Christianity’s spiritual turn ceded worldly life to profane authority

Evidence

The meticulousness of the regulations, the fussiness of the inspections, the supervision of the smallest fragment of life and of the body will soon provide, in the context of the school, the barracks, the hospital or the workshop, a laicized content, an economic or technical rationality for this mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 217 (#expands, via linked claim)

In its mystical or ascetic form, exercise was a way of ordering earthly time for the conquest of salvation. It was gradually, in the history of the West, to change direction while preserving certain of its characteristics; it served to economize the time of life, to accumulate it in a useful form and to exercise power over men through the mediation of time arranged in this way. Exercise, having become an element in the political technology of the body and of duration, does not culminate in a beyond, but tends towards a subjection that has never reached its limit. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 244 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modern domination both reacted against and transformed premodern Christian forms; Discipline repurposed religious ascetic exercise toward indefinite worldly domination. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 244; Christian Reconstructionism reconceived freedom as submission to hierarchical authority — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 175 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern domination both reacted against and transformed premodern Christian forms #expands (0.85)
• Discipline repurposed religious ascetic exercise toward indefinite worldly domination. #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 244
• Modern subjectivity emerged from Christianity’s principle of spiritual inwardness. #qualifies (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 615
• Institutions laicized religious minute-discipline into technical control of everyday life #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 217
• Secularized moral concepts inherit Christian forms while losing their epistemic grounding. #expands (0.78) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 993
• Christian Reconstructionism reconceived freedom as submission to hierarchical authority #exemplifies (0.75) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 175