Lehner, Ulrich

The Journal of Religion

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Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteTheology Faculty Research and Publications Theology, Department of1-1-2012Review of David Sorkin's The ReligiousEnlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics fromLondon to ViennaUlrich LehnerMarquette University, ulrich.lehner@marquette.eduPublished Version. Journal of Religion, Vol. 92, No. 2 ( January, 2012): 159-161. Publisher's Link. ©2012 University of Chicago Press. Used with permission.Book Reviews159Mengzi, of course, postulates a good human nature, thanks to inborn “sprouts”that, barring adverse exterior influence, will allow one to grow into a moralbeing. Yang Zhu likewise appears to be safeguarding inner nature from con-tamination.In chapter 4, we encounter a group of texts that also locate moral agencywithin the individual, but which trace a downward arc away from the optimismexhibited in previous texts. The Zhuangzi’s Primitivist chapters seem similar tothe Laozi, but they locate the crux of moral action in our nature rather thanin effortlessness. The Lu¨ shi chunqiu’s Nurture of Life chapters likewise privilegethe body, but return to the notion that a sagacious Son of Heaven is necessaryfor the well-being of the people. The Xunzi paints a darker picture of humannature, portraying it as a ball of willful confusion in need of ritual rectificationvia human effort. The Han Feizi observes that there simply aren’t enough sagesto govern the burgeoning Chinese state and that their ministrations are in anycase not effective enough to tame the teeming masses. Only the might andauthority of a just ruler can put us on the path to morality.Chapter 5 assesses two texts that bring together inner and outer prerogatives.In the Zhong yong, education and human nature are complementary, so thatexternal and internal authorities each have clear yet connected roles. Similarly,the Zhuangzi’s Syncretist chapters replace human nature with “refined numi-nosity” and advise us to return to our original state of clarity. However, theyalso advocate a yin-yang dichotomy of stillness and activity that is to be reflectedin government. Within this ideal government, the ruler delegates authority topreserve his effortlessness, while the ministers use their knowledge to play therole of active yang to the ruler’s passive yin.Individualism in Early China engages the professional sinologist as an inter-esting and timely analysis of the classical philosophical corpus. Even those fa-miliar with the texts Brindley cites will likely find in their presentation here anew and compelling perspective. Her assessment provides ample evidence fora kind of individualism relevant to the ethics of human rights in China. Heranalysis will also be useful for the wider fields of Chinese intellectual historyand religious studies. For those who teach the Mengzi-Xunzi debate on humannature, this will provide excellent and accessible context. Those involved inthe wider field of ethics will be interested in the many variations of self-culti-vation that she describes. Theology, like self-cultivation, cannot be adequatelyunderstood without an anthropological paradigm. Her book articulates severalsuch paradigms, each organically related to, yet nevertheless quite distinct from,the others. Religion is an eminently imaginative enterprise, and this monographprovides insight into how early Chinese authors imagined themselves in moralrelation to their bodies, their politico-religious sovereigns, and the logos of thecosmos.PAUL FISCHER, Western Kentucky University.SORKIN, DAVID. The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics fromLondon to Vienna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xviii339pp. $35.00 (cloth).When, in his 1967 book Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (New York:Harper & Row), Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that the Enlightenment had over-looked religious roots, namely Socinianism, Arminianism, and Erasmianism,The Journal of Religion160not many acknowledged his important insight. Most likely this was due to thefact that academia had overwhelmingly accepted Peter Gay’s Enlightenmentnarrative, published in two volumes in 1966 and 1969 (The Enlightenment: TheRise of Modern Paganism [New York: Knopf, 1966]; The Enlightenment: The Scienceof Freedom [New York: Knopf, 1969]), which diagnosed a dichotomy betweenthis eighteenth-century process and religion, or, more succinctly, identified itwith the rise of modern paganism and unbelief. While the recent works of LouisDupre and Charles Taylor have challenged this account in the disciplinary fieldsof philosophy and religious studies, David Sorkin has to be credited with dis-mantling it with the tools of historiography. He builds on the work of RoyPorter, J. G. A. Pocock, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Dale van Kley, and many otherswho have similarly argued for including religion in the description of the En-lightenment. The question, however, is whether this religious Enlightenmentcontributed to the values of a modern, secular society we cherish today to thesame extent as the radical Enlightenment of Spinoza and Diderot. Most fa-mously, Jonathan Israel would argue that it did not, even if he acknowledgesthe importance of the religious Enlightenment and laments the lack of researchon the theologies of the time.Sorkin argues convincingly that religion was not always the object of disap-probation but very often drove and invigorated the intellectual debates of thetime. He pleads for a comparative view of the religious Enlighteners in Ca-tholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism in order to show their common ideals,for example, the overcoming of cultural isolation, and to use the “new scienceand philosophy to promote a tolerant, irenic understanding of belief that couldserve a shared morality and politics” (6). This comparative methodology willhelp historians to better understand confessional identities and will ultimatelylead to an expansion of the canon of Enlightenment thinkers. “Only by re-claiming these heretofore ostracized thinkers can we begin to replace the mas-ter narrative of a secular Enlightenment with a more historically accurate no-tion, complex, differentiate, and plural” (5).Sorkin examines the intellectual achievements of a British Anglican (WilliamWarburton), a Swiss Reformed (Jacob Vernet), a German Lutheran (SiegmundJ. Baumgarten), a Prussian Jew (Moses Mendelssohn), and two Catholics, onefrom France and one from Austria (Adrien Lamourette and Valentin Eybel).He successfully compares their different approaches as the middle way betweenfundamentalism and rationalism. They aimed at an intelligible religion, bal-anced between reason and faith, a common morality, a critical interpretationof their holy scriptures, and a strong support for toleration and tolerance. Allof these men were quite influential and widely read during their lifetime, butsoon forgotten.This, however, opens up a number of questions that necessarily lead beyondthe scope of this extraordinarily lucid and dense book. The first concerns theobject of comparison, namely, what these thinkers understood by “religion.”As Ernst Feil has shown in his masterful history of the concept (Religio: DieGeschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs, 4 vols. [Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 1986–2007]), the understandings vary immensely, and especiallyfrom the eighteenth century onward. In other words: Is religion the same“thing” for the four compared authors? Sorkin’s important book makes clearthat more research is necessary to understand what European religious En-lighteners understood by “religion” if we want to make progress in compre-hending their stance toward the Enlightenment process.Book Reviews161Second, Sorkin’s intellectual history leads us to wonder how one could con-struct a similar comparative study about the actual practices of belief in thereligious Enlighteners, that is, a comparative, cultural history of their faiths.Could one perhaps find an even greater overlap here than in the intellectualpatterns of argumentation? The desire for a simple and intelligible liturgy mightsuffice as a possible example.The third methodological question pertains to the subjects of the comparison.With his comparative work, Sorkin has made academia aware of how manyhistorical treasures remain buried because of detailed, confession-orientedscholarship that does not look beyond its narrow focus. He alludes to theconnections, friendships, and reading patterns of his main characters, but large-scale research, for example, on the transconfessional, interreligious, and trans-national communication networks, or on the mutual reception of Protestants,Jews, and Catholics, is only rarely done. How much do we know about theinterconnections between Catholic and Protestant university professors? More-over, all major research projects on Enlightenment networking either excludethe religious dimension or do not pay attention to it. Sorkin’s book might bethe long-awaited wake-up call to change this, and to direct attention to theneglected religious history of the Enlightenment and its multifaceted, trans-national, transconfessional, and even interreligious face.Fourth, Sorkin admits that the religious thinkers he presents are “decidedlysecond rank” but “were prominent and influential in their day” (5). Thus, hereminds us just how intolerant and often narrow-minded the established canonof Enlightenment studies really is and encourages us to reconsider its structure.For example, no eighteenth-century Catholic writer made it into the Germancanon despite the wide dissemination of the works of Westenrieder and others.Last but not least, some readers might consider the figures presented hereas “conservative Enlighteners” at best, as Darrin McMahon did in his review ofthe book ( Journal of Modern History 82 [2010]: 673–75), mainly because Sorkin’sEnlighteners worked together with the establishments of their times. Does col-laboration with the state or the economic system really legitimize such a judg-ment? Is a Catholic thinker like Eybel, who advocates in favor of a church freefrom papal interventions, the possibility of ecclesiastical divorce, vernacularliturgy, and the election of clergymen, conservative simply because he collab-orated with the Habsburgs? Rather, Sorkin’s book invites us to reconsider thenature of both conservatism and liberalism. For, as he has argued elsewhere(in his essay “Godless Liberals,” http://www.religiondispatches.org, October2008), overcoming the myth of a secular Enlightenment will help to overcomethe wrongheaded “polarity of secular liberalism versus faith-based conserva-tism.”The importance of this book for religious studies and intellectual historycannot be overestimated. It has already become a classic in Enlightenmentstudies and should be on the reading list of every religion scholar as well.ULRICH L. LEHNER, Marquette University.THE COWHERDS. Moonshadows: Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2011. 272 pp. $99.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper).Religions are inevitably founded on a notion of truth, a truth more real thanthe one that spontaneous human perception apprehends. This truth is situated

Review of David Sorkin\u27s \u3cem\u3eThe Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna\u3c/em\u3e

Ulrich L. Lehner

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Sorkin, David. <i>The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna</i>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xviii+339 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

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Review of David Sorkin\u27s \u3cem\u3eThe Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna\u3c/em\u3e

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