Abstract

In dialogue with Hans Blumenberg’s account of modernity, Christianity, and Gnosticism, this chapter traces the contours of the Christian-modern world in Schelling as a structure of alienation and the not-yet. The chapter reconstructs the tension between theodicy and bliss in Schelling’s genealogy of modernity, as well as analyzes the place of mysticism in this genealogy and highlights his Romantic proclamation of the coming epoch of magic, bliss, and what William Wordsworth calls the “one life.” In the Schellingian framework, Christianity and modernity remain co-imbricated in and as the hegemonic Christian-modern world, and modernity appears as a failed salvific epoch that inherits the Christian promise of a blissful future. What the chapter terms the general Christian contradiction as the structure of universal diremption forms the basis of Schelling’s view of the world as a whole and provides the context in which his thought is placed in the rest of the book.