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As Western civilization developed from its beginnings in Israel and Greece through the Roman Empire, then the medieval age and into the modern world, it passed through a period known as the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment, roughly 1700 to 1800. The Medieval Age of Faith faded as the Age of Reason grew stronger and became our present Age of Science. It was time of optimism. Thomas Paine, a primary influence in the American Revolution was an enthusiastic evangelist for the Age of Reason. Said Paine, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” 

Well, in many ways, the world did begin again in those years, and we are greatly indebted to the new world achievements of reason and science. But there is a dark side. And that side seems to many to be getting darker.   In fact, in some ways we can refer back to those times not as the Enlightenment, but the Endarkenment, for—look around—things have not turned out entirely as expected. One modern thinker, for instance, Umberto Eco, goes so far as say that  “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.”

Critics like Eco and Runes would not, I think, say that reason as such was a bad thing. Rather that by itself reason was not enough to guide human lives. Reason and science give us tools; they do not tell us how to use those tools. Reason and science give us knowledge; what to do with that knowledge is a matter of wisdom, but wisdom, partly because it is so blurry and hard to define and partly because modern man thinks moral values are not as important as science and knowledge, is not high on modern priority lists. Nevertheless, we must value and seek wisdom, for without it the Four Horsemen gallop closer and closer.  It even sometimes seems that they have arrived in some parts of the world.