ABSTRACT
Descartes’ cogito is an idea, but its birth is more than an event in the history of ideas. The Augustinian self who is its alleged precursor helps us both to understand this event in theological terms, and to see in more profound depth just what was dying as this creature was born. Although Descartes is often credited with rigidifying an Augustinian dualism between mind and body, his res cogitans is symptomatic of an altogether different caesura already well underway by the seventeenth century. Now the individual will – distinct and separated from the love of beauty, the longing for God, or the praise of Christ – becomes a will to power, and it is set over against God’s body, which must be placed under house arrest. One need only consider the attempts to police the Church by the early modern political philosophy at the root of our own political arrangements to bear out this view. 1 One need only consider Christianity’s contemporary confusion and domestication to see how successful it has been.
