Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of premodernity 169
completed but whose consequences are not quite carried out, eternally and
achingly imminent. Th is painting is, of course, a painting of the end, the
coming end, and seems to herald the decline of a human-centered world
and to presage the looming age of destruction that was soon to follow. Its
reception also echoed the changing mood of the times. Almost as soon as
the painting was completed, it was criticized by the pious as immodest and
un-Christian, and lesser men were called in to paint over the genitalia, to
conceal the organs of generation that had been such an essential part of
the Neoplatonic vision of love that stretched from Petrarch to Ficino. In a
similar way for the next century and a half the humanists were forced to
cover and conceal themselves, hiding their true intentions and enterprises
away from the Inquisition and the intrusive public gaze of their fellow citizens
and communicants.
Th e world of humanism as it is refl ected in the Sistine ceiling begins
with the separation of light and darkness. Th e world of the Reformation
refl ected on the altar wall mixes these two together once again. In this
twilit world on the precipice of the Apocalypse, the armies of light can
scarcely be distinguished from the armies of darkness. Th e same was true
of the actual world, where each side in the confl ict was convinced that God
rode with them or that they were his emissaries. Th e creation of the modern
world, as we understand it both in a scientifi c and a moral sense, was
made possible only by fi nding a way once again to separate the light from
the darkness. Th e center of Michelangelo’s ceiling is the creation of the
human Eve out of Adam. Th e center of the altar wall is the dark God-man.
Th e center of the “ceiling” for those who opened up the modern world
was neither human nor divine. In the midst of the Wars of Religion that
called into question both God and man, the gaze of those who created the
modern age seems to have turned to an earlier panel in Michelangelo’s
ceiling, to the creation of the cosmos, and thus to the material world in all
its multipicitous motion. Th is modern “ceiling” in all of its magnifi cence
and power is, however, painted not in the vibrant living colors of the world
of ordinary experience but in the pure and brilliant, though colorless light
of mathematics.