Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment

Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment PDF Author: Thomas Ahnert
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9781580462044
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Analysis of the close relationship between religion and secular learning in the works of one of the central figures of the early German Enlightenment, the jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655-1728).The Enlightenment continues to be associated with the secularization and de-Christianization of intellectual culture in the West. And yet, religious thought played a far greater role in the emergence of the Enlightenment than is often recognized. In this book Thomas Ahnert analyzes the close relationship between religion and secular learning in the works of one of the central figures of the early German Enlightenment, the jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655-1728). Thomasius is now known mainly for his "enlightened" intellectual reform program, but Thomasius also believed that such reform necessarily involved a regeneration of Christian faith, which had been corrupted by self-interested clergymen and ecclesiastical institutions. This book is the first to examine the importance of Thomasius's complex religious beliefs for the entire spectrum of his main intellectual interests, which ranged from moral philosophy and law to history and the explanation of natural phenomena. Thomas Ahnert is Lecturer in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh. complex religious beliefs for the entire spectrum of his main intellectual interests, which ranged from moral philosophy and law to history and the explanation of natural phenomena. Thomas Ahnert is Lecturer in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh. complex religious beliefs for the entire spectrum of his main intellectual interests, which ranged from moral philosophy and law to history and the explanation of natural phenomena. Thomas Ahnert is Lecturer in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh. complex religious beliefs for the entire spectrum of his main intellectual interests, which ranged from moral philosophy and law to history and the explanation of natural phenomena. Thomas Ahnert is Lecturer in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh.

Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment

Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment PDF Author: Thomas Ahnert
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9781580462044
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Analysis of the close relationship between religion and secular learning in the works of one of the central figures of the early German Enlightenment, the jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655-1728).The Enlightenment continues to be associated with the secularization and de-Christianization of intellectual culture in the West. And yet, religious thought played a far greater role in the emergence of the Enlightenment than is often recognized. In this book Thomas Ahnert analyzes the close relationship between religion and secular learning in the works of one of the central figures of the early German Enlightenment, the jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655-1728). Thomasius is now known mainly for his "enlightened" intellectual reform program, but Thomasius also believed that such reform necessarily involved a regeneration of Christian faith, which had been corrupted by self-interested clergymen and ecclesiastical institutions. This book is the first to examine the importance of Thomasius's complex religious beliefs for the entire spectrum of his main intellectual interests, which ranged from moral philosophy and law to history and the explanation of natural phenomena. Thomas Ahnert is Lecturer in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh. complex religious beliefs for the entire spectrum of his main intellectual interests, which ranged from moral philosophy and law to history and the explanation of natural phenomena. Thomas Ahnert is Lecturer in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh. complex religious beliefs for the entire spectrum of his main intellectual interests, which ranged from moral philosophy and law to history and the explanation of natural phenomena. Thomas Ahnert is Lecturer in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh. complex religious beliefs for the entire spectrum of his main intellectual interests, which ranged from moral philosophy and law to history and the explanation of natural phenomena. Thomas Ahnert is Lecturer in Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh.

The Religious Enlightenment

The Religious Enlightenment PDF Author: David Sorkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188181
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book Here

Book Description
In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature. Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He demonstrates that, in the century before the French Revolution, the major religions of Europe gave rise to movements of renewal and reform that championed such hallmark Enlightenment ideas as reasonableness and natural religion, toleration and natural law. Calvinist enlightened orthodoxy, Jewish Haskalah, and reform Catholicism, to name but three such movements, were influential participants in the eighteenth century's burgeoning public sphere and promoted a new ideal of church-state relations. Sorkin shows how they pioneered a religious Enlightenment that embraced the new science of Copernicus and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Christian Wolff, uniting reason and revelation to renew faith and piety. This book reveals how Enlightenment theologians refashioned belief as a solution to the dogmatism and intolerance of previous centuries. Read it and you will never view the Enlightenment the same way.

The Secular Enlightenment

The Secular Enlightenment PDF Author: Margaret Jacob
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
Provides a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Jacob reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Jacob demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. --Adapted from publisher description.

The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory

The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory PDF Author: Simon Grote
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107110920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
This new study of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory situates it in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose.

New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment

New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment PDF Author: Brett C. McInelly
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683931629
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical and cultural movement that swept through Western Europe, has often been characterized as a mostly secular phenomenon that ultimately undermined religious authority and belief, and eventually gave way to the secularization of Western society and to modernity. To whatever extent the Enlightenment can be credited with giving birth to modern Western culture, historians in more recent years have aptly demonstrated that the Enlightenment hardly singled the death knell of religion. Not only did religion continue to occupy a central pace in political, social, and private life throughout the eighteenth century, but it shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways. The thinkers and philosophers normally associated with the Enlightenment, to be sure, challenged state-sponsored church authority and what they perceived as superstitious forms of belief and practice, but they did not mount a campaign to undermine religion generally. A more productive approach to understanding religion in the age of Enlightenment, then, is to examine the ways the Enlightenment informed religious belief and practice during the period as well as the ways religion influenced the Enlightenment and to do so from a range of disciplinary perspectives, which is the goal of this collection. The chapters document the intersections of religious and Enlightenment ideas in such areas as theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

God in the Enlightenment

God in the Enlightenment PDF Author: William J. Bulman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190267097
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.

Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism

Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism PDF Author: Michael Printy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521478391
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first account of the German Catholic Enlightenment, this book explores the ways in which 18th-century Germans reconceived the relationship between religion, society, and the state.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment PDF Author: John Robertson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199591784
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book Here

Book Description
This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.

Phaedon

Phaedon PDF Author: Moses Mendelssohn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Immortality
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description


Light of Reason, Light of Faith

Light of Reason, Light of Faith PDF Author: Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai
Publisher: St. Augustine's Press
ISBN: 9781587314667
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fr. Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai, a native of Cameroon, has written a fresh, exciting new study of the lifelong engagement of Josef Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, with the German Enlightenment and its contemporary manifestations and heirs. Contemporary European disdain for organized religion and the rise in secularism on that continent has deep roots in the German Enlightenment. To understand contemporary Europe, one must return to this crucial epoch in its history, to those who shaped the European mind of this era, and to a study of the ideas they espoused and propagated. These ideas, for good or for ill, have taken hold in other parts of the modern world, being incarnated in many minds and institutions in contemporary society and threatening to enthrone a disfigured rationality without faith or a sense of Transcendence. Ratzinger's extraordinary and sympathetic understanding of the sources of contemporary secularism equipped him to appreciate the gains of the Enlightenment, while still being a fierce critic of the losses humanity has suffered when reason falsely excludes faith. Fr. Agbaw-Ebai's account reveals Ratzinger, in relation to his various interlocutors, to be the truly "enlightened" one because he demonstrates a truly balanced understanding of the human mind. To be truly rational one must be able to hold to faith and reason both, reason informed by faith in Jesus Christ. A particular merit of this book is Agbaw-Ebai's presentation of Ratzinger's treatment of the German Enlightenment's greatest contributors: Kant, Nietzche, Hegel and Habermas, among others. In the postscript George Weigel characterizes what this study accomplishes in the larger framework of scholarship. "[Ratzinger's] position remains too often misunderstood, and sometimes deliberately misinterpreted, throughout the whole Church. And to misunderstand, or misinterpret, Ratzinger is to misunderstand or misinterpret both the modern history of theology and the Second Vatican Council." Agbaw-Ebai masterfully positions Ratzinger correctly in the history of ideas, and exhibits why Ratzinger will be remembered as one of its main players. Pure rationalists and true believers are equally indebted to him.