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The early responses to the Treatise show that the issue of “atheism” was neither peripheral nor irrelevant to the way that Hume's own contemporaries understood his aims and objectives. Most contemporary Hume scholars maintain, however, that this label, not only misrepresents Hume's intentions in the Treatise but that it also misrepresents his position on the subject of religion as presented in his later writings (which are understood to be more “directly” or “explicitly” concerned with religion). The immediate aim of this chapter is to develop a clearer understanding of the way that Hume and his contemporaries interpreted “atheism” and the specific doctrines that were associated with it. Once this standard is (back) in place, we will be in a position to determine the extent to which the charge of “atheism” fits the actual content of the Treatise.

Mendelssohn sees Jacobi's favoring of republicanism as a rhetorical subterfuge aimed at promoting religious despotism. For Mendelssohn, Jacobi's rejection of the authority of reason in metaphysics leads to religious oppression and Mendelssohn argues that when obeying the demands of reason we are most free. Mendelssohn holds that reason confirms the existence of a providential, good God and secures human individuality. Spinoza's error stems from his misunderstanding the principle of sufficient reason. Mendelssohn interprets Lessing's Spinozism as an innocuous type that is grounded in an attempt to give rational sense to Christian mysteries. Mendelssohn contrasts his Jewish concept of faith with Jacobi's Christian faith. Judaism seeks to unite of religion and reason, while Jacobi's Christianity creates a dichotomy between the two. In defending theism, Mendelssohn adopts a form of pragmatic religious idealism based on the efficacy of religious belief in promoting human flourishing.

In the first chapter I study the substance-mode relation in Spinoza, and criticize Edwin Curley's influential interpretation of the nature of this relation. Relying on a variety of texts and considerations, I establish that Spinozist modes both inhere in and are predicated of the substance. I show that Pierre Bayle's famous critique of Spinoza's claim that all things inhere in God is based on crucial misunderstandings. I also argue that this claim of Spinoza's involves no category mistake, and I criticize Curley's use of the principle of charity to motivate his reading. Finally, I discuss the similarities between Spinoza's understanding of modes and current trope theories.

This chapter examines the structurally determined recalcitrance of the mediating border in the grandiose expansion of typological thinking that is Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Focusing on Hegel’s treatment of the “Oriental World,” the chapter pays particularly close attention to his views on ancient Indian and ancient Hebraic cultures, both of which trouble him because they are situated on crucial frontiers in the trajectory of history from necessity to freedom, and from prehumanity to humanity as such. For Hegel, these two uncanny cultural Others are bound together, among other things, by the fact that both Sanskrit (language) and Hebrew (texts) play the role of anticipatory letter with respect to modern languages and thought. The motif of the pantheism of Oriental thought is further examined here, in connection with Hegel’s anxiety about materiality. Finally, the chapter examines the repetitions of the anxiety about the borderline impingements between matter and mind with respect to “modern” transitional processes such as the role of Islam, the Crusades, the French Revolution, and the future in America itself. The moment of Hegelian history turns out to be suspended somewhere between its already (over) and its not yet.

This chapter examines the thesis that the salient feature of modern Jewish thought is the dialogical imagination, an act of theopoiesis centered on the figural iconization of the invisible deity in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic terms. The emphasis on the dialogical, which proceeds from Hermann Cohen's logical principle of correlation, bears the risk that what should not be subject to imaginary representation invariably will be so represented, even in the guise of the nonrepresentable. Transcendence, which is a property of the uniqueness (Einzigkeit) as opposed to the unity (Einheit) of God, signifies the utter dissimilarity and incommensurability of the divine; inescapably, however, the transcendent becomes immanent to thinking insofar as there is no way to think the unthinkable that does not encroach on its unthinkability. The infinitude of transcendence is unknowable, not because there is some hidden essence that cannot be known, but because transcendence is expressive of the continuous manifestations of finitude by which the unlimited is delimited. The chasm between infinite and finite is narrowed to the extent that the transcendent is immanent, which is necessitated by the fact that God serves as an ethical ideal that imposes a mutual obligation on divine and human through the mediation of the world. Moreover, to generate the personification of transcendence, which is required by Cohen's own notion of divine forgiveness and goodness, the archetype, the originary-image whence all images originate, would have to be conceived itself imagistically. Like Cohen, Rosenzweig and Buber promote a dialogical thinking that is rooted in the principle of correlation that preserves the separate identities of God, human, and world. But they, too, acquiesce inevitably to the anthropocentric personification of transcendence.

"The Myth of Absence,” traces the myth that the philosophes and the mechanistic cosmology had eliminated the divine. It demonstrates that several key mythemes—the mythless age, the de-divination of nature, nihilism, and the death of God—had a conjoined genesis in German philosophical circles several decades before Nietzsche. Focusing on the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Jacobi, and Friedrich Schiller, it shows how a generation of German philosophers came to believe that they lived in a uniquely mythless epoch and then transmitted this particular lament to later generations, including our own. Turning to Jacob Burckhardt, it shows how the myth-of-the-end-of-myth was projected backward, producing the historiography of other epochs, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment

Gifford Pinchot first met John Muir in 1896, while on a trip through the West to study possible sites for new forest preserves. Pinchot was much impressed by Muir, twenty-seven years his senior, and recalled the meeting fifty years later in his autobiography. He described Muir as “cordial, and a most fascinating talker, I took to him at once.” Muir, in his writings of this period, was explicitly complimentary of Pinchot’s efforts at sustainable forestry. At the Grand Canyon, Muir and Pinchot struck off on their own and “spent an unforgettable day on the rim of the prodigious chasm, letting it soak in.” They came across a tarantula and Muir wouldn’t let Pinchot kill it: “He said it had as much right there as we did.” Within a year, however, Muir had complained bitterly and publicly about Pinchot’s decision to allow grazing in the national forest reserves. This rift between the Moralist (Muir) and the Aggregator (Pinchot) shaped the two wings of the environmental movement, and its original configuration owes much to attitudes developed in the early life and work of each man. Muir entered the University of Wisconsin in 1861, the year the Civil War broke out. Although he was almost twenty-three, his last formal schooling had been interrupted at the age of eleven, when his family emigrated from Scotland. His father, Daniel, a religious zealot, had no use for any book but the Bible. The elder Muir, who joined ever more extreme sects in search of one sufficiently pure and exacting, chose eighty acres of virgin land and put his eldest son John to work clearing it. Days were spent cutting trees and grubbing out roots, and nights were given over to memorizing Scripture. Daniel Muir planted only corn and wheat for cash crops, and the farmland was worn out in only eight years. Choosing a new and larger plot, the family moved and repeated the process. Again, the hardest work fell to John as his father spent all of his time studying the Bible and preaching to anyone who would listen.

In the wild garden of an early America there coiled and crawled the devil’s own plenty of poisonous vipers—cottonmouths, copperheads, coral snakes, the whole nasty family of rattlers and sidewinders. A naturalist roaming far from the settlements regularly ran the risk of a fatal snake bite. Fortunately, he was reassured by the field experts of the day, the deadly reptile always furnishes its own antidote. It conceals itself in the very plants whose roots can counteract its poison, plants like the so-called “Indian snakeroot.” As the viper sank its sharp fangs into your leg, you simply pulled up the roots of that plant, quickly chewed them down, and laughed in the viper’s face. You were instantly immune. How many backwoods naturalists and hunters died from believing that bit of advice is not known. Science, ever improving its hypotheses, now suggests carrying a snakebite kit in your pack or calling in a helicopter. But before we dismiss the old advice as completely foolish, we might ask whether it might not have had some useful, genuine logic in it. Sometimes the remedy for wounds does indeed lie near at hand among the shrubs and weeds in which the reptile lives; and sometimes dangerous forces do indeed suggest, or even contain, their own antidote. Take, for instance, the case of North America’s continuing environmental degradation. What we humans have done over the past five hundred years to maim this continent and tear apart its fabric of life is in large degree the consequence of the Judeo-Christian religious ethos and its modern secular offspring—science, industrial capitalism, and technology. I would put almost all the blame on the modern secular offspring, but I have to agree that religion too has been a deadly viper that has left its marks on the body of nature. Paradoxically, I would add what no one else seems to have noticed: an Indian snakeroot for this venom has appeared in the reptile’s own nest. The antidote for environmental destruction has been a movement called environmentalism and that movement has, in the United States, owed much of its program, temperament, and drive to the influence of Protestantism.

When the first Sufi text to be translated into European languages, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, was published in 1671, some correctly identified it as mystical theology, but more took it as support for a novel Western theology, called Deism. This chapter looks at the origins and nature of Deism and of the other Enlightenment theologies that would later be used to revise the Western understanding of Sufism. The earliest of these was the prisca theologia and perennialism, developed during the Renaissance Neoplatonic revival that is often (wrongly) understood as Hermetic, and which has its origins in early Christianity. A variant, called universalism, was promoted by Guillaume Postel in sixteenth-century France. Then, in late seventeenth-century England, the Deist John Toland promoted Spinoza’s Pantheism and developed a new understanding of the esoteric, called “anti-exotericism.”

This chapter traces a change in Florovsky’s evaluation of Vladimir Solovyov’s religious philosophy. Up to 1922, Florovsky saw Solovyov as an originator of the school of “integral knoweldge” and as an authentic interpreter of Orthodox theology. As Florovsky’s own thought matured in emigration, he began to emphasize Solovyov’s dependence on German Idealism and the tendency of his thought towards pantheism, rationalism, organicism, and determinism. Florovsky’s in-depth study of the Church Fathers in the 1920s became an indirect refutation of the problematic aspects of Solovyov’s system.