Keeping things interesting in Enlightenment studies is not easy, so it is a pleasure to find a book with something worthwhile to say. Kadane reminds us that the key to ‘the Enlightenment’ was the fall from grace of the doctrine of original sin. He splices the microhistory of the engagement of a single ‘nobody’ with Enlightenment thought and the broader philosophical debate over original sin. Kadane’s subject is Pentecost Barker (1690–1762), a Plymouth-born purser, wine merchant and reader of enlightened texts with a fine line in hangover-induced introspection. In tracing Barker’s abandonment of Puritanism for rational dissent, Kadane claims he captures in miniature the process of becoming Enlightened. Not that the story is purely one of discontinuity. In throwing off the sacral elements of original sin but keeping the understanding of human motivation, the Enlightenment’s ‘homo economicus’ was ‘just homo augustinius without the guilt’ (p. 139). Original sin had been secularised, transformed into duelling optimistic and pessimistic visions of how to manage a newly-naturalised human nature. In line with Carl Becker’s claims about the Enlightenment’s Christianity-imitating philosophes, Kadane argues that the Enlightenment remained in ‘Augustine’s debt’ (p. 161).

We have forgotten what our pre-war forebears knew: the Enlightenment was about original sin. From the counterrevolutionary ideologues like Joseph de Maistre through to Becker and Ernst Cassirer, it was abandonment of this doctrine that characterised the eighteenth century, for good or ill. The act of forgetting occurred, Kadane argues somewhat counterintuitively, following the horrors of 1939–45, when the debate over ‘the Enlightenment’ shifted focus, per Adorno and Horkenheimer, to its supposed ‘instrumentalist hyperrationality’ (p. 11). In bringing back a once-focal significance of original sin which has ‘largely disappeared from historiographic view’ (p. 11), The Enlightenment and original sin offers us a beautifully-written sort of scholarly anamnesis. Overviews of the Enlightenment have long focused on notions of perfectibility, unsocial sociability and the science of human nature. Original sin is a missing piece of the jigsaw, but its inclusion does not transform the picture.

The hero of Kadane’s story is Barker, a man who believed at forty that Calvinist self-denial was the essence of piety and at sixty that ‘no man could be a Christian without being a Deist’ (p. 38). His Presbyterian father, as a wine cooper, introduced Barker to his great vice: alcohol. Kadane writes with impressive empathy of Barker’s evident alcoholism and struggles with who he was as a man. The story that follows is built on two archival discoveries. The first is of the only surviving volume of Barker’s spiritual diary dated from 28 October 1729 to 27 June 1731; the second part, on his voluminous correspondence with the dissenting minister Samuel Merivale (1715–71) between December 1758 and July 1762.

One sentence from Barker’s diary entry from 3 May 1731 captures, to Kadane, a ‘major culture change’ going on in eighteenth-century Britain (p. 55). Reflecting on another bout of self-destructive drunkenness, Barker wrote that ‘as to the thoughts that I have been vexed with, I believe they may be part of my distemper and a disease rather than a sin’ (p. 55). Here is the battle between Barker’s established Augustinian understanding of drunkenness as a sin and the modern scientific understanding of it as a disease. The alternation in Barker’s diary between severe self-recrimination and his need for compassionate understanding is striking. This battle is as old as Augustine’s Confessions. What is new, however, are enlightened notions of human nature, offering escape from the prison of impossible demands given the weaknesses of sinful flesh.

By the time Barker was writing to Merivale in the late 1750s, he had abandoned his godly name and was signing his letters as Philalethes, or ‘lover of truth’. Their sparkling correspondence consists of more than 300 letters, hidden away in the old Devonshire Record Office, and ‘reveals two relatively obscure men writing intently about Enlightenment ideas, books, and authors’ (p. 79). With some élan, Kadane enriches our understanding of mid eighteenth-century rational dissent in England. And through his sensitive reconstruction, the liveliness of Barker shines through, an anti-Trinitarian Christian deist who read, critically, many of the canonical figures of the era and went through a self-described process of ‘éclaircissement’ (p. 39).

Barker’s story is fascinating. Whether a definition of ‘the Enlightenment’ can be built on it, however, is questionable. The decline in emphasis in commentary on the once-central concept of original sin also occurs around the same time, around 1960s, that the quantity and quality of intellectual history scholarship on the Enlightenment dramatically increases. We could ask whether it is plausible that a supposedly central idea could be overlooked, but Kadane’s argument also encourages us to think about what is missed when intellectual history is dominated by contextualised recovery of the intentions of prominent authors. To focus only on what is stated in printed works directs us away from underlying or background shifts in European thought. Similarly, it is questionable whether Kadane’s treatment of the rejection of original sin as the ‘conceptual threshold’ between the Enlightened and the unenlightened stands up (p. 5). The continuum for defining the Enlightenment runs from restrictedness to capaciousness. Kadane’s definition is Augustinian in its rigor. Defenders of original sin ‘co-opted’ and ‘appropriated’ Enlightenment language, but Kadane denies that this made them ‘Enlightened’ (p. 24). Others would say that they were part of the same Enlightened conversation.

Kadane writes brilliantly. An exception to the easy-going enjoying of The Enlightenment and original sin is his justification for the book. Barker’s voice is one that has ‘been marginalised’ in historiography, though given Kadane had to do some serious archival digging to find it, we might ask by whom (p. 19). Happily for us, Kadane wishes to challenge, and definitely not imitate, the ‘condescension of posterity’ for ignoring people like Barker (p. 20). Pesky elitist intellectual historians have arrogantly thought that to understand an intellectual moment we should study the producers of ideas. The ‘real story is found’, however, in the responses of individuals who consumed those ideas, with Kadane wanting both the kudos of studying ‘nobodies’ like Barker and for pointedly rejecting the framing of such individuals as unimportant (p. 20, my italics). As moralising, this is grating. As historiographical method, more importantly, it is overblown. What happens when the ideas are removed from the story? Is the story of an intellectually-voracious West Country rational dissenter struggling with alcoholism really that representative? More to the point, is there really only one story?