Slaying the Centaur of “the Enlightenment”
While a genuine historical sense always involves personal interpretation, those who embody it strive to see other people and other historical ages as factual realities on their own terms. Without this effort, one remembers only parts of the past or imagines a past that never really existed. Selective memory bends and constructs historical narratives to suit present projects, undermining public discourse through incommensurable arguments and unhelpful conflict.
Without a genuine historical sense to interpret the present and make sense of change, modern people tend to accept whatever genealogical fragments they find to suit their own narratives. In his work Against Heresies, Saint Irenaeus called such fragments “vain genealogies.” Their craftily-constructed plausibilities “draw away the minds of the inexperienced and take them captive,” breaking up the perception of reality.
Modernist and Traditionalist Historical Polemics
Today, “vain genealogies” include the modernist historical polemic and the traditionalist historical polemic. I call them “polemics” because they define themselves against something—often each other—in a kind of dialectic. The first tends toward utopian progressivism and the second toward reactionary conservatism (see images 1 and 2 below). Both evade aspects of objective reality, the first replacing gaps with that which is novel, the second with that which is nostalgic.
Both worldviews arose in the Age of Enlightenment during the eighteenth century and function as philosophies of history that feel normal and “true” when one is inside them. The suggestion here is that a way out of these paradigms is not found in some kind of impossible compromise between the two. Rather, it is to recover a genuine historical sense as the first step in creating an entirely different framework with which to interpret modernity, starting by rethinking the Enlightenment itself.
The modernist historical polemic shapes whole media empires, research agendas, and even churches in the twenty-first century. It holds to the idea of Progress, that modern history is a happy departure from a Dark Age of ignorance and organized religion toward a brighter future of social prosperity and sexual equality through human effort, reason, and technology. This narrative arose during the Age of Enlightenment in texts like Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) and continues today in works such as Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018). Pinker presents evidence for modern progress in the form of statistics about, for example, declining infant mortality rates. Extrapolating from data such as these, the modernist historical polemic tends ultimately toward a rival soteriology about man’s salvation by man.
In reaction, traditionalist Catholics and other anti-modernists created an opposing, if less pervasive, interpretation. It holds to the idea of Decline, that modern history is a sad departure from a Golden Age of faith and beauty toward a darker future of social chaos and corruption brought about by demonic influence and secularist ideas deriving from the Enlightenment and its child, the French Revolution. These influences have undermined the true hope of the future, which is some form of return to “tradition” in a new Christendom.
This traditionalist historical polemic arose during and after the Age of Enlightenment in texts like Augustin Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) and continues today in the work of Catholic writers and podcasters such as John Vennari and Taylor Marshall. Barruel’s widely read Memoirs argue that the French Revolution resulted from a master conspiracy by Enlightenment thinkers and secret societies to overthrow the monarchy, Church, and aristocratic society in France. His book created a model for conspiracy narratives ever since, positing the control of world events by hidden, nefarious groups.
Under the influence of this traditionalist historical polemic, many conservatives and religious people came to see the Enlightenment as a “bad thing,” the source of modern evils like rationalism or social fragmentation—critiques they share with postmodernists. The idea of Decline supports belief in a remnant of “true believers” bent on saving the Church and society from modernity through tradition, the Latin Mass, and integralist principles. Evidence for this view includes statistics about decreasing church attendance and religious vocations since the time of the Second Vatican Council, when supposedly Enlightenment ideals infiltrated and undermined the Church by creating liberal Catholicism. Extrapolating from data such as these, proponents make negative generalizations about modernity in general. They click to their favorite internet magisteria and give ear to the prophets of doom.
It is possible to live for decades within certain genealogical stories that, when examined, turn out to be false. Neither of these historical polemics is history. Modernists often neglect the significance of rampant secular violence during the twentieth century and how organized religion has shaped modern values. Traditionalists overlook serious Christian engagement with the Age of Enlightenment, which was brought to light by historians in the last twenty years. They also fail to incorporate development of doctrine into their worldview as theorized by John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century and as actually brought about through Christian encounter with modernity, particularly in the experience of totalitarianism during the 1930s.
Both narratives intend to make the past relevant to the present but fail because they do not actually respect the past—they select parts of it for their own purposes and discount the rest, creating “gaps.” As Russell Hittinger wrote, they use the past “to posit ruptures in history itself.” They include certain historical facts in a philosophy of history that can be easily manipulated for ideological or even theological purposes, depending on a positive or negative interpretation of modernity. Pope Francis wrote against such reductionism in his letter On the Renewal of the Study of Church History: “A proper sense of history can help each of us to develop a better sense of proportion and perspective in coming to understand reality as it is and not as we imagine it or would prefer reality to be.”
The Paradigm of the Centaur
The fulcrum of imagined reality in both the modernist and traditionalist historical polemics is their portrayal of the Enlightenment. Italian intellectual historian Vincenzo Ferrone wrote in The Enlightenment: History of an Idea that the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was in fact the “father of the Enlightenment”—of the idea of the Enlightenment as a central philosophical category in modernity. Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history portrayed the Enlightenment as locked in antagonism with religious faith, leading to the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. Modernity is a secular project at war with religion, to be either celebrated or condemned.
Fusing philosophy and history, Hegel fell into the “paradigm of the Centaur.” Ferrone used this half-man, half-horse creature from Greek mythology as a metaphor for an unholy alliance of philosophy and history that jumbles past and present. Since Hegel, Ferrone identified this conflation across a wide spectrum of thinkers, from postmodernists to Catholic commentators to secular academics like Jonathan Israel. This mental Centaur results from a failure to sufficiently differentiate between historical and philosophical objects of knowledge. The human needs for historical understanding and philosophical certainty are distinct and require different methods to fulfill. The Centaur creates an essentialist Enlightenment in a banal philosophy of history portraying modernity as a secular concept inherently in opposition to religious faith.
This intellectual confusion has consequences. George Weigel wrote in The Irony of Modern Catholic History that it led both secular and Church leaders well into the twentieth century to act as if “the relationship between the Church and the modern world was a battle to the death: a zero-sum game in which someone was going to win, decisively, and someone was going to lose, fatally.” Interpreting the world this way, under the spell of the Centaur, as a conflict of secular and religious ideas at war with one another, is bad for our souls. It induces naive embrace of modern culture on one hand, or fear and cultish rejection of it on the other.
The Historians’ Enlightenment
In response, there is a need to recover a genuine historical sense of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that emerged out of a deeply Christian civilization. It was not simply French, and the French Enlightenment was not simply the cause of the French Revolution. Nor did the Enlightenment represent an eternal, abstract idea or only one kind of rationality. Historical concepts, Max Weber wrote, attempt “not to grasp historical reality in abstract general formulae, but in concrete genetic sets of relations which are inevitably of a specifically unique and individual character.”
Historian Christopher Dawson noted in The Crisis of Western Education that the Age of Enlightenment affected the United States very differently than it did Europe—and France in particular. “While the ideas were the same, their relation to the traditional religions of society were entirely different,” he wrote. There was a vast divergence between Rousseau’s despotic emotional pantheism in France and James Madison’s basically Thomistic constitutional theory in the United States that protected religious liberty. These were two very different Enlightenments. It is necessary, Dawson urged, especially for American Catholics, to devote special attention to the “problem of the Enlightenment.”
The Enlightenment was a contested project—like the contested culture of our own age. It was not just one thing, and this fact requires reflection. Modern history is not a simple narrative of progress or decline but a strategic site in the overall unfolding of divine providence within time. The meaning of change is not so much “good” or “bad” but interpretive discernment of how best to live now, of how best to both adapt and guard the permanent things in one’s present time. By interpreting our times well through a genuine historical sense, one can avoid the pitfalls of naive hope on one hand and deficiency of hope on the other.
Featured image licensed via Adobe Stock; charts created by the author.