Parker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Drama and the Death of God: Secularity on Stage from Antiquity to Shakespeare, and reported the following:
Page 99 contains a description of Egypt as understood by the church fathers and medieval intellectuals, followed by a catalogue of the carpe diem motif in scripture and elsewhere.Learn more about Drama and the Death of God at the Cornell University Press website.
This captures the overall thrust of the book quite well! The Exodus narrative long served the church as an allegory for overcoming bodily appetites through self-discipline. The basic idea is that you are enslaved to your passions. Barring divine intervention these can only lead you to indulge in secular pastimes — sex, food, drink, instrumental music, non-biblical scholarship (saeculares litterae), and other forms of idolatry. Indeed the pull of the vita saecularis or secular life is all the more powerful if you reject out of hand the possibility of an afterlife: "Our time is the passing of a shadow. Come therefore and let us enjoy the good things that are" (Wis. 2:5-6). "What is your life? It is a vapor appearing for a little while, and afterward it shall vanish away" (Jas. 4:14).
Scholarship on atheism, unbelief, and secularity has often insisted that nothing like our current understanding of these concepts appears before the modern age. In fact modernity has inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages a rich apprehension of what it means to deny God and to live in the world as it is with no concern for heaven. I tried to chart the development of this position by looking at the many atheists, unbelievers, and infidels who feature in medieval dramas dedicated to the Exodus narrative, the Nativity, and Easter. In my reading they are the progenitors of the skepticism that we see in King Lear.
--Marshal Zeringue
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