Literature & Religion: Pascal, Gryphius, Lessing, Holderlin, Novalis, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Kafka

I would like to close with one of the moving paragraphs at the end of his Education of the Human Race: "Go your imperceptible pace, divine Providence! Only let me not despair of you because of this imperceptibleness. Let me not despair of you, if even your steps should seem to me to be going backward!"

The actual crisis of modernity, of course, was yet to be. Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky alert us to it as early as the nineteenth century, but only in the twentieth century would it fully take effect. If the name of Pascal stands for the dawn of modernity, then the name of Kafka stands for its breakdown.