Theological Origins of Modernity

284 chapter eight
tics of human liberation had proved to be the means to human enslavement
and degradation. Th e horror evoked by these cataclysmic events was
so overwhelming that it called into question not merely the idea of progress
and enlightenment but also the idea of modernity and the conception
of Western civilization itself.
At the heart of the matter were the unresolved contradictions that had
bedeviled modern thought from the beginning. Th e modern idea of history
was an attempt to reconcile freedom and necessity, but as Kant had
shown such a reconciliation was impossible. Freedom is understood to be
the goal of history, but history itself is imagined to be a necessary process.
To put matters in the terms of our earlier argument, history is imagined in
a Pelagian fashion to be the product of free human willing but at the same
time the unfolding of history is imagined to be guided by an “invisible
hand,” or by “the cunning of reason,” or by “dialectical necessity.” Th e fact
that this motion is imagined to be necessary or preordained is an indication
of the concealed theological assumptions that underlie such a view of
change. Th is view, as we have seen, contradicts the notion that humans act
freely. Th is contradiction, however, is not obvious and in practice is not
troubling when things seem to be moving in a positive direction. Th us as
long as history was identifi ed as “manifest destiny,” or the “spread of civilization,”
or “procession of God through the world” (as Hegel put it), it was
not particularly troubling.
Th e series of catastrophes that befell humanity in the twentieth century
called this positive or progressive notion of history into question. From
this perspective, the hidden hand looked more like the hand of Satan than
of God, the cunning of reason more like the diabolic shrewdness of an
evil deceiver than the will of a benefi cent deity, and dialectical necessity
more like the iron chains of tyranny than a path to freedom. In short, the
dominant Pelagian view of history as the product of free human willing
gave way in the midst of these troubling times to a more Manichean vision
of historical change that saw individuals as mere cogs in a machine or moments
of an inhuman causal process.
Such a view of history was not new. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers
such as Rousseau had already argued in the eighteenth century that the development
of the arts and sciences had not only not improved humans but
had actually made them worse, depriving them of a happy natural existence
and replacing it with a miserably alienated and confl ict-ridden life in
modern society. Elements of this counter-Enlightenment vision of history
persisted in the thought of thinkers such as Tocqueville, who saw the dark
underside of what they recognized as human progress. More decisively,