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realized-just as the bourgeoisie saw total reason surely achieved
through its progress. Both Enlightenments were blind to the light
which God is. That
is
one way of putting it. But we may also say:
God was not visible, he was not made visible, as he can alone be
made visible in the Age of the Incarnation-in men living humanly
together: in Christian brotherhood.
Now, wherever the fault is to be sought: the relation between
Christianity and enlightenment was, on the whole, unfortunate,
with the exception of a few phases-though even in these the his–
torical tragedy of a false situation remains perceptible. The historical
Enlightenment transformed the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
the Father of the Son of Man the Christ, into a philosophic idea
or at best into that supreme being which created the world but
does not intervene in its course; it condemned the body of the
Faith, the community of the Church with its history, its institutions,
with its customs and usages, and at first wished to replace it by a
purely spiritual community of enlightened reverers of Providence,
and then itself gave up even this minimum faith and put man in
the place of God. It has been held, and with justification, that en–
lightenment means not only the struggle against superstitions, against
delusive and erroneous faiths, but against faith itself: that enlighten–
ment wants to replace it by something else-perhaps knowledge, or
science, or even non-knowledge, in other words the self-resignation
of agnosticism or skepticism.
If
this anti-religious sense is given to enlightenment, there can,
of course, be no enlightenment from faith but only an enlightenment
against
faith.
It
was thus that the free thinkers of the past century
regarded their task; and it is thus that an area of science, especially
the natural sciences, has sought to see the problem for several gen–
erations: faith is held to be an antiquated, pre-scientific attitude of
humanity. In the "Law of the Three States" and in any form of
positivism, this supplanting or liquidating of religion has become an
essential element of modern enlightenment. The proletarian Enlighten–
ment is completely committed to disclosing to the people that faith
is an opiate; suffering, exploited man deludes himself with it, with
a false,
i.e.
religious, consciousness, or the exploiters deliberately give
him this cheap opiate for the same purpose. "Religion must be main–
tained for the people"-in this dictum the ruling group has itself
