The Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the American Revolution
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) was an art critic, novelist and most importantly a major philosopher of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a period of radical, rationalistic philosophy that unfolded roughly from about 1690 to 1790. The Enlightenment transformed the thinking of the elite of Europe and North America. Most commentators emphasize the secular progressive elements of the Enlightenment but there were great advances in Christian philosophy and political thought as well.
Diderot was raised Roman Catholic and was educated in a Jesuit college and for a time considered entering the clergy. This would prove ironic as he later rejected Christianity and embraced, at various times, atheism and Deism. Diderot briefly studied law, then rejected that learned profession. He decided to become a writer and translator instead. This change of career path so displeased his father that he disowned Diderot.
This forced Diderot into a wandering Bohemian existence for ten years. He befriended fellow Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau during those years. He also — ironically — married a devout Roman Catholic woman of low birth, again infuriating his father.
Diderot’s greatest (or worst) mark on the Enlightenment was his famous Encyclopedie which he co-founded in 1750. In it he wished to convey knowledge of philosophy, literature and even scientific and mechanical knowledge to the French people. It was a noble end in some respects but unfortunately was tinged with skepticism of Christianity and loaded with idealistic and impractical ideas.
Diderot’s criticism of both Christianity and the French government brought him popular disdain and persecution by the authorities. Diderot is quoted as saying: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” By the time of his death in 1784, Diderot had made a deep impact on the thinking of the French upper classes. Diderot, along with Rousseau, Voltaire and other French Enlightenment philosophers, laid the philosophical underpinnings that led to The French Revolution. The secular minded philosophers of the Enlightenment rejected revelation (the Bible) as an authoritative source of absolute truth. They rejected the concept of revealed truth. To them, truth must be discovered by human reason alone. This is philosophical modernism or modern philosophy. They rejected truth given to us by God and imposed a new manmade absolute truth. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed that God was unknowable. Rationality is great but radical rationalism is deadly.
The Enlightenment gave us modernism. In our own day, in the twenty-first century, philosophy has gone beyond modernism to postmodernism. Postmodernism regards truth as something not given by God or even discovered by human reason. The postmodernist view is that truth is totally subjective and varies from person to person and culture to culture. This is called moral relativism. To the postmodernist, there’s no absolute truth, just preferences. People with the same preferences band together and form activist groups and seek to impose their preferred “truth” on the rest of society.
The philosophy of the secular Enlightenment was, as we have seen, rationalism. Rationalism is the essence of modernism. The Enlightenment was called the Age of Reason. Rationalism is the idea that there are fundamental truths in logic, mathematics, and ethics that are absolute (can’t be contradicted) and discoverable by the mind. One rationalistic discovery was that the concentration of power in one man — the king — was morally wrong. The rationalists rejected hereditary dictatorship, also called royalty. Ironically, this discovery that dictatorship is wrong was the same conclusion Protestant reformer, John Calvin arrived at 200 years earlier and for which Calvin was persecuted. The secular Enlightenment affirmed the biblical concept of the fact that all men are created equal and concentrating too much power in one man is wrong. Revelation and reason agreed on the equality of man.
Yes, secular Enlightenment people embraced the biblical concepts of the equal standing of all people before the law (taught in both Old and New Testaments) and individual autonomy which is self-governance, also called personal freedom (Romans 14:1–5). We have to remember that the secular philosophers were raised in a Christian society and educated by Christians. Even the most rebellious and rationalistic of them still thought in biblical categories of justice and equality. The real danger and failure of the secular Enlightenment was its disdain for the sanctity of human life and its brutality in enforcing its political will on others. The followers of the Enlightenment philosophers attempted to impose equality without Christ. They did not show Christian virtues of patience, forbearance, respect for others’ opinions or the Christian standards for determining when war is justified.
One Christian doctrine the secular Enlightenment philosophers rejected was original sin. The Bible teaches that all people are born sinners who need to repent and turn to Christ to receive forgiveness of sins and experience moral transformation (Romans 5:12–21). The secular philosophers taught that people are born basically good and can collectively form a happy utopian society apart from Christian moral teaching and Christian restraint from evil. Even the initially well meaning revolutionary, Maximillian Robespierre, was swept up in the optimistic idealism of revolution yet became part of the infamous Reign of Terror.
The rejection of original sin greatly influenced the long term legacy of the Enlightenment and shaped the political ideologies of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. The claim that human nature is basically good gave momentum to the idealistic communist claim that a utopian society of “everyone sharing around the world” (John Lennon, song: Imagine) is possible. Communism had its roots in the Enlightenment.
The French Revolution was the immediate fruit of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution was a time of brutality, intolerance, rejection of Christianity — even going so far as to change the week to ten days in defiance of biblical time reckoning — culminating in a reign of terror with mass executions by guillotine and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte as an antichrist figure who embarked on a conquest of Europe.
This brings us to another aspect of the Enlightenment, namely, the Christian Enlightenment. There were philosophers in Europe at the time who consciously embraced Christianity and the Holy Bible. One such philosopher is Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu (1689–1755) known simply as Montesquieu.
Montesquieu is famous for his articulation of the separation of powers in government. Sound familiar? It should, because the constitution of the United States separates political power between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. The concept of the three branches of power is found in the Bible in Isaiah 33:22 “For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; he will save us.”
It can be argued that the Christian Enlightenment began long before the secular Enlightenment. In the 1500s we had the Protestant Reformation through which, for the first time in world history, the Bible was printed and distributed across a whole continent populated by millions of people. It was said that every plowboy in England had his own copy of the Bible.
In the 1600s we had the early political revolutions in the American colonies, among people enlightened by biblical revelation. During those years, Thomas Hooker (founder of Connecticut) and other colonial leaders applied the biblical concept of the fact that each Christian is part of a royal priesthood (I Peter 2:9). Each Christian has royal (self-governing) privileges and priestly (one-on-one relationship with God) privileges. In implementing this biblical concept, Hooker and other colonial leaders established elected legislatures throughout the colonies a century before the famous European Enlightenment.
During the Enlightenment, in the mid 1700s, the founding fathers of the United States wrote articles, letters and books detailing their beliefs about government under God. They despised the concept of being under the authority of a British king (too much power in one man) who governed his colonies capriciously.
In the 1970s, political science professors at the University of Houston undertook a study to determine the sources of the political philosophy of the founding fathers. In this ten year long study they found 3,154 quotes in their writings. Thirty-four percent of all quotes were directly from the Bible. They next most quoted were three Christian Enlightenment philosophers. These three, in order of most frequently quoted, were: Montesquieu, then Henry Blackstone, writer of the biblically based Blackstone’s Commentary on the Law, followed by John Locke. These three philosophers were highly biblical in their writings. Some have noted that the founders occasionally quoted the secular Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. This fact was verified but they found that when Hume was quoted it was because the founders largely criticized Hume’s secular perspective.
The Christian Enlightenment birthed the early American culture which was: small government, low taxes, minimal government intervention in society, personal freedom, hard work, personal responsibility and raise your own children (the village won’t raise them for you).
So we see that we had two Enlightenments; one Christian and the other secular. One submits to God and builds on His truth. The other rejects God, denies original sin and believes man can build a happy society on reason alone. One resulted in American republican government under God after a war of separation from Britain. The other resulted in a violent revolution, blasphemous rejection of Christ, a reign of terror and produced an antichrist figure — Napoleon — bent on conquest.
In each century there always seems to be a choice between two ways, the narrow way and the broad way. In the first century the choice was between Christ and Caiaphas, the High Priest. In the fifth century the choice was between Augustine and Pelagius. In the sixteenth century it was between Luther and Erasmus. In the eighteenth century the choice was between Montesquieu and Diderot. in the nineteenth century, here in the U.S., the choice was between Lincoln and Davis. The twentieth century presented the choice between Churchill and Hitler.
God has such high esteem for the dignity of man that He gives each of us a choice. God didn’t create robots who are forced to love Him. God gave us a choice to either remain in our sins or turn to Christ, the promised redeemer. Christ came in fulfillment of over three hundred prophecies written in the Old Testament. He worked miracles of healing in which people born blind were given sight and He even raised people from the dead.
The prophets foretold that Christ, the promised Messiah of Israel, would suffer and die, taking the sins of the people upon Himself. Christ rose from the dead to offer forgiveness of sins to all who call upon Him in repentance. Which will you choose: life or death? I invite you to call upon Jesus Christ today. “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13).
Steps to salvation:
Jesus said “Ye must be born again.” (John 3:7)
1) Believe that God loves you and sent the Messiah (Messiah is Hebrew for Christ) to redeem you.
2) Believe that Jesus Christ came to die for you, to take upon Himself the penalty of your sins (Isaiah 53:5–6, John 6:29, Romans 4:5, First Peter 3:18).
3) Repent of your sins and call on the name of Jesus to ask for forgiveness of sins (Romans 10:13).
4) Receive Jesus as Savior and experience the new birth (John 1:12, Acts 2:38).
5) Follow Jesus Christ as Lord (John 14:15).
Prayer to receive salvation:
To receive the salvation which Jesus purchased for us at the terrible cost of His suffering and death on our behalf I invite you to pray this simple prayer:
“Dear heavenly Father, I thank you for sending Jesus, the promised Messiah, to die for my sins. I admit that I’m a sinner. I repent of my sins and I ask you to forgive me on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I ask you to fill me with your Holy Spirit to empower me to serve you under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
If you prayed this prayer in the humble sincerity of your heart, then you have received everlasting life, which includes power to live right in this life and entrance into heaven in the afterlife!
Bill Nugent, Overcomer Ministries of Fort Mill, South Carolina, USA
© 2019 William P. Nugent, permission granted to email or republish for Christian outreach.
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