The fifth and final chapter analyses how people of African (and indigenous) descent practiced Catholicism in the 1770s to 1790s. It puts villages in the interior Caribbean and haciendas in Antioquia in conversation with the mines of the Pacific, revealing both how there were longstanding rural autonomies and possibilities and how they could be swiftly destroyed by the arrival of conquering missionaries or visiting judges. The chapter illustrates how Catholicism was at once a mode of colonial governance and transcultural, local, and interstitial. The first section examines the reducciones of arrochelados by the conquering friar Joseph Palacios de La Vega and is followed by a discussion of trials for illicit relations in Antioquia as part of a violent Enlightenment drive to reorder colonial (and especially black) life. It concludes with an analysis of baptismal and confirmation records from the mines of Nóvita, which reveal the extent to which people of African descent and the worlds of the mines of the Pacific transformed Catholicism.

In the Feyerabend lectures on Natural Law, Kant addresses the topic of freedom of religion and thought in his commentary on the title "The Right Regarding Religion and the Church” of Achenwall’s Natural Law. Kant goes beyond the discussion proposed by the jurist and introduces two central ideas to his conception of Enlightenment, which will be developed in “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”: the idea of self-legislation of the people and the distinction between private and public uses of reason. In this paper, I will first compare Kant’s and Achenwall’s views on freedom of religion and conscience and then show how the idea of self-legislation leads Kant to establish clear limits to the sovereign regarding matters of religion. Then, I will argue that the development of Kant’s idea of public use of reason results from the historical debate about the meaning of the concept of Enlightenment that took place between 1783 and 1784, especially regarding Ernst Klein’s assertions on freedom of opinion and freedom of the press.

Popular minimalist and moderate liberal interpreters suggest that, both in the 1780s and in the more fully developed political works of the 1790s, Kant adopts a narrow and skeptical approach to state-sponsored efforts addressing social welfare. Interpreted with due attention to context, however, relevant passages from Kant’s 1784 lectures in political philosophy—the Naturrecht Feyerabend—suggest no necessarily narrow commitments in the realm of social supports. Read in conjunction with his Feyerabend discussion of innate right, meanwhile, the contemporaneous essay on enlightenment provides us reasons (including an active conception of civic agency and a positive understanding of the state’s role) to conclude that the account of justice that Kant’s early works advance indeed could support a rich menu of such programs. Publications from the 1790s might, of course, take a contrary stance. It falls to those who favor a more conservative reading, however, to prove that Kant altered an earlier, agency-oriented position friendly to state-sponsored supports.

If the survival of practitioners of pre-Christian religions had scandalised Christians of the Reformation era, it was still more shocking (yet also intriguing) to intellectuals of the Enlightenment era that ‘pagans’ could still be found in some corners of eighteenth-century Europe. This era saw the last traces of pre-Christian cults in Lithuania and Livonia as well as the extensive Christianisation of the Sami, ostensibly eliminating pre-Christian faiths from Europe’s religious landscape at long last. At the same time, however, attitudes to religion itself were undergoing a profound shift and the possibility that ‘pagans’ might finally be accorded respect - or at least tolerance - was beginning to emerge; if, that is, any of them still existed in Europe. This chapter examines the possibility of pre-Christian religions enduring into Enlightenment Europe, which led to greater tolerance in some regions but also saw the forcible conversion of animists in the Volga-Ural region.

The aesthetics of the sublime, as it emerged in the eighteenth century, has frequently been seen as part of a process of secularization: What is “absolutely great” now becomes the object of an aesthetic experience that need have no reference to the divine or to religion. Kant in particular has been accorded a key role in the development of a modern aesthetics that establishes the autonomy of art and of the aesthetic vis-à-vis both religion and politics. Setting out from a seldom-read passage in Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” on the power of the sublime to liberate the imagination from tutelage by the church and by the state, this chapter traces the intimate connection in Kant’s text between religion, political emancipation, and the sublime in order to challenge widely shared if frequently unstated assumptions about the secular status of the sublime and of Kantian aesthetics more broadly. The sublime emerges as power that resists containment within the modern divisions between politics, religion, and aesthetics. In the process, Kant’s text is read as providing an implicit critique of the logic of secularism avant la lettre.

A committed student of vernacular literatures alongside classical ones, Shelley matured a deeply integrated vision of European literature as a transnational conversation including the English-language tradition. This conception informs his literary and theoretical writings, his reflections about and practice of translation, and his appropriations and recreations of foreign forms and modes, such as Dante’s terza rima or Petrarch’s Trionfi. His interests focused especially on the Renaissance (in France, Italy, and Spain) and the eighteenth century and Revolutionary period (especially in France) and on figures such as Michel de Montaigne, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or Madame de Staël and the members of her salon at Coppet. Shelley’s engagements with modern European literatures confirm him as a poet and thinker poised between classical and post-classical cultures, harnessing them to support his revolutionary approaches to versification and poiesis, political and philosophical reflection, and cultural-social activism, against the backdrop of an incessantly evolving modernity.

Protestant attacks against papal corruption of the cult of saints and falsification of miracles led the Post-Tridentine Church to reform the processes of saint-making through an intensified collaboration with medical science. The alignment of faith and science at the nexus of the human body culminated in the eighteenth century under Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740–58). Benedict published a monumental treatise, still influential today, that codified canonization proceedings on the basis of modern medical expertise, and he was a preeminent patron of scientific and medical institutions and practitioners for the advancement of medical knowledge and public health. The imperatives of the Counter-Reformation, canon law, experimental science and medicine, and the burgeoning Enlightenment coalesced, albeit uneasily, in his vision of a reformed Church, for which natural and saintly bodies became primary emblems in defense of the authority of the Catholic Church in a world increasingly resistant to it.

For nearly two centuries after the French Revolution, papal attitudes towards Judaism remained rooted in theological notions of the Jews as deicidal “others” whose salvation would only be achieved through repentance and conversion to Catholicism. Enlightenment notions of religious freedom and tolerance offered Jews an emancipation based on secular citizenship and assimilation, a development which repudiated the Church’s theological and eschatological views of Judaism. As a result, papal attitudes towards the Jews hardened through the nineteenth century, as popes associated emancipated Jews with liberalism, freemasonry, socialism, and democracy, the very ideologies which had undermined papal authority. It was not until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) that the Church definitely repudiated its negation of the Abrahamic Covenant and the Jewish people. The council document Nostra aetate disavowed anti-Semitism in all forms and recognized Judaism as the wellspring from which the Church emerged, creating a template of interfaith kinship and cooperation which the modern papacy has embraced and expanded upon.

The modern world has as its central characteristic the claim of man’s emancipation from submission to ecclesiastical authority. Born with the Enlightenment, this claim extended from the cultural level to many areas of social life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This process has found significant expressions in movements such as liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, which have marked the history of that period. It is commonly believed that only the Second Vatican Council has produced a turning point: the recognition of the “iusta autonomia” of earthly realities has led the Church from confrontation to dialogue with modernity. The historical judgment must be more nuanced. From the Enlightenment onwards, the papacy has sought to safeguard the submission of men to ecclesiastical authority, but it has also endeavored to adapt Catholicism to the needs of modern men for autonomy in order to be able to better communicate its message of salvation to them.

In American culture, there is a mix and mismatch of core discourses: religious, Enlightenment, and market economy. Each claims, contributes, and competes for kinds of belonging and national definition, by abstract principles of equality, particular community of religion and nation, and possessive individualism of each one’s own self-interest. Poetry, far from being private reflection or self-referring aesthetic object, is an arena in which each of these discourses encounter each other. Widely circulated in newspapers, magazines, publicly recited, poetry took part in and also refracted, in especially intense and focal ways, the drama, questions, and terms of belonging crucial to, and conflictual in, the unfolding of America. In this chapter, I explore the intercrossing and contention between American discourses of religion, Enlightenment, and individualism in the Abolitionist poetry of Whittier, the poetry of war in Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and the poetry of participation in Walt Whitman. In the texts of each, vocabularies, terms, allusion, and critique of American cultural, religious, and political life form complex interchanges, at times through alignment, at times in tense and critical relationship. The poem becomes a field of confrontation, appeal, and address within the context of their writing as voices of culture take on poetic force.

How did religious and political debates that had only recently generated violent conflicts become relatively peaceably conducted in growing numbers of publications and clubs?

This chapter explores the erosion of trust in public facts and the crisis within commonsense conceptions of reality. It traces the evolution of scientific practices, emphasizing the role of early experimental scientists like Robert Boyle in grounding them. Ezrahi argues that the contemporary breakdown of epistemological norms, which previously upheld facts as sociopolitical currency, inevitably undermines the foundations of contemporary democracy. The citizens' diminished confidence in understanding why political actors behave in specific ways, coupled with the disparities between motives and visible effects, fosters the proliferation of conspiracy theories. The current breakdown of epistemological norms manifests itself in the “post truth” era and the ascent of “alternative facts.” Ezrahi scrutinizes the challenges of discerning facts from opinions in journalism and underscores the perils of exposure to fake news. The chapter investigates the erosion of a shared commonsense perception of reality through the lens of the Brexit campaign and the Trump presidency. Ezrahi highlights that the blurring of the cosmological dichotomy between Nature and humans has made it increasingly challenging for the public to differentiate between facts and fiction. Finally, he advocates for an awareness of the public’s role in defining political causes and facts.

Ostensibly, Hume’s Essays do not have much to say about religion. ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ (1741) may contain an incisive treatment of the psychological origins of religious error and its ecclesiastical and political consequences, but it was the one Essay dedicated to religion published in Hume’s lifetime. But when the topic of religion does come up in the Essays, as it frequently does in examples, asides and footnotes, we find Hume doing two things: outlining the character and dangers of institutional religion on individual happiness and social stability and doing so in a neutral manner characteristic of his wider ‘science of man’. He brought religious belief and priestly power down to the level of another aspect of human life, comparable to the other themes discussed in this guide, and which could subject to ‘scientific’ observation that led to identification of general principles. Piecing together the various discussions of religion, we find Hume articulating a strong anticlericalism in which religion is understood to be a natural propensity of human nature, exploited by priesthoods claiming power over others, but which could be managed through increased scepticism about clerical claims amongst the citizenry and the subordination of church to state.

The chapter explores how Hume’s Essays were received in Germany during the eighteenth century, highlighting the cultural exchange and intellectual shifts of that time. Hume’s influence is analysed in the context of the growing interest in English books and culture in Germany during the eighteenth century, a trend known as ‘Anglophilia’. Hume’s political and economic writings were translated into German shortly after their original publication. His name was held in high regard and his writings were considered to be instructive. But the specifics of cameralism prevented his economic and political essays from having a major impact on German discourse. Nonetheless, new translations continued to appear. In the German reform debate of the late eighteenth century, Hume’s Essays were used to both support the status quo and to advocate for political change. In the early nineteenth century, an academic translation of Hume’s essay was published, acknowledging his contribution to the formation of political economy as a science. By exploring the reception of Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Germany, the chapter shows how translations not only played a big role in sharing knowledge during the Enlightenment but also reflected cultural differences.