The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought

Introduction

Introduction  .  &  .   The collection of essays to follow looks at the role of God in the work of major thinkers in modernity. The philosophers of this period are, by and large, not orthodox theists; they are freethinkers, emancipated by an age no longer tethered to the authority of church and state. This side of the story, which portrays the great minds of Western thought as cutting ties with the sacred and moving increasingly toward the secular , has received ample attention in classrooms and throughout the literature. The essays in this volume, however, are united around the belief that this is only one side of an even more complex and diverse story (or, more exactly, collection of stories), and that treating this side as the whole story, as is often done, hopelessly distorts the truth of the matter. The flipside of the story is about theologically astute, enlightened philosophers, bent not on removing God from philosophy but on putting faith and reason on more sure footing in light of advancements in science and a felt need to rethink the relationship between God and world. This book is focused on this oft-ignored side of the story—that is, the theologically affirmative dimensions of major philosophical figures stretching from René Descartes to Søren Kierkegaard. Our purpose is to help halt and indeed reverse the slow 1 secularization of the respective philosophical positions in modernity , a secularization that has been mounting over the last two hundred years. Before we begin unpacking the specific nature and aims of the essays to follow, a word about our use of terms is in order. In employing the cluster of terms modern, modernity, and modern thought to describe the period covered in this book, we are intentionally using broad brushstrokes as we strive to capture an overarching understanding of a key interval in Western thought. What we do not claim to offer is any kind of precise social or political history. In other words, this volume is directed more toward the history of ideas and the specific “thoughtworld ” of each individual philosopher than toward any sort of empirical history of philosophy or philosophical movements. The terms modernity and modern thought, as we will use them, thus cover not only the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also large chunks of the centuries just before and after them. In other words, we use the terms modernity and modern thought to refer to the entire “Age of Reason,” or the period of thought from roughly Descartes, Hobbes, and Pascal all the way to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. More will be said regarding the beginning and ending of this period below. For now, it will suffice to say that this period is singularly significant in the history of ideas for its wealth of freethinking individuals, its epoch-making philosophical systems, and its initiation of a comprehensive set of challenges to orthodox standards. Another cluster of terms that will attract a large share of our attention throughout are secular, secularism, and secularization. Harvey Cox is quite right in noting that “the word ‘secularization’ retains vague and fuzzy overtones. Despite its usefulness as a ‘hinge category,’ opening a door for discussion among theologians, sociologists, literary critics, historians, and others, the word often seems slippery and imprecise.”1 The term secularization has been used to indicate everything from mere modernization to antireligious modernization and has been applied to an even wider range of cultural and intellectual human activities.2 While a sacred/secular distinction can be used to indicate a profound difference in how peoples approach the world, as it does in Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane,3 secular need not connote “contrary or opposed to the sacred.” In the wide or generic sense, it may merely indicate 2 • Chris L. Firestone & Nathan A. Jacobs something outside the religious sphere.4 The contributors to this volume acknowledge this point. Be that as it may, secular in the academy in general and philosophy in specific often means something more than merely the mundane or nonreligious. And this more restrictive definition of secular or secularization will be used in this book. Many of the thinkers covered in this volume, though by no means all of them, can be described as secular in the wide or generic sense. Most, for example, stand somewhere outside the standard orthodox conceptions of Christianity (or, in the case of Baruch de Spinoza...