Historian Rienk Vermij wrote the book 'The genie out of the bottle'. In it he does not discuss the Enlightenment as a philosophical movement, but as a purely historical phenomenon. What preceded the Enlightenment, and why did 'Enlightenment ideas' become so important precisely around the year 1700? “Certain ideas got the tide because statesmen believed that tolerance and containment of the power of the church would make them better at controlling.”
So much has been written about the Enlightenment. Why did you think you could add another book? “What was missing was a real historical angle. Great historians such as Jonathan Israel and Peter Gay approached the Enlightenment with a strong philosophical angle. They argue above all that Enlightenment ideals are also very valuable in our time and they want to find and describe those ideas in the past. They have their own philosophical program, they project their own ideals onto the Enlightenment.”
“I prefer to approach it a bit more distantly, as a reaction to what preceded it and not as something that anticipates our own time. This is not only about ideas, but also about the way in which society was organized and how it changed. What happened during the eighteenth century, for example, with absolute monarchy, or with the relationship between church and state? Certainly the latter is one of the historical core questions of the entire Enlightenment period.”
What is historically problematic about the Enlightenment? “It is difficult to put an unambiguous label on every historical phenomenon. According to an Enlightenment philosopher like Emmanuel Kant, the Enlightenment had little to do with history. He called every person who could think rationally and dared to do so 'enlightened', whether he lived in prehistoric times or now. You also have all kinds of different types of lighting. Enlightenment in the Church or in various national contexts, it means something different everywhere. And for different historians who have different political agendas, it also means something different. If you want to research it historically, you should have a definition that can be agreed upon.”
What do you think is the definition of Enlightenment? “As a historian, I would say that the Enlightenment is primarily a process in the eighteenth century in which church and state were separated as a solution to problems that already arose with the Reformation, when the unity of medieval Christianity was torn apart. In the eighteenth century, the century of the Enlightenment, an earlier 'solution', the sacred, absolute kingship of the seventeenth century, of which the French 'sun king' Louis XIV is the prime example, was thrown overboard. As a crucial part of this, all kinds of thinkers started to fight the influence of the church on the state.”
You call a development that preceded the Enlightenment the 'crisis of European consciousness'. What kind of crisis was that? “From about 1680, people began to realize that the confessional monarchy (the bond between the church and the absolutist monarch, ed.), in which unity in society was guaranteed by a strong bond between church and state, had failed. This turned out to lead to more religious wars, oppression and other misery. So an active search was made for another solution and it was partly found."
“All kinds of radical voices emerged and a lively debate about very concrete political issues, which had been around for much longer, by the way. So you can see this crisis as the beginning of what we now call the Enlightenment.”
Can you give an example of such a pressing political issue at the time? “For example, the question 'what do you do with religious minorities in your state?' In the time of absolute monarchy, the solution was often oppression and persecution. But oppression led to more and more discussion and resistance. At the end of the seventeenth century it was generally recognized that the old solutions to these kinds of problems were no longer tenable. And it is very important that there were also people who offered concrete solutions. These were by no means always new ideas, but they were ideas that received support from powerful statesmen from about 1700. From that moment on, they thought they could better control things like tolerance and curbing the power of the church.”
And how did the church react to that? “That varied greatly. There were many people within both the Catholic and Protestant churches who had long felt that taking a hard line was especially counterproductive. But there was also a group of people who did not want to lose their privileges and started to resist. But in most cases the churches didn't have much choice. That was because the power of the state grew while the power of the church increasingly lagged behind. So the state needed the church less and less to legitimize their claim to power, forcing the church to play second fiddle. But of course it was also impossible to abolish the church completely.”
What exactly did they want? “That varied enormously. Some thinkers wanted a purely Protestant state and all Catholics to be silenced. But other thinkers already had ideas about citizenship. A state in which your faith – Catholic, Protestant or even atheist – had nothing to do with your position within the state. But both were radical. There was a very large group of thinkers in the middle. But what they all shared was that they wanted the church to have no influence on politics anymore. That would only lead to war and misery.”
What role did the new scientific thinking play in this? “In the first place, science in the seventeenth century was not the specialist profession it is today. It was related to philosophy and to thinking in general. As a result, all kinds of cross connections quickly arise between political ideas and scientific ideas. The church was still based on medieval knowledge from scholasticism. If the new science of Galileo and Newton comes up with alternatives, it will automatically acquire a political overtone. Many thinkers also resorted to the emerging scientific discourse to modernize their ideas and mold them into a form that was understandable to everyone at the time. Scientific and political ideas were thus used to justify and reinforce each other.”
Why did these kinds of political ideas eventually translate into 'Enlightened' views on education and good citizenship? “Separation of church and state was a pretty drastic separation. The church had an enormous influence on all of life, and for many people church and state were inseparable at all. When they were pulled out, however, the role of the church was still under discussion, especially in the field of ethics and morality. Before that, the church told what was sinful and the state punished it. If you disconnect that, the state has to ask itself:what is the justification for the state to punish and what does that mean for public morality? As a result, all kinds of 'enlightened' princes came to determine what was useful for society without the church and then implemented it."
In discussions about Islamic states it is nowadays said:The West went through the Enlightenment and Islam did not. But if the Enlightenment is so diffuse, is it really that simple? “If you want to draw parallels with history, then I think that the position in which many Islamic countries find themselves today is comparable to Western European countries at the end of the nineteenth century, which were struggling with problems related to modernization, industrialization and urbanization. In Western Europe, too, the churches then became the pre-eminent place where people started looking for their identity again. The Catholic Church then grew enormously. As a result, the influence of the church in society increased again. You can also see this development in many Islamic countries:in response to the problems associated with modernization, stricter forms of Islam are on the rise. I think it is indeed somewhat simplistic to attribute the differences between some Islamic states and the West solely to the Enlightenment.”