In the west, the young Augustine supports these world-critical movements with his severe paring back of Christian epistemic interests to the pair God and soul, inwardly turned to each other:

REASON

So what do you want to know?

AUGUSTINE

All that I pray for.

REASON

Please sum it up shortly.

AUGUSTINE

To know God and the soul: that is my wish.

REASON

Nothing more?

AUGUSTINE

No, nothing but that.

One must always return to this famous dialogue, which Augustine wrote in the winter of 386/387, shortly before his baptism in Milan—even if only for its unexploited possibilities of cosmoclastic development. Expressed laconically and conclusively, the pious interest of the Christian philosopher is, from the ground up, to prevent the world from stepping in between God and the soul. This provides the ontological formula for the motif of worldflight.

Peter Sloterdijk, Out of This World