A new history volume examines how Catholicism had a bigger impact on the Enlightenment—and by extension, the American founding and modernity—than is often credited.
The traditional story of the Enlightenment is one of Europe finally casting off the darkness of medieval religious superstition and moving into the light of modernity. Led by philosophers such as Voltaire, who vowed to “écrasez l’infâme” or “crush the infamous,” and outright atheists such as Diderot, the new thinkers were finally free of the need to even pretend that any of the old hokum was true. During the Renaissance and early Scientific Revolution, intellectuals had to accede to religion. These new deists, skeptics, and non-believers were then free to work unencumbered toward the betterment of mankind in this world.
But as Uhlich L. Lehrner’s new book The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement makes clear, this is far from the whole story. Firstly, you can’t have leaders without followers—and most of those following Voltaire were Catholics. While the Enlightenment in Protestant England was a phenomenon to which the whole world, and Americans in particular, owes attention, on the Continent the Enlightenment’s center of gravity was in Catholic lands—particularly France and the Habsburg Empire.
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