The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898

by Dominic Green

An incisive study of the Western world's shift from institutional religion to more personal beliefs in the second half of the 19th century . . . This is intellectual history at its most comprehensive and convincing. --Publishers Weekly, starred review



The late nineteenth century was an age of grand ideas and great expectations fueled by rapid scientific and technological innovation. In Europe, the ancient authority of church and crown was overthrown for the volatile gambles of democracy and the capitalist market. If it was an age that claimed to liberate women, slaves, and serfs, it also harnessed children to its factories and subjected entire peoples to its empires. Amid this tumult, another sea change was underway: the religious revolution.

In The Religious Revolution, Dominic Green charts this profound cultural and political shift, taking us on a whirlwind journey through the lives and ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman; of �liphas L�vi and Helena Blavatsky; of Wagner and Nietzsche; of Marx, Darwin, and Gandhi. Challenged by the industrialization, globalization, and political unrest of their times, these figures found themselves connecting with the religious
impulse in surprising new ways, inspiring others to move away from the strictures of religion and toward the thrill and intimacy of spirituality. The modern era is often characterized as a time of increasing secularism, but in this trenchant new work, Green demonstrates how the foundations of modern society were laid as much by spirituality as by science or reason.

The Religious Revolution is a narrative tour de force that sweeps across several continents and five of the most turbulent and formative decades in history. Threading together seemingly disparate intellectual trajectories, Green illuminates how philosophers, grifters, artists, scientists, and yogis shared in a global cultural moment, borrowing one another's beliefs and making the world we know today.

Genres: History, Religion, Philosophy, Nonfiction

464 pages, Hardcover

Published April 19, 2022

About the author

British writer and musician (b. 1970)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_...


Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. Well, let me start with the one positive. This book is beautifully written. That's the only compliment I can give. It is otherwise a meandering burble of loosely-related anecdotes of interesting figures from the 19th century with no central thesis. What is the argument of this book?! The author seems to think writing with a thesaurus next to him makes up for a lack of content. Even the epilogue is just listing off, in brief paragraphs, bite-sized information on the figures touched on in these pages. This has all the worst aspects of historical fiction with none of the redeeming qualities of an actual work of history. Stay away if you want to know about the religious/spiritual movement of the 19th century. Im disappointed I spent the time to read through to the finish.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A historical exploration from 1848 to 1898 considering the many socio-political, philosophical, scientific, and spiritualist figures whose exploits help define spirituality to this day.

The author begins with Emerson and Marx and life and spirituality in the industrial age. The narrative moves on toward Ruskin in Italy and Thoreau in America and their resistance to such industrialism. The constant churn of Paris with Baudelaire and Levi and the occult are considered. Then it is time for Darwin and Huxley, Whitman, and Wagner, and all the social theories and poetry that attend to them.

The next phase, 1871-1898, will see Blavatsky and her Theosophism along with Nietzsche and his prognostications predominate. The narrative will follow Blavatsky and all her journeys West and East with Olcott and their engagement with Buddhism, Hinduism, and what would become modern Islam. We meet Gandhi and his early life experiences and what would form and shape him. We see the origins of the Indian and Jewish freedom movements with Vivekananda and Herzl. And throughout we are "treated" to Nietzsche's ruminations. The epilogue considers the psychopathology which was coming about with Freud et al.

There's a lot of historical narrative here but not much explanation attempting to tie it all together. It is left for the reader to discern how even the early twenty first century remains haunted by these figures and their spiritual prognostications: the discontent with Christianity; confidence in humanity and its frustration; the line between profound wisdom and hucksterism; spirituality and liberation; the "death of God"; the appeal of Eastern wisdom; etc.

But if you're interested in seeing how thoroughly interconnected the world of the late nineteenth century was, and how all these various "luminaries" tie in to one another, behold.

Very interesting reading.

**-galley received as part of early review program

[Dolores of Course · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could have done without reading about Karl Marx lancing his carbuncles with a razor (p157). This is a solid five star book if you are an academic with alphabet soup after your name. It is incredibly well-researched and has 83 pages of footnotes and bibliography. I highly recommend it as a resource on Spiritually and the general thought zeitgeist of the time.

However, if you are an average reader with an interest in the subject, it's a three star read and a struggle to get there. I have read books on quantum string theory with less information density than this book. It's a name dropper from page one and unless you know your history and philosophy, you will be lost. I recommend reading the Epilogue (p369) first for a background briefing on some of the players. It will help you understand their importance since that is rarely addressed as they are introduced in each chapter.

[Dustcollector · Rating 5 out of 5]

okay, i'm writing this review to balance out an earlier one that said it is just terrible. i am having a total opposite experience... this book is paying off so much for me, single-handendly tying together the loose ends of so many things that were undercurrents in the 19th and 20th century. and also, more importantly, connecting it to major historical trends, somethign like:

(spoiler alert, next up is a bit of a summary of the book, starting from the beginning with...)

-French Revolution generated totally new ideas about individuality (remember, at some point most people were just considered another animal on the Duke or Baron's plot of land, equal to a rabbit, and could be killed for taking one of Lord's rabbits). it stimulated the idea of personal liberation, which is so central in modern esotericism and occultism and magick (a big change from the renaissance approach which was in some ways more of a form of early science but with angels involved, having happened before the scientific revolution). the world was much more open to negotiation all of a sudden, and really esotericism and magick in the 19th and 20th century is stemming so much from this. understanding that stuff can even help a person in an actual spiritual /occult practice too!
-Marxism picks up on the personal liberation ideology, has a billion consequences
-technology is completely changing the world, while Colonialism is cross pollinating all sorts of social groups for the first time, bringing eastern influences back to the west, in the form of Orientialist translations that also started creating ideas about some Ur societies that existed before Christianity, contributing to the decline of western religion and the increasing interest and exoticism of 'Other' cultures. meanwhile in places like India, the new trains are making people mix together in completely new ways, and major corporations like East India Company are now more powerful than any government in the world and are treating colonized people in brutal ways, but this then leads to abolitionist movements (personal liberation, connection with Marxism and feminism developing)
-with the digging of the trains and quarries, there are new discoveries of fossils and neanderthal skulls, and this leads to totally new ways of understanding history. recall, people in 1801 had no awareness of any of this stuff, like the molten core and layers in the earth and that earlier species existed (fossils)
-this develops evolutionary theory, which gets tied up with the simultaneously developing racial theories and ideologies (people before this did not talk about groups of races as different)
-so there are questions about Ur people, are people different by nature and is elitism happening. new questions abotu how humans originated, what is our spiritual destiny
-Thoreau is 'getting away from it all' (connection made here with Marxism, the revolt against society as it is), inspired by Emerson's writings (taking the newly translated Indian Vedas, and going oh hey there are alternatives to Christianity). i'm still reading it, so i'm on the part where Walt Whitman adds a layer of 'and no matter what my identity is, all things are divinely beautiful and lovely' (connected with later Jungian shadow work, and so much of modern magick and occultism, and the Kabbalistic qlipoth)

i'll mention now, you really need a lot of background knowledge to get anythign out of this book. it is a "popularizing" book (the type that gives a big narrative overview and explains little tidbits and pieces from across a range of historical events/figures). it is not really an academic one, like somethign from Yale or Harvard made for specialists... but it is also not an introduction book. but also it is, if you've been introduced to just enough of this stuff, and are interested in learning about more.

for example:
it talks about how Eliphas Levi was shaped into a reactionary authoritarian as a result of the French Revolution (just prior to his birth, so he's living through it's aftermath as it unfolds). he becomes misogynistic, and against lower classes (society now has upper, middle, and lower class, and he is against the lower class, after he wrote a socialist manigesto and then had a turnaround --- here's a good spot to mention, this stuff was also not necessarily very well explained, but i knew the history of this guy, and then went wow wow wow this is connecting so many dots and adding so much new depth and understanding for me by reading it) ... it also goes into how he also gets for the first time into 'exploring both the light and the shadow', and creates Baphomet as an image (the name was around earlier, when medieval Crusaders made hostile bastardization of Mohammed from Islam, but the image and god as he's now known, did not exist until Levi created it).

so to get any substance and new insights from just that one little bit, you'd need to know a fair bit about Eliphas Levi, and even better to know about the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley, and Dion Fortune, and Gurdjieff and Blavatsy, and slo about the French Revolution, modernism and modern philosophy and modern poetry and arts... etc etc..

basically, if you don't get somethign out of this book, it is due to lack of prior other knowledge, or patient interest, and/or ability to read between the lines and make insightful connections (but he does spell those out clearly too). it seems to be marketed as a basic beginners books, but actually it is making lots and lots of deep connections and insights, tying together so much of the central teachings of at least some New Age spirituality groups - so getting meaning from this book requires familiarity with at least a couple of those groups/writes. they have so many similarities, that you could pick or choose almost any, or even some just have experience with some Christianity sects. if you have read just a few original writings of some 19th or 20th century esoteric writers, this book would be a massive boost for understanding the roots and social context (note, it would help if are also thinking about them critically at least a bit too, not just aiming for transcendence by dogmatically following and not thinking about them as historical phenomena too)

it also helps if you have some understanding of some modern figures like Thoreau (the Walden's pond guy), and Emerson (the oversoul guy, you'd see here how he picked up from the newly translated Eastern writings and then lays out a template that all modern esoteric groups seem to follow from then on), and Darwin.

also, if even just think about some of the underlying ideas about Nazism,

i have only read 1/3 of the book, and have gotten so much out of it. i know i repeated myself but just had to write this thing and get it out, because it's awesome and some trashing review compleeeeeetely missed the point (sorry, but the problem here is likely that you just don't know how much you don't know)

[Santiago Aparicio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy buen libro para observar cómo las espiritualidades del siglo xx, Nueva era y autiayudas diversas, nada tienen de contemporáneas. La única pega, dentro de lo bien escrito que está, es que el lector puede perderse con tantos saltos de autores.

[xenya · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It was an age of grand ideas and great expectations, and it forged our ecstasies and our discontents. An age fascinated by speed and awed by machines. An age of evolutionary biology and religious fundamentalism, of global powers and tribal politics. An age of glowing cities and transitions lost, of the lone genius and the huddled masses, of restless tedium and the torments of hope. An age that believed in the infinite advance of knowledge, endured the infinite emptiness of a universe without purpose, and succored a pantheon of new gods. That age created global markets and global consciousness, but also class war and scientific racism. It dreamed of peace and genocide, chemical cures and chemical weapons. It overthrew the ancient authority of church and crown for the volatile gambles of democracy and the market. It freed women, slaves, and serfs, but it harnessed children to its factories and subject[ed] peoples to its empires. It was the New Age, the era of democracy and emancipation, but the emancipated yearned to elect new Caesars. Its vocabulary is ours: spirituality, evolution, ecology, crisis, culture war, diversity, Darwinist, fundamentalist, neurotic, organic, sadism, masochism, atomic power, karma, reincarnation. So are its pleasures: the department store (1838), the motor vehicle (1870), the telephone (1875), the moving image (1895). And also its consolations of knowledge and escapism: thermodynamic entropy (1851), the germ theory of disease (1870), synthetic opiates (1874), pornographic films (1895), the contents of the atom (1911). And so are its ideals, the transcendent principles that give meaning to life by appearing, like gods, to exist outside the world they create and explain."

Dominic Green's The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898 is certainly an ambitious and fascinating book. Its chapters cover vast grounds, including discussions on Marx, Thoreau, Baudelaire, Darwin, Whitman, Wagner, Madame Blavatsky, Nietzsche, Vivekananda, Herzl, Ghandi, and many more.

As this era—the late nineteenth-century—is of particular interest to me, I picked up this book after stumbling upon it at a Barnes & Noble (mirabile visu!, I thought to myself) in hopes that it would be illuminating for my research interests and helpful for my general understanding of the period's intellectual history. Which, it was, don't get me wrong. But despite my real interest in and fascination with the material and the time period, I often found myself struggling to get through this book. At times, the style felt too purple prose-y for an academic book; there were multiple occasions where I had to stop reading in order to spend half an hour untangling an unnecessarily complicated and/or metaphorical sentence which had no real reason to be so complicated and/or metaphorical, to the point that it obscured the author's (again, interesting, don't get me wrong!) meaning. So I thought that was a bit of a shame—but still, super interesting material in here!

I also found—and this might have been more of an issue of my expectation not aligning with the book's reality—that I wanted The Religious Revolution to... spell out its argument more? Much of the book, if not honestly all of it (save for the prologue and epilogue), was historical reconstruction of the intellectual development of the ideas traced throughout the text. And this was all interesting, but I had been hoping for more of a positive argument articulating the connections that Green was spending so much time outlining.

Relatedly, for a book subtitled The Birth of Modern Spirituality, I had hoped for some time spent defining what spirituality means (at least in the context of this book), and what specifically defines modern spirituality (as opposed to ancient spirituality?). Both of those definitional aspects were lacking, I thought, and only given any space on the page in Green's brief (paragraph-long) discussion of how, "[c]rudely, the difference between religiosity and religion is the difference between hunger and lunch," which, admittedly, I thought was an interesting and helpful distinction (!), but still didn't get at defining what was a central but spectral concept for the book.

Overall, 3.5/5 stars, rounded up to 4 because of how interesting the material is. Could easily have been 3 but I'm feeling generous.

[Lauren Hiebner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This intellectual history tells of the challenges to established religions from 1848 - 1898. These challenges were largely due to changes in technology, scientific advances, women’s rights, and revolts/revolutions against the established political order. Many thought that scientific advancements/religion would fulfill Christianity’s aims. This opened the door for the occult sciences, seances, magic, and mediums where spiritual cults replaced religion. In this age of unchecked capitalism and materialism it was thought that material power would equate to spiritual power. Being good or secularism became popular. Green’s book includes various spiritual movements such as; Agnostics, Theosophy, Hebraists vs Hellenizers, Zarathustraism, Positivism, Zionism, and probably the worst doctrine to emerge, Antisemitism. People involved in these movements were; Nietzsche, Ghandi, Blavatsky, Darwin, Thoreau, Emerson, Marx, Levi, Olcott, and Wagner. Each of these are analyzed for their beliefs and influence in furthering spiritualism as a religious belief. The author emphasized the influence of Eastern religions on the West such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam and how they challenged established western religions during this time period. Sadly, many spiritualist movements were associated with racism and became politicized leading to racist nationalism in the early 1900s. An interesting read.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Religious Revolution details the shift in thinking from a traditional religious perspective to an individualized system of thought which then could not be contained by the very institutions that fueled the shift. The author details these changes through the narratives of those who were pivotal to this change. It jumps from character to another, all the while building the momentum of the story, mirroring the momentum that was taking place in society.

This book is an exercise of deep thought and analysis about people who changed how our society functions through deep thought and analysis of their own world and roles within it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrah, Straus and Giroux for an ARC of this book.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an intellectual history of the 19th century that concentrates on religion. The main characters of the book are Nietzsche, Madame Blavatsky, Mohandas Gandhi and Theodor Herzl, and Green manages to leave "Spirituality" undefined. I have occasion to teach the history of Western Civilization from time to time and this book gave me more connective tissue to connect advances of civilization than I had had before.

[David Dickman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting topic, but difficult to read.

[Joseph Colicchio · Rating 2 out of 5]

You’ve got to be kidding me. This book is a mess of brain-straining juxtapositions, deep and invaluable tangents, and bewildering omissions.

[JUAN ANTONIO · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy buen ensayo, sobre el nacimiento de todos los ismos que forjaron el siglo XX

[Kenzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with both the positive and negative reviews...

The positive: the book makes fascinating connections between different thinkers and movements during a period when so much was shifting.

The negative: the book is a challenging read (awkwardly between academic and pop), and sure, I can pause to make the connections, but I prefer books that spell it out--I'm reading the book to learn, not check my knowledge. Maybe the lack of connections was due to the length of the book and the subjects covered, but I would have preferred less detail on the Theosophical movement, for example, in exchange for more summation.

I also felt like the book demanded a lot of trust, and more summations and slower recounting in exchange for a few less stories might have built that trust. For the amount of thinkers covered and random one-sentence assertions, I sometimes wondered how fast and loose the author was playing with the facts.