Heavenly City Revisited

By GEORGE L. MOSSE

he passage of time has not been kind to the 18th-century philosophes. Modern historians have characterized the makers of the Enlightenment as dogmatists whose belief in reason amounted to self deception. They fought Christianity, but merely succeeded in building a “heavenly city” of their own. Progressive disenchantment with the potentialities of human reason has colored our view of the philosophes. Carl Becker, who set the tone for this interpretation of the Enlightenment, gave his famous lectures on “The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers” in 1931, at a time when the forces of irrationalism were closing in on Europe.

Peter Gay, a professor of history at Columbia University, has now successfully challenged this interpretation. He meets the philosophes on their own ground, and refuses to look upon them through a window clouded with the accumulated experiences of the last centuries. The philosophes emerge from his analysis as a group of intellectuals who believed that man’s unfettered use of his critical mind would lead all mankind into a better future.

This first volume of his study concentrates upon the origins of the Enlightenment. The classics provided the foundations, but the philosophes did not hesitate to use Renaissance and 17th-century thought in order to fight their battles against Christianity. The Middle Ages were rejected, but the philosophes did make use of that Christian tradition which stressed ethics and rationalism at the expense of theology.

Peter Gay demonstrates the selectivity that the philosophes exercised in pillaging the past. This very selectivity leads him to one of his most important conclusions: the philosophes were not an integral part of the “seamless web of history,” but instead signaled a break in its continuity. The origins of ideas may be a clue to their function, but they do not determine it. Past ideas make a substantial contribution to the education of the philosophes, but they did not determine the definition of the Enlightenment. Historians, usually obsessed with continuities, might well take note of this approach to intellectual history, for it has proved singularly fruitful in this book. The philosophes may have used Christian terminology, but the mere use of words does not mean that the substance behind them has remained intact. The philosophes were pagans, after all.