Abstract

In a previous article,1 I suggested how certain aspects of postmodernist thought might be regarded as secularized expressions of theological ideas rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In this article, I attempt to look back briefly at the two great modern movements of Western thought and sensibility known as ‘the Enlightenment’ and ‘Romanticism’, to see how they too might be viewed as secularized forms or transformations of Judaeo-Christian theological themes. In later articles, I hope to extend this line of enquiry further, to see if it could be used to interpret thinkers like Hegel and Marx, whose impact on modernity may owe less to their own originality than to the power of the Western religious and theological tradition from which they both sprang.