In praise of the Enlightenment

Originally published 27 March 2005

In an essay “Why Reli­gion,” the poet Czesław Miłosz tells us that he lived at a time when human imag­i­na­tion was dra­mat­i­cal­ly chang­ing. Heav­en and Hell dis­ap­peared, he says, belief in an after­life was weak­ened, and the bor­der­line between humans and ani­mals was blurred by the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion. “The notion of absolute truth lost its supreme posi­tion,” and “his­to­ry direct­ed by Prov­i­dence start­ed to look like a bat­tle between blind forces.”

The age of home­less­ness has dawned, Miłosz laments.

He is wrong on sev­er­al counts.

First, I see no evi­dence that the changes he lists are in the ascen­dan­cy. The world is awash in reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism. Even in Amer­i­ca the great major­i­ty of peo­ple believe that his­to­ry is ruled by Prov­i­dence, and only a minor­i­ty believe humans are relat­ed to oth­er ani­mals by com­mon descent.

If polls are to be believed, the notion of absolute truth is alive and well.

The age of home­less­ness? Hard­ly. As I see it, jin­go­ism, chau­vin­ism, reli­gious tri­umphal­ism, and self-absorp­tion are the bane of our times, as they have been the bane of all pre­vi­ous ages. Oh, if only we had a rather more inclu­sive under­stand­ing of home.

Miłosz seri­ous­ly over­es­ti­mates the ero­sion of religion.

It is cer­tain­ly true that those of us who are guid­ed in our beliefs by the ideals of the Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion and Enlight­en­ment see no evi­dence of an after­life or a world ruled by Prov­i­dence. And, yes, we have jet­ti­soned the notion of absolute truth in favor of par­tial, ten­ta­tive, evolv­ing pub­lic knowledge.

But we are very much a minor­i­ty in a world that by and large still seeks the assur­ance of absolute truth in scrip­tures, reli­gious tra­di­tions, popes, aya­tol­lahs, New Age gurus, the stars.

I have just fin­ished read­ing poet Christo­pher Mer­ril­l’s new book Things of the Hid­den God: Jour­ney to the Holy Moun­tain, an account of his pil­grim­ages to the Mount Athos penin­su­la of Greece, a place famed for its many Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian monas­ter­ies. Afflict­ed by a sense of unease and home­less­ness, Mer­rill sought some­thing firm, unchang­ing, true. By his account, he found it. In the ancient and rigid monas­tic tra­di­tions of Mount Athos he caught a glimpse of the Eternal.

“This is why we believe the slight­est devi­a­tion from tra­di­tion can wreak hav­oc,” a monk tells Mer­rill. “You nev­er know what the con­se­quences of any change will be.”

Much of what Mer­rill found on Athos is unde­ni­ably beau­ti­ful — the icon­ic art, the litur­gies, the phys­i­cal geog­ra­phy — but I came away from his book with an impres­sion of men (women are banned from the penin­su­la) who are super­sti­tious, intol­er­ant, misog­y­nis­tic, and anti-Semit­ic. They can’t even get along among themselves.

Still, Mer­rill returned from Athos pre­pared to make Kierkegaard’s leap of faith: “To obey God’s will, even against the evi­dence of our sens­es and rea­son, as Abra­ham was ready to sac­ri­fice Isaac, his only son, because God told him to.”

And this, counts Mer­rill, is find­ing his way home.

Well, I dis­sent. If killing one’s child because of reli­gious delu­sion is “home,” then I choose home­less­ness. If absolute truth means intol­er­ance and exclu­siv­i­ty to those who hold dif­fer­ent notions of absolute truth, then I’ll take the ten­ta­tive but man­i­fest­ly reli­able truths of sci­ence. I’ll take the evi­dence of “our sens­es and reason.”

And, if truth be known, I don’t feel at all home­less. The Earth is my home, a tiny, beau­ti­ful dot in a uni­verse vast beyond my know­ing. I am bound to every oth­er crea­ture on the plan­et by com­mon descent. Every oth­er human is part of my fam­i­ly, and I would not sac­ri­fice a sin­gle one one of them because of a voice in my head. What I share with my fel­low humans — genet­i­cal­ly, chem­i­cal­ly, bio­log­i­cal­ly — is far greater than the (often beau­ti­ful) cul­tur­al tra­di­tions that divide us.

For those of us who live by the val­ues of the Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion and Enlight­en­ment, there is no inevitabil­i­ty to his­to­ry, at least not in its par­tic­u­lars. But his­to­ry is not there­fore “a bat­tle of blind forces,” as Miłosz sug­gests, because we are not blind. We can embrace the Enlight­en­ment ide­al of the “broth­er­hood of man.” We can be com­pas­sion­ate, inclu­sive, tol­er­ant. We can be con­fi­dent in our own abil­i­ty to make sense of the world. We can await per­son­al obliv­ion in the hope that we have left the plan­et a bet­ter place than we found it.

It is when we sur­ren­der out best instincts to notions of Heav­en, Hell, prov­i­den­tial favor, and absolute truth that all hell breaks loose.