http://www.sparknotes.com/history/european/enlightenment/section2.rhtml

The Quakers Were Part of the Enlightenment

Still Under Construction

David Yount in his otherwise wonderfully thoughtful book How the Quakers Invented America writes:

At some point in their schooling, Americans are taught that our nation's founding principles were borrowed from the European Enlightenment. No effort is made to explain how purely secular roots could give rise to the spirituality that has always pervaded American life [p. 1].

Mr. Yount dismisses the Enlightenment while giving the Quakers all the credit for many, if not most or even all, of the ideas and principles that made America a great democratic nation where government derived its authority to govern from the body of the people. But his evaluation of the Enlightenment is overly-simple and misleading in several respects. The historical assumption that non-religious sources could have no affect on a religious outcome is merely false. It is as false as the assumption that the enlightenment was purely secular with no origins in the religious thinking of the past. The Enlightenment, Mr. Yount seems to suggest, had one important fundamental characteristic worthy of mention – it was non-religious or secular. But the mainstream of Enlightenment thinking was neither anti-religious nor totally secular.

The Enlightenment began about the mid-17th century and included many diverse strains of thought. The Enlightenment itself and its orgins are complicated. Certainly, the French version of the Enlightenment was influenced by the anti-religious and materialist views of Voltaire, Diderot, and D’Alembert. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/#RelEnl

The Enlightenment has definite religious roots as well as secular roots – it was a reaction to the disastrous religious wars of the early 17th century (more than a third of the population was slaughtered) brought about by the extreme religious dogmatism of both the Catholic Church and Protestants, viz., Calvinists and Lutherans. And in part, the Enlightenment grew out of the tolerant Christian, religiously skeptical, but (still solidly religious) humanist tradition of the Renaissance that predated the Thirty Years War. Enlightenment roots extend to such Renaissance thinkers as Erasmus, Rabelais, and Michel de Montaigne.

Prior to 1600 discussions focused on such questions as when is it morally permissible for a king to launch a war or for a subject to kill a tyrant. Erasmus at once remained loyal to the Catholic Church, corresponded with Luther, and ridiculed religious dogmatism. Montaigne remained a good Catholic but doubted that certainty in theological beliefs was possible.

Secondly, no one is foolish enough to believe that the religious attitudes and beliefs of our forefathers came from secular sources. Our forefathers brought the religion they absorbed in the old world with them to the new world.

Our national culture has roots in the religions of the Middle-East that spread to the rest of the world. At the same time our national culture has other roots in the secular advances of the Post Thirty Years War Enlightenment. It remains true that school children probably hear something about these secular Enlightenment roots in the classroom. I suspect these lessons are too vague, too abstract, and probably well beyond their ability to comprehend. The ideas are challenging to young minds. To mature minds the ideas are not the difficulty as much as it is the entangled history and the difficulty in fathoming a diverse set of ideas and events that influences one thinker greatly but another one not as much. Weighing the influence of a particular thinker, event, or idea to determine its exact on the course of history is virtually impossible.

Again, many of central principles advanced by the Enlightenment have distant religious roots those roots. It is the use and emphasis that Enlightenment thinkers placed on those ideas that made them influential in the modern world. The idea of tolerance of other religions, the idea that all peoples have dignity and rights, and most importantly, the idea that science and knowledge are important to human progress; these are ideas that have roots in the Renaissance. Enlightenment thinkers gave these ideas a position of central importance that they did not previously enjoy.

I believe that Enlightenment thinkers got a lot of things wrong – DesCartes, Liebniz, Bacon, Locke, and as traditionally understood in the light of 20th century sense-data theorists, Hume as well, assumed epistemological and ethical principles which I believe were a step in the wrong direction from Renaissance thinkers even from dominant religious thought prior to the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinking on epistemological and ethical principles even infected religious and theological thought with their mistaken assumptions. While philosophical thinking is just now starting to dig its way out of these mistakes, theology remains mired in them.

Quakers, I believe, have largely avoided those fundamental mistakes of modern theology and Enlightenment philosophy while adhering to the principles such as tolerance and justice that were important advances promoted by the Enlightenment.




Two main causes brought about the Enlightenment: (a) intellectual progress in science and philosophy and (b) social and cultural events.

The scientific revolution brought about by the Copernican theory of heliocentrism and the work of Galileo in providing a mathematical and conceptual foundation for the new world–view expounded by Fontenelle, d’Alembert, and Voltaire led to an emphasis on naturalistic and rational explanations for an expanding range of phenomena.

My focus here will be on the social and cultural factors that caused the Enlightenment. The Quakers were primarily affected by these drivers. Although many Quakers were interested in and approved of the latest in scientific and philosophical ideas, most Quakers and their leaders were less focused on and less affected by scientific and philosophical advances than by the general changes occurring in religious, social and cultural attitudes.

In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia marked the end of the Thirty Years War – a war fought by Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics over the balance of power and extension of control over territory. It was reasoned that God must support one side or the other, so when the war turned into an inconclusive deadlock the result was a rise in theological skepticism. God was not in the business of solving our problems. From now on, it was realized, people would have to figure out their own solutions to their problems.

Jonathan Israel describes the Enlightenment as:

a philosophical ‘revolution’ which shattered all the major thought–structures and premisses of the past causing an unprecedentedly sharp break in intellectual and academic life. ... Within a very short space of time... [people came to believe] that both the basic assumptions of centuries of previous thought and most men’s prevailing beliefs and ideas in existing society were fundamentally wrong and ill grounded. Were it possible, moreover, to improve men’s thinking this would in itself greatly improve human life and institutions by rendering society safer, healthier, more tolerant, more effective in its use of science, and more orderly and equipped with better legislation and laws [Israel, Defining the Enlightenment, pp. 9–10].

Quakers and others religious groups began to question and reject various religious orthodoxies. Respect for the dignity and worth of each individual human person without regard to his or her religious beliefs, in short, humanitarianism served as a central characteristic of Enlightenment thinking. Christians and rationalists could work together in reforming the practice of slavery, improving working conditions, and improving the treatment of the mentally ill and criminals in prisons.

Medieval Christianity placed an emphasis on the equal capacity of each individual to attain salvation. The emphasis was placed on the moral significance of the next world. Enlightenment reformers focused their attention on improving conditions in this world. Their focus was on deliberate social change and legal reform including recognition of the rights of women. Rejecting the notion that people are fundamentally depraved and evil, Enlightenment thinkers pressed the idea that mankind is capable of improvement.

Quakers maintained their focus on salvation and the importance of gaining entrance into the next world, i.e., heaven. But the Quakers’ belief that every person has an “inner light” in them led them to see people in a new way. The Quaker philsopher Rufus Jones writes:

The Inner Light is the doctrine that there is something Divine, ‘Something of God’ in the human soul. (Social Law in the Spiritual World: Studies in Human and Divine Inter-Relationship, 1904, pp. 167–168)

This not only makes all of us equals, but having something of the divine in us it was thought that human character can be improved through education and legislation. Quakers in Philadelphia put an emphasis on education of the young.

Janney writes in his History of the religious society of Friends, from its rise to the year 1828:

Education was duly appreciated in Pennsylvania as an essential element of public prosperity and happiness. Within a year from the landing of Penn, the governor and council engaged the services of Enoch Flower to open a school in Philadelphia; and in the year 1689, the Proprietary wrote to Thomas Lloyd, President of the council, instructing him to set up a Grammar school, which he promised to incorporate. This gave rise to the 'Friends' Public School,' which was incorporated in 1697, confirmed by a fresh patent in 1701, and by another charter in 1708.

The corporation was forever to consist of fifteen discreet and religious persons of the people called Quakers, by name of 'The Overseers of the Public School founded in Philadelphia at the request, cost, and charges of the People called Quakers.' Its last and present charter from Wm. Penn, confirming and enlarging its privileges, is dated 29th of November, 1711. In this institution the poor were taught gratuitously, others paid a portion of the cost of their children's education, and it was open on the same terms to all religious persuasions. The first teacher was George Keith, a classical scholar, and a minister of the society. (p. 389)






Links

Enlightened and Enriched

Quakers Ask: What Do We Believe, and Why?