In distinguishing their age from the past, Enlightenment writers often spoke of their time as a ‘great age’, comparable to the Age of Augustus. Few of the Enlightenment writers would have preferred to have lived at any other time. J. Bury states that ‘the Enlightenment of the present age surpasses that of antiquity:
La docte Antiquité dans toute sans sa durée
A l’égal de nos jours ne fut point éclairée’.
- Appleby et al. also write: ‘Progress and modernity…marched hand in hand’. Did Enlightenment writers invent the idea of progress? What did they think progress consisted of? (Did they all agree, for example, about where it was evident, how far it could go, how desirable it was?)
J. Bury uses a metaphor to describe the idea of progress: ‘The sciences and arts are like rivers, which flow for part of their course underground, and then, finding an opening, spring forth as abundant as when they plunged beneath the earth’.
An Enlightenment writer who did not agree with the idea of progress was Perrault. He was so impressed with the advance of knowledge in the recent past that he was incapable of imagining further progression. However, Voltaire conceived progress as universal history, which advanced as an immense whole, steadily, and through periods of alternating calm and disturbance towards an achievement of greater perfection.
- How did Enlightenment ideas about time, history and progress differ from those of traditional Christian thought? Did they nevertheless have some things in common with it?
In terms of history, Enlightenment writers believed that new principles of order and unity were needed to replace the principles which rationalism had discredited (i.e. the ideas Christianity put forward as to how the world and the universe functioned). They also agreed that in many circumstances religion had been the great obstacle in the progress of humanity. As for progress itself, much of the attitude towards it was changing from pessimism (a feature of Christianity – the only way you could better yourself was if you got to heaven) to optimism (e.g. Voltaire).
