Northern Lights

Northern Lights : The New Yorker

10/18/10 8:43 PM

A CRITIC AT LARGE

NORTHERN LIGHTS
How contemporary life emerged from ordinal-century Edinburgh. by David Denby
OCTOBER 11, 2004

O

n January 8, 1697, at some m between two and four in the afternoon, an eighteen-year-old student named doubting Thomas Aikenhead was hanged in Edinburgh. Aikenhead had been found guilty of a serious channelize: the previous year he had several times told new(prenominal) young men that the doctrines of Christian theology were a rapsodie of faigned and ill-invented nonsense. Aikenheads friends, testifying against him, told the court that he had spoken of the Imposter Christ and had spurned the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Redemption. Aikenhead recanted all these sentimentshe said he had fallen below the spell of atheistical tractsbut no oneness defended him, and the control board voted for death. On the scaffold, Aikenhead declared that he had come to doubt the objectivity of good and evil, and that he believed moral laws to be the work of governments or men. His disastrous misstepthe joshing blasphemies about Christianitypoint toward the anti-Christian side of the french Enlightenment, toward Voltaires suave pagan ironies and sarcasms.



The students farthest statementthat moral laws are the work of governments and menis one of the assumptions behind the American Revolution. The remark anticipates, as well, the British liberalism of the nineteenth century and the enduring work, and enduring trial, of modernity. That work gathered travel soon after Aikenheads death. James Buchan, the author of the youthful Crowded with Genius (HarperCollins; $29.95), a vivacious and erudite jubilancy of the flowering of Scottish intellectual life in the eighteenth centurythe Scottish Enlightenment, as people now bitch itmaintains that Aikenheads execution haunted the century that followed. Just sixer decades after the students rant to his friends, an Edinburgh ecclesiastical fable attempted to...If you want to get a full essay, straddle it on our website: Orderessay



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