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The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna
In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature.
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.
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.
360 pages, Hardcover
First published July 21, 2008
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140 people want to read
About the author
David Sorkin
21 books4 followersDavid Jan Sorkin is the Frances and Lawrence Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies and the Director of the Institute of Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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January 8, 2023
“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 European society and culture. If we trace modern culture to the Enlightenment, its foundations were decidedly religious (3).”
David Sorkin tries to counter the popular viewpoint of the Enlightenment touted by historians and sociologists of the 1960s as solely a secular movement that gave birth to contemporary European culture. The Enlightenment featured a variety of religious perspectives from moderate positions that believed in God as Creator, divine Providence, moral role of religion, Jesus as savior, and an immortal soul represented by luminaries such as Newton, Locke, Descartes, Montesquieu, Leibniz, and Wolff to much more radical versions of Benedict Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, and Diderot that espoused anti-religious and materialist perspectives.
The religious Enlightenment had its origins in the violent conflicts that accompanied the Protestant Reformation, which “discredited all belligerent, militant, and intolerant forms of religion (5-6).” In this context, the Enlightened reformers sought to use reason and faith to enhance each other, developing a middle ground between extreme Orthodoxy and hyper-skeptical philosophes. Reason without faith was seen as being as bad as blind faith. Knowledge should enhance one’s faith and prevent it from taking dogmatic and intolerant forms, while unchecked reason led to unbelief, immorality, and unbridled skepticism. For these thinkers reason remained an important tool for critical judgement when approaching faith.
Sorkin argues that this “broad understanding of reason had two important consequences. It became common practice among the religious enlighteners first to show what reason could teach about a particular doctrine, then to draw on scripture to certify, augment, and refine that knowledge. In addition, the religious enlighteners endorsed the distinction that revelation could not contain truths contrary to reason (contra rationem) yet did include truths above reason (supra rationem), namely, the truths of revelation not accessible to, but in harmony with, reason (12-13).”
Many of them argued against the idea that reason and faith were hostile, but rather complimentary and some religious questions were simply issues beyond reason rather than antagonistic to it.
They also attempted to address issues such as religious toleration, sources of morality, and how multiple faiths could coexist and function within a single nation state. These ideas not only benefited the religious, but also were of interest to the Enlightened despots and other states who understood that adopting reforms along these lines could help promote political and national stability. However, even if they broadly advocated for religious toleration many different thinkers had different ideas about how far to extend this toleration: with some limiting it only to different sects of Protestants, others to Christians, and almost everyone rejected extending it to atheists.
As Sorkin points out these reformers rejected the more radical ideas of separation of church and state and the development of civil religion. Many of the thinkers of the religious enlightenment defended toleration in the context of an established state religion.
“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 (6).”
One of their primary techniques for Biblical interpretation Was adopting an accommodationist approach that assumed God spoke to cultures of the past through ideas and concepts that they would understand within their own historical milieu, but which also contained universal truths when properly understood. At the same time, they tried to restrict revelation’s authority by acknowledging the Bible wasn’t a guide for all questions, only man’s salvation and relationship with God, leaving room for other intellectual inquiries outside the Bible like science and philosophy.
Sorkin focuses on six different thinkers who represent religious Enlightenment in different areas of Europe: William Warburton of England, Jacob Vernet of Geneva, Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten of Germany, the Jewish Moses Mendelssohn of Germany, Joseph Eybel of who served under Joseph II of the Hapsburg monarchy, and Adrien Lamourette of France. Each of these thinkers wrote works that offered a vision of moderate religion and attempted to revitalize their respective religious traditions by incorporating Enlightenment ideas.
Within the context of the Glorious Revolution, William Waburton expounded “heroic moderation” as a position of the Church of England. He published two works that made him an important figure of the Religious Enlightenment: the Alliance between Church and State (1737) and The Divine Legation (vol 1 in 1738 and vol 2 in 1741). In the first work, he rejected the idea that the church should control the state or the state should control the church. Instead church and state were independent entities that must work together in an alliance to support each other. The civil state retained power to punish criminal behavior, but not people’s opinions because it only had jurisdiction over the body, while religion with its jurisdiction over the soul should promote morality through the promise of ultimate reward and the hope to win God’s favor. In addition, religion provided encouragement for people to perform their civil duties and to improve upon their intellectual gifts from God. In the latter work, he turned deist arguments against them in order to defend the Bible as a source of history and the superiority of Christianity to natural religion.
Like many in the religious Enlightenment, Warburton also participated in secular intellectual activities. His learning was so vast that even the renowned literary critic Dr. Johnson was reported to have praised Warburton for his extensive reading. Warburton wrote a stirring defense of the poet Alexander Pope against foreign critics and even became his literary executor. He also released an edition of Shakespeare, wrote the preface to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and provided an essay on the literary tradition of chivalry and romance as part of a translation of Don Quixote.
Jacob Vernet (1698-1789) tried to develop a middle way of reasonable belief against deism, Catholicism, and more extreme Calvinistic dogmas in Calvinist Geneva. He helped make Arminianism the public creed of Geneva.
Moses Mendelssohn nicknamed “the Socrates of Berlin” was a leading figure of Haskalah. He translated the Torah into German and argued for the emancipation of European Jewry. Mendelssohn tried to revive medieval interpretive traditions, which was in contrast too many of the other Religious Enlighteners, especially of the Protestant traditions, who castigated the medieval Scholastic methods. He defended multiple meanings of scripture and considered the Bible a practical source of knowledge, advocating for a plain meaning understanding of the biblical text. He also participated in other intellectual areas such as literature, aesthetics, and philosophy, transcending his intellectual and public role as spokesperson for Judaism by earning an esteemed reputation as a great German Enlightenment figure more generally.
Adrien Lamourette is credited with inventing the term “Christian democracy.” He argued that reason and revelation are never in conflict, except in their misinterpretation and misapplication by humanity. Based on Rousseau, he suggested that sentiment could be one of the basis of religious knowledge. In his view, Christianity formed the best and most ideal society based on equality and sociability, which were two of the three ideals of the French Revolution. He believed Christian democracy as found in the Gospel and not the elaborate theology developed to protect the interests of the aristocracy made Christianity “a force against tyranny (302).” While he initially opposed the philosophes in his earlier writings, once he began defending the revolutionary principles in his sermons and merging it with his understanding of Christianity, he changed his views to defending the philosophes as proponents of liberty fighting against tyranny. He endorsed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12 1790) that imposed state regulations on the Catholic Church and argued for citizenship rights for Jewish people. He became one of the patriotic clergy who participated in the French Revolution and served in the assembly. He thought the revolution had the potential to rejuvenate Christianity to its purer more primitive form as found in the early church and spoke out against the corrupting force of church wealth. Unfortunately many of his fellow Catholic priests conspired against the revolution and rise of the Jacobins that brought the reign of terror led to his execution by the guillotine.
“The French Revolution was “that volcano- crater,” in Carlyle’s words, that so forcefully jolted Europe as to constitute a seismic shift. Europe’s political and cultural terrain was irrevocably altered, and in a manner that virtually eliminated the religious Enlightenment. France now inflicted its characteristic polarization on the rest of Europe, irreversibly separating it into two camps of implacable belligerents who divided over the Enlightenment and religion: the revolution’s advocates claimed the Enlightenment, its adversaries claimed established religion. Enlightenment not only came to be associated with the revolution but, for many, became culpable for its worst excesses, while its actual achievements, especially the middle ground of incremental reform, or even its professed aspirations, were either traduced or wilfully forgotten (311).”
Indeed, many accounts of the Enlightenment identify the French Revolution as being its end point. Sorkin takes this a step further and identifies the polarization of religion and the secular that was unique to France and exacerbated by the French Revolution and people’s reaction to it as being part of the reason we have developed an inflated perception of the Enlightenment as being strictly anti-religious and secular without acknowledging the full scope and variety of religious responses and incorporation of the Enlightenment ideas.
David Sorkin tries to counter the popular viewpoint of the Enlightenment touted by historians and sociologists of the 1960s as solely a secular movement that gave birth to contemporary European culture. The Enlightenment featured a variety of religious perspectives from moderate positions that believed in God as Creator, divine Providence, moral role of religion, Jesus as savior, and an immortal soul represented by luminaries such as Newton, Locke, Descartes, Montesquieu, Leibniz, and Wolff to much more radical versions of Benedict Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, and Diderot that espoused anti-religious and materialist perspectives.
The religious Enlightenment had its origins in the violent conflicts that accompanied the Protestant Reformation, which “discredited all belligerent, militant, and intolerant forms of religion (5-6).” In this context, the Enlightened reformers sought to use reason and faith to enhance each other, developing a middle ground between extreme Orthodoxy and hyper-skeptical philosophes. Reason without faith was seen as being as bad as blind faith. Knowledge should enhance one’s faith and prevent it from taking dogmatic and intolerant forms, while unchecked reason led to unbelief, immorality, and unbridled skepticism. For these thinkers reason remained an important tool for critical judgement when approaching faith.
Sorkin argues that this “broad understanding of reason had two important consequences. It became common practice among the religious enlighteners first to show what reason could teach about a particular doctrine, then to draw on scripture to certify, augment, and refine that knowledge. In addition, the religious enlighteners endorsed the distinction that revelation could not contain truths contrary to reason (contra rationem) yet did include truths above reason (supra rationem), namely, the truths of revelation not accessible to, but in harmony with, reason (12-13).”
Many of them argued against the idea that reason and faith were hostile, but rather complimentary and some religious questions were simply issues beyond reason rather than antagonistic to it.
They also attempted to address issues such as religious toleration, sources of morality, and how multiple faiths could coexist and function within a single nation state. These ideas not only benefited the religious, but also were of interest to the Enlightened despots and other states who understood that adopting reforms along these lines could help promote political and national stability. However, even if they broadly advocated for religious toleration many different thinkers had different ideas about how far to extend this toleration: with some limiting it only to different sects of Protestants, others to Christians, and almost everyone rejected extending it to atheists.
As Sorkin points out these reformers rejected the more radical ideas of separation of church and state and the development of civil religion. Many of the thinkers of the religious enlightenment defended toleration in the context of an established state religion.
“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 (6).”
One of their primary techniques for Biblical interpretation Was adopting an accommodationist approach that assumed God spoke to cultures of the past through ideas and concepts that they would understand within their own historical milieu, but which also contained universal truths when properly understood. At the same time, they tried to restrict revelation’s authority by acknowledging the Bible wasn’t a guide for all questions, only man’s salvation and relationship with God, leaving room for other intellectual inquiries outside the Bible like science and philosophy.
Sorkin focuses on six different thinkers who represent religious Enlightenment in different areas of Europe: William Warburton of England, Jacob Vernet of Geneva, Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten of Germany, the Jewish Moses Mendelssohn of Germany, Joseph Eybel of who served under Joseph II of the Hapsburg monarchy, and Adrien Lamourette of France. Each of these thinkers wrote works that offered a vision of moderate religion and attempted to revitalize their respective religious traditions by incorporating Enlightenment ideas.
Within the context of the Glorious Revolution, William Waburton expounded “heroic moderation” as a position of the Church of England. He published two works that made him an important figure of the Religious Enlightenment: the Alliance between Church and State (1737) and The Divine Legation (vol 1 in 1738 and vol 2 in 1741). In the first work, he rejected the idea that the church should control the state or the state should control the church. Instead church and state were independent entities that must work together in an alliance to support each other. The civil state retained power to punish criminal behavior, but not people’s opinions because it only had jurisdiction over the body, while religion with its jurisdiction over the soul should promote morality through the promise of ultimate reward and the hope to win God’s favor. In addition, religion provided encouragement for people to perform their civil duties and to improve upon their intellectual gifts from God. In the latter work, he turned deist arguments against them in order to defend the Bible as a source of history and the superiority of Christianity to natural religion.
Like many in the religious Enlightenment, Warburton also participated in secular intellectual activities. His learning was so vast that even the renowned literary critic Dr. Johnson was reported to have praised Warburton for his extensive reading. Warburton wrote a stirring defense of the poet Alexander Pope against foreign critics and even became his literary executor. He also released an edition of Shakespeare, wrote the preface to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and provided an essay on the literary tradition of chivalry and romance as part of a translation of Don Quixote.
Jacob Vernet (1698-1789) tried to develop a middle way of reasonable belief against deism, Catholicism, and more extreme Calvinistic dogmas in Calvinist Geneva. He helped make Arminianism the public creed of Geneva.
Moses Mendelssohn nicknamed “the Socrates of Berlin” was a leading figure of Haskalah. He translated the Torah into German and argued for the emancipation of European Jewry. Mendelssohn tried to revive medieval interpretive traditions, which was in contrast too many of the other Religious Enlighteners, especially of the Protestant traditions, who castigated the medieval Scholastic methods. He defended multiple meanings of scripture and considered the Bible a practical source of knowledge, advocating for a plain meaning understanding of the biblical text. He also participated in other intellectual areas such as literature, aesthetics, and philosophy, transcending his intellectual and public role as spokesperson for Judaism by earning an esteemed reputation as a great German Enlightenment figure more generally.
Adrien Lamourette is credited with inventing the term “Christian democracy.” He argued that reason and revelation are never in conflict, except in their misinterpretation and misapplication by humanity. Based on Rousseau, he suggested that sentiment could be one of the basis of religious knowledge. In his view, Christianity formed the best and most ideal society based on equality and sociability, which were two of the three ideals of the French Revolution. He believed Christian democracy as found in the Gospel and not the elaborate theology developed to protect the interests of the aristocracy made Christianity “a force against tyranny (302).” While he initially opposed the philosophes in his earlier writings, once he began defending the revolutionary principles in his sermons and merging it with his understanding of Christianity, he changed his views to defending the philosophes as proponents of liberty fighting against tyranny. He endorsed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12 1790) that imposed state regulations on the Catholic Church and argued for citizenship rights for Jewish people. He became one of the patriotic clergy who participated in the French Revolution and served in the assembly. He thought the revolution had the potential to rejuvenate Christianity to its purer more primitive form as found in the early church and spoke out against the corrupting force of church wealth. Unfortunately many of his fellow Catholic priests conspired against the revolution and rise of the Jacobins that brought the reign of terror led to his execution by the guillotine.
“The French Revolution was “that volcano- crater,” in Carlyle’s words, that so forcefully jolted Europe as to constitute a seismic shift. Europe’s political and cultural terrain was irrevocably altered, and in a manner that virtually eliminated the religious Enlightenment. France now inflicted its characteristic polarization on the rest of Europe, irreversibly separating it into two camps of implacable belligerents who divided over the Enlightenment and religion: the revolution’s advocates claimed the Enlightenment, its adversaries claimed established religion. Enlightenment not only came to be associated with the revolution but, for many, became culpable for its worst excesses, while its actual achievements, especially the middle ground of incremental reform, or even its professed aspirations, were either traduced or wilfully forgotten (311).”
Indeed, many accounts of the Enlightenment identify the French Revolution as being its end point. Sorkin takes this a step further and identifies the polarization of religion and the secular that was unique to France and exacerbated by the French Revolution and people’s reaction to it as being part of the reason we have developed an inflated perception of the Enlightenment as being strictly anti-religious and secular without acknowledging the full scope and variety of religious responses and incorporation of the Enlightenment ideas.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 2, 2011
The Religious Enlightenment is a paragon of clarity and scholarly care. Sorkin demonstrates that “[c]ontrary to the secular master narrative, the Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief but conducive to it… mak[ing] possible new iterations of faith.” His study constitutes a significant contribution to 18th-century scholarship.
August 12, 2011
Great thesis, compelling ideas, but several chapters were poorly written. Too bad.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews