Enlightenment Darkness

It is common for conservative Christians to lay the blame for the collapse of Western Civilization at the feet of the Enlightenment. With a hyper-focus upon reason, a rejection of traditional Christian dogma, and a secularizing of the public square, the 17th-18th century cultural movement surely deserves at least some of the blame it is charged with. But some writers in the midst of that movement provided sensible critiques of the new intellectual dogma. Two such examples are Alexander Pope and William Shakespeare.

            Shakespeare’s Hamlet predates the Enlightenment by at least a century or so, standing in the liminal time between the Renaissance and the modern era. But many of the ideas interacted with in the text are relevant to ideas propagated in the Enlightenment, such as materialism and providence. Hamlet can be viewed as a preemptive critique of Enlightenment doctrine, an old-world defense the Christian cosmos against the seeds of the new world starting to bud and grow.

            The main-stand in for modern views of the world in Hamlet is Horatio, who expresses skepticism at the supernatural appearance of the Ghost. He continues to express his disbelief in his experiences until Hamlet famously replies, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”[1]

            Hamlet senses that all is not right with the world, that “time is out of joint.”[2] It is common in Shakespeare for the death of a king to cause the world itself to rumble in discontent; the Ghost confirms to Hamlet that these supernatural occurrences are not accidents. They confirm the foul deed of Claudius.

            Hamlet also critiques the Enlightenment worldview concerning divine guidance, where rigid, physical laws of nature replaced providence.[3] There is madness in the world, but is there “method in ‘t”?[4] Is a providential God the method? Or merely inflexible principles of nature?

            As the play crescendos, the answer is that the cosmos is indeed providentially governed: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough hew them how we will.”[5] Hamlet might as well fight Laertes soon, for “there is a / special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”[6] As Hamlet obediently pursues the duel, his actions and death allow the world to be set right again.

            Differing from Hamlet’s hope in God’s governance, the Enlightenment began to turn its back upon God’s direct involvement supernaturally or sovereignly in the affairs of the world. The philosophes placed this authority in man, and posited an optimistic view of man’s reason. Alexander Pope’s “theme” in his Essay on Man, as one scholar put it, was “man’s place in God’s universe.”[7] Throughout the Essay, Pope highlights how his contemporary thinkers have elevated man’s role in the “chain of being” beyond where he rests in reality.[8]

Adopting an approach which resonates with the psalmist, Pope proclaims,

Created half to rise, half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d:

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world![9]…

In pride, in reas’ning pride, our error lies…

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,

Aspiring to be angels, men rebel:

And who but wishes to invert the laws

Of Order, sins against the Eternal Cause.[10]

Men are a little beneath the angels. To aspire to more would be to fall as Lucifer, rebelling against the natural order of creation. Elsewhere, Pope references Milton’s account of Babel in Paradise Lost, admonishing those who seek to absolutize man’s reason. Attempting to rise beyond man’s spot in the hierarchy of the cosmos, man will only receive laughter from the heavenly throne room and a burying beneath the “heaps they raise.”[11]

            Pope, like the Christian humanists before him, does not deny that man is great in his own way. He simply tells man to stay in his own lane. “A being darkly wise, and rudely great”[12] must “[look] through Nature up to Nature’s God[.]”[13] In humility, man must use reason to study himself and nature, and through them to find the Eternal Cause.

            Amidst and before Enlightenment dogma, Pope and Shakespeare reminded mankind of the world we live in and our place in it. Pride in man must fall to humility before God; skepticism of the supernatural must fall before wonder at the nature of the cosmos.

Bibliography

[1] William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, Rebecca Niles (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2012), 1.5.187-88.

[2] Ibid., 1.5.210.

[3] J. C. D. Clark, “Providence, Predestination and Progress: Or, Did the Enlightenment Fail?” Albion 35, no. 4 (2003): 569. https://doi.org/10.2307/4054295.

[4] Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2224.

[5] Ibid., 5.2.11-12.

[6] Ibid., 5.2.233-34.

[7] John Laird, “Pope’s Essay on Man,” The Review of English Studies 20, no. 80 (1944): 286. http://www.jstor.org/stable/509993.

[8]Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man” in Essay on Man & Other Poems (Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 1994), 51, I.VIII.

[9] Ibid., 53, II.I.

[10] Ibid., 48-49, I.IV.

[11] Ibid., 71, IV.II.

[12] Ibid., 53, II.I.

[13] Ibid., 77, IV.VII.