Tag: Jean-Jacques Rousseau


The Rise and Fall of Liberal Theology

11
July

NB: This is the fourth part in a short series that will be summarizing and, at times, interacting with Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Vintage, 2007).[1]

Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768-1834)

After exploring the shift in philosophy and theology brought by the thinking of Georg Hegel, Lilla moves on in his next chapter to explore the rise of liberal theology. As always, it is helpful to begin with definitions. A movement that began in the Protestant churches of the United States and Europe, Lilla characterizes the term liberal theology as having different connotations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the former, a liberal theologian:

“…would have been someone critical of traditional orthodoxies and authoritarianism, a preacher of toleration among the Christian faiths, someone who welcomed the challenge of modern science as an opportunity to sift out the essential moral teaching of the gospel from the mythical and superstitious chaff obscuring it. Such a theologian would have deemphasized original sin and spoken of the grand possibilities of human self-improvement and the need to defend freedom of religious conscience, and of the benevolence of a caring God.” Continue reading »

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Georg Hegel: Reconciliation and the Validation of Bourgeois Society

8
July

NB: This is the third part in a short series that will be summarizing and, at times, interacting with Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Vintage, 2007).[1]

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831)

In the third episode that Lilla offers in his work, he turns to the changes that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel brought to Western conceptualizations of political philosophy and theology.

Hegel’s work comes after the reaction of Kant and Rousseau to Hobbes. As explored earlier, Hobbes brought the great separation of theology from political philosophy in part in order to help lower violence in post-Reformation Europe (to read the summary of the Hobbes episode click here). Following this, while accepting his anthropocentric view of religion, Rousseau and Kant both brought theology back into political discussion by arguing that God is necessary for morality to exist within society (for the summary of that episode click here). Lilla titles his next episode, focusing on Hegel, “The Bourgeois God.” Here is why…

One important aspect of Kant’s philosophy is that, throughout all of his works, he never allowed for ultimate reconciliation either within humans or between them. However, the generation that followed Kant, specifically in Germany, was not satisfied with such an existence. Having been touched by Romanticism, specifically Rousseau,

“[b]y and large these German figures accepted Kant’s new account of the limits of reason – and then proceeded, against Kant’s strictures, to seek a way ‘beyond reason’ through aesthetic experience, mystical insight, myth, or religious leaps of faith. Their aspiration was to make themselves and their world whole again, and to be fully reconciled with existence.”[2]

Hegel would emerge as one of the most influential of these voices through his work Phenomonology (1807). So, what changes did Hegel bring to the stream of intellectual history that preceded him? Continue reading »

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Rousseau, Kant, and the Ethical Necessity of God

2
July

NB: This is the second part in a short series that will be summarizing and, at times, interacting with Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Vintage, 2007).[1]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778)

Following Lilla’s extensive discussion of the effect that Hobbes’s Leviathan had upon the West in his chapter entitled “The Great Separation,” he moves to the next episode in the development of political philosophy and theology – a chapter that he appropriately entitles “The Ethical God.”

Lilla’s main focus in this second episode is the thought of two figures – Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Both are important as they bridged the rift between theology and political philosophy that was struck by Hobbes. However, they each made unique contributions to this new path.

Rousseau’s contribution springs primarily from his educational treatise, Emile (1762). The book is presented as the story of the education of a young man, Emile. In it can be found his philosophical anthropology: natural man is both good and not religious. However, once introduced into society, man witnesses an amour propre (unhealthy pride) that arises from a weakness – the need to be well regarded by others. Rousseau saw this amour propre as the source of all of society’s corruptions, “the psychological force that breeds unnatural needs and desires, and then the destructive economic, political, and educational means to satisfy them.”[2] Although humans do not need God when they are alone, once they are introduced to a society, they have a great need for God because their weakness is exposed and they experience a lack of morality that they would not know if they had remained by themselves. Continue reading »

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Thomas Hobbes and The Great Separation of Political Theology and Political Philosophy

2
July

NB: As promised, this is the first part in a short series that will be summarizing and, at times, interacting with Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Vintage, 2007).[1]

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Lilla’s work is a walk through the history of political theology and philosophy in the West. It begins by exploring the centrality of political theology, especially Christian political theology, for approximately 1300 years following Christianity’s rise to political power during the reign of Constantine. Political theology, as defined by Lilla, is “discourse about political authority based on a revealed divine nexus.”[2] Lilla argues that, for the 1300 years following Constantine, political questions were approached by looking at the deity’s revelation at the divine nexus and interpreting that revelation in terms of political thought.

However, Thomas Hobbes’s work Leviathan (1651) changed everything. According to Lilla, Hobbes’s work brought on “The Great Separation” – his term describing the forced removal of political theology from political thought, as well as the title for his second chapter. Hobbes removed the divine nexus from conversation by claiming that humankind’s concept of God arises from people, particularly from their fear of a violent death.[3] Furthermore, he posited that both religious and political conflict arise from this same source within human nature. Therefore, in order to end the theological-political violence that Christian Europe had been so deeply involved in, especially after the Reformation, Hobbes offered a two-part plan to achieve peace.

Hobbes’s plan deeply reflects his philosophical anthropology – that religious and political violence both come from the fear within each human being. The first part of the plan is to restore peace by placing an absolute sovereign over a nation – an earthly God – whose subjects would fear him above all others. The second part of Hobbes’s plan was to reform philosophy and the sciences, particularly at the university level, leaving only the experimental natural sciences and Leviathan, which he saw as the first genuine work of political science, to remain.[4] Continue reading »

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