10個西方文學時期3: 理性時代

1. 文藝復興好快轉入了理性時代: We may see the Reformation as the first phase in this process. But at the end of the seventeenth century there came a strong reaction against much that the Reformation had stood for. Thus we move into the period we call the Enlightenment. 

2. 人的理性代替了上帝的權威: What was the Enlightenment? Very generally, we may describe it as a period in which many key thinkers turned away from building their thought on what God said in his revelation, and instead put a great emphasis on human reason, and also on what is 'natural'. Now, Christians who worked on the basis of the Bible (and particularly in the Reformation tradition) have always insisted that human reason has a fundamental problem. The idea is a little like the Marxist concept of 'ideology': there is a deep bias in our thinking that affects our beliefs. And so it is very hard for us to think clearly and accurately about God, because as we do so we tend to try and protect our independence; ideologically, we want to believe whatever will preserve our autonomy from God. But what the thinkers of the Enlightenment were doing was denying that the problem existed. (Indeed, when we come to Kant we find 'autonomy' exalted into a principle that is absolutely good.) 

3. 人相信自己的理性可發展理想的社會:Human rationality will lead us into a new dawn of civilisation, they suggested; if we live according to what is reasonable, we can expect our society to work out right. 

4. 文學上表現出一種樂觀主義:We can see this optimistic philosophy reflected particularly in much of the work of the great poet Alexander Pope, perhaps the most important British poet of the early eighteenth century. There is the same easy confidence in a novelist like Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones, and other writers, painters and musicians of the movement that is known as 'neo-classicism'. 

5. 或稱新古典主義，因為希臘羅馬時代同樣相信理性: The rediscovery of the Graeco-Roman classical heritage tended to function as an alternative to Christianity's insistence that man needed a radical rescue: it was basically humanistic in tendency, reinforcing the optimistic confidence in human rationality and in his ability, just operating naturally, to build the society that we need.

6. 但後期發現理性製造混亂，甚至是破壞性的: But as the 18th century wore on there began to be doubts as to whether it is true. There began to be bad dreams. At the end of Pope's Dunciad, indeed, we find a nightmare of chaos overcoming human society, and the closing words are 'universal darkness buries all'. Where there should be rationality, where there should be the clarity of the human mind working out all our problems, we find that people are not reasonable, and ultimately night falls on humanity. The terrible final book of Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a parallel nightmare: human beings, devoid of reason, turn out merely to be animals wallowing in the mud. At the end of both these 18th century masterpieces we sense the same fear: what if people are not and cannot be trusted to be reasonable? What if we are, by nature, inherently destructive?