The Theological Origins of Modernity

Written by Michael Allen Gillespie Reviewed By William Edgar

Here is intellectual history at its best. When I first opened it, I thought to myself, ho-hum, one more book on modernity. A book this one is often compared with is Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, which, if more nuanced and perhaps on more solid diagnostic ground, I found to ramble through so many eras and trends without the cohesion that could have made it much more persuasive. Gillespie's volume is lengthy, but riveting all the way through. He has a way of placing you, the reader, right in the crucial meeting, or beside the important author. For example, we wander all over the world with Petrarch and thus realize why he contributed so much to modern individualism. We are right there in Luther's thunderstorm and thus have a sense of his terror of God. We are present at the execution of Louis XVI by guillotine and experience the transgression of regicide.

Gillespie is deeply acquainted with the primary sources, the difficult debates, the philosophical and theological issues that have shaped the modern world. But what makes this book important is its central thesis, repeated throughout, and supported by each episode he describes. Modernity is an attempt to deal with the late Medieval world, where nominalism has overcome realism. The scholastics of the High Middle ages were realists, believing in the real existence of universals. To call a chair a chair is possible because chairness has been fixed in heaven. Nominalism, on the other hand, states that we cannot be sure that particulars on earth truly connect with heavenly ones. So we need to find ways to do that. In the fourteenth century a vision of God as powerful and wrathful began to replace a vision of God as love. Ever since we have been struggling to find a way. Plausibility for the new quest was enabled because of the Black death, the discovery of gunpowder, economic upheavals, the failure of the Crusades, and the like.

Gillespie uses the term “theological” not in some providentialist sense, but to mean that modernity is the product of theological, really philosophical issues. At the center are the great debates among thinkers about whether humanity will have the freedom to pursue its liberal calling or whether the darker forces of nihilism will prevail. Over against the standard historiography that says modernity was born out of trends that move from God to secularization, Gillespie contends that secularization is simply a mask covering up deeper theological concerns that just won't go away. Throughout the book he looks for opposites, a sort of dialectic, out of which modernity emerges. Put differently, he argues that modern history is a series of encounters between those who defend humanity and those who cannot.

He has a brilliant chapter on Petrarch, whom he believes is the central figure in the renaissance, despite his neglect by historians. Through the poet-philosopher Western man was able to move away from the Greek worldview, where he is tied in to political, cosmological, and theological forces, to the emerging individualism he did so much to promote. Petrarch made the conscience, not the Bible, the best judge of virtue. This he proves by extensive explorations of texts such as the Song Book, My Solitary Life, and My Secret.

In two separate but related chapters, Gillespie compares and contrasts humanism, centering on Erasmus, to the reformation, centering on Luther. While never quite calling Luther a nominalist, it is clear that access to God was no longer possible through the standard Medieval practices of the sacraments, prayers, and so on. Luther's great crisis for knowing God led him to stress the role of faith, rather than reason. Instead, for Erasmus piety and learning, albeit in a more humanist way than in the Middle Ages, are more central. Gillespie employs something of the same tactic comparing Descartes to Hobbes. Descartes explores all of the layers of rationality and skepticism, to emerge with a rock of indubitability, and thus the possibility of science. His God will give us access through our reason. Hobbes's God is more remote, less scrutable. His is a “fearful wisdom.” Finally, Gillespie tackles the Enlightenment and discovers there the same kinds of opposition. Following Immanuel Kant he finds a “contradiction” in the Enlightenment, between the powers of reason and its limits. And what looks at first like a rationalist rejection of religion is only a truly religious faith in reason, one that, as Nietzsche demonstrated, is idolatry. The hope in progress is dashed then and now by the catastrophes of the French Revolution, the two World Wars, and the woes of globalization. Yet we can still hope for the emergence of a more positive answer to the great dilemma.

Toward the beginning of the book, the author sets before us two images. The first, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, gives us hope that the best in humanity will indeed triumph. The second, the blowing up of the Twin Towers, puts all of that into question. The purpose of the book is not to predict which of the two forces will prevail, but to raise the questions and thus give us more of a grip on modernity.

My own evaluation of The Theological Origins of Modernity is rather mixed. Gillespie is a masterful historian. In the best tradition of the history of ideas, a discipline sadly maligned by the more trendy culture studies, he takes us right to the texts and the persons so that we feel we know what was said and done, all of it without forgetting his larger narrative. Modernity was not born of random events, but of ideas, driven, why not, by “theological” convictions? Having said that, I found some of the oppositions he describes too rigid. The case for a drift from realism to nominalism is itself somewhat tenuous. Speaking as a theologian, I don't think he quite gets the distinction right. He wants to call Thomas Aquinas a realist, which he was not exactly. Associating Luther with nominalism may seem plausible at first, but Luther not only knew God but described his nature and his will from the Bible in very particular ways. William of Ockham may have been a nominalist, but surely not Luther. The Calvinist branch of the reformation is only very briefly mentioned, though it is arguably far more influential in the genealogy of modernity than the Lutheran. And both Luther and Calvin are lumped together as believing that nothing we do on earth affects our chances for salvation, something only divine election can decide. Here Gillespie shows himself surprisingly unaware of the very texts in the reformers that would have shown him the contrary. For them the sovereignty of God is not an alternative to human responsibility and the cultivation of virtue, though it is a necessary precondition. Gillespie describes God as a power, but not much a grace-giver. Grace, as theologians know, or should know, does not violate “second causes.”

While the book is long enough, it really concentrates on the struggles in the late Middle Ages and its aftermath, skipping very fast over the more recent centuries. As a result little or nothing is said about one of the most remarkable trends within modernity, the growth of the church outside of Europe. Nothing is said about the counterpart to the Enlightenment which are the awakenings and revivals, which spawned the great missionary movements of the nineteenth century, and the establishment of truly national and independent churches in the global south. The trouble is that those cannot be explained by the attempt to fill the gap of nominalism, at least without quite a stretch. A small portion interacts with Islam and rightly tells us we would understand it better if we understood ourselves better. But as to the possibility that Islam itself is connected to modernity, there is nothing.

Am I contradicting myself since I called the book intellectual history at its best? No, because this is a very good read and full of insights into some of the most significant voices that have shaped the modern world. And the idea of rival worldviews between optimists and pessimists has a ring of truth about it. It's just that the categories of realism and nominalism don't quite work as a master narrative.


William Edgar

William Edgar is Department Coordinator and Professor of Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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