Blinded by the Light?
A Light Too Bright: The Enlightenment Today: An Assessment of the Values
of the European Enlightenment and a Search for New Foundations
by Paulos Mar Gregorios
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992
(261 pages, $57.50 cloth, $18.95 paper)
reviewed by Brian McDonald
Any reader of this fascinating work will, at some point, lay down the book, shake his head and ask aloud, “How does this man know so much?” Paulos Mar Gregorios, former president of the World Council of Churches and current Bishop of Delhi in the Syrian Orthodox Church of India, seems equally at home in the worlds of ancient Indian philosophy, Orphic religion, modern quantum physics, nineteenth-century German metaphysics or twentieth-century logical positivism. Though he is particularly attracted to certain schools of German philosophy, no thick Germanic denseness fogs his work. His analyses are both profound and as lucid as the daylight which provides this book with its central metaphor.
It is Gregorios’ thesis that the European Enlightenment, still the most dominant intellectual and cultural force in the world, is a “light too bright.” In the author’s words:
Our European Enlightenment is something like the daylight, which makes us see many things that we would not have seen without its help; but in that very process . . . eclipses the stunningly vast expanse of . . . galaxies that lie around it. It is a light too bright [author’s emphasis].
The “light too bright” of the autonomous, critical reason, which was liberated in the eighteenth century, has led to dazzling feats of technical prowess and social organization in the modern world. It has, however, blinded us to other ways of knowing reality, which may ultimately be more important (for what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?).
In the early part of this work, Gregorios seeks the essence of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He finds it in the “repudiation of all external authority and of any debt to tradition.” Reason sought to exist without presuppositions and install itself as the sole means of understanding reality. The Enlightenment’s chief legacy to the modern Western world, he finds, is its hostility to tradition and authority.
To a great extent, this hostility was motivated by a hunger for human liberation since religion and tradition were often allied to oppressive social orders. However, in freeing reason from domination by tradition or any influence of Europe’s religious heritage, the Enlightenment thinkers and their modern heirs lost the ability (or even the inclination) to ground their ideas in any transcendent purpose. The Enlightenment has created a civilization that has produced vastly improved means for living even as it has lost the reason for living.
How did we get this way? Gregorios answers by giving a mini-course on the history of European and American philosophy and scientific thought for the last two centuries. At the beginning of this mini-course stands an entire chapter on Hegel, who, “ . . . more than any other thinker provided the vision that is at the basis of modernity.” Gregorios has a great affinity for Hegel and holds that he (far more than many Western Christians, in the bishop’s view) understands the central issues of “classical Christianity,” i.e., the Triune nature of God, the Incarnation of the Word in fallen history and the continuing work of the Spirit to bring peace, unity and love to the world through the historical process. Of course, the fact that Hegel understands these affirmations does not mean he embraces them in a full–blooded Christian manner. His Absolute Spirit who “realizes” himself in the dialectical process of history is only the metaphysical ghost of an expired Christianity. However, Gregorios rejoices that Hegel emphasizes both the freedom of reason and the transcendent grounding of all human activity and progress in history.
What Hegel kept together, however, his successors have torn asunder. Thinkers since his time have kept this doctrine of progress and some sense of the dialectical movement of history, but the Spirit (Absolute or otherwise) has receded further and further from view. Thus we have Marx, rejecting Hegel’s metaphysics and positing a totally materialistic vision of history. It is certainly true that Marxist millennialism has a quasi-religious feel to it. Anyone who has ever been devoutly devoted to the Socialist dream can attest to that. Transcendent purpose, however, is explicitly rejected as the “opiate of the people.”
Even Marx contains too much of a sense of “ultimacy” for the thinkers of the twentieth century. Ours is not an age of grand visions, secular or otherwise. The thinkers Gregorios examines are essentially technological and instrumental in their use of reason. Not even a shadow of transcendent purpose haunts their views. Germany’s Heidegger, the last philosopher with whom the author deals, is the great exception to this; but Gregorios pointedly notes that he has left many admirers but few disciples.
The major failure of the European Enlightenment, as Gregorios perceives it, is that in its failure to ground knowledge in some transcendent purpose, and in its constant putting of “practice ahead of theory,” it has reduced knowledge to power, “power to manipulate, control and dominate” the material world. And that material world is rapidly becoming the only world we are capable of seeing. He points out that we have lost the ability to recognize that “some of the things that matter are not made of matter.”
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