Theological Origins of Modernity

278 chapter eight
Arnauld and later Malebranche maintained, but fi nite human beings could
not, and the demand that they to do so inevitably ended in tragedy.
after enlightenment: the concealed
theology of late modernity
Post-Enlightenment thought has continued to struggle with these same
questions in ways that I have examined in great detail elsewhere. 40 What
later modern thinkers have not done is come to terms with the concealed
theological/metaphysical essence of these questions. Indeed, such questions
have seldom been perceived let alone posed.
Much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy was shaped and
directed by the perceived need to escape from the contradictions of the
Enlightenment that appeared in Kant’s antinomies and that manifested
themselves in the French Revolution and Terror. Th e Enlightenment expulsion
of God from the metaphysical constellation of beings left man locked
in juxtaposition to nature. Post-Enlightenment thinkers were forced to
recognize that a coherent and comprehensive account of actuality could
not be constructed on the basis of such a dualism. A number of possible
solutions presented themselves, from the notion that everything might be
explained as the product of a freely acting will, to the idea of an infi nite
series of material causes, or fi nally to some interaction of the two. Th e fi rst
was explored by the German Romantics and post-Kantian idealists as well
as by a variety of fellow travelers in other countries. Th e second possibility
was investigated by a variety of natural scientists who focused not merely
on the motion of matter but upon the interplay of natural forces that governed
motion. Th e third possible solution was developed by a variety of
thinkers who fall generally under the rubric of historicism.
Th e German Romantics, early German idealists, and their nineteenthcentury
followers were convinced that the Enlightenment had misconstrued
nature as a mechanical rather than as an organic or spiritual process.
Th ey believed that if nature were grasped in a pantheistic fashion as
the product of a world-spirit (Goethe), a world-soul (Emerson), an absolute
I (Fichte), or a primordial will (Schelling, Schopenhauer), it would be
compatible with human freedom, since both natural motion and human
action would spring from a common source. Th e real barrier to human freedom
in their view lay not in nature but in the institutions and practices that
had been created and propagated by the Enlightenment with its dedication
to a mechanistic understanding of nature, universal rights, bureaucratic
politics, the development of commerce, and bourgeois morality. True hu-