jonathan sheehan - enlightenment, religion and the enigma of secularization: a review essay (2003)

8/10/2019 Jonathan Sheehan - Enlightenment, Religion and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay (2003)

1/20

Review Essays

Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization:

A Review Essay

JONATHAN SHEEHAN

IN 1726, IN THE TINY TOW N OF

Berlebu rg in centra Germ any, a group of religious

radicals began publishing what becam e one of the most imposing Bible translations

of the eighteen th century. Over the next fourteen y ears, their leader, Johann

Friedrich Haug, orchestrated the release of over 6,000 pa ges in eight folio volumes.

Steeped in mystical speculations and spiritualist excess, this Bible was the publish-

ing high point of a heterodo x religious undergro und that thrived in the early

eighteenth century, wh en the reformers know n as Pietists began to erode the

foundations of a Lutheran Church the y saw as hopelessly hamstrung by orthodoxy.

In the nam e of such reform , the B erleburger Bible project sought to replace the

standard vernacular Bible w ith a new one, better suited to the religious sensibilities

of the age. Through translation, the "one divine meaning" of the B ible would finally

become appa rent.1

Not all reade rs, howe ver, appreciated these efforts. Indee d, the gut reaction of

the rel igious orthodoxy might be bo iled d ow n to two w ords: "poison and evil."

Filled with "am azing and erroneous expressions," the work w as, for one review er,

clearly the work of fanatics. 2 To the editor of the

A userlesene Theologische

Bibliothek,

the best diagnostician of this Bible 's faults was the E nlightenm ent

philosopher Pierre Bayle, whose article Aaron lambasted a certain Bible

translation, wh ich he c alled a `cunning a nd plagiarized' Ve rsion . . . recalling in the

me antime that the simple and ignorant w ould be able to protect them selves less

than the intelligent and know ledgeable." The Be rleburger Bible was not, the editor

continued, "a w ork for all people, in all classes," and B ayle presum ably testified to

this.3 But in making the comp arison between the n ew translation and that other

"Bible of the eighteenth century," Bayle's 1697

Dictionn aire historique et critique a

work irrevocably tainted for contemporaries by the stains of libertinism and

My thanks to Princeton University's Center for the Study of Religion and to the Indiana University

History Department for their generous support. Careful and insightful suggestions from Konstantin

Dierks, Constance Furey, Sarah Knott, Kate Seidl, Dror Wahrman, and the anonymous

AHR

reviewers

were much appreciated.

1

Johann Friedrich Haug,

Die Heilige Schrift A lles und N eues Testam entsInach dem Grund- T ext aufs

neue abersehen und abersetzet

(Berleburg, 1726), 3v.

2

Fortgesetzte Sammlung von alten und neuen theologischen Sachen (1727): 1176;

Fortgesetzte

Sammlung

(1731): 271; Josef Urlinger, Die geistes- und sprachgeschichtliche Bedeutung der Berle-

burger Bibel (PhD dissertation, UniversitAt Saarlands, 1969), 245.

3

Auserlesene Theologische Bibliothek

22 (1727): 917.

1061

atMcGillUniversityLibrariesonDecember22,2

014

http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/

Downloadedfro

m
http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/


2/20

1062

onathan S heehan

atheism the editor's tongue w as firmly in his cheek. Few w orks in the eighteenth

century, after all, represented the perils of learned scholarship for the "simple and

ignorant" more d ramatically than Bayle's dictionary.

4

The com parison between it

and a w ork of spiritualist prose w ould, then, seem a piece of rhetorical slight of

hand , tarring the Berleburger editors with the sam e brush of heterodoxy applied to

Bay le. In the end, after all, w hat did Berleburg h ave to do with Bay le? What could

religion have to do with the Enlightenment?

Up until recently, scholars wo uld have answ ered in near unison, "Nothing." But

in the past ten years, religion has returned to the En lightenment. Wh ile mo dern

scholars have long listened carefully to the com plaints of the d evout"that

Atheism

and Infidelity

grow m ightily among u s" they have begun, in the last decade, to pay

attention to other eighteen th-century voices.

5The 1758 voice of the

Edinburgh

Magazine,

for example, which declared that "there never perhaps was an age in

w hich religion w as so m uch in fashion am ong us, as it has long been... [G]reat is

the thirst of m ultitudes after little refined points and particular doctrines of piety."

6

Or that of

The Court Magaz ine,

which proclaimed in 1761 that "there never was an

age w herein a thirst after Christian K now ledge more universally prevailed, than the

present" and pointed to the "variety of Publications on religious subjects, the crow ded

assemblies in every place of public worsh ip, and the large increase and multiplicity even

of sectaries" as incontrovertible proof.

7

The new attention to such voices is emblematic

of a broader sh ift in the study of the Enlightenment. "Religion itself has returned to the

agenda," one sch olar triumphantly declares. Nor is he alone. Rather, as others

announce, "it has becom e almost a com mon place of historiography that... religion

remained a force [in the Enlightenment] de termining the lives of large sections of the

population"; "eighteenth-century religion . . . has b ecom ing increasingly central to

historians' understanding of the way in which eighteen th-century society functioned";

"religiosity . . . [wa s] at the very heart of English intellectual life in the period of th e

Enlightenment."

8

R eligion, it seem s, is back.

This resurrection of religion atop w hat Horton Da vies once described as the

"surface of the m oon," a terrain "pock-marked" w ith the "extinct volcanic craters"

of faith, has happe ned alongsid e a broad re surgence o f interest in religious topics

since 1989. 9

The resurgence is apparent across a w ide variety of fields. The "New

Gospel of Academ ia" was the October 2000 headline in the

Los Angeles Times,

4

Ruth W helan,

The A natomy of Sup erstition: A Study of the Historical Theory and Practice of Pierre

Bayle

(Oxford, 1989), 10.

5

R ichard W illis,

Ref lexions upon a Pamp helet intituled, A n A ccount of the Growth of D eism in

England (London, 1696), 1.

6

Edinburgh Magazine

2 (1758): 210-11.

7

T he Court Magazine

1 (1761): 126.

8Jonathan Clark,

English Society, 1660

832,

2d edn. (Cam bridge, 2000), 28 (the first edition

makes no such c laim); Eckhart Hellmuth, "Towa rds a Com parative Study of Political Culture," in

The

Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germ any in the L ate Eighteenth Century,

Hellmuth, ed.

(Oxford, 1990 ), 25; John G ascoigne, "Anglican Latitudinarianism, Rational Dissent and Political

R adicalism in the Late Eighteenth C entury," in Knud H aakonssen, ed.,

Enlightenm ent and R eligion:

Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain

(Cam bridge, 1996), 219; David R uderman, Jewish

Enlightenment in an English K ey: A nglo-Jewry's Construction of M odem Jewish Thought

(Princeton , N.J.,

2000), 19. Nigel Aston's

Christianity and Revolutionary Europe, 1750

830

(Cam bridge, 2003) and S . J.

Barnett's Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modemity

(Manch ester, 2003) unfortunately

appeared too late for consideration in this essay.

9

Horton D avies,

W orship and Theology in England, 5

vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1961-7 5), 3: 143.

A M E R I C A N H I S T O R I C A L R E V I E W

C T O B E R 2 0 0 3



Downloadedfro

m


3/20

Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization

0 6 3

wh ich declared religion a "hot field of inquiry" and reported an almost 35 percent

increase in m embership in the Am erican Acad emy of R eligion since 199 4.10 In

199 6, the Ford Founda tion added religion to their list of newly fund ed program

areas. In the past five years or so, the Pew Ch aritable Trust showed its ow n interest

by pouring m oney into ten "Centers of Excellence" including the U niversity of

Southe rn Ca lifornia's C enter for Religion and C ivic Cu lture, Princeton's C enter for

the Study of R eligion, and Yale's Center for R eligion and Am erican Lifethat

have given religion a prominent institutional face in the academy.11 In the

mea ntime, the Lilly Endow men t's "Initiative on R eligion and Higher Education"

launched in 19 89 has, in the w ords of i ts evaluators, precipitated a "rel igious

revitalization in the academ y."12 And it seem s that there is some truth to this

estimation. The "R eligion and Polities" section of the Am erican Political Science

Association took off in the early 1990 s, while the religion section of the Am erican

Sociological Associationbegun in 1994 has grown quickly to become one of the

larger in the organiza tion. Hent d e V ries' diagnosis of a "return of religion" in

contempo rary l iterary theory m atches this wider story, and w hen the h ippest of

theorists, Gianni V attimo, declares that "postm odern pluralism h as enabled . . . the

recovery of the C hristian faith," we can safely say that religion has found a home in

poststructuralism.13 Perhap s less apocalyptically, historians, too, have pu shed

religion into the sch olarly limelight. The 19 90s, com me nted C larence Taylor in

199 6, "have been a golden age for literature on . . . African-Am erican religion.""

In European historym y ow n f ield the immense and continued popularity of

historians such as Peter Brown, C aroline Walker Bynum, and Natalie Zemon D avis

testifies to the attraction of pre-mod ern religion. And even the vaun ted nineteenth-

century "secularization of the European m ind" has fallen on hard t im es, with

scholars such as Margaret L avinia Anderson declaring the decline of religion after

1800 a fantastic produc t of "the secularization of sch olarship in the tw entieth

century" rather th an a reflection of any real historical trend.15

But the de but of religion on the stage of the Enlightenm ent has been one of the

most dram atic mom ents in this play. After all, more than virtually any other period,

the Enlightenm ent has traditionally been read as the very crad le of the secular

wo rld. If, for Owen C hadw ick, "the problem of secularization" w as "not the same

10 Teresa Watanabe, "The New G ospel of Academia,"

L os A ngeles Times,

October 18, 2000.

11 On the Ford Foundation, see the "Ford Foundation Rep ort," Sum mer/Fall 1996 at ww w.ford-

found.org; on the Pew centers, see http://religionanddemocracy.lib.virginia.edu/partners/pewcenters-

.html and w ww .pewforum.org. My thanks to Pr ince ton's Center direc tor Rober t W uthnow for this

information.

12

The report, written by Kathleen Mah oney, John Schmalzbaue r, and James Youn iss, can be found

at ww w.resourcingchristianity.org/downloads/Essays/PublicReport.pdf.

13 Hent de Vries,

Philosophy and the Turn to R eligion (Baltimore, 1999), 431; Gianni Vattimo, After

Chtistianity

(New Y ork, 2002), 5.

14

Clarence Taylor, "A Glorious Age for African-American Religion,"

Journal of A m erican Ethnic

History

15 (Winter 1996): 79.

15

Owen Chadwick,

The S eculariz ation of the E uropean M ind in the N ineteenth Century (Cambridge,

1975); Margaret Lavinia Anderson, "The Lim its of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic

Revival in Nineteenth-Century Germany,"

The Historical Joumal

38 (Septembe r 1995): 648. See also

Dagmar Herzog,

Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionaty Baden

(Princeton, N .J.,

1996); David Blackbourn,

M atpingen: A pparitions of the V irgin Maly in B ismarckian Germany

(Oxford,

1993); and earlier, Jonathan S perber,

Popular Catholicism in N ineteenth

Century Germany

(Princeton,

1984).


C T O B E R 2 0 0 3



Downloadedfro

m


4/20

1 0 6 4

onathan Sheehan

as the problem of enlightenm ent," the difference for him was only quan titative, not

essential: "Enlightenm ent wa s of the few. Secularization is of the many ."

16Making

religion into a cornerstone of the En lightenme nt thus tends to raise intriguing and

troubling questions about the p recise nature of this secularizing vision. Ra ther than

treat this new enth usiasm for m atters of the spiri t as a mere historiographical

corrective to a literature that long left religion to the side, then, this essay w ill map

it onto what I see as a communal discomfort with the usual story about the

Enlightenm ent and the h istory of m odern ity. The injection of religion into the

Enlightenment, I suggest, is part of a revision of the history of secular society that

has sent the very category of the Enlightenment long defined as a philosophical

program w hose anti-religious zeal paved the way for our secular present into great

turmoil. Enlightenm ent and religion, for a variety of reasons, m ake a diff icult

marriage. Bu t these difficulties are productive, I argue, for they allow historians to

question implicit and explicit understandings of religion and to pu t pressure on the

slippery and often m isleading notion of secularization. R ecent scholarship he lps

point the w ay, I propose, to more expansive and rigorous approac hes to both

Enlightenment and religion. In so doing, it helps to address some of the

enigmas of m odern secularization. And it may sh ow that in fact Bayle had quite a

bit to do with B erleburg.

To

BEGIN EXPLORING THE DIFFICULTIES

of wed ding religion to the Enlightenment, we

can begin with a question and a story:

How far could theologians go . .. in allow ing the use of [scientif ic] techniques in matters

sexual? The abb [Jean-Antoine] Nollet and [Laz zaro] Spallanzi published an account of

their experiments using condom s on male frogs,

Exprience pour servir l'histoire de la

gnration

(1785); this, apparently, was allowa ble. But in 1777 the theologians had had Dr.

Guilbert de Prval banned from practicing med icine for his experiment to show h ow similar

precautions in hum an beings constituted a preservative against venereal infection hardly

surprising, since, in full-bottomed wig and chem ise, he gave a personal dem onstration with

two w hores in a public session presided over by the duc d 'Orlans.

17

Packed w ith similarly precious stories, John McM anners' monum ental Church and

Society in Eighteenth

Century France sketches the religious comp lexities of the age.

His affair of the condom reveals the Enlightenm ent dispute w ith religion in all its

perverse glory. "In the age of Enlightenm ent," the Catholic Chu rch wa s challenged

by "not only educated laym en, but also by the m ore intelligent church men ." Hand

in hand, the intelligent abb Nollet and the good doctor Prval battered the

irrational sanctions of the church, the first slyly, the other with bold gusto. Shagging

two w hores in front of the duc d'Orlans was not just fun

science, it was also

good

science and, moreover,

impious science. Antinomian delight paired with an

apprec iation for sober fact: the com bination w as a lethal injection for a church

stuck in i ts ways. If the eighteenth century w as the "golden era of the French

16Chadwick,

Secularization, 9

17John McManners,Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998), 2:

306-07.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


5/20


0 6 5

C hurch," it was also the "autum n season . . . before the leaves began to fall and

winter came." 18

McManners' greatness lies in his dissection of this fecund, decaying landscape of

the French C atholic C hurch. In its golden age, the French C hurch w as blessed w ith

an edu cated and mo tivated clergy, high levels of lay piety, and splendid ch urch

r i tual. But i ts roots were rotten, ready to break in the storm of revolution that

erased the connections between church and state and destroyed the web of

authority that had lent so much p omp and pow er to the Christianity of eighteenth-

century France . This wa s a pious age teetering on the edge of im piety, a baroque

castle of religious power whose foundations were melting away. The new science,

the new sex, the cutting w it, the creeping do ubts, the social conscience, the radical

politics: these forces of the Enlightenm ent prepared the ch urch for its dissolution

in the w hir lw ind of 1789. The " th inkers of Enlightenment" in McM anners '

s tory w ere the bad conscience of the G allican Church. V olta ire , Rousseau,

Didero t: they repre sent a self-evidently irreligious concept called enlightenm ent.

The "ag e of Enlightenment" m ocked religion and finally m ade it irrelevant. The

"State and the m ajority w ent their way," leaving only a trace of religion behind.19

Church and Society

offers rich fare, one of the few texts under review w hose

"religious and intellectual history .. . frequently engages with cultural history," as

B. W. Young ha s comm ented." But if rich, it is also a melanch oly fare. Although

McM anners clearly wo uld like to put religion back into the eighteen th century, his

story offers a church whose ow n f laws lead to an outcome both depressing and

inevitable. In a w ay, he just flips Peter Gay's fam ously optimistic sense that the

Enlightenment purged the m odern w orld of religious poison, echoing Ga y's vision

of "the d esiccation of C hristian m ysteries after a cen tury of criticism" bu t inverting

the em otional stakes. In both, the eighteenth century is the cradle of secularization,

the staging ground for a m odernity shorn of its religious character. "Word s wh ose

reverberation previously had an indescribab le force . . . have now lost all signifi-

cance," wrote one comm entator in 1793; w e can imagine these words included

"faith," "spirit," "resurrection," and "sin," among others. In the classic historiog-

raphy of the Enlightenment, freedom

of religion entailed freedom

from

religion, for

better or worse. The great church historian Johann M osheim saw the dark side,

gloomily declaring eighteenth-century Europe blighted by those "w ho aim at the

total extinction of all religion." "To d estroy every established institution h as long

been

the order of the day,

complained the

A nti-Jacobin Rev iew

in 1799: "Every thing

must bow dow n to the goddess, Reason.

This language of despair did not die in the

nineteenth century. We can find it in the oft-quoted words of Theod or Adorno and

Max Horkheimer, for w hom the Enlightenment "behaves toward th ings as a

dictator toward men, it liquidates them. Its idolatry of reason invents a

my thology based on annihilation. W hethe r optimistic or pessimistic, then, the old

18

McManners ,

Church and Society, 2: 306, 1: 3.

19

McManners ,

Church and Society, 2: 288, 2: 306, 1: 4.

2

B. W. Youn g, "Religious History and the E ighteenth-Century Historian," The Historical Joumal

43 (September 2000): 857.


CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


6/20

1 0 6 6

onathan S heehan

consensus saw an Enlightenment forcing religion into the corners of human

experience and destroying the stories it told abou t nature, society, and m ankind.

21

In doing so, the Enlightenmen t made m odernity "legitimate." Banishme nt of

religion guaranteed m odernity's freedom from the shackles of the past, and allowed

it to develop its own legitimate and authoritative character. Mode rn is mod ern, in

a sense, to the degree that it is secular.

22

This intimate bond between the

Enlightenm ent and se cularization forces all efforts to put religion back into the

Enlightenm ent to take a position on the n ature of m ode rn, secular society. It is

surely not accidental that although the tools to w rite a "better history" of the

Enlightenm ent have been long a vailable to historians, only now , in the past ten to

fifteen years, ha s religion "been reinstated as a legitima te part of Enlightenment

studies." 23

The rise of a religious politics in the U nited States and elsew here has

made it crystal clear that the dissipation of religion as an ideological force can in no

w ay be understood as an inevitable consequente of mod ernity. This new sense of

religion's potency raises serious doubts about secular mod ernity. More im portant

here, i t raises anxieties w hich perm eate the new scholarship on eighteenth-

century religionabout the ostensible birthplace of secular m odernity, the Enlight-

enment.

W e can find the origin of these an xieties, somew hat arbitrarily, in the once-

cheerful "d isaggregation" of the Enlightenment proposed by R oy Porter and

Mikulg Teich, w ho stressed in their 1982 book

The Enlightenment in National

Context

the "m any different forms th e Enlightenment took in vastly different . . .

environments." The enorm ous influence of this book has m ade G ay's hieratic

opening line to

The R ise of M odern Paganism there

were m any philosophes in the

eighteenth century, but there was only one Enlightenment" highly suspect, not

m erely because of i ts reifying tend encies but also bec 'ause of i ts treatmen t of

rel igion. Indeed, for m ost of Porter 's com me ntators, religion w as the dom inant

qualification of th e

kind

of Enlightenment pec uliar to distinct geographical areas.

In England , for exam ple, "Enlightenm ent goals . . . throve . . .

within piety." In

Germ any, the

Aufkldrer . . .

worked within religious and theoretical traditions

w hich they am ended but did not reject ." In the Netherlands, the Enlightenm ent

functioned "a s much in the n ame o f moral and spiritual rejuvenation as political or

philosophical progress." In Austria, "the closeness of the R eform C atholics to the

main assum ptions of the Enlightenme nt is obvious." In Switzerland, "the scientific

or rational and the transcenden tal views o f life w ere perfectly com patible."

24

21Peter Gay,

Th e Enlightenmen t: A n Interpretation,

Vol. 1: The R ise of M odern Paganism

(New York,

1966), 330

1; Reinhart K oselleck,

Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time

(Cambridge,

Mass., 1985), 252-53; Johann Loren z Mosh eim, "A Brief Sketch o f the Ecclesiastical History of the

Eighteenth Century," in

Ecclesiastical History

(Philadelph ia, 1798), 6: 6;

Anti

Jacobin Review 1 (1799):

506;

AntiJacobin Review

7 (1801): 25; Max Horkheimer and Th eodor Adorno,

Dialectic of Enlighten-

ment,

John C umm ing, trans. (New Y ork, 1972), 7, 9, 12-13.

22

On legitimacy, see Hans Blumenb erg,

The L egitimacy of the Modern Age

(Cambridge, Mass.,

1983). Blumenberg criticizes both the argument that legitimac y of the mode rn age depends on its

"w orldliness" and the corollary argum ent that, by revealing the religious found ations of the modern

age, one is someh ow d ivesting it of its legitimac y (17).

23

Pace

J. G. A. Pocock, "Within the M argins: The Definitions of Orthodo xy," in

The M argins of

Orthodoxy,

R oger Lun d, ed. (Camb ridge, 1995), 37; S. J. Barne tt,

Idol Tem ples and Crafty Priests: The

Origins of Enlightenm ent A nticlericalism

(New Y ork, 1999), 7.

24

R obert Sullivan, "Re thinking C hristianity in Enlightened

Europe, Eighteenth-Centwy

Studies

34,


C T O B E R 2 0 0 3



Downloadedfro

m


7/20


0 6 7

C heerfully distinct, national contexts offered a w ay to put religion back into the

Enlightenment.

In some cases, this cheer rem ains. As even its title indicates, David Sorkin's 1994

effort to unify the two faces of Germ any's premier Jewish ph ilosopher, Moses

Men delssohn, the "S ocrates of Berlin and . . . Moses o f Dessau," is relatively

optimistic about the reconc iliation of religion and th e Enlightenm ent. Sorkin's

M oses Mend elssohn and the R eligious Enlightenm ent

describes the Jewish Ha skalah,

reform C atholicism, and progressive Protestantism as com munally in search of a

m iddle w ay betw een faith and do ubt, not "a depa rture from previous . . . tradition

but an effort to renew it, not rupture but self-consc ious continuity." Bu t in recent

years, the story of the Enlightenment and religion has grow n bleaker, and scholars

seem u ncomfortable w ith conciliatory language.25 McManners' elegiac tone is only

one indication of a g eneral anxiety about a range of im plicit and explicit questions.

What would it mean for the idea of the Enlightenment if it came to include

religion? Can a category defined by its opposition to superstition, faith, and

revelation survive wh en this opposition disappears? What w ould a recon ciliation of

the Enlightenm ent and religion mean to the story of mod ernity's origins?

Such questions hide inside the mod ern scholarship on the Enlightenm ent and

religion and lend it its particular pathos. The category of enlightenment itself seems

shaky, as if incapab le of surviving the introduction of religion w ithout som e

reduction in pow er. The recent revival of Isaiah Berlin's "Cou nter-Enlightenme nt"

is, I believe, a symptom of these un certainties. If the Enlightenment he ld dear the

familiar principles of "u niversality, objectivity, rationality," Berlin's largely Germ an

C ounter-Enlightenm ent insisted on the particularity of truth and the "impo tence of

reason to dem onstrate the existence of anyth ing." Fiery passion, comm itm ent to

divine inspiration, and insistence on the primacy of faith and the irrational m ore

generally: Johann Herder and Johann Ham ann, later Edmund Burke and Joseph de

Maistre, held these standard s high in the battle against the coldness of reason.

Newer research has reached beyond Germany and made the Counter-Enlighten-

ment a general feature of eighteenth-century Europe. In a m inor key, C. D. A.

Le ighton has argued that the Cou nter-Enlightenm ent is "m ore deserving of study"

than its rationalistic opposite, precisely because it is so poorly defined . More

significantly, B. W. Y oung's 1998

R eligion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth

Centuty

England

has unearthed an English Counter-Enlightenment inhabited by the

followers of Franois Fnelon, William Law , and John Wesley, a heterogeneous

countertrad ition that took shape pre cisely around its opposition to New tonianism

and ra tional religion. Against the Enlightenm ent "clerical culture" in the England

of George 11 (1727-1760), there grew up a heterod ox Counter-En lightenment that

promoted a "m ystical, visionary, and essentially biblical" form of eclectic theology.

no. 2 (2001): 299; Roy Porter and Mikulg Teich, eds.,

The Enlightenment in N ational Context

(Cam bridge, 1981), vii ; Gay,

Enlightenment,

3; Roy Porter, The Enlightenment in England, in Porter

and Teich,

Enlightenment,

6; Joachim Whaley, The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany, in Porter

and Teich,

Enlightenment,

111; Simon Schama, The Enlightenment in the Netherlands, in Porter and

Teich,

Enlightenment,

55; Samuel Taylor, The Enlightenment in Switzerland, in Porter and Teich,

Enlightenment,

80 .

25

David Sorkin,

M oses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment

(Berkeley, Calif., 1996), xxi,

154-55.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


8/20

1068

onathan S heehan

In all of these ca ses, the Co unter-Enlightenmen t allow s its authors both to teil a

story of an eighteenth-century religion untarnished by the patina of decay and a lso

to salvage the traditionally rationalist idea o f enlightenment from the ch allenge of

religion. But its effects are profound ly "pathetic," for the En lightenme nt that

results is a

failure.

Even if the mode rnity of the Enlightenm ent is preserved, the

efficacy of the Enlightenment in actually creating this modernity is denied. Tragedy

persists, in other w ords, in an Enlightenment wh ose rationalist aspirations fell short

of their m ark, and fell victim to religion, irrationalism, and enth usiasm.

26

The pathos of the Enlightenm ent does not depend on tragedy. Irony works just

as w ell in the new stories of the Enlightenme nt and religion. It is not acciden tal, for

example, that the supreme ironist Edward Gibbon is the centerpiece of J . G. A.

Pocock's 1999 vision of effective if unsecular "clerical and conservative" Enlight-

enments in England. Pocock's "ecology" of the

Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire does m any things in its first two volume s, and w ill do ma ny m ore in the

volumes to com e. But in add ition to the marvelously rich m aterials that Pocock uses

to breathe life into the w ork of scholarship the overlapping contexts of Gibbon's

life, travels, and publishing Barbarism

and Religion

also articulates a strongly

ironie sense of Enlightenments w hose developm ent were "contained w ithin a

context of religious diversity, establishment an d dissent." Gibbon's Enlightenme nts

we re not instinctively anti-religious: they "had nothing . . . of the

riformatore

and

did no t conceal a "c landestine irreligiosity." Instead, G ibbon's tools of erudite

analysis, developed w ithin "the culture . . . of that liberal Protestantism that w as

seeking to ally belief with criticism and faith with scepticism, took him to

unexpected places. Like Protestants more generally, Gibbon replaced "the pursuit

. . . [with] the h istory of theology" w ithout meaning to. 27

The ironie separation of intentions and outcom es is not unique to Gibbon's

Enlightenme nts. Indeed, it permeates a numb er of Pocock's Enlightenments, which

include, among othe rs, a Protestant Enlightenm ent, an Utrecht Enlightenmen t, a

Scottish Enlightenment, a Swiss Enlightenment, an Arminian Enlightenment, and

an Anglican Enlightenm ent. Such diversity can be jarring indeed, i t seem s that

virtually any substantial adjective m ight have an Enlightenm ent in the eighteenth

century but it is a natural consequence when the Enlightenment is purged of the

drive to create a secular modernity. No longer does the Enlightenm ent have the

unified character it had w hen its great opponent w as religion. Once religion is

incorporated, in other w ords, it begins to divide the Enlightenment into thinly sliced

w edges of c oherence. The u ltim ate irony of Pocock's Enlightenments is that they

can be d efined as such only by virtue of their witting or unw itting participation in

the gen eral trend of "d iminishing spiritual authority, or reconc iling it with tha t of

civil society, by the conversion of th eology into history." If, as K nud H aakonssen

argued in a self-conscious extrapolat ion from Pocock, "the strong m odernising

drive that we identify with the Enlightenment" w as not

intentionally

irreligious, at

26

Isaiah Berlin, The Counter-Enlightenment, in Berlin,

et al., The Proper Study of Mankind: An

Anthology of Essays

(London, 1997), 263, 249; C. D. A. Leighton, Hutchinsonianism: A Counter-

Enlightenment Reform Movement,

Journal of Religious History

23 (June 1999): 176; B. W. Young,

Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Centwy England

(Oxford, 1998), 44, 121.

27

J. G. A. Pocock,

Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764

(Ca mbrid ge, 1999) , 298, 10, 298, 253, 298, 66, 73.


CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


9/20


0 6 9

least not in E nglan d, still its outcome

was renew ed secularism. Wh at was a tragic

failure in Berlin's story is an ironie success in Poco ck's. The sense of loss persists

nonetheless, for it is a success u nhop ed for by the participants in the Enlighten-

m ents, a consequence of their own failure to see wh ere their tools w ould take

them.28

Although recent scholarship has tried hard, in other words, to detach the

Enlightenment from irreligiosity, the story of Enlightenment secularization proves

very difficult to shed. On the one hand , the presence of religion seems to dim inish

the pow er of the E nlightenme nt. On the other , the resulting Enlightenm ent st il l

retains a funda m entally secularizing po w er. Given these d ifficulties, i t is not

surprising that we find a m ove afoot to discard the Enlightenment altogether from

the history of the eighteenth century. If so much work m ust be expended to preserve

an Enlightenment (and Pocock's fragmented E nlightenmen ts certainly dem and

Herculean scholarly labors), perhaps, as Jonathan C lark has argued in an influential

series of polemics, the Enlightenm ent "can no longer be used as a reliable and

agree d term of historical explanation . . . [or even] as a sho rthan d signifier of an

accepted bod y of authors and ideas." Perhaps the " unified project" called the

Enlightenm ent is a "fiction" that needs to be forgotten and , with it, all of its usual

baggage: secularization, modernization, liberalism, freedom of religion and

thought.29

If we do so, an account of eighteenth-century religion doubtless becomes easier.

By discarding the Enlightenment, C lark's

English Society, 1660

1832

can offer a

compelling story of the eighteenth-century English confessional state, a hybrid

church-state wh ose Protestant constitution dom inated England from the R estora-

tion until its quick dissolution with the repeal of the C orporation and Test Acts in

1828 and the R eform B ill in 1832. The hegem onic church, C lark argues, dominated

England du ring the eighteenth century. It guarantee d the authoritative hierarchy of

the state. It even sanc tioned

opposition

to it , for the "cen tral core" of the rad ical

critique of society was founded in religious heterodoxy, not anti-religious

sentiment. The dismissal of the Enlightenment is not incidental to this new ubiquity

of religion. Instead, excluding the Enlightenment evacuates the landsc ape of w hat

wa s traditionally und erstood as the force of irreligion, leaving religion its absolute

freedom.3

But i t is precisely this freedom that makes C lark's w ork so problematic. For

surely such a stable and comprehen sive system c ould not vanish virtually overnight

in the late 1820s. Wha tever the virtue in C lark's polemics against com fortable

stores of a secular and e nlightened England , it wo rks against him here, at least,

w here the "sudden collapse" of the

ancien rgime

becomes virtually inexplicable.

Even if secularization understood as a "long-term process by w hich a disappear-

ance o f religious ties, attitude s to transcen den ce, expectation s of an afterlife . . . is

driven onw ard in both private and daily public life" is a thorny co ncept, Clark's

easy dismissal of it comes at considerable explanatory cost. In essence, Clark has to

28 Pocock,

Barbarism,

138-39, 306; Knud H aakonssen, "Enlightened Dissent: An Introduction," in

Haakonssen,

Enlightenment and Religion,

3.

29 Clark, English Society,

9.

30 Clark,

English Society,

339.


CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


10/20

1070

onathan S heehan

pay the price for his own historical nominalism, for his insistence that the

Enlightenm ent and secularization are sim ply figm ents of the historiographical

imagination. R idding the historiography of accepted categories has its pleasures,

but pleasure alone d oes not justify such pruning. C ertainly, it is w holly irrelevant

that "eighteenth-century Englishmen h ad no sense of living through" the Enlight-

enm ent and "w ere unaw are of a social process later designated `secularization." '

The very discipline of history, after all, was built on the insight that people

participate in larger processes of w hich they are individually quite unaw are.

Distaste for categories is no argum ent against their usage. 31

But w e can take from C lark a real question: can w e m ake the Enlightenment

into a

useful

category, one capacious enough to comm ent on the peculiar forms of

religious life that inhabited the eighteenth century? To do so, it seem s crucial to

move the Enlightenment outside the exclusive am bit of philosophy. The contem-

porary literature has don e this in a few w ays, not least by push ing France to the

periphery of the d iscussion. Indeed , for Pocock, C lark, Sorkin, and m ost other

researchers, the French Enlightenment is the great counterexample. It is the

location of w hat Pocock calls the "cosm opolitan" Enlightenment, the movem ent

wh ose idol was the

Encylopdie

and wh ose god was philosophy.

32

With some notable

exceptions, French historians have tende d to absent them selves from the recent

literature on religion. The exce ptions are not insignificant: Suzann e Desan 's work

on lay religion and revolutionary politics, Timothy Tackett 's exam ination o f the

politics of the 1791 Ecclesiastical Oath, Dale V an K ley's longstand ing efforts to link

Jansenism to the "desacralization" of the French monarchy, D avid A . Bell's most

recent connection of revolutionary nationalism to C atholic ed ucational and m is-

sionary activities, among others. 33

But more than anyw here else, the Enlightenment

in France is still understood as fundam entally anticlerical and, in a connected w ay,

fundame ntally philosophical. That Bell's only index entry under "Enlightenment" is

a reference to the heading philosophes is a token of this deeper assumption, one

that makes the union of the

French Enlightenment and religion very d ifficult to

sust ain. 34

For the move aw ay from philosophy does not just create a new geograph y of the

Enlightenment, it also gives it a wh ole new intellectual and cultural content. Thus

Gibbon is interesting to Pocock not just as an ironist but as an advocate of e rudition

over philosophy. Erudition "d id not lead to the intellect 's sovereignty over i ts

environm ent, but rather to its imm ersion in it." By stressing erudition, Pocock

demotes philosophy to a mere com ponent of the Enlightenment, other components

of w hich m ight include religion and religious scholarship. And this demo tion is

clearly crucial for Pocock's own d isaggrega ting project: once the essen tial link

3 1

Blumenberg,

Legitimacy, 3; Clark,

English Society, 11,

10.

32

Pocock,

Barbarism, 138.

32

' Suzanne Desan,

Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France

(Ithaca, N.Y., 1990); Timothy Tackett,

Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Centuly

France

(Princeton, N.J., 1986); Dale K . Van IC ley,

The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From

Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791

(New Haven, Conn. , 1996), 136 (see also his

Jansenists and

the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757-1765

[New Haven, 1975]); David A. Ben,

The Cult of the

Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800

(Cam bridge, Mass., 2001).

34Ben,

Cult of the Nation,

296.


CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


11/20


0 7 1

betwee n philosophy and the Enlightenment is broken, enlightenm ents are free to

multiply.

Jonathan Israel's 200 1

Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of

M odemity , 16501750 is clearly concerned about this dem otion, not least owing to

his desire to overcome the grow ing sense, as John R obertson has recently put it,

that

the

Enlighten ment . . . never . . . existed."35 Ph ilosophy , in Israel's amazing

and wide-ranging book, glues together an Enlightenment threatened by the

fragme ntations of Porter and Pocock. It is the key to the "m aking of mod ernity,"

and, unsurprisingly, religion has little place in this story. Enlightenment philosophy

"overthrew the ology's age-old hegem ony" and "erad icated magic and belief in the

supernatural from Europe's intellectual culture. The Moses of the radical

Enlightenment" w as Baruch Spinoza, the secret f igure crucial "to any proper

understanding of Early Enlightenme nt European though t," the "suprem e philo-

sophical bogeyman " of the eighteenth century. Using Spinoza and Spinozism as

bench ma rks, Israel 's book reconstructs an aggressively pan-European an d anti-

Pocockian vision of an Enlightenment at w ar w ith religion. As in m ost wars, there

are quislings, in this case the "mod erate Enlightenment" those comm itted to

easing "con fessional rigidities . . . without effectively widen ing the scope of

intellectual freedom " w hose betrayal of Spinozan ideals threatened to derail the

mode rn virtues of secularism, democracy, and science.36

Whethe r his trenchant history is correct or not, Israel sees clearly how important

a specifically philosophical Enlightenm ent is to the traditional story of "rational-

ization and secularization."37 To move beyon d this storya s most recent scholar-

ship on the Enlightenment and religion wa nts to do mea ns moving beyond the

philosophical definition of enlightenment, which, while it has the virtue of

simplicity, tends to conceal as m uch a s it show s. Revisionists simply cannot allow

enlightenment to be boiled down, as it was by Norman Ham pson twenty years ago,

to a set of philosophical assumptions about nature, man, law, and providence.38

This approach both defines too rigidly the questions that can b e asked abo ut the

Enlightenment and predetermines the kind of stores that can be told about

secularization. It is because the Enlightenme nt is understood as ph ilosophical, in

other w ords, that an irreligious tinge repeatedly clings to it. To overcome this tinge,

new idea ls of enlightenment must be invented.

But to do this, as all of our authors show us, the problem of secularization must

be confronted directly. As an analytical category, secularization plagues the efforts

to connect the Enlightenmen t and religion, not least because the term is so crucial

to the self-imag ination of the m odern age, w hich has, from th e eighteenth century

onw ard, understood itself as surpassing its religious past. If secularization has long

been seen as a passive process Ch adw ick's "growing tendency in mankind to do

without religion"perhaps the time has long com e to inject some contingency and

35

John R obertson, "The Enlightenment above National Context: Political Economy in Eighteenth-

Ce ntury Scotland and Naples,"

The Historical Joumal

40 (Septembe r 1997): 671.

36Pocock,

Barbarism,

252; Jonath an I. Israel,

The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the M aking

of Modemily, 1650

750

(Oxford, 2001), 4, 12, 159, 80, 108. See pp. 137, 140-41, for criticisms of

Pocock and his theory of multiple Enlightenments.

37

Israel,

Radical Enlightenment,

4.

38

Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment in France, in Porter and Teich, Enlightenment,

41-42.


CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


12/20

1072

onathan S heehan

activity into it.39 To accom plish this, we need to think not just about enlightenmen t

bui also about its partner in the secularizing p rocess, "religion." For religion has

never bee n left behind , either personally or institutionally. Instead, it has b een

continually rem ade and given new forms and meanings over time Thinking m ore

carefully about religion is a fundam ental step in understanding both the Enlight-

enment and the enigmas of secularization.

"WE SHOULD NOT HAVE THE WORD `religion' at all. When and how did it originate?"

asked the German aphorist Georg L ichtenberg at the end of the eighteenth century.

As h is question signals, religion, as such, is an invented category of analysis. And

yet, for all of the ink spilt on the qu estion of the Enlightenme nt, the issue of religion

per se h as been o f little interest to historians. Indeed, historians have been c ontent

to play rather loose w ith this category, assuming, I suppose, that readers instinc-

tively recognize religion, and so explanation w ould incur the charge of ped antry.

How ever, such looseness ha s its perils, since it can generate useless statemen ts of

fact. Take, for exam ple, this bland, uninformative, yet utterly typical formulation:

Enlightenment religion can be characterised as rational, tolerant and non-

mysterious." Even leaving aside the issue of the E nlightenm ent, in w hat sense can

"religion" be "ch aracterised as rational"? Was it simply that a concept of "rational

religion" w as invented? Or w ere its exponents themselves rational? In the practice

of pulpit oratory, were logical syllogisms the rhetoric of cho ice? Were the articles

of faith arranged in a rational manner? Were practices rationalized and d evotional

exe rcises (prayer, sacrame nts, hym ns) transform ed into acts of the intellect? It

m ight m ean a ll or any o f these things, but the term itself tells us little about the

operation of religion ac ross social, political, and intellectual bound aries."

Man y researchers working on the Enlightenm ent and religion especially

Jonathan Clark and those followers living in the shadow of wh at one comm entator

has gleefully called the "C larkite revolution" have casually taken up religion as a

"revivified form of political history." B y focu sing on ecclesiastical polities, by

stressing the " political valence of virtually a ll eighteenth-century e xpressions of

religion," volumes such as

R eligion and Polities in Enlightenm ent Europe (2001) have

put religion onto the h istoriographical map by unraveling the connections between

rational Dissent and En lightenm ent polities, betw een Jansenism an d Enlighten-

ment po lities, betwe en Pietism a nd Enlightenment p olities, and so on. Thus w e now

have a fair ly r ich no tion of how religious heterodoxy and political opposition

intersected in eighteenth-century England, a sense of how political activity

[became] a n extension of . . . religious and m oral principles," and w e can c ertainly

no Jonger take for granted the simple opposition betw een rational and religious

thought. But at w hat cost? In the case of C lark, i t comes at the cost of flattening

religion into a politico-theological panca ke, and then dividing it up betw een the

Dissenters and the orthod ox. As a consequence, some of the mo st significant

9Chadwick, Secularization, 17 .

4 Georg Lichtenberg, Sudelb0cher, in

Schriften und Briefe,

Wolfgang Promies, ed. (Munich,

1968), 1: 671; Martin Fitzpatrick, The Enlightenment, Polities and Providence: Some Scottish and

English Com parisons," in Haakonssen,

Enlightenment and Religion,

64.


CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


13/20


0 7 3

religious transformations of the eighteenth century disappear. Methodism and

Evangelicalism, for example, were not signs of religious ferment but instead simple

"marks of the Church's strength and spiritual effectiveness," because they "inher-

ited almost intact the mainstream ecclesiology and political theology of the

Ch urch." Nor should we distinguish Methodism from Evangelicalism (wh ich would

have surprised m any late-century Evangelicals ) , because they share the sam e

"political theology." In fundamental ways, Clark has himself taken over the position

of such nineteenth-ce ntury High C hurch polem icists as William Van M ildert, later

the bishop of Durham , who argued that "the entire fabric of our C onstitution, our

Law s, and our Government" is completely upheld by w hat he called Religion. Van

Mildert's abstractly political concept of religion has beco m e C lark's ow n, and the

consequ ence is, to som e extent, impoverishm ent. Even for Orthodoxy, as Peter

Nockles has noted, the "exclusive preoccupation with the political dimension"

divests it of "those distinctively ecclesiastical, sacramen tal, and liturgical prefer-

ences" tha t give it coherence as a "sep arate theological party." W hat results is a

substitution: for the "triumph of rationalism and stability," w e get instead a "new

kind of stability" ground ed in an " age of largely unperturbed and unproblematic

faith."

41

R eading religion as a form of veiled p olities is perfectly legitima te and even

unsurprising given that, as Young has noted, "the social and cultural history" (of the

English eighteenth ce ntury in pa rticular) "h as seriously neglected religion." 42But if

legitimate, it is certainly not the only w ay to read religion. It is w ith a sense of "the

religious com plexity of m odernity" that, for example, Leigh Eric Schm idt's

Hearing

Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment recently show ed how , in

the U nited S tates, the eighteenth-century sensorium be came a zone of confl ict

about the proper use of the ear and eye. Religion, in Schmidt's story, is a

complicated set of rhetorics (of divine presence, pow er, and absence) that generates

both corp oreal and ph ilosophical practices. Alternatively, one m ight argue, as

Darrin McMahon has in his 2001 Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French

Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity,

that the "religion" to wh ich the

Enlightenment w as ostensibly opposed ne ver even existed as such, because it was

invented by the strategic arguments against

the Enlightenmen t generated by the

turmoil of the French R evolution. If, as Roger C hartier has argued, "the R evolu-

tion invented the Enlightenment by a ttempting to root its legitimacy in a co rpus of

texts," then McM ahon show s the counter-revolution delegitimizing this Enlighten-

me nt by g iving it an essen tially anti-religious disposition. By "em phasizing the

essential antagonism betw een rel igion and

philosophie, reactionary clerics an d

41

James J. Sack,

From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760-1832

(Cam bridge, 1993), 36; Young, "R eligious History," 859; Dale Van Kley and James Bradley, eds.,

"Introduction,"

Religion and Politics in Enlightenm ent Europe

(Notre Dame, Ind., 2001), 37; John Seed,

" 'A Set of Men Pow erful Enough in Ma ny Things': Rational Dissent and Political Opposition in

England, 1770-1790," in Haakonssen,

Enlightenment and Religion, 163; Clark,

English Society, 285, 294;

Mildert quoted in C lark,

English Society,

426; Peter Nockles, "Church Parties in the Pre-Tractarian

Ch urch of England 1750-1833: The 'Orthodox'S ome Problems of Definition and Identity," in

The

Church of England, c. 1689

. 1833,

John W alsh,

et al.,

eds. (Cambridge, 1993), 339; Jeremy Gregory,

"The E ighteenth-Century R eformation: The Pastoral Task of Anglican Clergy after 1689," in W alsh,

Church of Eng land,

68.

4

Young , "R eligious History," 859.


C T O B E R 2 0 0 3



Downloadedfro

m


14/20

1074

onathan S heehan

aristocrats reduced the E nlightenm ent to "the sum of its most radical parts wh ile

effacing the manifold religious distinctions drawn throughout the century." Reli-

gion, in this context and for these clerics, would be an equa lly fantastic catego ry, a

fic Live entity to wh ose decline "the Enlightenment" was dedicated.43

There is just as little need to em brace the post-1789 d efinition of religion, of

course , as there is to accep t the pos t-1789 definition of the Enlighten m ent. The

choice w e make is significant, how ever, because the kind of "religion" we exam ine

determines the kind of story w e can teil about the Enlightenment. The irony, of

course, is that the Enlightenment w as precisely the period in which the very concept

of religion unde rw ent radical change. Before the n, "religion" generally described

the ritual behavior practiced by Ch ristians, Jew s, Muslims, and pagans, and

religio

w as connected to the "ca reful performance of ritual obligations." By the beginning

of the eighteenth century, however, religion w as converted from a set of rituals into

a set of propositions: "propositional religion" allowed for the c omparison of various

religions by juxtaposing the co ntent of their beliefs. Enlightenment com parative

religion and its effort to understand the co mm on roots of "religion" (w hether in

nature, hum anity, or God ) w as bom and buil t atop this foundation." As mod ern

researchers, we ca n add

other

visions of religion: an anthropological one focused on

ritual, a social one focused on th e com m unities and their practices, an ideological

one focuse d on the d octrinal or theological content, an institutional one th at looks

at clergy and their churche s. Each of these visions shifts not only the kind of

relationship possible betwe en the Enlightenm ent and religion but also the story we

can teil about religious transform ation.

To see how categories shape stores, we need look no further than that great

divide in the study of religion, the one betw een the "internal" and the "external"

visions of religion. In the first case, historians d efine true religion as an internal

state reflecting the individual's relationship to God . This ideal developed in the

eighteenth century and perfected in the early nineteenth sees the "relegation [of

religion] to the private consciences of individual believers as the ultimate

expression of the religious spirit.45 The explosion of w hat Ann Taves has called

"theologies of experience" in the eighteenth century could serve as evidence for this

shift, as could the privatization of piety that lies at the heart of what Jean

Delum eau has c alled the "christianization" of Europe in the eighteenth cen tury, as

m issionaries converted paga n practices into C hristian faith." In this story, the

Enlightenm ent is no opponent of religion. Instead, it w as the elem ent that, as Roy

Porter's

Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern W orld

(2000) puts it,

43

Leigh Eric Schmidt,

Hearing T hings: Religion, Illusion, and the A m erican Enlightenm ent (Cam -

bridge,

Mass., 2000), 30; Darrin McMahon,

Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-

Enlightenment and the Making of Modernily

(Oxford, 2001), 101; Roger Chartier,

The Cultural O rigins

of the French Revolution

(Durham, N.C. , 1991) , 5; McMah on,

Enemies, 101.

44

Jonathan Z . Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious," in

Critical Terms for Religious Studies,

Mark

C. Taylor, cd. (Chicago, 1998), 270; Peter Harrison,

Religion and the Religions in the English

Enlightenment

(Cam bridge, 1990), 25-26.

45

Bel ,

Cult of the Nation,

37.

46

Ann Taves,

Fits, Trances, and V isions: Exp eriencing Religion and Exp laining Exp erience f rom W esley

to James

(Princeton, N.J., 1999), 47; Kaspar von Greyerz,

R eligion und K ultur: Europa 150 0

800

(Giittingen, 2000 ), 285; Jean Delum eau,

Catholicism between L uther and V oltaire

(Philadelphia, 1977).


CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


15/20


0 7 5

"purif ied and dem arcated" the sacred from the profane realm.

47

It offered the

cleansing fire that purged religion of wh at Friedrich Schleiermacher long ago called

the "de ad slag" of arbitrary customs."

Proponents of the "external" vision could no t be more scornfu l of this story and

its effort as Richa rd Trexler grimly w rote to "cauterise hum an experience."

R eligion, for the externalists, must be defined a s a "com munit[y] of behaviour" and

scrutinized through th e sociological and anthropological lens of practice.

49

Histo-

rians then judge th e progress or failure of religion by looking at evidence of ritual

participation by the faithful, regardless of their inner beliefs. If fewer people w ere

going to church , this would b e a priori evidence that religion is on the de cline. As

the ph ilosopher M arcel Gauchet 's Disenchantm ent of the W orld: A Political History

of Religion

(English translation, 1997) patently show s, this vision of religion is far

mo re am enable to the traditional secularization thesis. Although the "subjective

experience" of religion is an "irreducible anthropological residue," Gauche t argues,

real religionin w hich the divinity owns and inhabits "the entire social space"has

been on the decline since the time of M oses. In this view, the eighteenth century

represented the deepest ever fracture in history, as this decline of religion

reached its final terminus.

5

Given that such radically different stories can be produced simply by shifting the

nature of "religion," the importance of the (pre-empirical and pre-evidentiary)

choice of de finitions is clear. To put religion into dialogue w ith the Enlightenme nt,

in other word s, we ne ed to determ ine exactly who the partners in this conversation

are. It may very w ell be that "religion" in

all

senses cannot be related me aningfully

to the Enlightenment, precisely because the horizons of these two things were

socially an d cultura lly distinct in the period . This is not, I hope , an invitation to

endless theo retical speculation on catego ries. Bu t categories are important, in

particular in periods of h istoriographical transformation. And the b est theoretical

platform sh ould create the richest research program.

With tha t in mind, I would like to offer some provisional ideas about both the

Enlightenme nt and religion. It seems clear that if, as Pocock has suggested , we

move aw ay from the Enlightenm ent as a set of doctrinal or philosophical precepts,

the research program will become much more capacious. The language of

rationalism, materialism, determ inism, indeed, the entire philosophical definition

of the Enlightenment, has tended (with som e exceptions) to constrain rather than

promo te new research . At the same time, the language of multiple Enlightenm ents

has a scattering effect that threatens to deprive the category of real analytical

weight. I would suggest that rather than overly scatter or concentrate the

Enlightenme nt, it wou ld be m ore productive to treat it as a new constellation of

formal and technical practices and institutions, "med ia," to borrow from Friedrich

K ittler. Such practices and institutions might include philosoph ical argument, but

47Roy Porter,Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

(London, 2000), 205.

48

Friedrich Schleiermacher, O n Religion: Sp eeches to Its Cultured De spisers,

R ichard Crouter, trans.

(Cam bridge, 1988), 194.

49

Richard Trexler, Reverence and Profanity in the Study of Early Modern Religion, in Kaspar

von Grey erz, ed. ,

Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

(London, 1984), 256, 253.

5

Marcel Gauchet ,

The D isenchantm ent of the W orld: A Political History of R eligion

(Princeton, N.J.,

199 7), 163, 8, 162.


CTOBER 2003



Downloadedfro

m


16/20

1076onathan S heehan

w ould encom pass such d iverse elemen ts as salons, reading circles, erudition,

scholarsh ip and scholarly techniques, translations, book review s, academ ies, new

comm unication tools including journals and newspapers, new or revived techniques

of data o rganization and storage (d ictionaries, encyclopedias, taxonomies), and so

on. This would, in a sense, return us to some of the " structures" that m ake Jrgen

Habermas so popular even w hile abandoning the pedagogy of the p ublic sphere that

m akes him so problem atic. Enlightenm ent is not, in this context, value neutral, as

Martin Gierl has pointed out in his excellent analysis of the "new com m unication

systems" generated in the eighteenth century to deal with d isagreement about

theological and p olitical truths. The very possibility of juxtaposing a spectrum of

positions within one publication, Gierl shows, changes the manner in which

theological controversy can be w aged, defusing the polem ics of the seventeenth

century. These m edia m ake certain kinds of argum ents possible and rob others of

the ir structural efficacy. But they are not inhere ntly anti-religious, nor do the y force

the Enlightenment to reenact a blind process of secularization. They are not

intrinsically prejudicial to "religion," how ever unde rstood, nor do they p revent us

from treating in a nuanced way this enormous area of eighteenth-century cultural

life.m

Instead, the m edia-driven concept of the Enlightenment allows us concentrate

on precisely those places w here the so cial, cultural, and intellectual horizons of

religion and the Enlightenme nt fused. Scholarly me dia, academ ies, universities,

reading soc ieties, salons, journals, new spapers, translations: these w ere all places

w here various entities called religion we re investigated an d invigorated. Religion

and the Enlightenment were wedded together, not because of any intrinsic

intellectual affinity between rationalism and m ystery but because the m edia of the

Enlightenment we re fundam ental structures through w hich new religious cultures

and practices w ere created. And the creators were not just the devout, although

man y we re that. Instead, the creators spanned the spectrum of personal piety, some

pro foundly impious, some not. Finally, the media approach allows one to clarify the

limits of the Enlightenmen t-religion relationship. Indeed, certain religious dom ains

m ight be, by and large, external to these m edia: private devotion, prayers, certain

l iturgical elements, church law , and so on. Others w ould com e into continual

contact, helping to shape and being shaped by them. Not only w ould this expansion

of the Enlightenment allow for a more prod uctive scholarship on the Enlighten-

men t and religion, it would also, in my view, clarify the question of secu larization.

Secularization would no longer be shorthand for the inevitable (intentional or not,

serious or ironie) slide of the pre-m odern religious past into the mod ern secular

future. Instead, it would be an account of how new "religions" were prod uced in

and through the media of the Enlightenment. It would be an account of how

51Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Netw orks, 180011900 (Stanford, Calif. 1990), esp. chaps. 1-3 and pp.

229

9; Jrgen Habermas,

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

(Cambridge, Mass.,

1989), esp. part 2; Martin Gier ,

Pietismus und A ufk leirung: Theologische Polem ik und die K omm unika-

tionsreform der W issenschaft am Ende des 17 . Jahrhunderts

(Gt5ttingen, 1997), 415. The recent effort to

define the Enlightenm ent as a republic of lettersstructured b y "social and discursive practices and

institutions"could easily be encom passed by the m edia definition of the Enlightenment: see Dena

Goodman, Republic of Letters: A Cultural Histoly of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 2;

also Anne Goldgar,

Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750

(New Haven, Conn., 1995).

A M E R I C A N H I S T O R I C A L R E V I E W C T O B E R 2 0 0 3



Downloadedfro

m


17/20


0 7 7

religion was m ade m odern, how it was reconstructed in such a w ay as to incorporate

i t into the fabric of mod ernity. In short, i t would be an accou nt of cultural work.

WHAT WOULD SUCH AN ACC OUNT DO for our opening scene? Would it let Berleburg

have some thing to do w ith Bayle? The a nswe r, I think, is yes. For the accou nt asks

historians to shift the w ay they have read both docum ents. Le t's begin with Bayle,

w hose perplexing dictionary offered its readers an alphab etical series of articles on

figures as diverse as Aaron and Attila, Sarah and S pinoza, all attended by a h orde

of annotations. Traditionally, historians have asked the question, "Wh at w as the

aim of his w riting?" and their answers feil roughly into two cam ps: either Bayle w as

(with Elisabeth Labrousse) a w riter whose aims conformed generally with Christian

teachings, or Bayle wa s a "libertine" (David Woo tton) and advocate of "Sp inozism

and ph ilosophical atheism" (Jonathan Israel). 52

In the forme r case, historians take

Bay le seriously w hen h e professes his faith; in the latter , his texts are read as

"tactical device[s]" or as fine exam ples of "the art of theological lying."

53

What I am

calling a m edia reading of B ayle wou ld not resolve this longstanding conflict about

Bayle's religious intentions, because it wo uld not ask

what

Bay le meant. Instead, it

would ask

how

Bayle's text functioned. Ba yle's philosophical sentiments wou ld play

a seconda ry role to his textual practices, practices that, as Ernst C assirer w rote long

ago, are simply perplexing:

In Bayle there is no hierarchy o f concepts, no deductive derivation of one concept, but rather

a simple aggregation of materials, each of w hich is as significant as any other and shares with

it an equal claim to co mplete and exhaustive treat

jonathan sheehan - enlightenment, religion and the enigma of secularization: a review essay (2003)

Documents