What is "The Enlightenment"? As you probably know or can guess, it is a movement that places greatest emphasis on individual human thought (logical, systematic, evidenced, insightful and informed thought, not just any fleeting idea) as a guide and authority in life -- over the authority of kings and popes, over tradition, religion, 'great' leaders, group-think, rules-&-regs, hierarchy, superstition, emotional or intuitive leading, imitation of others.

      More specifically, the Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement of the 17th-18th centuries called "The Age of Reason" which followed and eclipsed the Reformation, in part due to the excesses, problems and failures of the Reformation. An example that greatly motivated Voltaire will help explain: A Protestant man named Jean Callas of Toulouse was accused of murdering his own son in order to keep him from converting to Catholicism. Jean Callas was arrested, tried, found guilty and executed -- death by torture on the wheel. Voltaire was convinced that Callas did not do the deed and that his execution was in reality one more Catholic state-murder of a Protestant. This particular event exemplifies in microcosm the huge, violent and repulsive Wars of Religion which the Enlightenment so completely rejected and resisted. Killing in the name of one religion against another moved Voltaire, and other Enlightenment thinkers, to overcome such blind, hateful and violent attitudes on both Protestant and Catholic sides. (Actually....)

       The Enlightenment mainly has to do with human reason bringing light and truth to each person. Like the sunflowers above, the light usually came from another source but it illuminated the essence within, and brought the light of truth to the world around. Sounds 'gilded edged', 'warm-&-fuzzy'? Not to those who pushed the movement forward, sometimes at great risk to themselves.

      Enlightenment figures zeroed in on the ideas surrounding secularization, nature, perfectability of society, tolerance, progress, freedom, optimism, and individualism. They, rather like Pico della Mirandola of the Renaissance, used primarily deductive reasoning to find humanity at the center of the universe, and unlike Pico, saw only a little room for (even his New-Neo-Platonic notion of) God, which would morph into 'Deism' during this Age of Reason. It was arbitrary tyrannies, such as that which oppressed Jean Callas and family, that had to go. Anything that oppressed, depressed, surpressed and otherwise stressed and compressed the true nature of the human was an object of attack.  These oppressors of humanity take their turn for some satirical fun in Voltaire's book, Candide.

     After examining major Enlightenment figures and ideas, we will explore how they pushed the Age of Revolutions forward. We will also grapple with the difficult questions of how/why the French Revolution strayed from the path. For example, given a conception of Natural Law, how would/could we apply it to the case of Jean Callas described above?