Theological Origins of Modernity

262 chapter eight
marionettes. Th e Luther/Erasmus debate thus actually ends in the same
unsatisfying juxtaposition of arguments as the later Kantian antinomy. If
we were to schematize that debate in a logical form corresponding to the
antinomy, the thesis position (represented by Erasmus) would be that there
is causality through human freedom in addition to the causality through
divine will, and the antithesis position (represented by Luther) that there is
no causality through human freedom but only through divine will. Th ere
is no solution to this problem on either a humanistic or a theological basis
that can sustain both human freedom and divine sovereignty. As we saw
above, the gulf that is opened up by this contradiction was unbridgeable. It
was also unavoidable since each claim is parasitic on the other. Th is antinomy,
which played an important role in propelling Europe into the Wars
of Religion, was thus in a certain sense inevitable.
As we saw in the last two chapters, modernity proper was born out of
and in reaction to this confl ict, as an eff ort to fi nd a new approach to the
world that was not entangled in the contradictions of humanism and the
Reformation. To this end, thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes
sought a new beginning that gave priority not to man or to God but to
nature, that sought to understand the world not as a product of a Promethean
human freedom or of a radically omnipotent divine will but of
the mechanical motion of matter. Modernity in this sense was the result
of an ontic revolution within metaphysics that accepted the ontological
ground that nominalism established but that saw the other realms of being
through this new naturalistic lens. While this revolutionary approach
seemed at fi rst to eliminate the confl ict within metaphysics which we examined
in chapters 2 through 5, as we will see, it was fi nally unable to erase
it and in the end actually reinscribed it within modern metaphysics as the
contradiction between natural necessity and human freedom. Th us, while
modern metaphysics began by turning away from both the human and
the divine toward the natural, it was able to do so only by reinterpreting
the human and the divine naturalistically. However, both were thereby
incorporated within the naturalistic perspective. In incorporating them
in this manner, however, the earlier confl ict between the human and the
divine was not resolved but concealed within the new metaphysical outlook.
In order to explain how this occurs, we must examine this process
more carefully.
As prototypical modern thinkers, both Descartes and Hobbes agree
that in our analysis of the world we must grant ontic priority to nature. 16
Insofar as they represent opposing poles within modernity, they disagree
about the way in which we should interpret the human and the divine