New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment ed. by Brett C. McInelly and Paul E. Kerry (review)

Recent historical and literary scholarship has revised an older characterization of the Enlightenment as a period of triumphant secularization, drawing attention instead to the important ways that religion shaped eighteenth-century ideas and practices. To this scholarship we can add New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment, a collection of fourteen essays covering an impressive range of subjects. But what connects these disparate essays? It is difficult to find an answer in the introduction by co-editor Brett C. McInelly, who tells us only that the book "demonstrates a breadth of disciplinary perspectives on and approaches to the study of religion during the age of Enlightenment" (vii). This vagueness is reflected in the organization of the chapters, which have no obvious geographical, chronological, thematic, or methodological order to them. Nevertheless, many of the individual essays command our attention.

In the first chapter, Kevin L. Cope explores the connections between religion and science in his insightful analysis of German theologian Friedrich Christian Lesser's (1692–1754) encyclopedic book of entomology, Insecto-Theologia (1740), a "travel account, scientific treatise, and religious rhapsody" all in one (4). Cope explains that for Lesser, insects expressed God's artistic and splendid work of creation. Two years after its publication, Lesser's book was translated from German into English, and substantially annotated and illustrated by Pierre Lyonnet (1706–1789). In this new version of the text, its message was transformed in significant ways: for Lyonnet, insects were not merely passive representations of the natural order, but rather, were themselves responsible for the active unfolding of God's providential plan. As Cope puts it, "[God's] design emerges piecemeal, from crumbs, grains of sand, pollen, and specks of dung carried by billions of beetles, ants, and bees. … In Lyonnet's world, insects continually and directly build the design that to some they seem only to signify" (30).

Andrew Kloes offers a fascinating examination of late eighteenth-century Protestant theologians who railed against the pernicious influence of atheism, linking them to increasing social disorder and revolution throughout Europe and America. Historical time, for them, was defined by a cosmic struggle between God and the Devil. Their counterparts in the earlier part of the century tended to see Roman Catholicism as their main adversary. But now it seemed that atheism was responsible for advancing the Devil's work, particularly by making possible the Revolution in France, and that this Revolution in turn had served to reinforce atheism, as citizens pledged their allegiance to the laws of the nation rather than to the laws of God. Kloes suggests that these Protestant theologians challenge the traditional view of the secular Enlightenment. More productive, I think, would be to connect this religious tradition to an earlier one: in the later seventeenth century, for instance, Protestants in England wrote prolifically about their fear of growing irreligion, which, they thought, would lead to a repetition of the disorders of the English Civil Wars and Revolution.

Douglass Madison Furrh turns his attention to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to consider the protracted conflict between Thomas Brattle (1658–1713) and both Increase (1639–1723) and Cotton Mather (1663–1728). Brattle was a well-educated, wealthy merchant, who had traveled abroad. He had become interested in the new experimental science of Newton, but he was also drawn to the rationalism of Cartesian philosophy. His accurate observations of the Great Comet of 1680 (published the following year) were cited by Isaac Newton (1643–1727) in his Principia (1687). Increase Mather, in contrast, wrote Kometographia (1683), in which he explained comets as signs of God's interference in his creation. A comparison of these two works and their authors is a compelling lens through which to view diverging Puritan thought in this period, as Furrh suggests. But this analysis is cut short so that Furrh can concentrate on the Salem Witch Trials. The younger Cotton Mather is here described as...