RT Article
T1 The Dark Side of the Enlightenment
JF Toronto journal of theology
VO 15
IS 2
SP 139
OP 148
A1 Ages, Arnold
LA English
YR 1999
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/196176010X
AB It would seem that all great languages, buildings, institutions and, by extension, ideas, have architectural faults. Physicists tell us that this is the way of nature. It is the imperfections, moreover, that produce the quirky dance of atoms and molecules that we call life itself. The French Enlightenment, the focus of this article, was the edifice of ideas whose first intellectual foundation and footings were formed by Descartes' elevation of reason in the seventeenth century and whose superstructure was completed by Descartes' coalition of thinkers in France called philosophes. The architectural monument we know in English as the Enlightenment and in French as Les Lumieres, was a soaring, life-giving and politically liberating dialectic. It has been said that the vices of a country often come from an excess of virtues: the same can be said of institutions and manifestoes.
DO 10.3138/tjt.15.2.139