Enlightenment

In E. L. Doctorow's City of God, the Enlightenment functions as a charged and ambiguous inheritance, the intellectual foundation of the modern secular world that the novel's characters both inhabit and interrogate. It is not a period to be celebrated or dismissed but a living question: the source of the very doubt that the book's religious seekers wrestle with, and the target of their suspicion that rationalism has impoverished or distorted faith. The novel repeatedly returns to the Enlightenment as the dividing line between a world that could believe and a world that can only doubt, making it a central term in the book's sustained meditation on the persistence of religious questions in a secular age.

The Enlightenment as the Source of Modern Doubt

The novel's most explicit engagement with the Enlightenment comes in Sarah Blumenthal's address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion in Washington, D.C., where she argues that "in the twentieth century about to end, the great civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt." This doubt—"the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism"—is presented as the Enlightenment's legacy, the intellectual posture that has held people in thrall to ethical behavior precisely because it refuses the certainties of faith. Sarah's formulation is striking: it is not belief but doubt that has civilized the century, and it is the true believers, "of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist," who "have done the murdering." The Enlightenment, in this reading, is not the enemy of ethics but its guarantor, the force that checks the murderous impulse of conviction.

The Critique of Enlightenment Rationalism

Yet the novel also stages a powerful critique of the Enlightenment from within the experience of faith. In a passage that reads as a sermon or interior monologue, the narrator asks whether faith must be blind, whether it must come of people's need to believe, and then turns on the Enlightenment's confidence in human knowledge: "sure of themselves, as if all human knowledge since Scripture is not also God's revelation!" The question "is time a loop?" and the feeling that "everything seems to be running backwards" and that "civilization is in reverse" suggest a world in which the Enlightenment's promise of progress has failed, leaving the faithful stranded. The rabbi Joshua is told, "If it's true and God truly does belong to the atavists, then that's what faith is and what faith does. And we are stranded, you and I." Here the Enlightenment appears not as the source of doubt but as the force that has exiled God from the modern world, leaving believers to choose between a rationalism that cannot believe and a faith that seems to belong to the past.

The Enlightenment as a Laboratory of the Self

The novel also treats the Enlightenment as a mode of self-understanding, a way of reading one's own life as a secular experiment. In a passage reflecting on a woman met at a dinner party, the narrator describes her as offering "the secular Enlightenment version of Amphitryon," a retelling of the classical myth in which a woman abandons the man who has committed himself to her, leaving him shattered. The narrator calls this "my laboratory, here, in my skull," suggesting that the Enlightenment's project of rational self-analysis has become an internalized habit of mind, a way of dissecting one's own desires and betrayals with clinical detachment. The reference to Amphitryon—a story of divine imposture and mistaken identity—also hints at the novel's larger concern with the difficulty of knowing who or what one truly is, a concern that the Enlightenment's confidence in reason cannot resolve.

The Enlightenment and the Possibility of Belief

The novel's most paradoxical engagement with the Enlightenment comes in its treatment of Pem's conversion to Judaism. Pem, who has not yet completed his conversion studies, tells the narrator that "he has never felt as completely, wholly Christian in his life as he does now, studying to be a Jew." This is a startling claim, one that seems to invert the Enlightenment's assumption that religious identities are fixed and exclusive. Pem's experience suggests that the path to a deeper faith may lie through another tradition entirely, and that the Enlightenment's project of critical self-examination—of questioning one's own certainties—can itself become a form of religious devotion. The narrator's warning, "maybe you better not say that to anyone else," and Pem's uncomprehending "Why? It's true," underscore the radicalism of this insight, which challenges both the secular assumption that faith is irrational and the religious assumption that one's own tradition is the only true one.

The Enlightenment as a Question Without an Answer

Throughout City of God, the Enlightenment remains an open question rather than a settled position. The novel refuses both the secularist's confidence that reason has superseded faith and the believer's confidence that faith has superseded reason. Instead, it presents the Enlightenment as the condition of modern religious life: the source of the doubt that makes belief difficult, the target of the suspicion that rationalism has emptied the world of meaning, and the very mode of self-examination that can lead a Christian to become a Jew. Sarah's address ends with the insistence that "something more is required" of the faithful who read Scripture with a "willing suspension of disbelief," that theirs is "a compromised faith" that demands a further step. That step, the novel suggests, may lie not in returning to a pre-Enlightenment innocence but in passing through doubt to a faith that knows itself as faith—a faith that has absorbed the Enlightenment's questions without being destroyed by them. The Enlightenment, in this reading, is not the opposite of faith but its necessary companion, the shadow that gives the light of belief its particular shape.