Religion and the Scottish Enlightenment, c. 1690 - c. 1790: Virtue, Providence, and History

启蒙运动经常与西欧思想的世俗化和宗教信仰的长期衰落联系在一起。尽管在18世纪，完全不信教的情况极为罕见，但有人认为，总体趋势是减少宗教，尤其是基督教对世俗事务的影响。然而，这种解释最近开始受到质疑。历史学家越来越多地把注意力转向宗教在18世纪知识分子文化中的持续存在，以及不同的宗教信仰，甚至基督教信仰，在多大程度上往往是开明文化的重要组成部分。然而，宗教和欧洲启蒙运动之间的这些联系还没有得到充分的探索，我的项目的中心目标是增强我们对宗教论点对启蒙思想的重要性的理解。这本书将聚焦于18世纪的苏格兰，它被广泛赞誉为启蒙文化最杰出的例子之一。这本书将主要以苏格兰或苏格兰人撰写的文本为基础。但它将把这些材料视为欧洲（包括英国和爱尔兰）的一部分，而不是专门考虑苏格兰的辩论，因为18世纪的苏格兰人经常参与并借鉴欧洲文学共和国的当代知识潮流。重点将放在在大学环境中或由大学教育的哲学家、历史学家、神学家和文学人物创作的作品上。我将参考苏格兰启蒙运动中主要思想家的思想，如大卫·休谟和亚当·斯密，但我也将研究其他18世纪作家的作品。与休谟或斯密等名人相比，他们中的一些人现在在专家圈子之外基本上被遗忘了，很少受到关注。然而，从历史上看，它们往往是非常重要的，因为它们在自己的时代被广泛阅读和影响。因此，这本书将在很大程度上，尽管不是唯一，借鉴启蒙运动的“主流”人物，这些人物比休谟或史密斯更能代表十八世纪苏格兰的启蒙文化。我将相当关注的一个重要群体是所谓的“温和派”牧师，如威廉·罗伯逊、休·布莱尔或亚当·弗格森，他们通过哲学、历史和文学出版物获得了相当大的名气，但他们也是老牌长老会的积极成员。我要讨论的问题是18世纪的宗教争论对于解释苏格兰启蒙运动的重要思想意义。关于宗教信仰的性质、地位和用途的争论在这一时期的许多文本中都很突出。这些争论在多大程度上影响了我们称之为世俗的关注？例如，宗教信仰在多大程度上被认为是美德和社交能力的必要条件？是否有可能将某些哲学论证视为早期神学教义的世俗化版本？启蒙运动时期的苏格兰人对社会历史演变的看法，是否源于对神意的信仰？这些问题和类似的问题之前已经在一些特殊的案例中被研究过，但更广泛、更全面的宗教与苏格兰启蒙运动之间相互作用的思想史仍有待书写。这本书将涵盖一个时期，从17世纪90年代戏剧性的政治和宗教变化的影响开始，到18世纪90年代初结束，当时包括苏格兰人在内的英国人对法国大革命的非宗教信仰及其对公共道德和政治稳定构成的威胁深感震惊。

The Enlightenment has often been associated with the secularization of Western European thought and a long-term decline in religious belief. Even if complete unbelief was extremely rare in the eighteenth century, the general tendency, it has been argued, was towards reducing the influence religion, and especially its Christian varieties, had on secular affairs. This interpretation, however, has begun to be questioned more recently. Historians, increasingly, have been directing their attention to the persistence of religion in eighteenth-century intellectual culture and to the degree to which different religious, even Christian beliefs were often an important and integral part of enlightened culture. These connections, however, between religion and the European Enlightenments have not been fully explored, yet, and the central aim of my project is to enhance our understanding of the significance of religious arguments for Enlightenment thought.The proposed book will focus on the case of eighteenth-century Scotland, which was widely praised as one of the most remarkable examples of Enlightenment culture. The book will be based mainly on texts written in Scotland or by Scots. But it will consider this material as part of European (including British and Irish), rather than specifically Scottish, debates, because eighteenth-century Scots regularly engaged with and drew on contemporary intellectual currents in the European Republic of Letters. The emphasis will be on writings produced within a university milieu or by university-educated philosophers, historians, theologians, and literary figures. I will refer to the ideas of the main thinkers in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, but I shall also examine the writings of a wide range of other eighteenth-century authors. Some of these are now largely forgotten outside specialist circles and have received little attention, compared to personalities like Hume or Smith. Historically, however, they are often very significant, because they were widely read and influential in their own period. The proposed book will therefore largely, though not exclusively, draw on the 'mainstream' of the Enlightenment, those figures, who were more typical of enlightened culture in eighteenth-century Scotland than Hume or Smith. One important group I shall devote considerable attention to were the so-called 'Moderate' clergymen, such as William Robertson, Hugh Blair, or Adam Ferguson, who achieved considerable fame through their philosophical, historical, and literary publications, but who were also active members of the established Presbyterian church.The particular question I will address is how arguments about religion in the eighteenth century are important for explaining key intellectual concerns of the Scottish Enlightenment. Debates over the nature, the status, and the usefulness of religious belief are prominent in many texts of this period. To what extent did these debates affect concerns we would describe as secular? How far, for example, was religious belief considered essential to virtue and sociability? Is it possible to see certain philosophical arguments as secularized versions of earlier theological doctrines? Were Enlightenment Scots' views of the historical evolution of societies informed by a belief in divine providential purposes? These and similar questions have been examined before, in a few particular cases, but a broader, more comprehensive intellectual history of the interaction between religion and the Scottish Enlightenment, still remains to be written. The book will cover a period beginning with the effects of the dramatic political and religious changes of the 1690s and ending with the early 1790s, when Britons, including Scots, were deeply alarmed by the perceived irreligion of the French Revolution and the threat it appeared to pose to publicmorality and political stability.