Are you enlightened? The "Enlightenment" caused a revolution in thinking throughout the Western world. Enlightenment thinkers offer us something better than Christ can offer us in this world. Christ offers us the peace of another world, a "pie in the sky." Enlightenment thinkers pretend to offer us peace in this world as well as eternal peace in the next - an offer most of us will find difficult to refuse.
The Protestants took the bait, hook line and sinker. The Enlightenment thinkers who poisoned the Christian atmosphere of the Middle Ages claimed that the knowledge of bible verses imparted a permanent state of saintliness. Simply by being exposed to the knowledge of Christ and by "confessing" that Christ is our Lord and Saviour, we become permanently saved with no possibility of failure. Through the power of Christ we are removed from the list of the hellbound and placed onto the list of the Heavenbound.
We all know that Christ gave His priesthood the power to "loose" sins. We call it "forgive" and we do this in the privacy of the confessional. Christ's priest forgives the sins explicitly confessed by the honestly contrite sinner. Unfortunately the priest cannot "forgive" (using the power of Christ and the authority of Christ's Church) the sins not related by the sinner. A priest is just a man; he cannot "loose" the sins he does not know about.
A priest will also demand from us some kind of restitution to redress the injuries we have inflicted upon God (the primary injured party) and our neighbors. We cannot "earn" our way into Heaven (as is patently obvious and we all know and we are constantly told) but "it is right and just" to repair the damage we commit. Furthermore, doing good to others is a sign we are following in the footsteps of Christ. God is Our Father, and we want Him to be proud of us. We must act the role of good sons and daughters as best we can.
But Enlightenment thinkers claim that since Christ forgives us (perhaps without us even asking!) then we might as well forgive ourselves. The people around us, injured by our sins, will simply have to forgive us too. They will be lucky to get a verbal apology since Enlightenment thinkers generally claim that this is unnecessary. God knows our intentions. They claim that once we are "enlightened" we are simply forgiven our sins as they occur. We may "backslide" from time to time, but our essential "enlightened", saved nature remains intact; unstained.
The natural and next step of Enlightenment thought is to deny that sins are even possible. New Agers claim that sins are "Catholic Guilt" that must be overcome for "wellness" and "peace of heart", like children and animals. But anyone who has spent any time with children and animals know just how unruly and difficult they can be. Children and animals are by nature uncivilized; we begin their new life in society by training them to behave properly, later we teach the children "why" they should behave.
An "Enlightened" society may train its children to behave but it can't tell them "why". That's because the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the society have been ripped away. What remains is the result of 2000 years of good habits, which will slowly erode and degrade into something unpleasantly unchristian.
Enlightenment thinkers simply resurrected ancient Gnostic thought. The Gnostics thought that we are saved by secret (occult) knowledge. The more knowledge we have, the closer we get to Heaven on earth. Once this knowledge has "enlightened" us, we are forever "improved" by it. Once we learn something, we can't unlearn it. We are forever affected by the sights and experiences of this world. However, not everything we are exposed to in this life makes us a better person.
There are experiences we will have in this world that will scar us for life. Some of us are exposed to terrible things. The Gnostics, in fact recommended this as a way to "become immune to the lure of sin". They claimed that we must expose ourselves to sin in order to break its power over us. This leads to a very dark path, well trodden by Freemasons and other followers of the New Age.
Saint Paul exhorted us to "continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling." That does not sound like we are saved by knowledge of Christ alone. That sounds like we must continue to struggle against our sinful natures even though we have been "enlightened" by our knowledge and profession of Christ. It sounds very much like we should never be content with ourselves; that we should never relax in the face of a fallen world.