I have described Descartes’s cogito as modernity’s founding ingratitude, the thought experiment that justified (doubtless against Descartes’s ultimate intentions) countless political, intellectual, and cultural erasures of the past.

So also biblical criticism, though the ingratitude takes a specific form here. Insofar as biblical criticism arises from “inner light” sectarians (and it does in large measure; see Reventlow), it is grounded in a notion of revelation that detaches it from tradition, not only from the tradition of interpretation but even from the traditio of the biblical texts themselves.

If God guides me by an inner light, what need do I have of texts, what need of the writers, what need of the careful copyists who kept the text alive for millennia?

Inner light thus becomes the pious form of ingratitude, as reason is the impious.