Jean d'Alembert, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Condorcet, among others, are often cited in this connection. Although there is some truth in these criticisms, the naïveté of these and other Enlightenment writers has often been grossly exaggerated. Also, insofar as "reason" is contrasted with "feeling" or "sentiment," it is somewhat misleading to describe the Enlightenment writers as rationalistic, for many of them (Denis Diderot, for example) characteristically emphasized the role of sentiment. Reason was praised in contrast with faith, traditional authority, fanaticism, and superstition. It chiefly represented, therefore, an opposition to traditional Christianity.
Here there are two contrasts with the seventeenth-century rationalism of Descartes and others. First, this rationalism is not characteristically antireligious or nonreligious; on the contrary, God in some sense, often in a traditional sense, plays a large role in rationalist systems (although Spinoza's notion of God was extremely unorthodox, and it is notable that the opposition of reason and faith is important in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus).
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