Religion in the Age of Enlightenment (review)

This collection announces confidently that criticism has freed itself from 1990s readings controlled by “race, class, and gender,” and that “eighteenth-century studies has, indeed, taken a turn toward religion.” While perhaps overconfident, the comment does reflect the earnest and attentive readings on religion and its influence contained therein.

In “The Holy Surprise Party: Glimpses of Divinity in Suddenly Emerging Literary, Artistic, and Geographical Settings, 1660– 1785,” Kevin Cope continues the Preface’s theme of separation from the recent critical past, stating that both the “idealized” “Age of Reason” and recent “modish” critiques of the Enlightenment offer an “illusory hope for a comprehensive explanation” because both neglect those “who probed the possibility that the world might not conform to human understanding.” Mr. Cope’s own explanation, based on “unpredictability and surprise,” focuses on the “eruptive,” which is fascinating, even if not unifying. Part of the eruptive is “immensity,” which he shows by moving from cave diagrams to volcanoes to joke books; each disrupts “the habitual association between physical size and informational capacity and thereby suggest[s] the possibility of an unexpectedly abundant universe.” “Surprise and process” are the normal responses to such experiences, both steering Mr. Cope to travel writing. “True travel writing” “is characterized by a superhuman interest in totality,” and his example is Antonio de Ulloa’s description of a meteorological iris that forms near the top of a volcano.

In “The Mentor’s Anxiety: Conduct Books and the Proliferation of Virtuous Guidance,” David P. Paxman seems to draw from Mr. Cope’s eruptive principle: in response to questions about the best means to instruct young people in the most virtuous behavior, advice books often “are characterized by a kind of multiplicity that inclines toward the unmanageable.” He sees this occurring on two “axes”: first, unifying principles meet “a counterforce” in everyday contexts; and second, simplicity of instruction “meets its counterforce” in moral action that must be determined individually or particularly rather than relying upon others. Cursorily pointing to the Bible as possessing a similar “multiplicity and anxiety,” Mr. Paxman alludes to three titles—The Whole Duty of Man, A Cap of Gray Hairs for a Green Head, and Directions—before acknowledging that “[a]lthough not all conduct books . . . illustrate the same tendency to multiplicity, many do.” Ultimately this selective reading of multiplicity, simplicity, and contexts points to Mr. Paxman’s larger aim—to show how conduct books anticipate an ethics akin to Alaisdair MacIntyre’s: “The multiplicity of conduct books may signal a vague, unformulated awareness that virtue is not one universal quality or thing, yet it appears in contextualized form throughout nearly all facets of human activity.”

Kathryn and Michael J. Stasio’s “The Primitive Church, the Primitive Mind, and Methodism in the Eighteenth Century” offers an interpretation of “Methodism’s success and the extremely vitriolic reaction to it” by drawing upon evolutionary psychology and its notion of reciprocity. Disenfranchised members of the Church of England found a reciprocal community in Methodism, while members of the establishment saw in the Methodists’ “crying, the speaking in tongues, and the fits” signals that they did not belong to the larger church and thus were “free-riding” on the sacrifices made for the Church of England. This theoretical reading sometimes proves indelicate and hasty, as when the authors opine that “if the church and state could not effectively punish Methodists, print culture could in such a way that might be evolutionarily satisfying.”

In “Evangelical Literacies: Predesti-nation and Print, 1739–1740,” Jennifer Snead argues that the Methodist debates over salvation indicate the “unevenness and instability of the secularization process,” especially in relation to literacy. Ms. Snead primarily focuses on Whitefield’s writings on predestination, contrasting them with Wesley’s on grace as “free.” Whitefield’s notion of “individual piety” served radically to undermine “human agency and the capacity to discern certain truth.” Ms. Snead also questions “twentieth-century models of the eighteenth-century public sphere as secular and rational,” a larger target that obscures the original strengths...