By Rev. R.J. Rushdoony – bio
After 1660, the foundations of Western culture began to shift away from Christianity. This was a resumption of a trend which began in the late middle ages and resulted in the Renaissance. The new, humanistic culture of the Enlightenment was primarily a culture of the court, of intellectuals, artists, and some of the clergy. This dominant culture did not reach into the lower classes except to impoverish them religiously and economically, so that eighteenth-century peoples were on a very low, neglected, and debased level.The explosion which affected all classes was the French Revolution, which insisted on a new foundation and a new creed for all men. As surely as St. Dominic and Francis had been reformers, and, later, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Loyola, so too the revolutionary leaders were reformers, but of a different kind. As Otto Scott noted, they did not begin by reforming themselves: "they expected to reform others."1 This was a major break with Christendom. In pagan antiquity, reform had meant the imposition of the will of a man or a group on all society. Gaius Marius (157-86 BC) craved justice for Rome with a great intensity, for example, but he had, as G.P. Baker noted, no doctrine of original sin. His solution was to see evil in others and then to destroy them in order to save Rome.2 Marius as a result had no patience nor interest in the ordinary legal processes of civil life. Instead, he bypassed them to gain quick "reform" and "justice." This meant the sack of Rome, corpses in the streets, the ravishing of the wives and children of all his enemies, and the pillaging of their properties. Marius's fretfulness over injustice made him a monster of vengeance.3 Because the Romans had no transcendental doctrine of sovereignty, lordship inevitably belonged to the state and its ruler.
In the French Revolution, Robespierre could declare in the Assembly, "The People are the Law," and hence the sovereign.4 In practice, this meant, in terms of Rousseau, that the general will of the people was made manifest in the people's voice, Robespierre. Because reason was sovereign, and Reason, the attribute of man, did not come into its own in the common man but rather in the general will and its elite voice, Robespierre was thus the sovereign, the voice of Reason, and the voice of Virtue. Fouche and d'Herbois set forth an edict which sums up the spirit of revolutions: "All is permitted those who act in the Revolutionary direction."5
An unappreciated aspect of the French Revolution and its aftermath, the Napoleonic Wars and their impact on all of Europe, was its effect on the universities. This in itself was one of the most far-reaching of all revolutions.6 Before the French Revolution, despite the presence of Enlightenment scholars, the university was still what some term "medieval." This means that its basic orientation was still formally theological. The triune God, His enscriptured and revealed word, and the ordained order of creation, were seen as the object of study, the ultimate source of knowledge, and the focus for all learning. Although the state had previously funded its universities in many cases, the state still saw itself and its universities as formally under God. The slow erosion of the theological foundations of society and learning were greatly stepped up by the French Revolution... read more>>
