Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of enlightenment 275
than the sinful viator of Christianity or the rational animal of antiquity.
Building on the earlier work of Descartes (who himself drew on the humanist
tradition), Malebranche argued that in contemplating ideas and
eternal truths the human mind participates in God. Leibniz made a similar
claim in his monadology, imagining in Neoplatonic fashion that human
being participated in or was an emanation of divine being. Many
Enlightenment thinkers, however, were convinced that such views did not
go far enough. Th ey believed that one could only truly understand human
being if it was completely freed from the tyranny of God and the church.
Religion fi lled the world with so many imaginary entities and powers that
under its sway human beings could not comprehend what was distinctive
and valuable about their own being. Lamettrie argued that humans could
not come to terms with themselves or be happy as long as they believed
in God. In his view man is a natural being and must understand himself
as such. What this meant for those who took their inspiration from
Descartes was that man thereby replaced God. Trying to determine what
was distinctive about the human will, Rousseau looked beneath the fi nite
will to self-aggrandizement and found a general will that could never err,
a will that Patrick Riley has shown is a direct descendent of God’s will that
all men be saved. 31 Others saw this divine element not so much in man
and his will but in the rationality of the natural world. Following Hobbes’
identifi cation of mechanical causality and divine will, Spinoza developed
a pantheistic account that identifi ed God and substance. Locke believed
that one could fi nd moral imperatives suffi cient to guide human life within
the divinely created natural world. 32 Newton saw time and space as the
forms of divine being. Aft er these divine capacities had been transferred to
man or nature, it was easy for the Encyclopedists Diderot, D’Alembert, and
Holbach to demonstrate that revealed religion was not only false but also
superfl uous. 33 By the end of the Enlightenment, many thinkers treated human
beings as quasi-divine. Th is is especially clear in someone like Kant
who asserts that human beings are infi nitely valuable ends in themselves. 34
Such a view is only possible because of the transference of what hitherto
were considered divine attributes to human beings. Th e Enlightenment
(and post-Enlightenment) exaltation of human individuality is thus in
fact a form of radical (although concealed) Pelagianism. Divine or at least
quasi-divine powers reemerge although always in disguise. Nature is an
embodied rational will; the social world is governed by an “invisible hand”
that almost miraculously produces a rational distribution of goods and
services; and history is the progressive development of humanity toward
perfection.