The first chapter deals in detail with the nature of the nominalist revolution. Yet these seeds of the scientific revolution would also bear a more acute question: how can one speak of the freedom of man in a world of natural necessity? It was from this conflict, which was not resolved intellectually and led to the horrors of the Religious Wars, that the idea of the ontic priority of nature was stated as an apparently neutral solution. Humanism responded to this by affirming the ontic priority of man while the Reformation radically proclaimed the absolute sovereignty of God. An uncertainty about the hierarchy among the realms of being (human, natural, divine) was then born. His alternative account is that the frighteningly omnipotent God imagined by the nominalists led first of all to an ontological individualism (i.e., only individual creatures have a real existence, not the species or universals). Instead, Gillespie believes that the nominalist revolution led to a great theological and metaphysical struggle, which continued as the core of modernity up to today. Gillespie thinks that Blumenberg is right in pointing out the context–”the rubble” left by the realist versus nominalist debate–yet misses the mark in asserting a sudden enlightenment of early modern man who discovered the values of reason and individualism as the means of escaping the nominalist uncertainty. In this intellectual environment emerged the idea of the self-asserting man and the need to refill emptied, exhausted Christian concepts. In this sense, he praises Hans Blumenberg’s account of the existential and metaphysical uncertainty brought by the nominalist concept of God as a voluntaristic Supreme Being who is not bound by any law, does not owe anything to humans, and may save or damn whomever He pleases–radically different from the “rational God” of scholasticism. In his view, the late medieval and early modern transformation has something infinitely more dramatic at its center, and it is this conflict that needs to be understood in order to make sense of today’s world. He does mention the thesis that modernity has many secularized Christian concepts, yet, at the same time, he believes the core of this phenomenon has not been very adequately described thus far. Gillespie’s conviction is that it is this religious core which has marked the 19 th and 20 th century contradiction between the idea of human freedom and natural/historical necessity. On the contrary, he believes that this phenomenon arises out of the need to find an answer to the question about the relationship between God, man, and the natural world–a question that came violently to the fore after the nominalist revolution and the brutal confrontation between Humanism and the Reformation. The first idea dismissed by him is the theory of a modernity that is, at its core, atheistic, antireligious, or agnostic. He thus engages himself with the entire debate about the causes and grounds of modernization or secularization.
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