Documenting Shifts in How People Perceived God

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Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion

By John Farrell

NYU Press 275 pp., $34.95 The modern age began for Western civilization when Europeans shifted their theological view of God, trading a "kindly Architect" for a "mighty King." The God of medieval Europe was the kindly Architect who reveals Himself in His plan for mortals and for the world they inhabit. The Renaissance replaced this Mediterranean concept of God with the mighty King of the Hebrew scriptures. Most of John Farrell's new book, "Freud's Paranoid Quest," is devoted to documenting such observations. With the shift, human knowledge about God derived not from a preexisting, plan, …