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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

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.