Testing the Primacy of God

The Heavenly City Of Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
Becker, Carl L.
Yale University Press 1932
168 pages

By Roger Bunn

June 22, 2009

In Becker’s book The Heavenly City Of Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, the age of reason replaces the previous beliefs that god was the answer to everything. The eighteenth century was an age of skepticism where the enlightenment thinkers tried to use reason instead of religion to explain things. This was a time when quotes like Nietzsche’s “god is dead” comes from, meaning that god was no longer able to explain things. Becker does an excellent job explaining the logic that these eighteenth century philosophers used to get their points across.

Becker’s book is short in length, using only four lectures, while the whole book is only 168 pages from cover to cover. The introduction entitled the climate of opinion challenges the beliefs of philosophers from the thirteenth century, leading all the way up to the eighteenth century. Becker also notes that intelligence was essential since god had blessed man with it, but it was also limited during this time. The eighteenth century was also the age of faith, but modern science tested a lot of these people’s beliefs in god. Becker also does a great job linking literature, language, government, law, science, economics, mathematics, and even sports to history, saying, and I quote, that using the word “history” is to be used as a method of approach rather than a special field of approach — meaning that all of these fields of study were directly related to history.

The lecture on “The Laws Of Nature and Of Nature’s God” states that while many philosophers didn’t believe that everything was correct about god, they believed that nature came from god. Many philosophers may have questioned the existence of God during this time, but Nature wouldn’t have existed without god as its creator. Many philosophers didn’t deny that there was a god, but they questioned things that they had been taught like the world being created in six days and so on.

The book also states that Voltaire was an optimist, although not a naïve one, and that he was not a man of faith. Hume is also said to have abandoned philosophical speculations for other subjects such as history and ethics where useful lessons might be drawn. Becker also says that “In the eighteenth century climate of opinion, whatever question you seek to answer, nature is the test, the ideas, the customs, and the institutions of man.” I believe that this means to look to nature for answers to questions, not superstition or religion, and to use empirical proof to answer questions by actually observing something in nature.

Becker’s lecture on “The New History: Philosophy Teaching by Example” is very similar to Becker’s last lecture, “The Uses of Posterity.” It was more difficult for me in trying to understand the meaning of the last lectures than the first two. I found myself often wondering if scholars at Yale University had the same amount of difficulty trying to follow these lectures as I had. These two lectures began to focus on nature and natural law. In the end Becker describes a lot of these philosophers as rejecting Christianity, while forming their own heavenly city. Becker was also skeptical, but he also believed in Christ to some extent.

I have said once that this book was really hard for me to relate to. I believe that it would be an excellent book for someone who is in graduate school or who has attained a higher degree of education than the master’s level. That’s why I chose not to write a bad review of The Heavenly City Of Eighteenth-Century Philosophers because I don’t feel that I should critique something I don’t understand fully. I feel that once I have completed my master’s degree and taught history for a few years, then I can go back and read this book of lectures. I have learned from reading this book that Becker was a brilliant man with many important facts on the time before and after the Age of Reason, and I look forward to going back and reading this book again in the future.