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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2014
Bernal calls the Dark Ages the Age of Faith; the period from the end of the 17th to the beginning of the 18th century is often called the Age of Reason. — Scientific American
“Shortest damn age in history” was The New Yorker's comment on this little gem; and the phrase, which for some decades did manful duty among writers of school textbooks and “popular historians” like the Durants and Sir Harold Nicolson as a substitute for study and thought, deserves no better epitaph. To the serious historian, these questions of labeling — “Shall we call the Dark Ages the Age of Faith, or shall we call the Age of Faith the Dark Ages? Shall we call 1660-1800 in Britain the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment or the Neo-Classical Age or the Augustan Age?” — seem only tedious pseudo-problems, better left for journalists — and professors of literature — to play with if it amuses them and their readers; for his purposes, it suffices to call 1660-1800 “1660-1800.” He knows too well that such labels represent not only naive oversimplifications and distortions of history, but sometimes even reversals of the historical actuality. “The Age of Reason” is certainly one of these latter. Nothing is easier than to demonstrate that “reason,” as signifying the power of the human mind, without external aid, to arrive at valuable truth, was, together with its handmaid “logic,” seldom in worse repute than in Britain from 1660 onward. The whole tendency of the ruling empiricist philosophy of the time, that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions” — is to minimize it and exalt experience in its place.
See Journal of British Studies, IX (1969), 49-70.
1. When Nicolson's large, glossy volume The Age of Reason appeared ten years ago, I was in a distinct minority among reviewers in dismissing it as “the nadir of the higher dilettantism.” Nicolson's diaries, recently published, disclose that he himself while he was writing it regarded it as a worthless piece of hack work: “It is a rotten book, and it saddens me,” he confides to his diary, and again, “I fear it is very dull, and so second-hand that it is second-rate.” Nicolson, HaroldDiaries and Letters, ed. Nicolson, Nigel (New York, 1968), III, 381, 382Google Scholar. One wonders less at Nicolson's cynicism in publishing it — he needed the money — than at the gullibility of that part of the scholarly world which took his pretentious and windy compilation of warmed-over clichés seriously.
2. How this epithet came to be attached to the eighteenth century in the first place is a mystery. The phrase was presumably first popularized by its use as the title of Tom Paine's manifesto of his religious beliefs, published in 1794-95. What it refers to there, however, is certainly not the priest-ridden, superstition-filled eighteenth century (as Paine sees it), just ending, but the new, enlightened regime of the future heralded by the French Revolution.
3. I have discussed these matters in greater detail in “Augustinianism and Empiricism: A Note on Eighteenth-Century English Intellectual History,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, I (Fall, 1967), 33–68Google Scholar, and “‘Logical Structure’ in Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” Philological Quarterly, XXI (July, 1952), 315–36Google Scholar.
4. “Neoclassicism” as a term in the history of art and architecture is of course a perfectly legitimate one. It refers to the fashion which began around 1760, largely as a result of Winckelmann's publicizing of the recent discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, of copying Greco-Roman building design and decoration.
It reached its height around 1820, though it persisted much longer, and we still have its products with us in the shape of state capitals, banks, and railroad stations. It had literary repercussions as well, and the foremost English neoclassical poets are probably Shelley and Swinburne. There can be no controversy about this use of the term: its concrete referents lie before our eyes, the British Museum and St. Pancras Church, the paintings of David and the sculpture of Canova, Prometheus Unbound and Atalanta in Calydon. How the transfer of the term to such conspicuously unclassical works as Absalom and Achitophel, Gulliver's Travels, and Rasselas took place is hard to say. The cause was probably the same as that which transferred Paine's phrase “the age of reason” to the age which he regarded as one of unreason — that is to say, sheer muddle-headedness.
5. Except for the proposition “in judgment by God the Father.” It seems more likely that this is simply a misconception on Mr. Johnson's part than that he is seriously propounding the restriction of the judicial function to one Person of the Trinity as a doctrinal innovation of the eighteenth century. The Nicene Creed says of the Son, “[He] sitteth at the right hand of the Father, And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.” If Mr. Johnson has not encountered this in its Anglican form, he has surely done so in musical settings of the Mass, such as Bach's: “Et sedet ad dextram Dei Patris, et iterum venturus est cum gloria judicare vivos et mortuos.”
6. It is probably only the accident that George was given the same name as his predecessors and successor on the throne that has kept his sixty-year reign from becoming as clearly defined an “age” as the sixty-three-year reign of his granddaughter. Had his name been as novel and distinctive as “Victoria” — had be been, say, “King Robert” — we might now have courses, treatises, journals, and scholarly experts devoting themselves to the study of “Robertianism.”
