Epistemology of ingratitude

Blumenberg writes ( Legitimacy of the Modern Age ) that with Bacon, Kepler, and particularly Leibniz, the Augustinian suspicion of curiosity is overcome, and knowledge thereafter “justifies itself; it does not owe thanks for itself to God; it no longer has any tinge of illumination or graciously permitted participation but rests on its own evidence, from which GOd and man cannot escape.”

More elaborately, the scholastics “had seen man’s relation to reality as a triangular relation mediated by the divinity. Cognitive certainty was possible because God guaranteed man’s participation in his creative rationality when He brought him into the fellowship of His world idea and wanted to furnish him, accordgint to the measure of His grace, with insight into the conception of nature. Any autonomous step beyond this conception strained the relation of dependence and the depth of thanks. This triangular relation is now dissolved; human knowledge is commensurable with divine knowledge, on the basis, in fact, of the object itself and its necessity.”