Enlightenment

Peter Hanns Reill, ed., and Ellen Judy Wilson, principal author, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (revised edition; New York: Facts on File, 2004), 670pp.

Contemporary critics of modernity, including Christian ones, often focus their attacks on ?The Enlightenment,?Ethe intellectual and cultural movement that endured through the ?long eighteenth century?Ebetween Louis XIV and Napoleon. Castigated by its critics for its rationalism and rigorous logic-chopping, ?The Enlightenment?Eis seen as the source for many of the evils of contemporary social, intellectual, and political life. The authors of this volume offer a more nuanced picture of the movement. It is a mistake, for example, to believe that there is only one Enlightenment; Descartes?Egeometric rationalism, for example, came under severe criticism, and for many Enlightened thinkers ?feeling and sensation replaced reason as the grounds upon which all human understanding and activity were founded.?EFar from being committed to abstract reason and speculation, ?one basic strain?Erecurs in nearly every Enlightenment writer, ?namely a great disdain for abstract answers based on empty logic.?EThe Enlightenment was not so much an age of rationalism as an age of criticism, more an age of autonomy than an age of system-building. As Kant defined it, ?Enlightenment is man?s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man?s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.?EThe Encyclopedia is clearly written, well-indexed, thoroughly cross-referenced, and gives a surprising amount of attention to theological writers and subjects (articles, for example, on Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Jansenism, the Jesuits, Reimarus, Vico, Hamann, and Reimarus). It provides an excellent overview of the current state of research on this highly important turning point in Western history.