The Reformation made language merely representational, giving birth to the experimental method.

Evidence

With the Reformation (and the Counter-Reformation) an unmediated divinity became scripturally disclosable, and his revelations pointed at once to his presence and his intentions. Thus language acquired the status of being extra-real, capable of “representing” and “reflecting”-and therefore also of “masking” the real. “The experiment, in the modern sense of the word,” notes Michel de Certeau, “was born with the deontologizing of language, to which the birth of a linguistics also corresponds. In Bacon and many others, the experiment stood opposite language as that which guaranteed and verified the latter. This split between a deictic language (it shows and/or organizes) and a referential experimentation (it escapes and/or guarantees) structures modern science, including ‘mystical science.’” Where faith had once been a virtue, it now acquired an epistemological sense. Faith became a way of knowing supernatural objects, parallel . — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 181

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: ‘the deontologizing of language’ as the hidden precondition of the scientific experiment — tracing how a theological shift about Scripture’s status enabled the entire epistemic apparatus of modern science.
• XREF: Connects to de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable and to Milbank’s critique of secular reason; also resonates with the ‘Protestant literal vs. Catholic sensual’ divide in the study of scripture. — connects to: Fascism transforms social character as profoundly as the Reformation and industrialization did — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1072