The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment

Shagan (The Rule of Moderation), a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, traces the surprisingly complicated evolving meaning of belief in this engrossing intellectual history. Rather than looking at shifts in what people believe in, Shagan questions what belief actually means to them. Starting with the church fathers and scholastics, Shagan shows that various understandings of belief existed in the medieval era, but that all Christians reserved it exclusively for communal religious claims. During the Reformation, arguments about belief intensified, with Protestants insisting that belief had to remake one’s life, Catholics arguing that belief meant strict adherence to tradition, and radical reformers taking a more mystical, transcendent approach. This fragmentation allowed groups to accuse one another of not truly believing, Shagan says, and paved the way for atheism as a meaningful religious category. He concludes with the Enlightenment, persuasively arguing that thinkers of the era expanded belief beyond religious contexts and thereby flattened distinctions between types of knowledge. This impressive unpacking of the now-common-sense understanding of knowledge glides smoothly through its arguments and provides useful insights for scholars in religion and beyond. (Dec.)