Review-Essay: Religion and Enlightenment

David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).Ulrich Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740-1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).Thomas Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006).In the decade since 2003, when a special issue of the American Historical Review heralded the return of religion to Enlightenment studies,1 the steady stream of books and articles restoring religion to the Enlightenment- alongside a parallel stream of review articles, conferences, and conference panels-has continued unabated.2A definitive history of this historiography's recent rise to prominence has yet to be written, but from the lofty perspective suggested by the general enterprise's very terms-"restoring religion to the Enlightenment"- the multiplicity of its many authors' individual arguments and purposes resolves into some basic shapes and trends that suggest a now familiar story. The Enlightenment, this story goes, has long been regarded as a moment in which the Western world took significant steps toward modernity, steps that involved the diminution of something commonly identified as religion. These steps include the rise of theoretical defenses of religious toleration and separation of church and state as a means of limiting the state's power to enforce religious observance, the rise of atheism and the diminishment of respect for revealed religion under the onslaught of biblical criticism and philosophical skepticism, and the emergence of powerful critiques of the spiritual and political prerogatives of the clergy, to take but a few examples. This type of modernization narrative is old but resilient. One of its best-known exponents, Peter Gay, retains his canonical aura and remains a point of departure for critics and admirers alike,3 and newer exponents of similar narratives abound. The Enlightenment has been described in recent years as witness to the liberation of humanity from divine-command theories of moral obligation4; the demise of the Christian church's cultural authority and of theology's long-lived dominion over the other sciences5; and the emergence of modernity within an intellectual underground inhabited by atheists, radicals, freethinkers, Spinozists, and other opponents of the established churches.6Over the past several decades, explicit or implicit attempts to push back against narratives like these have taken a variety of approaches. One has been to point out the various ways in which religion remained important through the eighteenth century and beyond.7 It continued to function as a principle of social cohesion and political legitimation with a major role to play in politics, culture, and people's everyday lives,8 and the Bible in particular retained its authority even as withering denials that it contained the word of God prompted German Protestant theologians to refashion it into a pillar of Western culture.9Another approach has been to stipulate the term enlightened religion or religious Enlightenment, largely in conformity with older histories of eighteenth-century Christian theology, to refer to theologians and theologies characterized by, among other things, respect for natural science; antipathy toward creeds; alertness to the dangers of fanaticism and superstition; promotion of religious toleration; and confidence that revealed truths, to the extent that they are not superfluous, do not contradict truths discoverable by human reason examining the natural world.10 This approach resonates with the religious connotations of Aufklarung''s eighteenth-century usage. …