For decades Peter Harrison has been one of the most distinguished intellectual historians of the relationship between science and religion in early modern Europe. Beginning with his first book, ‘Religion’ and the religions in the English Enlightenment (1990), and extending through The territories of science and religion (2015), he has interrogated key categories in narratives about Western intellectual transformations between the Middle Ages and the modern era. Where did our central concepts come from, how have their meanings changed over time, and how do received narratives obscure their histories? Some new world extends this critical, genealogical approach in a magnum opus that spans from ancient Mediterranean ideas and practices to contemporary debates about secularisation while concentrating on the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Harrison’s erudition is staggering: the bibliography lists 756 primary sources across twenty-five pages (plus fifty more pages of secondary sources); the 1,240 footnotes, many of which are discursive, substantive and illuminating in their own right, comprise perhaps 30 per cent of the work. An initial question about when in Western history people started to speak about ‘the supernatural’ prompted Harrison’s historical analysis of not only the concepts ‘supernatural’ and ‘natural’, but also of related, fundamental categories that are also treated in the book: ‘faith’, ‘belief’, ‘science’, ‘religion’, ‘reason’, ‘miracle’, ‘laws of nature’, and more. The result is a braided intellectual history that engages deeply with theology, multiple branches of philosophy and anthropology, with lesser forays into evolutionary psychology, linguistics and theories of perception.

The book’s title and subtitle point to Harrison’s aim of denaturalising ‘naturalism’, seeing it for what it is: not a commonsensical worldview based on ‘the evidence’ among modern secularists who have outgrown religion, but a recently constructed outlier among peoples and cultures in world history – one not neutrally based on the progressive triumph of the natural sciences but instead substantively reliant on Christian conceptions that were secularised in complex ways beginning with sixteenth-century Protestantism. ‘Some new world’ is a phrase from Hume’s Essay concerning human understanding (1748) in which he expressed his reaction to the strange views of nature encountered, as he put it, ‘When we peruse the first Histories of all Nations’. Harrison turns this on its head, arguing that when naturalism is seen historically and cross-culturally, ‘it is the naturalistic world of secular modernity that is new and strange’ (p. 3). Similarly, the book’s subtitle, Myths of supernatural belief in a secular age, does not denote the survival of superstitions about transcendence in our era, when the natural sciences have supposedly shown that ‘there are no supernatural entities or spiritual powers’ (p. 5). Rather, it refers to myths unwittingly held by secularists about the seeming obviousness of their convictions and their obliviousness of the history that lies behind them. In light of the book’s argument, Harrison’s subtitle means something like ‘naturalist misconceptions derived from theological ideas and rooted in historically constructed prejudices about “supernatural” belief that first appeared in the late nineteenth century’.

Harrison unfolds his argument in seven chapters, the first of which he calls ‘a prologue’ (p. 10) and the last of which includes a number of retrospective reflections. In between are five lengthy chapters that constitute the heart of his historical account. They proceed in broadly chronological fashion: Chapter ii is mostly about early and medieval Christianity and chapter vi ranges mostly from the eighteenth century into the early twentieth. Yet they also overlap, like strands in a tapestry that taken together strengthen the book’s main argument. Harrison’s brief opening chapter uses Hume’s famous argument against miracles as a way into the book’s analysis. The chapter’s title, ‘Hume’s dilemma’, refers to the problem of rival testimonies attesting respectively to the regularities of nature and to alleged miracles, which Hume resolved through ‘tacit assumptions about historical progress and the accompanying hierarchy of cultures’ (p. 14) that ‘can be read as a set of cultural prejudices and question-begging premises dressed up as a piece of philosophical reasoning’ (p. 11). Chapter ii, ‘Languages of belief’, makes the case that ‘belief’ understood as affirmations of propositions is far from cross-culturally or trans-historically universal, nor did it characterise the relational trust implied in ‘faith’ (pistis, fides) in early Christianity or medieval Latin Christendom, in which ‘implicit faith’ was such an important category. In chapter iii, ‘Inventing epistemology’, we see how the Protestant reformers’ attacks on implicit faith, coupled with their insistence on faith as an assent to doctrines along with justification for that assent, became the headwaters both for an enduring ‘ethics of assent’ and for the emphasis on epistemology in modern philosophy, starting in the seventeenth century: ‘The shift is from trust to an appeal to the evidence’ (p. 113). Chapter iv, ‘The age of evidences’, might be seen as a lengthy excursus covering broadly the same timeframe as the previous two chapters, but with a focus on arguments for God’s existence before and after the rupture introduced by the Reformation. Whereas such arguments had functioned as something like spiritual exercises in the Middle Ages, the burden of proof began shifting toward believers in the early modern period, which also saw the articulation of a new sort of natural theology related to mechanical philosophy, theological voluntarism and ‘laws of nature’ as established and sustained by a divine lawgiver.

The following chapter, ‘The birth of the supernatural’, traces a similar trajectory, from the absence of any natural/supernatural distinction before the Middle Ages, to its introduction by Aquinas (but not as a two-tier ontology), to an increasing early modern bifurcation between natural and revealed theology that accompanied miracles conceived as evidence of a discrete supernatural order, and concluding with ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism’ as nineteenth-century appropriations from the discourse of historical-critical biblical interpretation. The successive, eventually secularising transformations of a progressive historical narrative is the focus of Chapter vi, ‘The shape of history’: what started as the Protestant restoration of the Gospel’s light after medieval Catholic darkness became the illumination of Enlightened reason dispelling the illusions of revealed religion, and by the late nineteenth century had been appropriated by the influential founding fathers of the ‘conflict thesis’ between religion and science – Draper, White, Tyndall, Huxley – in a polemical history of science that still informs popular (and too many putatively educated) views of the relationship between science and religion in history. Harrison writes in his final chapter that ‘Popular culture and our educational institutions continue to propagate the dubious historical narratives created by Enlightenment philosophes and nineteenth-century naturalists’ (p. 372). In the original formulation of these narratives, the primitive, superstitious, ‘supernaturalist’ European peoples of the past, superseded by their civilized, rational, ‘naturalist’ successors in the later nineteenth century, were paralleled in the non-European peoples and cultures being colonised by their ostensible Western superiors in an imperialist era of social Darwinism. Harrison thus circles back to the issue of cultural condescension raised with respect to Hume in the opening chapter.

A brief review cannot do justice to the erudition, range and incisiveness of Some new world. Harrison’s conceptual clarity, analytical acumen and mastery of hundreds of thinkers and texts is consistently on display. He retains an eye for telling details, individual voices and linguistic nuances notwithstanding the vast scope of his undertaking. His authorial tone evinces a measured reserve despite the subversive, deconstructive power of his sweeping revisionist account, which cuts sharply against widespread metaphysical assumptions into which present-day academics, regardless of discipline, are presumptively yet tacitly socialised.

Questions might be posed and quibbles raised about any work of scholarship, including this one. Harrison occasionally adverts to the formation of modern academic disciplines in the nineteenth century, but some readers might have wished for more institutional contextualisation. More attention might have given to how assertions of metaphysical naturalism were related to the advent of modern research universities on both sides of the North Atlantic in the late nineteenth century. A still broader context, only hinted at in the book, concerns the aggressive imperialism, scientific racism, assertive nationalism and environmentally destructive expansions of industrial capitalism that coincided with the decades when the self-assured naturalism of the ‘conflict thesis’ took shape and had such influence. Twice Harrison quotes Roy Wood Sellars, whose Evolutionary naturalism (1922) assured readers that ‘we are all naturalists now’ (pp. 5, 342), an assertion as empirically false then as it remains today, including among learned scholars and scientists. More might have been said in the final chapter’s reflections about the implications of this enduring metaphysical pluralism, particularly in light of the current incuriosity among so many scientists ‘about where laws of nature come from’ (p. 238). So too might something have been broached regarding the sheer philosophical incoherence of naturalism, as per David Bentley Hart in The experience of God (2013). Yet no book can say or do everything. Readers of Some new world will profit from all that Harrison has done in this magisterial work, and how very well he has done it.