This is a first in a series I am writing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's First Discourse On the Sciences and Arts, one of the founding texts of the Enlightenment.  Each post is a meditation on an important section of the First Discourse.  These meditations are not meant to be academic but to contemplative.  Enjoy!  

''It is a grand and beautiful sight to see man emerge from obscurity soehow by his own efforts; dissipate, by the light of his reason, the darkness in which nature had enveloped him; rise above himself; soar intellectually into celestial regions; traverse with Giant steps, like the Sun, the vastness of the Universe; and---what is even grander and ore difficult---come back to himself to study man and know his nature, his duties, and his end.  All of these arvels have been revived in recent Generations.'''

This synopsis of the Enlightenment is an inversion of the Christian message, that Christ is the light of the world and we are better because of Christ's work and resurrection.  The Renaissance is the true Light, and Christianity led only to a darkness of knowledge. 

This summary of the Modern era equates intellect and knowledge with heaven, and the power of reason with the light of the sun and the greatness of the cosmos.  What has happened is a replacement of God and the Christian gospel with rationality and science.  The two ''narratives'' have been doing battle within Western culture ever since. 

The revival of Greco-Roman art, knowledge, and  the new scientific method were a move to eclipse the Christian movement within the West.  The West has not been all good, i.e. Crusades, divine right, and the devolution of the Roman Catholic church---but this should not be framed as a fight for Western Civilization; Christianity does not need any civilization or country to protect it, God will.  What is most significant is just as the Church bought into competing cultural beliefs during the Early church and Middle Ages the Church during the Rennaissance bit hook, line, and sinker into the Modernist mode of reason and science as being the true light.  This is one of the biggest arguments for the Western Church to embrace many of the tenets of the post-Modern movement away from the poisonous overdose of individuality and rationality so many have taken. 

Even more important is that the Church does not go hook, line, and sinker over post-Modernism either.  The Church needs to return to its original design as a subversive, counter-cultural movement that is a politically prophetic voice calling out against the powers of this world.