Philadelphia's Enlightenment, 1740-1800: Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason (review)

Philadelphia has long interested historians of technology. It was the home of the Franklin Institute and the site of important innovations in technical education; it may also rightly be called the political and intellectual capital of eighteenth-century America. As such, it was a pivotal site of the two great movements of that century: the American Enlightenment and the Great Awakening.

These two movements can be seen as antithetical, the one built on dispassionate reason and the other on religious enthusiasm. Nina Reid-Maroney argues, however, that such a distinction would be false if applied to what she calls the Philadelphia Circle, a group of medical men, ministers, natural philosophers, and botanists who, while "thoroughly enlightened" (p. 3) and enamored of science, nevertheless rejected the idea of rational religion and inclined to ground knowledge first in faith. The group centered on the American Philosophical Society, the new College of Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Hospital, and included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Ebenezer Kinnersley.

Reid-Maroney writes of the Christian Enlightenment of Philadelphia, which was informed more by Calvinist thought than by Church of England doctrines on which historians of the American Enlightenment have focused. This gave to the Philadelphia circle an intellectual system better able to accommodate both reason and faith, a system that served both devotees of Awakening and Enlightenment by legitimizing the question of the appropriate sources for understanding human life and the world in which it was lived. Philadelphia medicine best expressed this enlightened Christianity, by incorporating the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment in a context respectful of other routes to knowledge. Rush's sharp criticism of empiricism and his embrace of intuition in his medical practice make him a prime example of the synthesis Reid-Maroney proposes. What brought Enlightenment and Awakening most firmly together was a shared vision of progress and redemption, of a world transformed through faith tempered by reason, and yet aware of reason's cold dangers.

Historians of technology will find three parts of Philadelphia's Enlightenment particularly useful. First is a fascinating discussion of the career of Kinnersley, minister and electrical experimenter and lecturer, who saw within his apparatus evidence of a personal deity who could inspire wonder rather than fear and whose powers such electrical machinery made manifest. (Benjamin Franklin appears briefly as a deist and thus what Reid-Maroney calls a better example of European than American Enlightenment.) Second is its discussion of the doctrines of progress to which both faith and reason contributed, especially cases of illness whose treatment and cure were described by Rush as restoring "a right relationship with God." Instead of the oft repudiated notion of technology and progress as the fruits of applied science, here is an example of technology as applied faith, embodying, again according to Rush, "works of mercy to the souls and bodies of men" (p. 172). Third is an example of how to discuss religion where it might not seem to belong. Reid-Maroney's focus is the misleading distinction between Awakening and Enlightenment as expressed in natural science, but religion and technology often seem separate as well, and especially in the modern period. Reid-Maroney offers an elegant and reasoned intellectual history of a group that viewed the intellect with skepticism, and thus offers a fine example of finding synthesis where we did not expect it to be.