RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT

Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (Early Modern Europe Today) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981) ("The first revolution in modern Western history led to a breakdown of established authority of such major proportions that lower-class spokesmen were for the first time capable of putting in print coherent statements of their democratic and republican goals. At every turn these Levelers . . . directed the human condition and the natural world in language best described as pantheistic and materialistic." "The pantheistic materialism of seventeenth-century radical owed the origins to the magical and and naturalistic view of the universes which Christian churchmen and theologians had laboured for centuries to defeat. At the heart of this natural philosphy lay the notion that nature is a sufficient explanation or cause for the existence and workings of man and his physical environment. In other words, the separation of God from Creation, creature from creator, of matter from spirit, so basic to Christian orthodoxy and such a powerful justification for social hierarchy and even for absolute monarchy, crumbles in the face of animistic and naturalistic explanations. God does not create ex nihilo; nature simply is and all people (and their environment) are part of this greater All. Of course there are mystical tendencies in this pantheism and indeed the practice of magic can be but one of its logical conclusions." Id. at 31-32. I cannot help but sense that here, in early twenty-first-ceentury America, we are still in the middle of two wars concerning our 'intellectual traditions.' The first is between those who embrace the Enlightenment and those who do not embrace the Enlightenment. The second is between those who embrace the Moderate Enlightenment and those who embrace the Radical Enlightenment.).