The Enlightenment, Gnosticism and Modern Education
Part 3 of The Globalist Education Series
In Part 2 of this series, we discussed Western education in the context of the Enlightenment and the utopian thought that marked the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1
That essay introduced a critique of Enlightenment thought as a break with the classical Western philosophical tradition and with the ethics of traditional Christianity.
Following this, a critique of the philosophies of education of Claude Adrien Helvétius and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was mounted which argued that both were premised upon obtaining new means of controlling citizens rather than producing independent personalities with their own consciences.
Part 2 culminated with a discussion of the philosophy of education of Rousseau and some of his eighteenth-century English followers, all of whom can be considered forerunners of the progressive philosophy of education which emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This utopian paradigm was concerned with producing a new man who would live in a transformed society. Thus, education became centrally concerned with scientific techniques derived from emerging fields, such as psychology, to form the attitudes of the individual.
Using arguments put forth by philosopher Eric Voegelin, it was suggested that the secularisation inaugurated by the Enlightenment produced a “crisis” for Western man who was now disconnected from the transcendent. This secularisation and disillusionment with spiritual matters, it was argued, led to the replacement of God for new secular forms of authority such as managers, legislators and educators.
The assumption that the social forms and political structures that have evolved out of the Enlightenment are secular and therefore rational, and a significant departure from the Dark Ages, where religious authorities stifled human progress, remains an addictive one. This begs an important question—was modern secularism really such a departure or was it a political religion that transferred greater power to a new secular authority with all the same privileges, and perhaps a few more besides, when compared to the previous dispensation?
The German jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt, argued in 1922 that the modern state was largely derived from “secularized theological concepts” in which “the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver”.2
Schmitt argued that the metaphysical origin of the concept of sovereignty evolved across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where it was incorporated into the new naturalistic and rationalistic language of the Enlightenment which saw Thomas Hobbes establish his concept of the sole sovereign, a “leviathan” state which Schmitt considered to be deeply rooted in mythology. “Throughout the Enlightenment period until the French Revolution, such an architect of world and state was called the legislator.”3
Schmitt also observed the same theme in the political writings of Rousseau, the great liberator of human passions.
The politicization of theological concepts, especially with respect to the concept of sovereignty, is so striking that it has not escaped any true expert on his writings. Said Emile Boutmy, ‘Rousseau applies to the sovereign the idea that the philosophes hold of God: He may do anything that he wills but he may not will evil.’4
In this essay, we will analyse the possibility that secular modernity is the emanation of a kind of religiosity, most specifically defined as a resurgent Gnosticism.
This analysis will provide an alternative reading of modernity and of modern education which has increasingly become a means of creating a new kind of person who can contribute to the transformation of the world.
Modernity, Theology and Gnosticism
During the final years of the nineteenth and the opening decades of the twentieth centuries, a number of prominent intellectuals in Germany “became convinced that modern German culture, characterised as ‘liberal’, ‘secular’ and ‘rational’, was suffering a deep crisis and that Modernity itself was the problem.”5
Nietzsche, as harbinger of the new era, feels and proclaims that the transcendence of the Christian-Platonic faith that dominated Western civilization for over two thousand years has become void, has spent its vital force and creativity. Obviously this means the liberation of humankind from transcendence, yet what remains without transcendence is nothingness (das Nichts, or the Cathars' nihil) and liberation becomes ‘liberation unto nothingness’ (Befreiung in das Nichts).6
Amongst the group of intellectuals attempting to address the crisis in modern Germany were Georg Simmel and the neo-Marxist theorists of the Frankfurt School whose “Critical Theory”, in its own way, represented an attempt to grapple with the secularisation as well as the new economic and social order that followed the Enlightenment. Indeed, the Frankfurt School was combining Marx with the sociology of Max Weber who “saw in the degenerated state of the German educational system the deterioration of the German heritage of ‘Kultur’ (culture) and ‘Bildung’ (moulding the character of the individual through education) and a reflection of the same deep-rooted crisis.”7
Weber insisted that the secularisation wrought by the Enlightenment was an emancipation from religion, a view which pitted him directly in opposition to Carl Schmitt who argued that most, if not all, of the concepts associated with modern political thought were derived from theology.
What was generally agreed upon by many was that there was a “crisis” in modern life and that it had spiritual origins that required explanation. This was the same “crisis” alluded to in Part 2 of this series through the work of Eric Voegelin.
This interest in the religious origins of the West drove a number of German intellectuals to study Christianity and the Apostle Paul. This research, into the man considered to be the originator of Christianity after Jesus, spurred a spate of publications and intense debate over the significance of Christian theology and of related religious concepts such as apocalypticism and Gnosticism.
According to Jewish intellectual Yotam Hotam, it was philosopher Hans Jonas who provided the first great appraisement of Gnosticism in the twentieth century with his 1928 dissertation8 entitled Der Begriff der Gnosis (The Concept of Gnosis) which was supervised by Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann and published in 1934 as the first part of Gnosis und spatantiker Geist (Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity).9
Yotam Hotam has argued that Jonas was amongst a newer generation of German intellectuals, including Hans Blumenberg, Gershom Scholem, and Eric Voegelin, who found themselves grappling with the concepts of Gnosis and dualistic estrangement from the temporal world. Jonas, Blumenberg and Scholem were of Jewish origin whilst Voegelin was Catholic. This work on Gnosis gained increased relevance following WWII when an attempt to account for events in Germany was made through such theory before the Cold War brought more pressing geopolitical considerations to the fore.
The term Gnosticism is derived from the Greek word for knowledge or insight—gnôsis—and refers to an array of religious and philosophical traditions which can be traced to the first and second centuries BC including “the Corpus Hermeticum, the Jewish Apocalyptic writings, and especially Platonic philosophy and the Hebrew Scriptures”.10
Jonas explained that Gnosis was distinctly different from rational knowledge and reason. Instead, Gnosis had an “emphatically religious or supranatural meaning and refers to objects which we nowadays should call those of faith rather than of reason.” This knowledge of God, Jonas contended, was “something naturally unknowable and therefore itself not a natural condition.”11
Its objects include everything that belongs to the divine realm of being, namely, the order and history of the upper worlds, and what is to issue from it, namely, the salvation of man. With objects of this kind, knowledge as a mental act is vastly different from the rational cognition of philosophy.12
The first essential characteristic of Gnostic thought was a rejection of the material world which was seen as inherently flawed and evil. This initial rejection of the world by Gnostics “was not informed by a philosophical world-view or procedure.”13
Rather, the Gnostic vision of the world was based upon the intuition of a radical and seemingly irreparable rupture between the realm of experience (pathos) and the realm of true Being—that is, existence in its positive, creative, or authentic aspect.14
As such, Gnosticism “began with the same basic, pre-philosophical intuition that guided the development of Greek philosophy—that there is a dichotomy between the realm of true, unchanging Being, and ever-changing Becoming.”15
However, unlike the Greeks, who strived to find the connection between and overall unity of these two “realms,” the Gnostics amplified the differences, and developed a mytho-logical doctrine of humankind’s origin in the realm of Being, and eventual fall into the realm of darkness or matter, that is, Becoming.16
Therefore, the second component of any Gnostic belief system was radical dualism. For Jonas, “the most pervasive dualism in Gnosis is not theological opposition between two more or less equal divine principles, one good, one evil, but an existential dualism rooted in the Gnostics' feeling of estrangement” from the cosmos.17
Radical dualism provided the basis for the assumption that the transcendent God was distant and unaccessible to humanity who was ensnared in an evil world which had been constructed by a lesser god. “Disbelief in the world and estrangement from it are the symbol of the Gnostic existential state of mind in its quest for self-revelation and redemption.”18
Thus, an essential symbol of Gnostic thought is the idea that mankind must escape the earthly prison of matter through a mythology or ideological system which provides meaning and the possibility of final salvation. The early Gnostics found this in the myth of Sophia (wisdom) who, in error, created the Demiurge, the architect of the material realm which enslaves humanity.
The great task of achieving salvation and transcending the fallen world presupposed the return to the material realm of a saviour to guide humanity to salvation.
Unsurprisingly, the emergence of Christianity, which tells us that God sent his only son to Earth to die for our sins, was embraced emphatically by Gnostics, albeit as a vector of Gnostic speculation in opposition to the Apostolic Church.
Indeed, Gnosticism was purged from the early Church, just as it had been purged from the paganism of classical civilisation beforehand.
Eric Voegelin suggested that the fear of Gnosticism, whether it was rejecting the pagan gods or the God of the Old Testament, was not merely an argument over theology, but a “profounder worry about the actual destruction of structure in reality through the obsession with imagery of the Gnostic type.”19
If life in the cosmos was indeed life in a daimonic prison, man’s ordering of existence in this kind of world was reduced to the preparation of his escape from it; in particular, he had to acquire the knowledge (gnosis) that would enable his personal pneuma to return, in death, to the divine Pneuma. Consistently, this program could, as it did in certain instances, lead to the formation of communities of men and women who would live and die without offspring, in the hope that the communities would continue until all human beings had joined them, so that all human pneuma would be returned to the divine pneuma through the extinction of mankind.20
As such, Gnosticism was observed by the authorities of the time as an unhealthy philosophy that discouraged family formation and which represented a very plausible threat to the existence of humanity.
In 1835, German theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur “kicks off the fashion of comparing modern thought with ancient Gnosis.”21 Baur took particular issue with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the influential German idealist philosopher whom we will discuss later in this series of essays, whose system he compared to Valentinus, the second-century Christian Gnostic.
For him, Hegel is the heir to Valentinus. In Valentinianism the absolute Spirit is the top of the pyramidal Pleroma, and the aeons are the essences through which the Spirit knows itself by creating a negative reflection of itself. The link between aeons is love. All of this returns in Hegel, as well as Sophia's fall, which takes on the form of a break in the ‘Kingdom of the Son of the World,’ when the ‘finite spirit’ (endlicher Geist) appears, which is the equivalent of the Valentinian low-quality psyché (soul). The ‘Kingdom of the Son of the World’ will be concluded by the dialectic ‘negation of negation,’ a ‘process of reconciliation’ (der Prozess der Versöhnung) in which the absolute Spirit recognizes itself for what it is.22
In 1949, German intellectual Karl Löwith, another student of Martin Heidegger, argued that modernity was merely secularised theology in his book Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History.
For Voegelin, Scholem, Jonas and Blumenberg, Löwith’s thesis was crucial, because it made the history of Modernity a sign of human inability to overcome theology, not only because modern times emerged out of the medieval era as Löwith suggested, but more profoundly, because within modern secular patterns of thought [and] political life (i.e. within ‘human action in history’) lies a primeval theological under-layer, which was exactly Carl Schmitt’s concept of Political Theology from the 1920s.23
Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes provided his own analysis of modernity through the lens of Gnosticism in his influential doctoral thesis which was published in German in 1947 and later in English as Occidental Eschatology.
However, by making no distinction between apocalypticism and Gnosticism, Taubes demonstrated the manner that both concepts share distinct, yet related symbols.
For him, to put it in his own words, Gnosticism is the ‘historial’ ideology of apocalyptic Revolution, which manifests itself in Jesus' preaching of the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. Through Jesus' death and resurrection, this world is abolished, yet it is slow to disappear. St Paul is the first to give this paradox ‘gnostic’ expression by moving Christian salvation from the horizontal dimension of time to the vertical dimension of being, by transforming the end of the world into an individual escape from the prison of the world.24
Both Löwith and Taubes were influential to Eric Voegelin who argued that the modern period of Western civilisation, particularly since the Enlightenment, could be best understood as the successive resurgence of Gnosticism.25
Taking much of the essential thesis of Taubes, Voegelin argued that Christianity was a revolutionary religion which rejected polytheism and “de-divinized” the physical world. As a replacement for paganism, Christianity, as communicated through the Apostolic Church, ensured that the spiritual destiny of man could not be represented in earthly political institutions. Man would now have to content himself with the supernatural for salvation and the strength of his own faith for his relationship to God.
Just as Gnostics in pagan times refused to accept that salvation lay out of reach and that transcendence was a matter of faith, so did the Gnostics of the Christian Age, or “Ecumenic Age” as Voegelin described it, desire to “find shortcuts to immortality”.26
The witnessing of the resurrection of Christ had assured St Paul “that the transfiguration of reality had actually begun and would soon be completed by the Second Coming.”27 Indeed, the Revelation of St John, also known as the Book of Revelation, also predicted the return of Christ.
St Augustine rejected the literal interpretation of Revelation in his Civitas Dei (The City of God) and “boldly declared the realm of the thousand years to be the reign of Christ in his church in the present saeculum that would continue until the Last Judgement and the advent of the eternal realm of the beyond.”28
The Church accepted the Augustinian reading of Revelation but a minority of apocalyptic and Gnostic movements remained unsatisfied. From this dissatisfaction came the desire to find a “shortcut”, to re-divinize the world, not in a pagan sense, but to bring about the eschatological return of Christ to rule on Earth.
By the twelfth century A.D., this inconclusive arrangement had experientially outlived itself. The Western empire of the crusades, of the new religious orders, and the cathedral schools, of cities in growth and national kingdoms in formation, could hardly leave the witnesses of the age unaware that a ‘meaning’ beyond a mere waiting was being constituted in history.29
Löwith, and Voegelin, argued that from Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-century Cistercian abbot and mystic, modernity inherited its metaphysical structure through the application of the Christian Trinity to the course of history which was declared to be in three stages, “the outcome of which was his eschatological concept of progress in history towards the return of Christ.”30
Therefore, “the modern-secular concept of progress is a derivation of Joachimite eschatological belief in progress.”31
This theological origin for the metaphysical structure of modernity contradicted the modern assumption, as articulated by Max Weber, that modernity represented a break with religion and even suggested that modern secularism was itself the continuation of medieval eschatology.
Voegelin made one crucial modification to Löwith’s Christian theological explanation of the origin of modernity by arguing that Joachim had actually provided the first symbol of a Gnostic conception of man and his place in the cosmos. This new interpretation of progress was premised on Voegelin’s contention that “secularisation transforms the Gnostic concept of a true and hidden reality within the human entity into the new worldly reality.”32
Voegelin labels this a process of ‘immanentisation of transcendence’, meaning the attribution of the qualities and features of the divine and sacred to the worldly and mundane, and eventually to the human being. According to Voegelin, the outcome of this crossover between what was divine and hidden, and what was worldly and real, was the emergence of the human being as the new divinity, a process that Voegelin terms ‘re-divinisation of [man and] society’.33
This Gnostic yearning rather than Christian theology, Voegelin argued, had set in train the modern idea of progress and turned man into an active participant in the transformation of the world which would culminate in a “third age” or end of history. Voegelin viewed this as a repeating symbol of Gnosticism that could be viewed throughout numerous philosophical and ideological movements throughout modernity.
As variations of this symbol are recognizable the humanistic and encyclopedist periodization of history into ancient, medieval, and modern history; Turgot’s and Comte’s theory of a sequence of theological, metaphysical, and scientific phases; Hegel’s dialectic of three stages of freedom and self-reflective spiritual fulfilment; the Marxian dialectic of three stages of primitive communism, class society, and final communism; and, finally the National Socialist symbol of the Third Realm—though this is a special case requiring further attention.34
A second symbol of modern Gnosticism that Voegelin observed was that of the superman, previously alluded to in the context of the utopian supermen of Carlyle, Nietzsche and Marx in Part 2 of this series, who was to be reconstituted, without the impurities of the past, as the superhuman embodiment of the new age or final realm.
The Gnostic saviour or god-man was transposed by Voegelin as his third symbol of modern Gnosticism, the prophet of the new age, who often appears as a spiritual guru, an intellectual, a scientific expert, a manager, a legislator or a teacher, in the later secular period. The tendency of Gnostic movements to follow gurus of a spiritual, political, managerial or economic type remains consistent, as does the Gnostic approach to spirituality which is inherently “countercultural”, emphasising as it does the idea of a personal spiritual journey involving mystical initiation and ecstatic states.
The fourth symbol of Gnosticism outlined by Voegelin is the “brotherhood of autonomous persons” who will be spiritually perfected and living together in perfect harmony in the new age without the need for institutions of authority.
The idea was capable of infinite variations. It can be traced in various degrees of purity in medieval and Renaissance sects, as well as in the Puritan churches of the saints; in its secularized form it has become a formidable component in the contemporary democratic creed; and it is the dynamic core in the Marxian mysticism of the realm of freedom and the withering away of the state.35
Joachim of Fiore’s application of the symbol of the Christian Trinity to speculations on the meaning and direction of history, now viewed in three eras culminating in a final or new age, eroded, and later replaced entirely, the classical notion that history was cyclical. History was now linear and, having been given a definitive direction, provided to the Gnostic “prophet”—the legislator, manager and educator—the obligation to bring about its appropriate conclusion.
Joachim had simultaneously set in train the “re-divinization” of the physical world and brought about the end of profane history, a transformation which Voegelin described as “an attempt to endow the immanent course of history with a meaning that was not provided in the Augustinian conception.”36
The new age of Joachim would bring an increase of fulfilment within history, but the increase would not be due to an immanent eruption; it would come through a new transcendental irruption of the spirit. The idea of a radically immanent fulfilment grew rather slowly, in a long process that roughly may be called ‘from humanism to enlightenment’; only in the eighteenth century, with the idea of progress, had the increase of meaning in history become a completely intramundane phenomenon, without transcendental irruptions. This second phase of immanentization shall be called ‘secularization.’37
The proliferation of historical speculations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as previously discussed in the context of the rationalists of the Enlightenment and the later utopians inspired by Rousseau, can therefore be viewed as a consequence of a Gnostic conception of the world.
This conception assumed human nature to be perfectible and the world to be an earthly prison which humanity must transform into paradise through a process of personal and social transformation. The shifting of man’s focus from the transcendent towards humanism, and progressing onwards to enlightenment and secularisation, made man the focal point of history and the only mechanism through which man could find salvation.
During the Enlightenment, faith gave way to the promise of transcendence on Earth, as science and mysticism both set about acquiring secret knowledge on the human soul and psyche. The development of new institutions within liberal democracy and other systems of social organisation held out the promise of earthly transcendence and true equality.
Modern science facilitated the development of the social sciences, economics, psychology, and eugenics, each of which has had enormous significance for the moulding of humanity.
The simultaneous emergence of new idealisms, utopianism, socialism, making use of science and technology to drive social transformation, represented the “instrumentalization of the structure of existence”.38
We shall address a number of these ideologies and their chief messengers later in this series. First, we must develop our analysis of modern education and how it relates to the Gnostic objective of creating heaven on Earth through a discussion of the educational reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Education for Revolutionary Social Transformation
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment paved the way for utilitarian and utopian visions of the world, each of which would be realised in the progress of history through the application of science and technology to direct the development of man and society.
British educational historian, reformer and Marxist, Brian Simon, observed that the new middle class, who emerged towards the latter decades of the eighteenth century and who came to define a new conception of education, were generally “dissenters of the Unitarian trend” who were “Absorbed in the creation of new industrial processes and in developing civic life, deeply involved in scientific enquiry and often directly engaged in art and literature”.39
As such, they found themselves very much at odds with the prevailing social order of the time which was dominated by the landed aristocracy and merchant families. Many of the new middle class found themselves denied entry to the existing universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, a predicament that led to them seeking “higher education either in dissenting academies or in the Scottish universities”.40
That the English radicals and reformers were overwhelmingly from the reformed Protestant Churches and Scottish Calvinists is not surprising as Protestantism lended itself to independent thinking, the selection and reinterpretation of scripture and, therefore, to the proliferation of competing religions and utopian cults.
Indeed, the Puritan Revolution in England had served as the origin point for much of the revolutionary faith, the original vehicle for Gnosticism in England which paved the way for the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of new institutions and classes associated with liberal democracy.41
The new ideas and scientific developments across Europe provided this new class of social radical with the promise of establishing a new society of liberty and equality which would be premised upon rational principles rather than old dogmas.
It was to the writings of the great French philosophes of the Enlightenment that they most eagerly turned and they also enthusiastically acclaimed the works of Rousseau with their social and educational implications.42
The new paradigm inaugurated by the Enlightenment viewed man as matter and his personality and character as malleable by the careful hands of the new Gnostic god-man, as embodied in the legislator, the manager and the educator.
For the rationalism of the Enlightenment, man was by nature ignorant and rough, but educable. It was thus on pedagogic grounds that the ideal of a ‘legal despotism’ was justified: Uneducated humanity is educated by a legislator (who, according to Rousseau's Social Contract, was able ‘to change the nature of man’); or unruly nature could be conquered by Fichte's ‘tyrant,’ and the state became, as Fichte said with naive brutality, an ‘educational factory.’43
The continuity of British empiricism across the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century was expressed as a shift away from “the nature, scope and limits of human knowledge” towards a new “practical outlook, oriented towards legal, penal and political reform.”44
It was out of this new reformist agenda that modern education was to derive much of its basis, particularly through the utilitarian and utopian socialist movements which emphasised educational radicalism, new conceptions of society and practical applications for scientific theories.
Brian Simon placed the origin of the radical or progressive tradition in British education, which emerged most definitively in the early nineteenth century, at the feet of two men in particular.
In 1793, William Godwin, the British utilitarian theorist, published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, whilst, a year later, Thomas Paine, an American Founding Father, published the first part of The Age of Reason, both of which, Simon contends, “were concerned with education”.45
Paine, a largely self-educated inventor whose minimal education was in the Quaker tradition, expressed a Deistical view of the world commonly associated with the Enlightenment. His prescription for education assumed that science and technology ought to replace the dead languages of a classical education. Controversially, Paine also argued that Christianity had acted as a barrier to scientific advancement and progress.46
From the Enlightenment came the belief in human perfectibility and to achieve these ends came “the emphasis on the formative power of education”.47
It was Godwin who provided the most thorough articulation of this new conception of education which assumed that all people were capable of being educated, if the determination to do so was present and if the correct technologies of education were implemented. This was a direct refutation of the old order which viewed particular characteristics and talents as innate and beyond the reach of education to a significant extent.
The belief that children were effectively a blank slate, Brian Simon contended, found its root in the educational theories of the French Encyclopédistes, most directly Helvétius and “in the works of Hobbes, Descartes and Locke, who first elaborated a materialist theory of knowledge.”4849
The English radicals were certainly influenced by Enlightenment thinker John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding from 1689 and, more directly, by English philosopher and physician David Hartley’s associationism, “the idea that mental circumstances lay at the basis of the whole theory of human perfectibility. Change these circumstances and you change man.”50
Such views were shared by Godwin’s radical contemporaries and his wife, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and later “found expression in the work of the utilitarians – particularly Jeremy Bentham and James Mill – and, of course, Robert Owen and those who accepted his standpoint.”51
Serving as the first application of psychology to the realm of education, Hartley’s associationism also “provided a rational explanation of the learning process, and the idea arose that education itself could become a science.”52
Associationism was eagerly put to use in the educational institutions established by the Radicals, including the dissenting academies in Warrington, Manchester and Hackney, and in the school established by Unitarian Minister, David Williams, in Lawrence Street, Chelsea in 1773.5354
Formulating education as one would a science, rather than as an art, was perhaps the most significant of the radical transformations in education. It reduced man to matter, as has been shown to be the tendency of Enlightenment thought, and ensured that man would be moulded into a suitable component of the modern state under the wardship of the Gnostic god-man, the educator.
If we consider this reductive conception of education in comparison to the Erasmian humanist education, as exemplified by Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, which erupted out of the Northern Renaissance, then the transformation was enormous.55
The Erasmian humanists rediscovered earlier classical sources and “came to emphasise the importance of rhetoric as opposed to philosophical logic”.56
The emphasis on rhetoric and historical context led these humanists to stress the knowledge of Greek as well as Latin grammar and literature as indispensable to true scholarly learning, and this commitment to the study of language filtered down to each level of educational attainment.57
In contrast to the Enlightenment educators, Erasmian humanists sought to provide the fertile minds of the young with Greek and Latin as early as possible when the children were better equipped to learn them. Modern science has now proven that this practical observation from the Renaissance was correct and that languages are, in fact, far easier to learn early in life.
Understanding the power of rhetoric, whilst also being multilingual from an early age, would appear to be a means of cultivating a person capable of self-education and an independent moral actor. It could also be suggested that this form of education might mitigate against the techniques of social control and propaganda which emerged so forcefully out of Enlightenment thought and education.
Central to Erasmus’s idea of moral education is the need to inoculate the student against the contagion of popular opinion. In ‘The abbot and the learned lady’ Erasmus’s spokesperson (the lady) states that the public is ‘the worst possible authority’ on moral conduct, and that popular custom is ‘the mistress of every vice’.58
Whilst undoubtedly sharing the desire to mould man, Erasmian humanism appears to have been a more liberating philosophy of education than either Hartley’s associationism or the later psychological techniques such as behaviourism which were premised upon manipulating the emotions rather than appealing to the mind.
Following the publication of Hartley’s Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations in 1749, “psychology began to emerge as a distinct discipline, separate from philosophical enquiry.”59
This new conception of education was advanced by many of the reformers and educational radicals of the time whom we will discuss in these final paragraphs, amongst them Joseph Priestley of the Lunar Society of Birmingham who published an abridged version of Hartley’s Observations in 1775.
Following his mother’s death at the age of six, Priestley was raised by his aunt, “an open-minded Presbyterian who welcomed all neighbouring preachers, however heretical, if she found them ‘honest and good men’.”Author of a notable book on the Lunar Society, Jenny Uglow, argued that Priestley’s Calvinist upbringing had made him “terrified by ideas of predestination, which divided humanity into saved and damned”.60
In adulthood, Priestley abandoned such ideas and sought a rational alternative in science. This led him to Hartley, himself the son of an Anglican clergyman, who combined physiology “with the ideas of Locke and Hume – that far from being born into original sin, the child’s mind was a blank, inscribed through sensation and perception and the association of ideas.”61
At base Hartley hoped to prove that both our ‘inner’ and social lives were governed by Newtonian laws – a sort of moral push-pull mechanism. Pleasure and pain were the key: attraction to good and sympathy for others created happiness while their rejection caused misery: ‘self-interest’ was thus synonymous with benevolence. Social change would spring from ‘the diffusion of knowledge to all ranks and orders of men, to all nations, kindred, tongues and people’, setting humanity on a trajectory, ‘which cannot now be stopped, but proceeds ever with an accelerated velocity’.62
The manufacture of a terrestrial paradise was to be brought about by the application of science and the careful moulding of man by the benevolent god-men of the new capitalist order who were busy making scientific discoveries and industrialising the growing cities of Britain.
The Lunar Society brought together a small number of men who were intimately associated with matters of science and industry in Britain in the eighteenth century. It also boasted a number of educational reformers, amongst them Erasmus Darwin, “doctor, inventor, poet and – half a century before his grandson Charles – pioneer of evolution.”63
Darwin published his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools in 1797 and developed his own ideas of associationism which were influenced by Hartley.
Whereas Darwin was drawn to Hartley’s naturalist physiology, “Priestley responded passionately to his missionary view of learning.”64 Central to this was Priestley’s Calvinist zeal which he transformed into a materialistic belief system that accepted the idea of God, in a Deist sense, as the creator.
Priestley’s own scientific work on electricity and the work of Jesuit mathematician and astronomer, Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich, convinced him that matter was “made up of points, centres of force in perpetual motion governed by attraction and repulsion”.65
In this eighteenth-century prevision of atomic physics, all matter was energy, and thus in some sense spiritual. Religion and politics and science swept together. Around all his experiments and ideas hovered a shimmering aura of transformation.66
Whilst most members of the Lunar Society had little formal education, Priestley was a practising teacher over a career that included periods at the Warrington and Hackney academies, and as tutor to the children of the Earl of Shelburne.67
Priestley was also one of several members of the Lunar Society who wrote treatises on education and whom Brian Simon credits with making “important contributions to the theory and practice of education and to psychology—developing the ideas of Hartley”.68
In 1798, another Lunar man, the Irish landlord and inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth, in collaboration with his daughter, the author Maria Edgeworth, published Practical Education, a work which Simon describes as “certainly the most significant contemporary work on pedagogy.”69
Edgeworth’s close friend and fellow Lunar man, Thomas Day, also “advanced radical educational and social ideas in The History of Sandford and Merton” which is “one of the most popular children’s books of all time” and a project upon which Edgeworth initially collaborated.70
Although Priestley and Godwin were opposed to the idea, the middle-class reformers paved the way for compulsory state education in Britain which arrived in the nineteenth century.71
Nonetheless, their views on education were intimately concerned with producing the human capital for the new world being brought about by the Industrial Revolution and with the arrival of the new social order which reduced human interactions to financial transactions.
The means of producing this new human capital was initially found in the associationist psychology of Hartley and scientific methods of teaching which were to be “adapted both to the subject matter proposed and to the needs of the child.”72 Here was an early iteration of the “child-centred” model of education that became associated with progressive education in the nineteenth century.
Conclusion
The eighteenth century saw the secularisation of the Enlightenment move from theoretical argument over the limits of human knowledge and understanding to the practical application of human ingenuity to the disenchanted world of matter which was transformed by the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. The earliest forms of utopianism, utilitarianism and socialism soon followed. Modernity was gaining a form of its own and the new middle class was developing a new approach to education which was premised upon transforming the individual and the world.
It is to utilitarianism and utopianism which we will turn to in the next essay in the series as we attempt to unravel the impact of these two interconnected trends of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries upon education.
The Enlightenment, Utopianism and Modern Education
Harvard historian Charles Homer Haskins informs us that the modern university is the product of the Renaissance and “is the lineal descendent of medieval Paris and Bologna.”
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 36.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 47.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 46.
Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 8, Numbers 3–4, 591–608, September—December 2007.
Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism, 249.
Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 8, Numbers 3–4, 591–608, September—December 2007.
Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 8, Numbers 3–4, 591–608, September—December 2007.
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, xix.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Gnosticism,” archived April 25, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20230425235146/https://iep.utm.edu/gnostic/.
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 34.
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 34.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Gnosticism,” archived April 25, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20230425235146/https://iep.utm.edu/gnostic/.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Gnosticism,” archived April 25, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20230425235146/https://iep.utm.edu/gnostic/.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Gnosticism,” archived April 25, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20230425235146/https://iep.utm.edu/gnostic/.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Gnosticism,” archived April 25, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20230425235146/https://iep.utm.edu/gnostic/.
David J. Levy, “Mythic Truth and the Art of Science: Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin on Gnosticism and the Unease of Modernity,” 2002, https://docslib.org/doc/11447852/hans-jonas-and-eric-voegelin-on-gnosticism-and-the-unease-of-modernity.
Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 8, Numbers 3–4, 591–608, September—December 2007.
Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17: Order and History, Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age, 299.
Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17: Order and History, Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age, 299.
Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism, 256.
Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism, 256.
Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 8, Numbers 3–4, 591–608, September—December 2007.
Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism, 257.
A more detailed summation of Voegelin’s earliest arguments around Gnosticism and Western civilisation can be obtained by consulting Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction; Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays.
Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17: Order and History, Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age, 302.
Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17: Order and History, Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age, 334.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, 109.
Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17: Order and History, Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age, 335.
Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 8, Numbers 3–4, 591–608, September—December 2007.
Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 8, Numbers 3–4, 591–608, September—December 2007.
Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 8, Numbers 3–4, 591–608, September—December 2007.
Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Volume 8, Numbers 3–4, 591–608, September—December 2007.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, 111-112.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, 113.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, 119.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, 119.
Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, 48.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 23.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 24.
We will address the connection between Puritanism and Gnosis later in this series.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 24.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, 56.
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy Volume VIII: Modern Philosophy – Empiricism, Idealism, and Pragmatism in Britain and America, 2.
Brian Simon, The Radical Tradition in Education in Britain, 10.
Brian Simon, The Radical Tradition in Education in Britain, 12.
Brian Simon, The Radical Tradition in Education in Britain, 11.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 45.
For more on this see Part Two which deals with the Enlightenment philosophers.
Brian Simon, The Radical Tradition in Education in Britain, 11.
Brian Simon, The Radical Tradition in Education in Britain, 11.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 38.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 38.
For more on this experimental school see Part 2.
Brooke & Frazer Eds., Ideas of Education: Philosophy and politics from Plato to Dewey, 73.
Brooke & Frazer Eds., Ideas of Education: Philosophy and politics from Plato to Dewey, 67.
Brooke & Frazer Eds., Ideas of Education: Philosophy and politics from Plato to Dewey, 68.
Brooke & Frazer Eds., Ideas of Education: Philosophy and politics from Plato to Dewey, 73.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 45.
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, 71-73.
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, 73-74.
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, 74.
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, xiv.
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, 74.
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, 75.
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, 75.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 25.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 25.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 25.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 25.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 34.
Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780-1870, 38.