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Few people have heard of Sir Edward Coke, but most people reading this live under his rule. Coke served as the Attorney General of England in the early 17th century, which meant he would recommend laws to the Crown to implement. And in 1604, he gave us one of the bedrocks of the Common Law, used all around the world: “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”

Of course, today we might say an American’s, a Canadian’s, or an Australian’s, but Coke’s legal point was that what you did within your home, so long as it was within the law, was your business. The police cannot enter your home unwarranted. The sheriffs cannot bash your door down without good reason. What you did in private was up to you.

The distinction between the private and public spheres extends far beyond Coke’s corner of jurisprudence. There exists a long philosophical tradition that divides what we do, say, and believe in public, and what happens behind closed doors. How you eat, talk, or have sex are matters for the home. How you raise your kids or spend your free time are private things. But one of the most prominent topics philosophers have often hoped to banish to the parlor room was religion. Philosophize in public, worship in private. Rationality in the marketplace, faith and emotion at home.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, philosopher Simon Critchley, author of On Mysticism, argues this needs to change.

The German divide

The idea that you can believe what you like at home but must reason like everyone else in public owes much of its popularity to Martin Luther and Immanuel Kant. Both wrestled with a similar anxiety: What happens when private religious feelings spill out into the street? Luther, who opened the doors to the Reformation and made the Bible readable by the masses, quickly became nervous when people began reading it too freely. The radical fringes — peasants, Anabaptists, visionaries — started claiming divine authority for political revolt. Luther recoiled, siding with princes and writing that rebellious peasants should be “struck down like rabid dogs.”

Kant inherited this wariness and tried to offer a compromise for Protestantism. “What Kant gives us,” Critchley says, “is this modern idea of religious experience as authorized privately, but as not being sanctioned publicly.” In his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment?, Kant argues that “public reason” must be disciplined and rational, while “private reason” can hold whatever faith it likes — so long as it stays in its lane. As Critchley puts it, “Privately, you can believe whatever you like, but you have to respect that distinction between the public and the private.”

It’s a tidy solution: Religion can flourish quietly in the home but mustn’t interrupt public life. The Enlightenment, in this view, is defined by sober rationality that keeps emotion and mysticism at arm’s length. For Critchley, though, this isn’t reason — it’s repression. It’s probably not even possible.

Guido Reni / Public Domain / The MET / Big Think

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