We in the Western are living in a “scientific era”. So much should be understood. You might even say that we in the West are living in a very “Christian” era. I think that should be understood too. But I think that even the Christians in the West, ever since at least the Scientific Revolution, have lost something from ancient Rome and ancient Greece. I’m not sure when it was lost. I’m not sure if it was at the beginning of the Dark Ages or the end (the Renaissance), but definitely by the time the Scientific Revolution rolled around in the West, it was lost.
What was lost? Good question. The perspective that life is a drama.
It is said that ancient Greek culture grew out of an oral tradition of telling tales (I think one is to imagine the Greeks parked around a camp fire while some story teller recited tails of Achilles and the Trojans).
That became a social institution: theatre.
Now at this point in Western culture’s evolution, one has to ask–did the Greeks distinguish between reality and fairy tale?
They glorified it–sure–making a social institution out of story telling certainly counts in my books as a kind of glorification.
But still, one has to remember that this ancient Greek tradition–story telling–stems directly out of religion. The ancient Greeks made no distinction between the Ilyad and the Odyssey qua fairy tale and qua fact–up until that point, all fairy tales, all stories told around the camp fire, were generally told as facts about their history, where they came from–full to the brim with gods and supernatural occurrences. But they were facts in the story (just as how it is a fact that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father… in the world of Star Wars).
I think this mix between fact and fairy tail saturating ancient Greece made for a worldview that would not be adequately describe by our modern day scientific, nor Christian, way of looking at things. I can imagine no closer description than that life was a story–that we are all characters in a play (didn’t Shakespeare say something about this?). However, I don’t think this necessarily came with the deterministic worldview that we are all just pons to a god-like playwright (although it might for some of the ancient Greek philosophers), but more that the whole pretense is improv–that we make the story up as we go along–but not without the gods watching us from afar, as an audience, who either raises their thumbs at our performance or plunges them down.
And it’s interesting because each individual–on her or his own–not only gets to perform (i.e. to show off for the gods) but also gets a special seat in the theatre as both the performer and the spectator at the same time (one watches her own life after all).
Like I said, I’m not sure when this perspective was lost to the West (or even if it existed–I am speculating here 
)–whether the advent of the Dark Ages marks its end or it was still there in some latent form until the Scientific Revolution–but I do believe it is lost now. We are definitely living in a scientific, fact-based age.
Supposing it was alive throughout the Dark Ages but in some latent form–well, first, what do I mean by “latent form”–what I mean is that if this perspective–that life was ultimately a drama–was in some form alive during the Dark Ages, I can imagine no other sense in which this could be true except that history represented a continuation of the story of the Bible–and even if historians were writing it down, it was not to be considered part of Biblical cannon. This is the only sense that I can fathom how the human historical collective experience (at least in the West) could still be consider “part of the story” in the eyes of Medieval Europeans.
It’s almost as though a reversion occurred–a story within a fact, rather than a fact within a story (but was the story still alive?).
I think Medieval Christianity required a bit more than the fall of Rome in order to venture in this direction though–I think it required the noticeable intermingling between ancient Greco-Roman culture with ancient Hebrew culture through Christ. The ancient Hebrews are notorious for clinging to the “factual” perspective–even narrowing it down to historical fact–the OT was not considered by the ancient Hebrews as a “fairy tale”–it was considered to be a historical document, a record of their past–and they took this perspective very seriously (what do you expect of a persecuted tribe?).
I think that ancient Greco-Roman dramatism, if it survived at all during the Dark Ages, had to be pushed aside to make room for the influx of the ancient Hebrew fact-based historical perspective. That “pushing aside” may have killed it or it may have driven it only into hiding.
But the Scientific Revolution definitely represents the rejection of all that. The overthrowing of myth with fact–if it was still alive then, it was also definitely killed then–and so today, we don’t see life as a drama, we see it as a fact.