The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment is an important book. In it, Thomas Ahnert surveys with admirable clarity and thoughtful commentary the work of a remarkable number of Scottish philosophers and theologians from the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The central figures in the narrative, however, are the Moderates of the 1750s, Hugh Blair and William Robertson.

Ahnert's central theme is that in the eighteenth century, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland changed its view of the true measure of religious belief from theological doctrine to moral conduct. It was not strict adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith or the distinctive formulae of Reformed scholasticism that distinguished the true Christian; it was good character, virtue, practical acts of kindness, and benevolence. These were the qualities that should be cultivated by Protestants, Presbyterians or Episcopalians. But only revealed religion could provide knowledge of the immortality of the soul.

It is consistent with the focus of Ahnert's study that neither David Hume nor Adam Smith figure prominently in this narrative, given Hume's denunciation of revealed religion, superstition, and enthusiasm in both his Essays and his History of England, and Smith's representation of divine providence as “the invisible hand of Jupiter.” The intellectual forbears of the Moderates were Francis Hutcheson and William Wishart.

As Ahnert points out, Hutcheson had described Christianity in his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue as a religion “which gives us the truest Idea of Virtue, and recommends the Love of God, and of Mankind, as the sum of all true Religion” (55). The Moderates, too, thought that faith was founded “on the love of God and one's fellow human beings” (78). It was a redescription of Christianity that made disputation on the attributes of divinity irrelevant. As Ahnert points out, it was unfortunate, Robertson wrote, that “over-curious speculations were incorporated into the system of religion, and came to be the most essential part of it” (80).

In opposition to orthodox misunderstandings of religion, the Moderates insisted that faith should prompt humans to love virtue and cultivate a disposition to act in a spirit of benevolence. The motive that prompts us to pursue virtue is the assurance of an afterlife for the soul. As Ahnert explains, Blair maintained that belief in an afterlife had existed “throughout all ages and among all nations”; it was a belief rooted in “the natural sentiments of the human heart” (83). One did not have to be a Christian to be eligible for salvation according to Blair and other Moderates. Salvation was available to all who have lived virtuous lives.

It will be evident to readers of Ahnert's book that there are many affinities between the moral philosophy of Francis Hutcheson and the outlook of the Moderates. I would suggest, however, that the many similarities, so well documented by Ahnert, may lead one to attribute to Hutcheson positions that he did not hold. Ahnert believes that Hutcheson's attitude toward the great philosophers of classical antiquity who did not have the benefit of Christian revelation was less favorable and more ambivalent than is sometimes suggested. I would maintain that Hutcheson could not have been more explicit about his indebtedness to the moralists of classical antiquity. He declared on the title page of the first edition of the Inquiry (1725) that in that work the reader will find that “the Ideas of Moral good and Evil are establish'd according to the Sentiments of the Antient Moralists.” In 1730, in his inaugural lecture on the natural sociability of mankind, he recalled how, as a student, at the University of Glasgow, “I had my first taste of the immortal sublimities” of the classical poets, moralists, and dramatists, “likewise the abundant grace and dignity of Cicero in every branch of philosophy.” He also recalled that it was at Glasgow that he first reflected upon “the nature, the power, the wisdom of the eternal God himself, by whose power, wisdom, and design all things are governed” (Francis Hutcheson, Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind, ed. James Moore and Michael Silverthorne, trans. Michael Silverthorne [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006], 192). Hutcheson would have found these arguments expressed by the spokesman for the Stoics in Cicero's dialogue On the Nature of the Gods.

Finally, in the second edition of A Synopsis of Metaphysics (1744) Hutcheson added new paragraphs in all three parts of that work (on ontology, pneumatology or the science of the mind, and natural theology) in which he rehearsed the differences between the Stoics and the Peripatetics and judged the Stoics to have had the better of the argument. I submit that this is not a “slight” difference between the two editions, as Ahnert suggests (160), but that it was a matter of importance to Hutcheson that his readers, in particular his students, should appreciate the strength of the philosophy of the ancient Stoics. He added a chapter to the second edition of Philosophia Moralis in 1745, in which he celebrated the grand view of the good man according to the ancient Stoics would seem to be consistent with the same concern.

That said, I cannot conclude this review without reiterating that this is an important book that should be read by all students of the Scottish enlightenment.