In The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie has given us a big book. At once learned and lively, it enters the lists not simply of “origins of modernity” stories, but more particularly of those stories that engage the proudly secular and rational self-image of the age. Among the latter, its most explicit interlocutors are Hans Blumenberg and Martin Heidegger, but its effective resonances and dissonances extend, if more subtly, to Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Amos Funkenstein—and perhaps to the likes of Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze, and others as well. Indeed, in its insistent probing of connections between modern science and late medieval theology, this book is arguably in dialogue not only with a range of continental thinkers, but also with such Anglophone philosophers as Whitehead, Collingwood, and E. A. Burtt.

The thesis of the book is as simple as its elaboration is complex. Modernity, Gillespie argues, “came into being as the result of a series of attempts to find a way out of the crisis engendered by the nominalist revolution” of the fourteenth century.Footnote ¹ More particularly, it emerged and persisted—I resist the term “developed” for reasons that will be clear later—through a succession of responses to the ontic dilemmas that followed from the nominalist ontological revolt against the Aristotelian frame of scholastic realism. With “being,” and thus the realism of universals, called into question by ontological individualism, the dilemma of the “priority or primacy of particular realms of being” characteristic of metaphysica specialis—that is, relationships between the human, the natural, and the divine—became the principal focus of metaphysical controversy.Footnote ² As Gillespie puts it, “post-scholastic thinkers disagreed not about being itself but about the hierarchy among realms of being,” even as their disagreements continued to resound within the nominalist account of the divine predicate of omnipotence. Voluntarist rather than rationalist, absconded rather than incorporeally omnipresent, the nominalist divinity was not only omnipotent, but arbitrary, vengeful, and distant; and these attributes of divinity in turn inflected the possible constellations of relationships between God, nature, and humanity.

As a consequence, Gillespie argues, early modern philosophies of science as well as politics arose not in opposition to theological concerns, but rather, we might say, as their complements or auxiliaries. While their theological springs were increasingly concealed, their currents nonetheless ran both deep and strong, and it is the aim of this book to disclose their presence across a series of debates and controversies running from Renaissance humanism, through the Reformation and “the contradictions of premodernity,” to their rephrasing in “Descartes' path to truth,” “Hobbes' fearful wisdom,” and the ensuing “contradictions of Enlightenment and the crisis of modernity.”Footnote ³ The cast of major characters in this account includes but goes well beyond the familiar canon of political theory: Ockham and Meister Eckhart; Petrarch and Valla; Salutati and Pico; Ficino and Machiavelli; Erasmus and Luther; and, of course, Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes.

All this said, what distinguishes Gillespie's book is not only its philosophical and historical range (both characteristic of the best of its genre), but also its pointedly contemporary topical impetus. Gillespie aims neither to legitimate nor to debunk the modern age, but rather to understand it differently. Refusing all strong forms of the secularization thesis, he reads not so much against the grain as below it—ultimately to resituate the “concealed theology” of modernity's underlying epochal question in the context of post-9/11 debates over globalization, the clash of cultures, and Islamic fundamentalism. The problem, as it is phrased at the outset, lies not only in “our [Western] failure to understand these others,” though that would seem to go without saying; it also lies “in our failure to understand ourselves.”Footnote ⁴ Pulling back the drapery, decent or otherwise, that has covered the medieval origins of modernity's ontic disagreements over time, Gillespie by the end hopes to have offered “a first effort to come to terms with the implicit metaphysical/theological commitments that characterize our often concealed tradition.”Footnote ⁵ And this, finally, might prove a salutary path toward taking “Islam seriously” insofar as it opens the possibility of discerning “the ways in which Muslims' views parallel, intersect, and veer away from our own.”

This nutshell description doubtless suffers from all the inadequacies of any summary characterization of a complex work of scholarship. Not least of all, it fails even to touch on Gillespie's richly textured engagements with the specific thinkers that populate the book's eight substantive chapters. These, I trust, will be taken up by other contributors to this forum more prepared than I to sound the philosophical depths of those arguments. I hope, however, that this sparse overview will be sufficient to lay the groundwork for the two issues that I will raise here for common consideration, both of which have to do with the historiographical dimensions of the book. In a sense, what I will be talking about might be understood as the content of the form of this history of modernity: first, its narrative form; second, its representation of the operative mode of historical change within that form. These two are linked, of course, as the book's argument unfolds, but they can nonetheless be treated separately, in sequence here for the purposes of discussion. My point in raising these issues, I should add, is not to sidestep Professor Gillespie's substantive thesis and supporting arguments. Rather, it is to ask—and then suggest something of—how the form of its presentation as history stands in relation to the larger goal of advancing specifically Western self-understanding.

I

Let me begin by noting that, although some of the early figures it engages are poets or statesmen, Theological Origins plies the broad waters of intellectual history and more particularly the history of philosophy. Lest I be misunderstood, I mention this simply to acknowledge that while various historical accounts of modernity and its origins, particularly in relation to religion, are sociological or even anthropological, and might debate, for example, alternative features of that relation as they pertain to such social forms as churches, sects, or mysticism or such social practices as ritual or discipline, these things are not at issue here.Footnote ⁶ Some, perhaps, might think they should be if the point is to enable conversations with the Islamic world, but I will leave that issue aside. My aim here is to consider not what Gillespie doesn't do, but what he does, and what he does is argue that the “theological origins of modernity” lie in the philosophical shambles of scholastic theology wrought by the rise of nominalism. So my first question is the seemingly simple one: What is the form of the story here recounted?

Earlier I described Gillespie's project as concerned to show how modernity emerged, through a series of responses to the ontic dilemmas spawned by the nominalist revolt, and then persisted in time. To say this is to say that the story in Theological Origins is not a developmental narrative. In fact, if we make a distinction between narration and narrative—that is, between a chronologically contiguous series of episodes and the fullness of the narrative form which, like Aristotle's drama, includes a beginning, a middle, and an end—the story here has something of the picaresque about it, though the dignity of the topic would distance it from much of that literary genre. Unlike developmental narratives that would track the growth or degeneration of their narrative subject, the episodes related over the successive chapters of The Theological Origins of Modernity are linked sequentially by the repetition of a silent “and then,” “and then,” “and then.”

In a sense, with due gravitas accorded the topic, it would not be inappropriate to suggest that the story told here is the adventure of the divine predicate, Omnipotence, as it passes through a series of ontic constellations configuring the relationship between the divinity, nature, and humanity. Though nominalism transforms Omnipresence, potency's erstwhile fellow, into a shadow, Omnipotence itself is given a new cloak in modern science. And while another fellow-predicate, Providence, shifts shapes over the course of time, Omnipotence persists as the root of the problem that this age, in calling itself modern, persistently renews: the opening of the epochal abyss that marked its beginning. “In fact,” Gillespie observes, “the ‘nihilistic’ end of modernity is only the pale image of this beginning.”Footnote ⁷

This narration lands us at quite a distance from Blumenberg's distinctively modern “self-assertion,” perhaps because it thickens or augments that view with metaphysical depth and import. Like Funkenstein's history, albeit without the moniker of “secular theology,” Gillespie's attests to the unique fusion of theology and natural philosophy in the seventeenth century out of conceptual and figural materials on hand since the Middle Ages, largely though not exclusively through the efforts of writers who were not theologians by profession.Footnote ⁸ By contrast, however, Gillespie's closing reflections on the Enlightenment and after are not on the social and pedagogical drives that Funkenstein took as the Enlightenment's principal inheritance from Christianity. Instead, Gillespie's thematic interest is in a different aspect of the philosophical traditions of modernity, what might as well be called political modernity.

But the fact that “modernity” here, or political modernity more specifically, is, as it were, narrated rather than narrativized remains an interesting one. Absent the fullness of the narrative form, what is presented is not a tale of development in time, not a tale of the ultimate triumph or tragedy of “modernity” as a narrative subject beckoning affective identification by inciting admiration or pity. What Gillespie narrates is something different from all these.Footnote ⁹ Out of the “contradictions of premodernity,” in the space between Descartes and Hobbes, political modernity is born, a crisis-ridden child of crisis-ridden parentage. It persists amidst its own contradictions, which themselves become the occasion or matter for further episodes of continuing philosophical attention. In a deep sense, it simply is—and the readerly “we” invoked by Gillespie's authorial hand are less invited to identify with it than to recognize that “we” are already in it, that its contradictions are always already our own.

II

To say that the form of Gillespie's story is episodic or picaresque rather than fully narrativized is obviously not to imply that nothing changes. To the extent that it remains, after all, a reflection that takes the form of history, Gillespie's account still confronts the challenge of representing change in time, even though its overarching emphasis is on the persistence of a singularly modern problematic planted in the ruins of scholasticism. How, then, does Theological Origins represent the operative mode of historical change within its episodic form? Again, let me flesh this out through brief comparisons, on the one hand, with Blumenberg, on the other with Funkenstein.

Unlike Blumenberg's story of the rise of modern “self-assertiveness,” the modernity of Theological Origins is not an irruption in the stream of thought that fills the vacated categories of its predecessor, Christianity, with new and arbitrary content. In Blumenberg's account, the operative mode of change is “reoccupation”: when new answers are given to questions carried over from an earlier period, they “reoccupy” the position of the previous answers. Phenomenologically speaking, “reoccupation” in this regard marks a kind of historical continuity at the level of the question as a felt need, but in the relation between question and answer this continuity is functional rather than substantial. With regard to apparent continuities between medieval theology and sundry modern formulations, Blumenberg thus refuses the view that religious substance is or was historically translated into secular or profane form.Footnote ¹⁰ As a result, although numerous intellectual or conceptual continuities may be discerned between the modern age and its predecessor, this does not amount to “an objective cultural debt” on the part of modernity to a concealed Christianity that it surreptitiously carries forward.Footnote ¹¹

In Theology and the Scientific Imagination, Funkenstein, too, offers an account that turns on something like functional continuities, but he specifies two operative modes of transformation: “dialectical anticipation” and “transplantation.”Footnote ¹² He limits the first of these principally to physics, astronomy, and mathematics, and it is in these sciences that various dialectical oppositions in theological accounts of divine attributes became quite productive in the nascent sciences of the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹³ “Transplantation,” on the other hand, is less about logic than it is about language; it is the process by which specific “figures of thought” are transferred from one intellectual domain or discipline to another and become generative of new ways of thinking in their new environment. Funkenstein's most extended example of this traces the ways in which theological notions of providence and divine accommodation to human frailties became conceptually robust in historical thinking, most notably through a series of figures including but not limited to Smith's “invisible hand.”Footnote ¹⁴

How, then, does Gillespie's Theological Origins of Modernity represent the operative mode of change through which theological problematics are transmitted into the ostensibly secular philosophies of political modernity? Given the complexity of Gillespie's argument and the richness of his analyses, the answer to this question is surprisingly simple: in a word, “transference.” Equally surprising, though, this remains largely unexplained. If I understand the pattern suggested here, late medieval nominalist emphases on divine omnipotence generate compossible constellations of ontic disagreement, the dilemmas of which are transmitted via transference to various strands of early modern natural and political philosophy. This is the crux of Gillespie's argument vis-à-vis alternative “origins” stories. The emergence of modernity from medieval rubble is not the triumph of reason, nor is it the death or withdrawal of God, but rather “the gradual transference of divine attributes to human beings (an infinite human will), the natural world (universal mechanical causality), and history (the idea of progress, dialectical development, the cunning of reason).”Footnote ¹⁵ As Gillespie sums up the matter: “What actually occurs in the course of modernity is thus not simply the erasure or disappearance of God, but the transference of his attributes, essential powers, and capacities to other entities or realms of being. The so-called process of disenchantment is thus also a process of reenchantment in and through which both man and nature are infused with a number of attributes or powers previously ascribed to God.”Footnote ¹⁶

What I would wish clarified here is how to understand this “transference.” What is it that transference transfers? This would seem to be far more than the possibilities of innovative “rethinking” enabled both by Funkenstein's labile “figures of thought” and by his more disciplined “dialectical anticipations,” just as it must be more than Blumenberg's functional continuities of question and answers. This, in any case, is what might be gleaned from a note to the effect that, contra Blumenberg, this account “sees the continued importance of theological elements in modernity as more than merely formal.”Footnote ¹⁷ Does that mean, contra Blumenberg as well, that these elements are “substantial”? And if so, in what sense? More, to be sure, could be said here.

Finally, let me close by returning these ruminations to the topical frame of the post-9/11 political world with which Gillespie begins. How does the Western self-understanding made possible by Theological Origins open pathways to considering “how Muslims' views parallel, intersect, and veer away from our own”? Gillespie returns to this concern in the epilogue to the book, which begins with a vignette of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, an Islamic teacher in Baghdad in the eleventh century whose doubts and despair at his times led him to asceticism and, eventually, to mysticism and a new path of Islamic belief in opposition to its then-regnant rationalism. In these brief closing reflections on the subsequent history of Islam, Gillespie offers a series of passing but pointed comparisons with the themes developed previously, suggesting a series of parallels and divergences vis-à-vis the dilemmas plaguing Western philosophy in the wake of nominalism. Here, too, albeit briefly, it may be that Gillespie squares his account with Blumenberg. The “transference” of medieval theological concerns that Gillespie uncovers as the subterranean springs of the natural and political philosophies of Western modernity do not amount to the “objective debt” that Blumenberg refuses. Perhaps, however, they are something of an “objective” burden—the burden, as Gillespie's last words have it, of confronting “the abysmal questions that spring forth from our finitude.”Footnote ¹⁸ If so, then the closing invitation of the book is perhaps not, finally, to politics, but to philosophy. Yeats's falcons are still deaf, but no revelation is at hand.