When we speak of the Enlightenment, we are primarily speaking of 18th century Europe. After 200 years of religious wars throughout Europe, the men of the Enlightenment had had enough of religion, particularly of Christianity. The “godfathers” of the Enlightenment, men like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza, had laid the foundation upon which later men like Voltaire and Rousseau built.
Like all other movements, the Enlightenment was a mixed bag. Anyone who attempts to portray the Enlightenment as completely bad, with no redeemable qualities to it is either ignorant or just lying. At the same time, though, modern day “Enlightenment enthusiasts” who depict the Enlightenment as a glorious recovery of the golden age of Greece and Rome are equally deluded. Before we get into a full-out analysis of the movement as a whole, we must first look specifically at the major thinkers of the Enlightenment, and consider their impact on history.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778 AD)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most highly-influential thinkers of the Enlightenment, and his thought still impacts the world today. Even people who know next to nothing about Rousseau have imbibed many presuppositions that stem from the Rousseauean-Enlightenment worldview. Yet when studied against the backdrop of thinkers like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza before him, Rousseau signals a definitive break with the past. Unlike those men, who believed that religion, however irrational and idiotic it might be, could still be used to further the stability and power of a secular ruler, Rousseau unequivocally declared that such trash was irredeemable. He actively said that it was high time that the trash of Christianity be taken out, thrown away, and replaced with a completely “secular religion.”
The Anti-Genesis Myth
In order to establish a foundation for such a “secular religion,” Rousseau ironically made up his own “Genesis myth,” or more properly, an anti-Genesis myth regarding the origin of mankind. Simply put, in order to bolster his claim that what was needed was a completely secular and anti-Christian religion, Rousseau actually borrowed the creation myth in Genesis and subsequently completely twisted it to suit his own ends. As a quite note of clarification, “myth” should not be understood as just “fairytale” or “untruth.” Properly understood, a “myth” is simply a kind of story that attempts to lay the foundation for any society’s particular worldview. It is not a story that is meant to be taken as literal history, but it shapes the way people view history. It addresses metaphysical questions of meaning and purpose, but it doesn’t put forth actual history.
In any case, Rousseau wrote about his own vision of Eden in order to elaborate what he personally felt was the natural state of mankind. In his Eden story, Rousseau put forth the idea that human beings were not made in God’s image, precisely because there was no God to begin with. Rousseau reasoned that how could human being be made by a non-existent deity, let alone be made in the image of a non-existent deity?
Furthermore, according to Rousseau, his “Adam and Eve” (i.e. original humanity) were not naturally rational creatures; they were instead feeling creatures who instinctively lived according to their natural appetites. They weren’t concerned with some sort of “afterlife;” they just lived for the moment. Not surprisingly, according to Rousseau, they were not religious creatures either. Rousseau’s Adam simply lived in a state of blissful idleness, just lounging around in paradise. Rousseau put it this way, “His desires do not exceed his physical needs, the only goods he knows in the universe are nourishment, a female, and repose; the only evils he fears is pain and hunger.” In other words, in Rousseau’s view, the original, natural, and therefore ideal state of mankind was that of a hedonistic, free-loving hippie who gives no thought to tomorrow.
And when we say “free-loving,” we mean free-loving! Rousseau longed for a return to his own version of an Edenic-paradise, where men and women simply indulged in sexual gratification whenever they wanted and with whomever they wanted. He dreamed of a place where there was no such thing a romance, marriage, or family life—he wanted just one big non-stop orgy of sex and indulgence! Rousseau believed that things like romance, marriage, monogamy, and family were the results of a very peculiar “fall.”
Mankind’s “fall,” Rousseau said, was not due to sin, or violating the commandments of God. No, mankind’s “fall” was the development of civilization itself. Therefore, as Benjamin Wiker states in his book, Worshipping the State, “According to Rousseau, our ‘fall’ is this: we have become social, moral, cultural, artistic, rational, political animals—and that is why we are miserable. We have lost our natural simplicity, trading for a thousand artificial and destructive superfluities that come with advanced civilization” (173). This is what Rousseau meant when he famously penned the line, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains!” For Rousseau, it was civilization, with all its rules and obligations, that took away man’s freedom to do whatever the hell he wanted.
The Social Contract: Force People to Be Free…and Have Lots of Sex
The question naturally becomes, “What is a hedonistic, free-loving, anti-establishment hippie like Rousseau to do?” Rousseau’s answer just might astound you—he proposed that an entirely new political order be imposed on society in order to force people to be free. Does that sound fundamentally self-contradictory? It should, because it is. But that didn’t stop Rousseau…and that didn’t stop the radical revolutionaries of the French Revolution that Rousseau inspired—but more on that later. For now, it should be noted that Rousseau envisioned a completely secular government to impose what he called a “civil religion” that basically said, “Nothing is off limits, except the attempt to define limits!”
And what did he define as that exception? Christianity, with all its moral laws concerning what is right and wrong. Simply put, Rousseau said that Christianity had to go, so that a new civil religion could impose the view that anything ‘natural’ is good, and that the ‘highest good’ is for each individual to gratify his/her own desires without restrain, completely free from anything that might tie them down or impinge on that freedom.
In addition, according to Rousseau, since sexual gratification was the primary purpose of sex, not procreation, it shouldn’t matter with whom you had sex…but certainly not just one partner. The more, the merrier—men or women. Endorphins and orgasms were the ultimate aim of sexual activity, so heterosexuality, homosexuality, promiscuity, even bestiality—all was well and good in Rousseau’s worldview, because whatever you desire is natural, and whatever is natural is good…and no state or church should ever tell you otherwise. From that mindset stems the logical conclusion that marriage and family are unnatural as well. For marriage imposes the unnatural imposition of monogamy, and family imposes the unnatural obligation of parenting. How can you be happy, chained to one partner and being forced to raise little brats? There’s a world of sex waiting for you!
So goes Rousseau’s view of the natural (and preferred) state of mankind. And so goes Rousseau’s view of the purpose of the state: to encourage hedonistic libertinism, and to actively suppress any moral, social, or religious code that attempts to articulate any standards of right and wrong. The state is there to protect mankind from the “evils” of freedom-denying religion. This is what we find in Rousseau’s Social Contract.
It was Rousseau’s Social Contract that served as the broad outline for the French Revolution’s “civil religion.” We must remember that when Rousseau wrote, “…whoever refuses to obey the General Will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body; which means only that he will be forced to be free,” what he was advocating was the annihilation of the Christian religion, by force if necessary. If the “general will” was one of Rousseauean hedonism, and if someone (i.e. a Christian) objected to such hedonism, on the grounds it was sinful, that person would be “forced to be free”—i.e. forced to repudiate Christianity. Why? Because Christianity tried to impose moral limits…and that, for Rousseau, was the only real evil—it had to be stopped, by force.
Yearning for the Days of Sparta—We Don’t Want No Separation of Church and State
Not surprisingly, Rousseau was a fawning romantic for the times of ancient Sparta, the primitive Teutonic peoples, and the Roman republic. I mean, what guy doesn’t get amped up when he sees movies like 300? The testosterone-infused macho-masculinity of ancient war-loving cultures can be, from the outside, very appealing. Simply put, it is quite sexy to talk of killing in battle. But men like Rousseau seemingly really wanted to return to those days. In fact, was men like Rousseau who were responsible for the modern narrative that depicts Christianity as the cancer to culture, and the thing that destroyed the glorious golden age of classical Greece and Rome.
The ironic thing to note is that, despite modern claims that the idea of “separation of church and state” was an Enlightenment idea to combat the tyrannical church’s attempt to create a Christian theocracy, the fact is that the godfathers of the Enlightenment (like Rousseau) argued that the problem with Christianity was that it separated religion from the political sphere. We must remember that in ancient Rome the religion that bound the Roman Empire together was the imperial cult that worshipped Caesar as a god. To fail to do so was to be unpatriotic and a traitor to your country.
In light of that pagan mindset, it was Christianity that first attempted to distinguish “the City of God” from “the city of man.” This was this very thing that Rousseau railed against. He wanted a revival of the ancient world of classical Rome, in which the only “religion” was the political religion of the empire. For Rousseau, Jesus was the problem: “It was under these circumstances that Jesus came to establish a spiritual kingdom on earth. By separating the theological system from the political system, this brought about the end of the unity of the State, and caused the internal divisions that have never ceased to stir up Christian people.…when the cross chased out the eagle, all Roman valor disappeared.”
What’s more, Rousseau actually praised Islam for being able to fuse together again political and religious power. It should, therefore, come as no surprise to find that it was during the time of this so-called Enlightenment, when men like Rousseau began their “media blitz” against Christianity and the Catholic Church, that we begin seeing depictions of the Crusades as “evil and barbarous Christians attacking and killing innocent and noble Islam.” Of course Rousseau would say that—not only did he object to Christianity for separating political and religious power, he clearly supported Islam’s ability to wed the two together. So yes, if you have the assumption that the Crusades were an example of a zealous and militant Christianity lashing out in Islamophobia, congratulations—you’ve unknowingly imbibed Rousseau’s propaganda.
Rousseau: Machiavelli 2.0…Eradicate Christianity Altogether
Rousseau took Machiavelli’s vision to the next level. Whereas Machiavelli’s The Prince was a manual for rulers, and whereas Machiavelli taught that rulers shouldn’t be bound by the rules of Christianity but should rather use Christianity to rule over the ignorant masses, Rousseau believed that Christianity should be completely gotten rid of, and that the entire populace should embrace the “truth” that Machiavelli thought should only be given to the rulers. Rousseau taught that all of society should throw off the shackles of Christian morality in order to become truly free: “Christianity preaches nothing but servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that tyranny always profits from it. True Christians are made to be slaves. They know it and are scarcely moved thereby; this brief life is of too little worth in their view.”
Rousseau argued for a state-marriage as a “civil contract” (as opposed to a holy sacrament), and therefore would not allow the Church to have any power over marriage. Simply put, Rousseau said, “We should no longer allow priests or pastors to conduct marriage ceremonies. We should no longer allow the Church to issue marriages in the first place. Make marriage a civil contract, regulated by the State alone.” Make no mistake, Rousseau’s vision was that of the entire eradication of the Church from public life. He said, “…whoever dares to say there is no salvation outside of the church, should be chased out of the State, unless the State is the church, and the prince is the pontiff.” Yes indeed…the tolerance of Enlightenment-inspired thinking!
Even though Rousseau’s rhetoric clearly impacted both the American and French Revolutions of the late 18th century, the American Revolution did not really completely buy into Rousseau’s vision. Rather, it was the French Revolution that actually attempted to “go full Rousseau,” if you will, and work out his vision completely. The differences cannot be more clear: the American Revolution gave us George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, the Declaration of Independence, and the freedom of religion; the French Revolution gave us the Reign of Terror and Robespierre, a man whom Benjamin Wiker described as this supremely odd combination of being “…at once austerely virtuous and entirely savage” (174).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was not a good man. He advocated for the forcible eradication of Christianity; he promoted sexual libertinism; he yearned for a society in which politics was the civic religion; and he engaged in a propaganda campaign that completely re-wrote history and thus plunged Western culture into ignorance about the past. We are still suffering from Rousseau’s Enlightenment indoctrination, and it seems we are inching ever closer to his vision. That should be alarming to every clear-thinking person.
