The road not taken

"The new interest in nature was not a step outside of a religious outlook, even partially; it was a [subsequent] mutation within this outlook.  The straight path account of modern secularity can't be sustained.  Instead, what I'm offering here is a zig-zag account, one full of unintended consequences.  That the autonomy of nature eventually (after a number of further transpositions, of which more anon) came to serve as grist to the mill of exclusive humanism is clearly true.  That establishing it was already a step in that direction is profoundly false.  This move had a quite different [and profoundly theological] meaning at the time, and in other circumstances might never have come to have the meaning that it bears for unbelievers today.
". . . an interest in nature for itself, either in scientific study, or aesthetic portrayal, or ethical reflection, isn't always the same kind of thing.  It can be something very different, depending on the background understanding within which the things of nature show up for us."

     Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge,MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 95.

"to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of divine power."

"Detrahere ergo perfectioni creaturarum est detrahere perfectioni divinae virtutis."

     Thomas Aquinas, ScG lib. 3 cap. 69 (De opinione eorum qui rebus naturalibus proprias subtrahunt actiones) n. 15.

"our secular age has geographical and social as well as temporal boundaries."

     Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge,MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 59.

"a real promise of joy in God"

"the [Christian] teaching of divine impassibility [is] not simply a limit placed upon our language, a pious refusal to attempt trespass upon God's majesty in his light inaccessible, but [is] in fact very much part of the ground of Christian hope, central to the positive message of the evangel, not simply an austere negation of thought, but a real promise of joy in God."

     David Bentley Hart, "No shadow of turning:  on divine impassibility" (2002), in The hidden and the manifest:  essays in theology and metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2017), 46-47 (45-69).

The more of God, the more of me

Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study

"Each actuality, in differing from God, testifies to the fullness of God's actuality.  Indeed, the 'ever greater unlikeness' of the proportion means that the 'likeness' is itself ever greater the more fully anything is what it is, the more it grows into the measure of its difference, the more profoundly it drinks from the transcendent moments that compose it and allow all its modes of disclosure to speak of God's infinite goodness."

     David Bentley Hart, "The offering of names:  metaphysics, nihilism, and analogy" (2005), in The hidden and the manifest:  essays in theology and metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2017), 42 (1-44).

Heidegger the onticologist

"Heidegger was in error, and for the most surprising of reasons:  because he, perhaps more than any other philosopher in Western thought, was oblivious of the difference between being and beings."

     David Bentley Hart, "The offering of names:  metaphysics, nihilism, and analogy" (2005), in The hidden and the manifest:  essays in theology and metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2017), 9 (1-44).