“Practice in Christianity” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

In the invocation with which Kierkegaard begins this book, he starts by defining his conception of faith, “But as long as there is a believer, this person, in order to have become that, must have been and as a believer must be just as contemporary with Christ’s presence as his contemporaries were. This contemporaneity is the condition of faith, and, more sharply defined, it is faith.” He continues, ““History,” says faith, “has nothing at all to do with Jesus Christ; with regard to him we have only sacred history…. He is the paradox that history can never digest or convert into an ordinary syllogism. He is the same in his abasement as in his loftiness—but the eighteen hundred years, or if it came to be eighteen thousand years, has nothing at all to do with it…. That in his abasement he was God, that he will come again in glory—this goes not a little beyond the understanding of history…. But that God has lived here on earth as an individual human being is infinitely extraordinary. Even if it had no results whatever, it makes no difference; it remains just as extraordinary, infinitely extraordinary, infinitely more extraordinary than all the results…. Only God can attach that much importance to himself, so that the fact that he has lived is infinitely more important than all the results that are registered in history.” Kierkegaard opposes faith and knowledge, “Jesus Christ is the object of faith; one must either believe in him or be offended; for to “know” simply means that it is not about him. Thus history can indeed richly communicate knowledge, but knowledge annihilates Jesus Christ.”

Kierkegaard describes the difference between Christianity and Christendom. He begins with compassion as a daily practice, “To make oneself quite literally one with the most wretched (and this, this alone is divine compassion) this is “too much” for people, something they can shed a few emotional tears over during a quiet Sunday hour and involuntarily burst out laughing over when they see it in actuality. The point is that it is too lofty for them to bear seeing in its daily use; it must be at a distance for them to be able to bear it. People are not so familiar with loftiness that they really dare to believe in it.” By Kierkegaard’s time, Christendom is ubiquitous, but being an actual Christian is still a rarity, “To be a Christian has become a nothing, a silly game, something that everyone is as a matter of course, something one slips into more easily than one slips into the most trifling accomplishment. Truly it is high time for the requirements of ideality to be heard…. Only the consciousness of sin can force one, if I dare to put it that way (from the other side grace is the force), into this horror. And at the very same moment the essentially Christian transforms itself into and is sheer leniency, grace, love, mercy. Considered in any other way Christianity is and must be a kind of madness or the greatest horror. Admittance is only through the consciousness of sin; to want to enter by any other road is high treason against Christianity…. It is brazen to want to fraternize with God and Christ. Only the consciousness of sin is absolute respect.”

The proper Christian reveals himself inwardly. This is contrasted in Christendom, in which religion has become a part of the established order and religion is not content with personal belief. “By making devoutness and piety inwardness, Christ prodded this whole structure of qualifications and relativities, this direct recognizability of piety by honor and esteem, power and influence, this objectivity…. It is always that way when the established order has gone so far as to deify itself…. The relationship with God is abolished; custom, ordinances, and the like are deified.” Christ is not his teachings, for then he would just be a dead wise man. Christ is about his being as a God-man, which makes him one of a kind. As a God-man, he could not communicate directly with humanity. He is paradox. It is not his teachings, but his being that is all of Christianity, “Direct communication is an impossibility for the God-man, for inasmuch as he is the sign of contradiction he cannot communicate himself directly; to be a sign is already a term based on reflection, to say nothing of being the sign of contradiction…. It is eighteen hundred years since Christ lived; then he is forgotten—only his teaching lasts—yes, that is, Christianity has been abolished.”

Kierkegaard next writes about the higher life of the individual Christian, “If a human life is not to be lived altogether unworthily like that of the animal, which never lifts up its head; if it is not to be trifled away, emptily occupied with what, as long as it lasts, is vanity and when it is over is nothing, or busily occupied with what does indeed make a noise at the moment but has no echo in eternity; if a human life is not to be loafed away in inactivity or wasted away in busy activity—then there must be something higher that draws it.” Kierkegaard makes the case that contemporary Christendom has become soft in its power. The original Christian faith was militant and that is how it must remain. “What Christ said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” was not said in a special sense about the connection with that age; it is eternally valid…. As soon as Christ’s kingdom makes a compromise with this world and becomes a kingdom of this world, Christianity is abolished. But if Christianity is in the truth, it is certainly a kingdom in this world, but not of this world, that is, it is militant.”

Finally, Kierkegaard turns back to inwardness and his personal choices for living as a Christian in this world, “I chose the only escape that was left in Christendom: to seem to be the most frivolous person of all, to “become a fool in the world,” in order if it all possible in this earnest world to protect what I concealed in my innermost being, a little bit of earnestness, and in order that this inwardness could acquire the peace of inclosing reserve in which to grow in stillness…. I was concealing something else in my innermost being, but it was the best that I was hiding; I have never, never deceived by way of making myself out to be better than I was—through this life in the human throng, I learned with frightful veracity to understand that rigorousness is the only thing that can help.”

“Work on Myth” by Hans Blumenberg (translated by Robert M. Wallace)

This book deals with the function of myth in societies throughout history. It relies heavily on the Homeric epics, as well as depicting how the pantheon of Greek gods has been passed down through western culture. There are long expositions into the various treatments of the myths of Faust and Prometheus, including Goethe’s treatments of both. As well, there is a digression into Goethe’s affinity for Napoleon, a recollection of their mythic meeting at Erfurt, and, finally, Goethe’s mythologizing of Napoleon as a modern day Prometheus. Finally, Blumenberg concludes his book by contrasting how the Enlightenment and Romantic philosophers dealt with myth and, in particular, Prometheus.

Blumenberg begins with a description of the beginnings of myth. “That events were interpreted as actions is, according to Nietzsche’s formulation, the distinguishing mark of all mythologies…. Urgently and early on, the interest was certainly in the existence of powers that one could appeal to, that could be turned away from or toward one, that were capable of being influenced in every sense, and they were also (to a degree) dependable.” He continues on the function of myth, “The antithesis between myth and reason is a late and a poor invention, because it forgoes seeing the function of myth, in the overcoming of that archaic unfamiliarity of the world, as itself a rational function…. One of the arguments of Romanticism was that the truth could not and should not be as young as the Enlightenment had undertaken to present it as being.” Goethe suggests, “In the centuries when man found nothing outside himself but abomination, he had to be happy that he was sent back into himself, so that in place of objects, which had been taken from him, he could create phantoms.”

Ernst Cassirer was concerned with how the symbols of myth preceded science. “For Cassirer the most important concept is one that is remote from the actual terminologies of philosophy and consequently is able to transcend their history—the concept of symbol. The theory of the symbolic forms allows one for the first time to correlate the expressive means of myth with those of science, but in the historically irreversible relationship and with the unrelinquishable presupposition of science as the terminus ad quem [goal toward which the process is directed].  Myth is made obsolete by what comes after it; science cannot be made obsolete…. Myth moves into a position that has a functional value of its own only in relation to a totality that counts.” For modern man, myth was just a stepping stone to a “realer” truth. Cassirer relates, “What distinguishes mythical time from historical time is that for mythical time there is an absolute past, which neither requires nor is susceptible of any further explanation.”

Myth is next contrasted with Christian dogma. “Negligence in constructing chronology is one of the things that are inexcusable in dogmatic observance. The compensation that observance furnishes in return for this is that the ‘history’ it regulates is from the beginning a history of man, which is preceded by nothing except the mere preparation of the world for his entrance. He stands at the focus of God's actions, and everything depends on God's behavior in relation to man exclusively. Consequently the [comprehensive] history of histories must possess continuous identity, reliable chronology and genealogy, localization and dating. This produces an entirely different pathos from what can be characteristic of myth. In myth there is no chronology, there are only sequences…. Although myth refuses, and must refuse, to provide explanations, it does ‘produce’ another life stabilizing quality: the inadmissibility of the arbitrary, the elimination of caprice.” 

Blumenberg suggests Christianity was most successful when it combined elements of dogma and story. “Christianity, unexpectedly and contrary to its antecedents, went halfway to meet this pressure and enriched the invisible One with elements of a perceptual and narrative character. True, it did not need to go back to animal physiognomies again in order to prevail over the Hellenistic world; but for more than a millennium it created combinations of dogma and image, of concept and perceptivity, of abstraction and narrative…. Satan, in the Christian tradition is, like Proteus, a figure that exaggerates the mythical repertory, summing up all the means that can be employed against a theological authority characterized by reliability and commitment to man…. He represents the opposite of dogma’s substantial realism. In the figure of Satan, myth has become the subversion of the world of faith that is disciplined by dogma.”

Blumenberg now goes searching for the fundamental, if not the original, myth. “Attempts have repeatedly been made to reduce the diverse myths of our culture circle and of others to a fundamental myth [Grundmythos] and then to establish the latter as the ‘radical’ that underlies unfoldings and enrichments…. The radical myth does not have to be the initial myth…. The myth that is varied and transformed by its receptions, in the forms in which it is related to (and has the power of being related to) history, deserves to be made a subject of study if only because such a study also takes in the historical situations and needs that were affected by the myth and were disposed to ‘work’ on it…. The fundamental myth is not what was pre-given, but rather what remains visible in the end, what was able to satisfy the receptions and expectations.”

Now comes philosophy on the scene to contrast against both myth and Christian dogma. “Philosophy, in opposition to myth, brought into the world above all restless inquiry, and proclaimed its ‘rationality’ in the fact that it did not shrink from any further question or from any logical consequence of possible answers. Dogma restricted itself to ordering a halt to the pleasure taken in questioning by those who transgress boundaries, and marking out the minimum of what cannot be relinquished…. Myth lets inquiry run up against the rampart of its images and stories…. This fragment of a myth takes only the single step from the life-world to the unusual, and then the story is over. He who asks “Why?” is himself at fault if he is annoyed by the answer. He has violated the rules of the game of the mythical world…. Dogma refuses such offers, because it commands one to believe its God to be capable of anything.”

Blumenberg now arrives at the Enlightenment and the questions posed by modernity. “The abyss and the hermit—they are the metaphors of nihilism, the images of the modern age’s failure in the face of a question that it posed for the first time in this nakedness and for which it had forbidden itself every dogmatic and every mythical answer: the question of the reason for being.” Schopenhauer proposes the final myth of reincarnation. “The standard [Normierung] that a ‘final myth’ has to satisfy was, if I see it correctly, first laid down by Schopenhauer. For him the myth of the transmigration of souls is the epitome of a story that comes as close to philosophical truth as any story that could be devised…. Wherein does this quality of the myth of reincarnations consist? In contrast to Nietzsche’s idea of recurrence, it does not make the world return to what it once was, repeating its passages eternally, without change. Instead, the subject returns to its world, not as something that is eternally the same, but rather, according to the measure of what it can expect, it returns into the form of existence of which it is able to make itself worthy.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing asks, “But why should not every individual man have been present more than once in this world? Do I bring away so much from one visit that it is perhaps not worth the trouble of coming again? And what then have I to lose? Is not the whole of eternity mine?”

In modernity, for the first time, myth is unpacked and perhaps seen as myth—myth as purpose. Johann Herder suggests, “The harsh mythology of the Greeks, from the earliest times, should not be employed by us except in a mild and human way.” He expands that the elements contained within ancient Greek myth are “such a rich material for the cultivation of a spiritual meaning in their figures that they seem to cry to us: ‘Use the fire that Prometheus brought you, for yourselves! Let it shine brighter and more beautifully, for it is the flame of the forever continuing cultivation [Bildung] of man.’” Finally, Herder concludes that modern man is at his pinnacle, “when he puts the noblest, perhaps also the most natural meaning into them [myth], the cultivation and further cultivation of the human race to every kind of culture; the striving of the divine spirit in man toward the awakening of all of his powers.” Heinrich Heine says of  pantheism, “[it is] the reinstatement of man in his divine privileges.” Jean Paul quips, “Gods can play, but God is serious.” Goethe chimes in, “For myself, I cannot be satisfied, given the multiple tendencies of mode of thought; as a poet and artist I am a polytheist, but as an investigator of nature I am a pantheist, and I am the one just as firmly as the other. If I have need of a God for my personhood, as a moral man, then that has already been taken care of, too.”

After going into detail on Goethe’s interpretation of the Faust myth and his “heretical” ode to Prometheus, Blumenberg has quite a long digression into the epigraph to the fourth volume of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which was published posthumously. It states, “Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse [No one (can stand) against a god unless he is a god himself].” Blumenberg parses out, “The saying here is neither purely monotheistic (by describing a counterposition, against God, as illusory), nor exclusively polytheistic either (by setting up one god against another), but rather has a pantheistic implication: Only the entire universe can prevail against a demonic-divine nature, which is able to overpower every individual power within this universe. The universe is the absolute, which cannot be shaken, in its power, by what occurs within it.” Goethe often described Napoleon as a demonic power let loose upon the world. The epigraph, it is posited, is a reference to the two men's meeting at Erfurt, where Goethe looked the Emperor square in the eyes.

Blumenberg discusses the Christian concept of the Trinity and how it was a response to Gnostic and Manichaean concepts of dualism. “In it's historical function, the Christian dogma of the Trinity was, after all, intended as a means of barring the way to dualism, by reducing the impact of the bifurcation of the divinity that the production of the Son brings with it, by means of a third agency that the two cooperate in generating, and binding that bifurcation to the origin, without retracting it or destroying its meaning in terms of salvation…. Despite all the conjuring up of love and unity in the Trinity, traces of the old dualistic temptations have remained ineffaceable. Especially in the distribution of roles: of creation to the Father and redemption to the Son, as well as of the posteschatological (even antieschatological) institutionalization of the store of grace, which is assigned to the Spirit—the Spirit of Disappointment. Thus when, rather than looking at the conciliatory formulas, one analyzes what is implicit, an element of opposition always remains—always something of Prometheus in the way the Son acts in solidarity with mankind, who have fallen from Paradise. That applies to the demand that we should see the harshest sacrifice as the offer, to the Father, of the ransom for man; but it also applies to the intradivine rivalry for the assumption of the office of judge at the end of the ages.”

Finally, Blumenberg goes back to how the nineteenth century philosophers related to the myth of Prometheus. “Only when Nietzsche rediscovers in Prometheus the central figure of ancient tragedy, and finds in that figure the absolute antithesis of the Socratic type, does it become clear that the century had wagered on Prometheus as the victorious conqueror on behalf of mankind, the god who invents ways to combat the gods’ playing with men's fortunes, the patriarch of historical self-discovery.… The century had indeed used the Titan’s great gesture of the institution of fire as a metaphor for its own accomplishments…. It had not connected the mythical idea that earthly consummation could never be anything but “an encroachment on the gods’ privilege of happiness and their perfection” with the suspicion, or even fear, that in making himself comfortable in the world man might have to be prepared for resistance, for limits, or even for objections imposed by overwhelming force.” August Wilhelm Schlegel cries out, “O son, you are drunk with the delusion of creation!”

German Idealism resurrected Greek myth, but for its own purposes and in its own context. Friedrich Schlegel opined, “If the inner natural meaning of the old saga of the gods and heroes, the sound of which reaches us on the magic stream of imagination as the giant voice of the primeval age—if this meaning will be more closely revealed for us, and will be renewed for us, too, and rejuvenated, by the spirit of a philosophy that is itself alive and that also understands life clearly: then it will be possible to compose tragedies in which everything is ancient, and which yet would be certain to capture the sense of the age through the meaning.” Blumenberg comments, “The renewal of myth within Idealism is not a simple task, because Idealism is itself a myth. That a story has to be told about the spirit, a story that can only be imprecisely surmised on the basis of the actual history of ideas, is also part of the attempt to overcome the contingency that oppresses the self-consciousness of the modern age…. Zeus “chose” the world and he, Prometheus, chose man—that is the formula for the conflict both between ancient and modern and between cosmocentric and anthropocentric metaphysics.” Friedrich Schelling relates, “Prometheus is the thought in which the human race, after it had produced from inside itself the whole world of the gods, turned back to itself and became conscious of itself and its own destiny (the thought in which it perceived the unfortunate side of belief in the gods)…. Prometheus is not an idea that any man invented; he is one of the original ideas [Urgedanken] that force themselves into existence and that unfold logically when, as Prometheus did in Aeschylus, they find an abode in a thoughtful spirit in which to do so.” Blumenberg concludes, “The Prometheus myth, treated in this way, is no longer an element in the class of myths, but rather the one myth of the end of all myths.”

“Ion” by Plato (translated by Paul Woodruff)

This is a short dialogue between Socrates and Ion, a rhapsode (a reciter of the poetry of Homer), on his profession, the nature of poetry, mastery of knowledge, and divine inspiration. Socrates asserts, “You are powerless to speak about Homer on the basis of knowledge or mastery. Because if your ability came by mastery, you would be able to speak about all the other poets as well. Look, there is an art to poetry as a whole…. That’s not a subject you have mastered—speaking well about Homer; it’s a divine power that moves you…. The Muse makes some people inspired herself, and then through those who are inspired a chain of other enthusiasts is suspended. You know, none of the epic poets, if they’re good, are masters of their subject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all those beautiful poems…. For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy.” One must remember what Socrates has already said about poets, and Homer in particular, corrupting the well-ordered city-state in “Republic” and “Phaedrus” through their madness as opposed to philosophers. Socrates also cannot help but to get in one little dig at Ion, contrasting himself, “As for me, I say nothing but the truth, as you’d expect from an ordinary man.”

“The Legitimacy of the Modern Age” by Hans Blumenberg (translated by Robert M. Wallace)

This is a massive tome that seeks to uncover the roots of modernity by looking deeper at its Christian influences. Blumenberg makes the case that modernity did not emerge as a tabula rasa from the darkness of the Middle Ages. His book explores its Catholic underpinnings and the theological debates about the nature of man, God, infinity, free will, and the universe, which became the foundations on which the sciences of the modern epoch were built.

Blumenberg begins by contrasting the Christian conceptions of the eternal and material worlds, the city of God and the city of man in the context of patristic eschatology. “It was the created world that in the eschatological annunciation was reduced to the status of an episode and doomed to destruction…. The dualism between the sphere of salvation and the created world was so unavoidable that it had to appear even in the orthodox systems, though mitigated by the allegorization of the counterpower as a political entity, as in Augustine’s twofold civitas…. Thus the possibility of talk of secularization is conditioned by the process that established ‘worldliness’ in the first place. There was no ‘worldliness’ before there was the opposite of ‘unworldliness.’ It was the world released to itself from the grip of its negation, abandoned to its self-assertion and to the means necessary to that self-assertion, not responsible for man's true salvation but still competing with that salvation with its own offer of stability and reliability.” Hannah Arendt would comment, “Modern man, when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world.”

Reason was a marker thrown down by modernity, as well as a challenge to traditional Christian knowledge. “The identification of autonomous reason with the worldliness that originated in this way is a hasty interpretation, and no doubt one that is attributable to a desire to subject reason to the demonizing effect of the antithesis…. Modern reason, in the form of philosophy, accepted the challenge of the questions, both the great and the all too great, that were bequeathed to it.” With reason as a guide, modern man looked to ever-increasing progress as his right, not only within his lifetime, but also as a species, mankind. “The transformation of progress into a faith encompassing the future requires not only that it should be a principal immanent in history—that is, that it can emerge from the reason that is operative in individual human actions—it also requires that this principal should in fact be active and continue to be so…. As soon as the new undertakings visibly began to exceed the dimensions of what could be accomplished in one generation and its immediate future, the question of speeding up the theoretical, the technical, and so far as possible even the moral processes had to become a matter of interest to those participating in and affected by them. This acceleration not only gave rise to and reinforced expectations; it also produced uneasiness, mistrust, negative utopias, fear of the future, visions of downfall, and so forth.” However, the matter circles back to Augustine’s idea of the dual conceptions of civitas. “It does not matter whether a situation of paradisiac satisfaction is worldly or unworldly; the crucial question is still whether this situation is to be brought about immanently or transcendently, whether man can achieve it by the exertion of his own powers or has to rely for it on the grace, which he cannot earn, of an event breaking in upon him.” As Hegel asks, “Despite earlier attempts, it has been reserved for our times especially to claim as man’s property, at least in theory, the treasures that have been squandered on heaven; but what age will have the strength to insist on this right and to take actual possession?”

Blumenberg circles back, setting the foundations of modern rationalism upon the voluntarism of Franciscan nominalist scholars, such as William of Ockham and Duns Scotus, before contrasting them. “This book’s concept of rationality is neither that of an agency of salvation nor that of a creative originality either…. The concept of the legitimacy of the modern age is not derived from the accomplishments of reason but rather from the necessity of those accomplishments. Theological voluntarism and human rationalism are historical correlates; thus the legitimacy of the modern age is not shown as a result of its ‘newness’…. Here one must not lose sight of the difference between rationalism and voluntarism, insofar as it comes through in the philosophy of history. Rationalism has the advantage that it can base its mode of operation on impersonal ‘mechanisms,’ that is, it need not rely on rational subjects—even of the ‘world spirit’ [Weltgeist] type—and their rationality alone…. Voluntarism is necessarily dependent on a subject, be it only a fictional one.” Nietzsche contributes, “How science could become what it is now can only be made intelligible from the development of religion.” Blumenberg next discusses the process of secularization. “Secularization as an intentional style consciously seeks a relation to the sacred as a provocation…. The Middle Ages had found that just about every content was capable of spiritualization, and thus had opened up a wealth of expressive possibilities, of which anything could partake secondarily that seemed to need and to be capable, perhaps no longer of that spiritualization, but still of the obligatoriness that went with it.”

We now get to Christianity’s place in world history. “A religion that, beyond the expectation of salvation and confidence in justification, came historically to claim to provide the exclusive system of world explanation; that could deduce from the fundamental notion of creation and the principle that man was made in God’s image the conclusion that man's cognitive capacity was adequate to nature; but that finally, in its medieval pursuit of the logic of its concern for the infinite power and absolute freedom of its God, itself destroyed the conditions that it had asserted to hold for man's relation to the world—such a religion as a consequence of this contradictory turning away from its presuppositions, inevitably ends up owing to man a restitution of what belongs to him.”

Man, for the first time, has stepped out of history and looks at the epoch of modernity from the outside in. “The modern age was the first and only age that understood itself as an epoch and, in so doing, simultaneously created the other epochs. The problem of legitimacy is latent in the modern age’s claim to carry out a radical break with tradition, and in the incongruity between this claim and the reality of history, which can never begin entirely anew. Like all political and historical problems of legitimacy, that of the modern age arises from a discontinuity, and it does not matter whether the discontinuity is real or pretended. The modern age itself laid claim to this discontinuity vis-à-vis the Middle Ages. Consequently the continuous self-confirmation of its autonomy and authenticity by science and technology is brought into question by the thesis that “the modern world owes its uncanny success to a great extent to its Christian background.”” Nietzsche resents Christianity as he acknowledges our debt to it. “The long unfreedom of the spirit, the mistrustful constraint in the communicability of thoughts, the discipline thinkers imposed upon themselves to think within the directions laid down by a church or court, or under Aristotelian presuppositions, the long spiritual will to interpret all events under a Christian schema and to rediscover and justify the Christian God in every accident—all this, however forced, capricious, hard, gruesome, and anti-rational, has shown itself to be the means through which the European spirit has been trained to strength, ruthless curiosity, and subtle mobility.”

Blumenberg relates how Gnosticism, first, then modernity, tried to confront traditional Christian theology and to square how an omnipotent God could allow evil to flourish in the material world. “Gnosticism had made acute the problem of the quality of the world for man and, through the contradiction that the patristic literature and the Middle Ages opposed to it, made cosmodicy conditional on theodicy. The modern age attempted to strike out this condition by basing its anthropodicy on the world’s lack of consideration of man, on its inhuman order.” Nietzsche, again, strikes a resentful tone, “If the universe has no concern for us, then we have the right to scorn it.” Abbe Galiani shows more equanimity, “For nature time, space, motion are nothing, but we cannot wait.”

This idea of contingency versus omnipotency was also played out in the generational battle between Epicurean atomism and Franciscan nominalism. “Epicurus had assumed an uncaused divergence of atoms from their parallel straight-line paths in infinite space as the origin from which developed the vortices that gave rise to his worlds; nominalism could provide for all questions regarding the reason and purpose of the Creation only the Augustinian Quia voluit [Because God willed it.]… The primacy of the divine will, which puts rejection of the question in place of explanation, was meant to increase the binding force of the given over men; the basic mechanistic thesis, on the other hand, did indeed remove the origin of the world from the realm of what can be grasped, but it had no ‘conservative’ implications for the relation of man to nature…. Only after nominalism had executed a sufficiently radical destruction of the humanly relevant and dependable cosmos could the mechanistic philosophy of nature be adopted as the tool of self-assertion…. Nominalism is a system meant to make man extremely uneasy about the world—with the intention, of course, of making him seek salvation outside the world, driving him to despair of his this-worldly possibilities and thus to the unconditional capitulation of the act of faith.”

Descartes’ turn to doubt is considered the invention of the modern age. “The arguments for doubt appear not as an elaboration of the historical situation of reason but rather as an experiment that reason poses for itself under conditions of artificial difficulty in order to gain access to itself into the beginning it proposes for itself.” This is modernity’s unjustified attempt to claim for itself as arising ex novo. “Thus a claim was made to the absolute beginning of the modern age, the thesis of its independence from the outcome of the Middle Ages, which the Enlightenment was to adopt as part of its own self-consciousness. The exigency of self-assertion became the sovereignty of self-foundation, which exposes itself to the risk of being unmasked by the discoveries of historicism, in which beginnings were to be reduced to dependences. The weak point of modern rationality is that the uncovering of the medieval ‘background’ of its protagonists can put in question the freedom from presuppositions of which it claimed to have availed itself as the essence of its freedom.”

Here, again, man’s purpose in the universe is called into question by modern philosophy. “The late-medieval loss of the cosmos had been more a matter of doubt or suspicion than of critique; the prohibition pronounced by Bacon and Descartes against teleological anthropocentric assumptions was more a postulate of caution, of forestalling disappointment than of rationally eradicating an illusion. It was only for that reason that the teleological arguments of metaphysical reaction could have success—even in the early Kant himself—again and again in the midst of the Enlightenment. Kant’s critique concentrated all directed, purposeful processes in man's rational action, and this meant that the world could participate in this sort of directedness only by becoming a substrate subject to man's purposes. In its metaphorical usage, the expression “unfinished world” no longer legitimates human action by reference to a prescribed definition and obligatory role in nature. Rather, the transcendental turning requires that the world must be ‘unfinished,’ and thus material at man's disposal, because this is a condition of the possibility of human action. The materiality of the world is a postulate not indeed of the moral but certainly of the technical autonomy of man, that is, of his independence from ends supposedly set for him by nature.” Friedrich Schlegel contemplates, “This proposition, that the world is still unfinished, is extraordinarily important in every respect. If we think of the world as complete, then all our doings are nothing. But if we know that the world is unfinished, then no doubt our vocation is to cooperate in completing it…. If the world were complete, then there would only be knowledge of it, but no action.”

Modern knowledge has replaced eternal truth. “The disproportion between what has been achieved in the way of theoretical insight into reality and what can be transmitted to the individual for his use in orienting himself in his world is disconcertingly unpreventable. But the intensity of the process becomes critical in regard to not only the relation between the objective stock of knowledge and it's translatability into subjective orientation but also the stability of that stock itself in view of the fact that in the succession of generations of knowledge, the length of the ‘half-life’ of each, on its way to obsolescence, has already dropped to less than a decade. The phrase “in possession of the truth” [Wahrheitsbesitz]—no matter how one defines truth epistemologically—is no longer capable of nonironical employment.” Actual modern man was to attempt to find his personal satisfactions in identifying himself with the homogeneity of mankind. “The recovery of paradise was not supposed to yield a transparent and familiar reality but only a tamed and obedient one. For this equivalent of a magic attitude to reality, the individual no longer needed to understand himself in his relation to reality; instead it was sufficient if the combination of everyone's theoretical accomplishments guaranteed a state of stable domination over this reality, a state of which the individual could be a beneficiary even without having insight into the totality of its conditions. The subject of theory and the subject of the successful life no longer needed to be identical.” Martin Luther sounds almost blasphemous, “By virtue of his nature, man cannot will that God should be God; on the contrary, the essence of his volition can only to be God Himself and not allow God to be God.”

Man turned away from the City of God and devoted his powers of reason to the city of man. “The legitimacy of the modern age is not the legitimation of its specific constituent elements under all possible circumstances. It is possible that Socrates was in the right when, as Cicero says, for the first time he brought philosophy down from the heavens, settled it in the cities, introduced it into people’s homes, and forced it to investigate life, manners, and norms of behavior. But one must also see what this Socratic turning became once it ceased to be understood as making man the subject of inquiry and was interpreted instead as the theological reservation of other subjects to divine sovereignty and was accordingly placed in Socrates’s mouth as the abbreviated motto, Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos [What is above us is nothing to us].” Dominicans, such as Aquinas, read and quoted Aristotle as their loadstar, “But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us…. For man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man.”

In response to polytheism, classical philosophy, Gnosticism, and other heresies, was the Augustinian turn against all philosophy and curiosity about the natural world. “[Philosophy’s] ability to give exact prognoses regarding the most exalted object in the world, the starry heavens, exposes man to the danger of self-admiration, of autonomous cognitive security, of impia superbia [impious pride]…. Augustine puts this in terms of his characteristic metaphor of light: The man who knows is not himself the light to which he owes the intelligibility of his objects, but himself stands in the light, of whose full truth potential he deprives himself when he ascribes the origin of this light to himself…. The problematic that the alliance with philosophy constituted for the whole patristic tradition is reflected here: How was the critical rationality that one had employed against mythological polytheism to be circumscribed and subordinated in its turn to the religious interest?… Thus the desire to know, as such, does not by any means amount to curiositas; on the contrary, saecularis sapientia [secular knowledge] distinguishes itself favorably from Gnostic speculation precisely by the fact that it admits of empirical confirmation, whereas Gnosticism had required assent to its statements about the world as though by a kind of faith, without pretense of verification.”

The pejorative notions associated with curiositas are one of the most intriguing aspects of theological debate during the Middle Ages. “Curiositas could be rehabilitated only by freeing it of its characterization as ‘caring’ about superfluous matters. It had to be brought into the central precinct of human care…. Concern for salvation was largely removed from the sphere over which man has disposition…. This alienation of the certainty of salvation from self-consciousness and self-realization was accomplished by a theology that traced justification and grace exclusively to the unfathomable divine decree of election…. Nominalistic voluntarism, with its central emphasis on predestination, made man's care appear impotent in relation to the requirement that one possess a faith that was no longer initiated by the autonomous summoning-up of human obedience…. The world as the creation could no longer be related to man as the expression of divine providence, nor could he understand it as the first natural revelation. It was hermeneutically inaccessible, as though it had become speechless.” Arnobius had earlier made a similar surrender, “We are the ones who confess to not knowing what cannot be known.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, much later, resigned to himself as well, “If one day a higher being told us how the world came into existence, I really wonder whether we would be in a position to understand it…. The world is there not to be known by us but rather to form us in it.”

In the modern epoch, God receded to the background, increasingly more irrelevant in the day to day lives of humanity. “The element of cura [care] in curiositas now becomes the very root of its meaning, which legitimizes the cognitive appetite as the attentiveness that is provoked by the world. The modern age began, not indeed as the epoch of the death of God, but as the epoch of the hidden God, the deus absconditus—and a hidden God is pragmatically as good as dead. The nominalist theology induces a human relation to the world whose implicit content could have been formulated in the postulate that man had to behave as though God were dead. This induces a restless taking stock of the world, which can be designated as the motive power of the age of science…. The scientific progress of the early modern age is based on the destruction of the Aristotelian dogmas, on the one hand, and the new legitimation of interest in nature, on the other—both of which had been substantially accomplished by nominalism.” Leibniz comments, “Will without reason would be the chance of the Epicureans.”

In the last section of his book, Blumenberg goes into great detail comparing and contrasting Nicholas of Cusa’s (the Cusan) conception of man, the world, and God with that of Giordano Bruno (the Nolan). But Blumenberg begins by, once again, contrasting the concepts of knowledge and wisdom in the progress of mankind. He begins with the conception as understood by Nicholas of Cusa. “The inexhaustibility of the desire for knowledge in any stage of realization that it can ever arrive at is the reason why we can achieve something more than knowledge, namely, wisdom, the knowledge of what knowledge still does not know." Cusan, himself, states, “Since everything of which we have knowledge can be known better and more completely, nothing is known as it could be known. God’s existence is indeed the reason why there is knowledge of the existence of all objects, but God's reality, which cannot be exhausted in His knowability, is also the reason why the reality of all things is not known as it could be known.” Blumenberg expands, “The ideal construction and the real datum are not reducible to one another without remainder; however, the difference between them is not the difference between pregiven ideality and given reality but rather between the pretension of the knowing spirit and the knowledge attainable by it at any given time.” The Cusan’s worldview borrows from the Neo-Platonic framework. Plotinus writes, “As he who wants to see intelligible nature sees without any sense representation that which goes beyond the sensible, so also he who wants to see what goes beyond the intelligible will see it only after the surrender of everything intelligible, since while he does first learn through the latter that the former exists, he forgoes learning what it is.” Nicholas of Cusa continues, “The better one knows that one cannot know this, the more knowing one will be.” Blumenberg contributes, “Here transcendence is understood as a challenge; not yet, indeed, as the challenge to turn away from something futile and apply oneself to the knowable in its defined possibility and in the method by which it is accessible but rather as the instruction to construct limit concepts of knowledge that, so to speak, hedge about and protect the immanence of what is knowable, and, moreover, limit concepts from the point of view of which a very definite confidence is reflected into the realm of immanence.”

Nicholas of Cusa rebelled against Augustine, Socrates, the Stoics, and the Skeptics, as well as the Scholastics all in one fell swoop. He formulates a doctrine of docta ignorantia, of learned ignorance. “Augustine’s pia confessio ignorantiae, the humble confession of ignorance, which he had opposed to the thoughtless pretense of knowledge was precisely not the knowledge resulting from and sought in the fathoming of ignorance but rather the mere point of the surrender of the attention to knowledge in going over to faith…. The Cusan’s docta ignorantia differs from both Socrates’s statement that he knows that he knows nothing and the scientia nihil scire [science of not knowing], which was Seneca's term for the various tendencies of Skepticism. The ‘known negativity’ is different from the knowledge resulting from negativity…. [The docta ignorantia] was what was entirely lacking in Scholasticism, which seemed, in each of its representatives, to stand at the end of the summation process of what is humanly knowable. With the Cusan there begins a recollection of the unknown, no longer only in order to reject the presumptuousness of the pretension to knowledge but also at the same time to refer to the still unknown scope for the expansion of knowledge…. The idea of infinite progress is not the ‘secularization’ of Christian eschatology; vice versa, when this conception became possible, when its preconditions came into view, temporal transcendence—the eschatological future—ceased to be The Promise. It lost its compellingness as a possibility of heterogeneous fulfillment of the human desire for happiness and truth.” We return, once again, to the concepts of infinity and individualization. “The Cusan’s speculative approach led in a direction in which infinity and imprecision could be positivized. It will emerge in full clarity for the first time with Leibniz that there is an indissoluble connection between the concept of infinity and that of individuality because only the infinity of the universe of monads excludes any repetition in the always finite actualizations of its representation in the monads. The uniqueness of the subject is secured by the (now permitted) infinity of its constitutive of elements.”

Blumenberg makes the case that a line, of sorts, can be drawn from the Cusan and the Nolan. The Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake in 1600 for taking the ideas of Copernicus to their logical conclusions. Yet he was not quite modern yet either. “It is the case that one can only understand the Nolan’s metaphysical cosmology if one sees it in relation to the systematic ‘volume’ of the Cusan’s metaphysics. Giordano Bruno’s universe, as the necessary and unreserved discharge of the potentia absoluta [absolute power] of God the Creator, occupies the systematic position space that for the Cusan had been occupied by the intratrinitarian generation of a divine Person, the creation of the world, and the clamping together of both in the Incarnation of the Son of God…. For the Cusan, the Incarnation of the World was the supplementation and perfection of the Creation…. The duality of generation and creation is closed at this juncture and integrated into the unity of God’s self-expression…. Cusan also interpreted this connection teleologically and used it to prove the singularity of the created world, since the uniqueness of the Son of God presupposed the uniqueness of the world into which he could enter into which he could bring perfection…. Just this framework of positions now yields the condition that was to be fulfilled by the Nolan’s cosmological speculation. Since for him creation and generation lose their differentiation, since the Creation is already the whole of what could and had to ‘come forth’ from the discharge of the potentia absoluta…. ‘Godlikeness’ is no longer the signature of his origin imprinted on each individual but rather the ideality, to be realized by the species, of its future…. The difference from the Cusan is clear; no individual can fulfill the existential sense of the species, and consequently mankind cannot experience its final union with the Divinity in any historical member of the species…. For the Cusan, man's Godlikeness [Gottebenbildlichkeit, the term that is used to imply being “made in God’s image”] is an eidetic characteristic, an essentially definitive predicate, which is capable of a uniquely highest actualization and maximal “precision.” For the Nolan, Godlikeness is an ideal that gives a direction to man's distance from his origin in bestiality, but a direction that promises no rest in the attainment of a goal.”

“Euthydemus” by Plato (translated by Rosamond Kent Sprague)

In this dialogue Socrates discusses with his friend, Crito, the teachings of two Sophists, Euthydemus, and his brother, Dionysodorus. On the surface, Socrates seems to be praising their style of argumentation. He even recommends that he and Crito go to the brothers to take lessons in reasoning. Socrates states, “These two are first of all completely skilled in body, being highly adept at fighting in armor and able to teach this skill to anyone else who pays them a fee; and then they are the ones best able to fight the battle of the law court and to teach other people both how to deliver and how to compose the sort of speeches suitable for the courts…. They have now mastered the one form of fighting they had previously left untried; as a result, not a single man can stand up to them, they have become so skilled in fighting in arguments and in refuting whatever may be said, no matter whether it is true or false.” The reader might already question whether this is damning them with faint praise.

In the course of relating to Crito the back and forth between the Sophists and him, Socrates describes the preeminent value of the right kind of wisdom. He argues, “Even if all the gold in the world should be ours with no trouble and without digging for it, we should be no better off—no, not even if we knew how to make stones into gold would the knowledge be worth anything. For unless we also knew how to use the gold, there appeared to be no value in it…. Nor does there seem to be any value in any other sort of knowledge which knows how to make things, whether money making or medicine or any other such thing, unless it knows how to use what it makes…. Again, if there exists the knowledge to make men immortal, but without the knowledge of how to use this immortality, there seems to be no value in it, if we are to conclude anything from what has already been settled.”

Socrates also discusses with Crito those advisors to politicians who wish to dip their toes into both the worlds of knowledge and action. “These are the persons, Crito, whom Prodicus describes as occupying the no-man’s-land between the philosopher and the statesman. They think that they are the wisest of men, and that they not only are but seem to be so in the eyes of so many, so that no one else keeps them from enjoying universal esteem except the followers of philosophy…. They regard themselves as very wise, and reasonably so, since they think they are not only pretty well up in philosophy but also in politics. Yes, their conceit of wisdom is quite natural because they think they have as much of each as they need; and, keeping clear of both risk and conflict, they reap the fruits of wisdom…. Plausibility, is just what it does have, Crito, rather than truth. It is no easy matter to persuade them that a man or anything else which is between two things and partakes of both is worse than one and better than the other in the case where one of the things is good and the other evil; and that in the case where it partakes of two distinct goods, it is worse than either of them with respect to the end for which each of the two (of which it is composed) is useful…. Now if philosophy is a good, and so is the activity of the statesman (and each has a different end), and those partaking of both are in between, then these men are talking nonsense, since they are inferior to both.”

Socrates concludes by defending philosophy from the philosophers, not to mention the Sophists. “In every pursuit most of the practitioners are paltry and of no account whereas the serious men are few and beyond price…. Pay no attention to the practitioners of philosophy, whether good or bad. Rather give serious consideration to the thing itself.”