It is now a problem more or less universally acknowledged that religion, even in an ostensibly secular age, must be in need of good commentary. The underlying problem is: what would constitute good commentary at this point? It is not as if religion has just appeared on the horizon of the secular intellectual. Even if we restrict our purview to nonreligious, nontheological discourse, there is a long tradition of critical appraisals and histories of religious phenomena, dating from the ancient Greeks. The field receives an intellectual boost of sorts in the late eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the early twentieth centuries, as the religion of the theologians and prophetic reformers gives way to anthropological and sociological disciplines, the better to be scientifically understood and codified. This upsurge in the secular accounting for religious belief is often explained as the result of the Enlightenment—that is, materialist explanations of nature, textual authority, and psychology eventually turn religion into a natural function of human will (as in Hume and Kant), a series of authorial inventions (as in Strauss and the “higher criticism”), and a psychological manifestation of deeper impulses, from love (as in Feuerbach), to class-based self-narcotizing illusion (as in Marx), to fear of the loss of paternal care (as in Freud). Max Weber proposed the most intriguing and far-reaching hypothesis about how the Enlightenment superseded religion in the West: Protestant reform within Christianity itself—beginning with Luther and Calvin—designed to produce a purer and far less magical, mystical, hierarchic, and corrupt system of belief, had the unintended consequence of laying the psychological foundations for ascetic capitalism, and hence (as John Wesley foresaw) the seemingly inevitable decline of religion in favor of worldly pursuits.

But this modern secular interest in the meaning of religion can also be understood as a compelling quest after some social or cultural replacement for the religious certainties left behind. Auguste Comte proposed a reinvented, pseudo-Catholic religion of humanity once the “throne and altar” dualism of the ancien régime was reduced to recurrent parodies of itself; Matthew Arnold hoped a widely disseminated sense of the “best that has been thought” would prevent the franchise-seeking sans-culottes from tearing up Hyde Park once religion had been coopted by evangelical liberals in the service of social reform. And Durkheim reduced the religious impulse to the social impulse, though a sort of chicken-and-egg problem remained, demonstrating that strong nationalist or internationalist fervor would do just as well as religion in providing a sense of collective consciousness and moral community.

In general, these two accounts of the relationship between religion and modernity persisted throughout the twentieth century. The first, Weberian account led to the “secularization thesis” that preoccupied so many sociologists and historians of religion in the 1960s, such as Peter Berger, Robert Bellah, and Thomas Luckmann, though the second, Durkheimian account—that various substitutes for religion would inevitably arise, or need to arise, in order to provide continuing moral and social cohesion—often shadowed the first. Indeed, the field of literary studies was particularly keen on the implications of this second account, since literature was so often and rightly understood as a derrière-garde affair. Matthew Arnold's targets in defending the vocation of the man of letters were the liberal and scientific-minded reformers of his day, whose street politics were far more progressive than Arnold's defense of the vaguely genteel virtues he called “sweetness and light.” As in the work of Jonathan Swift, who pilloried the “the moderns” of the eighteenth century by adopting the satiric skills of “the ancients” in the battle of the books, literature often achieves its ends by a seemingly radical use of the tools of the old regime in order to undo the pretensions of the current one. Outdated forms of religion, in this sense, are tailor-made tools for unmasking the hubris of unthinking secularism. T. S. Eliot made great use of the topos, and Steven Greenblatt has more recently argued that Shakespeare did so too by inserting what would have been an overtly “Catholic” and hence proscribed Purgatory at the center of Hamlet when it played to the officially Protestant court and crowds at the end of Elizabeth's reign. One of the great and enduring books of American literary criticism—M. H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism (1971)—provides the most full-throated, organic, and Hegelian version of the persistence of religion in a secular age by arguing that the Romantics, both English and German, rediscovered in “nature” almost all that had been lost with the demise of biblical religion. Not unlike Spinoza, that is, Abrams's Romantics concluded that nature was where God was to be found in a world abandoned by God.

Only one of the books under review here—Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion—displays much of an interest in the problems and contradictions of accounting for religion along the lines I have just sketched out; that is, from within the limits of secular modern scholarship. This is in fact the theme of Brad Gregory's contribution to the volume, “Can We See Things Their Way? Should We Try?” And the reason to ask such questions is not hard to find, since “intellectual history,” far more than any other kind, is almost inseparable from the history of secularization in the West. I am sometimes tempted to tell my students that, in the end, all “intellectual history” ends up being the history of secularization: it is the account, played out in various registers, of how magic and then religion gave way to rationality and finally science (as both Comte and Frazer put it). No decent intellectual historian would ever say that that is all there is, or that the story is anywhere near as straightforward as I am making it sound. But this is nevertheless the story now being reconsidered in the wake of what many have seen as an upsurge in belief, especially outside the West, over the past three decades or so—roughly since the Iranian Revolution. Chapman and his fellow editors and contributors have made it their primary task to rethink this straightforward, inevitably Whiggish story of the coming of Enlightenment by emphasizing the degree to which religion has returned to intellectual history in ways that distinctly challenge older narratives grounded in the assumption of progressive secularization.

In their introduction to the volume, Chapman and Coffey target Quentin Skinner's version of intellectual history for failing to live up to its promise where religious thought is concerned: Skinner pursued “seeing things their way” when dealing with the past, but he conveniently tended to gloss over what “they” thought about religion. Instead, the editors find their precursors in figures like Natalie Zemon Davis, John Dunn, and John Pocock, and the collection of essays that follow bear out this heritage. John Coffey and Willem van Asselt argue directly with Skinner, Anna Abulafia and Howard Hotson deal with the problem of telling the history of Christian–Jewish relations in medieval and early modern Europe, Richard Muller takes on the larger problem of “Whiggism” in the standard accounts of early modern intellectual history, James Bradley elaborates on Pocock's revisionist accounts of Newton and Locke, Mark Noll takes on early American religious history, and Alister Chapman looks at religion in modern Britain. In the conclusion, David Bebbington supplies an appropriately edifying meditation on how the whole enterprise raises more questions than it can solve. It is a good, solid collection of essays, even if nothing of particularly dramatic consequence is uncovered, and it has a distinctly British flavor—calmly reasoned and somewhat worried about perhaps taking the whole revisionist thing too far.

David Biale's Not in the Heavens, which is to my mind the best of the books considered here, opens with a caveat that should be taken to heart by all who now write on religion and secularization. After a somewhat perfunctory overview of secularization literature (Funkenstein, Löwith, Schmitt, Weber, Berger, Gauchet—all in one page!), Biale delivers a crucial corrective:

Biale's larger point is that if Europe itself was this diverse, all the more so must be the forms of secularization found in China or India or Turkey—or in his chosen area, Jewish culture. Biale is perhaps too quick to overlook the immense contribution of Max Weber in all this. Weber's rich and voluminous accounts of religious traditions outside Christianity are—at least for their time—models of careful scholarship, even if Weber's work in this area eventually tends to support Biale's claim that earlier scholars of religion were likely to conclude that Christianity was far more prone to secularization and modernization than was any other tradition.

But the remainder of Biale's book is simply illuminating, and in many ways. He wants to demonstrate, per his claim about secularization being a plural process, that Judaism spawned its own forms of negotiation between religious and secular impulses that were distinct (or at least distinct enough) from this dialectic in Christian thought. Not surprisingly, Maimonides and Spinoza loom large in Biale's narrative, but Biale does such a good job of situating these figures in their specific social milieus that the story he tells does not seem tired or routine. Most important, he does not take the easy (but often false) route of seeing the secular as some sort of Manichean, external force in conflict with benighted religion, but rather (as Weber himself did with such skill) manages to reveal how Jewish religious traditions spawned a particular sort of Jewish secularism. He is able to tease secularism out of Kabbalah (someone should alert Madonna!), out of the Torah itself, and he does yeoman work in tracing how the debates over the basis of modern, post-religious Jewish identity—race, nation, or state?—themselves came out of the religious tradition that energized them. His concluding meditation on “Jewish secularism” as a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon brings the historical research of previous chapters to bear more heavily on continuing debates about the nature of contemporary Jewish identity.

This is not to say that everyone will agree with Biale at all points. Biale's account of the “territorial” basis—and consequent dilemmas—of nationalism is for me not very satisfying. On the one hand, he rejects the “utopian” accounts of nonterritorial (or diasporic) Jewish identity found in Hannah Arendt, but then concludes (somewhat blandly, in my view) that the existing state of Israel now constituted via territorial sovereignty has produced merely “a great irony,” since it entails a secular state “deeply entangled with religion.” Now, I have little to say about utopian notions of ethnic identity—Biale may be right, and he may be wrong—though I think he would agree with me that there are very few instances of historical success in this area. There are more Persian Jews in Los Angeles than in Iran, and I doubt (and I think Biale would too) that this is a good thing in the long run for those who desire the persistence of Persian Jewish communal “identity.” The problem is that he has very little to say about the actual territorial predicament today of “Israel”—and it is (and is in) a terrible predicament—beyond his acknowledgment of historical “irony,” and that is a shame. Surely, a great scholar with as much insight into the history of Jewish religion and secularism might be expected to express somewhat more trenchant views on what is, after all, one of the major geopolitical muddles of our time. “Irony” alone will not do.

Pericles Lewis's Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel is also about a return, but it is largely an unacknowledged return to a very old debate about the religious implications of modernist literature. The authors Lewis addresses here include those most often discussed previously in terms of religion—Kafka, Joyce, and the Henry James that can be illuminated by his brother William's interests—and those most often understood to be quite secular, such as Proust and Woolf. As a general introduction to the topic, the book is workmanlike and judicious. But specialists in the field, and especially in any of the authors discussed, will perhaps feel that what is true in Lewis's readings is really not all that new; and what is new is, too often, not all that true.

One problem is signaled already in the title. Lewis is interested in something he calls “religious experience,” though I could find no extended treatment of exactly what he means by this phrase. It derives most directly from William James's famous title phrase, “varieties of religious experience,” and Lewis treats William at length in his chapter on Henry. William James, as Charles Taylor has recently reminded us, is the foremost model for talking about nonconfessional and broadly spiritual “religious experience” in the English-speaking world, and Lewis is deeply indebted to both James and Taylor in his approach to religion. William James's account of such experience notoriously focused on the exclusively private and inward relations—many read them as echt Protestant relations—that an individual might have with the realm of the supersensual. James explicitly eschewed any interest in external forms of religion, in ecclesiastical matters, or in anything that might be called “social” where religion was concerned. Lewis's allegiance to this exclusively inward understanding of religion is further underlined by the thesis statement in his opening chapter, which emphasizes Taylor's Jamesian account of “religious experience”:

The point here is that “private life and idiosyncratic expression,” the hallmarks of William James's approach to religious experience, are at the heart of Lewis's understanding of modernism. I think there are a number of problems with this as a thesis for the book, quite beyond the very broad brush Lewis wields here. (The extent of secularization among the Victorian working class, to take just one example, has been a hotly contested issue for many decades. Even if the figures Lewis cites from Callum Brown are right—and they have been much challenged—only half of all Victorians at mid-century went to church, and we have little reliable evidence that this moiety was overwhelmingly made up of laborers. The fact that most Victorians married and buried in the church, as noted by Lewis, is itself not that telling—this is still the case in many Scandinavian countries, perhaps the most secular there have ever been. And the most fervently and assuredly evangelical of the Victorians, as Arnold never tired of pointing out, were the prosperous, politically liberal, and socially progressive haute bourgeoisie.)

Lewis's central claim that modernism belongs to an “age of authenticity” is, despite his apparent belief that Taylor is adding something to the discussion, actually quite routine. Taylor himself borrows the idea from a literary critic to start with—Lionel Trilling—whose rather famous Sincerity and Authenticity (based on lectures Trilling gave back in 1970) basically makes Lewis's point for him about literature after the Romantics, though Trilling is never cited. The idea that this quest for authenticity within modernism should have harbored its own concern with “spiritual matters” was vintage, mid-1960s Trilling as well: “No literature has ever been so intensely spiritual as ours,” Trilling wrote in “On the Teaching of Modern Literature” (also ignored by Lewis). “I do not venture to call it actually religious, but certainly it has the special intensity of concern with the spiritual life which Hegel noted when he spoke of the great modern phenomenon of the secularization of spirituality.”Footnote ¹ The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of finding “spiritual matters” in modernist literature; it was the time when Richard Ellmann (cited by Lewis only in passing for his later biography of Joyce) boldly declared that “the Edwardians were looking for ways to be religious about life itself.”Footnote ² Even Virginia Woolf, let us recall (even if Lewis did not), approvingly called Joyce a “spiritual” writer in contrast to Edwardian materialists such as Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy.Footnote ³ As often happens when one generation of scholars succeeds another, Lewis's putatively new unveiling of the “spirituality” in modernism is actually very much a rediscovery of a great deal that has apparently been forgotten. The inevitability of such rediscoveries will always be with us. What keeps the great game of criticism vital is the search for new ways of dealing with the old problems. But this can only occur when one acknowledges that the problems are indeed old.

Alas, even methodologically for Lewis, not that much has changed. Lewis's focus on how “religious experience” has escaped the channels built by organized faith and spilled out into “private life and idiosyncratic expression” was perhaps better stated by David Daiches (quite contrary to Lewis's claims that the problem was often ignored by previous critics) during Virginia Woolf's lifetime:

To his credit, Lewis dutifully hunts down a myriad of religious allusions in the works he discusses, and his effort usefully expands our sense of how often the modernists resorted to religious motifs or imagery—though, given the voluminous amount already written on religion in Kafka and Joyce, one wonders how much is really being added to the conversation. Yet it would have been genuinely helpful to know how Lewis differs from figures such as Daiches and Trilling and Ellmann (and many others) in the way he approaches, say, a religious image or allusion in a text. Would he claim, as J. Hillis Miller once did, that religious themes in a work of literature have no religious significance unless they emanate from the writer's own relation to God? Or would he agree with Gabriel Josipovici that the secular solipsism of many modernists was always paradoxically linked to some idea of religious communion, whatever their overt beliefs? We may never know, because Lewis writes as if he had never encountered such criticism.

Finally, Lewis's thesis, derived as it is from the inward and individual sense of religious experience emphasized by William James and Charles Taylor, does not hold up that well even on its own terms. When Lewis turns to Proust, it is less the individual's personal and isolated relationship with spiritual matters that counts than the similarity of some of Proust's social concerns with the work of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss on totemic religions, gifts, and the primacy of the clan as a social institution. This is not an unpromising line of thought (as I outlined, though apparently to little effect on Lewis's research, in Households of the Soul back in 1997). But arguing about spiritual matters on these grounds is in complete contradiction to everything James, Taylor, and presumably Lewis would want to claim about the essential nature of “religious experience.” Durkheim's group theory of religion eschews personal spirituality just as robustly as James's notion of experience denies the social. The two ways of looking at religion were at loggerheads throughout the early twentieth century, and the whole notion of an “age of authenticity” would have been meaningless to the more positivist Durkheim. I think it would have been meaningless to Proust too, especially if we accept his affinity to Durkheim's understanding of group religion. There is actually a great deal in Lewis's account to talk about. I just wish Lewis had managed to talk about more of it himself.