Sorkin D. The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. - 339 p.

David Sorkin, in" Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna, " attempts to fill in our understanding of the Enlightenment with a story about a once influential but now largely forgotten intellectual movement.-

It has a rather paradoxical name - "religious enlightenment".

The paradox-and this is what the first pages of the book are devoted to-is that both in the academic community and in wider circles, the Enlightenment is usually interpreted as a purely secular phenomenon. Moreover, the Enlightenment is considered to be "the cornerstone of modern secular culture" (p. 2). This interpretation fits perfectly into the standard theory of modernization, which describes the process of transition of Western societies from the traditional state to the modern one: on the one hand, urbanization, industrialization and democratization (socio-economic component), and on the other - the parallel processes of secularization of ideas and strengthening of scientific and rational principles (intellectual component). The same interpretation is shared by both sides of today's culture wars between progressives and fundamentalist conservatives. The former advocate a return to the ideals of the Enlightenment, a "new Enlightenment", while the latter advocate overcoming the destructive dynamics of the Enlightenment and returning to traditional forms of socio - political organization. The understanding of the Enlightenment is the same (it is a secular, anti-clerical and anti-religious project), only the attitude towards it is different.

With his work, D. Sorkin tries to shake such well-established ideas about the Enlightenment. It shows that within this intellectual project there was also a "religious enlightenment", which was a powerful current represented by many influential intellectuals throughout Europe: from England to Austria and Germany through France. He focuses on six very original, but still somewhat similar thinkers, each of whom is dedicated to a separate chapter of the book: William Warburton (William Warburtori), Jacob Vernet (Jacob Vernet), Siegmund Jacob Baumgar-ten (Siegmund Jacob Baumgar-ten), Moses Mendelssohn (Moses Mendelssohn), Joseph Valentin Eybel and Antoine-Adrien Lamourette, each of whom combined the seemingly incompatible: commitment to the ideals of the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and loyalty to their religious tradition, on the other. Hence the name of their intellectual movement: "religious Enlightenment".

These different people, in Sorkin's description, were driven by the desire to reconcile the radical message of new ideas, to create a new reality.-

they gradually captured the consciousness of educated Europeans, with their respective religions. These new ideas, if we refer to Jonathan Israel, can be summarized in eight basic propositions, which together constitute the essence of the so-called "radical Enlightenment", which has its roots in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza: (1) the acceptance of philosophical (mathematical-historical) reason as the sole and exclusive criterion of truth; (2) the rejection of all forms of the supernatural, whether magic, disembodied spirits, or divine providence; (3) the equality of all human beings (regardless of their gender or race); (4) a secular "universalism" in ethical matters, rooted in the idea of equality and focusing on impartiality, justice and mercy; (5) inclusive tolerance and freedom of thought based on independent critical thinking; (6) personal freedom in matters of lifestyle and sexual behavior, when it comes to the consent of two adults protection of the dignity and freedom of unmarried or gay people; (7) freedom of expression, political criticism, and the press in the public domain; (8) democratic republicanism as the most effective form of democracy. legitimate form of political organization ⁵. Sorkin focuses on the efforts of representatives of the religious Enlightenment to respond from within their religious traditions to the challenges posed by the ideas of radical philosophies. In particular, they were particularly concerned with the problem of reconciling philosophical reason with faith and Revelation, as well as the search for non-radical forms of religious tolerance that, on the one hand, would pay tribute to freedom of conscience and postulate the inadmissibility of coercion in matters of faith, and on the other, would take into account the confessional specifics of their countries and would not lead whether it is a complete separation of Church and state, or the creation of one or another kind of civil religion. In general, Sorkin suggests that the strategy of religious enlighteners should be considered a strategy of finding a "middle ground" between two extremes: radical Enlightenment, on the one hand, and radical conservatism, on the other.

What unites the representatives of the religious Enlightenment is the desire for what Sorkin calls the" reasonableness " of faith

^{Israel J.} 5. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670 - 1752. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. P. 866.

(p. 11). Rational faith, in their view, had to find a healthy middle ground between the traditional forms of intolerant, dogmatic, fanatical faith and the extreme exaltation of reason, fraught with immoral skepticism and the transformation of religion at best into a "natural religion" derived from philosophical speculations about what God is and what God-pleasing human activity can consist of. Religious enlighteners tried to " combine natural religion with the religion of revelation... They saw natural religion as a necessary but insufficient foundation of faith. Natural religion alone was not sufficient to provide instruction in matters of morality and true faith. Only reason paired with Revelation was an adequate response to the task at hand " (p. 23). In their quest for "reasonable faith," religious educators have tried to interpret Scripture using the principle of "adaptation": God, when communicating his will to people, always "adapted" to the specific temporal, spatial, and mental characteristics of his interlocutors, which requires the Bible interpreter to constantly take into account this specific historical context (p. 13).

Another common feature of religious enlighteners was the desire to develop an acceptable form of religious tolerance, which would logically follow from the principle of individual autonomy and freedom of conscience, which is important for the Enlightenment. The church and synagogue, viewed through the prism of the theory of natural rights, became for them voluntary associations of free individuals, in which coercion turned out to be an unacceptable practice. However, given their characteristic desire for moderation, each of them tended to make some exceptions to the principle of tolerance: Warburton, Baumgarten, and Mendelssohn-like Locke-were hostile to atheists; Bernet was willing to show tolerance towards other Protestants, but not Catholics; Eibel was ready for civil tolerance, but not Catholics. not to theological tolerance, that is, civil freedom for non-Believers was allowed, but theologically the goal of converting Jews and Protestants to the correct faith was still preserved (p. 15). Nevertheless, they sought to avoid the extremes of either purely secular or purely theocratic rule, instead advocating the ideal of a state church based on ecclesiological diversity.-

They advocated the guarantee of individual freedom of conscience (with the specified reservations) and the independence of church institutions. To the radical demands for the separation of church and State or the creation of a civil religion, they opposed the ideal of autonomy in matters of faith for both the individual and the church, provided that they fully agreed with the bureaucratic authority of the state in those matters that concerned civil order.

In his analysis of the ideas of religious Enlightenment, Sorkin tries to show that instead of a single Enlightenment, canonized in its radical French version, there were many versions of the Enlightenment, one of which was the Religious Enlightenment. Instead of singular Enlightenment, Sorkin suggests talking about " multiple enlightenments."

In this sense, the importance of Sorkin's work seems indisputable, especially in relation to the Russian intellectual context. After all, if in the European tradition the interpretation of the Enlightenment as a purely secular project is somehow softened by the understanding that in addition to the "radical Enlightenment" there is also an influential tradition of" moderate Enlightenment", represented, in particular, by John Locke and Isaac Newton in England, as well as by many other thinkers in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and other countries ⁶, then in the Russian consciousness, the Enlightenment-due to the peculiarities of Russian cultural history, as well as largely due to the specifics of the Soviet tradition of the history of ideas - is almost unambiguously identified with its radical variety and is still canonized in the form that it took in France in the XVIII century. As a result, the confrontation between believers and atheists in Russia takes the most radical forms: enlightenment ideas of freedom, reason, religious tolerance, and progress are conceived as essentially incompatible with the religious tradition that historically dominates our culture. The "middle ground", which religious enlighteners were searching for, turns out to be an unthinkable alternative in Russian culture.

To this, the absence in Russian culture of a "middle ground" between " superreligious-

^{Israel J.} 6. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650 - 1750. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. P. 11.

stu", on the one hand, and religious atheism-on the other, many authors have repeatedly pointed out-Yu. Lotman, B. Uspensky, M. Epstein and others. As a result, the dynamics of Russian cultural history are subject to what David Martin called the "vicious spiral" of secularization7, when the development goes from one extreme to the other - from the total churching of imperial Russia to the atheist state of the USSR. After the failure of the atheist policy in the late 80s of the XX century, Russia finally had a chance to move from a "binary" system, which knows nothing in between, to a "ternary" system, which implies the presence of something in between two extremes. However, it seems that the search for a "middle ground", for example in the form of "reasonable faith", was not crowned with success. The extremes have never been reconciled or even mitigated. The lack of this reconciliation is evidenced by such a rather paradoxical phenomenon as the figure of an "Orthodox atheist" (many well-known people, including the politician Alexander Lukashenko, the physicist Sergei Kapitsa, the philosopher Lev Mitrokhin), that is, a person who is unable to reconcile his enlightened views on the world (excluding the possibility of Incarnation, miracles, Revelation, faith) with those of other people. the need to somehow integrate religion into one's identity and prefer instead a simple mechanical connection of two dissimilar elements without the effort of their essential synthesis.

However, the lack of a" middle ground " is not only a problem of Russian culture. In his book, Sorkin shows that the project of religious Enlightenment ultimately failed, and the idea of a "middle ground" was implemented only within very limited limits. In fact, if this failure had not occurred, we would not be dominated by the secular interpretation of the Enlightenment today. Especially tragic and revealing in this respect is the fate of Antoine-Adrien Lamouret (1742-1794), to whom the last chapter of the book is devoted. It is to Lamouret the priest, a native of the Order of the Lazarists, that we owe the term "Christian democracy". The peak of his career was the appointment of the constitutional Bishop of Lyon and his mandate as a deputy in the Legislative Assembly. In the 1780s, Lamouret made a bold attempt to unify the disparate ideas of religion in France at the time-

^{Martin D.} 7. A General Theory of Secularization. Blackwell, 1978.

a single project aimed at the" rebirth " of the Church and the reinterpretation of the faith. Sorkin summarizes Lamouret's themes as follows:" the role of reason and feeling in matters of faith (influenced by Rousseau); the relationship between the religion of revelation and natural religion; Christianity as a political philosophy and social ethics " (p. 274). He formulated his vision of reformed Catholicism in three works published successively from 1786 to 1789 ("Reflections on the Philosophy of Unbelief, or Reflections on the Spirit and Design of the Irreligious Philosophers of Our Time", 1786; "The Pleasure of Religion, or the Power of the Gospel to Make us Happy", 1788; "Reflections on the Philosophy of Faith, or the System of Faith"). Christianity", 1789). He argued against the rationalistic arrogance of philosophes and argued that "philosophers must recognize not only the existence of truths beyond reason, but also that the fact that these truths transcend reason is evidence of their divine source" (p. 277) - In his meditations, Lamouret sought to reconcile reason and Revelation: "Reason and Revelation fit together much better than different interpreters suggest... These two lamps draw their own light ... from a single source; they are never ... they do not conflict, except in the hands of a person" (Quote from Lamouret according to Sorkin's book, p. 278). During the years of the revolution, Lamouret became one of those "patriotic" and "enlightened" priests who sought to combine the ideals of the revolution with those of Christianity. He gave the deputies a famous lecture on Rousseau's social contract, in which he tried to reconcile the gospel with the revolution. He took an active part in the debate over whether non-Catholics, i.e. Protestants and Jews, should be allowed to take the "civil oath"; in his view, "it is a matter of principle to allow Jews to have 'civil status' "(p. 285), as important gains are at stake in this matter Revolutions. Striving for the renewal of the Church, for its return to the ideals of equality and justice, Lamouret became an active supporter of the adoption of the Civil structure of the clergy(Constitution civile du clerge, July 12, 1790), according to which the Church was subject to reform-the introduction of 83 dioceses (instead of the former archbishoprics and bishoprics), coinciding with the division of the country into departments, the establishment of a fixed salary for priests depending on their duties, the establishment of the principle of beatings. -

slaves of priests, bishops and cardinals (in the spirit of the idea of popular sovereignty). In order to implement this program, part of the church's land was expropriated - Lamouret was a supporter of such secularization of land, as it contributed to the impoverishment and subsequent recovery of the Church. The adoption of this order provoked a split in society into "Catholic France", that is, an anti-revolutionary, pro-clerical party, and" free France", that is, a pro-revolutionary and anti-clerical party. Lamouret consistently supported this new arrangement, which he considered necessary for the regeneration of the Church, and which he constantly repeated in his sermons.

The tragedy of Lamourette's position was that his "middle ground" was interpreted by each of the opposing sides as a betrayal: some accused him of covertly adhering to the radical ideas of philosophes, while others saw him as a cunning opponent of progress and revolutionary conquest. Lamouret's last victory was the so-called "brotherly kiss", which he proposed in 1792 to end all party disagreements. The idea, which was initially supported by deputies of opposing parties who rushed to embrace each other, was quickly forgotten, and all Lamouret's efforts to find a "middle ground" ended in failure. In 1794, he was executed by guillotine on charges of participating in counter-revolutionary events in Lyon.

Instead of a moderate middle position, one of the extremes prevailed in France. Further events are well known - the years of de-Christianization that ended with the Concordat between the Church and Napoleon in 1801. This Concordat embodied the ideas of the Civil structure of the clergy, but this time in much more authoritarian forms: the nationalization of church property; the reduction of the number of dioceses and bishops; the transformation of priests into state officials on a salary (p.308).

The failure of the "middle ground" strategy, most vividly represented by Lamouret, and the radicalization of the Revolution polarized not only France, but all of Europe. Napoleon extended this radical policy to the entire empire. Concluding his narrative, D. Sorkin sadly notes: "A glorious revolution [in England] it marked an era of religious Enlightenment, marking the middle way between the state Church and religious tolerance, the king and the couple.-

lamentation. However, the French Revolution and Napoleon, having proclaimed the need for an unambiguous choice between the old order and the new, Christianity and reason, revolution and counter-revolution, reduced this alternative to nothing " (p. 309).

The French Revolution buried the religious enlightenment's dream of a " middle ground." Europe was almost irrevocably divided into two warring camps-supporters of traditional religion and supporters of the Enlightenment. Some demanded a return to the usual orthodox forms, others - a movement towards Enlightenment. Religious Enlightenment "could not fit into the new configuration of politics and religion to the point where it became almost unthinkable. The" interpretive matrix "of the Revolution proved unsuitable for understanding religious Enlightenment, leading to the fact that the latter was virtually forgotten" (p. 311). No subsequent efforts to revive the ideals of religious Enlightenment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were ever successful, although there were certainly occasional bursts, such as during the heyday of the "theological Enlightenment" in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. However, as Sorkin writes, " these heirs were only epigones of religious Enlightenment. Individually or collectively, in their scope and influence, power and prestige, they were only pale simulacra of the eighteenth-century movement" (p. 314).

Sorkin's reflections on the fate of religious Enlightenment lead us directly to the problems of 21st-century societies. After all, we inherited from our predecessors this irreconcilable opposition of Enlightenment and religion, progress and tradition, reason and faith, science and Scripture-an opposition from which the search for that "middle ground" is one of the most urgent tasks in the post-secular era.

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