The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna available in Paperback, eBook
The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna
- ISBN-10:
- 0691149372
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691149370
- Pub. Date:
- 05/15/2011
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691149372
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691149370
- Pub. Date:
- 05/15/2011
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna
Buy New
$44.00Buy Used
$15.50
-
$15.50
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He demonstrates that, in the century before the French Revolution, the major religions of Europe gave rise to movements of renewal and reform that championed such hallmark Enlightenment ideas as reasonableness and natural religion, toleration and natural law. Calvinist enlightened orthodoxy, Jewish Haskalah, and reform Catholicism, to name but three such movements, were influential participants in the eighteenth century's burgeoning public sphere and promoted a new ideal of church-state relations. Sorkin shows how they pioneered a religious Enlightenment that embraced the new science of Copernicus and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Christian Wolff, uniting reason and revelation to renew faith and piety.
This book reveals how Enlightenment theologians refashioned belief as a solution to the dogmatism and intolerance of previous centuries. Read it and you will never view the Enlightenment the same way.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691149370 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2011 |
| Series: | Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World , #64 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Religious Enlightenment Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna
By David Sorkin Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13502-1
Introduction In the academic as well as the popular imagination, the Enlightenment figures as a quintessentially secular phenomenon-indeed, as the very source of modern secular culture. Historical scholarship of the 1960s successfully disseminated this image by propagating the master narrative of a secular Europe an culture that commenced with the Enlightenment. This master narrative was the counterpart to modernization theory in the social sciences. The two shared a triumphalist linear teleology: in the social sciences, the destination was urban, industrial, democratic society; in intellectual history, it was secularization and the ascendancy of reason. A wide range of philosophers, working from diverse and often conflicting positions, reinforced this image. The Frankfurt School and Alasdair MacIntyre, Foucault and the post-modernists all spoke of a unitary Enlightenment project that, for better or worse, was the unquestionable seedbed of secular culture. Open the pages of virtually any academic journal in the humanities today and you will find writers routinely invoking the cliché of a unitary Enlightenment, sometimes as a pejorative, sometimes as an ideal, but invariably as the starting point of secular modernity and rationality.
In recent decades this image of aunitary, secular Enlightenment project has become a foundational myth of the United States: it has converged with the idea of America's "exceptionalism," or singular place in the world. Henry Steele Commager argued that whereas Europe only "imagined" the Enlightenment, the United States "realized" it; in America "it not only survived but triumphed" and indeed "was the American Revolution." Moreover, this was an Enlightenment of "secularism and rationalism," of "Faith in Reason, in Progress, in a common Humanity." Gertrude Himmelfarb has reinforced this view by asserting that America's "exceptionalism" consists in its embodying the Enlightenment's pragmatic "politics of liberty" hostile to rationalist utopias.
This image of a secular Enlightenment has become so pervasive that thinkers regularly invoke it to legitimize partisan positions. A recent writer on the left has appealed to it as representing "cosmopolitan tolerance, economic justice, democratic accountability and the idea of the 'good society,'" or, even more polemically, "a movement of protest against the exercise of arbitrary power, the force of custom and ingrained prejudices, and the justification of social misery." A recent writer on the right has claimed it as an endorsement for "compassionate conservatism" by having "superimposed on the politics of liberty something very like a sociology of virtue."
Finally, the image of a secular Enlightenment has become integral to America's response to twenty-first-century fundamentalism. At home, a secularist versus fundamentalist conflict allegedly threatens to divide us into implacably hostile camps. At the same time, there are serious concerns about America's creeping "national disenlightenment," its renunciation of science and rationality in favor of a "theologization" of politics and a "theological correctness" grounded in millenarian Christianity. Abroad, resurgent fundamentalisms are thought to presage seemingly unbridgeable chasms between adherents of different religions or religiously based "civilizations."
This book aims to revise our understanding of the Enlightenment. Contrary to the secular master narrative, the Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief but conducive to it. The Enlightenment made possible new iterations of faith. With the Enlightenment's advent, religion lost neither its place nor its authority in Europe an society and culture. If we trace modern culture to the Enlightenment, its foundations were decidedly religious.
This study endeavors to heed the call to "re-historicize the Enlightenment with a vengeance." It attempts to counter all those writers who, in diverse ways and for disparate reasons, have produced "cardboardcharacter representations of the Enlightenment mind." In bringing the religious Enlightenment to the fore, it undertakes "an exercise in retrieval" to reconceive the historical Enlightenment and understand "modernity aright."
Enlightenment or Enlightenments?
In the last three decades, historians have begun to question the image of a unitary secular Enlightenment project, asserting that it was neither unambiguously secular nor religion's polar adversary. Rather, in the words of J.G.A. Pocock, the Enlightenment was "a product of religious debate and not merely a rebellion against it." The same scholars have further argued that the Enlightenment included a range of positions, from the most thoroughly secular to the most thoroughly religious. For example, Pocock speaks of a "family" or a "plurality" of Enlightenments whose intellectual means, varied and multiple, extended from the genuinely religious to the genuinely antireligious. Jonathan Israel confirmed this notion with his bipartite view of a "radical Enlightenment," derived largely from Spinoza, alongside a "moderate," "mainstream," "providential" Enlightenment that inhabited the middle ground.
Although scholars first applied these ideas to Protestant countries, they have since extended them to Catholic ones as well. Jonathan Israel identified both Protestant and Catholic versions of the "moderate" Enlightenment. In their introduction to a collection of articles, James Bradley and Dale Van Kley portrayed two geo graphical "crescents": a "distinctively Protestant Enlightenment" that "stretched like a crescent from England and Scotland through the Protestant Netherlands and western Germanies only to end in the Swiss cities like Geneva and Lausanne," and a "distinctively Catholic Enlightenment" that "formed another and southern crescent from the Catholic Germanies in the southeast through the north-central Italies, including Rome in the center, and on through the Iberian peninsula in the West."
The authors of these views are to be applauded for providing a fuller account of the Enlightenment's relationship to religion. Yet they do not go far enough. To understand the religious Enlightenment's full scope, we need to consider not just Protestantism and Catholicism but also Judaism, as well as dissenting Protestant and Catholic sects. It would be fundamentally misleading to speak of a Christian Enlightenment, since we would thereby reinstate the Peace of Westphalia's terms (which in 1648 recognized only Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Catholicism) as if they accurately represented Europe's religious composition.
Moreover, it is imperative to compare the various manifestations of the religious Enlightenment. We need to be able to ascertain in what ways they constituted an identifiable entity, in what ways they were disparate, and how they functioned in various settings. This has not been possible, since individual scholars have usually confined themselves to analyzing a single tradition, either Protestant or Catholic, in one country or two. To take a broad view, we need to cross confessional and national boundaries. We need a multinational and comparative history of the religious Enlightenment that emphasizes similarities while recognizing and explicating differences.
Finally, we need to expand the canon of Enlightenment thinkers and literature to include theologians and theology. Only by reclaiming these heretofore ostracized thinkers can we begin to replace the master narrative of a secular Enlightenment with a more historically accurate notion, complex, differentiated, and plural.
To make the religious Enlightenment accessible, I have focused on individuals. I have selected figures who were sufficiently established and centrally positioned to render their respective traditions understandable. As writers and thinkers, agents and actors, they generated and adapted ideas to specific historical situations and circumstances. These figures serve as touchstones, rendering movements and events personal and tangible. They allow us to explore similarities and differences in the religious Enlightenment in particular times and places. Although in historical retrospect these figures were, by and large, decidedly second rank, they were prominent and influential in their day.
This book also suggests a different approach to Europe's religious history. The religious Enlightenment was not confined to any one denomination in one country or group of countries but crossed religious and national borders, encompassing Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism in a number of polities. It was perhaps the first development common to Western and Central Europe's religions. To account for the religious Enlightenment requires a comparative history of religion that, while respecting enduring differences, emphasizes shared developments.
The Religious Enlightenment
The immediate background to the religious Enlightenment was the century of warfare following the Reformation, which, by inflicting unprecedented devastation and misery, discredited all belligerent, militant, and intolerant forms of religion. As one of Montesquieu's Persian travelers put it: "I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ." Those wars also produced a religious stalemate that undermined the confessional state ideal-the territorial coincidence of church and state. The Peace of Westphalia, agreed to in 1648, recognized the existence of polities with virtual parity between religious groups, polities in which the ruler professed a different creed from the majority of his subjects and polities that included a substantial religious minority. The burning issue was how to establish the toleration, common morality, and shared political allegiance needed to sustain a multiconfessional polity. Finally, those developments coincided with the intellectual revolutions of Newtonian science and post-Aristotelian philosophy: Locke's empiricism and the rationalisms of Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff.
The religious Enlightenment addressed this situation. In the century from England's Glorious Revolution, which kept the monarchy Protestant and safeguarded fundamental rights, and its Act of Toleration (1689), to the France Revolution and its Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), religious enlighteners attempted to renew and rearticulate their faith, using the new science and philosophy to promote a tolerant, irenic understanding of belief that could serve a shared morality and politics. Aiming to harmonize faith and reason, and thinking themselves engaged in a common enterprise with all but the most radical enlighteners, the religious enlighteners enlisted some of the seventeenth century's most audacious, heterodox ideas for the mainstream of eighteenth-century orthodox belief. For Christians, the religious Enlightenment represented a renunciation of Reformation and Counter-Reformation militance, an express alternative to two centuries of dogmatism and fanaticism, intolerance and religious warfare. For Jews, it represented an effort to overcome the uncharacteristic cultural isolation of the post-Reformation period through reappropriation of neglected elements of their own heritage and engagement with the larger culture.
The religious Enlightenment spread across Western and Central Europe in a sequence of cross-confessional and cross-national influence and filiation. Many of its fundamental ideas, Protestant and Catholic, first appeared in the Dutch Republic, which maintained a precarious toleration. The republic, a confessional state with a "public Church" and a dominant clergy whose religious plurality (Mennonites, Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, Socinians, Quakers) was the "unforeseen and unfortunate result of the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt," prioritized social "concord," preventing either the Reformed Church or the Catholic Church from imposing confessional unity. In this setting, revisions of militant Calvinism and baroque Catholicism fl ourished, while Judaism engaged with the larger culture.
Among Protestants, Jacobus Arminus (1560-1609) emphasized free will, questioned predestination of the elect, and denied confessional creeds divine authority, initiating Protestantism's central reform theology, Arminianism. Writers such as Johannes Coccejus (1603-69) and Christopher Wittich (1625-87) disputed the literalist Biblical exegesis underpinning Calvinist confessionalism. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Simon Episcopius (1583-1643), and Philip van Limborch (1633-1712) championed versions of toleration, while the radical sect of Collegiants went furthest in recognizing freedom of belief by envisaging the Church as a voluntary society.
Catholics championed a new theology and controversial ecclesiology. Cornelis Jansen (1585-1638), bishop of Ypres, by proposing an austere notion of grace, morality, and inward piety opposed to excessive external devotion (baroque Catholicism), launched the movement that eventually bore his name, Jansenism. In response to Dutch circumstances, Catholics advocated local or national (Gallicanism) as opposed to papal control of the Church. The University of Louvain became a stronghold of Jansenism and Zeger Bernard Van Espen (1646-1728), one of its most renowned professors, a proponent of Gallicanism.
Jews in the Dutch Republic, many of them conversos from the Iberian Peninsula, enjoyed toleration and even, in some cases, municipal citizenship. The school in Amsterdam (Ets Hayyim) represented an ideal in integrating secular subjects into a well-ordered religious curriculum. Amsterdam became a center of Hebrew book publishing, and early Jewish enlighteners (maskilim) assembled there. Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), the descendant of a converso family, was educated in Amsterdam and, later associating with Collegiants and other radical Protestants, developed his materialist naturalism and critique of scripture that haunted Europe's religious imagination.
Dutch developments were so influential as to comprise the first matrix of religious Enlightenment ideas. Dutch books circulated in the original and in translation throughout northern and Central Europe. Catholics and Protestants from across Europe came to the Netherlands to study the new theology and natural law. Political refugees from England (Locke) and France (Descartes, Bayle) found a safe haven replete with, and receptive to, new ideas. The Dutch Republic, and particularly Amsterdam, served as a model of religious toleration and prosperity.
Nevertheless, neither Armininians and Collegiants nor Jansenist Catholics, let alone Jewish maskilim, became the dominant version of their respective religion and gained state sponsorship-essential features of religious Enlightenment. The Synod of Dort (1618-19) banned Arminian theology; an anti-Trinitarian scare resulted as late as 1653 in a prohibition of Collegiants; and Arminians and Collegiants continually lost members to the Reformed Church during the eighteenth century. The Dutch Catholic Church remained sorely divided until the schism of 1723 formally separated an "Old Catholic" Jansenist Church of Utrecht from the Pope's Vicar-Apostolic, and in subsequent decades the former shrank dramatically. Maskilic Jews were a tiny portion of a minority eager to display its adherence to rabbinic Judaism.
The first fully realized example of religious Enlightenment, and its second matrix of ideas, was the Church of England's "moderation." Moderation emerged in the wake of the Glorious Revolution as a broadly Arminian alternative to Catholicism and "inner light" enthusiasm. As one historian has put it, "If Popery was the epitome of despotism, imposed from above, Puritanism was anarchy incarnate, breaking out from below." Founded on Locke's philosophy and Newton's science, Moderation was not a fixed set of ideas but an ethos or disposition, ranging from the low church to the high, that concerned all aspects of religious life. William Warburton (1698-1779), bishop of Gloucester and author of highly influential works on church-state relations and historical theology, represents Moderation (chapter 1).
English Moderation became a model for "enlightened Orthodoxy" in Calvinist Geneva. Enlightened Orthodoxy emerged over two generations as theologians endeavored to replace Calvinist rigorism with a tolerant doctrine of reason, natural religion, and revelation. Jacob Vernet (1698-1789), the dominant theologian of his age, was inspired by Descartes's philosophy, Arminian theology, and English moderation (chapter 2).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Religious Enlightenment by David Sorkin
Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xi
List of Maps xii
Preface xiii
Introduction 1
Enlightenment or Enlightenments? 3
The Religious Enlightenment 5
Reasonableness 11
Toleration 14
The Public Sphere 16
State Nexus 18
The Enlightenment Spectrum 19
Chapter One: BRANT BROUGHTON, LONDON, GLOUCESTER
William Warburton's "Heroic Moderation" 23
Natural Right and Toleration 31
History 39
Established Religion 53
Justifi cation, Philosophy, and Science 54
Secular Culture 61
Moderation in Decline 64
Conclusion 65
Chapter Two: GENEVA
Jacob Vernet's "Middle Way" 67
Theology 76
Politics 85
The Enlightenment and the Philosophes 97
Geneva Transformed 109
Chapter Three: HALLE
Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten's "Vital Knowledge" 113
"The Union with God" 128
Exegesis 136
History, Sacred and Secular 142
Natural Right and Toleration 152
Neology and the State 158
Chapter Four: BERLIN
Moses Mendelssohn's "Vital Script" 165
Intellectual Renewal: Philosophy 176
Intellectual Renewal: Exegesis 180
"Civic Ac cep tance" and "Divine Legislation" 193
"The Socrates of Berlin" 206
Haskalah and Beyond 208
Conclusion 212
Chapter Five: VIENNA- LINZ
Joseph Valentin Eybel's "Reasonable Doctrine" 215
Church Law 228
Linz and Joseph II 237
"True Devotion" 249
Revolution 254
Conclusion 258
Chapter Six: TOUL- PARIS- LYON
Adrien Lamourette's "Luminous Side of Faith" 261
Where France Differed 263
Catholicism 266
The 1780s 269
Theology 274
Revolution, 1789-91 282
Revolution, 1791-94 296
Conclusion 307
Epilogue 311
Glossary 315
Index 319
What People are Saying About This
Sorkin is right to argue that enlightenment and faith went together for most participants in the Enlightenment, and that this is a major topic that has been relatively neglected. He has written an outstanding and eminently accessible book bringing the whole question centrally to scholars' attention. He skillfully demonstrates that all confessions and religious traditions found themselves very much in a common predicament and sought similar solutions.
— Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study
"Sorkin is right to argue that enlightenment and faith went together for most participants in the Enlightenment, and that this is a major topic that has been relatively neglected. He has written an outstanding and eminently accessible book bringing the whole question centrally to scholars' attention. He skillfully demonstrates that all confessions and religious traditions found themselves very much in a common predicament and sought similar solutions."—Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study"Powerfully cogent. Sorkin seeks to show that the 'religious Enlightenment' was not a contradiction in terms but was an integral and central part of the Enlightenment. Anyone interested in the history of the Enlightenment in particular or the eighteenth century in general will want to read this book. Sorkin is one of the leading scholars working in the field. His scholarship is as wide as it is deep."—Tim Blanning, University of Cambridge
Powerfully cogent. Sorkin seeks to show that the 'religious Enlightenment' was not a contradiction in terms but was an integral and central part of the Enlightenment. Anyone interested in the history of the Enlightenment in particular or the eighteenth century in general will want to read this book. Sorkin is one of the leading scholars working in the field. His scholarship is as wide as it is deep.
— Tim Blanning, University of Cambridge