Redeeming Mary?

Is Mary Wollstonecraft a lost ally of Benedict XVI? That is the bold suggestion Erika Bachiochi makes in her recent essay, “To Redeem Reason.”

*The arguments developed in this essay are presented here in necessarily condensed form. They are treated at far greater length in my book Autópsia do Feminismo, where the historical, theological, and philosophical foundations of this analysis are examined in detail. As the work has not yet been translated into English, I have sought in the present text to offer a careful synthesis of its central claims and bibligraphy, without repeatedly interrupting the argument with self-referential citations.

In her recent essay, “To Redeem Reason,” Erika Bachiochi revisits the work and legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft with an ambitious aim: to recover her from a long-standing distortion. For generations, Wollstonecraft has been remembered less as a moral and religious thinker than as a symbol of sexual libertinism and radical rationalism — a reputation shaped in no small part by William Godwin’s posthumous biography. That portrayal proved enduring and eclipsed the theological seriousness and moral vocabulary that saturate her writings.1

From my tiny part, I always stated that Bachiochi is right to resist this reduction. Wollstonecraft definitly was not a secular ideologue in the current sense. Her work is deeply marked by religious conviction, moral language, and an appeal to reason understood as something more than a cold instrumental calculation.

In this new article, however, Bachiochi advances a more ambitious claim.

Wollstonecraft, she argues, should not be situated within the trajectory of radical Enlightenment rationalism at all. When her political and religious writings are read together, she appears aligned with a tradition critical of modern rationalism itself — a tradition that Bachiochi provocatively associates with Benedict XVI. On this reading, Wollstonecraft stands closer to Benedict’s vision of faith purifying reason, and reason purifying faith, than to the secular radicals typically invoked in narratives of feminist origins.

This is a serious proposal. It is also a high-stakes one. For the implications extend beyond the rehabilitation of a single eighteenth-century thinker, they touch upon the philosophical genealogy of modern feminism itself.

To assess this claim, one must recall the framework within which Benedict XVI articulated his diagnosis of modernity. In the Regensburg lecture “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections”, Benedict argued that modernity’s reduction of reason to the empirically verifiable had effectively excluded from rational discourse the fundamental questions of God, moral truth, and the meaning of human existence. In doing so, reason became self-enclosed and severed from the original spirit of the universitas — the integrated search for truth.2

For Benedict, the roots of this crisis lay in a gradual rejection of the Logos and of the profound synthesis between Greek philosophy and Christian revelation. The first decisive rupture, he suggested, emerged in late medieval voluntarism, particularly in the thought of Duns Scotus, where the divine will was increasingly conceived as prior to, and potentially independent from, divine reason. From there, further developments— exacerbated by the Protestant Reformation — reconfigured the relationship between reason, will, and authority in ways that would reverberate through modern political thought.

It is within this broad narrative that Bachiochi situates Wollstonecraft. Beginning with Luther and Calvin, she traces a redefinition of authority whose consequences extended beyond ecclesial structures, touching the domestic and political orders alike. If law becomes primarily the expression of will, authority risks detachment from intelligible moral order. In the household, this transformation acquires particular weight. Wollstonecraft, according to Bachiochi, grasped the political and household implications of this transformation and responded with a defense of women’s education rooted in a rejection of voluntarism and of Cartesian rationalism alike.

Well, there is genuine insight here. Wollstonecraft really cannot be reduced to a simple transmitter of the “rights of man” in a French way, because her critique of arbitrary power is framed in moral and religious terms. The question, however, is not whether she rejected certain expressions of modern rationalism, but on what philosophical grounds she did so.

Does her opposition to arbitrary will constitute a recovery of lex naturalis in anything resembling its Augustinian or Thomistic articulation? Or does it unfold within the very Protestant and Enlightenment transformations that Benedict himself identifies as instrumental in the eclipse of the Logos?

When Wollstonecraft speaks of “natural law,” what does she mean by nature?

Answering this question requires a more precise account of what distinguishes lex naturalis from modern natural rights theory, particularly as it developed within the British Enlightenment.

Talking about natural law, but what nature?

It is undeniable that Wollstonecraft’s writings are saturated with the language of natural law, virtue, duty, God, and reason. She declares, for example, that it is not God’s power she fears, but that she submits not to arbitrary will, but to “unerring reason.” Such formulations sound almost alien in contemporary feminist discourse. When placed beside Simone de Beauvoir’s candid assertion — “je ne crois pas dans une nature humaine” — the contrast appears dramatic. One speaks confidently of nature, reason, and moral accountability before God; the other seems to denies that human nature exists at all.3

At first glance, the gulf seems absolute.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the mere presence of theological language situates Wollstonecraft within a pre-modern metaphysical framework. Modern rationalism did not announce itself as blasphemy. For a considerable period, it advanced in apparent harmony with Christian orthodoxy. The seventeenth century was not an age of open atheism, but of intense theological vitality where jurists and philosophers such as Suárez, Grotius, Pufendorf, Spinoza, and Locke labored to reconcile emerging political doctrines with Scripture. Neither Rabelais nor Montaigne inclined toward atheism; nor were Hobbes or Spinoza atheists in any straightforward sense, despite later reputations.

The decisive shift of early modern thought lay elsewhere. The defining mark of early modern rationalism was not atheism, nor even secularism in its contemporary sense, but the subversion of the conception of nature.

The classical conception of physis — as recovered and systematized within the framework of lex naturalis — gradually gave way to another understanding. In the older view, nature referred to the intelligible structure of being, to form as intrinsic principle, to the teleological orientation that rendered moral order intelligible. In the emerging modern natural law, nature increasingly signified something external: an environment, a field of forces, a set of constraints within which human beings found themselves situated.4

Far from Swan’s way, long before the French revolutionaries could dream of hanging the last king with the entrails of the last priest, the deeper revolution had already occurred, and it was this prior transformation that reconfigured the meaning of morality, law, and authority.

That the crisis of the anti-Logos is fundamentally a crisis of form — of nature as the intelligible structure of things — has been perceptively noticed by Mary Harrington. Reflecting on the dissolving effects of technology in her essay “The Nature of Chickens,” she observes:

Having arrived there, I reflected that it’s difficult to write about the effect of technology without coming up against the solvent effect its operation has on the forms of things. But we’re so far into the dissolving that forms as such are scarcely available as ideas, unless we retrieve key concepts from the medieval philosophy that preceded our technological moment to help us do so.

Although Thomas Hobbes did not invent this subversion, he was its first systematic articulator and may rightly be called the founder of modern natural law. Beginning from a radically abstracted individual, he reconstructed political society from a hypothetical “state of nature.” John Locke would follow, refining rather than overturning the model. Even in its more moderate forms, modern natural law reasons about human nature as an isolated individual unit, severed from prior communal and teleological determinations.5

So, too, when Mary Wollstonecraft speaks of “natural instinct” and of a “law of nature,” she does so within the modern conceptual grammar already outlined. These terms function within the logic of a “state of nature” that serves as a normative baseline, the measure against which the justice or corruption of English civilization is evaluated.6

Her polemic against Rousseau makes this clear. She rejects his account of feminine nature and his idealization of what he called “the night of sensual ignorance” as humanity’s authentic natural state. Yet her alternative does not abandon the state-of-nature framework. She writes:

If it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, from whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be? Arguments of this sort are an insult to common sense, and have a whiff of passion about them. I hope that in this enlightened age the divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, can be challenged without danger to the challenger;

The logic of this argument is revealing. Nature appears here as a given empirical condition susceptible to evaluation and modification. It is something that can be intensified, corrected, or resisted. Within a classical metaphysical framework, the question would be unintelligible. One would not ask why a naturally just man should strive to become more just than nature intended. In that framework, nature is form and telos, not adjustable baseline.7

To be fair, this language of nature reveals a great deal, though it does not resolve the question entirely. To determine more precisely which strand of the modern tradition her work inhabits, it is necessary to situate her within her proper intellectual lineage in English tradition. Only then can we assess the true scope — and the limits — of her Rational Dissenting.

Wollstonecraft Within the Whig Horizon

Although Wollstonecraft’s reputation was dramatically reshaped after her death — particularly following the publication of Maria — the immediate reception of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was neither scandalized nor ecstatic. Her arguments were debated seriously within intellectual circles and, in many cases, received with measured approval. Even The Critical Review, hardly a radical platform, endorsed aspects of her proposals for female education.8

There was no immediate outrage because her arguments did not at first present themselves as civilizational ruptures. Of course, we are conveniently setting aside Horace Walpole and his theatrical cries — Hyæna in petticoats! A serpent masquerading as a philosopher! — not least because his correspondent, Hannah More, by her own admission, neither read nor cared for her countrywoman’s treatise on female education. A remarkably prudent strategy, one might add. Had she actually read it, she would have discovered far fewer republican heresies than she seemed eager to denounce.

Wollstonecraft’s sweet invocations of modesty and virtue, after all, harmonized quite comfortably with an already well-established current within English intellectual life.

By the late seventeenth century, women had begun to enter public theological and philosophical discourse in discernible ways. Early evangelical women, along with later figures engaged with Enlightenment philosophy, had already developed accounts of female moral and rational agency. Damaris Masham, Catharine Cockburn, Elizabeth Burnet, Elizabeth Carter, Catharine Talbot, and Mary Astell participated in debates concerning reason, virtue, education, and the moral status of women. Their efforts formed part of a recognizable trajectory within English Protestant culture.9

The British Enlightenment was not an abstract rationalist movement detached from religious life. It was Protestant in tone and Whig in political orientation, where even prominent Anglican clergy aligned with Whiggism — Gilbert Burnet, Joseph Butler, Thomas Secker — actively supported female education and moral formation. Thinkers such as Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith formed the conceptual environment within which Wollstonecraft’s arguments were intelligible. The rational individual, historical progress, and the state of nature as normative baseline were shared assumptions across the spectrum.10

As one might expect, however, this shared intellectual field was far from uniform. The dispute between moral rationalism and Scottish sentimentalism divided many of the period’s leading thinkers. While Hume and his successors grounded morality in sympathy and sentiment, rationalists such as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price defended the objectivity of moral truth as accessible to reflective reason. Similarly, tensions between Lockean empiricism and moral Platonism shaped debates concerning knowledge and obligation. At the same time, the expansion of commercial society generated persistent ambiguities about the relationship between private interest and public good, as well as between domestic virtue and civic responsibility.

It is within this field of tensions that Wollstonecraft must be situated.

Influenced by her mentor Richard Price, she affirmed the objectivity of moral truth and the authority of reflective reason. She resisted sentimental reductions of virtue and insisted upon the centrality of rational self-discipline. Yet the categories within which she operated — conscience, inward reflection, moral autonomy — were unmistakably modern. Her defense of female education did not appeal to a recovered sacramental hierarchy or to participatory metaphysics; it appealed to the rational capacities of the moral subject within a constitutional order.11

This context also clarifies why it is correct, as Bachiochi observes, to characterize the dispute between Burke and Wollstonecraft as intra-Christian. The explanation, however, does not rest in Burke’s conservatism or in any putative adherence to and “older standards of human values”, whatever that means. It resides at a deeper structural level. Their disagreement unfolded within a common intellectual and theological framework that shaped the very terms of their conflict.

In the end of the day, both thinkers were Whigs.12

The decisive point in Wollstonecraft’s argument emerges when she confronts a structural assumption within that framework: that public virtue is the aggregate of private virtues. Since the Glorious Revolution, British political culture had presupposed that stable institutions rest upon moral character. Yet when this assumption is applied to women, a tension surfaces. Women are addressed as rational moral agents and charged with cultivating virtue, yet excluded from the civil structures through which virtue acquires public significance.

Wollstonecraft does not import an external principle into this order. She draws out its implications. If civic stability depends upon character formation, and if character formation is inseparable from education and rational agency, then the exclusion of women from civil participation generates a structural inconsistency. The modern project is compelled to confront its own premises.13

Redemption Without Fallenness

The religious dimension of Wollstonecraft’s thought further situates her within the modern intellectual landscape. Also influenced by Richard Price, her theology is Unitarian in orientation and anti-voluntarist in structure. It operates as a moral framework that grounds individual responsibility and connects private virtue to the public good. The centrality of reflective inwardness reflects an Enlightenment Protestant sensibility in which moral authority is located within rational conscience.

In this light, the difference identified by Bachiochi between Benedict XVI and Wollstonecraft — “its absence of a final ecclesial authority to whom one ought ultimately entrust the formation of one’s reason” — acquires structural significance. The absence of a transcendent authority ordering reason within a participatory metaphysical framework corresponds precisely to what Benedict describes as the defining feature of the modern crisis.

An additional element deepens the point.

Wollstonecraft explicitly rejects the doctrine of original sin. Writing in 1794, she states:

We must get entirely clear of all the notions drawn from the wild traditions of original sin: the eating of the apple, the theft of Prometheus, the opening of Pandora’s box, and the other fables, too tedious to enumerate, on which priests have erected their tremendous structures of imposition, to persuade us, that we are naturally inclined to evil: we shall then leave room for the expansion of the human heart, and, I trust, find, that men will insensibly render each other happier as they grow wiser.14

Her rejection of original sin constitutes an anthropological commitment with far-reaching implications, as anthropologies shaped by Pelagian tendencies historically tend to do. By setting aside the notion of a human nature wounded at its root and inclined toward disorder, she reframes the problem of evil from sacramental redemption and ontology in terms of formation and circumstance. Corruption becomes intelligible through defective institutions, inadequate education, and distorting social customs.

Within this horizon, the condition of women receives a corresponding interpretation. Female vice appears as the product of misformation; perceived weakness becomes historically conditioned; exclusion emerges as an institutional configuration open to correction. Moral transformation is located primarily in enlightenment, discipline, and gradual reform, and the role of Divine Grace no longer occupies a structuring role in the account of human renewal.15

As I have argued at greater length in Autópsia do Feminismo, the anthropology and theology underlying this framework provide a line of conceptual continuity with subsequent feminist developments. Its premises extend beyond eighteenth-century reformism and shape trajectories that unfold, in transformed form, within strands of modern radical feminism — passing through figures such as Virginia Woolf and extending to Mary Daly.

In this respect, Wollstonecraft’s project belongs fully to the architecture of reflective modernity and the feminist’s metaphysics. Its internal tensions are modern tensions. Its racionalism is an immanent one.

Modernity’s Mary

Mary Wollstonecraft does not represent a misplaced heir of classical natural law within an Enlightenment world that had already forgotten it; nor stand at the threshold between an older metaphysical order and the modern age, at least not at any distance from the very trench in which modernity itself was being consolidated.

She belongs, fully and consciously, to the intellectual horizon that Benedict XVI identifies as the site of the gradual erosion of the Logos. Her understanding of nature, her theology, her anthropology, and her political proposals unfold within the conceptual architecture forged by Protestant reform, Whig constitutionalism, and the transformation of lex naturalis into natural rights.

What distinguishes her from her fellow rationalists, including Burke, is not resistance to that framework, but the seriousness with which she pursues its implications. She presses its premises toward universality. In doing so, she inhabits the immanent radicalization of Enlightenment reason rather than stepping outside it and the reverberations of that move continue to shape the subsequent history of feminist thought.

Seen from this angle, the more decisive transformation in the life of the ordinary English woman may well not have been the rational reformism of the eighteenth century, but the earlier dissolution of monasteries and convents and the gradual withdrawal of the Our Lady from England’s symbolic imagination.16

Oh, the irony! Mary’s redemption, if conceivable, would require the mediation of the Virgin Mary. Yet the Virgin — as the reversal of Eve’s fiat — stands as a ladder only for those who confess the wound of sin.