The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690–1805 by Thomas Ahnert (review)

The Scots have long been a dour bunch, which is perhaps why the Scottish Enlightenment came as such a surprise, including to ministers of the established church. Their heirs have never got over it, alternately defending or blaming the "Moderates"—those ministers who made common cause with enlightened notions of culture and friends with notorious infidels such as Hume—for helping make Scotland famous and successful or for ruining their beloved Kirk. The Scottish nationalists of our day carry on this tradition, disparaging Scotland's surrender of sovereignty in 1707 while overlooking that Scotland's rise to fame and fortune came with the Union. For those of us who try to make sense of the Scottish Enlightenment three centuries on, the church politics of that era have long been as dangerous a bog as the North Loch was then.

Our scholarly picture of the Scottish Enlightenment has matured since it came of age in the 1960s. We are getting a better sense both of the details of enlightened Scots' devotion to science (as in recently published volumes of Thomas Reid's manuscripts) and of the depths of their religious commitments. Some, such as Hume, used a corrosive Newtonian methodology to challenge the Newtonian consensus of a benevolent providence. But most enlightened Scots labored sincerely to reconcile their Newtonian veneration of the natural order with their inherited Calvinism. Mr. Ahnert's concise new survey of the moralistic piety of four generations of eighteenth-century Scots does a welcome job of showing where Scottish Enlightenment studies have come to by the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Mr. Ahnert takes the religious thought of eighteenth-century Scots seriously, which has not usually been the case among secularized Enlightenment scholars or the dour heirs of the Scottish Presbytery. Historians need more of the details that made eighteenth-century religious values and commitments different from what came before and what came after, as well as how they changed over the generations of the Enlightenment itself. The scope of Mr. Ahnert's interest in eighteenth-century religious thought covers both the clerical members of the Moderate party (such as the best-selling historian William Robertson, who used political savvy and elite connections both to keep the Kirk independent of Westminster and push it in an Enlightenment-friendly direction) and their opponents, the members of the rival "Popular" party (sometimes erroneously termed "Evangelicals"), whom Mr. Ahnert chooses to call the "Orthodox" in recognition of their commitment to a creedal conception of saving faith. He is surely right to draw attention to the "change of emphasis in much of eighteenth-century thought from theological doctrine to moral conduct as the true measure of religious belief." Mr. Ahnert doubts there was anything very secular about this shift in Christian emphasis. The achievement of God's will in the Christian's life was not, for the Moderates, "some quasi-miraculous transformation of a believer's nature, but rather moral reform and salvation were the products of an incremental process . . . in which the natural good dispositions that were already present in the human frame were cultivated and reinforced." The Moderates fought their Orthodox brethren over many issues, most famously the moral propriety of stage-plays (notably Douglas) and the legal rights of church patronage, which concerned not just the appointment of ministers but the best method of applying discipline within a state-sanctioned religious monopoly. Their main dispute, however, was over the means of salvation, whether it lay in correct thinking and doctrinal precision (as the Orthodox believed) or in the steady and incremental improvement of one's moral life. The Moderate approach, as exemplified in the best-selling sermons of Hugh Blair, held that moral improvement is the fundamental purpose of the Gospel and that Christians therefore have much to learn from morally earnest Stoics and pagan sages, a prospect horrifying to the Orthodox.

Mr. Ahnert's most surprising claim is that the Moderates' religiosity can be...