Lizzie Sanduleac’s Reviews > Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age > Status Update

6) Humanity has gained an “ability to control” rather than simply to “predict the alleged agencies of the cosmos”. As I go about my day, the world feels like it is “a world for me”.

7)These foundational shifts created a new environment in which we get a different “sense of the divine in relationship to nature and to the city” than people did before modern times.

3)The city became “an icon of human activity” rather than the orderly dominion of the gods.
4)Nature was sentimentalized, especially by Romantics.
5)The city “threatens to swallow even the personalism of the countryside”.
All of this makes modern culture a possibility, but #6 makes it “all but inevitable”.

The modern era is comparable to early adulthood or “juvenility”. To explain this “epistemic and ultimately existential shift”, we need to understand 7 points.
1)After the HRE fell, the city became centered around “human flourishing” more than around religion.
2)Bacon’s scientific method changed “humanity’s posture toward nature” from Aristotelian “inner potency” to its function.

The ancients viewed the world as “series of individuated experiences, scenes, trusts, and fears”, like a young child but the medievals had more of a “theoretical sense of the whole” but including a level of “mystery” as we feel in late childhood.

But in the modern era, we’ve had a fundamental shift in understanding essential reality and in our posture toward it. “World of things” vs “actors”

Compared to medievals, “our universe… is less mapped out but more ordinary… and controlled (rather than vulnerable).”

“The mere act of looking up was far more wonder producing than it is for us— even though their picture was neater.”

The Greeks also discussed the world as a unified subject.

But “in neither the Hebrew nor the Greek tradition do we witness the loss of the felt agency of the cosmos.”

“While the world was theoretically and theologically mapped out,” it was still full of “immediate mystery.”

(Tracing the roots of our objectified/mechanical view of the world is helping me to discern what exactly to change in my life.)

4)”In the beginning” introduces a linear history. Ancient histories merely gave a “prehistory of a city or temple.”
5) All of humanity, not one king, is made in the image of God and given stewardship over Creation.
6) “The separation of God from chaos” and putting “pure actuality over the chaos of potentiality.”

We can trace the cracks in ancient “primal unboundedness” back to both the Hebrew Scriptures and Greek philosophers.

Hebrew Scriptures showed
1) The whole earth is God’s temple in a sense, implying “structural order to all of creation.”
2) God created ex nihilo.
3) He is “outside the unbounded and able to render it to nothing.”

For Max Weber, the modern mentality destroys “not the divine as such, but rather any tacit sense of the unpredictability and incalculability of the divine.”

“Divine and mechanical agency have a zero-sum relationship.”

The modern sense of divine absence involved losing the overwhelming sense of the chaos of the world as well as the sense of communication with the world.