The apostles liberating the mind, Bacon and Descartes, discovered the inconsistency of the religious pointer *) for philosophers and science. In their opinion, the same pointer should be discarded in ethical and political research. However, having noted the strongholds for independent philosophical and scientific research, the philosophers themselves in their ethical and political judgments took very timid steps forward, sometimes even retreating back. But first. how their successors were found among secular writers and a line was drawn between ethics and religious norms, thanks to the ongoing reform movement, in the great number of sectarian teachings and in ethical-religious writings of the late 16th and throughout the 17th centuries, ideas arose and were put into worldwide circulation, ideas that were extremely beneficial to both the political individualism and the diversity of ethics from religion. Their characteristic common feature is not only a break with church tradition, but,
1) Extremely characteristic in this regard is one of the works of Descartes, which we mentioned. Its full title reads: “The use of truth with the help of a natural connection, establishing by one’s own efforts, without religion or philosophy, an opinion about all things subject to his thinking, which (i.e., opinions) a decent person should have.”
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Mainly, the human search, in this era, for religious and ethical truth is not in a frank and supranatural way, but through personal reason and feeling.
After the destructive criticism by Protestantism of the old church dogma and ritual form, the sectarians who taught, spreading in Europe, not excluding some Slavic lands, are based on common human sense and the deepest inner feeling, bordering on enthusiasm. And moral philosophers continue the work of Protestant scholastics, more and more inclined towards rationalism. and subsequently even to experience and observation.
Rascalism and mysticism, noted by us in the reforms of the 16th century, instill in these schools, although opposite in religious mood, a sharper individualistic form.
Some believe that rational knowledge, not constrained in its skepticism by the demands of the world of reality, knowledge, using empirical methods, makes the person the owner of relimous truth. The spirit of emerging deism.
A different path of religious knowledge and piety was proposed by mystical and spiritualist-minded sects. Comprehension of religious truths by reason was replaced here by a religious attitude of personal feeling. Mysticism was extremely favored by relatable individualism. Rituals, liturgical and prayer formulas, church organization and hierarchy - all this is more important to lose for those who feel illuminated by “shashep Pe” and strive for to your enlightenment by straining your entire being. Here we meet the most intimate essence of the human “I”, completely inaccessible to the gaze of others. But, despite the differences between these methods of religious knowledge, there is a similarity between them in allowing personal verification of the truths of religion and accepting them through general agreement. Rait is possible and true to assimilate them with the mind, mysticism and spirituality - with the inner feeling. The religious movement, under the influence of these two methods, to infect the masses, is carried out in individuals and to promote religious heroes,
Personality grows before your own eyes. And this is especially important for her ideal of life, for the norms of her behavior, the roots of which are still nourished by the relic content of consciousness.
The individual gains confidence in independence from the system of ideas and forms of tradition and the church is eliminated. In other words: the person himself becomes the church.
Likewise, the philosophers of naturalism of that era contrasted man, as the individualized final form of the existence of nature, with the microcosm and the macrocosm.
If you think more deeply about the religiosity methodology just discussed and the corresponding ethical-religious outlook, you can find in the ideas it presents a preparatory to the secularization of religions from ethics.
In fact, we encounter in him a view of religion not as a historically established and obligatory system, but as an attraction deeply rooted in human nature, uniquely realized by him on the basis of imbued material, which is assimilated by the underlying personality or rejected, in part or in whole, according to his own choice. And the criterion for choice is the spiritual and moral nature of the individual, in other words, a natural person with his abilities, properties, intimate aspects of his “I”.