We’re All Protestants Now

Peter Harrison is one of today’s finest intellectual historians. He writes clearly, explains complex ideas lucidly without sacrificing accuracy or complexity, and supports his arguments with massive learning, from both original sources and secondary literature. Most of his books focus on the formation of modern concepts of “science” and “religion,” most succinctly in his 2011 Gifford Lectures, The Territories of Science and Religion.

Harrison’s latest, Some New World, paints on a larger canvas. Harrison’s historical thesis is: The split between “nature” and a “supernatural” realm above nature isn’t a permanent feature of human or even Western thought, but appeared in the relatively recent past. Once introduced, the dichotomy has shaped Western thought and society to the present. “Naturalism”—the ontological or methodological conviction that nature is self-creating and self-sustaining—is a by-product of the split, made thinkable only after “supernatural” forces like God and angels and demons were cloistered away in a supernatural realm far from the concerns of everyday life. Materialistic science is thus the product of the split, but so too is spiritualist religion, the assumption that religion has to do with things above and beyond this world, with the soul and heaven and ethereal things rather than with earth and body and tangible reality. The secular age is a downstream product of the split, which means the secular age is (as John Milbank has argued) the fruit of shifts within Western theology, not of the triumph of Enlightenment reason over theology. 

Once the split is introduced, it’s retrojected as the key conflict in world history: Two great Titans—Reason and Superstition—stalk the landscape, and Western history is the saga of Reason’s slow but inevitable triumph. Western myths of progress depend on the prior separation of natural and supernatural. The story can take a Whiggish turn, as a tale of science’s liberation from the meddling priests of supernature. In Comte, it takes a sociological turn: Progress from superstition to reason is the mark of social and political maturation, as the human race outgrows its childish submission to religious beliefs and institutions. The nature-supernatural dichotomy is the substructure of the legitimating meta-narrative of modern science, one that recounts the rise of science while conveniently by-passing the crucial role Christianity played.

Late medieval theology is usually blamed for or credited with introducing this dichotomy. Harrison acknowledges the medieval sources, but stresses the early modern emergence of this paradigm and its slow triumph between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. By and large, medieval thinkers emphasized that “openness to the supernatural is the ‘natural’ condition of the world and its creatures.” Counter-Reformation interpreters of medieval thinkers, by contrast, saw the supernatural as “an incursion into, or even a violation of,” natural order, and they won the day. 

The Reformation assault on the medieval idea of “implicit faith” looms large in Harrison’s analysis. Protestantism offers the “first articulation of what is now referred to as the ‘ethics of belief’—the principle that we have an ethical duty to have evidence for the beliefs we hold.” In Protestant culture, faith becomes a matter of intellectual assent rather than of “affective trust” in an authority. As Harrison says, for early Christians “faith” wasn’t equated with doctrinal knowledge, but mingled with trust and loyalty that gripped the whole person as heir of a tradition and member of a community. Yet the Reformers were right to stress the New Testament theme of knowledge (Eph. 4:13; Phil. 1:19; Col. 1:9–10). And one can develop an “ethics of belief” without abandoning the original integrated vision of the natural and supernatural. Besides, I suspect no modern believer wants to return to a world where “I believe it, though I don’t know why” is considered an adequate stance. Could we return if we wanted to? We’re all Protestants now. 

Harrison also highlights changes in the significance of theistic proofs. Classically, proofs of God’s existence were “spiritual exercises” for the faithful, not logical arguments to convince skeptics. With the rise of atheism in the early modern period, old arguments were re-deployed anew for apologetic purposes. To be precise, most of the same arguments were repackaged. Harrison traces the demise of the argument from consensus—namely that God is real because all human groups everywhere have been religious. Pre-modern thinkers introduced this argument not as a conclusion but “as an unassailable premise or logical principle,” one that assumes that human intuitions are reliable.

This version of the argument was killed off, Harrison argues, by Protestant rejection of implicit faith and later by the rise of Cartesian skepticism. The universal consensus of humanity was classified as nothing more than a “received opinion” that needed to be analyzed rather than accepted. Hobbes, Vico, and Hume came up with alternative explanations for the consensus: fear, ignorance, or the conniving of greedy priests—the latter owing something to Reformation-era polemics. Crucially, the collapse of the argument from consensus brought a “portentous shift in the burden of proof, from the assumption that the existence of God is ‘natural’ and a default position, to the view that it was a proposition that needed to be argued for.” 

Many theologians have addressed the themes of Harrison’s book, most notably Henri de Lubac in his epochal Surnaturel (1946). But theological treatments tend to get tangled in technicalities—whether “pure nature” is a reality or a thought experiment, the character of divine influence on creation, the gratuity of grace. Taking a centuries-long view, Harrison deftly and wisely avoids the common but tedious effort to prosecute a single villain—Scotus, Ockham, Cajetan, Suárez. Harrison enables non-theologians to grasp the cultural and political stakes of this crucial thread of Western intellectual history—stakes that could hardly be higher.