scholarly journals One and Many Truths Artistically Acknowledged

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-105
Author(s):  
Sara Marzana
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Real Nature ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Major Interest ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The World ◽  
Concept Of Truth ◽  
One And Many

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell both question, criticise and reinterpret the concept of ‘truth universally acknowledged’. From the intrinsic relation between the particular and the universal, to the scission between impressions and ideas, Pride and Prejudice concerns some elements of the entire dispute of knowledge. Moreover, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell urges us to reconsider any truth that we recognise as legitimately established, in the attempt to convey that it is our right and duty to determine what we believe – according to our senses, perceptions and feelings. In the eighteenth century, the philosophers of the Enlightenment were indeed disputing the origins of truth and more importantly the ways through which truth is uncovered. In a postmodern world, when, as John D. Caputo remarks, the only universality we acknowledge is diversity, fiction can lead us toward a more profound comprehension of reality – while enriching the flux of our imagination as we perceive the infinite possibilities inherent in human life. This literary approach to the world and its truth prompts us to contemplate existence from a different perspective, to find new meanings presumably hidden beneath the subjectivity of our judgement – to separate specific from universal knowledge. For, even if the prospect of formulating a commonly accepted norm of truth will always endure as humanity’s major interest, the real nature of our beliefs is inseparable from our ability to endlessly create, envision and conceive the unrevealed.  

A Russian Mystic Faces the Age of Rationalism and Revolution: Thought and Activity of Ivan Vladimirovich Lopukhin

1967 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-188
Author(s):  
Alexander Lipski
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Peter The Great ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
The World ◽  
Extreme Degree ◽  
State Of Mind

It is generally accepted that even though rationalism was predominant during the eighteenth century, a significant mystical trend was simultaneously present. Thus it was not only the Age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Holbach, but also the Age of St. Martin, Eckartshausen and Madame Guyon. With increased Western influence on Russia, it was natural that Russia too would be affected by these contrary currents. The reforms of Peter the Great, animated by a utilitarian spirit, had brought about a secularization of Russian culture. Father Florovsky aptly summed up the state of mind of the Russian nobility as a result of the Petrine Revolution: “The consciousness of these new people had been extroverted to an extreme degree.” Some of the “new people,” indifferent to their previous Weltanschauung, Orthodoxy, adopted the philosophy of the Enlightenment, “Volter'ianstvo” (Voltairism). But “Volter'ianstvo” with its cult of reason and belief in a remote creator of the “world machine,“ did not permanently satisfy those with deeper religious longings. While conventional Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on external rites, could not fill the spiritual vacuum, Western mysticism, entering Russia chiefly through freemasonry, provided a satisfactory alternative to “Volter'ianstvo.”

Puritan Radicalism and the Enlightenment

1960 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 424-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
George L. Mosse
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment presents a subtle and difficult problem. No historian has as yet fully answered the important question of how the world view of the eighteenth century is related to that of traditional Christianity. It is certain, however, that the deism of that century rejected traditional Christianity as superstitious and denied Christianity a monopoly upon religious truth. The many formal parallels which can be drawn between Enlightenment and Christianity cannot obscure this fact. From the point of view of historical Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, the faith of the Enlightenment was blasphemy. It did away with a personal God, it admitted no supernatural above the natural, it denied the relevance of Christ's redemptive task in this world. This essay attempts to discover whether traditional Christian thought itself did not make a contribution to the Enlightenment.

Furor Liturgicus: The Religious Concerns of Russian Poetry

2020 ◽  
pp. 395-411
Author(s):  
Martha M. F. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Russian Poetry ◽  
Modern Russian

In a now classic 1994 article Victor Zhivov counters the idea that the eighteenth-century quest to create a modern Russian literature represented a wholesale rejection of Russia’s previous literary tradition. He shows instead how poets appropriated elements of Orthodox liturgical tradition in a bid to adapt the classical notion of ‘furor poeticus’, marking it by the eruption of Church Slavonic norms into modern poetics. This chapter demonstrates how, as Zhivov contends, elements of Orthodox liturgical culture have continued to shape the modern Russian poetic tradition from the eighteenth century into the present. In particular, Russian poets have long presented poetry as uniquely able to transform the world by drawing on Orthodox imagery of theosis or divinization—the transfiguration of human life and thus the world, by the divine light and being. The liturgically inflected religious concerns of Russian poetry that sections address include prophecy, human co-creation with God, the problem of the body, and the role of silence.

Utilitarianism and Reform: Social Theory and Social Change, 1750–1800

Utilitas ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Burns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Systematic Development ◽  
Long Life

The object of this article is to examine, with the work of Jeremy Bentham as the principal example, one strand in the complex pattern of European social theory during the second half of the eighteenth century. This was of course the period not only of the American and French revolutions, but of the culmination of the movements of thought constituting what we know as the Enlightenment. Like all great historical episodes, the Enlightenment was both the fulfilment of long-established processes and the inauguration of new processes of which the fulfilment lay in the future. Thus the seminal ideas of seventeenth-century rationalism (in moral and social theory the idea, above all, of natural law) realized and perhaps exhausted their potentialities in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The ideas with which this article is concerned, however—conveniently grouped and labelled as the ideas of utilitarianism—only began to achieve systematic development in these later decades of the eighteenth century. Within that period—during the first half and more of Bentham's long life—attempts to apply those ideas to the solution of social problems met largely with failure and frustration. Yet unrealized potentialities remained, the realization of which was reserved for a time when the world of the philosophes no longer existed. The movements for social and political reform which have played so large a part in modern history since the French Revolution may be judged in widely differing ways; but whatever the verdict, these movements surely cannot be understood without due consideration of that part of their origins which lies in eighteenth-century utilitarianism.

Orthodoxy, rationalism and the world in eighteenth-century Holland

1973 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
J. Van Den Berg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Other ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Road ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Revival Movements

As far as the protestant countries are concerned the eighteenth century, the ‘age of reason’, might as well be called ‘the age of revival’. On the one hand, we meet with a strong desire to escape the snares of this world by concentrating upon the mysteries of salvation: the road to sanctity is a narrow road, to be trodden in fear and trembling. On the other hand there are those for whom this world is a world full of new and unexpected possibilities, a world to be explored and to be made instrumental to the fulfilment of the divine plan with regard to the development of humanity in its secular context. Naturally, also in the eighteenth century ‘sanctity’ and ‘secularity’ were not seen as in themselves mutually exclusive concepts. While many revivalists looked forward to the enlightenment of this world by the knowledge of God, many men of the enlightenment saw before them the prospect of the sanctification of the world by the combined influences of reason and revelation. Some of the fathers of the enlightenment - notably Locke and Leibniz - were essentially committed to the cause of Christianity, while on the other hand protagonists of the pietist and revival movements such as Francke and Edwards cannot in fairness be accused of an anti-rational attitude and of a lack of interest in the well-being of this world. Nevertheless, within the circle of eighteenth-century protestant Christianity there were conspicuous differences with regard to the evaluation of and the attitude towards the world in which the Christian community, while living in the expectation of the kingdom, still had to find its way and its place.

scholarly journals The Birth of Biopower in Eighteenth-Century Germany

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Stein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Atmospheric Pollution ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Optimum Population ◽  
The World ◽  
The Times

In April 2009, Sir David Attenborough, the respected face and voice of British natural history programmes for more than fifty years, became the patron of a new charity, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), an organisation campaigning to limit the world's population. His reason for accepting the honour, he confessed to The Times, was that he was terribly worried about the dramatic increase of the world's population and the effect it was having on the quality of human life throughout the world:There are three times as many people in the world as when I started making television programmes only a mere fifty-six years ago. It is frightening. We can't go on as we have been. We are seeing the consequences in terms of ecology, atmospheric pollution and in terms of the space and food production.

Coleridge on Beauty

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kirwan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Judgement ◽  
Traditional Notion ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Formal Condition ◽  
Explicit Reference ◽  
Divine Origin

Chapter 3 examines Coleridge’s analysis of beauty in the ‘Principles of Genial Criticism’ (1814), which aimed to establish a religious dimension to aesthetic experience. Coleridge’s argument is traced through his Kantian account of aesthetic judgement, and his assertion of unity-in-multiplicity as the formal condition of beauty, to his grounding beauty in that which is ‘pre-configured’ to our faculties. Coleridge’s depends on eighteenth-century aesthetic axioms, despite deliberately avoiding explicit reference to such accounts, electing Plotinus instead as a precursor. It is suggested that Coleridge is therefore reluctant to explain aesthetic experience in purely psychological and, potentially, exclusively naturalistic terms. The appeal to Plotinus’s traditional notion of beauty as the soul’s recognition of its divine origin grounds aesthetic experience in religion. Concomitantly, in Coleridge’s reassertion of the claims of religion in the wake of the Enlightenment, aesthetic experience as contemplation of the world as it is becomes proof of the existence of the divine.

Moderate Theology and Preaching c.1750–1800

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Stewart J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Actors

Through the Moderate movement, the clergy of the later eighteenth-century Church of Scotland became actively engaged with the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. This chapter explores the role of the Moderate sermon in this process of cultural engagement, focusing on two main themes. First, it considers how Moderate sermons in the later eighteenth century conveyed an optimistic, world-affirming and highly practical set of theological teachings. For Moderate preachers, God had given individuals the innate capacity—in the form of the moral sense or conscience—that would enable them to respond actively to the divine guidance of Scripture in exercising self-control and contributing to social progress. Second, the chapter shows how Moderate sermons also proclaimed that God was active in history, using human actors, often in ways not intended by those actors, to advance the divine plan for the world, which involved progress towards a future order of peace and freedom.

scholarly journals Vides exemplars. Terciàries carmelitanes a El Carmelo Esmaltado de Roque Alberto Faci (1743)

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Cristina Gimeno-Maldonado
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Third Order ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Religiosity And Spirituality

Resum: Carmelo Esmaltado con tantas brillantes estrelles, cuantas flores terceras, fecundas de frutos de virtud y religión, cultivó y fijo en el cielo de la Santa Iglesia la venerable Orden Tercera de Nuestra Señora del Carmen, és el títol de l’obra que el carmelita aragonès Roque Alberto Faci (1684-1744) va publicar el 1743. El llibre és un tractat per als membres de la tercera ordre del Carmel en què trobem diverses biografies de terciàries carmelites. El que pretendrem a partir de l’anàlisi de la obra i les biografies, és fixar el paper de les terciàries al món carmelita. Per això, analitzarem l’objectiu de l’autor tenint en compte la religiositat i espiritualitat del segle XVIII i la projecció de la Il·lustració. Paraules clau: Carmel, Dones, Religiositat, Seglar, Terciaris Abstract: Carmelo Esmaltado con tantas brillantes estrelles, cuantas flores terceras, fecundas de frutos de virtud y religión, cultivó y fijo en el cielo de la Santa Iglesia la venerable Orden Tercera de Nuestra Señora del Carmen, is the title of the book wrote by the aragonian carmelite Roque Alberto Faci (1684-1744) published in 1743. The issue is a treaty for the members of the Third Order of Carmel where we can find several biographies of the carmelites woman of third order. What we pretend by analyzing their work and biography is to set the role of the woman of the third order in the world Carmel. For that, we aimed copyright considering religiosity and spirituality of the eighteenth century and the projection of the Enlightenment.   Keywords: Carmel, Woman, Religiosity, Secular, Tertiary

The Importance of Jacques Saurin in the History of Casuistry and the Enlightenment

1956 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-209
Author(s):  
George L. Mosse
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Scientific Inspiration

The purpose of this paper is to examine several aspects of the relationship between Christianity and the rise of the new rationalistic spirit of the eighteenth century. It is in this connection that we intend to examine the thought of the French Huguenot preacher Jacques Saurin (1677–1730). Historians have held that the two leading ideas of that century, Nature and Reason, derive their meaning from the natural sciences. Such a point of view tends to ignore the greater realism towards nature and politics which developed within the Christian theological framework itself. From the sixteenth century on, we find orthodox theologians emphasizing the need for dealing with the world on its own terms. It was not so much the new sciences but rather the conflicts of the Reformation which brought out this increasingly rational attitude on the part of both Protestant and Catholic theologians. This development went on side by side with that secularized idea of reason which is of specific scientific inspiration. The means which theologians used to make room for a greater realism in their Christian framework of thought was casuistic divinity.

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