Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648–1715 by William J. Bulman (review)

The Savoyard reactionary Joseph de Maistre reportedly once called the Church of England "l'orang-outang parmi les singes," the orangutan among the monkeys. By this, presumably, de Maistre meant that Anglicanism, alone among the churches of the Reformation, had preserved in some measure the necessary elements of social order: hierarchy, liturgy, reverence for monarchy. He would, no doubt, be appalled to learn from Mr. Bulman's magnificent new study that the Church's capacity for conservatism derived not from the consecrated accumulation of thoughtless pieties and prejudices but was rather the work of rational men of substance, whose scholarly debates concerning the religious dimensions of civil peace in the later seventeenth century might plausibly be labeled "enlightenment."

"Anglican Enlightenment" for Mr. Bulman denotes the contribution of Anglican clergymen in the later Stuart era to wider public reflections on the meaning and maintenance of social order, which preoccupied English cultural life in the aftermath of a cataclysmic civil war. The signal feature of this clerical engagement was the use of the scholarly methods of late humanist intellectual culture in the search for civil peace. He sidelines more familiar spheres of enlightenment inquiry, such as natural philosophy or political economy, in favor of historical scholarship. The study of the past was thought to hold a key to neutralizing the threat politico-religious strife posed to the public weal. The central question of these enlightened clergymen was not that of the jailer before Paul and Silas—what must I do to be saved?—but rather the more worldly soteriology of what Bulman calls "national and global redemption," that is, which aspects of religious and political life are most conducive to civil peace? In this privileging of social utility he discerns the incipient modernity of the era.

As his guide to the Anglican Enlightenment, Mr. Bulman selects the unprepossessing figure of Lancelot Addison (1632–1703), dean of Lichfield, father of Joseph Addison. He was a dedicated pastor, devotional writer, and a historian and polemicist of genuine merit. His student days at Interregnum Oxford, his long chaplaincy in the imperial outpost of Tangier, his vigorous pastoral outreach as dean and archdeacon in the West Midlands, his empirically informed works of comparative religion, and his creditable sallies in the major theological controversies of his age all place him at the center of forces that defined the era: revolution and religious revival, empire and enlightenment. Mr. Bulman's book proceeds in a curiously helix-like fashion, revisiting key moments in Addison's career to enrich the context of his scholarly and devotional output.

Thus Mr. Bulman uses Addison's historical treatise West Barbary (1671), the fruit of his time in North Africa, to explode the historiographical presumption that enlightened scholarship necessarily advanced the cause of freedom. On the contrary, Addison's treatise was intended as a contribution to the "erudition of the state"—a repository of political, historical, and cultural intelligence delivered by scholars and travelers to the custody of men like the undersecretary of state Joseph Williamson, to whom West Barbary was dedicated. That Addison's work served the ends of commercial and territorial empire in no way mitigated its value. When he exhausted the evidence earlier European historians could provide, he supplemented his account of the civil discords of the Maghreb with first-person observations of and interviews with credible witnesses. He gleaned what successive revolutions in Morocco could teach about the elements of political stability, and with an eye on England warned about the liability of Muslim societies to religious imposture, going so far as to compare Sufi religiosity with English puritanical practices. Addison expanded his taxonomy of religious imposture in The Present State of the Jews (1675), where he compares the scholasticism, ritualism, and superstition of the Jews of North Africa to popery. Evidence of religious pathology gleaned abroad equipped Addison with the materials that inform his strikingly naturalistic apologetics on behalf...