Materialism in Defense of Faith

In a dense paragraph, Milbank (“Theology Without Substance, Part 1,” Journal of Literature and Theology, 1988) draws on Paolo Rossi’s Dark Abyss of Time describes how English and Neopolitan writers put Spinoza, Hobbes, and de Lapeyrere to work in defense of orthodoxy – even in defense of Scripture and biblical chronology:

“certain
advocates (in differing speculative degrees) of the human origin of language
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely the Englishmen John
Woodward, Edward Stillingfleet, Samuel Shuckford and William Warburton,
together with the Neapolitan, Giambattista Vico, are not straightforwardly
motivated by Enlightenment considerations. Instead, curious though
it may seem, they borrow and adapt from the materialist theses of ‘the
triumvirate of demons’—Hobbes, Spinoza and Isaac de Lapeyrere—in the
interests of a strictly Christian apologetic. Their purpose is precisely to refute
enthusiasts for Egyptian, Babylonian and Chinese antiquity—hermeticists,
Jesuits and others—who discovered in the symbolic writing of these ancient
cultures evidence of a buried primordial wisdom and traces of an original,
universal revelation, which was none other than the first handing-over of
language to human beings. This was of a piece with an esotericizing
syncretism, perceived by our writers as compromising the unique dignity of
the scriptures. As the idea of a divinely-revealed language lay at the heart of
these claims, counter-esotericists would be attracted by the ideas of someone like John Locke, who presented Adam as learning language slowly, and with
great labour. Along with the demythologizing of the hieroglyphs went the
possibility of doubting the claims of these ancient civilizations to great
antiquity, claims which often exceeded the six thousand years of Biblical
chronology recently computed by Archbishop Ussher, and also the opportunity
to present the cultic use of hieroglyphs as the result of priestly and
political trickery. Paulo Rossi correctly points out that the doubting of great
antiquity seemed at the time, for Vico and others, the genuinely critical path,
because such claims appeared to emerge merely from the inevitable ‘pride of
nations’ (3-4).

Early modern intellectual history in a paragraph.