through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the effect of his work was to reduce still further the place that a historical Christian faith and its institutions might have in the concerns of Western culture. It was he who in a short essay of 1784 gave the most celebrated answer to a question about this new movement posed by one of his Berlin contemporaries, ‘What is Enlightenment?’: ‘Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity’.
