Theological Origins of Modernity

16 introduction
for its concern with those things that transcend the senses and for its connection
with religion. Metaphysics in the period we are investigating, however,
had a broader meaning. It was divided into metaphysica generalis,
which included ontology and logic, and metaphysica specialis, which included
rational theology, rational cosmology, and rational anthropology.
Metaphysics was thus not a part of philosophy but the broadest kind of
knowing, including the study of being, reason, God, man, and the natural
world. To put this in more contemporary terms, general metaphysics
involved the investigation of the nature of being and the nature of reason,
while special metaphysics involved the investigation of three specifi c realms
of being: the human, the natural, and the divine. To use the language that
Heidegger later made famous, general metaphysics was concerned with
ontological questions, while special metaphysics was concerned with ontic
questions.
Th e nominalist revolution was an ontological revolution that called being
itself into question. As we saw above, it thus gave rise to a new ontology,
a new logic, and a new conception of man, God, and nature. All
succeeding European thought has been shaped by this transformation.
While nominalism undermined scholasticism, it was unable to provide a
broadly acceptable alternative to the comprehensive view of the world it
had destroyed. Some retreat from radical nominalism was thus probably
inevitable. On the basic ontological point, however, there was no turning
back—all or almost all succeeding forms of thought accepted the ontological
individualism that nominalism had so forcefully asserted. With
respect to the other elements of metaphysics, however, there was considerable
variation, although these variations themselves were constrained
by the structure of metaphysics itself. In fact, as we will see, succeeding
thinkers focused not on the fundamental ontological question but on the
ontic question of the priority or primacy of particular realms of being
within metaphysica specialis. Th e deepest disagreements in the period between
the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries were thus not ontological
but ontic, disagreements not about the nature of being but about which
of the three realms of being—the human, the divine, or the natural—had
priority. To put it simply, post-scholastic thinkers disagreed not about being
itself but about the hierarchy among the realms of being.
Th is is immediately apparent from even a superfi cial examination of
humanism and the Reformation, the two great movements of thought that
stand between nominalism and the modern world. Both accepted the ontological
individualism that nominalism proclaimed, but they diff ered fundamentally
about whether man or God was ontically primary. Humanism,