r TERM POSTMODERNIST was first coined in the 1930s to describe minor reactions to modernism in the arts. Its use expanded in the 1950s and 1960s to cover ever-wider phenomena in the arts, especially certain types of eclecticism in architecture. Eventually it became a cover-all for artistic trends that tended to break down the boundaries between art and everyday life, between high and low or popular cultures; to promote a certain promiscuity in styles and codes, mixing parody, pastiche, irony, and playfulness, and insisting on the absence of depth and the paradoxical importance of superficiality. This is the reductio ad absurdum of Romantic expressivism that ends by debunking the putative originality and genius of the artistic producer, suggesting that ultimately art may be no more than repetition. In philosophy and theology, postmodernism embraces a wide range of second thoughts about Enlightenment and Romantic versions of modernity in the guise of the classic forms of hermeneutics of suspicion. Marx used political economy to debunk the bourgeois subject and the Romantic subject, and Freud used psychology. But the central figure in postmodernism is Nietzsche, who used philology to radically critique the Enlightenments in fourth-century Athens and in 17thand 18th-century Europe as culminating in the Last Man of the late 19th and 20th century. In calling into question not just Enlightenment rationalism but the Romantic reaction to that rationalism ushered in by Rousseau, postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion eschews both the Enlightenment myth of progress and any form of Romantic nostalgia for a pristine past beyond restoration in present or future as well. In Western culture this double-barreled reaction is overwhelmingly evident in the arts. It plays a role in the music of Wagner, Stravinsky, Schonberg, and Berg; in the paintings of the Impressionists, the Postimpressionists, the Fauvists, the Cubists, the Futurists, Dada, the Surrealists, and so on; in the poetics of Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire in France; of Pound, Eliot, and Joyce in England and Ireland; of Kafka, Kraus, Musil, and Mann in Central Europe; and of Chekhov and Dostoevsky in Russia. Quite naturally, then, since Christian theology mediates between