The Traditional Enemy of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment had one traditional enemy which was the representatives of traditional society based on religion. This fight, this struggle was won in a way by Enlightenment thinkers but it kept many enemies at the same time. Some so diverging figures as the poet T.S. Eliot, Alexander Solzhenitsyn coming from Soviet Russia, or the Pope, John Paul II, were enemies of the Enlightenment because they believed that without transcendent basis, human societies were condemned to endless war and no values could be defended.