The 17th and 18th Century Intellectual Enlightenment as an Intellectual Movement that is in General, Inhuman and without Authentic Love.

The Enlightenment is a rationalist based movement that emphasises the use of human reason and generally denies the truth value of any knowledge obtained through the virtue of divine faith. Consequently, in general, the Enlightenment is against the notion of divine revelation and any knowledge that can be obtained from the divine apart from reason. For example, Enlightenment philosopher David Hume was an opponent of Christianity -

“He [David Hume] set out to destroy the traditional Christian view of man as divided between Divine reason and brute passion and directed his attack at the metaphysics that had since Plato’s time supported it.” - (The Pursuit of Certainty, by Shirley Robin Letwin)

Also, David Hume, along with Spinoza denied the existence of miracles in contradiction to divine revelation.

No other element of Spinoza's philosophy provoked as much consternation and outrage in his own time as his sweeping denial of miracles and the supernatural. In fact, Spinoza stands completely alone among the major European thinkers before the mid-18th century in ruling out miracles. Since miracles were seen as the ‘first pillar’ of faith, authority, and tradition by theologians at the time, Spinoza's rejection of the possibility of miracles seemed to bring all accepted beliefs, the very basis of contemporary culture, into question. (Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, by Jonathan I. Israel)

And because divine revelation is generally denied by prominent Enlightenment scholars, divine truth and divine gratuity must also be denied. For divine revelation is an action of gratuity on behalf of God, whereby God acts without obligation towards humanity, to reveal truths to humanity that would otherwise not be humanly known. And divine gratuity presupposed in divine revelation is an act of divine goodwill and thereby an act of divine love towards humanity. The Enlightenment's denial of divine revelation, therefore, includes an implied denial of divine love.

And the Enlightenment's denial of divine love is an implied denial of authentic love. For natural love is ordered towards the natural truth and natural good. And the natural good desired through natural love is ordered towards the supernatural good desired through supernatural love. For the supernatural is that which builds upon and exceeds the natural. Therefore the natural love is always in accord with supernatural love. And when supernatural love is denied in the Enlightenment, natural love which is naturally open to supernatural love, becomes artificially disordered. And the natural love, which is artificially disordered is itself disordered and thereby becomes an inauthentic love.

Or again, because all natural love is in accord with divine love, for supernatural love builds upon and exceeds natural love, the denial of divine truth and divine love is an implied denial of an authentically human love. And the denial of authentic love is a denial of love. As the Enlightenment denies divine revelation, so too, the Enlightenment denies divine love, and must also deny authentic love. Therefore the Enlightenment is an intellectual movement without authentic love. And because the nature of man is to know and love, as acts of the intellect and will, the Enlightenment is in general without an authentically human knowledge and authentically human love. And what is without an authentic knowledge and authentic love is inhuman. Therefore the Enlightenment is in general, both inhuman and without authentic love.

Conclusion - Because the Enlightenment is in general inhuman, the intellectual movement is, in general, a false intellectual movement. The general falsity of the movement does not, however, deny many truths contained within the movement mixed in with the falsity of the anti-Christian agenda.