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

启蒙运动往往与西欧思想的世俗化和宗教信仰的长期衰落联系在一起。尽管完全不相信在18世纪是极其罕见的，但有人认为，总的趋势是减少宗教，特别是它的基督教变种对世俗事务的影响。然而，这种解释最近开始受到质疑。历史学家越来越多地将他们的注意力集中在18世纪知识文化中宗教的持久性，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，我的项目的中心目的是加强我们对宗教论点对启蒙运动思想的重要性的理解。建议出版的书将集中在18世纪苏格兰的案例，它被广泛誉为启蒙运动文化最杰出的例子之一。这本书将主要基于苏格兰人或苏格兰人写的文本。但它将把这一材料视为欧洲(包括英国和爱尔兰)辩论的一部分，而不是专门作为苏格兰辩论的一部分，因为18世纪的苏格兰人经常接触和借鉴欧洲文人共和国的当代知识潮流。重点将放在大学环境中或受过大学教育的哲学家、历史学家、神学家和文学人物的著作上。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，但我也将研究其他广泛的18世纪作家的著作。与休谟或史密斯等名人相比，其中一些人现在基本上被专家圈子遗忘了，几乎没有受到关注。然而，从历史上看，它们往往非常重要，因为它们在各自的时代被广泛阅读和影响。因此，这本拟议中的书将在很大程度上(尽管不是唯一的)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18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”神职人员，如威廉·罗伯逊、休·布莱尔或亚当·弗格森，他们通过其哲学、历史和文学出版物获得了相当大的声誉，但他们也是老牌长老会的活跃成员。我将特别讨论的问题是，18世纪关于宗教的争论对解释苏格兰启蒙运动的关键智力问题是如何重要的。关于宗教信仰的性质、地位和作用的争论在这一时期的许多文本中都很突出。这些辩论在多大程度上影响了我们所说的世俗担忧？例如，宗教信仰在多大程度上被认为是美德和社交能力的关键？有没有可能把某些哲学论点看作早期神学教义的世俗化版本？启蒙运动苏格兰人对社会历史演变的看法是不是受到了对神的天意的信仰的影响？这些和类似的问题以前也曾被研究过，在一些特殊的情况下，但关于宗教和苏格兰启蒙运动之间相互作用的更广泛、更全面的思想史仍有待撰写。这本书将涵盖一段时期，从17世纪90年代戏剧性的政治和宗教变革的影响开始，到17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无宗教色彩及其似乎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.