Daily Inspiration Quote by M. H. Abrams

Abrams’s jab lands because it reverses the Enlightenment’s favorite self-portrait. The 18th century loved to narrate itself as a clean break from priestcraft: reason over revelation, nature over scripture, progress over providence. Abrams punctures that mythology with a critic’s eye for inheritance. Even when philosophers thought they were evacuating God from the system, they kept the architecture.

The intent is less to “catch” Voltaire or Kant in hypocrisy than to expose how durable religious narrative structures are. Secular enlightenment theories often smuggle in biblical plotlines: a fall into error or superstition, an exodus into liberty, a promised land of rational society. They retain theological habits of mind, too: the search for first principles, the moralized universe where history bends toward redemption, the confidence that human nature can be “read” like a text with an underlying order. Replace providence with Progress, grace with education, sin with ignorance, and you still have a sermon - just delivered in the key of “Nature” and “Reason.”

Abrams is also defending a methodological point central to his work in intellectual history: ideas don’t simply replace one another; they mutate, recycle, and keep their old metaphors. The subtext is a warning to modern secular confidence. If your supposedly post-religious philosophy still depends on inherited Christian categories, then the Enlightenment isn’t the opposite of theology so much as theology’s afterlife. That makes the period’s achievements no less real, but it makes their self-congratulation less convincing - and their blind spots easier to spot.