Enlightenment, Rationalism, and Religion

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking have been mainly categorized as a age in which rationalism was a widespread and dominant philosophy. To see Enlightenment in terms of rationalism and reason reduced Enlightenment to an anti-religious position. Especially researchers of modernity and secularization aimed to find anti-religious perspectives in the Enlightenment thought and social history. That built the discourse that there was an enmity between rationalism-reason and religion. However, rationalism has had roots within religion in the Western history since Middle Ages. Also, in the Enlightenment age rationalism was defended at religious circles and it was tried to find a balance or synthesis between reason and revelation. At the other hand, the notions of rationalism and the age of reason was not single one philosophy than could be seen in the Enlightenment age. In that period empiricism was also dominant in Britain and challenged rationalism. At the meantime, researches about various Enlightenment traditions made it possible to define Enlightenment as an age of sentiment. Because of that in spite of analyzing Enlightenment as a rationalist and age of reason against religion we need to rethink the relationship between Enlightenment/modernity and religion with more detailed analyses.

Keywords

Eighteenth-Century, Rationalism, Religion, Age of Reason, Age of Sentiment