Whereas some scholars have looked at the period from Spinoza (and before) as a steady march toward secularism, there are inevitably those who have (and will) try to defend the perseverance of faith and dogma, albeit in a different shape and form. As its title suggests, the book under review falls into the latter category. According to Tuska Benes, the onslaught of Enlightenment philosophy and the ascent of reason during the eighteenth century created a crisis of traditional revealed religion that forced intellectuals to either abandon or reinvent revelation. This struggle and the intellectual debates surrounding this resurgence of revelation are at the center of Benes's book. Benes focuses on the period between 1750 and 1850 in the German lands, which boasted some of the most important intellectual minds of the period. They include Lessing, Mendelssohn, Kant, Herder, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. The most intriguing part of Benes's book, however, is not the responses of these intellectual giants; rather, her approach is. She provides a much broader picture, including the religious struggles that haunted Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish intellectual communities at the time.
Of course, Benes goes down some well-trodden paths as well. Her first chapter reiterates a familiar albeit important story that no serious treatment of the German Enlightenment can leave out and that sets the tone for the entire book: Lessing's ugly ditch, namely the divide between revelation and reason. Lessing's dilemma came to the fore in the context of the publication of excerpts from Reimarus's Apologie, culminating in the Fragmentenstreit. Lessing offered a solution to this dilemma in his Education of the Human Race (1780), where he proposed that, historically, divine revelation advanced progressively, contingent with the intellectual capability of human communities. Just as problematic as the rationalist biblical criticism exemplified by Reimarus was the comparative study of religion, which inevitably raised issues of the prevalence of primordial polytheism and its relationship to the Judeo-Christian faith tradition. These debates were always complex in nature, and practitioners frequently arrived at very different positions. Whereas Johann Gottfried Herder, for instance, found traces of primordial revelation in the astral worship of the Sabians, Christoph Meiners advanced a racialist hierarchy of religion that favored the ancient Greeks.
Among the most significant contributions of Benes's book is her ability to illustrate the rich intellectual climate that pervaded the period on which she focuses. These debates were not limited to the ivory towers of Protestant academia such as those in Göttingen or Jena; instead, they spread through the domains of Roman Catholic Bavaria and the Jewish intellectual circles of Berlin. Jewish religious thinkers were in a particularly precarious situation. Whereas Protestant critics of revelation could reject Old Testament practices as the superstitious beliefs of a crude and primitive people, such a dismissal would have robbed Judaism of its foundations. This was the dilemma that plagued Mendelssohn. The Jewish sage from Dessau ended up endorsing the Torah as a fountain of practical information rather than a source of religious doctrine. Although other Jewish intellectuals ended up disagreeing with the subtle points of Mendelssohn's argument, even progressive thinkers such as Abraham Geiger ended up defending the importance of historical revelation for Jews.
Of course, as Benes illustrates throughout her book, these debates were influenced by the political and cultural climate that surrounded them. One example would be the grand scheme of Friedrich Rückert's “nationalization of God's word” that can only be understood in the context of the rising tide of German nationalism (88). Equally, the Roman Catholic Neo-Scholasticism espoused by Joseph Kleutgen and the reaffirmation of revelation rooted in a divinely inspired scripture can be viewed as the Roman Church's efforts to suppress liberal tendencies in response to the revolutionary upheavals of 1848.
At the same time, there are a few minor shortfalls in Benes's treatment of the subject. The idea of a specifically German context seems somewhat anachronistic and a fallback to the dark times of the 1980s and 1990s, which witnessed the emergence of a Renaissance in National Context, a Reformation in National Context, and the Enlightenment in National Context. The irony of such an endeavor becomes clear when Benes stresses the response of German intellectuals to Spinoza or Hume. German intellectuals engaged with the arguments of Spinoza, the English deists, and the French materialists in the same way as did their English or Dutch counterparts. As Martin Mulsow has shown for the radical Enlightenment, direct access to heterodox works was not even always necessary. Radical arguments were often disseminated unintentionally by an orthodoxy that was trying to refute them. Many of these debates are also much older than Benes acknowledges. The comparative history of religion, for example, reaches well into the seventeenth century. Several of these earlier arguments resurfaced decades (if not centuries) later and were considered far from outdated. Benes herself points out that Meiners “argued against Ralph Cudworth, Thomas Hyde, and P.E. Jablonski,” two of whom were English and all of whom had been dead for at least fifty years. This holds true also regarding her treatment of physicotheology. Benes mentions neither the father of physicotheology, the Englishman William Derham, nor pays any attention to a flowering field of eighteenth-century German physicotheology that includes the contributions of Johann Albert Fabricius and Friedrich Christian Lesser. Lastly, I am unsure how Benes could justify ignoring key developments in biblical scholarship that shaped the period under scrutiny. A German edition of Edward Robinson's massive Biblical Researches in Palestine and Adjacent Countries was published in Halle in 1841, and the publication of the work of David Friedrich Strauss and Bruno Bauer blew up the quest for the historical Jesus.
However, these quibbles notwithstanding, Benes has produced a portrayal of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theology that is truly interdisciplinary, interdenominational, and, albeit to a lesser extent, international. It is an overall very valuable contribution to an intellectually rich yet understudied period.
