With the help of such thinkers it is easier to recognise that what was already affecting Germany in the late nineteenth century was not a tiredness caused by a lack of muesli or fresh air, but an exhaustion caused by a loss of meaning, an awareness that the civilisation was ‘no longer accumulating’ but living off a dwindling cultural capital. If that was the case in the late nineteenth century then how much stronger is the case today, when we live on even smaller portions of that inheritance and breathe even further away from the sources that gave that culture energy.

For centuries in Europe one of the great – if not the greatest – sources of such energy came from the spirit of the continent’s religion. It drove people to war and stirred them to defence. It also drove Europe to the greatest heights of human creativity. It drove Europeans to build St Peter’s in Rome, the Cathedral at Chartres, the Duomo of Florence and the Basilica of St Mark in Venice. It inspired the works of Bach, Beethoven and Messiaen, Grünewald’s altarpiece at Isenheim and Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks.

Yet in the nineteenth century that source received two seismic blows from which it never recovered, leaving a gap that has never been filled. The effects of the wave of biblical criticism that swept through German universities in the early nineteenth century is still being felt two centuries later. When Johann Gottfried Eichhorn at Göttingen began to treat the texts of the Old Testament with the same scrutiny as would be applied to any other historical text, it had an effect that is still rarely acknowledged. Europe had knowledge of the great myths, yet the Christian story was the continent’s foundational myth and as such had been inviolable.