The Enlightenment and the End of Sainthood
How Modernity Quietly Deleted the Path to God
We tend to think of the Enlightenment as a triumph: a civilization stepping out of the shadows of myth and religion into the clarity of science and reason. But what if that “light” was a sleight of hand? What if, in promising to help us see more clearly, the Enlightenment quietly removed our ability to see what matters most?
Not by direct attack, but by a deeper sabotage—redefining what counts as knowledge, filtering what is allowed as real, and training generations to dismiss the deepest form of seeing: contemplation.
This is not a rejection of reason. It is a call to recover the full range of human knowing—and the soul’s path to God that the modern mind has forgotten.
Part I: What the Enlightenment Gave Us (and Took Away)
The Enlightenment, roughly spanning the 17th and 18th centuries, marked a revolution in how the West thought about knowledge, truth, and progress. Philosophers like Descartes, Locke, and Hume emphasized a new ideal: the rational individual, building knowledge from the ground up, brick by empirical brick.
Gone was the inherited trust in tradition, symbol, or mystery. In their place: observation, deduction, and methodical doubt.
"I think, therefore I am" became the rallying cry.
What did this worldview bring us?
The scientific method
Technological innovation
Democratic revolutions
Unprecedented control over the material world
But what did it quietly erase?
Participation in a sacramental cosmos
The symbolic structure of meaning
The contemplative gaze
The teleological aim of human life: union with God
It redefined knowledge as what can be measured, modeled, and mastered. It trained the modern mind to see everything else as fluff—sentiment, speculation, or superstition.
And this had a cost far greater than we realized.
Part II: The Failure of the Enlightenment Paradigm
Enlightenment thinking promised clarity, but often delivered reduction. It treated reality like a machine to be disassembled—not a mystery to be inhabited.
Let’s consider its fundamental assumptions:
Enlightenment Epistemology vs Reality’s Deeper Structure:
Knowledge comes from data vs Knowledge also comes from love
The mind is a neutral calculator vs The mind is shaped by formation
Truth is empirical and measurable vs Some truths are symbolic and veiled
Meaning is constructed vs Meaning is discovered and received
The Enlightenment gave us power, but it left us spiritually disoriented. We could split atoms, but we no longer knew what a soul was. We could manipulate the world, but we forgot how to receive it. And in that forgetting, something essential went missing.
Part III: What We Forgot — Contemplation
In the Christian tradition, the final end of man is not merely knowledge about God, but union with Him. This union is not achieved by effort alone, but by infused contemplation—a supernatural gift whereby the soul gazes upon God in silence and love.
Contemplation is not problem-solving. It is not analysis. It is not efficiency. It is the simple, receptive act of beholding.
Saint Thomas Aquinas calls it “the quiet gaze upon truth.” The Carmelites speak of it as “a secret, peaceful, and loving inflow of God.”
To contemplate is to be drawn into the mystery. To know not by domination, but by participation.
But here's the catch: you can’t contemplate what you’ve been trained to ignore.
The Enlightenment didn’t attack contemplation—it made it unintelligible.
It removed the conditions that make contemplation possible: silence, reverence, trust in mystery, symbolic imagination. It didn’t forbid the soul’s ascent to God. It simply hid the ladder.
Part IV: The Epistemic Coup — Subverting the Soul
This is the devastating trick:
You offer people "freedom of thought," but constrain their choices to what can be measured and mastered. You allow them to “seek truth,” but only in pre-approved categories. You let them believe they are free, while quietly deleting the only path that leads to the divine.
It’s not heresy—it’s amnesia.
Not rebellion—it’s deprivation.
Not the Tower of Babel—but a bureaucracy of lightbulbs, data sets, and metrics—all wired away from heaven.
Without contemplation:
The sacraments become symbols (in the weakest sense)
Prayer becomes therapy
The saints become role models, not intercessors
The Eucharist becomes a metaphor
And the Beatific Vision? That’s not even on the radar.
Alternative to Reduction: Knowing by Participation
The modern mind is trained to think that knowledge comes through control—to know something is to break it down, measure it, name it. But this isn’t how we come to know a person. Or a mystery. Or God.
There is another kind of knowing, older and deeper: participation.
To participate in truth is to enter into relationship with it. Not to master it, but to be transformed by it. This is the way of lovers. The way of saints. The way of the soul in prayer.
You don’t dissect a rose to understand its beauty. You don’t analyze a friend’s kindness to believe it’s real. You step into it. You live it. You receive it.
And the highest truths—the ones that give meaning to all the rest—can only be known this way.
Part V: The Stakes — Sainthood Itself
According to the Catechism (CCC 2013–2014), all Christians are called to the perfection of charity—to sainthood. And that path reaches its summit in contemplation: the infused gaze of love.
But when the Enlightenment redefined knowledge as control, and symbols as decorations, it didn’t just make contemplation difficult. It made it unthinkable.
The contemplative mode of knowing—the very heart of the saint’s journey—became invisible. And with it, the teleology of human life was severed from our imagination.
Part VI: What Must Be Recovered
We must rebuild the imagination for contemplative knowing.
We must remember that not all truth is propositional—some is personal.
That symbols are not distractions, but doorways.
That silence is not absence, but presence.
That reason is not enough—love must see further.
You can’t reach heaven by climbing a ladder that was never built.
We do not need to abandon reason. We need to baptize it. We do not reject clarity. We re-order it beneath mystery.
The soul longs to see. Not just to deduce, but to gaze. To behold. To be caught up in the Presence that made it.
This is the path to sainthood. This is the path modernity forgot.
But the door is still there.
Hidden in plain sight.
Look.
—Drago
BONUS SIMULATED CONVERSATION FOR REFLECTION:
Lucian: Theo, let me ask plainly: how can you claim to know something that can’t be tested, measured, or verified?
Theo: Let me ask you in return: can you measure love?
Lucian: Not precisely. But I can observe behaviors that indicate it.
Theo: And yet, those behaviors are signs—symbols—of something deeper, invisible, aren’t they?
Lucian: Perhaps. But symbols are subjective. One person’s symbol of love is another’s manipulation.
Theo: So you admit the symbol points beyond itself. The danger is not in the symbol, but in misreading it.
Lucian: That’s precisely my fear! If we can misread, how can we trust the symbol at all?
Theo: Can we misread a person’s words?
Lucian: Of course.
Theo: And yet you don’t say language is meaningless. You interpret within context, history, relationship. You participate.
Lucian: Fine—but in science, we don’t participate. We observe from a distance.
Theo: Then you’ll never know a soul. Only a shadow of one. Because some truths are only revealed in relationship.
Lucian: You mean I must risk being wrong?
Theo: Yes. That is faith rightly ordered. Not blind belief—but trusting the symbol because the fruit has proved true.
Lucian: But how do I know I’m not deceived?
Theo: The same way you know a true friend. Over time. Through coherence, transformation, endurance. Not in a petri dish—but in a life.
Lucian (quietly): Then perhaps the problem is not that symbols are vague… but that I’ve demanded they act like lab instruments.
Theo: Exactly. Some things must be lived into, not dissected.