"Endarkenment"/enlightenment history! (not sure if this is right forum))

[Mandalorious]

Anyway, if this IS the wrong forum for this, but I've noticed at least one or two people here using the word "Endarkenment" to describe the enlightenment.

I figured that if this is said out of lack of knowledge rather than contempt, that I'd address that a little bit. After, I'll let others discuss it.

“Endarkenment”? Odd, the jews (http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9706/abrams.html ) would disagree with that, I believe.

The emancipation of Europe’s Jews began in Europe itself—in the aftermath of the French Revolution and in the swirl of ideas and actions we call the Enlightenment. For Jews, the Enlightenment, the Haskalah, meant throwing off the patterns of life and thought with which they had bound themselves for centuries. It meant a new way of dealing with Christian neighbors and a new relationship with the government, which in many places began to grant Jews more rights as citizens. The first step had been to leave the Jewish settlements and head for the heart of Europe’s great cities. This was a physical action for some, coming from shtetls and small towns, and a psychological change for others, who emerged from urban ghettos.Gasp! How horrible this all was, huh? If only the “endarkenment” had never happened, eh?

Well, let’s look at what things were like just before the “Endarkenment”
In the 1720’s, English writer Thomas Woolston voiced doubt of the Resurrection and other Bible miracles, and he was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life. French intellectual Denis Diderot, editor of the first encyclopedia, was jailed briefly for writing irreligious thoughts. Many nonconformist thinkers had their writings seized and burnedSo, before this “endarkenment” the guy who wrote the first dictionary ran afoul of your religion and was imprisoned. Ah, the good old days, eh?
p.131 Holy Horrors (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0879755784/qid=1055215365/sr=1-8/ref=sr_1_8/002-3469196-8580820?v=glance&s=books) by James A. Haught.
Well, it gets better. Remember Voltaire, the guy you hate so much, you DO know, fine student of history that you are, that he became a defender of Protestant victims of injustice, hiring lawyers and waging long court battles in their behalf. p.132, same book
Ex) When Claude Chaumont was sentence to a galley bench for attending a Protestant worship service, Voltaire secured his freedom p.133
Ex) When Huguenot trader Jean Calas was falsely charged with the murder of his son, Voltaire was mad at the fact that the Catholic judges had his limbs broken in 2 places, strangled and burned. The rest of the family was banished. So, Voltaire wrote pamphlets about it, and asked some connected friends of his to seek redress. A new trial was ordereed in 1765, where 40 judges unanimously found Calas innocent, the family property was returned, and the kind paid compensation to the widow.! p.132

Not to fear, though. The other side fought valiently to prevent the “endarkenment”!
Voltaire’s onslaughts put him in danger. His irreverent Philosophical Dictionary was publicly burned in Paris, Geneva, and Holland, and was banned by the Holy Office. Louis XV banished him from Paris. p. 131
Oh, what a horrible man, compared to say, “great” men like Martin Luther! It turns out that anti-semitism was NOT the only problem Luther had! Let’s see: on p.111 of Holy Horrors, it notes that in 1531 Martin Luther publicly affirmed the edict from the “Diet of Speyer” in 1529, that decreed that Catholics and Protestants would put Anabaptists to death. I guess AIG has some more backpedaling to do.

From page 134, another thing this “apostate” did, Under his bombardment, France began to abandon torture and mutilation. Voltaire’s efforts taught kindred spirits around the world how to fight for human rights

[FirstSunday33ad]

:shrug:

I don't get it. Is this propaganda or is a point being made?

:huh:

[Solly]

I think you'll find his point is that what some regard as a retrograde social and intellectual movement was in many ways a positive thing.
Of course, he slightly forgot to mention that the French Revolution and all its horrors can be clearly laid at the feet of the "Enlightenment", as can Napolean and all that followed, with the subsequent rise in German nationalism, Nazism and the very anti-semitism, on a scale hitherto unprecedented, which he seems to be regaling us for. Then there was that other bastard child of the Enlightenment, Marxism, which culminated in Soviet Communism, and its wonderfully tolerant liberal ideals. And now the infanticide of Western abortion clinics. Don't forget Weird Uncle Freud, and that crazy nephew of the "Enlightenment", Nietzsche and his nihilist philosophy which is bearing fruit down to this day.

However, since I still bear the memory of Carl Sagan going on about the supposed 1000 years of darkness in Europe before our saviour science came along in the 16th century, I won't lose any sleep over it.

[John Reece]

Ah, here you are, Solly, spreading enlightenment :smile: .

:cheers:

[FirstSunday33ad]

Today @ 12:12 PM post located here (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=119338#post119338)
Solly:

I think you'll find his point is that what some regard as a retrograde social and intellectual movement was in many ways a positive thing.
Of course, he slightly forgot to mention that the French Revolution and all its horrors can be clearly laid at the feet of the "Enlightenment", as can Napolean and all that followed, with the subsequent rise in German nationalism, Nazism and the very anti-semitism, on a scale hitherto unprecedented, which he seems to be regaling us for. Then there was that other bastard child of the Enlightenment, Marxism, which culminated in Soviet Communism, and its wonderfully tolerant liberal ideals. And now the infanticide of Western abortion clinics. Don't forget Weird Uncle Freud, and that crazy nephew of the "Enlightenment", Nietzsche and his nihilist philosophy which is bearing fruit down to this day.

However, since I still bear the memory of Carl Sagan going on about the supposed 1000 years of darkness in Europe before our saviour science came along in the 16th century, I won't lose any sleep over it.

In other words - propaganda.

Thanks Solly.

[Celsus]

Ok I can play this game too. If you're going to pull out all the negative aspects of the Enlightenment, let's not forget its contributions: Modern science, rationality, enormous contributions to literature, enormous contributions to philosophy, the American Constitution and Bill of Rights, the end of slavery as an acceptable institution (at least in Europe), the social contract, modern medicine, the separation of church and state, epidemiology, the Linnaean system, enormous contributions to music, enormous contributions to art, the steam engine, economics, anthropology, and of course, the spread of ideas in general. And if Marx is classed with the Enlightenment, then let's add libertarianism, sociology, the theory of evolution, industrialisation, electricity, the automobile, the beginnings women's suffrage, atomic theory, the lightbulb, etc. etc.

Oh and since I'm enjoying the Whig historian game, let's look at the roots of Nazism. If we go a little further back than Nietzche, we find the prominent German racist, Martin Luther who wrote The Jews and Their Lies (this sounds not entirely unlike Julius Streicher). Wonder if he had anything to do with Nazism. And if we look for precursors to Communism, how about the early Christian Church under totalitarian control (remember Ananias and Sapphira?) with the penalty of death for not handing over all their possessions? This Whig historian game is easy peezy. And if we want to look for the origins of euthanasia and abortion,.how about the Deutero-Canonical Sirach 30:17: "Death is better than a life of misery, and eternal sleep than chronic sickness." Next?

Joel

[John Reece]

how about the early Christian Church under totalitarian control (remember Ananias and Sapphira)?

:huh:

[Celsus]

Today @ 02:11 AM post located here (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=119388#post119388)
John Reece:

:huh:
Find out what a Whig historian is, then all will become clear.

[John Reece]

So, what does this have to do with Ananias & Sapphira and totalitarianism?

Whig History

By Dr John Warren

new perspective Vol. 5, No. 3

Very few historians, past or present, would willingly proclaim their adherence to Whig history. The Whig historian is not a card-carrying member of a specific school of history, but the victim of name-calling. The word ‘Whig’ has its origins (in the seventeenth century) as a term of abuse against political opponents, and has become a convenient label for one historian to attach to another as a mark of disdain. Even so, we can still meaningfully identify certain ‘Whiggish’ tendencies to which many historians have allegedly fallen victim.

The British historian, Herbert Butterfield (1900-79), is generally credited with first exposing those tendencies. In his short book The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), he complained about historians who wrote ‘present-minded’ history and, in so doing, fell with a resounding thud into traps which good historians should avoid.

They allowed their interpretation of the past to be coloured by their own political views and what they saw as the political needs of their own times.
This led to them making arrogant assumptions about the direction history was taking. They applauded the British system of liberal parliamentary democracy, and assumed that the goal of history was to perfect it.
So, Whig historians were likely to see the past progressing in a reasonably straight line towards parliamentary democracy. There are two main problems with this. In the first place, it tends to encourage historians to look for, and then to over-emphasise, similarities between past and present, and so to tumble into anachronism. In the second place, Whig historians were prone to categorising their historical characters as those who favoured progress (the winners) and those (the losers) who did not.
Identifying winners and losers is a sure step on the road to making moral judgements about people in the past. In The Whig Interpretation of History, Butterfield generally avoided naming and shaming particular historians, but still reserved a prominent place of dishonour for Lord Acton (1834-1902) who, he felt, wrongly made the making of moral judgements the mark of true historical writing.


For whatever reason, Butterfield avoided a frontal assault on the historian who best exemplifies the characteristics of the Whig historian in full flight: Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59). Macaulay’s monumental The History of England from the Accession of James III (1848-55) opens with a hymn to progress:

… the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.

Macaulay’s heroes were those who stood on the side of the developing powers of Parliament in the struggle to overcome the "autocratic powers of kingship. Macaulay duly traced the origins of English nationhood and democracy back to the time of the signing of Magna Carta (1215), which he presented as an attempt to limit the powers of the Norman (i.e. French and foreign) kings. He interpreted the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century as a great blow for individual liberty against the monkish despotism of the Catholic Church. The English Civil War was the result of an attempt by Charles I to turn back the clock of progress by sabotaging the increasing authority of Parliament. Charles’s son, James II, was spurred by his reactionary Catholic beliefs to make similar attempts, but was happily defeated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when political opponents (significantly nicknamed Whigs) called upon William of Orange to rescue English liberties and rule as William III.

Macaulay is indeed open to all the criticisms made of Whig history by Butterfield. There is something almost gleeful about his anachronisms. He refers to the Englishmen of the past as ‘we’, and assumes that they shared the thought-processes of nineteenth-century gentlemen like himself. He uses his considerable literary artistry - in particular, his love of dramatic contrast and gift for irony - to ram home his moral judgements. He smoothes away the faults of his heroes but exposes to the glare of outrage the very similar faults of his villains.

Macaulay also represents an example of another of Butterfield’s pet hates: so-called ‘abridged’ history. Butterfield disliked the wide-ranging narrative histories which offered the general reader simplified explanations. He felt that, the more abridged the work was, the more likely it was to wallow in Whiggish errors. He also disliked what he saw as the fatuous and complacent optimism of such works. And why? Because, as a committed Christian, he felt that such optimism made sinful human beings, and not God, the shapers of their own destinies. As a defence against such tendencies, Butterfield upheld the rigorous and painstaking work of historical scholarship, in which one deliberately ignored the temptation to write history for the sake of the present. This disciplined archival scholarship (the legacy of those influenced by Leopold von Ranke) was also a defence against another contemporary threat to Butterfield’s particular Christian world-view: the challenge of atheistic Communism. Writing in a cold war context such works as Christianity and History (1949) and God in History (1958), Butterfield attacked those who saw merely human political philosophies or institutions as being the ultimate goal of history.

Butterfield’s attacks certainly helped to maintain and encourage prevailing tendencies in British academic history towards narrow PhD-style research and books which had little or no appeal to a general readership. Macaulay had sought and gloried in popularity. Most people interested in non-academic history enjoy a good, sweeping narrative and appreciate the way in which Whig-style history gives them straightforward explanations of events and - crucially - a sense of their own place in time. Butterfield’s unwitting effect was to discourage many post-war historians from meeting this need.

In practice, then, issues raised by Whig history remain central to debates about the nature and purpose of history. Butterfield was right to point out the dangers of glorifying and distorting the past to uphold a particular view of the present, and many would agree that the objectivity he demanded is central to all ‘good history’. Others might question how far objectivity is, in practice, attainable, and point to the way in which Butterfield’s own prejudices shaped his demands.

Dr John Warren is the author of History and the Historians,
Hodder & Stoughton - Access to History series, 1998.

[Celsus]

I see satire doesn't seem to be understood in these parts. Both the OP and subsequent replies were examples of Whiggish history.

From your article: In the first place, it tends to encourage historians to look for, and then to over-emphasise, similarities between past and present, and so to tumble into anachronism. In the second place, Whig historians were prone to categorising their historical characters as those who favoured progress (the winners) and those (the losers) who did not.
I was simply doing exactly the same--reinterpreting the past to prove a point about the present, or indeed just anything slightly later. IOTW, bad scholarship (And no, I wouldn't really call the Ananias and Saphira episode an example of totalitarian Communist control of course).

Joel

[Socrates]

06-11-2003 @ 04:07 AM post located here (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=119383#post119383)
Celsus barks:

Ok I can play this game too. If you're going to pull out all the negative aspects of the Enlightenment, let's not forget its contributions: Modern science,

Humph, the foundations of this were firmly set in the Christian presuppostions, as many historians of science have shown.

rationality,

Ignoring the tremendous reliance on logic in the Scholastic period by staunchly Christian philosophers such as Anselm, Aquinas, Buridan, Bonaventure and William of Ockham.

... enormous contributions to literature,

Better than the Christian-inspired literature such as much of Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan?

... enormous contributions to philosophy,

Better than Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal?

... the American Constitution and Bill of Rights,

The principle of representation was based on Deuteronomy 1:9-18, where the Israelites were to choose and appoint wise and respected men to lead and rule over groups of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. There was to be no partiality between natural citizens and aliens -- hence, equal justice for all.

Isaiah 33:22 was a justification for the separation of powers: "For the Lord is our Judge (judicial) ... our Lawgiver (legislative) ... our King (executive)."

... the end of slavery as an acceptable institution (at least in Europe),

What nonsense. The chief abolitionists like Wm. Wilberforce and Granville Sharp were strongly motivated by biblical presuppositions. Slavery advocates such as Lord Melbourne spouted the typical Endarkenment nonsense, "Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade public life". Other endarkenment philosophers like Hume and Voltaire believed in the inferiority of dark-skinned people.

... the social contract, modern medicine,

Discovered by such creationists as Pasteur (germ theory), Lister (antiseptic surgery) and Simpson (anesthesia)

... the separation of church and state,

A definite advance as originally meant -- and advocated by Baptists, not now though when it's misused to exclude Christianity from public life.

epidemiology,

Pasteur again.

... the Linnaean system,

By the creationist Linnaeus.

... enormous contributions to music,

Hah, ignoring the enormous Christian content of the music of the Reformation by Buxtehüde, Schütz; the great Baroque composers Vivaldi, Handel and Bach, and even the later music of Mozart and Mendelssohn ...

... enormous contributions to art,

Ignoring the great Christian themes of the Renaissance and Reformation ...

the steam engine, economics, anthropology, and of course, the spread of ideas in general.

And if Marx is classed with the Enlightenment, then let's add libertarianism, sociology, the theory of evolution,

The ultimate rotten fruit of the endarkenment.

... industrialisation, electricity,

Largely due to contributions made by the creationists Faraday and Kelvin.

the automobile, the beginnings women's suffrage,

In the British Empire, largely advocated by Christian women as a solution to male immorality and drunkenness. And in America, its biggest champion was the famous anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan.

Oh and since I'm enjoying the Whig historian game, let's look at the roots of Nazism. If we go a little further back than Nietzche, we find the prominent German racist, Martin Luther who wrote The Jews and Their Lies (this sounds not entirely unlike Julius Streicher). Wonder if he had anything to do with Nazism.

I've already shown the evolutionary basis of Nazism, and their fanatical anti-Christianity documented at the Nuremberg trials www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?postid=56147#post56147

And if we look for precursors to Communism, how about the early Christian Church under totalitarian control (remember Ananias and Sapphira?) with the penalty of death for not handing over all their possessions?

:dufus: Their death penalty was for lying to the Holy Spirit! The Apostle Peter made it clear that they were perfectly entitled to keep some of the proceeds, or not to sell at all. Try reading Acts 5.

And this alleged communism in the early Church was nothing of the sort. Sharing property was totally voluntary, and it was the Apostles not the State who distributed the property.

This Whig historian game is easy peezy.

Only for naïve misotheists with a por knowledge of the subject.

And if we want to look for the origins of euthanasia and abortion,.how about the Deutero-Canonical Sirach 30:17: "Death is better than a life of misery, and eternal sleep than chronic sickness." Next?

That's not part of real Scripture, and it says nothing about actually killing anyone. That's why the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches are strongly pro-life.

[geochron]

Hilarious.

You really didn't get his point, did you?

<pondering>
Is Biblical literalism always associated with an inability to spot subtlety? Perhaps we're on the verge of identifying a new disorder.
</pondering>

[Socrates]

Today @ 08:11 PM post located here (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=138395#post138395)
geochron:

Hilarious.

You really didn't get his point, did you?

The point that atheists distort history? That sort of nonsense is standard atheist fare. Just look at all the junk by Malodorous trying to prove that Christ-hater Hitler was really a Christian.

Not surprising, since if we're just rearranged pond scum, then what could be objectively wrong with distortions?

<pondering>
Is Biblical literalism always associated with an inability to spot subtlety? Perhaps we're on the verge of identifying a new disorder.
</pondering>

Who are these unknown biblical literalists? All inerrantists and YECs read historical narrative as historical narrative, poetry as poetry, parable as parable, etc.

[John Reece]

It is so much pleasure to read Socrates :smile: .

:thumb:

[Lobstrosity]

Today @ 02:23 AM post located here (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=138396#post138396)
Socrates:


Who are these unknown biblical literalists? All inerrantists and YECs read historical narrative as historical narrative, poetry as poetry, parable as parable, etc.

Actually, I think the main problem is that they don't.

[Celsus]

Socrates, you do indeed crack me up.

Thanks,
Joel

[Roy]

07-03-2003 @ 10:03 AM post located here (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=138393#post138393)
Socrates:

Better than the Christian-inspired literature such as much of Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan?

You're making this up. Shakespeare's works are not 'Christian-inspired' at all. Unless you think that Christian Mythology includes Oberon and Titania?

This is the silliest stuff ever I heard.

Roy