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PETER HARRISON. "Religion" and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge, 1990. Pp. ix + 277. £30.
Mr. Harrison's title is precise but obscure. "Religion" is an impersonal, presumably objective or "intellectual" term for systems of belief and practice. It emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-previously the Christian West had been concerned with faith, a "dynamic of the heart." This book identifies some of the factors responsible for the objectification of religion and describes the resultant "new science of religion." Mr. Harrison's focus is philosophical rather than literary or social, and he confines himself chiefly to England with sporadic forages into wider Europe. A conventional but competent and useful exercise in the history of ideas, his book will serve students of pluralism and secularism as well as comparative religion.
Mr. Harrison cites, as two important antecedents, the classical naturalistic accounts of religion and the endorsements of religious pluralism found in some Renaissance Neoplatonists. The classical explanations-for example the "fear theory" that men created the gods to understand the vicissitudes of nature...