Reading Modernity, Modernism and Religion Today: Spinoza and Van Gogh (Routledge Focus on Literature)

Feelings of rootlessness, fragmentation and loneliness are endemic in today’s secular societies.In the late nineteenth century, Émile Durkheim described this kind of social malaise as anomie, a concept this book locates within a historical narrative of the emergence of Modernism from Modernity.The book focuses on two representative figures, Benedictus de Spinoza and Vincent van Gogh, on whose works it offers significant new perspectives.Spinoza drew up a blueprint for Modernity, which is to say, the cultural transformations that took place as a result of the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation.In counterpoint to his overriding confidence in reason, a persistent current in Spinoza’s writing shows how concerned he was about a possible loss of confidence in his governing idea of a single Substance, the philosophical God, with which he sought to replace the creator God of the Bible.In promoting art as a means of filling the gap left by the absence of Spinoza’s philosophica