Enlightenment – Navigating Between the Scylla of God’s Omnipotence and the Charybdis of Man’s Omnipotence

Abstract

This article is an attempt to look at the philosophy and culture of the Enlightenment in a very general way (from a great distance) and at the same time in a comparative context: I will take into account the eras preceding it and following it. I am inspired by the reflections of Jerzy Stempowski, an outstanding expert and an enthusiast of this era. This view is primarily from “one angle”—the attitude to human possibilities, to “human power.” I claim that the Enlightenment was a foundation governed by moderation and prudence as well as faith in “gradual” progress (as a reaction to the fanaticism of religious wars), and therefore that—in its mainstream—the Enlightenment was an intermediate era between the medieval belief in the omnipotence of God (focused on preserving the scala naturae) and the not uncommon belief in the omnipotence of man in modernity. In the Enlightenment, freedom ceases to be a means to good, but becomes an autotelic value. In modernity, the belief in human omnipotence is often transformed into the belief in the omnipotence of one man personifying a class, nation, or humanity: a leader, a spiritual guide, a quasi-Messiah. This transition takes place on a radical ideological ground, both on the right and on the left side of the ideological spectrum: in radical nationalism, in scientistic utopias, and especially among egalitarian utopians and communists. It involves the rejection of the liberal concept of freedom and a return to the concept of freedom as “consent to a good necessity,” freedom as “acceptance of the will of the leader.”