Kadane applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Enlightenment and Original Sin, and reported the following:
This is in many ways two books in one, a macro- and a micro-history, with one tending to ebb when the other flows. So it is not surprising to me that I only partly pass the test. Page 99 captures just one “book.”Learn more about The Enlightenment and Original Sin at the University of Chicago Press website.
Missing from that page is, for example, the big argument. I maintain that the Enlightenment can be defined by its opposition to original sin, as that doctrine was understood theologically. People at the time recognized that the Enlightenment entailed a new view of human nature that threatened a major premise of Christian orthodoxy, which was the Augustinian view that humans are naturally depraved and dependent on Christ for salvation. But if that’s where the coherence of the Enlightenment began, it ended, I also maintain, in the eventual debates enlighteners had about human nature on their own terms. Some wanted nothing to do with religious orthodoxy but, still convinced of Augustine’s psychology, anchored their worldly vision to the belief that people are irreparably self-interested. Against these anthro-pessimists, more optimistic enlighteners instead held that a society restructured would in turn improve human nature and set people on a more benign path. Original sin has the capacity, then, to explain where the Enlightenment was both consistent and contradictory.
Page 99 nevertheless does manage to capture the microhistory told in the book. This relates to a recovering Puritan alcoholic named Pentecost Barker, who rejected original sin in his early forties and, with the zeal of a convert, embraced the Enlightenment. On page 99, the reader finds Barker describing his late-life view that “God” is tantamount to what the ancient Greeks called “Nous,” or pure intelligence. On the same page, Barker characterizes Jesus as a mere man and recounts an argument he once had with a religious “bigot” who he “stunned…with a few plain texts, indeed: God so loved &c that He sent &c.” The language is cryptic. But here, as elsewhere, Barker wrote in shorthand to a fellow traveler, the Unitarian minister Samuel Merivale, who knew well the anti-Trinitarian argument Barker was referencing: God could not send Jesus to earth if the two beings were folded into the same entity. The Trinity was therefore a contradiction in terms, not to mention being absent from the Bible.
At the bottom of page 99, Barker then tells Merivale that there are two types of Christians. Some recognize “how fine and beautiful are the sermons of X on the Mount.” But others, who Barker snidely calls the orthodox, “run to Paul’s Epistles…transub[stantiation] Confession Absolution etc etc makes Deists in France. The ∆ [Trinity] and Satisfaction [predestination] makes em [deists] in England. But tho I am censur’d for the Rational, nothing but Reason will make reasonable xtians.” The language is again obscure. But Barker was unmistakably dividing Christians (much as in an adjacent frame of reference we could divide enlighteners) into two general camps. One was animated by the hopeful idea that people still reflect the divine image in which they were made. The other, rooted in the Pauline and Augustinian tradition, rested on an accretion of doctrines and ceremonies that had the intended effect of keeping people in check. Barker was further convinced that this latter tradition made “deists” out of reasonable people. In this and in other passages in his writing, he drew on his own experience to try to answer one of the vexing questions in European history. Why, for some people, did traditional religion stop making sense?
My Book, The Movie: The Watchful Clothier.
--Marshal Zeringue
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