Not an Enlightened Age

James Davison Hunter considers Peter Harrison’s “Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age.”

By James Davison HunterMarch 30, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

THE STORY THAT ENLIGHTENMENT intellectuals and philosophes told about themselves and their movement was one of rupture. It was the story of a break in European history from a civilizational order rooted in and animated by religious authority and tradition to one grounded in science, empiricism, and self-directed reason. The symbol of a dawning “light” evoked a picture of a world in which the “darkness” of ignorance, superstition, and bigotry would be dispelled, replaced by the bright radiance of expanding knowledge and increasing toleration.

This story was, at best, aspirational. For those more directly involved through the 18th century, “Enlightenment” as such was difficult to discern. As late as 1784, Immanuel Kant could say that this was still not “an enlightened age,” but rather “an age of enlightenment.” To enter fully into it, Kant argued, one must “thro[w] off the yoke of self-imposed immaturity,” by which he mainly meant religion—“that form of immaturity [that] is both the most pernicious and disgraceful of all.”

For Kant, the Age of Enlightenment was certainly a story of illumination, but also, by implication, what would emerge from it. Growing into maturity by embracing freedom could inaugurate what Virgil described as “a New Order for the Ages,” a hope embraced not only by Americans, who made it their national motto, but by Europeans as well. Such a moment in history could produce a new beginning for humanity, an epoch defined by freedom, tolerance, equality, and justice.

This remarkable story is, of course, a mythos—a story people tell about themselves—past, present, and future. A narrative of collective self-understanding. But it is more than that. A mythos is powerful because it provides an intuitive and integrative sense of the world, how it works, how everything fits into it, and the hopeful possibilities toward which it is moving. A mythos, in other words, is not defined by truth or historical accuracy. In fact, the picture it presents of the world is largely beyond the reach of countervailing facts or perspectives. The power of a mythos lies in its resonance with experience, its coherence, and its practical effect—that is, its capacity to inspire and mobilize people toward common ends.

On the face of it, the Enlightenment mythos was extraordinary. It underwrote centuries of nation-building—not only in Europe and North America but also around much of the world.

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There are some modern-day philosophers who celebrate this story (Steven Pinker comes to mind), yet they are rare. By the middle of the 20th century, the evidence of just how flawed and destructive the Enlightenment mythos had been could no longer be denied. Since then, critics from across the political spectrum have been merciless in pointing out how the cruelest pathologies of the modern age can be traced to back to it.

Even before the end of World War II, the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism produced a manuscript (soon to be published as The Dialectic of Enlightenment) posing a question: How could a society that had for generations cultivated Enlightenment thought and ideals sink “into a new kind of barbarism”? The horrors of two World Wars and the Holocaust specifically, the authors argued, could be clearly traced to the instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment. As the Cold War intensified, liberals and conservatives alike (including Jacob Talmon, Isaiah Berlin, and Michael Oakeshott) tracked the origins of communism to the utopian aspirations of the Enlightenment, but also the intolerance and oppression of all totalitarian movements to its totalizing rationality. By the 1970s, the Enlightenment mythos had become the central foil against which postmodernism defined itself. Prominent postmodernists (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard) expanded accounts of how the universalism, foundationalism, and rationalism of the Enlightenment led to new forms of surveillance and control—and were, therefore, inherently hegemonic and oppressive. Feminist and other critical theories linked the Enlightenment and its mythos to colonialism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. Suffice to say that by now, the Enlightenment mythos has been thoroughly deconstructed, its moral ambitions comprehensively debunked.

What has received far less critical attention is the idea of the initiating rupture itself. It was only with the publication of the first part of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason in 1794 and G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, beginning in 1805, that the late 17th and 18th centuries could be distinguished retrospectively as an “age of reason,” an age made distinct by its repudiation of all philosophies rooted in theologically inspired metaphysics. This idea of a sharp breach in history, severing an “age of reason” from a prior “age of faith,” has only become sharper with time.

It is this cleavage in history that is the focus of Peter Harrison’s marvelous new book, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (2024). Thematically, some of this ground has been covered before, most notably by Carl L. Becker in his important treatise The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932). Becker argued that the key progenitors of the Enlightenment were still living in a medieval world, and while they sought to demolish the “heavenly city” of Saint Augustine, they ended up—ironically—rebuilding it in a modern naturalist and secular way: its innovative philosophies, a secular faith; its buoyant confidence in progress, a secular hope; and its humanitarianism, a secularized charity. Harrison’s book is in the same vein, but with a particular focus on the historical transformation of the central concepts at the heart of the historical rupture—concepts such as belief and disbelief, faith, the supernatural, reason, and naturalism.

What most set the “age of reason” apart, of course, was the assertion of a particular form of naturalism, a philosophical commitment defined by its denial or disbelief of supernatural entities and powers. With meticulous detail, Harrison argues that in premodern times, neither “belief” nor the “supernatural” was available to those to whom such concepts were meant to describe. How they became available historically had significant implications for the substantive meaning and ideological uses of naturalism.

Consider the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Harrison demonstrates that the dichotomy emerged somewhat late in the West. The distinction was not made by Aristotle, who contrasted the natural with the artificial, nor was it made in premodern Christianity, which preferred the contrast between the heavenly and the earthly. When the disjunction did begin to make an appearance in the late Middle Ages, it referred to agency rather than ontology; acts performed by angels and demons, rather than a description of different realities. In medieval Christianity, as it has been shown in other premodern religions, the natural was not a self-subsistent reality, but one suffused with and dependent upon the transcendent. With the Protestant Reformation, however, the dichotomy became more distinct as Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic theologians worked through their theological differences, especially those that bore on the fundamental nature of the human in relation to the divine. In the wake of these controversies, the supernatural and the natural emerged as increasingly separate and dissimilar realities:

The subsequent “-isms” […]—naturalism and supernaturalism—came even later, appearing at the close of the eighteenth century. […] [O]nly in the nineteenth century did it become a mainstream historical thesis expressed in terms of a tension between science and religion or naturalism and supernaturalism.

David Hume’s philosophy was a harbinger of an evolution in which supernatural agency would be understood as an incursion into, or violation of, an order that could be grasped in its own terms, without reference to the transcendental. How could God act in a world whose operations seemed to be adequately accounted for by the natural sciences? For believers, miracles would now be seen as visible supernatural interventions into an independent natural order. For skeptics such as Hume, a miracle was “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity.”

Put aside for a moment that any formal conception of a “law of nature” had not existed before the 17th century—the burden of proof had now shifted. For Hume and other early modern natural philosophers, the existence of miracles (such as those in the Gospels) now had to be demonstrated on the evidentiary terms that had supposedly established the laws of nature in the first place. And, since the testimony in favor of divine intervention “abound[ed] among ignorant and barbarous nations” or within “a civilized people” from their “ignorant and barbarous ancestors,” Hume had a “strong presumption against” taking such testimony seriously. As Harrison concludes, “The true foundations of modern naturalism lie not in philosophy or the logic of the natural sciences, but in tacit assumptions about historical progress and an accompanying hierarchy of cultures.”

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What of “belief,” then? Here, too, the concept proves both distinctly Western and historically recent. Unlike the concept of “supernatural,” the evolution of modern belief is obscured by an older terminology of faith that appears to correspond fairly well with current understandings. However, modern conceptions of belief became embedded within a new epistemological framework that fundamentally shifted the form and the meaning of the term. As Harrison puts it, “the historical possibility of disbelief was accompanied by a change in what belief itself was thought to consist in.”

Modern forms of belief are thought to be constituted mainly by a body of doctrines or dogmas to which one must give thoughtful assent. In this vein, one believes if one rationally affirms a set of propositions that define a particular religious faith. Yet in early Christianity (as with other premodern religions), faith was not only cognitive but also affective, active, embodied, experiential—and, therefore, relational. Christian faith was to be “a new way of life” marked by “godliness,” by virtue of which Christians were “a new race.” Likewise, Harrison argues, “salvation was not a matter, primarily, of explicitly assenting to the right set of propositions, but of being incorporated into the body of the Church through the medium of the sacraments.” In the end, faith was understood as a divine gift, one that elicited both gratitude and obedience. Against the reduction of faith to “right belief” in a collection of theological creeds, faith was mainly understood to consist of trust. That is why, well into the Middle Ages, Christians preferred to describe themselves as “the faithful.”

There were creeds, of course—the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, most importantly—whose doctrines are all “prefaced by the phrase ‘We believe.’” These creeds did have an exclusionary function that reinforced demarcation lines between orthodoxy, heresy, and heterodoxy. Yet Harrison notes that, in their time, these creeds were as much “about the promotion of cohesion and unity—typically expressed through ritual acts—rather than doctrinal conformity.” That one could join the community of the faithful through baptism points to what came to be known as “implicit faith.” Infants, of course, could not give an account of the articles of the creed, yet they were still thought to be capable of a saving faith. (So could, by extension, the illiterate and the supposedly simpleminded.)

With the Reformation came the accusation that the medieval church had gone too far, substituting religious ritual for correct belief. Thus, among the ambitions of the Reformers was to dismantle implicit faith. In pursuit of that end, reason was elevated and trust was diminished. In John Calvin’s view, implicit faith “not only buries true faith, but entirely destroys it.” Martin Luther concurred, acknowledging that “every man is responsible for his own faith” and, therefore, has a duty to give a reasoned account of what they believe and why. Though reason on its own was deeply flawed in their view, it was still a gift. Its good was by no means effaced by human sinfulness.

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“With Locke,” Harrison notes, “reason moves from being intimately connected to divine revelation to being an independent judge of what actually counts as revelation in the first place.” Accompanying this turn, was Locke’s assertion in his Third Letter Concerning Toleration (1692) that belief is “assent to the Truth of Propositions.” The reorientation of belief was complete. The transformation of belief into the affirmation of certain propositions about supernatural powers and entities created the preconditions for its own rejection.

In a pithy summary, Harrison concludes that “modern religion, understood as belief in the supernatural, and modern naturalism, understood as its denial, are two sides of the same historical trajectory.” They evolved together and were dependent upon each other. Certainly, this is why the declension narrative of the Puritan jeremiad despairing over secularization has long been and remains the inverse of the ascension narrative of the celebrity atheists who commend secularization. They share the same conceptual framework. Perhaps the rupture between “the age of reason” and “the age of faith” was considerably less than we imagine.

Sustaining the intellectual foundations of modern naturalism, Harrison argues, requires an assumption of the universality of what are, in fact, contingent and culturally unique historical categories (belief and the supernatural). It also requires a progressive view of history that “lends legitimacy to the unique historical turn that the secular West has taken.” That progressive view of history is far more fragile than we previously imagined—as is the larger mythos within which it is set.