Spinoza can help us to understand part of the motivation underlying
this project. His family had fl ed the Inquisition in Portugal to the
presumably more tolerant Netherlands. But there Spinoza got him-
self excommunicated from the Jewish synagogue (and thereby from the
Jewish community), and found the Calvinist establishment so hostile to
his Theological-Political Treatise that he decided it was not safe to publish
his Ethics in his lifetime. He was, you might say, an ecumenical victim
of religious intolerance and persecution, fi rst from Catholics, then from
Jews, and then from Protestants.
The hope of the Enlightenment project was that by virtue of reason’s
presumed universality, a religion of reason would rise above the sectarian
pluralism that produced religious wars and persecutions. Lessing’s Nathan
the Wise is a classic expression of this hope. We are greatly indebted to
Enlightenment thinkers for our heritage of religious liberty. While various
orthodoxies were persecuting and going to war against those with dif-
ferent beliefs, they led the battle for freedom of religion, which included
freedom of the press, an important political value.
But, as I shall argue, they fought the right war with the wrong weap-
ons. Their “reason” turned out to be a broken reed, manifestly unable
to carry out the mission assigned to it. One way to see this is to look at
our trio, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, theologians of the new religion of
reason. 7 The problem is that each reinterpretation of traditional theism
and/or Christian orthodoxy (“mere Christianity”) was plainly inconsis-
tent with both of the other two. While claiming to be the voice of univer-
sal reason, the same in all people at all times and places, they looked more
like Lessing’s Jew, Christian, and Muslim, or Will Herberg’s Protestant,
Catholic, Jew. 8
We can put this in terms of the worldview, or paradigm, 9 or language
game that each presupposed, the lens through which he looked for God
and interpreted the Bible. We can call Spinoza’s worldview scientifi c natu-
ralism, Kant’s moral idealism, and Hegel’s complacent historicism. Like
any a priori assumptions, they governed what each thinker could see and
say. They showed the world, without intending to, that “reason,” at least
when it comes to such substantive matters as morality and metaphysics, is
particular and contingent rather than universal and necessary.
An important corollary of this, also unintended, is that adherence to
any particular version of the religion of reason is a matter of faith. By faith
here I do not mean acceptance of the beliefs and practices of an insti-
tutionalized religion—Enlightenment religion was notably inept at insti-
20 M. WESTPHAL