indulgences united to exclude metaphysics
• Corneanu: the roots of the Enlightenment were the Renaissance with its humanism, which valued human nature positively, unlike the Reformers with their original sin, a century of religious conflict (1550–1650) and England’s freedom from tradition’s burdens
• Science and the world-machine: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton (Principia, 1687) joined heavenly and earthly motion in the law of gravity
• Shelley: science and the world-machine – science’s flowering rested on Christian convictions, while God became “another actor” in debates
• Crisis of Christianity: for 1200 years Augustine’s ideas of the enslaved sinner ruled; now sages said man is rational and needs common sense
• Crisis of Christianity: believers tried to reconcile reason and revelation; in France many rejected revelation as superstition
• Gunton: the Reformation’s quarrels and wars led many to see dogma, authority and tradition as the root of evil; the modern age began by assaulting the Trinity. Newton remained a believer, but some disciples developed a mechanist philosophy that tended to exclude God’s interaction with the world.

People

• Benjamin Franklin
• Isaac Newton
• Galileo Galilei
• Blaise Pascal

Place

England, France, Europe