The Via Positiva, the Enlightenment and Science – Part Three

The Via Positiva, the Enlightenment, and Science

We can understand the Western Enlightenment – the period of intellectual, scientific and political advances of the 17th and 18th centuries – as the second attempt to bring about a kind of Neoplatonist revolution, this time on the back of the revelations ushered in by Galileo, Kepler and Newton. Science emerged in its modern form for the first time on this planet, and it is no exaggeration to say that it changed everything. However, its very success, I would suggest, completely occluded the spiritual nature of the Enlightenment.

The great spiritual revolution of the Renaissance was a turn from via negativa to via positiva, based on the turn from the Hebrew tradition to the Neoplatonist counter-religion. It is mostly lost to us today, partly because the Catholic Church could not shift its spiritual centre of gravity so quickly, and therefore clamped down on the Greek revival (even though it eventually adopted Aristotle as its “first philosopher”), and partly because the secular history now taught in schools and universities in the West overlooks the intensely spiritual nature of movements like Ficino’s Academy.

The spirituality of the Enlightenment period is even more lost to us. In my book Secularism I show how, while we are generally taught that the Enlightenment was a successful secular revolution giving rise to modern science and democracy, it can also be considered a spiritual revolution that came perhaps at the wrong time to grip the imagination of the West. Out of some fifty key Enlightenment thinkers I have only found two or three who were committed to a materialistic atheistic project, the rest, in fact, revelling in the possibilities of new spiritual and religious thought.

This spiritual revolution has disappeared from view as “Deism” and its role in underpinning the thinking of America’s Founding Fathers quite forgotten. And what was the essential spiritual quality of their thought? Why, the via positiva….Click here to read the rest of the article (to download the PDF, ‘right-click’ and select “save as”)