In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment
is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and
secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless
liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In "The Religious
Enlightenment," David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing
that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature.
Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant,
Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as
William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and
Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He demonstrates that, in
the century before the French Revolution, the major religions of
Europe gave rise to movements of renewal and reform that championed
such hallmark Enlightenment ideas as reasonableness and natural
religion, toleration and natural law. Calvinist enlightened
orthodoxy, Jewish Haskalah, and reform Catholicism, to name but
three such movements, were influential participants in the
eighteenth century's burgeoning public sphere and promoted a new
ideal of church-state relations. Sorkin shows how they pioneered a
religious Enlightenment that embraced the new science of Copernicus
and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Christian
Wolff, uniting reason and revelation to renew faith and piety.
This book reveals how Enlightenment theologians refashioned
belief as a solution to the dogmatism and intolerance of previous
centuries. Read it and you will never view the Enlightenment the
same way.
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