Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Mittelalter, Reformation; Scheitern des mittelalterlichen Christentums: Versagen nach den Wahrheitsansprüchen d. Christentums zu leben

Kurzinhalt: ... medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing, but each in different ways ... the failure of medieval Christendom was not a function of the ... demonstrable falsity of truth ...

Textausschnitt: CONCLUSION
Against Nostalgia

365a Judged on their own terms and with respect to the objectives of their own leading protagonists, medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing, but each in different ways and with different consequences, and each in ways that continue to remain important in the present. This sums up the argument of the book. To be sure, the genealogical method employed is expandable, and more comprehensive accounts are possible. Additional domains of human life have scarcely been mentioned that could have been analyzed in the same manner—sex, marriage, and families, for example, or forms of communication—by tracing their long-term transformations over time from the late Middle Ages to the present, with particular attention paid to the impact of the Reformation era. Nevertheless, the six chapters as they stand explain much about how the contemporary Western world came about, and how the Reformation era continues to influence it. As was stated in the Introduction, my intent in treating the subjects of the respective chapters discretely was strictly analytical. No domain of life was lived in isolation from the others. Along the way, I have referred to some of their points of overlap and intersection while trying to avoid burdening the exposition with too many cross-references. Still, the work’s structure and method risk leaving a mistaken impression that these are six separate stories, rather than an analysis of human realities that were lived together in a tangled, temporal succession by historical protagonists frequently unaware of where their actions would lead. That is how all human life is lived. The principal aim of this conclusion is to sketch briefly a narrative picture of the whole based on the six chapters taken together, to note some of its implications, and to make a suggestion about contemporary academic discourse. (Fs)

366a Alexandra Walsham has recently written that because of the manner in which long-standing paradigms for understanding the Reformation “were themselves partly a deliberate product of [protagonists’] own propaganda, polemic, and retrospective, mythologizing rhetoric ... the task of writing a history of Protestantism with the notion of ‘progress’ left out remains a formidable one.”1 This book about the unintended Reformation and its multifarious, long-term influences over half a millennium would seem to qualify as such a history, even though it is much more than a conventional history of Protestantism. (Fs)

366b Despite contrary claims by those who espouse supersessionist conceptions of history or hold alternative beliefs about reality, the failure of medieval Christendom was not a function of the demonstrated or demonstrable falsity of central doctrinal truth claims of the Christian faith as promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church. Over the course of more than a millennium the church had gradually and unsystematically institutionalized throughout Latin Europe a comprehensive, sacramental worldview based on truth claims about God’s actions in history, centered on the incarnation, life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Intellectual life on the eve of the Reformation was vibrant if sometimes contentious, variously institutionalized not only in universities but also in monasteries, at princely courts and among participants in the “religious Republic of Letters.”2 Nor was the failure of medieval Christendom the result of the wide diversity of ways in which the faith was expressed from Scandinavia and Scotland to Sicily and Spain. An enforced uniformity of piety and religious practice was neither a medieval social fact nor even an ecclesiastical ideal. Much was left to lay discretion and initiative in the unprecedentedly devout fifteenth century. (Fs; tblStw: xy) (notabene)

366c The failure of medieval Christendom derived rather from the pervasive, long-standing, and undeniable failure of so many Christians, including members of the clergy both high and low, to live by the church’s own prescriptions and exhortations based on its truth claims about the Life Questions. It was at root a botching of moral execution, a failure to practice what was preached. Judged by the church’s own criteria—the extent to which Christians were holy and pursuing greater holiness by imitating Christ via the shared practice of the virtues in communities of faith—the concrete realities of late medieval Christendom as a whole were far from what Jesus had preached and distant from the church’s own ideals. Sins were everywhere. In one way or another, this is precisely what exercised so many committed reformers within the church from the eleventh into the early sixteenth century. How could the gulf between prescriptions and practices be narrowed, and human life be made more genuinely Christian? Late medieval Christianity was an institutionalized worldview, but one that by its own standards fell gravely short of having realized its own constantly repeated ideals, despite the self-flattering claims of those theologians who identified the church with the kingdom of God. Every domain of human life was adversely affected. Communities were hampered in their capacity to foster habituation into the virtues on which the individual good, the common good, and eternal salvation depended. In the fifteenth century, secular authorities from civic magistrates to royal sovereigns increasingly took ecclesiastical reform into their own hands in the absence of serious interest or initiative by most churchmen, and in light of the difficulties encountered by those ecclesiastical leaders who did take action. (Fs)

367a No less consequential than myriad sins by members of the clergy and laity were the widespread failures of secular and ecclesiastical authorities to find nonoppressive ways of exercising power consistent with caritas. The challenge was to use power in a manner that sought not simply to safeguard the common good (by maintaining and enforcing rules that are indeed necessary for the existence of moral communities), but also to foster within those communities the individual flourishing of the women and men who were created in God’s image and likeness. To the extent that caritas was indiscernible in the exercise of power, Christianity might well have seemed simply a noxious ideology wielded for the purpose of ensuring order in a hierarchical society of ranks and stations. This awareness among the church’s late medieval critics did not have to wait for the modern invention of sociology or political science as academic disciplines. The naturalization of socioeconomic hierarchy in a preindustrial but monetized economy of relative scarcity, an economy increasingly permeated by market practices, was taken to justify enormous discrepancies between rich and poor in ways that highlighted medieval Christianity’s central moral blindness. Without this obliviousness, the early Reformation’s most conspicuous and disruptive popular manifestation, the Peasants’ War of the mid-1520s, might never have happened. In the later Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century, not only oligarchic, aristocratic, and royal secular authorities but also the highest-ranking ecclesiastical authorities enjoyed power, privilege, possessions, and money, which seem only rarely to have been used in genuinely self-denying ways that expressed the virtues and sought the good of those beyond families and friends. (Fs)

Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Versagen d. Reformation: Problem d. Wahrheitsfrage der Christentums; Versagen d. Prinzipien: sola scrptura, prophetische Inspiration; Ursache für: Relativismus, Hyperpluralismus; Konfessionalisierung; weltliche Herrscher: Kontrolle d. Öffentlichkeit

Kurzinhalt: In contrast to medieval Christendom, this was not in the first instance a moral failure ...problem of how to know what true Christianity was. “Scripture alone” was not a solution to this new problem, but its cause.

Textausschnitt: 368a Many of those who rejected the authority of the Roman church in the sixteenth century were moved by the same problems, but they proposed a different diagnosis, one that various suppressed individuals and groups had in their respective ways proffered in preceding centuries. They thought that doctrinal error lay behind medieval Christendom’s moral shortcomings. They believed that human life was so troubled not merely because of the manifest failure of so many sinful Christians to live up to the church’s teachings, as so many medieval reformers had said. It was also that many of the church’s teachings were themselves false, as those condemned for heresy in the Middle Ages had also claimed. Certain key doctrines were grave misunderstandings of the way God worked and misrepresentations of how he revealed himself in history. Only God’s true teachings could ground a genuine renewal of human life, and they were to be found in the Bible alone liberated from the self-interested trappings and traditions of the Roman church. In order for Christianity to be the right sort of shared human life actually willed by God, it had to be based on the correct interpretation of God’s word in scripture. (Fs) (notabene)

368b The Reformation succeeded in providing an alternative way of grounding Christian answers to the Life Questions and thus of providing the basis for the living of Christian lives ideologically and socially separated from the Roman Catholic Church. The history of Protestantism over the past five hundred years provides a great many examples. But the Reformation’s putative solution to Christendom’s problems turned out to be a simultaneous failure relative to its protagonists’ intentions. In contrast to medieval Christendom, this was not in the first instance a moral failure (leaving aside the historical evidence for ways in which many Reformation-era Protestants also failed to live up to their respective ideals and teachings). Rather, the Reformation’s failure derived directly from the patent infeasibility of successfully applying the reformers’ own foundational principle. For even when highly educated, well-intentioned Christians interpreted the Bible, beginning in the early 1520s they did not and manifestly could not agree about its meaning or implications. Nor would anti-Roman Christians change or compromise their exegetical claims about the meaning of God’s word on points they regarded as essential. Furthermore, what was essential rather than inessential and the criteria for distinguishing between them were themselves just additional things about which they could and did disagree. The unintended problem created by the Reformation was therefore not simply a perpetuation of the inherited and still-present challenge of how to make human life more genuinely Christian, but also the new and compounding problem of how to know what true Christianity was. “Scripture alone” was not a solution to this new problem, but its cause. It implied questions about the nature of knowledge and raised explicitly the specter of radical doctrinal skepticism and relativism already in the 1520s. Supplementary interpretative criteria such as illumination by the Holy Spirit or the exercise of discursive reason in the determination of true doctrine increased rather than resolved the disagreements they were intended to overcome, as did bolder claims of direct prophetic inspiration or new revelation from God. This was the case throughout the Reformation era and has remained so ever since. (Fs) (notabene)

369b Most competing Protestant protagonists in the sixteenth century did not draw from their disagreements the conclusion that the Reformation’s foundational principle or its adjuncts were themselves the source of the new problem. (Those who did so tended to return to the Roman church.)1 Rather, they usually reasserted—and argued, in endless doctrinal controversies and sometimes with formidable erudition—that they were right and their rivals wrong. This settled nothing. Having rejected the authority of the Roman church, Protestants shared no institutions or authorities in common to which they could turn to resolve disputes among themselves. This was evident already in the 1520s and has remained the case ever since. Instead, their disagreements were themselves institutionalized most influentially in the only two Protestant traditions that, because their leaders secured lasting political protection from secular authorities, turned out to be the great exceptions among anti-Roman Christians in the Reformation era: Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism (including the Church of England). Especially after the Peasants’ War of 1524-1526 and the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster a decade later, the large majority of anti-Roman answers to the Life Questions were suppressed, and socially or politically challenging expressions of Protestantism were curtailed until they emerged again in England in the early 1640s. This control was an imperative in the eyes of those committed to maintaining a traditional sociopolitical order, because some Christians wanted radically to remake socioeconomic and political realities according to their very different understandings of the Gospel. The largely successful suppression of radical Protestantism in the century between the Kingdom of Münster in 1534-1535 and the English Revolution also helped to minimize the implications of the Reformation’s practical failure, because the predominance of Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism made it seem as though Christians who had rejected Rome exhibited more doctrinal coherence than in fact they did. Nearly all radical and magisterial Protestants agreed, though, with the traditional condemnation of the avarice that was so obviously present in the Roman church, so corruptive of the rest of human life, and so contrary to biblical condemnations of greed. (Fs) (notabene)

370a The late medieval Christianity that Protestant reformers sought to fix was not something called “religion,” separate from the rest of life. It was an institutionalized worldview on which eternal life depended, with ramifications for all of human life lived in certain ways rather than others. Regardless of the particular forms taken by their respective ambitions, magisterial Protestant reformers shared this assumption plus many other biblically based beliefs with their late medieval predecessors and Catholic contemporaries. Accordingly, Lutheran, Reformed Protestant, and Catholic leaders (especially after the Council of Trent) embarked on the arduous work of confessionalization in their respective territories. Secular authorities oversaw the churches they controlled and together with ecclesiastical leaders sought to create a better-informed, better-behaved, more-disciplined and self-disciplined laity compared to the laypeople of pre-Reformation Christendom. Better-educated, more-conscientious clergy led worship, supervised lay piety, catechized, preached, explained, exhorted, encouraged, threatened, and consoled, reinforcing repeatedly the newly central virtue of obedience in every domain of human life. The threat of heterodoxy necessitated vigilance because dissenters subverted the very conditions of the moral communities that authorities sought to forge. Secular rulers also oversaw their respective institutions of higher education, politically privileging theology and seeking to ensure that the transmission of knowledge in the training of bureaucratic officials was shielded from threats to orthodoxy. Outside of confessionalized universities, the same rulers were patronizing the pursuit of new knowledge, especially the observation-based knowledge about material things in the natural world that could be used to serve human desires. In a divided and confessionalizing Christendom, sovereign secular authorities exercised all public political power, ceding to the control of their respective churches only what seemed to serve their own desires and perceived interests. Encouraged oftentimes by clerical advisers convinced that they saw clearly the particular paths of God’s providence, conscientious rulers sometimes took advantage of the new opportunities for the military defense and proactive promotion of Christian truth as they respectively understood it. They made war on each other, off and on, from the late 1520s through the 1640s, with confessional hostilities persisting much longer. (Fs)

Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Versagen d. konfessionellen Europa: 1 politisch-militärisch, 2 allgemeine Zustimmung; Gehorsam - Wahrheitsanspruch; Dilemm: caritas - Zwang im Rahmen eines konfessionellen Staates

Kurzinhalt: ... the failure of confessional Europe was twofold: they failed politically and militarily, just as they failed to create moral communities free of religious dissent... Thus was the stage set for Enlightenment emancipation and the postulation ...

Textausschnitt: 371a In terms of what its respective protagonists hoped to achieve, the failure of confessional Europe was twofold: they failed politically and militarily, just as they failed to create moral communities free of religious dissent. In the first instance, none of the leaders in the religio-political conflicts during the Reformation era achieved their principal military or political goals in any enduring ways. Unlike the medieval heresies that secular and ecclesiastical authorities had largely managed to suppress and control, Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism, including the Church of England, demonstrated their institutionalized staying power. Sustained political support from secular authorities made them in this respect parallel to Catholic regimes and distinguished them from marginalized and persecuted radical Protestants who collectively manifested a much wider range of claims about true Christianity. At the same time, despite the apocalyptic expectations of many Protestant reformers about the demise of the papal Antichrist, Catholicism not only persisted but its leaders regrouped, reenergized, and spread the faith around the world from Brazil and New France to the Philippines. By the mid-seventeenth century the religio-political conflicts of the Reformation era, capped by the Thirty Years War and the English civil wars, had proved ruinously destructive, extremely expensive, and frequently subversive of rulers’ own desires to serve God as they shored up their political authority. In various forms confessional regimes endured in most European states throughout the eighteenth century, but partly because of the failure of bellicose confessionalism, some monarchical authorities began experimenting more robustly with modifications and accommodations in the direction of religious toleration. Some of them began to look with particular interest on a new nation, the Dutch Republic, whose political leaders and mercantile elite supported a Reformed Protestant public church but eschewed confessionalization in the interests of promoting commercial profits and pursuing lives increasingly devoted to the acquisition of things that money could buy. This was an alternative to assumptions about the relationship among Christianity, morality, the exercise of power, and economic prosperity that ignored the biblical condemnation of avarice but looked as though it might be able to overcome the vexing problem of confessional antagonisms. (Fs)

371b In the second instance, early modern confessional regimes failed within their respective polities to rid their moral communities of religious dissent. This was true in Puritan New England no less than in Europe. Confessionalizing efforts to secure subjects’ obedience echoed in geographically more circumscribed but politically more demanding, more narrowly prescribed ways the ambitions of medieval Christian authorities at least to ensure conformity through the threat of punishment wherever persuasion or personal enthusiasm failed to produce desired behavior and piety. This was not a problem for everyone: the willingly devout seem largely to have welcomed the confessionalizing efforts of the early modern period, whether manifest in the efflorescence of Catholic Marian and eucharistic piety, the spread of individual Bible reading among Lutherans and Reformed Protestants, or the astonishing demand for devotional literature among all confessions. Indeed, eager practitioners were likely to think that authorities were not doing enough to foster the formation of godly fellow Christians. The willingly devout helped to make confessionalization a partial success, marking the Reformation era as one of fervent religiosity among Catholics and Protestants alike. Committed believers who agreed with authorities’ truth claims in confessional regimes did not resent their demands of obedience per se, because whatever else it entails Christianity is, like Judaism, most fundamentally and ineradicably a matter of obedience to God, the faith’s sine qua non. (Fs)

372a The real questions, then, were whether subjects thought that secular and ecclesiastical authorities had the truth claims right, and whether they thought those in charge acted in ways that Christian rulers and pastors should act. If so, then obedience was not a problem, but merely an obvious, almost trivial condition for the pursuit of substantive Christian life in community. Those subjects that disagreed, however, were bound to resent the same requirements that others willingly embraced as a minimal prerequisite for shared Christian life. And now there were many different non-Roman versions of God’s truth from which to choose, including whatever one might come up with oneself. More than a few Protestants pleased to have thrown off the Roman yoke were frustrated to find themselves under much more restrictive forms of “new popery.” Confessional authorities sought to compel obedience among the unwilling by exercising coercive power, which tended to cause discontent in proportion to their efforts precisely among those whose conformity was sought. Objectors resented as invasively obnoxious or presumptuously tyrannical the heavy-handed measures of confessional regimes from Catholic Spain to Presbyterian Scotland, most dramatically manifest in judicial executions for heterodoxy. Some advocates of toleration argued that even if authorities were seeking to create and protect a Christian community, such actions were unchristian attacks on human beings who were ostensibly supposed to be part of that community and whom God had created in his image. This createdness in God’s image was why and how human beings had individual rights, as canon lawyers had begun to argue in the twelfth century. Now the inherited discourse of individual rights was being appropriated in novel ways, against Catholic as well as magisterial Protestant confessional regimes. (Fs)

373a Experience demonstrated that grudging conformity was simply incompatible with joy, was not the truth that made one free, and did not conduce to one’s flourishing. In order for Christianity to thrive as shared life in Christ rather than to be experienced as an ideology of coercive oppression, faith had to be adopted freely and practiced willingly. But this was antithetical to the ambitions of confessional authorities, secular and ecclesiastical alike, and it was unlikely to be spontaneously pursued by individuals left to their own devices, because Jesus’s commands grated sharply against ordinary human inclinations. Hence the importance of communities of faith through which the virtues could be inculcated and in which joy would be apparent, communities to which Christians would want to belong. But how could those communities be fashioned without at least some exercise of force, when necessary, given the recalcitrant desires of selfish individuals to seek their own advantage and have their own way? It was the same medieval conundrum of caritas and coercion, but now in the context of a divided Christendom among much more resolute confessionalizing regimes. Those for whom Christianity seemed little more than obeying hated rules and committing catechetical propositions to memory understandably hoped for something better, a way of life that would dispense with resented impositions. Thus was the stage set for Enlightenment emancipation and the postulation of Western modernity’s autonomous individual selves. But how much of the rest of Christianity, and in what forms, would be retained? By the mid-seventeenth century, amid deadlocked doctrinal controversies and revivified Pyrrhonian skepticism, new options were being pursued that sought to transcend disputed religious truth claims by endeavoring to base answers to the Life Questions entirely on reason. (Fs)

Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Antwort d. Moderne auf Krise; Holland als Vorbild (Universität Leiden); Trennung zw. öffentlichem u. privatem Leben; Privatisierung von Religion, Ethik;

Kurzinhalt: A politically protected individual right to freedom of religious belief and practice within the state’s laws solved the European problem of confessional coercion, in part because of widely shared agreement about what “religion” was.

Textausschnitt: 373b Western modernity was forged in the context of the unintended persistence of Christian pluralism and the failures of confessional rulers to achieve their goals. Its central problem at the outset was different from that of medieval Christendom, the Reformation, or confessional Europe: how might human life be structured such that human beings could coexist in peaceful stability and security even though they disagreed about God’s truth and were frequently hostile toward one another? The answer would apparently have to include some (at least implicit) definition of “religion” and a stipulation of this new thing’s relationship to the rest of human life. In the first half of the seventeenth century that strange neo-medieval polity, the Dutch Republic, was to a significant extent practicing what would become the modern answer before it was theorized. Especially in the maritime and mercantile province of Holland, a distinction was in effect being drawn between public and private life, and “religion”—understood largely as a matter of belief, worship, and devotion—was being individualized, privatized, and separated from political and economic life. So long as one obeyed the laws that provided for common security and stability, one could believe whatever one wished and worship in private however one pleased. Attracted by prospects of peace and a better life that contrasted so starkly with persecution for their faith, religious refugees poured into the Dutch Republic and contributed to its economic prosperity. In circumstances of relative religious toleration, the consequences of the Reformation’s failed foundational principle grew clearer: without political authorities seeking to enforce specifically Reformed Protestant or Lutheran interpretations of scripture, the open-ended arbitrariness generated by sola scriptura and its supplements became more apparent, just as it was in England in the 1640s and had been in Germany and Switzerland in the 1520s. The same relatively tolerant Dutch attitude and latitude extended into higher education. Keeping its other faculties from being dominated by theology, the Dutch Republic’s new institution in Leiden dispensed with confessional oaths, attracted star scholars, and within a generation of its founding in 1575 had become one of Europe’s leading universities. Across confessional lines, most Dutch Christians understandably preferred the prospect of greater material prosperity to religio-political hostilities and their disruptions of human life, even if the pursuit of the goods life as though it were the good life was antithetical to the Gospel. Nevertheless, here was something about which, it seemed, nearly all people could agree notwithstanding their theological differences. (Fs)

374a What the Dutch adumbrated was first institutionalized in the United States near the end of the eighteenth century among men and women more thoroughly inculturated to regard material acquisitiveness not as sinful avarice, but as benign self-interest and the providentially sanctioned path to individual happiness, societal prosperity, and national strength. By then the Dutch innovations had been well theorized. Self-consciously and institutionally, the American federal government would neither support nor permit an established church, but rather begin to undo the magisterial Reformation altogether. Provided they were politically quiescent and compliant, citizens could believe and proselytize for anything, at least within the limits that were in effect prescribed by the new nation’s Protestant “moral establishment.”1 A politically protected individual right to freedom of religious belief and practice within the state’s laws solved the European problem of confessional coercion, in part because of widely shared agreement about what “religion” was. It also provided a template for the articulation of other individual rights, which, when enforced, similarly protected specified human beings from abusive mistreatment. But only since the 1970s, nearly two centuries after the American and French Revolutions and more than two decades after the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has the self-conscious protection of human beings via human rights against oppressive states spread around the world on the ruins of failed socialist revolutions, the demise of territorially imperialist Western colonialism, and the decolonization that followed the Second World War.2 Nevertheless, considered as such and despite its restrictive intertwining with nationalist states for most of its history since the late eighteenth century, this spread of protective individual rights is perhaps the greatest outcome of modern Western liberalism, notwithstanding the still incomplete extension of human rights to women, children, ethnic minorities, and post-colonial peoples. Other impressive modern Western triumphs include the extraordinary progress of the natural sciences and their applications in medicine and manufacturing technologies that have made possible the flourishing of literally billions of human beings. These are great achievements, particularly when compared to Western modernity’s fascist and communist regimes of the brutal twentieth century and the many millions of human lives that they destroyed. (Fs)

Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Versagen d. Moderne; soziale Fragmentation; Natralismus, Säkularismus: Aufhebung der Voraussetzungen für politischen Diskurs; Philosophie (wie sola scriptura): unzureichend für Konsens in Lebensfragen -> Ausweg: Hyperpluralismus; Konsumerismus

Kurzinhalt: ... the same institutional arrangements that solved the central problem posed by the failure of confessional Europe created the conditions for the failure of Western modernity itself ... The hegemonic cultural glue comes especially from all-pervasive ...

Textausschnitt: 375a Yet the same institutional arrangements that solved the central problem posed by the failure of confessional Europe created the conditions for the failure of Western modernity itself, which is now well under way in different respects. In order to see this, we have not only to consider simply and narrowly the problems that modern liberalism solved, but also what its institutional arrangements have facilitated in combination with other historical developments. A centrally important, paradoxical characteristic of modern liberalism is that it does not prescribe what citizens should believe, how they should live, or what they should care about, but it nonetheless depends for the social cohesion and political vitality of the regimes it informs on the voluntary acceptance of widely shared beliefs, values, and priorities that motivate people’s actions. Otherwise liberal states have to become more legalistic and coercive in order to insure stability and security. In the West, many of those basic beliefs, values, and priorities—including self-discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, ethical responsibility for others, duty to one’s community, commitment to one’s spouse and children—derive most influentially in the modern Western world from Christianity and were shared across confessional lines in early modern Europe. Advanced secularization, precipitated partly by the capitalism and consumerism encouraged by liberal states, has considerably eroded them in the past several decades and thus placed increasing pressures on public life through the social fragmentation and political apathy of increasing numbers of citizens who exercise their rights to live for themselves and to ignore politics. This is one way in which modernity’s failure is under way, a symptom of which is the constant stream of (thus far, ineffectual) proposals about how to reinvigorate democracy, restore public civility, get citizens to care about politics, and so forth. More abstractly but important in different ways, the ideological secularism of the public sphere and the naturalist metaphysical assumptions of academic life, combined with the state of philosophy and the explanatory successes of the natural sciences, prevent the articulation of any intellectually persuasive warrant for believing in the realities presupposed by liberal political discourse and the institutional arrangements of modernity: that there are such things as persons, and that they have such things as rights. Secularization and scientism are thus subverting modernity’s most fundamental assumptions from within, developments that are facilitated by the same institutional arrangements of liberalism that solved early modern Europe’s problem of religious coexistence. (Fs) (notabene)

376a Despite the political, military, and socio-moral failures of confessional Europe, neither Roman Catholicism nor Protestantism went away, whether in the eighteenth century or at any point since. Instead, they have persisted alongside and in complex interactions with secular ideologies, social realities, and economic developments up to the present within the institutional protection afforded (and the control exercised) by modern liberal states. At the same time, the literally endless, back-and-forth non-dialogue of theological controversialists in the Reformation era was the springboard for the secularization of public discourse. Enduring doctrinal disagreements also problematized the epistemological status of theology compared to other sorts of knowledge, notwithstanding its privileged status in Reformation-era universities, academies, and seminaries. Thus were the seeds also sown, with the failures of confessional rulers to achieve their goals, for the eventual marginalization of theology, secularization of knowledge, and relativization of religious truth claims as such in public life. If any solutions to the issues about which Christians disagreed were going to be found, whether intellectually or institutionally, it seemed that they would have to be built on bases other than the ones in dispute among Christians. Otherwise one would still be caught in the maelstrom of doctrinal controversy, arguing about the sacraments, the nature of the church, the interpretation of scripture, and so forth. Ironically, even the many beliefs about which Catholics and the large majority of Protestants agreed—the trinitarian nature of the transcendent creator-God, the natural world as creation, the divinity of Jesus, his bodily resurrection, the reality of the Holy Spirit, original sin, the necessity of faith for salvation, eternal judgment by God, scripture as the revealed word of God, and many aspects of Christian morality—were thereby set up for an exclusion from public discourse and a segregation from the realm of knowledge-making. A major reason for this secularizing exclusion was the tendency of early modern Protestants and Catholics to emphasize their points of difference rather than of commonality, precisely the opposite of what has characterized ecumenical efforts in the past half-century. Early modern doctrinal controversy seemed to dictate that reason alone, not scripture or the Holy Spirit or ecclesiastical authority, not God’s actions in history however understood, would have to provide answers to the Life Questions, in an intellectual parallel to the ways in which Christianity was being disembedded from political and economic life beginning in the Dutch Republic. What other plausible options were there? Ever since the later seventeenth century, and seeking to transcend the problems of the Reformation era, Western modernity has banked intellectually on reason to deliver the goods. (Fs) (notabene)

377a The two most influential expressions of modern Western rationality have been foundationalist philosophy and the natural sciences, which were more closely related in the seventeenth century than they subsequently became. Modernity is failing partly because reason alone in modern philosophy has proven no more capable than scripture alone of discerning or devising consensually persuasive answers to the Life Questions. The natural sciences, on the other hand, have been an extraordinary success; but because of the self-imposed limitations that have made them so successful, by definition they can offer no answers to any of the Life Questions. (Fs) (notabene)

377b What remains in the absence of shared answers to the Life Questions is a hyperpluralism of divergent secular and religious truth claims in contemporary Western states, and of individuals pursuing their desires whatever they happen to be. The world in which all Europeans and North Americans are living today is a combination of hegemonic and hyperpluralistic realities, the former safeguarding and permitting the latter. Highly bureaucratized sovereign states wield a monopoly of public power in enforcing laws. The hegemonic cultural glue comes especially from all-pervasive capitalism and consumerism: scientific findings are applied in manufacturing technologies to make the stuff consumers want, whatever they want, heirs to the early modern Christians who made the industrious revolution that preceded and prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution. There is no shared, substantive common good, nor are there any realistic prospects for devising one (at least in the immediately foreseeable future). Nor does secular discourse offer any realistic prospects for rationally resolving any of the many contested moral or political issues that emerge from the increasingly wide range of ways in which individuals self-determine the good for themselves within liberalism’s politically protected formal ethics of rights. Appeals to a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus” are akin to reminders of the fact that antagonistic Christians nevertheless continued to share many beliefs in common in the sixteenth century. Indeed they did. But it hardly conduced to their moral agreement or political cooperation. (Fs)

Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Moderne: Resultat eines Hyperpluraslimus, Kingdom of Whatever; soziale Desintegration; Versagen d. Philosophie; Naturwissenschaften; moderne Rechte; Versagen einer Rechtfertigung

Kurzinhalt: The intellectual foundations of modernity are failing because its governing metaphysical assumptions in combination with the findings of the natural sciences offer no warrant for believing its most basic moral, political, and legal claims.

Textausschnitt: 378a As a result, public life today, perhaps especially in the United States, is increasingly riven by angry, uncivil rivals with incompatible views about what is good, true, and right. Many of these views and values are increasingly distant from substantive beliefs that derived most influentially from Christianity and that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remained much more widely shared, notwithstanding inherited early modern confessional antagonisms. But the rejection of such answers to the Life Questions has led to the current Kingdom of Whatever partly because of the dissolution of the social relationships and communities that make more plausible those beliefs and their related human practices. Most visibly in recent decades, this dissolution owed and continues to owe much to the liquefying effects of capitalism and consumerism on the politically protected individuals within liberal states, as men and women in larger numbers prioritize the fulfillment of their self-chosen, acquisitive, individual desires above any social (including familial) solidarities except those they also happen to choose, and only for as long as they happen to choose them. Which means, of course, that the solidity of these social “solidarities” is better understood as liquidity, if not vaporosity. Nevertheless, these same liberal states continue to depend on the widely embraced pursuit of consumerist acquisitiveness to hold together the ideological hyperpluralism within their polities. Hence modernity is failing, too, because having accepted the redefinition of avarice as benign self-interest—a latter-day extension of early modern Christians’ self-colonization by capitalism—it relies for cohesion on a naturalized acquisitiveness that simultaneously undermines other shared beliefs, common values, and social relationships on which the sustainability of liberal states also depends. And this cultural contradiction of capitalism stands quite apart from what else seems very likely: that ever greater levels of consumption are contributing to global climate change in potentially dangerous ways, another unintended consequence of the political protection of individual rights within modern liberal states (and of burgeoning consumption by citizens in illiberal states, too, as in the case now of China). (Fs)

378b But is philosophy really failing with respect to the Life Questions? In ways analogous to Protestantism and on its own terms, the evidence suggests that it has already failed. Those who dispute this might revisit the historical evidence and survey the state of contemporary philosophy. Considering the practical problems posed by deadlocked doctrinal controversy in the Reformation era, modern philosophers beginning with Descartes understandably sought to articulate universal truths based on reason alone, without reference to authority or tradition. By the late twentieth century, there was every indication that this ambition had been a long-lived albeit profoundly influential washout. Instead of discovering or devising rationally demonstrated answers to questions about God, metaphysics, morality, human nature, or human priorities, or even offering any evidence of convergence toward such answers, modern philosophers replicated in a rationalist key the unintended, open-ended, apparently irresolvable pluralism of Protestantism. Those who carry on in the same tradition continue to do so. There is nothing remotely resembling agreement or convergence among contemporary philosophers about what is true, what reason prescribes, what their discipline’s starting point or assumptions ought to be, what philosophy’s most important problems are and priorities should be, or by what methods philosophers should or could try to resolve their disagreements. Based on the evidence of the past four centuries and the state of contemporary philosophy, the rational conclusion is that reason alone has failed as a means by which to discover or devise the truth about the nature of reality, morality, what human beings should care about, and how they should live. Despite high hopes for its success since the seventeenth century, modern philosophy has foundered in its central ambition. It sought universal, rationally demonstrable truth, but has produced instead an open-ended welter of preferential, ultimately arbitrary truth claims. The implications extend much further than philosophy as such because of the pervasive influence of modern philosophical ideas about human nature and reality, often uncritically taken for granted, throughout the social scientific and humanistic disciplines. At the same time, the demise of modern philosophy has left considerable skeptical detritus in its wake, with many academics inferring relativism from pluralism and asserting the truth claim that all “truths” about matters of morality and meaning are contingent and constructed. After a centuries-long modern interlude, this is a postmodern reappearance of the early modern skepticism that Descartes and other thinkers sought to overcome: Montaigne redivivus, but now without recourse to custom in the Kingdom of Whatever. (Fs; tblStw: xy) (notabene)

379a The modern natural sciences, on the other hand, have been and continue to be an astonishing success, nowhere more obviously than in their technological applications and never more so than in the past half century. From Copernicus through Galileo to Newton and beyond, most early modern investigators of nature’s regularities understood themselves to be discovering the rationality with which God had imbued his creation. But it turned out that whether the natural world was God’s creation or not, the explanation of those regularities did not depend on theology or morality and was intellectually separable from them via amoral methodological naturalism. By deliberately setting aside the Life Questions and any questions of value, meaning, morality, purpose, or teleology strictly in favor of efforts to explain natural phenomena, scientists have produced and continue to produce ever greater, cumulative, specialized knowledge of the natural world in their respective domains of inquiry, Kuhnian protestations notwithstanding. Besides its countless contributions to human flourishing, the application of scientific findings has also contributed to untold destruction and human suffering, especially in the past century. Nor is this surprising, because science itself does not prescribe nor can it even suggest whether, how, or to what ends its findings should be applied. These are moral issues, about which the findings of science per se can say nothing. But moral questions are vigorously contested and incapable of rational resolution not only within the narrow scope of modern moral philosophy, but more broadly within the wider society’s hyperpluralism that is protected and incubated by modern liberal states. Science enables human beings to do increasingly extraordinary things in manipulating the natural world, but says nothing and can say nothing about what we should do or why we should do it. It is definitionally amoral. Yet power is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of political leaders and the wealthy, who are thus in a position to enact their moral preferences through the technological applications of science in disproportionately influential ways. (Fs)

380a Modern reason in its two most influential expressions is therefore a schizophrenically mixed bag: philosophy has dramatically failed, but science has spectacularly succeeded. One consequence is that the ever-expanding technological capacities afforded by scientific advances are set within an increasingly rancorous culture of moral disagreement and political contestation. If not necessarily a failure of modernity per se, this fact certainly contributes to its volatility and potential for man-made catastrophes on scales inconceivable in the preindustrial world. Another consequence of modern reason’s schizophrenia goes to the root of modernity’s inability to justify intellectually some of its most basic moral, political, and legal assumptions. Not that this inability has yet been widely recognized. But the exclusion in the secularized academy of any religious claims or metaphysical assumptions besides naturalism has eliminated any possibility of justifying the belief that members of the species Homo sapiens are persons, or that rights are real. There are certainly no grounds for thinking that rights are natural, rooted in nature as many Enlightenment theorists claimed, given all that biological and medical research has disclosed about human bodies. Never in any anatomical investigation or surgical procedure or lab test on any human being has any evidence for any rights been discovered. Nor has a shred of dignity been detected or any value been measured. Nor indeed has a person ever been observed. The persistent, even adamant, positing of rights has no evidentiary basis given the metaphysical assumptions and epistemological demands that govern not only the natural sciences, but knowledge-making across the disciplines in the academy. Thus the fundamental categories at the basis of Western modernity’s most influentially institutionalized philosophy—liberalism—cannot be rationally legitimated on the terms of the scientistic naturalism that prevails in research universities and in the public sphere. Those who regard this as a pseudoproblem easily resolved by reference to an allegedly shared, intuitive, commonsensical understanding of what it means to be a person should consider more carefully the unresolved disagreements about abortion. Transhumanists, with their biogenetic aspirations to hasten a post-human future for today’s descendants of Homo sapiens, understand much more clearly that “persons” and “rights” no less than “dignity” are fictions if metaphysical naturalism is true. (Fs)

381a Rights and dignity can be real only if human beings are more than biological matter. The modern secular discourse on human rights depends on retaining in some fashion—but without acknowledging—the belief that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God, a notion that could be rooted in nature so long as nature was regarded as creation, whether overtly recognized as such or not. But if nature is not creation, then there are no creatures, and human beings are just one more species that happened randomly to evolve, no more “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” than is any other bit of matter-energy. Then there simply are no rights, just as there are no persons, and no theorizing can conjure them into existence. The intellectual foundations of modernity are failing because its governing metaphysical assumptions in combination with the findings of the natural sciences offer no warrant for believing its most basic moral, political, and legal claims. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Moderne: Verlauf d. Geschichte wider alle Versuche von Kontrolle und Planung (Z. Bauman); Versagen d. Liberalismus; Säkularisierung: kontingentes geschichtliches Ereignis; Aufforderung an Wissenschaftler: Eingeständnis eigener metaphysischer Annahmen

Kurzinhalt: ... liberalism is failing in multiple respects. It lacks the intellectual resources to resolve any real-life moral disagreements, to provide any substantive social cohesion, or even to justify its most basic assumptions.

Textausschnitt: 381b I wish this book could have had a happier ending. But that would have happened only if the world in which we are living today were different. And our present world would be different only if the past had not been what it was, because the past made the present what it is. At the outset of the twentieth century Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” His answers turned out to be disastrous. I am not among those who believe in comprehensive blueprints for human social engineering backed by political power. That has tended not to go so well, especially in the past century. Nor do I have any illusions about what academic books can achieve in light of the powers that rule the world. Intellectuals per se have only their arguments, not billions of dollars in capital or arsenals of sophisticated military weaponry. Still, if the analysis of this book is near the mark, some things might be done in the small world of higher education and research universities, on its terms and yet in ways that could (and in terms of what is intellectually justified, should) shift some of its assumptions. (Fs)

382a Zygmunt Bauman has recently written that “for the past two or three centuries since that great leap to human autonomy and self-management variously called ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘the advent of the modern era,’ history has run in a direction no one planned, no one anticipated, and no one wished it to take.” That seems incontestable. He adds: “What makes this course so astonishing and such a challenge to our understanding is that these two to three centuries started with the human resolve to take history under human administration and control—deploying for that purpose reason, believed to be the most powerful among human weapons (indeed, a flawless human facility to know, to predict, to calculate, and so to raise the ‘is’ to the level of the ‘ought’)—and were filled throughout with zealous and ingenious human effort to act on that resolve.”1 But what if that faith in reason alone, however it appeared to many protagonists in the Enlightenment, was actually a major misstep rather than the progressive panacea it appeared to be? If this were true, it might change one’s historical perspective considerably. Rather than being astonished and confronted with “such a challenge to our understanding,” we might instead have discovered something that would explain much about the course of Western history since the mid-seventeenth century. Yet by itself such a hypothesis, even if it were true, would still be incomplete, because its chronological compass would be insufficient to explain the character of the present world in which we are living. (Fs) (notabene)

382b Not only present-day champions of the Enlightenment and its legacy but also the large majority of postmodern critics of modernity and the Enlightenment assume a supersessionist notion of history. They presume we can account for the Western world as it is today by largely ignoring the Reformation era and the Middle Ages, which belong, so they think, to a premodern past that was ostensibly transcended and left behind beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Enlightenment reason having now failed, so the thinking goes among its postmodern critics, we are left only with skeptical shards and individualistic bricolage. This book has sought to show both that such supersessionist assumptions are mistaken and that their correlative, allegedly unavoidable skeptical conclusions are by no means necessary. It has also sought to show something of why this is so. The world Westerners are living in today cannot be understood without seeing the deep ways in which it is an unintended extension and continuation of late medieval and Reformation-era developments that are not dead and gone, but remain influential in the early twenty-first century. Nor are the only intellectually viable options today the rationalist or skeptical ones circumscribed by metaphysical naturalism. But these are the only sorts permitted in the secularized academy. (Fs)

383a The genealogical analysis presented here provides the intellectual basis for an interpretation of Western modernity and the ways in which it is failing that differs from the diagnoses of postmodern secular critics. It also differs from the ongoing efforts of those secular believers who seek to defend and somehow salvage Enlightened modernity’s beleaguered presuppositions. To be sure, modern Western liberalism solved the serious problem of religio-political disruption in early modern Europe, and modern Western states extended religious liberty and other individual rights in ways that were not true of early modern confessional regimes. But the failure of modern philosophy to provide a convincing rational substitute for religion with respect to the Life Questions suggests that there is no reason to believe modern claims about the supersessionist triumph of secular reason over religion per se. On the contrary, the failure strongly implies that philosophical efforts to contrive a universal, self-sufficient, rational replacement for religion, for all their historical intelligibility and desirability in the context of early modern Christian doctrinal controversies, were self-deceived from the outset, and that those intellectuals who continue today to carry on likewise are engaged in a similarly self-deceived enterprise. At the same time, the rejection of historical supersessionism as a mistaken view of Western history since the Middle Ages permits a candid recognition of the fact that intellectually sophisticated expressions of religious worldviews exist today as part of Western hyperpluralism. They have not been “left behind” or “overturned” by “modernity” or “reason.” They have been institutionally excluded and ideologically denounced, not disproven. Their dismissal out of hand by most scholars seems less a function of familiarity with relevant intellectual realities than of the fact that secular research universities have banished theology from among the academic disciplines, permitting most scholars to pretend as though intellectually serious theology, philosophy of religion, and nonskeptical yet historicist biblical scholarship do not exist. But they do. And perhaps some religious truth claims really are true, and maybe their rejection helps to explain both why Western history has unfolded as it has in the past half millennium and why modernity is now failing. Perhaps the baby of religion, once invented to cope with the unwanted and unintended effects of the Reformation, has been rashly thrown out with the bathwater of its past political perversions and social failures. (Fs)

384a The natural world investigated by the sciences has always been and continues to be understood by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as God’s creation. Modern science is widely thought to have falsified this notion or at least made it utterly implausible to the well educated. But as the contemporary social fact of intellectually sophisticated religious believers demonstrates, it has not, it need not, and this is not what happened historically. Rather, Reformation-era theological disagreements rendered newly important in the seventeenth century the widespread metaphysical univocity inherited from the late Middle Ages, which reinforced the default influence of ordinary linguistic grammar on discourse about God. Neo-Scotist univocity plus Occam’s razor as it was applied to an either-or understanding of “natural” and “supernatural” are still widely (if unself-consciously) assumed and taken for granted today. This explains the common category mistake among the theologically ill-informed that God, if real, must be some sort of entity “out there” in the universe and must be discoverable through the empirical methods of scientific investigation. Most of those who unknowingly conflate their metaphysical assumptions with the findings of the natural sciences regard the relationship between science and religion as a competitive, zero-sum game. Thus they confuse success in explaining natural regularities with the allegedly diminished plausibility of the claims of any and all revealed religions. In fact, any and all possible discoveries of the natural sciences are compatible with the reality of a transcendent creator-God understood in non-univocal terms, whether in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. It is unsurprising that this recognition is not widely understood, given the sociological fact that most scholars and scientists tend to be notably (but explicably) lacking in theological sophistication and self-awareness of their own metaphysical beliefs. (Fs)

384b Contrary to widespread assumptions, the findings of the natural sciences accordingly provide no legitimate intellectual grounds for an a priori exclusion of all religious truth claims from academic discourse. It all depends on what the claims are. In practical moral terms, however, eliminating any consideration of a creator-God who will judge human beings means unburdening human life of restrictions on human desires. That is important. It protects our hyperpluralism from the unbearably invasive claim that some widely held beliefs and widely enacted behaviors might be objectively detrimental to human flourishing as such, indeed from the similarly outrageous implication that there is such a thing as “human flourishing as such” to which anything could be “objectively detrimental.” Such notions are intolerable. So “God” (for those who choose to be religious believers) can only be what individuals individually want “God” to be. That way, “God” cannot cause trouble and we can each individually get on with our lives as we please within the state’s institutions and legal stipulations. This line of thought suggests one important reason for wanting to keep religious discourse out of the public sphere and the secularized academy: it protects one sort of substantive challenge to late Western modernity’s core ideology of the liberated and autonomous self. No matter what, each neo-Protagorean individual must be the sovereign of his or her own Cartesianized universe, determining his or her own truths, making his or her own meanings, and following his or her own desires. This is a non-negotiable sine qua non of Western modernity in its current forms. It is also a major reason why it is failing. (Fs)

385a The processes by which theology and the consideration of religious truth claims were excluded from universities between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries made sense at the time. Few theologians possessed the intellectual wherewithal to engage with the burgeoning findings of the emergent academic disciplines within modern research universities, and those who did tended to assume uncritically the unavoidability of a post-Kantian philosophical framework, itself premised on a strictly deterministic Newtonian universe of invariable natural laws from which the possibility of miracles had been excluded. In addition, many religious claims were made in nineteenth-century academic settings with nonchalant complacency, and thus deserved to be excluded from institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge in the absence of serious arguments about why such claims belonged. Moreover, in the nineteenth century it seemed to many learned observers not only that the natural sciences and philosophy were progressive, but that both were helping progressively to pave the high road to human happiness through the beneficent spread of global civilization with a colonizing Western face. Then came the twentieth century. (Fs)

385b Our situation now is different, with the intellectual tables turned. Now some intellectually sophisticated postmodern critics who are religious believers have gotten behind and underneath modernity’s secularist assumptions and offered explanatorily powerful interpretations of their implications. The governing modern ideology of liberalism is failing in multiple respects. It lacks the intellectual resources to resolve any real-life moral disagreements, to provide any substantive social cohesion, or even to justify its most basic assumptions. In a reversal of the situation common in the nineteenth century, now it is many secular academics who tend to be uncritically complacent about the historical genesis of and intellectual grounds for their beliefs, oblivious of what Steven Smith has recently exposed as their “smuggling” of premises and assumptions insupportable within naturalist assumptions.1 Therefore, consistent with the academy’s commitments to the open pursuit of intellectual inquiry without ideological restrictions, to critical rationality, to the importance of rethinking and reconsidering, to the questioning of assumptions, to academic freedom, and motivated by the desire to shed light on our current problems and to seek more fruitful ways to address them, the contemporary academy should unsecularize itself. It should become less ideologically narrow and closed-minded, opening up the Weberian “iron cage of secular discourse.”2 Those who bring religious perspectives to bear must be prepared to argue for their claims in intellectually coherent ways and based on knowledge of the assumptions and findings of the academic disciplines with which they engage. But the a priori exclusion of religious truth claims from research universities is no longer intellectually justifiable and might well be closing off potentially important avenues for addressing some of our many contemporary problems. (Fs)

386a Unsecularizing the academy would require, of course, an intellectual openness on the part of scholars and scientists sufficient to end the longstanding modern charade in which naturalism has been assumed to be demonstrated, evident, self-evident, ideologically neutral, or something arrived at on the basis of impartial inquiry. It would require all academics—not only those with religious commitments—to acknowledge their metaphysical beliefs as beliefs rather than to keep pretending that naturalist beliefs are something more or skeptical beliefs are something else. The secularization of knowledge was a historically contingent process that derives from the religious disagreements of the Reformation era, even though it has been for a century or so an ideological imperialism masquerading as an intellectual inevitability. Future scholars and scientists are socialized into its assumptions as they pass through its institutionalized portal in the graduate schools of research universities. Facing up to these things is bound to be unnerving and is sure to be resisted, because confronting challenges to cherished beliefs and seemingly settled assumptions is rarely a cause for comfort. (Fs)

386b Preferential “usable pasts” aside, the actual past made the real present in which we are living. It continues to affect us whether or not we understand how. And the abiding influence of the Reformation era on the real present cannot be understood unless supersessionist conceptions of history are corrected and conventional historical periodization is challenged. For all the putative encouragement of original thought in the academy, in fact we are generally expected to accept the scholarly division of labor we have inherited and the assumptions that govern it. Subversive ideas and unsettling research that threaten seemingly settled foundational assumptions are just as likely to be welcomed now as they were in the late Middle Ages—that is, not at all. Along with other scholars in their respective disciplines and specializations, we are supposed to stick to established genres, cleave to discretely circumscribed intellectual goals, and follow well-established methods. These are different things: to study the distant past, to show how the distant past continues to inform the present, to explore the intellectual formation of the assumptions that govern historical inquiry, to analyze central problems of the contemporary Western world, and to critique the presuppositions within which modern knowledge across the disciplines is pursued and transmitted. But aren’t all these things parts of a single complex story? (E15; 24.06.2015)