The Enlightenment

Oversimplified

• The 17th–18th century intellectual movement exalting autonomous human reason over revelation, tradition, and authority.
• Its inheritance — secularism, skepticism toward the miraculous, and the private self as final judge — shapes the world the Church now addresses.

Summary

The Enlightenment (the "Age of Reason") placed individual reason and empirical method at the center, subjecting religion, tradition, and revealed authority to critique. It produced deism, biblical criticism that bracketed the supernatural, and the political ideal of the autonomous individual.

An Orthodox appraisal

Orthodoxy honors reason as a gift of God but denies its autonomy: true knowing is communion, not detached mastery (Mysticism and Theology). The Enlightenment's dichotomy of faith and reason is foreign to a tradition where the Nous is healed to perceive God. Its fruit — Secularism, the sovereign private judgment the Reformation had already unleashed in religion — set the stage for modern unbelief.[^1] See Secularism, The Right to Private Judgment, The Transcendental Argument, Causality.

[^1]: Orthodox critiques of autonomous reason; the Enlightenment thinkers in view are Kant, Hume, and their heirs.