Dror Wahrman | Review Essay: God and the Enlightenment, Introduction | The American Historical Review, 108.4

Review Essay

God and the Enlightenment

Historians of the West have a love-hate relationship with "modernity." The burden seems easier on sociologists and political scientists, say, who often write about modernity as a notion that is analytically equivalent to "antiquity": that is, one that is conceptually straightforward even if its meaning remains an open and much debated question. Historians, by contrast, are more likely to be skeptical about the very meaningfulness of "modernity": What does it refer to? When does it begin? What multiple presuppositions does the very assumption of modernity necessitate, regardless of how one defines it or locates it chronologically? And yet, at the same time, so much historical inquiry is egged on—almost despite itself—by a teleological curiosity about the origins of things modern. (It is revealing that historians, typically, find the adjective more congenial than the greater commitment demanded by the noun.)

For no period, perhaps, is this more true than for the eighteenth century—that century poised precariously between the "Early Modern" and "the Modern." Practitioners in this field have long been convinced that their gaze is focused on the threshold of modernity, and that if they hold it long enough the mysteries of the modern will inevitably unravel in front of their eyes. Many contemporaries agreed: the early nineteenth century boasted a whole choir of witnesses who reflected back on the huge, perhaps unbridgeable gap between their "modern" world and that of the eighteenth century—a gap proportionally greater, they asserted, than that between other adjacent generations in historical memory.

Predictably, the understanding of the nature of the transition to modernity has changed with every new generation of historians: economic, political, social, and cultural factors have all taken their successive turns on the front seat of the scholarly bandwagon. And yet one element in the changing faces of the nascent modern has until recently remained, overall, rather constant: the modern, we were told, was secular. In any case, it was more so than the pre-modern. The balloon of modernity that finally broke its centuries-old chains could only soar upward by jettisoning overboard the ballast of religion: with a lesser weight assigned to God, the sky was the limit.

The view of religion as antithetical to European modernity is the point of departure for the following two Review Essays. Both Jonathan Sheehan and Dale K. Van Kley wish to revise and indeed reverse this view: surveying recent literature—Van Kley focusing on France, Sheehan primarily on England and Germany—they insist that such a picture of modernity suffers from what Donald Winch has elsewhere described as "premature secularization."¹ The works they review signal a new trend in the historiography of Enlightenment Europe that brings religion centrally back into the picture. As such, moreover, these works partake of a broader return of religion among European historians: a comparable case is the history of the Renaissance, the characterization of which as a secularizing period has come already a while back under heavy assault in the works of Natalie Zemon Davis, Donald Weinstein, and Carlo Ginzburg, among many others. To be sure, historians are not likely to be greatly surprised by evidence of tenacious survivals of earlier religious forms, bastions of resistance that coexisted together with those new Enlightenment trends. But the essays before us suggest a more powerful and more surprising argument: namely, that the resurrection of eighteenth-century religion is not simply a shift of scholarly emphasis to the limits of European modernity but rather the belated identification of religion at the heart of the project of modernity itself, a constitutive element of its very shaping.

Dale Van Kley's "Christianity as Casualty and Chrysalis of Modernity" is primarily concerned with the contradiction between these two characterizations, casualty and chrysalis, as it unfolded in the French case: that is to say, why did a deeply Christian nation suddenly turn against Christianity more radically than any other, as was the case in the postrevolutionary efforts of "dechristianization"? In order to get there, Van Kley first directs the reader's attention to the considerable evidence for the vitality of eighteenth-century French Catholicism, encouraging us to rethink the images of a straightforward conflict between "zealots" and "the enlightened" that had been common currency since the days of Paul Hazard, or of the Enlightenment as a straightforward "rise of modern paganism" in the manner of Peter Gay. Secondly, Van Kley suggests that the break between the French Revolution and religion was ultimately contingent rather than inherent to the revolutionary project: the advent of modernity, even in the exceptional French case, did not inevitably require it. Nothing, perhaps, demonstrates this contingency more clearly than a comparison with the American Revolution, where, as Patricia Bonomi wrote almost twenty years ago, "evangelical Calvinism and religious rationalism did not carve separate channels but flowed as one stream toward the crisis of 1776."²

Jonathan Sheehan's "Religion, Enlightenment, and the Enigma of Secularization" squarely considers the consequences of making religion into a cornerstone of the Enlightenment, given the Enlightenment's longstanding reputation as the supposedly secularizing movement par excellence and the handmaiden of Western modernity. Not least among those consequences are the difficulties and possibilities that emerge as we try to assign new meanings to the key terms in this equation—"religion," "enlightenment," and "secularization." "Religion," Sheehan reminds us, is not an ahistorical, heuristic analytical category but rather a category that was made and remade in highly relevant ways during the very period under investigation. For "enlightenment," Sheehan takes the opposite route, suggesting a different heuristic meaning in order to capture more precisely and more broadly the distinctiveness of this period: namely, as a set of communicative and knowledge-organizing practices or "media." The forms of such media had a more decisive modernizing effect than any particular ideas expressed through them; a point that Sheehan drives home with an intriguing coupling of two unlikely eighteenth-century texts, drawn from his own work, whose commonalities of form override their apparent disparity of message. Sheehan's redirection of the Enlightenment from the realm of ideas to the realm of the structures that make the communication of such ideas possible, it may be noted, brings to mind Roger Chartier's well-known Cultural Origins of the French Revolution: a conjuncture that in turn may lead us to wonder about the possible connections between two parallel historiographical developments—the revival of historical interest in religion, as documented in these essays, and the ascendance of cultural history at about the same time.³

Finally, the third category that is now in need of reconsideration is "secularization," a task with which both pieces before us centrally engage. Van Kley prefers to replace it with "laicization," which allows for change without this change amounting to a decrease in religion, and which he then contrasts with that contingent and tragic postrevolutionary attempt at "dechristianization." Sheehan is equally committed to a narrative of change—the eighteenth century for him becomes a "post-theological" age—but one that is far from equivalent to secularization, as is evident from the prominence of religious figures in its unfolding. These conclusions therefore direct the reader's attention to the question that is likely to become the next step: What was God doing in the eighteenth century? If God's continuing central presence during this period cannot be denied, and yet if this presence was indeed different from that which God had had in previous centuries, then it is only by stepping outside the arguments for and against a narrative of secularization—as both essays in front of us exhort us to do—that we can grasp the distinctiveness of the European eighteenth century, in contrast both to the "Early Modern" that had preceded it and to the "Modern" that succeeded it.

Dror Wahrman

Associate Editor

Notes

¹Ê Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), 23.

²Ê Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion,Society, and Politics in Colonial America, rev. edn. (1986; New York, 2003), 188.

³Ê Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1991).

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