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Imagined civilizations: China, the west and their first encounter

common cause against the Anabaptist “Kingdom” of Münster (including the singularly gruesome punishments of its leaders) and the 1529 Diet of Speyer – which revived the Theodosian Code mandating capital punishment for “rebaptizers” – was dominated by an imperial Catholic majority. While Erdozain is probably right to dispute the claim that heretic burnings were “inevitable” (263), neither were they unexpected. Religion was primarily a communal – not individual – identity in the sixteenth century, and aberrations were treated as grave threats to the greater good. Such nuances do not excuse the sins of our forefathers, but they do temper our understanding of them. From a wider angle, it is also worth asking whether religious faith was always categorized as an act of the intellect. Erdozain’s thesis that religious certainty (i.e. dogmatism) breeds religious doubt is both illuminating and defensible, but faith was often perceived to be volitional as well as cognitive. For example, he correctly underscores the cerebral nature of Calvin’s definitions of faith (50), but both Calvin and Luther also described faith using terms such as “rest” and “trust” in addition to “belief”. These reservations, however, are incidental to Erdozain’s main task, which is to revise the narrative of “religion vs. secularism” by demonstrating that it was actually competing Christianities which dissolved Christian orthodoxy. This he accomplishes admirably (especially in chapters four and five). The Soul of Doubt is a provocative study that challenges weighty scholarly narratives such as Charles Taylor’s “secularity”, Peter Gay’s “modern paganism”, and William Cavanaugh’s “myth” of religious violence, and is worthy of a serious read by any scholar or student of intellectual history in the West.