While Western Europe’s spirituality was showing signs of becoming detached from its liturgy, divinity parted company with revelation, and patterns of society were being shaped by other sources besides Christianity’s sacred book, Western discourse on philosophy came to be dominated by a philosopher whose assumptions likewise radically detached the spiritual from the material. René Descartes was a devout French Catholic who from 1628 had found that the Protestant but pluralist northern Netherlands were the refuge best enabling him to express himself without inhibition and to strip away
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