Review of Jeffrey Burton Russell's "Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World"

To be frank, I haven’t read any of the previous three of Jeffery Burton Russell’s books which together comprise a “history of the Devil” from antiquity through the twentieth century. I started at the end, because the only other volume I own, the third in the series, is packed away in a box somewhere and it didn’t have the chance to catch my eye. The reason why series like these attract me so much is beyond me – maybe I’m just drawn to big, unwieldy reading projects. However, judging from the last volume alone, this seems to be at a superficial treatment, with little to offer someone already interested in the history of religious ideas.

This volume picks up with the beginning of the Reformation, whose emphasis on sola fide revitalized older medieval ideas of diabology. Some interesting, and scary, fragments of Martin Luther’s life are retold, including the tidbit that one of his most important biographers, Heiko Oberman, described Luther’s whole existence as a “war with Satan.” He also uses this section of the book to look at the diabology of John Calvin and sixteenth-century mystic-contemplatives St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. 

With the appearance of the Enlightenment, increasing popularity of empiricism, rationalism, and use of the scientific method, people started to take diabology – or at least the possible existence of the Devil – much less seriously (which is hardly a surprise). In this section of the book, Chapter III, the reader gets a plodding, thirty page-long piece of exegesis on Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which while it is a poem largely about the Devil, seems to consist of too much summary and too much ham-handed literary analysis. Its appearance is abrupt and completely out of place in an otherwise smooth (at least until that this point) history of ideas. 

When Russell begins to talk about the Enlightenment and some of its most prominent thinkers, he weirdly and biliously starts tossing around pejoratives, like “propagandist.” He doesn’t seem to except the modern biological consensus position on evolution, stating “new reflections on randomness and time suggest that even in billions of years the information of intelligent life by random processes is virtually impossible,” though he intelligently stops short of trying to argue that a supernaturally intelligent being is responsible for the diversity of life on Earth (p. 151). 

He has a particular dislike for Hume, especially his argument against miracles, which Russell again endlessly belabors, attempts to rebut, and fails. He hilariously claims that de Sade is the “logical conclusion of atheism” – an interesting admission concerning an author whose work perhaps more than any other in the eighteenth century confirms the existence of evil in the world. He reads de Sade as an inveterate misanthrope and sexual deviant (which is much too easy) instead of as an ironist who is actually trying to make cogent points about the very real existence of good and evil in society. None of this bodes well for his reading of Goethe’s “Faust” – which is much shorter than his reading of Milton, though just as uninteresting. 

The overall tone of this book comes across as a later-day apology for religious ideas which don’t really jibe with modernity, which probably explains his hostility to several facets of it. Russell’s obvious trouble reconciling himself to commonly accepted scientific positions (like evolution), the long, meandering renditions of literary works (of which I only mentioned two, but there are several more of less important writers), and his obvious disdain for the Enlightenment make for a perfect storm which make this book both sad and funny to read. Russell’s specialization is the medieval time period, so maybe I just caught him trying to tie up loose ends in a historical period with which he has little familiarity. This can be forgiven. As soon as third volume finds its way out of a box and onto a bookshelf, I might pick it up.

Review of Michael Allen Gillespie's "The Theological Origins of Modernity"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Modernity, broadly understood as a “realm of individualism, of representation of subjectivity, of exploration and discovery, of freedom, rights, toleration, liberalism, and the nation state,” is often assumed to be rooted in a growing hostility toward, or at least indifference to, theological ideas. Michael Allen Gillespie, a professor of political science and philosophy at Duke University, uses this book to argue against this point. Rather than a disengagement from theological discourse, he suggests modernity has actually been a completely different set of answers to questions that we would recognize as explicitly theological.

He begins his discussion by going all the way back to medieval Scholasticism, and in particular looking at the rift between Scholastic realism (or universalism) and nominalism. Scholasticism was dominated by realist thought, which said that everything in the world was merely a kind of Platonic simulacra of the only thing that was real – the perfectly rational, divine mind of God. During the early fourteenth century, William of Ockham became one of the most outspoken opponents against realism and for a position known as nominalism. Nominalism rejected the central position of realism, and suggested that such a divine reason which human beings could access and understand didn’t even exist in the first place. (Ockham was not, for clarity’s sake, proposing atheism. He was instead saying that the mind of God was something so distant from the frailties of the human intellect that we will never understand it – i.e., the deus absconditus of Martin Luther.) This got him into a lot of trouble with Pope John XXII, who eventually excommunicated him. The important thing to take away from Gillespie’s discussion of Ockham is that Scholasticism’s marriage of the human and divine intellect is ruptured by nominalism, which “replaced it with a chaos of radically different beings” and focused on a God of extreme will and omnipotence instead of one whose rational mind was reflected in the perfection of nature.

The rest of the book is taken up with how these ideas have been taken up in subsequent thinkers. The first person Gillespie understands as being in conversation with Ockhamite nominalism is Petrarch, Ockham’s contemporary. Petrarch’s idea of the moral life is one, starkly in contrast with Aristotle’s conception of the zoon politikon, pursued mostly in private conflicts drastically with the Roman authors, especially Cicero, whose lives and works he so cherished and revived. His several books, including “Rerum Memorandum” (“Memorable Things”) and “Africa,” an epic poem presenting the parallel lives of Scipio, Caesar, and Hannibal, serve to detail his ideas in these respects.

Next, Gillespie moves on to give a rather conventional account of Renaissance humanism and some of its major figures, including Machiavelli, Salutati, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Erasmus. He argues, very much in line with mainstream historical understanding, that these humanists placed an emphasis (or, as Gillespie phrases it, “ontic priority”) on human reason and cognitive faculties, rather than a divine being, even though almost none of the memorable humanists concluded anything like atheism. 

Much of the rest of the book discusses two pairs of thinkers, and uses each pair to compare and contrast the influences of nominalism and humanism that each offered. The first of these pairs is Luther and Erasmus. Gillespie never assumes too much of the reader, and therefore spends quite a bit of time giving introductory information about each of these. He suggests that both, but especially Luther, were influenced by nominalism and therefore God’s radical separation from man. He sums up the differences and similarities between the two thus: “…modernity proper was born out of and in reaction to this conflict [the debate between Luther and Erasmus], as an effort to find a new approach to the world that was not entangled in the contradictions of humanism and the Reformation. To this end, thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes sought a new beginning that gave priority not to man or to God but to nature, that sought to understand the world not as a product of a Promethean human freedom or of a radically omnipotent divine will but of the mechanical motion of matter. Modernity in this sense was the result of an ontic revolution within metaphysics that accepted the ontological ground that nominalism established but that saw the other realms of being through this new naturalistic lens” (p. 132). Gillespie then goes on to discuss the second pair, Descartes and Hobbes, and their relative understanding of physics, human psychology, and epistemology. He gives a heavily historical account of their thought refracted through personal and biographical experiences. 

Gillespie’s last chapter discusses some more ideas of modernity, including those of Kant (“Sapere aude!”), Hegel, and the German Romantics. One of the most interesting ideas he talks about here is how Heidegger formulated this problem, namely not one as a de-theologizing or secularization, but as God becoming increasing “concealed” or “withdrawn” from public discourse. I’ve always found Heidegger an enigmatic, but fully rigorous thinker and thought that this was an interesting way to resituate an extraordinarily complex historical question.

There are a couple of critical things I have to offer about the book. I find it perhaps not flatly wrong, but at least odd, to suggest that much of the above thought is explicitly answering theological questions. To say that “The Enlightenment was all about theology, because many of its thinkers disavowed theism” seems to be self-consciously defining a movement negatively, instead of taking its real, central concerns to heart. Could one not just as easily write a book called “The Platonic Origins of Modernity,” arguing how all of modernity was a response to the Platonic forms? 

This shouldn’t detract someone from the book, though, especially if they’re interested in a great synthetic treatment of all these thinkers backed up by solid historical and philosophical understanding. I may not have agreed with all of Gillespie’s conclusions, but this book offers up a lot of questions for anyone with a soft spot for intellectual history.