the seventeenth century, European scientists were beginning to liberate themselves from these old constraints. There was no need for them any longer, since the factors that had held agrarian societies back were gradually being overcome. Bacon insisted that science alone was true. His view of science was, admittedly, very different from our own. For Bacon, scientific method consisted chiefly in gathering facts; he did not appreciate the importance of guesswork and hypothesis in scientific research. But Bacon’s definition of truth would be extremely influential, especially in the English-speaking countries. He believed that the only information upon which we could safely rely came from our five senses; anything else was pure fantasy. Philosophy, metaphysics, theology, art, imagination, mysticism, and mythology were all dismissed as irrelevant and superstitious because they could not be verified empirically.
People who subscribed to this wholly rational way of life but who wanted to be religious would have to find new ways of thinking about God and spirituality. We see the death of the mythical approach in the philosophy of the French scientist René Descartes (1596–1650), who was able to speak only in logoi, in rational language. His was a lonely vision. For Descartes, the universe was a lifeless machine, the physical world inert and dead. It could give us no information about the divine. The single living thing in the cosmos was the human mind, which could find certainty merely by turning in upon itself. We could not even be sure that anything besides our own doubts and thoughts existed. Descartes was a devout Catholic; he wanted to satisfy himself about God’s existence, but refused to go back to the primordial, imaginary past of myth and cult. Nor could he rely on the insights of prophets and holy texts. A man of the new age, he would not accept received ideas; the scientist must make his mind a tabula rasa. The sole truth was that supplied by mathematics or by such lapidary propositions as “What’s done cannot be undone,” which was irrefutably correct. Since the way back was closed, Descartes could only inch his way painfully forward.
One evening, sitting beside a wood stove, Descartes evolved the maxim Cogito, ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” This, he believed, was self-evident. The one thing of which we could be certain was our mind’s experience of doubt. But this revealed the limitation of the human mind, and the very notion of “limitation” would make no sense if we did not have a prior conception of “perfection.” A perfection that did not exist, however, would be a contradiction in terms. Ergo, the Ultimate Perfection—God—must be a reality.17 This so-called proof is unlikely to satisfy a modern unbeliever, and it shows the impotence of pure reason when faced with such issues. Rational thought is indispensable for our effective functioning in the world. It is at its best when directed toward a pragmatic goal or when, like Descartes, we withdraw from the mundane to consider something as objectively as possible. But when we ask why the world exists (if it does!) or whether life has meaning, reason can make little headway, and the object of our thought itself can become strange to us. Descartes beside his stove, in his cold, empty world, locked into his own uncertainty, and uttering a “proof” which is little more than a mental conundrum, embodies the spiritual dilemma of modern humanity.
Thus, at a time when science and unfettered rationality were forging brilliantly ahead, life was becoming meaningless for an increasing number of people, who, for the first time in human history, were having to live without mythology. The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) believed that there was a God, but for all practical purposes, God might just as well not exist. Like Luther, Hobbes saw the physical world as empty of the divine. God, Hobbes believed, had revealed himself at the dawn of human history and would do so again at its End. But until that time we had to get on without him, waiting, as it were, in the dark.18 For the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), an intensely religious man, the emptiness and the “eternal silence” of the infinite universe opened up by modern science inspired pure dread:
When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.19
Reason and logos were improving the lot of men and women in the modern world in a myriad practical ways, but they were not competent to deal with those ultimate questions that human beings seem forced, by their very nature, to ask and which, hitherto, had been the preserve of mythos. As a result, despair and alienation, as described by Pascal, have been a part of the modern experience.
But not for everybody. John Locke (1632–1704), who was one of the first to initiate the philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, had none of Pascal’s existential angst. His faith in life and human reason was serene and confident. He had no doubts about God’s existence, even though, strictly speaking, he was aware that proving the reality of a deity that lay beyond our sense experience did not pass Bacon’s empirical test. Locke’s religion, relying entirely on reason, was similar to the deism espoused by some of the Jewish Marranos. He was fully convinced that the natural world gave ample evidence for a Creator and that if reason were allowed to shine forth freely, everybody would discover the truth for himself. False and superstitious ideas had only crept into the world because priests had used cruel and tyrannical methods, such as the Inquisition, to force the people to accept their orthodoxy. For the sake of true religion, therefore, the state must tolerate all manner of beliefs, and must concern itself solely with the practical administration and government of the community. Church and state must be separate, and neither must interfere in the business of the other. This was the Age of Reason, and for the first time in human history, Locke believed, men and women would be free, and, therefore, able to perceive the truth.20
This benign vision set the tone for the Enlightenment and the inspiring ideal of the modern, secular, tolerant state. The French and German Enlightenment philosophers also subscribed to the rational religion of deism, and saw the old mythical, revealed religions as outmoded. Since reason was the sole criterion of truth, the older faiths, based on a fictitious notion of “revelation,” had simply been naive versions of this natural religion and should be rejected. Faith had to be rational, argued the radical British theologian Matthew Tindal (1655–1733) and the Irish Roman-Catholic-turned-deist John Toland (1670–1722). Our natural reason was the only reliable way to arrive at sacred truth, and Christianity must be purged of the mysterious, the supernatural, and the miraculous. Revelation was unnecessary because it was quite possible for any human being to arrive at the truth by means of his or her unaided reasoning powers.21 As Newton had pointed out, reflection on the design of the physical universe provided irrefutable evidence for a Creator and First Cause. On the continent, the German historian Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) argued that Jesus had never claimed to be divine, and that his ambitions had been entirely political. Jesus should simply be revered as a great teacher, the founder of a “remarkable, simple, exalted and practical religion.”22
The old truths of mythos were now being interpreted as though they were logoi, an entirely new development that was, eventually, doomed to disappoint.
For at the same time as these theologians, philosophers, and historians proclaimed the supremacy of reason, the German rationalist Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) undercut the entire Enlightenment project. On the one hand, Kant issued yet another of the early modern declarations of independence. People must have the courage to throw off their dependence upon teachers, churches, and authorities and seek the truth for themselves. “Enlightenment is man’s exodus from his self-incurred tutelage,” he wrote. “Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his own understanding, without direction from
