Jesus and Augustine: The God of Terror and the Origins of European Doubt

Abstract

This article explores a central current of religious doubt in the West, from Sebastian Castellio in the sixteenth century to Ludwig Feuerbach in the nineteenth. It argues that theologies of arbitrary judgment — chiefly Augustinian — have served as a major stimulus to scepticism and doubt in the modern era. The claim is that philosophical suspicion that the God of orthodoxy is an invention rests on a set of ethical intuitions, mostly Christian, leading to the apparent paradox that many of the fiercest critics of Christianity have listed Jesus Christ among their intellectual sources. Such an alignment, it is argued, cannot be regarded as purely tactical, even in Enlightenment figures such as Baruch Spinoza and Voltaire. If, as can be shown, religious reasoning was so central to the psychology of radical criticism and doubt, it may be time to drop the terminology of “secularisation” altogether.