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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:12.748)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Michael Gillespie, Professor of Political Science at Duke University. And we're here to talk about his book, Theological Origins of Modernity. Dr. Gillespie, wonderful to have you on today.
Michael Allen Gillespie (00:27.608)
That's great to be here.
PJ (00:29.592)
So Dr. Gillespie, tell me, what was the impetus to write this book? You've mentioned that you're in process of writing a sequel. Why this book in particular though?
Michael Allen Gillespie (00:39.086)
Well, I started out my career working on Hegel and Heidegger, and then I decided I would write what I thought was going to be a small book on 19th century German thoughts, especially thoughts about nihilism.
When I started working on that, discovered that it had an 18th century origin and that the, when I looked at that 18th century origin, that pointed me back towards Descartes. And when I was talking about Descartes, he talked about a God who could do everything, which led me back to look at nominalism. And I wrote a book called that Nihilism before Nietzsche.
And when that book came out, a number of people, especially people in the radical orthodoxy movement sort of took me under, you know, as a bellwether for somebody that finally understood that all of modernity was nihilism. So I then felt that really wasn't what I said. I...
Michael Allen Gillespie (01:39.96)
wrote this book in a certain sense, I started writing this book in any case to try to explain that while nihilism was one of the consequences of modernity, it certainly wasn't the only consequence of modernity.
PJ (01:54.922)
Awesome. As I'm listening to you, it sounds like kind of the crux of that book, there's a couple things, but the crux of this book hinges around nominalism and what you think, how nominalism has played out in multiple ways. Can you just give us a brief working definition and we can expand it from there about what nominalism is?
Michael Allen Gillespie (02:19.02)
Well, not when I mean, just term wise, means that it refers to the fact that the things that we typically think call words or categories are are not real things. They're just things that we used to refer to collections of things.
so that it's rooted in a Christian notion of divine omnipotence and the radical creation of everything as a completely particular individual. And, you know, in contrast to God, unfortunately, we can't understand all things as individuals, so we're forced to rely upon concepts, nomina in Latin words, names.
and then names of names. So you have a particular proper name, I have a proper name, and we're grouped together with lots of other people with proper names that we call human beings, but the concept human being is not an adequate representation. So Akam, who's often thought of as one of the first anomalous, he is very famous for his razor, which is don't multiply
universals needlessly. But what that really means is every universal, every time you use a category that refers to more than a single thing, you're telling a lie in a certain sense. They're useful lies because they help us to understand the world and we put things together in terms of things being similar, but they're none of them really the same. And as a result, when we tried to come to terms with
the world. have to use those universals, but that effectively means we can't use syllogistic logic. So in a way that had characterized lots of medieval thought, certainly down to Aquinas.
PJ (04:18.968)
Do you see that as part of the turn towards inductive logic then?
Michael Allen Gillespie (04:23.548)
Yes, certainly towards inductive logic, but also towards more empirical science, right? and a different view of what it means to be rational and human as well. But from the scientific side, the logical side, really it has to do more with the development of concepts that are effective and work well, but aren't necessarily true.
One of the examples I like to use is the rethinking of modern mathematics that assumes that we can show that things that were previously thought to be incomprehensible are in fact something that we can deal with. Whereas for the Greeks, the square root of 2, when it appears on the number, it doesn't ever appear on the number line. It's an incommensurable, can't be measured.
Whereas, you know, for modern mathematics, and especially for calculus, which is the language of the modern world, we can keep cutting that number line until we get down to some place where we know that the square root of two is between those two points, even though we can't find out exactly where it is.
So, you know, that's, you know, it's a kind of lie from a Greek or a scholastic point of view, but it's the kind of lie that can get us to the moon, right? Right? So it can be very useful.
PJ (05:49.196)
Hahaha!
PJ (05:53.794)
Yeah. So what would be kind of, so you have nominalism on one side, what would have been the other side of the debate at that time?
Michael Allen Gillespie (06:04.27)
The other thing is called realism. And by realism in the medieval world, they didn't mean what we today think of as realism, which is actual things in the world. They meant the real existence of universals. So it's a kind of platonic or neoplatonic notion that the names of things are referred to ideas. And these ideas in a certain sense are super instances of these things that
existed, you know, perhaps somewhere in the world, but certainly in God's mind before he created the world. You know, and we see that, you know, it remains to a certain extent in modernity. So someone like Hegel says at the beginning of his logic, you know, I've got this conceptual structure that's finally come into being when we now have perfect knowledge is a reflection of the ideas that God would have had before he created the world, if he created the world.
So they're real things. mean, they're real things. And we, individual, you and I are just particular imperfect instances of the real image of what it means to be a human being.
PJ (07:18.136)
And forgive me, it's been probably 15 years since I've read this, but as I was looking at your book, I was reminded of the book Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver. How does your thesis relate with his thesis?
Michael Allen Gillespie (07:28.451)
Mm -hmm.
Michael Allen Gillespie (07:34.04)
Well, I mean, the ideas do have consequences. The consequences are not, they're not always obvious. in my, from my point of view, they're not, they're not necessary, right? You know, there's a, people sometimes, if you look at the very beginning of philosophy with dailies,
PJ (07:37.016)
Okay, like that's good.
PJ (07:50.839)
Hmm.
Michael Allen Gillespie (07:58.072)
Thales sort of looked out into the world and he saw kind of everything sort of was sort of the same thing. It sort of fit together. And we would say, it's all matter or it's all substance.
he didn't have a word for matter or substance. So every time he opened his mouth, all that came out was water. And, you know, so the development of a terminology and a language to talk about things is a long, I would call it a genealogical process. There's no historical necessity to it. But, you know, in order to think about, you know, the kinds of things that Descartes, for example, thinks about, it's, you unique.
to have a notion of self -consciousness and that's not, and even in the modern world you need a notion of will which there's even a word for that in Greek. it's, you know, there's a development of ideas and thinking about the world that opens up certain possibilities for how things might be. You know, they're almost never univocal. There are many different ways you can go but
I think it's very useful for us to look back and try to come to terms with how we got to where we are. I end the book talking about Oedipus who imagines
He's kind of the first American, I suppose you could say. thinks he's a self -made man, right? I mean, thinks he's his unfortunate child when Joe Casta tries to get him to stop looking for the answer there. But he finds out, much to his dismay, that he isn't a self -made man, that everybody comes from someplace, and the place he came from was not where he wanted to come from. And that's the story
PJ (09:46.904)
That's such a humorous but great skewer of American life. Sorry, I love that. had to stop. Just enjoy that for a second.
Michael Allen Gillespie (10:01.08)
Well, know, Americans, it's characteristic of the entire scientific enterprise.
Now, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. mean, obviously, I'd like to go to the moon or to Mars or to wherever. I like the fact that we have health care that actually makes us well rather than bleeding us to death. So, science is good thing, but we've lost the... We've come to believe that science can do anything for us. And we just have to reckon.
our own limits. I'm constantly surprised by articles that say we've discovered a new planet, an Earth -like planet, and it's only 20 light years away, which is really in cosmic distances is quite close. Unfortunately, at our current technological level, it take us two million years to get there.
relatively close is, you know, has to be understood in a way and to see how, you know, how constrained we are and how we shouldn't overestimate our own abilities.
PJ (11:18.236)
And you kind of, well, before I get into that, sorry, I'm gonna take these questions in kind of an order a little bit here. You start off in your introduction talking about three men standing amid a crowd of worshipers in Notre Dame, in Avignon. Who are these three men and why did you start there?
Michael Allen Gillespie (11:34.147)
Mm -hmm.
Michael Allen Gillespie (11:41.026)
It seemed to me that, you know, it's one of those chance encounters of people that you wouldn't, and they were all in Avignon at that time. I don't actually have a detailed story. And I say it's a story. It's not meant to be a description of what actually happened. But they were...
Petrarch, who from my point of view is the inventor of, well, not only my, most people think of as the inventor of humanism. Meister Eckhart, is kind of the, one of the crucial steps in the development of modern science. And,
Michael Allen Gillespie (12:31.96)
William of Ockham, is the person that sort of led the charge against scholastic realism and opened up the possibility for thinking of things normalistically, and of course had the important followers. Luther, for example, described himself as an Ockhamist. So you can see how, in a way, all of the...
strains of modern thought in a certain sense can trace their origins back to that, you know, that seminal moment. My general thesis behind it is it's rooted in a problem within Christianity, which is when we think about the attributes of God, we think about omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness.
And the question that arose in the end of the late Middle Ages was how can God be both omnipotent and good, right, and rational? Because how can he be subject to rational laws if he's omnipotent? Descartes would later say, you know, an omnipotent God could have made mountains without making valleys. He could have made it the case that two plus two were not four. So, you know, when you put those things together and then
there are a whole variety of consequences that modernity has to face, which is in the Luther Erasmus debate, Luther is convinced that God is omnipotent and can do anything, and Erasmus points out to him, if that's true, then God is responsible for not just for things that are good, but things that are evil. you know, so making sense, now one answer to that is, you know, kind of answer that some existentialists like Heidegger picked up on.
which is, God is incomprehensible, right? We, we, you know, to think that we can understand, this is what revelation gives us, but we, we can't understand how God can be both good and omnipotent. Well, we really push that. We just have to take that on faith. One of the problems, of course, for, for the early 14th century was
Michael Allen Gillespie (14:47.448)
That sounds all good, but we've got the Hundred Years War, the Black Death, we've got the Little Ice Age, a third of the European population has died. So some people thought, well, we must have really sinned to make this happen. But that certainly was not something that most people would accept. Erasmus later couldn't,
Michael Allen Gillespie (15:18.016)
Somebody told him his mother who had died trying to take care of him was, you know, she was a sinner. And he said, she was just good. I mean, there wasn't a cheat in sin. She wasn't tainted forever by original sin. She, know, God gave her a chance to live a good life and she lived a good life. And, know, that's, I think that's.
That's a continual question for people, certainly in their own lives, about people that they know, but you know for someone like Dostoevsky who in the, when he's talking about in this chapter in the Brothers Karamazov, he's perfectly clear that
know, people that, you know, that the children who are tortured by adults are not, you know, that can't be a world in which God is both good and omnipotent. That can't be, you know, no matter what the, you know, no matter that if even if it all works out in the end that everybody's reconciled with one another, those poor children can never forgive the people that tortured them.
So, you know, it's a running theme in, not just in modern thought, but in all thought, that it's very difficult to understand that, how those attributes of gods all fit together.
PJ (16:43.138)
So to take the first one of those men that you mentioned, how does humanism start with Petrarch and play out? I love, one, I particularly, I personally appreciate the way that you came to this book of, you're gonna write a 19th century book and then you're at 18th century and you're like, dang it, it keeps going back, you know? I mean, there is that idea of that kind of chain,
genealogical process. what's the genealogy there with, obviously we have multiple strands going on, but what's the one with humanism?
Michael Allen Gillespie (17:21.876)
Well, I try to argue in any case, I began by talking about Socrates being willing to let the city put him to death and not wanting to escape because in the Crito, the laws, he hears the laws telling him, you know, I made it possible for your parents to meet. I made it possible for you to exist.
And, you know, even though he's unjustly put, he thinks he's unjustly put to death, it's, it's a lot for talking to him. And part of that is because he was an Athenian. He left Athens only twice to go fight in battle, but otherwise he never left the city. And being a citizen for, in the ancient world was way more important than being an individual.
So, know, even Shakespeare even captures that in his discussion of when Cassius, you know, tells, says, why man, he doth bestride the world like a colossus and we peep out among his legs looking for dishonorable graves, which is, there's no possibility for us to be full citizens anymore because he's got everything that's worth having.
So, you know, but even the Stoics then think about being cosmopolitan, which is to say a citizen of the cosmos. And Christians think about the city of the pagans and the city of God. you know, so everybody imagines themselves to be a citizen. Even down to Dante, who when he's with the other Guelphs from Florence, he spends the next...
the rest of his life writing an imaginary tale about what heaven must be like, but also more importantly from a certain point of view, what the inferno must be like because when he goes through there, he discovers all of those people that booted him out of Florence in heaven.
PJ (19:22.232)
What a surprise!
Michael Allen Gillespie (19:28.996)
That's a you know, and so Petrarch who's just 20 years younger than Dante and whose father was also kicked out along with Dante Petrarch begins his his familiar letters by recounting that he was He was conceived in exile. He was born in exile He's never lived in one place for very long
and he's found a new way to live, which is to be an individual, to think of himself as a... He said, for a while I had friends, but then came the Black Death. They were gone in a flash. So I had to find a way to live within myself. And he wrote a, you know, what at the time was a well -received book called Mesa Cretum, My Secret. And his secret was...
kind of internal dialogue with himself. And I think of that as the development of what we think of as the modern self. And in a way, the notion of modern self -consciousness that really didn't exist in the way he thought of it. So, you know, and he becomes, you know, we, most people don't know much about Petrarch.
because he's, you know, mostly written Latin. He wrote some beautiful Italian poetry, which people still like. But in his, and when we actually read what he says, seems so commonsensical to us. We wonder like, why would anybody write something like that? Well, part of the reason it seems commonsensical is he was so incredibly successful in convincing people to think about themselves in a new way as individuals and not just as citizens.
And so, you know, part of what I try to look at in his thinking is how he does that and what the consequences of that are because he's accepted that non -alist teaching that everything is radically individual. And all of those so -called words like Athenian or, you know, Roman or...
Michael Allen Gillespie (21:43.874)
Florentine, those are all just phrases that connect together individuals in important ways. Now, I don't necessarily think that that's correct, you know, but most of modernity becomes nominalistic in that respect.
we think of ourselves as individuals, you know, and one of the big questions is, certainly in political science and political theory is, how can we convince people to live, to join and live together? Especially, you know, that leads it to social contract theory. So we imagine that there was some point.
in which all of these individuals got together and decided that they were going to live in a particular way and under a particular form of government, etc. etc. You know, that's reasonably unlikely in the sense that, you know, they're, they're, all of those people who are born anywhere have navels and they were, they were born to somebody.
And there's a family, know, the family proceed in some sense, you know, the family and the individual are work together, but you can't imagine human beings surviving very long if they weren't raised by families.
PJ (22:59.34)
I constantly, my own background is philosophical hermeneutics and it's a little bit of work in John Batiste's De Vico, but mostly in Gadamer and I talk a lot about historicity. And so I've often had to explain, know, the same idea of you need parents. I've never heard everybody has navels, but if you don't mind, I'm gonna steal that. That's a great line.
Michael Allen Gillespie (23:22.068)
It comes from an old riddle, which is, you know, in paradise, how did, how can you find Adam and Eve? Right? They're the only two without nails. So it's, you know, it's a
PJ (23:37.548)
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (23:42.088)
It's a kind of trivial fact, it explains why Eastern thought is sometimes derided for just contemplating your own navel. But contemplating your own navel is not such a bad thing to do. And it helps you understand that you didn't just spring into existence by dragon teeth that were planted in the soil.
PJ (23:59.17)
like that.
PJ (24:09.452)
And I just want to clarify and make sure that I'm kind of on the right track here. I'm a little distracted by the, still think about the naval thing. So as we're talking about this, that social contract theory that people are individuals and then they come together. And if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that people are always together.
and then they had to learn to come apart.
Michael Allen Gillespie (24:41.58)
Well, sort of both. mean, once we, mean, humans almost certainly existed as what we would call a species. You know, in fact, they were probably species before they were human in a certain sense. I sometimes ask my students to sort of juggle their minds. I said, you know, what does modern science tell us about how long we've been human and how many of your ancestors are human?
PJ (24:43.573)
Okay.
Michael Allen Gillespie (25:11.166)
And they almost invariably want to say, and then they stop and they think for a while, then they say, well, I guess not very many of my ancestors were human. So, you know, it's a thought that leads you to see that, I mean, it's connected to the kind of pantheistic vision that underlies even Darwin's evolutionary theory.
that we have to understand that we are related to the rest of nature and things. Darwin didn't think that that was something that undermined religion, but it certainly was a, let's say a dissenting view within traditional Christianity.
PJ (25:55.776)
And so, and again, just to make sure I'm on the right track here, the social contract theory, when we get Hobbes later on, yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (26:01.892)
Thanks for watching.
So we started, I think Aristotle captures this notion that human life begins in families, families join together to form tribes, tribes join together to form cities. Now how that happens, whether it's through conquest, whether it's through intermarriage, knows? But.
PJ (26:13.186)
Yes.
Michael Allen Gillespie (26:25.656)
Petrarch is the first one that recognizes that you don't have to be a citizen of a city in order to be a human being. Aristotle says, people that live outside of cities are either beasts or gods. Petrarch says, no, we humans can live outside of cities and be something on our own. Now.
It often turns out that people that live outside of cities who are outlaws, to put it that way, are more beast -like. It often turns out that some philosophers don't fit in and they go live in the mountains. He's thinking of the gymnosophist in India, the naked wise men who go live in mountains. There are different ways to think about it. But then once you've come to that conclusion, when people...
start imitating Petrarch. There's this poor man that comes to Petrarch and says to him, I really don't like you. I know your work is great, but you've ruined my son.
And Petrick says, why? Well, all he wants to do is write verses, right? He doesn't want to be a banker. He wants to write verses. He thinks about himself all the time and he tries to. And that became, you know, people, that became an important path for people to follow. And that whole humanist path became a very popular.
And it led to this, so I think that that led people was the basis on which people could come to think of themselves as individuals.
Michael Allen Gillespie (28:16.628)
whether they're individuals created individually by God or whether they're individuals just in terms of natural variation, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference. But they can also stand on their own. They didn't need to have a city. And once people come to that conclusion, if they live in cities that they don't like,
they start wondering like, why am I staying here? Why don't I go somewhere else? Or why don't we improve our city? And maybe I don't have to listen to this prince. Maybe I haven't consented to any of these things. Hannah Arendt in her book called, or let's say called What is Authority,
begins by saying, you know, I think I should have called this essay, what was authority, because we don't have it anymore, right? Real authority was Rome, where they had 12 tablets and they lived according to those rules and they all had to be Romans and there wasn't any, they knew what the authority was, it was rooted in history.
PJ (29:04.301)
Yeah
Michael Allen Gillespie (29:19.938)
in their history and traditions and mores. But, you know, for us, we sort of think, you know, we can make our own way.
Years ago, I must have been 19 or so I was studying philosophy and I got picked up hitchhiking and something like that. What do you do? I said I study philosophy. He said, well, I think everybody's a philosopher. Okay, well, but that's a reflection of this notion that somehow we all have the ability to understand things and we don't have to listen to others or.
PJ (29:44.29)
Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (29:57.308)
And even during, know, Burke complains a great deal about the philosophes who thought that they could do everything just on the basis of sheer reason and give up on tradition. So, you know, those are your guy, Gadamer, who is a very nice man. I had a good conversation with him once. He was convinced that we could we had to fuse our horizons.
between the new things we've learned with the old traditions that we're part of. I found that, I mean, it's a good path to follow.
PJ (30:36.224)
I mean, it does seem to describe kind of that continual learning process. It's kind of like, I mean, you can disagree with Hegel on lot of things, but his description of how we learn things seems pretty spot on. It's hard to argue with some of that. And so it's this invention of kind of the modern self that in a lot of ways, you and you have this chapter on Hobbes, it leads us to Hobbes, right? Because if all of sudden,
Michael Allen Gillespie (30:51.18)
Right. Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (31:03.481)
No.
PJ (31:05.858)
People are like, if the Leviathan is splintering, it's like how does this whole thing work?
Michael Allen Gillespie (31:13.89)
Right, that's, for Hobbes thinks, Hobbes is a nominalist, you know, through and through, he admits that as much. And...
What's crucial for him is sovereignty, right? We need to have a sovereign. The sovereign, you know, in the frontal illustration to the Leviathan is a, like a human being, but the human being is made up of lots of other human beings that form the body of that creature. And...
The question is what holds that all together and what are the sources of disruption? One of the sources of disruption is the fact that people don't use words correctly.
they with a proper meaning that instead they are constantly developing their own definitions for these things. And therefore he insists that the sovereign, one of the things the sovereign has to do is as he says, make sure that words are well snuffed by which he means make sure they have definitions and you insist upon the definitions. something like, so people can't say things like immaterial substance to describe spirit.
There isn't any such thing as an immaterial substance, and that's a misuse of the terms. So he thought we had, number one, that the sovereign has to control the use of language. Secondly, the sovereign has to keep the country united by being the head of all of the institutions that can make
Michael Allen Gillespie (32:53.57)
moral claims on people. So the sovereign, you know, he has to be a sovereign ecclesiastical and civil as the subtitle is, which is to say he, you he has to be the head of the church and the head of the state. And that, those are the two crucial things. And then he has to enforce the law. Now, you know,
people have to obey. So he relies a great deal on force in that respect and that's your wonderful image of the Leviathan back there is exactly the point of that. By the time you get to Locke, Locke thinks you need sovereignty, but you don't need a Leviathan in the sense that is simply not accountable to the people.
You don't even need a Leviathan in his view to give definitions to words. He had a notion that he developed and the first thing that he wrote, which is almost never read anymore, is a book on common placing, is how do you commonplace books during that whole period for and were books that people wrote, what they had read, thoughts that they had.
PJ (34:08.588)
Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (34:18.326)
Et cetera, et cetera. And one of the things that happens, if you look at the earlier books, they're almost all arranged according to a stoic or towards a Christian logic. you know, so you've got different categories and you put things in there. And that was a huge problem because you've run out of space, right? You'd have to start another book and you'd have, so, yeah.
know, Locke had this idea of what we today call alphabetization, right? So he organized things alphabetically. And that became the basis then for Johnson's dictionary. Johnson drew especially on that and for the insight, both the British Encyclopedia Britannica and the French Encyclopedia. So it was, we can just get together and decide how these things, words should be used and what they mean.
So, you know, that was the way he solved Hobbes's first problem. The second problem was, you know, how to, you know, how to make laws and establish a sovereign. And he's pretty clear sovereign has to have the power of life and death. He has to put people to death. So he adopts that from Hobbes.
PJ (35:32.129)
Forgive me. Is that is there a Roman antecedent for that too? Do they see that coming from Rome?
Michael Allen Gillespie (35:36.568)
There are lots of antecedents for that. Cicero, I mean, that's just seems straightforward to everybody up until the 20th century. Even today, people, they're not entirely, I some people have never been in favor of the death penalty. But frankly, just putting people in prison forever.
PJ (35:38.998)
Yes, yes, yes.
Michael Allen Gillespie (36:03.252)
is what requires a level of opulence that most countries don't have, right? mean, you know, nobody wants a serial killer walking on the street or getting out of prison at some point. But they can't afford to keep them in prison forever, at least under humane circumstances. So...
PJ (36:24.376)
And it's the threat of force, is ultimately the threat of life and death that keeps people in prison too. So I mean, it's really hard to escape. Sorry. Continue.
Michael Allen Gillespie (36:34.274)
Right. so, you know, where he differs is in thinking about the consent that people have to give to the laws. And, you know, he has this notion of tacit consent and express consent. And, you know, I sometimes ask my students how many of them have expressly consented to being an American citizen.
And they almost nobody raises their hand. then I asked them, how many of you are registered to vote? And how many of you have a passport? Okay, they all do, know, one or the other. And I I said, did you read the fine print? They have all, and I said, you know, you can leave the country without a passport. You just can't get back in. Right. I mean, because that that's your.
you've sworn to obey the laws of the United States. And at least in the old days when I signed it to not having been a member of the communist, of a group that sought to overthrow the government by force. I don't know what that would mean for people from January 6th these days, but I think that's probably not in there anymore.
PJ (37:47.586)
Yeah, yeah. So, one, thank you. was, I really enjoyed kind of that overarching view, kind of tracing that through. I was actually a little surprised, because I don't know that I've ever heard really someone take Eckhart and make him the father of modern science. What makes Eckhart the father of modern science?
Michael Allen Gillespie (37:54.968)
Thank you.
Michael Allen Gillespie (38:17.418)
Eckhart faced this problem. He was convinced that the rationalistic structure of Thomism and scholasticism generally was using artificial categories that didn't really come to terms with God.
And God was beyond those categories in any case. know, here's a very famous section of it. And I relate this through an incident I was involved in. Lesha Kolokovsky, who was a very bright.
man was gave a lecture at the University of Chicago and there was a dinner afterwards and somebody asked him about the ground of things and he says well you know I can't really tell you in English but I can tell you in German so I you know being fluent in German I told him well I could translate for you and he said der Grund ist der Ungrund the ground is the unground and der Ungrund ist der Abgrund
which is to say the abyss. And then he stopped and I said, well, I know where that is in Eckhart. And he said, I said, the next line is, and we're talking in German, the next line is, when the uproot is God and the abyss is God. And he said, yeah, but don't translate that. But so for Eckhart, the question was,
We've understood, you know, previously God has been understood as you know that the world somehow is Created out of divine substance in particular shapes and forms And If that's not possible, which is one of the consequences of normalism Because that's not compatible with divine omnipotence You know God can't be God if that's the case The question is how can how does
Michael Allen Gillespie (40:25.208)
What is the world made out of? And for Eckhart, is divine will. It's just the various manifestations of divine will as they appear. One in you, one in me, one in, know, one in, et cetera, et cetera, but also rocks, planets, plants, everything. It's always just, but divine will is not static. It's constantly changing. So if we want to understand the world,
we have to understand that it is an expression of divine will. Now, so if you come to Hobbes, for Hobbes, the world and all of us are matter in motion.
Michael Allen Gillespie (41:15.2)
And some people say, well, that sounds atheistic. Well, it depends upon who began that motion. So it's essentially equivalent to the position that Eckhart takes, which is that we can't understand the world by asking what it is. We can only understand the world by asking how it works and how it dissolves. And so modern science in comparison to ancient science, it's a science of motion and change.
PJ (41:37.196)
Hmm.
Michael Allen Gillespie (41:44.368)
and this is what calculus is meant to measure, right? So, you know, it doesn't start out, know, that isn't what people thought when they were thinking mathematically, but you know.
Galileo gets put into under house arrest. He's bored to tears. He's a mathematician and he starts rolling balls down an incline plane and it eventually, you he says, huh, you know, there's a kind of mathematical proportion there. And that was what people don't real, people would take that for granted today. But at the time that was called a category error, right? Because mathematics was about things that don't change, not about things that change.
And if you tried to use mathematics to understand things that change, you were wrong headed in that respect. So Galileo begins that. That gets picked up by Descartes, who develops the Cartesian coordinate system.
and which allows us to map out the change, know, changing points within analogic geometry. And then, Luther and Leibniz, not Luther, excuse me, Leibniz and Newton.
PJ (43:00.908)
Newton.
Michael Allen Gillespie (43:03.448)
formulate calculus out of that, which enables us to, you know, we can understand everything from how much water pressure do we need in order to get water to all of the houses in Florida, and how much, you know, and how much money do we need to change the vote in an election, right? mean, it can be voted, you know, we need to measure those things and we can have, you know, they're not gonna be perfect.
PJ (43:21.804)
Yeah
Michael Allen Gillespie (43:31.22)
examples, but we have enough to go to the moon. So we understand the motions of things and that's really what comes, which is what modern science is all about. Now, whether that ultimately is sufficient in something like biology, which is itself a living thing that's constantly varying.
question, but that's the whole impetus. So I think that it is this insight that Eckhart has that the world is better understood as, let's just say, the will of God rather than the body of God that becomes the foundation for modern science.
PJ (44:13.656)
Well, I want to be respectful of your time, and I would like to at least talk a little bit about the modernity portion, but to avoid you purely being the bellwether for why all of modernity is nihilism, aside from nihilism, aside from nihilism, what are some of the other results of these strands?
Michael Allen Gillespie (44:18.787)
Okay.
Michael Allen Gillespie (44:26.691)
Bye.
Michael Allen Gillespie (44:36.962)
Well, humanism is obviously something that continues in both right in varying forms over time. Evangelical Christianity, right? It follows from, you know, Luther and kind of Calvin, who I think of as Luther on steroids.
and you know it becomes, you know that certainly is a role. And then something that I've been investigating in my current book which is a sequel to this which is the path that leads from Erasmus through the anti -trinitarians in Italy to
that, you know, who are then forced to sort of flee Italy by the Inquisition. They go to Transylvania where they become Socinians and Poland where they become Socinians and then are chased out of Poland. They go to Holland and where they work with the grocers and.
there and then on to England and eventually they land in the United States and if you look at the committee on detail for the Declaration of Independence the three men who are principally responsible Jefferson Adams and Franklin are all anti -trinitarians. So it's you know it is now that doesn't mean they're not Christians it just means they they're not Trinitarian Christians.
So in a way, they're paths that lead to where we are today in ways that we...
Michael Allen Gillespie (46:07.904)
So a lot of the debates that we have today where people on the evangelicals think, this is just an atheistic doctrine, et cetera, et No, it's just a different form of Christianity. You have to understand that. And to do that, though, you have to go back and study the long history of dissenters within Christianity and to realize that what's called Orthodox Christianity are just...
are just the people that won in the various debates for a long time within Catholicism just because they had other people killed. mean, beginning with Augustine who, you know, so that, you know, that's, and they use the power of the state to do that. So now, you know, they're.
sometimes the Catholic Church was very worried about continual splintering and that they would lose authority. And after the Reformation, you don't have to go far before you see that happening. At one point I was trying to make a list of all of the dissenting sects during the English Revolution, just during the English Revolution, not everywhere.
PJ (47:14.725)
my goodness.
PJ (47:19.473)
okay, I was about to say, I thought you were talking about America. I was like, I can't even imagine, but yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (47:23.306)
Yeah, but I got so, you know, at a certain point I came to realize that, you when I got the Muggletonians, they, you that this had, you know, was already in Harry, you know, they still existed in Harry Potter, but the, is, you know, there are just so many, you can't count them all. In America, you're right, I wrote an article years ago called,
religion and conservatism in the Anglo -American democracies. And one thing that's perfectly clear from the data we have on that was that the absence of establishment in religion is the key to proliferation of religious belief.
so that in England at that point five percent of people were willing to say they were members of churches. In Canada it was a little bit higher, in the United States it was 90 percent. And why? Well we didn't ever have religious establishment and when you think about it
established religions are rooted in tax a taxation system so people have to church tax still true in Germany for example and and If you if you have to pay it suppose you don't agree with your church and you want to leave well You still have to your taxes, right? So you're not gonna have any money to fund another church while in America We see the splintering of congregations all the time. So people what some people believe one thing some people believe another
They go off and start their version of this here and they do their version here. just take their, you know, they got their own money to go and do that. So it doesn't, you know, it just, allows people the freedom to believe what they want to without, and to spend their money on supporting that belief without any, without any interruption from the state. So.
PJ (49:16.664)
Yeah. Without those economic penalties. Yeah.
Michael Allen Gillespie (49:19.928)
Yeah, so I think that the modern world with all of its horrors, with all of its miracles is deeply rooted to this whole beginning. And in a certain sense, the debate we see in the United States today between the two partisan sides of our spectrum is really just a kind of continuation of the debate that
that Calvin had with Michael Stavridis and the anti -internetarians. mean, this is, it's not, you know, it's just a continuation. So it's not, it shouldn't be so surprising to us. And it's exacerbated in our case by the fact that, you know, there are only four countries that exist in pretty much the form they're in today since 1800. Iceland, England, Switzerland, the United States.
Two of those are islands. The United States is effectively a very big island. And Switzerland is an island of mountains. So we don't really have any existence. don't have existential, certainly in the United States, we don't really have existential threats. And we don't have existential threats in an impartial industrial society. There's a natural tendency to partisanship and people breaking apart and going in different directions.
know, Hegel says at one point, in commercial society, people forget about the importance of the state until the Huns appear on the horizon, and then they want the state to come to their rescue. And, you know, the people, you know, if you look at a country like Ukraine, Ukraine certainly was falling apart in all kinds of ways until Russia decided to invade. Now they're, you united.
PJ (50:55.32)
Right.
Michael Allen Gillespie (51:11.097)
So it focuses the mind and the society on important things. You know, we, since the end of the Cold War, and our...
when we lost our role as the leader of the free world, because there wasn't effectively an unfree world for a while there, you know, we, all kinds of splits came about the theokons versus the neokons, the evangelicals versus the, you know, that, you know, it just goes on and on. So, but before that, if you think about what was sometimes called the Protestant consensus in the United States, you had
mean like Protestantism, you had reform Judaism, and you had post Vatican II Catholicism, all of which were pretty darn indistinguishable. I mean, in the bigger picture, right? know, different church structure was different. But when you look at it as moral doctrine, you know, the moral doctrine of those things, that became very similar, right?
Michael Allen Gillespie (52:21.932)
again, partly because they all had one big enemy in common, communism. J. Edgar Hoover would appear on television and I can still remember, and point seven, the communists are atheists, they do not believe in God, et cetera, et cetera. And people were worried about that. Anyway, so I think that's what happens.
PJ (52:46.552)
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to be respectful of your time. Before we kind of end our interview today, what is one thing you'd ask people to kind of think on or meditate on or even do throughout the week after listening to this? Besides, excuse me, they should read your book, your excellent book, especially as you have a sequel coming out, Like they should read it in anticipation.
Michael Allen Gillespie (53:07.32)
Thank
PJ (53:12.588)
But besides reading your book, what's one thing that people should do this week or think about this week?
Michael Allen Gillespie (53:12.611)
Yes, sir.
Michael Allen Gillespie (53:18.688)
I think it's very useful for people to ask themselves to live, number one, to live in the world and not walk around with their hand in cell phone all the time. And to ask themselves things that they take for granted, chairs that we sit in. Where did that come from? How did that happen? Who's responsible for this?
you know, what do we, and in that sense, what do we owe to the past? What do owe to all those generations of people that have come before us? And I think that makes us a little bit more humble and a little bit less likely to jump to conclusions about the fact that we're right and you're wrong.
I sometimes ask my students when freshmen students in any case, when we start out, how many of them have thanked their parents for toilet training them? And I first asked them if they're toilet trained, they all admit to that. And I asked them how many of you have ever thanked your parents for that? And think what life would be like if you hadn't been toilet trained.
and how important or learned how to eat three meals a day to, know, et cetera, et All the things that we take for granted that we don't even remember. That's just the tip of the iceberg of all of the things that exist in our world that we forget had a human origin in some place and that owe something to somebody else's ingenuity and efforts.
PJ (54:52.478)
One, thank you, that's a tremendous answer. Especially my last kid is, we just started potty training her. So that speaks directly to me. Dr. Gillespie, really informative, really enjoyed it today. Thank you for coming on.
Michael Allen Gillespie (54:59.62)
There you go.
Michael Allen Gillespie (55:09.717)
Thanks for having me. Bye bye.