Prophets were reframed as flawed human geniuses rather than superhuman vessels.

Evidence

Not only was it conceded that prophets and apostles were not superhuman, they were even credited with an awareness of their personal inadequacy as channels of revelation. In the romantic conception of the poet, the tension between authentic inspiration and human weakness allowed for moments of subjective illusion—and thus accounted for evidence of exaggeration and insufficiency. In this regard the prophets and apostles were no different. What mattered was not the authenticity of facts about the past but the power of the spiritual idea they sought to convey as gifted humans. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 215

Categorization

• XREF: This is a key move in how secular modernity domesticates the religious—the aestheticization of revelation parallels how, in the Cooper thread, religious norms get re-encoded as secular/universal categories. Prophet as ‘poet’ shows Christianity’s sacred texts being absorbed into an aesthetic framework that Islam’s Quran resists.