Theological Origins of Modernity

256 chapter eight
shattering their faith that reason could rule the world, that progress was
inevitable, and that the spread of enlightenment would usher in an age of
peace, prosperity, and human freedom. Th e Terror convinced them that
when universal reason came to power it wore a devil’s mask and opened
up the gates not of heaven but of hell.
Th e hopeful dreams of the “century of lights” were swept away, and reaction
set in on all sides. Th e blade that separated the muddled head of an
ineff ectual king from his body thus also severed the unblemished ideal
of modernity from the reality of modern practices and institutions that
were taking hold all over Europe. Since then modernity has swept in everywhere
and changed the face of Europe and the world, but despite this
triumph no one has ever been quite able to forget that modernity has an
edge that cuts for good and ill.
As we have seen, questions about the modern project had been raised
before. Indeed, while modernity had increasingly engaged the imagination
of European intellectuals since the latter half of the seventeenth century,
there had always been those who had doubts that it was an unqualifi ed
good. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the broadest
claims of the modern project had been called into question in the famous
Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, but this for the most part was
merely a rear-guard eff ort by humanists defending the authority of classical
thought against Cartesian modernists. Rousseau launched a similar but
broader attack in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, arguing that modernity
not only failed to improve human beings but actually made them
worse, producing not virtue, strength, or truthfulness, but vice, weakness,
and hypocrisy. And fi nally, Hume mounted a skeptical attack that called
into question the idea of a necessary connection between cause and eff ect
that was essential to the modern idea of an apodictic science. While such
criticism did not go unheard, European intellectuals were still overwhelmingly
committed to modern thought in the broadest sense in 1789, in large
part certainly because the power of modern rationality seemed to have
been borne out by the success of the Americans in peaceably establishing
their own laws and choosing their own leaders in the aft ermath of the
American Revolution. 1 Th is example led most European intellectuals to
conclude that human reason could give order to human life if only given a
chance. As a result, the critique of modernity oft en fell on deaf ears.
Even those who recognized the profundity of Rousseau’s and Hume’s
critiques more oft en than not came to the defense of modern reason. Kant
was a case in point. While he was deeply impressed by the arguments of
Rousseau and Hume, he remained convinced that modern science and