Modernity (n.) is liberated from ancient servitudes and for the same reason deprived of all sacrificial protection.
Modernity (n.) is quietly marked by the revelation and so answers the pagan Christianity of earlier times with anti-Christian parodies of the Gospel's demand.
Modernity (n.) is the worst and the best of all worlds at once: it has made more victims than any other, and saves more than any other.
Modernity (n.) would puzzle a visitor from another planet: armies of scholars on Oedipus and Dionysus, and none on the texts that openly foretell its own ruin.
Modernity (n.) is the decay of mythic forms: the sacred survives only as persecution, and our power to decode grows as the sacred decomposes.