How the Enlightenment ideology obscured our historiographical imagination
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| The Ancient of days by William Blake (1794) |
I’m a graduate in Medieval Studies, and when I try to explain some myths about it, people look at me as if I was insane. The Enlightenment propaganda is so strong, that telling the truth about Medieval era sounds like a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory. And this is a serious problem. Many school textbooks, media, etc. promote most of these myths, which are inherently biased and dangerous, because they distort the truth.
The Enlightenment historiography is still the most successful propaganda ever made; it refused to die, because the [anti-Christian] sentiment which these thinkers had promoted seems to be popular ever since. Demonizing the Other is the best way to begin a fight, because it gives you the feeling of the moral superiority. In our case, this has been done by distorting and misinterpreting historical facts, and inventing myths and false villains and heroes. This genius propaganda has affected and influenced most of us, therefore it’s not surprising how our imagination has been constructed. For example, when we think or talk about [the] historical horrors, the vast majority will think of the those ‘dark’ Middle Ages. Ironically, we rarely realize that the most morbid and inhumane crimes were committed during the Enlightenment and Modern era. Concentration camps, gulag, genocides, eugenics, racism, reign of terror, totalitarianism, etc. The aforementioned catastrophes are a result of the ideology which promoted the cult of progress, reason and science, which ended becoming the cult of irrationality, regress and crimes. But of course, rarely will we hear that being denounced, because we still live in that era, where one of the most criminal and bloody act of history [the French Revolution] is presented as ‘glorious’ and ‘good’.
The Enlightenment way of thinking may have ‘freed’ people from believing in religion or God, but at the very moment when this philosophy rose, ideologies were born. So, today, many don’t believe in religion because they consider it dogmatic, but unconsciously and even dogmatically believe and follow ideologies as Enlightenment.
— Albert Bikaj
This interpretation ignores the central role of the Protestant Reformation in creating the "Dark Age" stereotype. The idea of the middle ages as a time when the true light was obscured by a corrupt church was a product of the sixteenth century and such works as the Magdeburg Centuries and Foxe's Martyrs rather than the eighteenth. The Enlightenment invented little in terms of the critique of the Middle Ages; mostly it secularized the critique already invented by the Protestants.
ReplyDeleteThis was posted originally as a Tweet, but you are right. I plan to update it soon.
DeleteWilliams can you share any in-depth sound sources on that
DeletePlease explain your position with the publication of the complete blog. Nonetheless the proposition is interesting.
DeleteNot all protestants were in this camp. The magesterial reformers were not the anabaptists. But your main point is taken well. There was a mixing of renaissance and reformational thought
DeleteWhen I was in College, my little school brought Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn to speak. He gave a talk to about 50 people on the relationship between Luther and the French Revolution - glorious.
ReplyDeleteOf course, he was in his late 80’s and so, as sometimes happens, his talk the next night was THE SAME EXACT TALK as the first night. Still great, but not as gripping lol.
I grew up in a catholic family, though I left that behind to become more or less the standard modern atheist. Yet in recent years something curious happened. On one topic then another I investigated or learned more about the supposed sinister role of the Church in one historical abomination or another... and it seems to turn out, that was just a myth!
ReplyDeleteCase 1: the Church and the Inquisition was into mass-burning of witches to stamp out a popular pagan rival religion.
Here is one scholarly attempt to set the record straight
http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Arcana/Witchcraft%20and%20Grimoires/witch_hunt.html
It describes early christian missionaries attempting to stop charges of witchcraft. How there were no witch trials when and where the Catholic Church had the most authority. More shockingly, it describes the Inquisition as actually trying to cool down mobs on a witch-hunting craze. And finally, and perhaps relevant to your post, how later modern (well, XIXth century) writers made up and popularized the idea of the Inquisition as a witch abattoir.
Case 2: the Church was pro-nazi and put Hitler in power (because he was anti-communist)
The claim made superficial sense and I believed it was true, but I was completely surprised to find out the Church had been clearly anti-nazi, called them pagans, denied them the sacraments, publically and repeatedly called to NOT vote for them, in addition to well, wrting an encyclical like "Mit brennender Sorge".
So these topics started making me think that maybe modern secular authors were making up charges and spreading false myths about the backward medieval Church. Wait! Aren't these guys suposed to be the enlightened ones? So, actually the Church had condemned all the totalitarian ideologies of the XXth century, like fascism (Non abbiamo bisogno), communism (Divini Redemptoris), nazism (Mit brennender Sorge) as well as the excesses of capitalism (Rerum Novarum) while so many intellectuals fell hard for them. Could there be a lot of wisdom in the Church? Hmm...
Similar thing happened to me... my parents were nominally Catholic and I grew up as an atheist... until I started studying philosophy and history (particularly medieval history, which I went on to study in grad school at a secular university)... long story short, I am now a practicing Catholic with 6 kids :)
DeleteFortunately, libertarianism is picking up on the notion that the Middle Ages were more free and more productive. Even Ludwig von Mises praises the Middle Ages. It was the Renaissance movement that spurned on the coming totalitarianism and Enlightenment.
ReplyDeleteIn England at least, the principle fuel for the Reformation and Enlightenment seemed to be the plunder in it. That has to be why it refused to die. The dogged insistence of the nobility was key, for the nobility strove against the consensus of the people, and strove against their general welfare, and strove against the practice of the immediate fathers, and strove against decency itself. But it paid so damned well to seize all those monasteries, to install selves as landlords, to melt down all those gilded cups and altars. The level of pure venality is staggering.
ReplyDeleteIt was a looting operation.
DeleteTwo points:
ReplyDelete1-More grist for your mill is the "everybody used to think the world was flat" canard. This is flatly (ha) wrong; an anti-clerical Enlightenment slur invented by Voltaire and others.
2-Voltaire's Candide is often used in classrooms to skewer religion as an exemplar of enlightenment thinking. Do you think of a similarly concise work rebutting Candide? Someone pointed me to Christopher Dawson, but he's written like 3 dozen books and I have no idea which one to look in.
Not all bad things can be laid solely on the Enlightenment. Did you know, for instance, that the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) required that Jews wear distinguishing dress?
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DeleteThe medieval Church developed an entire teaching on the Jews, to protect Catholics from their subversive behavior (such as usury). It also protected Jews from being harmed in retaliation. History is repeating itself today, but the Church is nowhere to be found.
DeleteTo look at the role of the Reformation in England in creating negative views of the Catholic Church, see Eamon Duffy's "The Stripping of the Altars." It was a real eye-opener for me. I had studied medieval and renaissance England, but no one had laid out the origins of the anti-Catholic prejudice in post-Catholic England for me. The Reformation in England was a top-down affair, forced on a population that resisted it for a long time. And of course the desire for plunder played a role. The poor were the ones who suffered.
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