Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780 by Howard D. Weinbrot (review)

The bicentenary of Darwin’s birthday and the 150-year celebrations for On the Origin of Species in 2009 generated appraisals, reevaluations, and theoretical applications of his work. Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture presents a daring, seemingly anachronistic continuation of those deliberations: it applies principles formed in the nineteenth century to the manifold and usually interconnected political and religious upheavals in the eighteenth century. Using the progressive notion of “problem resolution” as the heart of eighteenth-century conceptions of evolution, Mr. Weinbrot attempts to answer the complex question that is asked at the outset: “How did seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England survive, heal, and prosper in spite of civil war, regicide, and multiple dynastic changes?”

And, not to beat around the bush, therein lies the crux. The premise stated later, that “biologically and cooperatively based concepts of evolution” such as those formulated by Darwin “are adaptable to aesthetic, literary, and broadly cultural concerns” is far from being as self-evident as Mr. Weinbrot would have us believe. The question is whether the concept of a political “organism” (or of several “organisms”), used by him in a metaphorical sense, can actually capture, within the given time span, the essence behind the gradual evolution of a state. It does not become quite clear what exactly the metaphor is meant to refer to and, what is more, whether it really can be applied to the mechanisms priming the development of England throughout the eighteenth century (and beyond, as the book takes us to Dickens’s fictional rendering of the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge). In fact, it seems Mr. Weinbrot anticipated such criticism, for he humbly admits that he “can only hope that readers will find the connections connected.”

The wealth of quotations in this breathtakingly erudite book sometimes betrays deficiencies in terms of interpretation; at times, the reader feels the absence of any obvious direction, the most glaring example being the first sections of the chapter “Threats to the Species”; those, taken together, read like a tour de force undertaken in a frantic attempt to establish a solid foundation for the massive edifice they are meant to support. Throughout, then, this monograph, sometimes more so, sometimes less, reveals a lack of overall structure and disciplined narrative: a good number of the “connections” unfortunately remain indiscernible. Mr. Weinbrot’s at times volatile argumentation and haphazard organization are in evidence when he moves effortlessly from Gilbert Burnet’s 1687 refutation of persecutory principles (in the Preface to his translation of Lactantius’s Relation of the Death of the Primitive Persecutors) to Edward Synge’s 1725 sermon The Case of Toleration Consider’d. Because there is no transition to indicate the reason for this leap, it seems that the strictures of time and space (Burnet began his essay in Amsterdam, Synge preached in Dublin), to which even scholars must bow, are suspended here. The evolutionary angle (which is spelled out in rather rudimentary terms) seems too fragile to carry the theoretical load of this very ambitious book. The different sections and chapters can be read as (at times brilliant) case studies, but the associations between them are too often hidden from us. Even if one of Mr. Weinbrot’s objectives is certainly to avoid gross oversimplifications, chronology alone is not a sufficient guideline for readers.

It is of course much easier to find fault with an ambitious book than with a lesser one. Structural shortcomings are partly remedied by its many virtues. Mr. Weinbrot’s study is an infinitely rewarding sourcebook for important eighteenth-century religious concepts (including passive obedience, the Thirtieth of January Sermon, or Augustinianism) and movements (such as Methodism). Without doubt, he offers a most impressive reconstruction of the raging religious feuds. Moreover, his study of Defoe’s monumental Shortest Way with the Dissenters is as careful as it is penetrating. His book is informed by his keen sense of injustice: its pages are suffused with his...