The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers

Four lectures, delivered at Yale in 1931 and published in 1932, arguing that the philosophers of the Enlightenment were far less emancipated from the medieval mind than they believed. Becker’s claim is that they demolished the City of God only to rebuild it on earth with different materials — replacing Providence with Nature, grace with reason, and the life to come with posterity, while keeping the same underlying shape of a redemptive history moving toward a final good.

Why it’s on the list: Assigned in UATX’s “History, Historiography, and the Philosophy of History”, where it does specific work: Becker is the book that makes the course’s question about secular faith unavoidable, and it sits directly upstream of Löwith’s Meaning in History on the same syllabus.

Where I saw it: The University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list, 65 Texts Our Students Are Reading, published November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 65-text curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
• Carl Becker — already in the wiki, quoted in American Sphinx on Jefferson’s ideas resting “precariously on the aspirations and ideals of good men”; this book is the long form of that same suspicion about Enlightenment optimism.
• Enlightenment — the movement the book re-reads.
• Philosophy of History — the genre the argument belongs to.
• Progress — the idea Becker traces back to a theological ancestor.