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The thesis of this work derives from the post-modernist notion of continuity of cultural narrative. In spite of the revolutions in thought that have characterized the development of modernity in the West, these discontinuities, the author of this book suggests, are more apparent than real. It is the narrative that is the active factor in intellectual history, and even revolutionary thinkers are enslaved to the narrative's imperative. Thus the great movement of secularization, which has its roots in the anti-clerical Enlightenment and achieves its apotheosis in the psychoanalytic theories of the self in twentieth-century America, represents but a new mutation of the Western mystical tradition.
The theological basis of this Western narrative concerns the splitting of the soul from God and its redemption through union with God. This theme of emanation and return emerges early in Christian Neoplatonism and stands in contrast to the linear and finite view of history in the Biblical tradition. In the work of the late-sixteenth-century Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme, this mystical tradition was individualized and interiorized, and a new emphasis was given to earthly life and to the establishment of God's Kingdom in the world. The Romantic movement in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recaptured some of these earlier themes and represented yet another—and in this instance a secular—mutation of the mystical Christian narrative: 1. “God is eliminated or relegated to a position of relative unimportance” (162); 2. “the subject, self or mind appropriates the powers of God and the dynamics of the self” (163), and 3. “'this world' becomes the sole locus of development and redemption” (165) Separation and union with God give way to a concern for the separation of self or spirit from nature and the return of the subject to the object, the identity of ego and non-ego, and the self-development of the individual and society into something higher, nobler, universal, and whole.