The legitimacy of the modern age

Part I: Secularization : critique of a category of historical wrong. Status of the concept ; A dimension of hidden meaning? ; Progress exposed as fate ; Instead of secularization of eschatology, secularization by eschatology ; Making history so as to exonerate God? ; The secularization thesis as an anachronism in the modern age ; The supposed migration of the attribute of infinity ; Political theology I and II ; The rhetoric of secularizations

Part II: Theological absolutism and human self-assertion. Introduction ; The failure of the first attempt at warding off gnosticism ensures its return ; World loss and demiurgic self-determination ; A systematic comparison of the epochal crisis of antiquity to that of the Middle Ages ; The impossibility of escaping a deceiving God ; Cosmogony as a paradigm of self-constitution

Part III: The 'trial' of theoretical curiosity. Introduction ; The retraction of the socratic turning ; The indifference of Epicurus's gods ; Skepticism contains a residue of trust in the cosmos ; Preparations for a conversion and models for the verdict of the 'trial' ; Curiosity is enrolled in the catalog of vices ; Difficulties regarding the 'natural' status of the appetite for knowledge in the scholastic system ; Preludes to a future overstepping of limits ; Interest in invisible things within the world ; Justifications of curiosity as preparation for the Enlightenment ; Curiosity and the claim to happiness : Voltaire to Kant ; The integration into anthropology : Feuerbach and Freud

Part IV: Aspects of the epochal threshold : the Cusan and the Nolan. The epochs of the concept of an epoch ; The Cusan : the world as God's self-restriction ; The Nolan : the world as God's self-exhaustion