Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of enlightenment 273
with modernity was in fact something diff erent than it seemed, not the
crushing victory of reason over infamy, to use Voltaire’s famous term, not
the long drawn out death of God that Nietzsche proclaimed, and not the
evermore distant withdrawal of the deus absconditus Heidegger points
to, but the gradual transference of divine attributes to human beings (an
infi nite human will), the natural world (universal mechanical causality),
social forces (the general will, the hidden hand), and history (the idea of
progress, dialectical development, the cunning of reason).
We see this already in Descartes and Hobbes. God for Descartes is no
longer the wild and unpredictable God of nominalism. In fact, it is precisely
this God that Descartes suppresses in favor of a more rational God,
or at least a God that can be comprehended by human reason. At the same
time he brings God downward towards man, Descartes elevates man towards
God with his claim that man has the same infi nite will as God.
Hobbes, by contrast, accepts a more orthodox Calvinist position that asserts
the absolute power of God and the insignifi cance of man. According
to the doctrine of predestination, each individual either is or is not saved
by God’s will alone. Since God is no man’s debtor, man can do nothing to
infl uence God. In an ironic fashion, God thereby becomes irrelevant for
human conduct and human life, that is, he becomes nothing other than
the enduring fi rst cause, or the motion of matter determined by a series
of mechanical causes. While God in a narrow sense may be disposed of in
this way, it would be a mistake to believe that any explanation of the whole
can do without those powers and capacities that were attributed to him.
Indeed, it is no accident that as the Calvinist God becomes less important
for human life in Hobbes’ account, the “mortal God,” that is, the sovereign
becomes more important. Moreover, while this transference does serve to
moderate and ultimately eliminate the expressly theological debate that
had been so contentious and violent, it also conceals the theological nature
of the claims made by the contending parties. Th ey thus cease to be
disputable theological assertions and become unquestionable scientifi c or
moral givens.
Th at the deemphasis, disappearance, and death of God should bring
about a change in our understanding of man and nature is hardly surprising.
Modernity, as we have seen, originates out of a series of attempts to
construct a coherent metaphysica specialis on a nominalist foundation, to
reconstitute something like the comprehensive summalogical account of
scholastic realism. Th e successful completion of this project was rendered
problematic by the real ontological diff erences between an infi nite (and
radically omnipotent) God and his fi nite creation (including both man