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Reflections on Michael Gillespie's Theological Origins of Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2010

Kirstie M. McClure
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Extract

In The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie has given us a big book. At once learned and lively, it enters the lists not simply of “origins of modernity” stories, but more particularly of those stories that engage the proudly secular and rational self-image of the age. Among the latter, its most explicit interlocutors are Hans Blumenberg and Martin Heidegger, but its effective resonances and dissonances extend, if more subtly, to Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Amos Funkenstein—and perhaps to the likes of Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze, and others as well. Indeed, in its insistent probing of connections between modern science and late medieval theology, this book is arguably in dialogue not only with a range of continental thinkers, but also with such Anglophone philosophers as Whitehead, Collingwood, and E. A. Burtt.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 72 , Issue 4 , Fall 2010 , pp. 697 - 704
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2010

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References

1 Gillespie, Michael Allen, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hereafter cited as Origins.

2 Ibid., 16.

3 Ibid., the titles of chapters 5 through 8, respectively.

4 Ibid., 2.

5 Ibid., 287.

6 See, for two disparate examples, Troeltsch, Ernst, Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World, trans. Montgomery, W. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912)Google Scholar or Asad, Talal, Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. For a relatively recent overview of debates over the status of history in religious studies, see Klippenberg, Hans G., “Religious History, Displaced by Modernity,” Numen 47, no. 3 (2000): 221–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Origins, 13–14. Despite the figure of a faded image, this seems not a narrative of decline but a suggestion of forgetting.

8 Funkenstein, Amos, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

9 It may, however, partake of the anti-ironic stance that Hayden White views as the last available after the end of the great nineteenth-century philosophies of history. See the conclusion to Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

10 It is a fair question how Professor Gillespie regards this in relation to his own account. By laying out the metaphysical significance of Blumenberg's argument, he stresses the “the way in which modernity takes form within the metaphysical and theological structures of this tradition” (Origins, 12).

11 Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 117Google Scholar.

12 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, esp. 12–18.

13 See, for example, Funkenstein's discussion of Leibniz in the context of divine omnipotence, where such dialectical oppositions as potentia absoluta/ordinata and plenitude/economy provide the resources for hypothetical reasoning (ibid., chap. 3). See also Funkenstein, Amos, “The Dialectical Preparation for Scientific Revolutions,” in The Copernican Achievement, ed. Westman, Robert S. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

14 Funkenstein, Theology, chap. 4.

15 Origins, 273. Thus Hobbes is something of an epitome of the phenomenon: as the significance of the harsh Calvinist God diminished in worldly life, its potency passed by transference to the “mortal God,” the civil sovereign.

16 Ibid., 274. The passage continues: “To put the matter more starkly, in the face of the long drawn out death of God, science can provide a coherent account of the whole only by making man or nature or both in some sense divine.”

17 Ibid., 356 n. 28.

18 Ibid., 294.