Now part of what has happened in our civilization is that we have largely eroded these forms of immediate certainty. That is, it seems clear that they can never be as fully (to us) “naïve”13 as they were at the time of Hieronymus Bosch.

What did (does) this buffered, anthropocentric identity have going for it? Its attractions are fairly obvious, at least to us. A sense of power, of capacity, in being able to order our world and ourselves.

supplement the usual account of “religion” in terms of belief in the transcendent, with one more focussed on the sense we have of our practical context.

its “inner” side, the replacement of the porous self by the buffered self, for whom it comes to seem axiomatic that all thought, feeling and purpose, all the features we normally can ascribe to agents, must be in minds, which are distinct from the “outer” world.

it can be used to put the whole notion of Providence on trial, and beyond it, belief in God as such. This has perhaps been its most important effect in the last two centuries. A very common objection of unbelief to Christianity has been that it offers a childishly benign view of human life, where everything will come right in the end, something whi

But there are surely many unbelievers for whom this life in what I’ve described as the “middle condition” is all there is. This is the goal. Living this well and fully is what human life is about—for instance, the threefold scenario I described above.

This changes when through increased contact, interchange, even perhaps inter-marriage, the other becomes more and more like me, in everything else but faith: same activities, professions, opinions, tastes, etc. Then the issue posed by difference becomes more insistent: why my way, and not hers?

But beyond power and reason, there is something else very strong going for this anthropocentrism: a sense of invulnerability. Living in a disenchanted world, the buffered self is no longer open, vulnerable to a world of spirits and forces which cross the boundary of the mind,

From the standpoint of this anthropology of fusion and beauty, we can understand one of the central criticisms that the Romantic age levelled at the disengaged, disciplined, buffered self, and the world it had built. Beauty required the harmonious fusion of moral aspiration and desire, hence of reason and appetite. The accusation against the domina