Christian anxiety is real because we have already lost our xiety, a divine gift that parallels God’s creative acts of making our souls.

An Archaeology of the Fall proposes an evolutionary perspective for this loss:  A transition from hand-speech to speech-alone talk potentiated not only the emergence of Civilization (unconstrained complexity) but a permanent disorientation, because the semiotic indexality or referentiality that imbued hand-speech was replaced by the semiotic symbolic ordering or social construction that imbues speech-alone talk.

In short, the secular parallel to the sanctifying grace that preceded Eve and Adam, and was withdrawn as punishment for their transgression, was “the gift of referentiality or literalness” and “the gift of not knowing any different” that permeated the world of our ancestors.  This was the world that humans evolved in.  In this world, words referred to things.  And we did not know any different.