Image
Richard Bentley’s Paradise Lost and the Ghost of Spinoza
Formatted Title

Richard Bentley’s Paradise Lost and the Ghost of Spinoza

Summary
Ellenzweig, Sarah. “Richard Bentley’s Paradise Lost and the Ghost of Spinoza,” in God in the Enlightenment, William J. Bulman and Robert Ingram, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 257-77. We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation.
Links