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.”
