Desecularizing the Christian Past: Beyond R.A. Markus and the Religious-Secular Divide 9789048556298

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Desecularizing the Christian Past

Desecularizing the Christian Past Beyond R.A. Markus and the Religious-Secular Divide

Enrico Beltramini

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: ‘The Last Judgement’ by Fra Angelico. Wiki Commons CCBY Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 188 2 e-isbn 978 90 4855 629 8 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463721882 nur 684 © Enrico Beltramini / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

For Laura, my wife, my love, my friend



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 9 Abbreviations 13 Introduction 15 Gregory 15 Problem 18 Subject 23 Argument 27 Structure 33 Method and Terms 40 Conclusion 44 1. Sacramental Ontology 47 In Its Own Terms 47 Two Books 50 Sacramental Ontology 53 Sacramental Ontology 59 Secular and Sacred History 63 2. Ontological Turn Ontology and Christian Historians Against Dualism Against Immanentism Ontological Turn 3. History and Theology On Method The supernatural Post-secular History History and Theology (I) History and Theology (II)

69 69 73 80 87 93 93 98 101 104 110

4. Saeculum 115 Introduction 115 Saeculum 118 Definitions 122

Secular and Desecularization Political Augustinianism Final Remarks

123 129 134

5. Ancient and Modern Christianity 137 Introduction 137 Christendom 138 Christendom and Modern Church 143 Reform of the Church (Aggiornamento) 149 Aggiornamento and Return to the Sources 153 6. Augustinianisms 159 Introduction 159 Nature and Grace 160 Augustinian Scholasticism 171 Neoplatonic Augustinianism 175 7. Saeculum Retold 187 Introduction 187 Prophecy and Sacred Institutions 188 General and Individual Eschatology 192 Secularity and Holiness 198 Biblical References 207 Conclusion 211 Introduction 211 Beyond Divides 213 Markus’s Saecular 216 History and Theology 218 Christian Philosophy and History 219 Further Directions 221 One Last Thought 223 Conclusion 224 Bibliography 225 Index of names

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Acknowledgements The idea for this book came out of two intellectual and research interests, which serendipitously ended up agreeing in this case. On one hand, I have been working for years now on secular and secularism along the lines of Henri de Lubac, Charles Taylor, and John Milbank. This is, so to speak, a methodological interest of mine. A second driving impulse behind this research has been my reading of Gregory the Great’s writings in the context of his political theology. This is not, however, a book on Gregory. “This is not the book I set out to write. My original aim had been to write a study of Gregory the Great (pope 590–604) in his world.”1 These are the celebrated initial words of Robert Markus’s masterpiece, The End of the Ancient Christianity. Soon after, Markus became interested in another question, that is, “what was it about Gregory’s world that so changed the framework of thought, the assumption about the world, God and man, the shape of discourse, that his questions came to differ so profoundly from those of Augustine and his contemporaries?”2 This is, as is well known to scholars of late antiquity and the history of Christianity, the preamble to Markus’s desecularization theory. According to this theory, what made Gregory’s world different from Augustine’s was the passage from the Roman secular to the totally religious world of Christendom. Markus believed that to properly approach Gregory, it is necessary to understand the “nature of the changes that transformed the intellectual and spiritual horizons of the Christian world” from Augustine to Gregory.3 To correctly engage with Gregory, one must place him in the correct context; for Markus, the correct context has to do with his specific understanding of the secular in late antiquity, specifically in some of Augustine’s work, and its reception in the early Middle Ages. Like Markus, my original aim was to write a study of Gregory; however, I soon became interested in another question, namely, what is it about our scholarly world that so changed our framework of thought—the assumption about the world, God and man, the shape of discourse—that we came to understand Gregory in a way that differs so profoundly from the view of his contemporaries? How is it possible that the great pope, saint, and father 1 Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xi. 2 Ibidem. 3 Ibidem.

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of the Latin Church is considered today a champion of obscurantism, an integralist pontiff, an embarrassingly outspoken discloser of disturbing supernatural presences? What did they (i.e., his contemporaries) see that we (i.e., modern scholars) do not see? Conversely, what do we see that they missed? The gap between the two interpretations, the ancient and the modern, is now of interest in its own right, one that has derailed my original intent to write on Gregory. In my opinion, what makes our interpretation of Gregory so different from that of his contemporaries is that the two interpretations are based on two different cosmovisions. It is no surprise that the modern historians’ interpretations of Gregory differ from that of his contemporaries. Historians and Gregory’s contemporaries inhabit in different worldviews. The example of Gregory can be generalized to the point that one may claim there is a fundamental problem in modern historical writings of late antiquity and medieval Christianity. The problem is this: a historical reality that is totally religious—once placed against a sacramental horizon of intelligibility (synonymous with cosmovision or worldview)—is addressed with totally secular modes of interpretation. A reality founded on a sense of unity between the spiritual and phenomenological orders is placed against an immanent or dualistic background. Thus, the use and misuse of the historical method has become for me a subject that requires additional investigation. The intent to correct a historical method that ignores the integrity of the Christian past has replace my interest in Gregory’s political theology. This is why I placed my project on Gregory on hold, at least momentarily, and turned my attention to ancient and medieval Christian historiography. *** I am primarily a theologian who works in the field of theology with the resources of the Roman Catholic tradition. However, I have been trained as a theologian, historian, and social theorist, and I work in and across all three disciplines. To be trained in different disciplines is like speaking different languages. In this book, I speak as a historian. *** In past years, I have had preliminary and inconclusive discussions on the current status of methodology concerning religious history in several circumstances, including at the events hosted by the American Society

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of Church History, the Conference of Faith and History, the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, and the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. During these events, I benefited from the generosity of theologians, historians, and medieval scholars who were willing to share their time and wisdom. I am grateful for audience questions and responses and for the participation of other panelists. With their comments, praise, and criticism, they helped me to think more critically and more comprehensively about the thesis of this study, at a time when this study was still at an early stage. I am indebted to several colleagues and friends with whom I had either short or long conversations on the subject on this book. Here I remember Marianne Delaporte, who hired me at Notre Dame de Namur University and is herself a medievalist, and Arthur Holder, who debated my exceptions to current historiography in an animated lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Berkeley. Any errors are, of course, my own. I also want to acknowledge the students of my two courses of History of Christianity at Notre Dame de Namur University. During a period of a decade, I had the privilege to teach, and collect feedback from, hundreds of students who asked me repeatedly (I do not know how many times), always in creative and sometimes deprecating fashions, the crucial questions of these days: is the past still relevant to the present? And if yes, how? I want to thank my editor, Sarah Tyrrell, for her expert guidance through the twists and turns of the English language as this study took shape. Sarah read and reread my manuscript more times than I can count, bringing it to the level that it is now. Her tireless work in editing this book, as she did with the previous two (not to mention dozens of academic papers and presentation scripts, sometimes written and rewritten several times), is the reason I can offer this study to the reader. I am indebted to my editor at Amsterdam University Press, Erin Thomas Dailey, for his deep and thoughtful engagement with this work as well as his patience and encouragement. Erin was more than an editor. He is a medievalist, and through that special expertise, he helped me find my path and supported me at every step. I thank Erin for believing in my book proposal, suggesting improvements to the original manuscript, and making it a great one. I must recognize the members of the editorial board of AUP for their precious feedback. They have been germane to shaping my ideas here. The comments of the anonymous referees have also informed the final version of the argument. Lastly, I owe the most profound thanks to my wife, to whom I dedicate this book. Her patience, trust, friendship, and love are a continuing inspiration

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to me. As a wife and a friend, Laura has provided me more than I can ever hope to repay. *** During my work on historical method, I have published essays in academic journals. Extracts from the second chapter of this book (“Ontological Turn”) were published as an academic paper. See: “Between Dualism and Immanentism: Sacramental Ontology and History,” Religions 12, no. 1 (2021). I am grateful for the editors’ permission to reproduce that content.

Abbreviations Books (Augustine) (For complete citations, see Bibliography at the end of the volume) Conf. Confessiones De civitate Dei De civ. Dei De gratia et lib. arb. De gratia et libero arbitrio De libero arbitrio De. lib. arb. De ordine De ord. Epistulae Ep. (Epp.) Sermo Sermones For Augustine’s works I have adapted (rather than adopted) the abbreviations of Augustinus-Lexikon (Basel: Schwabe, 1986–)

Books (Latin Fathers) (For complete citations, see Bibliography at the end of the volume) HEz. Mor.

Homiliae in Hiezechielem Moralia in Job

Books (by Markus) (For complete citations, see Bibliography at the end of the volume) The End The End of Ancient Christianity Gregory Gregory the Great and his World Saeculum Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (2007) Secular Christianity and the Secular

Introduction Gregory In the very first line of his book on Gregory, John Moorhead states that “the voice of Gregory the Great is a strange one, which speaks in accents alien to the modern West.”1 In her excellent Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, Carole Straw echoes Moorhead’s perplexity. However, in contrast to Moorhead, she frames the problem. “Gregory’s problem,” she argues, is different from the modern world with its clinical objectivity, where any trace of the extraordinary is scoured impatiently from contemporary life. Gregory’s world is still the late antique universe populated by Principalities, Thrones, and Powers; a reality whose boundaries witness an energetic traffic of visitors to a from the other world. Yet Gregory’s world differs subtly from the late antique world of Augustine, or that of the Desert Fathers, for theirs are worlds where one is still cautious of crossing these boundaries, still conscious of how this dull life differs from the shimmering brilliance of the other side. The late antique “upperwordliness” Peter Brown describes is a world of such distinctions.2

The quotation is lengthy, but it says it all. The world of Gregory and our world, that of the moderns, are different: the first flirts with the extraordinary, the second embraces objectivity. Gregory’s world is still populated by angels and demons, supernatural forces, and divine grace; ours is not. Then Straw adds this: Gregory’s world does not only differ from ours; it also differs from Augustine’s world, which temporally precedes Gregory’s world. Straw’s explanation of the curious situation is the following: in Augustine’s world, people showed a more cautious and parsimonious engagement with the otherworld. Thus, Gregory’s voice is alien to modern ears because of his 1 John Moorhead, Gregory the Great (London: Routledge, 2005), 1. 2 Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 8.

Beltramini, E., Desecularizing the Christian Past. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463721882_intro

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prodigal use of the supernatural. One might add that Augustine’s world is more in sync with modern sensibilities because of a more frugal use of the supernatural. Historians, like impartial observers, register either the dissonances or the assonance between one age and another, between our world and Gregory and Augustine’s worlds, then scrupulously report them. The point raised by Straw should not be confused with the more generic issue of the distance between Gregory’s mentality and modern mentality. In one of his works on Gregory the Great, Italian medieval historian Giuseppe Cremascoli makes a remark that only superficially resembles one of Straw’s; it is included in a sentence centered on the French priest, theologian, and patristic scholar Jean Daniélou’s effort to familiarize modern scholarship with the Fathers of the Church. This effort proves even more important because of the prejudice claiming the Fathers’ writings are difficult to understand. At this point, Cremascoli notes that this perception is actually fact: it is in fact “extremely difficult” for moderns approaching the Fathers’ works to connect with them at a deeper level due to the gap between their mindsets and cultural frames.3 Straw’s comment is identical: “The unity, coherence, and internal logic of Gregory’s mind and world view often escape his critics because Gregory’s world can be so alien and inaccessible to modern minds.”4 The identity, however, is only apparent: Straw goes on with her observation (already quoted) on the role of the supernatural in making Gregory’s world so distant; Cremascoli instead persists with the assertion that effort should be made to build a bridge. Cremascoli does not detect a problem with Gregory’s engagement with the supernatural, only a cultural distance. The comments of Moorhead and Straw, filled with circumstantial specifications, are the polite, soft version of much harsher evaluations of Gregory and his world that a previous generation of scholars offered. In discussing Gregory’s theological works almost a century ago, Frederick Homes Dudden complained that in his eyes, Gregory was not as good as Augustine. In Dudden’s assessment, Gregory was “destitute of originality,” “extremely uncritical,” and “often puerile and absurd” in his exegesis.5 Behind the first couple of descriptors, that is, “not original” and “uncritical,” lies Dudden’s cruel opinion on Gregory’s theology, seen as derivative of Augustine and 3 Giuseppe Cremascoli, Gregorio Magno: Esegeta e Pastore d’Anime (Spoleto: Fondazione CISAM, 2012), 179. 4 Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, 8. 5 Frederick Homes Dudden, Gregory the Great: His Place in History and Thought, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905), 2:286.

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totally ordinary. Behind the last couple of adjectives, “puerile” and “absurd,” is Dudden’s reaction, among other things, against Gregory’s angelology and diabology and the collateral collection of miracles and saints. Dudden is not alone in his critical assessment of Gregory’s work. The celebrated Church historian Adolf von Harnack relegated Gregory’s engagement with the supernatural to the theological reserve of monastic piety: [In Gregory’s works] The doctrine of angels and the devil comes to the front because it suited popular and monastic piety. We can call Gregory the “Doctor angelorum et diaboli.” […] He who thought so little of GraecoRoman culture sanctioned its most inferior parts in his doctrine of angels. His monkish fancy dealt still more actively in conceptions about the devil and demons, and he gave new life to ideas about the Antichrist, who stood ready at the door, because the world was near its end.6

The quote needs no explanation. According to a scholarship tradition that goes back at least a century, Gregory’s involvement with the supernatural renders his voice as well as his world foreign to modern audiences. In turn, this gap of sensibilities between his world and ours worlds is responsible for a bizarre situation: for centuries considered a giant, today Gregory occupies a remote spot in our historical consciousness. One of the “fathers” of the West is now alien to the West he helped to found. Reception history has been unmerciful with the great pope of Rome.7 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians who received and interpreted the voice of Gregory the Great have de facto transformed a Doctor of the Church into an unoriginal thinker.8 More recently, a new stream of studies on Gregory’s thought has partially rectified this negative judgement, reframing him as a creative theologian, although in the Augustinian tradition.9 French historian Henri-Irénée Marrou (1904–1977) articulates a nuanced position in which Gregory’s work is original but 6 Adolph von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. by James Millar, 7 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1898), 5:263–264. 7 For an updated list of scholarly work on Gregory, see: Francesca Sora D’Impero, Gregorio Magno: Bibliografia per gli anni 1980–2003 (Firenze: SISMEL–Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2005). 8 See, for example: Claude Dagens, Saint Gregoire le Grand: Culture et experience chretiennes (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1977), Gillian Rosemary Evans, The Thought of Gregory the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Robert A. Markus, Gregory the Great and his World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9 See, for example: Katharina Greschat, Die Moralia in Job Gregors des Großen. Ein christologischekklesiologischer Kommentar (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), and Rade Kisić, Patria Caelestis. Die eschatologische Dimension der Theologie Gregors des Großen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011).

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appears Augustinian: “The work of Gregory the Great, whom the Middle Ages looked on as a master of mystical theology, is profoundly original, but a first reading of it will give this same impression of Augustinianism, elementary and popularized.”10 Others scholars have expanded the investigation and addressed Gregory from a pastoral or ascetical perspective.11 Finally, some have seen him as a grand administrator of people and things.12 At the same time, the relationship between Gregory and the supernatural has been reshaped. No longer is Gregory seen as indulging in “puerile and absurd” engagements with the supernatural; he is rather the product of a social and intellectual environment inflated by the rise of the supernatural.13 Or, to take the position of the influential historian Peter Brown, Gregory should be placed in a distinct context, a context in which the barrier between this natural world and the other world—namely the spiritual, divine world—has been broken.14 As a result, Robert Markus, in his comment on the miracle stories of Gregory, noted that the Pope of Rome showed “a lack of any inhibiting sense of the unlikely.”15

Problem The scholarly landscape in which Gregory is approached these days can be summarized in these terms: (1) Gregory is the product of his world; (2) Gregory’s world is inflated by the supernatural; (3) the world of Augustine and the world of Gregory are different because the former maintains a more 10 Henri-Irénée Marrou, Saint Augustine and His Influence Through the Ages, trans. by Patrick Hepburne-Scott (1954; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 154. 11 Barbara Müller, “Führung im Denken und Handeln Gregors des Grossen,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61, no. 3 (2010), 588–590; Barbara Müller, “Gregory the Great and Monasticism,” in Bronwen Neil and Matthew Dal Santo (eds.), A Companion to Gregory the Great (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 83–108; George Demacopoulous, Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2015). 12 Jeffrey Richards, Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), and Demacopoulos, Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome. 13 Markus, Gregory. 14 Peter Brown, “Gloriosus Obitus: The End of the Ancient Other World,” in William E. Klingshim and Mark Vessey (eds.), The Limits of Ancient Christianity. Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 289–314, 291. 15 Markus, Gregory, 55. A detailed analysis of the “loss of interest in Gregory” can be found in Peter McEniery, “Pope Gregory the Great and Infallibility,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 11, no, 2 (1974), 263-280. The quote is at page 264.

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prudent involvement with the supernatural; and (4) the world of Gregory and our world are distant, and this distance can be explained in terms of a different appreciation of the supernatural.16 In sum, the current scholarship is concerned with the degree of estrangement between Gregory’s world and our world, on one hand, and Gregory’s world and Augustine’s world, on the other; it is also concerned with the role played by the supernatural in the construction of such a condition of estrangement. The crucial point is the link established by some scholars between Gregory the Great’s supposed foreignness and the supernatural. In that context, the “problem of the supernatural” arises in the sense that the supernatural contributes to this perceived distance, to this alienation between his world and the world of his modern critics. A case in point is Gregory’s atmospheres crowded with spirits, saints, miracles, and grace. The point has nothing to do with this or that particular interpretation of Gregory’s atmospheres; the quibble is with the atmospheres themselves. At a recent session of the American Society of Church History, one participant vocally expressed his distress with miracles. “I do not know what to do with miracles,” he complained.17 So, the point truly seems to center on just what historians should do with Gregory’s atmospheres, saturated with the supernatural. For Gregory, the supernatural is a natural condition in the sense that it is natural that nature revels in its supernatural end. For scholars of Gregory, the supernatural is instead a cultural condition. Gregory coexisted with the supernatural; his scholars attempt to naturalize it or, more simply, to erase it. According to some scholars, Gregory is a foreign voice to the moderns because of his unrelenting involvement with the supernatural. But it is equally possible that Gregory remains a foreign voice because of scholars’ reluctance to get involved with him at his own terms. The modern interpretation stands on a secular worldview (a synonym of cosmovision) that is either totally immanent, in the sense that it assumes uniquely the historical, phenomenological, natural order, or dualistic—namely that it accepts the existence of a spiritual or the divine order that is added to a self-founded, autonomous natural order. These two articulations subsist on the secularization thesis, according to which the secular and the religious are separate realms, with the former being the qualifier of the latter. Addressed in secular terms, either immanent or dualistic, Gregory is a pathetic character of a world 16 Here the phrase “scholarly landscape” refers only to the scholarship that interprets Gregory as a product of his context. 17 At the Spring Meeting, April 6–9, 2017, of the American Society of Church History, in Berkeley, California. Personal recollection.

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tainted with superstition. The interpretation of Gregory’s contemporaries was instead based on an entirely sacramental worldview, that is, based on the unity of the spiritual and the natural orders. As a matter of fact, in the Christian worldview of Gregory there was no natural order that was purely natural: what one mistakenly calls “natural” was already included in the divine. The world reflected the presence of the divine, and reality was more than the appearances that one could see and touch; invisible realities, too, had their place. This was the mysterious character of the world of Gregory: it was a supernatural world. Once Gregory is placed against the background of this supernatural worldview, he is a model for the ages. Gregory’s eschatological view is a good place to start testing the hypothesis. The task is to resist the temptation of historicizing Gregory’s eschatological view or displacing it on a parallel to the historical plane of reality, and rather to receive it as a potentiality of transcendence within immanence. Like we citizens of the modern world, Gregory the Great lived in an eschatological time. Unlike us, he was conscious of that condition. The eschatological time is the time on this side of the eschaton, that is, the advent of the Kingdom and the end of the world. It transitions humanity to the general resurrection, the last judgement, and the renewal of creation. In the eschatological, time deals with the universal, general, cosmic end, and it can be an age of troubles. Certainly, it was an unsettling time for Gregory because the Roman Empire collapsed, the barbarians were at the gate, and the plague brought death to many. This distressing chain of events has forced scholars of the present day to frame Gregory’s eschatological worldview in terms of a historical march toward disintegration, decay, and death. But Gregory believed he was moving toward the manifestation of the ultimate realities. In the eschatological time, history is an exodus from the existing status to the establishment of the Kingdom, and yet the Kingdom is somehow already here. How the transition occurs—how the exodus happens—remains a mystery. The world around us is as uncontrollable, undetectable, and impenetrable like the Teutoburg Forest. Strange things happen, horrible entities appear, and life is somehow suspended between earth and heaven, heaven and hell. This is the invisible side of the eschatological time as it manifests itself in the concrete circumstance of life. One cannot consider one side, the visible one, and conveniently disdain the other, the invisible, because the two for Gregory were distinct yet inseparable. The eschatological time for him was more than just time. It was an era, so to speak, in which time is impenetrated with , and transparent to, eternity. This vision of a mixture of time and eternity for Gregory was not a rejection of time but of

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the absolutization of time: in his world, the eternal and temporal dimensions of time coexisted. In the eschatological time, to borrow a line from a contemporary theologian, men and women are water without ceasing to be a drop.18 All is already transparent to the divine that is embedded in everyone and everything; yet beings and things maintain all their limits and finitudes and forms. To paraphrase Saint Paul, in an eschatological time, we (i.e., human beings) “see through a mirror, indirectly” Christ and His presence in everyone and everything. “But then,” namely, when the time is over and the enthronement of Christ at the Father’s right hand is completed, we will see “face to face” (1Corinthians 13:12). This ambiguous status is what marks the people of God and grants Christians the power to rise above the purely earthly condition of this world. It means that human beings are historical artifacts, but not exclusively. The entire creation, human beings and the entire cosmos around them, already manifests the unstoppable impulse to reveal its divine core. This was Gregory the Great’s eschatological worldview. Gregory was conscious that Christ was present at the very heart of His creation. Christ was not looking at His creation from above. He was not a Being. He was a Presence in the double sense that He was within human beings and among them. Gregory knew that if he had faith, if he had hope, and if he loved, he could stretch out a hand and “touch” Him. He was the immanent Christ, the Augustinian Christ inward. If nothing else, the miracles, the spirits, and the devils served Gregory in depicting the sense of this eschatological time and the manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit and His action in human life. We (i.e., scholars) have lost the sense of the eschatological time and therefore do not know what to do with miracles. The same can be said about Gregory’s sense of the sacredness of both human nature and reality at large. We have lost Gregory’s sense of the sacredness of the world, so we treat human beings as totally historical artifacts. In brief, we have lost Gregory’s sense of the supernatural, and we have apparently also lost the sense of Gregory’s greatness. I believe that these two losses are related, and that both are the result of the same methodological choice. Scholars have spent considerable time scrutinizing the degree of estrangement of Gregory from our world, as if the cause of that estrangement indisputably lies on the side of Gregory; they have probably dedicated less work to investigating their own studies as a potential cause of that estrangement, neglecting to 18 Raimon Panikkar, The Water of the Drop: Fragments from Panikkar Diaries (Delhi: ISPCK, 2018).

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assess the effect of their own theoretical and methodological premises on the object of their study. The current interpretative metanarrative maintains the general practice of filtering out historical elements that appeared incongruous with dominant historiographical claims. Historians place Gregory against a secular horizon of intelligibility, and he looks less than adequate. If they locate him against a mysterious, transcendent, supernatural horizon, however, he will probably recover the original splendor. Here “supernatural” stands for the qualification of a taken-for-granted structure of reality, not in terms of episteme, the domain of certain knowledge, but of doxa, the domain of belief. The inhabitants of Gregory’s world believed they lived in a supernatural world, namely, a world in which the phenomenological was infused with the spiritual. Miracles and demons, spiritual forces and providence made perfect sense within such a supernatural horizon; it is evidence of the historians’ recontextualization of Gregory within a secular horizon that such miracles no longer make sense. Modern historians conceive the world as totally immanent, in the sense that it works uniquely at a historical, phenomenological level. Alternatively, they frame the world as it was affected by dualism, namely that history— conceived as an autonomous, self-founded order of reality—is open to receiving the intervention of the divine from the outside. When they engage the supernatural, historians tend to regard it not as the discernment of reality but as either a superstition or an addition to an essentially neutral bedrock. For these modern historians, the supernatural is not intrinsic to the natural order but a ridiculous illusion or an unfortunate accessory. Their tendency to either naturalize the supernatural or misinterpret it as extrinsic to an autonomous, self-grounded realm of nature conditions the scholarly interpretation of Gregory. That secular prejudice against the supernatural has built the gap between his world and ours. The result is the enormous distance between Gregory’s greatness as perceived in the Middle Ages and the modern more cautious reception. Historians place Gregory in the social and intellectual context of his age, but this context nevertheless reflects the underlying ontological—one might say, secular—assumptions of the context in which the scholars live. The result is that Gregory emerges from these interpretations as an artificial man, as a man who is incomprehensible unless he does not conform to a mentality of the twentieth or twenty-first century. The result is an inauthentic Gregory. The cause of the distance between Gregory’s world and our world—Straw is correct on this—is the supernatural, but not in the sense of Gregory’s engagement with the supernatural; rather, it is in the sense of the refusal on the side of scholars to engage with the supernatural. The historians’

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anti-supernatural sentiment is the ultimate source of such a distance. The entire problem of the gap between Gregory and modern historians can be reframed in terms of the modern effort of historians to remake the the late ancient and medieval Christianity (or simply “Christian past”)--the past in terms of the res gestae--on their secular terms. What is missing in the relationship between Gregory and his historians is a critical look at the discipline of history itself and how its internal structure helps make the Christian past a secularized past. So, the two worlds—that of Gregory and that of the historians—drifted apart. With this in mind, the limited, specific problem of the alien Gregory can be seen as a derivate of a much wider historiographical problem, a problem of theory and method. The primacy of immanentism and dualism over the realm of ancient and medieval Christian historiography (or simply “Christian historiography”) does not confine its effect to the interpretation of Gregory: it conditions the scholarly interpretation of Gregory’s world. That primacy affects the scholars’ capability to see the world how Gregory’s contemporaries saw it. These contemporaries saw it as a place in which two different manifestations of the same mystery, a divine level according to the plan of God, and a historical level operated in unity without confusion. Thus, if modern scholars aim to see Gregory as his contemporaries saw him, they must locate the Christian past against the background of a worldview in which “the supernatural,” to borrow a phrase from Roman Catholic filmmaker Robert Bresson, “is the real in all its precision.”19 They must replace their naturalistic, historicist worldview with a supernatural worldview.

Subject This book is not about Gregory and his world. It is an essay in ancient and medieval Christian historiography. Its aim is to assess the status of the Christian past in recent historical research and offer suggestions for advancement. It is part of an ongoing conversation regarding the best way to approach the Christian past. The crux of the matter is whether a methodology based on the secularization thesis (the separation between a secular means of investigation and a religious phenomenon) can produce 19 “Le Surnatural, c’est du réel précis.” Quoted in Guy Bedouelle, “Le tout dans le fragment: Hommage à Robert Bresson,” Communio, 34, no. 2 (2000), 105. Bresson directed, among others, a f ilm on Roman Catholic author Georges Bernanos’s book Diary of a Country Priest in 1951. Another translation could be: “The supernatural is precisely what reality is.”

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a reliable picture of a past in which that separation did not yet exist. The secularization thesis draws a sharp distinction between the religious and the secular, paralleled by the distinction between a secular means of investigation (secular disciplines, including secular history) and a religious phenomenon. The thesis, unfortunately, does not operate only out there, in our modern Weltanschauung, but also in the methodological tools scholars use to investigate the premodern past. The theory also elevates the secular above the religious, where the religious is confined to the realm of personal faith or practice, not to serious scholarship. Thus, the secularization thesis creates not only a means of investigation that is totally secular (i.e., secular history) but also an object that is totally secularized—that is, desacralized, which becomes the only proper object of study for historians. I suggest disputing the legitimacy of this “privilege of the secular” to position, qualify, or criticize religious history. To put it differently, I question the assumption that the secular is the privileged means of investigating the religious (or at least the Christian) phenomenon because of a simple fact: the discipline of history itself, as a field of academic inquiry, provides well-intentioned, highly educated modern scholars with a set of intellectual assumptions and ethical (or methodological) guidelines for the secularization of the Christian past. Regardless of the good faith of historians, history is a tool that functions much like a railway: it delivers a secular view of the Christian past. History enables historians to write secular histories; it is no surprise that written history is secular. Historians of early Christianity are the unintentional enablers of the secularization of the Christian past. The typical methodological assumption about how religious history works is that religious ideas and religious discourses need to be mediated through a neutral, secular filter to make sense. The objection? That the secular filter is not neutral but on the contrary is intrinsically biased about the supernatural. History refuses to recognize the supernatural end of Christianity. And yet, Christianity is a supernatural religion: the economy of the Trinity, the dual nature of Christ, and the government of creation are concepts that imply a profound understanding of the supernatural. Scholars’ refusal to fraternize with the supernatural disfigures the entire Christian world they aim to represent. To put it differently, history is an intellectual and cultural mechanism that ultimately distorts the religious past. In a nutshell, secular history, a means of investigation that is totally secular, assimilates the elements of the Christian past: historians decontextualize these elements from their proper religious horizon of sense and intelligibility and recontextualize them in a modern, secular horizon of sense and intelligibility. It is the way secular history as a methodology produces a secularized Christian past. The

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people, the events, and the ideas of the Christian past are still there, ready to be investigated, but they are filtered, organized, and understood against a secular background. It is like having a company of actors and actresses dressed in 17th-century costumes who are performing a Shakespearean tragedy in a setting arranged to modern standards. Whatever element of the Christian past, including miracles, prophetic visions, and providential events, that is inappropriate for a secular horizon of sense is normalized or terminated. In this study, scholars are invited to think about the fact that the people who populated the ancient Christian past had anything but a naturalistic or extrinsic worldview. Historians claim that history as a discipline is itself the highest level to be attained in the investigation of the past. Then the depict as if the past was, like the present, secularized. But the past (or at least the Christian past) was not secularized. The inhabitants of the past did not envision their world as secular; it is a secular historiography that has shaped visions of a secularized past. The discipline of history has itself enabled the secularization of the past. It is this role of history in shaping secular visions of the past that makes modern historiography such an unlikely partner for the Christian past. The reason that the match endured for such a long time was that no strong voice emerged to call attention to the nature of the limitation that history put upon the Christian past. That changed when Brad Gregory and Andrew Jones introduced the notion of sacramental ontology in the discipline of history, challenging the dualism of the secularization thesis through the integration of the natural and divine orders.20 In their books, in fact, nature and divine orders are integrated in the same reality. They packed the methodology into a chapter and applied it to, respectively, Reformation and thirteenth-century France. They have been criticized and labeled integralists, nostalgic Christians, and false historians. Their critics have framed their works in terms of history as the confession of faith, not history as an object of scholarly research. That reaction, which at times took overly dramatic tones, to Gregory’s and Jones’s books requires a scholarly, unapologetically, and lengthy response, one that re-centers the discussion around its essential point: can a secular history get a pre-secular past right? This can be rephrased: is the current status of ancient and medieval historiography adequate to reconstruct the religious 20 Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic Press, 2017).

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history of Europe on its own terms, that is, without plunging into one form or another of anachronism?21 As long as the historians fail to recognize this intrinsic limit of secular history in addressing the Christian past, they will never understand the religious past of Europe as the people of the past understood it. A secular history, to put it simply, is constitutionally incapable of getting right a Christian past in which people believed the supernatural was at hand. In the end, the internal structure of the discipline is not simply non-Christian, but intrinsically anti-Christian in the sense that infringes on the integrity of the Christian worldview. It changes the Christian past rather that addressing it as it is. This study, however, is not an attack on historical knowledge. It is a recognition of its limits. History, as a discipline, has limits. How can a supernatural religion be included in the domain of the secular? How can history as rational enterprise be capable of investigating the supernatural end of the Christian past? Scholars can object to my objections by asserting they operate with a methodological reserve. Because they write as historians, they determine the whole reality as immanent, and as historians they intentionally put aside the question of the supernatural in their critical examination of Christianity. This move, however, is equivalent to an admission of incompleteness. It is like admitting that history (as a discipline) has limits, so historians can offer only a partial, and eventually partisan, reconstruction of the past. The subject of this study is not the ontological distance between the fabric of Gregory’s world and that of the scholars. The question “Can a secular history get correct a supernaturally infused past?” does not imply a view of the past in which the supernatural was indeed at work in the world. Here the idea is not that the supernatural existed in the past but not in the present. The idea is neither that the supernatural exists and the inhabitants of the past acknowledge its presence while the moderns do not. A discussion of such matters would require a scholar of the caliber of Charles Taylor. More modestly, in this book the ontological existence of the supernatural is placed, so to speak, in brackets (one may believe it or not). 21 I accept the vulgata in scholarship stating that “anachronism” is the adoption of modern forms of interpretation of the past. More accurately, however, anachronism is actually the opposite: it is to judge the world of today with the ideas of yesterday. The sin of scholarly anachronism would be better reframed in terms of “catachronism,” which is exactly using today’s categories to judge the past. The dictionary constructs “anachronism” by associating the prefix ana, which means “out of,” with the noun cronos, that is, “time.” The neologism “catachronism” (the prefix cata plus cronos), however, is not included in the dictionary, and this absence may say something about a time past beneath something present.

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It is indeed the author’s belief that the supernatural was at work in the past in the same way that it is at work in the present. Or to be clearer, the author believes that the world of the past and the present world share the same sacramental condition, regardless of the perception of their inhabitants. However, this is not the point that the author is concerned with in this book. The crux of the matter is not an ontological interpretation of reality, rather an interpretation of reality that incorporates ontological assumptions. I will be more precise soon. Historians should work to reposition themselves within past frameworks rather than demand that the past sees things their way. Still, there remains a fine line between discussing the past within a supernatural worldview and deploying a truly ontological argument. Modern historical scholarship has lost the supernatural worldview of the citizens of the Christian past and now reads their writings and interprets their lives through a largely anti-supernatural, post-Enlightenment lens, a lens that causes historians to miss or dismiss many important features of ancient Christian life and thought. In this book, it is argued that scholars need to “recover” the supernatural worldview if they are to correctly understand the ancient and medieval Christian past, where “recover” implies a method that delivers a supernatural worldview that safeguards the integrity of the Christian past. That said, the reader should avoid the impression that the “supernatural” is the secret key to unlocking all the hidden features of ancient Christians’ lives and thought. Unlocking the role of the supernatural in their worldview undoubtedly enhances scholarly understanding of some aspects, but it does not offer a complete revelation of it. It is important not to push the point too far. Much has been learned about the past through sensible scholarship that is secular in its approach—and not always unreflectively or uncritically so—and methods have been developed to operate within those gaps. That is also part of the story.

Argument This book offers a sweeping critique of scholarship on the Christian past, especially scholarship on Latin Christianity. It is an attempt to move beyond the consensus of scholars within the discipline and the perceived limitations of the discipline. On one side stands the existing perspective of secular history, in the double sense that history is both approached through secularized means of investigation and also secularized. The problem with this paradigm is that when it comes to the premodern history of Europe, and more specifically a Christian past that is so saturated with Christian images

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and motivations, scholars project modern conceptions instead of unveiling the late antique and medieval world as it was experienced by its inhabitants. This amounts to a problem of anachronism. When historians secularize the Christian past, they create a false sense of equivalence between past and present. They make the past familiar when in effect, it is estranged. In his Before Church and State, Jones reminds his fellow historians that the distinction between “temporal” and “spiritual,” or between “state” and “Church,” did not exist in the high Middle Ages. What he meant is that historians who adopt that distinction are guilty of retroactivity; namely, they produce a retroactive effect of a modern worldview on a secular reality that was populated by Christians rather than a reality that was itself Christian. Jones is right to raise this problem, but this is only one problem. The other problem is that secular history disfigures the Christian past by reducing it to just another secular reality. Christianity, which was perceived as a supernatural religion—a religion in which Man and God, nature and the supernatural, earth and heaven are united without confusion—is naturalized and historicized. God, the supernatural, and heaven are reframed in modern, secular terms. Eschatology becomes a discourse on the future. The Christians of the past resemble their modern counterparts, their faith seen as a personal convincement, their religion interpreted as a set of rules and rites. In this vision of history, the secular positions, qualifies, criticizes, and most importantly reframes the religious past on secular terms. In this book a claim is advanced that a “secular methodology,” namely a commitment to understanding the Christian past without integrating the supernatural order in historical perspectives, opens a gap between how people in the past thought compared to how today’s historians think. Notably, much historical understanding can be lost in this gap. There certainly exist examples of a historical scholarship that is so incapable of understanding past ways of thinking that it results in straightforward anachronism. There are other examples, not as severe but far more numerous, in which historians make little mistakes because their secular perspective creates blind spots. This approach can sometimes cause ignorance about the past even in its attempts to create knowledge. Accordingly, an attempt is made in this study to articulate an alternative view of religious history in which the question of the supernatural stands at the very condition of religious history itself, as the latter is incomplete without including the former in its descriptions of the Christian past. This alternative stands for a historiography that acknowledges how present secular beliefs shape the scholarly descriptions of the Christian past. It is an attempt to rework the relationship among history, historians, and

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Christianity as a supernatural religion. The proposed alternative perspective of history addresses the past on its own terms despite regardless historians’ personal worldview. I tentatively call this alternative approach “post-secular history” considered neither in the sense that it is the result of men and women of faith, nor that it responds to high doctrines or theological frameworks. “Post-secular history” is the writing of history, the historical writing, that is, the study of the past, the recording and interpretation of past (historia rerum gestarum). It is religious history of religion in the same terms of the philosophical history of philosophy or the theological history of theology; it means that it is an account of the historical investigation of religious ideas and facts that recognizes the religious context in which these ideas and fact occurred. Scholars’ reluctance to engage the supernatural, a contraction for “engaging the Christian past within a supernatural cosmovision, doxa, horizon, worldview (or any synonym of it),” is received in this study as an obstacle to addressing the Christian past on its own terms. I previously defined the “Christian past” as the late antiquity and medieval Christianity, but more precisely it is Christendom, the Christian civilization, the organic world of Christian society that was infused of, and driven by, a wholly Christian worldview. The source of that reluctance is methodological. Historians approach the Christian past, the Christian civilization, as if they were unaware of the myth that laid behind it. The term “myth” is not used as a synonym for a widely held but false belief or idea; it stands for the unconscious that lies behind the horizon (cosmovision, doxa, worldview). The myth embodies certain ontological assumptions about the status of reality, the place of humanity in the universe, and the role of the divine, if any. The myth is the unconscious that lies behind the unconscious structure of meaning. The horizon is the fundamental “syntax.” Since this syntax is not a single meaning but an inseparable interweaving of meanings, it is a “structure,” i.e., a logical-semantic complex consisting of the totality of determinations that must be present for people, things, and events to make sense. The horizon is the terrain where all ontological assumptions receive their proper meaning. The myth that provided the horizon of sense to the Christian past was sacramental in character: it means that the supernatural order, the order of the spiritual, was participating in the order of nature, the order of human affairs. Historians rather approach Christendom through the lens of another myth, the secular myth, which assumes the separation between the secular and the religious spheres of human affairs. The myth of the sacramental ontology justifies a view of reality as supernatural; the myth of the ontological separation of the secular and the religious, instead,

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justifies a certain immanent or dualistic view of reality. This is the source, so to speak, of the gap between the reality of the Christian past and what becomes the Christian past after it is delimited within a historical investigation. The historical method defines not what is and what is not, but what is included within the secular order of meaning and what is excluded from it. Intentionally or not, the method produces a domesticated interpretation of the Christian past and aligns it to a secular worldview. I believe no intentionality is at work here. Historians are, in effect, unaware of the existence of both the sacramental myth and the secular myth. Their historical method is, in fact, based on a universalistic paradigm according to which some meanings have universal application or applicability. The invisibility of the myth, the horizon of sense that would allow to distinguish the meaning of people, events, and ideas in the Christian society of the Middle Ages from the meaning of people, events, and ideas in the secular society of the modern age, is inherently ingrained in the dominant historiographical approach. Historians must be aware of the implicit assumptions of their historiographical approach to the Christian past so that they can see the related benefits but also the unfortunate shortcomings. An effort of self-understanding on the side of the historians engaged in the study of the Christian past is crucial if they want to overcome the risk of an anachronistic interpretation of such a past. In this book, I invite historians to move from an unreflexively universalist method to a conscious and eventually critically adopted contextual method. I suggest engaging the Christian past on its own terms, namely, against the background of the sacramental myth. I show, although I do not enter into details, that engaging the past on its own terms is a complex operation that implies a methodological shift from epistemology to hermeneutics. The recommendation, accordingly, is to engage the Christian past by adopting a particular approach, an approach that I frame from different angles—postsecular history, sacred history, Christian historiography—to better define it. Although the central intention of this book is a critique of the existing historical method, a related concern should be the sketch of an alternative which would be truly adequate for the Christian past (or a past totally dominated by a Christian worldview). This sketch would describe the conditions of a proper engagement with the Christian past. In this study I decline to advance a complete theory, but I suggest a couple of elements for a method that does not subsume religion, and particularly a supernatural religion such as Christianity, under history. This book, in fact, is a preliminary study on the secular investigation of the Christian past. I simply argue that a secular epistemology produces a secularized past and that a hermeneutic

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method is more effective in capturing the totally religious worldview of the Christian past. In this book, I mention the relationship between worldview and hermeneutics as well as the decontextualization / recontextualization of the ingredients of the Christian past. However, more can and must be said on how this apparatus works in a secular domain. However, I do not explain how these relationships work. A task of such proportions requires a separate volume. The same is true with the opposite operation, namely, how is it possible to produce a sacramental worldview of the past? Here I do not offer a complete methodology, only a couple of recommendations. Finally, I do not respond to the ultimate question: What is, in the end, the Christian past? What is a Christian society acting under a sacramental horizon of intelligibility? What is a Christian civilization and what is a sacred society? What is Christendom? Andrew Jones has tried to answer these questions, but of course, more can be added. Jones focuses on the sacred society of the High Middle Age, which was Thomistic in character; it would be interesting, for example, to investigate the case of sacred society in the Early Middle Age, which was informed by Augustinian Neo-Platonism. This investigation, too, deserves a dedicated volume. All the above is to say that I am deeply aware of the limits of this book; more work is needed to round out the argument. This book has the limited scope to carry on the debate initiated by Jones and Gregory. Although it does not provide a full methodology, the book does suggest two elements to address the Christian past without succumbing to the trap of anachronism. The first element consists of a shift from an epistemological to an ontological orientation, from the method to the horizon. It can be called the privilege of the ontological over the epistemological. The shift consists, on one hand, of revealing the ungroundedness of the secular-religion distinction that orders historians’ investigation of the Christian past, showing them to be arbitrary and partial; on the other hand, the shift relies on attribution of a crucial importance to the context that provided legitimation of given ontological assumptions. The neutralization of the immanent or dualistic perceptions of reality is a monumental obstacle. In a secular perception of reality, the secular and the sacred belong to opposite spheres, but this was not true in the Christian past. In the Old Testament, the sacred was the realm within the temple; the profane was everything that was celebrated outside the temple. But in the New Testament, and therefore in Christianity, the entire universe is God’s temple. Accordingly, the sacred does not stand for separation but for unity in distinction of the order of the divine with that of nature. The qualification “in distinction” protects Christianity from the risk of pantheism. Therefore, the sacred should be considered in terms of

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integration in distinction of the two orders, the divine and the natural. It is not an entity but a relationship—the relationship between the Creator and His creation. To paraphrase a sentence from David L. Schindler, sacredness, with its call to share in the perfect love of the Trinity, is inclusive of the objective order of human beings. Sacredness is intended to comprehend the order of human beings in its entirety.22 In brief, sacredness is the name of the relationship between the order of the divine and that of nature. The subject of sacredness is God and all other things insofar as they are related to God. For reason already mentioned, I reframe sacramental ontology in terms of “sacramental worldview.” In brief, sacramental worldview is the perception of the saeculum as a sacramental reality, as a sacred secularity. Sacred secularity is a secularity that is still original, untouched by the process of secularization. The sacred can reveal itself independently from the secular structures of reality, but the secular structures of reality, when deprived of their supernatural end, decay to a profane condition. The saeculum is sacred when it is perceived and lived in its integrity. When its earthly component is perceived as detached from its supernatural roots, however, the saeculum is profane. My point is that historiography should be able to address the Christian past against a sacramental worldview, instead of a secular view, for the simple and fundamental reason that the former better approximates the Christian past’s inhabitants’ own worldview. The second element of this framework consists of the realization that historians could not address the Christian past without the help of theology. This refers to the already mentioned limits of history to grasp Christianity as a supernatural religion. A non-secular complement helps historians construct a sacramental worldview that resembles that of the inhabitants of the Christian past, including the sacrality of human nature and the eschatological horizon of human history. .23 Although the secular worldview is the result of certain events and intellectual achievements that redefined the Weltanschauungen of early modern Europe, the sacramental worldview was principally the product of the theological achievements of the first ecumenical councils. Just like historians study the Enlightenment or the scientific revolution to detect the underground spirit of the modern era, they 22 The original quote reads: “In a word, holiness, with its call to share in the perfect love of the Father in the Son by the Spirit, is inclusive of the objective order of intelligence and of the meaning and truth of all created entities. Holiness is intended to comprehend the order of being in its entirety.” David L. Schindler, “Trinity, Creation, and the Order of Intelligence in the Modern Academy” in Communio: International Catholic Review 28 (Fall 2001), 406–428, 412. 23 Here the source of inspiration is the work of Maurice Blondel and the discussion on philosophy of religion in France in the 1930s. The discussion is summarized at the end of this book.

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should study Nicaea and Chalcedon to grasp the ontological presumptions hidden in the sacramental horizon of the Christian past. In that sense, they need theology. This complementary role of theology does not imply religious authorities and theologians who dictate to historians without consideration for the autonomy of human reason and subjectivity. Brad Gregory is an example of a historian who works at the intersection of history and theology, although he keeps himself rigorously at that intersection as an historian.24 The point is not to take sides in the old-fashioned debate between reason and faith or science and theology but to recognize their mutual enrichment. When it comes to addressing the Christian past, the relationship between history and theology is one of unity without confusion or bricolage between two heterogeneous kinds of discourse. The unity of history and theology is required because the two disciplines achieve their fulfillment only in mutual dependence. To be more explicit, history is able to reach a comprehensive understanding of the reality of the premodern history of Europe to the extent that it denies its own self-sufficiency. Thus, the necessity in history to raise the question of a proper context of a supernatural religion implies that such a question cannot be answered within the scope of history alone. The historical study of Christian civilization, or Christendom, assumes the necessity of raising the question of Christianity as a supernatural religion. I do not mean the hazard of addressing the supernatural as a possibility; this is a matter that concerns theology. I mean the necessity to address the Christian past in the same way in which it was constructed, qualified, and perceived by its inhabitants, that is, as a reality filtered through a supernatural background. Another way to put it is through the distinction between the categories of mystery and enigma. Mystery is a theological category: it is not a revelation that mysteriously descends from God to human reason. It is an event that only faith can affirm on the basis of a revelation. Enigma is a historical category; historians, in fact, can consider the supernatural in terms of a historical enigma.

Structure The book is divided into two sections. The first (covering Chapters One, Two and Three) focuses on the methodological debate. Gregory and Jones initiated a discussion about approaching religious history from a distinct 24 I am in debt to William R. Pinch for this specification. Private communication to the author (May 4, 2021).

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perspective. In fact, they have been accused of writing “confessional” history. Such criticism is unjustified on a methodological ground and should be reversed. Religious history as it is done these days is not neutral: it shows, in fact, an undeniable anti-supernatural bias. It does not tell stories about the past; it offers secularized interpretations of the past. Progress in present understandings of the religious past proceeds through the exclusion of elements such as the supernatural character of Christianity from those stories. The Christian past must adapt to a secular worldview. The particular historical sensibility embedded in today’s historiography of the religious past is narrow and limited and needs to be challenged. A post-secular sensibility provides a much better understanding of how people of the past viewed their world and acknowledges the contingency of the secular and its limits in addressing the sacred. A change of perspective, that is, the embrace of an ontological orientation that allows the detection and recognition of the supernatural, and an entente cordiale between history and theology in which each discipline remains autonomous from the other and both benefit from mutual assistance, may help allow the Christian past to keep its integrity. In the first section I summarize how dealing with religious ideas in religious history (and specifically Christian history) has recently become a matter of discussion. Two authors have framed their work around the concept of sacramental ontology, that is, a unified vision of reality in which the secular and the religious, the physical and the spiritual, the natural and the divine, come together while maintaining their distinction. The goal of these authors is a new understanding of historical realities, and more specifically of the Christian past, by replacing one ontology with another: what is constitutive of true historical past is no longer grounded in rational certainty but in sacramental ontology. The latter is conceived as a remedy to writing history and to historical methods that tend to exclude the supernatural. To some, these scholars have moved beyond the question of perception alone to push toward a view of the past in which the sacral was indeed at work in the world. The question of sacramental ontology has been read by critics as stating that seeing the past with secular eyes is fundamentally an act of distortion. That has generated much controversy. Not surprisingly, both Jones’s and Gregory’s books have been labeled in terms of “manifestos.”25 For the sake of this study, two distinct lines of criticism are addressed. According to the first line of criticism, Jones’s and 25 With regard to Jones, see: Edmund Waldstein, “An Integralist Manifesto,” First Things, October 2017: at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/10/an-integralist-manifesto (accessed on July 23, 2019). With regard to Gregory, see note 67.

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Gregory’s books are not merely making a historical claim; they also make a normative claim in the sense that they offer an integralist alternative to contemporary worldviews.26 According to the second, these books have been categorized as works of theology and philosophy, not of history; to justify that, some of their fellow historians have criticized the choice to look at theology and philosophy. In the first section of this study, an attempt is made to go beyond the mutually alternative reasons raised in the mentioned debate on sacramental ontology to unveil the genealogy of the present, alienated relationship between the Christian past and modern scholarship. Among other causes, both immanent historicism as well as the dualist (or separatist) character of secularism are identified as the most prominent, the argument being that secularism is an obstacle to reaching the Christian history in the dark corner of the past where modern scholarship has confined it. The crux of the matter, in this section, is to resist the effect of desacralization on the historical reconstruction of the religious history of Europe, whereby the supernatural is seen as either non-existent or an addiction to an autonomous secular space. This, in a nutshell, is the question. The inquiry, however, is broader than that to target why historians maintain the conviction that a desacralizing approach is still the way through which religious history manifests itself, even when those historians deal with forms of religious history that reject that conviction. The answer is, to paraphrase a remark of German philosopher Kurt Hübner, to free historians from the epochal misconception that the sacred has nothing more to say to contemporary men and women because it contradicts a neutral, secular, autonomous idea of history.27 In clearer terms, the answer is a method that delivers a view of the Christian past that includes the supernatural. A first suggestion is to overcome the limits on history, caused by the secularization thesis, by embracing an approach to the Christian past that circumvents the impact of the limits of a secular epistemology on the representation of the Christian past. Another suggestion is to reintegrate theology and history at the level 26 John Ehrett, “More Thoughts on Neo-Integralism: A Critical Review of Andrew Willard Jones’s ‘Before Church and State,’” Between 2 Kingdoms, July 4, 2018: at https://www.patheos. com/blogs/betweentwokingdoms/2018/07/more-thoughts-on-neo-integralism-a-critical-reviewof-andrew-willard-joness-before-church-and-state/ (accessed on March 24, 2020). 27 The original quote reads: “to free oneself from the epochal misconception that it [the faith] has nothing more to say to contemporary man because it contradicts his humanistic idea of reason, enlightenment, and freedom.” Kurt Hübner, Das Christentum im Wettstreit der Weltreligionen: Zur Frage der Toleranz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 148. The translation is my own.

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of methodology as a fundamental move of a serious, historical attempt to understand the Christian premodern on its own terms. In the second section (from Chapters Four to Seven) I unveil the dramatic effects of the current historiography on the interpretation of the Christian past. The section is essentially an engagement with the work of R. A. Markus on Augustine, and more specifically, Markus’s interpretation of the saeculum. There is likely no better example of this accidental process of secularization than Markus’s interpretation of the saeculum. A critical examination of Markus’s treatment of Augustine and the secular grounds the theoretical discussion developed in the previous section into an example of the sort of methodological limitations that this book seeks to signal and overcome. The engagement with Markus’s saeculum, however, is also a long reflection on the “thesis” of the ancient secular. The choice of the term has no unmasking intent. Speaking of “thesis,” I am referring to one of those meta-narratives through which scholars try to impose order in the corners of historical ages that are the most disorienting. Personally, I have nothing against these great narratives; on the contrary, I think that they have a value that is not just instrumental; namely, they help scholars understand something more about the ancient world. This is precisely the value of Markus’s narrative, which has undergone a transformation from a tool for orienting scholars in their study of the ancient world into a thesis—an argument taken for granted. The pillar of this grand narrative is precisely the widespread feeling that the very foundations of modern secularism can be found in the work of Augustine, the defining Father of the Latin Church. In Markus’s Augustine, human existence—time, space, desires, practices, imaginaries—suddenly moved away from the religious matrix that was shaping them (and would shape them for centuries) in the opposite direction, a direction not easy to identify but that scholars can define precisely as worldly, “secular.” Across a string of key publications—Saeculum, The End of Ancient Christianity, and Christianity and the Secular—celebrated historian Markus famously transplanted, so to speak, liberal secularism from modernity to the end of antiquity. His primary interest was to argue the discontinuity between Augustine’s political thought and those of his early medieval interpreters, specifically Gregory the Great. But in his writings, Markus also established a double hermeneutic between Augustine’s understanding of the saeculum, that is, the time before the eschaton, and what the moderns believe is a secular society. Somehow a certain secular ideology became a historical proposition that was in turn framed in terms of political theology. In his study on Augustine, Markus identified a “theology of the saeculum” that referred to the bishop of Hippo’s theology and that acknowledges “a

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sphere of temporal realities in which the two ‘cities’ share an interest.”28 The two cities are, of course, the earthly city and the heavenly city, two real and distinct civitas driven by two different kinds of love. These two societies are nevertheless mixed now, in the saeculum, and they cannot be disentangled. It is the coexistence of the two cities until the end of time and history, until the parousia or the return of Christ, that prevents any political order to be sacred, that is, to hold transcendental legitimation. Markus identified the key passage in Augustine’s The City of God: The heavenly city, while on its earthly pilgrimage calls forth its citizens from every nation and every tongue. It assembles a band of pilgrims, not caring about any diversity in customs, laws and institutions whereby they severally make provision for the achievements and maintenance of earthly peace. All these provisions are intended, in their various ways, among the different nations, to secure the aim of earthly peace. The heavenly city does not repeal or abolish any of them, provided that they do not impede the religion in which the one supreme and true god is worshipped.29

Markus himself summarizes the argument as indicating that “the state and social institutions in general […] ha[ve] no immediate relation to ultimate purposes.”30 States and their governments, including those formally Christians, cannot take for granted divine protection from their enemies. From the premise that states and governments surrender any privileged place in God’s scheme of salvation, Markus deduced that political orders are theologically neutral. In the decades after the publication of his work on Augustine’s The City of God, Markus recognized that his interpretation of Augustine’s view of the secular reflected a certain intellectual atmosphere of the post-conciliar era, in which the Church had to enter dialogue with a secular, open, pluralistic, and religiously neutral state. Despite his delimited revision, Markus stood strong on his argument, and its role in the generation of an intellectual lineage of political theology named Augustinian liberalism still endures today. In the second section of the present book, Markus’s interpretation is deconstructed in terms of secular theology, that is, an appropriation of theological concepts and the transformation of their understanding 28 Robert A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, revised edition (New York: Cambridge, 2007), 133. The original edition was published in 1989. 29 Quoted in Markus, Saeculum, 40. 30 Markus, Saeculum, 133.

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though a secularization process.31 Secular theology is the application of the secularization thesis to intellectual history, so that modern, liberal political theories contain all the essential ingredients of political theology, even if they lack any reference to the supernatural. Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s political theology as totally oriented toward the world, ad saeculum, stands on the condition that Augustine’s theological thought is considered from an extrinsic perspective in which the supernatural is considered as an addendum to a self-legitimized secular. When these supernatural concerns are properly reintroduced as integral to his thought, however, the groundlessness of this total orientation toward the world emerges. It was not Augustine himself, but a secularist appropriation of his thought that spawned the development of liberal, theologically grounded political theories. The argument of this section is that a secularization of Augustine’s theology is responsible for the generation of a historical thesis on an ancient secularism. A few explanatory remarks should be added about the structure of the book and the nature of the claims I would make for its argument. After an introductory chapter in which the problem, scope, and argument of this study are presented, the next three chapters form a discussion on Christian historiography. In Chapter One, “Sacramental Ontology,” I address questions surrounding the adoption in history of the concept of sacramental ontology (understood as a Weltanschauungen). I also discuss the potential consequences of such an adoption on theory of history. While the chapter does not offer definitive answers, it does contribute valuable elements to the ongoing debate. First, the chapter addresses Jones’s and Gregory’s important interdisciplinary books and the intellectual debates surrounding these works. Second, it articulates sacramental ontology in relationship to both secular and sacred history. In Chapter Two, “Ontological Turn,” the difference between the sacramental ontology and other Christian approaches to history is framed as follows: the former is based on an ontological orientation, the latter on an epistemological orientation. The chapter offers a proper context in which to locate the phenomenon of sacramental ontology. I suggest considering (1) the generation of the concept of sacramental ontology as part of the internal dialectic of the Christian intellectual world, not as a reaction to the secular, and (2) the adoption of the concept as a protection against ontological nihilism, not as an attack on scientif ic knowledge. Finally, I provide explanation of the ontological turn in terms of a discourse 31 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from The Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3.

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on the actual conditions of the past and on some kind of ideal structure or formal principle that stands behind the history of historical knowledge and the forms of inclusion and exclusion it employs. In Chapter Three, “History and Theology,” I present a specific approach to late antiquity and medieval Christianity in which history and theology work together to probe the Christian mysteries, or the historical enigmas, of that age. It is a sort of third way between the mainstream secular representatives of a history separate from theology, on one hand, and fellow theologians who not only did not distinguish history and theology but tended to mix them on the other. This third way opens the Christian past to the possibility of being addressed integrally. The four chapters of the second section are a genealogy, explanation, and a critique of Markus’s idea of the ancient secular. In Chapter Four, “Saeculum,” the focus is Markus’s argument of the late ancient secular. The argument is linked to Markus’s discussions of the process of desecularization that brings the ancient world to an end and of the debate on political Augustinianism. In Chapter Five, “Ancient and Modern Christianity,” I move from the argument to Markus. The aim is to reveal the assumptions behind the argument—assumptions that need to be found in the scholarship of Markus’s time—by digging deeply into Markus’s scholarly project. The chapter is predominantly an investigation into the intellectual roots of Markus’s argument on the ancient secular. A connection is suggested between the argument and Markus’s personal commitment to the renewal of the Roman Catholic (henceforth only “Catholic”) Church. Here the point under observation is the link between Markus the scholar and Markus the Catholic intellectual. The chapter covers the potential nexus between Markus’s engagement with the life of the twentieth-century Church and his scholarly formulation of interest in the ancient secular as one important stream of Augustine’s thought. The chapter also establishes a link between Markus’s concerns for the future of the post-conciliar Church and his specific interpretation of Augustine’s saeculum. In Chapter Six, “Augustinianisms,” I investigate further Markus’s argument. The specific angle is the supernatural, in the sense of the nature–supernatural (or nature–grace) relationship. One main conclusion is that the autonomous status of Markus’s secular is a consequence of his assumption that nature and grace operate in two different domains. Then the focus returns to Markus’s argument of the ancient secular, framing his position as a product of Augustinian Scholasticism, a distinct stream of the twentieth-century retrieval of Augustine. Moreover, the chapter introduces succinctly the stream of Neo-Augustinianism to which this work belongs: Neoplatonic Augustinianism, which is an effort to address Christianity as a

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supernatural religion by recovering the treasures of Augustine (in the work of Maurice Blondel) and Greek Patristics (in the work of Henri de Lubac and the thinkers of the ressourcement movement). In Chapter Seven, “Saeculum Retold,” I show that dismissing the supernatural does not serve historical reconstruction well. Although in Markus’s interpretation Augustine was talking about phenomenological institutions, in my interpretation Augustine was dealing with the unseen realm of the supernatural. Markus is right in pointing out that this-worldly institutions lack an eschatological dimension, but this does not mean that they are neutral. It means that the eschatological dimension is downplayed at the level of the members of those institutions. Augustine produced a shift from social to individual eschatology. The basis of Augustine’s thought is supernaturalist, and that of Markus is extrinsicist. Markus’s argument is confronted with an interpretation of Augustine in which the intent is primarily to supplement the study of the Christian past with a focus on what is left out in his approach, namely the supernatural.

Method and Terms In this book I do not renegotiate the secular–religious duality—they did— but I show how such a renegotiation changes the terms of familiar concepts like “sacred” and “profane.” Most importantly, it modifies the understanding of the “secular,” not as an autonomous realm but as a timespan that is no longer simple “temporality” but “tempiternity,” the union in distinction of time and eternity. I make an effort to return words like “supernatural,” “sacred,” “profane,” “secular,” “sacred history,” and “time” to their own original, Christian meaning. Historians usually address the supernatural and the sacred as entities separated from the secular, but I intend them to be read as being the link between the divine and natural orders. The secular is not a space but an eschatological time, a time that is more than just temporality and that precedes and anticipates the end. I clarify the terms of engagement with all these terms in this subsection and throughout the manuscript. The reader is invited to adopt the secular or the religious meaning of these terms according to the context. The criterion of interpretation is always the same: when the reader finds separation, like sacred history separated from secular history, the reader is in a secularized environment. When the reader finds unity in distinction, the reader is in a desecularized environment. “Supernatural” is a polysemic term. I make use of it with three different meanings, and context helps the reader to determine which meaning is more appropriate in a sentence. First, supernatural refers to the preternatural or

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the supra-natural, events that are not otherwise explainable, like miracles. I make little to no use of this sense of the word. Second, supernatural refers to an entity or more precisely to an order of reality. I make good use of this distinct meaning, particularly when I address how historians, including Markus, understand the supernatural or related terms, sacramental ontology and sacred. I basically employ the term to criticize extrinsicism. The supernatural in Christianity has nothing to do with the notion of a divine intervention from the outside of creation. Such an extrinsic view of the supernatural implies that the reign of the creation and that of the creator are separate. It is a view born from the same secular roots that infuses an immanent view of reality; the only difference between the immanent view and the extrinsicist view is that the former believes in the naturalization of the supernatural while the latter accepts a separation between the two reigns. I will return to these topics. Finally, supernatural is an operation: to borrow historian of theology Henri de Lubac’s words, “the divine order understood in its relationship of […] union with the human order.”32 I mostly refer to the supernatural in those terms. In the same fashion, I use the term “sacred” not as an entity but a relationship, namely the relationship between the order of divine affairs and that of human affairs, or more simply, between God and His creation. I borrow from biblical scholar Paul Minear the distinction between “sacred” and “holy.” For Minear, “The sacred is found wherever religion is found […] it is religion that provides the origin, context, and limits for using the adjective sacred […] sacredness points to human activity oriented toward God […] sacredness is indigenous to the realm of human or institutional practice.”33 In this study, the sacred stands for transcending the powers of natural order and refers to God or the Holy Spirit in His self-communication or relation with creatures. The sacred is the blending of nature and the divine. In summary, I treat supernatural (as an operation) and sacred as synonyms. “Nature” can mean both human nature and cosmos (physical nature), depending on context. The term assumes two distinct meanings according to the relationship between nature and the supernatural. When a separation is assumed between the former and the latter, one secures the forms of extrinsicism mentioned earlier, and nature is pure nature. When a union is accepted between God and His creation, between God and cosmos as well as Man, nature is more than the modern definition of nature: it implies a blending of nature and 32 Henri de Lubac, SJ, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. by Br. Richard Arnandez, FSC (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 17. 33 Paul S. Minear, “The Holy and the Sacred,” Theology Today 47, no. 1 (1990), 5–12, 5 and 6.

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the supernatural. The supernatural, in fact, is already present in nature, and one has the Augustinian, paradoxical, yet poetic image of the first paragraph of the Confessions. A Christian past is a past in which people were immersed in a supernatural horizon of sense. As mentioned, Christian past stands more generally for late antique and medieval Christianity and, more specifically, for Christian civilization, or Christendom. I identify this Christian past in terms of “sacred secularity” to indicate a world that was suspended between the sacred and the profane. By “sacred world” I mean a world in which the material and the spiritual, the phenomenological and the supernatural, the historical and the divine, were seen as interrelated; a synonym for sacred world is sacramental world. A profane world is one in which such interrelation is broken so that the secular is unconnected with the divine. I make use of the term “secular history” to identify (1) a mode to write history, (2) a secularized representation of the Christian past, and (3) a secular dispositive, or method. The context will help the reader identify the correct meaning. I apply the terms “post-secular history,” “sacred history,” and “Christian historiography” to indicate respectively a mode to write history, a representation of the Christian past built against a sacred background of understanding, and a distinct historiography. Post-secular history is a specific mode of writing history that addresses the Christian past without compromising the integrity of its supernatural horizon. Post-secular history is not ecclesiastical history but rather history conceived to study the elements of the Christian past within their supernatural horizon. It is history that places the Christian past in the context of time perceived as eschatological time. Post-secular historians do not state that history is sacred but rather that when the history of the Christian past is written, it should be written in a way that preserves and protects the view of the inhabitants of the Christian past, who equalized history to historia salutis. Thus, post-secular history is not historia salutis, but a mode of writing that recognizes the ancient and medieval specific interpretation of history as historia salutis. For the inhabitants of the past, in fact, history was history of salvation, and time was a “medium of a sacred history” that ultimately moves toward establishing a divine kingdom.34 Post-secular history reconstructs the history of the Chris34 Joannes Fabian, Le Temps et les autres: comment l’anthropologie construit son objet, trans. by Estelle Henry-Bossoney and Bernard Müller (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2006), 26–27. Fabian’s book is “a radical epistemological critique of anthropological writing” with regard to “the notions that anthropologists are “here and now,” their objects of study are “there and then,” and that the “other” exists in a time not contemporary with our own.” Source: Fabian, Le Temps and les autres, iv.

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tian past as sacred history, or historia salutis, to safeguard the motivations of the people and the meanings they assigned to the events. “Integralism” is a term used in distinct fashion: it is neither religious integralism—the subordination of the secular to the religious—nor secular integralism—the subordination of the religious to the secular—but an integration of them that safeguards the autonomy and the integrity of both. In proposing the importance of accounting for what lies beyond the natural, I introduce a distinctive school of thought, labeled ressourcement (return to the sources) movement, and I embrace its specific approach. The ressourcement movement has been primarily linked to the efforts within Catholicism to recover the spiritual, liturgical, and theological riches of patristic and high medieval Christian orthodoxy to address contemporary theological, philosophical, political, and cultural concerns. Although initially considered a crucial effort to revitalize moribund, static, and self-centric twentieth-century Catholicism, it has increasingly been addressed as an intellectual framework with the potential to challenge the priorities and assumptions that are characteristic of modern and late modern thought. It is a theological, literary, philosophical movement of scholars and authors, including poets. Although initially internal to Catholicism, it has progressively been embraced by scholars of other Christian denominations, including Evangelicals and Anglicans. Theologically, the movement has expressed some of the most important theologians of the twentieth century, but it does not represent a Catholic (or any other denominational) orthodox position. More specifically, the movement has challenged—theologically, philosophically, and literally—the hierarchical duality of the secular and religious; by doing so, the scholars associated with the movement transcend the shared background assumption of all modern theology to somehow inaugurate a post-secular theology. More recently, the results and implications developed by the ressourcement theologians have been incorporated into non-theological works, including historical works. In brief, this study offers an original application of the thought of ressourcement thinkers in the realm of historiography. In this study I basically complete a hermeneutical cycle: first, I investigate the sources of Christian history to empower a post-secular historical perspective. At that point, I apply this post-secular perspective to the sources of Christian history. Along these lines, I hope to return to the sources of Christian history and allow them to resist the effects of desacralization by abandoning the idea of the “supernatural” as merely either a superstition or an addition to an autonomous secular space. In the ancient and medieval world the supernatural was unreflexively held and phenomenologically

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assumed as the taken for granted structure of reality. Among other things, the ressourcement approach sustains a vision of Christianity as multivalent historical phenomena. There has, of course, never been one Christianity but multiple, competing, overlapping Christianities. There is an inherent tension in arguing that Christianity exists beyond its secular confines, and that it exists entirely within the confines of a specific denominational doctrine. That is especially true when attempting to reconstruct the intellectual landscape of a past that was plural, dynamic, fast-moving, and always in flux. Moreover, incorporating a multivalent perspective helps steer the book clear of an apologetic position. This book was conceived as a book of history (in terms of past events), but it materialized as a book of historiography (in terms of ways of writing history). History is a polysemic term: it is used as a synonym of (1) the past, the res gestae (the object); (2) the writing of history, the historical writing, that is, the study of the past, the recording and interpretation of past (historia rerum gestarum, the activity); (3) history as the product of historical writing, namely the written history, the representation of the past (the result); (4) history as historiography, the ways history is written (the process); (5) the discipline of the past, the historical enterprise, including the above (1), (2), (3), and (4). The context will suggest the correct meaning. Here historiography, method, and methodology are used as synonyms. The term “historiography” is not only used to mean the study of the theory and method, that is, the writing of history based on certain principles and methods, but also the history of the changing interpretations of the past. Historiography is also the evaluation of different historical approaches (i.e., political, social history) or styles (i.e., postmodernism, revisionism) to the scholarly investigation of the past. Each approach or style assumes a theory of history (both as a discipline and as an object) and a certain method. Once again, the context will direct the reader to the proper meaning.35

Conclusion The primary subject matter of this book is late antiquity and medieval historiography and one argument raised is that a historian’s disregard of the supernatural affects that historian’s view of the Christian past. It is not sufficient that historians approach the supernatural convictions of the past 35 The author has translated ancient authors’ words (including their scriptural citations) directly from the original texts.

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in good faith and equanimity to appreciate the worldview of the people who lived at that time. The problem is not about intention (or religious faith or lack of it) but rather method. The historians are not asked to dismiss their personal secular beliefs but to disengage those beliefs from their historical work and embrace a re-theorization of their discipline so that the Christian past is described as it would have been described by its inhabitants. It is a path that in some capacity resembles the one Christians were asked to follow in recent centuries: to keep their beliefs to themselves and engage in historical writing with estranging tools. It is only fair, I think, to switch the burden every now and then.

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Sacramental Ontology

In Its Own Terms How to deal with religious ideas in history has recently become a matter of discussion, and the efforts of numerous authors framing their work around the concept of “understanding the historical past on its own terms” is the point of departure.1 The publication of Seeing Things Their Way almost a decade ago was, in the minds of the editors, an opportunity to explore and apply the methodology of intellectual history that Quentin Skinner pioneered in the field of religious thought.2 Since the 1970s, in fact, scholars have tried to escape the narrow borders of secular history to deal with the complexities and nuances of religious history, particularly in the fields of medieval and early modern intellectual history. The problem can be summarized in these terms: the scholarly approach to these periods, in which intellectual life was still profoundly shaped by religious ideas and practices, was exclusively secular. The question was a gap between medieval and early modern religious ideas as they were, and as they were seen then, and the analytical lenses crafted for and in modern historical eras. Several scholars have worked to f ill the gap, including Heiko Oberman, Heinz Schilling, and Callum Brown.3 The cultural turn ignited new interest in 1 Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory (eds.), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 2 Quentin Skinner, “Introduction: Seeing Things Their Way,” in Quentin Skinner (ed.), Visions of Politics, vol. 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–8, and 47. For a bibliography on the Cambridge method and its critics, see: Alister Chapman and John Coffey, “Introduction,” in Chapman, Coffey, and Gregory (eds.), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, 1–23. 3 Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); reprint (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001); Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” in Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.), Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 1994–1995), 641–681; Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001). In Seeing Things Their Way, Chapman also mention Brown’s articles, “The Secularisation Decade: What the 1960s Have Done to the Study of Religious History,” in Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (eds.), The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),

Beltramini, E., Desecularizing the Christian Past. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463721882_ch01

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religion. Keith Thomas recently provided a precious parallel between social and cultural anthropology and historians: the latter have learned from the former to conceive their subject as a “kind of retrospective ethnography” and to understand “the native point of view.” He added: Instead of trying to classify and order human experience from the outside, as if historical actors were butterflies, and historians entomologists, much imaginative effort has gone into the re-creation of the way things appeared to people at the time. This shift from the etic to the emic, as the linguists would call it, involves an enhanced concern with the meaning of events for those who participated in them, and a new respect for what people in the past thought and felt. Back in the 1950s, it was common to disparage ideas as mere rationalizations of self-interest. Today, even the hardest-nosed historians seek to recapture the vocabulary, categories and subjective experience of the historical actors, rather than anachronistically viewing their behaviour through modern spectacles. 4

Historians like John Dunn, John Pocock, Richard Tuck, and Mark Goldie have produced excellent examples of this anti-anachronistic approach in the field of political thought.5 Other historians have worked in the realms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, science, and Enlightenment. More recently, Quentin Skinner—a leading figure in the “Cambridge School” 29–46, and “A Revisionist Approach to Religious Change,” in Steven Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 31–58. 4 Keith Thomas, “New Ways Revisited: How History’s Borders Have Expanded in the Past Forty Years,” Times Literary Supplement, October 13, 2006, 3. 5 John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); John G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2005); Richard Tuck, “The ‘Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” in Michael Hunter and David Wootton (eds.), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 111–130; Richard Tuck, “The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” in Nicholas T. Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 120–138; Michael Goldie, “The Civil Religion of James Harrington,” in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 197–222; Michael Goldie, “The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in Ole P. Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 331–368; Michael Goldie, “The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 30, no. 1 (1991), 20–62; Michael Goldie, “Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism,” in Nicholas T. Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 209–231.

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of intellectual history—addressed his distinct branch of the gap, one covering the political thinking of fifteenth-century Italy or seventeenth-century England, periods in which intellectual life was still deeply framed by religious ideas and practices; Skinner sought to comprehend these eras on their (rather than on our) terms. The archaeological intent is clear: the collection of religious ideas left behind by a particular historical period and culture are repristinated and approached according to the episteme of the period. None of these ideas has predictive value: they are all included in the description of limited historical orders. Only if located in their own context, in fact, can religious ideas be correctly comprehended in their broader significance. The problem, Skinner argued, is how to avoid two similar and opposite temptations: to identify the correct context in the theological system of reference or to identify it in social, political, or economic facts. Working on these insights, the contributors to Seeing Things Their Way identified Skinner’s notion of “seeing things their way” as a means of providing a guide to conducting studies in history of theology and religious ideas across a wide range of subjects. For the sake of this study, a specific element of that notion needs to be highlighted, that is, the pursuit of a middle ground between a religious secular context and a historical theological context, the two tendencies Skinner was against. In their Introduction, the book’s two editors, Alister Chapman and John Coffey, clarified the point: on one side, as stated, is the secularist approach and on the other is the confessional approach. According to Chapman and Coffey, the confessional approach (my definition) “ignore[s] all material considerations, reducing their problem to abstract intellectual terms,” and is pursued by “old-fashioned confessional theologians and Church historians.”6 They continued their analysis by dividing this approach into two streams: one, the application of modern theology to history of theology so that medieval and early modern theology is assimilated into modern categories; and two, their strict attention on Luther, which has forced generations of German historians of theology “to judge all subsequent theological developments within German Protestantism from the privileged standpoint of this one individual.”7 For the editors of Seeing Things Their Way, the confessional approach is as anachronistic as the secularist approach. Religious ideas, they stated, need to be understood first and foremost on their own terms—not in terms of some competing theological framework, nor in terms of some modern standpoint. “In short,” Chapman and Coffey suggested, “intellectual historians should try to be less 6 Chapman and Coffey, “Introduction,” 13. 7 Chapman and Coffey, “Introduction,” 14–15.

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‘present-minded’ and work harder to master the languages and vocabulary of the past.”8 Before moving to Brad Gregory’s Unintended Reformation, Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State, and the acrimonious debate they ignited, I offer a summary of the outcomes of Seeing Things Their Way. According to the editors, the correct method for approaching the history of theology and religious ideas is to treat the narrow path that is marked on one side by the theological worldview and religious context of those days and on the other by the characters’ life circumstances (that is, of their time). In one essay on the sixteenth-century Mennonite Jacob de Roore, Gregory criticized those historians who try to explain that “the point of studying religion is to show that it is not what its protagonists claim that it is.” Religion may well be worthy of close attention, and it cannot be explained in secular, nonreligious terms, he argued; historians’ objective should be “to understand and present something of Jacob de Roore’s ideas in such a manner that he would recognize them as his own.”9 The target has become to understand the religious past on its own terms.10

Two Books Two recent works of European premodern history, both centered on the idea of sacramental ontology, are one additional step in the direction of a comprehensive appreciation of the religious past on its own terms. Sacramental ontology is a unified vision of reality in which earth and heaven—that is, physical and spiritual, history and theology—come together while maintaining their distinction. Sacramental ontology is an ontological perspective that incorporates the notion that the material and the spiritual coexisted in the 8 Chapman and Coffey, “Introduction,” 16. 9 Brad S. Gregory, “Can We ‘See Things Their Way’? Should We Try?,” in Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory (eds.), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, 24–45. 10 Among those scholars who have attempted to expand the limits of epistemology, I like to mention Eleonore Stump and her work in medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion, and contemporary metaphysics; Lorraine Daston and her study on the history of rationality, especially but not exclusively scientific rationality; and Barbara Shapiro and her writings on early modern English political culture. See: Eleonore Stump, “Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism Without Reductionism,” Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 12, no. 4 (1995), Article 5; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth‐Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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reality of the past. C. S. Lewis, who knew and loved the medieval “cosmos,” describes it as “tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”11 It was an organic whole, ordered from within, animated by a hierarchy of souls, perhaps even by a “world soul.” It meant that nature possessed a sacred and spiritual value by virtue of its creation by God and by the immanent presence of God within it. Recently, historians Willard Jones and Gregory adopted the concept of sacramental ontology in their work, making the notion relevant in the domain of history. For these authors, sacramental ontology is distinct from both immanentism and extrinsicism and centered on the sacramental relationship between historical, visible realities and the spiritual, invisible realities. In his Before Church and State, Jones pointed out that our (i.e., scholars’) understanding of the kingdom of Louis IX is conditioned by a secular worldview. When discussing the Christian kingdom of France in the thirteenth century, we adopt categories such as “secular” and “religious” but always from a secular viewpoint. It means that we see society, or at least the state, as fundamentally secular, although hosting and protecting genuine, sporadic, or permanent forms of religiousness. This secular view of the Christian kingdom of France, Jones pointed out, misses the point because the Christian kingdom was, in the view of its people, a sacramental kingdom, one in which the secular and the religious were distinct but united in the same social order. In studying such a reality, Jones noted, “our modern categories do not hold.”12 Another author who addressed the theme of sacramental ontology is Brad Gregory. In his monumental The Unintended Reformation, Gregory presented the thesis that modernity is an unintended product of the Protestant Reformation. More specifically, he argued that the replacement of “a comprehensive, sacramental worldview,” which has stood as the classic and medieval Catholic understanding of reality, disintegrated as an unintended consequence of the replacement of the sacramental cosmos with a disenchanted universe devoid of God and meaning.13 Gregory did not suggest adoption of a sacramental view in approaching the study of the Christian premodern past, but his work can nevertheless be connected with Jones’s in the sense that both scholars detect a caesura between premodern and modern eras at the level of ontological assumptions. In brief, 11 Quoted in Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 24. 12 Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX, 6. 13 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 55.

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the framework of premodern ontology is incompatible with the framework of modern ontology, the former being “sacramental” in character and the latter, according to Gregory, basically secular.14 Both authors simultaneously pursued their respective projects on two levels: one level is more properly historical, and it deals with the France of the thirteenth century and the impact of the sixteenth century on the development of modernity; the other is metatheoretical, that is, it addresses how the historical research is conducted. Clearly, both authors had reservations about the current state of the historical enterprise, and both proposed distinct approaches, or methods or theories, of historiography. In Chapter One, Gregory claimed that “a different approach is needed if we are to avoid being overwhelmed by specialized scholarship […] which tends to reinforce ingrained assumptions about historical periodization that in turn hamper an adequate understanding of change over time.”15 In fact, Gregory went well beyond normal disciplinary boundaries; he was confident in establishing his claims, reliant on contributions from the history of philosophy, theology, politics, morality, and economics. He argued that part of the historian’s assignment is to identify new narratives.16 In turn, the search for these forms of narratives forced Gregory to look beyond the traditional, narrow boundaries of history as a discipline. He surveyed the work of the authors who, across different disciplines, are challenging notions of the secular and the religious as separated in social reality, and quite naturally he found peers among Catholic, Anglican, and Evangelical theologians. Not surprisingly, this peculiar approach has made Gregory vulnerable to criticism on the theoretical level and led to his book being received as a “philosophical rather than historical work.”17 Both Jones and Gregory, probably the latter more obviously than the former, work simultaneously as historians and historians of historiography, “historiography” being understood as the theory and method of historical inquiry. They consider the history (in terms of discipline) of their own era 14 More precisely, Gregory’s argument is built around the alleged shift in ontology between a sacramental view of the world to “the domestication of God’s transcendence and the extension of his presence from the natural world.” See: Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 38. 15 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 3. 16 Gregory, “Can We ‘See Things Their Way’? Should We Try?,” 24–45. 17 Nelson H. Minnich, Joshua Benson, Hans J. Hillerbrand, Simon Ditchfield, Paul F. Grendler, and Brad S. Gregory, “Forum Essay,” reviews of Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation in The Catholic Historical Review 98, no. 3 (2012), 503–516, 511. Gregory mentions two forms of historical writing and declares that he belongs to the minority one. Thus, from Gregory’s point of view, his book is a work of history, although not from that same category that a majority of scholars must expect from a historian.

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to be deteriorating into a science and believe that history would signal humanity’s abdication of the right to understand the past as it was. It seems clear that the target of Gregory’s book is a secular and supposedly neutral approach to the past, for he believed this approach is not neutral at all. It is a theory of history built on a set of assumptions, including the separation of the secular from the religious. Consequently, Gregory suggested nothing less than to “unsecularize” academia.18 In other words, he proposed that religious truth claims should be discussed and debated in research universities. This solution, in turn, is considered by one of his reviewers (with little professional courtesy), “little short of absurd.”19 Critics like James Chappell and Ian Hunter have argued, respectively, that Gregory’s work “is not a serious work of history,” in the traditional sense, but rather a “confessional [that] gives rise to a sectarian relation to cultural pluralism” (emphasis added).20 They believe that Gregory’s book is a work of Catholic theology masquerading as a work of history.

Sacramental Ontology In retrospect, Seeing Things Their Way was more properly an intellectual experiment much less significant than the publication of Gregory’s Unintended Reformation. In his book Gregory adopted the same Skinnerian approach he articulated and defended in his contribution to Seeing Things Their Way, that is, to take seriously the ideas of people in the past. As he did then, in his book he recognized the enormous cultural distance that separates the historian from the Reformers but maintained the worthiness of this goal. The challenges historians face do not justify recourse to reductionist theories. The adoption of a non-reductionist theory, in turn, implies a reconsideration of the epistemology and ideology of the historical enterprise. This is the task accomplished in that essay, in which Gregory 18 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 365. 19 Kathleen Crowther, “Review of Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society,” H-HRE, H-Net Reviews. September 2012. At https://networks.h-net.org/ node/15337/reviews/15467/crowther-gregory-unintended-reformation-how-religious-revolution (accessed on March 1, 2020). 20 James Chappel, “An Intended Absence? Democracy and The Unintended Reformation,” The Immanent Frame, September 2013: at http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/09/05/an-intended-absencedemocracy-and-the-unintended-reformation/ (accessed on February 22, 2020); Ian Hunter, “The Return of Sacred History,” The Immanent Frame, September 2013: at https://tif.ssrc.org/2013/09/10/ the-return-of-sacred-history/ (accessed on April 22, 2020).

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laid out four categories (two normative and two positive) of objections to this methodology as applied to the study of religious ideas, which he then brilliantly refuted.21 This step is not surprising, as the only way to look at why a historian’s statement can be accurate or inaccurate has been, since at least the rise of historicism, to look at how the mind, the language, and the experience of the historian function. In a scholarly reality such as North America, in which philosophy has been separated into epistemology on one side and a history of ideas on the other, Gregory was trying to make a philosophical discourse. In his contribution to Seeing Things Their Way, Gregory displayed his method then subsequently applied it in The Unintended Reformation. Truth be told, Gregory mentioned two forms of historical writing and declared that his writings belong to a less common one. Thus, from Gregory’s point of view, his book is a work of history, although not of the kind that most scholars expect from a historian.22 When writing about his method, he recognized his study as an “experimental analysis of the past” and his role as a historian to be “self-consciously selective.”23 Yet, the method that the scholarly community so appreciated in Seeing Things Their Way was substantively rejected in The Unintended Reformation. This is the sense of my previous statement that Seeing Things Their Way can be considered, in retrospect, an intellectual experiment much less significant than the publication of Gregory’s Unintended Reformation. So, what went wrong? One possible answer is simply that Unintended Reformation (and Jones’s Before Church and State, as I will show soon) struck a chord because the adoption of sacramental ontology moved the criticism against anachronism a little bit further. To put it differently, Gregory’s Unintended Reformation proved that the contributing authors (including himself) of those essays contained in Seeing Things Their Way did a better job of discussing the divide between the medieval and the modern than they did discussing the divide between the secular and the religious; they proved effective in rejecting the idea that modern thought is superior to all past forms of understanding reality and is therefore normative for history. Those authors sounded more conservative when it came to rejecting the idea that history can only be understood in terms of contemporary, secular models of inquiry. But the question arises regarding how one can bridge the gap between the medieval and the modern if the gap between the secular and the religious is not 21 Brad S. Gregory, “Can We ‘See Things Their Way’? Should We Try?,” 24–45. 22 Gregory argues that his history is “a different kind of history.” See: Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 2. 23 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 4.

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simultaneously bridged as well. As it happens, the discussion on method that Gregory articulated in Seeing Things Their Way did not go far enough. Sure, he considered (and persuasively refuted) objections to his method that are epistemological or ideological; however, the adoption of a non-reductionist theory does not inevitably imply a reconsideration of epistemology. The adoption of a non-reductionist theory suggests a turn to ontology. This is the step Gregory took in his Unintended Reformation, and this is where Jones’s book comes into the picture. In Before Church and State, Jones pointed out that the kingdom of Louis IX of France was in the view of its people a sacramental kingdom. Some scholars construe the Middle Ages in terms of tensions between Church and State that prefigure those of modernity and modern tensions between the religious and the secular, but Jones took a different path: he revealed a world in which there is no Church/ State duality because there is no clear distinction between Church and State. The world in which Jones travels is totally different from the lunar landscape in which his secular colleagues have been working with epistemological tools. Jones, in fact, operates a reappropriation of a distinct ontology to investigate the Christian premodern. The target of his criticism is a notion of the supernatural not conceived as intrinsic to the order of human history, but as a superfluous addition. More precisely, his target is the assumption of separated realms of human affairs and divine affairs, with history being perceived as an autonomous sphere of existence standing alongside God. Jones’s sacramental ontology is quite the opposite, namely, the blending of the two realms. Sacramental ontology becomes a prism through which scholars can penetrate the relationship between the human person and his/her God as premodern Christians saw it. An implication is inevitable: it is not enough to reframe epistemology in order to reach the point where the past is on its own terms. An investigation on the nature and meaning of reality in the medieval days is required for the historian to recognize the integral supernatural reality of the events of a Christian past. In Before Church and State, Jones showed great respect for the ideas of religious practitioners of thirteenth-century France; by doing so, he surely mitigated the risk of reading his own ideas into those of his historical subjects. But his ambition was greater than that. The carefully drafted issue his book presents is, in fact, that “in the Middle Ages the ‘secular’ was integral to a conception of social reality that was thoroughly ‘supernatural’ in character.”24 He was not satisfied to deal with this or that religious idea; 24 Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX, 5.

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he wanted to recreate “a sacramental world in which the material and the spiritual were everywhere and always present together.”25 This world, a sacramental world, “made sense on its own terms.”26 Here is a dramatic case of a historical inquiry that does not look for the limits of human representation but for the world’s ways of marking the limits. The people of those days did not see the world as fundamentally secular, but fundamentally Christian. In Jones’s words, “I do not mean that the religious was everywhere and that the secular had not yet emerged from under it. I mean they did not exist at all” (original emphasis).27 To understand Jones’s position, it is necessary to reject the methodological assumption of a secular approach, that is, the modern premises of (1) a world outside, untouched by human hands and impervious to human history, and (2) a mind isolated within itself, striving to gain access to an absolute certainty about the laws of the world outside. Jones had no patience for attempts to see things in the way other scholars did; he was not saying that scholars need to reframe the relationship between world and mind. He claimed that in an investigation into the premodern era, the separation between world and mind did not exist: the world was not outside, and the mind was not inside. There are both merits and limitations to speaking of sacramental ontology. By addressing the supernatural as an operation, sacramental ontology is supposed to deliver the idea of a dynamic between nature and the divine. More importantly, the adoption of sacramental ontology should convey the notion that the historical is not merely “natural” because it is the place of God’s self-revelation. If these and other elements are not adequately emphasized, the risk is to transmit the idea that sacramental ontology refers to an entity. In turn, that idea may be interpreted in the sense that sacramental ontology goes beyond the question of perception alone, that is, beyond the point that people in the past thought and interpreted experience differently from today. If sacramental ontology is an entity, the criticism goes, it implies a view of the past in which the sacral was indeed at work in the world. The work of Jones and Gregory, and the question of sacramental ontology, has been read by critics as stating that the past was itself infused with the sacred; therefore, to study the past with secular eyes is fundamentally an act of distortion. I do not share the criticism, but I recognize the source of the misunderstanding. A simple remedy to such misunderstanding is replacing sacramental ontology with sacramental worldview. The difference 25 Ibidem. 26 Ibidem. 27 Ibidem.

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between sacramental ontology and sacramental worldview is the very same difference standing between the reality and the perception of reality. When discussing Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, for example, it may not be enough to describe the political advantages of such a conversion or the influences of other personages upon Constantine; it may be necessary to take seriously the claim that Constantine experienced some sort of vision in the sky (or in a dream) that he understood as a sign from God. That historians have been reluctant to do so is a point about the historians, not about the history—and not about Constantine. Neither Gregory nor Jones devoted too much attention in their books to matters of methodology. In particular, they did not elucidate the genealogy and the implications and limits of sacramental ontology. Sacramental ontology is a distinctive interpretation of Henri de Lubac’s work on the relationship between nature and the supernatural. It addresses the supernatural as an operation, and as such, visible and created realities work as sacraments of the divine and the eternal. In the words of Joseph Flipper, “the invisible is made present in the visible; the transcendent is made present in the immanent; the supernatural is made present in the natural; the divine is made present within history.”28 I will return to this soon. The implication of sacramental ontology is, of course, an ontological turn. While historians argue about how to have a faithful representation of the world of the past, the world of the past itself, in the meantime, remains completely out of the scene, serenely and obstinately represented as a resemblance of today’s world. This result is the consequence of a presupposition that all historians share, that is, the separation of epistemological from ontological questions. Everyone seems to agree that in sorting out good representations of the world of the past, only the side of the researcher—the side of the historian—must be interrogated, not what the world did. Yet, for better understanding, the main partner that should be interrogated is the complexity of the world, which does not remain the same. As long as historians look at the Christian world of the past with their epistemological tools, no matter how God-dependent the world may be, the historians will inevitably try to do what scientists do, that is, attempt to stabilize the world. Against epistemology, ontology directs scholarly attention to the ways in which the world was. The methodological implications of this situation—approaching history from the angle of the ontologically sacramental—is that history can no longer be constrained within the epistemological perimeter. It means a 28 Joseph S. Flipper, Between Apocalypse and Eschaton (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 110.

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shift from an epistemological to an ontological orientation. A shift from an epistemological to an ontological orientation implies a change of perspective: from questions on the reliability of historical methods and the ultimate purpose of historical writing to questions about what the past is and what its nature is. Approaching the Christian past in terms of the horizon that sustains a certain ontology implies that history is no longer methodologically constrained within epistemological boundaries. It means rethinking the foundational assumptions of the historical investigation of the Christian past with regard to the meaning of being in the past. It consists in revoking the conditions that make history a secular investigation of the past and liberating the Christian past from the effects of secularism upon history. A certain historical reality is established as such by the contemporaries who acted under the presumption of its existence. This reality was a living reality in which the inhabitants of the Christian past experienced events that shaped their lives. I will provide more on this in the next chapter. As mentioned, the option of the sacramental ontology has been matched with a barrage of criticisms. These criticisms, however, reveal and miss the point. They reveal the tacit assumption behind those criticisms: the secularization thesis. If the approach is not secular, in fact, it must be confessional. If the methodology is not rational, it must be tainted with superstition. If the approach is not empirical, it must be philosophical. I cannot help but refer to the famous words of Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “You’ve made a hurdy-gurdy song of it!”29 Some secular historians reacted to the concept of sacramental ontology with a hurdy-gurdy song, the endless displaying of the same old myth of the secular, which remains permanently closed in on itself—rigid, unchangeable, and proudly self-sufficient. Their criticisms are less a denunciation and more an affirmation of a certain worldview that pervades modern historiography and makes some historians unable to look beyond. In fact, the sacramental worldview, slowly emerging from centuries of theological and philosophical elaborations of some of the finest minds of the late ancient and medieval European history, was not a primitive, unsophisticated, irrational construction, but, more properly, a different rationality, a non-secular rationality—one based on a different myth than the secular myth. The confrontation between the secular myth and the sacramental myth is not about rationality versus irrationality but about two forms of rationality—one empiricist and scientific, the other ontological and theological. The great Neo-Platonic and Thomistic synthesis 29 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 176.

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were everything but irrational. It is the narrowness of certain secular historians, their unfortunate inability to move beyond a limited understanding of the concept of “rationality,” that forces them to say so. These criticisms, however, miss the point, too. A move from epistemology to ontology, or, more precisely, from historicism to hermeneutics, is emerging as an option for the simple reason that the former has proved itself unable to deliver the Christian past on its own terms. All these attempts to supply religious history beyond the divide between the medieval and the modern are doomed to fail because they cannot overcome the divide between the secular and the religious that is embedded in the historical method. The history of the Christian past, or better, the historical investigation of a totally religious reality of the past, is a case study about the limits of current historiography when it comes to religious history. The available options seem to be only two: first, to consider religion perfectly assimilable into a secular myth; this amounts to a domestication, normalization, and immanentization of religion. The second option is to approach religion as if it was not perfectly assimilable to the secular myth; in this case, history recognizes a supernatural margin to religion, but it confines this supernatural margin to a secondary, almost insignificant role. In brief, the supernatural is, for historians, either an epistemological obstacle or an extra-epistemological entity. The primacy of secular knowledge over religious knowledge is responsible for a disfigured picture of the religious past; the remedy, of course, should be a cooperation between secular knowledge and religious knowledge. I will offer more on this soon. The shift from epistemology to ontology is really a shift from faith in the method to deliver the past to a genuine interest in understanding the role of myth in structuring the ontological assumptions behind the ancient and medieval worldview. Religion history should be contextual: not in the sense of designing the social or cultural horizon in which religious facts happened, but of designing the theological and ontological assumptions that stayed behind those facts. Thus, it is not sociology or anthropology but theology that informs religion history. The construction of the theological-ontological assumptions inherent to the sacramental horizon of sense that pervaded Christendom is propaedeutic to a hermeneutic exercise that transforms the past from an object to a source.

Sacramental Ontology Gregory’s and Jones’s books reveal the need for greater contextual analysis and interdisciplinarity in historical studies. No matter how the problems of

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epistemology and ideology have been solved, the ontological gap between the world of the past and scholar’s world remains. Epistemology, with its attention to language, representation, clarity, and rigor, is ill-equipped to bridge the gap. That is why a transition from the familiar realm of epistemology to ontology is necessary when it comes to describing the Christian premodern past on its own terms. The adoption of sacramental ontology is a shift in the realm of ontology, so the adoption of sacramental ontology, the notion of a sacramental cosmos that brings to life both Jones’s and Gregory’s writings, is relevant. The idea behind sacramental ontology, namely that the secular realm is not autonomous and self-referential, is hardly novel. What is novel is the transition of this idea from the domains of philosophy and theology to history. Responding to this climate, the project of the sacramental ontology movement is to sketch out a constructive study of the past that is neither totally secular in a classic sense nor hopelessly clerical in any way. In this context, Jones and Gregory have built their narratives on the premise that serious historical inquiry is possible outside the paradigm of secular/sacred. Jones’s assumption is that the separation between secular and sacred is a modern invention; Gregory’s assumption is that the modern crisis of the Western world is derived from internal troubles of late medieval/early modern Christianity. Their thought is permeated by the conviction that it is no longer possible to defend a historical narrative founded on the secularization thesis. To be clearer, Gregory’s claim amounts to an invalidation of the selfproclaimed autonomy of the secular from the religious. Enlightenment, so the secularization thesis goes, severed from the previous Christian thought and established a self-founded dominium of secular knowledge that is independent from religious knowledge. The rejection of the self-foundational status of secular knowledge exists in the rejection of that severance: the secular is not a product of Enlightenment but of an internal deviation within Christian thought. The secular conserves its roots in the religious and therefore is not independent of it. The secular is not a product of a distinction from the religious, but of an internal dialect of Christian theology that at some point created a twofold universe in which the natural (the secular) is separated from the supernatural. Once the secularization thesis is dismissed, the renegotiation of the duality between secular history and Christianity can proceed. Gregory’s Unintended Reformation is a contribution to this alternative genealogy of the secular, and for his ideas; one scholar has dramatically accused him of producing among non-specialists lasting damage that only the work of “a generation (or more) of scholarship” might

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hope to undo.30 But his rejection of the secularization thesis is shared by giants like Charles Taylor, John Milbank, and Henri de Lubac. Gregory’s book was an effort to demonstrate that ideological, philosophical, religious, and institutional shifts “that occurred five or more centuries ago remain substantively necessary to an explanation of why the Western world today is as it is.”31 In his eyes, the fact that the enormous historical landmark separating premodern from modern Europe and North America is indisputable has paradoxically helped conceal the enduring influence of the distant past in the present. It is no coincidence that in this respect he shares Taylor’s thesis in A Secular Age, where we (i.e., scholars) are programmed to misunderstand ourselves if we cannot do justice to where we come from.32 As applied to the specific role of the Reformation in the making of modernity, Gregory’s project consists of writing a genealogical history of Protestantism without the notion of “progress.” For Gregory, the secular space is, in effect, the result of a religious twist, so much so that the so-called secularization is incoherent because that secularization presupposes a clear passage from the sacred to the secular. Not only does such a passage play no positive role in his thought, but he always argues that the secular is nothing more than the religious in disguise. In his The Unintended Reformation, he traced the various historical streams and theological, political, and philosophical ideas that gave rise to the modern secular notion of the world. He argued that the modern view is a mass of contradictions in comparison with the much more homogenous worldview of the premodern era. In sum, a secular view in which spiritual things are relegated to private inclinations and ultimately naturalized replaces the sacramental view still dominating European consciousness before the Reformation. Somehow, Gregory’s project aligns with Jones’s in the sense that the former shares with the latter the idea of a secular sphere needing to be unmasked as an unfounded fiction. In The Unintended Reformation, Gregory links the Reformation with the rise of the secular. He focuses specifically on the phenomenon of a fragmentation of the modern world unintentionally created, in his opinion, by the Reformers. To sustain his argument, he borrows a theme popular in contemporary theological discourse, that is, the shift in ontology from the medieval synthesis of pagan and Christian wisdom reached by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) to the one made by Duns Scotus (1265–1308) and by 30 Jordan, J. Ballor, Reviews of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation in Calvin Theological Journal 47, no. 2 (2012), 349–353, 352. 31 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 7. 32 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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his fellow Franciscan William of Ockham (1287–1347). In turn, the shift in ontology involved the disappearance of the sacramental world that was the dominant mind of medieval and early modern Christianity (and still is, officially) and the rise of scientific naturalism.33 This is not the only theme Gregory borrowed from theology; another one is the notion that the secular is, in the words of John Milbank, “theology in disguise.”34 Gregory could thus claim that “the moral foundations of the modern liberal state in general are inextricable from central Christian truth claims.”35 More examples can be made, but the point that Gregory’s works owe much to the reading of the secular/sacred binary pioneered in the reign of theology is properly established. As a matter of fact, his turn to theology has not gone unnoticed. Various scholars have labeled Gregory’s book a work of theology, not of history (or as one conceded, bad history).36 Another scholar summarized the problem with Gregory’s history in terms of “lack of historical evidence.”37 While Gregory applied the counternarrative in the construction of modernity, Jones placed it in the Middle Ages. If the modern distinction between “sacred” and “secular” rests on questionable premises, scholars should not rely on the modern distinction between “sacred” and “secular” to investigate the premodern reality of the kingdom of Louis IX. They would rather see Louis IX’s kingdom in the same way his contemporaries saw it, that is, the “most Christian kingdom,” a kingdom in “the business of the peace and the faith,” a concept which permeates many texts from Louis’s reign (1226–1270) and is reflective of a convergence of spiritual and temporal powers. That convergence was mirrored in a complementarity of Church and State, which operated like the “two swords.” But, Jones reminded, “the secular, temporal sword […] belonged to God.”38 Underpinning this fabric was 33 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 55. 34 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 380–381. 35 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 214. 36 Kenneth G. Appold refers to Gregory’s work in terms of “preecumenical Catholic apologetics.” See: Kenneth G. Appold, “A World Undone: Brad Gregory’s critique of the Reformation,” in Pro Ecclesia 22, no. 4 (2013), 395–399, 399. James Chappell and Ian Hunter have argued respectively that Gregory’s work “is not a serious work of history, in the traditional sense” rather it is “confessional [and] gives rise to a sectarian relation to cultural pluralism” (emphasis added). See: Chappel, “An Intended Absence? Democracy and The Unintended Reformation”; Hunter, “The Return of Sacred History.” Michael Horton has no doubts: “The Unintended Reformation gives intellectual history a bad name.” See: Michael Horton, “The Unintended Reformation,” February 2016, The Gospel Coalition, https:// www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/the-unintended-reformation/ (accessed on February 28, 2020). 37 Josh A. Reeves, “How Not to Link the Reformation and Science: Reflections on Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation,” Religions 8, no. 5 (2017), article 83. 38 Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX, 5.

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a shared sacramental understanding of reality “in which the material and the spiritual were everywhere and always present together.”39 When Jones goes to great lengths to frame the sacrament, it is not only the representation of that medieval Christian worldview that he is determined to examine with such meticulous precision but also the boundary of the modern mentality. In interpreting Jones’s use of this terminology, one must avoid thinking of two “worlds,” as two “domains,” the secular and the religious, when speaking of a premodern European world. The temptation would be strong to give a description of each—to say what is on both sides of the world view. But these two worlds, these two domains, had yet to be invented at the time of the sacramental kingdom of Saint Louis IX of France.

Secular and Sacred History Ian Hunter has titled his critical review of Gregory’s book “The Return of Sacred History.” I take Hunter’s statement at face value. “Sacred history” is an expression that has suggested different meanings to different people in different ages. For example, it meant a view of history that placed the origins of humankind in the Garden of Eden in 4004 BC. This was the conviction of early modern European historians and their predecessors in the JudeoChristian tradition. “Sacred history” also meant the history of God’s dealings with humanity as recorded in the Old and New Testaments (the history of the biblical Jews and early Christians) and the history of the Church, its leaders and saints, and its institutional and doctrinal developments (ecclesiastical history). The distinction of history from sacred history is a relatively recent achievement. In 1750, fewer than three centuries ago, the French physiocrat Turgot still relied on sacred history for his treatise on the advancement of the human consciousness. Here is an example: Scarcely had it [i.e., human race] begun to make good its losses when the miraculous confusion of tongues forced men to separate from one another. The urgent need to procure subsistence for themselves in barren deserts, which provided nothing but wild beasts, obliged them to move apart from one another in all directions and hastened their diffusion through the whole world. Soon the original traditions were forgotten; and the nations, separated as they were by vast distances and still more by the diversity of languages, strangers to one another, 39 Ibidem.

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were almost all plunged into the same barbarism in which we still see the Americans. 40

Turgot is connecting the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel and the disinheriting of the nations—Genesis 10 and 11—with the return of humankind to a primitive condition (which does not correspond to the datum of biblical text) and a reference to the conditions of the Americans in Turgot’s days. The days of the sacred’s grip on the discipline, however, were already numbered. 41 By the middle of the nineteenth century, with the professionalization of their discipline, historians were ready to exclude sacred history from the terrain of the historian, according to the theory that the discipline is about method and documents, not beliefs and sacred writings. At that point, the line between respectable historian and religious apologist was drawn: individual historians were not precluded from worshiping God in a plurality of confessional ways, although they were precluded from bringing their faith in and through historical research. It was like saying that the historians of the sacred were not really historians in their own right but rather theological or religious apologists. The assumption, of course, was that no reasonable compromise is possible between autonomous historical reasoning and practice and Christian belief. At stake in this separation between reason and faith within the boundaries of historical enterprise was a conception of secular history in which scholarly method requires historians to treat recorded events as the contingent products of human beings acting within flat historical time, as opposed to the self-revelatory actions of God. As a result, the notion of sacred history became, from those days forward, a paradox. Whatever the meaning that Hunter assigns to the term “sacred history,” it seems that he sees it as separated from secular history. Now a different idea of sacred history is resurfacing in the work of historians who attempt via a plurality of means and paths to draw history and religion, or more precisely, history and Christianity, back together after two centuries of separation. In their view, the sacred is not an addendum to the flux of human events but is synonymous with an integrated view of reality. Sacred history refers to a past seen through the lens of a transcendent horizon of sense. In fact, the sacred that manifests itself in this world; it neither marks 40 Ronald L. Meek (ed. and trans.), Turgaf on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 42. 41 I borrow the expression from Daniel Smail, “In the Grip of Sacred History,” American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (2005), 1336–1361.

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the wall between the transcendent and this world nor demolishes such a wall; it unifies the two while safeguarding their reciprocal independence. The phrase “sacred history” is used to identify the product of an alternative mode of writing that allows to better detect the reality of the Christian past. Sacred history is an account of human history in connection with an age in which the human activity was totally oriented toward God. Sacred history is the product of a specific mode of writing history that engages Christianity as a supernatural religion: the Christian past is approached in a way in which the sacred replaces the secular as a primary doxa. Sacred history is, therefore, the result of a methodological choice, the assimilation of sacramental worldview within historical enterprise, neither in the sense that it is the result of men and women of faith, nor that it responds to high doctrines or theological frameworks. It should be productive for scholars to look with sympathy at these attempts, as intellectuals such as Gregory and Jones address an intellectual need, the reconnection of history and supernatural religion, at a time when these entities seem to be culturally and irrevocably polarised. It should be useful for historians to see how their colleagues bring these polarities together in a way that is necessary and beneficial for both history and religion. In his critique of Gregory, Hunter still relies on a presumed neutrality of secular history in his rejection of what he sees as a project of sacred history reestablishment. Here is another example from his review of Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: Rather, it should be located, like Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, in the genre of Catholic confessional metaphysical hermeneutics, where historical narratives are composed as unfoldings of predetermined metaphysical or theological doctrines. […] For the ahistorical and absolute manner in which he posits this metaphysics must be taken as a symptom of the fact that it, too, represents only a particular “faith commitment” jostling for space alongside a plurality of others, though it is blind to this fact. It is a mordant irony that Gregory should have relegated a form of history capable of doing justice to this plurality—the secular history of philosophies as rival historical teachings—in favor of a sacred history based on exclusive adherence to a particular confessional teaching. 42

Hunter is confronting, although implicitly, the “predetermined metaphysical or theological doctrines” of Gregory’s sacred history with the scientific—i.e., 42 Hunter, “The Return of Sacred History.”

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non-metaphysical—theory supporting secular history. But the metaphysical assumptions embedded in the secularization thesis are the justification of the alleged neutral space of secular history that Hunter so proudly celebrates. Both secular and sacred histories are based on predetermined metaphysical doctrines. Gregory’s and Jones’s writings have prompted a barrage of questions, complaints, and criticism. 43 The criticism has focused broadly on the historical themes addressed in their books but mostly on their approach and their method, in which the secular is no longer the accepted natural background of historical research. In brief, their work has been received as a form of apologetics and a return to integralism and ultimately homologated to that of Christian fundamentalists. 44 Another stream of criticism has, however, focused (exclusively with regard to Gregory’s book) on the deeply pessimistic evaluation of the modern age, as if the non-sacramental world of modernity had forced people “into a tale of inevitable futility and decline,” or as if the history of modernity could be seen as a “history of decline” (Verfallsgeschichte). 45 What is at stake in these critiques? On one hand, it is to show how the secular does not depend, openly or covertly, on the religious. On the other hand, however, the effect (intentional or not) of these critiques is to question the possibility of a different story, one with the potential to heal what can be seen as a distorted Christianity. More than opposing Enlightenment and the secular world, Jones’s and Gregory’s 43 In the case of Gregory’s book, highly appreciative remarks (especially from the Catholic side) are countered by rather dismissive, sometimes even venomous reviews (by Ian Hunter, James Chappel, Mark Lilla, and others), as well as by more balanced critiques (those of Peter Gordon, Victoria Kahn, and Adrian Pabst, for instance). Apart for the already mentioned Hunter and Chappel, see: Mark Lilla, “From Wittenberg to Wal-Mart,” in The New Republic 243/15 (October 4, 2012), 47–52; Peter E. Gordon, “Has Modernity Failed?” The Immanent Frame, September 2013: at http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/09/12/has-modernity-failed/ (accessed November 25, 2019); Victoria Kahn, “Get Over It,” The Immanent Frame, September 2013: at https://tif.ssrc.org/2013/09/16/ get-over-it/ (accessed December 2, 2019); Adrian Pabst, “Secular Supercessionism and Alternative Modernity,” The Immanent Frame, September 2013: at https://tif.ssrc.org/2013/09/24/secularsupercessionism-and-alternative-modernity/ (accessed October 23, 2019). 44 I refer to Mark Lilla’s comment that “over the past thirty years” this genre [to which Gregory’s book belongs] has been adopted by a new group of “anti-modern Catholics (and some Anglicans) on the left and the right, from members of the post-modern Radical Orthodoxy movement in Britain to conservative American writers around First Things magazine.” See: Lilla, “From Wittenberg to Wal-Mart,” 49. William T. Cavanaugh writes that “Gregory seems to be arguing that when the West turned from an integrally Catholic society, it took a wrong turn.” See: William T. Cavanaugh, “The Modest Claim of an Immodest Book,” in Pro Ecclesia 22, no. 4 (2013), 406–412, 409. 45 Quote from Matthew Lundin, “The Unintended Reformation: A Review Essay,” in Christian Scholar’s Review 41, no. 4 (2012), 407–413, 413.

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books are a reaction against this distortion. Their alternative narrative is more precisely a counternarrative, a narrative of resistance in which the secular is seen not as a reaction to the religious but an evolution of the religious. The purpose of this alternative narrative is to escape a scholarly framework that tells Christians what can be said and what cannot be said based on a supposed division of competences between the religious and the secular. In such a division, the religious (or the sacred) belongs to the private sphere and has no place in public debate (including academia) where the secular reigns. The result is that Christians must accept that their past remains a foreign past. The return of sacred history (in the terms explained earlier)—an expression borrowed from Ian Hunter, who uses it to describe a deviant line of thought from the long-standing secular tradition of the historical project—seems the same as a return to the clerical past, or a new form of fundamentalism. Secular academics may become worried in looking at this counternarrative as a retreat into sectarian insularity and neofundamentalism. Because of the secular/religious divide and because of what can be called the question of the irreversibility of Enlightenment, whoever claims that Christianity should frame itself according to traditional sources of ecclesiastical and doctrinal authority and not to the contemporary scholarship is labeled in terms of the clerical, anti-liberal, and eventually conservative—and rightly so. The alternative, however, cannot be for modern Christians simply to accept the criteria of truth that prevail in the modern, secular university. A third way needs to be built between embracing secularism and falling into fundamentalism, obscurantism, and intellectual irrelevance. It is true that authors like Jones and Gregory describe secularism as a constraining or eventually imperialist discourse within the university. They claim that in this very moment in history, a historical discourse open to more religious language is not only possible (their writings stand as proof) but necessary. The authors of the sacramental ontology movement, I would say, argue that traditionally secular scholarly spaces should be open to religious constructions of the past. They are aware that it is no longer the nineteenth century; the context, so to speak, is different. Among other differences between then and now is one worth mentioning directly: Christian historians (or at least those belonging to the sacramental ontology movement) have learned to distinguish between the language of apologetics and historical narrative; it goes without saying that the emphasis is on the latter. Their aim, in brief, is not to carry some extrinsic denominational argument that does not fit into modern minds, minds like those of their colleagues nourished in the school of criticism. Rather, they see it necessary

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in history to raise the question of a supernatural religion and move beyond modern rationalist historiographies stuck in the immanent order of reason and willed action. A much-needed conversation around the question of the historically contingent nature of history is necessary, and as history is a historical artifact, history can be redeemed from its original dependency and rendered, therefore, post-secular. The historical knowledge is historically contingent: the history of the Christian past that we know now is not the history that was known in the past, so it is equally possible—and eventually urgent—that the history of the Christian past that we will know in the future might be different. History must liberate itself from its own prejudices, pressing upon contemporary historians to continue practicing history as a means of delivering secularization. Historians can seek fresh ways to connect the present and the past, eventually reworking the relationship between history as knowledge and as an agent of secularization. If historians play a significant role in setting the secularization agenda of the Christian past, they can also devise anti-secularization narratives. “History” should fight for both sides; it is also a site of post-secularization “resistance.” Not just an instrument of secularization, history needs also to be an instrument of resacralization. Thus, a call for a different historical imagination open to the sacralization of time is not only welcome but legitimate.

2.

Ontological Turn

Ontology and Christian Historians In recent years, Christian historians in the United States have produced a thriving literature on the integration of religious faith and history. This literature represents a remarkable testimony to a grand effort among Christian historians to explore the complex interdependence between religious belief and professional and responsible historical investigation.1 Although influential and provocative in the best sense of the words, these recent works suffer collectively from significant limitations: their authors have chosen to look in epistemology for a touchstone that distinguishes good history from bad. Here lies the difference between these authors and those like Jones and Gregory: the latter have chosen to look not in epistemology but in ontology. They look not in the word but in the world. The epistemological question is what out of the range of things that make up the world can we know? The ontological question is what exactly is there to know? What makes up the world? The problem the sacramental ontology authors address is not what it would look like, practically and specifically, for a Christian historian to 1 John Fea notes that with the establishment of the historical profession, history became a science, and providential history was no longer considered a legitimate way of practicing the discipline. See: John Fea, Why Study History (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 70. Nevertheless, some authors keep trying. For a few works on faith and history, see: George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Bruce Kuklick and Darryl G. Hart (eds.), Religious Advocacy and American History (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997); Ronald A. Wells (ed.), History and the Christian Historian (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998). An extremely abbreviated list of pivotal writings on the topic over the past half century would include Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1949); Christopher Dawson, The Dynamics of World History (London: Sheed and Ward, 1957); Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961); Van Austin Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (New York: Macmillan, 1967); Frank Roberts and George Marsden (eds.), A Christian View of History? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1976); Carl Thomas McIntire, God, History and Historians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Carl Thomas McIntire and Ronald Wells, History and Historical Understanding (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984); Laurence W. Wood, Theology as History and Hermeneutics (Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2005); Laurence W. Wood, God and History (Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2005).

Beltramini, E., Desecularizing the Christian Past. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463721882_ch02

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bring a “faith-informed” perspective into a secular institution such as the historical profession. The problem is rather what it would look like, practically and specifically, for a Christian historian to deal with a reality of the past that is “supernatural-infused” and bring it into a historical profession that does not identify with a Weberian understanding of the secular. Put simply, the sacramental ontology thinkers wonder what it is to see the past as sacramental then bring this perspective into the historical Weltanschauung in which secular modernity and religious tradition contaminate each other. Because of their ontological shift, both Jones and Gregory have been accused of stating that the past was itself infused with the sacred; therefore, to study the past with secular eyes is fundamentally an act of distortion. This interpretation was not entirely fair: neither author suggested a view of the past in which the sacral was indeed at work in the world while it is not at work in the present. Their work—and my work, for what it is worth—does not go beyond the question of perception alone, that is, beyond the point that people in the past thought and interpreted experience differently from today. To avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, the reader is invited to consider sacramental ontology in terms of sacramental worldview and the ontological turn suggested in this study as an ontological orientation. As long as Christian historians remain in the realm of epistemology and maintain a separation between their faith, the faith of the inquirer, and the naturalized object of their inquiry, they remain constrained within the limits of the secularization thesis. Despite all their efforts, their Christian history is nothing more than a style of investigation. As long as Christian historians do not enter into the realm of ontology, their faith pervades the choice of their areas of investigation, how they approach a topic, and the way they frame their argument. For these Christian historians, therefore, Christian history is the result of a certain Christian style of doing history.2 It is an important achievement, although still narrowly constrained by the rigid limits of a secular worldview of separation between faith and reason. The problem with this approach is, to borrow a word from Benno Herzog, the invisibilization of the supernatural.3 Surely there is a relationship between means and results in the historical study of the Christian past. When historians investigate the Christian past through an apparatus of secular means, what they get is a secularized past. If modern scholars are serious in their attempt to avoid the trap of anachronism, they need to dismiss their 2 Jay D. Green, Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015). 3 Benno Herzog, Invisibilization of Suffering (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

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disdain for the supernatural view of the inhabitants of the Christian past. As long as one remains in the realm of epistemology, one can escape the problem that pre-Reformation Christianity was a supernatural religion, by turning Christian history into a style of investigation. Sacramental ontology recognizes Christianity as a supernatural (not natural) religion: it implies the possibility (or at least the hypothesis) of a supernatural operating at the very core of human history. If for no other reason than that, it is better equipped to deal with the Christian past. I adopt the reception of Jones’s and Gregory’s books as a point of departure for an introductory inquiry into the “sacramental ontology movement,” as I label the group of authors (historians, philosophers, and theologians) who are driven by a desire to retrieve, in one way or another, the sacramental ontology of the premodern tradition. No matter if they are historians, philosophers, or theologians, they tend to look to the past in hopes of recovering a sacramental mindset. For some, the retrieval of the great tradition’s sacramental ontology is at the heart of almost all their work; for others, it is one interest among others. Sacramental ontology can be preliminarily def ined as a specif ic ontological conf iguration of the relationship between the realm of human affairs and that of divine affairs; in theological terms, it is a specific ontological configuration of the relationship between creation and Creator—a configuration of unity in distinction. Another way to def ine sacramental ontology is against the background of the secularization thesis. 4 Secularism is a peculiar worldview in which the spheres of the secular (and therefore history, reason, and the whole world of human affairs) and the religious (theology, faith, and God) are differentiated and separated (the so-called “secularization thesis”). On the contrary, sacramental ontology is a worldview in which the two spheres are united in distinction. Secularism mirrors the view of the twofold order of knowledge corresponding to the epistemological separation between reason and faith (material and spiritual, human and divine), and the lines of demarcation between the secular disciplines (including history) and theology. Sacramental ontology is instead the view that the human order and the divine order are distinct yet united. And because they are united, they participate in each other, although in terms that need to be clarif ied. I will investigate the theme later in this chapter. Sacramental ontology assumes a kind of ontological link, a 4 José Casanova, “Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” The Immanent Frame, October 25, 2007. At https://tif.ssrc.org/2007/10/25/secular-secularizations-secularisms/ (accessed on October 12, 2020).

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participatory link, between the human order and the divine order. Against secularism and its ontology of differentiation and separation, sacramental ontology offers a unified vision of reality in which everything is sacred because everything participates in the divine. Another way to put it is this: Christianity is a supernatural religion because it implies a supernatural cosmology. According to evangelical theologian Hans Boersma, sacramental ontology is a view of reality in which there is co-participation between nature and the supernatural. How does this participation work? Perhaps the easiest way to answer this question is by distinguishing between symbols and sacraments. The symbol and the reality merely have an external or nominal relationship. The distance between the two makes clear that there is no real connection between them. Unlike mere symbols, sacraments actually participate in the mysterious reality to which they point. When it comes to sacraments, sign and reality co-inhere; the sacrament participates in the reality to which it points. A sacramental relationship implies that the reality to which the sign points is “really present” in the sign. This understanding of sacramentality has a long lineage. According to the sacramental ontology of much of the Christian tradition, the created order was more than just an external or nominal symbol. Instead, it was a sign (signum) that pointed to and participated in a greater reality (res). The reason for the mysterious character of the world—in the understanding of the Great Tradition, at least—is that it participates in a greater reality from which it derives its being and its value. In other words, things and people depend on God as the source of their existence. In fact, only the invisible reality can give true meaning to the visible sacrament. Hence, instead of speaking of sacramental ontology, we may also speak of participatory ontology. Why does any of this matter? In modernity, one has come to see the world around as nothing but symbols: material objects separate from each other and separate from their origin in God. The secularism of modernity is based on the premise that the world around is just materiality. Or, to use a theological term, the material world is a world of “pure nature” (pura natura). When one denies that the world around us participates, sacramentally, in eternal realities, one deprives them of meaning. The reason why we treat everything (and perhaps everyone) as dispensable is that we have lost the sense that the natural world is sacred. By considering things and people as “purely natural” and independent from God as the source of their existence, we end up treating them as dispensable. The cure for modern malaise, therefore, is to recognize that God is present

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throughout the world, drawing it (along with us) back to its ultimate and glorious destiny in Him.5 Sacramental ontology is considered a remedy to both dualistic tendencies within theology and disrupting effects of current nihilism, especially ontological nihilism. As a matter of fact, sacramental ontology is a concept developed by thinkers who maintain a positive relationship with modernity and science. It was not generated as a reaction to secularism. A look at the genealogy of sacramental ontology as a cure to both dualism and immanentism is a necessary step to clarifying this line of reasoning.

Against Dualism Andrew Jones and Brad Gregory have paid their debts to a small but easily identif iable group of Catholic, Anglican, and Evangelical scholars who have developed and still preserve a counternarrative about the “history of emergence” (Entstehungsgeschichten) of secularism in the Anglo-American context. These scholars are the Catholic priest Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) and the Israeli historian Amos Funkenstein (1937–1995); the Anglican theologian John Milbank (b. 1952) and his Radical Orthodoxy circle of writers; the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) and the Evangelical writer Peter Leithart (b. 1959); the Catholic historian of philosophy Etiènne Gilson (1884–1978), and the Catholic philosopher Louis Dupré (b. 1925). Milbank, Boersma (b. 1961), Bryan C. Hollon (b. 1969), and other theologians and historians have detected in the duality of nature and the supernatural the source of the malaise of the modern world, and they have identified in the unity of nature and the supernatural in ontology, that is, sacramental ontology, the solution for that malaise.6 5 These paragraphs on sacramental ontology are an extract from Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2011), 19–39. 6 Dennis Doyle is responsible for the term “sacramental ontology.” See: Dennis M. Doyle, “Henri de Lubac and the Roots of Communion Ecclesiology,” Theological Studies 60, no. 2 (1990), 209–227. For recent studies on sacramental ontology and related themes, see: Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Theologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry; John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005); Hans Boersma, “Sacramental Ontology: Nature and the Supernatural in the Ecclesiology of Henri de Lubac,” New Blackfriars 88, no. 1015 (2007), 242–273; Brian Daley, “The Nouvelle Theologie and the Patristic Revival: Sources, Symbols and the Science of Theology,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7, no. 4 (October 2005),

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These authors do not constitute a homogeneous school, yet in their approach to diverse theological and historical problems, it is possible to detect the same impulse toward restoration of the sense of the sacred. For this reason, I have collectively labeled these authors as part of the “sacramental ontology movement.” The term “sacramental ontology” was introduced into scholarly conversation during the assessment of the theological and historical theological work of de Lubac. A generation of scholars addressed his imposing legacy in search of the real core of his life’s output. According to Milbank, this core can be identif ied in de Lubac’s account of nature and the supernatural, as articulated in his 1946 book Supernaturel: Etudes historiques7 in which de Lubac formulated the most authentic and enduring reaction of the hierarchical duality between nature and grace, between nature and the supernatural; to put it differently, he sought a theory for the two-story universe. Other theologians developed Milbank’s ontological interpretation of de Lubac’s work. Denis Doyle is responsible for the term “sacramental ontology,” and Boersma borrows Doyle’s terms to argue that sacramental ontology concerns the “sacramental character of all created existence.” 8 Thus, “sacramental ontology” is a derivative of de Lubac’s account of nature and the supernatural, and I turn to that theme now. In the period between the two world wars, a group of French and Germanspeaking theologians, although far from being a tightly organized school, developed the conviction that Catholic theology needed to enter into dialogue with the secular thought world and the daily life of the Church of their times. Most of these theologians in the early and mid-twentieth century—de Lubac, Daniélou, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, MarieDominique Chenu, and Louis Bouyer—would become known as members of the ressourcement movement and adopt Blondel’s non-adversarial approach to modernity that called for science and modern intellectual culture to be incorporated into Catholic tradition. Blondel (1861–1949) was a philosopher, not a theologian, who produced his most influential works between 1893, the year when his doctoral thesis (L’Action) was published, and 1909–1910, the years when a set of articles was published under pseudonyms in Annales 362–382; Bryan C. Hollon, Everything is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009). 7 John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural, 5. 8 Boersma, “Sacramental Ontology: Nature and the Supernatural in the Ecclesiology of Henri de Lubac,” 243–244.

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de philosophie chrétienne.9 Blondel was a convinced Catholic and a religious man who seriously considered becoming a priest, although he decided against this course. He was also a French philosopher familiar with modern philosophical vocabulary and methods. He wondered if being a loyal citizen of the anti-clerical state and a devout member of the integralist Catholic Church was a sustainable condition for French Catholics. He considered if the separation between reason and faith could be considered a permanent, inevitable collateral effect of modernity, or rather if modernity could be reimagined to the point that a unity between faith and reason could be reestablished. One point of departure of Blondel’s philosophical enterprise was the reconnection of dogma and history, against the tendency in play since the end of the Middle Ages to keep them separate. He accomplished this reconnection by means of articulating an influential notion of tradition. The word “tradition” comes from the Latin verb tradere and means “to pass or hand something on.” In this basic sense, tradition is the process of handing on the faith; in pre–Vatican Council II Catholicism, tradition was the second distinct source of revelation after Scripture (or, in a less dominant interpretation, a second mode of expression of revelation). Blondel was not a specialist in the history of tradition; nevertheless, he was caught in the middle of the modernist crisis and found it imperative to clarify the meaning of tradition. “Modernism” is the negative label--conceived by its opponents--for a historical movement of thought within Catholicism. This movement of thought, which developed in Europe and the United States, had its epicenter in France and exercised its influence during the first decade of this century, until its condemnation in 1907 by the Encyclical Pascendi dominici gregi, an authoritative papal statement. Modernism was a premature, and ultimately erroneous from the doctrinal standpoint, but genuine intellectual movement within Catholicism. The aim of this movement was to break the cultural isolation of the Church and confront the world of modern philosophy, critical historical scholarship, and science. At a much deeper level, modernism was an unintentional but unequivocal challenge to traditional Catholicism, its isolation, its static doctrinal formulas, and 9 Maurice Blondel, L’Action: Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (Paris: Alcan, 1893; reprint, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). English translation, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. By Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Maurice Blondel (under the pseudonym Testis), “La ‘Semaine Sociale’ de Bordeaux,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 159 (1909–1910), 268–271. These essays were then republished as a single volume entitled Catholicisme Social et Monophorisme: Controverses sur les Méthodes et les Doctrines.

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ultimately its authoritarian structure. Theologian Roger Haight explains that the crisis between modern world and Catholic theology was inevitable. Given this situation, once the principle of immanence and the presuppositions of man’s autonomy began to be taken seriously in the domain of philosophy, the idea of a supernatural truth imposed on man from the outside and solely through a church authority became ambiguous. On the level of historical science, when the method and findings of biblical criticism began to be recognized, certain historical data seemed to contradict this authority. When this modern world came crashing in on Catholic theology, crisis was born.10

The modernist crisis materialized in a series of debates about apologetics, biblical criticism, and the question of dogma. It was in the discussion around the question of dogma that Blondel articulated a religious historical method that became normative for the next generation of Catholic theologians. Blondel’s entry into the question of dogma debate was in 1904 through a set of articles published in La Quinzaine. They were later published under the title Histoire et Dogme: Les lacunes philosophiques de l’exégèse moderne.11 In the introduction, Blondel clarified that the object of his analysis was Christian beliefs (dogma) in juxtaposition with Christian facts (history). The Blondelian perspective assumed that in the controversy between traditionalists and modernists, both sides were wrong. He labeled the traditionalist option alternative “extrinsicism,” and he labeled the modernist alternative “historicism.” In Blondel’s opinion, extrinsicism and historicism were the two modes of thought competing to bridge the gap between human history and divine revelation. Extrinsicist theologians interpreted dogma as based on divine revelation given once and for all in its entirety at a given point in history; from this point on, dogma is conceived as an unchanging and unchangeable set of formulations, statements unrelated to history and subject to the sole authority of the Church. Historicism stressed historical facts as the primary source of truth; however, in Blondel’s opinion, historicism is a closed system that develops 10 Roger D. Haight, SJ, “The Unfolding of Modernism in France: Blondel, Laberthonnière, Le Roy,” Theological Studies 35, no. 4 (1974): 632–666, 661. 11 Maurice Blondel, “Histoire et dogme: Les lacunes philosophiques de l’exégèse moderne,” La Quinzaine 56 (1904): 145–167; 349–373; 433–458, and one article in Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique de Toulouse (February–March, 1905) titled “De la valeur historique de dogme.” English translation: The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. by Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan, OSB (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson, 1965).

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with no regard to the Christian dogma, which is the supernatural datum. In the context of historicism, “history” is understood as modern and objective critical-historical method in biblical exegesis. The single most important figure in this critical-historical method in biblical exegesis was Alfred Loisy. Blondel and Loisy exchanged letters in early 1903 to clarify their positions.12 Loisy was adamant that he was writing as a historian; as a historian, he argued, his conclusions depended exclusively on a critical examination of Scripture. As a historian, he operated within the narrow realm of historical data, according to historical methodologies and intentionally leaving the whole reality of the religious to theological investigation. More generally, however, Loisy rejected the idea that Christian faith may be reduced to pure fideism, the acceptance of authoritative doctrinal pronouncements of the magisterium of the Church. As theologian William A. Scott, SJ, notes in his comment to Loisy’s position, “a distinction is introduced between faith, which is a matter of voluntary adhesion to a doctrine, and history, which is the realm of reason, of fact. There is no necessary correlation between these two orders of faith and history.”13 For all that, Blondel suspected that with Loisy’s history exclusively based on facts and his historical method excluding the supernatural, Loisy was compromising Christianity. Blondel offered an interpretation of tradition as a work in progress, a dynamic expression of the ever-changing understanding of the revelation as the Church interprets the Scriptures in light of the Christian experience. The Blondelian perspective assumed that dogma and history are interdependent; to put it differently, theological formulations and historical facts are inherently valuable but need to be seen not as autonomous but instead as interdependent of each other and at the service of tradition. The relationship that exists between Christian revelation and human history is neither one of independence of revelation from “all the sediment accumulated by centuries of human thought” nor one of dependence of revelation on the investigations of historical investigation. Each option is an incomplete portrait of the Christian reality.14 Christian reality is a “synthesis of dogma and facts […] a synthesis of thought and of grace, a union of man and of God.”15 Christian reality is the mutual relationship and interpenetration of nature and grace, the created world and the eternal Logos. In the words 12 These letters are part of René Marlé, Au coeur de la crisemoder niste: Le dossier inédit d’une controverse, ed. by René Marié (Paris, 1960), 72–111. 13 William A. Scott, SJ, “The Notion of Tradition in Maurice Blondel,” Theological Studies 27, no. 3 (1966): 384–440, 385. 14 Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, 217–218. 15 Ibidem.

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of the Apostle Paul, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). De Lubac was an avid reader and sincere admirer of Blondel. He studied the two alternatives that Blondel rejected, extrinsicism and historicism, and applied them to the problem of grace and nature. As is well known, de Lubac’s Surnaturel focuses particularly on the danger of extrinsicism, which is the idea of a realm of the supernatural that is separated from an independent realm of nature (previously mentioned as a two-story universe). De Lubac is the one who launched the decisive attack on the traditional interpretation of Aquinas by Cardinal Cajetan which was distorting Christian thought. Iberian Scholasticism is a seventeenth-century re-elaboration of Thomist corpus. Articulated by Catholic theologians Thomas de Vio Cajetan (1468–1534) and Francisco Suarez (1548–1617), Scholasticism would become dominant in Catholic theology and in some Protestant circles. According to Cardinal Walter Kasper, it established a “timeless, unified theology that provided a norm for the universal church.”16 In a series of books published across a span of 20 years before the Second Vatican Council (or “Vatican Council II,” or simply “Vatican II”), de Lubac made a persuasive case that Cardinal Cajetan and Scholasticism misread Aquinas.17 In an attempt to defend nature from Lutheranism—especially the doctrine of the total corruption of human nature by original sin, and later, the supernatural from the attack of Enlightenment humanism—scholastic theologians separated the order of the supernatural from the natural order of reason. The supernaturalistic character of Catholic theology, severed as it was from effective engagement with nature, conducted to a kind of extra-historical Catholicism. With no connection to the supernatural order, Catholicism at the level of natural order was a private interior practice or an external social observance. The first option was the Kant–Kierkegaard line of thought on the limit of reason. Accordingly, theologians located faith to the privacy of one’s individual soul. The second option was the social space, especially the social doctrine of the Church. Thus, Catholic theology unintentionally ignited total secularization, embraced an unconstrained criticism against the dualistic epistemology of modern thought, and offered the idea of faith as an “extrinsic” addition. 16 Walter Kasper, Theology and Church (London: SCM Press, 1989), 1. 17 Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel, études historiques, “Théologie” collection (Paris: Aubier, 1946); Le Mystère du surnaturel, “Théologie” collection (Paris: Aubier, 1965); Augustinisme et théologie moderne, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 12 (Paris: Cerf, 2000). For the English translation, see: Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (New York: Crossroad, 1998) and Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. by Lancelot Sheppard (New York: Crossroad, 2000).

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The separatist theology of the supernatural and natural orders was an imperceptible and yet decisive departure from the patristic–medieval conception of the unity of natural and supernatural. In fact, the distinction between natural and supernatural introduced by scholastic theologians ruined the patristic–medieval understanding of history as operating according to an inner orientation toward a supernatural destiny. Thus, Scholasticism rendered eminent service to Catholicism, defending the gratuity of the supernatural order of grace from the natural order of reason (a reason that is purified from added supernatural end) and at the same time effecting a separation between the supernatural and reason that eventually came to be taken for granted. In a theological system based on the separation between the supernatural and the natural, the Catholic Church prided itself on being above history, while the natural world became a place divorced from God. In a two-story universe, one is the so-called “real world” (physical, material world), which is neutral territory, inherently devoid of religious content. Spiritual things, including God, are relegated to the second story and somehow cordoned off from daily existence. Sacramental ontology is the unification, in distinction, of the two stories in one single world. In the early twentieth century, the traditional interpretation of Aquinas by Cardinal Cajetan emphasized the discontinuity between nature and grace, to the point that the notion of the state of pure nature was generally accepted. In this way, nature was isolated from grace, the world from God, and philosophy and science from theology. De Lubac argued that the option of a purely natural condition does not exist and in fact sustained the opposite, that is, the continuity between the natural and grace or the interpenetration of nature and grace. In this regard, von Balthasar (1905–1988) would say that de Lubac attempts to recover the ancient intuition that the transcendent is already contained in the immanent. [de Lubac’s goal] was to burst the bonds of the whole sphere of nature to reach that of revelation—which had already occurred in fact and which indeed was the very foundation of the whole sphere of nature in the first place.18

De Lubac’s goal consists of recovering an outlook on life that merges natural philosophy and supernatural religion. He insisted repeatedly that there is an essential heterogeneity, with real continuity, between the natural and 18 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. by Edward T. Oakes, SJ (German edition 1951; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 341.

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supernatural orders. Accordingly, his aim is to articulate a Catholic reality that can operate at the intersection between nature and the supernatural, without reducing either. To put it differently, de Lubac (like Blondel before him) claims that to end the crisis between reason and faith, or the secular state and Catholic religion, scholars need to keep the immanent order and the transcendent together as one in their irreducible and inseparable distinction from one another. This perspective, further deepened by theologians before Vatican Council II and ultimately absorbed within the conciliar documents of Vatican II, would become known as the universality of grace.

Against Immanentism If the origin of sacramental ontology as a concept refers to a situation of dualism between the reign of nature and the supernatural, the use of this concept today refers to a condition of radical immanentism. To put it differently, if the situation from which the recovery of a sacramental view of reality emerged was the dualist thesis of the two-story universe, the application of that view today is related to a form of historicism emphasizing the temporal upon the transcendental. Once again, de Lubac provided the guidelines. In his Preface to the 1965 The Mystery of the Supernatural, de Lubac warned his readers that “the tide of immanentism is growing irresistibly.”19 He added that “the dualist […] thesis has finished its course,” and now we face the challenge of the “doctrines of immanentism.” He clarified that it is chiefly a question of “historical” immanentism, concentrating completely upon history, and envisaging the end of its development as a “universal reconciliation” which, both in itself and in the means needed to achieve it, would exclude everything supernatural.20

For de Lubac, “historical immanentism” stands for Marxism, which lacks a transcendent goal. In Catholicism, he had already suggested that Christianity held the corrective to two views of human existence: an ahistorical escapism in which the goal is to flee the world and the historical immanentism of Marxism.21 In Catholicism, de Lubac made little effort to explicate this second 19 De Lubac, Augustinisme et Théologie Moderne, XXIV. 20 De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, XXXV. 21 Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 140–141.

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stream of thought or the philosophies of historical progress that underlay it. The pressing need was to assert the social and historical dimensions of Catholicism in the face of a growing spiritual individualism. During and after Vatican Council II, however, de Lubac more directly emphasized the narratives of history within atheistic immanentism, including but not exclusively understood as Marxism. The conception of history advanced by historical immanentism is one that lacks transcendence. Rebutting the view of an immanent order reduced to or nullified by the transcendent, de Lubac suggested recognition of such an immanent order as insufficient to itself and rather an integral part of the larger structure. History when correctly understood, he believed, unites history and transcendence. Once again, he ultimately bridged the gap between modernity and Christianity through a rearticulation of the relationship between nature and grace. In the decades since his death, interest in de Lubac’s work, including his work on theology of history, has not faded. Initially, scholarship on de Lubac was limited to the effort of Catholic theologians. Increasingly, the scholarship on him has expanded to include authors of Protestant and Anglican traditions who appeal to de Lubac’s theology as a resource for ecumenical engagement and for the renewal of their own theological traditions. Among these authors, Anglican theologian John Milbank is particularly relevant here: he engages de Lubac with his own postmodern theological vision. Milbank is especially concerned with atheist immanentism and argues that Transcendence saves both all cognitive appearances and all ontological realities. By contrast, atheist immanentism is the doctrine of damnation of some for a while and in the end the eternal damnation of all and everything.22

While de Lubac addresses the absence of transcendence in atheist immanentism as a challenge to the Church’s tradition of reading history spiritually, Milbank peculiarly links the absence of transcendence in atheist immanentism with nihilism. He notes that modern immanentism is post-Christian in character because it “has to think creation out of nothing without God, a nothing that is self-generative. This is why the shadow of nihilism is a 22 The quote is from John Milbank, “Stanton Lecture 3: Immanence and Number,” Unpublished lecture, University of Cambridge, February 2, 2011. At http://theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/ papers/Milbank_StantonLecture3.pdf (accessed April 1, 2017). See also: John Milbank, “Henri de Lubac,” in David F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Modern Theology since 1918 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural.

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post-Christian shadow.”23 With other Anglican and Evangelical theologians, Milbank believes that the challenge of nihilism in the socio-political realm consists of a straight choice between either embracing nihilism or embodying salvation.24 What exactly did Milbank have in mind when he described modern immanentism as “creation out of nothing […] a nothing that is self-generative?” And how does modern immanentism affect the enterprise of history? In the next few pages, I will try to unpack Milbank’s cryptic remark and answer the second question. Usually, historians learn that their profession was born in the nineteenth century from a desire to replace theology with science. An epistemological shift moved the meaning of ideas and events from divine will or natural law to historical context, replacing suprahistorical truths with historical truths (history reveals truth, in Hegelian terms). These historical truths, relative to specific times and places as they may be, can be taken seriously, although discounted to partial, contingent, incremental truths, as historicism relies on the integrity of the historian and the reality of the past. A synthesis of German Romanticism and French Enlightenment forged scientific history as we know it. For most historians, historicism’s discovery of absolute historicity concerned the rejection of the “extrinsicism” that places the absolute outside of the existential conditions of the one concrete order of history, and an acceptance of a secular “intrinsicism” that removes the absolute from the one concrete order of history. In other words, the scientification of history expelled theology from the discipline. Further developments in the field provided an essential and durable philosophical foundation for historians’ scientific ambitions to the point that today, although questioned from multiple angles, the presumption of scientific historiography seems to hold. Not many historians pay close attention to theory, as they assume history is a practical discipline that deals with archives, books, and other artifacts. Among the few historians who do carefully consider the intellectual status of their discipline, however, a majority would agree on a sort of softer version of scientif ic history. They would probably accept some level of subjectivity on the part of the historian to protect a higher degree of objectivity of the past. As a result, the more innovative forms of historical methods crafted by historians these 23 Milbank, “Stanton Lecture 3: Immanence and Number.” 24 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006); John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997); Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998).

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days—linguistic and cultural studies, French Annales, and so on—result in various configurations of “realism.” Only a small minority of these scholars would mount the case for a different status of their discipline by claiming that history does not retain any trace of objectivity. Postmodernist forms of history validate a far more subversive degree of relativism. Historicism introduced a moderate form of relativism, truths relative to particular times and places once history conserves the claim of rigorousness and professionalism (“scientific history”); postmodernism instead denies historical truths—truths grounded firmly in their historical context—and implies a futility of the historical enterprise. Historians Anthony Molho and Gordon Wood once predicted no future relevance to postmodernism in history. They argued that postmodern relativism “is so destructive of all historical reconstruction” that “it is not likely to have a lasting effect on the writing of history in the United States.”25 Molho and Wood echoed a well-established sentiment in the discipline, that is, American historians are genuinely and instinctively suspicious about a certain kind of relativism—postmodern relativism. Both contended that postmodernism disrupts the scientif ic essence of their profession and potentially alters the very character of their identity. Historians assume that there is a level of certainty written in the very fabric of reality that timelessly presides over our lives, but postmodernism argues that historians have given this status of certainty to these structures by depositing paradigmatic examples in an archive, turning them from empirical claims into object. Historians have seen the dismissal of the scientific approach as a gateway to historical investigations that would be merely subjective or imaginary, perhaps only in historians’ heads.26 Historians see postmodernism as an ultimate attack on the notion of the absolute and the possibility of truth. For some, scientific history is fighting 25 Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, “Introduction,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (eds.), Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 12. 26 Theorists such as Joyce Appleby and Gordon Wood have branded this evolution in terms of the democratization of the discipline. History becomes populated by many languages. Authors other than those who are white or male enter the discipline, historical claims are no longer universal, and postcolonial, postmodern, racial discourses are initiated. See: Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York and London: Norton, 1994), 3. This democratization is welcome as long as it does not affect the universal claim of scientific objectivity. Historians were invited to imagine scientific “historicities as some among many,” declares Kerwin L. Klein, “historicities in both conversation and conflict with a profusion of narrative traditions.” See: Klein, From History to Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 111.

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for its right to defend the existence, if not of suprahistorical truths, at least of historical truths, or truths relative to particular contexts. Truly, postmodernists dismiss the validity of historical truths as well as the possibility of historians’ integrity and any access to the reality of the past. This anti-realistic attitude of postmodernism in history fuels criticism. But this specific postmodern attack on historicism limits its effects on epistemology. A powerful challenge to history comes from ontological nihilism, which is not intended to reject and oppose historicism in terms of the relative but rather in terms of the ephemeral. As a theoretical approach, nihilism is the manifestation within the discipline of history of a nihilistic cultural package that has triumphed and reigns ubiquitous. To put it differently, nihilism is not internal to history as a discipline, rather it is the essential substratum of the culture of these days. Like gravity it is everywhere, and everywhere it is invisible. The mistake resides on the side of historians who examine nihilism while wearing philosophical glasses, missing the culturally embodied aspects of the problem. Nihilism is an entire cultural package with a complex array of ontological and metaphysical foundations affecting every dimension of our lives, including history. Nihilism is not eroding the objectivism of history but reducing it and rendering it meaningless. The nihilistic character of the culture of this age does not claim that the past is subjective; it celebrates the liberation of all from the ontological fixity of the past. Nihilism is the essence of the culture of our time. So, although historicism remains the dominant approach applied by professional historians, nihilistic modernism is already the signature characteristic of how contemporary culture addresses the historical enterprise. Nihilism is the action guided and shaped by the so-called nihilation of things, that is, the belief that no objective, immutable things exist. Nihilism, philosopher Emanuele Severino argues, is “the persuasion that every thing is ephemeral, insofar as it is subject to birth and death.”27 He describes how nihilism turns the world on its head: things, insofar as they are things, do not exist by necessity. For the philosophical tradition, divine things exist by necessity; but they exist by necessity not insofar as they are things, but insofar as they are divine. But then, in its deepest […] essence, contemporary philosophy shows that divine things cannot exist.28 27 Emanuele Severino, Nihilism and Destiny, ed. by Nicoletta Cusano (Milan: Mimesis International, 2015), 13. 28 Severino, Nihilism and Destiny, 14.

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Severino makes clear that a main effect of nihilism exists in making inconceivable the existence of permanent objects. As a matter of fact, immutable objects are, in effect, permanent values (ethical, natural) raised with the logic of the remedy, to defend individuals and societies from the “becoming,” the historical character of the becoming of things.29 Having Severino in mind, the dynamics between “immutable” and “becoming” can be translated in the realm of history: the past as an objective reality is a value that historians raised to defend themselves, their discipline, and an eventual order of society perceived as necessary. The past is not changing; the past is a permanent reality. It does not become. In fact, if the past really becomes, it is time in motion, the transitory figures of ideas and events that are located in the historical flux. In such a situation, the primary reality of the flux of time—what becomes—exercises a centrifugal force against the artificial edifice of historicism through which the “immutable” vanishes. Not only that, but society at large, to paraphrase Nietzsche, becomes a chaos.30 Thus, historians maintain that history is possible only if the “becoming” is corrected with the notion of realities, essences, and institutions that cannot become. The abandonment of the “immutable” and the choice of the “becoming” is the folly that scientific history is trying to avoid. Faced with the radical nihilism of the motor of becoming, historicism has evoked the ordering and governing principles of time, including the objectivity of the past. The fundamental definition of nihilism, Severino argues, is the persuasion that “things— that is, entities, non-nothing—are nothing” because they are ephemeral.31 They are for a while, and then become nothing. Sometimes it seems that historians operate on the assumption of a dual structure of reality: the being and the becoming. Their faith in the “immutable” causes them to see the “becoming” as a simple mutation, a matter of forms and sensibilities. The binary distinction between the mutable and the immutable is the implicit assumption of historians, who can continue to investigate the unchanging structure of the past while recognizing a landscape that is constantly in flux. Thus, the reality of the past persists despite the unstoppable dynamism of time; it remains untouched by all of that flux and provides stability and certainty. By postulating the “immutable” as the underlying reality 29 The original quote goes as follows: “The West has invoked the immutables to save itself, that is, to dominate the eruption of becoming.” See: Emanuele Severino, Gli Immutabili, il Niente, il Caso (Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 1979), 18–19. The translation is my own. 30 “How, In Other Words, Could a Chaos Become a Cosmos?” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1961), 107. 31 Severino, Nihilism and Destiny, 39.

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of history, historians have segregated the evidence of “becoming” at the level of mere appearance. If the past is understood as the accumulation of what the “becoming” is ineffective with, namely, if the past is outside the domain of the “becoming,” then the “becoming” no longer possesses the ontological character that postmodernism has recognized. If the “becoming” is understood as a process in which the past is unchangeable, outside the domain of the “becoming,” then the “becoming” stands in front of the past as the face of God. Indeed, the immutability of the past presents the most characteristic features of the divine, its untouchability. If there is a past in these terms, then this unchangeable past implies the impossibility of “becoming.” But there is no dual structure of reality, the being and the becoming. There is only the “becoming” that constructs and deconstructs reality in a permanent process of nothing that turns into something and vice versa. “Becoming” is not mutation but rather change in the order of ontology. Severino points out that the “becoming” dissolves everything that claims to possess immutability because the former operates at the deepest dimension of reality of the latter: “True nihilism is essentially unconscious.”32 Nihilism is the ethos, the dwelling place of this age. If we mention the “death of the past,” to echo J. H. Plumb, it is because the essential substratum of the culture of these days shows that the only possible truth is the becoming of everything.33 Severino argues that in the spirit of our times no “immutable” can exist. There exists the concrete evidence that we live in a reality in perpetual becoming, in which “becoming” is what becomes, what comes to life and comes to an end, what comes from nothing and returns to nothing. People, cities, events, and concepts enter the stage of history, then inexorably leave it, and everything is left behind. The “death of the past” is the denial of the “immutable,” the fixity of the past, and thus any objective truth about the past.34 Historians recreate the past and can annihilate it at will. To paraphrase Severino, the past is nothing other than an absolute availability to be produced and destroyed.35 Not surprisingly, history according to postmodernism tends to sink into literature, because literature is compatible with the “becoming.” I should be clear now about what Milbank intends when he talks about modern immanentism as “creation out of nothing […] a nothing that is 32 Severino, Nihilism and Destiny, 8. 33 J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 11–17. 34 Ibidem. 35 The original quote goes as follows: “Which is to say that a thing is nothing other than an absolute availability to be produced and destroyed; a thing not available in this way is unreal.” See: Severino, Nihilism and Destiny, 6.

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self-generative” and how it affects the whole enterprise of history. If Milbank and other Christian scholars who share his insight are correct, ontological nihilism poses a much more dangerous threat to history than does mere relativism. Historicism can still dominate the discipline, and historians can debate which degree of subjectivity they agree to accept without risking any compromise to the coherence of reality, but nihilism has revealed history to be indifferent and arbitrary. Where we once lived in a world steeped in historical significance, we now live in a world where things simply happened. Where once the meaningfulness of history was an unquestioned certainty—the very foundation of social order—now we must continually struggle to make our past meaningful and to do so, moreover, without the sanction of objectivity. To say that history is seen as nihilistic is to say that it is indifferent to human concerns. Where historicism revealed a world as meaningful, the fundamental meaning of nihilism applied to historical enterprise is that human history is arbitrary and meaningless. If there is no history in the objective sense, then there is no direction in the unfolding of events or of historical structures.

Ontological Turn A few points can be extracted from this brief inquiry into the origins and motivations of the sacramental ontology authors. First, sacramental ontology comes from intellectual circles that are on amicable terms with modernity and open to incorporating at least some elements of modernity into Christian tradition. Second, the development of the concept of sacramental ontology is a result of a struggle internal to the Christian intellectual world and was not generated as a reaction to secularism. As a matter of fact, the source of that dangerous dualism, as de Lubac branded it, is bad theology, not Enlightenment. Sacramental ontology is part of a remedy of a deviation that occurred within the realm of Christian thought. Third, the adoption of this concept of sacramental ontology works as an antidote not against science but against the challenge of ontological nihilism, the idea that all is ephemeral. In the first chapter of his book, Gregory attacks the widespread modern perception that science and religion are incompatible.36 At the same time, he protests the effects of ontological nihilism by arguing, in regard 36 Kathleen Crowther maintains, however, that Gregory’s statements about science throughout the book might best be described as ambivalent. Crowther, “Review of Gregory, Brad S., The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.”

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to the present, that secularism and scientism are “subverting modernity’s most fundamental assumptions from within” in that they are undermining and preventing “the articulation of any intellectually persuasive warrant for believing in the realities presupposed by liberal political discourse and the institutional arrangements of modernity: that there are such things as persons, and that they have such things as rights” (emphasis added).37 When Gregory criticizes science, it is not a liberal understanding of science he has in mind but instead the radical forms of scientism of these days—those forms like transhumanism and biogenetics of the new scientific naturalistic worldview. Gregory claims that the basis of liberalism cannot sustain itself “in research universities and in the public sphere” against the rise of scientific naturalism (and here he addressed transhumanism as a moral philosophy) in which “‘persons’ […] ‘rights’ [and] ‘dignity’ are fictions […].”38 When he attacks science, he attacks a science already located in a post-liberal world. In response to critiques against the general outlook that he provides on the contemporary situation, Gregory also says, It remains to be seen how well liberalism’s alleged “pragmatic, negative consensus” can hold up in societies whose members lack shared substantive values, disagree sharply over matters of central importance for human life, and are increasingly equipped with technological means to pursue unprecedented aims that serve the divergent desires. Indeed, how well is it holding up now?39

One interpretation of the above sentence reads as follows: the entire debate on sacramental ontology and history needs to be rethought in these terms, that is, whether historians should maintain the separation between immanent and transcendental realities or try to build bridges between the two in a context in which Christians feel more equipped than seculars to face the crisis of Western historical consciousness and the mounting nihilism ignited by the technoscience. A Christian historiography that does not allow the inclusion of the supernatural and does not recover a sacramental worldview is inherently misrepresentive because it is inherently dualistic or immanent in character. The suggested ontological turn, however, does not consist in a plain adoption 37 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 376. 38 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 381. 39 Gregory, “Response to Matthew Lundin’s Review,” in Christian Scholar’s Review 41, no. 4 (2012), 415–419, 419.

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of a sacramental worldview on the side of the historians, but in a process of reconceptualization of historical theory and method so that written history can dispatch the sacramental worldview of the Christian past on its own terms. The task is not so much to revisit the relationship between history and conscience but to reinterrogate the connection between history and method. The models of history at the heart of Christian historiography, in all their variants, cannot but see religious history in terms of “the secular.” Historians’ apparent loyalty to secularism is what disfigures the Christian past. As mentioned, the shift from epistemology to ontology has nothing to do with what is in the historian’s mind, what the historian believes, or whether he/she is a believer or an atheist. No author (including this author) suggests that atheists are incapable of historical scholarship. The crux of the matter in not on the side of the historian but of the method. A “secular methodology,” that is, a commitment to understanding the past without meaningfully analyzing the supernatural dimensions of historical perspectives, opens a gap between how people in the past thought and how historians of today think. And much historical understanding can be lost in this gap. Methods have been developed to operate within those gaps, so this method is not working and should be replaced. All historians, including those with a secular mindset, and regardless of their faith or lack thereof, need to embrace a method to truly understand the past. As historians, we must work to reposition ourselves within past frameworks rather than demand that the past dances to our tune. The ontological turn compels a change in how historians approach the Christian past. Reckoning with the vibrancy—and vagueness—of natural and supernatural realities requires new approaches. In a traditional context, epistemology as a given method does the work. An ontological orientation recognizes the reality of the inhabitants of the Christian past, leaving the modern historians the task of representing such a past. This reality is constituted of a myth, an horizon of sense and of events, people, and ideas that received meaning from such horizon. The myth is the subsoil sthat lies even deeper than the subsoil constituted by the fundamental horizon through which everything, including the ontological presuppositions, receive sense. Accordingly, a historical investigation of the Christian past first requires a patient reconstruction of such a horizon and then a hermeneutical exercise. All worldviews have ontological assumptions upon which their conceptions of reality rest. This is true even for those worldviews that deny the existence of such assumptions. In the ancient and medieval worlds, theological and spiritual assumptions were the primordial originators of sense,

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the origin from which everything else—law, culture, politics—received meaning. One must return to ontology in an original Aristotelian sense. The ancient understanding of ontology as “first philosophy” is a science of “being qua being” that frequently turned into a plain understanding of ontology in terms of the basic presuppositions behind a given Christian societal stance, “the bedrock of fundamental assumptions and unshakable commitments.”40 These primordial assumptions were ontological assumptions covering the meaning and the place of God and the divine in human affairs, and vice versa. In turn, these ontological assumptions were formulated in the first ecumenical councils. The formulation of the doctrine of the single substance in three different hypostases that was finally established at the Council of Constantinople, for example, is not an obscure detail in the history of the Christian theology. True, it was a doctrine to contain the spread of Arianism, but it had theological political implications, too. The formulation, in fact, subsists on the Judaic notion of divine monarchy, not on the Aristotelian deity that is the transcendent principle of any movement. Erik Peterson summarized the political implication of the doctrine in the following terms: “Political monarchy was restored and, at the same time, divine monarchy was secured…the single king on earth corresponds to the single king in Heaven and the single sovereign nomos and Logos” (original emphasis). 41 The point is that historians have applied modern philosophical, legal-political, and cultural-anthropological categories to grasp the experience of kingship in late antiquity, but the ultimate meaning comes from placing kingship against the background of a set of ontological assumptions. The ultimate meaning of kingship come from a theological-spiritual horizon that was the ultimate producer of sense. Accordingly, the patient and delicate work of weaving a semantic background is propaedeutic of a more proper historical investigation. Certain events and beings that the inhabitants of Christendom interpreted in terms of miracles and spiritual forces demand on the side of the historians a preliminary work of reconstruction of the proper context that provided a supernatural meaning to those facts. Only subsequently can a genuine interpretative process begin. Miracles and spiritual events, among other things, must be explained within a supernatural worldview because it is only in such a supernatural worldview that they make sense. To put it differently, historical realities should be placed in their given context; 40 Sergei Prozorov, “What Is the ‘World’ in World Politics? Heidegger, Badiou and Void Universalism,” Contemporary Political Theory 12, no. 2 (2013), 102–122, 105. 41 Erik Peterson, Ausgewiihlte Schriften. Vol. I, Theologische Traktate (Wiirzburg: Echter, 1994), 50.

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they command their own reasons without depending on an epistemological validation. They are justified by the context, not by historians’ secular methodology, as if historians are prosecutors and history is a court in which judgements should be passed on ancient and medieval individuals’ perception of reality. An example might help clarify the point: what is, basically, a sacramental horizon of intelligibility? More precisely, how is it possible to articulate the connection between history and eschatological salvation as conceived in the past without falling between the Scylla of immanentism and the Charybdis of dualism? By secularizing the Christian past, some historians have basically absorbed eschatology entirely into history. For those grounded in the secular metaphysical spirit, salvation is seen as belonging essentially to this temporal realm. Those who recognize the supernatural relevance of eschatology instead confine it to the supra-temporal realm. They cannot conceive of history moving toward total sacralization because they conserve the opposing concepts of time and eternity: this world is subject to time. It is the world to come that will be eternal. The shift implies the rejection of both immanentism and dualism between history and eschatological salvation because these are metaphysics foreign to the inhabitants of the Christian past. One must recognize (in the sense of discerning a historical reality regardless of the historian’s personal belief) that those inhabitants perceived the world as sacred. Borrowing the term from theology, Jones and Gregory have labeled this specific ontological reality sacramental ontology. Sacramental ontology refers to a progressive sacralization of the world, a sacralization that although in progress remains unfinished business. This saeculum, the time on this side of the eschaton, is not inertial but implies a movement—the sacralization of creation—and it therefore contains both this-worldly and otherworldly reality. In its earthly–heavenly integrity, the saeculum is exactly that process of sacralization. The example shows a first approximation to a sacramental worldview.

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On Method Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State and Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation are two different projects. The former is a meticulous reconstruction of the social worldview of the Christian kingdom of France in the thirteenth century. The latter is a much more ambitious project, aiming to reformulate the existing scholarship on the contribution of the Reformation in the development of modernity. Both books, however, mention “sacramental ontology,” namely a unifying vision of reality in which earth and heaven, or the human affairs and the divine affairs, are considered together. Sacramental ontology stands as a synonym to unity in distinction of the two orders of knowledge. For Jones, this vision contradistinguished thirteenth-century France. For Gregory, this vision, which marked the Christian premodern, has been substituted by a fractured, eventually nihilist modern replacement. Clearly, the sacramental plays a different role in the two authors’ books. In Jones’s book, the sacramental becomes a useful tool to challenge the notion that the Christian premodern can be investigated from a secular point of view. In Gregory’s book, the passage from the sacramental to nihilist modernity rewrites secularization. The target of Jones’s Before Church and State is twofold: on one hand, the secular is a central modern epistemic category, a category to construct, codify, grasp, and experience a realm or reality differentiated from the religious. On the other, secularism is understood as a kind of secular worldview. The secular did not exist in thirteenth-century France, and therefore no secularization was possible. This conclusion, of course, raises a methodological question: how suitable is a secular epistemology to investigating a non-secular reality? Historians investigate non-secular realities all the time, but they investigate these non-secular realities through a secular lens. The question Jones raised, however, is more specific: how to address a historical reality with a supernatural end? The supernatural is beyond the competence of history, for ultimately it is transcendent, and its acceptance is a function of a personal faith. But this is only one side of the problem. The position to investigate the Christian premodern without including the

Beltramini, E., Desecularizing the Christian Past. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463721882_ch03

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supernatural is a position concealing an implicit and untenable Christology. Once again, historians can object to this theologically based criticism by maintaining that they are working as historians and that the exclusion of the supernatural is the inevitable conclusion of an examination of the past driven by historical method. Here we reach the point at stake in this discussion: the very historical method that would lead to such a conclusion. The inescapable argument is that historians work as historians, according to standards of historical method. Yet the historical method is responsible for either the exclusion or the externalization of the supernatural. It is not that the historical method limits historians in their efforts to reconstruct the whole past, as if it marks a boundary that cannot be crossed. The historical method by its very nature secularizes the past. Rather than being a neutral endeavor, history is a system of secularization. The point of departure in my line of thought is the questioning of a typical methodological assumption of history of religion: that religious ideas and religious discourses need to be mediated through a neutral, secular filter in order to make sense. The methodological question is whether religious ideas and religious traditions need to be mediated through a secular approach in order to be properly investigated and understood. The question is, sic et simpliciter, whether the secular approach is neutral at all or rather it is intrinsically biased about the religious. The objection? That the secular filter is not neutral but on the contrary is intrinsically biased about the religious; it is infused with explicit antisupernatural assumptions. Secularization implies that the secular is a result of clearing away the spoilage of rituals, religion traditions, and ultimately of forms of superstition that dominated medieval Christianity in order to open new doors to human knowledge and thinking directed by the neutral hand of reason. The historians do not attempt to acknowledge the whole reality of religious data but only the section that is open to historical investigation. The rest is excluded. Or, I should have said, it is left open to the question of a theological or faith interpretation. The secular filter is responsible for the desacralization of the Christian past because it assumes that what is real consists of an indifferent natural order to which either (1) any trace of the supernatural has been removed or (2) a sense of the sacred has been added. Desacralization is the process where either (1) the naturalization of the supernatural occurs, namely, the supernatural is reduced to events explicable in the natural order; or (2) the externalization of the supernatural happens, so that the supernatural is no longer an operation, but rather an entity that is added to a self-standing secular. This anti-supernatural

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thought is mainly responsible for either the vanishing or the distortion of the supernatural. History as a discipline has been complicit in a secular project by making the supernatural rejectable and ultimately by providing a powerfully anti-supernatural narrative. Historians mostly proceed into the methodological dispositive of decontextualization / recontextualization embedded in their methodology, operating uncritically and unreflexively. For sure unintentionally, modern historians have rendered the desacralization of the Christian past ethically thinkable and scholarly justif ied, furnishing legitimacy to a dispossession of the Christian past to the very Christians who populated it. The problem indeed is not simply a partial representation of the past, it is also a caricaturizing of Christianity: a limitation in the representation of the sacramental in the Christian premodern leaves the faith of the Christians in those days with no real historical support. The result is f ideism. This is the devastating impact of the application of the historical method to the Christian premodern past: not only history freed from faith, but also faith disentangled from history. This modern, secular worldview of a strict separation of history and faith is anachronistically retroacted. The historical method is not really neutral after all. How did the discipline of history become a vehicle for secularization? An approximative answer, one may argue, can be found in the particular understanding of history as autonomous from religion. This theoretical outlook is rooted in the secularization thesis according to which the secular enjoys the privilege to investigate the religious, but the other way around is labeled as irrational and disgraceful. This is essentially the argument of secularization applied to the realm of history. The endgame consists of the bifurcating historiographical logics that justify the modern sense of superiority over the premodern, dividing the secular from the religious in both tacit and overt ways. These logics secularize and ultimately disfigure the Christian past by banishing the supernatural end of Christianity as a religion outside the boundaries of epistemological legitimacy. A cadre of historians provides moral cover and scientific justification for an antisupernatural thought—a secular conceit I believe to be self-contradictory, with its idea of a liberating and normalizing form of understanding that is at once partial and discriminating. The historians’ secular accounts of the Christian past must consistently deal with the challenge of reconciling the sacramental perception of the inhabitants of the past with what is portrayed as the secular atmosphere in which those inhabitants lived. The result is a

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misrepresentation of the Christian past. Secular values and concerns are clearly at war with historical knowledge. History is a covering process that constructs secular accounts of the Christian past. To put it differently, a certain secular history makes a desacralized Christian past. In doing so, it reveals the morally precarious foundation of established Christian historiography. Historical views of the Christian past remain hostage to the secularization thesis partially because historians made them so. While acting as record makers, historians were also myth makers, drawing from sources that are priorly shaped by secular concerns. The discipline of history has itself enabled the process of secularization of the Christian past, making it not only scholarly acceptable, but normative. In doing so, Christian historiography shows to be inherently contradictory, at once claiming to represent the past while denying that it represents part of it. Among the historians responsible for a secularization of Christianity are Christian historians who have become blinkered about their own history. Christian historians, in other words, have played a role in distorting the picture of the Christian past. Christian historians who ignore the supernatural end of Christianity contribute to historical illiteracy as much as historians. To Christian historians, also, is directed the call to step away from narratives of secular progress and seek fresh ways to connect the present and the past. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation provides a complementary entry to this discussion on the method. Namely a genealogy of modernity, Gregory’s book assumes the debate on secularization, which is at once a historical process of transformation and a theory. The historical process is that of progress, a general and progressive human and societal development from the primitive “sacred” to the modern “secular.” The theory explains the differentiation of “the religious” (ecclesiastical institutions and churches) and “the secular” (state, economy, science, art, entertainment, health, and welfare) institutional spheres in terms of decline and privatization of religion in the modern world. This is the Titanic that Gregory wants to sink. Gregory’s book belongs to a stream of monumental works across the academic disciplines, which has recently challenged the story of secularization as a process characteristic of modernity that creates the modern by extirpating the religious and anything else that is not secular or rational. A condensed version of these works’ main theses, which does not do justice to the intricacies of the authors’ arguments, is that the secular is indissolubly entangled with the religious not only because it sequesters itself to the spaces that remain uncontaminated by religion, but also because it arises from the very past from which it tries to break. Any secularization thesis that

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merely views it as a negative process by which the secular is what remains after the removal of the religious fails to comprehend the complexity and contradiction of the ontological shift that comes to restructure the modern understanding of reality and the self. Consequently, confidence in this Weberian story of secularization is on the wane as an alternative history of the secular is emerging to challenge the existing understanding of the complex relationship between the religious and the secular. The alternative history of the secular began with a series of historical studies on Christian theology written by de Lubac in the first half of the twentieth century. I do not dare attempt a summary of his findings here but simply offer a broad vision of his thesis—that is, Christianity is itself the source of secularization. Or, to paraphrase Bruno Latour’s claim that “we have never been modern,” we have never been totally modern, in the sense that we (Western people, societies, and cultures) have never been totally severed from Christianity.1 The opposite is true: Christianity maintains a grip on modernity, modernity being a product of Christianity. In de Lubac’s opinion, in fact, there is no such thing as autonomous and universal reason; therefore, faith and reason are not essentially distinct because both are but differing degrees of participation in the mind of God.2 I will return to these statements. In the last two decades, philosophers, historians, and theologians have picked up de Lubac’s pioneering work. These intellectuals in turn produced works of unusual depth and magnitude to pose a compelling, provocative challenge to the fundamentally Weberian claim that modernization signals the historical triumph of secularism and the death of religious thinking. Monumental and erudite books such as John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in philosophy, Vincent Pecora’s Secularization Without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee in cultural criticism, and Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation in history offer alternative histories of the secular.3 Taylor and Gregory defend the view that the secular is actually saturated in religiosity. Pecora rhetorically asks the following:

1 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 2 Neil Ormerod, “Milbank and Barth: Comparison and Contrasts from a Catholic Perspective,” in Geoff Thompson and Christiaan Mostert (eds.), Karl Barth: A Future for Postmodern Theology? (Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum, 2000), 276–289. 3 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory; Taylor, A Secular Age; Vincent Pecora, Secularization Without End: Becket, Mann, Coetzee (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).

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If it is possible to rethink the process of secularization […] so that rather than being satisfied only with the ironies and unintended consequences by which religious thought produces rationalizing and secularizing motivations from within itself, as Max Weber so brilliantly understood, we also pay attention to the manifold way secularization manages to stimulate […] religious thinking in return. 4

The central thesis of these writings is that modernity did not originate as a reaction against religion but arose out of its inner evolution, in which Christianity has played a central role. No single aspect of Christianity (e.g., nominalism, as in Hans Blumenberg’s work) but an amalgam of diverse elements has yielded modernity; similarly, no single aspect of modernity (e.g., capitalism, as in Weber’s theory) but modernity as a whole has resulted from Christianity. Taylor and Milbank share the view that the secular is the product of a deviation within Christianity. Taylor also shares Milbank’s idea of deviation (although not of heresy) but places the locus of this deviation within the culture of the masses and not within the thought of the elites.5

The supernatural How should historians approach a worldview infused with the supernatural? How can historians draft a supernatural horizon of sense? Historians can be tempted to avoid the problem by either naturalizing the supernatural or reinterpreting it in terms of superstition. The operation amounts to a decontextualization of the ancient world and its reimagination through the lens of a secular worldview. Take Constantine’s vision on the Milvian Bridge: it has either been reframed as a natural phenomenon or dismissed as a popular credence. Scholars with a positive attitude toward religion, including the supernatural, may eventually show interest in accepting a suspension of the natural order, a miracle, or a direct intervention of God in human affairs. For them, the supernatural is an entity external to history but powerful enough to eventually touch the flux of human events and deviate them at the appropriate time. The supernatural, for those scholars, is both sovra-natural and extrinsic to human history. Biblical scholar Michael Heiser poses an interesting and sarcastic description of this extraordinary form of divine intervention into human history. In his assertion that the Bible as an 4 Pecora, Secularization Without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee, 25. 5 Taylor, A Secular Age, 775.

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inspired collection of books, he offers an example of a Jewish prophet who is having breakfast and suddenly becomes possessed by an irresistible power. The prophet needs to stop eating; he is forced to take his papyrus and start writing every single word God is whispering into his ear. When the divinity is satisfied, the dictation ends, and the prophet awakes from the dream to go back to his breakfast.6 The point of Heiser’s caricature of the inspired author of Scripture is that the extrinsic supernatural is unlikely in reality as much it is dubious in Christian literature. This picture has little to nothing to do with a Thomistic horizon of sense. God operates in the world, in the terms of Thomas Aquinas’s manus gubernatoris, without being seen; God directs human history as if human history governed itself, to paraphrase Jacques Benigne Bossuet.7 But to grasp the total sense of this identification of the history created by God with the history produced by human beings, one should turn to an immanent and interior supernatural rather than an extrinsic supernatural. How the creator and the creation are blended is a sophisticated and eventually complicated business. It implies deep understanding of doctrines, dogmas, and theological principles that work as the theoretical ground of Christian faith. In brief, creation is an emanation of its creator and does not exist without Him. Let me unpack this sentence. Creation is an emanation of its creator: creation is not an entity but a form of participation with God. As such, creation does not exist without Him. It is through this participation that creation receives at every moment its being. In other words, Christianity assumes at every instant a relationship of contingency between creation and creator. Whether or not God decides to interrupt such participation, the creation returns to being nothing (nihil). Thus, creation ex nihilo goes back to being nihil. Two important corollaries should be added to this picture. First, God grants creation its own autonomy. Yet as the metaphysics of participation make quite clear, creation is not autonomous at all. Whoever attempts to resolve this dilemma through the laws of logics risks getting nowhere. The tension between the two poles, autonomy and contingency, need to be protected not severed. The dilemma has no solution. Actually, the dilemma stands at the heart of the Christian mystery. The tension between autonomy and contingency is an accurate description of the reality 6 Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 16–20. 7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. and ed. by Thomas Gilby et al. (London: Blackfriars, 1964–1981), q. 103, a. 1, ad 2, p. 5. Bussuet’s original sentence reads as follows: “One can in fact say that God makes us just as we would be were we able to be on our own.” See: Jacques Benigne Bossuet, Traite du fibre arbitre. In Œuvres choisies, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1871), 64.

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of the cosmos. It is also a good picture of human life. This tension pictures a “suspended middle” (to borrow von Balthasar’s phrase, in turn borrowed from Erich Przywara) between the reign of the spiritual (spiritual creatures without a physical body) and pure nature (physical creatures without a spirit).8 Human beings have a physical form and are infused by spirit, or the natural already contains spiritual realities. Second, God is the creator and the protector of His creation. In fact, creation without participation in God is nothing. And participation is not an ontological status, a right, or an earned result, but a gratuitous gift from God that is renovated at any moment. The creator creates and then maintains His creation on going participating in it continuously, in aeternum (another paradox). In other words, the relationship between creator and creation is the relationship between the dispenser and the receptor of the divine gift of participation. Still, the metaphysics of participation is more fundamental than a vague notion of “maintaining” or “dispensing;” God is the creator and the administrator of His creation. Creation, in fact, is more than just “creation:” it is the generation of an “order,” an ordered arrangement of humans and things that if followed will bring about peace and harmony within the world. In other words, creation and order (in the sense of “generation of an order”) are closely entwined in the creationist paradigm, where God brings the world into existence and continues to generate order through continuous creation. An important consequence of God’s administrative role deals with causation and has an immediate impact on the discussion of history and the supernatural. Causation is a shortcut for “what (or who) causes what.” On one side stands God the administrator and on the other the autonomy of His creation, translated in this specific context as human free will. Again, one recognizes a situation of irresolvable tension between God the administrator and the human free will. This tension is incorporated in the scholastic debate between divine causation and creaturely causation, or primary causes and secondary causes. Crucially, the creaturely causation is neither completely autonomous from the divine causation nor purely instrumental or determined by it. It is the blending between the former and the latter—the participation of the former in the latter—that ensures “God’s will is done.” A miracle occurs when creaturely causation is removed to leave only the divine primary causation.

8 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview, trans. by Joseph Fessio, SJ, Michael M. Waldstein, and Susan Clements (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 14–15.

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Post-secular History In this book, I advance the option of “post-secular history”—not necessarily a history of Christianity or a Christian way of doing history, but rather an approach to history that maintains the integrity of the Christian past. It is post-secular history because it acknowledges the essential relationship that subsisted in the mind of the inhabitants of the Christian civilization between history and Christianity conceived as a supernatural religion, which is beyond the power of reason. Post-secular history is not apologetics because history is not done according to the revelation, the doctrine, or even the theology of the Church. It is a method built on the assumption that the Christian past should be studied on its own terms. For some time, Christian historians have attempted to mitigate this approach by investigating the relationship between faith and history, the faith of the historian, and the history of the fact the historian aims to study. For these Christian historians, Christian history is the result of a certain Christian style of approaching history. Secular historians, instead, have expelled the supernatural from history and redirected into the domain of faith. Here, then, the positivistic assumptions of historiography govern interpretation and ultimately exclude the supernatural from the events considered. In both approaches, the tendency is to escape the problem of the supernatural by turning Christianity into a natural religion or a style of investigation. To put it differently, there is only a slight difference between the secular historian and the faithful historian: the former naturalizes history while the latter still considers the supernatural from a secular perspective. Their methodology, in fact, works under the criterium of the meaningfulness of what is said, namely, the limits of what is said are the in the meaningfulness of what is say. Everything that has no meaning in a secular worldview—that which does not correspond to a secular understanding—is eliminated. This does not mean that words like “sacred,” “spiritual,” or “transcendent” are abandoned; their meanings, however, are changed to fit a secular horizon of sense. Christian past is an excellent example of this expansive notion of secularization. People, events, and ideas, think at “anything,” enter the domain of the secular, and are literally reinterpreted in secular terms. The old realities, once they are clothed in new significances, become available for general use, despite their high degree of anachronism. The methodology demonstrates a strength that is greater than its explicative and argumentative efficacy. The strength of the methodology is not only its universalistic tendency but also its ability to be a prescriptive instrument on a practical level. It is from this practical advantage, from

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this capacity of problem solving, that the resources for maintaining the methodology in place come. When looking at the Christian past, historians must recognize that a supernatural horizon of sense dominated the ancient and medieval worlds. In that world, Christianity was a supernatural religion, and the supernatural operated at the very core of human history. Any representation of the past that is not produced against that supernatural horizon risks to be misleading, if not untrue. Accordingly, the recovery of a supernatural horizon in the study of the Christian past is a central historical problem. Reality is events, people, and ideas, but their meanings are given to us through a worldview; it is against that worldview, that horizon of understanding, that those events, people, and ideas receive their significance. Understanding requires both the horizon and the fact that happened under such horizon. If scholars do not place the world of the Christian past against its own horizon, a supernatural, sacramental horizon, they end up placing it against a secular horizon. The historical work on the Christian past is a hermeneutical activity around the facts and against the background of a supernatural worldview. Of course, a distinct hermeneutic is needed to overcome the limitations imposed by an approach, the secular approach, that rejects or normalizes the supernatural. Thus, a scholarly investigation of the Christian past on its own terms is, ultimately, the development of a deep awareness of the theological and spiritual assumptions that sustained the late antique and medieval civilizations. The Christian civilization, in fact, was an organic society that articulated a coherent worldview based on foundational assumptions. The Neo-Platonic framework of Christianity maintained a relationship of unity in distinction between Man and God. When Augustine wrote his famous incipit to the Confessions, “Fecisti nos, Domine, ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te,” he was not indulging in a piece of well-crafted literary prose.9 He was making a precise theological point by stating that the creature cannot be separated from its creator, and creation cannot be disentangled from its creator. Creation does not stand alongside God or even “outside” of God. Paradoxically, creation still enjoys its own autonomy, its own otherness from God’s being. Creation is not autonomous and yet it is. This paradoxical condition—creation is contingent, yet it is autonomous—that contradicts the principle of non-contradiction is the result of the incarnation of God through Jesus Christ and the simultaneous divinization of creation. To put it differently, this paradoxical condition is the 9 “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Augustine, Confessions, I, 1, 1.

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fruit of the dual nature of God and therefore of Man and the rest of creation. This is the supernatural as mystery, and this is the supernatural in terms of relationship of unity as it evolved and established itself in antiquity and in the medieval era. The supernatural is conscious, related to the Scripture and to an autonomous, free, and personal acceptance of the deposit of faith. The supernatural is also interior and immanent. The supernatural penetrates the world both as an external fact of faith and as an immanent fact operating in the soul of human beings. When the premodern became the modern, however, this blending between creation and creator, between cosmos and divine, between Man and God, was lost. The modern world is constituted of two spheres, one dedicated to human, natural, and ultimately secular facts and another to spiritual, supernatural, and eventually religious facts. This is the relationship of separation between nature and the divine. The passage from the unity to the separation of the orders of nature and divine was established in Christian doctrine itself. The new framework became known in terms of duplex ordo cognitionis, a twofold order of knowledge that is distinct both in principle and also in object.10 This twofold order corresponds to both the two epistemological realms of reason and faith, secular and religious—and therefore to the disciplines of philosophy, history, and sociology—and to theology. To a worldview in which God has been exiled from its creation, history is a chain of events, people, and forces that enjoy total autonomy from God. Gone is the paradoxical condition of humans and cosmos, now both dependent on logical deductions, scientific laws, and rational principles that follow the principle of non-contradiction. In this situation, a contemporary Augustine would never say that “our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” The idea of post-secular history is somehow emerging from the publication of two books that have generated a wide, tense, and mostly approximate debate. But a post-secular history could be better understood if placed against the background of the recovery of a certain relationship between immanence and transcendence, between the natural order and the divine order, namely between Man (and Cosmos) and God and therefore between life and spirit, reason and faith, and ultimately between history and the 10 This refers to a statement included in dogmatic constitution of that 1870 Council on the Catholic faith, Dei Filius, stating that the notion of duplex ordo cognitionis refers to a “twofold order of knowledge [that is] distinct both in principle and also in object. In its principle, because in the one we know by natural reason, in the other by divine faith; in its object, because apart from what natural reason can attain, there are proposed to our belief mysteries that are hidden in God that can never be known unless they are revealed by God.” See: Council Fathers, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic faith, Dei Filius, First Vatican Council, Rome, April 24, 1870.

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spiritual.11 This relationship of unity (although in distinction) of the natural and the divine orders was the original framework of Christianity in ancient times and in the medieval era. It is important to clarify that, in the context of post-secular history, the supernatural is neither an entity nor preternatural or sovra-natural events like miracles or visions. It is a relationship of either unity or separation between Man (and Cosmos) and God: the supernatural is the relationship between the order of nature and the order of the divine. The supernatural is the mystery of Christ, totally human and totally divine, and the mystery of each and every human, who, to borrow from the Scripture, was conceived in terms of the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26 and 5:3).

History and Theology (I) At least two reasons sustain the claim that a new relationship is needed between history and theology. One has already been addressed: a theological knowledge is required to picture the horizon of sense that was hiding behind the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages. If historians aim to address the Christian past on its own terms, they must reframe the relationship between immanence and transcendence, between the natural order (or the order of nature) and the supernatural order (or the order of the supernatural). In turn, this operation of reframing requires theological sensibility. In the immortal words of Tolkien, “The old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost,” which does not mean that the past never dies but rather that the past is the product of an even older past.12 Only a genealogy of the myth that generated and sustained the Christian past can provide historians with the needed horizon against which to proceed with their hermeneutic exercises. However, a second reason is equally relevant: secularism is a subproduct of theology in disguise, according of the lesson of de Lubac, Milbank, and others. Now it is time to investigate the main implications of that conclusion: there is no separation between the religious and the secular and therefore between theology and history. Or, to put it differently, history is not an autonomous realm, independent from theology. 11 In this book, the word “Man” stands for the anthropos of the tripartite vision of God–Man– Cosmos and not for the male gender. “Man” integrates in one term both masculine and feminine. 12 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), Vol. 1, 260. Some commentators link the statement “deep roots are not reached by the frost” with the next immediate sentence, “from the ashes, a fire shall be woken,” producing a sense of the enduring of traditional values. This is not my interpretation.

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Traditionally, historical studies of Christianity expel the supernatural from history and redirected into the domain of faith. Here, then, the positivistic assumptions of historiography govern interpretation and ultimately exclude the supernatural from the events considered. In a twofold order of knowledge in which nature and the divine are separated, history and Christianity are severed so that the supernatural is considered as totally superfluous to self-sufficient reason’s capacity to explain a strictly natural reality. In a twofold order of knowledge, history consists of the construction of Christianity (or the religious in general) as the natural object of historical and critical study. The relationship between the two orders of knowledge is often figured in terms of adequacy and self-sufficiency in the sense that the natural order, to which history belongs, is autonomous from the supernatural order (and vice versa). The standard thesis posits that the secular is a sphere of neutral and autonomous reason that developed through the simultaneous retreat of religion and theology. Thus, the secular space of human affairs can be investigated with the tools of historiography while theology is confined to operate in the sphere of the religious. When the two spheres of the human and divine affairs are united, however, no objection can be raised against the collaboration between history and theology. In sacramental ontology, history and theology work together. As a matter of fact, that is how it worked in the Christian premodern era. Historians’ recognition of both the insufficiency of their discipline to address a supernatural religion and the complementary role of theology could open the potential to open a new phase in ancient and medieval Christian historiography. The cooperation between history and theology does not imply a confusion between the two disciplines; it means that each discipline maintains its identity while entering into a kind of mutual relationship at the level of methodology. My argument is that the reintegration of history and theology is already contained in the non-dualistic, sacramental ontology of the Christian premodern. In other words, the separation of history and theology is an implication of the separation between the world of the human affairs and that of God and the consequent application of historical inquiry to a despiritualized world and of theological reflection to a disembodied spirit. The adoption of sacramental ontology, which means that nature and the divine constitute an organic unity, inevitably involves the deconstruction of the history–theology divide and the reunification (in distinction) of history and theology. This unity, in fact, implies the interweaving of history and theology while denying them any real autonomy. To put it differently, this unity implies an insufficiency on the part of history to deal with a

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supernatural religion and the necessity of the complementary role of theology. Critics are correct to identify an incipient form of integralism, but it is an ontological, not a political, form of integralism. These critics are also correct to acknowledge the important role theology plays in Jones’s and Gregory’s books but incorrect to consider a return to theology in historical enterprise as a form of corruption of the enterprise itself. It is rather the consequence of the adoption of a different ontology, of a sacramental worldview in which nothing is uniquely and only natural; therefore, a neutral description of the past cannot fully grasp this view. In retrospect, an overcautious discussion on the relationship between theology and history of religious thought represents another weakness in Seeing Things Their Way. The editor and the contributing authors still look at that relationship from a dualistic view, in which history and theology defend the natural–spiritual divide. In Seeing Things Their Way, in fact, the main problem is identifying, among the essays, a third way between secular reductionism and theological anachronism. In the minds of the editors, “history of theology” refers to the discipline of narrating the development of Christian theology from the perspective of more recent theology. In this regard, the convenience in articulating a form of history of theology in which the theology of the past is not seen through the lens of the theology of the present is discussed. Renowned scholar Mark Noll proposes a social and intellectual history of theology, that is, a form of history in which, to borrow his phrase, theology gets “incarnated” in particular times and places. To proceed in that sense, Noll asserts that scholars should familiarize themselves with the relevant contexts.13 In his opinion, this form of history of theology is a midway point between secular reductionism and historical theology (a phrase that I believe the editors use as synonymous with “history of theology”).14 Of course, it is a matter of definition: history of theology is the internal history of the theological thought in which theological ideas on theological topics are addressed in theological contexts. Theological questions on theological topics can be answered either through historical methods or theological reflection. Noll suggests replacing the theological context with intellectual and social contexts and addressing theological topics through the resources of historical methods. The first option, theological ideas 13 Mark Noll, “British Methodological Pointers for Writing a History of Theology in America,” in Chapman, Coffey, and Gregory (eds.), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, 202–225. 14 Chapman and Coffey, “Introduction,” 23.

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in intellectual contexts, aligns the historian of theology with a historian of Christian thought who studies historically the different expressions (ideas, thinkers, theories, schools of thought) of Christian thought against intellectual contexts. The second option, theological ideas in social contexts, aligns the historian of theology with an intellectual historian who inquires historically about the different expressions (ideas, thinkers, theories, schools of thought) of Christian thought against social contexts. Finally, the historical theologian deals with theological ideas on theological topics but addresses them in theological contexts through theological reflection.15 The overlapping between history of theology and historical theology is evident, so it is no surprise that the editors of Seeing Things Their Way use the two phrases as synonyms. History of theology is closely related to but distinct from the discipline of historical theology, although both disciplines are interested in the historical contexts in which theological ideas arose: this is precisely what the editors of Seeing Things Their Way argue. To make the situation worse, one can claim that an intellectual historian focusing on theology also addresses questions about the historical contexts in which theological ideas arose. The problem, in fact, is that the primary methodological tools that the historian of theology uses are precisely historical, and this may be why the description of historians of theology can also be easily applied to intellectual historians who focus on theology. So, what is the difference between history of theology and historical theology? How does one consider a piece of work, a piece of historical theology, rather than a piece of history of theology? How does one differentiate a piece of theology that focuses on history from a piece of history that focuses on theology? If there is something that distinguishes the historical theologian from the historian of theology in the way that they approach the material, what is it? Two answers come to mind. The first is about judgement: the historical theologian delivers a theological judgement, the historian of theology an historical one. The second answer proves more aligned with the method—that is, whether the method applied is theological or historical in character. Here things become more nuanced. In Seeing Things Their Way, the editors have in mind a “descending” form of inquiry, the already mentioned anachronistic approach or the application of modern theology to history of theology. 15 “Historical theology is the branch of theology which aims to explore the historical situations within which ideas developed or were specifically formulated. It aims to lay bare the connection between context and theology.” See: Alister McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 121.

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However, an “ascending” form of theology is also possible, in which an account of the present form of theology ascends from older forms. This option points toward a history of theology that provides meaning for and understanding of modern theology. The difference between a piece of history that focuses in particular on theology and a piece of theology that focuses on history is this: the first focuses on the application of modern theology to history of theology, and the second focuses on the spirit of the sources, with an eye toward identifying their meaning for people today. Gregory offers two terms to define the difference: “supersessionist” and “genealogical” historiography; he defines a supersessionist model of historical writing as determined by the view that the distant past is assumed to have been left behind, explanatorily important to what immediately succeeded it but not to the present. […] its structure tends to conflate the past’s intelligibility with a quasiinevitability conceived in holistic and supersessionist terms—as if, all things considered, of course we find ourselves where we are.16

To clarify, the past is distant from the present to the point that it prevents the past from exercising influence on the present. Against this supersessionist model, Gregory argues for a genealogical approach that maintains the continuing influence of the distant past in the present. Scholars show two distinct sensibilities about time and past. In brief, some historians belong to a world that understands time as living and dynamic and the past as a resource from the present; others, however, belong to a world that understands time as inertial and passive, though still relevant to the present. To understand the expression “spirit of the sources,” one must look at the ressourcement theologians (see below); they deliberately reject all forms of archaeologism and repristination of the past. What they advocate is not ultimately a work of historical scholarship but a work of religious revitalization. Indeed, in their writings the word “source” only secondarily refers to a historical document; the primary meaning they assign to the term is “living tradition.”17 The Catholic Tübingen theologian Johann Adam Möhler 16 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 9. 17 Here is the def inition of historical theology from Patrick Carey: “The primary focus of historical theology, as I understand it, is the investigation and understanding of the theological tradition, not as a representative of a dead past, but as a living reality. Past theological ideas are not merely past but are part of the tradition that lives on in liturgies, prayer, conciliar decisions, current theological discussions, and official ecclesial pronouncements. No doubt there is much in the theological systems and conceptualizations of the past (and the present)

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described tradition as “the living influence of the Holy Spirit animating the whole body of the faithful, perpetuating itself through all times, continually living, and yet expressing itself in bodily forms.” For Möhler, therefore, tradition is an inner principle of spiritual life. “Tradition,” he wrote, is the “mysterious, invisible side of the spiritual power of life that perpetuates itself and perdures in the Church.”18 Early in the twentieth century, the lay philosopher Blondel further developed the concept of tradition. He argued that tradition preserves the living reality of the past, including the tacit knowledge that is most effectively transmitted and received through faithful action. Thus, for this ressourcement thinker, historical theology is a hermeneutical exercise in which the sources are reinterrogated with the pressing questions of the present days. With this background in mind, Jones’s and Gregory’s writings prompt two questions: (1) are they really works not of history at all but of theology masquerading as history? and (2) what role does theology definitely play in those works? The answer to the first question is simple: they are works of history. Both authors judge their sources historically, not theologically. In Jones’s book, then, the archaeological intention, the intent of repristination, is palpable. In Gregory’s Unintentional Reformation, the intention is less perceivable, probably because the ambition is greater because of his intent to move from a purely archaeological approach to a genealogy. Regardless, the book is surely not an inquiry into the spirit of the sources. It goes without saying that neither author is reinterrogating the sources of Christian faith (as theologians like to do), rather normal historical sources. In other words, the blurring of the boundaries between history and theology (in the case of Jones) and intellectual history and theology (in the case of that is conditioned by social, intellectual (especially philosophical), political, ecclesiastical, economic, and psychological forces. Historical theology tries to shed light on the ideas and the tradition that transcend the multiple historical incarnations, and on the ideas and systems of theological thinking that have either been captured by the times in which they emerged or were so conditioned by the languages and conceptions of their day that they have outlived their usefulness and are alien to the contemporary world for which historical theologians write. Historical theologians, like other theologians and like historians in general, cannot legitimately claim to operate within the context of an objective discipline. Within the Catholic tradition at least, historical theologians, like systematic theologians, work within the Anselmian context of faith seeking understanding. The historical theologian is not, as John Henry Newman once noted with respect to theology in general, ‘external to the system’.” See: Patrick Carey, “History and Theology: A Personal Confession,” U.S. Catholic Historian 23, no. 2 (2005): 9–20, 11. 18 Johann Adam Möhler, Die Einheit in der Kirche (1825). For an English translation see: Johann Adam Möhler, Unity in the Church (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 34.

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Gregory) is unmistakable. But a proper work in defining with more nuance the distinction between theology and history helps situate their work on the side of history. When they recognize their debts to theology, it is not the coastline of that (theological) island that they are bent on surveying with such meticulous accuracy but the boundary of their chosen discipline—that is, history. Yet, certain theological atmospheres are unequivocal.

History and Theology (II) A sacramental worldview opens the door to some kind of mutual relationship between history and theology, at the level of methodology. It means that reason and history, on one hand, and faith and theology, on the other, can be interrelated because they are no longer separated, but they remain in a relation of strict heterogeneity of discourses. A sacramental worldview says that each of the two discourses preserves its own identity without being confused with the other, much less reducing either one to the other. The historian enters into dialogue with theology as a complementary form of inquiry into a historical realm in which nature and the divine cohabit, but he/she does this from within history, not from within theology. No serious scholars, including Christian scholars, are interested in reactivating an old-fashioned, confused, and authoritarian form of theology that imposes itself on the historical data and orients research as if it were from the outside. A healthy relationship between history and theology implies a third way, one between a secular option with no methodological interest in theology and a clerical option with a specific theological agenda in mind. In their books on thirteenth-century France and the Reformation, respectively, Jones and Gregory recognize their debt to the philosophical and theological conclusions some scholars draw. Jones concedes that theologian John Milbank “fully articulated so many of the ideas and intuitions that I have been trying to make sense. He clarified so much of my clouded thinking.”19 Gregory does not mention Milbank but picks up (particularly in the first chapter) some of his main contributions. Milbank also mentions Christian theologians and philosophers (including de Lubac, Jacques Maritain, Alasdair MacIntyre, and the theologians of the Second Scholasticism).20 The theological background of Jones and Gregory is obvious, reliant as they are 19 Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX, xiii–xiv. 20 Jones also mentions Henri de Lubac, Jacques Maritain, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

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on post-liberal theology, Karl Barth and new orthodoxy, Radical Orthodoxy, and more importantly, ressourcement theology. Thus, certain theological atmospheres are unequivocal. Still, these theological atmospheres have more to do with ontology than they have to do with doctrine. The transition from a secular to a sacramental in the realm of ontology poses consequences, and often this means a shift from one ontology to another. This shift is only possible because the very notion of the sacramental points to a time before the separation between the natural and the divine. In the Christian premodern, nothing was “purely natural.” Because all is created, the ordinary creation was already supernatural. The point can be broadened: history is not the method of inquiry into an autonomous natural realm of the past, and theology does not deal with a wholly extrinsic, somehow superadded and completely separated realm of the supernatural. No. There is neither a self-sufficient natural sphere open to historical inquiry nor a distinct supernatural sphere available to theological reflection. As the Christian premodern resists this kind of (modern) two-story view of the world, with a self-sufficient “natural” world at the bottom and an added “supernatural” world at the top, it also resists history as a discipline that belongs to the natural world and the natural nature of man and theology as a reflection on the spiritual world. In sacramental ontology, the dualism between history and theology is overcome. Thus, the adoption of a sacramental view of reality in history implies a redefinition of the engagement of history with theology. The reintegration of history and theology offers a new understanding of historical realities, one more adequate to confront the unified vision of reality at work in the Christian past. There was a time in which Christian historians could f ind common ground with other historians on the territory of a self-contained, naturalized history separated from any infusion of transcendental hope. The separation of history from the supernatural relegated the more socially contentious supernatural beliefs and aspirations of Christians to the realm of the supernatural. Thus, the acceptance of a totally secularized history allowed Christian historians to reflect on ancient times and the medieval era in a secular mode and align the patristic perception of history and explanation about why certain events occurred with empirical historical chronology and its understanding of cause and effect. The theology’s exile from history resulted in a mutual estrangement of the religious and the world. Accordingly, theology allowed modern history to separate the orders of nature and grace, a tendency that expresses itself in the development of a theory of history detached from theology and a theology that is detached from history. This history/theology dualism operating in Christianity posed

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enormous implications for both the theological and historical levels. At the theological level, a natural sphere could run autonomously—irrespective of the supernatural end of redemption—to render the experience of salvation a total gift. At the historical level, the implication of separating the order of natural from the order of divine was a self-contained and self-sufficient notion of history. History was understood as natural history and became a legitimate object of scientific investigation. A new generation of Catholic theologians, including de Lubac, von Balthasar, and Daniélou, were critical of the pre-conciliar Thomism and its “two-tier” approach to the relationship between grace and nature—or division between natural and divine—that provides space for autonomous historical inquiry while unintentionally reducing theology to natural theology, a non-historical enterprise, and fostering the secularization of history. These theologians also tried to articulate an alternative: in brief, the relationship between Revelation and History replaces the one between Revelation and Reason. The relationship between Revelation and Reason in Scholasticism is articulated as follows: God cannot be revealed in history because history is in the realm of the finite and accidental, the phenomenal world that is governed by the universal natural law of cause and effect, and truth is a rational interpretation of our sense perception. God can be inferred on practical grounds with logical rigor. As Revelation in Scholasticism is the communication of some truths to reason through concepts, God’s grace floated above history. De Lubac, von Balthasar, and Daniélou’s work was a response to this problem. The alternative is the restoration of a patristic and medieval perception of time, a reconciliation between human and divine temporality, and a conception of history sanctified by the coming of Christ. Although they found Catholicism short of a peculiar theology of history, de Lubac and the other Catholic theologians of the ressourcement embraced an Augustinian viewpoint in which Revelation is the historical action of God. At a theological level, the implication is that the natural sphere cannot run autonomously, irrespective of the supernatural end of redemption. The experience of salvation is not a total gift. They tested the notion that there is nothing that is “purely natural.” Because all is created, the divine order of things is always already present within ordinary creation. The ordinary is extraordinary, so history can only be understood as supernatural history. History can be recognized as filled with “mystery,” that is, with the creative and redemptive presence of God, rather than as a mere unfolding of material events. Not surprisingly, Daniélou emphasizes that everything known in secular history takes on its true meaning in sacred history.

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One main conclusion of these Catholic theologians is that history as we know it is largely the creation of a double form of dualism, a dualistic theology that creates a space for an autonomous natural order and a dualistic philosophy that exclusively assigns this space to a scientific investigation. In modern times, theologians have tried to legitimize their discipline by building it upon ahistorical rationalistic conclusions. In response, historians have sought to explain the past from a neutral, secular vantage point. Not surprisingly, the result is a narrow understanding of history as a scientific enterprise that estranged faith and history from the public conversation. An important implication of this theological work is that Catholic historians are asked to reincorporate theology into their work. In fact, the rediscovery of history in Catholicism occurs in the greater context of a rediscovery of the patristic eschatology that placed salvation within history. The shift from Scholasticism to patristic theology urges Catholic theologians to reengage history in light of the universal solidarity among human beings and of the significance of time and history in what concerns their salvation. Jones’s and Gregory’s books represent a non-coordinated attempt to reclaim the integration of history and theology at the level of methodology on the side of history. In effect, the “supernatural thesis” deconstructs the possibility of speculative theology as previously understood in modern times, just as it equally deconstructs the possibility of intellectual history or even of a clearly autonomous history tout court. Where the theologians of the ressourcement movement were primarily concerned with rediscovering the place of history in theology, the historians discussed here are concerned with rediscovering the place of theology in history: the former were engaged in the revaluation of temporality, and the latter are interested in the revaluation of the sacred. In both cases, the idea is a more unified, organic conception of the relationship between history and theology. Wherever the former sought to outline a historically conscious theology, Jones and Gregory attempt to frame a theologically conscious history. Their concern is a remedy for the divorce between the scholarship of a secular world and the ways of thinking about medieval and premodern periods. For those historians, the assumption is that one who deals with the Christian premodern could not practice history without considering transcendence, in the same way that theologians could not enter theological reflection without considering the essential inner, immanent historical structure of reality. Their books are the first timid attempts of a discipline that, for lack of a better phrase, one may call “theological history,” which is neither the history of theology nor historical theology (theology embedded in history) but a form of history infused with theological consciousness. A further step will prove necessary at some

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point, a move toward becoming indifferent to the history–theology divide: in the near future, one will draw no firm distinction between theological and historical materials when it comes to the Christian premodern. One will treat both as part of the overall reality of the sacramental ontology that enlightened the Christian premodern and will take for granted the existence of debates and development that proceed indifferently across whatever boundaries one may be tempted to draw between the two fields.

4. Saeculum Introduction In the previous three chapters I outlined how a proper historical understanding of the Christian past is neither a question of faith nor lack of it, but of method. This method should be able to deliver the Christian past on its own terms. The method must deliver a sacramental view, not a secular view, because it is the former that better approximates the view of the inhabitants of the Christian past. To reach that understanding, I suggested an ontological turn that has already been incorporated in the work of two historians and is currently at work in other disciplines outside history. I also proposed the framework of a mutual assistance between history and theology on the basis that both disciplines are necessary, but neither sufficient, in addressing the Christian past. The same call of mutual integration was raised almost a century ago, as I will better explain in the final chapter. Across the next four chapters I move my study from theoretical discussion to an example of the sort of distorted accounts that the existing methodology produces, which is to say the work of R. A. Markus on Augustine’s saeculum. There likely exists no better example of the secularization of a supernaturally infused Christian past than the work of Robert A. Markus on Augustine and more specifically, Markus’s interpretation of the saeculum. Markus’s Saeculum represents the conviction that the saeculum is a transitory state before the Kingdom. It also represents a great example of the misleading effects of an extrinsic view of the secular on the interpretation of the Christian past. Markus interpreted Augustine’s political thought as totally oriented toward the world, ad seculum, because he (Markus) read Augustine’s theological thought through an extrinsic prism. I will show that Markus did not find the secular in late antiquity; he constructed the secular by reading the past through a specific extrinsic lens. It is on the premise that supernatural is added to an autonomous secular, in fact, that Markus “discovered” the equivalence between the end of prophecy and the beginning of the secular. These extrinsic lenses are particularly evident in his reading of Augustine’s relationship between the order of nature and that of human will. According to Markus, Augustine separated the two orders

Beltramini, E., Desecularizing the Christian Past. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463721882_ch04

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of eternal law (lex aeterna) and temporal law (lex temporalis).1 Originally united, they became separated later in Augustine’s thought, to the point that the temporal law was replaced with “will.” To borrow from Alex Fogleman, this formula entails a more crystalized distinction between the natural order, which cannot transgress divine law, and another order, the order of wills (voluntas, whether human or angelic), which can in principle transgress divine law. Both of these orders remain ultimately governed by eternal law, but they have no bearing on one another. Importantly, questions of law, for Augustine, will belong to the order of wills and not the order of nature.2

For Markus, “[t]he importance of this separation is that it allows Augustine to restrict the scope of the ‘natural order’ while safeguarding the all-embracing sweep of the eternal law (God’s will).”3 This separation marks a decisive break from Augustine’s earlier position, as well as from later Thomistic views. 4 Markus argued: The earlier assimilation of all order, human, social, political, to a single cosmic order which manifested the eternal law is now decisively rejected. Such order as there is in human affairs, in the societies of men, their arrangements and their historical careers, is no longer part of a cosmic or natural order. But, like the natural order, this, too, falls under the sovereign providence of the one Lord.5

For Markus, both the temporal order and the natural order fall “under the sovereign providence of the one Lord.” But this one Lord, for Markus, reigns but does not govern.6 The divine sovereignty, in Markus’s interpretation of Augustine, does not lose any of its legitimacy or sacredness, but it is impotent with regard to the government of the civitas. The autonomy of the government from sovereignty is the ultimate celebration of the triumph of 1 Markus, Saeculum, 88. 2 Alex Fogleman, “Augustine and Natural Law: Negotiating the Saeculum with Markus, Milbank, and Mathewes,” Political Theology 20, n. 7 (2019), 595–612, 598. 3 Markus, Saeculum, 90. 4 Markus, Saeculum, 175–177. 5 Markus, Saeculum, 91. 6 Michel Foucault attributes the formula “le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas” (the king reigns but he does not govern) to Adolphe Thiers in 1830. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory and Population (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 85n.

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the immanence of power. The real power is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God but the politician; it is not the king, but the ministry; it is not the law, but the administration. In Markus’s interpretation, Augustine is a progenitor of a sort of constitutional monarchy. I will return to this in Chapter Seven, “Saeculum Retold.” For now, it is sufficient to say that the separation of an order of nature and an order of wills, in Markus’s words, or in my words, of an order of the divine and an order of nature, is crucial ground for Markus’s conception of the secular as a neutral, ambiguous space. Because humans organize and govern themselves in light of such fallible wills, and not an inviolable natural order, political claims to perfection become relativized.7 It is undisputable that Markus articulated his celebrated reading of Augustine’s saeculum from an extrinsic perspective. In this and the next three chapters, I delve into the characteristics of, and motivations and justifications for, Markus’s distinct perspective. I will argue that part of this perspective is a result of Markus’s projection of his personal convictions about the destiny of the Roman Catholic Church and part is indebted to Markus’s own neo-scholastic approach. Finally, I will show how the scholarly interpretation of Augustine’s saeculum is dependent upon extrinsic prejudices and how such an interpretation changes as soon as the extrinsic prejudices are healed. The aim is to prove that Markus produced a distorted account of Augustine’s view of the saeculum but not to offer a complete, novel interpretation of Augustine. I hope to demonstrate how the historical method works: by approaching religious history in secular terms, a scholar quite inevitably produces secular accounts. When Augustine is approached from an extrinsic perspective, the result is unsurprisingly a secular story. My approach makes manifest the effect of the correction, that is, the effect of a dismissal of such a perspective. But I also hope to undermine the independence of the government of the civitas from the divine sovereignty; to paraphrase Foucault, I wish to cut off the ministry’s head in Christian historiography, that is, to displace Markus’s theory of a neutral, autonomous secular in the analysis of the Christian past.8 This intellectual decapitation is necessary so that a desecularized saeculum in Christian historiography 7 Fogleman, “Augustine and Natural Law: Negotiating the Saeculum with Markus, Milbank, and Mathewes,” 598. 8 The original sentence reads: “we need to cut off the King’s head’ in political theory, that is, to displace the juridical-political theory of sovereignty in the analysis of power.” Source: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 88-89..

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can emerge from a strict Augustinian interpretation of the relationship between divine sovereignty and the government of the civitas.

Saeculum The “conversion” of Constantine in the fourth century raised the question of whether Christianity would be capable of fulfilling the function of the previous pagan gods, namely, to guarantee peace, prosperity, and integrity for the Roman Empire. Eusebius of Caesarea, a contemporary of Constantine, responded positively to that question, advocating a sort of fusion of Church and empire into one single reality. In his view, correspondence could be established between the coming of Christ on earth as savior of all nations and Augustus’s erection of the universal Roman Empire. Before Christ, nations were used to living in a polyarchy. The correspondence between the unity of the empire and the revelation of the unique God had become the hermeneutic key to interpreting history. The process of unification, both in earth and heaven, was initiated with Augustine and brought to completion with Constantine. According to Eusebius, the reunification of the political monarchy, after the defeat of Licinius, conformed to the divine monarchy on all nations. Eusebius applied Jesus’s command “to teach all nations” (Matthew 28:16) to the composite world of the Roman Empire; in doing so, he mythologized the Roman Empire—that is, he recognized the Roman Empire as a divine instrument of the Christianization of the world. The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 CE, however, seemed to dismiss this view, as Christians were blamed for the decline and the fall of Rome. Pagan authors raised one criticism against the Christians by declaring that the Christian god was unable to protect Rome, or uninterested in doing so; this made imperative a return to the ancient gods. Against this argument, Saint Augustine composed his magnum opus et arduum (a great and arduous work) as he called it: De civitate Dei contra paganos. The City of God Against the Pagans is a critical engagement with pagan political theology throughout a repudiation of both Roman civil religion and Greek philosophy. It is also an effort to reframe the theological outputs of his Christian predecessors. In his work, Augustine dealt with God’s action in the advancement of human history and defended the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan creeds. In his excellent, brief history of medieval Christianity, Kevin Madigan dedicates less than one page to the passage of Christianity from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. Mostly it is an explicit rephrasing of Markus’s famous argument of the eclipse of the secular in the Latin West between

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Augustine and Gregory the Great.9 Medigan’s book is one example, albeit an important one, of the long-lasting grip of Markus’s argument on the scholarship of Christianity. As a historian of late antiquity, Markus’s main interest was the trajectory of Latin Christian thought from Augustine to Gregory the Great. Against a previous scholarship thread more attuned to the way a pagan society eventually resisted the mounting Christianization, and with the intent to bypass burdensome questions regarding the semantic divide between what was Christian and what was pagan, Markus switched perspectives. He became concerned about another kind of semantic divide, namely the divide between what was “religious” and what was “secular.” He became absorbed with “the manner in which Late Roman Christians, lay and clerical, drew the line which distinguished what they would have seen as their ‘religion’ from the rest of their activity and experience, their ‘secular lives’ and its setting.”10 In a period spanning more than three decades, Markus built a corpus of influential publications—including his magnum opus, The End of Ancient Christianity—and established his argument, a theory of desecularization in which the passage from the era of Augustine to that of Gregory is conceptualized in terms of the “drainage” of the secular.11 In Markus’s work, “the secular” became the single most important criterion for defining the passage from one age to another. The deconstruction of the secular as a distinct order, an order distinct from the divine order of the Church, led an open society enriched by religious pluralism and benign civil power to the narrowness of Christendom. According to Markus, Augustine envisioned the traits of a society that is “intrinsically ‘secular’ in the sense that it is not committed to any particular ultimate loyalty.” In his opinion, Augustine’s “‘secularization’ of the realm of politics implies a pluralistic, religiously neutral civil community.”12 Central to this theory is his interpretation of Augustine’s articulation of the saeculum, this age, and the secular, an autonomous space from the Church. The saeculum is a Christian concept, related to a span of time, that is, the period between the fall of Adam or 9 Kevin Madigan, Medieval Christianity. A New History (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press), 29–30. Madigan qualifies Markus’s argument in terms of “the most stimulating and pervasive examination of [i.e., the question of when the Christian Middle Ages began]”; see 29. 10 Markus, The End, 9, 14–15. 11 Robert A. Markus, “The Sacred and the Secular: From Augustine to Gregory the Great,” Journal of Theological Studies 36, no. 1 (1985), 85–96, at 96; Markus, The End, 15, 16, 131, 228; Robert A. Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 71–91; Robert A. Markus, “The Secular in Late Antiquity,” in Éric Rebillard and Claire Sotinel (eds.), Les frontières du profane dans l’Antiquité tardive, Collection de l’Éçole Française de Rome 428 (Rome, 2010), 353–361. 12 Markus, Secular, 173.

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the Incarnation, or the Resurrection (different authors come with different interpretations) and the Final Judgement.13 In such a period, the ordinary life of people is “secular” in the sense that perfection cannot be achieved, total justice is beyond the reach, and institutions are born, grow, and die. In his seminal 1970 work, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine, Markus spatialized the saeculum and reframed it as a space that is neutral with regard to sacred–profane alternatives. This space, this “secular,” is a public space in which religious beliefs have no place. Markus argued that Augustine’s eschatologism is useful for explaining—namely framing and justifying—a spatialized secular sphere. The eclipse of the secular marked the beginning of the early Middle Ages. In Saeculum, Markus turned his attention to Augustine’s theology of the saeculum and his characteristic view of the relationship between the two cities, civitas Dei and the civitas terrena, or the society of the elects and the society of the impious. What makes Augustine’s theology of the two cities so distinctive, Markus argued, is the saeculum, the historical time before the eschaton, which marked the advent of the Kingdom and the end of the world. The saeculum is a time largely opaque to theological scrutiny. Because the individual members of the city of God and the worldly city would only be revealed at the Last Judgement, in the current age the two cities coexist but are indistinguishable. In such a time, a historical time before the Last Judgement, the citizens of the heavenly city and earthly city, those who would be saved and those who would be damned, inhabited the same time and space with no discerning means of determining who was who. Virtuous people and sinners, faithful and pagans, shared a public space that is neutral in the sense that recognized ordinary, imperfect life. To put it differently, in his De Civitate Dei, Saint Augustine develops the idea of two overlapping cities, a secular space hosting the pilgrimage of a corpus (or civitas) permixtum, a “mixed body.” The temporal, secular, and ultimately historical status of Augustine’s corpus permixta defines a secular order that remained outside the Church because of the inscrutability of redemption. According to Markus, the “secular” was, for Augustine, a third option between the sacred and the profane, a space in which human institutions were free from being unambiguously related to the sacred. Thus, what is really at stake in Marcus’s secular is the admissibility of a secular politics autonomous from religion, or a government of the civitas independent from divine sovereignty. Markus identified with the secular Augustine’s articulation of a political 13 There is some disagreement about Augustine’s understanding of the beginning of this time, whether it was inaugurated at Christ’s incarnation or with the Fall (Genesis 3).

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theory leading to a liberal, non-confessional, pluralist state that was “neutral in respect of ultimate beliefs and values.”14 This autonomous public space, however, came to an end by the time of Gregory the Great. The closure was the result of the increasing Christianization of the post-Roman West and the loss of the theological subtleties that were so typical of Augustinian thought. Increasingly, regnum and sacerdotium became so intertwined that there was scarcely any “outside” to the Church. In an almost totally Christian society, Gregory no longer needed to navigate the articulations of a pluralistic society and the existence of a civic culture. Thus, the secular slowly moved from being Augustine’s morally neutral space, populated by a variety of soteriological conditions and religious traditions, to being Gregory’s morally neutral space, inhabited by a variety of Christianities. Gregory’s writings encapsulated this “grand simplif ication” and exercised enormous influence in the Middle Ages. Markus notes that “[t]he grand simplification of Gregory’s model had more influence on medieval political thought than the complexities of Augustine’s theology of social living.”15 The declining influence of the Roman imperial state in the West created a void that allowed Gregory to elevate the Church to the most significant earthly institution. Augustine and Gregory represented different ecclesio-political architectures, in the sense that the former offered a theological view of a desacralized politics without any greater spiritual meaning or justification. The latter, in contrast, proposed a doctrine of ecclesiological authority grounded in a Christian society that was properly ordered and led in the awaiting time before the eschatological end. Most scholars still accept Markus’s argument of the ancient secular, but some harbor reservations, and some have totally rejected the argument. Among those who recognize the validity of Markus’s thesis but also its limits are scholars like Richard Lim, Hartmut Leppin, Éric Rebillard, and Maijastina Kahlos, who believe that a strict adoption of a modern (or supposedly Augustinian) secular to the history of late antiquity may veil more than it unveils.16 Lim has pointed out that “christianization 14 Markus, Saeculum, 151. 15 Robert A. Markus, “The Latin Fathers,” in James H. Burns (ed.), Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 122. 16 Maijastina Kahlos, Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); Maijastina Kahlos, Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity, 350–450 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 177–178; Richard Lim, “Christianization, Secularization, and the Transformation of Public Life,” in Philip Rousseau and Jutta Raithel (eds.), A Companion to Late Antiquity (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 497–511; Richard Lim, “Inventing Secular Space in the Late Antique City: Reading the Circus Maximus,” in Ralf Behrwald and Christian

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and secularization” should be seen “as historically meaningful discursive strategies that ancient persons employed in order to help shape the nature of the christianizing Roman society.”17 In Lim’s opinion, words like “pagan,” “Christian,” and “secular” were “negotiated categories,” and decisions as to their application were “situational.”18 Rebillard has criticized the adoption of theological categories.19 Other scholars have expressed the need to revisit the closure of the Augustinian secularism in the early Middle Ages so as to open interpretive possibilities for that period.20 Among the scholars who have rejected Markus’s argument is John Milbank. His criticisms (and Markus’s responses) will be investigated in the chapter on Augustinianisms.

Definitions Before proceeding further, it may be useful to introduce a terminology that helps the reader understand Markus’s arguments. These definitions approximate what Markus had in mind when he distinguished “the secular” as a central late antiquity epistemic category, the “saeculum” as a specific historical time, “desecularization” as the analytical conceptualization of late antiquity-to-medieval world-historical processes, and “desecularism” as a worldview.21 At first approximation, “the secular” is a central category to construct, in the terms proposed principally by Markus, a realm or reality differentiated from “the religious,” or better, “the religious concerns.” Here one may recapitulate all the historical and political debates over the “desacralization of politics and history” of this late antique reality and the roots of modern “Augustinian liberalism.” Phenomenologically, one can explore the different types of “secularities” as they are codified, institutionalized, Witschel (eds.), Rom in der Spätantike: historische Erinnerung im städtischen Raum (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), 66–67; 77–78; Éric Rebillard, Christians and their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 62, 95–96, 107 n. 8; Hartmut Leppin, “Christianisierungen im Römischen Reich: Überlegungen zum Begriff und zur Phasenbildung,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 16, no. 2 (2012), 247–278. 17 Lim, “Christianization, Secularization, and the Transformation of Public Life,” 510. 18 Lim, “Inventing Secular Space in the Late Antique City: Reading the Circus Maximus,” 78. 19 Rebillard, Christians and their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE, 61–62, 95–97. 20 Robin Whelan, “After Augustine, after Markus: The Problem of the Secular at the End of Antiquity,” Early Medieval Europe 29, no. 1 (2021), 12–35, 12. See also: William E. Klingshirn, “Theology and History in the Thought of Robert Markus,” Studia Patristica 53, no. 1 (2013), 73–83. 21 This section is both an adaption and re-elaboration of Casanova, “Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms.”

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and experienced in various historical contexts and the parallel and correlated transformations of late antiquity to medieval modern “religiosities,” “spiritualities,” and understandings of the “sacred.” The “saeculum” is the time in which the secular is allocated. An intermediate and temporary period, the “saeculum” involves human history between the fall of Adam and the end of time. That period precedes the advent of God’s Kingdom and the end of the world. “Desecularization” instead refers to both the historical process and the grand theory that explains the process. Thus, “desecularization” deals with the historical patterns of transformation and indifferentiation of the secular (state, politics, king) with the sacred (ecclesiastical institutions, religion, pope) from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. Among historians, a grand theory of desecularization has developed and it conceptualizes this transformation as part and parcel of a general and progressive involution from the late antique “secular” to the medieval “sacred.” The theses of the disappearance of the secular and the elevation of the Church to the most signif icant earthly institution have become central components of the theory of desecularization. Both the disappearance and the elevation theses have undergone numerous critiques and revisions in the last decades; however, the core of the theory—the understanding of desecularization as a single process of amalgamation of the various institutional spheres or sub-systems of late antique societies, understood as the paradigmatic and defining characteristic of processes of medievalization—remains predominant particularly among historians of late antiquity. Finally, “desecularism” refers more specifically to the kind of worldview (or “Weltanschauungen”) which may be either consciously held and explicitly elaborated or unreflexively held and phenomenologically assumed. In the comments to follow, desecularization, the historical process and the related grand theory, is addressed incidentally, reserving considerably more space for a deep reflection on Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s secular worldview.

Secular and Desecularization In his The End of Ancient Christianity, Markus’s interest was grounded in “the manner in which Late Roman Christians, lay and clerical, drew the line which distinguished what they would have seen as their ‘religion’ from the rest of their activity and experience, their ‘secular lives’ and its

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setting.”22 Rather than arbitrarily deciding what is religious or secular, Markus aimed to map the shifting boundaries of these divisions as delimited by authors ranging from Saint Augustine to Gregory the Great. According to Markus, there had been a change of Christian attitude toward what is called “classical culture.” The range of that change was indeed ample. It could take the form of the respect that a new religion deserved in the face of an old imperial culture, or rather that of the cultural heritage taken for granted. To cover such an extensive topic, Markus structured his book in three parts. First, Markus sketched the uncertainties that the Constantinian revolution brought to the Christian community and its identity. He referred to the large-scale Christianization of Roman society at the end of the fourth century. Second, he explored some of the pressures that led to the eradication of the secular dimension from Christian consciousness. Finally, Markus focused on examining the final result, the absorption of the “secular” into the “sacred,” with the culmination of the wide dissemination of ascetic rules in Christian society, marking this as the end of the ancient Christianity mentioned in the original title. Markus aims to examine a “change in the nature of Christianity itself.”23 The rapid Christianization of the Roman Empire (after CE 312) paradoxically forced Christianity into an identity crisis. Christian identity, or “What is it to be a Christian?” (quid sit christianum esse?) became a central question for Christians. In the period between CE 380 and 430, in fact, Christian identity changed not only in relation to the pagan religions and the secular cultures of the Roman Empire, but also to the different tendencies within Christianity (gnosticism, Pelagianism, and ascetism). The question that arises in the post-Constantinian Church—as Markus presented in the first part of his book—is that of fidelity to a memory, or how to be a Christian when there is no longer any persecution. The answer to this crucial inquiry will be brought at two levels, the first being the writing—for the use of the elites—of an ecclesiastical history (that of Eusebius) that reaffirmed the continuity of the Christian as persecuted believer. The second—this one for the masses—was the establishment of the cult of martyrs, thus leading to a tangible Christianization of the ancient calendar and geography, with its annual celebrations and pilgrimages. Markus established an explicit link between his argument of the ancient secular and his study on Gregory. In the Preface to his landmark The End of Ancient Christianity (1990), Markus explains that his original intention in 22 Markus, The End, 14–15. 23 Markus, The End, 16.

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writing the book was to study Gregory the Great.24 However, soon the scope changed, and the book became an investigation on the end of classic forms of Christianity and the beginning of medieval forms of Christianity in Western Europe. As Pope Gregory I is generally situated on the threshold of medieval Christianity, an investigation of the nature of changes that transformed the Christian world of Augustine, still rooted in classic Christianity, into the Christian world of Gregory is crucial; an investigation of this transition, in fact, allows a more precise valuation of the novelty and quality of Gregory’s pontificate. Markus devotes considerable effort and space to the meaning of time in these periods of transition, and he studies the absorption of the “secular” into the “sacred” (Markus’s terminology). Markus then makes an interesting point by arguing that “the intellectual and spiritual horizons of the Christian world” changed “between around C.E. 400 and 600,” to the point that new questions—Gregory’s questions— replaced the old questions, that is, Augustine’s questions. Markus puts it this way: What was it about Gregory’s world that so changed the framework of thought, the assumptions about the world, God and man, the shape of discourse, that his questions came to differ so profoundly from those of Augustine and his contemporaries, and that of traditions he inherited from them now furnished material for answers to questions so different?25

He summarizes his answer with one word: desecularization, a term he defines as a collapse of the secular as well as the Christianization of society and culture. The ascetical emerges as a final result of this dual movement. Markus also sketches the theoretical assumption behind his historical project. “Sociologists of religion,” he notes, “have familiarized us with the process of ‘secularization:’ a process wherein areas of life, thought, activity and institutions are withdrawn from religious or ecclesiastical domination or influence.” Then he adds: “I shall try to describe is the reverse.”26 Markus published his book in 1997. Ten years later, Harvard University Press published A Secular Age, the opus magnum of philosopher Charles Taylor based on Taylor’s earlier Gifford Lectures (Edinburgh 1998–1999). Berkeley sociologist of religion Robert Bellah has referred to A Secular Age as “one of the most important books to be written in my lifetime.” Why it is so 24 Markus, The End, xi. 25 Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, xi. 26 Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity,16.

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important? Because most historians would characterize the transformations that have led toward modern Western culture as a process that is mostly the product of a rational or social evolution. Taylor instead believes that these transformations are the result of a deviation within Christianity to which modern culture remains a tributary. Of course, A Secular Age is a work of enormous breadth and intimidating erudition: any attempt to summarize its findings inevitably falls short. However, as several scholars have pointed out, Taylor’s main point is the construction of an alternative narrative to the dominant “subtraction theory” of secularization, which defines it as a process whereby religion simply falls away, to be replaced by science and rationality. Secularization, Taylor claims, is not the mere removal of all things religious from the state, society, or individual consciousness. The process of secularization, Taylor suggests, also includes addition and transformation. More precisely, Taylor argues that the secular is an unintended evolution of the religious; the secular grows up within Christianity. Back to Markus: the theoretical assumption behind his The End of Ancient Christianity is a “subtraction theory” of desecularization, in which the secular is removed and the religious takes its place to play the role the secular had played. Everything remains the same apart from the presence of the secular. The subtraction theory is, however, also behind his Gregory the Great and His World. This time the “subtraction” refers to the eclipse of the ancient secular culture. For Augustine, Markus explains, “secular culture […] had been a part of the educated person’s normal intellectual equipment.”27 Not so for Gregory. Gregory distances himself from such secular culture and becomes, in Markus’s reconstruction, the quintessential learned Christian when the golden age of classic philosophical and theological advancement is over. Markus describes the Christianization of the Latin world in these terms: “The complexity of Augustine’s world has collapsed into simplicity […] Christianity had come to give definitive shape to a ‘totalizing discourse.’ The boundaries of Gregory’s intellectual and imaginative worlds were thus the horizons of the scriptures.”28 It seems that not only Markus’s interpretation of the secular in Saeculum but also his entire historical production were applications of the subtraction theory. I will return to this. The explicit reference to the modern theory of secularization has made some scholars suspicious, at least those who have seen in Markus’s argument the projection of a modern framework into the reality of late antiquity. In brief, Markus’s ancient secular—and this is what is suspect—is a product 27 Markus, Gregory, 39. 28 Markus, Gregory, 41.

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of his secular view. In his review of Christianity and the Secular, philosopher and scholar of Augustine James Wetze makes a few interesting points: Students of the secularization thesis—roughly the thesis that modernity spells the end for religion—are well familiar with a religiously neutral notion of the secular and the irony of a modern Christianity that has been, in its accommodations to modernity, as much the agent of secularization as its victim. If Markus has some historical basis for his mildly paradoxical talk of a sacred secularity, then those of us who study religion after the demise of the secularization thesis can afford to be less taken with the idea that fundamentalism is the religious persona of our time.29

There is too much to disentangle here, but one point is the secularization thesis. Another point refers to the question about whether Markus “has some historical basis” for his desecularization thesis. A third point refers to the interesting remark on “sacred secularity,” an oxymoron. Finally, there is the idea of fundamentalism. The quote is a labyrinth of paths, but the thread is the enduring grip of Markus’s argument on the scholarship of Christianity, despite the absence of strong historical evidence. Markus was an excellent historian, one of the best of his generation. He patiently built his thesis, writing a number of books, from the already mentioned Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine to Gregory and His Times. Markus’s thesis is composed of an ideology, the reality (hard facts), or historical basis, and an interpretation. The ideology is embedded in his uncompromised repudiation of Christendom, repudiation which in turn becomes the impetus behind Markus’s search for a non-integrationist model for the Church of his times. The reality is composed of some passages of Augustine. Finally, there is Markus’s famous interpretation of Augustine’s passage. Scholars must decide which one among ideology, reality, and interpretation takes priority. It is a testament to the strength of the ideology, however, that scholars have digested Markus’s interpretation while deeming unconvincing the hard facts proposed to sustain it. In summary, The End of Ancient Christianity traces the progress in the Latin West of what Markus calls “the eclipse of the ‘secular’ dimension.”30 One of the real merits of Markus’s study is that he shed new light on the vexed question of the “secular” culture, a question he already addressed 29 James Wetze, “Review of Christianity and the Secular,” by Robert A. Markus, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 76, no. 2 (2007), 395–397. 30 Markus, The End, 17.

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in previous works. In his celebrated Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine, Markus explored Augustine’s invention of “the secular” as a theological concept. To most early fifth-century Christians, saecularis simply meant “worldly.” But Markus argued that Augustine used the old word (saeculum) to make a revolutionary claim. When Augustine was writing in The City of God (CE 412 and 413) about the “secular” government, the increasingly intrusive legislation on religious conformity had driven him to believe that some limit should be imposed on the expansion of theocracy. In the present stage of history (the saeculum), Augustine argued, all human institutions are provisional because none can be perfectly aligned to God’s will. This is true for both the Empire and the earthly Church herself, and thus genuine theocracy is simply unfeasible. Consequently, the theocratic tendency should not be embraced uncritically, and certain aspects of society may appropriately be protected from religious conformity by marking them as inherently “this-worldly,” neither sacred nor profane. Markus saw Augustine as proposing, although unsuccessfully, an unavoidable constraint to the growing and invasive propensity of the Empire as well as the Church toward confessional conformity. In later studies Markus would discuss how Christian emperors and their barbarian successors conveniently forgot, with the full support of Christian bishops, this untenable idea that their authority was provisional. Markus argued that at the core of the great Latin Church stood a tradition of “secularity” (the codified “secular”). This tradition has innervated the pre-Constantine Church and found in Augustine its champion. Then, with the rise of Christendom, this tradition had declined and finally disappeared into the spiritual depths of the Church (ready eventually to reemerge if circumstances allowed). This disappearance, which is not to be confused with a termination, marked the beginning of the Middle Ages. Gregory the Great stands on the conclusive end of the arc when the tides of the religious had grown irresistibly to the point that, in essence, all was religious. No room had been left in society for the nonreligious: the religious had come to dominate every single aspect of private and public life. This long and not necessarily inevitable process of transformation is the “desecularization.” It describes how a heterogeneous society in which Christianity negotiated its place and values with other subjects in a pluralistic (so to speak) cultural and intellectual climate became a homogenous, Christian, conformed society. Thus, the secular has a place in the history of Christianity and within a Christian understanding of society. The discovery of the origins and development of this “secular Christianity” is not only a legitimate academic scope but also a meritorious task for a devout Christian scholar like Markus

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who is interested in investigating and eventually reframing the relationship between the Church and “the world” in his own time.

Political Augustinianism The City of God is the tale of two cities—the temporal (or earthly) city and the heavenly. The book soon became the key source for Christian reflection on the relationship between the two powers, priestly and regal, spiritual and temporal. Against the theory of the Caesaropapism of the Byzantine emperors, who regarded themselves as priest-emperors, Augustine became the authority for a different theory of the two powers, as expressed by Pope Gelasius in his letter to the Emperor Anastasius. The Gelasian theory distinguished the two powers so that the spiritual power maintains authority in spiritual matters and the imperial power rules over the affairs of the earthly city. The distinction of the two powers left unresolved the question that would become the object of endless debates throughout the entire Middle Ages. The participants in the debates—popes and kings, representatives of the spiritual power as well of the temporal power—relied on Augustine as the ultimate authority on the matter. Gregory the Great appealed to Augustine in the defense of the Roman claim to Petrine authority against the Byzantine emperor and his Patriarch during the sixth-century dispute over the ecumenical title. Most famously, Pope Gregory VII invoked Augustine during his struggle with Holy Roman emperor Henry IV over the right of investiture. In modern times, and more precisely in the period between the two world wars, Augustine’s tale of the two cities was reinterrogated. Once again, The City of God became the object of a hermeneutical exercise and the primary source of Christian faith when it comes to the relationship between Christians and politics. The question was no longer about the relationship between pope and king but between Church and State. How was it possible for Christians to maintain a foot in both worlds, the world of faith and the world of the polis, without betraying one? The distinguished French historian Henri-Xavier Arquillière (1883–1956) identified in a distorted interpretation of Augustine’s The City of God the foundational roots of the modern state. According to Arquillière, who was also a priest and a neo-scholastic theologian, a profound misinterpretation of Augustine’s political thought during the Middle Ages led the Church to reject the theory of the two powers. He believed that across a period that spanned centuries, a sequence of popes, including Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, Gregory

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VII, and Giles of Rome, shifted the balance of power toward the Church. The political power (the king and the state) was not only subordinated to the spiritual power (the pope and the Church); it was absorbed into the spiritual power. Arquillière defined this movement of absorption as “political Augustinianism,” that is, the “tendency to absorb the natural right of State in supernatural justice and ecclesiastical law.”31 The political Augustinianism—this is Arquillière’s thesis—is a degeneration of Augustine’s recognition of the authority of the political power in its own right, not through the mediation of the Church. By labeling the medieval theocratic theories based on Augustine’s political thought “a distortion,” Arquillière tried to weaken Augustine’s authority over those theories and therefore their influence on the Church of his time. Arquillière’s scheme was to clear the Church of all theocratic pretensions to protect her spiritual authority. By severing the link between the political order and the spiritual order, he believed he could help the Church preserve her spiritual authority in the very moment that her political power was vanishing. In the same period in which Arquillière elaborated and debated his thesis, Pope Pius XI and Pope XII were coming to terms with the loss of the pontifical state as well as the existence of non-confessional states where religious pluralism was accepted and protected. Arquillière’s thesis is that in the centuries after Augustine, Augustine’s tendency to blur the distinction between the natural and the divine orders allowed popes like Gelasius, Gregory the Great, and others to develop a sort of “medieval conception of a sacred imperium,” a primacy of the ecclesiastic power over the civil power.32 Political Augustinianism, in Arquillière’s view, came to express the “subordination and subsequent absorption of the civil order by the supernatural order of the Church.”33 The heart of the matter is whether political Augustinianism subverted the temporal order. Arquillière’s work on political Augustinianism survived in several ways and exercised a critical influence on the works of Henri-Irénée Marrou and Robert Markus, the outstanding historians of late antiquity. Marrou resisted Arquillière’s inclination to see Augustine or his followers as expressing a tendency to absorb the natural order into the divine and proposed a different interpretation of Augustine’s two cities, an interpretation in which the citizens of 31 Henri-Xavier Arquillière, L’Augustinisme politique: Essai sur la formation des théories politiques du Moyen-Age (Paris: Vrin, 1934), 54. 32 The quote is from Michael J. S. Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 39. 33 Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought, 35.

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the two cities, the heavenly and the earthly, are inextricably intermixed. The crux of the matter is the hermeneutics of the relationship between the two cities. Étienne Gilson, a French Christian philosopher and historian of medieval thought, characterized the two cities as living side by side. They never merge.34 The same can be said of Arquillière, who reads Gilson and leverages Gilson’s distinction between the temporal and sacred orders. Marrou, instead, interprets the two cities as intertwined. The reading of the two cities as mixed brought Marrou to his interpretation of a third option, tertium quid, called the saeculum. The reality of the saeculum is where the two cities overlap.35 In Marrou’s interpretation of Augustine, the heavenly city, the expression of spiritual perfection and union with God, is the city of the saints. That city is inextricably intertwined and mingled with the earthly city, where good and evil continue to coexist in a single body until the last judgement. It must be added, however, that the heavenly city is not out there, in the sky (so to speak), but here below, although hidden. There is, to borrow a phrase from Marrou, a “mixed nature” both at individual and social levels. Those who are saints, the citizens of the heavenly city, live side by side with the citizens of the earthly city, yet the invisible borders are constantly changing.36 This option of the saeculum became the point of departure for Markus. On one side, Markus picked up from Arquillière the idea of the subversion of the temporal order and the subsequent absorption of the temporal by the supernatural order of the Church (i.e., “sacred Christendom” in the definition of Maritain).37 He also received from Arquillière the political characterization of Augustine’s The City of God. From Marrou he borrowed the tertium quid, which he then developed further. In Markus, the reality of the saeculum is not simply the overlapping of the two cities: it is a neutral, autonomous space (and time). In fact, Markus distanced himself from Marrou on one fundamental aspect: Marrou believed that in Augustine, human history is part of the grand economy of salvation: “The duration of our history is the time necessary for the recruitment of the population of saints and the building of the City of God.”38 In Marrou, the inextricable and provisory 34 Étienne Gilson, St. Augustine’s City of God: Books I–VIII, trans. by Demetrius B. Zema, SJ, and Gerald G. Walsh, SJ (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1950), 177. 35 Henri-Irénée Marrou, “Civitas Dei, civitas terrena: num tertium qui,” Studia Patristica: Papers presented to the Second International Conference in Patristic Studies held in Christ Church, Oxford, vol. 2, ed. by Kurt Aland and Franck Leslie Cross (Berlin: 1957), 348. 36 Marrou, “Civitas Dei, civitas terrena: num tertium qui,” 348. 37 Quoted in Markus, Secular, 78. 38 Henri-Irénée Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 40–41.

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corpus permixtum (he called it commixtio) is “the still unfinished story of the mystery,” that is, the mystery of history.39 Markus’s reception of Marrou’s concept of the saeculum is partial. If Marrou reframed the saeculum in a third way, Markus transformed that third way into a neutral third way. Markus looked to John Rawls to develop his concept of the saeculum as a neutral space.40 In the words of Bruno, “Markus understood this concept [of Marrou] of saeculum as essential, the necessary ‘eschatological gap’ between the proclamation of the Christian message and submission to it.”41 In this time between now and the eschaton, history is a human affair. Although Markus may or may not have shared the liberal school of Protestant theology of the twentieth century’s vision of a human community in pilgrimage, he retained the basic idea of liberalism and believed that Augustine’s The City of God provides a practicable framework for the civic, public life of the human community. Accordingly, in Markus’s saeculum the Church plays a marginal role. 42 Markus’s claim that the ancient secular is neither sacred nor profane, but a third, neutral space in which institutions and individuals operate in proto-liberal modes, consists in the neutralization of Marrou’s interpretation of the third space between the sacred and the profane as an overlapping space. According to Markus, the “secular” was, for Augustine, a third option between the sacred and the profane, a space in which human institutions were free from being unambiguously related to the sacred. His neutralization of Marrou’s interpretation of the third space between the sacred and the profane as an overlapping space is based on a specific operation: the secularization of Marrou’s theology of history. I will examine this theme of the neutralization of Marrou’s interpretation in Chapter Seven, “Saeculum Retold.” Second, Arquillière’s work on political Augustinianism provoked a reaction within Catholic intellectual circles. De Lubac, in alignment with Congar (1904–1995), framed The City of God as a moral, spiritual piece of work. De Lubac proposed a third, distinct reading of the relationship between the two cities by asserting how Augustine showed that there are two cities, each built upon one love, the love of self and the love of God. Therefore, these two cities remain mixed within each human being until the end of the world. De 39 Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire, 202. 40 Markus, Secular, 67. 41 Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought, 52. 42 For criticisms on Markus’s minimization of Church’s role in the saeculum, see: Michael Hollerich, “Milbank, Augustine, and the Secular,” Augustinian Studies 30, no. 2 (1999), 12.

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Lubac was also critical of Marrow’s third way, casting it as an unnecessary addendum that risked disfiguring Augustine’s mystical view of the city of God. In his Theologies d’occasion, de Lubac noted that Augustine’s The City of God is a reflection on “the holy city where God reigns,” not on a “state founded on evangelic justice.”43 In other words, The City of God, in de Lubac’s opinion, is seen from the perspective of the Kingdom, the auctoritas, and the supernatural, not from that of history, potestas, and nature. The holy city, de Lubac continued, is “essentially hidden here below, even though some of its radiance can be detected, and its invisible borders are constantly changing.”44 The holy city, the Kingdom, is already here below, in essence (i.e., the fundamental and immutable nature of the holy city), but it has yet to fully manifest its existence. Joseph Ratzinger stated something similar but more clearly: “His Civitas Dei is […] a sacramental-eschatological entity, that lives in this world as a sign of the future world.”45 Markus’s argument of the secular, temporal, historical status of the civitas permixta does not confine its influence to scholarship on late antiquity. It has become the canonical starting point for debates in the fields of philosophy of politics, political theory, and political theology regarding “Augustinian liberalism.” Janet Coleman, for example, recovers Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s saeculum as a secular time and a neutral space between the two cities, the heavenly city and the earthly city, opened to desacralized political institutions. 46 Eric Gregory has recently framed Markus’s Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine “the scholarly lodestar for Augustinian liberalism.”47 In turn, Augustinian liberalism, in its growing number of ramifications as well as critics, is a cottage industry for religious scholars, historians, and political theorists. 48 A difference remains between the forms of Augustinian liberalism of these authors and 43 Henri de Lubac, Theological Fragments: Essays in Unsystematic Theology, trans. by Rebecca Howell Balinski (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 245. 44 Ibidem. 45 Joseph Ratzinger, L’Unita’ delle nazioni. Una visione dei Padri della Chiesa (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2009), 78. 46 Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 339. 47 Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008). 48 See, for example: Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought and Robert C. Crouse, Two Kingdoms and Two Cities: Mapping Theological Traditions of Church, Culture, and Civil Order (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017). A difference remains between the Augustinian civic liberalism of these authors and the original Augustinian ecclesiological liberalism of Markus.

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the original Augustinian ecclesiological liberalism of Markus: the latter will be discussed in the next chapter. On the opposite side, Peter Burnell rejects the idea of a civil government divorced from religion. “It is difficult to see how they [civil government and religion] can be [divorced], if he [Augustine] sees civil life as having an ultimately religious purpose.”49

Final Remarks In an article on Augustine’s thought on civil life, historian of Christianity Marinus Pranger makes two interesting observations. The first refers to the indispensable connection between the Augustine of The Confessions and the Augustine of The City of God.50 The self “is forced to cry out for the gift of grace (‘give what you command and command what you will’) in order to sustain his voice,” and by implication, Pranger concludes, the same is true for the body politic, which “is no less dependent on the creator of time and history.”51 He means that a connection should be established between the spiritual life within and the realm of politics out there. In more precise terms, the grace that enlightens human interiority does not confine its effect to interiority. I will return to this point. The second observation is simultaneously intriguing and incomplete. Discussing Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s civitas permixta and its secular, temporal character, Pranger labels the latter “fragile fabric.” He does not elaborate but prefers to examine the remedy that the medieval Church and political institutions developed as an alternative to Markus’s option.52 Why “fragile fabric?” Pranger states that “there is more to time and history that the state of saeculum would seem to suggest.” He also argues that time “contains more flux and more stability than the civitas permixta allows.”53 But he does not provide further detail. Pranger’s remark on the “fragile fabric” of the saeculum can be explained in a variety of ways, and certainly one is related to the contingent character of the saeculum. The saeculum takes place as a formal, not substantial, political 49 Peter Burnell, The Augustinian Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 136–172. 50 Marinus B. Pranger, “Politics and Finitude. The Temporal Status of Augustine’s Civitas Permixta,” in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds.), Political Theologies. Public Religion in a Post-secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 113–121, 113. The Augustinian remark (da quod iuben, iube quod vis) is repeated three times in the Book 10 of Conf: X, 29, 31, 37. 51 Pranger, “Politics and Finitude. The Temporal Status of Augustine’s Civitas Permixta,” 113. 52 Pranger, “Politics and Finitude. The Temporal Status of Augustine’s Civitas Permixta,” 115. 53 Ibidem.

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theology, namely as a transformation of God as transcendental, so that this time remains open to the political. Therefore, the saeculum is a theory in which the political conceptually depends upon the theological. Moreover, the saeculum is the result of a decision that precedes the political, and as such it is a theory of the non-rational origin of both the secular and political reason. The foundational act of the saecular is not against the sacred but within the sacred and therefore within theology. The saecular, in fact, implies a certain view of the sacred in which the supernatural is added to an autonomous, self-justified secular. This is no small thing. The rational foundational act of the saecular assumes that it is possible to operate a gesture of complete neutralization. In Markus’s words, “the realities of the saeculum must be spoken of in historical or political, not in theological terms.”54 The opposite is also true: without a certain extrinsic perspective, the sacred could not be divided in two separated parts, the secular and the supernatural, with the latter conveniently placed beyond the reign of history. In short, theology is at the same time the original point that makes the saeculum and the decision that provides the saeculum with a sense, an orientation. The theological foundational act implies a partial, incomplete neutralization; the gesture, in fact, discounts the existence of a dark spot, a shadow cone, an exclusion from the neutralization, namely the origin of the saeculum. This discourse on the origin of the saeculum reveals the theological origin of political reason, which is an origin based on a decision not founded on the self-justifying power of human rationality. In other words, neither the secular nor the political orders that inhabit it are autonomous from the religious. To put it another way, the saeculum is a form of metaphysics, an ontology: it does not exist if there does not exist a set of a priori conditions. In his Christianity and the Secular, Markus tries to make the saecular necessary. He insists that “in declaring the saeculum […] Augustine protected the richness of human culture from the hubris of those who wanted to relate every aspect of the world […] directly to the sacred.”55 But a secular that is a means for a scope that precedes it cannot be defined as necessary; it is contingent on that scope. To clarify, the secular is dependent upon the religious from which it is a derived. In his interpretation of Augustine, Markus attempts to makes the saeculum autonomous. He argues that “to assert the autonomy of the secular was to resist any hostile takeover of this middle ground between sacred and profane.”56 He is quick to forget the 54 Markus, Saeculum, 104. 55 Markus, Secular, 37. 56 Ibidem.

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theological origin of the saeculum, its scope and orientation, and therefore its contingency. The saecular is provisional and not self-sufficient. What Markus can do in his interpretation of Augustine is limited: he can make God transcendental, that is, make the saeculum independent from the providential-economic operations governing the world, and therefore the temporal and history. He can make the saeculum free from God. What he cannot do, however, is make the saeculum self-grounded. Another way to put it is this: when Markus allocates the potestas to the civitas, and not to God, he disrupts the correlation between potestas and auctoritas, that is, between the divine government of creation and the Kingdom of God. Moreover, in his attempt to make the world autonomous from the sacred, he leaves the potestas without auctoritas, government without legitimacy. No wonder Pranger frames the situation in terms of “fragile fabric.” I will return to this theme in Chapter Seven, “Saeculum Retold.” Three brief comments are necessary to complete a meaningful study of Markus’s argument. First, with his contribution Markus framed a view that became known as modern Augustinian liberalism. It is clear at this point that Markus’s argument is more than a historical interpretation of Augustine’s thought. For some, it is an example of anachronism, an application of a theory (namely the secularization theory), developed in modern times, to the phenomena of the past. For others, however, it is the retrieval of a resource of the past for the benefit of Christian political theology of the present. It seems that Markus’s argument assumes, or at least justifies, a two-way journey between past and present. Second, Markus retraced his central argument again and again in his work, at times expanding, at times refining or even redefining it, because his argument did not go unopposed. Milbank mounted a serious challenge to Markus’s argument in his famous Theology and Social Theory, and Markus responded in his Christianity and the Secular. Finally, Markus’s argument served well not only the historian Markus, but also the Catholic Markus, who sought to leverage Augustine’s saeculum to show the way to the Catholic Church in the aftermath of Vatican Council II and how to cohabit peacefully with a secular society no longer dealing with clerical and dogmatic temptations. Now I turn my attention to these last two themes.

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Ancient and Modern Christianity

Introduction In his Political Augustinianism, Bruno addressed at length Markus and the hermeneutical approach with which Markus adapted Augustine to the political problems of his time. More specifically, Bruno framed Markus’s argument as internal to the shift “from the Modernist influenced, decontextualized ‘scientific’ study of Augustine” to a study of Augustine in the context of “the history and culture of Late Antiquity.”1 Bruno’s interpretation of the ideology or system of ideas behind Markus’s scholarship is indisputable; in fact, Markus himself validated Bruno’s interpretation. Markus, however, was more than just an academic, and his ideology was not just related to the progress of his discipline. Markus was a fascinating man, as the sketch Peter Brown drew on his friend shows.2 Markus was a scholar but also a Catholic intellectual. He was a British academic born in Hungary. He was a Christian born as a Jew. If the search for Markus’s deep ideology should be pursued, the evolution of his discipline is only one of the places that need investigation. The other is the Church herself. Markus decided to become a priest. Then he changed his mind. But those years spent at the very core of the Church of Pius XII may have left some mark on his view of the pre-conciliar Church. At least, this is the hypothesis tested in this chapter. When Markus made the civitas (and, by extension, the state) autonomous from the Church and neutral with regard to religion, he was not protecting the state from the invasive presence of the Church but defending the Church from her own temptation for political power. Arquillière attempted to clear the Church of all theocratic pretensions to preserve her spiritual authority in the very moment in which her political power was vanishing. According to Bruno, Marrou believed that a proper Augustinian vision had to be recovered in order to escape the manipulation of such a vision, for centuries adopted as a framework of thought for the builders of Christendom.3 If the two main 1 Bruno, Political Augustinianism: Modern Interpretations of Augustine’s Political Thought, 128. 2 Peter Brown, “Introducing Robert Markus,” Augustinian Studies 32, no. 2 (2001), 181–187. 3 Bruno, Political Augustinianism, 44 and 52.

Beltramini, E., Desecularizing the Christian Past. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463721882_ch05

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sources of Markus’s thought, Arquillière and Marrou, dedicated most of their careers to helping the Church move beyond Christendom, it is reasonable to speculate that the same happened to Markus. Markus’s challenge was not to build modern liberalism but liberal Catholicism. Commenting on the intent of Markus’s scholarly project and the liberal character of his interpretation, Brown writes, “Saeculum was a book written against the future of Catholic Western Europe.”4 Markus’s problem was Christendom.

Christendom From the viewpoint of Christianity, late antiquity is marked by the passage of the Church from a primitive, persecuted minority within the boundaries of the Roman Empire to an institution at the service of the empire. This passage, often termed “Constantinianism,” identifies a period in which Christianity was no longer only recognized as faith in Christ Jesus but membership in the institutionalized Christian community. Constantinian Christianity, of course, refers to the Edict of Milan, which Constantine signed in CE 313 and thereby granted tolerance to Christianity. It also refers to the temporal and spiritual problems caused by the consequent integration of the imperial and ecclesial power for the Christian community. In general terms, what was at stake in the passage from early Christianity to Christendom is the destiny of the primeval Church, in which to be Christian meant primarily to have faith in Christ and eventually included but transcended institutional membership or doctrinal assent. In Christendom, instead, Christians became part of a sociological group and an institution with a precise, defining doctrine. The original community, made up of those who f irst and foremost had faith in God the Father as revealed through Christ, was replaced by Christendom, the social, institutional, and political bodies that determined Christian identity outside the experience of faith. Thus, no longer was a Christian witnessing an experience of faith; a Christian was rather identified as belonging to a particular sociological, institutional, ecclesial community. In the end, the fusion of Greek philosophy and Roman law generated the Christian order, an order that was religious as well as political, rooted in a vision of Christian theocracy, an order founded upon and upholding Christian beliefs, whose institutions were spread along with Christian doctrine. The Church not only acted as guardian and transmitter of these elements stemming from the Roman Empire but also forged and protected 4

Brown, “Introducing Robert Markus,” 184.

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an order that was assumed and accepted by the peoples of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Canadian theology professor Douglas John Hall dates the “inauguration of Christendom” to the fourth century, with Constantine playing the primary role to assign political authority to the Christian clergy.5 The Church gradually became a defining institution of the empire. A further passage, the elevation of the Church to the most significant institution of the West, signaled the advent of Christendom and the beginning of the Middle Ages. British Church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch describes Christendom as “the union between Christianity and secular power.”6 Gradually, Christianity (i.e., the Christian community) became Christendom, the Christian empire, and the Christian civilization.7 Over the course of centuries, Christendom gradually took form, and culture, faith, political life, and territory coincided. People centered on a single ideological worldview, and anyone who was a stranger to it, was assimilated, converted, or emarginated. Christianity ceased to only or simply be witnessing to faith in Jesus Christ and became a certain worldview, expressed in a series of confessions of faith, carrying with it a theology and a well-structured worldview. Equally important, this religiousness came to be associated with increasing political power, to the point that Christianity came to enjoy in the West a cultural and political hegemony that would bring the Latin Church to occupy a central, dominant, and sovereign role in the Western world from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. “Christ founded Christianity, but Constantine founded Christendom” is a popular expression among historians of Christianity, although the phrase belongs not to a scholar but a journalist and satirist. 8 His hyperbolic statement has been echoed innumerable times by theologians as well as 5 Douglas John Hall, The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002), 1–9. 6 Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Penguin Publishing Group, 2010), 572. 7 The Anglo-Saxon term cristendom appears to have been invented in the ninth century by a scribe somewhere in southern England, possibly at the court of King Alfred the Great of Wessex. The scribe was translating Paulus Orosius’s book History Against the Pagans (c. 416) and in need of a term to express the concept of the universal culture focused on Jesus Christ. The current sense of the word of “lands where Christianity is the dominant religion” emerged in Late Middle English (by c. 1400). See: MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 572. 8 The quote is: “Christendom began with the emperor Constantine. Christianity began with the Incarnation.” Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans– Lightning Source, 1980), 14.

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historians worried that Christendom was not, as some believed “the zenith of Europe’s historical destiny […] the source of European identity.”9 On the contrary, around the time of Vatican Council II, the opinion that Christendom was not only a liability for the progress of Europe but also for the spiritual health of the Church herself became mainstream. Theologian Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010) drafted several essays on the change of Christian self-understanding during the passage from the Church of Pentecost to Christendom, namely the Christian political and religious order. What Christianity lost in the transformation of the original minority community into a dominant religious institution was the possibility of being Christian as a personal attitude, as an attachment to the person of Christ, as a response to evangelization without belonging to Christendom or totally adhering to doctrinal dogmas of Christianity, insofar as the former represents institutional structures and the latter a special doctrinal set-up. Panikkar notes that “during the period of so-called Christian culture in medieval Europe, it was almost impossible to be Christian without belonging to Christendom.”10 Thus, Christendom is synonymous with Christian civilization. In Panikkar’s view, Christendom was the result of a profound misunderstanding affecting the Christian interpretation of the nature of the fundamental Christian fact, that is, the incarnation of Christ in time and space. In his celebrated The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, Panikkar argues that Saint Paul had two opposite fronts to fight against in order to defend the Christian position. On a [sic] one hand, the Jews, even when converted to Christianity, had a tendency to make Christianity into a reformed sect of Judaism. The Greeks, on the other hand, were inclined to absorb Christianity into a kind of gnosis.11

For Panikkar, Christianity was at risk of either replacing Israel or becoming another religion. “The reaction of Paul,” Panikkar continued, was to show Christ as “the ‘Pantocrator,’ the cosmic redeemer,” the cosmic Christ.12 The fact that Christ is cosmic means that everything participates in Christ (this concept will be addressed again in the next chapter). But in effect, 9 Markus, Secular, 78. 10 Raimon Panikkar, “The Dawn of Christianness,” Cross Current 50, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2000), 185–195, 185. 11 Panikkar published the book under the name Raymond. See: Raymond Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1964), 137–138. 12 Panikkar, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, 138.

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the Church did not embrace the cosmic Christ. The cosmic Christ was ultimately the road not taken. For Panikkar, Christianity avoided the risk of becoming a stream of Judaism: this was the output of the Council of Jerusalem. But it did not escape the risk of becoming another religion. Soon Christians forgot that Jesus came to bring the Kingdom and rather fell into the temptation to erect a religion and to worship their God. In the decades immediately before and after the Second Vatican Council, historians and theologians would articulate different versions of this story, and they arrived at different “roads not taken.” Yet, the framework remained substantially the same: Christendom was a deviation within the thought and the life of Christianity. The reasons for this deviation varied, and so did the remedies offered. In the course of the debate, “Christendom” ceased to be a term representing Western Christianity, or the Latin Church, during the long era of the Middle Ages, and it became a sociological image of a contemporary institution in disarray. Panikkar, a celebrated theologian of interreligious dialogue, believed that Christendom, and its more recent incarnation, the Christian society emerging from the Catholic Reformation, was an obstacle to a dialogue among religions. Liberation theologians criticized what they deemed was the artificial spiritualization of the Church, and the related apolitical theology, as a fiction of the powerful. The Church had no interest in a theological critique of society and politics, they claimed. Historians of theology dismissed the official theology of the Church because they believed that it was responsible for the intellectual “fortress mentality” that had disconnected Catholic theology from contemporary thought.13 Initially emerging within the boundaries of Catholic Action, fueled by the growing power and selfconfidence of the Catholic laity, a new generation of Catholics in politics rejected the inference of the ecclesiastical authority and established politics as a neutral space.14 The worker priest movement challenged the hierarchy and its bourgeois and reactionary sentiment against social classes and working class in particular. The worker priests held that full-time manual jobs were appropriate for missionary activity in working environments, in effect rejecting the Tridentine form of parish priesthood.15 Religious activists, including priests and members of religious orders, refused the 13 For the phrase “fortress mentality,” see: Henri de Lubac, Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes écrits (Namur: Culture et vérité, 1989), 34–35. 14 Gerd-Rainer Horn, Western European Liberation Theology: The First Wave (1924–1959) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 15 Anonymous, The Worker-Priests A Collective Documentation, trans. by John Petrie (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956).

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strict distinction between laypersons and clergy and created communities for the renewal of languages and ​​ structures, laboratories of liturgical and celebratory creation. In the turbulent years after the Council, expectations for a reform of the Church were embodied by movements that represented the Catholic contribution to an era of change. It was an era shaped by aspirations of colossal magnitude, namely the reform or eventually the revolution, of the Western social order. Within Western societies, the search for liberation was everywhere, although there was disagreement on the possible engine of such liberation. For liberals, post-liberals, light progressives, and moderates, the engine was “reason;” for hard socialists and pure communists, it was the proletariat. For Christians, however, real liberation was impossible in this time because the motor-subject of liberation, namely Christ, is in this world but does not belong to this world. No earthly illusions: the promised land is not of this time. However, this did not preclude the possibility of reform of the Church. The Church, identified with Christendom, seemed to her critics old, clerical, dispirited, paternalistic, and dogmatic; more significantly, she was closed within herself, unable to engage in dialogue with the world. Stanley Hauerwas, in a series of lectures significantly titled After Christendom?, asserted that Christendom was a “Constantinian set of presumptions that the church should determine a world in which it is safe.”16 Theologians, historians, social activists, lay people, priests, and members of the religious orders embraced aggiornamento, the Italian word for “up to date” that Pope John XXIII used at the inauguration of the Second Vatican Council.17 They hoped for a renewal of the Church that would end her intellectual, liturgical, pastoral, and spiritual ossification. They worked hard to develop a post-Constantinian set of presumptions that would allow the Church to safely enter into dialogue with a world she no longer controlled.

16 Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation are Bad Ideas (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1991). 17 Originally, as John XXIII announced in his 1959 speech, the word only referred to an update of the 1917 Code of Canon law. The term, however, was eventually broadened to refer to the larger process of Church reform sought at Vatican II. In June 1961, in an address to a religious group, John XXIII said: “The ecumenical council will reach out and embrace under the widespread wings of the Catholic Church the entire heredity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Its principal task will be concerned with the condition and modernization (in Italian: aggiornamento) of the Church after 20 centuries of life.” Pope John XXIII, “Allocuzione del Santo Padre Giovanni XXIII con la quale Annuncia il Sinodo Romano, il Concilio Ecumenico e l’Aggiornamento del Codice di Diritto Canonico,” Sala capitolare del Monastero di San Paolo Domenica, January 25, 1959; Anonymous, “Pope Speaks of Unity and the Council,” The Criterion, Archdiocesis of Indianapolis, July 7, 1961.

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For most of these Christians involved in the reform of their Church, it was clear at the time that Christianity was primarily a historical reality.

Christendom and Modern Church The ancient secular is, in Markus’s opinion, the road not taken. The Christianization of late antique society closed down the possibility of an early medieval secular and propelled the contemporaneous raise of Christendom. The emergence of Christendom as a civilization, as a totalizing religious reality “closed in itself,” as Markus described in his last book, 45 years after the end of the Second Vatican Council, was deleterious for the Church. Christendom is guilty, for different reasons and with different levels of responsibility, of the “estrangement from the Eastern churches,” the isolation from the fruitful tensions of the early Church and the consolidation of a hierarchical institution.18 Challenged in one way or another by massive historical events such as the Reformation, the Wars of Religions, and the Enlightenment, Christendom has survived and with it the gap between the Church and the world.19 There is a need, and this is Markus’s heartfelt plea, to revisit the ancient secular so as to reopen not only interpretive possibilities for the Church of the past, but more importantly, of the future. Markus’s scholarship, to paraphrase Brown, was written against the future of Catholic Western Europe.20 Like many other Catholic intellectuals of his generation, Brown perceived the Second Vatican Council in terms of the end of Christendom. A convert to Catholicism, it is not surprising that Markus was fascinated by the idea of identity transformation. “What […] will make a convert ‘a Christian’?” he asked in his most famous book, The End of Ancient Christianity.21 Born in Budapest in 1924, Markus made a point, after moving with his parents to England in 1938, to conform to his new home country. In retrospect, I think my main aim, apart from enjoying myself, was to become thoroughly English, to conform in manner, appearance, language etc. and […] was always proud of being British. I did not wish to forget 18 Markus, Secular, 89–90. 19 Markus, Secular, 90. 20 The original reads: “Saeculum was a book written against the future of Catholic Western Europe.” See: Brown, “Introducing Robert Markus,” 184. 21 Markus, The End, 6.

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my past; but I have always been very skeptical of much current “multiculturalism”, and much of my work on Augustine has been coloured by sense of need for some common culture to give a society at least minimal coherence (I tried in later pieces to remedy what seemed to some critics a lack of this in my book Saeculum). I still think immigrants have some obligation of conforming to the values and to the culture of host-societies.22

These biographical details are mentioned merely to state that the option to conform to the country of new residence is, for an immigrant, one among many options. Another is to pursue integration of two cultures, the original and the earned. Regarding his own identity, however, Markus decided to replace one culture with another, to the point that he was already over 40 years of age when he relearned Hungarian. Markus’s decision to conform, that is, to produce an identity transformation through the replacement of one culture with another, reveals something about Markus; it is a window into his mindset. One can speculate how Markus’s personal decision to replace rather than integrate the native culture with the learned culture led to his subtraction narrative of desecularization. Markus connected his conversion with the “secular,” the theme that made him famous. In a majestic example of his characteristic manner of presenting the biographical background of his study while downplaying his own decisive contributions, he stated: My “conversion-experience” seems to have been central to almost all my subsequent interests: what is involved in conversion to Christianity? What relationship to pre-conversion past? Questions of “religion” and “secular culture” always remained at core of my work. From my first book, Saeculum, to the end of my career this has been an obsession, but I never quite got it right, and still cannot formulate my views on the “secular” in a satisfactory form.23 22 Quoted in Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, “Saeculorum peregrinus. In memoriam Robert A. Markus (1924–2010),” May 20, 2011. At https://medievalstudies.ceu. edu/article/2011-05-20/saeculorum-peregrinus-memoriam-robert-markus-1924-2010 (accessed on December 1, 2020). A discussion of Markus’s own experience as a refugee in Britain in the war years can be found in Kate Cooper, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Markus, Robert Austin (1924–2010).” At https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-103000 (accessed March 13, 2019). 23 Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, “Saeculorum peregrinus. In memoriam Robert A. Markus (1924–2010).”

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The last sentence is to be taken with caution, said as it was by a historian who was trained as a philosopher and who built his reputation on the unmatchable clarity of his literary style and the sophistication of his arguments. The rest of the quote, however, must be true. The relationship between the secular and the religious—better, the replacement of the secular with the religious—is, in a nutshell, Markus’s legacy to scholarship on late antiquity. For Markus, the respect for the secular informed the vitality of late antiquity and the eclipse of the autonomy of the secular explained the end of late antiquity and the beginning of the early Middle Ages. The mythos (i.e., meta-narrative, worldview, paradigm) of the lost secular is the distinctive trait of Markus’s scholarship. A former Dominican novice, later a happy and untroubled family man, he welcomed the Second Vatican Council and the Catholic Church’s renewed interest in entering into dialogue with “the world.” At that time, his mind, as he graciously conceded in the introduction to his last book, was filled with concepts like “secular theology,” “religionless Christianity,” and Bonhoeffer’s idea of “adulthood of the world.”24 His lifelong study of the passage from ancient Christianity to medieval Christianity was a quest into the facts, people, and ideologies that had interrupted that dialogue between the Church and the world in the first place, almost fifteen centuries earlier. Markus looked at his Church and asked how she became such an intractable champion of religious conformity. Speaking of conformity, one cannot forget that Markus left the Dominican Order in 1954, only a few months before taking final vows and, crucially, swearing the Anti-Modernist Oath. Imposed in 1910, the oath was required of “all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries” of the Catholic Church until it was rescinded in 1967. Modernism was the name of a crisis between believers who participated in modern culture, were driven by science, and shared the modern sense of historicity and cultural relativity and an authoritarian ecclesiastical hierarchy, intellectually isolated from the world. To these believers, mostly Catholic intellectuals, the problem was to reconcile, within their own identity, their double belonging to the world and to the Church. Surely during the last year of his novitiate Markus had one or two thoughts about the oath. One can only speculate here about the role played by the incoming anti-modernist oath in his decision to leave the Dominican Order and religious life. It is a fact that Markus was unimpressed by the pre-conciliar intellectual status of his Church, a status he experienced personally. He characterized 24 Markus, Secular, 2.

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that status as a “ghetto.”25 For those born between 1890 and 1940 and who entered Dominican Order, the essential thing was to become accustomed to neo-scholastic (or “neo-Thomistic”) philosophy. Novices were required to attend courses in philosophy and theology according to the approach, doctrine, and rules of a contemporary interpretation of Saint Thomas Aquinas. There was no way to study theology without first mastering philosophy, that is, philosophy taught according to Saint Thomas’s masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae. Thomist philosophy, however, distilled as it was in the TwentyFour Thomistic Theses, was the indispensable framework for the study of theology. Moreover, it was the necessary antidote against the shortcomings of French Enlightenment and German Romanticism. To the ahistorical form of reasoning of Enlightenment, Thomist philosophy opposed the institution of the Church, including the papacy, as a historical truth; to the historical orientation inherent to Romanticism, the perennial philosophy offered the proved argument (from cause to effect) of the existence of God as well of the absolute (and therefore unchangeable) truths of Catholicism. This was a matter of philosophical (i.e., rational) demonstration, not something that one must believe on faith. The course of Thomist philosophy was divided into four sections: psychology, theodicy, ontology, and cosmology. Its goal was to affirm clearly and proudly that Catholicism frames its truths through reason, not through faith, tradition, or experience. The section on psychology was built around the list of metaphysical arguments that demonstrate human immortality. The section on theodicy focused on the existence of God as philosophically demonstrable. For the sake of this book, however, the sections on ontology and cosmology have special interest. The section on ontology addressed the difference between “pure act” and “potency and act.” God is identified as “pure act of being,” dependent on no entity or event to be God. There is no potentiality in God, no possibility that waits to be realized. On the contrary, some bodily beings—like humans—are composed of potency and act, as the section on cosmology declared. This difference stands as an explanation of the radical difference in being between God and His creatures. The point of cosmology and its five theses was to secure proper understanding of the relative autonomy of the natural (or “immanent”) order from the spiritual (of “transcendent”) one. The neo-scholastic scholars who studied the idea of order in Thomas Aquinas’s thought noted the structural duplicity of order (ordo) of reality. On one hand, ordo expresses the relation of creatures with God and on the other the relation of creatures with 25 Ibidem.

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themselves. Thomas often explicitly asserts the twofold character of ordo: “Est autem duplex ordo considerandus in rebus. Unus, quo aliquid creatum ordinatur adalium creatum […] Alius ordo, quo omnia create ordinantur in Deum.”26 This was the neo-scholastic teaching regarding a “duplex ordo.”27 Corresponding to the epistemological distinction between the immanent order and the transcendent order were the lines of demarcation between reason and faith. According to this “duplex ordo cognitionis,” philosophy (and the other human sciences, including history) remained in the domain of reason, autonomous from the truths of revelation. Theology was, instead, the divine science concerned with the content of revelation. One can only speculate that Markus’s engagement with patristics was born out of his reaction to neo-scholasticism. On the eve of the Second Vatican Council, like many educated Catholics, Markus experienced the tension of being loyal to an integralist Church while living in an open, heterogeneous, secular society. During that tumultuous period of transition, a search for an answer to the challenge presented by a newly secularized society, an answer that would enable the Church to speak to the present situation of the world, became an urgent matter. Like other Catholic intellectuals, Markus believed that the key to Christianity’s relevance to the present lay in the creative recovery of its past. He found in Augustine—not the Augustine of Confession but of The City of God—what he was looking for. For Markus, doing history meant doing theology.28 Yet the distinctive approach to intellectual history that he showed was not simply scholarly reconstruction and repristination but a creative hermeneutical exercise in which the sources of Christian faith were reinterrogated with new, burning questions of the twentieth century. With such questions serving as hermeneutical keys, Markus was able to unlock new rooms in the treasure house of Augustine and discover there many of the ideas that the pre-conciliar Church had neglected or even resisted. Markus became particularly engaged with the question of the secular and found in Augustine a theologian of the secular. He developed a theory of Christian secularism that has in Augustine its champion, a theory that assumes a neutral, autonomous space in which a religiously heterogeneous culture can flourish, protected from the dominant presence of the sacred. 26 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 21, a. I, ad 3. 27 Council Fathers, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic faith, Dei Filius, First Vatican Council, Rome, April 24, 1870. See also: Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matter of Faith and Morals, ed. by Peter Hünermann, 43rd edition, trans. and ed. by Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), § 3015. 28 See Markus, Saeculum, Chapter 7.

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According to Markus, Augustine elaborated this tradition (see especially book XIX of The City of God), which eventually did not survive the emergence of Christianity in the Latin West as the hegemonic religion. In his last work, Christianity and the Secular, then, the secular was no longer (and simply) Augustine’s invention but an inherent and legitimate tradition within Christianity, from the New Testament to modern days, although at times neglected, forgotten, or even dismissed.29 The secular was no longer a road not taken but a potential remedy to the present crisis of the Church. Markus belonged to a well-known stream within Catholicism that interpreted the French Revolution first, and modernity later, as a secular revolution. Their idea was that that revolution and Christianity were compatible, as long as Christianity accepts becoming an integral part of a secular society. The progenitor of the stream is the liberal priest and statesman Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852), who framed the end of Christendom in terms of the beginning of a secular society in which believers and non-believers cohabit peacefully. Traditionally, the adversaries of the liberals within Catholicism are the moderates. The liberals and moderates interpreted the Council as an opportunity for breaking down the barriers between Christianity and the modern world. They pursued a middle ground between progressivism and conservatism, although they differ on one relevant point: for the liberals, the path to renewal is immanentism, that is, a secular reality in which the divine order is extrinsic; for the moderates, the path is instead a return to transcendence, namely, the presence of the divine in the world. It was against the moderates that Markus articulated and then defended his conception of the ancient secularism. Among the moderates, there were the theologians, authors, and philosophers belonging to the ressourcement movement that I will address soon. In his last book, Markus insisted that his academic concern had always been the possibility of a Christianity grounded on laïcité rather than on intégrisme.30 This should not surprise anyone. For Markus, trained as a philosopher and as a historian of renaissance science, the crux of the matter was the defense of humanity, understood not as a generic term for the human race but as the given freedom of cultivating human nature, ruling over human affairs and harnessing its raw potential to move society forward. 29 This is the author’s interpretation of Markus’s Christianity and the Secular. His own interpretation is different; he claims that his argument works this way: “Christian tradition has a legitimate place for the autonomy of the secular.” It is claimed here that Markus identified a legitimate place for the secular within Christianity, suggesting that Christianity is, among other things, a source of an understanding of the secular and its social implications. Markus, Secular, 9. 30 Markus, Secular, 7, 9.

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In Markus’s discussion of the passage from early Christianity to Christendom, one finds the spectacle of a vital human drama. Markus’s scholarly project of the secular was both a retaining wall against the “hegemony of the sacred” and a secured space for nurturing the vitality and diversity of human nature. Not surprisingly, Markus established a link between this tradition and the work of the Second Vatican Council: “With the Blessed Pope John XXIII,” writes Markus at the conclusion of Christianity and the Secular, “the Church has come to embrace the secular and to acknowledge its value, its autonomy, and even, if I may add what may seem paradoxical, its sacredness or holiness.”31

Reform of the Church (Aggiornamento) The studies on the passage from the early Church to Christendom took place in the second half of the twentieth century. The motivation behind those studies, or at least behind some of the scholars conducting those studies, was not exclusively historical; it was existential. These scholars had the impression that they were attending, in real time, the very end of Christendom, the same Christendom whose beginning they were investigating in their studies. The fact that the new pontiff, John XXIII, announced that his purpose was to “bring the church up to date” and to work for its spiritual regeneration helped create that perception. He was the first pope since the Reformation who recognized openly that Catholicism stood in need of reinvigoration and reform. In Catholic academic circles, the beginning of the Second Vatican Council (in 1961) and the command, proffered by Pope John XXIII, to bring the Church up to date (the English translation of the Italian word aggiornamento) and to reform the Church in order to open a dialogue with the modern world were considered a watershed. The scope of the Council, according to the primary mission of the Church—to proclaim the gospel, to make disciples, and to protect their faith—was for the Church to adapt herself to the changing fashion of the world to make the gospel intelligible and relevant to the people of the new, modern age. During the sessions of the Council, the “modern world” was defined precisely: Today, the human race is passing through a new age of its history. Profound and rapid changes are spreading by degrees around the whole world. 31 Markus, Secular, 91.

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Triggered by the intelligence and creative energies of man, these changes recoil upon him, upon his decisions and desires both individual and collective, and upon his manner of thinking and acting with respect to things and people. Hence we can already speak of a true social and cultural transformation, one which has repercussions on man’s religious life as well.”32

Most perceived this as the end of Christendom, a form of Christianity inaugurated by Constantine that survived until the papacy of Pius XII (1876–1958). Once the Council was opened, the pope and the conciliar fathers made it clear that the scope of the Council was not the development of doctrines or the reaffirmation of dogmas, rather the primacy of the pastoral over the doctrinal, the kerygma over the didache. The Council was a chance for the Church to modernize without becoming entangled in doctrinal squabbles. In the words of von Balthasar, the Council’s main task was to facilitate “an opening [of the Church] to the world, an aggiornamento, a broadening of the horizons, a translation of the Christian message into a language understandable by the modern world.”33 Pope John XXIII commanded the reform of the Church, but in Catholicism, “reform” has a specific meaning: it implies a re-form, a change of form, a re-forming of the original revelation, which stands immutable and constant (because the truth never changes). The concept of reform (or aggiornamento) was not about updating doctrine but about updating ways of communicating these doctrines to the modern world. In the decades before the Second Vatican Council, the question of reform, or aggiornamento, came with a fundamental hermeneutical problem: how to open the Church to the world—how to engage the world—without disentangling the Church from her past or from her tradition. In other words, how could the Church operate the reappropriation of the Christian tradition in a radically new historical context, without, in the words of Yves Congar, “doing violence either to Catholic dogma or to the most delicate evangelical spirit”?34 During the pre-conciliar period, the most common 32 Pope Paul VI, Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: Gaudium et Spes, Second Vatican Council, December 7, 1965. 33 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “In Retrospect” (adapted from Rechenschaft 1965 by Kenneth Batinovich, NSM), in John Riches (ed.), The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), 194–221, 196. 34 Yves Marie-Joseph Congar, OP, “Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’église,” Unam Sanctam 20 (Paris: Cerf, 1950), 339. In English, True and False Reform in the Church, trans. by Paul Philibert, OP (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011).

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French term used to designate the reappropriation of the Christian tradition was “adaptation.” In the years immediately before the beginning of World War II, two French Catholic intellectuals, the philosopher Jean Guitton (1901–1999) and the already mentioned theologian Congar, addressed the question of adaption, although neither knew of the efforts of the other, in terms of true and false reform of the Church.35 The two intellectuals came to the same conclusion: two methods can be used. The first method brings a true reform of the Church and gives priority to tradition, to the point that the current state of affairs is seen through the lens of tradition when tradition is understood correctly. The result of this method is an interpretation of the modern world from the point of view of tradition. The second method, which leads to a false reform, gives priority to the current state of affairs and basically sees tradition through the prism of the current state of the world. The result is an expression of tradition in modern terms. The first method results in a reform within the Church (Congar used this word) and the second to an innovation (Guitton adopted this term). Two methods can be used, but only one is legitimate. Adaptation, in fact, is less a work of innovation than of religious revitalization. To put it differently, when Guitton and Congar talked about “adaptation,” they did not mean an assimilation of tradition within the modern consciousness, rather the opposite—the assimilation of the modern world within tradition. It is tradition that positions modernity, not the other way around. Their ideas became mainstream, and the council Fathers adopted them. In Catholicism, tradition is a complex concept that can only be superficially equated to the constant transmission and reception within the Church of the teachings of the Apostles from one generation to the next. The deposit of faith (Latin: fidei depositum) refers to the entirety of divine revelation. The Second Vatican Council addressed the theme of tradition in Dei verbum: “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church.”36 Tradition and Scripture, therefore, are viewed and treated not as two sources but as two witnesses to one and the same body of truth that includes both the deeds of God and the words of God. For Christians, the Bible is the canonical text par excellence. Tradition consists of words (“oral tradition”) and ways of living and acting. Thus, tradition does not confine itself, in first approximation, to the historical documents of the primeval Church, but it extends to the 35 Jean Guitton, La Pensée moderne et le catholicisme, III, La Pensée de M. Loisy (1935–1936) (Aix-en-Provence: Imprimerie d’Editions Provencales, 1936), 57–59. 36 Pope Paul VI, Dogmatic Constitution of Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, November 18, 1965, n. 10.

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whole spirit of Christianity and to all its doctrines. Tradition includes the living reality of the faithful, including elements that cannot be stated in words. It is the bearer of tacit knowledge and is most effectively transmitted and received through faithful action. The fidelity of tradition, in Blondel’s view, comes not from verbal or conceptual conformity with prior statements but from fidelity to the reality intended by the statements.37 The discourse on tradition is complicated by a specific interpretation of tradition that took shape in the nineteenth century and then became mainstream in the post-conciliar age. According to Catholic Tübingen theologian Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838), tradition embodies itself in language and therefore can be articulated in different forms across different times and cultures. At the core of tradition, however, operates a mysterious inner principle or power of spiritual life, the Holy Spirit. “Tradition,” Möhler wrote, “is the living influence of the Holy Spirit animating the whole body of the faithful, perpetuating itself through all times, continually living, and yet expressing itself in bodily forms.”38 It is the Spirit, the “mysterious, invisible side of the spiritual power of life that perpetuates itself and perdures in the Church” and embodies itself in the life of the faithful, taking different forms in different times and cultures.39 At this point the fundamental hermeneutical problem of aggiornamento, of the reform of the Church, should be clear: on one side, it cannot be a simple innovation, a manifestation of tradition in modern terms. In fact, tradition is not a pure process without any stable or inalterable content; it is not an interpretation that is always up for reassessment. The essence of Christianity is the revelation, and the revelation is and remains forever the same. On the other side, tradition is not a given, the mere transmission of received teachings, but the development of the deposit of faith in the sense that the latter has been enriched by having been “lived, pondered, and expressed by generations of believers inhabited and vivified by the Spirit of Pentecost.”40 In brief, tradition is neither innovation nor mere permanence. Is there any path available between the Scylla of tradition as innovation and discontinuity and the Charybdis of tradition as continuity, one that allows the reformation of the Church, ultimately aggiornamento, without “doing violence either to Catholic dogma or to the most delicate evangelical spirit”? 37 Blondel, “Histoire et dogme: Les lacunes philosophiques de l’exégèse moderne.” 38 Möhler, The Unity of the Church, 3. 39 Möhler, The Unity of the Church, 28. 40 Yves Marie-Joseph Congar, OP, The Meaning of Tradition (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1964), 114.

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In 1920, Werner Förster (1897–1975) wrote “La vraie et la fausse adaptation” (The true and false adaption) in which he made this powerful point: “only a profound understanding of the tradition can guide one to discern the useful elements in modernity, to select them with certainty, to adapt them with tact.”41 Thus, adaptation requires a “profound understanding of the tradition.” As Pope John XXIII himself explained, the deposit of faith, the revelation, remains the same, but our understanding of it improves: the Church’s teachings remained, but its understanding and formulation had to be changed. 42 A reform of the Church requires new formulation as well as a new understanding of the deposit of faith. The Catholic Church holds that the understanding of faith continues to deepen and mature over time through the action of the Holy Spirit in the history of the Church and in the understanding of that faith by Christians, all the while remaining identical in essence and substance.43 According to Balthasar, the aggiornamento was only one side of the coin; the other, and it is at least equal in importance, was “a reflection on the specifically Christian element itself, a purification, a deepening, a centering of its idea, which alone renders us capable of representing it, radiating it, translating it believably in the world.”44 This purification, this deepening, was for the Church the equivalent to a return to the roots of her tradition.

Aggiornamento and Return to the Sources Aggiornamento (or “reform”) and ressourcement (return to the sources) operated as twin impulses in the period before the Council. In the same fashion of the ressourcement theologians who anticipated and led the Second Vatican Council, Markus believed he had to break out of the Constantinian mindset and begin developing an idea of Christianity that would truly meet the challenges of the age. By paraphrasing a celebrated statement of the French Catholic poet Charles Péguy, Markus’s historical work was an 41 Werner Förster, “La vraie et la fausse adaptation,” in Autorité et Liberté (Lausanne, 1920), 183. This work is the French translation of Werner Förster (ed.), Autorität und Freiheit: Betrachtungen zum Kulturproblem der Kirche, 2nd edition (Munich: Jos. Koesel’schen, 1911). 42 On his death bed, Pope John XXII was heard saying that “it is not the Gospel that changes; it is we who begin to understand it better” (in Italian: “Non è il Vangelo che cambia, siamo noi che cominciamo a comprenderlo meglio”). The translation is my own. See: Mario Benigni, Goffredo Zanchi, Giovanni XXIII. Biografia ufficiale (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: San Paolo, 2000), 428. 43 Pope Paul VI, Dogmatic Constitution of Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, n. 8. 44 Von Balthasar, “In Retrospect,” 51.

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investigation into the deeper sources of Christianity, in the literal sense of the word, a re-source. 45 He shared with the ressourcement theologians the common (and paradoxical) instinct to go backward to go forward. To regain the original meaning, ressourcement scholars adopted a two-step hermeneutic, or hermeneutic of retrieval, in which the first step was an interpretation of the source in its original context. The second step was the application of the original meaning to the contemporary situation. Like theirs, Markus’s scholarly work was not, or not simply, for the progress of the discipline but for the revitalization of Catholicism. His main assumption, in brief, was that the study of Christian tradition embedded in the early Church brings more than a more accurate historical understanding of Christian origins. The investigation of the events and texts of the minority religion, the rites of the liturgy, the creeds and decrees of the councils, the teaching of the Fathers, Doctors, and great spiritual masters before the rise of the “hegemony of the sacred,” as he called it, operates as a recentering of the Church of these days and a therapy to her isolation. 46 In his scholarship, Markus resembled ressourcement theologians to a great degree: his work as a historian, his orientation toward revitalization, not restoration, his appreciation for both aggiornamento and the return to the sources of Christian thought. The resemblance, however, ends there. A closer look at the difference between ressourcement theologians and Markus’s understanding of “reform,” in fact, brings to light a certain set of diverging methodological assumptions. A case in point is the discussion on the exit of the Church from Christendom and the necessity of the Church’s reform. The crux of the matter is the relationship between aggiornamento and ressourcement, or what exactly is a reform of the Church and her tradition. Like many other Catholic intellectuals of his generation, Markus called for a reform of the Church. And a reform was surely needed. In Markus’s perspective, however, the reform was seen as the result of the integration of the Church in the world. Methodologically, Markus supposed the historical reality was a given and showed how the different actors reacted. Markus believed that Augustine reacted to the circumstances of his days “to assert the autonomy of the secular was [for Augustine] to resist any hostile takeover 45 The original quote reads: “a [true] revolution is a call from a less perfect tradition to a more perfect tradition, a call from a shallower tradition to a deeper tradition, a backing up of tradition, an overtaking of depth, an investigation into deeper sources; in the literal sense of the word, a ‘re-source.’” See: Péguy quoted in Congar, Vraie, 602. 46 The phrase “hegemonic of the sacred” is quoted in Jinty Nelson, “Robert Markus Obituary,” The Guardian, January 9, 2011. At https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/jan/09/robertmarkus-obituary (accessed on December 1, 2020).

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of this middle ground between sacred and profane from either side.”47 In the same fashion, he believed that the twentieth-century Church should react to the circumstances of her day, namely to a profound gap between the clerical and dogmatic institution and the highly proactive and secularized world. Aggiornamento for Markus is the Church embracing the historical, temporal, concrete circumstances of her days. In Markus, people and institutions ratiocinate in a purely historical manner. What is completely missing in Markus’s method, however, is the role played by the supernatural, including the providential-economic operations, in the reform of the Church. For Markus, the Church’s reform is uniquely a human business. Markus shared with the ressourcement theologians the instinct to go back to the sources. And surely, they shared his opinion that the Church needed to be reformed. The exit from Christendom was not only imperative to save the spiritual authority of the Church, but also to enable the Church to remain in dialogue with the people, including the Christians, of this age. All this was common ground between Markus and the Catholic intellectuals who laid down the foundations and led Vatican Council II. However, Markus’s vision of Christians embracing the secular while extricating themselves from the economy of salvation (and, more generally, the supernatural) distances him from ressourcement theologians. First, the distance refers to the meaning of aggiornamento. Markus framed the path to reform as a decision taken by the pope. In a strictly historical method, in fact, the transcendent character of certain religious data is simply ignored. But how did the Church consciously take a path without believing that this is where the Spirit led her? The distance between ressourcement theologians and Markus, moreover, extends to a “Christian” approach to ressourcement. It extends to the definition of “source:” a theology, a mentality, a philosophical (or eventually political) framework, in the case of Markus, and the Mystery of Christ for the ressourcement theologians. Markus was primarily concerned with the forms and categories of ancient Christianity, not with the Spirit that was their common impulse and source. What is at stake in this distinction between forms and categories, on one hand, and on the other the Spirit, is Markus’s approach that confines the supernatural to irrelevance. In Markus’s vision, God has no say in the destiny of His Church. In summary, the difference between Markus’s thought and the ressourcement theology that framed the Council is a matter of mediation: for Markus, the mediating principle between faith and existence, religious and secular, is history and the historical reconstruction of the past. The saeculum is just that: history. 47 Markus, Secular, 37.

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For ressourcement theology, and for the Church that emerged at the other end of the Council, the mediating principle is primarily the presence of God for Christian life experience by His grace. The role of grace is totally absent in Markus’s thought, and it is that, more than anything else, that aligns him with the Protestant liberal theological tradition with which he had much in common. Markus was a devoted, faithful, engaged Christian who cared about the destiny of the Church. He almost became a priest, and for the rest of his life he placed his enormous intellectual resources at the service of academia as well as Christianity. The retrieval of the ancient secular, in Markus’s opinion, demonstrated the possibility of a peaceful cohabitation of the twentieth-century Church in a dechristianized society. The secular was the road not taken then, in the past, that should be taken now to solve the crisis of the Church. However, Markus never clarified how in his view the “embracement of the secular” should be pursued. He probably thought it was self-evident. And, in some way, it was. Still, he never addressed how the Church should shift from introversion to an openness toward the world. This may be a predictable situation as Markus was a scholar of late antiquity, not of contemporary times. He was satisfied to juxtapose one situation he knew at heart, the ancient secular, to a situation he experienced personally, the end of Christendom. He articulated an authoritative interpretation of the “secular” in late antiquity, and then he used it as a hermeneutical key for interpreting the secular in his time. Markus was surely correct in identifying the Church’s reticence to engage the world as her major problem. A Church closed in on herself was a Church in crisis. He was right on that, and eventually the Church took that path and turned her isolation into an openness, exactly as Markus envisioned. Still, the approach he adopted did not serve him well on that occasion; it was an approach, in fact, entailing a misreading of how Christianity operates. He was wrong in his opinion that such an openness was a choice to be taken by men (the pope, the cardinals) without any reference to the supernatural. The solution of the crisis did not require a return to the secular but a return to the Word. The interpretation of the Church’s reform in a larger context of the providential and divine, economic-administrative framework is missing in Markus. In brief, he was wrong to juxtapose a situation from the past against one in the present—not because the past cannot be used as a prescription for the present, but because the juxtaposition is not an approach suitable for the Church. The method that pervades Markus’s thought prevented him from capturing the reality of how the Church works. He adopted a historical method; the Church conserves a providential orientation.

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There is a small, almost unknown episode that occurred during the last days of Pope John XXIII’s life. 48 The pope, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (1881–1963), was on his death bed, having been diagnosed with stomach cancer. A few weeks earlier (on April 11), he had signed and issued Pacem in terris (lit. Peace on Earth), a papal encyclical which would become, in the opinion of his biographer Peter Hebblethwaite, Pope John’s “last will and testament.”49 In the last days of April 1963, however, the encyclical was coming back to bite him. In the local newspaper Il Quotidiano, a journalist wrote an article that was extremely critical of the encyclical and of the pope himself. The article was clearly inspired by John XXIII’s archnemesis, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, secretary of the Holy Office, the Church’s central administration, and the leading conservative voice at the Second Vatican Council. In the article, the pope was accused of changing “the doctrine and the Gospel.”50 These words upset the pope. During his pontificate, John XXIII had been criticized from the right and from the left, by the conservatives and by the progressives. He had never replied publicly to those criticisms, preferring to record his deeper thoughts in a private diary.51 In the last four days of his life, however, Pope John XXIII was too weak to write in his notebook, but strong enough to dictate a few words to his personal secretary, Msgr. Loris Capovilla: “Non è il Vangelo che cambia, siamo noi che cominciamo a comprenderlo meglio.” The translation reads: “It is not the Gospel that changes; it is we who begin to understand it better.” Christians’ task is not to “change the Gospel,” or to adapt the Gospel according to the circumstances, but to read the Gospel anew. John XXIII’s solution to the crisis of the Church had never been to align the Church to the world and to adapt theology to contemporary thought. It had been to return to the 48 The episode is described in Alberto Melloni, Pacem in terris: Storia dell’ultima enciclica di papa Giovanni (Roma, Bari: Laterza, 2010), 25–28. The original source is Loris Capovilla, The Heart and Mind of John XXIII: His Secretary’s Intimate Recollection (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1964). 49 Peter Hebblethwaite, John XXIII Pope of the Century, abridged, revised, and retitled edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 249. Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, Encyclical Letter, Rome, April 11, 1963. 50 The crux of the matter was the distinction between ideology and movement within the Pacem in Terris. In practice, it means that Communism as an ideology can be excommunicated but not the people who belong to that ideology. The reference was to Pope John XXIII’s predecessor, Pius XII, who had excommunicated both Communism and communists in 1949. In this regard, see: Pope Pius, Decretum, July 1, 1949, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 1949, 334. 51 Alberto Melloni (ed.), A. G. Roncalli-Giovanni XXIII Il Giornale dell’Anima. Soliloqui, note e diari spirituali (Bologna: ISR, 2003); Pope John XXIII, Journal of the Soul, trans. by Dorothy White (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).

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Word and reach truths in revelation that have been there forever but have never before been detected. Roncalli’s phrase of the growing understanding of the Gospel is uncannily similar to a much more famous phrase, that is, Gregory the Great’s phrase on the growing understanding of Scripture included in his Homilies on Ezekiel.52 It is an undisputable similarity because Pope John XXIII was an assiduous reader of Gregory and knew that passage.53 Each pontiff in his day faced a decisive crisis: Gregory the end of the Roman civilization, John the end of Christian civilization. Both pontiffs felt impotent in the face of the crisis and ignorant regarding a possible solution. The history of Christianity is of course marked by pontiffs who were able to understand but not dominate the monumental changes of their time; those living during the first globalization come to mind. Alternatively, there were popes who proved able to dominate but still not understand the shift from one age to another; the popes of the Counter-Reformation are an example of this type. Then, there are the popes who proved able to both understand and dominate the change, and this is the case of the popes of the Crusades. With Gregory and John, however, one faces a category of pontiffs who are impotent and ignorant. While the barbarians were at the gate of Rome, Gregory believed that the explanation of the crisis was hidden somewhere in the Book of Ezekiel and that the solution would be unveiled to the people of Rome who had convened to listen to the pope’s commentary on the Book. Although a newly secularized society challenged the Church of Rome, John believed that the significance of the crisis was concealed somewhere in the Gospel and that the solution would be revealed to the bishops gathered in Rome for the council. In both pontificates, there is a peculiar sense of the administration of the Church conducted in alignment with providence. In both pontificates, the pope’s decisive move was to create the opportunity for the Spirit to “speak” to the Church.

52 “Divina eloquia cum legente crescent,” HEz, I, VII, 8. See also: “Scriptura sacra […] aliquo modo cum legentibus crescit,” Moralia in Iob, XX, I, 1. 53 Pope John XXIII studied Gregory in the period 1904–1906 in Bergamo and then, in a more systematic fashion, during the 1920s in Rome. In this decade, the future pope specifically focused his attention on Regula Pastoralis and Moralia in Iob. The then Roncalli mentioned Gregory 26 times, in private notes and public addresses, in the period before his election, and 32 times in the five years of his pontificate.

6. Augustinianisms Introduction Scholars have interpreted Markus’s saeculum (or better, Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s The City of God) as a form of secularization of the Christian sense of history, particularly due to his emphasis on the neutral, autonomous character of the ancient secular. Others have instead seen Markus’s saeculum as the result of a form of collapse of the duplex ordo cognitionis into one unique order—the order of the secular. This is the case of the already mentioned James Wetze, who accordingly spoke of “sacred secularity.” In this present study, the hypothesis is instead that Markus did not want to secularize the Church but to protect a dominion independent of the truths of revelation in which Christians can cohabitate with members of other religions and non-believers. The hypothesis is that Markus maintained the neo-scholastic mindset he eventually absorbed during his years of seminary, and in this chapter I will prove this hypothesis correct. In his L’Augustinisme politique, Arquillière framed his concern with regard to political Augustinianism—that is, the subordination of the political order to the Church—in terms of the relationship between nature and the divine. He argued that the political Augustinianism, the application of the thought of Augustine’s The City of God to the political domain during the Middle Ages, corresponded to a misinterpretation of the Bishop of Hippo’s intentions. The problem, according to Arquillière, was that this application amounted to a distortion of the natural law institution of the state by the ecclesiastical law of the Church. Augustine’s followers, in Arquillière’s opinion, did not develop a consistent theology of the relationship between nature and grace. Accordingly, in their work one can detect a tendency “to erase the formal separation of nature and grace,” to absorb the natural order into the divine order.1 It is this absorption, this amalgamation between the reign of the divine and the reign of nature, that amounted to a distortion. From Arquillière’s neo-scholastic perspective, this lack of separation between 1 Henri-Xavier Arquillière, L’Augustinisme politique: essai sur la formation des théories politiques du Moyen-Age (Paris: Vrin, 1934), 53.

Beltramini, E., Desecularizing the Christian Past. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463721882_ch06

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nature and grace was the question raised by political Augustinianism. The solution, therefore, was the rectification of this distortion, which consists of the reestablishment of the original separation. In practice, it equals the denial of the power of the pope to interfere directly in temporal affairs while giving a measure of autonomy to the secular. From Marrou’s perspective, the problem is the opposite—the excessive separation between the order of nature and the order of the divine. Human existence, he claimed, is a mixed business. To reconnect the two orders, nature and the divine, Marrou elaborated the suggestive proposal of a tertium quid, the reality of a saeculum where the two cities overlap, and the two orders reach unity. At this point, Bruno’s words are crucial: Arquillière’s argument that there is a subversion of the temporal order in Augustine’s thought and an isolation of political matters in his corpus would be embraced and built upon by Robert Markus. Markus would also expand Marrow’s tertium quid, neutralizing this overlapping space of the two cities of the influence of any belief or value system in his notion of the saeculum.2

The genealogy of Markus’s secular is a matter of interpretation. If Markus is more dependent upon Arquillière, his neutralization of Marrou’s tertium quid functions as a separation between the natural order and the order of the divine. If Markus is instead more dependent upon Marrou, his neutralization of Marrou’s tertium quid amounts to the collapse of the duplex ordo into one unique order, the order of the secular. The ambiguity of Markus’s secular sustains both interpretations. In this study, Markus’s secular is interpreted as belonging to a certain stream of Augustinian Scholasticism that, at least according to de Lubac and the ressourcement movement, came to see the supernatural as if it were another realm superadded to the first—that is, to nature. In other words, Markus’s secular is seen as aligned with Arquillière’s Augustinian Scholasticism.

Nature and Grace One way to understand Markus’s secular is to compare his approach with those of thinkers such as de Lubac and Milbank: the latter try to see everything within a unitary or integral supernatural horizon against the 2 Bruno, Political Augustianism, 41.

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possibility of “pure nature,” a nature not contaminated by the divine. In Markus there is a distinct exposure to the supernatural, a separation between the realm of history and that of salvation. This separation is the source of a secular politics that is independent of the Church and of the immanent action of the divine economy. To put it differently, Markus’s peculiar interpretation of Augustine’s saeculum is the product of an extrinsic prejudice. On the contrary, de Lubac’s and Milbank’s work can be interpreted as a rejection of the idea of pure nature, “the idea,” to borrow a phrase from Bernard Mulcahy, “of human nature which can be had by any reasoning person.”3 Milbank believes that Markus got Augustine wrong and objects that Augustine leaves no room for a natural politics. On the contrary, Augustine makes the Church herself a political reality. But Milbank criticizes Markus from an approach to the supernatural that is the opposite of Markus’s: in Milbank there exists an integration between nature and grace in which there is little room for distinction. That being so, it makes sense that no point of contact can be found between the two scholars. The analysis of both Markus’s and Milbank’s approaches to the supernatural functions to infer Markus’s assumptions. It is also propaedeutical to framing a third approach (separate from Markus’s and Milbank’s) to the supernatural, an approach that de Lubac championed and the one adopted for this study. This third approach has been addressed in depth in a previous chapter through the study of Blondel’s distinct philosophy of the supernatural. The Milbank–Markus debate and the related scholarship offer the resources to draft the difference among Markus’s, Milbank’s, and de Lubac’s approaches, and I address that difference in this chapter through the prism of the relationship between nature and grace, or through the question of whether everything is sacred. 4 Other angles are obviously possible. Markus refined his argument of the secular during his career, particularly in Christianity and the Secular, one of his last works. The book, written in response of Michael Hollerich’s provocative critique, contains some admissions and a few corrections to the original framework.5 Hollerich connects 3 Bernard Mulcahy, OP, Aquinas’s Notion of Pure Nature and the Christian Integralism of Henry de Lubac: Not Everything Is Sacred (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 2. 4 The opposing positions are effectively presented by Bryan Hollon and Bernard Mulcahy, OP. See: Bryan C. Hollon, Everything is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac (Eugene, OR: Cascade/Wipf, 2009); Mulcahy, OP, Aquinas’s Notion of Pure Nature and the Christian Integralism of Henry de Lubac: Not Everything is Sacred. 5 Michael J. Hollerich, “John Milbank, Augustine, and the ‘Secular,’” in Mark Vessey, Karla Pollmann, and Allan D. Fitzgerald (eds.), History, Apocalypse and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God (Bowling Green, 1999), 311–326; and Markus, Secular, 40–45.

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Markus to Milbank with regard to Milbank’s critique of Markus’s Saeculum. The crux of the matter is the proper genealogy of the secular. Milbank claimed that the origins of the secular lie in late medieval nominalism.6 Milbank recognizes Markus’s interpretation of Augustine: Augustine, in particular, has been interpreted as foreshadowing Protestantism and liberalism. It is contended that he invents an individualistic understanding of both Church and State, because, on the one hand, he interprets the State as merely a compromise between individual wills for the satisfaction of material conveniences, and, on the other, he understands the true Church, the Civitas Dei, as the collection of elect true believers, known only to God.7

Milbank believes that Markus misunderstood Augustine: Augustine did not portray a sort of liberalism ante litteram as a path to embrace but as a path to reject. For Augustine, in Milbank’s interpretation, “an individualizing degeneration” had been mounting in Rome’s more recent history. Augustine condemned “the ‘incipient liberalism’ as found, for example, in Cicero’s view that the object of a commonwealth is that each may ‘enjoy his own.’”8 The same can be said of the Church: Augustine did not show an individualistic conception of the Church. For Milbank, Markus fails to recognize the social dimension of the early Church. For Milbank, Augustine condemned the Roman commonwealth for its individualism and envisioned the Church as a social remedy, as a corporate subject capable of really fulfilling the goals of antique politics. As a matter of fact, “the Church is, for Augustine, itself a ‘political’ reality.”9 This is Milbank’s first objection to Markus. The second refers to Markus’s substitution, in his interpretation of Augustine, of the visible, institutional Church with a “purely eschatological separation by God of the elect from all ages.”10 For Milbank, Augustine promoted the opposite view, namely that the salvific process is not an individual Christian practice; it required the explicit and active presence of the visible, institutional Church. In Milbank’s words, “the Church itself, as the realized heavenly city, is the telos of the salvific process.”11 The third objection is the artif icial separation, according to 6 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, revised edition, 406–407. 7 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 404. 8 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 405. 9 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 407. 10 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 406. 11 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 407.

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Milbank, of Markus’s theory of State and Church. For Milbank, there is no room for a natural politics in Augustine: “All ‘political’ theory, in the antique sense, is relocated by Christianity as thought about the Church.”12 No separation is possible between the political, seen as a permanent sphere, and the ultimate (supernatural) ends. In Milbank’s opinion, the conversion of the empire was expected to have implications not only for the character of political governance but also of the ecclesial. The gradual overlapping of boundaries between the political and the ecclesiastic rules, in fact, “led to fears that the distinctive character of the ecclesial rule was being lost, and so encouraged the monastic movement: precisely the setting up of relatively self-sufficient Christian societies.”13 Thus, the political is relocated inside Christianity to preserve the ecclesiastical rule and to avoid the risk of a submission of Christianity to a natural (pagan, secular) political authority. In brief, Milbank believes that Markus’s Augustine is more a result of Markus’s liberalism than Augustine’s theology of providence. In Markus, according to Milbank, the reader detects an individualist flavor materialized in both the neutral secular and the Church, to the point that the pilgrimage through this world is in effect an individual pilgrimage, one made in solitude under the invisible and impenetrable eye of divine providence. In Markus, however, the reader can also detect a form of historical immanentism, namely that concentrating completely on history would exclude everything supernatural. Mentioning Markus by name, Milbank denies the idea in Augustine (and Aquinas) “of a permanent political sphere concerned with positive goals of finite well-being, and clearly distinguished as a ‘natural’ institution, from the Church as a ‘supernatural’ one.”14 What is at stake is the substitution of a pagan ontology with a Christian ontology and therefore of a natural politics which a political theology. Milbank is claiming that Markus conserves a pagan ontology. Before moving to Markus’s response to Milbank, it is critical to acknowledge which point of reference Milbank is coming from. In this regard, I propose a comparison between Milbank and de Lubac’s theology of the supernatural. In Milbank, nature is at a much higher density of grace than, say, de Lubac’s Christendom. This difference is detected in both his The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural and Peter Samuel Kucer’s Truth and Politics: A Theological 12 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 410. 13 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 403. 14 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 412.

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Comparison of Joseph Ratzinger and John Milbank.15 The crux of the matter is the relationship between nature and the divine, or the nature–grace relationship. On one hand, while de Lubac upholds that nature and grace are united, he nonetheless defends the distinction between the two. It does not mean that nature is autonomous from grace but that grace is already within nature, so that there is no natural “natural status” in the first place. The suspended middle of Milbank’s book title, a reference to von Balthasar’s synthetic recapitalization of de Lubac’s notion of “nature,” is de Lubac’s representation of human nature that is more than simply “natural.”16 In turn, de Lubac borrows his interpretation of the supernatural end as constitutive of human nature from Augustine. The whole topic will be addressed later. For now, it is sufficient to add that for de Lubac, this supernatural status of human nature does not imply its total dependency. Human nature is both autonomous and dependent because it rests upon a paradoxical relationship with God. Milbank instead advocates a deeper integration of nature and grace to such an extent as to limit the distinction between a natural order from a divine one. In sum, both de Lubac and Milbank embrace the notion of the unity-in-distinction of the orders of grace and nature; the difference between the two is a matter of degree of distinction between the two orders. For future reference, the integration of nature and grace in terms of unity-in-distinction is defined as “integralism.” This discussion of Milbank and de Lubac is not a distraction from the main subject of the comparison between Markus’s and Milbank’s theories of secularization. It helps to determine how close to, or distant from, Markus’s and Milbank’s theories on Church–world relations are to one another. Their differing appropriations of the supernatural, addressed as a relationship of unity or separation between nature and grace, leads toward wildly different evaluations of matters such as the theology of politics. For de Lubac, there is no such thing as political theology. He was adamantly clear that “[the Church] does not take the place of statesmen and formulate ‘programs’, in the precise, complete sense of the word, or suggest ‘plans.’”17 Apparently 15 Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural; Peter Samuel Kucer, Truth and Politics: A Theological Comparison of Joseph Ratzinger and John Milbank (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). Ratzinger follows de Lubac on this line of thought. 16 Von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview, 14–15. However, von Balthasar’s phrase was in turn borrowed from Erich Przywara. See: Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. by John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014), 290ff. 17 De Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, 364.

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aware of the danger of the integralist or clericalist theories of the political authority of the Church, he refused to recognize that the Church holds jurisdiction over temporal matters because the temporal must be subject to the spiritual.18 Equally aware of the peril of secularist theories, he rejected the suggestion that the Church holds no real authority on temporal matters, merely an advisory role on matters of pure morality.19 De Lubac identified a middle ground between clericalism and secularism on the basis of a sharp distinction between a “power over the temporal” and a “power in temporal matters.”20 “The Church’s authority,” de Lubac argued, “is entirely spiritual.” However, in a characteristically Augustinian move, he specified that the Church’s authority “is limited to the individual conscience.”21 He explained that “there is the commandment, the order, which is no less rigorous because it is addressed only to the consciences of the faithful and, consequently, produces its effect only through the intermediary with the consent of those consciences. This is the way God commands. Should his Church not do the same?”22 This is the way God commands. The power of the Church is exercised in the depths of the human interior life, in the mysterious dynamics between the natural spirit and grace, not in the order of doctrines and canon law. This is the way the Church commands. Once again, the nature–divine relationship is the theological locus in which de Lubac’s political reflection found its source and its ultimate destination. Previously, it was shown how de Lubac and Milbank articulated two different conceptions of the nature–grace relationship. This differing appropriation of the supernatural is significant for any political theology, whether or not one accepts it. In de Lubac’s reflection, there is no space for political theology stricto sensu. On the contrary, the radical integralism (in the sense of the integration of nature and grace) in Milbank’s thought reduces de facto the space of a social order autonomous from the supernatural order. The result is, to borrow a phrase from Kucer, a “politicized version of de Lubac’s nature–grace relationship,” that is, a close link between politics and faith and therefore the possibility of a real political theology.23 In his opus magnum, Theology and Social Theory, 18 Henri de Lubac, “The Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters,” trans. by Rebecca Howell Balinski. In Theological Fragments (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 199–221, 203. 19 De Lubac, “The Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters,” 205. 20 De Lubac, “The Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters,” 213. 21 De Lubac, “The Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters,” 211. 22 De Lubac, “The Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters,” 205. 23 Kucer, Truth and Politics: A Theological Comparison of Joseph Ratzinger and John Milbank, 247.

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Milbank criticizes de Lubac for insulating “ecclesial history from secular and political history in general.”24 In Milbank’s opinion, this insulation establishes an unnecessary distance between the social and religious realms and ultimately makes the religious irrelevant to the social. As a remedy, Milbank offers a stricter integration of the religious and the social to the point that the Church is “itself a ‘political’ reality.”25 Once the Church is framed in terms of political reality, Milbank is free to conceive “the Church […] rather than the sovereign state, as the site of a new social order,” the agent “of a new, universal society, a new civitas.”26 In Christianity and the Secular, Markus updated and extended his theory of secularization. He defined the secular in two ways: as common ground in which a certain range of beliefs are shared by different religious traditions while the confessional differences are eliminated or confined outside the boundaries of the shared ground.27 His second explanation for the secular is as a set of norms for how citizens should follow in the public sphere “on which to found a public morality” that is independent from religious beliefs.28 For Markus, the secular is what is outside the religious, or in the case of Roman society up through the sixth century, what was outside Christianity. Markus recognizes that the book is a response to a variety of critics, not only Milbank. Here, however, the focus is Markus’s response to Milbank (and therefore to Hollerich). Markus concedes to Milbank the point of the social character of the Church, although with reservation on the definition of the Church as political reality.29 He downplays Milbank’s second objection on the salvific role of the visible, institutional Church. For Augustine, he states, “imperfection is inescapably woven into man’s fallen condition, and grace is the only gateway to salvation.” Therefore, Markus, concludes, “in this life what mattered was incorporation into the community of the redeemed by baptism and a continuing life of prayer, love, humility, and repentance.”30 This is Markus’s answer to Milbank’s second objection; then he turned his focus on Milbank’s third objection, that Augustine did not promote a natural (secular, pagan, Roman) politics. Two political traditions, one the opposite of the other, claim the authority of the Augustinian tradition, Markus explains. 24 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 226. 25 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 403. 26 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 196 and 228. 27 Markus, Secular, 7. 28 Ibidem. 29 Markus, Secular, 42 (26) and 51 (4). 30 Markus, Secular, 73.

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One argues that in his De Civitate Dei, Saint Augustine developed the idea of two separated realms, the public and the religious realm. The other instead saw the public realm as founded on Christianity.31 “At the heart of this [second] way of thinking,” Markus notes, “is the radical equation of secular with sin.”32 Implying the idea of sin as an ontological privation, as something that should be present and is not, Markus points out that not “all acts of virtue, to be virtuous, need to be perfectly virtuous.”33 This middle space between sinful acts and perfectly virtuous acts, namely the space of the imperfect virtuous acts, is the secular. Markus presents his idea of the secular in few straight sentences: An imperfect or relative version of justice may be found in all sorts of places, although its full realization will only be in the eschatologically purified Church. Here on earth justice may be achieved, but it will always be necessarily an imperfect justice (emphasis added).34

In Augustine, per Markus’s response to Milbank, subsists the germ of a secular politics, the recognition of secular structures, and the recognized value of secular culture. Not everything is religious; not everything should be Christian. To Milbank, who defends the idea that only the Christian is just, Markus replies that there are different levels of justice. Here on earth, in this historical time marked by imperfection, the impossibility of true justice discloses the possibility of an imperfect justice, not of total injustice outside the Church. Yet, the debate between the two goes much deeper. Markus quotes a passage from Milbank: This civitas [the civitas terrena], as Augustine finds it in the present, is the vestigial remains of an entire pagan mode of practice, stretching back to Babylon. There is no set of positive objectives that are its own peculiar business, and the city of God makes a usus of exactly the same range of finite goods, although for different ends, with “a different faith, a different hope, a different love”. For the ends sought by the civitas terrena are not merely limited, finite goods, they are those finite goods regarded without “referral” to the infinite good, and, in consequence, they are 31 Markus, Secular, 41. 32 Ibidem. 33 Markus, Secular, 43. 34 Markus, Secular, 43–44.

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unconditionally bad ends. The realm of the merely practical, cut off from the ecclesial, is quite simply a realm of sin.35

At stake is the possibility of a natural (secular) politics, a politics without referral to a supernatural end. Milbank is clear: a natural politics, cut off from the supernatural end, is quite simply a realm of sin. Markus rejects this position: natural politics can be either sinful or not. “If it is not sinful, then it depends for its goodness on grace and all that is involved in the life of grace.”36 Then Markus makes a second move. Here on earth, he explains, ordinary people act intentionally with reference to their ultimate ends, and their actions, if not sinful, are imperfect, and so is justice. The members of the two cities, the elects and the damned, “make use of the same finite goods, although for different ends.”37 In the corpus permixtum, in the mix of the members of the two cities, there is a mix of ends, finite and infinite. This is Markus’s answer, but he misunderstood what Milbank meant. This civitas, Milbank argues, is the vestigial remains of a natural politics, a politics without supernatural end. A politics without a supernatural end is the derivate of a theological anthropology that understands human beings as purely natural, without a supernatural end. When Markus refers to members of the earthly city with finite ends and refers to members of the heavenly city with infinite ends, he missed the point of Milbank’s criticism. Members of both cities have—or should have—infinite ends. All are made in the image (which corresponds to nature) and the likeness (supernatural) of God. By making this distinction, a curious distinction indeed as the members of the two cities have no knowledge of which city they belong to, Markus places “the ends” in the realm of intentionality, that is, in a human nature gifted of intentionality. Markus’s reference to the mixed ends of the “mixed body” does not serve him well. More effective is his comment on individual persons’ own ultimate ends, which is mirrored in Lawrence Feingold’s remark on a supernatural end “added on” to human nature. To understand Markus’s position, it may prove useful to quote Feingold, whose opinion on the relationship between grace and nature is squarely opposed to that of Milbank: we cannot conclude that because God has destined man for an end that is above his nature, such an end must therefore be a finality “imprinted 35 Markus, Secular, 73. The original text is from Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 410–411. 36 Markus, Secular, 44. 37 Markus, Secular, 45.

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on the nature” itself, or an “intrinsic” or “ontological” end, or an “essential finality.” All that we can conclude is that if God has eternally destined us to a supernatural end, it is fitting that he gives a new form, “added on” to our nature, by which we are suitably ordered to that supernatural end. This new accidental form, which is sanctifying grace, must necessarily be above our nature, so as to make us proportionate to an end above our nature, connatural only to God.38

Feingold is contending that above human ends (namely, Markus’s individual persons’ own ultimate ends), God adds another end—a supernatural end. The addition of a supernatural end to a natural end does justice to Markus’s defense against Milbank’s criticism. Milbank is saying that there is no politics outside grace. The integration of politics and grace relocates the political within the Church, which becomes a political reality. Markus is saying that politics and grace maintain the political within nature, and the only reason he can say that is that grace, in Markus’s framework, is an extrinsic grace, an addendum to an autonomous human nature. Thus, what is really at stake in the debate between the two is not only the admissibility of a natural politics versus a political theology, but also two completely opposite conceptions of the nature–divine relationship. In Milbank, the unity of nature and grace minimizes the distinction between the two. In Markus, the separation between nature and grace makes possible a natural world separated from the Church. An alignment of intent can yet be identified between Markus and Milbank. First, both scholars refuse to seek the foundation for the secular in the Enlightenment. At the risk of oversimplification, Markus and Milbank share the same basic idea of the secular as a product of an internal deviation within Christian thought. For Markus, the deviation is Christendom; for Milbank, the deviation is what comes after Christendom. For the former, the problem is the emergence of Christendom; for the latter, it is the dissolution of Christendom. Second, both decline serious engagement with the supernatural, although for different reasons. Markus maintains a separation between the natural and the divine that de facto makes the natural order autonomous, the divine irrelevant, and the supernatural impossible. Milbank instead reduces the distinction between nature and the divine to the point that they almost coincide. Gone in both authors is the complexity of the nature–supernatural relation, the mystery at the center of human history, 38 Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters, 2nd edition (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2010), 321.

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which is paradoxically autonomous and dependent. In Markus, the secular is self-regulated, and the Church is the “other.” In Milbank, the Church is the true social, the just social; the Church is all one needs. Once Markus, de Lubac, and Milbank are placed near each other, and their thoughts on the supernatural are compared, the notion that Markus and Milbank occupy opposite poles is compelling. The former envisions the Church as disengaged from politics; the latter sees the Church as the source of a new political practice based on “sacramental and charitable bonds.”39 Milbank shares with Charles Taylor a commitment to the claim that it is a deviation within Latin Christianity that gives rise to the modern secular, although they otherwise disagree on the details. 40 In A Secular Age, Taylor asserts that the mark of a secular society is that believers can no longer enjoy a “simple” or “naïve” faith. The “conditions of belief” have changed such that Western Christians are now unable to believe without reservations. The genuine believer must concede, “I am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all doubt, untroubled by some objection—by some experience which won’t fit.”41 In sum: secularism means that our Christian experience is now shaped by a secular worldview. Hence the “titanic change” of secularism: “We have changed […] from a condition where most people lived ‘naïvely’ in a [Christian outlook] […] to one in which almost no one is capable of this.”42 How did this transformation come to pass? What is it about our inherited modes of thought and experience that prevented our religious worldviews from manifesting them freely and “naïvely”? Taylor’s answer is that we are living in a culture shaped by a history of a certain self-distortion of Latin Christianity. One might say that the problem with Taylor’s book is that he fails to offer a comprehensive theological alternative in the way Milbank does. Taylor seems content to invite his Christian readers to embrace a modern mode of faith that accommodates itself to contemporary culture. Milbank, like no other contemporary theologian, instead calls on theology to “position, qualify, or criticize other discourses.” If theology no longer seeks 39 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 433. 40 The main difference, according to Taylor, is that Milbank sees modern secular as an intellectual deviation within Latin Christian theology, that is, “changes in theoretical understanding, mainly among learned and related élites.” His own is instead more concerned with how secularity “emerges as a mass phenomenon.” Taylor, A Secular Age, 774–775. In his review of the book, Milbank basically conceded the point. John Milbank, “Review Article: A Closer Walk on the Wild Side: Some Comments on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,” Studies in Christian Ethics 22, no. 1 (2009), 100. 41 Taylor, A Secular Age, 11. 42 Taylor, A Secular Age, 3.

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to position, Milbank exhorts, “then it is inevitable that these discourses will position theology.”43

Augustinian Scholasticism One reason why historians rejected Markus’s argument of the ancient secular is well known and transparently addressed by Markus himself: the incoherence between a neutral space and a coercive state that is active in the field of religion.44 It is known that the greatest problem facing Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s political theology is Augustine’s endorsement of the civil authority’s role in promoting true worship, a role that enters into direct conflict with the supposed liberal orientation of the saeculum. Markus admitted that his interpretation of Augustine’s thought and of the autonomy of the secular order from the Church collided with Augustine’s preference for a use of the state’s coercive power.45 How is it possible to reconcile Markus’s Augustinian political theory with the Augustinian admonition regarding the use of civil authority in promoting true worship? How is it possible to, on one hand, harmonize Augustine’s view of political power as focused on earthly concerns and uncommitted to any “particular ultimate loyalty” and, on the other hand, to subscribe to the use of the state’s coercive power in promoting true worship? Markus recognized the incoherence but applied it to Augustine’s theologian framework, not to his own interpretation. 46 Yet, the case concerning the proper use of civil authority in promoting true worship is not closed. The matter is not whether the incoherence belongs to Augustine or Markus, rather whether this incoherence reveals something of Markus’s theory on the ancient secular. In his Theology and Social Theory, Milbank writes extensively about “desire.” He only tangentially connects this subject to his criticism toward Markus. Nevertheless, it is decisive to follow his line of thought. The starting point is Milbank’s account of Augustinian “directed desire, an ever-more-true orientation of our thoughts towards an infinite plenitude of love.”47 Milbank’s description of desire is similar to de Lubac’s: “desire for God, desiderium naturale videndi Deum.” This desire is “natural” in 43 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), 1. 44 Markus, Saeculum, 152. 45 Markus, Saeculum, 134. 46 Markus, Saeculum, 134. 47 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 304.

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the sense that it belongs to human nature. But human nature, de Lubac claims, is not simply natural: the natural contains its supernatural end, which is in effect the desire for God. Pure nature, in the sense of human nature without the supernatural ends, does not exist. Human nature is not isolated (or independent) from grace. Moreover, the desire belongs to human nature, that is, it is “in us” but is an infinite component and as such is not “of us.”48 The desire for God is an infinite inherency of a finite material body. How the desiderium naturale videndi Deum works, according to de Lubac, is it resembles Augustine. It is an important topic because it signals the rediscovery in modern theology and philosophy of Augustine’s reformulation of an old, celebrated Western tradition: the desire for mystical union beyond thought.49 That rediscovery led to historical study retrieving, in a non-dualistic fashion, what existed before the modern dualisms and separations. The rediscovery of Augustine’s mystical immanentism became the basis of a Christian alternative to the modern dualist or separatist thesis, or at least of a Christian critique of the Western theory of secularization. In Theology and Social Theory, Milbank proceeds for dozens of pages to discuss “desire” in the theological and philosophical realms then tracks the same in Augustine’s work. According to Milbank (who takes the idea from Rowan Williams), Augustine “indicates that the direction of desire is the key factor in determining whether or not a community will be truly just and united.”50 Thus, the desire for God becomes, with Augustine, the key element in the construction of a just community. Milbank explains that “in contrast to the true goal, and the true desire, stand the spurious goal and false desire.”51 Previously he had clarified that “to be virtuous, one must both ‘refer’ all to the infinite goal and find the right path, the right perspective and sequence for desire.”52 Thus, the false desire, that is sin, “is the failure to ‘refer’ our desire to God.”53 That failure brings Milbank 48 “Ce désir est en nous, oui, mais il n’est pas des nous.” See: de Lubac, Surnaturel: Études historiques, 488. 49 Henri de Lubac’s doctrine of grace and nature, argues David Grumett, is rooted in de Lubac’s critical engagement with Augustinianism. In advocating for the continuity of Augustine’s theology, Grumett argues, de Lubac made an important contribution to Augustine scholarship. See: Grumett, “De Lubac, Grace, and the Pure Nature Debate,” Modern Theology 32, no. 1 (2015), 123–146. 50 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 404. With regard to the reference to Williams, see: Rowan Williams, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God,” in Milltown Studies 19, no. 20 (1987), 55–72, 59–60. 51 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 440. 52 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 439. 53 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 439.

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to his final point, namely the discipline of human desire. This summary does not do justice to Milbank’s extremely nuanced line of reasoning, but I suspect the reader gets the point. The crux of the matter is the nature of the “desire,” whether it is “in” as well as “of” human nature, or only “in” human nature. The point to clarify is whether the desire is the desire for God or the desire for something else, including goodness. Milbank’s position is clear. On the other end, Markus does not address “desire;” he prefers to mention “virtue,” and the difference is not simply one of terminology. Markus defines “true and perfect virtue” as the virtue that brings, with the help of God’s grace, salvation. He continues by saying this does not allow one to believe that in Augustine, “all acts of virtue, to be virtuous, need to be perfectly virtuous.”54 In a previous section of this chapter, this passage was cited with reference to perfection; here it is cited with regard to the desire for God, that is, the alignment between human will and God’s will. It is this alignment that according to Milbank makes a community truly just and united, but no alignment is implicit in Markus’s phrase. On the contrary, Markus sustains, “an imperfect or relative version of justice can be found in all sorts of places.”55 In a subsequent passage, Markus refers to political action is terms of goodness: “its goodness [depends] on grace and all that is involved in the life of grace.”56 The goodness of political action depends on grace, not on the articulation or the dynamics, between human nature and the absolute component that is in human nature. In another passage, Markus states that in Augustine, people always act intentionally with reference to ultimate ends, which means that in the public sphere, no morally indifferent action is possible. In Markus, human nature is led by virtue, and virtue belongs to human nature and eventually allows human beings to act imperfectly—and being imperfectly just. The result is imperfect communities of men and women in which individuals reach a higher or lower level of goodness depending on grace; however, there is no alignment between human and divine wills, and the reason for this is that human nature is separated from grace. Grace is extrinsic to human nature. In Markus, to borrow some words from Charles Boyer, human nature “is a state in which man possesses all that belongs to his definition, everything necessary for the exercise of his faculties.”57 54 Markus, Secular, 43. 55 Markus, Secular, 43. 56 Markus, Secular, 44. 57 Charles Boyer, “Nature pure et surnaturel dans le ‘Surnaturel’ du Père de Lubac,” Gregorianum 28, nos. 2/3 (1947), 379–395, 387.

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In Milbank, Augustinian political theory is perfectly reconcilable with the Augustinian admonition regarding the use of civil authority in promoting true worship. The same is not true with Markus because Markus’s Augustine does not recognize the crucial importance of the alignment of human and divine wills in the making of just communities, since in his worldview, the world of human affairs is separate from the world of divine affairs. Grace works as an extemporary bridge between the two worlds.58 In other words, the inconsistency in Markus’s Augustine between a secular politics and a coercive use of that politics in promoting true worship for religious matters veils a more essential conflict between Augustine’s theology of the saeculum and his theology of providence. Augustine clearly affirms that God is at work in all times and places, for “everything is governed by his providence,” and only a fool would say that “his providence does not extend to these earthly matters.”59 There can be no justice and peace in human affairs without reference to the actions of grace, and this is all that the case concerning a proper use of civil authority is about. To be fair, Markus mentions “grace” several times and in a multiplicity of contexts. But the relationship between human nature and grace is depicted as a static state, and rightly so, as the notion of desire for God is missing. Providence does not act from above or from outside history, one should clarify, like an extraordinary event that changes the course of human history. Providence acts from within history and through each man and woman on earth. In Markus’s Augustine, there is little space for providence as a governing apparatus of human history. From this perspective, human history, and the secular, independent as it is from grace and 58 One may concede that, in Markus’s Augustine, there is the recognition of God’s salvific action in the life of the individual. But there certainly is no appreciation of administratio mundi, that is, the administration of creation. Augustine, Conf. VI, 7, 9–10: “nulla pugnacitas calumniosarum quaestionum per tam multa quae legeram inter se confligentium philosophorum extorquere mihi potuit, ut aliquando non crederem te esse quidquid esses, quod ego nescirem, aut administrationem rerum humanarum ad te pertinere.” In Augustine the cosmic administration is understood through the event of the incarnation. For Augustine’s theology of providence see: Elisa Dal Chiele, “Ricerche sul Lessico della Provvidenza in Agostino,” PhD dissertation, University of Cologne (Faculty of Philosophy), 2014; Christian Parma, Pronoia und Providentia: Der Vorsehungsbegriff Plotins und Augustins (Leiden: Brill, 1971); Annette Rascol, “La providence selon Saint Augustin,” in Alfred Vacant, Eugene Mangenot, and Emile Amann (eds.), Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, Paris 1936, vol. 25, 961–984; Norbert Scholl, “Untersuchungen zur Vorsehungslehre bei Plotin und Augustin,” PhD dissertation, Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (Faculty of Theology), 1960. 59 Augustine, De lib. arb. II.17: “Hinc etiam comprehenditur omnia prouidentia gubernari;” Ep. 184A.6: “Illi autem alii stulti non desunt, qui dixerunt: ‘non uidebit dominus’ [Ps 93:7], id est prouidentiam suam in haec terrena non tendit.”

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from the salvific supplement of the Church, remains isolated from the divine providential-administrative machine. In Markus’s representation of Augustine, salvation is placed at the end of history—actually, beyond history. “In this life,” he writes in an already mentioned passage, “what mattered was […] a continuing life of prayer, love, humility, and repentance.”60 But this implies the very neutralization of a human history concretely oriented toward salvation. The exclusion of a dynamic between natural spirit and grace within human nature, that is, the alignment between human will and God’s economy, transforms historical time into a suspended time in which any progress toward the eschaton is abolished and the parousia expected outside history. In Markus’s Augustine, one has not only the spatialization of the saeculum but also the secularization of the theology of history and the repression of the divine economy.

Neoplatonic Augustinianism Markus’s secular is internal to a conversation within Catholicism on the retrieval of Augustine. He belonged, based on the conclusions of the previous notes, to a stream of that retrieval, Augustinian Scholasticism. It is time to introduce another stream labeled Neoplatonic Augustinian. This stream, promoted mostly in France under the stimulus of the pioneering work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), could be seen as a reaction to modernity as well as to neo-scholasticism. In other worlds, the Neoplatonic Augustinianism of early twentieth-century Catholicism was the search for a third way between modernity and the doctrinal theology of the Church of that time. Émile Bréhier (1876–1952), a historian of philosophy who did not belong to that stream, identified two directions in which the transcendence is affirmed in the twentieth century, each mirroring one of the two ways in which integration between Christianity and secular thought was united in the Middle Ages. The two directions are Neo-Thomism (or neo-scholasticism) and Augustinianism. In the former, transcendence is “an external relation [with the faith].”61 The latter instead is “the principle less of a hierarchy between the forms of being than of an interior life; it fastens itself to Neoplatonism and to the Greek Fathers […] Its essential thesis is that the interior life, 60 Markus, Secular, 73. 61 Émile Bréhier, La Philosophie du Moyen Âge. Bibliothèque de l’évolution de l’humanité, synthèse collective; Deuxième section, VII: L’évolution intellectuelle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1937), 434.

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communion with oneself, is a way to God, a way to the transcendent.”62 For the sake of this book, the focus is mainly on two main figures, Blondel and de Lubac, as well as on de Lubac’s colleagues in the ressourcement movement. The first is responsible for a monumental gesture at the end of nineteenth century: the shift from the notion of supernatural as an external relation to an internal relation with faith. The second thematized the supernatural, in the first half of the twentieth century, in a way that changed the course of Christian thought. Blondel identified the modern dualisms, separations, and oppositions that were destroying Christian thought. De Lubac and his colleagues undertook a historical study for the retrieval of what existed before such dualisms. In the years before World War I, Blondel experienced the same interior conflict that Markus would decades later. Blondel was a philosopher and member of the secular academia and he wanted to be taken seriously by his colleagues, but he was also a serious scholar of Christian theology and a devoted member of the Catholic Church. He was also part of a highly secularized society as well as an obedient member of a highly dogmatic Church. The issue was the participation of a believer who supposed the supernatural character of Christian religion, in modern public space, was marked by a sense of neutrality and autonomy from the realm of faith and by a sense of historical and cultural relativity. The problem was the separation between the immanent secular and the transcendental religious. Gifted with a rare sensibility, he detected a dangerous dualism at the roots not only of the secular–religious divide but also within Christian theology. The former is self-evident. The latter, that is, the dualism within Christian theology, was a result of among other things the First Vatican Council’s teaching regarding a duplex ordo cognitionis. The latter refers to a “twofold order of knowledge [that is] distinct both in principle and also in object,” according to the dogmatic constitution of that 1870 Council on the Catholic faith, Dei filius.63 In brief, the duplex ordo corresponded to the epistemological distinction between faith and reason. In turn, this distinction marked the borders between theology on one side and philosophy and history on the other. The former presupposed the Christians truths and investigated the content of revelation; the latter remained outside the truths of revelation and relied on the kind of knowledge that reason can reach by itself. The duplex ordo is the separation of the order of the divine from the order of 62 Émile Bréhier, Les thèmes actuels de la philosophie. Initiation philosophiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 43. 63 Council Fathers, Dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith, Dei Filius.

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nature. No conflict can be detected, according to neo-scholasticism, between the two orders. In the field of history, the duplex ordo amounts to a specific form of dualism: the separation between history and theology, life and spirit, action and contemplation. While seeking to protect the divine by separating it conceptually from the natural, scholastic theologians exiled the Church in a one-sidedly supernaturalistic order and set the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment free to develop their scientific strategies in the natural order. Independent of a supernatural end, historians could conceive human history as totally secularized, part of an order of creation that is operating independently from God, governed by natural rules that can be known through scientific investigation. Accordingly, historians engaged history as a natural space, separated by the divine order. Historians approach history as “pure nature,” that is, considered without reference to grace or to the supernatural destiny of a personal union with God. Thus, historians also appropriated history as a scientific rather than a theological category because theological categories provided them the justification to engage history scientifically. In a kind of two-story view of the world, with a self-sufficient “natural” world at the bottom and an added “supernatural” world at the top, history—as well as philosophy, politics, and economics—became explorations of the natural world and the nature of human beings, to be conducted without any reference to God. Proof for the existence of God was offered on the basis of natural reason, and reason could go from that to revealed and supernatural truths. Catholic theology’s exile from history resulted in a mutual estrangement of the Church and the world. Accordingly, theology allowed modern history to separate the orders of nature and grace, a tendency that expresses itself in the development of a theory of history separated from theology and a theology separated from history. This history/theology dualism operating in Catholicism had enormous implications for both the theological and historical levels. At the theological level, a natural sphere could run autonomously—irrespective of the supernatural end of redemption—to render the experience of salvation a total gift. At the historical level, the implication of separating the order of natural from the order of divine was a self-contained and self-sufficient notion of history. History was understood as natural history and became a legitimate object of scientific investigation. Blondel was a good, devoted Christian but found the synthesis between the two orders conflictual in the highly polarized reality of the French Third Republic, which was built on both a secularized philosophy and a dogmatic Christianity. Through the eyes of the young Blondel, immersed as he was in writing his doctoral dissertation at the École Normal in Paris (successfully

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defended in 1893), late nineteenth-century France was a society in which every person, ordinary people as well as intellectuals, was the carrier of a divided soul. France was a reality where the secular and the religious, the human and the divine, seemed to be at odds. How is it possible combine the two spheres of Blondel’s existence without doing any wrong to either? Blondel’s decision was to restrain himself, dodging any option to solve the tension by prioritizing one pole over the other. Instead, he left unresolved the tension between the two poles, the secularized philosophy and the dogmatic doctrine. As a result, Blondel could articulate a highly sophisticated third way between secularism and clericalism. On one hand, faith and religion are not superstructures added to the self-sufficient world of reason and philosophy. On the other, the world of reason and philosophy is not self-sufficient. Blondel argued not just against resolutely secular philosophers who recognized the greatness and immensity of their discipline, but not its limits. He also argued against religious authorities and theologians who believed they could dictate the agenda to philosophy with no consideration for the freedom of human reason. This marks a fundamental choice by Christianity, he believed, to recognize that freedom is intrinsic to Man’s nature, and that to act subjectively is therefore to align with God’s will. Blondel’s tendency to mark the limits of philosophy (from within) makes him a modern philosopher in line with the critical line of philosophical thought that reflects on itself (metaphilosophy) and recognizes its inadequacy for dealing with the ultimate questions. For Blondel, who kept himself rigorously at that intersection of philosophy and theology as a philosopher, philosophers can consider Christian mysteries as a theological counterpart of philosophical enigmas, that is, they remain as unknowable to mere reason. What does history have to do with Christianity as a supernatural religion, a religion that transcends not only the empirical but also the rational? Marrou’s answer to this is the tertium quid, a point of encounter of nature and divine, the overlapping reality between secular and religion. Blondel, however, perceived the hidden existence of the spiritual within the evidence of the practical, human existence. He did not look up to the sky in search for God; he discovered God within. Blondel’s “shift” is manifested in his Augustinian turn. If one follows Blondel, history assumes the possibility of the supernatural not imposed from without by an external authority but coming from within, as a supernatural life.64 In the first book of the 64 Michael J. Kerlin, “Maurice Blondel, Philosophy, Prayer, and the Mystical,” in Charles J. T. Talar (ed.), Modernists and Mystics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 76.

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Confessions, Saint Augustine famously addresses God with these words: “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This Augustinian theme of the restless heart had for centuries been the subject of French religious reflection, at least since the time of Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century. Inspired in part by Augustine, Blondel recovered this tradition of interiority in which the relationship between God and Man is both internal and external to human consciousness. In his words, the supernatural enters concretely and historically into the natural order through “the afference of the external gift [and] the reality of an internal afference.” God’s grace is coming from both inside and outside human consciousness.65 To put it differently, against the option of both secular philosophers, who pay no attention to the supernatural, and strict neo-scholastic theologians, who see God as communicating with human beings only from without through evidence (miracles, prophecies) and external authorities, Blondel took a basically Augustinian position. Accordingly, he stressed the interior fact, the infinite that is inside the human heart. This is the supernatural that Blondel had in mind. He recognized the crucial importance of the external forms of revelation (Scripture and Church’s official teaching) but refused to limit the human response to a matter of intellectual obedience. God’s grace operates both inside the human heart and outside the human mind. Blondel reframed his understanding of the dual source in terms of “double afference” of the supernatural, or to borrow a line from René Virgoulay, “the reality of the supernatural surpasses and unites at once and at the same time the lived supernatural and the known supernatural”66 Thus, the supernatural is both the lived supernatural, the reality of interiority, and the known supernatural, the external gift. The original framework of Christianity maintained a relationship of unity in distinction between Man and God. When Augustine wrote his famous incipit to the Confessions, he was not indulging in a piece of well-crafted literary prose. He was making a precise theological point. He was stating 65 Maurice Blondel and Joannes Wehrle (Henri de Lubac, ed.), Correspondance: Maurice Blondel–Joannes Wehrle, vol. 2 (Paris: Aubier, 1969), 383–384. The term “afference,” which figure prominently in the “Testis” essays, was drawn from the science of neurophysiology. Blondel had appropriated the term from the following source: Alfred Fouillée, “Le Sentiment de l’effort et la conscience de l’action,” Revue philosophique 28 (December 1889), 561–582. Blondel read Fouillée’s paper while working on his dissertation. See: Peter Henrici, “Les Notes-Semaille de Blondel,” L’Action: une dialectique du salut, Colloque du centenaire Aix-en-Provence – Mars 1993. Textes rassemblés par M. J. Coutagne (Paris: Beauchesne, 1994), 17–42. 66 René Virgoulay, L’action de Maurice Blondel, 1893: Relecture pour un centenaire, Bibliothèque des Archives de philosophie (Paris: Beauchesne, 1992), 295.

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that the creature cannot be separated from its creator; creation cannot be disentangled from its creator. Creation does not stand alongside God or even “outside” of God, and yet creation paradoxically enjoys its own autonomy—its own otherness from God’s being. Creation is not autonomous and yet it is. This paradoxical condition—creation is contingent, yet it is autonomous—that contradicts the principle of non-contradiction is the result of the incarnation of God through Jesus Christ and the simultaneous divinization of creation. To put it differently, this paradoxical condition is the fruit of the dual nature of God and therefore of Man and the rest of creation. This is the supernatural as mystery; this is the supernatural in terms of relationship of unity as it evolved and established itself in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The theme of Blondel’s philosophy is the human being in action, which in Blondel’s view comprehends life and spirit. To follow is a comment from Oliva Blanchette, an esteemed translator and interpreter of Blondel: What Blondel did see, however, was that philosophy had to do with the life of spirit, his own as well as that of other rational beings, even when that life and that spirit included strong doses of religion such as he had learned early in his life at home and at his parish church, and in his own reading in the Catholic tradition and Scriptures. While others with a similar religious upbringing downplayed religion as they went deeper into philosophy or the modern scientif ic way of thinking, in order to deal only with matters within the power of reason to investigate, Blondel took a broader view that included what remained an integral part of his life and spirit, part of what he had to think of as a philosopher in reflecting on his life. For him the life of faith and the life of reason could not be conceived as two separate lives. Both had to do with a single destiny for every human being as well as for himself, so that neither could do without the other. This was the source of his lifelong study of philosophy as philosophy of Catholic or supernatural religion.67

It is a long quote, but it says it all. What is “spirit”? Like other French Catholic intellectuals, Blondel was influenced by Henri Bergson. In fact, Bergson popularized the theme of spirit in philosophy. Bergson argued that the process of evolution is ignited by a vital impulse that unstoppably breaks through to higher levels. This vital impulse, this élan vital, is a form of 67 Oliva Blanchette, “Why We Need Maurice Blondel,” Communio 38 (Spring 2011), 138–167.

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immanent creative activity. In his later works, Bergson acknowledged the existence of a transcendent creative activity, too. Blondel came to see this élan vital in terms of a natural spirit and to believe that the possibility of supernatural life corresponds (here I borrow another sentence from Blanchette) to “a quest for the infinite, an aspiration at once congenital and inefficacious by itself, for a knowledge that saturates and a fruition that leaves nothing to be desired.”68 Secular scholars recognize the emergence of religion as a human search for the infinite. This is not what Blondel had in mind when he linked élan vital and Christianity. Actually, he rejected the possibility of an emergence of the supernatural arising from human beings or by human means, exclusively from below. Blondel denied this possibility in categorical terms: No, Christianity does not emerge from nature by a subconscious and spontaneous evolution. No, it is not an emanation of the religious conscience of humanity. It proceeds from a positive intervention and a gratuitous and miraculous condescension of God.69

In Blondel, the search of the infinite is not caused by “the serenity of an emancipation through speculation” but rather “by the presence of the infinite within us.”70 It is such a presence that activates a dialectic of human will that in vain attempts to pair its concrete manifestation with its endless natural élan. The dialectic mirrors the incommensurability between what Blondel named the “willing will” (volonté voulante) and the “willed will” (volonté voulue). The “willing will” is the limitless aspiration to reach the infinite that is never permanently extinguished by the “willed will,” which is the concrete illustration of willing. According to Blondel, It is impossible not to recognize the insufficiency of the natural order in its totality and not to feel an ulterior need. It is impossible to find within oneself something to satisfy this religious need. It is necessary, and it is impracticable.71 68 Oliva Blanchette, Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010), 682. 69 Although the editorial was published anonymously, the effective writer was Blondel. Maurice Blondel (under the pseudonym La rédaction), “L’Encyclique Pascendi Dominici Gregis,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 155 (October, 1907), 7. 70 The quote is from James Le Grys, “The Christianization of Modern Philosophy according to Maurice Blondel,” Theological Studies 54, September (1993), 480. 71 Blondel, L’Action: Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique, 297.

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“It is impossible,” at that point, “not to feel an ulterior need. It is impossible to find within oneself something to satisfy this religious need.” Human life is affected by the natural desire for the supernatural, and nature is unable to satisfy such a desire. Human life is naturally oriented toward the supernatural as its own completion.72 The ontological vocation of humanity is supernatural. Unable as it is to go beyond the limit of the natural order, human life (or human action) experiences the necessity of going further and the impracticability of doing so by itself. What brings human beings to be naturally oriented toward the supernatural is neither the human spirit, the élan vital, which is a natural spirit, nor an external authoritative revelation brought to him/her by a philosophy positively influenced by faith. For Blondel, neither of these two approaches encapsulates the supernatural orientation of the human being; it is rather the combined reality of both the internal fact of hidden grace at work in the depths of the human spirit and the external fact of the revealed supernatural. How the supernatural relates to the natural in history is not limited to the supernatural fulfillment, divinely revealed through the organs of tradition and Scripture, but it broadens to the internal fulfillment. The point of encounter of nature and the supernatural, between human action and divine action, is interiority. In the words of religious scholar Phyllis H. Kaminski, “the transcendent god, source and end of being, is immanent to human action through the Divine Mediator.”73 The Divine Mediator, that is, the immanent Christ, works in the heart of each human being so that all human beings participate in Christian economy more by acts that are aligned to the interior supernatural than by thoughts that conform to external dictum. The Christian economy, that is, human history, cannot be subordinated to what is explicitly known by revelation. Blondel identified not only an interior reality of grace in human existence but also in creation. How does the transcendent meet the immanent without risking either naturalizing the former or divinizing the latter? How can God be in the world and the world be in God without falling into the temptations of either secularization or paganism? Blondel saw Christ as the mediation 72 In other words, nature is not regarded as complete in itself; it is rather regarded as in a kind of anticipation of revelation that will complete human existence. Thus, revelation is more important for natural thinking than people usually believe. Yet, revelation is a gift, and therefore the question can be raised: how can one anticipate something that has not yet arrived? Of course, the answer is that revelation has always been latent. It is impossible, in fact, for God to create without creating human beings, without orientating human beings back to Him. 73 Phyllis H. Kaminski, “Seeking Transcendence in the Modern World,” in Darrell Jodock (ed.), Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115–141, 140.

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between the immanent and the transcendental, in the same terms of the formula that the Council of Chalcedon adopted for Christology: nature and the divine must be interrelated without “confusion” and without “separation.” “Without confusion” means that each must preserve its own identity, yet together the two form a unity. Looking at various Pauline texts, such as “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17), as sources of inspiration, Blondel conceived Christ as a universal mediator who united humanity and all creation (visible and invisible, nature and the divine) in Himself. Christ is the substantial bond that unifies (without confusion) earth and heaven from within, so to speak, not from above. Christ is the principle of union (in distinction) as well as a synonym for action. Blondel defined this view of Christ, “Panchristism,” a form of “cosmic theantricism” (i.e., the theandric nature of the Word made flesh, where humanity and divinity are united in distinction, extended to the whole cosmos), according to which nothing in the universe, whether intelligent, living, or material, achieved a stable existence or reached its perfection without the intervention of the Incarnate Word, “solidifier of the universe” (Colossians 1:15–20).74 Christ is not only the substantial bond but also the solidifier of the universe; He is not a static but a dynamic, active force within creation. Christ, with His theandric nature, grants internal consistency upon the creation’s actions in their various ramifications, including the human ones. Thus, action needs to be framed as “sacramental action,” action that operates as a unifying force at both the distinct orders of nature and the divine. The human demand for the supernatural (as Augustine meant by the phrase totum exigit te, qui fecit te) cannot be ignored, even though its essence may be beyond the scope of history.75 Indeed, every human action definable as such contains implicit indications of a divine action over the course to be followed. Action, and therefore history, is the mysterious integration of the two distinct, autonomous freedoms. One is f inite, but open, exigent, and capable of infinite. The other is infinite, but respectful, friendly, and supportive of finitude. When Augustine wrote that God is at work in all times and places, for “everything is governed by his providence,” he was not implying an extrinsic divine action in human affairs.76 When he claimed that only a fool would say that “his providence does not extend to these earthly matters,” 74 Pierre de Cointet, “Le Mediateur,” in Rene Virgoulay (ed.), Le Christ De Maurice Blondel (Paris: Desclee, 2003), 147–186, 161. 75 Augustine, Sermo 34, 7. 76 Augustine, De lib. arb. II.17. “Hinc etiam comprehenditur omnia prouidentia gubernari.” Translation: “from this one understands that everything is governed by providence.”

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he meant a providence that operates from within, not from outside.77 From Blondel’s perspective, followed in this by de Lubac and the ressourcement movement, Augustine’s theology of the saeculum is consistent with his teaching concerning the ultimate end of divine providence. De Lubac and his colleagues considered the implications of Blondel’s work in their own theological work. Two of these implications are crucial for this study. First, the interpretation of Christ as cosmic Christ, namely the notion of Christus totus, implied that to some degree everything is sacred. The theme was only briefly addressed in the previous chapter: it is the Pauline “in omnibus omnia Deus” (“so that God may be all in all,” Corinthians 15:28). The cosmic Christ, Blondel’s Panchristism, recovers a patristic idea of Christ as a continual act of communion without annihilation (creation becomes united with God while remaining itself) and reintroduces Christ as the Prime Mover of creation (and history) in scholarship. In turn, theology of creation becomes an alternative of the modern interpretation of God as being namely a distant, passive, and motionless divinity, and that was alien to Gregory and his contemporaries. Second, the retrieval of Chalcedon brought the relationship between nature and the divine, nature and grace, back to the center of Christian reflection. Although de Lubac initially thematized the relationship in terms of “nature” and “the supernatural,” he then regretted his choice of terms, only to replace them with the phrase “Christian mystery.”78 As is well known, de Lubac’s Surnaturel focuses particularly on the danger of extrinsicism, which is the idea of a realm of the supernatural that is separated from an independent realm of nature (previously mentioned as two-story universe). The separatist theology of the supernatural and natural orders was an imperceptible and yet decisive departure from the patristic–medieval conception of unity of natural and supernatural. In fact, the distinction between natural and supernatural that scholastic theologians introduced ruined the patristic–medieval understanding of history as 77 Augustine, Ep. 184A.6: “Illi autem alii stulti non desunt, qui dixerunt: non uidebit dominus, id est prouidentiam suam in haec terrena non tendit.” 78 “I should also have been more specific, with respect to ‘independent’ thinkers and historians of philosophy even more than with respect to Scholastics, about the sense in which the word ‘nature’ was taken: it referred to a concept of the ‘supernatural’ and not to an idea that would be opposed, for example, within philosophic thought, to ideas such as that of person or history or culture, etc.” In retrospect, he acknowledges that his choice of the term “supernatural” does not sufficiently consider the “historic revelation or of creation in Christ and for Christ.” So de Lubac agrees with Henri de Bouillard that this term should have been instead “the Christian mystery.” See: de Lubac, At the Service of the Church, trans. by Anne Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 199.

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operating according to an inner orientation toward a supernatural destiny. Thus, Scholasticism rendered eminent service to Catholicism, defending the gratuity of the supernatural order of grace from the natural order of reason (a reason that is purified from the added supernatural end), while effecting a separation between the supernatural and reason that eventually came to be taken for granted. In a theological system based on the separation between the divine and the natural, the Catholic Church prided itself on being above history while the natural world became a place divorced from God. In the early twentieth century, the traditional interpretation of Aquinas by Cardinal Cajetan emphasized the discontinuity between nature and grace, to the point that the notion of the state of pure nature was generally accepted. In this way, nature was isolated from grace, the world from God, and philosophy and science from theology. De Lubac argued that the option of a purely natural condition does not exist and in fact sustained the opposite, that is, the continuity between the natural and grace: the interpenetration of nature and grace. In this regard, von Balthasar would say that de Lubac attempted to recover the ancient intuition that the transcendent is already contained in the immanent. [de Lubac’s goal] was to burst the bonds of the whole sphere of nature to reach that of revelation—which had already occurred in fact and which indeed was the very foundation of the whole sphere of nature in the first place.79

De Lubac’s goal consisted of recovering an outlook on life that brings together natural philosophy and supernatural religion. He insisted repeatedly that there is an essential heterogeneity, with real continuity, between the natural and divine orders. Accordingly, his aim is to articulate a Catholic reality that can operate at the intersection between nature and the divine, without reducing either. To put it differently, de Lubac (like Blondel before him) claims that to end the crisis between reason and faith, or the secular state and Catholic religion, the immanent order and the transcendent need to be together as one in their irreducible and inseparable distinction from one another. This perspective, further deepened by the ressourcement theologians before the Second Vatican Council and ultimately absorbed within the conciliar documents of Vatican II, would become known as the universality of grace.

79 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 341.

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Saeculum Retold

Introduction In this chapter I take a second look at Markus’s interpretation of the Augustinian saeculum to show how the scholarly interpretation of Augustine’s saeculum changes as soon as the extrinsic orientation is corrected. The scope, in other words, is to make manifest the effect of the correction, not to offer a complete, novel interpretation of Augustine. The reader should be aware of this limited scope in addressing this chapter. I offer an alternative interpretation, an interpretation in which his extrinsic perspective is corrected, and a sacramental worldview is re-established. The reader will be the judge. In my opinion, Markus’s interpretation is, in the end, weak: he places the Augustine of The City of God against the Augustine of The Literal Meaning of Genesis. If, as Barth would say, the whole world is in Christ, then the relationship between the human order and the divine order cannot limit itself to a simple matter of subordination. In my interpretation, the entire relationship between the human order and the divine order is re-established, and only general eschatology, “the sovereign providence of the one Lord,” is lost. The cautionary note is particularly necessary with regard to a couple of aspects of my interpretation. First, Augustine’s theory of providence is presented in this chapter as if providence is the only driving force in the evolution of human affairs. This is an approximation. Augustine was conscious that providence plays a crucial role in directing human affairs toward salvation, but providence neither expropriates nor limits humanity’s freedom. Providence and human nature cooperate and mutually adjust to each other. Human nature, in its own autonomous movement—namely in its freedom—operates in the flux of time, although conserving an orientation toward providence. Second, the ancient secular is, for Markus, a third, neutral space between the sacred and the profane. In this chapter, I address this statement. I show that the third, neutral space is not only the result of Markus’s interpretation of Augustine but also of assumptions that may be questioned. In particular, I focus on Markus’s ambivalence about the

Beltramini, E., Desecularizing the Christian Past. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463721882_ch07

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saeculum, which is supposed to be a time, but which Markus sometimes handles as a space. I do not offer an entire reinterpretation of the saeculum.

Prophecy and Sacred Institutions In the previous chapters I showed the characters, sources, and motivations of Markus’s extrinsic orientation. Here I return to the extrinsic orientation itself. In Markus’s words, The earlier assimilation of all order, human, social, political, to a single cosmic order which manifested the eternal law is now decisively rejected. Such order as there is in human affairs, in the societies of men, their arrangements and their historical careers, is no longer part of a cosmic or natural order. But, like the natural order, this, too, falls under the sovereign providence of the one Lord.1

It could not be said more clearly: the cosmic order, the sacramental ontology, the unity in distinction of nature and divine is rejected. Even though there remains a kind of subordination of the earthly to the heavenly, this does not impact human organization because it operates in the order of wills independently of the supernatural. The divine sovereignty is in place but impotent; the government of the civitas operates autonomously. Markus made the saeculum free from God through a three-step process: he connected the government of the civitas to the Kingdom of God; then he established the invisibility of the Kingdom, from which he implied, finally, the autonomy of the government of the civitas. The reader will not find the first statement in Markus’s writings; however, it is the supposed relationship between the government of the civitas and the Kingdom that justifies the other two statements. It is because the Kingdom of God is severed from the government of the civitas that the government of the civitas is autonomous. Markus framed this severance in nuanced fashion. In Markus’s Augustinian saeculum, the world organizes itself outside the parameters of Church, theology, and religion. It is the secular saeculum, the neutral, independent, and secularized time on this side of the eschaton. In Markus’s Augustinian saeculum, not only does the order of politics operate independently of the supernatural, but the entire relationship between the human order and the divine order is severed. Humans act in their neutral space as if grace does 1 Markus, Saeculum, 91.

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not act, individual eschatology is not pursued, the Spirit does not blow, the Church has no spiritual purpose, and more importantly, God’s plan is suspended. But is it really suspended? In his seminal 1970 work, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine, Markus framed his argument in a specific fashion: for Augustine, temporal events are seen to be the unfolding in time of a metahistorical narrative that exists beyond time as God’s eternal plan for humankind. This metahistorical narrative in turn intertwines the historical narratives of the quarrels of the predestinated members of the “city of God” with those of the “earthly city.” For Augustine, therefore, sacred history as the res gestae is operative. Augustine clearly stated that God is at work in all times and places, for “there is nothing that is not subject to the administration of divine providence.”2 But a fine distinction can be drawn between the res gestae, history as divine salvific work, and historia rerum gestarum, the writing of history. In Markus’s opinion, Augustine’s distinction between sacred history and secular history is not a distinction between periods of historical facta, but rather a distinction in historical interpretations. Sacred history is, in Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s thought, biblical history.3 Accordingly, biblical (or sacred) history is the written history, the events as documented in the Scripture, that were written under divine inspiration. On the contrary, the events not recorded in the Scripture fall outside historia sacra and belong to secular history. Augustine did not use terms such as historia saecularis or historia profana for non-sacred history, but Markus believes the term “secular history” can work as a synonym. 4 He based his interpretation on an application of the subtraction theory, to borrow the definition from Taylor, according to which the secular is what it is left when the supernatural is taken away. In Markus’s words, “as a first rough approach to the distinction between sacred and secular history we can define sacred history as the story of God’s saving work, secular history as all the rest, all that is left, so to speak, when we subtract from history the strand singled out as ‘sacred’.”5 It is clear that Markus used “sacred” as a part, not as the whole. For him, the sacred is what I called “the supernatural.” His choice left him without a word to indicate the total reality, something I termed “the sacred.” It seems a question of terminology, but it is rather 2 Quoted in Markus, Saeculum, 11. 3 To be more precise, Markus pointed out that biblical history is sacred history: “he [Augustine] endowed the biblical history with a privileged status, which I have, for convenience, labelled as ‘sacred’.” Markus, Saeculum, 11. 4 Markus, Saeculum, 1–21. 5 Markus, Saeculum, 11.

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revealing of a specific worldview in which the supernatural (my term) is an addendum to the secular. This is the first observation. The second refers to the fact that for Markus, the supernatural can eventually be taken away so that the secular stands alone and is autonomous from the supernatural. It is true that the distinction between sacred and secular history is, in Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s thought, a matter of accounts not facts. In Markus’s words, “in calling a strand of history ‘sacred,’ no special claim is made on behalf of the mode of divine action in the events narrated and no special quality is attached to these events. The special quality resides in the narrative. […] The privileged status of sacred history derives from the privileged status of the biblical authors and hence of their stories, rather than from the nature of the events they tell of.”6 In Markus’s interpretation of Augustine, it is not that humanity entered into a new phase of sacred history, rather that it entered into a new phase of interpretation of sacred history. This distinction between facts and interpretations, however, forces Markus to introduce a further distinction, that between uninspired and inspired recounts of God’s saving work found in Scripture. Augustine believed, and this is Markus’s main point, that we live in a post-biblical time, in which no certitude of supernatural inspiration can be taken for granted. The post-biblical time between the resurrection of Christ and His return is the period of time Augustine called the saeculum. No biblical prophets, namely the authors of the prophetically written biblical writings, inhabit this post-biblical time. When the biblical prophets are silent about an event, we must keep silent as well.7 This means that human beings cannot explain the events of secular history. It means that the rise and fall of kingdoms and civilizations are still the result of God’s salvific purposes for human beings, but human beings no longer have visibility of such purposes. What they see is only the rise and fall of kingdoms and civilizations. To put it differently, there is still progression through the ages from the (pre-temporal) beginning to the final consummation, but this progression operates at a trans-historical level. At an historical level, there is instead no progress because God distributes earthly power to members of both the heavenly and earthly cities in accordance with an order to events that is hidden from human speculation but known perfectly by God. Thus, no link can be established between the rise and fall of kingdom and civilization and God’s purposes, not because this link is unreal, but because it is out of sight. The saeculum is merely the time in 6 Markus, Saeculum, 14–15. 7 Markus, Saeculum, 159.

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which the conflict between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena is taking place. Therefore, post-biblical time is essentially opaque to theological scrutiny; all history, in the sense of historical accounts, is necessarily secular history, history from a secular perspective. In denying the applicability of any supernatural framework to post-biblical history, Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s thought has important political implications, the most important of which is that no politics can claim sacral pretentions. Therefore, no political structure prior to the parousia can be seen as a divine instrument of the Christianization of the world. For Eusebius of Caesarea, the target of Augustine’s critique, the redeemed civilization has been realized within the Roman Empire, but for Augustine nothing can be said about the redeeming status of any kingdom or civilization, including the Roman Empire. No societal reality can be identified with the City of God or the City of Man in the saeculum. Writing the City of God in the fall of the Roman Empire, Augustine discerned the risk of applying prophetic interpretations to kingdoms and civilizations this side of the eschaton. According to Markus, Augustine desacralized the Roman Empire and with it any political society: in Augustine’s view, “the Empire is not to be seen in terms either of the messianic image of the Eusebian tradition or of the apocalyptic image as the anti-Christ of the Hippolytan tradition. The Empire has become no more than a historical, empirical society with a chequered career, whose vicissitudes are not to be directly correlated with the favor of the gods, pagan or Christian, given in return for services rendered.”8 These are Markus’s words, and he was right: Augustine rejected Eusebius of Caesarea’s view that God’s heavenly kingdom had become manifest in the Roman Empire. The very terms of Augustine’s critique of the sacralisation of the Roman Empire implied eschatological conflict prematurely revealed in visible, identifiable form. All we can know is that the two cities are always present in any historical society; but we can never—except in the light of a biblical revelation in the unique strand of “sacred history”—identify the locus of either.9

No kingdom or civilization in history is inextricably linked with the ultimate Christian triumph because no kingdom or civilization has a privileged place

8 Markus, Saeculum, 55. 9 Markus, Saeculum, 101–102.

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in God’s inscrutable providence. No kingdom, no civilization, no society, and no political regime can be labeled as realized eschatology.

General and Individual Eschatology In Markus’s interpretation of Augustine, God’s plan is made invisible and, consequently, severed from human history. It amounts to making the separation in God between His power and its exercise, between His formal sovereignty and His effective government, between the Kingdom and the government. Markus’s interpretation de facto consists of a limitation of the divine power. Surely, both the temporal order and the natural order fall “under the sovereign providence of the one Lord.” But because of the invisibility of the eschatological categories in human history, this one Lord reigns but he does not govern. For Markus, sovereign providence is severed from the government of men and women because it is no longer visible; it is no longer visible because humanity lives in the saeculum as an unintelligible time. In Markus, therefore, the darkness blinds human beings and deprives God of being the power that acts in human history. For Markus, “this invisibility of the presence of eschatological categories in historical realities is the foundation of Augustine’s theology of the saeculum.”10 It means that God is unable to govern the world by means of divine ministers and human officials. Now, Markus said nothing about the angels. The angels, in the Christian tradition of angelology, serve as God’s ministers. Consequently, scholars can understand Markus’s view as if he was interrupting the divine government of the world somewhere between the angels and humanity. The question is whether the invisibility of the eschatological categories implies the autonomy of the government of men and women from God’s sovereignty. Is this a correct interpretation of Augustine? I previously mentioned that when Markus allocates the potestas to the civitas, and not to God, he disrupts the correlation between potestas and auctoritas, that is, between the divine government of creation and the Kingdom of God. Moreover, in his attempt to make the world autonomous from the sacred, he leaves the potestas without auctoritas, government without legitimacy. It is time to return to this topic and explain that, in Augustine, the divine power is both sovereign power (the Kingdom) and governmental power (the government of creation). The point is that in 10 Markus, Saeculum, 151.

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Augustine, the government of the civitas is included in the much more comprehensive divine government of creation. In his writings, Augustine makes clear that no autonomous order from God is possible: God is, in his own being, ordo, order. However, God is order not in the sense of substance, but in the sense of activity. It is by ordering, namely governing the world, that God is order.11 To put it differently, order, that is, the order by means of which God has arranged creatures, does not belong to the realm of creation but of the creator. In his work on the literal meaning of the book of Genesis, Augustine explains that “these three, measure, number, weight, in which, as it is written, God has arranged all things;” they were not created but somehow existed before the whole natural cosmos was created.12 He goes on by clarifying that this activity of arranging is God; or, to put it better, that God is order not as a substance but in the sense of an arranging, that is, an activity. Agamben synthesizes Augustine’s thought as follows: “the being of God, as order, is structurally ordinatio, that is, praxis of government and activity that arranges according to measure, number, and weight.”13 Governing His creation, governing the world, is what God is. God is the perpetual activity of government. Therefore, it is in Himself that God (the Trinity) bridges the distance between divine sovereignty and government of the world. It is in God that the articulation between power and execution of power takes form. It is in God that the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the government of creation is articulated. This incessant activity of ordering, arranging, and ultimately governing the world is necessary because, in the words of Augustine, “the world will not be able to go on standing for a single moment, if God withdraws from it his government.”14 According to Augustine, the substance of all creatures is neither autonomous from God nor part of the being of God; rather, the being of God is government, and it is thanks to such an incessant activity of governing that all creatures are. Roman Catholic theologian Simon Oliver elegantly frames this theology of participation: What this amounts to is a crucial claim: there is only one real existent, and that is God. When God creates, there are not suddenly two foci of being or two “things,” God plus creation. Creation does not stand alongside God or 11 Giorgio Agamben offers a detailed analysis of this specific element of Augustine’s theology of creation in Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2011), 88–91. 12 De Genesi ad litteram, 4, 3, 7–8. 13 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 89. 14 De Genesi ad litteram, 4, 12, 22.

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even “outside” God. Crucially, in no sense is creation autonomous because creation is, at every moment, ex nihilo. It is suspended over the nihil, held in existence by participating in existence itself. So creation has no existence that is self-standing and properly its own. Rather, it receives its being at every moment from an infinite and gratuitous divinity. Creation’s existence is, in this sense, “improper.” Yet even the very participation of creation in God is “improper” to creation; it does not belong to creation by right or power, but is always the gratuitous gift of God.15

All creatures are as the result of His incessant operation, His activity of governing. The divine, perpetual activity of government bridges the gap between formal sovereignty and administration of creation, between the Kingdom of God and the government of the world. It must be clear at this point that an autonomous reign of creation, independent from the divine activity of governing, is foreign to Augustine’s mind. The government of the world, and therefore of men and women, is a divine prerogative. The invisibility of the Kingdom to human eyes is irrelevant when it comes to the government of the world. According to Markus, the invisibility of the Kingdom implies the severance of the Kingdom from the secular, the self-governed space of men and women. But Augustine’s theology of creation makes this interpretation highly improbable: by governing the world, God makes the world possible. The invisibility of the eschatological categories does not stop the divine government from embracing the whole of creation, including the civitas. In De ordine, Augustine described this pervasive divine government with an example: the noise of a mouse that wakes up Licentius during the night belongs to the same order as the letters that will come out of the conversation between Licentius and Augustine. The human order is part of the divine government of the world. Who will deny, great God, that you administer all things with order? […] The little mouse has come out in order for me to wake up […] And if one day what we told each other were transcribed into letters and became known to people […] certainly the fluttering of leaves in the fields and the movement of the unworthy little animals in the houses would be as necessary as those letters in the order of things.16 15 Simon Oliver, “Henri de Lubac and Radical Orthodoxy,” in Jordon Hillebert (ed.), TT Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac (London: TT Clark, 2017), 393–418, 401. 16 De ord., I, 5, 14.

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The divine power is both sovereign power and governmental power: it means that, for Augustine, the government of the civitas is included in the very comprehensive divine government of creation. But it also means that there is no severance between the Kingdom and the divine government; the order of the supernatural is not separated from the order of nature. The Kingdom is somehow correlated to the divine government: God, who lives hidden in heaven, is able to govern the world by means of divine ministers and human officials. The divine government of the world operates as an invisible principle of power, an ineffable power, a providential power that “penetrates and traverses the divine as well as the human world, from the celestial principalities to the nations and peoples of the earth.”17 The definitive relationship is that between auctoritas and potestas of the divine power, that is, the articulation between the Kingdom of God and the government of creation and its creatures. How can scholars alternatively interpret Augustine? One way is to consider that Augustine did not move Christianity from eschatology to secularity, rather from social to individual eschatology. That, I think, was Augustine’s intent: to sever general eschatology from human history. Markus made a sharp distinction between providence and intelligibility of the history of salvation. He argued that “God was, of course, active in all history […] He would continue to act in all history, and nothing would be remote from His providence.”18 Here Markus was consistent with Augustine, who clearly affirms that God is at work in all times and places, for “everything is governed by his providence,” and only a fool would say that “his providence does not extend to these earthly matters.”19 “But,” Markus continued, “nowhere outside the Bible could the Church be bound to an authoritative insight into the meaning of any historical event or process in the scheme of salvation.”20 In other words, Markus identified Augustine’s reticent orientation to offer a definitive interpretation of historical events as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.21 After the devastation of Rome (CE 17 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 154. 18 Markus, Secular, 35. 19 De lib. arb. II.17: “Hinc etiam comprehenditur omnia prouidentia gubernari”; Ep. 184A.6: “Illi autem alii stulti non desunt, qui dixerunt: non uidebit dominus, id est prouidentiam suam in haec terrena non tendit.” 20 Markus, Secular, 35. 21 The connection Markus established between sacred history and prophecy is obviously discretionary. To be fully appreciated, the connection needs to be contextualized in the scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, when some ancient and early medieval Christian authors, including Gregory the Great, were associated with certain forms of “prophetism.”

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410), Augustine recognized the risk of applying prophetic categories to the Roman Empire or to any earthly society, for what it matters. In denying the applicability of any prophetic category to history, Augustine rejected the prophetic significance of the Roman Empire as a divine vehicle of the Christianization of the world; he also desacralized all political institutions. Once political institutions were stripped of all sacral claims, they are reduced to a secular state. By Markus’s account, Augustine’s political theology assumed that “the Empire is not to be seen in terms either of the messianic image of the Eusebian tradition or of the apocalyptic image as the anti-Christ of the Hippolytan tradition. The Empire has become no more than a historical, empirical society with a chequered career, whose vicissitudes are not to be directly correlated with the favor of the gods, pagan or Christian, given in return for services rendered.”22 This secular state of politics is the secularization of politics and the definitive rejection of the very possibility of a Christian empire, a Christian state, a Christian politics, or a Constantinian establishment. This is the initial assumption behind Markus’s interpretation of Augustine’s theology of the saeculum: once the history of salvation becomes unintelligible, history can no longer be seen as sacred history. In Markus’s words, in calling a strand of history “sacred”, no special claim is made on behalf of the mode of divine action in the events narrated and no special quality is attached to these events. The special quality resides in the narrative […] The privileged status of sacred history derives from the privileged status of the biblical authors and hence of their stories, rather than from the nature of the events they tell of.23

History, in other words, is no longer an inspired accounting of God’s providential work found in the Scripture; it becomes a mere secular account. Thus, the initial assumption is a nuanced distinction between secular and sacred accounts of human history. The second assumption is this: once the political institutions had been desacralized, their role was assimilable to that of a modern liberal institution—to guarantee order and peace. In Markus’s words: “there is no trace [in Augustine] of a theory of the state as concerned with man’s self-fulfillment, perfection, the good life, felicity, or with ‘educating’ man toward such purposes. Its function is more restricted. 22 Markus, Saeculum, 55. 23 Markus, Saeculum, 14–15.

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[…] The state exists propter securitatem et sufficientatiam vitae.”24 The conclusion at this point is well known: “Society became intrinsically ‘secular’ in the sense that it is not committed to any particular ultimate loyalty […] His ‘secularization’ of the realm of politics implies a pluralistic, religiously neutral civil community.”25 By now it is clear Markus recognized that the providential work objectively exists. To borrow a few words from Dominic Verner’s paper on Markus, “for Augustine, the saeculum is a time of epistemological obscurity wherein the mysterious and ineffable plans of God are being worked out until Christ comes again.”26 How does the correlation between the Kingdom and the divine government of the civitas work? While Eusebius of Caesarea envisioned in the Roman Empire the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, namely a realized general eschatology, Augustine focused on the individual eschatology and rejected general eschatology. This means that no regime, political system, or human institution can be seen as a vehicle to salvation; general, social salvation is a matter of the eschaton. But individual eschatology stands. Augustine did not move from redeemed society to secular society but from general to individual eschatology—from society to individual person. The salvific plan is no longer carried through systems and regimes but through individuals. The cosmic order remained, and under such an order one can see the struggle of individual eschatology, the dynamics between human spirit and Spirit, the unity of the “invisible” and “visible” aspects of the one Church, and the display of God’s plan for humanity. To borrow a beautiful line of the late Brian T. Trainor, “for Augustine […] the properly ordered individual soul is a kind of reflection or miniature of the well-ordered city-state, and both in turn are images or reflections of the cosmos, of the beautiful order of nature; the ‘good’ of the individual is integrally related to the more inclusive (common) good of the city state, and ultimately of the universe itself.”27 In The City of God, Augustine refused social eschatology; he maintained, however, individual eschatology, the action of the Spirit through the people who live in such institutions, His Church, and more importantly His plan of salvation. This interpretation of Augustine allows the divine government being carried on through people, not institutions. It does not mean that 24 Markus, Saeculum, 94–95. 25 Markus, Saeculum, 173. 26 Dominic Verner, OP, “Ultimate Loyalties in the Saeculum: Augustine and the Secularization of Politics,” unpublished. 27 Brian T. Trainor, “Augustine’s Glorious City of God as Principle of the Political,” Heythrop Journal 51, no. 4 (2010), 543–553, 553.

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for Augustine, any kingdom, civilization, society, and political regime becomes an autonomous neutral region; it means that Augustine excluded the social dimension of eschatology from history. It does not mean that social institutions are autonomous; it means that they do not carry salvific status. To put it simply, the ultimate Christian triumph in the social realm, the general eschatology, is realized outside history, not within history. General salvation is not in history but from history. History is purely the time in which the clash between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena is taking place. What Augustine meant is that no social institution is a vehicle for salvation because general redemption cannot be reached in history; in this time of clash between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena, however, the anticipation of the end at the level of individual souls remains possible.28

Secularity and Holiness Another way to consider the relationship between the Kingdom and the divine government in Augustine is to re-examine Markus’s neutralization of Marrou’s interpretation of the third space between the sacred and the profane as an overlapping space. In my opinion, Augustine did not move Christianity from eschatology to secularity, rather from social to individual eschatology. To put it differently, I retain an eschatological exegesis of Augustine’s vision, including the role of the Church within the economy of salvation. Among other things, this position has the advantage of discouraging an understanding of the saeculum as a space. Here my interest, however, is not to prove my position, rather to (a) synthesize Marrou’s interpretation of Augustine’s City of God in terms of holiness and association to the history of salvation and (b) deconstruct Markus’s position on the secular as a third, neutral space between the sacred and the profane. In Markus, I suggest that the secular is not a third space between the sacred and the profane, but the only space. Under Markus’s assumptions, in fact, the sacred and profane simply vanish. Then I show that Markus’s inability to address the sacred and the profane as processes almost inevitably drove him to see them as spaces. Finally, the secular must be opaque to prophecy but remain open to holiness. 28 Bernard McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters by Lactantius, Adso of Montier-en-Derl, Joachim of Fiore, the Spiritual Franciscans and Savonarola (London: SPCK, 1979), xv.

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Markus’s neutralization of Marrou’s interpretation of the third space between the sacred and the profane as an overlapping space is based on a specific operation: the secularization of Marrou’s theology of history. Both Marrou and Markus recognize Augustine’s opacity of the saeculum, but the former treats this opacity in terms of per speculum et in aenigmate, that is, “partial, filled with darkness, and at one ignorant and certain,” and the latter considers this opacity absolute so that humanity lives in the saeculum as an unintelligible time in which “no signposts to sacred meaning, no landmarks in the history of salvation” are intelligible.29 The difference between the two positions is evident: in Marrou, the unity in distinction of the natural and the supernatural is protected; in Markus, the distinction is replaced with separation. In Marrou, the darkness in the land of men and women allows the same radiance of holiness to be detected. In Markus, the darkness blinds human beings. For Markus, “this invisibility of the presence of eschatological categories in historical realities is the foundation of Augustine’s theology of the saeculum.”30 In brief, Marrou protects the unity in distinction of the Kingdom of God and the government of the civitas; Markus separated the Kingdom from the government. Markus was correct in assuming that Augustine rejected “any claim to knowledge the duration of this last age [between the incarnation and the parousia].”31 Markus’s assertion—together with Brown—was convincing that “in terms of their ultimate significance, in relation to salvation and damnation, history remained opaque to human scrutiny.”32 At the core of Markus’s interpretation of Augustine is the idea of prophecy and more specifically, the notion that prophecy ended with the last of the biblical authors. There is no prophecy after the biblical prophets; consequently, there is no longer sacred history. All history is, at least from the human point of view, secular history. For sure, the sack of Rome in 410 impressed Augustine. But his notion that no crisis, including that of the Roman Empire, is in itself a serious and true indicator of whether the end of time has arrived allowed him to assess that epochal event in a distinct way. In his correspondence with a certain bishop Hesychius in Dalmatia, one can appreciate the moderation with which Augustine embraced his own rejection of general eschatology. 29 Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire, 196; Markus, Secular, 36. 30 Markus, Saeculum, 151. 31 Markus, Secular, 36. 32 Markus, Secular, 36. The quote from Brown is the following: “To protect the merciful opacity of human affairs. In declaring the saeculum to be largely opaque to human scrutiny, Augustine protected the richness of human culture from the hubris of those who wanted to relate every aspect of the world around them directly to the sacred.” See: Brown, “Introducing Robert Markus,” 184.

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In it one may discern exactly how Augustine allowed himself to detect signs as indicators of the last phase of world history. In his letters with Hesychius, Augustine declared that the “last days” began with the time of the apostles and would end with the return of Christ. All these certain facts are based on the historia sacra. Apart from these facts, however, there are other important indications: Christ Himself said that the gospel should first be proclaimed to all peoples (Matthew 24:3; Mark 13 and Luke 21); in the last days, nation shall rise up against nation; there will be plagues, famines, and earthquakes; wickedness will grow, and love will wax cold.33 Prophecy contradicts the status quo, the reality as it is perceived. The visible reality is wiped out because the prophetic message becomes true in history, because it happens.34 Augustine, like other Latin and Greek fathers, had no doubt that the time of prophecy, biblical prophecy, was over, but the end of biblical prophecy was not the end of prophecy tout court. After the first coming of Jesus, prophecy no longer means to bring the word of God to the community and foresee the second coming, because Christ Himself is the Word and therefore He is the prophet of His second coming. The revelation is completed, and everything that is profitable for humankind to know has been delivered. After Christ, a prophet is he/she who receives the word of Christ in his/her heart and is able to pronounce words of eternal truth. After Christ, prophecy no longer deals with future events like the coming of the Messiah but is the manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit and His action in human life. Prophecy is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In the post-biblical era, biblical prophecy was replaced by new forms of prophecy, including the eschatologically oriented prophecy of monasticism. Monasticism would become a visible example of prophecy. The very essence of monasticism in Gregory the Great was prophetic because it led to the perception of two realities: the divine reality and the human reality, which would otherwise be concealed from humans in their fallen status. Monasticism was prophetic in the sense that it allowed men and women to live in conformity with the holy and perfect will of God. In turn, this allowed them to perceive the presence of God and at the same time falsehood in the world around them.35 Men and women of the monasteries were prophetic people who could testify and announce 33 Ep. 197−199. 34 Hans-Joachim Kraus, “The Actuality of Biblical Prophecy,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 15, no. 1 (1993), 119–135, 127. 35 Archimandrite Zacharias, Monasticism (Essex: Monastery of St John the Baptist, 2020), 211–212.

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the arrival of God and His kingdom. In other words, monks became the prophets of the eschaton. In his excessive emphasis on the darkness in the land of men and women, Markus segregates God and His Spirit from the world; he excludes grace from the concrete, ordinary flux of life. In his effort to avoid the marginalization of the political order and the totalizing triumph of the spiritual order in the public space, Markus forgot that God for Augustine is not just the creator of all, but also the Lord of history. His view is that of a religiously pluralistic reality in which Christians and pagans live together in peace and through arrangements rooted in “shared moral basis” and “common objects of love,” and mediate their faith through preaching.36 It must be added, however, that whether the public state is neutral or not, or the political power is Christian or pagan, both the state and the power remain earthly and therefore imperfect and contingent for a Christian people in pilgrimage. The earthly city, whether Christian or not, requires another city, a heavenly city that is qualified of supplementing it and revealing to it the spiritual forces that lie at its unfathomable depths. Markus’s secularization of Marrou’s theology of history, and, more specifically, the secularization of the historical dicta, becomes another step in the process of neutralization of Marrou’s interpretation of the third space between the sacred and the profane as an overlapping space. In Markus’s opinion, the secular is a shared space, a distinct territory where the sacred allows the profane to occupy its own distinct position, and vice versa. The secularization of the historical dicta, however, implies the invisibility of the transcendentality of the profane and, ultimately, the concealment of the sacred. In turn, the concealment of the sacred implies the disappearance of the profane itself. It is the possibility of the sacred that establishes the category of the profane. Thus, the double structure of the saeculum is the correlation between sacred and profane; once one of the two poles of the system disappears, the entire structure collapses. Accordingly, Markus’s saeculum is not a third space between the sacred and the profane, but the only space, purified from any reference to the sacred and its contrary (the profane). An ambiguity rests at the bottom of Markus’s saeculum: if the saeculum is an age, a Christian age, how is it that it becomes a space?37 The fact is, 36 For the quotes, see Markus, Secular, 63–64. For the mediation through preaching, see Robert Markus, “Political Order as Response to the Church Mission,” Political Theology 9, no. 3 (2008), 319–326, 322. 37 Markus offers a synthetic introduction to the concepts of “sacred” and “profane” as “realm,” “spheres,” “areas,” etc. in Markus, Secular, 4–6. This engagement with the sacred and profane in Markus benefits from the reading of Giorgio Agamben’s chapter “In Praise of Profanation,”

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Markus envisioned sacred and profane as static spaces, not as operations. “To assert the autonomy of the secular,” Markus argued, “was [for Augustine] to resist any hostile takeover of this middle ground between sacred and profane from either side: either to included it in the sacred—by Christian or by pagan—or to repudiate it as irredeemably profane” (emphasis added).38 Another way to put it is this: the distinction between sacred and profane assumes not only two spaces, but also two processes—sacralization and profanation—through which people and things move from one status to another. Sacred is the space available to the gods. Sacralization is the process that moves the availability of things and people from the realm of individuals to the realm of gods. Profanation is the opposite process that makes things and people from the realm of the gods available for individuals to use. Thus, sacralization deactivates the apparatus of power of the individuals over things and people and activates the apparatus of power of the gods over those things and people. Profanation operates the opposite. Both sacred and profane are agents of separation because things and people belonging to the realm of the sacred are separated, no longer available for individuals to use; furthermore, things and people belonging to the realm of the profane are separated, no longer available to the gods. Both situations are unnatural, in the sense that neither is original: both situations, in fact, are the result of a process. The passage from the profane to the sacred happens through a sacrifice; the passage from the sacred to the profane occurs through a contamination. It is important to consider that neither process, the sacralization and the profanation, abolishes the realms of the sacred and the profane; they transfer things and people from one realm to another. In this process of transformation, however, the grasp of one realm on things and people is neutralized: sacred things and people become profane, that is, the power of the gods is neutralized. The same is true in the process of sacralization: profane things and people become sacred, namely, the grip of individuals over them is neutralized. In this process of transformation, things and people are placed in a different kind of availability. Sacralization does not simply place things and people in the availability of the gods; it also makes them available to liturgical, cultic, and religious scopes. Profanation, conversely, makes things and people available to civil, political, and social scopes. This is precisely how the machine of sacrifice and contamination ensures the distribution of use among humans included in Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73–92. I read and directly translated Agamben’s chapter from the original Italian text: Profanazioni (Roma: Nottetempo, 2005), 83–106. 38 Markus, Secular, 37.

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and divine beings.39 Although the sacred and profane are two separate spheres, sacralization and profanation can operate simultaneously. The two operations, in fact, are at work in the consecrated man or woman. As a consecrated, he/she belongs to the gods; as a human being, however, he/ she inheres in his/her body an irreducible residue of profanity. An example of this profane residuality is the incomplete Christianization of the Pagan calendar by the primitive Church. As far as the profane sphere, he/she continues to lead an apparently profane existence among other men and women. However, as a consecrated man/woman, he/she introduces an incongruous remnant of sacredness into the domain of the profane.40 In this overlapping of the sacred and the profane, one may eventually recognize Marrou’s reality of the saeculum as the overlapping of the two cities, the heavenly city and the earthly city. That said, the Christian machine of sacrifice and contamination is not based on separation but on distinction in unity. Christ is the Son of God who is sacrificed for the sacralization of things and people so that the grip of sin over them is neutralized. At the same time, God becomes human “and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), namely he was placed in the availability of individuals who, in fact, executed Him. In Christianity, the machine of sacrifice and contamination is more correctly a machine of sacrifice and glory, that is, sacrifice and redemption. The distinction between sacred and profane is no longer in the world out there but in the very core of Christ, who is true God and true man (incarnation). The same can be said of all human beings who maintain a divine fragment in their nature and therefore are not purely human, but also divine. And the same is true for all things, represented as they are in the sacrifice of the mass (eucharist): the bread is bread, but it is also the body of Christ (transubstantiation). In paganism, the machine of sacrifice and contamination is based on the separation between sacred and profane in the world out there, but in Christianity, the machine of sacrifice and glory operates on the assumption of the unity in distinction of two natures, divine and human nature, in a single person. The transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain—not in the temple—is a paramount example of the innovation introduced by Christianity in the religious machine. The Taboric experience, in fact, breaks down the separation between the sacred and the profane. Once again, the reader can return to Marrou’s interpretation of a third option, tertium quid, between heavenly city and earthly city, called the 39 Agamben, Profanazioni, 90. 40 Agamben, Profanazioni, 89–90.

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saeculum. For Marrou, the saeculum is the domain of the saint (or holy) man or woman. 41 As a saint, he/she belongs to God; as a human being, however, he/she inheres in his/her body an irreducible residue of profanity. As far as the profane sphere, he/she continues to lead an apparently profane existence among other men and women. However, as a saint man/woman, he/she introduces an incongruous remnant of sacredness into the domain of the profane. This overlapping between the sacred and the profane, this permeability between the two, is absent in Markus. He maintained a distinct interpretation of “profane” as “pagan” so that the pagan is a space and the sacred, namely Christianity, is another space, and no dynamics operate to break down the separation between the two. 42 Markus, in fact, reported an absolute degree of separation between the profane and the sacred in the sense that the former is “what the convert has to renounce in undergoing conversion.”43 Of course, the profane is not the secular. The profane is, by definition, that which is not sacred. It is what stands in front of the temple and is not encircled by the sanctum. The sacred-profane distinction is a priestly distinction. The realm of the priest, in fact, is the temple, the sacred. The realm of the non-priest, the layperson, is the profane. The secular belongs to a different line of thought. For Markus, “the secular is roughly equivalent to what can be shared with non-Christians.”44 But the secular is primarily a time, not a space. From the Christian point of view, therefore, the secular is a time to be shared with the pagans. What kind of “time”? Saeculum comes from the Etruscan, most probably, and means time—or better, time-span. Per omnia saecula saeculorum does not mean “forever and ever,” rather “for all the time-span of all the time-spans of the world.” It is a sort of time span to the second power in which eternity and time are united in distinction. Theologian Raimon Panikkar coined the term “tempiternity” to capture the distinct mingling between eternity and time. 45 According to Markus, tempiternity operates at the level of historical facta, but at the level of historical dicta, it is replaced by an indefinite linear temporality. At the level of historical dicta, saeculum is no longer time-span to the second power: it is simply time-span, temporality, the flow of time, the temporal character of things and people. The difference between the tempiternity of 41 Here I refer once again to the difference between sacred and holy offered by Minear, “The Holy and the Sacred,” 6. 42 Markus, Secular, 5. 43 Markus, Secular, 5. 44 Markus, Secular, 6. 45 Raimon Panikkar, Blessed Simplicity (New York: The Seabury Press, 1982), 60.

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historical facta and the temporality of the historical dicta is not so much the relevance of the temporal structure of the world, a structure that cannot be eliminated or dismissed as irrelevant. It is rather the fact that time in the tempiternity is decisive and cannot be relinquished or utilized in order to reach something more important. Time in tempiternity designs the arch of the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God on earth. It is not just time; it is the time that remains. For St Paul, “time has been shortened. The remaining time” (1 Corinthians 7:29), that is, the time between time and its end, is the only thing that matters. This remaining time before the end—an end that remains indeterminate, although it is imminent—is a time ready to implode into eternity. How exactly does the religious machine work in Markus’s saeculum? As already mentioned, the invisibility of the transcendentality of the profane implies the disappearance of the profane itself and its contrary (the sacred). Accordingly, the philosophical triangle of the sacred, the profane, and the secular gives way to a monolithic reality. Markus’s saeculum is a mundus on its own, without transcendental or immanent limits; it is “the elevation of the world” in the words of the celebrated German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, “to an ontological self-sufficient totality” (gegensatzlosen Inbegriff des Seienden). 46 But how does it work? Differently from sacralization/profanation, Markus’s secularization implies not transformation, only dislocation. The secularization of the theological concepts such as the divine monarchy does not change the concept of monarchy, only its location: from heaven to earth. The secularization of the theological concept of social justice does not change the concept of social justice but dislocates it from the divine economy to the liberal state. That is to say, in secularization a floating signifier travels from one domain to the other without ceasing to refer to the same object. Secularization is not a machine, rather a process of dislocation from eternity to temporality. This is the core of Markus’s saeculum: the passage from eternity to time. And this is also its limit. Markus is correct: the saeculum is the time shared by Christians and non-Christians. But it implies transformation, not simple dislocation: pagans are transformed into Christians, and when the last pagan is converted, the saeculum will end. The saeculum ends with the “healing of the nations” (Rev 22:2), that is, the reclaiming of the seventy nations and the re-establishing of the Kingdom of God on earth. 46 Peter Sloterdijk, Chancen im Ungeheuren. Vorwort zu: William James, Die Vielfalt religiöser Erfahrung. Eine Studie über die menschliche Natur (Frankfurt a. M./Leipzig: Inselverlag, 1997), 11–35, 13. It is Sloterdijk’s preface to the new edition of William James’s Die Vielfalt religiöser Erfahrung.

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It is clear at this point that in Markus’s saeculum the eschatological notion of time that is still preserved in Marrou’s interpretation is replaced with a modern notion of time. The sacred may stand in opposite relation to the profane, but the secular and the holy can coexist. The crux of the matter is the possibility to experience the holiness in the midst of the very everyday reality. Monks (religious and married), men and women, and saints have proved that possible. They discover in and through the temporal the tempiternal, hidden dimension of reality. To borrow a sentence from Panikkar, “the temporal shell of existence” is broken “in order to savor its tempiternal kernel, not only at the individual level but at the level of the entire humankind.”47 The holiness of the secular is not centered in the passage from eternity to temporality, rather in the healing of the separation between eternity and temporality. The secular is the tempiternal character of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is at work here and now, and it only needs to be discovered as such. In an embarrassingly simplistic way, Augustine’s City of God can be seen as a journey to reach revelation (re-velation), that is, to discover what things and people are. For Markus, the secular is neutral not because Augustine says so, but because neutrality is an essential prerogative of the secular: “it can be spoken of without reference to religion.”48 Like other Catholic intellectuals of his era, Markus rightly detected an opposition between the Roman Catholic Church and the secular. For sure, secularization has been a challenge raised against a distorted understanding of the Church as mystical and detached from the living experience of the faithful. Secularization was supposed to be an alternative to what Markus named (quoting Marrou) “a sacral Christendom.”49 But secularization is a proper challenge to a sacral Church only if it either heals the separation between the sacred and the profane or reframes the relationship between the world and the holiness. Marrou inclined toward the first option. Markus failed to completely embrace the second. Eager as he was to find a precursor of the modern neutral secular within Christian tradition, he detected temporality where there was tempiternity. He was correct in recognizing the ultimate and indispensable value of temporality as such and the affirmation of everything that comes with temporality: the body, history, the material world and all its temporal and mundane values. A Church “closed in on itself,” still protective of its 47 Panikkar, Blessed Simplicity, 67. 48 Markus, Secular, 6. 49 Markus, Secular, 6.

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special regime of the sacred, separated from, eventually in opposition to corporality, material world, and everyday existence outside cloisters and monasteries comes at a great cost.50 But he was wrong in assuming that Pope John XXIII and his Church have come “to embrace the secular and acknowledge its values, its autonomy, and even, if I may add what may seem paradoxical, its sacredness or holiness.”51 There is nothing paradoxical in the holiness of the secular, provided that it is centered in tempiternity. Or, similarly, there is no sacredness or holiness in temporality.

Biblical References In rejecting John Milbank’s criticism of his argument over the saeculum, Markus quoted a long passage from Augustine. He qualified this content as “crucial,” in the sense that Markus considered these paragraphs crucial to proving his own argument. After the quote he provided his interpretation: Political institutions, social practices, customs—are all radically relativized. In so restricting their sphere, Augustine is at the same time asserting their autonomy within their restricted sphere. In a Christian perspective, they are neutral; they can be used rightly, or wrongly, directed to the enjoyment of lesser goods, the earthly peace.52

Once again, he was correct in his claim of the relativization of politics. Here are the paragraphs from Augustine’s The City of God: The heavenly City, while on its earthly pilgrimage, call forth its citizens from every nation and every tongue. It assembles a band of pilgrims, not caring about any diversity in customs, laws, and institutions whereby they severally make provisions for the achievement and maintenance of earthly peace. All these provisions are intended, in their various ways among the different nations, to secure the aim of earthly peace. The heavenly City does not repel or abolish any of them, provided that they do not impede the religion in which the one supreme and true God is taught to be worshipped.53 50 Markus, Secular, 89. 51 Markus, Secular, 91. 52 Markus, Secular, 40. 53 Ibidem.

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There are several ways that Augustine’s vision can be described. One is simple: it is the cosmic vision of Christ who is present everywhere and in the midst of every human being, community, even religion. No matter the beliefs, the customs, the morals, He is present in every human being and, according to Augustine’s theology of predestination, will conduct each human being to his/her final destination. But in this earthly pilgrimage, Christ is present to all, Christians and pagans, and through all He rules His creation. That is why, to quote Markus, “political institutions, social practices, customs—are all radically relativized.” He is correct. They are relativized because Christ operates in the heart of every human being. This means that God operates within institutions through human beings, assuming that God respects the human being’s freedom. It is through the human hearth, contingent upon human response, that providence operates through political institutions, social practices, and customs, including those of the Roman Empire. Christ is cosmic—He operates everywhere: in the Roman Empire and the barbarian kingdoms, in the northern provinces of the lost empire as well as in the rising eastern provinces. Christ is at work everywhere and in everybody. Political institutions, social practices, and customs come and go, and—again I quote Markus—“in a Christian perspective, they are neutral.”54 True. They are neutral with regard to Christ’s ruling. Markus’s interpretation of Augustine view on politics was right with reference to the surrounding privileged place of state, including a formally Christian state, in God’s scheme of salvation. It remains an earthly state and therefore cannot claim transcendental legitimation. This status, however, does not prevent divine providence from making use of political structures to affirm the Christian presence in history, promote the worship of “the one supreme and true God,” and finally exercise religious coercion. Although the political order is prevented from appropriating divine authority, nothing prevents the divine economy from making use of the political order. Divine providence can make use of political structures, but it does not identify with them. Augustine is not saying, as Markus suggested, that given political regimes must not be identified with God, rather that God must not be identified with given political regimes. Markus’s anti-Eusebian strategy is as deterministic as the strategy he planned to reject. As Eusebius claimed the divine legitimacy of political structures, Markus argued the impossibility to any divine legitimacy. In doing so, Markus hibernated the much more dynamic, rhythmical, and eventually sophisticated vision of the bishop of Hippo. History is sacred 54 Markus, Secular, 40.

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history as God cares about His creation. People can detect such a sacrality of history or not, depending on their alliance with the immanent Christ. Markus was brilliant in detecting Augustine’s move away from his earlier Eusebian enthusiasm about the historical fulfillment of eschatological hopes because of the conversion of Constantine and the Christianization of the empire. After the fatal sack of Rome, Augustine refused to identify the providential action with any specific political order. That is what the saecular is about: the time in which any political order is a neutral means of God’s rule. Markus was right to argue that politics is desacralized in Augustine. The earthly structures are not sacred in the sense that they are not sacred in themselves. No empire is sacred, not even the Roman Empire of the converted emperor Constantine. Nations, in biblical terms, cannot be sacred, because they are destined to perish. Another way to express Augustine’s vision is biblical. His reference to the heavenly Church, which “in its earthly pilgrimage, […] calls forth its citizens from every nation and every tongue,” is on one hand a crystal clear reference to God’s disinheritance of the nations as His people in the aftermath of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) and His re-inheritance of the nations on the Day of Pentecost, and on the other, to cause the message of the gospel to spread into many nations. “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when He divided mankind, He fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s portion is His people, Jacob His allotted heritage” (Deuteronomy 32:8–9). In the aftermath of the episode of the Tower of Babel, humanity was divided into nations and allocated to inferior, created gods (ref. “son of God”) who acted as administrators on behalf of God the Almighty. God is distinguished as the creator of all other gods; He is the preexisting One, making Him ontologically distinct. The only exception was Israel, “His allotted heritage.” After the Resurrection, however, one had the drawing of the nations. This is overarchingly clear in Acts 17:26–27, where Luke reports Paul’s speech at the Areopagus. In talking about God’s salvation plan, Paul says: “he (God) made from one man every nation of humanity to live on all the face of the earth, determining their fixed times and the fixed boundaries of their habitation, to search for God, if perhaps indeed they might feel around for Him and find Him. And indeed, he is not far away from each one of us.” This is what the eschatological time is about: the Kingdom of God is already present but not yet proclaimed. The king is here, the Kingdom is here, but the people from the nations are not yet gathered. In this time between the Pentecost and the eschaton, the people of the nations are called, although the provisions (the sons of God) of these nations remain in place. As Augustine explained,

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“all these provisions are intended, in their various ways among the different nations, to secure the aim of earthly peace.” The aim of these provisions was to secure earthly peace, which is different from the real peace that comes only from God. Peace is an ahistorical category. Peace does not belong to history because history always proceeds, and peace means the opposite—to rest in God. Earthly peace, instead, exhausts itself within historicity. This was the mandate of God Almighty as reported in Psalm 82.55 Moreover, to understand the sentence “the heavenly City does not repel or abolish any of them, provided that they do not impede the religion in which the one supreme and true God is taught to be worshipped,” one must remember the Bible. In fact, while the disinherited nations were placed under the authority of lesser gods, they remembered that only God Almighty can be worshiped. To put it differently, the sons of God were assumed to direct their nations to worship God Almighty. The Shema, the proclamation of the God of Israel, was related to the exclusive worship of God Almighty in a context of surrounding deities (Deuteronomy 6:4–9). The other deities, the lesser gods, are for administration, not for glorification. If glorified, people fall into the unforgivable sin of idolatry. In conclusion, the quote from Augustine that Markus mentioned is a chain of biblical references regarding the unseen realm: nations provisionally placed under the rule of lesser gods and reclaimed by God Almighty after resurrection. Christ reclaimed the nations while the provisions, namely the divine administrators, remain in place and guarantee peace.

55 “God stands in the divine assembly; he administers judgment in the midst of the gods. “How long will you judge unjustly and show favoritism to the wicked? Selah Judge on behalf of the helpless and the orphan; provide justice to the afflicted and the poor. Rescue the helpless and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”” Psalm 82:1–4. The mandate starts at “judge.”

Conclusion Introduction In his review of Carole Straw’s Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, Bernard McGinn calls Pope Gregory a “puzzling complexity.” His point is that [o]f the four Fathers of the Latin church, Gregory the Great, pope from 590–604, is arguably the least appreciated. Traditional histories of doctrine, from Adolph Harnack on, dismiss him (all too easily) as the great simplifier of Augustine. Historians of spirituality, recognizing the immense impact he had on medieval piety, have tried to explain why he was so widely read, so often quoted, and yet so elusive and difficult to present in a synthetic way. The problem with Gregory does not involve the pieces—a host of perceptive studies of particular aspects of his thought exist—but with the sense of the whole.1

In McGinn’s opinion, the solution to the scholarly problem with Gregory is to offer not a correction of this or that element but of the whole interpretation of the elusive figure who has often been called the first medieval pope, an interpretation that overcomes apparent contradictions and paradoxes. Straw attempts to do exactly this through the notion of perfection in imperfection, that is, the necessary roles that affliction, temptation, and even imperfection and sin play in the spiritual path. My book was born as an attempt to do the same through the notion of the supernatural. Where mainstream commentators have attempted to downplay or explain away the parts of Gregory’s writings that speak of the supernatural (demons, miracles, providential events), I wanted to bring them to the fore, believing that it is possible to discern a heavenly dimension to salvation history that others have missed and setting out to tell it. In that reconstruction, the supernatural would become the background that provides the sense of the whole. 1 Bernard McGinn, “Review of Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988),” The Journal of Religion 73, no. 2 (1993), 250.

Beltramini, E., Desecularizing the Christian Past. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463721882_concl

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Originally intending to write on Gregory the Great’s theology of the divine power, I found what I call anti-supernatural thought central to that theme. The project took a different direction, and consequently other topics have been addressed: an ancient and medieval Christian historiography incorporating the supernatural and an application of such historiography into Markus’s saeculum. Earlier in this work I made my methodological commitments clear. I first recommended removing the Christian past from the current secular interpretive metanarrative; I then offered a competing metanarrative for an interpretation of the Christian past through the prism of the supernatural. “Secular” metanarrative stands for a historiographical tradition in which the general practice is to filter out passages that appear incongruous with a secular worldview. The competitive metanarrative points to a rereading of the past in its original context. In the twenty-first century, there are many layers of cultural filters that lie between us (scholars) and the text; this book is a contribution to that scholarship, helping peel back those layers to give the reader a better understanding of what the words of Augustine, to offer an example, meant to those who originally read them. This study is composed of two parts: the first part serves to sketch certain historical approaches to the premodern Christian past that distort the supernatural character of Christianity. To the extent that these approaches succeed in determining and explaining religious data in terms of ordinary, positive, and empirical events, the transcendent character of these data is distorted. This is particularly true with regard to the supernatural, which is not an entity, like some form of preternatural or sovra-natural event, but a relationship of either separation or unity between Creator and creation, God and humanity, the divine and nature (and therefore history). An alternative approach is offered at this point, one in which the premodern past is seen “on its own terms.” The replacement of the secular filter with a sacramental horizon allows the history of Christianity, or at least the history of premodern Christianity, to approach the past on its own terms. The historical study of the Christian premodern requires an appropriate method. This alternative approach in turn becomes the starting point for an investigation of historical reasoning and its limits. To prove the value of the suggested approach, there is no better case than Markus’s interpretation of Augustine. This notion, addressed in the later chapters, is considered a product of a specific theological viewpoint, a neo-scholastic interpretation of the Augustine of The City of God. In this view, a supposedly natural order is distinguished from the divine order. The final result of this distinction carries on a strict form of historical reconstruction, a historical method intended to consider the supernatural extrinsic to an autonomous secular.

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In this regard, I deconstruct Markus’s interpretation and show (1) how his interpretation, framed in terms of the neo-scholastic, can be replaced with something more Neoplatonic, and (2) that his neo-scholastic and the newly introduced Neoplatonic interpretations of Augustine are both, in the end, internal to a Christian (not secular) debate on Augustine. Properly received, the supernatural does not create some “filter-less” reading of the Christian past but helps me reconstruct that past’s horizon more fully than most other readers have.

Beyond Divides Almost 50 years ago, Georg Iggers wrote a book on European historiography. It was about the crisis of the “conventional” conception of scientific history, and Iggers’s aim was the reorientation of scientific history through a study of the history of European historiography. Iggers explained that “the days when historians could confidentially write that ‘history is a science, no less and no more’ are long past.”2 But, he added, “the historian’s task remains to reconstruct and interpret an actual past.”3 His statements can be picked up and reframed in the following terms: how can one do history in an era in which the status of history is in question? An effect of this questionable status may be symbolized by the shift in recent decades from history in the sense of a reconstruction of the past to history as a narrative that is affected by its authors’ beliefs. The shift reflects a movement away from concerns with texts as sources for a historical reconstruction of the past to an interest in the literary merits or ideological presumptions of the texts. One main point of this shift is whether the source is a representation of reality or a product of the author’s imagination. In the introduction to his true classic David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory, Walter Brueggemann clarifies immediately that “it must be understood here that we are not interested in the ‘historical David,’ as though we could isolate and identify the real thing. That is not available to us.”4 This distinction has become more and more relevant in the past decades. A reconstruction of the past is doomed to be inconclusive; historians should know better 2 George G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 4. 3 Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography, 5. 4 Walter Brueggemann, David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory, 2nd edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Fortress Press, 2002), 1.

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and move on to how to understand the narrative. Of course, there exist different understandings of “narrative.” In his brilliant collection of essays on the semantic shifts in scholarship discourse, Kerwin Klein has reported how historians migrated from social sciences to literature, from scientific precision to memory.5 Compared to these advanced forms of narrativist (or postnarrativist) historiography, this present work looks quite conservative.6 I am still concerned with reconstructing the past, rather than engaging in an exposition of the received past. I even mentioned “method” and “methodology,” which makes this study unquestionably old-fashioned. In this study I treat history as a comprehensive process that constructs secular accounts of the Christian past. In doing so, I (hope to) reveal the morally precarious foundation of established Christian historiography. I hope this study may contribute to undermining the very identity historians conceive for themselves, that is, as some force for neutral knowledge framed within a broader contest between scientific truth and superstition. When it comes to the Christian past, historians secularize to disclose, and they misrepresent to reveal. The overall purpose of this book is nothing short of reframing the conversation on the Christian past. I attempted to do so precisely by overcoming the limitations of the categories currently adopted in the study of the ancient and medieval Christian past. My criticism is not concentrated on modern categories, and my suggestion is not simply to recreate an original medieval worldview. In this work I dismiss modern religious categories only to replace them with other modern religious categories; as a matter of fact, I still adopt modern categories to deal with past religious forms of thought. My criticism is not against modern categories of thought per se. The modern religious categories I adopt, however, have a peculiar quality: they are the result of historical and theological hermeneutics, in the sense that past forms of thought are brought back to life through a reinterrogation of the original theological and historical sources. The personal faith of the historian is not a necessary attribute to engage the supernatural horizon of the Christian past, and it has nothing to do with the supernatural as a central historiographical problem. For a long time, Christian historians have attempted to mitigate the naturalistic approach by investigating the relationship between faith and history, the faith of the historian and the historical fact. These Christian historians have done and still do a great deal of work on this issue. They frame their research 5 Klein, From History to Theory, 161–170. 6 Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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in a Christian way, tell the story in a Christian way, and conceive and pick up eras, subjects, and problems from a Christian perspective because they are Christians as well as historians. These historians revisit the past and construct history as Christians, and as Christians they emphasize (or not) some characters, events, and contexts. Their faith shapes their mindset, their interests, and their findings. For them, Christian history is the result of a certain Christian style of doing history. It is a style genuinely historical as much as Christian, and yet their history is Christian simply because it comes from Christians. Their approach is affected by the same limitations as secular historians’ approach: they are the result of a certain theory of secularization in which the religious, and therefore faith, is separated from the secular and therefore from history. Christian historians maintain the dualistic distinction between subject and object, between the faith of the historian and objective history. The engagement with the supernatural requests neither an apology for the modern condition of historians nor a religious faith. Instead, the question of the supernatural imposes a reconsideration of the relation between two divides: the divide between the religious and the secular and the divide between the medieval and the modern. With regard to the first divide, the question is whether the supernatural can be understood in terms of contemporary models of inquiry, marked by unconditional dualism; regarding the second, the question is whether modern thought is superior to all past forms of understanding the supernatural and is therefore normative for historical investigation. Amusingly enough, these divides have produced fatal consequences such as (1) the naturalization, and therefore the obliteration, of the supernatural, that is, the supernatural is reduced to events explicable in the natural order; and (2) the distortion of the supernatural, as if the supernatural was external to reality. The problem of the supernatural is an unfortunate consequence of the historians’ modern dualist or separatist view. Historians have confined religion and the entire supernatural outside the boundaries of epistemological legitimacy and developed an ideology not only to maintain this confinement but to disqualify any attempt to reverse the situation. By contrast, the engagement with the supernatural assumes a departure from the bifurcating logic that places secular against the religious, modern against premodern, and history against theology.7 It therefore requires a prompt dismissal of those bifurcations and a delicate, sustained effort at reunification. It also implies a strong but necessary 7 I borrow the word “bifurcation” from Isabelle Stengers, Cosmpolitics I, trans. by Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 30.

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effort at re-legitimizing the supernatural. To be crystal clear: to recover the supernatural in history, it is important to disqualify the idea that the modern is legitimated (or better, self-legitimized) per se (because it is modern) and the premodern, as non-modern, is not. Or, to put it differently, the recovery of the supernatural is important to disqualify progressive modes of writing history.

Markus’s Saecular In the preface of his landmark The End of Ancient Christianity (1990), Markus explains that his original intention was to study Gregory the Great (590–605). However, soon the scope changed, and the book became an investigation on the end of classic forms of Christianity and the beginning of medieval forms of Christianity in Western Europe. Because Pope Gregory I is generally considered to have stood on the threshold of medieval Christianity, an investigation of the nature of changes that transformed the Christian world of Augustine, which was still rooted in classic Christianity, into the Christian world of Gregory was crucial. An investigation into this transition, in fact, allowed a more precise valuation of the novelty and quality of Gregory’s pontificate. Markus devoted considerable effort and space to the meaning of time in these periods of transition. He also studied the absorbing of the “secular” into the “sacred” (Markus’s terminology). In his first book, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (first published in 1970, revised in 2007), Markus articulated a specific dynamic between the secular and the religious in the age of Augustine, which resembles our current cultural situation. He examined Augustine’s thought on the temporal order in De Civitate Dei and elsewhere and Augustine’s views on the saeculum as a theologically neutral space. In Markus’s opinion, because of the mixed nature of the saeculum, for Augustine the line between the holy versus the profane cannot be mapped onto the difference between the Church and the state but runs through each person. For Augustine, there is no space for Christendom in the period between the Incarnation and the parousia, and the history of the Church is not necessarily part of sacred history. In Chapter 7, Markus seems to appreciate the doctrine of a cosmic order in which there is space for the secular state and eventually a secular Church. Somehow, he sees in Augustine’s conception of the saeculum an ancestor of the present cultural situation. In The End of Ancient Christianity, he explains how this distinction between secular and sacred ended. Roughly 200 years after Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great

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could assume that everybody who mattered was Christian. The Church now inhabited a culture that was, to a large and ever-growing extent, of its own making. One major contribution by Markus in his seminal 1970 work is the recognition that the “secular” is, for Augustine, a time inhabited by Christians and non-Christians until the return of Christ. In Markus’s interpretation of Augustine, however, the “secular” is not only a time inhabited by Christians and non-Christians until the return of Christ but also a time without providence and grace. It is the time of ανομία, absence of divine order, and therefore a time at the disposal of a human order. In Markus’s view, ανομία is external to the realm of the providential. The separation between the secular and the supernatural is functional to the constitution of this human order. The separation suspends the operativity of the providential dispositive. Thus, Markus’s “eschatologism,” according to which it is impossible to separate the citizens of the heavenly city and earthly city who remain inextricably intermixed, transforms a time—the period between the fall of Adam and the final advent of Christ—into a space. For Markus, the saeculum is not simply an era in which the Church as much as the state are “secular,” that is, partially good, incomplete, far from the final realization, and yet under the salvific action of providence and grace. For Markus, the secular becomes a space permanently marked off from the “religious” or “sacred” sphere. According to Markus, this secular is the natural status of things that was eventually corrupted with the rise of Christendom. I use “natural status” in a Grotian sense: the human order works regardless of the existence of providence and grace. Thus, the separation between the secular and the supernatural both constructs and defends the autonomy of the human order. In this study I tried to explain how Markus subjected Augustine to such an impossible interpretation. How can Markus’s Augustine be reconciled with Augustine’s notion that God is order and without order the entire creation collapses? In his theology of participation, Augustine made clear that no creature is autonomous from God. It is exactly the divine government of the world that heals the distance between God and His creatures. The government of the civitas is included in the divine government of creation and all creatures. The divine power is both sovereign power and governmental power. As mentioned, it is similar to imagining God, who lives hidden in heaven, governing the world by means of divine ministers and human officials. I did not offer a precise answer to the consequential question, namely, how does the Kingdom align with the divine government? I primarily suggest that Augustine was considering a shift from general to individual eschatology. I secondarily recommend returning to Marrou.

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History and Theology In the words of Kerwin Klein, “the story of philosophy of history in our time was the story of the emergence of new anti-historical forces as a result of historicism’s inability to build a durable foundation for either a scientific or a romantic historiography.”8 The idea is the groundlessness of history and the remedy of it. In this study, theology has not been proposed as a means of foundation: theology is neither a remedy to the groundlessness of history nor a substitute for a philosophy of history. The crux of the matter, in fact, is not the separation between transcendence and history, or in more nuanced terms between theologia (knowledge of God) and oeconomia (God’s action in history). The articulation of a theology of history is a work of theologians, not historians, and it belongs to the field of theological reflection. In this book, the question of theology arises in relation to the limits of historical knowledge in order to investigate Christianity as a supernatural religion. The question refers to an understanding of Christianity as a supernatural religion in a world of historicity and historical consciousness and the possibility (and necessity) of interpreting Christianity of the past without anachronism. Most historians see the relationship between history and theology in the same way Paul Tillich saw the philosophy–theology relationship.9 The historian (who acts as a historian and is not a theologian) deals with the materiality of human experience, but the theologian (who works as a historian) looks for a correlation between that experience and the theological framework rising from Christian doctrine. This is to say that in historians’ view, history is a factual, self-contained, neutral account of the past into which theologians attempt to inject a distinct, extrinsic, speculative addendum. This view, however, is another effect of the secularization thesis. In a world in which the secularization thesis is unknown, a world where the historical and the spiritual are united without confusion, there is no factual account separated from the theological account. Both disciplines manage to conserve their integrity and yet complement each other. The limits of theology and the limits of history emerge from an ontological frame in which the separation of the secular and the religious is replaced with their distinction. Here I have proposed to bridge the gap between theology and history without compromising either’s integrity or autonomy. I have suggested a consideration of both disciplines as limited and inconclusive as concerns investigating the Christian past. 8 Klein, From History to Theory, 162. 9 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 63.

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Christian Philosophy and History In this study I have proposed the phrase “post-secular history” and a specific meaning for it: history that is written neither from a Christian perspective nor with an alignment in Christian doctrinal systems. Rather, it is religious history written with Christianity as a supernatural religion in mind. This idea is literally a translation within the historical field of a debate that occurred in France almost a century ago about the possibility of a Christian philosophy. The results of that debate, occurring especially in France and more recently reenacted in a book by Adam English, can be seen as direct antecedents of, and preliminary justification for, the current conceptualization of post-secular history.10 As a matter of fact, Christian philosophy is the ideal case study for approaching post-secular history, because like post-secular history, Christian philosophy became a matter of dispute between Christian and secular scholars and as a field struggling to establish itself. Like post-secular history, Christian philosophy emerged because of the ontological shift from a twofold order of knowledge to the unity (in distinction) of the two orders of knowledge. Philosophy, which remained within the limits of natural reason, investigates the kind of knowledge that is independent from the truth of revelation. Theology, in contrast, assumes the truth of the Christian faith and is dedicated to the exploration of revelation. Scholars of both disciplines are protective, and rightly so, of their autonomy, rejecting interference from the other camp: philosophers carefully dismiss theological arguments and affirm the idea of philosophy conceived as a rational discipline; theologians are in opposition to philosophers who investigate the sphere of revelation. Regarding to philosophy, in a twofold order of knowledge there is a substantial alignment between secular and Christian philosophers: philosophy is self-sufficient in the natural realm of reason, and it has no room for faith. Accordingly, a “Christian philosophy” is a pure and simple contradiction in terms. Surely, Christians reflect on philosophical themes, and eventually their reflections should align with the requirements of Christian faith; their reflection, however, must stand on its own, being the work of autonomous reason in the natural world, and it owes nothing to faith.11 The situation changes when one moves from a twofold order of 10 English’s book is an attempt to revive the discussion on Christian philosophy and to pull Blondel one step further into theology. See: Adam C. English, The Possibility of Christian Philosophy: Maurice Blondel at the Intersection of Theology and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2007). 11 Émile Bréhier famously argued that “It is no more possible to speak of a Christian philosophy than of a Christian mathematics or physics.” See: Bréhier, “Y a-t-il une Philosophie Chrétienne?” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (April–June, 1931). In a well-known passage, Martin Heidegger

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knowledge to the unity of the two orders. When philosophy comes to address the reality of human life in the context of the unity of the two orders of knowledge, philosophy becomes aware of its own insufficiency. Philosophy, when it reaches the limits of the dominion of nature, inevitably becomes conscious of its own limits. It is a philosophy that assumes the hypothetical reality of the supernatural as well as the impossibility of philosophy to address such a reality. Against the background of the unity of the two orders, philosophy goes beyond secular reason while paradoxically standing on its own, being the work of autonomous reason in the natural world and owing nothing to revelation. In an essay on the agenda of Radical Orthodoxy, Milbank writes, Radical Orthodoxy considers that Henri de Lubac was a greater theological revolutionary than Karl Barth, because in questioning the hierarchical duality of grace and nature as discrete stages, he transcended, unlike Barth, the shared background assumption of all modern theology. In this way one could say, anachronistically, that he inaugurated a postmodern theology.12

Milbank is correct to identify de Lubac as the theologian who transcends the “hierarchical duality of grace and nature as discrete stages,” namely the twofold order of knowledge. But he should have mentioned that it was a philosopher, not a theologian, who initially questioned that hierarchical duality. Blondel was motivated to be a rigorous French philosopher and a good, devoted Christian but found the synthesis difficult to reach in the highly polarized reality of the French Third Republic, a republic built on both a noted that “A ‘Christian philosophy’ is a round square and a misunderstanding. There is, to be sure, a thinking and questioning elaboration of the world of Christian experience, i.e., of faith. That is theology.” See: Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by Ralph Manheim (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), 6. In the same fashion, historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston, SJ, argued that “The most that the phrase ‘Christian philosophy’ can legitimately mean is a philosophy compatible with Christianity; if it means more than that, one is speaking of a philosophy which is not simply philosophy, but which is, partly at least, theology.” See: Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, Mediaeval Philosophy, Part II, Albert the Great to Duns Scotus (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1962), 280–281. 12 John Milbank, “The Programme of Radical Orthodoxy,” in Laurence Paul Hemming (ed.), Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 35. Henri de Lubac wrote this appreciation: “Latin theology’s return to a more authentic tradition has taken place—not without some jolts, of course—in the course of the last century. We must admit that the main impulse for this return came from a philosopher, Maurice Blondel […] he is the one who launched the decisive attack on the dualist theory which was destroying Christian thought.” De Lubac, SJ, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, 37–38.

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secularized philosophy and a highly dogmatic Christianity. As a result, Blondel produced an articulated third way between secularism and clericalism. Blondel’s main goal was to provide new philosophical clothes to the ancient Augustinian restlessness and therefore orient the human spirit toward the stances of Christian tradition. Philosophy disclosed a certain urgent and undetermined need in the human quest that raised the possibility of a supernatural that would fill the gap. The philosophical investigation of human life ended with results that remain enigmatic to philosophers. This paradox, a mystery in the domain of Christian theology, resisted any definitive solution within the philosophical realm. This paradoxical condition—philosophy is autonomous, yet it is insufficient—is the result of Blondel’s investigation that aligns with Christian convictions on creation. Reason’s incapacity to solve the riddles of human life forced philosophy to recognize its own insufficiency and turn to Christianity. When one takes a broader view of the reality of the human existence, “it is impossible not to recognize the insufficiency of the natural order in its totality,” and therefore of philosophy, which operates within the limits of natural reason.13 When one takes a broader view in the sense just described and does not settle for a closed system of rational knowledge, one becomes aware that an autonomous philosophy cannot be self-sufficient. Blondel spent almost ten years working on his dissertation, anthropologically investigating the ultimate meaning of life. He engaged philosophy to see if and how the problem of life (or of action, as he called it) can be resolved speculatively in the present without having to rely on faith. Blondel conceived action as a link between thought and being. In his long, systematic exploration of the entire phenomenon of action, he tried to see if the problem of action could be resolved within the boundaries of philosophy. He realized in the process that contrary to those who thought of philosophy as self-contained in its own natural order, philosophy is insufficient when the frame of reference exceeds the natural order. It is insufficient because it is unable, despite the innumerable dimensions, schools, and perspectives, to answer to the very question of the meaning of life, or in Augustinian terms, the restlessness of the human heart.

Further Directions In this work I call for an ontological turn in history. More specifically, I suggest a turn toward a fully Christianized horizon of intelligibility to better 13 Blondel, L’Action: Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique, 297.

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address the reality of the Christian past. But I am aware that methodological problems may arise from this turn. The first problem concerns the translatability of fundamental ontological assumptions to the realm of history. How straightforward, or uninterrupted, in other words, is the transition from the ontological assumptions of a Christianized doxa to an historical representation of the past? This book must be received as a strong case for an ontological turn in the study of the Christian past, but I can foresee possible objections. The second problem is that, once the ontological turn is at work, it probably results in several and conflictual horizons of sense. The historical reconstruction of the past, in other words, rests on the recognition that the Christian historiography may be traversed by antagonism and that the ontological presumptions of the Christian past are as legitimate as the ontological presumptions horizons, say, of the pagan past. Modern history has provided a legitimized reconstruction of the Christian past, but can one also understand the discipline as a means of the secularization of Christianity? This study is very much a work of the present moment and its sharp discontents. The core argument of the book is that a certain secular history produces a desacralized Christian past. But—and this is the inevitable question—can it make a desacralized Christianity here and now, too? Is the study of history really a vehicle for the secularization not only of the past but of the present age as well? A scholarly conversation about a historical view of the Christian past matters because it is keenly oriented toward authorizing the present secular understanding of Christianity. In this book I have explored the fact that the field of history helps make the religious past a secular place. The religious past in question is Christian, but I should add that in its telling of the secular tale, historians are among the intellectual and moral enablers of the secular tide that rises to undermine the sacramental perception of modern Christians. After all, history is not just a way of knowing and categorizing the past, it is also a system of governance of the present. Someone may raise the case one day that historical imagination has played and still plays a central role in the unfolding of Western secularization. By describing the past as populated by Christians and not as a Christian world, as a natural and not as a supernatural world, and by framing the past as a convenient antecedent of this secular world, historians are not only the scribes of secularization but also its architects. Their work builds a wider understanding of religion and of being religious as a secular story. Historians who are critical of such a distortion of Christianity must engage the past on its own terms rather than imposing on evidence a template drawn from the present. This move would be benef icial not only for a

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convincing reconstruction of the Christian past, but also for a proper understanding of Christianity today. This is a study of Christian historiography. Its argument is that historians involved in Christian history should take Christianity on Christianity’s own terms. But the argument can be approached in more general terms: when historians do religious history, they should take religion on its own terms. This means that scholars involved in religious history, at least those religions with deep roots in the historicity of the religious phenomena (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), need to consider the supernatural character of those religions.

One Last Thought Taking down statues, a popular activity on both sides of the Atlantic these days, is not erasing history; it is replacing cultural contexts. Those who pulled down the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol and that of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford were, in a way, making history by insisting that public space should reflect the values of postcolonial Britain. The inevitable counter argument is, of course, that we should not judge the past according to our modern standards, and that despite any shortcomings, Colston and Rhodes did much good. Yet the very notion of judging the past was always part and parcel of how the imperial project legitimized itself.14 Scholars of the Christian past may raise a similar proposition, claiming that they are reframing Christianity as a supernatural religion to regain the scholarly conversation so that it reflects the value of a post-secular society. Christians are re-learning how to speak about themselves and their past by allowing themselves to be tutored by religious categories rather than secular categories of thought. This is the great lesson provided by the movement of post-liberal theology associated with Yale and recovered and expanded by the theologians of Radical Orthodoxy.15 Christian historians position and qualify the Christian past and by doing so, they criticize other discourses. Secular historians should be prepared for that. 14 Kim A. Wagner, “This Ambitious History of the British Empire Touches on Everything from the Mahabharata to Marx,” Scroll, February 13, 2021. At https://scroll.in/article/986437/ this-ambitious-history-of-the-british-empire-touches-on-everything-from-the-mahabharatato-marx (accessed on May 12, 2021). 15 John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999).

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Conclusion In this book I do not claim that the supernatural was present in the past but not in the present; I believe, as a theologian, that the supernatural was present in the past as much as it is present now. As a historian, however, I am content to argue that the people living in the Christian past believed in the presence of the supernatural and that this is a sufficient reason to make the supernatural a subject of study.

Bibliography Latin Primary Sources (Details of editors and date are not given for works published in these series of editions of Latin texts) CCL Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina (Turnhout, 1953–). CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna, 1865–). PL Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, ed. by J. P. Migne (Paris, 1844–1864). PLS Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, supplementum, ed. by A. Hamman (Paris, 1958–1974). Confessiones De civitate Dei De libero arbitrio De genesi ad litteram De ordine Epistulae Sermones Homiliae in Hiezechielem Moralia in Iob

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Index of names

Agamben, Giorgio 193, 195, 203 Anastasius, emperor 129 Appleby, Joyce 83 Aquinas, Thomas 61, 78–79, 99, 147, 163, 185 Arquillière, Henri-Xavier 130, 159 Augustine 13, 15–16, 18, 36–40, 102, 115–22, 124–37, 147–48, 154, 159, 161–64, 166–67, 171–75, 179, 183–84, 187, 189–202, 206–13, 216–17 Barth, Karl 79, 97, 111, 185, 220 Bellah, Robert 125 Benedict XVI, pope, see Ratzinger Bergson, Henri 175, 180–81 Bernanos, Georges 23 Blanchette, Oliva 75, 180–81 Blondel, Maurice 19, 40, 74–78, 80, 152, 161, 176–83, 185, 219–21 Blumenberg, Hans 98 Boersma, Hans 72–74 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 145 Bossuet, Jacques Benigne 99 Bouyer, Louis 74 Boyer, Charles 173 Bréhier, Émile 175–76, 219 Bresson, Robert 23 Brown, Callum 47 Brown, Peter 18, 137, 143 Brueggemann, Walter 213 Bruno, Michael 130, 132–33, 137, 160 Burnell, Peter 134 Cajetan, Vio 78–79, 185 Chapman, Alister 47, 49–50, 106 Chappell, James 53, 62 Chenu, Marie-Dominique 74 Cofffey, John 49 Coleman, Janet 133 Colston, Edward 223 Congar, Yves Marie-Joseph 74, 132, 150–52, 154 Cremascoli, Giuseppe 16 Crowther, Kathleen 53, 87 Daniélou, Jean 16, 74, 112 Daston, Lorraine 50 Dawson, Christopher 69 de Lubac, Henri 40–41, 73–74, 78–81, 97, 100, 110, 112, 132–33, 160–61, 163–66, 170–73, 176, 184–85, 194, 220 de Roore, Jacob 50 Doyle, Dennis 73–74 Dudden, Frederick Homes 16–17 Dunn, John 48 Duns Scotus 61, 220 Dupré, Louis 73

English, Adam 219 Eusebius of Caesarea 118, 124, 191, 197, 208 Fabian, Joannes 42 Fea, John 69 Feingold, Lawrence 168–69 Fogleman, Alex 116 Förster, Werner 153 Foucault, Michel 116–17 Funkenstein, Amos 38, 73 Galison, Peter 50 Gelasius, pope 129–30 Giles of Rome 130 Gilson, Étienne 73, 131 Gioberti, Vincenzo 148 Goldie, Mark 48 Gordon, Peter 66 Gregory, Brad S. 25, 33, 47, 50–52, 54, 61–62, 73, 93, 97 Gregory, Eric 133 Gregory the Great, pope 10, 13, 15–23, 33–34, 50–57, 59–62, 65–67, 69–70, 87–88, 96–97, 108–10, 119, 121, 124–30, 158, 211–12 Gregory VII, pope 129–30 Grendler, Paul F. 52 Grumett, David 172 Guitton, Jean 151 Haight, Roger D. 76 Hall, Douglas John 139 Hauerwas, Stanley 142 Hebblethwaite, Peter 157 Heidegger, Martin 90, 219–20 Heiser, Michael S. 98–99 Henrici, Peter 179 Henry IV 129 Herzog, Benno 70 Hesychius, bishop 199–200 Hippo, bishop of see Augustine Hobbes, Thomas 48 Hollerich, Michael 132, 161, 166 Hollon, Bryan C. 73–74, 161 Holy Roman emperor 129 Hübner, Kurt 35 Hünermann, Peter 147 Hunter, Ian 53, 62–67 Iggers, George G. 213 Isidore of Seville 129 John XXIII, pope 142, 149–50, 153, 157–58, 207 Jones, Andrew Willard 25, 28, 31, 33–35, 38, 50–52, 54–57, 60–63, 66–67, 69–71, 73, 91, 93, 106, 109–10, 113

240 Index of names Kahlos, Maijastina 121 Kaminski, Phyllis H. 182 Klein, Kerwin L. 83, 214, 218 Kucer, Peter Samuel 163–65 Latour, Bruno 97 Leithart, Peter 73 Leppin, Hartmut 121–22 Lewis, C. S. 51 Licentius 194 Lilla, Mark 66 Lim, Richard 121–22 Loisy, Alfred 77 Louis IX, king 25, 51, 55, 62–63, 110 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 139 MacIntyre, Alasdair 110 Madigan, Kevin 118–19 Maritain, Jacques 110 Markus, Robert A. 17–18, 36–37, 39–41, 115–22, 124–28, 131–38, 143–45, 147–49, 153–56, 159–64, 166–71, 173–76, 187–92, 194–99, 201–2, 204–10, 216–17 Marrou, Henri-Irénée 17–18, 130–32, 137–38, 160, 178, 198–99, 201, 203–4, 206, 217 McEniery, Peter 18 McGinn, Bernard 198, 211 McGrath, Alister 107 McIntire, Carl Thomas 69 Melloni, Alberto 157 Milbank, John 61–62, 73–74, 81–82, 86–87, 97–98, 110, 116–17, 122, 132, 136, 160–74, 220, 223 Minear, Paul S. 41, 204 Möhler, Johann Adam 108–9, 152 Molho, Anthony 83 Moorhead, John 15–16 Mulcahy, Bernard 161 Müller, Barbara 18 Müller, Bernard 42 Nietzsche, Friedrich 58, 85 Noll, Mark 106 Oberman, Heiko 47 Ockham, William of 62 Orosius, Paulus 139 Ottaviani, Alfredo, cardinal 157

Panikkar, Raimon 21, 140–41, 204, 206 Paul, saint 21, 78, 140, 205, 209 Paul VI, pope 150–51, 153 Pecora, Vincent 97–98 Péguy, Charles 153–54 Peterson, Erik 90 Philibert, Paul 150 Pius XI, pope 130 Pius XII, pope 137, 150, 157 Plumb, J. H. 86 Pocock, John 48 Pranger, Marinus B. 134, 136 Przywara, Erich 100, 164 Ratzinger, Joseph 133, 164–65 Rawls, John 132 Rebillard, Éric 119, 121–22 Rhodes, Cecil 223 Roncalli, Angelo Giuseppe see John XXIII Schilling, Heinz 47 Schindler, David L. 32 Scott, William A. 77 Severino, Emanuele 84–86 Shapiro, Barbara J. 50 Skinner, Quentin 47–49, 53 Sloterdijk, Peter 205 Straw, Carole 15–16, 22, 211 Stump, Eleonore 50 Suarez, Francisco 78 Taylor, Charles 26, 61, 65, 73, 97–98, 125–26, 170, 189 Thomas, Keith 48 Tillich, Paul 218 Tolkien, J.R.R. 104 Tuck, Richard 48 Verner, Dominic 197 Virgoulay, Rene 179, 183 von Balthasar, Hans Urs 74, 79, 100, 112, 150, 153, 164, 185 von Harnack, Adolf 17, 211 Weber, Max 98 Wetze, Augustine James 127, 159 Williams, Rowan 172 Wood, Gordon S. 83 Wood, Laurence W. 69



Index of subjects

Acts, Book of 209 Adam, fall of 119, 123, 217 affference 179 aggiornamento 142, 149–50, 152–55 ahistorical escapism 80 anachronism 26, 28, 54, 101, 136, 218 scholarly 26 theological 106 anthropology 59 cultural 48 theological 168 anti-Christ 191, 196 anti-supernatural 27, 94–95 artifacts, historical 21, 68 auctoritas 133, 136, 192, 195 Augustinianism 18, 39–40, 122, 129–37, 159–60, 159–85 Augustinian liberalism 37, 122, 133, 136 Augustinian Scholasticism 39, 160, 171–75 Before Church and State (Jones) 28, 50—51, 54—55, 93, 110 Canadian theology 139 Catholic Church 79, 117, 136, 142, 145, 153, 176, 185, 206 Catholicism 43, 75, 78–81, 112–13, 143, 146, 148–51, 154, 175, 177, 185 Catholic theology 74, 76, 78 Christ 21, 24, 102, 104, 118, 138–42, 180, 182–84, 187, 190, 200, 203, 208, 210, 217 body of 203 cosmic vision of 208 dual nature of 24 enthronement of 21 incarnation of 140 interpretation of 184 mystery of 104, 155 patristic idea of 184 resurrection of 190 return of 37, 200, 217 Christendom 29, 31, 33, 42, 119, 127–28, 137–43, 148–50, 154–56, 169, 216–17 Christian historians 67, 69–70, 96, 101, 111, 214–15 Christian historiography 23, 30, 38, 42, 70, 88–89, 96, 117, 214, 222–23 Christian integralism 161 Christianity 24, 28–34, 44, 64–65, 71–72, 95–99, 101–2, 104–5, 118–19, 124–28, 135–36, 138–41, 143–44, 148–50, 152–54, 163, 166–67, 178–79, 203–4, 218–23 Christianity and the Secular (Markus) 13, 36, 119, 127, 135–36, 148–49, 161, 166

Christianization 118, 121–22, 124, 126, 143, 181, 191, 196, 209 Christian Past 10, 12, 15–16, 18–45, 47–48, 50–66, 68–72, 74–84, 88–91, 93–96, 98–184, 187–88, 190–224 Christian philosophy 219–20 Church 16–17, 74–78, 109, 118–21, 127–33, 137–43, 145–59, 161–67, 169–71, 175, 177, 188–89, 197–98, 206–7, 216–17 The City of God (Augustine) 37, 118, 120, 128–29, 131–34, 147–48, 159, 161–62, 187, 189, 191, 197–98, 206–7 civitas 37, 116–18, 120, 131, 133, 136–37, 162, 166–68, 188, 191–95, 197–99 Civitas Dei see The City of God civitas permixta 133–34 civitas terrena 120, 131, 167, 191, 198 Confessions (Augustine) 102, 134, 179 Constantinianism 138 cosmic theantricism 183 Council of Chalcedon 183 Council of Constantinople 90 Council of Jerusalem 141 Counter-Reformation 158 desecularism 122–23 desecularization 39, 119, 122–23, 125–26, 128, 144 desecularized environment 40 desecularizing 10, 12, 15–16, 18–44, 47–48, 50–90, 93–94, 96–184, 187–88, 190–224 divine government of creation 136, 192, 217 divine revelation 76, 151, 153 doxa 22, 29, 65, 222 dualism 12, 22–23, 25, 73, 80, 91, 111, 113, 176–77 duplex ordo cognitionis 103, 147, 159, 176 élan vital 180–82 The End of Ancient Christianity (Markus) 13, 36, 119, 123–27, 143, 216 Enlightenment 32, 35, 48, 60, 66–67, 87, 143, 146, 169, 177 French 82, 146 Scottish Catholic 48 epistemology 30, 50, 53–55, 57, 59–60, 69, 84, 89 eschatological time 20–21, 40, 42, 209 eschatology 28, 91, 187, 195, 197–99 eschaton 20, 36, 57, 91, 120, 132, 188, 191, 197, 201, 209 European historiography 213 externalization, of supernatural 94 extrinsicism 41, 51, 76, 78, 82 danger of 78, 184

242 Index of subjec ts extrinsic orientation 187–88 extrinsic supernatural 99 Ezekiel, Book of 158 First Vatican Council 103, 147, 176 France 25, 32, 51–52, 55, 63, 75–76, 93, 110, 175–76, 178, 219 French Revolution 148 French Third Republic 177, 220 genealogical historiography 108 Genesis, book of 63-64, 193 German Protestantism 49 German Romanticism 82, 146 Giles of Rome 130 government 37, 116–18, 120, 136, 188, 192–95, 199, 217 civil 134 divine 192, 194–95, 197–98, 217 governmental power 192, 195, 217 government of creation 24, 192–93, 195 grace 39, 41, 77, 79–81, 111–12, 134, 156, 159–61, 163–66, 168–69, 172–75, 177, 179, 184–85, 217 Gregory the Great and His World (Markus) 13, 17, 126 hermeneutics 30–31, 59, 69, 131, 154 metaphysical 65 theological 214 historia salutis 42–43 historical theology 106–9, 113 historical writing 29, 44–45, 52, 54, 58, 108 historicism 35, 54, 59, 76–78, 80, 82–85, 87, 218 historiography 28, 32, 34, 36, 43–44, 52, 59, 101, 105, 212, 214 medieval 25, 44 modern 25, 58 romantic 218 history 22–30, 32–35, 37–39, 42, 44, 50–55, 57–60, 62–71, 75–77, 79–91, 93–101, 103–15, 131–37, 174–78, 182–85, 189–91, 195–96, 198–201, 212–16, 218–19 holy 41, 200, 204, 206, 216 holy city 133 Holy Spirit 21, 41, 109, 152–53, 200 Iberian Scholasticism 78 immanentism 12, 23, 51, 73, 80, 91, 148 atheist 81 atheistic 81 doctrines of 80 historical 80–81, 163 modern 81–82, 86 mystical 172 primacy of 23 radical 80 incarnation 102, 120, 139–41, 174, 180, 199, 203, 216 integralism 43, 66, 106, 164

intégrisme 148 intellectual history 38, 47, 49–50, 62, 106, 109, 113, 147 intrinsicism 82 Kingdom of God 136, 188, 192–95, 199, 206, 209 late antiquity 39, 44, 115, 118–19, 121–23, 126, 130, 133, 137–38, 145, 156 correlated transformations of 123 culture of 137 historians of 119, 123, 130 history of 121 Identities in 122 religious dissent in 121 scholars of 156 vitality of 145 late medieval nominalism 47, 162 Latin Christianity 27, 170 metahistorical 189 method 27, 30–31, 40, 42, 44–45, 47, 52, 54–55, 64, 66, 75–76, 89, 107, 115, 151 methodology 23–25, 31, 36, 44, 47, 54, 57–58, 95, 101–2, 105, 110, 113, 115 Middle Ages 18, 22, 55, 62, 121, 128–29, 133, 139, 141, 175, 180 modernism 75–76, 145 modernity 51–52, 55, 61–62, 66, 72–75, 81, 87–88, 93, 96–98, 127, 148, 153, 175 modern theology 43, 49, 78, 81, 107–8, 172, 220 myth 29–30, 58–59, 89, 96, 104 natural reason 78–79, 103, 177, 185, 219, 221 nature 25, 28–29, 31–32, 38–39, 41–42, 55–58, 72–74, 78–80, 103–5, 110–12, 115–17, 124–25, 159–61, 163–65, 168–69, 172–73, 177–78, 181–85, 195–97, 220 theandric 183 Neo-Augustinianism 39 Neo-Integralism 35 Neoplatonic Augustinianism 39, 175 Neoplatonism 31, 175 Neo-Scholasticism 147, 175, 177 Neo-Thomism 175 nihilism 73, 81–82, 84–87 ontological 38, 73, 84, 87 radical 85 Nouvelle Theologie 73 ontological turn 12, 38, 69–91, 221 order of nature 29, 103–4, 115–17, 160, 195 Panchristism 183 pantheism 31 parousia 37, 175, 191, 199, 216 philosophy autonomous 221 contemporary 84

243

Index of subjec ts

dualistic 113 Greek 118, 138 mediaeval 220 medieval 50 modern 75, 181 moral 88 perennial 146 postnarrativist 214 Thomist 146 philosophy of religion 32, 50 political theology 36–38, 116, 118, 133, 136, 161, 163–65, 169, 171, 196, 201 postmodernism 44, 83–84, 86 post-secular history 29–30, 42, 101, 103–4, 219 post-secularization 68 Prime Mover of creation 184 prophecy 115, 179, 195, 198–200 Psalm 82, 210 Radical Orthodoxy 111, 194, 220, 223 Reformation 25, 47–48, 61–62, 93, 110, 143, 149, 152 Catholic 141 Protestant 51 religion 28–29, 41, 47–48, 50, 59, 64–65, 94–96, 98, 105–6, 119–20, 123, 126–27, 134, 140–41, 143–44, 178, 180–81, 206–8, 210–11, 222–23 dominant 139 hegemonic 148 pagan 124 supernatural 24, 26, 28–30, 32–33, 65, 68, 71–72, 101–2, 105–6, 178, 180, 218–19, 223 Ressourcement 40, 43–44, 74, 108–9, 111–13, 148, 153–56, 160, 176, 184–85 revelation 33, 75, 77, 79, 112, 147, 151–53, 158–59, 176, 179, 182, 185, 219–20 Roman Catholic Church see Catholic Church Roman Empire 20, 118, 124, 138, 191, 196–97, 199, 208–9 Rome 18, 103, 118–19, 130, 147, 157–58, 162, 195, 209 sacramental ontology 32, 34–35, 38, 41, 47–67, 70–74, 79–80, 87–88, 91, 93, 105, 111, 114 sacramental ontology movement 60, 67, 71, 74 sacramental worldview 20, 31–32, 51, 56–58, 65, 70, 88–89, 91, 106, 110, 187 sacred history 30, 38, 40, 42–43, 53, 62–67, 112, 189–91, 195–96, 216 sacred history and prophecy 195 sacred imperium 130 sacred orders 131 sacred secularity 32, 42, 127, 159 sacred society 31 sacred sphere 217 sacred world 42 saeculum 32, 36-38, 91, 115-23, 128, 131-36, 155, 160-61, 171, 174-75, 184, 187-92, 196-207, 209, 216-17

Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Markus) 37, 133, 216 Scholasticism 39, 78–79, 112–13, 160, 171, 175, 185 Second Scholasticism 110 Second Vatican Council 78, 141–43, 145, 147, 149–51, 153, 157, 185 secular 22–27, 34–38, 40, 42–43, 50–56, 58–63, 65–67, 93–98, 115, 117–28, 131–36, 143–45, 147–49, 154–56, 159–63, 166–70, 173–76, 194–99, 204–8, 215–19 secular academia 176 secular academics 67 secular accounts 95, 117, 196 A Secular Age (Taylor) 61, 65, 97–98, 125–26, 170 secular culture 124, 126–27, 144, 167 secular disciplines 24, 71 secular epistemology 30, 35, 93 secular government 128 secular historiography 25 secular history 24–27, 40, 42, 47, 60, 64–66, 96, 112, 189–91, 199, 222 secular ideology 36 secularism 35, 58, 67, 71–73, 87–89, 93, 97, 104, 165, 170, 178 secularity 32, 122, 128, 170, 195, 198 secularity and holiness 198 secularization 24–25, 36, 38, 61, 68, 93–98, 119, 121–22, 126–27, 164, 166, 196–97, 201, 205–6, 222 secular knowledge 59–60 secular metanarrative 212 secular methodology 28, 89, 91 secular mindset 89 secular myth 29–30, 58–59 secular order 30, 120, 171 secular politics 120, 161, 167, 174 secular reality 28, 148 secular reason 82, 162, 171, 220 secular reductionism 106 secular society 30, 36, 136, 147–48, 170, 197 secular state 80, 185, 196, 216 secular structures 32, 167 secular university 67 secular values 96 secular world 66, 113, 222 secular worldview 19, 30, 32, 34, 51, 70, 93, 95, 98, 101, 170 Seeing Things Their Way 47, 49–50, 53–55, 106–7 social theory 62, 82, 97, 136, 162–63, 165–66, 168, 170–72 supernatural 16–19, 21–24, 26–29, 32–35, 38–43, 55–57, 70–74, 77–81, 93–96, 98, 100–105, 111–12, 155–56, 160–61, 163–65, 168–70, 176–85, 188–90, 211–17, 224 tempiternity 40, 204–7 tertium quid 131, 160, 178, 203

244 Index of subjec ts theology 32–35, 37–39, 49–50, 59–60, 62, 71, 73, 78–79, 82, 93–115, 135, 146–47, 155–57, 170, 174, 176–78, 184–85, 188–89, 215–16, 218–20 theology of creation 184, 194 theory 23–24, 52, 64, 66, 82–83, 96, 107, 119, 121, 123, 129–30, 135–36, 147 clericalist 165 grounded political 38 historical 89 juridical-political 117 liberal political 38 medieval theocratic 130 modern 126 non-reductionist 53, 55 reductionist 53 secularist 165

tradition 75, 77, 108–9, 125, 128, 146, 148–54, 179, 182 Augustinian 17, 166 Catholic 10, 74, 109 Christian 72, 87, 148, 150–51, 154, 192, 206, 221 Eusebian 191, 196 Hippolytan 191, 196 historiographical 212 Judeo-Christian 63 oral 151 political 166 premodern 71 religious 94, 121, 166 Western 172 The Unintended Reformation (Gregory) 25, 51–54, 61–62, 65–66, 87–88, 93, 96–97, 108