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Thomas PaineThe Age Of Reason
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1794A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Ideological Context: Deism and the Christian Churches
Deism is the belief in one God who created the world and then left it alone to function according to natural laws discoverable by human reason. Unlike the God of the Old and New Testaments who, from time to time, intervenes in human affairs, the Deist God is remote, detached, and knowable only through His Creation. Deism, in short, is the religion of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment.
Like most major phenomena in the history of knowledge, the Scientific Revolution lacks firm chronological boundaries. It is generally thought to encompass parts of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, highlighted by the work of Isaac Newton. The Scientific Revolution began with astronomical discoveries: Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric universe, Galileo Galilei’s telescopic observations, Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, etc. These discoveries fueled Europe’s much broader 17th- and 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, when growing awareness of the laws of nature spread to the social and political realms, giving rise to ideas such as liberty, equality, and natural rights. Rooted in the free exercise of human reason, these historic intellectual movements exerted tremendous influence on Paine and other luminaries of his era.
Scientific knowledge turned Paine and others not into atheists, but into Deists. Inspired by the mechanical regularity of the known universe, they began to describe the Creator God as a kind of omnipotent “clock-maker.” They regarded science as the only pathway to God, which is Paine’s major argument in Age of Reason. Even before Deism emerged as a coherent set of ideas, few scientists saw any tension between knowledge and faith. Kepler, for instance, always believed that his work gave glory to God.
Nonetheless, some religious authorities perceived scientific discoveries as a threat to their interests. The Catholic Church’s notorious Inquisition (the Roman version, not the Spanish) prosecuted Galileo for spreading Copernican, heliocentric ideas deemed contrary to Biblical teachings. The Protestant Reformation did produce a degree of liberalization, but according to Paine this was merely ancillary, “for with respect to religious good, it might as well not have taken place” (39). Deists such as Paine, therefore, had learned from experience to regard the Christian church authorities as their enemies.
Historical Context: The Age of Reason and the French Revolution
In 1789, Paine welcomed the French Revolution as an extension of the American Revolution he had once helped to inspire. Two years later, he published the first part of Rights of Man, a spirited defense of the French Revolution against the criticisms of Edmund Burke, an Irish-born member of the British Parliament. Paine followed up with Rights of Man’s second part in 1792 and then fled to France later that year after the British government accused him of sedition. By late 1792, Paine found himself near the center of revolutionary activity when he won election to France’s National Convention.
In early 1793, the French Revolution took a radical turn when the new French Republic executed Louis XVI, former King of France, and then declared war on Great Britain. Paine’s opposition to the execution, coupled with his English birth, made him suspect in the eyes of the new French regime. Paine had associated with the more moderate Girondin faction, but he and many of his compatriots fell victim to the bloodthirsty Montagnards, led by Maximilien Robespierre. During Robespierre’s 1793-1794 Reign of Terror, thousands of French men and women suffered death by guillotine, often for no other reason than suspicion of counter-revolutionary sympathies. In the midst of this madness, Paine wrote feverishly to complete Age of Reason. On the morning of December 28, 1793, having finished the manuscript only six hours earlier, Paine was arrested and then imprisoned for nearly a year.
Unlike Paine’s earlier and more famous writings, Common Sense (1776) and Rights of Man (1791), Age of Reason is neither a political treatise nor a commentary on the French Revolution. Paine would not have written Age of Reason in 1793, however, had it not been for the French Revolution’s descent into state-sponsored terror. As Paine well knew from personal experience, the “humane principles of the revolution […] had been departed from,” and the general disillusionment of the populace toward all ancient institutions, in particular the Christian church, had “prepared men for the commission of all manner of crimes” (63). While there is evidence to suggest that Paine might have written some passages of this book more than a decade earlier, there is no question that he wrote Age of Reason in 1793 to fill the moral vacuum and serve as an antidote to revolutionary nihilism.
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