WHAT REALLY WAS THE ENLIGHTENMENT?

One might say, with some justification, that it was the dead end of the Reformation. 

The Reformation had been a kind of long series of civil wars between, among, and within the Old European Aristocracies, and involving their monarchies and emperors, as well as The Papacy.

The common Protestant man was more ignorant, more blindly evangelical, more superstitious, and more under the arbitrary sway of fragmented and demagogic preachers, after the Reformation and the wars of religion, in say 1650, than he had been, as a common Catholic man, before it. Trust me. 

The best example of how this would develop may be Luther himself.