The Enlightenment’s Darkness

“Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than he will be forced to be free”[1]

“The worship of the self by the godless self-gods means a death sentence for the self as the god that failed.”[2]

Those who lust to dominate the world become dominated by their passion for domination.[3]

Happy New Year, the Year of our Lord, 2025!  Some things are new, but other things stubbornly remain –   Things like worshipping the creature instead of the Creator.  Neo-paganism is still with us.  Neo-paganism often embraces an anti-intellectual dimension, eschewing rational inquiry and discourse.  Recall the influence of Joseph Campbell[4] upon the Star Wars franchise. Yoda, the Great Master [ala a pagan Ascended Master] instructs his disciple to “clear your mind of questions”[5] as well as to “Feel, don’t think.”[6]  Access the Force “by feeling it”.  

A true disciple of the Force must embrace a Gnostic and dualistic conception of metaphysics, as Yoda instructs:  “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter:”[7] Physicality bad; spirituality good.[8]   The Apostle Paul, as did the Apostle John, thundered against such Gnostic notions:

“Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch”. . . These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticismand severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.[9]

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.[10]

Given these Gnostic features of neo-paganism, which Scripture rejects, it seems prudent that a proper antidote involves being intentionally rational – engaging the mind, instead of ignoring or by-passing it.  Well, yes and no – Let’s get to the gist.

Minimizing the mind, as paganism does, is problematic; however, over-emphasizing and relying on rationality in the form of rationalism is just as deadly.  Christless rationality forms the thrust of the Enlightenment and is no answer to rank paganism.  Here’s why.

The Enlightenment – by extolling “Reason” – sought to rescue mankind from superstition and baseless myths.  So far, so good.  Yet, and in doing so, this move severed knowledge from revelation, and in some cases became openly hostile to Christianity.  Thomas Paine, having embraced the Enlightenment’s invitation for “free-thinking,” minced no words:

“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in general it leads to nothing here or hereafter.”[11]

Other Enlightenment examples could be multiplied.[12] While paganism minimized the human mind, the Enlightenment elevated it to a position of ultimacy – indeed, man did become the measure of all things –  by using his mind.[13]  While appearing scholarly and reputable, this form of rationalism promotes a great many problems.

First, because rationalism jettisons God, it replaces Him with something in creation, just as Paul notes.[14]  In the Enlightenment’s case, this means human reason and its by-product, secularism.

Second, politically speaking, reliance on Reason is a prime driver for engendering arrogance toward “ordinary” people[15]:

Modern elites are as gods, and they behave like it.[16]

This chasm thus created between the elites and the “ordinary” largely explains the blistery political landscape now facing the West:

Most obviously, the chasm helps to explain the astonishing arrogance of the elites, as well as the significance of the populism that reacts and rises up against the ignorance—the “forgotten people” behind Donald Trump in the U.S., Nigel Farage and Breit in the U.K., Marine Le Peen in France, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Viktor Oban in Hungary.[17]

The elites and their rationalism assume the divine attribute of omniscience, therefore justifying their parochialism concerning others:

“[W]hy waste time debating with people who do not and cannot possibly understand what is best for them?”[18]

This engenders a condescending paternalism.  “Do as we dictate; we’re the experts.”  Accordingly, we now see measures aimed at curtailing free speech via technology rather than tanks.  As Guinness notes:

[T]he elites shifted their efforts from undermining dictators abroad to undermining democracy at home, and they radically subverted the First Amendment, replacing free speech with censorship – all in the name of the elites’ “saving democracy.”[19]

This (perhaps) well-intended move, however, raises a crucial question:

Can a human civilization rely solely on reason and its powers so that humans can rise to be gods and run the world and its affairs successfully?[20]

The Psalmist knows the answer:  nothing makes God laugh like human beings who think they are gods, who discard the true and living God and His Son:[21]

      Why do the nations rage

            and the peoples plot in vain?

The kings of the earth set themselves,

            and the rulers take counsel together,

            against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,

       “Let us burst their bonds apart

            and cast away their cords from us.”

      He who sits in the heavens laughs;

            the Lord holds them in derision.[22]

Avoiding pagan mysticism by incarnating reason provides no societal solution, as the psalmist understands.  Why?  Incarnating reason becomes the foundation for societal managerialism.  This is the notion that man can “figure it out” for himself on his own terms without Divine aid.  The right experts will do the thinking for the rest of us.  This absolutizes reason which in turn carries the seeds of authoritarianism.[23]   How so?

Over-reliance on intellectuals, experts, and specialists tends toward oligarchy – a consolidation of coercive power supposedly based on Reason.  Being a specialist, however, is not equivalent to possessing wisdom or leadership.  Moreover, this form of self-reliance creates the illusion that “everything can be figured out and smoothly engineered,” leading to the birth of the “messianic intellectual” class[24]  We’ve seen this assumption operate previously – in the Garden of Eden.  This Edenic serpentine-inspired equation remains enticing yet grossly wrong: 

Autonomous human reason + 

proper managerial choices (increasingly enforced via Statist coercion) = 

Worldly perfection 

Ironically, it was Paradise itself that was destroyed by unaided Reason.  And, this primordial error continues to wreak havoc today.

This mistaken notion fosters all sorts of problems. First, the Enlightenment’s favored Child, Modernism, appealed to unaided reason as a universal norm, a veritable societal panacea. Modernism’s logic however, produced Post-modernism, which rejects universals.  Accordingly, the postmodernists confidently “reasoned” that

“reason, argument, logic, data, evidence mathematics, and even the scientific method itself are anything but universal.”[25]  

Rather, these notions of rationality are suspected to be instruments of power to promote “white privilege” and “white nationalism.”[26]  As Guinness concludes, reducing logic to “a white way of knowing” is flagrantly irrational, sounding in particulars, not universals:

Such blatant irrationalism which is the unintended consequence of Enlightenment rationalism, is both a problem and a telling example of the inadequacy of unaided reason.[27]

It gets worse:  relying on unaided reason 

“creates the illusion that to change the mind through reason is to change the person and to transform the culture.”[28]

That’s precisely what the revolutionaries who gave us the bloody French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions thought.  They agitated in the name of “the People” and left swaths of real people dead.  When “re-education” and Reason do not prevail, the revolutionary elites invoked the State’s coercive arm (deploying bullets, bazookas, and bombs) to close the gap – hence all these “efforts of Reason” were both naively utopian and brutally murderous – all in the name of the god of Reason.[29]

As Guinness observes,

Deep and lasting change happens in [and through civil] society and not through the state.[30]

True change for the good must be rooted in human freedom, not coercion, and in human responsibility, not servitude.  Both vessels are necessarily rooted in the fundamental reality of humans being created in the image of God – human dignity can be rightly grounded in no other way.  Reason alone never suffices.

Third, as we glean from the Apostle Paul, the root ethical issue centers on what we worship:  the Creator or the creation.  Reliance on Reason ala the Enlightenment actually produces just a another form of dressed-up paganism.  Gouverneur Morris, the American Minister to France shortly after the Founding and a devout Christian, quickly noticed that the French Revolution stemmed from a different religion, yet one dressed up in the vestments of “secular” rationality.  Writing to Lord George Graham, Morris noted that he had lived:

“To see a new Religion arise.  It consists of a Denial of all religion and its votaries have the Superstition of not being superstitious.  They have as much Zeal as any other sect and are as ready to lay Waste [to] the World in order to make Proselytes.”[31]

Thus, the Enlightenment’s secular feting of Reason was actually fervently religious though expressing itself in anti-religion.  The Enlightenment had the veneer of being non-religious, but in fact manifested a religion oozing darkness.  The reality is that the Statist experts and bureaucrats who became politicized under the guise of Reason became the “spiritual militia of the material [world]”.[32]  And, this spiritual militia exists to pursue and feed upon raw power – if God, the actual omnipotent One, is deemed sidelined, then something or someone within creation must grasp the ring of power.  This is the lust of a godless mindset; it’s the fundamental temptation presented by the serpent to Eve, and by Satan to Jesus.[33]  It is – and always will be – an idolatrous invitation to worship the created Self either individually or in its collective manifestation, the State – with inevitable disastrous results:

“The worship of the self by the godless self-gods means a death sentence for the self as the god that failed.”[34]

Those who lust to dominate the world become dominated by their passion for domination.[35]

Ultimately, the Idol of Self always worships on the altar of Death and this is true whether the idolatrous worship appears as a spell-chanting androgynous voodoo shaman sacrificing children or a serious bow-tie clad tweed-wearing respectable and chic scholar of Reason advocating for abortion.  We don’t need the Enlightenment’s man-made light; we only truly see – and truly flourish — and truly become responsibly free – in His light:

      For with you is the fountain of life;

            in your light do we see light.[36]

Let’s commit to focusing on – and worshipping – the true light of the world:  The Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God because “in him was life, and the life was the light of men.”[37]

[1] Rousseau, cited in Nicola-Ann Hardwicke, https://www.e-ir.info/2011/03/01/rousseau-and-the-social-contract-tradition/#google_vignette

[2] Os Guinness, Our Civilizational Moment – The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (2024), 81

[3] Idea derived from Augustine, City of God, Book 1, Chapter 1

[4] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).  Geroge Lucas explicitly credited this work of Campbell for shaping the narrative of the Star Wars franchise.   Lucas candidly and effusively describes this influence in a biography of Campbell, Stephan Larsen and Robin Larsen, Joseph Campbell, A Fire in the Mind (2002), 541

[5] Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

[6] Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, The Phantom Menace (1999)

[7] Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

[8] The Apostle Paul thundered against Gnostic dualism:  see, e.g., the book of Colossians. 

[9] Col. 2:21-23

[10] 1 John 4:1-3

[11] Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1018077-the-age-of-reason-being-an-investigation-of-true-and-fabulous-theology#:~:text=Of%20all%20the%20systems%20of,to%20nothing%20here%20or%20hereafter.

[12] One could canvas similar quotes from Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, et al.  In each case man and his reason became the standard for knowledge and ethics to the exclusion of Christian revelation.

[13] This form of relativism stems from paganism of the Classical period:  Protagoras (490-420 BC), who claimed “man is the measure of all things.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/protagoras/

[14] Romans 1:25

[15] As C.S. Lewis reminds us, however, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”  The Weight of Glory, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/42142-there-are-no-ordinary-people-you-have-never-talked-to

[16] Os Guinness, Our Civilizational Moment – The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (2024), 61.

[17] Id. at 62

[18] Id.

[19] Id. at 63

[20] Id.

[21] Os Guinness, Our Civilizational Moment – The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (2024), 

65

[22] Ps. 2:1-4

[23] Guinness, at 66

[24] Id. at 67

[25] Id. at 75

[26] Id.

[27] Id.

[28] Id.

[29] The French Revolution, in despising the Christian faith and seeking to de-Christianize France, established The Cult of Reason in 1793 along with a Festival of Reason.  A year later revolutionary radical Robespierre replaced this cult with the Cult of the Supreme Being, invoking Voltaire’s notion that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.  Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (2006), 294.  Notice how, though wrapped in “rationality” and intellectualism, this exhibits pagan impulses and roots: God is created from man’s ideas – a direct inversion of the truth.  And, this invented God is not separate from the creation, rejecting the foundational binary of all reality:  The Creator-creation distinction, or what Peter Jones has called Twoism.

[30] Id. at 76

[31] Cited by Guinness, at 77.

[32] Julien Benda, writing in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927) cited by Guinness at 78

[33] In Gen. 3:5 the serpent claims that Eve will receive power to “be like God” to see and autonomously determine good and evil; In Matthew 4, Satan tempts Jesus by ultimately promising to give Him “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” (v. 8) – worldly power – in exchange for pagan worship of a created being.  

[34] Os Guinness, Our Civilizational Moment – The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (2024), 81

[35] Idea derived from Augustine, City of God, Book 1, Chapter 1

[36] Ps. 36:9

[37] John 1:4