Understanding The Enlightenment

These are some great lectures.

I agree with everything presented in the videos below. In the previous article on St. Augustine, we noted how Augustinian values dominated the West down to the 17th century. Both Catholics and Protestants emphasized different elements of Augustine’s thought.

It was this Augustinian worldview which, shall we say, kept the West anchored in a conservative view of human nature for a millennium. The Scientific Revolution shattered the dominant Aristotelian paradigm. This is what cleared the path to the Enlightenment, not the Reformation.

From about 1700 forward, Christianity is displaced from the center of Western culture to the point where it is gradually marginalized. Liberalism moves into the vacuum and spreads from Britain and the Netherlands. As Christianity is pushed to the margins of Western culture, it is transformed into what it is today by conforming and adapting to the latest trends in the dominant secular culture.

This is why modern Christians sound so unlike their forebears. It is due to the waning of Augustine’s influence in Western Christianity since the Enlightenment.