The Theological Understanding of Modern Man Revisited

Description

This book presents the theological story that led to the apparition of modernity, of the way man understands himself, society, and the world. According to the accepted view of this development, the theological roots of modernity are generally seen as been born out of the nominalist and voluntarist theology inaugurated by William of Ockham. But this approach has to be completed. The cause of that lies at the theological revolution that engendered nominalism lies much deeper in the past, as Joseph P. Farrell shows in his magnus opus God, Reason, and Dialectic. These two historical approaches must be connected. William Ockham, just as his predecessors did, and the theologians that came after him built upon what can be called the philosophical pagan absolute divine simplicity, the exclusion of every kind of multiplicity and distinction in God. In other words, the whole Western theological tradition is the result of the substitution of the biblical God with the Neoplatonic God accomplished by St. Augustine in his work On The Holy Trinity. This was a revolutionary act, that distorted Christian theology, and faith in Western Europe. It set the path towards modernity.