The birth of modern Europe

COVER STORY

Episode 2

If the present age social, political and cultural make-up of Europe can be most directly attributed to any particular era in history, it’s the Age of Enlightenment. This roughly 18 Century time period also known as the Age of Reason is what shaped Europe as we know it today. After the long and reformative process of the Renaissance, Europe awaited another phase of turmoil and agony called the Reformation after which it was both ready and eager to change or in fact explode and then rebuild itself into a desired model of its ideals, a profound example of which can be found in the French Revolution.

The Reformation

Around the same time as the Renaissance period when new ideas were sprouting in the European society, a major religious rift drastically changed the united Christendom and the fate of Christianity forever. This was the time when the now familiar segregation between Catholics and Protestants took place. The Reformation Movement started when several learned men across the continent started pointing out and advocating against the Church and its corrupt practices.

The biggest and perhaps the most well-known hero of the Reformation is Martin Luther. Luther rejected many corrupt practices of the Catholic Church; sowing the seeds of the split in the largest religion of the world was a rather interesting one. The Church had a custom of selling ‘indulgences’. These indulgences were written documents or certificates which could be bought from the priests in order to gain forgiveness. The practice was common and even kings were bound to get themselves pardoned in exchange for money if they had committed any offences, according to the Church. Martin Luther, who was a monk and teacher at the University of Wittenberg, Germany. found this practice very misleading and spiritually incorrect. Through his personal education and understanding, he came to the conclusion that one’s relationship with God depends on one’s faith: faith in people’s heart and thus forgiveness couldn’t be granted through a piece of paper. Luther believed that the religious lives of the Christians should be dictated by the scripture rather than by priestly authority.

When asked by the Pope to recant, Luther said: ‘Unless I am convicted of error by the testimony of Scripture… I cannot and will not retract …. Here, I stand, God help me!’ On October 31, 1517 Luther published his ideas and views in the form of 95 points, historically known as ‘95 theses’ which became the guideline for the Protestant faith in Europe. The document became extremely popular thanks to the newly developed technology of the printing press. Protestant leaders were labelled as heretics and burned and executed, and their followers were openly persecuted. The word Protestant came from the act of protesting against the Church, hence the name.

England, under King Henry VIII, was the first kingdom to openly defy the Roman Catholic Church and declare itself protestant. Considering how deeply the Church was rooted in the socio-political structure of the European society, the changes brought by the Reformation were more political than religious or social. Soon afterwards, several kingdoms, one after another, converted to Protestantism, while a few like Spain, Portugal and Italy remained Catholic. The continent was ravaged with religiously motivated war and conflict as different sects took up arms against each other. Europe became a bunch of quarrelling states, a continent ready to tear itself apart. In fact, the time that followed is regarded by some as the bloodiest century in the history of Europe. It is an irony how more people were killed in the name of the religion of love than any other cause in history.

The Enlightenment

The Renaissance was an age of arts and new ideas. What it did was enrich the minds of intellectuals and philosophers, equip their minds with the elements necessary to translate it into actual change in society. The revolution and social transformation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a direct result of the Renaissance.

The overall attitude of the Age of Reason can be highlighted in one question: Why are the things the way they are? Society experienced a drastic change in mindset; there was a newfound urge to question everything, including the legitimacy of the absolute monarchs who claimed that their right to rule was a divinely ordained phenomenon. The most significant work that paved the way for the Enlightenment was The Encyclopedie. In the mid-18 Century, the French philosopher Denis Diderot invited many of his country’s leading intellectuals, literary men, scientists, scholars and philosophers for a rather remarkable project. The goal was to assemble all the knowledge scattered in the Earth into a huge “Classified Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Trades”, for which Diderot was editor-in-chief and a contributor. The first volumes appeared in 1751, and full work was completed 21 years later, comprising 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of illustrations. The Encyclopedie made huge quantity of relatively modern knowledge from every field of education easily accessible to the masses. The content of The Encyclopedie was a revolution in itself.

There was massive focus on reason and it paid a lot of attention to the practical sciences like trades and crafts that had a direct effect on the society. The articles reflected an overall air of rationality, the importance of observation and experimentation in science and the search for a way of organizing states and governments around natural law and justice. Surprisingly, there was no separate section for religion or theology which had been the major component of education and learning in Europe for more than a millennium. The subjects of God and the divine, the supernatural and the spiritual matters were discussed in other sections of sciences, history and philosophy, with little attention and focus. The whole work and its up-to-date and revolutionary ideas were a challenge to both the Catholic Church and the French monarchy, which relied on tradition and ignorance for their absolute authority. The work’s multidisciplinary articles distilled ideas and theories of France’s key Enlightenment thinkers including the legendary Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu. They argued about the universal truths and laws, set down by the doctrines of the church. For them, the evidence of the senses of a person and the use of reason was more important than blind faith. A Frenchman, Immanual Kant, when asked what enlightenment is, replied: ‘Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!’

One of the greatest writers and social activists of the Enlightenment was Francois-Marie Arouet, publically known as Voltaire. In fact, his influence can be imagined from the fact that sometimes the entire 18 Century is regarded as the Age of Voltaire. Though born and educated in France, Voltaire moved to London to publish his initial works which were refused to be published by the rigid French monarchy. He was a prolific writer, and an outspoken activist which often resulted in short spells of prison for him. The most popular of Voltaire’s ideas in today’s world is the notion of individual freedom and liberalism. Actually, the obsession of today’s western society with the idea of individualism and freedom can be attributed, to some extent, to this man. He was an advocate of religious tolerance and multiculturalism. A well-known quote by Voltaire is: ‘I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ Through his wit Voltaire conveyed his ideas across the common people and they were often perceived quite well.

In his remarkable novel Candide (1759), Voltaire suggests that the earthquake that had caused massive destruction in Lisbon four years earlier was due to natural phenomenon instead of God’s wrath over the wrongdoings of mankind, and perhaps we did not live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’. This was a new and revolutionary idea because since forever the Church had made people believe that the world that we live in and everything that occurs in it including the social hierarchy, the royalty of the royals, the noble’s nobility and tyranny of the peasants was according to a perfect and divine social order. The power of Voltaire’s work can also be imagined from the fact that even today, the world views some things as depicted through Voltaire’s pen. When he was residing in England, Voltaire came across the work of Newton, and was particularly mesmerized by his theory of gravitation. At the same time Newton was quite poorly known in France and the rest of the world and Voltaire knew just how to make his message popular among the masses. Hence came the story of the apple falling on Newton’s head. Voltaire heard the story from Newton’s niece and decided to stick with it; thankfully he skipped the mathematical details of gravitation.