Part V ◈ The Modern Period

It is not a question that can be answered decisively. Within Catholicism, there was little perceived need to develop or reaffirm any aspects of the doctrine of justification following its magisterial discussion in the sixteenth century, and some apparently inconclusive debates on the issue during the seventeenth. If Catholicism had not entirely resolved the major debates on these themes, it had developed viable ways of living with such differences, and there seemed no need for any reformulation of its core statements on the matter. The situation with Protestantism, however, was significantly different, not least because of the cohabitation of Protestantism and Enlightenment in many parts of north-western Europe. 4

The scholarly understanding of the relation of the Enlightenment and Christianity has undergone significance change since the 1970s. An earlier generation, dependent on Peter Gay’ s views on the Enlightenment, assumed that the Enlightenment and Christianity were antagonistic. The fate of religion in France in the eighteenth century offered a normative paradigm, pointing to the inexorable rise of rationalism, linked with a belief that modernity was shaped by the defeat of dogma. In 2020, Gay’ s ideas are seen as more representative of the 1960s than the 1760s. The French experience of Enlightenment, which Gay took to be normative, is now seen as the European exception rather than the rule and that, far from being its foe, Christianity was the midwife and sustainer of the siècle des lumières. 5 This complexification of the older narrative of the essentially secular nature of the Enlightenment is in the process of being displaced by a much more complex and nuanced understanding of the cultural landscape, questioning the sharp distinction that has been drawn between the religious and the secular.

The complexity of the phenomenon usually styled ‘ the Enlightenment’ has led some to conclude that this was essentially a polemical term devised in the nineteenth century to make sense of what had happened in the eighteenth, and contain it within preferred narratives of progress. 6 While any attempt to construct a normative account of Enlightenment and Christianity is to be resisted, it is important to note the often close relationship between various forms of Pietism and the Enlightenment, especially in England and Germany, and the apparent absence of such a relationship in eighteenth-century France. Although political relationships between France and the newly founded United States of America were initially close, the Enlightenment in America did not express itself in anti-religious ways, but in forms of synergies of thought and action. 7