Theological Origins of Modernity

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of human will and freedom, however, the time in which humans lived, that
is, history, appeared in a new light. Th e relevant story of humanity from this
perspective was not the cyclical pattern the ancients imagined, nor the biblical
story of a past fall and a future (divine) redemption, nor even the humanistic
account of man’s Sisyphean eff orts to master fortuna, but the story
of humanity’s ever increasing conquest and transformation of the natural
world. History in this way came to be seen as the story of human progress
that had a direction and an end. To be human meant to be progressive, to
move toward that end. Humanity may once have been subject to nature, but
since the advent of civilization humans had made intermittent progress in
achieving mastery, and, now that the true method had been found, could
rapidly complete the conquest of the natural world, establishing a peaceful
world in which they could freely pursue whatever they desired and in
which they could live a commodious life. At the core of this modern notion
of progress was the (Pelagian and at times Promethean) notion that, while
humans are in some sense natural, they are also in some sense transcendent
beings who can master and transform the natural world.
As we saw in chapter 1, this notion of history as progress is intrinsic to the
modern age and an essential moment of modernity’s self-understanding.
Th e modern conception of history was developed in the late eighteenth
century by thinkers such as Vico, Motesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, Herder,
Turgot, and Condorcet, who imagined history as the process by which human
beings employed their reason to create a free world in which human
being could live prosperously and at peace with one another. 45 Th e implicit
goal of history that underlay all of their work was the realization of
a perfectly rational and secularized world, an earthly paradise. For them
history was thus also the source of a moral imperative that compelled all
those who understood it to do everything in their power to accelerate the
historical process and bring this new world into being. Th is imperative
played an important role in motivating and justifying many of the French
Revolutionaries. Th eir principal goal, as we discussed above, was to establish
the rule of reason, which they understood in Rousseauian fashion
to be identical with absolute freedom. When the realization of such freedom
proved diffi cult, they were able to justify the use of terror to attain
this exalted end. Th e problem with this Revolutionary project was that no
amount of violence could bring about the world they desired since it depended
on an impossible transformation of human nature.
In the aft ermath of the Revolution, thinkers such as Hegel began
to rethink the grounds of history. Hegel, too, believed that history was
progressive. He also believed that it would end with the rule of reason. Th e