I. THE ILLUMINIST TRADITION
The Augustinian philosophical tradition, especially
after the twelfth century when contacts between
monks and laymen grew more frequent and respect-
able, became the intellectual source of new types of
devotion and religious philosophy. The career and
mind of Augustine himself served as a vivid pattern.
The contrast between his experience of the trans-
formation of sexual passion into an intimate com-
munion with Perfect Being and the Augustinian theol-
ogy of Grace as a predestined election into “the City
of God” was in itself a dramatization of the difference
between an emotional conversion and a moral
regeneration. Gradually there developed under
Augustine's influence, especially among laymen, three
types of “enthusiasm,” that is, of having an “indwelling
Holy Spirit” as a channel of Grace independent of the
sacraments. This experience was interpreted as a mid-
dle way between the mystics of the Neo-Platonic type
and the Aristotelian rationalizations of the scholastics
and the Jesuits. One type found expression in religious
love (philia): the Béguines (Dutch and Flemish nuns
who live in convents without taking vows), Brethren
of the Free Spirit, The Friends of God (devotio
moderna), Christian Brotherhoods (collegia pietatis),
Societies of Friends, and “theophilanthropy.” Another
type centered in the covenant relationship: French and
Swiss Huguenots, Scottish Presbyterians, Puritans,
Covenanters, Federalists, and Christian Common-
wealth Men. A third type believed that an inner light
(not the “light of nature,” reason) kindled in them a
holy love of Perfect Being. Such love is quite distinct
from friendship, secular benevolence, charity, and
enlightened self-love. These were called Illuminists.
Among the philosophers who were directly and signifi-
cantly influenced by this type of enlightenment were:
Tommaso Campanella, Vico, Malebranche, Pascal,
Fénelon, Francis Hutcheson, Jonathan Edwards,
Pestalozzi.
This article describes the ideology of one brief, local
movement within the long history of religious enlight-
enment. It arose among a small group of New England
Puritans and among the “new light” Presbyterians in
New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. It served
as the philosophical explanation of the Great Awaken-
ing during a few decades after 1730, and it was sub-
merged under a deluge of evangelical piety and theo-
logical wrangling early in the nineteenth century. The
philosophical leader of this movement was Jonathan
Edwards (1703-58).
