Burrell, David. "Review of Michael Gillespie's THE THEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF MODERNITY." NDPR (November 2008).

Gillespie, Michael Allen. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. This massively erudite study offers an alterative genealogy of "modernity," showing it to be a sustained attempt to re-cast the created world in a new key, once the metaphysical idiom had shifted from "scholasticism" to "nominalism." Gillespie challenges the standard account, which focuses on the religious wars of the seventeenth century to trigger a set of strategies we call "modern," inaugurated as ploys to circumvent and neutralize "religion" or "faith," so as to clear a way to understand the universe more straightforwardly. His elaborately constructed case proposes to show how intractable controversies in philosophical theology helped to shape the goals of that more straightforward understanding of nature, though not the disparate paths proposed to attain that understanding. The details of the case instruct us well in the "history of ideas," allowing us to become philosophically engaged as dialectical oppositions emerge and meet. His story opens in Avignon with a brief chance encounter of William of Ockham, Francesco Petrarch, and Meister Eckhart after Sunday mass (1, 43). In different ways, these three presage the emergence of alternatives to "scholastic realism," each shaped by the novel metaphysical mode of "nominalism." But let us outline the story before scrutinizing what these abstract names portend for the author, and the ways he wishes to put them into play. The initial chapter elaborates the metaphysical thesis noted, rooting the dynamic proper to modernity in the near-total supersession of "nominalism" over "scholasticism," with the narrative then moving to "Petrarch and the invention of individuality," leading into a fulsome description of Italian humanism by way of its principal protagonists, only to shift to the Low Countries with the impressive figure of Erasmus. While frequently mentioned as a source of patronage for intellectuals, the papal court provides the cultural backdrop for the urbane Christian humanism of the Mediterranean, yet that very urbanity proved a stumbling block to the church's claim to presage the coming of the Kingdom, triggering a northern reaction of righteous reform: "Luther and the storm of faith." The ensuing chapter proves axial to the author's thesis: Erasmus and Luther locked in combat yet each somehow beholden to the "nominalist" revolution. The next two chapters focus on Descartes and Hobbes, respectively, each searching for new strategies with which to think the universe, while these are tested in a mutual encounter highlighted in the final chapter: "contradictions of the enlightenment." An epilogue liberates us from the dreary landscape of northern Europe to introduce a player ancient and new: Islam; suggesting that "the west" will prove unable to engage Islam fruitfully until we understand the real roots of our touted modernity. So what appears as an afterthought in response to recent events, traumatic for the west, becomes the point of this extensive and intensive study. The detail of the extensive study is breathtaking, with intellectual biographies of the major protagonists elaborated against the backdrop of social and political upheavals of their times. We are constantly and consistently instructed. The intensive study, however, is bedeviled with some crucial ambiguities, though these need not undermine the author's overall thesis, and may in fact elicit refinements which could prove enlightening. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14665.