What I find most compelling is the implication that atheism might always have held the seed of antihumanism within itself—even though unrecognized in its naive forms until sufficient force of history had been applied.

A cataclysmic failure of civilization like the period 1914-1945 worked as a solvent to expose the merely conditional or conventional bond which had until then allowed atheism to cling to humanism as part of its raison d’etre. If the French thinkers cited are correct, history after all shows that it has the circumstantial potential to destroy the illusion of this combination, so that atheism is exposed as something unique and quite apart from both theism and humanism.

At this point—in this point—God and the imagination become one in the bacchanalian revel of a world that is a work of art.

The evanescent itself must…be regarded as the essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True, and left lying who knows where outside it, any more than the True is to be regard as something on the other side, positive and dead. Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is ‘in itself’ and constitutes the actuality of the movement of the life of truth. The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is sober; and yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 27)

What Stevens describes as the “permanence composed of impermanence” in which everything arises and passes away is the Infinite, and this Infinite is life itself. The Infinite comes by not coming after God. “We keep coming back and coming back / To the real” (Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems, 471, 472). Monism and dualism are both theologies of death: in the former, individual differences collapse in the entropic totality where Eros becomes Thanatos; in the latter oppositional differences negate themselves by destroying each other. To overcome this destructive nihilism, it is necessary to cultivate emergent creativity in complex adaptive networks that figure, disfigure, and refigure what once was believe to be the substance of things seen and unseen. Always after God, the endless restlessness of the Infinite is the eternal pulse of life.

From the conceptualization Taylor offers of “complex adaptive networks” it seems to me that the place he opens for imagination, if not yet deserving of a “throne,” at least earns imagination a seat at the table, as that is in keeping with Derrida’s affirmation in conclusion in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, where he tells us that a “Yes” comes before every “No.”

I thank you for your attention and look forward to a response.