From the Easy Chair

The Enlightenment

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 35-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AS81

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AS81, The Enlightenment from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 187, February 7, 1989.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to talk about the Enlightenment. It was the Enlightenment that marked the beginning of the modern age. Although its roots go back and, in a sense, you could say it was revival of the Renaissance faith, about 1660 the Enlightenment temper triumphed in Europe. And from thereon it expressed itself with increasing clarity.

One can also call the Enlightenment the age of Modernism, because it began its disassociation from Christianity at first quietly and progressively more and more openly. Out of the Enlightenment and its premises came the Romantic movement, the age of revolution, and the whole of the 20th century.

The roots of the Enlightenment go back, of course, to pagan antiquity, the Renaissance, very definitely was a precursor, but there was another thing. The Reformation and the counter Reformation for a time captured Europe. But the rise of Arminianism was a precursor to a degree of the Enlightenment, because a good many of the Arminians were simply trying to water down the full force of the faith and, as a result, more than a few who were subsequently to manifest a deistic faith or an Enlightenment philosophical premise first came out into the open as Arminians. It was a good way of undermining the Reformation.

So the Enlightenment is very important for us to consider because we still are living in terms of the premises of the Enlightenment. One of those premises was that the center of society was openly shifted from Christianity and the Church to Humanism and the state.

Well, Otto, do you want to add anything to that general introduction?

[Scott] Well, it is a very interesting introduction and, of course, I agree with the main thrust of it, but I am not sure on your comment that the Arminians knew what they were doing. The effect of Arminianism, of course, was to soften the faith. And once you begin to soften anything the softening process doesn’t necessarily stop, because if you soften what was hard then it gets progressively softer and finally into the sort of mush we have today.

But to a great extent these are trends which people move into in a more or less intuitive way, an unthinking way, you might almost say, because there is lots of rationale that takes place. One of the big rationales of the Enlightenment was that it was going to be scientific. It was going to be... I know that I have a set of Durant’s Histories and one of them is entitled The Age of Reason, which I think is very interesting, because it really could have been put the age of declining faith with equal accuracy. So when we talk about the Enlightenment we are really talking about a double edged situation. On the one hand some genuine advances in terms of investigation into physical phenomena, advances in medicine, astronomy, et cetera. And then on the other hand declines in the spiritual area.

[Rushdoony] I could not agree with you more that a great deal of Arminian thinking was not Enlightenment thinking, but it was a good front for a great many people who were anti reformed and anti Christian. They could oppose the Reformation while supposedly a part of it. And that was an important factor. Then with regard to science, only later did the Enlightenment become scientific in its concern. In the early years, as even Peter Gay admits, the Enlightenment figures disliked science because it was too closely associated with Puritanism. Later on they became the champions of science. But earlier they were suspicious of it.

[Scott] Well, of course, we are talking here about a gap of several generations.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean, 1660 was the Reformation in England or pretty close to it. When was the Reformation...?

[Rushdoony] No, no, no. The 1660 was Charles II returning.

[Scott] Charles II.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, yeah, that was the restoration.

[Rushdoony] Restoration.

[Scott] Yes. It was the restoration. And the restoration brought in with it great reaction against Puritanism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And especially against the fake puritans. You know, Puritanism is never... nobody ever goes into this, but the Puritans were in... to a certain extent undone by the fact that once they were in control under Cromwell, all kinds of idiots flowed in and called themselves Puritans.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the frauds, as usual, outnumbered the pure. And after Charles came back there was a great reaction against the individuals who had gone overboard during the Cromwellian period and the restoration brought in with it a wave of ridicule against religion. And that was a very important thing, because it is awfully hard to maintain dignity against ridicule, as you know. It is one of the ... it is one of the... today I think Susan Sonntag wrote an essay about camp in which she talked about the faggot use of ridicule in our day today. And that is... paved the way for the Enlightenment because it knocked down the barriers of manners, of custom, of tradition, of what was acceptable and brought in what had previously been inacceptable.

[Rushdoony] Well, in France the Philosophs, the enlightenment figures in France had two basic approaches to everything. One, Christianity was not to be treated with respect. And, second, instead of serious discussion, everything was to be ridiculed.

[Scott] I just said that.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So I am calling attention to that as the strategy. It was one of the strategies of the French Philosophs in particular, which they learned from the English not to consider seriously anything that they disliked, but to make it the object of ridicule.

Now there was another aspect of the same thing. The essence of it, I think, was set forth by John Locke, very much an Enlightenment figure in his idea of the clean slate mind, and education as the means of changing everyone because you could take the child whose mind was a clean slate and if you could separate him from the past, you could make him into whatever you choose. Behaviorism was a conclusion of that.

And this meant the Enlightenment figures were profoundly anti historical.

[Scott] Oh, yes. Well, that is true. I guess the... the apex of that line of reasoning was Rousseau.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Who felt that the purity,... the savage was pure, sinless and that the closer we could get to the primitive the better.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I am surprised at how long that sort of thing lingers. It is still with us.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Scott] In Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind there are some very sharp and astute observations of the present situation in the university and the condition of the students. Then suddenly he goes into triple talk, you might say, which is worse than double talk, when he gets to Rousseau. He thinks Rousseau was a great philosopher and it is astonishing, 1989, to read somebody who is intelligent and who still believes in Rousseau.

[Rushdoony] Well, the academic community—you mentioned Bloom—is really the heir of the Enlightenment and the French Philosophs, because their attitude towards what they dislike is ridicule. They will not treat anything seriously that they want to abolish from intellectual discourse.

[Scott] Well, there is a wonderful tactic, because it means that you don’t have to answer the other fellow’s arguments. You can ridicule them and therefore you can evade their... their point. Now Voltaire picked this up in London, took it back to France, introduced it and, of course, the Church was awfully easy to make fun of because it was a politicized church in France. It had been under the crown since the time of Francis I, a long time. The king appointed the cardinals and the bishops. So these were political jobs. Richelieu wasn’t even a priest.

And by the... in Voltaire’s hands it became, first, a fad and then a fashion and then a custom. And custom, you know, is almost ineradicable. To this day the French will dismiss you with an aphorism. They very seldom put together a completely structured argument the way Germans do or, of that matter, the English speaking world. They dismiss you with a metaphor.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the interesting things in France with the Philosophs was that in the early years it was never a frontal attack, of course. It... it was not only ridicule, but an attempt to make anyone who believed look childish, simple minded. They would speak of the Bible as having such a horrible tone, such bad taste writing and that it as painful with what vulgarity the Holy Spirit appears in the Bible. That type of comment was routine.

To make people embarrassed at believing as though there was something disrespectful of intelligence and faith.

[Scott] Well, of course, it was also something else which is peculiar. We see it today. There was at one end of the spectrum a great parade of learning and erudition and on the other end of the spectrum ridicule and in between an argument for equality.

Now this didn’t fit. The erudition and the argument for equality were paradoxical. You couldn’t... it would be, you know, I have sometimes thought of that here. Instead of burning their draft cards the left should have burned their diplomas. But that will never happen, because they are going to be equal while they have graduate degrees.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the French Revolution, as you have pointed out, abolished all titles except academic degrees.

[Scott] They kept the degrees.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the Philosophs and their contemptuous and cynical attitude you see not only in the academic community, but in the media and in the culture of New York, the critics, the periodicals, the editors.

[Scott] There has to be another term than culture to describe New York. We need a word there which we haven’t got. We need it very badly to describe the unwashed literati of New York.

[Rushdoony] Well, not everything that comes out of New York is bad, Otto. You and I were both born there.

[Scott] Our parents went there briefly.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the anti historical aspect of the Enlightenment has culminated in our contemporary schools with the abolition of history and its replacement with social studies. We no longer want an historical perspective. We are going to have social studies which deal with the control of man and society.

[Scott] Well, this is a corollary subject, really. The Enlightenment, as we know, culminated in the revolution and the terror.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now the great students of that revolution were the international socialist movement. And the Russian socialists applied the same lessons to Russia and they had a bloody revolution and a terror. Now we are going through an enlightenment here and if everything works as it has worked before, it will lead us into a bloody revolution.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And most of our people are blundering in the same direction as the French and the Russians did.

[Scott] Exactly the same. Even the same arguments, the same... every step the same.

[Rushdoony] Well, the...

[Scott] It seems to be impossible, though, to tell or to convince, rather, the average American that this is underway.

[Rushdoony] The one thing that militates against their planning is that the Christian community is stronger here and is reviving in its strength and dramatically so.

[Scott] Well, we have a more sophisticated, if I could use that term, Christian community by far than the French had and a larger, more intellectual Christian community than Russia had. Russia intellectuals were lost, but the thing that Russia lacked, in its own defense, was a large middle class, an educated middle class which we have.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean, we have the same treasonous intellectuals, but we also have... they are greatly outnumbered by an educated middle class. I would say that Christianity, though, is the one area of education that is the most lacking in the American population as a whole and the American Christian community, therefore, is better rounded and better educated than the rest of the ... of the population.

[Rushdoony] There is another aspect of the Enlightenment to consider. It was hostile to all institutions other than the state, according to {?} and Kingsley Martin who was not unfavorable to it, said that the Enlightenment thinkers saw the state as the new divine power. Everything else, therefore, had to go. The new god could not tolerate rivals such as the Church, the family, ancient institutions. So it has been erosive of every element in society.

[Scott] Well, that is true, but it is interesting to reflect that both the French and the Russian example culminated in militarism in which the army become synonymous with the state. They are very worried and always have been in the Soviet Union about Thermador and about a possible Napoleon. And, of course, Napoleon came out of the first revolution. And it is interesting, though that revolution should have this dynamic quality where they want to revolutionize everybody everywhere. And the Church is not what they are talking about. The state is what they are talking about, but force in the end becomes the main instrument of revolution and anyone who goes along with fostering force as an answer to social problems is helping the revolution whether they know it or not.

[Rushdoony] An exceptionally important point which too many church people today are forgetting as in operation rescue. The denial of Christianity, the denial of the spiritual is basic to the enlightenment and to revolution.

[Scott] All right.

[Rushdoony] Stalin said when he was asked to consider the importance of the Catholic Church before he moved more vigorously against the Church in areas of the Soviet empire he said, “How many divisions does the pope have?” To him the only thing that counted was military power, force.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] The spiritual did not count and that is basic to the Enlightenment perspective.

[Scott] Well, it is. If we look at the manner in which Christianity emerged from the decaying pagan civilization, we find that it was the moral stature to moral authority of the Christians which attracted the pagans to them. They did not get together in armed bands to go out and rescue the slaves or rescue the infants or anything of that sort. What they did is that the led quiet, moral lives and they did what they could to help their neighbors and to take care of themselves. And over a period of time during several centuries of persecution they became the most admirable people in the population. Everyone came to know it. Everyone came to admire them and many came to join them.

Now, of course, revolution is opposed to this, because revolution wants to eliminate time. It wants to accomplish its ends immediately. It doesn’t want to allow anyone to grow. It doesn’t want to allow anyone error. It doesn’t want to allow any time to pass. No more waiting for the next generation. They want to handle all the problems of the future today. And, of course, this is not possible. And this was the great error of the Enlightenment to change all society within the scope of a single generation was their desire.

[Rushdoony] Yes. They actually believed that the whole world could be regenerated by ...

[Scott] One group.

[Rushdoony] Yes, by an elite group. Now one of the things that is interesting is that they had to defame Christianity and one of the masterpieces of defamation was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because in that study all he did was to search for every kind of stupid Christian he could fin and stupid statement, never anything about the work they did to alleviate poverty, to take care of the elderly, to take care of children and so on. It was only instances of stupidity. And he was not lacking in knowledge. It was a deliberate attempt to defame the faith.

[Scott] Well, it is an interesting thing about Gibbon. He ... his eloquence, which is stupendous...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...will carry you along. The narrative is marvelous, but he credits the Jews and the Christians with destroying the ancient world. His argument is that they both introduced an intolerance with the pagan world did not possess otherwise. And he managed to go through the whole period from the Adenines, I believe, all the way up to his own time, or practically his own time, without ever discerning the fact that a great civilization was being created during those years.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the argument about the tolerance of the empire or of the Greeks is a particularly ridiculous one, because nothing could exist apart from state licensure. The idea of having any freedom or the right to decide anything on your own was alien.

[Scott] Oh, well, it... it... the... the individual had no rights whatever. As you know, I am working on this Arminian and Calvinist thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I am so inundated with information on it that I am now involved in cutting it back to reasonable proportions. One of the things that I have run into has been the dispute between Lord Acton and Thackeray on the question of slavery... of human sacrifice in ancient Greece and Rome. Thackeray was a great admirer of both the Greeks and the Romans. And he wrote poems in Latin and, I believe, also in Greek using their antique forms. And Acton finally got a little bit irritated at this and wrote an essay on slavery under Paganism. And every single one of the Roman empires up to Constantine authorized human sacrifice for religious and political purposes without exception.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And so hostile are they to what Christianity has done that Pierre Doquette in dealing with the fact that very early in the Middle Ages, by 900, Christians had abolished slavery in western Europe. He insists it was not due to religion.

[Scott] What was it due to?

[Rushdoony] Well, he has a Maoist interpretation of economic determinism by which he explains the abolition of slavery. Now it is curious that this Maoist thesis hasn’t work anywhere else in the world.

[Scott] It wasn’t working in China.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] It wasn’t working in the orient. It wasn’t working in black Africa. It wasn’t working in the Central or South America. It wasn’t working in any civilization except the Christian. And yet the exception doesn’t prove a thing.

[Rushdoony] Not a thing. And here is an entire book written by Doquette on medieval slavery which ... and liberation which refuses to concede that Christianity had anything to do with the abolition of slavery.

[Scott] Well, you know that the European Christians abolished slavery in black Africa.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I have yet to see a single monograph on the subject.

[Rushdoony] No, of course not. In fact, of late it is becoming fashionable to blacken Wilberforce for his part in this.

[Scott] And what reproach can they level against him?

[Rushdoony] Well, he was a Christian and therefore he was narrow minded.

[Scott] He was narrow minded.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, the Enlightenment is a fascinating era. The individuals who took great pride and strutted on the stage at that time were curious combination of radical lawyers, radical journalists, upstarts of various sort who gave themselves false titles of nobility while they thundered about equality.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, they resented anyone being better than themselves, but regarded most people as beneath them.

[Scott] Well, you know, that most people who argue for equality are really arguing that you and he are equal.

[Rushdoony] And he is really better than you are.

Well, the Enlightenment certainly did not bring out the best in men. And it is interesting that both the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment—and a recent book published in England does deal with this—brought a great many homosexuals out of the wood work and to the fore in the movement. To a degree it was because the whole idea of being Greek, as they saw it, and being in tune with Plato and Socrates appealed to them. And then also the idea of rebelling against the faith. This was very, very important to them.

There is another aspect of the Enlightenment which is very, very important. They did believe that man had to be a new creation, so to speak. So they were in line with the Bible in believing that man had to be a new creation, however it was not through being born again through Christ, but, as Louis Bredbold wrote in his book on the Enlightenment, human nature was going to be changed by changing the environment. Our modern environmentalism come straight out of the Enlightenment. It was a belief that if you could capture the state and if you could command the institutions of the state—and especially its schools—you could then remake man and he would be everything that you could imagine to be desirable.

[Scott] Well, of course there was a thread of empiricism in this. Looking at what was still relatively new to these people, don't forget, generation, the idea of different cultures, different manners, different customs and... and different religions around the world, was still.... they were something that ... that they were still in the process of discovering. The new world was still contained Indians and tribes that had not been contacted. The world ... their world was still expanding and it was still showing them hitherto unknown diversities in human behavior. So if you wanted to apply a strict logic to these observations it would come out that all we have to do is to change society and we can change the people.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And in the process, of course, they invented the myth of the noble savage.

[Scott] Yes. That was part of it.

[Rushdoony] ... because they believed that supernatural man, that is Christ and anyone made a new creation in Christ represented evil whereas the noble savage, natural man, was the desirable person and, hence, they went to all kinds of lengths to idealize primitive people’s everywhere and are still doing it.

[Scott] Well, let me... let’s put it this way, that they became overly aware of their own sins. They began to spend all their time looking at the errors of Christianity, the crimes of Christianity. Voltaire spent the better part of his life itemizing the terrible things that Christians had done. I mean Candide, is great satire with Dr. Pangloss saying this its he best of all possible worlds. Observe how the leg is curved so it fits a stocking and the nose it has a bridge so it will support glasses and so forth and so on. And then by contrast the unknown was perfect.

What you have here is a sort of... what I always think of as the engineering mentality. I have a great deal of respect for engineers and their ability, but I also look at them sometimes with wonder at their expectation that the human race should become logical, because we are not logical in that sense. We are not mathematical entities. We don't add together like a piece of mathematics. And the Enlightenment was reason gone crazy, reason without control. And also plagiarizing now slightly from that essay you lent me the other day about the romantics, that part of their argument against the late scientific argument was that it was insufficient description of individuals because it didn’t include the spiritual.

[Rushdoony] You referred earlier to Voltaire and his work. He referred to Christianity as a ferocious animal, that beast. He made the motto of the Philosophs to erase, wipe out the infamy, meaning Christianity. When in 1762—according to Peter Gay, who is pro Enlightenment—Diderot affectionately saluted him as his, quote, “sublime, honorable and dear antichrist,” unquote.

[Scott] Yes. Well, that is what Peter Gay liked.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Peter Gay being one of the most anti Christian writers of modern times.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And he says that to Voltaire no epithet could have been more welcome. And he goes on to say Voltaire’s life reveals a distaste for Christianity amounting to almost an obsession.

[Scott] I think it was an obsession. I think it becomes an obsession. I think it is the mirror image of anti-Semitism. It simply is a different target.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I think it stems from the same syndrome.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I agree very emphatically. Well, the Enlightenment, because of its militant anti Christianity and its environmentalism, naturally gravitated to the state which it saw as the only natural institution and believed that coercion through the state was going to be the regeneration of man. So the more we work out the implications of the enlightenment the more coercion, the more brute force we are going to see in society. So not only revolution, but terror is a logical conclusion.

[Scott] Well, that is true. The ... there was a sort of a revival of the Enlightenment attitude, though, by the middle of the 19th century. The Victorian era went in for social improvement. And the methods that they applied were theoretically persuasion, but, in actual fact, there was a great deal of force involved, but the establishment of Colonialism. The blacks in Africa were stopped from enslaving one another by the armies of Britain, France, et cetera. And we came along in our abolitionist movement and introduced force as a means of resolving the social problems. We introduced political terror here and we called it anti slavery.

Now it recall wasn’t necessary to kill 600,000 men and injure over a million in order to get rid of slavery. But that is the method we chose.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And every since then the American method for solving a social problem has been force.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the Enlightenment thinkers, as Bredbold has pointed out, believed that society should be governed by an elite group made up of educators, scientists—that came in later—philosophers, philosopher kings and the like, the intellectuals and their associates. And that is very, very much with us to the point that if anyone is not a part of that group, he is seen as a threat. The candidacy of Pat Robertson in the 1988 election was... I... I did not favor it. But I deeply resented the hostility to it. It was as though there was something immoral about an evangelical pastor running for the presidency.

[Scott] No other candidate was attacked in such personal terms, nor could anyone accept a Christian be attacked in those kind of terms in this country. This is a very strange development.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But in that sense we are very much in the condition of France in, let us say, 1780. In 1780 where all the intellectuals are running around. They had the underground newspapers. They had pornographic publications on all levels. They were using pornography and ridicule against the crown, against the Church, against all traditional institutions and so forth and at the same time the nobility was dressed down, was wearing ordinary clothes and was going... Marie Antoinette was playing at being a milk maid and everybody was supposed to be equal and everybody was liberal. But in the meantime the revolution was building.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the Christians were being made to feel as though they were outcasts. That parallels our situation today precisely.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the aspects of the Enlightenment was its, of course, was its interest in the noble savage, but another was an interest in non Christian religions. For a time China ...

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] ...and its religions was very popular in the 18th century and that lingered into the 19th. To this day we see that. Interest in Hindu religions.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] Any kind of eastern faith and at the same time a contempt for Christianity. I have been going through lately a number of university book catalogs and it is appalling to see that every religion except Christianity gets so much respectful treatment in series of books. But I was looking at one today and when it came to Christianity the books were things like a study of Jim Jones and his cult in San Francisco and New Guinea so that anything disreputable was what they had as far as a Christian content was concerned.

[Scott] Well, yet they don’t talk about the Hindu massacres in India.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] They don’t talk about the disputes between Mohammedism, the Islamic people. They don’t talk about the arguments in Israel. Only... only Christianity.

[Rushdoony] Yes. How many were ... millions... millions were murdered in India after World War II?

[Scott] Roughly, I believe, between four and five million. The figures dropped out of the encyclopedias.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

[Scott] And they were hacked to death with swords.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And bayonets. Guns were not used. I suppose the anti gun people would be astonished to know that most of the Cambodians were killed with clubs and they were.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They weren’t killed with bullets, because the ... the... the red army, the Khmer Rouge didn’t have that much ammunition. But you don’t have to have a gun to kill people.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] And you don’t have to be a Christian to have a dispute or to be imperfect.

But the Enlightenment did set the fashion and when I went to school, my brief school experience, I will still remember the enthusiasm of the teachers for the French Revolution...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the flat way that they talked about our War of Independence. They reduced our War of Independence to an argument over taxes.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Then and now everything in the tradition of the Enlightenment is treated with respect as though a man then began to wake up out of a long nightmare.

[Scott] Well, look at the glorious name of Voltaire and see if you know anyone who has ever read him.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Voltaire is surprisingly...

[Scott] He is dated.

[Rushdoony] Not only dated, he is shallow.

[Scott] He is hard to read.

[Rushdoony] Very, very shallow. There is very little in his writings that I have read—and I read quite a bit years ago—that was anything but superficial. You had to agree with him in order to say this is good.

[Scott] Well, there is an apocryphal saying that Voltaire said, “I will defend to the death your right to say what I disagree with,” which is absolutely nonsense.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He never said any such thing and he never behaved that way. He wasn’t defending the right of Christians to believe in Christianity at all.

[Rushdoony] No. No. He was a very intolerant and unpleasant character.

[Scott] It is almost like talking to a modern liberal who, if you disagree with, immediately assumes that you are a racist and says so.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And he is the soul of tolerance even as he clobbers you.

[Scott] {?} Excepting for you he is very tolerant.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

[Scott] But the Enlightenment still... now here is Peter Gay talking about the revival of Paganism. And we have to wonder, because Mr. Gay came over here from Nazi Germany. He took refuge in this country. He has become a great success here. His books are sold by the tens of thousands and he is highly honored and yet what does he say about the majority of the culture that has embraced him? And how often do we see this phenomenon?

[Rushdoony] Yes. In his recent book on Freud, he simply does not touch on all the recent studies that show a very discreditable side to Freud.

[Scott] Well, Dr. Sahs reviewed Gay’s book on Freud in the Wall Street Journal and said Gay has read everything about Freud and understood nothing. Pardon me.

[Rushdoony] Well, the Enlightenment also felt that the only valid approach to man and society is a humanistic one. By definition anything that was Christian represented the mythical. Therefore it could never give any honest consideration to a Christian perspective. It was ruled out of court automatically. And, as a result, to this day, our Christian past, our Christian heritage is denied. It is ruled out of court.

One very fine professor lost two positions, one at a major university and another at a prominent Christian college because his historiography was Christian and that was intolerable. He had to have a humanistic approach to historiography.

[Scott] Well, there is one point about the aspect of the Enlightenment we haven’t touched upon and that is its anti-Semitism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It was from Voltaire down or from Voltaire sideways, however, you want to put it. The leaders of the Enlightenment were open in their contempt for the Jewish people. And it is amazing that writers like Peter Gay would so admire then.

[Rushdoony] Eric {?} in his book on the left written in the 70s, a classic which should be reprinted, goes into that aspect and says it has been from the anti Christian left that most anti-Semitism has come forth. And the handful of, oh, crack pots on the right who occasionally spout anti-Semitism are unaware of the fact that it is left wing propaganda. It is based on an anti biblical perspective which damns both Christians and Jews. The Jews were hated by the Enlightenment, because they gave the Old Testament to the world. And they could not be forgiven for that.

[Scott] That was Hitler’s attitude.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He called Christianity a Jewish religion.

[Rushdoony] Yes. But we don’t hear about that now.

[Scott] And you don’t hear about it regarding the Enlightenment.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] And it is a very strange omission on the part of individuals who claim to be scholars.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, it is a deliberate omission.

[Scott] All omissions are of that size.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because you can’t go into the research of the period without stumbling across this.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the sad fact is that so many scholars of both Christian and Jewish background have gone along with that and have failed to call attention to that fact.

[Scott] There is also the fact, which I started out my book on the French Revolution with, was the growth of superstition, astrology, magicians like {?} and so forth, Mesmer, et cetera, which accompanied the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment had all these strange cults.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] All these bizarre sex groups, all this pornography, all in the name of free thought.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The rise of alchemy which had been an incidental fact in the history of thought previously was phenomenal in the post Reformation era. The search for the philosopher stone, all kinds of things like that. Knowledge had to be sought outside of the biblical world view.

[Scott] Out of... out of... outside the tradition.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Outside the law.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... you might say. And we are running into this same sort of thing again. We are running into bizarre groups.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The animal rights people who are going to shoot the farmer.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The most recent cover of the ... of a prominent animal rights magazine has pigs featured and the lead article says that pigs are a very lovable creature and you really don’t know what joy can be until you rub the tummy of a pig.

[Scott] Well, it was very interesting that the Enlightenment was also the era of tremendous immorality. Adultery became not only fashionable, but almost commanded. You were considered something strange if you didn’t have a mistress or if your wife didn’t have a lover.

[Rushdoony] Yes. As a matter of fact in the era of Louis XIV any man who would have objected to his wife’s adultery would have been laughed out of the court.

[Scott] And we are beginning to run into the frustrations that that sort of thing creates. Don’t forget the slogan that Abby Hoffman created at one point. He said, “Revolution for the hell of it.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this was an aspect of the French Revolution. And I think it was also an aspect of the Russian Revolution in terms of the nobility of Russia. The revolution as a result of boredom. After all the rules had been thrown away and you could do everything you wanted to do, what is the inevitable result except boredom?

[Rushdoony] If all the institutions of the past, if the family, the Church, various organizations are all irrelevant to man’s future, then why not destroy them? Do it for the fun of it and you are being virtuous in doing it. Abby Hoffman and others like him were sanctimonious in their feeling of their moral superiority.

[Scott] Well, that is a ... that is a constant.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is one of the defects of Liberalism. It ... that virtue doesn’t become a matter of behavior. It becomes a matter of opinion. To have the right opinions makes you a virtuous person. To have the wrong opinion makes you something else.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] What you actually do is beside the point.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is a very important point. And that is why today our so-called great men are men who simply spout their opinions, who set the liberal line, the anti Christian line, perhaps, would be the better term and, therefore, are regarded as great men, great thinkers and pillars of morality.

[Scott] Well, here we have something that is ... we have reached a stage where Christianity is not openly attacked so much as it is treated as though it doesn’t exist. It is totally outlawed from discussion. I don’t know when I have read anything that has a footnote quoting an Christian thinker. We do not exist.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And very sadly so many church leaders are afraid to stand up to these people. Today I read a letter from someone in Europe, a Christian leader and I shared the letter with Dorothy. He described going to an evangelical meeting where some decisions and policies were to be set. And he found there were homosexuals there to provide them with guidelines.

[Scott] Guidelines?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And...

[Scott] Guidelines for what? For discussion?

[Rushdoony] Oh, for the moral stance of the Church.

[Scott] Of the Church?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Of the Church. And everybody was afraid to say anything because it would mean they would lose intellectual respectability. So this person spoke out plainly and scripturally against these things and was an embarrassment to many.

[Scott] They were embarrassed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, they don't really know what is coming, then, do they?

[Rushdoony] No, they don’t.

[Scott] Because embarrassment is going to be the least of the problems that the future will bring about.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is running out. We have a couple of minutes. Are there any general statements you would like to make summing up the Enlightenment?

[Scott] Well, I... yes. I think that there are parallels between the Enlightenment and our situation, but we do have what the French did not have. We have an awareness. We have a knowledge. We have historic background. We understand the formula. We know the dimensions of the enemy, his tactics, his methods, his arguments backwards and forwards as well as he does himself.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I think the United States is going to provide a great surprise.

[Rushdoony] I agree with you. I think Christians are coming out of their closets and they are coming out ready to make a stand and I do believe we are going to win.

I was reading late this afternoon a statement by John Calvin on the concluding phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever amen.”

And he said, “With such a God and such a kingdom, we must recognize that victory belongs to us.” That was the substance of his comment. And he was right.

Well, thank you all for listening. And God bless you.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.