28 Islam and Modernity
by the forms of authority they used to produce. Contestation is now polarised by
the emerging centres of power and is no longer dissipated within the chasm that
once separated the immanent and transcendent spheres.
The emerging secular thinkers of the epoch contributed to give meaning to
the process by defying any resurgent temptation of a compromising of religious
reformers with power, which would support theocratic forms of government
- a temptation that was very much alive through the entire era of the Wars of
Religion, was ignited by the Protestant Reformation and was terminated by
the Peace of Westphalia, and whose most powerful incorporation, apart from
some examples from the experience of leading reformers (like Calvin’s Geneva),
corresponds to the fi rst stage of the ‘puritan revolution’ of Oliver Cromwell. In
order to pursue this goal, fi rst Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), then Thomas
Hobbes, and fi nally, with more sophisticated tools, Baruch Spinoza (1632–77)
attempted to re-create a principle of social cohesion that was no longer depend-
ent on the cycles of upheaval and restoration, which had endangered the exist-
ence itself of the order of Latin Christendom at a time when the Ottoman threat
was becoming most acute. Hobbes was a lucid theorist of the ultimate meaning
of the sacralisation of national kingship that, originating in the period of the
ecumenical renaissance in parallel with the erosion of the dual authority of pope
and emperor, reached its apogee with the rise of absolutist monarchic rule in the
seventeenth century. Hobbes delivered the image of the Leviathan, originally
a biblical monster, as a direct metamorphosis of the Christ and his body, the
church, now being transformed, in the shape of the absolutist state, into a mortal
God or supreme super-person. This is evident from the frontispiece of the origi-
nal edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, where this is represented, not as a biblical
monster, but as a giant holding the pastoral staff on his left and the sword on his
right – exactly in the inverted posture of the medieval representation of the dual
yet converging spiritual and temporal powers as a unifi ed body, whose head
is the Christ (Taubes 1983). According to this Hobbesian representation and
related theory, the state represents an inversion of the hierarchy of powers of the
church, spiritual and temporal.
While the rigorous diagnosis of Hobbes singularises Western modern politi-
cal theory and leaves no space for seeking patterns of cross-cultural compari-
sons and intercivilisational dynamics, Spinoza offers a more open approach,
since he was heir to a more composite philosophical heritage, not anchored in
the exclusive myths supporting the cohesion of Latin Christendom. The son
of a Sephardic Jewish family that had resettled in Amsterdam because of the
Catholic persecutions in the Iberian peninsula – formerly al-Andalus – he unset-
tled the Western trajectory of modern thought through the injection of motives
drawn from other traditions. Spinoza pieced together distinct elements, some
of which echo the most daring visions of Islamic philosophy and rationalist
speculative theology, to deliver a highly original reinterpretation of the relation