Theological Origins of Modernity

Until recently, the importance of this debate and the nominalist revolution
that it engendered were not recognized. Th is was certainly due in
part to the decision of the Catholic Church in the late nineteenth century
to unify church doctrine around Th omism, which led to the neglect and
belittlement of the fourteenth- and fi ft eenth-century critics of Aquinas.
Th is emphasis on Aquinas was motivated by a reasonable desire to clarify
Catholic doctrine, but it also rested on the recognition that these nominalist
critics had played an important role in laying the intellectual groundwork
for the Reformation. A second and perhaps more important reason
for the failure to recognize the importance of this epochal revolution is the
fact that the God of nominalism was so unsettling. Th e God that Aquinas
and Dante described was infi nite, but the glory of his works and the certainty
of his goodness were manifest everywhere. Th e nominalist God, by
contrast, was frighteningly omnipotent, utterly beyond human ken, and a
continual threat to human well-being. Moreover, this God could never be
captured in words and consequently could be experienced only as a titanic
question that evoked awe and dread. It was this question, I want to suggest,
that stands at the beginning of modernity.
Th e new vision of God that rose to prominence in the fourteenth century
emphasized divine power and unpredictability rather than divine love
and reason, but this new God only made sense because of the tremendous
changes in the world itself. Th e Great Schism, the Hundred Years War, the
Black Death, the development of gunpowder, the dire economic circumstances
brought on throughout Europe by the advent of the Little Ice Age,
and the dislocations wrought by urban development, social mobility, and
the Crusades, were all of crucial importance to the formation of the anxiety
and insecurity that made the nominalist vision of the world believable.
the metaphysical path to modernity
introduction 15
Modernity came into being as the result of a series of attempts to fi nd a
way out of the crisis engendered by the nominalist revolution. Th ese attempts
were neither arbitrary nor accidental but refl ected the philosophical
choices from among the available metaphysical possibilities. As we will
see in what follows, each eff ort to fi nd a way out of the abyss that nominalism
seemed to open up was an attempt to construct the world on a specifi c
metaphysical foundation. To understand what this means, however, we
must briefl y discuss the nature of metaphysics.
We understand metaphysics today as a specifi c branch of philosophy, a
branch that in our secular and generally positivistic age is oft en denigrated