And more: \u201cAs an attentive reader of Montaigne and Bacon, of Telesius and Descartes, Spinoza knew the models of his predecessors and developed his argument with unsurpassed elegance, as if Montaigne had moved Descartes\u201d pen. Nature is an infinitely complex system whose laws are circumvented and distorted through ignorance or greed\u201c (p. 198). Finally Spinoza was buried in the index of banned books, \u201dhowever, his work sank under the general movement towards the new gospel of scientific and rational domination of nature, engine of new prophets...\"(p. 199).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Enlightenment was never a school of thought with binding dogmas, apart from the emphasis on reason, a basic optimism and a certain elitist tendency which, however, already had very different faces\u201c (p. 208). In addition, various trends began to differentiate themselves: \u201dThe rationalist and moderate enlightenment of Immanuel Kant or Voltaire, Thomas Hobbes or Leibniz was, for many of its opponents, an attack on the traditional order of the world, although in reality it also played the opposite role, because in a secular world it breathed new life into many central ideas of the Christian theological tradition\u201c (p. 209).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Blom then reminds us: \u201cMost of the enlightened had received a Christian education and these ideas were so familiar to them and their societies that they seemed to them the only possible structure of thought. Although the Enlightenment authors attacked Christian dogmas, they also used arguments and conceptual images from the Christian tradition to rewrite them in their own way\u201d (p. 211).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Logically, Philipp Blom had to dedicate a chapter to the Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, which caused thousands of victims in that city and in others nearby and, in addition, the tsunami that took thousands more people and, above all, a broad and heated philosophical, scientific and theological debate about physical evil and moral evil (p. 219). The conclusion, for Blom, after exposing the Kantian, Voltairean or Herderian arguments is the following: \u201cLisbon became synonymous with the analytical weakness of rational religion. At least for the educated elite, the earthquake of 1755 was an intellectual tremor\u201d (p. 223).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moreover, he will add: \u201cAfter all, both the aristocracy and the Church derived their legitimacy from a divine mandate and the grace of God (even the rich Calvinists had learned to consider their prosperity as proof of God's favor, which at the same time allowed them not to feel responsible for the poor). Therefore, any reasoning that questioned the divine order and removed the authority of knowledge and morality from the throne and the Church was in itself a revolutionary act\u201d (p. 224).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Having arrived at the substance of the Enlightenment Blom will tell us: \u201cOn the one hand Kant drove his contemporaries to despair insofar as his philosophy affirmed that with the sensory experience of the essence of the world it was impossible ever to perceive anything and therefore nothing either of an expected spiritual truth, i.e. of God, but, on the other hand, like Descartes with his res cogitans<\/em>, created a space that made room for mystery and the Creator, a place that would never be touched by science\u201d (p. 226).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n La relaci\u00f3n del hombre con el mundo ha tenido diversas interpretaciones a lo largo de la historia y, sobre todo, actualmente tenemos una clara sensaci\u00f3n de haber llegado tarde en el dominio desp\u00f3tico de la naturaleza, como si ya no tuviera arreglo y hubi\u00e9ramos provocado un deterioro casi irremediable. En ese marco se mueve este […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2431,"featured_media":53478,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[36,39,45],"tags":[594],"class_list":["post-53474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-actualidad","category-cultura","category-libros","tag-libros"],"yoast_head":"\nThe subdued land<\/h2>\n\t\t
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