Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture.

"Modernity is an event that has transformed the relation between the cosmos, its transcendent source, and its human interpreter" (249). Louis Dupre argues explicitly against identifying that event with science and technology and implicitly against dating modernity from the French and Industrial Revolutions. For him, the late medieval nominalist theologians established the essential philosophical preconditions for modernity; their conclusions combined with "the early humanist notion of human creativity to form a combustive mixture . . . [that caused] the cultural explosion we refer to as modernity" (3). That mixture, he argues, sundered the constituent parts of an "ontotheological synthesis" forged in antiquity and that survived, with some crucial Christian adaptations, into the late Middle Ages. This synthesis conceived of all that is - man, nature, and God - as part of one, organic, meaning-bestowing whole. After its destruction, the expansive classical notion of kosmos was reduced to a purely physical natural world, objectified and viewed largely as an instrument for the achievement of human ends; man the microcosm became man the isolated subject and the sole arbiter of meaning; and nature fell from grace as God withdrew both His presence and His blessing.

In his essay, Dupre fills a large intellectual canvas with a crowd of philosophers and theologians from Plato to Pascal. But William of Ockham and the nominalist philosophy he fathered is always the vanishing point in Dupre's perspective. The consequences of Ockham's denial of the reality of universals, his conventional view of language and view of creation as an expression of divine will rather than divine reason played out in everything from politics to personal piety. Dupre does record various efforts to reunite elements of the original synthesis (for example, Giordano Bruno's pantheism, civic humanism, and the culture of the baroque), but in his account all fail.

Ultimately, Dupre seeks to replace an already disputed triumphalist view of inevitable human progress with one of successive ruptures having equally inevitable but catastrophic results; he wants to show how the Renaissance "Promethean" man became Nietzsche's man of "small soul." Many readers may feel uneasy with the terms of his argument - which needs, in any event, some updating of its depictions of Renaissance and early modern intellectual developments. For example, Dupre casts the differences between "Puritan" and "Catholic" science in the familiar terms of innovation versus tradition, but recent scholarship in the history of science has brought to light a very vigorous school of Jesuit science and suggests that the Scientific Revolution is a story of how natural philosophers on both sides of the confessional divide sought to embed their findings in new authority structures, both sociological and methodological, to ensure their credibility.

Even more problematic is Dupre's assertion of a "combustive mixture" of nominalist philosophy with Renaissance humanism. He writes, for example, that "neither humanist nor Renaissance attitudes can be derived from nominalist theology, yet they could hardly have developed as they did without the cultural conditions created by late medieval thought" (128). But, justly wary of reductionism, he explicitly rejects an approach that contextualizes ideas in cultural and social specifics in favor of a search for "permanent meaning" and some truth transcending historical contingency. Yet, writing as an intellectual historian, I question how one can establish connections between intellectual trends without contextualization.

AORIL G. SHELFORD Princeton University