Modern domination both reacted against and transformed premodern Christian forms

Evidence

It is no longer accurate in this context to employ the term domination, for it underrepresents the force of modern Europe’s structure of thought and its performativity. Domination is merely control and influence exercised over someone or something else, a characteristic that may be attributed to all complex societies and empires of the past, since the dawn of “civilizational” time. The term, I think, might be adequate to describe the way empires ruled over subjects, especially the conquered; and it is certainly too strong to describe premodern domination over nature in the material, physical sense. However much the environment and ecology were exploited, and to a limited extent they undoubtedly were, the conception and understanding embedded in domination did not extend to a consciousness of control-for-the-sake-of-transformation to one’s will, if not one’s pleasure. Nor did premodern domination over conquered subjects involve conscious or even semiconscious designs that began with the assumption that they were an extension of a controllable and—as Scheler put it—manipulable nature and thus subject to domination that integrates the power to transform. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 192 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Christianity alone among the monotheisms sought premature reconciliation of civilization with nature; Christianity’s spiritual turn ceded worldly life to profane authority; Nature-domination’s roots precede the Enlightenment in earlier rationalism and Christianity. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 287 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Premodern empires lacked the will to transform nature that defining modern sovereignty #complicates (0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 192