Before the Fall of the Enlightenment

William Shakespeare and John Donne lived, in a sense, in a pre-lapsarian world. This was the world before Descartes and others and before the Enlightenment gained ground. A previous harmony between the body, the heart and the mind was unbalanced and spoiled as the mind’s supposed powers of re-creating the given world began to be prioritised. From this flowed rationalism, scientism, progressivism, utopianism, communism, technocracy and all our woes........Shakespeare and Donne were not without wit. Perhaps, in a way, this is what William Blake referred to in his “mind-forged manacles.” In an access of hubris the human mind got above itself and has been ever since.....