Reviewed by R. J. W. Mills
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2019.2.6
Cite: R. J. W. Mills, review of The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment 1690–1805, by Thomas Ahnert, Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 1, no. 2 (fall 2019): 20-21, doi: 10.32655/srej.2019.2.6.
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This engaging work is a significant contribution to scholarship both on the Scottish Enlightenment and on the relationship between the European Enlightenment and religion. Writing with persuasive acuity, Ahnert examines how over the course of the eighteenth century a shift in emphasis occurred in Scottish theology away from doctrinal orthodoxy and toward moral conduct as the true measure of piety. The stress that leading clerical figures of the Scottish Enlightenment put on pious action was bound up with a skeptical reclassification of the capacity of unassisted reason to achieve epistemic certainty in doctrinal matters. These clergymen wanted to get away from the orthodox idea of salvation sola fide, which viewed good conduct as a secondary element of Christianity. The Moderates, the key grouping of “enlightened” clergymen who emerged by the 1750s, encouraged piety and virtue through recommending the “culture of the mind.” The term “culture” was used as meaning the process of cultivation: the incremental improvement of the moral and religious character of an individual through scripture-inspired practice. To avoid “papism,” however, the Moderates maintained that divine support was still necessary for salvation. Ahnert purposefully presents us with a paradox in the process of cultivation: orthodox Presbyterians maintained the existence of natural religion resulting unavoidably from the act of reasoning, whereas the Moderates believed that religious tenets were achievable through access to divine revelation and were of secondary importance to pious behavior.

Ahnert charts the ideas of theologians and moral philosophers promulgating this new understanding of religion and reason, their orthodox Presbyterian opponents’ position, and the various controversies that these rival understandings caused within the Kirk. The introduction situates Ahnert’s argument within scholarship on the relationship between religion and European Enlightenment and the characterization of the Scottish Enlightenment. The opening chapter places the reader among the theological disputes within Scottish Presbyterianism that occurred immediately after the Glorious Revolution. Orthodox Calvinists held that the Kirk was in danger from numerous threats, including the spread of fashionable deistic thinking, homegrown “Bourignonist” fanatics who believed in immediate divine inspiration, and prominent theologians including Henry Scougal, George Garden, and John Simson who maintained the importance of pious practice over doctrine acceptance. The second chapter examines the growth of heterodox Presbyterianism between 1720 and 1750. Clergymen such as Archibald Campbell, William Wishart, and Francis Hutcheson stressed the importance of genuine faith focusing on charitable action. Reason is weak: knowledge of religious truths is imperfect and hence should not be disputed dogmatically. Instead, pious conduct was central to justification; salvation was not achieved by faith alone but by action and divine support. Hutcheson’s religious thought is innovatively recontextualized within this new theological current.

The third chapter offers a fresh perspective on the Moderates in the 1750s. Ahnert focuses here first on their position on patronage: they undertook a difficult balancing act between maintaining the authority of the General Assembly and respecting the tender consciences of individuals. He then examines how the Moderates, with Hugh Blair a key figure, accepted and extended the arguments of the heterodox figures discussed in the previous chapter on moral and religious “culture.” In both cases the Moderates were less secular than commonly argued. Ahnert next explores their orthodox critics, with John Witherspoon the main focus, and their arguments during the disputes in the mid-eighteenth-century Kirk. Ahnert stresses how the orthodox maintained a far stronger belief in the possibility of natural religion, and he discusses the Common Sense philosophers’ views on relationship between religion and reason. Primarily using Thomas Reid as an example, he shows that the Common Sense school held that the Moderates’ appeal to natural sentiments in encouraging pious action was naïve. But Reid and his colleagues did share a focus on the culture of the mind, rather than adherence to doctrine, as being central to good character. The conclusion examines the Moderates’ position during the Leslie Affair of 1805. Historiographical orthodoxy here is that Moderates had become a backward-looking interest group trying to maintain their grip on power. Ahnert examines them from this institutional angle, but he also analyzes the continuation of their earlier generation’s views of “culture” and the successful characterization of the Moderates by the Popular Party as a complacent and lethargic grouping within the Kirk.

Ahnert has written an innovative and persuasive book with broader significance for understanding the European Enlightenment. And he has new things to say about many of the conventional interpretations of key controversies within the Scottish Enlightenment. The following thoughts emerge as conversation points and not criticisms. Many of the “enlightened” theorists that Ahnert discusses maintained a belief, despite their skepticism about unassisted reason, that humans are providentially framed to passionately believe in the existence of one God by dint of internal sense or intuitive principles. As a result, “enlightened” Scots dampened, rather than rejected, the earlier Calvinist belief in the unavoidable knowledge of religious doctrine. Secondly, the paradox of the “enlightened” being skeptical about reason is less puzzling when viewed from the perspective of the dispute over innate religious ideas in the late seventeenth century. Viewed in the context of the abandonment of the innatist doctrine partly following from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke’s stress on the hard work involved in reasoning and the role of revelation for the majority, and the increased willingness to view the anthropological testimony of human societies as demonstrating religious diversity, the Moderates’ position can seem eminently “enlightened.” Is Locke not more important in framing the philosophical developments described? Moreover, the relationship between the contemporaneous Scottish and English debates over the religious capabilities of human nature would be a fruitful area for further research. Finally, Ahnert describes the changing understanding of the role of moral conduct as being primarily a theological dispute and certainly far less to do with the positive reception of ancient thought, especially in the form of “Christian Stoicism.” Another potential line of further investigation would be the relationship between these theological debates and the study of religion within the “science of human nature.” In the case of many of the key works—those of Archibald Campbell, Lord Kames, and William Robertson spring to mind—skeptical positions on human reasoning powers were being grounded on arguments framed using these new methods of investigation.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Galbraith
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2019.2.5
Cite: Jeffrey Galbraith, review of Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, by William J. Bulman, Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 1, no. 2 (fall 2019): 16-19, doi: 10.32655/srej.2019.2.5
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The Enlightenment, in its traditional, boiled-down form, describes the European intellectual movement that rejected older forms of religion and knowledge in pursuit of rationalism and science. Philosophical in nature, anticlerical in impulse, the Enlightenment was the product of emancipating ideas, the embrace of which led to the production of mature, autonomous individuals. This traditional account of the Enlightenment, viewed as heralding the dawn of secular liberalism, has met resistance from scholars who argue that traditional knowledge and belief frequently proved compatible with new ideas. Recent scholarship has gone a step further in laying down its challenge to the standard view. Current work focuses on the role of media in the period, attending foremost to the articulation and dissemination of ideas rather than to the ideas themselves. Such an approach yields a thicker, more insightful description of the changes occurring in late-seventeenth-century England. Historian William J. Bulman’s examination of the Anglican clergyman Lancelot Addison joins this growing body of scholarship. In Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648­–1715, Bulman argues that the clergyman’s life and writings reveal a phase of enlightenment that preceded the latitudinarian, rationalist Anglicanism of the eighteenth century.

The life and writings of Lancelot Addison provide a window onto the shift from late humanist learning to Enlightenment historical scholarship. In this, they yield a narrative that belies the typical association of conformism with coercion. Addison devoted his learning to the project of securing civil peace after the violence of the English Civil War. His work, along with that of other Anglican divines, is notable for demonstrating “the predicament of secularity” in the period (177). In this conception, which Bulman adapts from Charles Taylor, secularity describes a set of conditions under which public religion recognized and responded to an increasingly pluralist context. As Anglican conformists engaged a diverse audience both at home and abroad, they were forced to consider questions such as, “How was it possible to persuade the pious, the impious, the radical, and the orthodox, all at the same time?” (177). Anglican Enlightenment argues that such rhetorical predicaments pushed Addison and other Restoration clergy toward scholarly innovation. From the treatise West Barbary (1671) and the Islamic history of The First State of Muhamedism (1678) to the pastoral care of The Catechumen (1690), Addison’s works reveal the rhetorical, non-coercive dimension of conformism and, significantly, the global context that shaped it.

Attention to the practices and institutions of Enlightenment media distinguishes Anglican Enlightenment as a work of history that yields insights into scholarly methods, literary form, and styles of worship. Bulman’s method, which finds precedent in the work of Jonathan Sheehan and Oscar Kenshur, operates on the assumption that tools and practices do not bear any necessary or essential ideological value in themselves. The Modest Plea for the Clergy (1677) attests to the merits of this approach. Addison’s treatise employs scholarly methods that predate the deist Matthew Tindal’s use of similar tools decades later to attack the clergy: “the freethinkers’ tools,” Bulman explains, “had not been invented by dissidents, but long cultivated by the establishment” (3). The discussion of toleration provides an additional example. While we typically regard toleration as the key to the progress of liberal democracy, Bulman builds on recent revisionist scholarship to examine toleration as a strategy of governance that “could be championed by adherents of any ideology if the moment seemed right” (210). The tools of argumentation acquired by clergymen from their late humanist training represent one of the central conflicts examined in the book. The humanist curriculum was often singled out as having caused the theological disputes that led to civil war. In the Restoration period, Anglican conformists sought to neutralize the association between rhetoric and violence; however, some, like Addison, remained ambivalent about the value of public engagement. Although he found it necessary to speak out in defense of moral and divine truths, there seemed to be “no obvious way to simultaneously protect the truth and bring peace to church and state” (174). Such was the dilemma of public theology.

Anglican Enlightenment is divided into four thematic sections of two chapters each, comprising Foundations, Culture, Religion, and Politics. This choice of organization at times feels awkward, resulting in a disjointed approach that revisits Addison’s works in different contexts. Chapter 1 focuses on Addison’s education in the traditional humanist curriculum, which he began during the Civil War and later continued at Oxford during the Interregnum. Addison’s humanist education honed his argumentative skills, giving him a powerful set of tools that would lead him into orientalist scholarship. Chapter 2 follows young Addison to the English colony at Tangier after the Restoration, where he served as chaplain and worked as a spy gathering intelligence for the state. In these chapters, Bulman frames Anglican enlightenment as challenging any expected connection between innovation and freedom. “Innovative, scholarly travel writing in this period,” he argues, “was in no way dependent upon freedom from the shackles of authority” (59). The cultural and religious diversity that Anglican divines encountered through travel only intensified the conditions of secularity that they met at home. Time spent in North Africa caused Addison and other Englishmen to relativize their own context, with the result that “they began to hammer out a sort of rudimentary social science that allowed them to understand all civilizations on the same terms, so better to manipulate them” (42).

In the next set of chapters, Bulman argues that Anglican conformism in this early phase of the Enlightenment proved innovative rather than reactionary. In chapter 3, the subject is the orientalist scholarship that resulted from Addison’s days in the Maghrib. Bulman demonstrates how this work reveals advances in historiography, particularly in relation to the changing norms of credibility. Chapter 4 focuses on the historical study of religion in The Present State of the Jews (1675) and The First State of Muhamedism (1678). Addison engaged in the study of civil and natural religion in these treatises, in effect working out a comparative study of religion. The most important innovation discussed in this section is Addison’s universal theory of religious imposture. As Bulman explains, “by the later seventeenth century, the basic categories of post-Reformation polemic were becoming truly universalized. There was no longer anything inherently Christian about popery, puritanism, or priestcraft, and there was no longer anything inherently European about universal monarchy” (126). For Addison, history revealed that priestcraft was a problem for all civil religions. It was not merely the domain of muftis and imams but could be found among laypeople as well. Although the charge of priestcraft is typically regarded as the invention of Whig anticlerical writers, Bulman argues that Addison’s work takes the novelty out of their challenge to the clergy.

Historical accounts of civil and natural religion aided conformists in responding to the predicament of secularity. In The First State of Muhamedism, Addison analyzed Islam as a civil religion that offered numerous parallels to England’s recent conflicts. In Addison’s depiction, Islamic jihadists looked a lot like some puritans, while the actions of Muhammed mirrored those of Cromwell. However, the study of civil religion suggested multiple, often incompatible, recommendations for how to proceed in the present. For Addison, the answer lay in proper religious instruction. Addison’s support for catechizing, found in the tract The Primitive Institution (1674), serves Bulman as an example of how conformists advanced their agenda through noncoercive means: “Because it was the only sure way to control men’s minds, catechizing young people and their ignorant elders was the linchpin of Anglican Enlightenment” (158). Bulman’s phrasing in this passage captures the grudging tension that animated conformists. Anglican elites accepted the conditions of secularity even as they continued to seek control of society. The sixth chapter, on worship, provides an additional angle on this tension, this time in relation to the tracts An Introduction to the Sacrament (1682) and The Catechumen (1690). In these, Addison found in the sacrificial function of ancient natural religions a means of defending “the media of the Laudian style” (186). As is the case throughout Anglican Enlightenment, history again provided an alternative to theological conflict. Whereas arguments for ceremony divided England before the Civil War, enlightened Anglicans fared much better when attempting to advance their Laudian commitments. They achieved a “silent triumph” through efforts such as Addison’s search for the universal characteristics of natural religion (177).

The last section of the book situates Addison in the context of political conflict, spanning the period from the Declaration of Indulgence to his appointment as Dean of Lichfield in 1683 and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. While previous chapters focused on Addison’s backward-looking gaze, the seventh chapter examines the same set of works in the context of the pressing partisan concerns that often faced the Restoration church. We learn, for instance, how the Declaration of Indulgence prompted his work on catechizing, and how The Modest Plea for the Clergy served as his response to the anticlerical rage of the 1670s. The front matter of The First State of Muhamedism shows Addison endorsing a skeptical view of the Popish Plot. In this last example, Bulman explains that Addison characteristically used literary form to “elude censure, and discourage open controversy” during the succession crisis (233). Unlike his more disputatious brethren, a group which included the vitriolic Samuel Parker, Addison pursued the path of restraint, opting for a more measured response to conflict. He would go on to reprint and repackage earlier works as a way of contributing to subsequent controversies, such as when he designed the third edition of The First State of Muhamedism as part of the Anglican resistance against James II. The treatise that “had once served as a takedown of anti-popery,” Bulman explains, “was now being used to skewer a Catholic king” (249). The practice of reprinting provides another testament to how Enlightenment media could be put to different ideological purposes.

The last section, “Politics,” offers a more traditional, and some might say more helpful, presentation of Addison’s work. But it quickly becomes clear why Anglican Enlightenment saves it for last. While partisan context often lends itself to a reductive interpretation of an author’s motives, Addison proves a bad fit for existing scholarly narratives of the period, which Bulman faults for their “Manichean” rigidity (5). An accurate picture of enlightened Anglicanism requires bringing to light the tension, and the irony, to which clergy like Addison remained committed. As Bulman explains, “Anglican pamphleteers and orators never tired of calling for violent disputation and excessive preaching to be replaced by diligent catechizing and humble homilies. Yet by publicly arguing against public argument they partly perpetuated the very dilemma about confronting threats to the church that their interventions were meant to resolve” (164). This irony serves to clarify rather than obscure, as Bulman shows how Addison’s work provides a new perspective on a number of public clashes. The last such conflict, coinciding with Addison’s death in 1703, is the controversy over occasional conformity. Building on recent work by Brent Sirota, Bulman shows how the controversy led Laudian, Tory clergymen like Addison to abandon their public support of limited religious toleration, despite the fact that it had long served as “a rhetorical staple of post-Reformation Protestantism” (279). With the divisions in the church continuing to widen in the aftermath of 1688, this moment represents the demise of enlightened Anglicanism. In response to the challenge of the freethinkers, the high church movement abandoned the historical study of civil and natural religion that had informed so much of Addison’s work, insisting on recognizing the church as a society distinct from the state. During the reign of Queen Anne, the moderation sought by Addison became the focus of dispute.

The book’s final pages attest to the value of Anglican Enlightenment for literary scholars as well as historians. Addison’s death brought about the return of Lancelot’s son, Joseph, from his tour of the continent after the completion of his studies. Joseph has proven to be the better known of the two Addisons, due to his authorship of the Tatler and Spectator papers with Richard Steele. The enlightened Anglicanism of the father, however, offers a significant vantage point for gaining perspective on the son. Bulman concludes the book with the suggestion that Joseph Addison carried on his father’s conformist agenda through the medium of the periodical essay. The moderate sociability that Joseph developed in the Spectator essays, he notes, “speak[s] far more to the perfection of pastoral power in secular form than to a triumph for free speech in a literary public sphere” (283). The Spectator worked out a form of Whig sociability that, for Bulman, combined freedom and discipline in a way reminiscent of the father’s response to the problem of public theology. The claim is well worth pondering further. With insights like these, Anglican Enlightenment should be required reading for anyone willing to wrestle with the complex nature of the Enlightenment and its legacy.

Reviewed by Siti Sarah Binte Daud
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2019.2.4
Cite: Siti Sarah Binte Daud, review of The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam, by Ziad Elmarsafy, Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 1, no. 2 (fall 2019): 14-15, doi: 10.32655/srej.2019.2.4
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In The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam, Ziad Elmarsafy argues that the Qur’an, the sacred text of Islam, was a key influence on some of the most ground-breaking intellectual work in the European Enlightenment because “the engagement with Islam enable[d] a radical break with past traditions and the conception of something new” (x). Such “shifts in perspectives,” according to Elmarsafy, were possible only because of “new translations of the Qur’an that were being produced in Europe after the mid-seventeenth century,” translations that moved away from the “outright hostility” found in Ludovico Marraci’s version to the “genuine understanding” of  George Sale’s version (xi).

As such, the book can be broadly divided into two parts. Elmarsafy dedicates the first half of The Enlightenment Qur’an to charting the history of translating the Qur’an into Western languages from the twelfth to the eighteenth century. In the second half of the book he is concerned with the way in which such translations were used by some of the most iconic figures of the European Enlightenment.

The book’s first half opens with a chapter that traces the different translations across the centuries and notes how they are marked by the political upheavals of their time. These translations, Elmarsafy writes, “bear witness to a history of conflict—not only with Islam but within Christendom—as well as a secret attraction across the boundary between cultures and religions” (1). Throughout the chapter, Elmarsafy provides examples of landmark translations that appear at specific points in history, along with copious descriptions of the climate of ideas that produced each unique version. He notes that the earliest translations, such as the Toledan Collection commissioned by Peter the Venerable in 1142, were borne out of a desire to “convert Muslims” and thus became a “standard part of Christian anti-Muslim polemical and apologetical literature” (1). Later translations were still marked by anti-Muslim sentiment despite taking a “dramatic turn for the better,” as translators had to include such anti-Muslim propaganda in order to “foil any censors” (8–9). One example is Marraci’s remarkable 1698 translation, which is ruined by the “frequent recourse to military language and the “refutations” that he adds to display his “open hostility” toward Islam (13). It is not until George Sale, whose “youth coincided with key advances in European studies about Islam” and the “growing Cartesianism of early eighteenth-century Utrecht,” that translations of the Qur’an began to improve (14).

Sale’s translation of the Qur’an is of special interest to Elmarsafy, and the reason for this becomes abundantly clear as the book transitions into the second half of the argument. In chapter 2, Elmarsafy expounds on the key differences between Sale’s and Marraci’s translations. Marraci, he writes, saw his “task as verbal warfare” (38) and had put great emphasis on characterizing Muhammad, a key figure in the Qur’an, as violent and forceful by describing him as a fraud who appropriated Judeo-Christian truths to “hoodwink and bully his helpless victims” (44). Sale however, bearing no anti-Islamic agenda, characterized Muhammad as “the legislator of the Arabs, rather than a warrior king,” and thus creates a more respectable version of Muhammad in his translations (41). The way that their different perspectives produced wildly different conclusions from the same text is explored further in the following chapter, in which Elmarsafy outlines how the two translators negotiated the similarities and differences between the Qur’an and Christian scriptures.

However, it is chapter 2’s findings that have the most bearing on the second half of this book. The revamping of the figure of Muhammad in Sale’s (and later in Claude Savary’s) translation underpins chapters 4, 5, and 6, which explore how this new conceptualization of Muhammad influenced the ideas of Voltaire, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, and Napoleon Bonaparte. In chapter 4, Elmarsafy shows how Voltaire’s “reading of Sale’s translation of the Qur’an” (83) allowed him to “rehabilitate” the figure of Muhammad and “recognise his ability as a statesman and ‘grand homme’ whose existence changes history” (81). This view of Muhammad was also taken by Jean-Jacque Rousseau. Elmarsafy posits in chapter 5 that the Frenchman would very likely have come across Sale’s Preliminary Discourse and would have used Sale’s Muhammad as “an important case study” upon which to theorize his ideal legislator (127). What follows is a fascinating chapter on Napoleon Bonaparte and the influence that Savary’s translation of the Qur’an had on him. Like Sale, Savary painted Muhammad as a “legislator and a demagogue” (147), and Napoleon, Elmarsafy observes, “displays more than a few parallels with Savary’s portrait of Muhammad” and “thought he himself could have been Muhammad” (148–49).

Elmarsafy rounds off this illustrious list with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, linked to the chapters before him through “a mechanism similar to the one operative in the cases of Voltaire and Napoleon: an identification with a great man” (160). However, unlike Napoleon, Goethe has a gentler conceptualization of Muhammad. This milder impression arises from Goethe’s ideas on world literature and his own role as a translator. For him, the “operation of literature is bound intimately with its role as an earthly gospel”; he saw the work of a translator as akin to that of a prophet “who transmits God’s message in a language that the people … can understand.” (174). Thus, Goethe saw “in Muhammad and the Qur’an a brilliant example of what words can do.” (177). Elmarsafy suggests that the influence of Goethe’s views on world literature can be seen on Thomas Carlyle, who wrote an “account of Muhammad that overturns the routine accusations of imposture and ambition in favor of a man seeking, finding, and proclaiming answers regarding his place in the universe” (177–78).

Elmarsafy’s book is thus a persuasive and insightful challenge to two of the most enduring assumptions of the European Enlightenment: the notion that religion had little impact on this fiercely rationalistic era and the widely held belief that the “rapport” between the Islamic and the European world was “defined by conflict alone” (x).