Alan Jacobs on scholarship that rethinks whether "The Enlightenment" happened as an actual historical movement or a 19th and 20th century intra-scholastic supermyth

https://blog.ayjay.org/clarks-enlightenment/

This is a mere note about a fascinating book rather than a review or analysis. The book is  J.C.D. Clark’s The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History, which makes a curious but in the end fairly compelling argument. You can get a sense of what Clark is up to from a passage near the end in which he summarizes a series of potential objections to his argument: 

First, that ‘the Enlightenment never happened’. On the contrary, this book has shown how ‘the Enlightenment’ was a concept that was widely adopted in the twentieth century in some countries and that persisted for several decades, influencing large numbers of people in the anglophone world and beyond to the point where the existence of an objective phenomenon to which the term appropriately corresponded seemed beyond question. 

Second, that ‘the Enlightenment happened but was unimportant’. On the contrary, this book has contended that, once conceptualized, the notion of ‘the Enlightenment’ was highly influential, and it has indicated how the term could be used (although with varying effectiveness) to promote a variety of causes both thematic and national. 

Third, that ‘the Enlightenment happened, was important, but was a bad thing’. On the contrary, this book has asserted the historian’s obligation to refrain from normative comment on the phenomena of the past, and has suggested how refraining in this way can better illuminate the normative forces that others have used to shape the development of knowledge, or supposed knowledge, in this field. 

For Clark, “the Enlightenment” definitely happened — but it happened in the 19th and 20th centuries as a scholarly concept, not in the 18th century as an intellectual movement. What happened was the retroactive bestowing by historians of a “badge of normative superiority” on a miscellaneous and heterogenous set of 18th century writers who were in point of fact constantly at odds with each other. (One of Clark’s services to scholarship here is noting points where translators have inserted the word “Enlightenment” into works where it does not in fact appear.) The best way to earn this badge was to be an enemy of religion, and almost any writer or thinker who could be described as such was conscripted into the thought-police force called “Enlightenment.”

 

So ... could this be somewhat like 19th an 20th century post hoc proclamations about "tonality" in music from the 18th century, too?  One of the more memorable lines Richard Taruskin had was pointing out that there was a cosmic gap between what Haydn actually did in his music and what music theorists said Haydn did in his music. Sounds like Alan Jacobs has come across a historian who proposes The Enlightenment was to the 19th and 20th century what "the 1950s" is to North American conservatives, pining for the wholesome virtue and can-do attitude of an era that is a post hoc cumulative ret-con. 

It sounds like what Jacob L Wright wrote about the 19th century German liberal Protestant project of declaring that everything about the Deuteronomistic history (Joshua through 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings) was a construct to whitewash the life and reign of King David.  Wright pointed out that nobody who actually reads the biblical narrative can possibly have that impression but enough German scholars formed a club that said this must be that it became a scholastic supermyth lasting centuries. It's one of many things he mentioned in this here book I commend to you.

What if ... "The Enlightenment" was a shortcut, an overly broad and overdetermined heuristic used in 19th and early 20th century historiography somewhat like the way "Tonality" was defined in the 19th century? The concept isn't useless but we may be due for a reappraisal of its accuracy and usage in popular and academic contexts.

Miles Smith on futility and wars and causes at Mere Orthodoxy, comparing the existence of songs about the futility of dying in the War to End all Wars to there being no comparable songs for the Lost Cause (you know which one)

https://mereorthodoxy.com/futility

...

That a song like “Green Fields of France” could even be written is a testament to a society that had socially confronted the emptiness and futility of a political cause. As I listened to it the week of the Confederacy’s defeat it occurred to me that I had never heard a song, listened to a sermon, or even read a book written by a southerner in the aftermath that suggested the cause of the Confederacy—maintaining a republican society wedded to racial caste—was empty and futile. The scale of death and destruction in the South certainly should have prompted the question. Around six percent of adult British men died in World War 1. By comparison death in the southern states was staggering during the Civil War; over thirteen percent of southern men lost their lives in an undeniably losing and fruitless cause.

To quote Pulitzer winner David Potter, slavery was dead, secession was dead, and 600,000 men were dead. And yet few southern evangelical protestants thought the cause was empty or futile. In A Consuming Fire Eugene Genovese suggested that some of the more reflective southern Protestants might have thought they failed to live up to the standards of a holy God and were judged for it, but even fewer could squarely confront the emptiness and futility of trying to maintain racial caste in a Christian society by political or military means. Southerners’ conviction that their cause wasn’t futile, in fact, no doubt played a role in the terrorism and violence against free Afro-Americans in the Reconstruction Era. The KKK and their allies, however, might have saved themselves the trouble of a race war.

...

over at Slipped Disc Ruth Leon notes the birthday of Duke Ellington

Slipped Disc has its combative and acrimonious moments (and personalities, for that matter), But I still visit regularly because Norman introduced me to Grazyna Bacewicz

Recently, Duke got a highlight (and well he should since it's his birthday).

https://slippedisc.com/2025/04/ruth-leon-recommends-233/

Ellington's been one of my musical heroes over the last thirty years.  Probably need to write a tribute sonata at some point ... but only after thirty years of composing and guitar-playing would I even dare to consider such a project.  

HT Terry at Phoenix Preacher's Open Blogging, Robert Kelbe on Disciple Making Movements

https://www.phoenixpreacher.com/open-blogging-608/#comment-665066

https://gentlereformation.com/2021/06/29/disciple-making-movements/

I suppose it may be because my parents dragged me to house church movements in Oregon in the 1990s where old men held forth on black U. N. Helicopters and the New World Order and then in the 2000s being at Mars Hill because (at the time) it really seemed like a healthier alternative to "that", that this article has lingered with me.

Keble describes the disciple making movement and it reminded me of a couple of guys I met from International Church of Christ and the ethos of disciple-making where you aren't really a disciple of Jesus until you make a disciple who has made a disciple, a convert-with-obedience.  I do think, as a Christian, obedience to the teaching of Jesus is important ... but I'll reiterate I thought I shared at Phoenix Preacher after reading this article.

It would seem that the lower the ecclesiology and liturgy in North American (U.S. specifically) church movements, the more forcefully multi-level marketing methods and ideals saturate the systems.  Of the three co-founding pastors of the former Mars Hill I only ever heard Mike Gunn say there's such a thing as growing to the size your church is supposed to be and then resting in that.  If it caps out at 230 that's fine and don't feel obliged to "grow more".  

I'm also reminded of a John Owen quote Jim West has cited from time to time. 

https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2025/04/14/paging-karl-barth-you-have-a-call/

"If a man teaches uprightly but walks crookedly, more will fall down in the night of his life than he built in the day of his doctrine”. – John Owen

At this stage in my life that sounds a lot like, to be blunt, a lot of guys I met in the leadership culture of the former Mars Hill, starting from the top and working on down.