The seventeenth century did not get off to a great start in Europe. Religious conflict still simmered, and in 1618, the continent became embroiled in the bloodiest and most destructive war it would suffer before the two World Wars. The Netherlands was fighting for its independence. In Britain, the dispute between King and Parliament led to wars costing hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1640s and 1650s. Scientific progress faced massive barriers. Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for arguing that the Earth orbited the Sun and not the reverse, as Aristotle and generations of his followers had maintained. Across the continent, people remained poor, ignorant, oppressed, and victims of seemingly continuous violence.

Yet, by the end of the century, the religious wars were over, Europe had modern astronomy and physics, the Dutch had created the corporation and the stock exchange, England had established parliamentary government, and books calling for freedom of religion were openly being published and distributed. ‘In 1700 the mental outlook of educated men was completely modern; in 1600, except among a very few, it was largely medieval,’ wrote Bertrand Russell in his A History of Western Philosophy.

This shift in mindset, from the medieval to the modern, is the subject of Paul Strathern’s Dark Brilliance: The Age of Reason From Descartes to Peter the Great. Strathern covers the major figures and events of the era, painting a sweeping picture of the century and the monumental changes it brought to intellectual and cultural life in Europe. Dark Brilliance has remarkable breadth, touching on every field of knowledge from calculus to cooking. It includes the microscope and telescope, probability and statistics, gravity and motion, the Golden Age in the Netherlands and the Glorious Revolution in Britain. We meet—as we expect—figures such as Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton. But Strathern pays far more attention to culture and the arts than most other writers on the Enlightenment. He also breaks down the contrast between reason and unreason running through the seventeenth century; this is the ‘Dark’ of the book’s title.

The Culture of Enlightenment

As he promises in the subtitle, Strathern begins Dark Brilliance with René Descartes, as he is developing his new philosophy in a bucolic winter scene in a Bavarian village. From Descartes, he makes an unexpected jump to the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Caravaggio would not normally feature in a book on the Age of Reason. He lived in Italy, which had been the unquestioned centre of Europe during the Renaissance but was falling into the shadows of the Netherlands and France in the seventeenth century. For all their wealth and splendour, Rome and Florence never became centres of the Enlightenment in the way that Paris, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, or London did. Not only that, Caravaggio died before the Age of Reason really began.

Still, Strathern argues that Caravaggio’s painting was a leap forward from the past, just like the works of the Enlightenment thinkers. His painting showed more depth, photorealism, and understanding of scientific topics such as anatomy and optics than the Italian Renaissance masters who preceded him. And they, in turn, painted far more lifelike scenes than medieval European artists. Like the Renaissance artists, Caravaggio drew on classical as well as Biblical inspiration, although he painted with more drama and energy. Strathern highlights, in particular, Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, where he painted a scene from the Bible, a conventional subject, but presented it in a way that was unconventionally violent, visceral, and shocking. Compare the painting with medieval European art, which was often without passion; even people suffering violent deaths can look only bored or vaguely annoyed.

This focus on culture is an original approach, but one which makes sense. Culture reflects society, and we can see the ideas of the Enlightenment reflected in the art of the Baroque artists. But it has limitations, and centres of culture and art were not always centres of learning, science, philosophy, or law. There was no Florentine Newton or Milanese Spinoza.

The splendour of the court of Louis XIV made France the cultural centre of Europe—even today fields like cooking and fashion are speckled with French words and phrases—but the French Enlightenment only really took off after the Sun King’s death. Strathern could have perhaps explored this further.  

Reason and Unreason

The other theme of Dark Brilliance is, as the title itself illustrates, the paradoxes of the Enlightenment. To Strathern, the seventeenth century was the Age of Reason and Unreason. As he points out in the introduction, the achievements of the Enlightenment ‘took place against a background of extreme political turbulence and irrational behaviour on a continental scale,’ from frenzied persecutions of supposed witches to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

The developers of the telescope and the microscope were achieving steadily higher levels of magnification and bringing more and more of the hidden universe into view even as Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the tens of thousands. In the first chapter of Dark Brilliance, René Descartes invents his new philosophy while in the winter quarters of the Bavarian army during the Thirty Years War. The metastatic growth of the slave trade provides another example of how the irrational and inhumane could easily grow alongside the ideals of the Enlightenment. ‘…[I]n the Age of Reason, it was slavery that produced the capital which led to the progress of western European civilization, laying the foundations upon which its empires were built,’ Strathern writes. ‘At the same time, it also prompted a few rare spirits such as Montaigne to recognize the contagious barbarity of all who took part in it—to say nothing of the absurdity of its claims regarding racial superiority’. Man’s expanding knowledge did not seem to lessen his brutality—at least not yet.

The greatest paradox of the Enlightenment was, arguably, the French Revolution itself, which led to mass killing, the establishment of a dictatorship, and a new ‘rational’ religion in the name of Enlightenment values and freeing the people of France from the oppression of monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and a corrupt and reactionary Church. As he finishes his account at the start of the eighteenth century, Strathern doesn’t cover the French Revolution, although the theme of paradox runs through the book.

Conclusions

Why should we care about the Enlightenment? Because we live in a world shaped by it, and while we enjoy its benefits, we should also be aware (and beware) of its lessons. At the start of Dark Brilliance, Strathern asks if human progress will end up destroying the civilisation it helped to create. We face a range of threats, including climate change, enabled by the scientific progress and material wealth which has made our lives so much better. At the end of the book, he has not yet answered his own question, although he concludes that ‘paradoxically, the answer would appear to be progress itself’. Admittedly, it’s hard to see what other conclusion anyone could reach. There are calls today from the far left and far right of the political spectrum to dismantle the modern economy and modern society and revert to some pre-modern ideal. But this ideal is, in all cases, as mythical as it is real.

Strathern chooses to tell his overall story as a collection of colourful little biographies. This is an accessible approach and makes the book engaging for a general audience. Anyone who reads Dark Brilliance will reach the end with a much better understanding of not just the Enlightenment but life in seventeenth-century Europe in general. As someone who has read and written much about the subject, Strathern’s account of the development of Baroque painting was still entirely new to me.

I was left feeling that some of the threads remained loose, particularly on the impact of the Enlightenment and the paradox of reason coexisting with unreason. But as a panorama of seventeenth-century Europe, Dark Brilliance is both an impressive and very readable book.

Related reading

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

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In Why the Enlightenment Matters, Adam Wakeling sets himself the ambitious task of defining the shift in thinking known as the Enlightenment that occurred in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and explaining how it made much of the modern world what it is.

Prosperous nations now enjoy benefits unimaginable throughout most of history, such as advanced health care, respect for human rights, free speech, tolerance, democracy, material comfort, scientific knowledge, education, and a reduction in wars and barbaric punishments. The author’s central thesis is that this is due to the Enlightenment. Of course, things are far from perfect – famine, disease, poverty, and dictatorship are still widespread, and the Enlightenment has an ambivalent record when it comes to racism and slavery. But today’s world would have been unrecognisable to the people of sixteenth-century Europe, when the book’s story starts.

Wakeling begins his narrative in 1553, with the burning alive of the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus in Calvinist Geneva. Servetus had denied the Trinity, proclaiming to the very end that Jesus was ‘the Son of eternal God’ and not the ‘eternal Son of God’. John Calvin, who had once been Servetus’ friend, approved of the heretic’s execution. This was the pre-Enlightenment world. In the fourteen chapters that follow, the author takes us through the unfolding story of the extraordinary changes that took place in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and gives us his explanation of why and how they happened.

His account is admirably comprehensive in scope, rich in historical detail, and highly readable. This reviewer is not an historian, and other curious non-historians will learn much about the manifestations and effects of Enlightenment thinking. Their common themes are principally the challenges to spiritual and political authority, and the rise of science and innovation. They include the effect of the Protestant Reformation on the breakdown of centralised authority in northern and western Europe and its role in promoting literacy. From these came the growth of toleration in the Netherlands, despite the efforts of the Dutch Reformed Church. In seventeenth-century England there was the end of rule by ‘divine right’ of English monarchs after the Civil War, and the subsequent  growth of alternative justifications for government found in the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and especially John Locke. Scholastic natural law theory was modified to include rights to property and political rebellion. Developments in just war theory, especially by Hugo Grotius, had already been made urgent by the excesses of religious wars. The eighteenth century saw Adam Smith’s attempt to provide a ‘science of man’ and his role in the decline of mercantilism and the burgeoning of free trade.

Also discussed in learned detail is the history of the Enlightenment in France, where it arrived later than in the Netherlands, England and Scotland. We read of the eventual success of the Encyclopédie despite attempts to suppress or censor it, and the influence of Enlightenment ideas about the ‘Rights of Man’ on the French Revolution. Of course, the Revolution’s bloodthirsty descent into Terror, largely engineered by the fanatical Maximilien Robespierre, caused many to doubt the whole Enlightenment project.

Running parallel to these rich narratives of political changes and their attendant wars is an account of how the scientific method became established. Aristotle had already made patchy attempts at empirical enquiry into nature but had been hamstrung by his teleological theory. His ideas had become embedded in the Catholic Church’s teaching as doctrines, despite their originally provisional nature, and it was only when the Church’s authority began to fracture that Aristotelian science could be questioned. Francis Bacon exposed some ‘idols of the mind’: errors or cognitive biases such as the ‘gambler’s fallacy’, excessive reliance on personal experience, the miscommunication of correct ideas and the spread of false ideas through existing systems of philosophy. Such issues still make it hard to discern truth from prejudice in science. Yet it was only after the patient observations and hypotheses of Galileo, Kepler and Newton, in part while trying to explain the anomalous behaviour of planets, that the geocentric view of the universe was dislodged, and otherwise inexplicable celestial movements could eventually be explained in terms of a universal theory of gravitation.

Wakeling shows how religious authorities tried to obstruct scientific thinking, not only in Europe but further afield. In fifteenth century Samarkand, for instance, the Islamic authorities destroyed an observatory, and in sixteenth century Constantinople, a similarly impressive observatory was closed by the Sultan amid concerns that its founder, Taqi ad-Din, would be prosecuted for heresy. But for some reason, the Enlightenment prevailed in northern and western Europe, whereas the pockets of Enlightenment thinking that had sprung up in other places, such as the Ottoman Empire and India, never took off. Moreover, in the eighteenth century, the nations where the Enlightenment occurred began to overtake the rest of the world in technological knowledge and economic power, and in the nineteenth century brought massive improvements to the living standards of ordinary people.

The final chapter of the book is especially interesting and potentially controversial, as it explores why the Enlightenment was successful in Europe and north America but not elsewhere. It brings us back to the author’s account, given near the start of the book, of what the shift in thinking that defined the Enlightenment really amounted to. In his view, it consisted of five simple elements: recognition of the limits of reason, empirical thinking, toleration of dissent, universality, and progress. Of course, in a broad sense the Enlightenment was a rational project, in that its thinkers used reason to question authority and dogma. But they rejected the notion that pure reason could reach truths that, as it happened, only empirical methods could reveal. Once dogmas were questioned, dissent was inevitable, and the issue of toleration became unavoidable. Wakeling argues that it was precisely this shift in thinking that explains the success of the countries where the Enlightenment took root.

This is controversial, not only because fashionable post-colonial theory is suspicious of the Enlightenment, but also because some writers think the flourishing of Western civilisation is traceable to Greco-Roman times and Christianity.

Wakeling’s rebuttal of the latter notion is, in essence, that the Enlightenment’s empirical style of thinking and its toleration of dissent amounted to a radical break with the past. There was much that was bad about the Greco-Roman world, and much of the history of Christianity is one of intolerance.

In reply, one might say that it was the best features of the classical world, such as Greek democracy and philosophy that inspired Western civilisation, and that it was not so much Christianity as its connection to state power from the fourth century onward that explains why the Enlightenment took so long to occur. As Wakeling concedes, Jesus reportedly said that his Kingdom was not of this world, and Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire until 313 AD. These questions are of course complex, but whether or not Christianity ultimately contributed to the Enlightenment, Wakeling is persuasive in arguing that the latter was almost certainly a major factor in Western success, due to its distinctive style of thought.

I highly recommend this book both for scholars and the general reader. It is a rare combination of erudition and lucidity; it makes its thesis plain from the outset and it sets out its evidence clearly and thoroughly. Since it is primarily an historical analysis, it does not respond to contemporary philosophical critiques of the Enlightenment, such as that of Alasdair MacIntyre. Some thinkers might regard the Enlightenment view of human nature as naïve and lacking in spiritual insights into our darkest flaws: a world of rights and prosperity may be lacking in love and humility. But for all that, the Enlightenment provided fertile soil for the better as well as the worse aspects of humanity, and readers will find this stimulating book an invaluable resource.

Adam Wakeling, Why the Enlightenment Matters: The shift in our thinking that made the modern world, is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing, May 2023.

See also Wakeling’s article for the Freethinker, Do we need God to defend civilisation?

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