The Age of Reason

In Faith is Not Blind, the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe functions as a hinge in the book’s “life / my life” box diagram — the framework for how cultures decide what gives life meaning. Before the Age of Reason, the medieval church and the kings supplied the explanation for the outer “life” box. The Enlightenment began to change this pattern because “science and reason gradually replaced the church and the kings as the sources that explained the meaning of ‘life.’” These secular explanations competed with religion for cultural influence and, over time, came to dominate it — yet people still looked to some larger frame of reference for their own lives.

The book’s larger argument is that this macro frame collapsed entirely in the twentieth century: the shocks of relativism, Frankl’s camps, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot dissolved the outer box, leaving only personal preference and what the Givenses call “cosmic loneliness.” The Age of Reason is thus the first step in a longer arc the book traces — from inherited religious certainty, through secular reason, to Moral Relativism — against which the Restoration is positioned as a way to rebuild the “big box.”

Context: The Age of Reason (the Enlightenment) was the broad 17th–18th-century European intellectual movement that elevated reason, empirical science, and individual rights as the basis for knowledge and authority, displacing tradition and ecclesiastical sanction; “The Age of Reason” is also the title of Thomas Paine’s 1794 deist tract.

Where this appears

• Faith is Not Blind — the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when science and reason gradually replaced the church and the kings as the sources explaining the meaning of “life” in the outer box of the Givenses’ diagram.