In Chapter 13 I began a survey of leading attempts to replace revealed religion with versions of natural religion as conceived by philosophers, not prophets – a theoretical enterprise that arose in the seventeenth century and culminated in the nineteenth. I now resume that narrative.

The next major work in this tradition (that is, the tradition of those who attempted to use philosophy as a lever by which to pry religion away from dogma, intolerance, and theocratic orthodoxy) is Rousseau's Emile. One of the main reasons Rousseau's work is so intriguing is that he is both a severe critic of the liberal philosophy of politics and life and himself a part of the liberal tradition; he is both a critic of Enlightenment and himself an Enlightener. He is both the author of the vehement critique of modernity in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and the author of the liberal theology in Book 4 of Emile. Rousseau was the author not of a single coherent political philosophy but of several mutually incompatible political philosophies. The key line in his work is this: “Common readers, pardon me my paradoxes. When one reflects, they are necessary.” That is, life itself is paradoxical, and the chief vocation of the theorist is to give expression to this paradoxicality. As he put it in his letter to Voltaire of August 18, 1756 (“Letter on Providence”), life does not admit of a single existential catechism. There are at least two – the catechism of man and the catechism of the citizen – and it is impossible to live one's life simultaneously according to both catechisms. In Part I of this book we pursued a dialogue with his catechism of the citizen; now let us look briefly at his catechism of man.