Enlightenment And Superstitions

The politics and economy of a war-torn Europe around 1650, provided an opportunity for the educated thinkers to come to the fore in this period, immediately after the end of the Thirty Years' War when the great powers of Europe fought along (roughly) religious lines (Asch 9). The war eventually ended as much through “exhaustion” as it was an economic necessity, having drawn in most of Europe from Spain to Sweden but it did deliver the end of the previous “Holy Roman Empire” stranglehold on Europe and that a ruler or monarch could determine the religion of their realm (Asch 126). The Enlightenment’s important 17th-century early movers included the Englishmen Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman Renee Descartes and the key natural

Newton’s revered work presented his theories of motion, gravity and explained eccentric orbits of Comments, the Moon and the tides with mathematical explanation that others could readily validate and understand. Then in 1705, Newton became the first scientist ever to be knighted (Burton 408). Generally, the above listed “heroes” of the enlightenment also rejected superstitions, challenged tradition and further developed the humanistic values where they were known to be tolerant of others and indeed held views of equality in society. They were both atheists and devout Christians (like Newton), but there was a common belief about the divine among the Enlightenment philosophers, which was Deism, where they believed in the ethical direction provided by religion and the Bible but they did not believe in the supernatural revelations of creation of the natural

None of this thinking of the “rights of the individual” was present in the Renaissance, when it was still widely assumed that Kings were essentially ordained by God, that monarchy was the natural order of things and that Monarchs were not subject to the laws of ordinary men, and that the ruled were not citizens but subjects and serfs. This is the view documented in the 17th century by Thomas Hobbes in his study on government. He attacked the divine right of monarchy but strongly believe that subjects required a strong ruler to keep them in check otherwise their “passions” would prevail to the detriment of the Monarch and the worthy (wealthy land owners) in society. Hobbes developed this political philosophy in two books. The first was entitled The Elements of Law (1640); this was Hobbes's attempt to provide arguments supporting the King against his challengers. Then in his most famous work Leviathan (1651) he expands on the argument and offers the need to question religion and to separate the monarch from the divine (Padgen