ABSTRACT
To read early modern texts with an eye for natural disasters is to bring the urgency of now to the remoteness of then. Disasters always were disastrous of course. But as the etymology of the term itself suggests, ‘disasters’ (literally stars displaced from their sphere) are supposed to be aberrations: disturbances in a larger and stable scheme of things. Today, however, natural disasters inevitably connote something permanent: global warming, loss of species, loss of habitat, loss of nature itself. The scheme of things itself is becoming disastrous. Hence, do we read early modern disasters with an anxious eye. This coda looks back on the main issues discussed in the volume by way of the provocatively ‘early modern’ perspective provided by Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, First Reformed. The film’s intertwining of a consciously archaic Calvinism with climate change mounts an ostensibly religious challenge to the self-centred materialism of both secular and evangelical modernity. Rather than a religious critique, however, Gillies argues that the film is best understood in postsecular terms: namely, a critique capable of challenging our enlightenment faith in the perpetual availability of the natural world without simply reintroducing the religious categories which that secular faith displaced. Hence, the acute emotional and intellectual discomfort that the film leaves us with. It is not an answer but an aporia. Our tragic inability to confront or deal with, or even acknowledge, so apocalyptic a reality as climate change is entailed by our inheritance of the secular enlightenment. But though the writing is on the wall, we will not be saved by religious faith either.
