Shaken by Nominalism: The Theological Origins of Modernity

He thus engages himself with the entire debate about the causes and grounds of modernization or secularization. The first idea dismissed by him is the theory of a modernity that is, at its core, atheistic, antireligious, or agnostic. On the contrary, he believes that this phenomenon arises out of the need to find an answer to the question about the relationship between God, man, and the natural world–a question that came violently to the fore after the nominalist revolution and the brutal confrontation between Humanism and the Reformation. Gillespie’s conviction is that it is this religious core which has marked the 19^th and 20^th century contradiction between the idea of human freedom and natural/historical necessity. He does mention the thesis that modernity has many secularized Christian concepts, yet, at the same time, he believes the core of this phenomenon has not been very adequately described thus far.

In his view, the late medieval and early modern transformation has something infinitely more dramatic at its center, and it is this conflict that needs to be understood in order to make sense of today’s world. In this sense, he praises Hans Blumenberg’s account of the existential and metaphysical uncertainty brought by the nominalist concept of God as a voluntaristic Supreme Being who is not bound by any law, does not owe anything to humans, and may save or damn whomever He pleases–radically different from the “rational God” of scholasticism. In this intellectual environment emerged the idea of the self-asserting man and the need to refill emptied, exhausted Christian concepts. Gillespie thinks that Blumenberg is right in pointing out the context–”the rubble” left by the realist versus nominalist debate–yet misses the mark in asserting a sudden enlightenment of early modern man who discovered the values of reason and individualism as the means of escaping the nominalist uncertainty. Instead, Gillespie believes that the nominalist revolution led to a great theological and metaphysical struggle, which continued as the core of modernity up to today.

His alternative account is that the frighteningly omnipotent God imagined by the nominalists led first of all to an ontological individualism (i.e., only individual creatures have a real existence, not the species or universals). An uncertainty about the hierarchy among the realms of being (human, natural, divine) was then born. Humanism responded to this by affirming the ontic priority of man while the Reformation radically proclaimed the absolute sovereignty of God. It was from this conflict, which was not resolved intellectually and led to the horrors of the Religious Wars, that the idea of the ontic priority of nature was stated as an apparently neutral solution. Yet these seeds of the scientific revolution would also bear a more acute question: how can one speak of the freedom of man in a world of natural necessity?

The first chapter deals in detail with the nature of the nominalist revolution. There never was, claims the author, an easy relation between Christian dogma and Greek metaphysics. The decisive moment was the rediscovery of Aristotle–an event which led to the rise of scholasticism as the dominant trend in medieval institutions of education. Theologians came to posit a syllogistic logic of nature, the mutual reflection of nature and reason, and the possibility of knowing through the analogy of Being. Yet some would come to identify a certain number of implications with supposedly dangerous consequences for the faith: could logic and natural theology complement or even replace revelation? Is there an autonomy of rational knowledge? And would the existence of the universals or the rational, autonomous structure of the world, limit God’s sovereignty?

William of Ockham and his followers responded in a radical and unprecedented way. God, they purported, is omnipotent, bound by no law or determination. Creation is an act of sheer grace, comprehensible only through revelation. Ockham’s concern was that the universals would only restrain God’s omnipotence. There is not even a universal called “man;” in reality there are only unique individuals. Only God is necessary, while everything else is contingent on His will. What is good is good only because He wills it because He can even recreate the world, damn the saints, or save the sinners if He wants. Lasting consequences sprang from another of Ockham’s crucial ideas: little or nothing can be known about God besides what He has revealed in the Scripture, while in regard to the natural world investigation and hypothesis are the main methods of inquiry, for the reality of universals or of the rational structure of the world is denied. God is not understood or influenced by human beings even in respect to their own salvation. The spiritual and intellectual consequences of this revolution led, according to Gillespie, to a sense of arbitrariness and perplexity in view of the irrational structure of the world. Man discovers himself as just another being in an infinite universe with no natural law to discover or follow and with no certain path to salvation.

The next two chapters, “Petrarch and the Invention of Individuality” and “Humanism and the Apotheosis of Man,” are devoted to the first of the series of responses to this uncertainty: humanism. Petrarch and the later humanists attempted to argue for the ontic priority of man by stating his capacity for self-affirmation, self-creation, and free will. What is new here is that it happens within a nominalist ontological framework in which there is no rational goal of human life. There is only the free will which strangely resembles the voluntaristic God of Ockham:

“Humanism thus sought to answer the problem posed by divine omnipotence by inspiring a new kind of human being who would secure himself by his own powers in the chaotic world nominalism had posited.” (p. 31)

On the one hand, one can still find praise for a combination of Christian and pagan virtue, with a tendency of minimizing the consequences of original sin and the need for grace. On the other hand, the denial of a telos opens the possibility of an arbitrary understanding of the good: Petrarch affirms on some occasions that each individual decides according to his own preferences or that “conscience is the best judge of virtue” (p. 67).

According to Gillespie, man becomes a willing rather than a rational being. “Thinking from this perspective is not a form of contemplation, but of action . . . . All logos or language is thus a form of poesis or poetry, and knowing is thus always a form of creation” (p. 79). A Pelagian or even Promethean trend begins to gather momentum as the thinkers of this time state man’s capacity to become like God (but also like a beast), to imitate God’s creative power. The example of Pico della Mirandola’s intellectual biography is illustrative: while his early work shows much of this trust in the power of man, his later period is witness to an increasing pessimism about the limits of philosophy and human nature as he begins to be influenced by the charismatic preacher Savonarola. With Pico, humanism steps back from the brink which it had alone discovered.

The other response to the fall of scholasticism is dealt with in the fourth chapter, “Luther and the Storm of Faith.” Martin Luther’s nominalist roots are well-known and adequately described by the author. The originality of his account lies in the convincing causal link between nominalism and Luther’s theology, metaphysics, and anthropology. Besides the denial of universals or of the relevance of merit for the eternal life of the soul, Luther affirms with characteristic firmness the radical ontological gap between God and creation, a gap which makes any natural theology futile. The only source of unity is the Cross.

Yet, to his credit, Gillespie chooses to devote considerable space to the Erasmus-Luther debate on free will. For this, he argues, is one of the most important legacies of premodernity, of the violent clash between Humanism and the Reformation. Luther’s denial of the impact of works on the eternal fate of the soul and his strong nominalist background are parts of his doctrine of a supremely sovereign God which moves everything, even human beings, according to His own mysterious plan. For Luther, free will is a fiction and “all things occur by absolute necessity” (p. 145). History is basically a struggle between God and Satan in which man does not play any role. Besides the obvious theological problem of opening the possibility of making God responsible for evil, Gillespie also observes that Erasmus’ position, underlining an at least minimal role for human free will, could have qualified as a good foundation for the concept of human dignity.

The next generations continued to debate the same problem with increasing acuteness, boldness, or anxiety. This spiritual uncertainty lead Descartes to attempt constructing “a bastion of reason against the terrifying God of nominalism, a bastion that could provide not only individual certainty and security, and not only mitigate or eliminate the incommodities of nature, but also bring an end to the religious and political strife that were tearing Europe to pieces” (p. 171). Descartes posited, therefore, a certainty of intuition solely from the light of reason. Observation must then confirm the truths discovered through intuition. Ego cogito ergo sum becomes the standard of all other truths as the subject discovers “it is necessarily posited or willed in every act of thinking. Every act of thinking is thus also a self-thinking, or to put the matter in a later vocabulary, all consciousness is self-consciousness” (p. 198). Man is not so much a rational being as a willing being, because doubt, as a way to certainty, is understood as an act of the will. Certainty is an act of will not of the intellect. Knowledge of the world is possible only through representation and, therefore, construction. And human will is infinite just like God’s, the only difference being the finitude of our own bodies.

From one inference to another, Descartes reaches revolutionary conclusions:

“The infinite is not the negation of finite; rather the finite is a negation of the infinite . . . We are only a limitation of the unlimited, finite figures inscribed upon an infinite plane, negations of this infinite whole that is God.” (p.203)

No clear ontological distinction between God and Being exists anymore as, in Gillespie’s words, the God of nominalism is tamed and reduced to pure intellectual substance, pure intelligence, pure will, and pure causality of the universe. The task of man becomes to know and master God by decrypting natural causality, “by reconstructing the chaos of the world in representation,and by transforming the flux of experience into the motion of objects in mathematically analyzable space” (p. 204).

Thomas Hobbes took this a step further when he affirmed that man’s primary task is to not to understand the causality of the universe, but to comprehend the very causal power of God in order to master nature and transform the world: “The end of all knowledge is power” (p. 230). Hobbes’ political theory about the necessity of a Leviathan, which would arbitrate even in matters of religious doctrine, and his debate with Descartes about free will further show both the continuity of the intellectual upheaval which began with the fall of Scholasticism and the new forms of this debate.

In my view, the main strength of the book comes from its main weakness: Gillespie certainly risks a lot with the attempt to cover almost 500 years of intellectual ferment; experts on one or the other authors can always claim that their field was not treated accurately or exhaustively. In particular, the chapters on nominalism and humanism are inevitably in need of further expansion and in-depth analysis of the original texts. Yet these drawbacks should not prevent admiration for the overall boldness and achievement of following the relationship between God, man, and nature as it was redefined throughout these crucial centuries and as it came to shape modernity.

Within an impressive list of sources, Gillespie convincingly shows how, through nominalism, humanism, the Reformation, and Cartesian science, our age came to inherit a deep contradiction between freedom and necessity and Prometheanism and natural/historical determination. Through the “reassignment” of divine attributes to the other two realms, human and natural, modernity arrived at a series of conflicts: on the one hand, man was viewed as endowed with infinite will and creativity capable of transforming the world and, on the other hand, he was viewed as totally determined by an outer causality which mimicked the absolute sovereignty of God in the form defined by the Reformation. God becomes a part of nature, but so does man. The latter, however, also aims at becoming its master. Gillespie correctly senses that, under these developments, the political project of human freedom came under threat as the ontic distinction between man and nature is erased, and “freedom is understood to be the goal of history, but history itself is imagined to be the necessary process” (p. 284).

The so-called Counter-Enlightenment (Gillespie includes Rousseau and Heidegger in this movement) only managed to propose a Manichean interpretation in which Western civilization itself was seen as built on a corrupted foundation and that a radical structural transformation was needed. It is not clear, as the author suggests, whether 9/11 above all, signals a crisis of Western consciousness or that the most urgent problem today is a hypothetical clash with Islam. Nor does the author attempt a systematic reflection towards a possible alternative philosophical solution to the problems he names. It is perhaps a pity that such a fine achievement of historical scholarship–the rediscovery of the roots of the modern antinomy “freedom vs. necessity”–is not followed by a discussion of today’s challenges against human dignity in the field of economics, politics, and bioethics, even though these seem to be natural consequences of that history and, in fact, the far greater enemies today. It is the task of contemporary thinkers to lead the debate in these directions. Nevertheless, Michael Gillespie deserves a respected place among the great innovative minds that have dealt with genealogies of modernity.

Also available is Lee Trepanier’s review of the same book.