Love and the Divine

The Enlightenment has long been presented as a quest to unshackle the world from Christian civilization and create a fertile climate for philosophy. But the findings of recent scholarship indicate that God did not just survive the Enlightenment but actually thrived. Admittedly, great changes did take place in the eighteenth century, also for believers, chiefly in relation to their understanding of God. This chapter sets out to offer a historical survey of notions of divine impassibility, and then closely examines the early modern ‘transvaluation of values’ that cleared the way to thinking (once again) of a pathetic and loving God.