Biology Reference
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the fruition of what had been driving progress all along, the operations of
reason in nature.
More specifically, Socrates' transformation into a man of science is
made necessary by the fact that the dark age inaugurated by his martyr-
dom functions as a historical theodicy. In it, Condorcet seeks to explain
how a rationality embedded in history and inclined by nature toward prog-
ress could have been so long delayed in reaching its full scientific matura-
tion. The distractions of ordinary human ignorance and passion could not
account for this, since the doctrine of progress would be weakened once
it was supposed that such merely venial foibles had forestalled its march.
Learning's derailment would have to find its cause in the perversion of
reason itself, in this case in an idolatrous rationality that arose in coinci-
dence with priestly institutions. If the full revelation of reason was natural
and inevitable, the actions which delayed it for so long would need to have
roughly similar power, and so to round out his drama, Condorcet presents
priestcraft as scientific rationality turned against itself—and thus against the
ancient philosopher who had been its prophet.
Priests such as those blamed for Socrates' fate had been around since the
earliest period of civilization. Long before the Greek Enlightenment, they
had established themselves as “the depositaries of the principles of the sci-
ences or the procedures of the arts, the mysteries or ceremonies of religion,
of the practices of superstition, and often even of the secrets of legislation
and politics.” By using reason to build institutional monopolies, the priests
also engineered the
separation of the human race into two parts; the one destined to teach,
the other made to believe; the one jealously hiding what it boasts of
knowing, the other receiving with respect whatever is condescendingly
revealed to it; the one wishing to place itself above reason, the other hum-
bly renouncing its own reason and abasing itself to less than human stat-
ure by acknowledging in others prerogatives that would place them above
their common nature.
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Religious authority for Condorcet thus remains an exercise of rationality, but
one now divorced from nature so as to sustain social privilege. These priests
had not discarded so much as misapplied and monopolized reason. In doing
so, they had abandoned reason as knowledge for the sake of reason as power.
This explains how priestcraft could have “accelerated the progress of reason
at the same time as it has propagated error, which has enriched science with
new truths whilst it has plunged the people into religious servitude, and
