Theological Origins of Modernity

notes to pages 274–277 357
29. Th is has a number of pernicious consequences, as I have shown in my Nihilism
Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
30. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, 2.1. On this point see, Ernst Cassirer, Th e Philosophy
of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James Pettegrove (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1951), 5.
31. Patrick Riley, Th e General Will Before Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1986).
32. Th ere is no naturalistic fallacy for those who see a divine will behind nature, and
even as this will fades into obscurity the patina of divine goodness remains. Th is
is nowhere so evident as in the modern environmental movement that moves
from an anthropocentric and utilitarian justifi cation to a pantheistic account of
the independent value of the natural world.
33. Cassirer, Philosophy of Enlightenment, 134.
34. Th is secular Pelagianism, of course, does not realize or remember its own origins.
Modernity, at least in its Cartesian form, imagines that it creates itself. It was as a
result of such claims that Blumenberg was misled into imagining that modernity
is grounded by its own self-assertion or autonomy rather than in its Christian
inheritance. It is true that many moderns believe this to be the case, but what we
have tried to show in the foregoing argument is that such a belief is only conceivable
as the result of a long development within Christianity.
35. For an account of what this can mean, see Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism and
Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 5–42.
36. On this point see also Denis Diderot, Jack the Fatalist and His Master, trans.
Wesley D. Camp (New York: Peter Lang, 1984).
37. For a broad and comprehensive account of the importance of the fear of conspiracy
throughout the French Revolution, see François Furet, Penser la Révolution
française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); Lynne Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class
in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1984); Marisa Linton, Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2007).
38. Th e Baroness de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution,
3 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1818), 1:122. . Rousseau believed
that all moral action was in harmony with the general will, but he understood that
there was a great deal of human action that was neither moral nor immoral. His
Jacobin successors became convinced that all action that was not in harmony with
the general will was immoral. Th is is an extension of Rousseau’s argument that he
himself would certainly have rejected.
39. On this point see Albert Camus, Th e Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans.
Anthony Bower (New York, Random House, 1956), 112–32. Th ere were, of course, a
multitude of such examples during the Wars of Religion. However, it is important
to distinguish between those who imagined themselves to be inspired by God or
to be acting as his agents on earth, and those who imagine themselves to be divine
or to possess divine capacities.