Reviewed by Brijraj Singh 
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2019.2.7
Cite: Brijraj Singh, review of New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment, edited by Brett C. McInelly and Paul E. Kerry, Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 1, no. 2 (fall 2019): 22-27, doi: 10.32655/srej.2019.2.7 .
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The twenty-first century has seen the reestablishment of religion at the center of Enlightenment studies. If there was a belief toward the end of the twentieth century that the growing modernization of society in the eighteenth century resulted in a fading of religious influence on people’s lives,¹ it is being increasingly asserted now that even this secularization was not free of religious influence.² As the blurb on the back cover of New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment states, while people still believe that the Enlightenment led to a growing secularization of society, the fact is that religion not only continued to occupy a central position in all aspects of eighteenth-century life but also “shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways.” The fourteen essays by as many writers in this book continue the exploration of the interweaving of religious and Enlightenment concepts. They do not all follow the same definition of religion or indeed even of the Enlightenment; in fact, none attempts a definition of these contentious terms. But many exhibit originality of argument as well as deep and thorough scholarship, and all are written in a clear, very readable, sometimes elegant style.

In a collection such as this it is inevitable that while certain subjects are dealt with, others perhaps equally important have to be left out. New Approaches offers illumination into little-known recesses and crevices of the eighteenth century’s religious concerns, but in the process bypasses certain major issues. Thus we have a very fine essay by Kevin Cope on insecto-theology, but nothing on the development and spread of Methodism in Britain and the United States, its influence on the lives of the working classes, and its contribution to the Industrial Revolution. The late Bob Tennant contributed a very scholarly study of the work of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in the Isles of Scilly, a far-flung corner of England that was little visited in the eighteenth century, but the book has nothing about Christian missionary work further afield in India, China, or Japan. There is an essay on the Jewish scholar Daniil Avraamovich Khvol’son, who converted to the Orthodox Russian Church, but nothing about any of the three important British writers and religious thinkers, Swift, Johnson, or Blake, or about August Herman Francke and the Halle Pietists. The occasional essay refers to eighteenth-century sermons. Sermons formed an important part of the publications of that period: they were widely read, and it was in them that major theological positions were advanced or controverted. However, no essay in the book deals with them. The result is that while the topics addressed in New Approaches make it a valuable research tool for the specialized scholar, they also limit its appeal for the general student who wishes to find out more about significant religious developments in the age of Enlightenment.

Collections of this sort usually have a broadly defined focus, generally thematic, though they can sometimes follow other organizing principles, and the essays themselves tend to be prefaced by the editor(s) laying out the aims and purposes of the book. Such an introductory essay is absent from this volume. It does have a one-and-a-half page preface in which the editor, Brett McInelly, states that the essays demonstrate “a breadth of disciplinary perspectives” on the study of religion in the Enlightenment, but the blurb on the back cover is more useful in explaining the essays’ purpose.

In the absence of any guidance or direction from the editor at the outset, and lacking a theme, however broad, the book is less like other collections and more like a high-class scholarly journal that includes many outstanding essays on widely disparate subjects, not all of them having to do fully with religion or indeed even the very long eighteenth century. (Khvol’son, the subject of one of the essays, died in 1911.)³ Essay follows essay without any sense of theme, national boundaries, or chronology; they seldom talk to one another, and if they do, it is only by accident. One peculiar and ironical consequence is that the whole book is somehow less than the individual essays that make it up. Therefore perhaps the best way to review it might be to consider the essays individually, noticing where they might show some convergence.

Those who have heard or read Kevin Cope will agree that of all contemporary eighteenth-century scholars he has the most distinctive style. I can characterize this style best in words that Sir John Denham applied to the Thames in “Cooper’s Hill”: “Though deep, yet clear,” and “without overflowing, full.” This style is on display in Cope’s essay on Pierre Lyonnet’s 1799 commentary on Friedrich Christian Lesser’s Insecto-Theology as an example of the argument from design: God exists because without Him the complex designs and subtle interrelationships we perceive in the world of insects would not be possible. Both these entomologists, Cope maintains, hold that the structure of an object corresponds “to some greater structure in the cosmos,” (6) that in the minute parts of an insect and their interconnectedness one can perceive the hand of a master Creator. But while Lesser bases his reasoning on a rather simple taxonomical analog, Lyonnet, fully conscious of contradictions and discrepancies in Lesser’s argument, proposes what may be called a more complex ecological model that perceives the wholeness of relationships between all life forms. All of them, even the meanest, have intelligence, and thus are participants in the creation of God’s design. But, though Cope does not say so, this God is not necessarily a Christian God; He is more akin to the deists’ God, who has created a perfect and complex world which now keeps ticking on its own. This is an ironical conclusion, given that Lesser was a parish priest and Lyonnet well read in theology.

On the other hand, Samuel Clarke visualizes a Christian God. A Newtonian and a latitudinarian, he argued in his Boyle lectures, as Jonathan Pike demonstrates, that human beings have free will because God has it and He has endowed them with it. So, like the entomologists, Clarke sees a relationship between God and the nature of human beings. However, God, being good, cannot choose but to do good. However, human beings in their post-postlapsarian state, though capable of making the right use of free will, are free to choose wrong; and this is what makes them moral agents. This view takes God away from the deists and allies Him closer to a more generally accepted Christian view, even as Clarke clarifies and adds to the discussion of free will and human intelligence.

Andrew Kloes shows that in Britain, America, and Germany there existed an anti-Enlightenment movement that can be labeled as the evangelical revival and that saw history as an ongoing spiritual war between the devil and the people of God. The Enlightenment was the work of the devil. So were all revolutions, for though they tried to usher in a better society, it was not truly better because it was not based on religion. Kloes’s essay, unfortunately, suffers from overkill: he piles example upon example and gives quotation after quotation to prove what is ultimately a simple and clear point.

The evangelical revival was represented in the Massachusetts Bay Colony by the Mathers, father and son; Newtonian science and rationality had Thomas Brattle as their spokesman. In his essay entitled “Tale of the Comet,” Douglass M. Furrh maintains that Increase Mather thought that the 1680 comet presaged destruction: it was a sign of God’s anger. So he asked people to repent and reform. Brattle, on the other hand, saw it as a natural phenomenon that needed to be studied scientifically and explained rationally. These divergences were to fracture the political stability of the Colony, for Increase’s attitudes led eventually to the Salem witch trials in which his son Cotton played a leading part, instigating the execution of the accused. Ultimately Brattle’s scientific attitude prevailed. The Mathers were expelled from Harvard College, the curriculum was secularized, and a nature-based theology emerged in the Colony. Enlightenment ideas won out over superstition-laden religious beliefs.

Two essays in New Approaches deal with religion in Russia. Andrew C. Reed, in “An Apostate Maskil,” offers an account of the life and achievements of Daniil Avraamovich Khvol’son. In the 1830s Nicholas I started a project of encouraging Jewish children to get an education, partly to suppress any danger of uprisings and partly to get qualified people to serve the state. Khvol’son took full advantage. He went to study in Germany, where he was exposed to Enlightenment ideas. He obtained a doctorate from Munich; his book on the Sabians was greatly praised, and on returning to Russia he was appointed a professor in St. Petersburg. He converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, becoming what Shulamit Magnus has called a “good bad Jew,” one who gave up his religion but then used his newly gained position of importance to help former coreligionists. The essay demonstrates the influence of German Enlightenment thought in modernizing Russia.

Andreas Berg’s essay is also concerned with modernizing Russia. He discusses Mikhail M. Kheraskov’s belief that religious sensibility is crucial in transforming a nation from rudeness to civilization. Russian Orthodoxy, Kheraskov thought, was incapable of inculcating civic morality in its followers. Only to a select few individuals of pure lives were God’s truths revealed, and they then spread these truths among the general people, a point which he argued in his novel Numa Pompilius. Numa, Rome’s ruler and founder of the Roman religion, realized that though the State may legislate a religion which, in turn, may lead to civic virtue, this religion has to be grounded in spiritual values that belong only to the pure at heart, for spiritualism is within the purview of the individual alone, not of the State. Historically Numa’s religion had transformed Roman society into a virtuous one; and Kheraskov hoped that if Russian rulers could be virtuous like Numa, they would, without opposing existing rituals, be able to create new ones that would inculcate civic morality.

In his essay on George Whitefield and John Wesley, Glen O’Brien says that in many ways Whitefield was less liberal than Wesley. Whitefield supported the Hanoverians because he thought that their Anglicanism represented a spirit of freedom that the Stuarts had tried to suppress. He upheld slavery and himself owned slaves, though he wanted their conditions ameliorated. On the other hand, Wesley opposed slavery and saw the hypocrisy of American freedom fighters who owned slaves. But the revolutionaries adulated Whitefield while castigating Wesley because the former supported war while the latter, though detesting tyranny, opposed it. Whitefield was afraid that Britain would impose an episcopacy on America and held that this should be opposed by violence; Wesley saw an organic unity between the Crown, Parliament, and the people, and he opposed the revolutionaries for wanting to disrupt this unity.

In one of the finest essays in the collection, John J. Burke Jr. discusses Milton, Dryden, and the politics of biblical interpretation. His two texts are Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) and, written only a decade later, Dryden’s very different Absalom and Achitophel (1681), and his argument is that both Milton and Dryden used the Old Testament, especially the story of Samson, to different religious and political ends. In Milton, Samson destroys the Philistines as the poet hoped his works would destroy kingship and the Anglican Church in favor of a puritan orthodoxy. Dryden’s Absalom, too, tries to destroy the kingdom in order to fulfill his political ambitions. Ultimately neither Samson nor the man who would be like Samson, the Duke of Monmouth, succeeds. This is a barebones summary of an essay that is well written, clearly and compellingly argued, and richly documented. A marvelous teaching essay for anyone teaching Milton and Dryden or the Restoration period generally, it is also a model for those who wish to write about the creative use of sources, especially the Bible.

Two essays deal with women writers. Robin Runia disagrees that Sarah Fielding’s Volume the Last (1753), which was intended as a sequel to her earlier The Adventures of David Simple (1744), views death as the only escape from the pain of this world while the earlier novel had extolled the pleasures to be gained from tenderness and benevolence. Rather, Runia sees Volume the Last as an extension of its predecessor and says that both novels argue that Christian faith must be grounded in rational principle while also claiming “the potential for women’s intellect to justify their moral exemplarity” (229). She makes her points by examining various incidents in David Simple to show that reason has to be an essential element in a true Christian life, and that Christian reasoning is different from secular or “Human Reason” because it is based on an acceptance of God’s will. Using Milton, Sarah Fielding also argues for women’s superior Christian intellect which enables Cynthia to repulse the Satan-like Atheist. By depicting her triumph, Fielding offers Cynthia up as a new Eve who is capable of a life of “principled piety.”

Contrasting Aphra Behn’s treatment of Isabella in The History of the Nun with her later treatment by Thomas Southerne and David Garrick in their plays, Lisa Sikkink claims that Behn’s Isabella has agency, which Southerne and Garrick’s Isabellas lack. This agency is the result of her religious faith: in spite of her many sins (including bigamy and murder) she always returns to prayer and penitence and thus regains her spiritual equilibrium. It is this quality that enables her to accept her punishment of death at the end and yet remain in good standing with her community, while Southerne and Garrick’s heroines, who lack this religious faith, are passive victims whose only solution is to commit suicide. I thought that this essay, wholly competent though perhaps the slightest in the collection, was also a trifle repetitious. Given that the author was finishing her PhD dissertation when the essay was written, it is good to see that the editors reached out to one just beginning her career in the profession.

Séverine Collignon-Ward analyzes the Mémoires, published in 1757, of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe, who served as a galley slave from 1700 to 1713 because of his religion. The Mémoires may be approached as an example of the Protestant Memoir, stories of French Protestants who suffered persecution on account of their religion in the reign of Louis XIV, but they are also a plea for religious tolerance in the manner of the philosophes. Marteilhe, like the philosophes, recognized that fanaticism prevailed in France, but he also believed that France could be saved, and the publication of the Mémoires was aimed at bringing about greater toleration. Collignon-Ward examines the rhetorical features that the memoirist used to make his work credible and interesting and concludes that these features were similar to those used by the philosophes.

Toleration and harmonious coexistence between different faiths is also the theme of Paul Kerry’s study of four new translations of Schiller and Goethe. In the first piece by Schiller, “Jesuit Rule in Paraguay,” the author attacks the intrigue, machinations, and spiritual bankruptcy of the Jesuits and their exploitation of indigenous South American populations. In his account of the Duke of Alba at breakfast in the Rudolstadt Castle in 1547 Schiller shows how the firmness and foresightedness of the hostess, Catherine of Swartzburg, was able to save her poor peasants from depredation by the Spanish army. Goethe, in response to a question by some students as to how he might have completed his epic Die Geheimnisse (The Mysteries) wrote an essay in which he laid out the scheme of the poem. There would be twelve men, each representing a different religious tradition, gathered around a man called Humanus. The twelve would honor and respect one another, and each would have found his own way to God. Through this fiction Goethe hoped to preach not only religious tolerance but also religious appreciation and the view that each faith can lead to God. Tolerance and respect for other religions is also the theme of his essay “On the Reformation Festival” (1817). He realized that if Germany were to celebrate the tercentenary of Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 theses to the doors of the church at Wittenberg, it would alienate the Roman Catholics. So he proposed that Germany should celebrate instead its victory at Leipzig in the battle known as the Volkerschlacht (the Battle of the Nations, 1813), which would bring the whole nation together. Once again, respect for other religions was emphasized.

Monika Renate Barget’s essay on British caricatures of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion is excellent and skillfully analyzes the satirical prints and caricatures that both sides, the Hanoverians and the Jacobites, produced. But it has nothing to do with religion except in the most obvious sense that the Jacobites represented a Roman Catholic threat to the Anglicanism of the Hanoverians.

The last essay in New Approaches, Bob Tennant’s on the SPCK in the Scilly Isles, 1796–1819, based on solid archival research, shows the extent and nature of the control that the society exercised on the Anglican establishment of the islands, and the kind of competition that the Anglican church had to face from the Methodists. It examines two incidents, one related to staffing and the other to the inhabitants’ economic and political relationship to the government and to the Duke of Leeds, who was the lord proprietor, in order to establish that economic, political, and ecclesiastical issues are inextricably interwoven in missionary activity.

New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment concludes with a thirty-six-page bibliography (365–90), which is exhaustive and will prove a great boon to all students and researchers. The book is well bound and got up and will withstand a lot of handling in libraries.

It is well printed on good quality paper. I was able to detect only two very insignificant typos, both in the last essay: islands spelled with an o (353), and was as as (367).

ENDNOTES:

[1] This view was most forcefully expressed by Peter Gay in his two-volume The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Knopf, 1966, 1969).

[2] See, inter alia, Jonathan Clark, “Providence, Predestination and Progress: or, did the Enlightenment Fail?” Albion, 35 (2003): 559–89; Stephen J. Barnett, Enlightenment and Religion: Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); and David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). A good recent summary of the subject can be found in Simon Grote, “Review-Essay: Religion and Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 75, no. 1 (January 2014): 137–60.

[3] After submitting this review to the editor I learned that the essays were, in fact, originally slated for inclusion in Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, a learned journal published by AMS Press. Following the death of the owner, Gabriel Hornstein, and the dissolution of the press, it became necessary to find a new home for them, and they have been accommodated in book form by Fairleigh Dickinson Press.

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).