Faith's fate

Taylor's account encompasses art, literature, science, fashion, private life -- all those human activities that have been sometimes more, sometimes less affected by religion over the last five centuries. With copious documentation, he traces the rise of "exclusive humanism" to such late medieval developments as one-on-one confession for the laity, a concession that every peasant had a mind and conscience of his own. He compares the post-Westphalian shift to a supernova -- an explosion that keeps on exploding. Among its long-recognized consequences, such as romanticism in the arts, he notices the less noticed: for example, a major and somewhat mysterious wave of 19th century Anglo-Saxon missionary activity. Readers may occasionally lose their way, since Taylor never denies himself the pleasure of an interesting digression. Yet if we leave this work a bit weary, we also depart well instructed on the complex cultural evolution that produced the Secular Age.

Lilla's "The Stillborn God," a far narrower work, deals just with political secularization. But rather than seeing it as a historical movement for which Hobbes provided part of the rationalization, he sees it as a movement Hobbes virtually created. In Lilla's heroic view of him, Hobbes is a pinnacle from which later German thinkers (why only Germans?) each deviated in his own way, lured by Rousseau toward some lamentable accommodation of religion. The stillborn deity is one of these: the 19th century religious liberalism of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ernst Troeltsch and Hermann Cohen. The lesson drawn (though never quite argued) is that such soft-headed, meliorist liberalism cannot revive religion but can, by promising a heaven on Earth, invite fascism; we're better advised to trust a hard-headed, Hobbesian conservatism to insure domestic tranquillity and provide for the common defense.

Lilla's book, astonishingly, contains not a single reference to current scholarship. Of such contemporary analytic terms as "modernization, secularization, democratization, the 'disenchantment of the world,' " he opines contemptuously, "These are the fairy tales of our time." Yet of his own book he says," 'The Stillborn God' is not a fairy tale." Sadly, in its extreme simplification "The Stillborn God" is indeed a kind of fairy tale. It's hard to write a history of "Religion, Politics, and the Modern West" without discussing Darwin or Freud, but Lilla manages to do so. Taylor may risk boring his readers by including too much, but Lilla, a writer capable of such tautologies as "Modern political philosophy is a relatively recent innovation," offers only a small part of a large story and, by grossly exaggerating Hobbes' role, gets even that part more wrong than right.