This is a modest book, about moderate people—but for those very reasons, it is of very great importance, for early modernists and modern historians alike. David Sorkin, the author of several seminal studies of Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah, has written a book that can, and should, change the way we think about the Enlightenment. Challenging Jonathan Israel's recent attempt to make the term “Enlightenment” synonymous with the radical critiques of clerical and political authority, Sorkin shows that there were viable and very influential “enlightened” religious believers who cannot simply be grouped with the orthodox enemies of “the age of reason.” These religious reformers came in various confessional stripes—Anglican, Calvinist, Lutheran, Catholic, Jewish—but all believed that reason and faith could be reconciled, and that some form of civic toleration could be combined with the state's fostering of religious communities. They belong, he insists, to an “Enlightenment spectrum” that consists of radical, moderate, and religious thinkers—the final group, in fact, may have had more adherents and more political clout than either of the other two (p. 21). The secular narrative of the Enlightenment, Sorkin concludes, has been oversold; and he shows, in diverse and fascinating ways, that ideas we usually credit to secularizers—toleration, natural law, political liberalism—are rooted, too, in religious thought.

This is an important set of claims for which there is a vast amount of evidence—but that evidence has usually been collected by scholars working in separate national or confessional fields. Sorkin has done us a great service by synthesizing this very large and often arcane secondary literature, in addition to providing brief but insightful analyses of the work of six little-known writers who hail from diverse contexts: William Warburton (London); Jacob Vernet (Geneva); Siegmund Baumgarten (Halle); Moses Mendelssohn (Berlin); Joseph Eybel (Vienna-Linz); and Adrien Lamourette (Toul-Paris-Lyon). Sorkin's choice of these six figures allows him to cover a great deal of ground while also specifying the particularities of each of his contexts. Selection was made not only to permit a discussion of different political and cultural contexts, but also to bring in a wide range of faiths, from the Whiggish Anglicanism of Warburton to Jansenist-tinted Catholicism of Vernet. By showing how each of these figures defended religious faith while also embracing reason and the new truths discovered by the natural sciences, Sorkin allows us to see that the search for a “middle way of reasonable belief” was by no means an incidental pursuit—for it often went hand in hand with absolutism's advocacy of state churches. Nor was it a form of false consciousness, doomed to slide down the slippery slope to revolutionary radicalism, or backward into counterrevolutionary reaction. The Religious Enlightenment identifies a real, Europe-wide movement that was both enlightened and religiously pious. If its efforts at moderate modernization were cut off, briefly, by the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, as Sorkin notes in an all-too-brief epilogue, the religious enlightenment would reappear in many nineteenth-century guises, from the Wissenschaft des Judentums to French Catholic Modernism.

To carry off such a project, one that implicitly if not explicitly stretches from the Reformation to the Congress of Vienna, a scholar needs not only good, solid historical knowledge of all six of these contexts, but also mastery of Europe's vast and complicated religious literature. One of the major advantages of this book is that the author not only has an expert grasp of the political worlds he treats, but fully understands and appreciates the complexity of Jewish, Calvinist, Catholic, and Lutheran theologies. There are wonderfully lucid descriptions throughout of subjects such as Christian Wolff's attempt to marry scholasticism and natural science, and Moses Mendelssohn's historical, but not historicist, reading of the Pentateuch. Sorkin shows, for example, how Baumgarten used the principle of accommodation to modify the orthodox Lutheran position on scriptural inerrancy, distinguishing passages essential to salvation from those that were not. Reading the book, in fact, one has a sort of “tip of the iceberg” feeling, which is borne out by the rich footnotes (gloriously printed at the bottom of the page!); Sorkin clearly knows his stuff, and the reader, too, must keep on her toes to follow his often highly condensed accounts of the complicated world of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European theology and religious politics. Those who do will be rewarded with many fascinating insights, and pithy but judicious analyses of these little-studied contributors to the public sphere.

Another of Sorkin's contributions is to continue progress made in recent years to decenter the French Enlightenment, which Sorkin, following Roy Porter, explicitly calls the “great anomaly.” In France alone, “the state chose not to sponsor a movement of religious reform but to suppress it,” Sorkin argues; this created “a peculiarly French polarization between religion and Enlightenment” (p. 265). We have known for a long time that the French were different (who started the Revolution, after all?), but this book helps to clarify how the suppression of religious reform by both the state and the orthodox clergy pushed clerics such as Lamourette, Sieyès, and the Abbé Grégoire to embrace the principles of 1789, if not those of 1792. But Sorkin's comparative context makes this all the more striking.

The only real quibble I have with this book is its length—this reader could have done with a slightly longer book, one that did a bit more justice to the seventeenth-century roots of the developments Sorkin tracks. One feels that Socinianism and Dutch collegialism could be given a bit more space. It is a bit unclear, in fact, why Holland in the 1630s and 1640s is not Sorkin's real starting point, rather than the Glorious Revolution, and why he offers no profile of a Dutch figure here. Similarly, the French Benedictine reformers known as Maurists are only briefly described (pp. 220–1), though they seem important in laying the foundations for French and Austrian Reform Catholicism. Some very interesting lines of thought—the development of natural rights theory as it comes through ecclesiastical law, for example, or moderates' need to keep both justification by works (to refute religious enthusiasts) and justification by faith (to avert a fall into Deism)—flash past all too quickly. The beginnings and ends of chapters, too, sometimes seem so condensed that the narrative's flow is disrupted—perhaps the result of overly exuberant editing. But one hopes that this concise, erudite, and unprepossessing book succeeds in putting its moderate subjects where they should be: in the middle of our eighteenth-century map.