Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Both the moderate Enlightenment and a radical or revolutionary Enlightenment were reactions against the authoritarianism, irrationality, and obscurantism of the established churches. Philosophers such as Voltaire depicted organized religion as hostile to the development of reason and the progress of science and incapable of verification.
Storm points out that there are vastly different and mutually contradictory periodizations of the Enlightenment depending on nation, field of study, and school of thought; that the term and category of "Enlightenment" referring to the Scientific Revolution was actually applied after the fact; that the Enlightenment did not see an increase in ...
In the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras, Europe was a "persecuting society" which did not tolerate religious minorities or atheism. [4] Even in France, where the Edict of Nantes had been issued in 1598, then revoked in 1685, there was very little support for religious toleration at the beginning of the eighteenth century. [5]
The advantage of giving a standard definition of 'Deism' is to distinguish it from Christianity on the one hand and atheism on the other hand. Robert Corfe argues since deism is not organized as a church, and because it teaches self-reliance and to question authority through its intrinsic characteristics, it has little inclination to move toward the status of a highly organized body.
Both emphasized the importance of shaping young minds early. By the late Enlightenment, there was a rising demand for a more universal approach to education, particularly after the American and French Revolutions. Enlightenment children were taught to memorize facts through oral and graphical methods that originated during the Renaissance. [5]
In Spanish America just as in Spain, the Enlightenment had some aspects of anticlericalism, but many priests were in favor of science and scientific thinking and were practitioners themselves. [3] Some clergy were proponents of the Enlightenment as well as independence. [ 4 ]
Of course Enlightenment ideas about religion influenced the gentry but Catherine established the Commission on Church Lands on February 6, 1764 to support the finances of the state. [15] The appropriation of Church lands to the state brought a substantial amount of money, land, and peasants under Catherine's control. [15]
The concept originated during the Enlightenment period in the 18th and into the early 19th centuries. An enlightened absolutist is a non-democratic or authoritarian leader who exercises their political power based upon the principles of the Enlightenment. Enlightened monarchs distinguished themselves from ordinary rulers by claiming to rule for ...