The Penumbra of the Empty, Part XVIII

We have to remember that at the beginning of the epic project of separating religious from secular, dated by Carlos to the year 1648, there were no concepts for the social, the cultural, the scientific, or the economical, and in a way there was no such thing as a society (or culture, or science, or an economy.)

People didn’t get together to “socialize,” to converse, discuss the issues of the day, swap opinions, or share ideas about economic or political policy. There may have been a tremendous amount of activity, of talk, of commerce, but virtually everything would have been thought of in religious terms. There is no doubt in my mind that to begin to separate some element or region of the mind from the overarching religiousness would have been arduous and dangerous…To invent new terms from which to understand…Nearly impossible.

You can't separate what doesn't yet exist. This seems to be a key point I am trying to make.

At the beginning, there couldn’t have been discussions about beginning or needing to begin. There couldn’t have been some preliminary sketches of what would belong where. There couldn’t have been an agent of change or an intention of change, as we, the product of this monumental change, would understand these terms.