Whatever else "postmodernism" may be, it is a response to the rise of what has come to be called the "modern." The "modern" here refers to an array of ways of thinking about and doing things that has been widely operative in the west since the decline of the middle ages and which came into its own in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Modernist assumptions, all mutually implicated, include:

a "spatialization" of knowledge in which objects, defined in terms of extension, are arrayed side by side in a grid, without a sense of co-participation within a whole and denuded of their temporal dimension and thus teleology

an approach to knowledge that values apodictic certainty above all else and ties knowledge closely with instrumental control

the conception of the "secular" as a particular social space as opposed to the religious

an abstract opposition between "society" and the "individual" or the public and the private

a separation of reason and faith

a sharp division between the order of nature and that of grace or of the natural and the supernatural

a dichotomization between the exterior or objective and the interior or subjective

a sharp distinction between mind and body, defining the self primarily in terms of reflexive self-consciousness and will

embracing unworkable forms of epistemological foundationalism

strategically displacing metaphysics with epistemology in such a way that the metaphysical foundations of the modern become maximally hidden

creation of grand metanarratives in which the Enlightenment turns out to be the goal of history

mystifying politics in such a way that individual freedom is seen conditioned upon more intrusive disciplinary technologies and/or foreign imperialism

tending toward logical positivism and other forms of hyper-empiricism

Thus, in the following I will attempt recount some central features of the earliest layers of that story. My particular version of the narrative will draw heavily upon those thinkers loosely grouped together as "Radical Orthodoxy" as well as the accounts of Michael Gillespie, Michel de Certeau, Michael Buckley, and others. This story is basically one of the transition from pre-modern thinkers through the late medieval scotists (followers of John Duns Scotus) and nominalists and into the beginnings of the modern era.

For our present purpose we can think of "pre-modern" figures of importance to western thought as including Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the like. Transitional figures figures include Roscelin, Abelard, Henry of Ghent, Scotus, Ockham, Biel, among others. The modern, in turn, emerges in connection with figures such as Lessius, Bodin, Machiavelli, Ramus, Descartes, Hobbes, and so on.

The primary hinge between the pre-modern and the modern is the shift we see in Scotus and Ockham, with the rise of nominalist thought. Before moving on to the story of that transition, however, it may be helpful to have some understanding of what counts as "nominalist" thought.

The term "nominalism" arises in the context of medieval discussions of universals and nominalists were opposed to realists with regard to universals. "Universals" are, roughly speaking, those aspects of reality that things share in common and are able to be understood by the human mind, abstracted from the particularities of the concrete, individual things themselves.

So, for instance, consider what it means for there to be a group of animals that are all "dogs": a Doberman, an Australian shepherd, a poodle, a Pekingnese, a mutt. Each member of this group has the quality of "being a dog" in terms of its species and thus it is something that all of these animals share in common. A realist about universals would say that there really is such a thing as "being a dog" that each member of these groups has. We can think about it, talk about it, and abstract it from the particular things. We can grasp this "being a dog" in such a way that, in the future when we come into contact with a completely new breed of dog, we will recognize it as "being a dog" as well. When we apply the term "dog" to these various individuals, we are truly saying something about the reality they share in, even if, given the differences between the various individual animals, the term "dog" is being used analogously (i.e., expressing similarity within difference).

Realists about universals may disagree about whether or not a universal like "being a dog" can exist apart from actual dogs, but they are all agreed that this quality of "being a dog" is something that really exists in the individual animals and is shared by them. Plato was a realist of one sort, Aristotle of another. So were Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas and, in an attenuated way, Scotus.

Nominalists, on the other hand, deny the real existence of universals. For them things in themselves have no real commonalities at all, but are isolated individuals that are each unique. Thus when we attribute "being a dog" to various individual animals, we are using the term equivocally (i.e., expressing a completely different meaning) in terms of reference since there is no one thing that all these groups really have in common. Thus "dog" is really just a word, a name (nomen, thus "nominalism") that functions as a kind of mental "place-holder" through which we group things for the purpose of convenience or function. The name taken in itself, indeed, is completely univocal (i.e., expressing one simple, undifferentiated meaning) and does little to communicate the reality of the individual things to which that name is applied.

This view had some earlier medieval precursors in Roscelin and Peter Abelard and was developed more fully in the later middle ages through the thinking of Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, and especially William of Ockham.

This shift towards language as dialectically both univocal and equivocal is a decisive break with earlier thought and underlies much of what could be considered "modern."

When we turn back to the pre-moderns, however, we find that they draw none of the sharp distinctions and dichotomies of modernism and function with a thoroughly analogical notion of reality, language, and knowledge. Thus they do not, for instance, isolate a particular area of human life as somehow neutrally free from the claims of faith or the influence of grace or that is purely natural and not supernatural. Let's begin then with a survey of some of the thought of Thomas Aquinas as representative of the pre-modern.

For Thomas Aquinas the "natural" is not the self-contained world of manipulable matter that is the opposite of "artificial" (as it became in later modernist thought) and so the "supernatural" is not some second story of "stuff" that is somehow added to a more basic nature. On the contrary, for Thomas "natura" has to do with kinds of things, their origins and ends, and what they do (including making "artificial" things), as they are organized in relation to one another in a single whole, co-participate. All things within their fundamental relations to other things within this whole are "natural." Those very same things, however, are "supernatural" in terms of their absolute origins since all creation is ultimately pure gift (i.e., grace) and they aim at God as their end since life within God is the graciously given goal of all creation. "Natural" and "supernatural" for Thomas, therefore, are adjectival or adverbial and have no reference to a distinction in substance. Nature is always-already "graced." The only thing that isn’t "supernatural" in any way is God himself.

Within such a context something like Hume’s arguments against miracles cannot even get off the ground. Nor could Descartes’ project to found knowledge—even knowledge of God—solely upon the claims of reason alone. Thus we can see that the pre-moderns are operating within an entirely different perspective.

For Aquinas, then, since the creation is from God, is directed towards God, and stands in relation to God, it is like God and revelatory of God. Nevertheless, this revelatory likeness is only analogous—thus the notion of an analogia entis or "analogy of being." Analogy implies both likeness and unlikeness. Since everything is created by God it images him (supremely human beings, individually and corporately); but since everything is created by God it images him only within the greater and absolute divide between Creator and creature. The Fourth Lateran Council had formulated this in the following way: for every similarity between God and the creature there is an even greater dissimilarity (maior dissimulitudo in tanta similitudine).

Contrary to the contentions of some Reformed thinkers (Barth, van Til, Dooyeweerd), this is decidedly not "chain of being" thinking, but a sophisticated account of the absolute distinction between Creator and creator and the all-encompassing Lordship of God over his creation. As we shall see, it is in fact the later developments in Scotus and nominalism that move in the direction of a "chain of being" and wreak havoc not only in the development of post-nominalist Catholic theology and the construction of the modern, but also with effects on the shaping of Protestantism and the Reformed tradition in particular.

In any case, part of the upshot of this is the fact that, according to Thomas, when we say "God exists" and "creatures exist" we are using the term "exists" analogously, not purely univocally (and not equivocally either, since a real likeness is there). For God to "exist" is to exist non-derivatively, independently, originally, a se, etc. For us to "exist" is to exist derivatively, dependently, createdly, in deus, etc. In God, existence and essence are co-terminous and identical (God necessarily exists). In the creature, there is a real distinction between existence and essence (we don’t have to exist) that gives primacy of act over form as the concrete and particular subsistence of things. Nevertheless, for Thomas, there are real analogies between the divine existence and creaturely existence, founded upon the doctrine of creation.

For Thomas the created order, according to the analogy of being, really, in some sense, participates in God by analogy. Now this language of "participation" can confuse some people, as if Thomas (and other theologians) were somehow saying that mere creatures can become God or share in God’s own essence or the like. But that is not at all what Thomas has in mind.

First, he means that God, in himself, always-already contains the plenitude of being, and thus every possible thing already pre-exists in God—in his reflexive self-knowledge (through the Son in the Spirit) by which he knows every kind of possible thing he could make. Thomas also suggests that God is "in things" (and they in him) in the way that a thing known by us is in us, that is, it makes itself present to us through some operation of our existence. So, God is in us in the way the tree I see outside my window is in me, in that it makes itself present to my experience, as also God does.

God is known as the cause of all things, however, only through his effects (and thus God’s "substance is present to all things as the cause of their being").

To better under the notion of causes and their effects in pre-modern thought, it is helpfulto be familiar with the "four causes" in Aristotle. "Cause" here means something more like "explanation" and answers the "why this?" Moreover, all four causes are related perspectivally.

Formal Cause – explains what kind of thing a substance is, its principle of organization
Material Cause – explains the material properties of a thing, i.e., its being formed of wood rather than metal
Efficient Cause – the bringing to be of a thing or change within it ("cause and effect" as we ordinarily think of it)
Final Cause – the purpose or end of a thing

Generally, "forms" are real, active, dynamic structures within things that explain the distinctive behavior and various latent potentialities of the thing given the material of which the thing is composed (after all, the paradigmatic examples of substances having form for Aristotle were living things: plants and animals). Forms are what cause the thing to be the kind of thing it is, constituting it as that kind of thing, and they do so in such a way that this causation is everywhere simultaneously present within the thing (e.g., as the structure of a wave is everywhere simultaneously present throughout the water through which it moves, explaining the behavior of the water even though the wave-form itself is not made of water since it is moving through it). Forms can have a multiplicity of physical instances and even be realized within various kinds of matter (e.g., the principle of an arch, whether made or brick or stone or concrete block). They can be intelligently apprehended in the thing, conceived, and often defined or described, even mathematically on occasion.

Forms likewise account for the replication of things whether an animal species, a song, a genetic code, a book, or a computer program. They account for the scientific behavior of things in a law-like way. They also explain how certain structures can be transmitted or replicated without being fully realized and manifest during transmission or replication (e.g., the color of a thing does not color the atmosphere between the object and you, a program isn't running as it is being downloaded from the internet). Scientific descriptions that describe the behavior of things and predict outcomes are not generally explanatory in the way forms are, but simply are reflecting the regularities that forms produce. But forms go beyond mere regularity to embrace purpose and design.

With that in mind, we can note that for pre-modern Christian thought, the nature of God’s causing things to be is as their formal-efficient-final cause, the cause of not only their coming to be, but their coming to be out of nothing and directed towards God as their goal. Given this kind of divine causation of things and given their pre-existence in God, all things participated in God and God is the cause of all things in a still deeper way since God himself is the Truth, Goodness, Beauty and all other perfections of things.

So, for instance, God is not merely Good in himself and the cause of goodness in created things, but the very Goodness that is in God is analogically the goodness of created things which they never can, in themselves, possess except in relation to God. This is, in part, because the notion of a "good" is a set of analogically related concepts. For instance, when we ask what a pen is "good for," we are asking its purpose: to write with. When we ask what a "good pen" is, we are asking when a pen is a good pen: when it writes well (i.e., fulfills its purpose with excellence). The good of things can be considered merely in relation to other created things within the order of the world, but the ultimate Good of all things is their life together in and with God as Goodness itself. Things enjoy their good in virtue of their existence from God (and so existence itself is a good), in their divinely-appointed co-relations with other things within an ordered whole, and in their final goal within God’s purposes. Thomas’ doctrine of analogy comes in here when we speak of things as being "good" which, in one sense they are in themselves, but ultimately only are so in relation to God as "Good." Similar analyses would hold true for other perfections such as truth, knowledge, beauty, and so on.

Another corollary of Thomas’ teaching on analogy is that the creation itself has its own integrity as a created whole so that creation itself explains further things within it. God effectively wills all that happens to happen as it does, but not in such a way that that the true secondary causation among creatures and free choices of intelligent beings are in any way compromised (how that precisely works out is another matter to be addressed at another time). Thus, while it is true that in one sense "God causes the change of seasons" it is more accurate to say that "God causes the world, with its changing seasons, to be," allowing thereby for the full participation of all the created powers, secondary causes, and potentialities of the created order their proper role. While all things exist and continue to exist by the direct power of God, they are caused to exist, with all the qualities that they exhibit and exercise, in such a way that it is truly those things that do what they do and not that God makes them do what they do by a power that is extrinsic and external to them.

Moreover, in Thomas' ontology things share real natures, their "formal" constitution, by which they stand in a real and ordered relationships with one another as part of the created whole. Thus they are analogically related to one another, for instance, in that both humans, dogs, and dolphins are "animals" where the term "animal" is being used analogically with reference to real similarities between the various creatures (e.g., they all have senses and desires), despite how those commonalities are differently articulated (e.g., we do not hear in the same way as dogs or dolphins, not only in terms of the subjective experience of hearing but in the nature of the symbolic content that hearing communicates). Individuals and kinds of things are never merely isolated and atomistic objects standing in no essential relationships with other things, but are internally and intrinsically connected to them within a single ordered whole.

In terms of epistemology and language, language itself must also obviously be analogical, on Thomas’ view, and thus intrinsically involves a metaphysical component, assuming analogical relations among things. Knowledge, moreover, arises in the reception of and action upon the real, mediated through language, in which what is real reveals itself to us and any illusion can be unmasked as such within this kind of interaction. Indeed for Thomas, part of the potentiality of things is to be knowable and thus, e.g., our coming to know a chair is as much an event in the life of the chair unveiling itself to us as it is an event within us (therefore, there is no subject-object dichotomy nor the spectre of brute factuality; since all facts are interpreted, event-mediated facts). Since the meaning of creation is its constitution as a loving gift from God directed to a further graciously given end, this same order is present within the creation, for instance, in knowledge, which requires the loving and receptive perception of the knower in order for the real to be truly known as it gives itself over to the knower. This is the very antithesis of a Cartesian model of knowledge, which presupposes a distance and rupture between subject and object that simultaneously reduces the world to a set of externally related, atomistic, and mechanized objects (contrary to Thomas’ doctrine of creation) and theorizes our knowledge of those objects primarily in terms of instrumental control.

Moreover, on Thomas’ doctrine, all of created being symbolically discloses the divine, pointing to transcendent reality, not just as some undifferentiated "God of the Philosophers" but as the Triune God of Scripture. This is the case, in part, because all of the perfections of God (truth, being, goodness, beauty, etc.) are only manifest in the generation and utterance of the Logos in the Spirit. Thus our knowledge of God, ourselves, and the world is an analogous manifestation in us of God’s own Trinitarian knowledge of these things and thereby, as it were, our thinking God’s thoughts after him. Part of our participation in God, then, is our incorporation into the very inner life of the Trinity, which we have and grow in by grace.

Thus Thomas’ theories of truth and knowledge are thoroughly Trinitarian. So, for example, in De Veritate (q 4, art 4, resp) Thomas writes, "…for the divine Word to be perfect, it must express whatever is contained in that from which it had its origin…Consequently, whatever is contained in the Father’s knowledge is necessarily and entirely expressed by his only Word and in the very same manner in which all things are contained in his knowledge…Through his knowledge, moreover,the Father knows himself, and by knowing himself, he knows all other things. Hence his Word chiefly expresses the Father and, as a result, all other things which the Father knows by knowing himself. Therefore, because the Son is a word that perfectly expresses the Father, the Son also expresses all creatures." (Incidentally, it easily follows from this and the overall contours of Thomas’ epistemology that he would readily agree that the "presupposition of the ontological Trinity is the only basis for predication.")

Thomas writes earlier in De Veritate (Q 1, art 4) that "...a thing is said to be true principally because of its order to the truth of the divine intellect rather than because of its relation to the truth of a human intellect." Indeed Thomas goes on to insist that all knowledge ultimately comes from God, De Veritate (Q 1, art 8): "All [truth and knowledge] is entirely from God, because both [a] the very form of a thing, through which it is conformed, is from God, and [b] the truth itself insofar as it is the good of the intellect [is from God]...Hence, since every good and every form is from God, one must say, without any qualification, that every truth is from God." This is not merely to say that "all truth is God’s truth" in some superficial sense, but that truth itself is only constituted and understood in relation to God and, indeed, as Thomas says elsewhere, "In every act of thought and will, God is also thought and willed implicitly" (De Veritate Q 12, art 2, ad 1).

Therefore, for Thomas, theology and ontology, faith and reason, grace and nature, are coordinate ways of knowing and participation in the mind of God. There can be no philosophy independent of theology, for Thomas, since we can’t even raise the most basic of philosophical question—talk about "Being," basic ontology—without raising the question of created or uncreated being and the ratio and participation between them. Even Thomas’ famous "Five Ways", function in a thoroughly theological context, not as neutral "proofs" of God’s existence, but presupposing various theological concepts: divine simplicity, that God’s essence cannot be known in itself, the nature of divine causation, and so on. Faith and reason, therefore, cannot be seen in Thomas as strictly distinct, but are coordinate ways of knowing that represent different degrees of intensity of participation in the single reality of divine illumination in which all rational creatures participate. Reason, moreover, requires faith because the use of reason is always-already graced by God and faith, in turn, needs reason as its discursive explication.

Thus, contrary to many popular presentations, Thomas is no advocate of "natural theology." On the other hand, he is does not push the sufficiency of Scripture beyond its proper sphere in such a way so as to entirely negate the role of reason. Nevertheless, revelatio for Thomas is not radically discontinuous with other human knowing, but is simply a higher form of that same illumination that enlightens all men, intrinsically and inseparably conjoined with a created event that symbolically discloses the truth of God in a new and even unexpected and startling way, though it is also true that every created event always-already points to that truth. Thus "revelation" for Thomas (unlike later Catholics like Suarez and much of Protestantism) is not merely some kind of depositing of propositional content into the world with certain externally imposed guarantees of infallibility. Rather a true analogy exists between the knowledge granted in revelation and all other human knowing so that the two are mutually interpretive, even if a certain priority is given to revelation due to its greater participation in and manifestation of the Spirit’s illumination.

This completes, then, the basic presentation of the contours of Thomas Aquinas’ thought as a representative of pre-modern Christian theology. By no means should this be taken to provide a complete sketch of his thought (e.g., ethics is largely ignored). Rather this is simply an overview that focuses upon those aspects of Thomas that are most relevant to such later developments that grew into nominalism. Let us turn, then, to those developements.

Having explained Thomas in some detail, the rest of the story is easier since it can be described in terms of deviations from Thomas’ ways of thinking which had been built upon the thought of earlier Christian thinkers (particularly the Christian neo-platonism Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius). Let us turn then to the thought of John Duns Scotus (1266-1308).

There are several important shifts that Duns Scotus (and later, nominalism) introduced into wider questions as they had been explicated by Thomas. The major Scotist shift was a denial of the analogy of being and, with it, the analogical use of language. Scotus maintained that it is possible to consider "being" or "existence" in abstraction from the question of created or uncreated being, the absolute distinction between Creator and creature. In doing this, however, Scotus established the separation of philosophy (ontology and epistemology) from theology since it, on his view, it would be possible to construct a philosophical ontology that is unconstrained by and transcendentally prior to theology itself, philosophy thereby being permitted to set the conditions for theology. Other separations and dichotomies (nature/grace, nature/supernature, faith/reason) flow from this basic shift.

Since for Scotus language functions univocally, God and creation can be set univocally within one undifferentiated chain of being. This, however, introduces serious difficulties into language and its ability to refer since "being" can now refer univocally to two different realities—created and uncreated—and thus language, and our ideas and concepts expressed in language, become a mask over reality rather than a medium by which reality is able to reveal itself to us in the context of the event of knowing. This in turn begins to shift epistemology into a direction in which the subject and object of knowledge become increasingly related extrinsically and externally, rather than maintaining the kind of interior intentional connection that was found in earlier thought.

With regard to nature and supernature (and its concomitant, nature and grace), the Scotist picture involves a twofold separation and fission between God and the creation (even if Scotus’ intent in this separation was to safeguard the gratuity of grace). First, since God and creation are both situated within one univocal extension called "being" (which simultaneously blurs the proper distinction between Creator and creature), it is possible to explain and think about the world in relation to existence in general without reference to God in particular. Thus the world becomes the self-enclosed system of "nature," a material reality that remains complete in itself and at our disposal, not inherently opening towards and revelatory of God.

Second, God’s relation to the creation within this single extension of "being" must be theorized simply in terms of God’s degree of existence (quantity), rather than in a truly analogous possession of existence in an entirely different way (quality). For Scotus, God simply is to a greater degree than created things, rather than having an entirely different mode of existence. In this way, God becomes reduced to a being who is univocally like us, but more powerful in every respect, possessing our attributes to a maximal degree of empowerment. This thereby, in effect, identifies God’s essence with the omnipotent divine will. This provides the foundation for later divine "voluntarism" (which Luther and Calvin in some respects inherited), by which God’s absolute will is unconstrained by other aspects of his nature, raising questions such as "can God make 2 + 2 = 5 ?" and the spectre of an arbitrary divine will is raised.

Moreover, given this conceptualization of God’s relationship to the world, the operation of grace must be seen as an extrinsic operation that is super-added from outside of the creation—one self-enclosed being acting upon another within the wider realm of being, divine causality being simply a more powerful, but univocal parallel to created efficient causality. Creation is no longer, as for Thomas, in itself ordered to grace as a necessary condition for its eschatological completion and yet as something that can only be received as a sheer gift.

Since, on the Scotistic picture, grace becomes external to the order of nature, on an individual experiential level, the operation of grace becomes unknowable and undetectable except by a sheer act of faith. Moreover, grace tends to be reified into another layer of reality that must be super-added to nature as a further kind of "stuff" and which operates upon the individual soul as an external cause. Religion, thus, begins to be pushed to the margins of what is distinctively human and natural, a development that will have significant implications for the Renaissance isolation of the "secular" as a particular space of human existence, under the sole scrutiny of human reason.

In terms of faith and reason, then, for Scotus these are no longer two coordinate ways of knowing that mutually presuppose one another, but are extrinsically related, separate modes of knowledge. Reason can only know the world through ideas and language which are rendered problematic by the way in which they potentially mask reality and, therefore, they must be secured by an act of the divine will (as later happens in Descartes’ Meditations).

Faith, on the other hand, works on the level of grace and the supernatural and must only deal with discrete, revealed punctiliar entities—either revealed facts or grace-given experiences that are incommensurate with human experience as a whole. In terms of theological facts, special revelation becomes a wholly unique mode of divine disclosure, discontinuous with natural revelation, enshrined, on some models, in the revelation of individual propositional truths proposed to faith (on some views of Scripture) or through externally imposed authority (on some views of the magisterium).

In terms of human experience, salvation becomes something that remains outside of our conscious personal life. Rather, in order to be saved (i.e. attain one's supernatural end through grace), a person must strive to receive grace by doing those things specifically revealed as granting grace (sacraments, spiritual and corporal works of mercy, etc.) and avoiding things revealed as destroying grace (mortal sin). This, in turn, easily falls into those "mechanized" or "magical" views of sacramental causality that were criticized by both the Reformers and later Catholic theologians.

Of course, most of these developments are not to be found in Scotus himself in any explicit form, but awaited their unfolding in the later thought of various theologians (e.g., Ockham, Biel) and the ways in which these trends trickled down into popular piety and, still later, even into Enlightenment philosophy (e.g., Descartes). From here, then, let's turn to some of the further development we find in Ockham.

William of Ockham represents a further radicalization of the steps that Scotus had already taken. He maintains Scotus’ view on the univocity of being and language, but gives it a further twist by saying that language and reality is also simultaneously wholly equivocal. So, for example, not only does every being exist in such a way that the term "exists" can be univocally (and thus emptily) applied to every existing thing, but it is also the case that each thing’s existence is so unique and distinct from every other’s existence that the term "exists" is also completely equivocal (and again empty).

Since the order of creation (nature) is a closed system of non-analogically related objects, Ockham maintains that no existing thing stands in any essential (internal, intrinsic) relation to any other existing thing. Thus no creature is in any sense dependent upon or explained by creation in general (as for Thomas with his notions of causality). Rather it is radically contingent and immediately dependent upon the divine will (in keeping with Scotus' divine voluntarism), the inscrutable force behind everything. This virtually denies any kind of true secondary causation. Moreover, the divine will is absolute and can literally do anything (potentia absoluta; for example, making 2+2=5) though in God's actual ordering of things he (arbitrarily?) limits himself (potentia ordinata).

Language, for Ockham, and with it knowledge, is likewise only explicable by reference to a divine will (as Descartes will later repeat) since the ability to interact with and manipulate the real is no guarantee of truth. And, furthermore, since each and every thing is a discrete kind of existence, equivocal and extrinsic in relation to every other, our names for things and, especially, categories of things ("human," "animal," etc.) do not refer to real natures that are shared in the world but simply to ideas that are in our minds. Names become mental placeholders for various contingent groupings of things. This, however, makes the possibility of illusion and deception a great difficulty apart from complete faith in the divine will (and thus we have the twin developments of Descartes’ philosophical doubt and Luther’s theological search for assurance).

In terms of faith and reason, the only certainty knowable by reason in itself, says Ockham, is "I am a living thing" (quoting Augustine). Unlike Augustine, however, Ockham does not ground the notion of "life" within a creation that analogically participates in the divine life. Rather, human life is, for Ockham, largely severed from the world as a whole and a doctrine of creation since those things are only knowable subsequent to my discovery of myself. Faith, moreover, can only know God as a being, an object, apart from any human being and apart from oneself since God is not disclosed within the self. Thus the order of the supernatural and grace is unknowable except as externally and extrinsically revealed.

The construction of the modern as that is worked out in later philosophy is only a carrying forward of these basic shifts that are already in place. The ways in which this unfolds and develops is too diverse and complex to address adequately here. Nevertheless, in order to gain some concept of this development, we can take Descartes as a brief example, particularly as he explicates his view in his well-known Meditations on First Philosophy and his Discourse on Method.

The effects of late medieval shifts are evident first of all in Descartes' individualistic methodology, by which he places himself in isolation for the purposes self-reflection, carrying forward nominalist atomism and division between the individual subject and all possible objects of knowledge. Second, Descartes assumes, for methodological purposes, that the epistemic choice is one between apodictic certainty and skepticism, operating within an assumed ontology of knowledge in which all relations to the knowledge are placed under suspicion.

Third, Descartes presupposes a foundationalist approach to knowledge, entwined with a correspondence theory of truth and representationalist theory of mind. Structuring knowledge as linear and deductive, proceeding from certainty to certainty, treats knolwedge as divisible into discrete propositional elements that are then related to one another externally, rather than as arising together within a single and seamless disclosive event. This placed in the context of a subject-object dichotomy where the distance between the knower and known remains a chasm to be breached and thus not a matter of co-belonging of knower and known in a movement both opening outward and receptive, so that the known becomes internal to the knower and vice versa. Thus, the question is always one of whether or not the reality that forever remains "out there" corresponds to ideas in a mind that bears no essential relation to the knowable in God.

Fourth, in terms of wider ontology, material objects are conceived by Descartes in thoroughly spatialized terms as mere res extenda, stripped of thier teleological position within a single ordered whole. Morever, given nominalist assumptions about the univocity and equivocity of ideas, the substantiality of things is wholly evacuated so that the the paradigm of a substance is no longer a living thing with its activity and dynamism, but the nihilistic emptiness of, e.g., a ball of wax denuded of all material and imaginables qualities until all that is left is a bare and contentless "idea."

Finally, when God does emerge within Descartes' project, he comes in only at a second stage, posterior to reason and self-awareness, and as as abstract "perfection" who functions as the external guarantor of truth for beings, whose mind/body dualism has isolated them from the world outside of the mind. The body is no longer the materiality wholly informed by the soul as its principle of life and organization, but a mechanical extension of matter bearing no intrinsic relation to a soul that barely seems located in space or time.

While much more could be said here and further examples added, the Cartesian outlook will have to suffice as representive of wider trends. If postmodernism is a response to and critique of these kinds of trends and shifts that characterize the emergence of the "modern," then arguably the postmodern can also be an opportunity for Christians to retrieve a pre-modern understanding of reality in relation to the God of Jesus Christ.