Concomitant with the political and cultural realignments within Europe and the rise of religious fundamentalisms outside it, the notion of Enlightenment has been undergoing a reassessment over the past years. David Sorkin's book gives ample evidence of this new “turn” that, following J. A. Pocock's plea, sets the agenda for a plural understanding of the Enlightenment. For many historians of the Enlightenment, Sorkin reinstates religion as an intelligible field of studies. It is true, however, that the reform movements in the churches and their manifold interactions with politics have been studied before, only to mention Mario Rosa's Settecento religioso (Venice, 1999). But in view of the mainstream scholarship that has been interested mainly in the Enlightenment's “project” of secularization, the reform movements within the churches and the Enlightenment's impact on theology have been considered of minor importance, if not altogether negligible.

With few exceptions, these studies have been mostly concerned with one denomination only and with the national framework within which the reform movements operated, and their interests lay primarily with the flow of unilateral influences from here to there. Sorkin, however, crosses over both the confessional and the national boundaries and, in addition, reaches out to include Judaism. This transconfessional and transnational approach, innovative as it is, is based on the assumption that all religious beliefs and institutions basically encountered similar challenges and that their responses were cast in a similar mold. Consequently, Sorkin chooses one representative figure of each belief, sets him in his political and cultural milieu, and meticulously investigates the contents of his main writings.

Common to all is a profound anchorage in the natural law theory with its principle of freedom of conscience that was conducive to toleration. Hence, the moderation of theological disputes and religious practices and the suppression of fanaticism became a common cause. Historical scholarship, in turn, supplied the instruments of the critique necessary to obtain an understanding of the Bible and the traditions in tune with reason. The reasonableness of religion, supported by natural science and natural religion, was to lie in the balance between reason and faith, in a “middle way” that recognized revelation, i.e., truths above reason, as a divine donation necessary to overcome man's imperfection. In general, the religious enlighteners, as Sorkin calls the six figures of his case studies, accepted the state's authority while pleading for church autonomy in matters of faith. They were persons of public stature as a result of their appeals to the public. Only Moses Mendelssohn was to achieve an international reputation.

Space allows brief mention of only five of the “enlighteners,” and to expound on the Austrian Joseph Valentin Eybel (1741–1805) as the representative of the Catholic Enlightenment. The Anglican bishop William Warburton (1698–1779) figures as the herald of “moderation” in England; Jacob Vernet (1698–1789) defended a reasonable religion against the philosophes in Calvinist Geneva by using Wolffian logics; Sigmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706–1757), professor at the Prussian university of Halle, laid the foundations of Lutheran neology; Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), a key figure of Berlin's enlightenment, pioneered the renewal of Jewish religiosity and scholarship known as Haskalah; and Adrien Lamourette (1742–1794), a member of the Lazarist order, bishop of Lyon, and delegate to the Legislative Assembly, attempted to accommodate a reasonable religion with the Revolution.

Finally, Eybel, whose reputation rested less on his scholarly achievements as professor of canon law in Vienna (1772–1779) than on his role as the most ardent propagator of state-organized church reform in the 1780s. Furthermore, as one of the most pugnacious provincial bureaucrats, he briefly assumed episcopal responsibilities in the newly erected diocese of Linz. Of Joseph's generation, he was the learned man on the spot to use his vernacular pen, starting with the pope's visit to Vienna in 1782. However, those who are familiar with the intellectual potency of state chancellor Wenzel Anton Kaunitz and of Franz Joseph Heinke, the Austro-Bohemian Chancellery's head in church affairs (some of their writings have been published, 1951 to 1957) will contest the author's conclusion that “Eybel supplied the blueprint for the state church that Maria Theresa, Kaunitz, and Joseph II considered integral to transforming the Habsburg monarchy into a unified state” (236). Thus, not the least among this book's achievements is the revival of discussion on the religious Enlightenment in the multiconfessional and multinational Austrian monarchy.