Thread by @johnmilbank3

Thesis: the two most decisive things in modernity are distorted Augustine: 1. Political Economy is genealogically Jansenist. 2. Legitimation by coordinated individual rights is genealogically Malebranchian. The hidden hand instead of ethics. Occasionalism instead of relationality

Therefore one could say that the main God of modernity was not a deistic God, nor a no-God, but a heterodox Christian ‘God of the gaps’. Secularisation has left us either just with the gaps or with sinister immanent substitutes for an idolised deity.

Recent research would seem to suggest a certain French revolutionary oscillation between Jansenist ideas of the total emergent providential consensus of individual wills that could favour direct democracy and Malebranchian ones of representatives laying down reliable general laws

There’s much more sense here of the infallibility of representatives (crucially in the Abbé Sieyes) and the separation of the general from the specific than in English constitutional tradition. Malebranche’s legacy is the key.

But things get more complicated insofar as Rousseau’s secularised rendering of Malebranche’s general will was less ‘ecclesiological’ (National Assembly as ‘the Church’) than Sieyes. He read general will still more ‘occasionally’ as implying direct democracy.

But all these theories are semi-secularised (their authors were still theists) versions of a perverted Augustine such that the divine will interacts with and overrules ours and links individuals in lieu of real relations in terms of a zero-sum contest of merely ontic realities.

It’s in other words onto-theological with a vengeance.

For far too long everyone seems to have assumed that all those Abbe’s that helped make the French Revolution were just cynical deists. But no: they were real Christians, if poor theologians. Often in a Gallican tradition linked to specific theological currents.

Thus a delayed backlash against both the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (ending tolerance of Huguenots) and Unigenitus (Papal bull vs Jansenism and Gallicanism, asked for by Louis XIV) is a factor in the French Revolution.

It goes without saying that the bastardised Augustinian origins of modernity imply that liberalism is a pessimistic not optimistic doctrine. Far from ignoring original sin as usually said by ‘conservatives’ it overdoses on human degeneracy. (See Milbank and Pabst Pol. of Virtue)