Abstract
This broad study takes aim at the seemingly timeless and normative category of “belief” and argues that it carries its own conceptual history, developed over time. Indeed, while many persons are increasingly disassociated from formal institutions of religion, Shagan contends that belief is a ubiquitous and widely accepted notion and practice because “in the modern West belief has effectively become a synonym for opinion or judgment: a space of autonomy rather than a prescription for its exercise” (6). This conclusion follows from an evolution in belief as a category or “challenging space where the nature of religious knowledge is contested and constructed” (19). The thesis driving S.’s study is that, far from segregating belief from the modern world, today’s diversification of belief claims and practices provides “the promiscuous opening of belief to the world” (29). This dilation of belief offers a way forward in a world of increasingly and ferociously competitive truth claims; modern belief, claims S., “is the glue that prevents diverse societies from spiraling into chaos” (292).
S. charts the history of belief over three principal periods of development, collapsing ancient and medieval Christian thought into one continuous epoch to address origins, followed by further evolution through the Reformations of the 16th century and reaching its proliferation and detachment from exclusively religious grounds in modernity. Focusing in the later Middle Ages (chapter 1), S. suggests that faith was not understood to be coextensive with personal individual views of religion or specific knowledge claims about Christianity’s content. Rather, belief generally connoted “some form of participation in the collective and indubitable credenda of the Church” (62). Belief as participation, for example, made it possible to think of infants or those without significant formation in the faith as nevertheless being in a state of belief. Processes of Reformation and confessionalization in the early modern period (chapters 2–4) brought narrower notions of belief, concentrating on particular doctrinal loci or practices. Speaking of the magisterial reformation as the Protestant Reformation, S. suggests that reformers focused particularly on doctrines (such as justification by faith alone) and their personal appropriation by the believer, while radical reformers, represented by the Anabaptists, coupled belief with increasingly demanding forms of personal perfection or transcendence. The interpretations of belief in these movements are distinguished from Roman Catholic perspectives, characterized by belief in specific content claims in concert with obedience to an ecclesial teaching magisterium. The strategy of associating dogmatic claims with the magisterial reformation, Christian piety or perfection with the radical reformation, and obedience with the Catholic “Counter-Reformation” tends to resist the distinctive ways that all three movements attached content-knowledge, praxis, and obedience to belief. Speaking of the sum of these movements, S. concludes that belief was increasingly valued for its rarity, and the hard-won effort to possess it by specific kinds of believers.
Modernity (chapters 5–6) reacts to the restriction of belief within confessional boundaries by disassociating it from institutional religion altogether and attaching it to a sovereign and individual judgement. Such judgement increasingly sought nonreligious authorities in which to ground belief, so that a consensus emerged that belief involved weighing evidence and making more or less rational judgements. These chapters—perhaps more so than earlier ones—attend to the intellectual conversation around belief even as much of the Western Christian world practiced forms of belief far removed from them. S. notes that, while many Enlightenment figures disputed the proper relationship between faith and reason, they shared “a second order commitment to the autonomous judgement of the believing subject” (247). To judge was also to believe. S. thus proposes that modernity births a certain “ecumenism” that “allowed for a common conversation, not only within religion, but also across religion, science, and society” (249). The move to autonomous judgment necessarily transects the conceptual distinctions among supernatural belief, knowledge, and opinion. S. offers the important argument that the permeability of categories is generative—allowing for the “infinite invention that characterizes modernity” (281). The historical development of belief over these three epochs leads S. to conclude that “People today believe in the state and the nation, the law and the market, with little or no concern about the idolatry of loving, relying upon, and being incorporated into purely human categories, institutions, and movements. Believing in is now easy, and its objects are limitless” (293).
S’s intellectual history features a radical thesis about the developing meaning of belief. It is rooted in a wide-ranging survey of Western Christian and intellectual history. The sheer breadth of sources brought to bear is impressive. Moreover, S proceeds with an intellectual humility that his study is “an essay with an argument rather than an exhaustive survey of its vast subject” (27). The Christian historian might therefore justly raise questions about the selection and juxtaposition of sources or the situating of the three epochs in their more ancient context. Similarly, in an effort to demonstrate certain vital developments, discrete Christian insights or practices—such as Cajetan’s ecclesiology (84), Menno Simons understanding of the Christian life (93), or the ecclesial context of Jansenism (217)—are “compressed” (27) to facilitate handy comparisons on questions of intellectual belief. The journey is nevertheless rich and fruitful. It challenges easily held assumptions about the nature of belief, and for those concerned about the viability of belief, including religious belief in the 21st century, The Birth of Modern Belief demonstrates the durability and popularity of the human impulse to declare, “I believe.”