Radical Secularization?: An inquiry into the religious roots of secular culture 9781628921786, 9781501308543, 9781628921809

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Radical Secularization?

Radical Secularization? An inquiry into the religious roots of secular culture Edited by Stijn Latré, Walter Van Herck and Guido Vanheeswijck

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Stijn Latré, Walter Van Herck, Guido Vanheeswijck and Contributors, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Radical secularization?/edited by Stijn Latré, Walter Van Herck, and Guido Vanheeswijck. – 1st [edition]. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-62892-178-6 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Secularism. 2. Secularization. 3. Civilization, Secular. 4. Religion. 5. Religions. I. Latré, Stijn, editor. BL2747.8.R333 2014 211’.6–dc23 2014020001 ISBN: HB: 978-1-628-92178-6 PB: 978-1-5013-2268-6 ePDF: 978-1-628-92180-9 ePub: 978-1-628-92179-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Notes on the Editors Notes on the Contributors Acknowledgements

1 Introduction Stijn Latré, Guido Vanheeswijck and Walter Van Herck Part 1

vii viii ix 1

In the Wake of Löwith and Blumenberg

2 Heaven on Earth? The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate Jean-Claude Monod

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3 The Eternal Return of Gnosticism? Secularization and the Problem of Evil Willem Styfhals

17

4 Secularization as a Category of Historical Entitlement Herbert De Vriese Part 2

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Secularization in Christianity and Beyond

5 Christianity, Incarnation and Disenchantment: Marcel 6 7 8 9 10

Gauchet on the ‘departure from religion’ André Cloots The Strength of Weakness: Vattimo and Gauchet on Secularization Andreas Michel The Legitimacy and Genealogy of Secularization in Question John Milbank Beyond Radical Secularization and Radical Orthodoxy? Guido Vanheeswijck Apologetics and Anti-Apologetics in Taylor’s A Secular Age Charles Lockwood Religion, Modernity and the Notion of Subtler Languages Gerbert Faure

47 67 83 128 152 169

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11 Wilfred Cantwell Smith on the History of ‘Religion’ and ‘Belief ’ Walter Van Herck

178

12 The Axial Age and the Dynamics of Transcendence Stijn Latré

190

13 To World or not to World: An Axial Genealogy of Secular Life Laurens ten Kate Index

207 231

Notes on the Editors Stijn Latré (1978) obtained his PhD at the University of Leuven in 2008, with a dissertation on the philosophy of Charles Taylor and is currently working at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) as lecturer. He was funded by the Flemish Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) for a research project on Theory of Secularization. He also teaches the courses The End of Secularization? and Levensbeschouwing (‘World views’, German: ‘Weltanschauungen’) at the Centre Pieter Gillis, University of Antwerp. Recent international publications include ‘Jean-Claude Monod and the historical heritage of secularization theory’ in Bijdragen: International Journal in Philosophy and Theology, 71:1(2010), 27–50 and ‘On the Religious Sources of Autonomy and Selfexpression: Charles Taylor and Marcel Gauchet’ in Amsterdam Law Forum, 2:1(2009), 139–56. Stijn Latré has also contributed two chapters to the Dutch book Radicale secularisatie? Tien hedendaagse filosofen over religie en moderniteit (Pelcmans/Klement, 2013), which he co-edited with Prof. Guido Vanheeswijck. Guido Vanheeswijck (1955) is full professor of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy (University Antwerp) and is part-time professor at the Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven). His research and publications concern the domains of metaphysics, philosophy of religion, theories of secularization and philosophy of culture. He is member of the editorial board of Bijdragen and Collingwood and British Idealism Studies. Walter Van Herck (1962) is associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Antwerp and guest professor at the University of Ghent, Belgium. Recent publications: H. Geybels and W. Van Herck (eds), Humour and Religion, Bloomsbury, 2011; L. Gómez and W. Van Herck (eds), The Sacred in the City, Bloomsbury, 2012.

Notes on the Contributors André Cloots is full professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven) and is part-time professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp. Herbert De Vriese is lecturer at the University of Leiden. His latest edited volume (with Gary Gabor) is Rethinking Secularization. Philosophy and the Prophecy of a Secular Age (2009). Gerbert Faure is preparing his PhD thesis working as a fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Institute of Philosophy (University of Leuven). Laurens ten Kate is associate professor in the philosophy of religion and in theology at the University for Humanistics, Utrecht, the Netherlands, and senior fellow researcher at the Faculty of Theology of the Free University of Amsterdam. He also teaches at the International School of Philosophy in Leusden. In 2001 he published Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology (in collaboration with Ilse N. Bulhof, eds). Recently, he published as coordinating editor Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (2012). Charles Lockwood is college fellow in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His current research focuses on the philosophical and theological legacies of Kant’s conception of autonomy. His broader research interests include the interconnections between philosophy and theology in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods, theories of secularization, and historical and contemporary debates about the relationship between religion, ethics and politics. Andreas Michel is associate professor of German at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. John Milbank is research professor of religion, politics and ethics and director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Most recent publications are The Suspended Middle (2005); The Monstrosity of Christ (with Slavoj Žižek) (2009); The Future of Love (2009) and Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) respectively. Jean-Claude Monod is full professor at the CNRS (Center for National Scientific Research), Paris. Willem Styfhals is preparing his PhD thesis working as a fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven), Centre for Metaphysics and Philosophy of Culture.

Acknowledgements This book proceeds from the conference with the same title held in Antwerp, in September 2012. The conference was the culmination point of a research project entitled ‘The End of Secularization?’ The project focused on the ideas of Gauchet and Taylor with regard to religion and secularity and was funded by the FWO, the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research. We would like to thank the FWO for its generous support. We are also very grateful to all keynote speakers and speakers in the parallel paper sessions at that conference, since they helped to frame the issues discussed in this book. Some of these talks have found their way into the present volume. We would also like to thank Haaris Naqvi of Bloomsbury for his meticulous and patient assistance to the editing process of this book. If it is true that we are now living in a secular age, in an ‘immanent frame’ that tends to obscure transcendence, he at least showed that there is still life beyond a deadline.

1

Introduction Stijn Latré, Guido Vanheeswijck and Walter Van Herck

Secularization theory is a popular theme in social science. In sociology, the secularization paradigm has been amply discussed in the works of Berger, Bruce, Casanova, Davie, Inglehart, Luhmann and Norris, to name just a few. In philosophy, political theorists such as Habermas, Rawls, Barry and Audi have contributed to debates about religious accommodation in secular societies. Sociological, historical and philosophical perspectives on secularization have recently been brought together in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Warner et al. 2010) and Rethinking Secularism (Calhoun et al. 2011). With these contemporary debates in sociology of religion and political philosophy in mind, this book wants to deepen the discussion by focusing on the genealogy of secularization. What are the cultural roots or radices of secularization? ‘Radical secularization’ indeed suggests two meanings of ‘radical’. First, ‘radical’ can refer to the ‘end’ of secularization, which in its turn can be understood in two different ways. The radical end of secularization either means that the process of secularization has now come to its terminus, and that there is no way back. Put differently, the irreversible process of secularization has reached its final destination. Or, the end of secularization may refer to the nowadays popular phrase of the ‘return of religion’, implying that religion is conspicuously present in the public sphere in material and symbolic forms such as headscarves, or that religion is back on the agenda of (academic) Western culture, and when considered on a global scale even has never really left the scene. These considerations equally include claims that secularization has been culturally adapted in non-Western contexts. Second, ‘radical’ can also refer to the philosophical–historical roots (radices) of secularization. The authors of this book primarily look at philosophical and sociological theories of secularization and religion, continuing the traditions of Weber, Durkheim, Schmitt, Löwith and Blumenberg. Since a philosophical study of secularization simply cannot neglect the classic debate between Löwith and Blumenberg, the first and smaller part of this volume is dedicated to the heritage of this debate in our days. Jean-Claude Monod sheds light on the reception of this debate in France, specifically in the writings of Foucault, Lyotard and Nancy. He also discusses Taylor’s rather cursory mentioning of Blumenberg towards the end of A Secular Age (Taylor 2007).

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Willem Styfhals argues that the debate between Löwith and Blumenberg about secularization, in fact, points to a more fundamental debate about the problem of evil. If it is to be understood in an ontological way, as Löwith and Voegelin claim, the problem of evil is still radically tied to the modern idea of progress. In their view, the problem of evil is the real substance of every eschatological view of history. In view of their ontological nature, eschatology and the problem of evil are surviving in the modern idea of progress – they even make this idea possible. Consequently, modernity does not escape the Gnostic opposition between good and evil. By contrast, Blumenberg sees modernity as the ‘second overcoming of Gnosticism’: since, in his account, the problem of evil does not take metaphysical proportions, human beings do not need to become godly heroes in order to defeat the ‘god’ of evil. So the debate between Löwith and Blumenberg about secularization and eschatology ultimately revolves around different metaphysical and anthropological presuppositions. The history behind Blumenberg’s ‘secularization theorem’ is further illuminated by Herbert De Vriese. He observes a paradigm shift in sociological debates about secularization, namely, from the ‘exit from religion’ half a century ago, to a ‘return of religion’ in our times. At the same time, philosophical debates seem to stick to the old secularization theorem, linking the origins of modernity to Christianity. However, Blumenberg’s analysis of secularization as a rhetorical category of illegitimacy, depicting modernity as a ‘historical wrong’, has lost its vigour, precisely due to sociological debates about the ‘return of religion’. The meaning of secularization, instead of being a category of historical wrong denouncing the shortcomings of modernity, now shifts to a category of historical entitlement with regard to Christianity and other religions. If modernity is partly the result of religious transformations, religion may vindicate its rights within secular societies. De Vriese’s thesis about secularization as a category of historical entitlement is amply attested in the second part of this book, ‘Secularization in Christianity and Beyond’. André Cloots examines the pivotal role ascribed by Marcel Gauchet to Christianity as the ‘religion for the departure from religion’. Andreas Michel confronts Gauchet’s and Vattimo’s views on the Christian dogma of Incarnation. Whereas the former emphasizes the dynamics of transcendence endemic to Incarnation, the latter highlights the immanent aspects of Incarnation. Gauchet’s and Vattimo’s views nonetheless converge in regarding Christianity as the end of society’s sacred foundation. The most lengthy and arguably the most thought-provoking chapter of this book is John Milbank’s essay on the legitimacy and genealogy of secularization. According to Milbank, secularization has unduly displaced a metaphysics of participation in Platonic style by a univocal understanding of being. Secular society came about by nominalist and Protestant theology, and by its procedural and rationalist Enlightenment heirs in philosophy. In the course of his essay, Milbank touches on almost all subjects and protagonists present in other chapters of this book: Löwith and Blumenberg, de Lubac, Ratzinger and Habermas, Taylor, Gauchet and Bellah. His criticism of Gauchet is equally insightful as well as being open to contestation. In his essay on Gauchet, André Cloots anticipates Milbank’s views about orthodoxy and the metaphysics of participation, by making use of Gauchet’s interpretation. Milbank’s view of participation questions the

Introduction

3

autonomy of the secular world and hence threatens to render the world second hand. It is just one example of intertextual references in this book which may be compelling to the reader. Milbank’s defence of Christianity in its radically orthodox form is also questioned in the next chapter of the book by Guido Vanheeswijck. Radical orthodoxy as an alternative for radical secularization may invoke what Leszek Kolakowski has called ‘metaphysical horror’. Charles Taylor is well aware of this danger in speaking about the need for ‘subtler languages’ that are more prudent in articulating deep ontological commitments. Hence Taylor cannot be seen as just another advocate of ‘radical orthodoxy’, as Milbank likes to present him. The essays by Charles Lockwood and Gerbert Faure dwell on Taylor’s A Secular Age. Lockwood provides a very neat analysis of the reception of Taylor’s trail-blazing book. Just like Taylor himself tries to lay bare presuppositions of narratives about secularization, including his own, Lockwood articulates so-called apologetic and ‘non-apologetic’ presuppositions in Taylor’s book. His conclusion is that Taylor’s account of secularization cannot be discarded on grounds of its being a reduction to apologetics, since he explicitly warns against exclusionist positions, either on the side of believers or on the side of unbelievers. Faure starts off with Taylor’s criticism of Gauchet, in the foreword to the English translation of Le désenchantement du monde. He argues that the disenchantment of the world may be compatible with subtler languages of ‘re-enchantment’, including religion. Nonetheless, since religion also entails claims about the ‘objective’ nature of reality, it remains vulnerable to disenchanting criticisms of science. The relation between science and religion is also implicitly present in Walter Van Herck’s essay about the history of the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘belief ’, as it was described by W. C. Smith. It is only when ‘belief ’ started to refer to a propositional content, believing that such and such is the case, that religious belief became vulnerable to competing outlooks such as science. However, the original and cross-cultural – and hence more universal – meaning of belief points in the direction of ‘believing in’: belief as an attitude of confidence, faith in a person, rather than in some propositional truth. The future of religion in a secular society may well depend on the recognition of this original meaning of belief. Though philosophers like Gauchet and Taylor refer to the crucial role of Christianity in the process of secularization, they also embrace Karl Jaspers’s notion of the Achsenzeit, the period of axial religion. The penultimate essay of this book by Stijn Latré dwells on the meaning of axial religion in Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World (Gauchet 1985) and Bellah’s more recent Religion in Human Evolution (Bellah 2011). The eventual convergence between the ‘transcendental’ Gauchet and the more ‘empirical’ Bellah is striking. Though the latter fails to fully articulate the different layers of the meaning of transcendence throughout his book, both Bellah and Gauchet are to be admired for their comprehensive views on religion and society. Axial religion is also at the centre of Laurens ten Kate’s essay on the deconstruction of Christianity by Jean-Luc Nancy. Ten Kate argues that, just like the past hegemony of religion could only exist by reference to the world or the ‘secular’ as its counterpart,

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the ‘secular age’ or ‘immanent frame’ of our days is equally questioned and rendered unstable by a ‘return’ of religion: not religion in its old forms, but transformations of religion; religion in a new guise, a secular guise. The secular contains its own limit, a limit that has nothing beyond it, that is, no border that can be transgressed. This ‘limit’, this otherness of the secular makes the secular possible, and may be called ‘religious’. Hence conceptual demarcations between religion and the secular are unstable and ultimately fail. The ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ mutually support each other; their interdependence fosters their independence. Future debates about religion and secularity may well go in that direction.

References Bellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds). 2011. Rethinking Secularism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gauchet, Marcel. 1985. Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Oscar Burge, 1997. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Warner, Michael, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds). 2010. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Part One

In the Wake of Löwith and Blumenberg

2

Heaven on Earth? The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate Jean-Claude Monod

1 Introduction If one thinks of secularization as the name of a historical process, several questions immediately arise: Is this process still going on? At what intermediate point of this process do we stand? What would mean an achieved, or a radical, secularization? As to the first question, one finds in the contemporary international discussion about secularization at least two different answers:

1. Secularization has passed, we live in a post-secular world. The most powerful trends nowadays go in a direction opposite to secularization, at least in many parts of the world – Europe being partly an exception. 2. Secularization is certainly not a steady and continuous process, without backlash effects, but rather an ongoing struggle. It continues even in regions marked by strong political–religious movements, by new anti-secularist political theologies, Christian or Jewish fundamentalisms, Islamism, and so on. If answering empirical questions about secularization requires a sociological diagnosis, the last question – what would an achieved or radical secularization mean – calls for a more projective and philosophical answer. And here again we encounter several answers which have already been developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the discussions of various secularist thinkers and in connection with social forces moulding the future. A first answer was to say that a radical secularization would not only imply the move to free society from clericalism, hegemonic Churches and coercive religions, but also to dismiss all theological or religious concepts. We can find this answer among some scientist thinkers, sometimes inspired by Darwinism (such as Clémence Royer in France), among some branches of socialism and, for instance, in a text by the young Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage (Marx 1982) ‘On the Jewish Question’ – but here, the emancipation of the world from religion implied doing away with the social roots of what Marx regarded as a collective alienation. In France, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was an opposition inside the socialist movement, between those (like Vaillant and Allard) who promoted

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a ‘destruction of the Churches’ and those, like Jaurès, who were defending a liberal laïcité, in which the liberty of consciousness and liberty of cult would be guaranteed. The second position suggests a different view of what could be called a radical secularization: not the destruction of religions, but the refusal of the hegemony of any institution, including those which could appear as the new sources of authority and power – not the Churches, but also nations, the state, science itself. We find this position among philosophers of the late twentieth century who fostered a ‘separation between state and science’ (according to Paul Feyerabend’s motto), parallel to the liberal or secular ‘separation between State and religion’, and parallel to a separation between politics, or democracy, and ‘truth’ – for example, in Richard Rorty’s plea for a secular and liberal relativism and a post-metaphysical tolerance. Here, secularist thinking takes the shape of following or even radicalizing the former Religionskritik by a criticism of any ‘substitute religion’, as Nietzsche has called what he perceived as new collective ‘faiths’ and mass organizations promising a (secular) collective salvation. Here, the new idols were not gods but the nation, the race and the class, – and a radical secularization would entail a rejection or destruction of all these idols.

2 The Löwith-Blumenberg debate Karl Löwith (1941) has given a remarkable account of this radicalization as a shift from Religionskritik to the criticism of new ‘secular religions’ in his book about the history of German philosophy, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche. But Löwith has also proposed a global reconstruction of the history of the ‘Western’ conception of . . . history, precisely as a shift from theologies of history to modern philosophies of history. This book, first published in 1949 in the United States entitled Meaning in History, then in Germany under the title Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschechen, is one of the main ‘pieces’ of what has been called Säkularisierungsstreit, ‘the quarrel of secularization’. Its main thesis is well known: the modern philosophies of history, and more generally, the modern ‘faith in history’, are nothing but a secularization of messianism. Here a semantic precision is due: we have to distinguish between the two senses of ‘secularization’. When we speak, as I’ve just done, about the process of secularization and about the question of whether it has come to its end or not, this process is understood as the withering away of the public influence of religion, as a form of de-theologization of the ways of thinking, and as a growing independence of the various social spheres vis-à-vis the Churches and their prescriptions. To sum up, we could speak of a secularization as de-theologization. When one says, with Löwith, that the Marxist philosophy of history is nothing else than a secularization of messianism in the language of political economy, one points to an operation of transfer, of a transformation of something into something else; but in this transfer, the ‘something else’, the new formation to a certain extent preserves its origin. And here lies the polemical point, leading us to the second meaning of secularization envisaged here: the assertion of a hidden continuity, of a ‘religiosity’ of a

Heaven on Earth? The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate

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kind of discourse or thought which to itself pretends to be purely rational. A religiosity at odds with the de-theologization mentioned above. It is about this second meaning of secularization that Hans Blumenberg has opened a debate, about what he has called ironically the ‘theorem of secularization’: ‘Y is nothing else than a secularized X’. Before wondering about the history of this debate, I briefly bring to mind the debate itself. I do not want to repeat things that I have already written elsewhere (in my book La Querelle de la secularization, 2002). I would just like to stress a few points that became clear to me quite recently, following my reading of the correspondence between Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt, published in 2007. I will also slightly alter my usual focus, by dwelling rather on Löwith than on Blumenberg in this chapter. We know that the discussion has started, as a public debate, during the conference of 1962, organized in Münster, about ‘the idea of progress’. There Löwith gave a famous lecture, ‘Das Verhängnis des Fortschritts’, (‘Progress as Fatality’). Blumenberg, still young and unknown, for the first time launched his thesis that secularization was a category of historical illegitimacy, and applied it to Löwith’s book Meaning in History. Blumenberg’s thesis comes down to the assertion that secularization may not be used to discard all modern achievements as merely illegitimate transfers of theological concepts to a more worldly sphere. It is, so to speak, illegitimate to consider secularization as a ‘category of illegitimacy’. In 1966, Blumenberg considerably extended his first ‘attack’ on Löwith and the secularization theorem in Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (translated as The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 1983). However, Löwith’s account of Blumenberg’s book in Philosophische Rundschau in 1968 quoted in fact only excerpts from . . . Blumenberg’s paper at the conference of 1962, as Blumenberg (2007) complains to Carl Schmitt in his letter of 7 August 1975, where he answers to Schmitt’s question concerning the ‘elimination’ of a positive reference to ‘Löwith’s important book’ in the new edition of Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Beyond this anecdote, what seems important to me in this context is the fact that the debate around secularization was immediately a debate about Fortschritt, progress, and about the modern concept of history. Löwith’s thesis of a continuity between prophetic awareness, Jewish messianism, Christian theologies of history and the modern philosophies of history might have concealed, for reason of its very massive character, some critical remarks that introduce more complexity. For instance, Löwith acknowledges the difficulty inherent in the very idea of a ‘Christian conception of history’, writing that it is an ‘artificial construction’ and a ‘contradictory mix’. The Christian eschatology was originally something absolutely different from any attempt to find a meaning and an ‘order’ in human history. What was important and expected was the end of times. But, in a way, Löwith’s book aims at describing how these two levels, Weltgeschichte and Heilsgeschehen, have been brought together, step by step, during Western history, and have merged into something strange – the faith in history itself – not in a ‘future world’, but in the future of the world. So these two histories have finally merged in what Löwith calls the ‘innerworldly doctrines of collective salvation’. This process can be described as a process of historicization and immanentization of eschatology. The division of history into

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three ‘ages’ shifted from a transcendent perspective in Daniel’s prophecies to a more immanent one with Joachim of Fiore. With Joachim, it has been projected from a theological level (the Trinity) into a succession of historical ‘ages’ – the age of the Father, the age of the Son and the age of the Holy Spirit. And with the German philosophers of history who were the heirs of the Johannic and Joachite theology, this scheme became a purely historical, dialectical scheme of realization of the Spirit, Geist.

3 The continued effect of the debate Subsequently, this ternary scheme was adopted and distorted under the form of Auguste Comte’s ‘trois états’, but also, Löwith argues, as the ‘Third Rom’, and even the Nazi ‘Third Reich’ – through Möller van den Bruck’s Third Reich and Mereschkovsky’s ‘Christianism of the Third Testament’. Here, I think, Blumenberg has raised a decisive objection: an analogy or surface resemblance is not a secularization; not every ternary structuration of history is a metamorphosis of the Trinity; nor is every historical expectation the expectation of the eschaton or of the millennium. What is more difficult to contend, and what might have had a deeper impact on Löwith’s book, is the following idea: the fact that the West thinks it has a historical– universal ‘task’, a historical mission which will lead the ‘barbarian’ peoples out of their backwardness, superstition and so on, to the path of ‘civilization’. This view of a historical mission is, according to Löwith, unthinkable without and inseparable from the Christian past of the West. In its new, secular guise, ‘democracy’, ‘reason’, ‘human rights’ and economic prosperity have replaced God and salvation and have become the driving forces of a secular mission of evangelization. And if we replace ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ by ‘communism’ and redemption of the suffering international working class, we have the Marxist version of the same logic. This view has had a long history, if one notices that many thinkers of the 1960s, including the so-called postmodern thinkers, have taken up this critical view of any philosophical belief in progress as a form of secularized Christianity – for instance, Foucault and Lyotard. The way Löwith unfolds his history of ideas is somewhat reminiscent of Hegel, and is at odds with the kind of meta-history that Foucault practised and valued, as Löwith’s somewhat tragic philosophical style diverges from the postmodern and postmetaphysical ‘lightness’ and ‘aesthetic’ turn, if one thinks of Lyotard. Nevertheless, Löwith’s declared scepticism about the modern philosophies of progress, liberal and Marxist alike, and his Nietzschean disavowal of Christian ‘anthropocentrism’,1 have resulted in seeing him as a precursor or forerunner of neo-Nietzschean, postmodern thinkers. What is interesting here is the place of Nietzsche as the common inspiration to overcome the ‘Christian-modern’ world or historicity. In his paper Eschatologie, fin de l’histoire, ontologie de l’actualité, Philippe Büttgen recalls that Löwith and Foucault attended the Nietzsche conference in Royaumont in 1964. They met, and Büttgen notes that for both thinkers, the genealogical project

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(inspired by Nietzsche) constituted a dam against the idea of progress in (dialectical) philosophy of history. I don’t think it makes sense here to talk about a heritage, but in either case, we are invited to turn ourselves to the present, and to consider with distance and irony the ‘promises’ of a future ‘fulfilment’ – what Foucault calls, in Les Mots et les choses (1966), ‘the big dream of an end of History’ (‘la grande songerie d’un terme de l’Histoire’) promising the emergence of Man at last, of the free Man (‘l’émergence de l’Homme enfin’). We can observe a similarity between Löwith and Foucault’s views. Löwith has been interpreted as supporting a kind of return to the Greeks, and to their ethics of measure, rejecting the human and modern hubris. The late Foucault has equally shown a renewed interest for ancient ethics, especially for the Greek understanding of an ethics that, unlike Christian and Kantian ethics, would not be based on absolute commands, but on provisory rules and ‘technics’. But of course, Foucault’s political activism and, on the topic of the Greek ‘care for oneself ’ (souci de soi), his interest for the sexual part of ethical life diverges from Löwith’s views. Löwith’s sceptical thesis about philosophy of history heralds many posterior philosophical developments about ‘post-history’, including the postmodern idea of an end of the ‘grands récits’ as has been reformulated by Jean-François Lyotard. Contrary to the case of Löwith and Foucault, I could not find any empirical evidence that both philosophers did ever meet or read each other’s work. Two points are striking. The first is that Lyotard clearly unifies the modern philosophies of history (including Marxism, in which he previously ‘believed’) and the Christian ‘grand récit’ as origin of our imaginary of historicity, in such a way that he lays bare a kind of narrative structure of historicity, with changing terms, but a stable framework. I quote here Lyotard’s essay, ‘Une fable postmoderne’, in Moralités post-modernes: Paul’s and Augustine’s eschatological reinterpretations of Christianity installed eschatology properly speaking in the heart of western thinking, and made it predominant in modern historical consciousness. Eschatology tells the story of a wanting human being, and promises that this condition will come to its terms at the end of times by overcoming evil and death, and by the return to the house of the Father. . . . Secular modernity retains the temporal structure of a grand narrative, as one has called it, and promises in its turn reconciliation within the heart of human subjectivity. The story of Enlightenment, the romantic or speculative dialectics and the Marxist narrative unfold the same historicity as Christianity, albeit in a secular form, because they preserve the eschatological principle.2 (Lyotard 1993, 90–1) [translation: sl]

Here, we have a beautifully written, but direct repetition of Löwith’s main thesis – it is as if postmodernism were already there in 1949. The second point is that during the 1930s, Löwith fled from Germany to Japan, and there he showed a deep interest in Asiatic culture, namely Japanese, and especially in the Zen tradition of Buddhism, in order to find an alternative view of the relationships between world and time – in the post-Christian culture, without any ‘faith in the future’.

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Lyotard also evokes, in Moralités post-modernes, a Japanese motto: ‘Earth has no path by itself ’ (‘la terre n’a pas de chemin par elle-même’). He interprets it as the idea that there is no way to emancipation, not one way to follow, but that the understanding of this ‘negation’ (‘no way’) could be a chance, an ‘awakening’ from Western teleology. He compares this Japanese view to Heidegger’s image of the Holzwege. Today, we often notice that in the contemporary Continental philosophy about secularization, Löwith’s thesis, combined with a certain reading of Heidegger about the metaphysics of will and its decline, seems to be much more accepted than Blumenberg’s counter-argument. The most frequently used criticism against the category of secularization is not its weak heuristic value and the fact that it places the ‘modern’ in a position of ‘cultural debt’ (as Blumenberg argued); it is much more, as Heidegger has argued in his lectures on Nietzsche, the fact that the very category originates from the ecclesial-Christian tradition and from metaphysical distinctions (sacred and profane, secular and regular . . .). So secularization would be an inner-Christian category, which loses its relevance outside Europe or the West. Derrida (1996) repeats that claim in Faith and Knowledge.

4 Löwith and Blumenberg in Nancy and Taylor About the question of the history of the Blumenberg-Löwith debate, I must say that in France, there is not much history to report. Hence, I was a little surprised by the premises of Jean-Luc Nancy’s attempt of a new ‘déconstruction du christianisme’ (new if we consider that the young Heidegger has attempted such a deconstruction of Christianity in his lectures of 1920–1, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens). In his paper ‘La déconstruction du christianisme’, first published 1998 in the French review Les Etudes philosophiques (October–December 1998), Nancy introduced his project of deconstruction with the following ‘axiom’: ‘toute notre pensée est de part en part chrétienne. De part en part et toute, c’est-à-dire nous tous, nous tous jusqu’au bout’.3 (‘The whole of our thought is through and through Christian. Through and through and as a whole, that is to say all of us, all of us through and through’). To put it bluntly, I found this axiom ‘pre-Blumenbergian’. It is as if the entire debate about what is new in the Modern Age, and what can be considered as a heritage or a legacy of Christianity, was already settled. Nancy sees Christianity as the principle of its own overcoming (or ‘self-deconstruction’); but this denies the conflicts and the heterogeneity of sources of the modern age, to begin with the modern scientific revolution and what Blumenberg points out as the antiChristian rehabilitation of theoretical curiosity, at the beginning of the modern age. I addressed this criticism to Nancy, but I did not convince him, I think, because when he republished the paper in his book La Déclosion. Déconstruction du christianisme, he did not change a word of his ‘axioms’. Nevertheless, in the ‘Ouverture’ (Preface) of the book, he mentioned Blumenberg: The buzz word of the ‘return of religion’ which denotes a real phenomenon does not deserve more attention than any other ‘return’. In phenomena connected to

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repeating, resuming, relaunching or reappearing, what matters is never what is identical, but what is different. For the identical henceforth loses its identity in its own return, and the question should be asked again tirelessly and with renewed efforts: if secularization cannot mean a simple transfer of the identical, what else can secularization mean, and what else does it inevitably mean? (Blumenberg has asked this question long time ago, but he has failed to answer it.) (Nancy 2005, 9) [translation: sl]4

This formulation is more cautious than the one from the first paper, and I am now myself more sensitive to this philosophical approach of religion and Christianity in as much as it tries to ‘translate’ some Christian ‘mottos’. Nancy evokes the very notions of fides, understood as faithfulness, of ‘brotherhood’, and of a certain idea of ‘renewal’ as it figures in baptism. But this process of translation could also concern notions from Jewish or extra-European religions, in a way that could make sense in the very context of ‘déclosion’, that is, for someone who doesn’t believe in any ‘article of faith’, but who simply asks himself, to quote Nancy, ‘jusqu’à quel point tenons-nous au christianisme? Comment exactement, dans toute notre tradition, sommes-nous tenus par lui?’ (‘To what extent do we adhere to Christianity? And how precisely are we doing so, in our whole tradition?’) (Nancy 2005, 203) Christian, and more specifically Augustinian views of community as fraternity have been ‘translated’ by Nancy in the (Freudian) secular language or perspective of a fraternity beyond the sharing of a ‘possession’, of a ‘property’, or of a ‘murder’ committed in common (with Freud’s motto, coming from Atkinson and Darwin, of the murder of the primitive father, the Urvater, killed and eaten by his sons after a ‘conspiracy of brothers’). The Christian scheme would be an attempt to build a fraternity without constitutive murder, a brotherhood not based on a ‘sharing of hate’ or of any substance, but on a ‘sharing of sharing’ itself. Partage qui serait, à l’infini, partage. So Nancy acknowledges that Blumenberg has seen that secularization is frequently conceived of as a form of historical ‘identity’ or ‘substantialism’ – and falsely so. Can it be approached from a different angle? As a tool to think differences, instead of repetitions? Another example of weak reception of this debate is to be found in Charles Taylor’s already famous book, A Secular Age (2007). Blumenberg is only cited twice.5 Taylor seems to agree with Blumenberg’s idea that the representation of an all-mighty sovereignty of God has contributed to destroying the image of a hierarchical cosmic ‘order’, in which the creature could recognize with trust the work of the Creator. This destruction of the very idea of a regular ‘divine order’ by the theological voluntarism of late nominalism paved the way for an autonomous secular rationality, a new form of ‘assurance’. But Taylor states that nominalism was only one of the sources of the human ‘re-assertion’ during the Renaissance and the beginnings of the Modern Age. Human self-assertion was not only a ‘reaction’ (to what Blumenberg called ‘theological absolutism’). Taylor emphasizes the role of the Platonic Renaissance and the prominent place it has given to an intellectual poiesis, to a form of art that would go beyond nature and beyond imitation, in such a way that the artist becomes a real creator himself.

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But oddly enough, Taylor does not evoke the fact that Blumenberg has devoted some important studies to the history of imitatio Natura, and of its decline, to highlight a new idea of man as creator, and even as creator of (imaginary) worlds. The discussion is only brief here, and it is surprising that Blumenberg appears as the last name (before Darwin) cited by Taylor in A Secular Age. In the epilogue of the book, entitled ‘ The Many Stories’, Taylor returns to the genealogy of ‘the rise of a culturally hegemonic notion of a closed immanent order’. He follows the narratives of Christian dualism that have led to the view of a mechanical world, to the ontological equality of all beings and to the destruction of the idea of a hierarchical cosmos. If God was present as the ‘supreme Artificer’ at the beginning, an increasingly immanent and independent world could logically ensue from these premises – that is the narrative which Taylor calls the ‘Intellectual Deviation’ (ID). In this narrative, Taylor notes, nominalism and its theology of the Absolute Will play an important role for the development of ‘a clear distinction between . . . immanent nature and transcendent reality’. We are not far from Blumenberg here, but Taylor then remarks: ‘ID was a move within Christian doctrine; it found Christian reasons for the changes we described; but . . . it didn’t provide motives for turning on Christianity in anger (though Blumenberg doesn’t think so?)’, Taylor (2007, 775) adds, but with a question mark. An interesting discussion could unfold here, making explicit what Blumenberg might have considered as the ‘motives of anger’ against the late medieval Christianity at the beginning of the modern age. In fact, I think that Blumenberg has documented such an ‘anger’, which was not directed against theological absolutism, but against the condemnation of theoretical curiosity and its inscription in the catalogue of vices. More generally, the anger against Christianity was directed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, against all that could be perceived as a ‘repression’ of some natural and good needs, good because natural – but that is another story.

5 Concluding remarks Of course, I’ve not given a complete picture of the reception of the BlumenbergLöwith debate, which should have included Odo Marquard’s ‘history of the farewell to philosophies of history’, and Giorgio Agamben’s criticism of both Blumenberg and Löwith about the fact that they did not distinguish between eschatology and messianism, and did not see what makes messianism absolutely irreducible to any view of a progressive and linear time. Anyway, my impression is that the reception of this dialogue is still under way, and that we have not yet explored the full depth of Blumenberg’s defence of the legitimacy of the modern age, nor of his reflections on history and progress. Blumenberg shows well, I think, that we should distinguish between a specific and a generic denotation of ‘progress’. First, it is somewhat irresponsible to deny the reality of ‘local’ forms of progress – in science, health, medicine, struggle against child mortality, technics, and also, maybe, concerning the institutionalization of legal protections and mechanisms of public discussion.

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We have to distinguish this local form of progress from the emphatic and general idea of ‘the progress of humanity’, supposed to go on and to grow as a total process to a telos, a point of fulfilment. Such a general idea of progress would indeed be tantamount to the ‘reinvestment’ of a ‘total narrative’, and would neither resist a critical and rational scrutiny, nor account for the atrocities of the twentieth century. Löwith’s book was, in a way, a reflection on the roots of these catastrophes. Perhaps we need to develop a concept of history that allows us to recognize the idea of progress and at the same time makes us vigilant for the permanent possibility of catastrophe (including the ecological catastrophe). Maybe that would be the right way to think a radical secularization, that is to say a secularization without illusion about the future and about its own effects.

Notes 1 About Nietzsche’s view of Christianity as an anthropocentric religion, see, for instance, Valadier 2001. 2 ‘C’est le christianisme, repensé par Paul et Augustin, qui introduit au cœur de la pensée occidentale l’eschatologie proprement dite, qui va commander l’imaginaire moderne de l’historicité. L’eschatologie raconte l’expérience d’un sujet affecté par un manque, et prophétise que cette expérience s’achèvera à la fin des temps par la rémission du mal, par la destruction de la mort et par le retour à la maison du Père . . . La modernité laïque maintient ce dispositif temporel, celui d’un “grand récit”, comme on a dit, qui promet à son terme la réconciliation du sujet avec lui-même et la levée de sa séparation. Bien que sécularisés, le récit des Lumières, la dialectique romantique ou spéculative et le récit marxiste déploient la même historicité que le christianisme, parce qu’ils en conservent le principe eschatologique’. 3 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘La déconstruction du christianisme’, Les Etudes philosophiques, October–December 1998, 506. Reprint in Jean-Luc Nancy, La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianise, I (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 203–26, here 207–8. 4 ‘Le ‘‘retour du religieux’’ dont on parle tant, et qui désigne un phénomène réel, ne mérite pas plus d’attention qu’aucun autre “retour”. Dans les phénomènes de répétition, de reprise, de relance ou de revenance, ce qui compte n’est jamais l’identique mais le différent. Car l’identique perd d’emblée son identité dans son propre retour, et la question devrait bien plutôt se poser sans cesse à nouveaux frais, de savoir ce que la “sécularisation” peut désigner et désigne inévitablement d’autre qu’un simple transfert de l’identique. (Il y a longtemps que Blumenberg a bien posé le problème, même s’il ne l’a pas résolu.)’. 5 I’ve given a more extended account of this discussion in: Jean-Claude Monod, ‘Une si brève discussion: Blumenberg dans L’Âge séculier’, in Sylvie Taussig (ed.), Charles Taylor: Religion et sécularisation (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2014), 155–61.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Blumenberg, Hans. 1983. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Blumenberg, Hans and Carl Schmitt. 2007. Briefwechsel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Büttgen, Philippe. 1998. ‘Eschatologie, fin de l’histoire, ontologie de l’actualité: Sur quelques déplacements historiques et religieux chez Luther et Fichte’, édité par Jocelyn Benoist et Fabio Merlini (eds), Après la fin de l’histoire. Temps, monde, historicité. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin (coll. ‘Problèmes et controverses’), 61–90. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. ‘Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison’, in J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (eds), La Religion. Paris: Seuil, 9–86. Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard. Jay, Martin. 1985. ‘Review Essay: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age’. History and Theory, 24(2): 183–96. Löwith, Karl. 1941. Von Hegel bis Nietzsche. New York: Europa Verlag Zürich. —. 1949. Meaning in History The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. —. 1968. ‘Besprechung des Buches “Die Legitmität der Neuzeit” von Hans Blumenberg’, Philosophische Rundschau 15, in: Sämtliche Schriften, II. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987, 452–9. —. 1981–8. ‘Das Verhängnis des Fortschritts’, in Löwith, Karl, von Klaus Stichweh, Marc B. de Launay and Bernd Lutz u (eds), Sämtliche Schriften, 9Bde. Hrsg. Henning Ritter, Stuttgart: Metzler, 392–410. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1993. Moralités postmodernes. Paris: Galilée. Marquard, Odo. 1973. Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Marx, Karl. 1982. ‘Zur Judenfrage’, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe Abteilung I Bd. 2, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 141–69, 648–67. Möller van den Bruck, Arthur. 1923. Das Dritte Reich. Berlin: Ring Verlag. Monod, Jean-Claude. 2002. La querelle de la sécularisation Théologie politique et philosophies de l’histoire de Hegel à Blumenberg in the series Problèmes et controverses. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin. Nancy, J.-L. 2005. La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme, I. Paris: Galilée. —. 2007. Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. New York: Fordham University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valadier, Paul. 2001. ‘Niezsche et l’avenir de la religion’, Le Portique, 8, online, http://leportique.revues.org/199. Wallace, Robert M. 1981. ‘Progress, Secularization and Modernity: The LöwithBlumenberg Debate’, in New German Critique, vol. 22. New York: Cornell University, 63–79.

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The Eternal Return of Gnosticism? Secularization and the Problem of Evil Willem Styfhals

Modern progress is secularized eschatology. One of the strongest advocates of this claim about modern historical consciousness is the German philosopher Karl Löwith, especially in his book Meaning in History (Löwith 1949), where he compares modern thought to Christian eschatology. Löwith, however, was not the only philosopher who tried to understand secular modernity by referring to eschatology’s theological speculations about salvation and the end of time. On the contrary, his concept of secularized eschatology was adopted by many of his contemporaries, and developed into an influential topic in the post-war debates about secularization and modernity. For example, Odo Marquard and Hans Blumenberg have worked extensively on this topic of modern eschatology, the former as a radicalization of Löwith’s project (Marquard 1973, 14–19), and the latter as a critique (Blumenberg 1983, 37–52). From a completely different perspective, Eric Voegelin has employed Löwith’s concept of eschatology in his analysis of modern politics (Voegelin 1952, 107–32). It is the aim of this chapter to explain how these topological references to eschatology all imply a specific interpretation of modern thought, an interpretation that also underlies the equally idiosyncratic reading of modernity in terms of another premodern religious phenomenon, namely Gnosticism. First, I argue that the appeal to eschatology necessarily entails the recognition of the epochal role of the problem of evil in modernity. Connecting the modern concept of progress to eschatology essentially implies that modernity adheres to some kind of premodern belief in future salvation. Such an idea of eschatological salvation is only conceivable assuming the existence of radical evil from which humanity has to be delivered. This focus on the problem of evil will allow me to reassess Löwith’s position on this matter (Section 1), and especially to gain insight into his relation to some of his contemporaries, in particular Eric Voegelin (Section 2) and Hans Blumenberg (Section 3). The focus on these two thinkers is interesting, as they not only elaborated on the relation between modernity and eschatology, but also discovered a possible connection between modernity and Gnosticism.1 Since Gnosticism’s pessimistic cosmology assumes a much more explicit ontology of evil than eschatology, both

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Voegelin’s and Blumenberg’s positions will help put the eschatological dynamics of evil in modernity into a new perspective. Second, I demonstrate how this recognition of evil’s role in modernity necessarily assumes an evaluation of the way modern man can or cannot legitimately deal with this problem of evil: Will modern man ultimately be capable of conquering evil, or is the modern belief in the eschatological manipulability of evil a dangerous illusion that essentially fails to acknowledge the human condition? Löwith and Voegelin would argue in favour of the latter view. On that account, they even discredit the modern project in general. Blumenberg, however, in an attempt to defend the legitimacy of modern thought against both thinkers, rethinks modern evil in such a way that the modern intervention in the world is legitimized as an effort to fight evil.

1 Karl Löwith on modern eschatology Eschatology can generally be defined as the theological discipline that is concerned with the salvation of human kind at the end of time, and with the subsequent establishment of the kingdom of God. In Christian orthodoxy, this end of time is almost always interpreted as the completion and fulfilment of world history (Ratzinger 1988). In this respect, eschatology breaks with the premodern cyclical interpretation of time. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, time no longer appears as an eternal return of the same cycles, but rather as history in the proper sense of the word, that is, as a linear evolution from a beginning towards an end. Up till today, this linear structure determines our modern experience of time and is, by the same token, essential for the modern interpretations of history and progress. In line with this general relation between eschatology and the belief in a linear and progressive time, Karl Löwith elaborates on the epochal relation between modernity and eschatology. Referring, among others, to Turgot, Condorcet, Hegel and Marx, he maintains that the modern philosophy of history adopts the theological structure of eschatology, but secularizes it by applying it to the immanent course of profane history. Modern philosophy thus gives meaning to history by transforming the hope in a providential and transcendent fulfilment of history into the rational pursuit of a historical progress towards immanent perfection. However, because this secularization of eschatology distorts the originally transcendent meaning of Christian eschatology, for Löwith, the modern belief in progress appears as Christianity’s illegitimate child rather than as its legitimate successor. In reply to Löwith’s negative evaluation of progress and to the general post-war pessimism about modernity, Hans Blumenberg has tried to defend the ‘legitimacy’ of the Modern Age. On this point, the latter has radically criticized Löwith’s theory of the secularization of eschatology. Because of this influential and convincing critique, the early theories of secularization, and pre-eminently Löwith’s, have often been misrepresented. Secularization is almost always understood today as a mere privation of Christianity. Secularization theory would define modernity in a merely negative way: progress is eschatology without transcendence, and, more generally, modernity

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is Christianity without the supernatural. Although this picture is not entirely wrong, it is at least one-sided. Löwith does not just define modernity as the disappearance of a valuable cultural tradition, but he also develops a more substantial definition of modernity precisely by relating it to eschatology. In this respect, a reassessment of Löwith’s theory of secularization cannot be confined to the process of secularization, but it also has to focus on the substance that is secularized, that is, on eschatology itself. Such a substantial theory about modern eschatology, to be discovered in Löwith’s analysis of modernity, has to determine the meaning of eschatology in the Christian tradition (Section 1.1) as well as the nature of its survival in the modern age (Section 1.2).

1.1 Christian eschatology and its modern secularization To put it in a crude and almost paradoxical way, Christianity, in contrast to most other eschatological religions, has situated the eschatological end of history in the past, namely in Christ’s Incarnation. Christ is indeed not just proclaiming the eschatological end of time and the coming of God, he is ultimately the Incarnation of this God Himself. He not only announces future salvation, for He Himself is the Savior who will redeem human kind. In this regard, Incarnation is the single most central event in the Christian history of the world. In Meaning in History, Löwith subscribes to this interpretation of Christian eschatology stating: ‘What really begins with the appearance of Jesus Christ is . . . the beginning of an end’ (Löwith 1949, 197). In this regard, the present era, beginning after Christ’s resurrection, is the last phase in the eschatological history of the world, as Christ’s Incarnation and resurrection were the last significant events in the Christian history of salvation. This interpretation of eschatology, however, does not entail the complete negation of the future-oriented expectation of salvation. On the contrary, Christians certainly do not believe that the earthly paradise is already realized in history after Christ’s resurrection. The Christian kingdom of God is rather projected into another, supra-historical world: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ (Jn 18.36). Even after God’s Incarnation in Christ, salvation from this world is still necessary. On this point, Christianity as it were doubles the chiliastic paradise. On the one hand, the Kingdom of God loses its political and historical meaning. The Christian kingdom of God is not a future realm coming after this world, but it is a transcendent reality beyond immanent history. On the other hand, the present state of the immanent world, though it appears to be the last epoch of world history, is not the realization of the kingdom of God. In this respect, Löwith emphasizes that the Christian eschaton cannot be conceived as a revolution in (political) history or as an immanent end of time. Rather, it becomes a purely transcendent and spiritual fulfilment on the level of the individual believer. In this sense, the future retains its spiritual vigour in Christianity, but it is transformed from the belief in a future and cosmological destruction of the present world into the spiritual hope for salvation of the individual soul in the hereafter: ‘In Christianity the history of salvation is related to the salvation of each

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single soul. . . . From this it follows that the historical destiny of Christian peoples is no possible subject of a specifically Christian interpretation of political history’ (Löwith 1949, 195). In The New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin relies on Löwith’s interpretation of Christian eschatology, but pursues its political consequences further. According to Voegelin, Christian eschatology has no political significance whatsoever. In other words, Christian eschatology does not allow for political theology. Accordingly, Voegelin argues that the domains of religion and politics can be separated for the first time in world history. In the Christian society, the secular powers represent the political and transitory aspects of this society, whereas the Church represents the same society in its spiritual and eternal sense. The church is thus the representative of an unchangeable spiritual truth of revelation. Its institutional legitimacy against the political order is based on the apolitical message of eschatology, while the legitimacy and consistency of its dogmatic content is founded on the impossibility of a new eschatological revelation of a transcendent truth in history: ‘The one Christian society was articulated into its spiritual and temporal orders. In its temporal articulation it accepted the conditio humana without chiliastic fancies, while it heightened natural existence by the representation of spiritual destiny through the church’ (Voegelin 1952, 109). We can now understand why Löwith’s and, as we will see later on, also Voegelin’s evaluations of the modern secularization of Christian eschatology are negative: a secular, and therefore historical and political interpretation of eschatology is simply impossible in Christian orthodoxy. Christian eschatology is only concerned with the transcendent history of salvation and with the possibility of spiritual salvation, not with immanent world history. In line with Christian orthodoxy, Löwith sharply distinguishes between Weltgeschichte and Heilsgeschehen. In this perspective, Christian eschatology can be neither a philosophy of history, nor a political theology. This observation obviously has important consequences for Löwith’s implied evaluation of modernity and modern eschatology. In his perspective, the modern eschatological ideal of progress appears as a distorted copy of the Christian original. The modern secularization of eschatology negates Christian eschatology’s spiritual, and hence essentially ahistorical and apolitical meaning. Therefore, modernity is at the same time too Christian and not Christian enough. On the one hand, it adopts Christian theology, while on the other hand, it corrupts its meaning by negating its transcendent origin: ‘The modern world is as Christian as it is un-Christian. . . . The whole moral and intellectual, social and political, history of the West is to some extent Christian, and yet it dissolves Christianity by the very application of Christian principles to secular matters’ (Löwith 1949, 201–2).

1.2 The meaning of evil in history In order to grasp the full scope of Löwith’s eschatological analysis of modernity, it does not suffice to focus on what has been lost in the process of secularization, that is, on the disappearance of eschatology’s transcendence. One also has to account for

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the remains of eschatology after its secularization. In other words, one has to ask what can it possibly mean for modernity to be eschatologically structured, and what it means for eschatology to be modern and to remain without transcendence. In this regard, an exploration of eschatology’s ontological ground structure is necessary. Such an exploration will reveal that the problem of evil is the driving force of every eschatological speculation, whether it is conceived of as Jewish, Christian, Chiliastic or even modern. The eschatological orientation towards the end of time presupposes an experience of evil, because the hope for salvation and for a better future would not make sense without recognizing the inferiority of the present world. Without the experience of evil and suffering from which we want to be saved, the hope for salvation is indeed empty. Ultimately, an eschatological interpretation of history wants to account for the meaning of evil and human suffering. In its turn, the future-oriented hope for salvation from such an evil is the condition of possibility of eschatology’s most characteristic feature: its linear and progressive concept of time. In Meaning in History, Löwith subscribes to this interpretation of eschatology. In his perspective, the course of history becomes meaningful to the extent that an eschatological and linear change from an evil to a better world has taken place in it: The outstanding element . . . out of which an interpretation of history could arise at all, is the basic experience of evil and suffering, and of man’s quest for happiness. The interpretation of history is, in the last analysis, an attempt to understand the meaning of history as the meaning of suffering by historical action. (Löwith 1949, 3)

However, the relation between linear time and the problem of evil is also valid the other way around. Not only is the progressive and eschatological interpretation of history a way of dealing with the radical experience of evil, but the problem of evil itself is, in its turn, only intelligible from the eschatological perspective that history has an ultimate meaning. In other words, the ontological problem of evil can only appear in view of the possibility of a better future that is significantly different from the present. Without the touchstone of a future that gives ultimate meaning to the history as a whole, the present cannot be experienced as evil. The meaning of historical events cannot be perceived empirically, but it goes beyond mere facticity. An event can thus only be good or evil in view of a (future) meaning that transcends the present facts. In Christianity, for example, the eschatological interpretation of history is even present without an explicit emphasis on the ontological nature of evil. Here, the linearity of time is often more fundamental than the problem of evil. Except for Augustine’s emphasis on man’s sinfulness, radical evil seems to be absent in medieval orthodox Christianity. Because the benevolent Christian god has created a fundamentally good world, neither salvation nor the end of time assumes a violent subversion of the evil immanence. Christianity’s eschatological framework, however, will ultimately allow the problem of evil to pop up. From the moment a significantly better future is conceivable, the human being and the present world can appear as fundamentally evil and

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depraved. But not until the genesis of modernity, Protestantism and especially modern eschatology, could these consequences of Christian eschatology become clear. In the end, it does not really matter whether the linear conception of time or the problem of evil is most primordial. For the analysis of modern eschatology it suffices to grasp the relation between evil and eschatology. This relation is fundamental for understanding Löwith’s as well as Voegelin’s position, as their respective eschatological accounts of modernity entail an implied interpretation of the problem of evil’s scope in the modern age. If the problem of evil is essential to eschatology, it will also be pivotal for its secularized version, namely, for progress. Without the notion of a depraved reality or human existence, the need for salvation and, consequently, for modern progress and its orientation towards the future become redundant: ‘While the starting point of the modern religions of progress is an eschatological anticipation of the future salvation and consequently a vision of the present state of mankind as one of depravity, no similar hope and despair can be found in any classical writer’ (Löwith 1949, 61). We can conclude that in Meaning in History there is more at stake than a straightforward resemblance between the Judeo-Christian orientation towards the future and the modern ideal of progress. Defining progress as secularized eschatology, Löwith implicitly defends a substantial continuity of ontological problems between premodern and modern thought: the problem of evil as well as the question of salvation remains fundamental in the modern age. However, although modern man is confronted with the same metaphysical problems as the medieval Christian, modern thought rejects the traditional answer to these questions. More specifically, it discards the Judeo-Christian transcendent salvation and solves the problem of evil immanently. Accordingly, the overcoming of evil is no longer understood as a spiritual salvation; rather, it becomes an intra-historical and controllable progress towards an immanently perfect world. Through modern science and rational politics, modern man can accomplish, as it were, its own salvation. Modernity develops a radically new solution to a problem that is fundamentally entwined with the JudeoChristian tradition. In this respect, Löwith criticizes the fundamental equivocality of modern thought. Modernity is ‘as Christian by derivation as it is anti-Christian by implication’ (Löwith 1949, 61). In this regard, one might object to Löwith that an extra-Christian solution for an intra-Christian problem does not necessarily have to be an inadequate solution. Obviously, modernity alienates us from a more original interpretation of evil and eschatology. Modern eschatology is indeed unorthodox, maybe even the heretical illegitimate of Christianity, but is it therefore also misguided and dangerous? As such, Löwith’s description of modernity does not seem to allow for such a strong normative claim, especially because he is not even interested in the clear-cut defence of the value of Christianity. In order to fully understand Löwith’s disdain for modern progress, Eric Voegelin’s interpretation of modernity will be illuminating. The latter is much more explicit about the reasons to reject the modern solution for the problem of evil: he would argue that the modern conception of controllable salvation from evil fundamentally negates the human condition.

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2 Eric Voegelin: Gnosticism and the divinized humanity In The New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin elaborates extensively on the topic of modern eschatology. His analysis of modern thought and modern politics initially bears close resemblance to Löwith’s theory of secularization. Referring several times to the latter, Voegelin argues that the modern philosophy of history secularizes Christianity’s transcendent eschatology.2 He maintains that, in modernity, the meaning of the history of salvation is applied to the course of secular world history – eschatology is ‘immanentized’ (Voegelin 1952, 117–21). While adopting Löwith’s theory of secularization almost literally, Voegelin also extends the latter’s position in at least two significant ways. First, Voegelin not only recognizes the structure of eschatology in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy of history but even more so in twentieth-century totalitarian politics.3 In this regard, fascism, communism and Nazism appear as fundamentalist excrescences of the modern eschatological ideal of progress and the modern faith in the immanent possibility of a perfect society. Second, Voegelin is also much more explicit about the historical causes of secularization. Although Meaning in History extensively documents the process of secularization, Löwith does not really explain why it took place. Unlike Löwith, Voegelin does not explore the different modern examples of secularization in detail. Rather, he seeks to find out how and why this illegitimate immanentization of eschatology could have taken place in modernity. For Voegelin, the driving force of modern secularization is ultimately a search for existential certainty. He argues that the Christian believer is always in doubt about the transcendent meaning of his existence, about the purpose of the world and world history, and especially about the possibility of his salvation. As Voegelin provocatively puts it: ‘Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity’ (Voegelin 1952, 122). In Christianity, the human being’s relation to God as well as his knowledge about the meaning of the world and the possibility of salvation is merely grounded on the tenuous bond of hope and faith. Modern man, says Voegelin, cannot cope with such an uncertainty about the most fundamental questions. Therefore, the modern immanentization of Christian eschatology is an attempt to capture and control the meaning of the world (history): ‘The attempt at immanentizing the meaning of existence is fundamentally an attempt of bringing our knowledge of transcendence in to a firmer grip than the cognitio fidei, the cognition of faith will afford . . .’ (Voegelin 1952, 124). In modernity, the meaning of reality is no longer to be found in an unattainable salvation or in a world beyond, but it can be discovered within the evolution immanent history itself. Until now Voegelin’s analysis, though extending Löwith’s position, remains true to the philosophical framework of Meaning in History. Surprisingly, however, by uncovering the existential reasons behind the process of secularization, Voegelin will derive a completely new definition of modernity from his initial reference to eschatology. Indeed, he does not only connect modern thought to eschatology but also to the ancient spirituality of Gnosticism, a dualistic Christian heresy that rejects the goodness of the immanent world and posits the possibility of salvation form this evil world through the mystical awareness of a remote god. More specifically, Voegelin

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compares the existential certainty modern man attains by immanentizing eschatology with this mystical ‘gnosis’ of this transcendent deity. Gnosis – the Greek word for knowledge – is an indubitable spiritual certainty about transcendence; it functions as a heretical alternative to the uncertain Christian concepts of faith and cognitio fidei. In this regard, it is important to emphasize that the certainty of Gnosis is not an epistemic one. Ultimately, the knowledge of Gnosis is a spiritual experience that has a redemptive function. To the extent that the Gnostics consider the present world to be radically evil, their conception of redemption is of vital importance. Gnosis is both the knowledge of the world’s depravity and the condition of possibility of salvation. The consciousness of being imprisoned as such is redemptive, as the attempt to escape evidently presupposes the realization of being imprisoned. In the fourth and central chapter of The New Science of Politics, entitled ‘Gnosticism – the Nature of Modernity’, Voegelin radicalizes the comparison between Gnosticism and modernity. He even calls modernity the Gnostic age.4 By characterizing modernity as the return and even the growth of Gnosticism, he emphasizes the role of evil in modernity more explicitly than Löwith. For Voegelin, modern man considers the present reality to be meaningless, negative and restrictive. Just like the ancient Gnostic, the latter seems to believe that the immanent world is metaphysically corrupted. Unlike the Christian believer, the modern Gnostic does not blame this evil on his own failures but rather on a cosmological corruption. Gnostic speculation even maintains that an inferior or malevolent deity has created this world. In this regard, creation can no longer appear as intrinsically good. Consequently, unlike the Christian god of creation, the remote and redeeming god of Gnosticism has no relation to immanence whatsoever. He only saves the human being from an evil world that was created by an inferior god. From these opposed interpretations of evil and creation also derive two utterly different conceptions of salvation. On the one hand, the modern/Gnostic salvation pursues an eschatological destruction of immanence as a cosmological revolution from evil to good. Christianity, on the other hand, appeals to an individual and transcendent eschatology that hopes for forgiveness of our own human sins. The distinction between ‘pursuit’ and ‘hope’, on the part of the Gnostic and the Christian understandings of salvation, is crucial for the understanding of modern eschatology. It shows that the difference between modern and Christian salvation is not merely conceptual, but that their respective functioning is radically different as well. Unlike Christian grace, modern and ancient Gnostic salvation is considered to be within the reach of our human capacities. The redemptive knowledge of Gnosis is not just something modern man hopes for, it something he pursues. Paradigmatically, knowledge is what we attain ourselves; it is not something we just passively receive. Since Voegelin emphasizes that the modern human being does not want to depend on the uncertain and uncontrollable transcendent redemption of Christianity, the Gnostic alternative fits the modern mind perfectly. By adopting the Gnostic conception of salvation, the modern human being controls its own salvation, and subsequently posits it within the scope of immanence. In other words, eschatology is secularized in Gnostic modernity. Voegelin shows that the secular overcoming of evil has to be

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projected to the immanent future: ‘From this follows the belief that the order of being will have to be changed in a historical process. From a wretched world a good one must evolve historically’ (Voegelin 2000a, 297). Immanent salvation is first of all historical salvation. Consequently, history and life on earth gain immanent meaning to the extent that they take part in a progress towards a better world. More important, however, since humanity creates its own future, it also controls salvation. Through modern science and politics, the human being intervenes in the world, improves it and even recreates it. The modern philosophers of progress believe ‘that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action, that this salvational act is possible through man’s own effort’ (Voegelin 2000a, 298). Voegelin thus concludes that immanent salvation is self-salvation. Because the modern human being becomes its own saviour, Voegelin would even argue that modern man takes over God’s position. When modern man is an earthly god, even the position of the Christian deity is secularized. Accordingly, modernity reaches its apogee when man ‘becomes conscious that he himself is God, when as a consequence man is transfigured into superman’ (Voegelin 1952, 125). Voegelin typically recognizes this divinization of man in Nietzsche’s Übermensch or in Hobbes’ earthly god, the Leviathan, but this divinization of man is also a central feature of Gnosticism: ‘ The Gnostic experiences . . . are an expansion of the soul to the point where God is drawn into the existence of man’ (Voegelin 1952, 124). Gnosis is an ontological knowledge about reality that is only attainable by means of a mystical consciousness of a univocal presence of a divine infinity within us. In this regard, modern and ancient Gnosticism make the divine accessible and even controllable by drawing God into the immanent world. Only by immanentizing God’s transcendence, and even by becoming God, will the modern Gnostic attain absolute certainty about salvation. This Gnostic divinization of man is for Voegelin, however, radically suspect. If modern man thinks that he is able to take over God’s place, modernity fundamentally disregards the human condition. Voegelin maintains that doubt and uncertainty are simply essential features of our human existence. The human being is a finite creature that oscillates between immanence and transcendence without ever being able to appropriate the truth of transcendence definitively.5 The modern thinkers cannot cope with this incertitude and choose the illusory certainty of Gnosis rather than the uncertain truth of Christianity. However, this immanent trust in man’s divinity is not just illusory, it is also dangerous and literally life threatening. In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin shows that the modern faith in an immanent and controllable salvation has directly caused the rise of totalitarian politics in the twentieth century. In view of certain immanent salvation, these totalitarian regimes have legitimized the most vicious political actions: mass-murder and genocide. Paradoxically, the fundamentalist faith in an immanent salvation from evil has caused the most evil events ever to appear in human history: The nature of a thing cannot be changed; whoever tries to alter its nature destroys the thing. Man cannot transform himself into a superman; the attempt to create

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If we apply Voegelin’s insights to Löwith’s interpretation of secularized eschatology, we can summarize both positions according to four claims about the nature of modernity that are implied by their reference to eschatology. First, in modern thought, the present immanent world is experienced as something negative or even evil. In light of this, Voegelin shows how modernity relies on Gnosticism’s pessimistic cosmology. Although the modern metaphysicians have never explicitly called this world evil, modern thought is implicitly structured by an ontological experience of evil. Second, salvation from this radical evil is possible and necessary. For Löwith and Voegelin, the hope for salvation is even the driving force behind some of the most important modern phenomena such as technical science, belief in progress, German idealism, utopian socialism and even totalitarian politics. Third, modern salvation breaks with Christian grace to the extent that it immanentizes salvation. This modern salvation is historical, that is to say, it is attainable within the immanent course of profane history; and it is a self-salvation, that is to say, it is controllable by the human being. Finally, modernity disregards human nature. In Voegelin’s and in Löwith’s perspective, the modern attempt to overcome human finitude and open up a redemptive infinity from within immanence grievously wrongs human nature. Compared to Christian and classical thought, modernity is therefore a historically illegitimate paradigm of thought: ‘It sees with one eye of faith and one of reason. Hence its vision is necessarily dim in comparison with either Greek or biblical thinking’ (Löwith 1949, 207). Löwith and Voegelin argue that the human being is essentially related to a non-recuperable and infinite otherness. In antiquity, this otherness takes the shape of a harmonious and eternal cosmos; in Christianity it is the divine truth of transcendence. In spite of Löwith’s more nuanced philosophical style, he would subscribe to Voegelin’s pessimistic evaluation of modernity. Both maintain that the modern faith in an ultimate and infinite self-fulfilment within the finite perspective of immanent history is modernity’s central and most dangerous illusion.

3 Hans Blumenberg: The modern overcoming of Gnosticism and eschatology The interpretation of Löwith’s critique of modern progress from the perspective of evil and Gnosticism will now allow me to reassess his renowned debate with Hans Blumenberg about the legitimacy of the modern age.6 As I have tried to demonstrate, modernity would not only be illegitimate for Löwith to the extent that it is Christianity’s illegitimate heir, but pre-eminently because it ignores an essential aspect of human nature. Not unlike Voegelin, he would argue that modern man loses

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its constitutive relation to the irreducible eternity and to the infinity that transcends his existence. Consequently, it turns out that there is more at stake in the LöwithBlumenberg debate than a mere conceptual question about the legitimacy of historical change. Ultimately, an anthropological question is at stake here. Accordingly, Blumenberg’s criticism of Löwith’s position cannot succeed if he only refutes Löwith’s explicit claims about the secularization of eschatology. Rather, Blumenberg has to develop an alternative interpretation of the problem of evil and of the modern status of humanity. It is hardly an accident that these two issues will be pivotal in Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, not so much in the first part where he explicitly deals with the theories of secularization, but all the more in the second. Here, Blumenberg argues that modernity is the ‘overcoming of Gnosticism’ (Blumenberg 1983, 126) and introduces the notion of human self-assertion. This original and non-eschatological interpretation of modern thought radically breaks with both Löwith’s and Voegelin’s interpretations of modernity. In this respect, his position can be summarized as a refutation of and an alternative to the four claims about modernity I have just ascribed to Löwith and Voegelin. With regard to the first claim, the modern world view is, in Blumenberg’s perspective, neither pessimistic, nor does it assume a radical experience of evil. In modernity, nature as such is neither good nor evil; rather, it appears as a completely indifferent facticity. In this sense, the modern world view goes beyond the anthropocentric and premodern oppositions between good and evil, harmonious and chaotic, godlike and godless. Although the modern universe is a world without god, it is not a godless or wicked world. For Blumenberg, the de-divinization of the world is just a ‘disappearance of order’ (Blumenberg 1983, 137). Nature is the complete absence of any possible order, whether conceived of as good or bad. Here, Blumenberg quotes Nietzsche: ‘ There is neither order nor disorder in nature’ (Nietzsche 1994, 372). In this sense, the Gnostic problem of evil does not return in modern thought. Against Voegelin, Blumenberg even defines modernity as the ‘overcoming of Gnosticism’ (Blumenberg 1983, 126). Consequently, modernity does not and cannot pretend to solve the problem of evil, for the ontological problem itself becomes redundant in an indifferent cosmos. Obviously, this does not imply that modern man no longer experiences evil. It only implies that evil cannot be conceived as a metaphysical corruption that requires salvation as a cosmological revolution. In modernity, evil is just the unfortunate event in an indifferent universe that happens to be in conflict with our human will to live. In Blumenberg’s words: The bad aspects of the world no longer appear as metaphysical marks of the quality of the world principle or punishing justice but rather as marks of the ‘facticity’ of reality. In it man appears not to be taken into consideration, and the indifference of the self-preservation of everything in existence lets the bad appear to him as whatever opposes his own will to live. (Blumenberg 1987, 138)

Second, if Blumenberg no longer considers the world to be intrinsically evil, the necessity of salvation also becomes less central in his interpretation of modernity.

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Contrary to Voegelin and Löwith’s second claim, Blumenberg does not interpret the modern tendency to control and change the world as an attempt to save the human being from an ontological evil. For him, the modern intervention in nature is merely an attempt to make life possible and bearable in a world that is indifferent to human aspirations. What is more, the indifference of plain materiality also legitimizes the human intervention in the world to the extent that this intervention is no longer conceived as an untouchable divine creation or a perfectly harmonious Greek cosmos. From the moment the divine meaning of the world has completely vanished, nature becomes the field of activity of human self-assertion. Third, since the hope for salvation becomes redundant in modern thought, modernity can no longer be characterized by a secularization/immanentization of eschatology. On this account, Blumenberg rejects any substantial continuity between Christian, Gnostic or eschatological problems and modern thought. The modern age is a completely original and legitimate paradigm in the history of Western thought. It introduces a radically new set of concepts that cannot be reduced to secularized premodern or Christian concepts. Finally, in Blumenberg’s perspective, modern man does not take up God’s position. When modern man no longer needs to save himself, he does not need the infinite perspective of an earthly god either. On the contrary, Blumenberg’s anthropology of modern man is based on human finitude rather than on a supposedly accessible infinity. Unlike Voegelin, who argues that the modern Gnostic pretends to have access to a divine truth, Blumenberg has indeed emphasized that the relation between the human being and the transcendent world has become fundamentally unbridgeable at the end of the Middle Ages, and at the beginning of modernity. As such, the human being is utterly powerless in view of a remote and unintelligible transcendence. He realizes that the ultimate truth about his existence and his salvation is inaccessible. The only possibility that remains for modern man in such an awkward existential situation is the immanent assertion of his own finite life here on earth. Not surprisingly, the project of human self-assertion is the cornerstone of Blumenberg’s interpretation of modernity. From this follows that the immanent world does not just serve as means for the survival of the human being, but that it becomes the material in which human existence realizes itself. ‘Self-assertion . . . means an existential programme according to which man posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities that are open to him’ (Blumenberg 1983, 138). Thus, instead of negating the human condition, modernity rather seems to account for it. Blumenberg’s defence of the legitimacy of the modern age against Löwith and Voegelin can succeed to the extent that he tackles and even reverses the anthropology that is implied in their criticism of modernity. When God disappears in modernity, man does not occupy his empty infinity.7 Rather, man can now become conscious of his radical finitude for the first time. Modernity is the fundamental assertion of this finitude and the exploration of its potential. Perfectly in line with Blumenberg, and against Löwith’s and Voegelin’s positions,

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the contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet also denies the modern divinization of man in the following, very illuminating quote: The death of God does not mean that man becomes God by reappropriating the conscious absolute self-disposition once attributed to God; on the contrary, it means that man is categorically obliged to renounce the dream of his own divinity. Only when the gods have disappeared does it become obvious that men are not gods. (Gauchet 1999, 199)

4 Conclusion This chapter has found that the interrelated problems of evil and salvation are crucial to understand the topical references to eschatology and Gnosticism in postwar debates about modernity and secularization. Depending on the way that these problems are interpreted, modernity can either be evaluated positively or negatively. On the one hand, the conception of modern evil as a radical ontological corruption, shared by Löwith and Voegelin, tends to delegitimize the project of modern thought. Such a strong metaphysical evil seems to require an equally powerful modern man who is able to cope with and even to save himself from this evil. For both thinkers, this modern picture of the human being as a pseudo-god is simply wrong, and even radically dangerous. On the other hand, a different and less weighty interpretation of evil allows Hans Blumenberg to develop a less ambitious anthropology of modern man that does not exceed the limits of the human condition. Consequently, it also allows for a less pessimistic interpretation of modern thought. Furthermore, in a more technical way, I can conclude that the emphasis on the modern problem of evil also makes a new reading of Blumenberg’s Die Legitimität der Neuzeit possible. To a certain extent, the comparison between Löwith and Voegelin can function as a tool to understand the relation between the first and the second parts of Blumenberg’s seminal book. Traditionally, the first part of the book (‘Secularization: Critique of a Category of Historical Wrong’) is considered to be an extensive critique of Löwith’s omnipresent concepts of secularization and secularized eschatology. On this account, it also deals with some other contemporaries of Löwith, such as Odo Marquard or Carl Schmitt. In the second part of the book (‘Theological Absolutism and Human Self-assertion’), Blumenberg is thought to develop his own, original interpretation of modernity. Surprisingly, his first chapter of this second part explicitly takes up Voegelin’s suggestion that modernity is the Gnostic age, but reverses the latter’s claim: ‘The thesis that I intend to argue here begins by agreeing – with Voegelin – that there is a connection between the modern age and Gnosticism, but interprets it in the reverse sense: the modern age is the second overcoming of Gnosticism’ (Blumenberg 1983, 126). This definition of modernity as the overcoming of Gnosticism will be the starting point of Blumenberg’s original interpretation of modern thought. Consequently, the relation between Löwith (eschatology) and Voegelin (Gnosticism), which I have tried

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to develop in this chapter, shows how Blumenberg’s critique of eschatology in the first part of Die Legitimität der Neuzeit already anticipates his original interpretation of modernity as a critique of Gnosticism in the second part; and, vice versa, how this original interpretation presupposes the critique of secularization and eschatology. In this respect, the comparison between eschatology and Gnosticism from the point of view of the modern problem of evil touches on a very fundamental motif in the debate about secularization and the legitimacy of the modern age.

Notes 1 Referring to Jacob Taubes’s eschatological interpretation of modernity, I pursue a similar line of argument in ‘Evil in History: Karl Löwith and Jacob Taubes on Modern Eschatology’ (Styfhals 2014). Also see Taubes’s Abendländische Eschatologie (Taubes 1947). 2 For these references, see Part IV of The New Science of Politics, notes 8, 9, 21 and 22 (Voegelin 1952, 107–21). 3 Although the question of totalitarianism is also important for Löwith, his political message is only implicitly present in Meaning in History. For an overview of Löwith’s political position: Barash 1998. 4 For a more detailed analysis of Voegelin’s interpretation of Gnosticism and modernity: Wiser 1980. 5 ‘By letting man become conscious of his humanity as existence in tension toward divine reality, the hierophanic events engender the knowledge of man’s existence in the divine-human In-Between, in Plato’s Metaxy’ (Voegelin 2000b, 50). 6 For an overview of the renowned Löwith-Blumenberg debate: Wallace 1981; Monod 2012, 203–40. 7 See Part I, chapter 7 in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age: ‘The supposed migration of the attribute of infinity’ (Blumenberg 1983, 77–88).

References Barash, Jeffrey. 1998. ‘The Sense of History: On the Political Implications of Karl Löwith’s Concept of Secularization’. History and Theory, 37: 69–82. Blumenberg, Hans. 1983. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gauchet, Marcel. 1999. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Translated by Oscar Burge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Löwith, Karl. 1949. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Marquard, Odo. 1973. Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Monond, Jean-Claude. 2012. La Querelle de la Sécularisation: Théologie politique et philosophies de l’histoire de Hegel à Blumenberg. Paris: Vrin. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1994. ‘Die Teleologie seit Kant’. Frühe Schriften: Band, 3: 372–92. München: Verlag C.H. Beck.

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Ratzinger, Joseph. 1988. Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Styfhals, Willem. 2014. ‘Evil in History: Karl Löwith and Jacob Taubes on Modern Eschatology’. Journal of the History of Ideas (Forthcoming). Taubes, Jacob. 1947. Abendländische Eschatologie. Berlin: Matthes und Seitz. Voegelin, Eric. 1952. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago: Chicago University Press. —. 2000a. ‘Science, Politics and Gnosticism’ in Manfred Henningsen (ed.), The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Volume 5: Modernity without Restraint. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 247–313. —. 2000b. Order and History. Volume IV: The Ecumenic Age. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Wallace, Robert. 1981. ‘Progress, Secularization, and Modernity: The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate’. New German Critique, 22: 63–79. Wiser, James. 1980. ‘From Cultural Analysis to Philosophical Anthropology: An Examination of Voegelin’s Concept of Gnosticism’. Review of Politics, 42: 92–104.

4

Secularization as a Category of Historical Entitlement Herbert De Vriese

This chapter offers a short reflection on current philosophical debates on secularization, in particular, on the extent to which they are still framed by Hans Blumenberg’s influential critique of the category of secularization. It starts from a simple observation. Today, much of the philosophical discourse on secularization takes its starting point in the theoretically solid German literature on the topic from roughly the early 1950s to the early 1970s. Especially when it comes to the conceptual status of secularization as a category of historical interpretation, Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) is still regarded as the unchallenged standard work from which all further analysis must proceed. This immediate and rather straightforward adoption of ideas and arguments that were first published nearly half a century ago, however, stands in sharp contrast to the deep gulf that separates that time from ours, when we look at the prevailing beliefs and theories concerning the fate of religion in modern societies. The aim of this chapter is to reveal that such a remarkable discontinuity in the background understanding of secularization is not without its impact on the supposedly unbroken continuity in the philosophical discussion.

1 Different intellectual environments When Blumenberg read his paper ‘Secularization: Critique of a Category of Historical Illegitimacy’ at the Seventh German Philosophy Conference in 1962, the intellectual climate was strongly marked by ideas about the inevitable decline and disappearance of religion. This is not directly apparent in the two papers on secularization that were presented during the conference, but is all the better illustrated by the ensuing plenary discussion on the subject, which was chaired by Karl Löwith. A point of reference for a diagnosis of the age in this discussion is Alfred Müller-Armack’s Das Jahrhundert ohne Gott. Zur Kultursoziologie unserer Zeit [The Century without God. For a Cultural Sociology of Our Time] (1948), in which the unrestrained modernity of the totalitarian experience is explained as a consequence of a mass society without God (Braun 1962, 334, see also Lübbe 1962, 235). There had been a time, so one of the participants

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commented on the notion of an epoch without God, when secularization still bore the ideological weight of the catchphrase ‘away from God’, towards which one could relate either positively or negatively. Another participant quickly followed up by saying that it now would seem rather absurd, in the light of the ‘present realities’, to give serious attention to the question whether the age moves in the direction of God, or in the direction away from God (Braun 1962, 334). This generally shared conviction of a society in which religion and religious ideals are increasingly in retreat, is also aptly summarized in the following statement by Löwith, with which he opened the second session of the plenary discussion: Today, secularization, just like atheism, has indeed become something obvious and is no longer particularly disconcerting to anyone. The secularization of the world already seems to have come to a close. (Löwith, cited by Braun 1962, 335)

In the current philosophical debate on secularization, such bold assertions have become the exception rather than the rule. Today, the intellectual climate is marked by ideas on the desecularization of the world (Berger 1999) and by the widely shared assumption of the ‘return of religion’. The idea that modernization, with a sort of inner necessity, leads to the progressive weakening of religious practices, beliefs and institutions, is hardly a defensible one today. Both in popular and in scholarly discourse, reports of the impending demise of religion have been relegated to the margins of the discussion. But it does not come as a surprise to find completely different views on the issue, if one goes through the proceedings of a conference session on secularization held more than 50 years ago. On the contrary, it has become a commonplace of contemporary scholarship to point out how drastically the terms of the debate have shifted since the 1960s. Innocuous as it may be, this observation paves the way for new insights, if we further examine how a different background understanding of secularization may have repercussions on the philosophical treatment of the subject. Returning to Blumenberg’s work, there is one specific element that turns out to be highly vulnerable to a change in the intellectual environment: his analysis of the rhetorical use of the concept of secularization. I will first rely on the intuitive argument that we have become estranged from understanding secularization as a category of historical illegitimacy, and will then provide a more systematic examination.

2 A category of historical wrong? At the foundation of Blumenberg’s research on secularization is the insight that descriptive concepts, when used for the interpretation of historical processes, are only value-neutral in appearance (Blumenberg, cited by Braun 1962, 333). This holds true especially for the concept of secularization, which is bound to contain at least ‘a latent ideological element’ (Blumenberg 1985, 117). In a separate chapter of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, entitled ‘The Rhetoric of Secularizations’, Blumenberg gives a detailed

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analysis of secularization as a stylistic technique. He argues that the concept, even if it pretends to be an objective description of historical connections and transformations, implicitly carries with it the reproach of an ‘objective cultural debt’ (115, 117, 119, 125; see also 1962: 242). This argument needs further clarification, because it has often been misunderstood. By passing a guilty verdict on the Modern Age, it is not only stripped of its autonomous status, but also put into a trajectory of history that has gone totally wrong. These are two closely related and interwoven elements. By exclusively considering the first one, as many commentators have done, one only addresses the question of the transposition of premodern contents into a new and modern framework, thereby isolating the issue of modernity’s self-comprehension and of the validity of its claim to make a radical break with tradition. But this does not cover the full scope of the argument. By exposing the Modern Age, in its historical substance, as a product of secularization, it is also presented as the embodiment of what in reality should not have come into existence. As Blumenberg underlines, this implicit refusal of its right to exist involves a repudiation of the present as being a historic failure, and, in addition, claims to have an explanation for this failure. So, what is ultimately at stake in the rhetorical employment of secularization is ‘the suggestion of a distant event that is responsible for what is wrong in the present’ (119). The distant event is not only seen as a violation of the historical logic and thus burdened with the charge of injustice, but conceived of as a ‘harmful presence’ as well, just because it has been forgotten, denied and repressed (116). As such, it receives the connotation of a ‘wrong turning’ in history of which, after age-long fermentation, the consequences are gradually being revealed and experienced. To put it more concretely, by describing key features of modern life by the category of secularization, they are not merely deprived of their own worth and authenticity and brought into a relationship of dependence to a previous historical epoch. What is a much more forceful suggestion is that they are associated with some great historical evil, committed by usurping the previous historical content. According to Blumenberg, the dominant background metaphor at play here is the usurpation of ecclesiastical rights and more particularly the expropriation of church property (19–21). It is above all this conception of secularization as the usurpation of a previous realm of cultural values that brings forth the connotation of illegitimacy, since it is seen as a transgression against the laws of history. It thereby produces the expectation of historical damnation, just like the fate of Macbeth in Shakespeare’s classic tragedy is doomed from the very beginning by his plan and decision to murder Duncan. What I want to draw attention to is that precisely this second element of Blumenberg’s rhetorical analysis, the implicit charge of a historical wrong, has lost much of its convincing power in the intellectual context of our time. It certainly is not a conspicuous aspect of the actual use of the concept of secularization as one encounters it in current philosophical literature. Of course, many contemporary studies on Blumenberg are at pains to illuminate what is meant by his notion of ‘historical illegitimacy’ and I do not suggest that they entirely fail in their ambitions. My point is that such a clarification was

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far less needed in the context of the 1960s and 1970s – the period when Blumenberg elaborated his theory and defended it against, among others, Karl Löwith and Carl Schmitt – because understanding secularization as a category of historical wrong was much more self-evident at that time than it is today. To put it otherwise, I do not agree with the proposition that the term ‘secularization’, when employed as a category for the interpretation of modern history, still evokes the idea of historical injustice, nor that it would be consciously used in contemporary secularization theory to achieve this sort of rhetorical effect. Yet this contention, even if it may be a plausible one, requires a solid foundation. In the following sections of this chapter, I will try to meet this requirement by developing a more systematic argument. Instead of examining the entire intellectual environment, I will confine myself to the domain of academic scholarship. The basic idea is to make a distinction between two different debates on secularization within the past 50 years of scholarship, and to show that while the first has undergone a major paradigm shift, the second continues to work along the same general lines of thought. The upshot of my argument will be that the rupture in the first debate has nevertheless exerted considerable influence on the other one, and that this interaction helps explain a change in the connotations of the word secularization.

3 Two debates on secularization During the second half of the twentieth century, scholarly interest in the problem of secularization divided itself into two different fields of research, each with its own distinct methodology and specific set of research questions. The first was the field of philosophy of history and intellectual history, representing a hermeneutic methodology focused on a deeper understanding of modern culture. Starting from the presupposition that much in the Modern Age is unthinkable without the Premodern Age that went before, the aim of its research was to reveal a dimension of hidden meaning behind the accepted self-understanding of modernity (cf. Gadamer 1968, 201). The idealtypical approach was to determine whether and to what extent key features of the modern world could be interpreted as having their roots in the premodern, religious culture that preceded it. Accordingly, it tended to establish an intrinsic relationship between Christianity and modernity, one that indeed ran contrary to the latter’s selfcomprehension, in particular to the grand narratives it had developed and cultivated from the Enlightenment onwards. The second was a social scientific field of study, mainly occupied by the disciplines of sociology of religion and the history of religion. It adhered to the ideal of scientific rigor and objectivity and thus sought to apply a value-free method of inquiry. Here, the interest in the topic of secularization arose from the question of religious change in contemporary, modern societies. Supported by an analysis of empirically measurable indicators of religious adherence, like church attendance or denominational membership, much of the research in this area was centred around the hypothesis that processes of modernization have a negative impact on the vitality, stability and social

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significance of religion. Hence, secularization theories pretended to offer an objective description of the changing role of religion in modern societies. Earlier in the twentieth century, these two different approaches to the question of secularization had not yet been so clearly distinguished from each other. In the oeuvre of Max Weber, for instance, one easily recognizes both types of investigation. His famous thesis about the role of the Protestant ethic in the rise of capitalism is a typical example of the first type of investigation. It seeks to elucidate how a peculiar mode of rational conduct, one that became a fundamental element not only of capitalist economies but of ‘all modern culture’, was born from the spirit of Christian asceticism (Weber 1958, 180). Weber’s thesis, though it was not explicitly organized around the concept of secularization, even acquired paradigmatic status in the fields of history of ideas and philosophy, since it provided the model for later secularization theories (Weidner 2004, 102–5). His studies on the process of rationalization, however, attest to the second type of inquiry. A telling example is his conclusion concerning the ‘irreligion of bureaucracy’ (Weber 1978, 476–7). For Weber’s thesis that the advance of bureaucracy, as the carrier of a comprehensive sober rationalism and of the ideal of a disciplined order, has destroyed structures of domination that are ‘not rational in this sense of the term’ (1003), is based on a substantial body of empirical research in a wide-ranging comparative and historical analysis. Again, it proved to be pioneering work in the development of social-scientific research on secularization. A clear parting of the ways took place soon after the middle of the twentieth century due to the progressive neutralization of the term ‘secularization’ in history and sociology (Monod 2002, 112). Yet, the standard of positivism that was planted in these two areas of research, did neither prevent scholars of other affiliations from continuing to address the question of the totality of Western history and of its ‘meaning’ – nor from continuing to use the term ‘secularization’ in order to make sense of their more speculative undertaking. As such, the social scientific discourse on secularization, firmly grounded on empirical examination of the way in which both individual religiosity and religious authority had changed over the past decades or even centuries, was sided by much more daring theories of secularization, which offered a unified and comprehensive account of the emergence and development of modernity and can, therefore, rightly be considered as the last significant ‘master narratives’ of Western culture (113). By the 1960s, there was a growing awareness that the scholarly study of secularization had split into two separate approaches, each using the same term but applying it in a very different way. An important and influential attempt to draw the demarcation line between these two branches of study came from none other than Blumenberg himself: There is after all a difference between, on the one hand, saying that in a particular state the ‘secularization of the countryside’ is very advanced, and that this is indicated by the empirical decline of obligations owed by village communities to the church, and, on the other hand, formulating the thesis that the capitalist

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valuation of success in business is the secularization of ‘certainty of salvation’ in the context of the Reformation doctrine of predestination. (1985, 10)

Yet, instead of contenting himself with distinguishing a purely descriptive and quantitative approach from an explanatory and qualitative one, Blumenberg went on to make a much sharper distinction. In his view, the watershed was defined by the specific use of the term ‘secularization’, namely, by the difference between the intransitive (‘secularization is progressing rapidly’) and the transitive sense of the word (‘one thing is secularized into another’). In retrospect we can see, however, that this criterion was too stringent and too demanding to serve as the borderline between two major areas of research. For it is clear, if we consider the reception history of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, that Blumenberg has remained part of that peculiar context of research from which he wanted to distance himself (Monod, 276–9; Latré 2010, 47). I therefore propose to stick to the more general, above-mentioned criteria. First of all, there is a crucial methodological difference: hermeneutic inquiry versus empirically based research. Second, the research questions and research objectives are poles apart: while the first field of inquiry concentrates on the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, in order to develop a deeper understanding of modernity, the second examines quantitative indicators of various types of religious change and from them induces general patterns and relationships, in order to accurately describe the transformation of religion in the modern world. If we rely on these criteria, no one will doubt that Blumenberg’s proper place is the first context of research. This holds especially for his own functionalist interpretation of the passage to modernity, which he advanced as an alternative to the prevailing secularization theories. In what follows, I will refer to these two areas of research more briefly as the philosophical and the sociological debate. These terms do not cover the total scope of their object, but are introduced here for the sake of convenience. With this in mind, I shall now conclude my argument by taking a closer look at the internal historical dynamics of each debate and at their inevitable interrelationship.

4 End of religion, return of religion If we compare the philosophical to the sociological debate by viewing them from a historical perspective, another striking difference comes to light. Apart from the distinction in research agendas and methods, there is a remarkable divergence in the historical evolution of each debate. While the sociological debate has undergone a major paradigm shift over the course of the past 50 years, the philosophical debate is still governed by the same general patterns of thought. Since its introduction in the sociological debate in the late 1950s, secularization theory was organized around the central thesis that processes of modernization within societies will eventually have a negative effect on the stability and vitality of religious communities, practices, and convictions (Pollack 2011, 485). For more than three decades, this thesis remained the guiding principle for social scientific research on

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religious change in modern societies and even became the reigning dogma in the field (Swatos and Christiano 1999, 210). Bryan Wilson, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann and Karel Dobbelaere were among the principal proponents of the theory. At the heart of it was the assumption, ‘often stated but mostly unstated’, that religion in the modern world was in decline and would likely continue to decline until its eventual disappearance (Casanova 1994, 25). About 20 years ago, however, the tenor of the debate changed significantly. Supported by evidence of contemporary religious resurgence and of a much greater visibility of religion in the public sphere, the predominant antagonism between modernity and religion was dissolved. The secularization thesis was not simply revised and modified, but rejected and unmasked as a product of biased data selection (Martin 1991, 466) and wishful thinking (Stark 1999, 269). All this happened so suddenly, and implied such a dramatic shift in the established research perspectives, that one could say that a ‘typical Kuhnian revolution in scientific paradigms’ was taking place. As early as 1994, José Casanova remarked that the majority of researchers in the field were abandoning the classical theory ‘with the same uncritical haste with which they previously embraced it’ (11). As a result, the idea of a gradually secularizing world lost its credit. Secularization, if the concept was to maintain a role in the sociological debate, would no longer refer to the gradual decline or disappearance of religion, but merely to the process of how religion was made modern (Gorski and Altınordu 2008, 75; Sheehan 2003, 1079–80). The philosophical debate, by contrast, shows a continuous and almost uninterrupted line in its historical dynamics. Over the past half a century, it has remained loyal to the same general framework of research questions and hypotheses. It does not reveal a significant change in its approach to secularization, let alone something comparable to a paradigm shift. In this field, secularization theory still refers to the intellectual endeavour to narrate ‘the birth of modernity out of the spirit of Christianity’ – I borrow the expression from a recent book review of one of today’s much-publicized secularization theories (Anderson 1998, 55) – and, until today, expresses genuine concern and respect for its historical heritage. The range of interpretations that have been offered since the 1960s is not characterized by deep fractures, but rather by a progressive deepening of understanding by virtue of further elaboration, in-depth investigation and critical reconsideration. If we focus on the German literature of about 50 years ago, especially on the heated exchanges between Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt, one easily notices how prominently their texts and theories still figure in contemporary studies of secularization theory and how often they set the stage for further inquiry on the topic. Here, the scholars of the 1960s have not become the representatives of an ill-conceived paradigm that is now carried to the grave, but have retained and even expanded their authoritative status. The Löwith-Blumenberg debate, for instance, is generally credited with providing the fundamental theoretical and methodological issues that any scholar in the field, who is seriously concerned with the nature and historical emergence of modernity, must address (McKnight 1990, 177). This even goes to the extent that it is viewed as a flaw in contemporary secularization theory, when it fails to account for the

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basic positions in this seminal discussion (Jay 2009, 81; Koening 2011, 662; but see also Vanheeswijck 2013, 438). Yet, even though it can be shown that the historical evolution within each of the two debates is very different, it would be premature to conclude that the above-mentioned shift in the sociological debate has not so far had any determinant influence on the philosophical debate. There is one specific dimension of the latter that has undergone considerable change due to the influence of the former: its rhetorical dimension. Indeed, it can be noted that the rhetorical force of the concept of secularization, when used as a category for the interpretation of modern history, has taken a remarkable new twist. So, while it is true that philosophical approaches to secularization have remained more or less the same over the course of half a century, the value-laden connotations of the word have changed radically. The insight that this is a particularly vulnerable part of the philosophical debate, by which it is liable to undergo the influence of the sociological debate, stems from a reflection on its methodology. For it is a basic principle of the hermeneutic inquiry conducted here that the interpretative subject does not start from a detached and value-neutral standpoint, but is always already situated in a given historical context of knowledge and understanding. The paradigm shift in the sociological debate reflects a deep divide between the intellectual climate of the 1960s and that of the present time when it comes to the issue of the future of religion in the modern world. Hence, it stands for a profound change in the background understanding of secularization. I agree with the general thrust of Blumenberg’s rhetorical analysis that this background understanding or latent ideological content is always present when the Modern Age is explained through the concept of secularization (1985, 18, 116–17). Contrary to the concrete result of his analysis, however, I claim that the implicit suggestion of a historical wrong no longer applies to our current situation. I am now in a position to pull together the threads of my discussion and articulate my central and decisive argument: if today, our understanding of the long-term unfolding of modernity, as rooted in a premodern theological world-view and determined by the shaping influence of secularization, is no longer spontaneously associated with the ‘end of religion’ but rather situated in a context whose catchword is the ‘return of religion’, then the term ‘secularization’ no longer evokes the self-evident connotation of a historical wrong. The obvious reason is that the process of secularization is seen as much less destructive vis-à-vis the religious sources from which it originated: it is no longer tacitly held responsible for the infamous destruction of religion. Accordingly, the concept is much less susceptible to the accusation of historical injustice. This argument retains its cogency, even if it may be argued that the principal steps of my reasoning are in need of further elaboration. I admit that the above distinction between two scholarly debates is too rudimentary. It should be replaced by a nuanced account of two outspoken directions within a common philosophicohistorico-sociological debate: positivist versus interpretive research, two approaches of a concerted research effort, whose mutual ties are certainly stronger and more intimate than they appear in my exposition. But even if the above distinction is basically an analytical one, not an empirical one, the core of my argument remains valid.

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The final result of my investigation is that the term ‘secularization’, when it is currently employed as a category for the interpretation of historical processes, no longer carries with it the reproach of ‘historical illegitimacy’, but rather the suggestion of ‘historical entitlement’. In other words, I contend that secularization, when it has rhetorical force in contemporary secularization theory, conveys the implicit message that religion, and more particularly the Christian religion, has a legitimate claim to key elements of modern culture and may justifiably recognize and accept them as its own offspring. The last section of this chapter is meant to illustrate and explain this in more detail.

5 Historical entitlement Let us first return to the 1960s. At stake in the discussions of that time between, among others, Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt, is the conceptual status of secularization as a category for the interpretation of the Modern Age. What is conspicuous in this controversy, however, is that it revolves around a radical critique of modernity. It is the Modern Age itself that is portrayed in a negative light, and the historical failures of modernity are traced back to the original sin of secularization. In this way, the concept is related to a grave historical offence against the venerable heritage of religion that now begins to take its toll. For Schmitt, who argues that the fundamental concepts of the theory of the modern state are secularized theological concepts (2005, 57), this toll is paid during the years of the Weimar republic. The lack of decision-making power of the newly formed German republic, and more generally the inherent instability of the modern political sphere as such, can in his view only be overcome if the terminology of Christian theology is rehabilitated in legal theory (Ifergan 2010, 151). For Löwith, who maintains that the modern idea of progress is the secularization of Christian eschatology, the dark side of modernity unmistakably appears in the dropping of the first atomic bomb. The boundless optimism of the Modern Age has led to disaster, ‘progress has become a fatality’, leaving behind a generation that has learned to ‘wait without hope’ (1983, 407–8; 1949, 3; Wallace 1981, 65). In this analysis, Löwith distinguishes modern historical consciousness from its foundation in Christian theology, which helped restrain the experience of history and ‘prevented its growing into indefinite dimensions’ (1949, 193). In the intellectual context of post-war Germany, this utterly negative appraisal of modernity, which is viewed and evaluated through the lens of secularization, is also strongly related to the barbarity of the Nazi regime. It has even been remarked at that time that the concept serves as a perfect vehicle for Vergangenheitsbewältigung, for coming to terms with the past (Lübbe 1962, 235–7). Indeed, in this case secularization theory is deliberately designed to uncover the historical illegitimacy that is responsible for the horrors and evils of the twentieth century. And the intellectual community was familiar with this way of thinking. I recall that the 1962 plenary discussion on secularization began by considering the idea that the atrocities of totalitarianism arise from a society without God (Müller-Armack 1948).

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If we turn our attention to the present time, a very different picture emerges. Here, the debate on secularization is no longer marked by the putative shortcomings and failures of the Modern Age. On the contrary, the spirit of modernity is generally presented in a much more positive light. In line with this, the concept of secularization does not serve to portray key features of modernity as ill-fated and intrinsically disastrous, but rather to reclaim them as a legitimate part of the legacy of the Christian tradition. A telling example is Gianno Vattimo’s secularization theory, which argues that the emancipatory and ‘weakening’ dynamics of the modern world is not a refutation of the Judeo-Christian revelation, but its very substance: Secularization as a ‘positive’ fact signifying the dissolution of the sacral structures of Christian society, the transition to an ethics of autonomy, to a lay state, to a more flexible liberalism in the interpretation of dogmas and precepts, should be understood not as the failure of or the departure from Christianity, but as a fuller realization of its truth. (1999, 47)

Secularization, as the essence of modernity, is the essence of Christianity itself: it is the deeper sense of the Christian message of salvation (52, 57, 68). In Vattimo’s reading, this message amounts to the dissolution of metaphysics, to the destabilization of all dogmatic power structures and, as a consequence, to the overcoming of the originary violence of the sacred and of social life itself (48). In a direct challenge to Blumenberg’s analyses, Vattimo underlines that this vision of secularization is a destiny ‘proper to Christianity’ (64). In two other much-debated secularization theories, those of Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World (1985) and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), one finds a similar background understanding of secularization, however much these theories may differ in their conclusions and underlying ideological orientation. According to Gauchet, modern political autonomy and the secular understanding of reality do not embody a space ‘wholly outside the religious’, but are essentially constituted from within the religious field, either ‘nurtured by religion’s substance’ or ‘deployed as an expression of its fundamental potentialities’ (1999, 59). In this way, central processes of modernization, such as the rise of technology and the development of democracy, are determined by a religious logic, more particularly the ‘inner logic of Christian religious schemas’, and hence should be recognized as the fulfilment of the ‘unusual dynamic potentialities of the spirit of Christianity’ (4, 151). In Taylor’s narrative of the Modern Age, too, secularization no longer carries the principally negative connotation of a modern offence against the religious past. Of course, Taylor acknowledges that a profound change in our condition has taken place and that ‘the unchallengeable status that belief enjoyed in earlier centuries has been lost’ (2007, 530). He underscores the new configuration of modernity and even pits this view against ‘subtraction stories’, which fail to see ‘how innovative we have been’ (294, 572–3). Yet, the cultural developments of the Modern Age have not only destabilized and swept away earlier forms of religious life, but generated new believing positions and alternative modes of religiosity as well, because religious longing has remained

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‘a strong independent source of motivation in modernity’ (530). Against this backdrop, it comes as no surprise that the word secularization receives a much more positive connotation, when Taylor develops his ‘own view of secularization’: Religious belief now exists in a field of choices which include various forms of demurral and rejection. . . . But the interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life. This new placement is now the occasion for recompositions of spiritual life in new forms, and for new ways of existing both in and out of relation to God. (437)

In sum, the ‘immanent frame’ which in Taylor’s story is the principal result of secularization, can be recovered as the breeding ground for both religious and non-religious outlooks.

6 Conclusion These cursory observations on contemporary secularization theories have no other purpose than to reflect a general trend in the current philosophical debate. What we can infer is that the theoretical framework of secularization no longer evokes the idea of an illegitimate appropriation of religion’s authentic substance, but rather hints at the wondrous ways of religion’s self-transformation. In line with this, we find that core elements of modern life are no longer cast in a negative light, nor spontaneously associated with a hidden historical calamity, but treated much more sympathetically and at least partially reclaimed for a better understanding and even a legitimate continuation of the religious tradition. So, what I have argued in this chapter is that our implicit understanding of the term ‘secularization’ has changed considerably since the 1960s. Today, when used as a category for the interpretation of the Modern Age, the term tends to express a logic of historical entitlement rather than to create a sense of historical illegitimacy. The aim of my investigation on this topic, though it specifically aims at a reconsideration of Blumenberg’s rhetorical analyses in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, is not to invalidate the main theoretical merits of this book, but to transfer them to the presentday context of research. I believe it can open new avenues for making Blumenberg’s intellectual legacy, in particular his critique of historical substantialism and his own account of the genesis of the Modern Age, more relevant and better adjusted to current philosophical discourse on secularization.

References Berger, Peter L., ed. 1999. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

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Blumenberg, Hans. 1962. ‘“Säkularisation”: Kritik einer Kategorie historischer Illegitimität’, in Helmut Kuhn und Franz Wiedmann (eds), Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt. München: Anton Pustet, 240–65. —. 1985. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Braun, Hermann. 1962. ‘V. Kolloquium: Diskussionsbericht zu Referat Hermann Lübbe und Hans Blumenberg’, in Helmut Kuhn und Franz Wiedmann (eds), Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt: Verhandlungen des Siebten Deutschen Kongresses für Philosophie. München: Anton Pustet, 333–8. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1968. Review of Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, by Hans Blumenberg. Philosophische Rundschau, 15: 201–9. Gorski, Philip S. and Ateş Altınordu. 2008. ‘After Secularization?’ Annual Review of Sociology, 34: 55–8. Ifergan, Pini. 2010. ‘Cutting to the Chase: Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg on Political Theology and Secularization’. New German Critique, 37: 149–71. Jay, Martin. 2009. ‘Faith-Based History’. Review of A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor. History and Theory, 48: 76–84. Koenig, Matthias. 2011. ‘Jenseits des Säkularisierungsparadigmas? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Charles Taylor’. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 63: 649–73. Latré, Stijn. 2010. ‘Jean-Claude Monod and the Historical Heritage of Secularization Theory’. Bijdragen: International Journal in Philosophy and Theology, 71: 27–50. Löwith, Karl. 1949. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —. 1983. ‘Das Verhängnis des Fortschritts’, in Klaus Stichweh (ed.), Sämmtliche Schriften. Bd. 2. Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: Zur Kritik der Geschichtsphilosophie. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 392–410. Lübbe, Hermann. 1962. ‘Säkularisierung als geschichtsphilosophische Kategorie’, in Helmut Kuhn und Franz Wiedmann (eds), Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt. München: Anton Pustet, 221–39. Martin, David. 1991. ‘The Secularization Issue: Prospect and Retrospect’. The British Journal of Sociology, 42: 465–74. McKnight, Stephen A. 1990. ‘ The Legitimacy of the Modern Age: The LöwithBlumenberg Debate in Light of Recent Scholarship’. The Political Science Reviewer, 19: 177–95. Monod, Jean-Claude. 2002. La querelle de la sécularisation: Théologie politique et philosophies de l’histoire de Hegel à Blumenberg. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin. Müller-Armack, Alfred. 1948. Das Jahrhundert ohne Gott. Zur Kultursoziologie unserer Zeit. Münster: Regensbergsche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Pollack, Detlef. 2011. ‘Historische Analyse statt Ideologiekritik: Eine historischkritische Diskussion über die Gültigkeit der Säkularisierungstheorie’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 37: 482–522. Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sheehan, Jonathan. 2003. ‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay’. The American Historical Review, 108: 1061–80.

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Stark, Rodney. 1999. ‘Secularization, R.I.P’. Sociology of Religion, 60: 269–70. Swatos, William H. and Kevin J. Christiano. 1999. ‘Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept’. Sociology of Religion, 60: 209–28. Vanheeswijck, Guido. 2013. ‘Notes and Comments. Charles Taylor’s Dilemmas: A Sequel to A Secular Age’. The Heythrop Journal, 54: 435–39. Vattimo, Gianni. 1999. Belief. Translated by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons. —. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley : University of California Press. Weidner, Daniel, 2004. ‘Zur Rhetorik der Säkularisierung’. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 78: 95–132.

Part Two

Secularization in Christianity and Beyond

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Christianity, Incarnation and Disenchantment: Marcel Gauchet on the ‘departure from religion’ André Cloots

Radical secularization – question mark. That question mark is indeed what presses itself when we look around. In an extremely short period of time, secularization has not only become quasi-self-evident in large parts of the West, but it has seriously affected almost all other cultures as well, to the point of calling for vehement and even violent reactions. Is secularization inevitable? How far can it extend? Is a fully secularized world liveable, and what about religion in such a world? Does secularization exclude all religion? And what are the roots of this secularization? These are just a few questions that stir concern, especially among religious people. The notion of ‘secularization’ in itself does not explain anything. It only describes certain processes. What I want to do in this contribution is to reflect on these questions and these processes on the basis of the thought of the contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet and especially on the basis of his main work from 1985 – at least when it comes to these questions – namely, The Disenchantment of the World (Gauchet 1997). The title itself is already instructive. It does not talk about ‘secularization’ but about ‘disenchantment’. This distinction becomes more clear when compared to Charles Taylor’s concept of secularity. At the beginning of his book A Secular Age, Taylor distinguishes three processes that the word ‘secularity’ can refer to (Taylor 2007, 1–3): secularity 1, 2 and 3. First, we have the change in relation to the public sphere: the public sphere breaking loose from its religious backing, the end of communal religion if you want (secularity 1). Secularity 2 is the decrease of religious belief and practice – an inner-religious phenomenon. And finally, there is also secularity 3, a change in the conditions of belief, more particularly, the phenomenon that religion becomes one option among others, and even a hard one to take. What strikes us from the very beginning in this definition of secularization is that one of the processes with which secularization is often associated is not even mentioned as such by Taylor, namely, the disenchantment of the world, whereas, for Gauchet, this disenchantment is the very core of the whole problem. That Taylor does not even mention it (not even in his ‘Foreword’ to the English translation of Gauchet’s

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book), is no accident. Taylor precisely wants to argue that disenchantment is no given, not a fact to be accepted, even if you want to accept modernity and its secularization. Therefore, for him secularization must not be intimately linked to disenchantment. And indeed, much of the discussions today on secularization centres around this problem of enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment. From the standpoint of Gauchet, Taylor might have a point when he does not include disenchantment as one of the processes to which secularity refers, since for Gauchet, it is indeed not just one process or one aspect of it. To the contrary, it is its very core. It is for Gauchet even the core of modernity as such, in whatever sense, and it is the basic explanation of secularization. In this chapter, my aim is not to give another introduction to Gauchet, as I have done elsewhere (Cloots 2008), but I want to bring up Gauchet’s views in the context of the problems related to secularization. And I will do that by the notion of disenchantment: its meaning, its relation to modernity (as Gauchet sees it), its consequences etc., and its relation to what he calls the ‘specific Christian solution’. Hence the two main parts of this chapter. First, I will go deeper into the notion of disenchantment and its link to what Gauchet calls ‘the departure from religion’, and secondly, I will say something about that ‘specific Christian solution’, particularly by paying attention to two elements of it, namely, the doctrine of Incarnation and the establishment of a specifically religious institution, the Church.

1 Disenchantment and the ‘departure from religion’ The basic structure of Gauchet’s theory can be summarized in three interrelated insights. First, the insight that the ‘departure from religion’ is primordially an innerreligious process rather than a process against religion. Secondly, that this process is fundamentally linked to disenchantment. And thirdly, that this disenchantment is made possible, or at least co-possible, by religion itself and more specifically by Christianity. In a way, none of these insights is really new. Separately, they can be found in one form or another in different authors. And Gauchet is certainly an offshoot. But what is new is the way in which Gauchet connects and develops them into a very original and strong theory of secularization. As to the first insight, namely, that the ‘departure from religion’ is primordially an inner-religious process rather than a process against religion, Gauchet clearly follows in the footsteps of Max Weber. It is well known that Weber already stressed the innerreligious roots of the rise of modern capitalism, by linking it to the Protestant work ethics. Also Hans Blumenberg in his monumental The Legitimacy of the Modern Age from 1966 (Blumenberg 1983) developed the insight – taken over by many authors later on – that modern self-assertion has to be understood as proceeding from a development within late mediaeval Christianity, namely, nominalism and its theology of divine voluntarism. Gauchet is certainly influenced by both (although he never mentions Blumenberg), when he links modern developments to developments within

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religion. But he broadens radically the perspective both on the side of religion as well as on the side of modernity. For Gauchet, it is not a specific characteristic of one specific denomination that is at the basis of one specific modern phenomenon (Weber), nor is it merely a specific movement within Christianity that forms the bedrock of modern selfassertion (Blumenberg), but it is Christianity as such (and even religion as such) that paved the way for the entire intellectual history of the West, up to our contemporary ways of thinking. Therefore, according to Gauchet, the key to understanding the modern and even the postmodern condition is the notion of ‘departure from religion’ (sortie de la religion). This notion of ‘departure’ (sortie) actually has two sides. It expresses not only that we have left – and are still leaving – (societal) religion behind, but also that we have come out of it and thus are its result. This movement is crucially linked to Christianity, which for that very reason is called ‘the religion for the departure from religion’ (la religion de la sortie de la religion). At the heart of that movement of ‘departure’, is for Gauchet, a growing disenchantment, due to the specific structure of Christianity. Gauchet follows the footsteps of Max Weber not only when he stresses the innerreligious source of modern phenomena, but also when he links modernity to a progressive disenchantment. As a matter of fact, even the notion itself of disenchantment (Entzauberung) comes from Weber1 – while Weber himself borrowed it from the Romantics and, to some extent, from Kant.2 But again, Gauchet does something new with it, in relation to both the meaning of disenchantment and its consequences. Disenchantment becomes for him the key to understand a range of phenomena, far broader than only the literal Entzauberung within religion, and even broader than modernity in the strict sense. It is also the key to the rise of democracy, to the French laicité with its secularism, to the evolution in the aftermath of May 1968 – and thus in a way the whole history of the West. Not only is modernity intrinsically linked to disenchantment, but disenchantment is the heart of our culture, our world-view, our institutions, ‘our human-social universe’, as Gauchet puts it (Gauchet 1997, 3) – and even of our ways of believing. For that very reason – and here again Gauchet is in line with Weber – it is not the notion of secularization that we should work with, but rather, that of disenchantment. The notion of secularization, Gauchet says, though descriptively strong, does not help us to comprehend, nor to explain what happens. It ‘passes over exactly that phenomenon that makes up the originality of our world’ (Gauchet 1998, 14) – namely, disenchantment. In addition, disenchantment brought about something else that is less expressed by the notion of secularization, but which is of utmost importance to understand our situation, namely, the fact that through disenchantment, we have turned into a completely new universe, a universe at the other end of a religious one. That is, for Gauchet, crucial and has to be taken into account when talking about the ‘departure from religion’. The departure from religion is not something purely negative, in the sense that we are leaving behind something, nor is it just a new theory that this leaving behind has come out of religion itself, Christianity being ‘the religion for the departure from religion’. For Gauchet there is a third element in that notion, namely, that through this coming out and through this leaving behind, we have gone into

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something new, a new world which is the antipode of a religious one. The ‘departure from religion’ through disenchantment brought about a new universe. It created a new world, the world ‘after’ religion. Not a world that has only left behind something, but that leaving behind created something new (which also will make it more and more difficult to go back – I will come to that). However, this new world can be understood only, at least in its origins, through that process of coming out and leaving behind. In addition, it can be measured only precisely in relation to a religious universe. That is exactly why disenchantment and ‘departure from religion’, as interwoven notions, are the key concepts in Gauchet’s work. That these concepts are so intimately linked is not so surprising. It has to do with the way Gauchet defines ‘disenchantment’ in the first place. ‘Disenchantment’ can indeed be understood in different ways. Charles Taylor, for instance, understands it in a rather ‘minimal’ way, equating disenchantment with disengagement, with the cool, objectifying way of looking at the world, which finds it origin in modern times and characterizes so strongly modern science and even modern philosophy. Defined this way, disenchantment is not much more than the characteristic of a certain period, which in principle even can be reversed or undone. For Taylor, this is exactly what we need: a form of ‘re-enchantment’. For Gauchet, however, disenchantment is a far more radical and a more far-reaching phenomenon, the basis of the disengaged look and at the same time strengthened by it. Its consequences are really revolutionary and virtually irreversible. Here again, Gauchet follows in Weber’s footsteps, although at once he distances himself from Weber, both as to the meaning of the notion of disenchantment and with regard to its consequences. For Weber, Entzauberung means first of all what it says, namely, the disappearance of Zauber, that is, magic – or of ‘fetisjism’, as Kant has it (in almost the same wording as Weber). That means not only that things in the world lose their magic and their magical power, but also that they eventually do so because the relation between man and God has drastically changed: no magical influence of man on God, nor of God on man (or world). Neither arbitrary divine decrees nor magical forces rule the world, but universal, profane laws, accessible to man. Stretched a bit further, this yields a growing awareness of the self-sufficiency of the world and of its uniformity: to understand the world we no longer need to appeal to ‘super-natural’ forces (forces of a kind different from the natural ones). Even stronger: the world does no longer, by itself, refer to something supernatural, nor is it permeated by it. Angels, spirits, devils etc. are increasingly difficult even to conceive of. Eventually, ‘the disenchantment of the world’ means nothing less than ‘l’épuisement du règne de l’invisible’ (Gauchet 1985, ii)3 and that is what it means for Gauchet: ‘the impoverishment of the reign of the invisible’ (Gauchet 1997, 3), or, more precisely, the exhaustion of the ‘other world’. The falling off of the enchanters, the disappearance of the whole mass of influencing creatures, shadows etc. are for Gauchet only the surface of a much deeper revolution, namely, a revolution in the relations between heaven and earth through which there will be a complete reconstruction of our habitat (Gauchet 1997, 3).4 Put this way, we are close to Nietzsche and to the disappearance of any reality behind reality, to which the here-now would intrinsically refer.

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The consequences of this move can hardly be overestimated. It not only means a departure from religion (and its almost universal duality between the ‘here’ and the ‘beyond’, certainly in the ‘axial’ religions5), but also a departure from the Middle Ages, where all thought and even all reality was fundamentally symbolic: everything referred to something else, it signified something else (virtues, eternal truths, God . . .) and these similitudes, associations, analogies, references etc. guaranteed to all natural entities an abundant significance. ‘ Things of nature were regarded as signs’ and ‘every visible feature of creation corresponded to some reality in the unseen, heavenly realm’ (Harrison 1998, 17).6 Disenchantment then means that we now take the world as it is, in and for itself. This does not mean, at least not necessarily, that the only world left is the world of science, nor that the world has no longer any significance in itself (as Weber seemed to suggest – Dassen 1999, 226). None of these meanings is what disenchantment means for Gauchet. But it does mean that the world here-now no longer has any intrinsic reference to anything beyond – no longer ‘signifies’ something else, something ‘beyond’. In other words, that the world we live in is no longer intrinsically dependent on something which is literally ‘super-natural’. I really do think that Gauchet touches here the heart of our culture – a culture that can be characterized indeed by the evaporation of the beyond (and all otherworldliness). This means more than just a falling back upon the world here-now, as Nietzsche saw already. Nietzsche’s famous aphorism ‘How the real world eventually became a fable’, dealing exactly with that problem, ends with the sentence: ‘[T]he real world we have abolished. What world is left, the apparent world maybe? But no [Nietzsche says], with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world’ (Nietzsche 2005, 171). The old distinctions no longer do, and one can no longer dream to balance back from one side of the opposition (e.g. the opposition between immanence and transcendence) to the other. The opposition itself has disappeared,7 at least as it has functioned in the past. That is probably also a reason why Gauchet does not talk about an immanent transcendence after religion,8 as philosophers like Luc Ferry9 or Charles Taylor do, because talking about an immanent transcendence is using an old opposition to capture the new. By doing so one reduces it to the old. One continues to think in the classical (religious) terms, making the new universe outside of religion somehow religious (in the classical way) again, while, for Gauchet, it has only ‘family resemblances’ with what religion used to be, to put it in Wittgensteinian terms.

2 The specific role of Christianity: Incarnation and the Church A second major characteristic of Gauchet’s theory of disenchantment is the role of Christianity in that whole process. Not simply of Christianity as such, but eventually of the entire history of religion, since Christianity is itself the outcome of a long development, including first of all the rise of axial religion. For Gauchet, though, it is especially Christianity which has been crucial, because of its ‘specific Christian

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solution’ as he calls it. As I said, I will stay with two central elements of that solution, two elements typically Christian, that is, the theory of Incarnation on the doctrinal side, and the establishing of a church on the practical side.

2.1 Incarnation: An ‘axiomized ambiguity’, an ‘axiomized instability’ For Gauchet, the typically Christian doctrine of Incarnation is actually the culmination of a dynamics which has been going on for millennia, ever since purely mythical religion turned into what is called ‘the higher religions’ (the ‘axial religions’ as Gauchet calls them, referring to Jaspers10), namely, the dynamics of transcendence. That dynamics is set in motion by the rise of the axial religions. The singularity of Gauchet’s theory is that he links this rise itself to the emergence of the state, thereby stressing, at the heart of the process, the intertwinement of religion and politics from the outset (Gauchet is, after all, writing ‘a political history of religion’): the separation of power among humans pushed the gods further and further away. However, it is not only through the growing transcendence of the gods that we have turned over into a new world, however important that dynamics of transcendence (as the title of the second chapter in Gauchet’s book reads) might have been. The growing transcendence of the gods actually set in motion a whole process of questioning, not only of man’s place in relation to the gods, but also of the structure of society, of the world here-now and of its religious foundation. Instead of being an element of stability, providing a stable foundation to the whole world of man, as in myth, religion now becomes an element of questioning and thus of in-stability. And exactly this element of instability for Gauchet culminates in the doctrine of Incarnation – a doctrine that will pave the way for an active investment not only in the other world, but via that other world more and more in the world here-now. As Blumenberg showed, the dynamics of transcendence led to the hidden and even ‘deceiving God’ (Blumenberg 1983, 181) of nominalism, the reaction to which was modern self-assertion. Also for Gauchet this move is crucial. However, it is not enough. It pictures modernity as, first of all, a reaction to a certain evolution within Christianity. For Gauchet, modernity is first of all the result of Christianity as such, namely, of its religious logic, the logic of Incarnation. The doctrine of Incarnation in its final form was the result of fierce theological battles during the first centuries of the Christian era, settled eventually by councils and dogmas. All these battles were related to the interpretation of Incarnation, and thus of the relation between heaven and earth, between the divinity and the humanity of Jesus, between God and man, between transcendence and immanence, and eventually between the rejection or the acceptance of the world. With all kinds of ‘heresies’ as a result: arianism, adoptianism, docetism etc. The true originality of the relation to the world established by Christianity lies in its ‘axiomized ambiguity’ or ‘ambiguity in principle’ (ambiguité principielle) Gauchet says (Gauchet 1997, 131), which was a direct refraction of the union of the two natures in Christ. All attempts to settle the disputes once and forever showed to be fragile. The instabilities remained: What

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did it mean that Jesus was ‘truly God and truly man’? And what was the meaning of his Incarnation? Did it bring God and world closely together (that ‘God became man in order for man to become God’ as Origin said) or did Incarnation testify to the distance between God and world (as Calvinism would have it)? The discussions were not silenced by councils or dogmas but, on the contrary, re-emerged time and again, and found always new expressions, in all kinds of movements, heresies and theological discussions throughout the centuries. What ‘this specific Christian solution’ to the relationship between heaven and earth did do was to exclude two possible extremes: on the one hand, a straight worldrenunciation, on the other hand, a straight world-acceptance. Gauchet links them to Buddhism and to Islam, respectively. The Christian doctrine of Incarnation excludes both. Incarnation – as creation did already but now, infinitely stronger – made the world sufficiently ‘ontologically complete’ (Gauchet 1997, 77) for the Son of God to become man in this world. But the world also needs salvation: it is so much out of tune with God’s original aim, so sinful, that it needs to be saved from the outside. Thus, the world cannot be simply the expression of God’s will, either. The combination of these two affirmations – the ontological completeness of the world on the one hand, and the world not simply being the expression of the divine will but needing salvation, on the other – made possible the ‘specific Christian solution’. That ‘solution’ is a culmination of an instability brought in by the axial religions between world-negation and world-affirmation. It consists not in purely accepting the world as it is, nor in just turning away from it, but rather in investing in the world in order to make it better, as a religious duty, in the name of God. Investing in the herenow, in the name of the beyond. That actually is what the Christian West has been doing all along, since the Middle Ages. However, when that ‘beyond’ is emptied of its justifying power due to the dynamics of transcendence boosted to its maximum (see Cloots 2012, 82–3) in nominalistic and puritan divine voluntarism, the world herenow and our investing in it had gained so much validity already that, eventually, it was able to stand on its own. This happens increasingly in our disenchanted world: even if a religious justification for our investing in the world here-now is still possible (and even might reinforce it), it no longer is really necessary. It is no longer ‘in the name of the world beyond’ (e.g. because of divine command, or to earn salvation) that we invest in the world here-now. That investing can find its justification in itself. This move certainly did not happen at once, or at a certain moment, nor as a reaction or a reoccupation (as in Blumenberg), but step by step and as an internal development, always contingent, but intimately linked to the religious logic of Christianity itself. Up to the point that for us today, our investment in a better world is justified in terms of the world itself. Christianity’s instability, its continuous back and forth between world-negation and world-affirmation, actually has proved to be a driving force towards the emergence of the modern world. Notwithstanding the temptation of world-negation in its earliest centuries, Christianity eventually cannot take that road. It requires at least some recognition of the world’s basic consistency. And yet, it cannot take the world as it is, either. It requires investing in the world in order to improve it. It is exactly that

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requirement that has been a driving force towards the modern world we live in. From ‘love thy neighbour as thyself ’, to the efforts of mediaeval monks to irrigate the land and to set up charity, up to building universities and hospitals, doing research and curing the sick: all of this done ‘for the glory of God’ (Stark 2003) is the expression of the ‘specific Christian solution’ linked to the doctrine of Incarnation. Until eventually, working for a better world means ‘a better world here-now’, a ‘heaven on earth’. We hear about improving the world every day, but we rarely realize the exceptionality of such a way of thinking. Just like we rarely realize the exceptionality of the doctrine of Incarnation. What has to be understood here is twofold. On the one hand, the emergence of a disenchanted world, uniform and isomorphic, without intrinsic supernatural references or causes. On the other hand, the growing investment in that world, so typical for modernity. Rather than turning away from it, back to the divine and the beyond, as could be expected from a mediaeval perspective and as the Reformers actually intended, modernity ends up investing all its efforts in the world-below, at all levels: economic, scientific, political etc. As explanatory factors, nominalism and divine voluntarism, referred to by Blumenberg, and even the Reformation as such, do not seem to be sufficient. It certainly can explain the emergence of a disenchanted world, as this is linked to the dynamics of transcendence, also for Gauchet. The more God is transcendent, the farther away He is, and thus, eventually, the less relevant. A God without a world eventually leads to a world without God. If God is totally other than the world, than the world is also other than God and God becomes less and less relevant for our dealing with it. In that sense it is possible to understand how within a fully enchanted world, disenchantment could grow through the dynamic of transcendence, leading eventually to a world without God: literal, isomorphic homogeneous – the most extreme expression of which is the world of science. But that is not all. Nominalism and divine voluntarism could be enough to understand the evaporation of the other world, as that world recedes so far away that it no longer gives any hold. But this could have left us without any hold whatsoever. Or, with a kind of a Buddhist renunciation. But that is not what happened. Man thinks he has a hold stronger than ever, even if it is no longer through contemplation of the divine ideas in things, but through hypothesis and experiment. For a long time, that investing in the world here-now was in view of the other world, but step by step it is done in view of the world here-now itself. In other words, what has to be understood is not only the evaporation of the other world, but the zealously investing in the worldbelow, which is so typical for our modern culture, and increasingly so. Both movements, the growing transcendence and the investing in the world herenow, both linked to Incarnation, came together in a peculiar way in Calvinism. The sovereign God is so far away that we cannot have any certainty about our salvation (predestination), but that does not take away our duty to work towards a better world. Even more, successes in the world here-now might be an indication of selection, thus leading through its inner-worldly asceticism to the rise of capitalism (Weber), and to the attempt to bring the world more in tune with the divine will again through a new science (Bacon – see Cloots 2012, 83). At the same time, since all mediation

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of the divine is impossible, either through acts, things (sacraments, images, relics) or whatever, not even through ordinations, priests or monks, the world is eventually completely de-divinized, factual and literal. It loses all its symbolic meaning and its power to ‘re-present’ the divine or to bring it closer by human means. In this particular interpretation of both the transcendence of God and of his Incarnation, for the first time in history, a completely disenchanted world and an active investment join hands for purely religious reasons, and with the only aim to glorify God. This very specific (and very contingent) ‘solution’ has played a central role in the whole process, eventually leading, however, to exactly the opposite of the actors’ intentions,11 namely, our secularized Western modernity. It was by turning away from the world here-now, that we eventually ended up turning towards it, more and more, meanwhile disenchanting the world by divine transcendence. Through that move, it is understandable how out of a world filled with the divine, we ended up with a world completely disenchanted. But it should be repeated: what has to be understood is not only the disenchantment of the world, nor only its independence vis-à-vis the gods. What has to be understood is how out of a culture putting all emphasis upon the other world, as in the Middle Ages, a culture has grown, which invests all its energy in the here-now. So, modernity has come out of the Middle Ages it appears, not merely opposing it, but grown from within it. That is why for both Blumenberg and Gauchet (as for Weber already), nominalism and puritanism have been so crucial. As long as there is still a strong link between the two worlds, as in medieval catholic theology (and actually in Greek philosophy, Gauchet says) it is certainly more difficult to get to a ‘completely isomorphic world’ which is so central to modern science. It is true, the catholic interpretation of Incarnation, just like that of participation, linking the two worlds together, also emphasizes the value of this world. However, Gauchet would say, it does not allow for the world’s real autonomy, which is so characteristic for modernity. For some religious people, this autonomy is to be contested. For most modern people (religious and non-religious alike), it is a gain. Participation threatens to make the world second-hand.12 To the extent that participation entails that the world remains a copy of a more original ‘other’, it goes against one of the basic tenets of modernity. The world is not second-hand, just as for Blumenberg modernity is not something second-hand: a (bad) copy of something else (as in Karl Löwith or Carl Schmitt13). It is an original in itself. Or better still: the whole way of thinking in terms of copy and original, a basically Platonic way of thinking, has lost its validity. The world is no longer intrinsically an offshoot of something ‘beyond’ it. It stands on its own feet and has its own validity and autonomy. It is no accident that the whole theory of participation is so much under pressure these days. It is a form of hierarchical thinking, so universal in ancient and mediaeval times at all levels – a thinking in terms of higher and lower, of copy and original. Those are in the end full-fledged religious ways of thinking. The theory of participation tries to bridge the rift between the opposites and dissolve the tensions. What happened in nominalism and puritanism, however, is that the opposition is deepened, turning the two sides into opposites. It is precisely through that deepening that an autonomous world becomes possible: a world both different from God and independent, or more

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precisely, independent because different. Transcendence does indeed make God not only greater but also different (which in the analysis of Gauchet is even true of Christianity as such14). In any case, the more God is different from the world, the more the world is different from God. In the words of Gauchet: ‘the greater the gods, the freer humans are’ (Gauchet 1997, 51). By all this, Gauchet interprets the role of the Protestant Reformation in a very specific way. Not in terms of continuity or discontinuity with tradition, nor in terms of freedom over against authority, or of faith against godless reason, but rather, as an alternative development of what is inherent in the Christian doctrine of God as such and of its notion of Incarnation. It is this alternative Christian logic which constitutes the Reformation’s novelty, its new way of dealing with what has been at stake ‘throughout the whole religious and intellectual history of Christian Europe’, namely, ‘an emphasis in favor of God’s omnipotent exteriority and the effort to counter it and to reverse its effects’ (Gauchet 1997, 60), that is, a balance between divine transcendence and divine immanence. It was the specific religious logic of Christianity as such and its alternative interpretation by the Reformation (and mainly in its Puritan version) which have been so crucial in the rise of modernity. It is important, however, to see that it is a logic inherent in Christianity itself, equally inherent in it as the logic of unity or unification (stressed so strongly by the catholic interpretation). From this perspective Gauchet stresses, both in Christianity’s God and in its doctrine of Incarnation, the transcendence and the difference of God rather than his becoming human: even Incarnation testifies in Gauchet’s analysis first of all to transcendence and separation. For some, that might seem odd, but it means that for Gauchet Incarnation, instead of bending the dynamics of transcendence, actually is part and parcel of it, so strongly that it even precipitated the process. It is evident that Incarnation can be read otherwise, and often has been. Incarnation certainly not only testifies to the separation of God and man, but to God’s becoming man as well, and thus certainly also to the rapprochement between God and man, even if, as Gauchet claims, behind this is a tacit deepening of the difference.15 In that sense, it might be seen as a pity that Gauchet does not analyse how an understanding of Incarnation as the binding together of the two worlds – and not only in terms of separation – might have contributed to our full investing in the world here-now16 as well. And this also out of religious conviction. Does not the doctrine of participation, even more than that of pure separation, emphasize the validity of the world here-now and of our dealing with it? That’s why the growing transcendence in itself is not enough: Incarnation, with its emphasis on the consistency of the world is needed as well. And that is precisely what the doctrine of participation tries to account for. However, it does this in a way that in principle does not allow for a world considered really in and for itself, which precisely is so central to modernity. Incarnation binds the two worlds together, it is true, but for Gauchet, it is first of all in the world’s not being divine in any sense that we should look for the roots of the full turn towards the world here-now in modernity. It is through a God more and more separated from the world that we got a world more and more separated from God. In other words, it is in the doctrine of Incarnation interpreted not so much as a metaphysics of the One, but first

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of all as a metaphysics of duality (in line with the overall movement of the history of religion) that the main impetus towards our modern culture is to be found.17 Also here, Gauchet is the heir of Weber, as Weber had already talked about the ‘monism’ of the magical world over against the dualism of rationalized religion (Weber 1920, 254 and 564 – see Dassen 1999, 195), thus anticipating his friend Karl Jaspers, who would later characterize the axial revolution in these terms (Jaspers 1949, ch. 1). Another friend of Weber’s, namely, Ernst Troeltsch had already indicated years before how central the ‘absolute metaphysical dualism’ of Protestantism (Troeltsch 1911, 84) had been for the emerging of the modern world. The understanding of Incarnation in terms of a unification of the two worlds and the catholic doctrine of mediation (so strongly opposed by the Protestants) are eventually ‘monistic’. Gauchet stresses the other side: the side of Jesus preaching the unimportance of the world here-now in view of the impending end of history, and ‘reversing’ as Gauchet says, all possible mediation between heaven and earth (Gauchet 1997, 122). This is especially important in the domain that Gauchet is specifically interested in, namely the political: Christianity eventually leads to the separation of church and state. Not in the least, by establishing a church in the first place.

2.2 The role of the church – and the separation between Church and state The ‘specific Christian solution’ concerning the relationship between heaven and earth also radically affected the realm of the political. The logic of separation indeed developed into a distinction between religion and politics, dealing respectively with the management of the beyond and the management of the below – a division of labour that will lead to a growing separation of the religious and the political. Because of that, this very same logic is also at the base of the rise of democracy, of the ‘departure’ from religion as society’s organizing principle and eventually, as the ultimate justification of the political. It is well known that Jesus not only preached the otherworldliness of his kingdom (‘My kingdom is not of this world’), but also that he stressed the distinction between the realm of Caesar and the realm of God (‘give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God’). That distinction also characterizes the Christian: ‘in the world, but not of the world’ as, for instance, Paul and Augustine put it. But in order to understand what happens to the political within the context of Christianity, the pivotal point is not so much what Jesus did say. It is, first of all, who he was in the religious-political realm. He is called ‘the son of God’. This is not so new. Others were also called the son of the gods, such as the pharaoh or the emperor. Totally new however, is the position from which the claim is made: not at the top of the social scale, but at the very bottom. By being the son of God as the son of a carpenter, Jesus actually wipes the floor with all divine claims of pharaohs and emperors alike: they are not the son of God. By this very fact, that is, by his very being, Jesus undermines all religious justification of the political realm. Much stronger than by what he actually said.

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But there is more. According to Gauchet, the actual driving force for the separation between religion and politics in the West has not just been the sociopolitical position of the son of God, nor the content of his preaching, but another typically Christian invention, namely, the church. We used to think that the separation between church and state is the result of the opposition of the state to the claims of the church. And in a way that is true. But what is so specific for Christianity – and for the theory of Gauchet as well – is that it was the very existence of the church itself that was the real lever for that opposition. Here again we have to realize the specificity of Christianity. It is the only religion which developed an organized and even bureaucratic body for the management of souls, claiming the monopoly of all that is religious. By this very claim, however, that church has taken away the religious from the worldly powers to which it used to be always intrinsically linked. It separated the religious from the political, thereby fostering not only the independence of the religious, but at once the development of the political as something in itself, as an ‘other’ realm, eventually independent of religion. In that sense, the very creation of the church has contributed not only to the separation of religion and politics, but to the very development of the political as an independent domain. Not at the beginning, it is true, and not without many controversies, since according to the religious logic, the below remained submitted to the beyond. For centuries, the church conceived of the political as submitted to the religious. However, the age-old fights between church and state, especially from the Gregorian reform in the eleventh century on, testify to the inherent contradiction in it. Not only was the political a domain in itself, it was even one that could resist the claims of the church all the more since from time immemorial it had itself a divine backing. The king was and remained king in the name of God. The more the management of the religious became the monopoly of the church, the more the management of the world-below became the monopoly of the political. Through different steps, of which not only the Investiture Controversy (in the eleventh century), but also the rise of absolute monarchy, the theories of social contract and the idea of a sovereign state are just some crucial examples. Leading eventually (often unintentionally and even straight against the intention) to democracy and the selfrule of the people (Gauchet 1997, 57–9). And at once to a complete reversal of the political: from then on, political power no longer represents the gods, but only the people. Its basis is no longer any transcendent heteronomy: it is the people governing itself. Throughout the evolution, politics has lost both its religious backing and its transcendent principles. No longer do principles coming from the god’s structure and orient our politics, but principles from below do. In that sense, modern society is an a-theistic society, even if it is made up and governed by a majority of believers (Gauchet 1997, 4). Atheistic, not in the sense that religion would no longer be possible, but ‘a-theistic’ in the sense that no longer are divine principles or religious traditions modelling society, but principles having their foundation in the people and in that sense in the world below – even if they might still be linked to the gods. Today we are attesting, according to Gauchet, the last episode of this process. ‘De-traditionalization, de-subordination, des-incorporation, de-institutionalization, de-symbolization’ (Gauchet 2007, 35), which in a way are all forms of de-hierarchization,

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represent the last steps in this ‘departure from religion’, bringing us, since the 1970s, in a society without (societal) religion, or a society-outside-religion, more than ever. Not without creating new problems, however. Even so much so that Gauchet talks about ‘democracy against itself ’.18 In our days, democracy reaches its fullest possibilities. Yet, at this very moment, it is left without a hold, more than ever. At the very moment that the people have conquered the possibility of governing themselves, they know less than ever how to do it. It would be fascinating to follow Gauchet’s analysis of today’s society in this regard, but that is not what is at stake here. What is important, however, is that we are now at the antipode of the mythical societies of the beginning. Our society is a society-after-religion, structuring and justifying itself politically in a way totally different from before, from time immemorial. Yet in a way only understandable fully, it should be stressed, precisely in relation to this age-old religious pattern. That is why, for Gauchet, the notion of ‘departure from religion’, in its dual sense, is the key to understand the vicissitudes of the political in the West and of the ensuing democracy. Not only are we the result of (societal) religion but also the adventures of the political in the West are determined by the process of leaving religion behind. By the same token, however, we are confronted with the enormous challenge to invent something completely new, the society-after-religion. What about religion in such a society? That question is often the hidden motivating force behind many discussions and many theories of secularization. As to Gauchet, it will be clear by now that the future of religion is not his primordial concern. His primordial concern is politics – and the tremendous role religion has played throughout the ages in organizing every society we know of. Throughout the history of the West, however, that role has dissolved, to such an extent that today we are entering a society-after-religion. Seen from that perspective, Gauchet’s concern is more the religious past than the religious future. Just as he is more concerned to understand what is than to figure out what should be or could be. Nevertheless, his view on the religious past has certain consequences. One of them is that notwithstanding all logic which can be found post factum, history is unpredictable. Except that we never simply can go back. Given the history in which we stand and the disenchantment that is ours, a return to the societyof-religion is not only improbable but actually impossible: a return is never a return. Indeed, there is much talk about a return of religion. But what returns for Gauchet – at least in Western Europe – is not classical religion and certainly not societal religion, but, first of all, identities – Muslim, Asian, African and others – of which religion is a central part (‘I am what I believe’). And secondly, what returns is a hunger for spirituality. But is that a return of religion? What returns often refers to something immanent (identity, need of symbols, quest for meaning . . .), or to forms of immanent transcendence (as e.g. in Luc Ferry, Gianni Vattimo etc.). That is certainly not what religion used to be all about, both at the origin and during the whole Axial Period. Characteristic of all axial religions is an openness towards a transcendent ‘beyond’, in relation to which the world here-now loses (much of) its substantiality. ‘The highest human goal can no longer just be to flourish, as it was before’, as Charles Taylor characterizes the rise of axial religion (Taylor 2011, 372).

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But even when identity and the search for meaning are linked to a full openness to a real transcendent (i.e. not immanent) beyond, even then are we dealing, Gauchet would ask, with a religion that has gone through a Copernican turn (Gauchet 1998, 109)? Such a religion is certainly no longer just what religion always used to be: something you receive, rather than something which is the result of a quest or a hunger, something in which you stand, rather than something of your deliberate choosing, something societal rather than something individual, something at the service of God rather than something at the service of man, full dispossession rather than full self-possession etc. In other words, with the ‘departure from religion’, not only society but also religion has changed, to the extent that also here we are at the antipode of the beginning.19 We should be aware that in today’s context, we are testifying not only a society-afterreligion, but also the religious-after-religion (Gauchet 1997, 200). What exactly are we asking, when we are asking about ‘the future of religion’?

3 Conclusion: Enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment With all this, Gauchet clearly puts the discussion on edge. Let me conclude with a few remarks. It is evident that Gauchet’s approach to religion is an external one, and more specifically a functional one. For some people this is a source of strong criticism. For instance for Charles Taylor, in his ‘Foreword’ to the English translation of Le désenchantement du monde (Gauchet 1997, xv). But, to be honest, I fail to see the problem. I don’t see why this would be more problematic than a purely internal approach. Both are complementary, as they both contribute to making clear what religion actually is. Also a functional approach can contribute to that. Just like a good book on the actual functioning of art, or politics for that matter, can give one a view on what art (or politics) actually is, sometimes better than or at least complementary to the books of artists or politicians themselves. The ‘is’ question about any human practice can never be reduced to a first-person standpoint, though that standpoint might be more important than Gauchet himself seems to allow for. Without any doubt, many important aspects of religion remain out of Gauchet’s ‘political’ perspective. For instance, religion as praxis, or the mystical component of religion or the utopian one (the ‘not yet’ and the ‘and yet’ of religious eschatology), or religion as transformation etc. Especially from a Wittgensteinian perspective, it is claimed that religion is more a matter of practice than of cognition. Gauchet, however, stresses the religious ‘logic’, time and again, that is, the way in which a religion or a religious movement structures the relation between man, world and God. Such a structure is indeed always in the background, even of the religious practice or, for that matter, in the utopian or mystical aspect of religion, a background that cannot simply be put aside without ‘emptying’ all the other aspects, certainly in a religion of revelation. On the contrary, it is a basic presupposition for the very authenticity of all religious practice, for mysticism etc.

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Which does not exclude that all these aspects in their turn co-model the religious logic, on the contrary. In Christianity – as the religion of interpretation – that was certainly the case, time and again. And for Gauchet, it was this very religious structure relating man, world and God, which, as the point of reference of all the other aspects of religion, was the central key to understand the development of the political, throughout history. To talk about a ‘logic’ and its historic development makes one think of Hegel. What Gauchet shares with Hegel is certainly the need for the big picture. Only then can one understand things fully, Gauchet claims, however vulnerable such ‘grand narratives’ may be. At the back flap of the original French edition of the Disenchantment of the World, Gauchet links his work to ‘the pioneering works of Durkheim, Max Weber, Rudolf Otto at the beginning of this [the 20th] century’.20 Gauchet’s aim is to develop a panoramic view that enables us to see the threads, the breaks and the shifts which make it possible to somehow understand why we stand where we do stand and think the way we do think. What Gauchet lays open is the ‘logic’ of how it all went. But the logic Gauchet discovers in history is certainly not the Hegelian Logik. First of all it is an a posteriori logic, not an a priori one. Not that there is nothing a priori in it, though. What the possibilities are, given a certain situation or way of thinking, is a matter of logic, but the road history will actually take is unpredictable and often dependent on bare contingencies – such as the contingency of the historical Jesus, to name just one, though an important one. Even when such a figure is only possible within a certain religious logic (and the specific Jewish contexts Gauchet sketches at the beginning of part II of his book – Gauchet 1997, 107 ff ), the actual existence of the historical person, the development of his movement into a major religion with a contingent but enormous influence on the West, both socially and cognitively, was totally unpredictable. Without all this, Gauchet’s ‘logic’ would have been completely different. Actually, as far as the driving forces of history for Gauchet are oppositions and the deepening of oppositions (e.g. between God and the world in his interpretation of Incarnation) and the falling apart of the metaphysics of the One, there certainly is as much Kantianism (and Weberianism) in Gauchet as there is Hegelianism. The critique of Gauchet’s so-called crypto-Hegelianism has to do most of the time with his view of the future rather than with his analysis of the past. It has to do with his picture of progressive disenchantment. He indeed sees disenchantment as the result of a progressive process, a process that in addition is hard, if not impossible, to turn around. He does not say that this implies the end of all forms of religion and he even sees Christianity as a good candidate for religion-after-religion.21 But it does imply that any religion will have to take disenchantment seriously. One does not have to take Gauchet’s personal (atheistic) road, but it is undeniable that in the modern Western classical theistic transcendence has become more difficult than ever, even for many believers. Due exactly to disenchantment, understood in the way Gauchet understands it: the emptying of the world beyond. Since the beginning of modernity, the tension between the two worlds has only increased, to the point that indeed, for most of our fellow citizens, the other world has disappeared. I think this is the main reason why,

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for the great majority of young people in Western Europe, traditional Christianity is no longer the answer to their yearning for meaning or their hunger for spirituality or their quest for authenticity, which are indeed strong. Classical religious discourse – and the discourse of different religions for that matter – is permeated through and through by a two-world-picture and does not succeed in breaking loose from magical imaginaries. Therefore its language no longer ‘mediates’ the divine. So that eventually also the practice threatens to stop ‘mediating’ it. But is it not a basic characteristic of the Bible to break open time and again any fixing of the divine, any ‘image of God’? If so, then even in a disenchanted world there might still be strong anchors for religion. ‘Disenchantment’ for Gauchet is indeed the heart itself of secularization, but it does not mean, at least not necessarily, that human life and the world in which we live are intrinsically without meaning. Or that meaning becomes purely subjective. Not at all. In Gauchet’s understanding, a disenchanted world can still bear a meaning that is not simply man-made and that can engage us. We just have to think for instance of Merleau-Ponty, to whom Gauchet regularly refers (e.g. Gauchet 1997, 202). It is too easy to state that one has either the religious world or the pure meaningless world of science. That is a false dichotomy. There is much in between, and many people indeed are somewhere in between. A disenchanted world only means that the world no longer, simply by itself, bears or needs any necessary reference to another reality. Which does not exclude for the believer that something can resonate, through ‘subtler languages’ (as Charles Taylor would argue), in the meanings we find around us, something which might be linked to the religious word ‘God’. But it certainly does not have to: through disenchantment, a world without God has become very well conceivable, both intellectually and existentially, for the first time in history, even in the head of the believer. That is the real challenge for religion today and in the future.

Notes 1 For a detailed analysis of the different layers of that concept in Weber, see Monod 2002. 2 See Kant on sorcery (das Zaubern) and fetishism (Fetishismus) in Kant 1998, 172. 3 To some extent, this is already the case in Weber, but then as a process linked to external influences of science, and not to religious self-transformation – see Dassen 1999, 199. 4 In that sense, Gauchet’s theory is certainly not just what Taylor calls a ‘subtractiontheory’ (Taylor 2007, 26–9). Gauchet’s point is certainly not simply that we have left behind something which eventually proved to be not necessary at all. Rather, Gauchet’s theory is also a theory of reconstruction, even when it is put in apparently negative terms like ‘departure’ or ‘dis-enchantment’. We still understand ourselves in terms of what we have left behind (and actually we should, since we are the result of it), first of all because we are still inventing the world after religion (‘Concepts for thinking about post-religious man do not yet exist’ – Gauchet 1997, 172).

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5 A dualism which is characteristic for all (higher) religions (over against the ‘monism’ of magic, according to Weber) – see footnote 17 below. 6 Harrison shows how the rise of a literal interpretation of the Bible, especially in the Reformation, led to a literal and no longer symbolic interpretation of nature (and thus to modern science). Also for Michel Foucault (Foucault 1977, ch. 2) ‘similitudo’ was the basic characteristic of the epistèmè of the Renaissance. 7 It would be interesting to connect this to Casanova 2010, 274–5, where José Casanova links the pre-axial age to the dichotomy sacred/profane, the axial age to transcendent/ immanent, and modernity to the dichotomy religious/secular. 8 He does talk about ‘the religious after religion’ (in the last pages of The Disenchantment of the World – Gauchet 1997, 200–7), because of the dispossession, not because of ‘transcendence’. 9 See the discussion between Gauchet and Ferry exactly on this topic, in Ferry 2004. 10 A reference he owes, I suspect, to Eric Voegelin who already in 1952 refers to Jaspers’s book of 1949 precisely in the context of politics (Voegelin 1987, 60 and 79). Since the time Charles Taylor has taken it over from Gauchet, it seems to have become like a common expression. 11 Which is also the central thesis of Gregory 2012. 12 In relation to Plato’s philosophy of participation, A. N. Whitehead writes: ‘He [Plato] can find only second-rate substitutes and never the original’ (Whitehead 1967, 168). This is also a main argument of Hans Blumenberg against the ‘secularizationthesis’, that it continues to think in terms of ‘original’ and ‘copy’, seeing modernity as a (bad) copy of Christian theology and thus as an ‘idol’ (Blumenberg 1983, 72). In contemporary Continental thought, especially the metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze is based on the rejection of this scheme of thought (see, for example, Deleuze 1994, 126–8). Participation can also be understood however in a less Platonic sense, in terms of ‘embeddedness in a larger whole’. That would be something Deleuze would be the first to recognize. But then we are no longer within the framework of an ontological hierarchy. 13 For whom modernity is an (illegitimate) secularization of religious concepts. See Löwith 1949, 1–2 and Schmitt 1985, 36. 14 Cf Gauchet 1997, 82: ‘But the Christian God was more than a major deity. . . . He was above all a god who is other’, no longer linked to earthly power or a chosen people. Jesus reverses ‘all possible mediation between heaven and earth’ (122). This leads to ‘a God separate from the world and a believer outside the world’ (123). 15 See for example, Gauchet 1997, 77 and also 81: ‘For Christians, mediation has occurred definitively in the person of the Word incarnate. This is an event that will never have a truly substantial structure. The best one could hope is to reach the level of an image of Christ without ever being able to occupy this intersection of the human and the divine’. 16 Nor does he analyse sufficiently the undeniable Jewish contribution (for Gauchet’s treatment of this, see Gauchet 1997, 105 ff.). Weber had stated already that Judaism was a kind of forerunner of puritanism. Was it an accident that in Germany during the inter-war period, the Jews were often considered to incarnate modernity with its capitalism, cosmopolitism and its rationalism, thereby undermining traditional society and its idea of Bildung – which led to anti-Jewish sentiments among many

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18 19

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Radical Secularization? conservative Christians (Dassen 1999, 97). In the case of Judaism, we are evidently in the realm of separation, leaving room for disenchantment. And for investment in the world. With Incarnation, however, this investment is not only something ‘outside’ of the realm of the religious, but it becomes a religious duty as such, and it is this religious motivation which for Gauchet has given such a strong boost to our turn to the world here-now. That metaphysics of duality did away with the monistic metaphysics of hierarchy as well. ‘The revolution for equality began in, and with, the advent of a separated god’ (Gauchet 1997, 82). As the title of Gauchet 2002 reads (La démocratie contre elle-même). Cf. Gauchet 1997, 4 where Gauchet writes, concerning Christianity: ‘What is currently alive in the Christian faith has no connection (n’a plus rien à voir) with the circumstances surrounding its birth . . .’. ‘Remarkable lacuna: since the pioneering works of Durkheim, Max Weber, Rudolf Otto at the beginning of the century, religion as a domain of reflection upon societies has been left fallow, so to say’ (backflap of Gauchet 1985 – my translation). (‘Remarquable lacune: depuis les travaux pionniers de Durkheim, Max Weber, Rudolf Otto au début du siècle, la religion est restée un domaine de la réflexion sur les sociétés pour ainsi dire en friche’). Reference is also made to ‘Montesquieu or Rousseau, Tocqueville or Marx’ (Gauchet 1997, 17). Gauchet 2004, 144. See already Gauchet 1997, 4: ‘Christianity proves to have been a religion for departing from religion. For this reason, Christianity remains the most relevant religion in a post-religious society’. First of all precisely because of its doctrine of Incarnation, which by its very ‘axiomized ambiguity’ opens up various possibilities for a God really related to the world here-now. But besides that, there are those elements of modernity to which Christianity is intimately linked. We could think of the central importance of man, the equality of all human beings, the importance of the world here-now, the separation of church and state etc.: all crucial features of Christianity as well as of modernity, although Christianity actually often resisted their full unfolding. Therefore, as Charles Taylor says, the human rights, though developed on the basis of Christianity, had to break out of it, since within Christianity there were always reasons, doctrinal or other, to limit their scope (e.g. the freedom of religion, the rights of homosexuals etc.). See Taylor 2011, 170.

References Blumenberg, Hans. 1983. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Casanova, José. 2010. ‘A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight?’, in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds), Varieties of Secularism in A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 265–81. Cloots, André. 2008. ‘Modernity and Christianity: Marcel Gauchet on the Christian Roots of the Modern Ways of Thinking’. Milltown Studies, 61: 1–30.

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—. 2012. ‘Marcel Gauchet on the Radicalization of Transcendence and the Rise of Modern Immanence’, in Wessel Stoker and W. L. van der Merwe (eds), Culture and Transcendence: A Typology of Transcendence. Leuven-Paris-Walpole, MA: Peeters, 77–89. Dassen, Patrick. 1999. De onttovering van de wereld: Max Weber en het probleem van de moderniteit in Duitsland, 1890-1920. Amsterdam: Van Oorschot. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Ferry, Luc and Gauchet, Marcel. 2004. Le religieux après la religion (Nouveau college de philosophie). Paris: Grasset. Foucault, Michel. 1977. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. Gauchet, Marcel. 1985. Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion (Bibliothèque des sciences humaines). Paris: Gallimard. —. 1997. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Translation (of Gauchet 1985) by Oscar Burge. With a Foreword by Charles Taylor (New French Thought). Princeton: Princeton University Press. —. 1998. La religion dans la démocratie: Parcours de la laicité (Le débat). Paris: Gallimard. —. 2002. La démocratie contre elle-même. Paris: Gallimard. —. 2004. Un monde désenchanté? Paris: Les éditions de l’Atelier/éditions Ouvrières. —. 2007. L’avènement de la démocratie I: La révolution moderne. Paris: Gallimard. Gregory, Brad. 2012. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Harrison, Peter. 1998. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaspers, Karl. 1949. Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. Munich: Piper Verlag. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Translated and edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, with an introduction by Robert Merrihew Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Löwith, Karl. 1949. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Monod, Jean-Claude. 2002. La querelle de la secularization: Théologie politique et philosophies de l’histoire de Hegel à Blumenberg. Paris: Vrin. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2005. ‘Twilight of the Idols’, in Nietzsche, Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (eds), The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Essays (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab, foreword by Tracy B. Strong. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Stark, Rodney. 2003. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunt, and the End of Slavery. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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—. 2011. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Troeltsch, Ernst. 1911. Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt. Aalen: Otto Zeller Verlagsbuchhandlung. Voegelin, Eric. 1987. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 1920. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I. Edited by Marianne Weber. Tübingen: Mohr. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1967. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press.

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The Strength of Weakness: Vattimo and Gauchet on Secularization Andreas Michel

Lay modernity is constituted above all as a continuation and desacralizing interpretation of the biblical message. (Vattimo 1999, 41) Throughout the twentieth century, the notion of secularization – conceived as the retreat of religion as the ultimate foundation of public welfare – has played a crucial role in the way we think about modernity in the West. In fact, the centuries-long process of secularization is widely held to constitute the very essence of Western history. Yet, the precise nature of this process is contested. One of the principal controversies surrounding secularization, the so-called Blumenberg–Löwith debate, focused on the question of whether modernity – roughly the period encompassing the last five centuries – ought to be seen as a continuation of Christian foundations, merely translated into other, secular terms – or if, on the contrary, in the wake of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of science and technology, modernity ought to be seen as possessing an identity all its own.1 More recently, during the so-called religious turn of the 1990s, a new perspective was added to this debate, one that squarely emphasizes ‘the religious roots of secular thought and action’ (Gauchet 1985, 61). This view locates the origin of secularization long before the rise of modernity: far from being its antagonist, secularization is in fact an integral part of the historical unfolding of Christianity. What is more, philosophers such as Marcel Gauchet and Gianni Vattimo, for example, single out the Incarnation, that is, God’s becoming man in Christ, as the decisive moment in the process of secularization. Yet Vattimo and Gauchet make their case in ways diametrically opposed to each other, especially when it comes to the interpretation of the doctrine of Incarnation: for Gauchet, the Incarnation confirms God’s ultimate difference from mankind; for Vattimo it signals precisely the opposite, the abandonment of the difference between the sacred and the mundane. While this difference will lead to a different assessment of the status of religion in the present, their approaches nevertheless provide a common

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perspective regarding the process of secularization. For what is decisive is that both see the Incarnation as the event that inaugurates the departure from religion as the sacred foundation of communal life. Their respective grand narratives articulate ‘the central process of reversing sacral otherness’ (Gauchet 1985, 103) and are interesting in two respects: one, they provide a clarifying perspective on the religious underpinnings of the secularizing process and, two, they conceptualize the future as being open to human self-determination, conceiving the political as a contested space which, besides the necessity of bureaucratic administration, allows for the utopian hope of ongoing emancipation.

1 Two vantage points There can be little doubt that, in the Western world, the most radical approach to secularization is the thesis according to which Christianity inaugurates (Gauchet) or is synonymous with (Vattimo) secularization. Yet, this is precisely the thesis that I would like to review. In spite of their different approaches to this topic, one epistemological, the other ethical; in spite of identifying themselves as non-believer (Gauchet) or halfbeliever (Vattimo), Marcel Gauchet and Gianni Vattimo concur in their assessment of the crucial role played by Christianity when it comes to the rise of the secular world, the Enlightenment and modernity. And while Gauchet, as sociologist, historian and Enlightenment thinker, treats this outcome as a historical fact, Vattimo, as postmodern anti-foundationalist, calls it an interpretation, the end result of their work is essentially the same: both hold that, besides being its sworn enemy, Christianity gave birth to and has nourished the secular development of Western societies ever since the Incarnation. In The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Marcel Gauchet claims that today ‘we are at the point where religion has been systematically exhausted and its legacy has gradually disappeared’ (Gauchet 1985, 9). He views this development favourably since he is convinced that, for us moderns, it is both possible and desirable to ‘go beyond the age of religion’ (Gauchet 1985, 6). This does not mean that there is no place for religion, but the gods that survive today, especially those of monotheistic religions in the West, do so only in the private arena. ‘What is currently alive in the Christian faith has no connection with the circumstances surrounding its birth, the conditions that allowed it to assert itself and develop, or the role through which its major themes and variations have played out’ (Gauchet 1985, 4). Fernand Tanghe has recently summarized Gauchet’s position in the following terms: [Today] the terrestrial sphere [exists] without reference or relation to divine exteriority. When it comes to organizing human life into viable social structures the divine has become superfluous. Accordingly, for Gauchet, the ‘end of religion’ refers to a specific condition: the end of constitutive otherness in the formation of society. When that principle becomes powerless, society

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continues to exist without gods, even when the majority of its citizens still believe in them.2

Gauchet’s counterpart in my story is Gianni Vattimo, the postmodern philosopher whose work is identified most closely with the notion of pensiero debole, or weak thought. Vattimo’s entire philosophy is concerned with, even desirous of, the fading of the authority of metaphysical foundations in general. Weak thought’s purpose is, precisely, to delineate – and advocate – the steady weakening of strong metaphysical structures – theoretical and practical – in particular, those of Christianity and the Catholic Church.3 Yet, in his 1996 publication Credere di credere (translated into English as Belief), Vattimo provided a more nuanced reading of Christianity by introducing a radical split within it. For Vattimo, the Christian message is split between, on the one hand, the metaphysical violence and authority of God the Father, Christian dogma and the rule of the Catholic Church, and, on the other, Jesus’s message of non-violence, community and brotherly love. Vattimo rejects the first message while appropriating the second. This allows him, on a practical level, a (partial) return to the faith of his youth which he had left behind; on a theoretical level, however, this (re)turn resulted in a new relevance of Christian concepts (kenosis and caritas) for Vattimo’s philosophy. Such attribution of relevance to Christian concepts puts him at odds with Gauchet, for whom religion essentially represents a state of human dispossession. From this vantage point, therefore, Gauchet and Vattimo seem to disagree about the contemporary relevance of Christianity in the West. However, as I will try to show, they are in agreement when it comes to the deep structure of the impact, role and function of religion and – in particular – of Christianity in the West. As put by Gauchet: ‘[T]he path from primitive religion to modern Christianity was largely an attempt to re-appropriate the source of meaning and law initially transferred beyond the grasp of human actors’ (Gauchet 1985, 23). What Gauchet describes here in terms of re-appropriation, Vattimo refers to as secularization – both terms indicating a process of desacralization and the demise of divine authority. While Gauchet provides a different rationale (‘the dynamics of transcendence’) for this process than does Vattimo (‘the event of immanence’ [kenosis]), both thinkers put forward the thesis of the end of religion as foundation, that is, as authoritative, normative discourse governing communal interactions from an external point of origin. Therefore, Vattimo’s return to religion is compatible with Gauchet’s description of the end of religion in the public sphere. In addition, when these authors are read together, as I am going to suggest we do, their combined approaches paint a surprising if somewhat paradoxical picture: a view of the present as a post-religious world whose best chance of survival consists, perhaps, in the Christian imperative of love. It is the elaboration of this seeming paradox around the continued significance of religion in (post)modernity that is at the heart of my articulation of Gauchet’s political history of religion with Vattimo’s narrative of secular Christianity. If I am successful, Vattimo’s activist Christian secularism might add an emancipatory political project to Gauchet’s description of the fate of religion in modernity.

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2 The religious and the dynamics of transcendence (Gauchet) In the most general sense, the phenomenon of the religious posits a relationship between the visible world and its invisible (sacred) foundation or truth. The invisible is conceived as a realm beyond, exterior to the world of everyday collective life. According to Gauchet, there are two basic options for the visible world and its invisible foundation to exist: a temporal and a spatial relation. The temporal relation is found in archaic societies organized around primitive religion, where an absolute past functions as the foundation of collective life. Everything here is owed to a primordial origin. Yet despite this temporal division, life is lived as cosmic-theological unity, with the past playing an authoritative role in the present. This is the world of myth, where the fullness of meaning guaranteed by the past is activated in the present. Here gods, spirits or ancestors are perceived as exercising a direct influence, representing the link between the foundational time and the present. The spatial relation, however, is operative in transcendent religions – religions, that is, where the unity of the mythical world has given way to duality, a world split between immanence and transcendence. Here, the religious foundation is no longer viewed as anterior but rather as concurrent – in the same time – yet transcendent, that is, in sacred space. The religious foundation, according to Gauchet, has been ‘transported into the social space and the nonhuman has been incorporated into the structure of human ties’ (Gauchet 1985, 36). The sacred sphere is still imagined as separate from the visible world. Yet, because the invisible shares the space of the visible world, over time there occurs the ‘interpenetration of the visible sphere with its invisible source’ (Gauchet 1985, 95). For Gauchet, these two basic options – the temporal or spatial relation of the foundation of the here and now – represent the ‘logic of religion’ (Gauchet 1985, 12), the structural possibilities of ‘religion as such’ (Gauchet 1985, 13), and the historical argument developed in Disenchantment of the World is predicated upon the essential difference between these two options. In addition, during the transformation from the temporal (primitive) to the spatial (transcendent) relation, the function of the religious – and this is one of the innovations of Gauchet’s approach – changes from the foundational social anchor to the agent of dissolution. The religious, in other words, does not possess the self-same function throughout history; rather, in the case of primitive religion, it constitutes the anterior ground nourishing all life in the present. However, in the case of transcendent religion, the religious is transformed into a force for radical change, becoming the very agent of secularization. The process of secularization that occurs over two millennia is thus rooted in what Gauchet refers to as the dynamics of transcendence. It is the appearance of the state – roughly 3,000 years BCE – that inaugurates this dynamics. With the emergence of the state (the ‘sphere of institutionalized domination’ [Gauchet 1985, 9]), ‘the religious Other returns to the human sphere’ (Gauchet 1985, 35). The formerly primordial origins of mankind are now being incorporated

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into the structure of human ties. In the emerging state, the instituting force (religion) is made visible and accessible through royal and ecclesiastical representatives of the divine – and the distinction between ordinary humans and those who are in contact with the non-human is made for the first time. Thus, with the state, inner-worldly practices of domination, rule and authority enter the arena, just as the ‘imperial ambition to dominate the world comes with the state’. Yet, as we will see below, in the long run, political domination will prove to be the invisible hoist lifting humanity out of the religious (see Gauchet 1985, 37, 105). The second step concerns the rise of the religions of transcendence proper and the genesis of the transcendent god in the axial age (Jaspers). Here begins the paradoxical ‘two-thousand year process of surreptitiously reducing otherness by the dynamic process of making God different’ (Gauchet 1985, 59). This paradoxical process of ‘reducing otherness’ while ‘making God different’ represents the true essence of the dynamics of transcendence and the heart of Gauchet’s argument. As soon as transcendence appears on the horizon as a conceptual possibility, the hitherto accepted unified reality of primordial past and derivative present is shattered, and with it the assuredness of a pre-existent meaningful universe. The most important consequence of this development was the insight that ‘meaning was no longer given by a destiny allocated to you but could now be found here-below in a voyage of inner discovery. It was no longer to be found in the human and cosmic hierarchical chain but now lay beyond it’ (Gauchet 1985, 47). The dynamics of transcendence ushers in the split between this world and the beyond, inaugurating the duality of the world (sacred and profane) that is the mainstay of transcendent religions. How can this ‘revolution in transcendence’ (Gauchet 1985, 58) be explained? According to Gauchet, the transcendent God differs from the supernatural beings and multiple gods of primitive society in that he combines the two aspects that had been kept apart in primitive religion: ‘the inaugural institution and the actually present forces of the invisible’ (Gauchet 1985, 52). In other words, the transcendent God unites the authorities of the past and the present: ‘a reunification that completely alters the nature of supernatural power by conceiving it as both our world’s source and its driving force’ (Gauchet 1985, 52). It alters it because, as an invisible source and a driving force, God has command over the totality of being, unlike the mythical and supernatural powers of primitive society who were merely acting out the scripts of the past in the present. The new God is the prime creator. Yet, for human beings, the result of this revolution in transcendence is that they are now completely separated from the source of the divine, unlike before when gods dwelt among them. What is truly fascinating now is that rather than proving a disadvantage for human beings, being separated from the spatially transcendent God represents the opening for humans to re-appropriate the power of which primitive religion had dispossessed them. For despite the transcendent God’s separateness, human beings are now in closer proximity to the foundation, since the deeds of this God, acting in the present, can be observed, questioned, critiqued and interpreted by mankind. The foundation no longer dwells in an absolute past but coexists in time; in other words, the revolution in transcendence ‘makes the foundation accessible’ (Gauchet 1985, 52). Throughout

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the ensuing centuries, in more or less tormented ways, communication with the new deity leads human beings to develop the critical tools that allow them to question first, divine and then, worldly authority. Summing up Gauchet’s ideas about religion, then, we should bear in mind, first, that the truth of religion consists in its external source and immutable nature: ‘. . . the real kernel of religious attitudes and thought lies in accepting the external as the originating source and the unchangeable as law’ (Gauchet 1985, 28). Secondly, once this absolute past is left behind, religion exists only as derivation, as a move away from its true self: ‘The major religions are major stages in the challenging of the religious; if not major steps toward departing from religion’ (Gauchet 1985, 34). Religion therefore, despite the radical transformation that it has undergone from primitive to transcendent, has not left the stage: rather, it has been radically transformed. ‘If we have surpassed the religious it has not left us, and perhaps never will, even though its historical effectiveness is finished’ (Gauchet 1985, 59). Gauchet’s Disenchantment of the World, then, tells the story from human dispossession to human self-possession through the dissolution of religion in its original, dispossessive quality. In the process, human actors are transported from a world of unity (Oneness) and stable meanings into one of duality where they have to search for meaning. This is the essence of the dynamics of transcendence to which we will return when we discuss the Incarnation as the decisive moment in the ‘internal logic of Christianity itself ’ (Gauchet 1985, 34) and its repercussions for the role of religion in the West.

3 Kenosis and the reign of immanence (Vattimo) In 1996, for a postmodern philosopher, Gianni Vattimo published a surprising text. In Credere di Credere, which translates as ‘believing to believe’, he found his way back to Christianity, albeit a secular kind of Christianity.4 It is this, at first glance, paradoxical construct (secular Christianity) that is at the heart of his theory of secularization. Yet the notion of a ‘secular Christianity’ is only the latest example in a long line of paradoxical constructions – I prefer to call them mergers of conceptual or historical opposites – that Vattimo has advanced over the last 30 years. Determined to provide an interpretation of our contemporary (postmodern) condition, Vattimo has overturned traditional philosophical lines of demarcation. Not only does he read Nietzsche with Heidegger and Adorno, Lyotard with Löwith, and Rorty with Hegel, but he also translates this unorthodox approach into paradoxical sounding projects such as Nihilism and Emancipation.5 This is no idle posturing, however. His idiosyncratic readings of the philosophical tradition bolster his claims for pensiero debole or weak thought – his own brand of an ‘ontology of actuality’ – see below – as the best analytic framework to understand the contemporary world. But what can it mean to speak of secular Christianity? In answering this question, Vattimo makes use of only two concepts: kenosis – God’s becoming human through Christ – and caritas, the Christ-inspired generalized love for all mankind. He uses the conceptual pair of kenosis and caritas to formulate an alternative vision of a Christian

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redemption of history, one no longer defined by – in his words – authority, violence and submission. This new interpretation of Christianity is in line with Vattimo’s philosophy of the weakening of being, which maintains – and affirms – that, today, all strong metaphysical structures and foundational discourses of the West are in decline, be they religious, philosophical or political. In Credere di credere, Vattimo foregrounds the process of secularization, which he now sees as coterminous with his philosophy of the weakening of the strong structures of Being. This decline can be observed in the loss in explanatory power of such philosophical concepts as Nature, Reason, Progress and History. The same goes for theological concepts such as Truth, Revelation, and the Sacred. In Credere di credere, Vattimo holds that this ongoing process of secularization has been at work in the history of the West since the Incarnation. This is the reason for the paradoxical notion of a secular Christianity. In this expression, then, Christianity and secularization are inextricably interwoven; they refer to the same historical process; they are, in fact, one and the same process. Through the Incarnation of God in his mortal son, the strong authoritarian aspects of the Old Testament God give way to a relationship of friendship and love between Christ and man. In Vattimo’s words, the strong principle of auctoritas turns into the weaker notion of caritas. With this explanation through secularization Vattimo returns to his Christian origins – establishing a new relationship between (weak) reason and (weak) faith. Like philosophy, then, Christianity has been on a path of weakening from the very beginning – a path leading from a former reliance upon strong metaphysical structures to today’s weakened, postmodern philosophy and theology in a globalized world. Yet, what looks from the vantage of Credere di credere like symmetry of religious and secular thought had not always been part of pensiero debole. In fact, until the mid1990s, there had been no intimation of the religious in Vattimo’s elaboration of the postmodern. The framework of his reflections had always been – and still is – indebted to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer and the critique of metaphysics (in Heidegger’s sense). In his postmodern philosophy, Vattimo follows Heidegger’s grand narrative of the forgetfulness of Being into the mid-twentieth century where he departs from it so as to formulate his own philosophy of ‘weak ontology or better an ontology of the weakening of Being’ (Vattimo 2004, 19). The reason for his departure is that, in late modernity, and unlike Heidegger, Vattimo sees light at the end of the tunnel. Postmodernity, in his view, is characterized by the decline of metaphysics, by the refusal to identify an ultimate philosophical foundation that could command universal assent. Our times, which Vattimo calls the ‘age of interpretation’, knows (and is content with) only this: that we live in a world of interpretations for which no general, universal or ultimate foundation can be asserted. In the cultural arena, this development can be attributed, according to Vattimo, to the growth of the information society and the pluralization of viewpoints; on the political stage, it can be observed in such events as decolonization, or the slow and arduous process of moving beyond institutional discrimination based on gender, race or class. Vattimo’s move beyond Heidegger is inspired by indications in Heidegger’s own texts, in particular, where he speaks of the ‘Verwindung’ rather than ‘Überwindung’ of

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the metaphysical tradition. For Vattimo, the change in prefix is decisive: Überwindung (overcoming) could potentially mean moving on to a new metaphysical stage, a renewed establishment of yet another ultimate foundation, which would only continue the history of metaphysics (that is: the history of the will to power, authority and violence). Verwindung, on the contrary, refers to an acceptance/distortion (Vattimo and Girard 2010, 82) of metaphysics, to the insight that, in postmodernity, we are still part of the history of metaphysics (with the continued relevance of figures such as Subject, Reason, Truth, etc.) – but equally at the end of granting such figures the power of authority. Thus, while never (at least: not yet) moving entirely beyond such metaphysical figures, the postmodern condition allows us insights into their weakening, maybe even into how to weaken them. Verwindung thus refers to a decline of authority and authoritarian structures in the direction of weaker ones. In the political arena, democratic rule is still the rule but it affords more people a voice than did absolutism and dictatorship. Verwindung thus signals that post-metaphysics refers not to a stepping out, an overcoming of metaphysics, but rather to a slow process of weakening its strong structures (Truth turning into agreement, History into histories, Kultur into cultures). For Vattimo, the ultimate and only justification for his philosophy of weak thought is ethical: the reduction of violence in the world. Until the mid-1990s, weak thought remained strictly within the bounds of a critique of metaphysics. Then, as suggested above, with the publication of Credere di credere, Vattimo superimposed the secularization narrative onto it. As he states in this text and in most publications since then, at that point in his life Vattimo diagnosed a confluence of individual and social developments that pointed to a return of religion. Concurrently, on the theoretical front, he discovered the thought of René Girard and, most importantly, Girard’s thesis regarding the relation between violence and the sacred. This relation – or, more pointedly, the view of the sacred as sacrificial violence – is central to Vattimo’s ‘return to Christianity’. Girard identified a scapegoat mechanism at the heart of myth and natural religion that, in his view, enables the cohesiveness of all human societies. His philosophical anthropology is based on the mimetic origin of desire; that is, human beings, led by their natural aggressiveness, desire each other’s goods and privileges and are therefore in perpetual competition with each other. In order to safeguard against a war of all against all, the competing factions find a scapegoat; the scapegoat, usually an innocent victim, is sacrificed for the good of society and later assumes a sacred status that is acknowledged in ritual activity. The scapegoat assumes this status precisely because it reduces the violence that would otherwise disrupt the community. When Girard moves from myth and natural religion to an interpretation of the New Testament, a decisive change takes place in his interpretation of the relation between sacrifice and the sacred. Christ remains scapegoat and victim; however, and here I cite Vattimo as reader of Girard, his death, his status as victim and scapegoat, unveils the sacrificial mechanism by subverting it: Jesus’ Incarnation did not take place to supply the father with a victim adequate to his wrath; rather, Jesus came into the world precisely to reveal and abolish the nexus

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between violence and the sacred. He was put to death because such a revelation was intolerable to a humanity rooted in the violent tradition of sacrificial religions. (Vattimo 1999, 37)

Christ is the bearer of a message too radical in contrast with the deepest (sacral and victim-based) convictions of all ‘natural religions’. The extraordinary character of his revelation (the sacred is not sacrificial violence, God is Love) demonstrates, among other things, that he could not merely be human (Vattimo and Girard 2010, 91). It is this interpretation of the Incarnation, as the severing of the nexus between violence and the sacred that is at the heart of Vattimo’s return to Christianity. His reading of Girard allows Vattimo to arrive at what he calls the ‘historical-progressive essence of Christianity’ (Vattimo and Girard 2010, 27). This essence of Christianity is love, caritas, which came into the world with Christ’s sacrifice. Its message is Christ’s offer of love and brotherhood to mankind, not of obedience to the authority and the violence of the sacred. Since Christ’s sacrifice human history lives under the possibility of this love, it represents the principle of history as a history of redemption. This view of the pivotal role of Christ in world history fuels Vattimo’s return to Christianity, his optimistic view of the future; and it dovetails with his philosophy of weak thought, the entire purpose of which consists in the reduction of violence in the world. The point is to regard the reduction of violence no longer as an ideal condition of authenticity to be realized once and for all by corresponding to the eternal essence of humanity, morality, and society, but as an ongoing process. (Vattimo 1999, 74)

Vattimo’s ontology of the weakening of metaphysics is thus complemented by a theology of caritas as the principle of history. But how exactly does Vattimo merge the Heidegger-inspired philosophy of the decline of metaphysics with the principle of caritas? The answer is through the concept of secularization. While secularization is traditionally seen as describing the move away from Christian authority, and therefore – from a Christian point of view – as a negative development, Vattimo, starting out from Girard’s reflections on violence and the sacred, describes the process of secularization as a positive development in the dissemination of the Christian faith: If the natural sacred is the violent mechanism that Jesus came to unveil and undermine, it is possible that secularization . . . is precisely a positive effect of Jesus’ teaching, and not a way of moving away from it. It may be that Voltaire himself is a positive effect of the Christianization of mankind, and not a blasphemous enemy of Christ. (Vattimo 1999, 41)

For Vattimo, God’s Incarnation in Christ sets the process of secularization in motion. But if we stay with the example of Voltaire for a moment, we can unpack Vattimo’s paradoxical interpretation of secular Christianity, and observe how secularization is, indeed, the overarching term of Vattimo’s positive nihilism and weak ontology. How,

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indeed, can Vattimo maintain that Voltaire, the defender of Enlightenment reason and opponent of religion, can be seen as a positive step in the Christianization of mankind? Only, I think, if we accept three interpretive strands that come together in Vattimo’s weak thought, namely: (1) his rejection of all kinds of ‘naturalism’ or ‘metaphysics’ (i.e. all thought that acts as ultimate foundation) – for Vattimo, all naturalisms are, in essence, modes of violence; (2) the sacred – any sacred – as an instance of such naturalist violence; and (3) the Christian principle of caritas (love and neighbourly love) as the only way to reduce such violence. Against this background, we can say that Voltaire the atheist rejects Christianity in its guise as natural (metaphysical) order because it stands for violence (against reason, for example). In standing up to such violence, however, Voltaire paradoxically advances Christ’s true message of love since, as a stage in the history of mankind, the Enlightenment – as judged by Vattimo – represents an important step in the reduction of violence. Voltaire can thus be seen as an example of the paradoxical meaning of secular Christianity: ‘Lay modernity is constituted above all as a continuation and desacralizing interpretation of the biblical message’ (Vattimo 1999, 41). What is the significance of merging weak thought, secularization and Christianity in this manner? Besides enabling the return to Christianity on a personal level, Vattimo turns the – formal – interpretation of the Christian message as caritas into the principle of progressive human salvation. This formal principle functions – similar in its formalism to Kant’s imperative – as a call to dissolve, ever anew, the natural (metaphysical) structures that be, wherever and whenever they are seen to exert violence, the will to power and authority. This principle, in Vattimo’s view, is a formal appeal only representing a content-less limit condition, necessary for the hope in a continued process of human emancipation (salvation). It is not a foundational structure providing a normative content. Without this principle, Vattimo holds, Enlightenment, human progress and the idea of a public intellectual are without a signpost. All of which means that the formal view of Christian redemption through love is not accidental to the theory of weak thought; rather, it represents its heart, and the ethics of pensiero debole could not function without it. Secular Christianity is the keystone both of Vattimo’s philosophy of history and his ethical and political engagement. Salvation is an event in which kenosis, the abasement of God, is realized more and more fully and so undermines the wisdom of the world, the metaphysical dreams of natural reason which conceive God as absolute, omnipotent and transcendent, as ipsum esse (metaphysicum) subsistens. In this light, secularization – the progressive dissolution of the natural sacred – is the very essence of Christianity. (Vattimo 1999, 50)

With his return to Christianity Vattimo has added to weak thought the basic principle that – with hindsight from 1996 – has always animated it; a discovery

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post festum which makes him exclaim: ‘In Christianity I find the original “text” of which weak ontology is the transcription’ (Vattimo 1999, 70) – caritas as against auctoritas.

4 The inverted messiah: Jesus as mediator When first considered, Vattimo’s view of the Incarnation as the origin of secularization must sound baffling. Yet, as we saw in the previous section, this is precisely how Vattimo interprets the event of kenosis: as the beginning of the process of secularization and the progressive dissolution of the sacred. Arguing that God the Father stands for sacred violence (or ‘metaphysics’ in Vattimo’s terms) while Christ represents love (or the driving principle of weak thought), Vattimo opts for a strong reading of kenosis: to wit, that God emptied/fulfilled himself in Jesus Christ and that, in and through this emptying, Christianity has shed its metaphysical (‘the natural sacred’) properties. To be sure, this interpretation of kenosis is a radical one.6 Yet, it is all-important if Vattimo’s objective is to regain the essence of Christianity for a post-metaphysical age: only by turning into a human being can God’s auctoritas be overcome by Christ’s caritas. And caritas has been (and ought to be, according to Vattimo) the hidden engine of secularization and salvation. Vattimo’s interpretation of the Incarnation therefore collapses the dualism of transcendence and immanence in favour of immanence: after the move from auctoritas to caritas, the human being that is Jesus Christ alone incarnates the good news; with his life begins the story of secularization and salvation in this world. Things could not be more different for Gauchet. While he also singles out the Incarnation as the pivotal event in the process of secularization, for him the Incarnation remains the ‘mystery of separation and otherness condensed into the figure of the Savior’ (Gauchet 1985, 77). Gauchet takes the mystery of Christ at face value: Christ is and remains both divine and human, transcendent and immanent. His reading thus cements rather than abolishes the dualism of immanence and transcendence. As we saw, for Gauchet the history of mankind undergoes a radical change from primitive to transcendent religion. In the later constellation, God has become wholly other and is therefore ontologically separate from mankind. God’s and mankind’s spheres of dwelling can only be bridged by a mediator, a ‘god-man’. The task of the mediator (usually the ruling monarch) is to establish, in and through his elevated position in society, the connection between transcendence and immanence and thus to guarantee the continuity of the spheres. What is decisive now is that, for Gauchet, Christ as mediator disrupts rather than affirms the continuity of the spheres. And it is this disruption of the union of the visible and the invisible that represents the true significance of Christianity; not just for itself but for the fate of religion, in general. For Gauchet, Christ is, in essence, an inverted messiah. Before Christ, messiahs had been monarchs – the powerful of this world chosen to serve as mediators between the visible and invisible world. But with Jesus as mediator there occurs a drastic change: ‘While the monarch of the world was

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at the top of the human pyramid, Jesus was at the bottom, just like any other ordinary human’ (Gauchet 1985, 119). And, for Gauchet, this hierarchical inversion is of the greatest importance: Jesus’s task and his aspirations are those of a traditional messiah, yet his social position of powerlessness makes their realization impossible. According to Gauchet, this shift within human space gave the encounter between two levels of reality in one and the same person a radically different meaning. The incarnation of the invisible used to be the archetypal means for showing the continuity between the earthly hierarchical and the celestial order; here it became the very signifier of their mutual exteriority. (Gauchet 1985, 119)

The mutual exteriority of the two worlds is represented in the disparity between Christ’s lowly birth and his Incarnation of the highest otherness (God’s transcendence). When God becomes human in Christ – a man at the bottom of the social ladder – he incarnates himself, against all tradition, in the opposite of all earthly hierarchy. For Gauchet, this constitutes Christ’s exceptionalism and the decisive moment in the history of religion; for here the Incarnation must not be ‘understood in terms of the political logic of higher and lower, but in terms of a purely metaphysical logic of otherness’ (Gauchet 1985, 126). Here for the first time in history, political logic (hierarchy) and metaphysical logic (immanence/transcendence) drift apart. Christ’s status therefore constitutes an altogether new sundering of political and religious authority which, for Gauchet, represents ‘the first decisive step toward the Western deconstruction of the hierarchical principle’ (Gauchet 1985, 126). The true meaning of the Incarnation and of Christ as inverted messiah must therefore be seen in the first unlinking of political power and transcendent truth. Religious truth can now be used to question political truth (i.e. authority) setting the process of secularization in motion. Messiah and ruler are no longer one and the same. While the invisible world of transcendence (God’s otherness) stays unchanged (until today), the visible world begins to change. For Gauchet, the two spheres stay intact but separate, other to each other, because the metaphysical hierarchy can no longer be mapped onto the political hierarchy. What this means, then, is that for Gauchet, too, the Incarnation leads to a challenge to auctoritas, just as it does for Vattimo. The weakening of the principle of auctoritas is thus the decisive characteristic of both interpretations of the Incarnation. Christ also differed from the messianic monarch by virtue of the new message he preached. Unlike the prophets of old, the transcendent God Jesus incarnated did not preach the empowerment of a people through war and the overcoming of all its enemies. Rather, Jesus’s message was one of universal love: ‘living according to the truth of the other world meant freeing ourselves from the archetypal worldly obligation, namely, violent reciprocity, the call for blood, the necessity for revenge as a communal duty. . . . Love was the interior distance of individuals from the social bond, their inner release from the original communal obligation’ (Gauchet 1985, 120). Mankind can be released from the authority of the sacred religious foundation.

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Gauchet arrives at this point – so close to Vattimo’s reading of caritas – through precisely the opposite route. While Vattimo interprets the Incarnation as a collapsing of immanence and transcendence arriving at a diagnosis of ontological Oneness, Gauchet gets there by claiming that the Incarnation demonstrates the impossibility of merging Christ’s two natures. As a result the gulf between this world and the transcendent world cannot be bridged. Yet, it is precisely this recognition that represents the beginning of the deconstruction of the hierarchical principle and the abandonment of religion as foundation. From this moment onwards, to reach salvation, mankind needs to take action to overcome the gulf between the visible and invisible worlds. Gauchet calls this taking of action mankind’s ‘salvation requirements’, by which he means ‘a total orientation towards the other life’: Believers were torn away from perceptible reality, as opposed to their previous integration into the cosmos, and humans in general earned a privileged position over the rest of creation, in so far as they were the only creatures in a position to hear the call of the beyond. Having been thus delivered from the common lot, they attained a freedom toward everything around them, which foreshadowed their theoretical right to be ‘lord and master of nature’. (Gauchet 1985, 75)

Mankind thus became active and could devote itself ‘completely to attaining salvation . . . by investing in [this world] and opening up to the plenitude of its own realization’ (Gauchet 1985, 77). From here, humanity sets out to re-appropriate the powers that religion had taken away, thus beginning a process which, after hundreds of years, culminates in the Enlightenment and, finally, the end of religion (as foundation). The unbridgeable gulf between immanence and transcendence thus initiates mankind’s grab for freedom – the process of secularization – for Gauchet, in the register of laïcité, for Vattimo in that of salvation.

5 The spirit of Christianity Both Gauchet and Vattimo, then – in different ways to be sure – assign Christianity the pivotal role in the process of secularization. The reason is that Christianity engineered a decisive break in the history of religion: both Vattimo’s secular Christianity as well as Gauchet’s interpretation of Christianity as the ‘religion for the departing from religion’ (Gauchet 1985, 4) dismiss religion as ‘dictatorship [from] outside society’ (Gauchet 1985, 13). The consequences of this event can only really be felt or understood in the (post)modern epoch. Yet, this event set in motion, at least in the West, the transformation of the sacred into the secular world – a world that is not bereft of religious import, but in which it survives in a different mode. It is with respect to its mode of survival in the modern world that Gauchet and Vattimo part ways. For Gauchet, the consequence of the immanence/transcendence split is that the religious has had to entirely relinquish its foundational role in politics and in history; its survival occurs in the private sphere alone. For Vattimo, the birth

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of Christ signifies that the authority and violence of the all-powerful God has been superseded by the love and brotherhood of Christ. In his view, this transformation of authority into love is palpable in the process of secularization which, in the West, has led to the demise of absolutist, authoritarian political structures in favour of more participatory and democratic ones. In Vattimo’s analysis, then, a secularized or desacralized Christianity is the worldly effect of Jesus’s teachings, and therefore ultimately responsible for the trajectory of Western history. In other words, the true spirit of Christianity – caritas – still animates the world. And as caritas, as the project of the reduction of violence, postmodern Christianity can maintain its universal aspirations. In After Christianity, Vattimo formulates its task: ‘Christianity should develop its lay vocation which is already visible in that in European modernity it made possible, and promoted, the lay orientation’ (Vattimo 2002, 99). Postmodern Christianity – for Vattimo the only authentic form of Christian belief – only comes into being after the end of metaphysics, that is to say, after the end of foundational truths. Thus, the lay vocation of modernity does not refer to a simple overcoming of Christianity, but rather to its Verwindung (see Section III). According to Vattimo, we have not left Christianity behind; rather, we are only now able to see its true nature which is not dogmatic foundationalism but rather, the practice of the reduction of violence – and it is this which will set us free. And ‘us’ is everybody. This is the true universalism as preached by Jesus. In Vattimo’s view, therefore, Christianity, once it has purged its authoritarian structures, ought not to give up on its ethical universalism. Rather, and here Gauchet agrees, it is this aspect of Christianity that overcomes the parochialism of other religious or philosophical foundationalisms; and it is for this reason that ‘Christian’ universalism is the true originator of the lay orientation, that is, of secular modernity.7 This is why Vattimo can regard ‘le christianisme comme un fil conducteur pour l’avenir’ (Ferenczi 2003, 50).

6 Conclusion What does it mean that a modern historian and a postmodern philosopher from their different points of view suggest – in opposite ways, to be sure (eclipse of religion vs. return to religion) – that the birth of Christ is at the origin of the process of secularization, and thus of the triumph of the secular world? It means, I think, that both of them see in Christ the principle of dehierarchization and of the weakening of strong structures that previously allowed metaphysics to rule. Christ, either as inverted messiah or as the brother of mankind – both of which can probably be seen as very much the same thing – represents the critique of all foundational authority. He is therefore the paragon of a future of human self-empowerment, freedom and responsibility. It is this common dimension that unites Gauchet and Vattimo despite their different views on the role of religion in the modern world. In addition, I am suggesting that we read them together so as to better appreciate the double gesture they perform in the speculative interpretation of the Incarnation. Gauchet’s narrative of Christianity as departure from religion provides us with an

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explanation for the independence of the political realm as a self-governing system in modernity. Vattimo’s account of the ‘return’ of religion – as caritas – adds to this the ethical imperative of the reduction of violence on a global scale. For both authors then, the spirit of Christianity as manifested in the person of Jesus Christ is responsible for shaping the modern secular world.

Notes 1 For recent interpretations of the Blumenberg-Löwith debate and the broader context of secularization theory, see Rethinking Secularization (2009), co-edited by Herbert de Vriese and Gary Gabor. This volume, focused more narrowly on the secularization debate in intellectual history, also includes chapters on Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor. For additional perspectives on the secular, secularism and secularization, see the co-edited volumes by Warner/Calhoun/ VanAntwerpen, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (2010), as well as Calhoun/ Juergensmeyer/VanAntwerpen, Rethinking Secularism (2011). 2 Fernand Tanghe, ‘Marcel Gauchet and the End of Religion’, in de Vriese and Gabor, Rethinking Secularization, 153–76, here 166 (my emphasis, AM). 3 Vattimo develops these ideas in most of his publications. See bibliography. 4 Published in English as Gianni Vattimo. 1999. Belief, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 5 Gianni Vattimo. 2004. Nihilism and Emancipation. Ethics, Politics, & Law. New York: Columbia University Press. 6 Thereby giving a very definite interpretation to kenosis, a theological concept that has been debated over 2,000 years. For a short history of this concept in the context of Vattimo’s re-actualization, cf. Onno Zijlstra (ed.). 2002. Letting Go, Bern: Peter Lang, especially Zijlstra’s introduction, 7–24, and Rinse Reeling Brouwer’s contribution ‘Kenosis in Philippians 2:5–11 and in the History of Christian Doctrine’, 69–108. 7 Both Gauchet and Vattimo are here on a collision course with the thinkers who see the value of the return of the religious precisely in its nature as the totally Other (Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida). Both of them are well aware of this fact. In this context, cf. also the volume co-authored by Caputo and Vattimo (see References).

References Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds). 2011. Rethinking Secularism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caputo, John D. and Gianni Vattimo. 2007. After the Death of God. New York: Columbia University Press. de Vriese, Herbert and Gary Gabor (eds). 2009. Rethinking Secularization: Philosophy and the Prophecy of a Secular Age. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing. Ferenczi, Thomas. 2003. Religion et Politique: Une liaison dangereuse? Paris: Edition Complexe. Frascati-Lochhead, Marta. 1998. Kenosis and Feminist Theology: The Challenge of Gianni Vattimo. Albany : SUNY Press.

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Gauchet, Marcel. 1985. Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1997. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Meganck, Erik. 2011. From Veritas to Caritas: A Critical Reading of Gianni Vattimo’s Nihilism. Antwerpen: (PDF) (web-accessed, January 2012). Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Harvard: Belknap. Vanheeswijck, Guido. 2005. ‘Every Man has a God or an Idol: René Girard’s View of Christianity and Religion’, in Peter Jonkers and Ruud Welten (eds), God in France: Eight Contemporary French Thinkers on God. Leuven: Peeters, 68–95. Vattimo, Gianni. 1997. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 1999. Belief. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2002. After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2004. Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, & Law. New York: Columbia University Press. Vattimo, Gianni and René Girard. 2010. Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue. New York: Columbia University Press. Ward, Graham, ed. 1997. The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Warner, Michael, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds). 2010. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zijlstra, Onno, ed. 2002. Letting Go: Rethinking Kenosis. Bern: Peter Lang.

7

The Legitimacy and Genealogy of Secularization in Question John Milbank

1 Is secularization legitimate? 1.1 Feeling, faith and reason In the early twenty-first century, the global presence of religion is growing – in terms of active numbers in the Third World, and more sporadically in terms of public influence in the West. This return to visibility is by no means always benign: religious extremism is returning also and the persecution of one religion by another. Yet in a novel combination, secular extremism has also reached a new pitch of intensity and we are seeing the rise of an increasingly militant naturalism and of the persecution of religious people by secular states. We are evermore aware that outside the West secularization is an alien import that has never taken much hold, while within the West, if secularization has certainly not been reversed, and arguably still proceeds apace, nevertheless ‘religion’ is suddenly figuring more in public life, both in terms of its new contestability and the realization that nothing has displaced its considerable role in the upholding of civil society, while this has even proportionally increased with the decline of secular ideological and political formations as matters of mass interest and involvement.1 The German thinker Jürgen Habermas understandably regards the rise of both religious and secular extremism as threatening to a reasonable humanism. In the face of this threat he wishes to defend and re-fortify its neutral, secular ground as the best guarantor of freedom, religious or otherwise. However, he continues to be haunted by a sense that religion provides some factor of inspiration beyond the scope of reason (as witnessed by its continued central role in civil society, despite – till now at least – dwindling church and synagogue attendance) and therefore suggests that reason must continue to draw upon faith’s resources. Religion is not going to go away and we need not only reasonable forms of religion but also a rational respect for faith if human beings and the planet are to have a sane future. This seems immediately compelling. However, what may be problematic about Habermas’s proposals is the sharp divide that he assumes between faith and reason, on the basis of a presumed finality of the post-metaphysical era inaugurated by Kant.

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He understands both the revival of a metaphysical mediation between faith and reason as advocated by Pope Emeritus Benedict, and what is for him the over-extended ontological naturalism of a Gilles Deleuze or an Alain Badiou (not to mention a Richard Dawkins) to be equally violations of the ‘limits of pure reason’. Yet Habermas may fail to see that a return to speculation is less an unwarranted over-extension of reason, than an admission that reason, far from being selfgrounded, as Kant demanded, is inseparable from our affective and elective intuitions concerning the nature of reality. Reason is always conjoined with feeling and can even be considered to be a reflexive intensification of feeling: passion become [sic] more distanced and yet more constant and stable. This implies no mere subjectivism, because in contrast to the (albeit identically transferable) solipsism of reason, feeling is always feeling of or about. Its rootedness in our body alone ensures also its radically ecstatic, external object-reaching intentionality, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty realized.2 Equally, its subjective dimension as experience of irreducible qualia ensures that mind as feeling cannot be reduced to any unconscious equivalence, whereas coldly regular, formally rational procedures (of the kind that Habermas recommends) in principle might be so reduced.3 Accordingly, the aspect of feeling that is irreducibly subjective also tends to guarantee the objectively irreducible character of the mind and its accompanying positive liberty to develop a specific habitus. By comparison, a merely procedural reason, whether regarded as spiritual or mechanical, can only entertain freedom as negative refusal, arbitrary spontaneity or else an affirmation of its own emptiness. Quite evidently, the former conception of positive freedom, allied to a desiring feeling, can sustain a more generous tolerance of individual and group practices than can the latter, negative conception, allied to a formalism of reason. For it soon turns out that most exercises of negative freedom interfere with the liberties of others, resulting both in the endless rise of the power of a police executive with its ever-extended surveillance, and in the need continuously to expand the sphere of ‘emancipated’ negative liberty, but then once more to call it into check when this release is seen to inhibit the free choice of other people.4 By contrast, the double advantage of reason-as-intensified feeling (which is reason as it truly is)5 is that it both secures a more substantive shared situatedness of human beings, and yet, at the same time, renders irreducible the only freedom that matters, which is a substantive capacity for self-shaping towards socially definable ends. And if one refers to David Hume, one can see that such a perspective is by no means entirely alien to the Enlightenment legacy, to which Kant need not, after all, be regarded as the primary witness. Hence, I would argue that when faith and reason are mediated by feeling they are actually less likely to take sinister forms than when they are corralled against each other. It is the fluid but not thereby necessarily nebulous realm of feeling that may allow us a new sense of toleration of religious and non-religious perspectives which goes beyond a mere ‘agreement to differ’ – which in reality ensures that some arbitrarily imposed difference will always generally prevail at the expense of corporate variations, religious or otherwise.

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1.2 Ratzinger versus Habermas Today we have a kind of sterile oscillation between a ruling liberal ruthlessness on the one hand, and an impotent and unrealistic liberal moralism on the other. The ruthlessness is the result of the ever-greater submission of more and more spheres of human life to an instrumentalist and capitalist logic, which Habermas fears is increasingly driven by a revived social Darwinism. In the face of this ruthlessness, moral reserve retreats into the private domain and takes the form of a stuttering series of complaints that too often are merely about the supposed restriction of certain individuals and groups from full participation in the mass instrumentalizing process. Habermas sees that perhaps the greatest exception here is religious groups, who continue to foster impulses towards moral action on a collective scale. For this reason one has to ask, what is it which they nurture that is otherwise ‘lacking’? Habermas’s answer is that they provide vivid pictures and motivating stories for individuals, and above all that they provide images of community that are compelling, but which exceed the bounds of the mere nation-state – thereby opening up a universal and global loyalty. He is clear that human solidarity now needs these religious resources if it is to fight both religious and naturalistic fanaticism. However, he asks to what extent it is legitimate for religious people to speak in terms of their religious visions in the public domain. And his reply is uncompromising: although secularity should continue to draw on religious resources, it must eventually translate these resources into strictly rational terms for the sake of official legislative debate and usage. And by rational terms Habermas means the (no doubt updated and extended) terms of Kantian critical reason, which render out of court any universal and cosmological metaphysical claims. In order to sustain this demand, two more protocols must be observed. First, religions must be required to accept this need for translation implied by the secular neutrality of the state, besides the monopoly over the ‘fact’ of scientific discourse and the monopoly on public morality of the norms of communicative action in terms of free access to conversation and the intention of publicly verifiable truth. But secondly, this acceptance must be no mere reluctant resignation. To the contrary, religions must be culturally required so to modify their dogmas as to find specifically internal, theological ways of embracing the absoluteness of these secular norms.6 Yet correspondingly, secular reason must be required to admit that it has no remit when it comes to determining the truth or otherwise of faith. A question arises about the doubtful practicality of such proposals. But more fundamentally, questions arise about their coherence. Everything in fact depends, for Habermas, upon the absoluteness of the Kantian revolution which, by banishing metaphysical mediation, finally gave secular consecration to the Protestant separation of reason and faith. But in that case, is Habermas covertly engaging in a new sort of Kulturkampf? One could argue that this is indeed so. He is prepared to admit that the great metaphysics of East and West are of a single axial birth with the world religions: the strangely coincident arrival around the second-century BC of a new reflexivity that

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took the form (albeit highly diverse) both of a theoretical and an ethical critique of the existing norms of the archaic kingdoms and related polytheisms.7 Thereby, he concedes that the arrival of critical thought and political resistance went hand in hand with a greater invocation of religious transcendence – whether with Plato, Buddha or Confucius. However, he wishes to say that much later ‘a division of labour’ between philosophy – including a natural morality – and Christian theology, regarded as an elaboration of faith, was worked out. Yet, this is immediately to admit that what we are faced with here is an event that arose within Christian history alone, so that one can suggest its possible ideological contingency – as affirmed by Charles Taylor – rather than logical necessity, both from a Christian point of view and of that of other religious perspectives.8 Habermas chides Ratzinger with a deficient historicism, yet it is concerning just this issue that Ratzinger appears the more prodigious historicist. For the Pope Emeritus would seem to ascribe to the view that the dogmatic separation of philosophy from theology is the paradoxical result of the dubious creation of a category of ‘pure nature’ by a theology concerned for theological reasons sharply to divide nature from grace. Equally, he tends to the view that a metaphysics independent of all theology is the result of a specifically theological establishment after Duns Scotus of being as univocal, and so as comprehensible outside the neoplatonic logic of participation in God.9 The fact that the issue between Habermas and Ratzinger turns in part on this question of genealogy is confessed by Habermas himself, at the end of his essay in the volume recording his debates on religion and secularity with the Munich Jesuits.10 There he alludes to the contingent shifts just mentioned, but says that:

1. Scotism and nominalism were preconditions for the rise of modern science. 2. Kant’s transcendental turn was required for ‘our modern European understanding of law and democracy’. He identifies these two stages as ones in a progressive ‘de-Hellenization’. But such claims are historically debatable. First, the medieval rebirth of Greek science preceded the advent of univocity and nominalism and much later continued to be promoted by Platonic, neo-Aristotelian and Hermetic currents. Secondly, the French and American, to say nothing of older British, Scandinavian, Swiss and Italian contributions to European constitutionalism have got nothing to do with Kant or even an equivalent to the Kantian theoretical reconfiguration. Meanwhile, the approbation of ‘de-Hellenization’ is revealing. For this phenomenon derives from a claimed (but arguably spurious) greater fidelity to the biblical legacy, sundered from Greek metaphysics, of Scotist, nominalist and Protestant thought. Clearly Habermas cannot be seen to be assenting to this tendency in theological terms, if he adheres to the canon of ‘pure reason’. Yet here arises most acutely the question about the status of his proposed ‘translation’ of theological into secular understanding. The above-cited remarks show that at least some of the theology he wants to translate is Scotist, Ockhamist and Protestant. But given the genealogy which Habermas admits,

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one might legitimately ask whether even the secular variants have ever been fully translated? Do they really struggle entirely free of a specifically theological and religious origin? And is it not strange that the translations which all Christians are asked by Habermas to sign up to are translations of post-Scotist positions, at variance with those of most mainstream catholic intellectuals – which remain largely Patristic and Thomistic? Thus, in order to ascribe to these translations, they would have first to switch their allegiance from theologically metaphysical positions, which, according to Habermas, are not translatable into the terms of pure reason at all. In order to make such a drastic requirement of Catholic Christians, Habermas would have to show conclusively that Scotus and Ockham are but anticipators of Kant’s new reason, rather than it being the case that Kant still thinks within the terms of Scotus and Ockham’s arbitrary assumptions – such as the univocity of being, the primacy of possibility over act and the primacy of will over reason – which are as much theological as philosophical in character.11 The point is not here to adjudicate this issue, but rather to throw into doubt Habermas’s rather blithe assumption that those who cannot accept our ‘postmetaphysical’ situation have somehow failed to follow certain ineluctable arguments. Therefore it must remain highly doubtful as to whether Habermas has successfully shown that the former pope’s alternative premodern model for the mediation of faith and reason is no longer critically viable. Is genuinely objective reason just a matter of conforming to a pragmatically normative criteria for communication, as Habermas teaches, in his modulation of Kantian transcendentalism? Or is our ‘communication’ of reason true to the degree that its specific shape participates in the infinite communication of the Logos in Creation and Incarnation by the divine Father, as Ratzinger suggests? There is after all some prima facie plausibility in the latter’s claim that this idea alone rendered reason coterminous with being itself and suggests thereby an unlimited diversity and scope for its ontological reach. How strange indeed that we are therefore faced with a debate between a religious rationalism arguing for the limitless sway of reason and a secular rationalism arguing for the limits of reason and yet with a sublime respect for a faith that lies ineffably outside reason altogether. Is it the limitation and yet confinement of reason to a formal check that guards against cultural intolerance and political terror, or is it rather the advocacy of a generous extension of reason both in reach and in kind? I would argue that the latter position of Ratzinger is the better safeguard. In arguing it, he in general appeals not only to the Church Fathers and to medieval authors, but also draws upon long-standing traditions of German Catholic Romanticism that were critical of Kant in the ultimate wake of the Lutheran pietists Jacobi and Hamann – who drew much inspiration from David Hume.12 Part of the Romantic case is that the ‘critical’ view of Kant arose because of an increasing sundering of reason from the emotive, the aesthetic, the linguistic, the traditioned and the trusting, and a corresponding division between reason and a will increasingly viewed as pure ‘choice’, or else a will only of willing itself (as with Kant). In order, therefore, to recover, as Ratzinger desires, a ‘broader’ and not finitely limited reason, it is necessary to insist upon the non-foundational character of reason and instead

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focus upon its embedding in the emotive, the aesthetic, the linguistic, the social, the historic and the natural. Here the German theologian Michael Reder has made two important critical points concerning Habermas’ perspective.13 First, the latter’s rejection of religion’s public right to speak in its own voice is a sub-category of his insistence that public virtue is a matter of Kantian Moralität and not Hegelian Sittlichkeit. In other words, Habermas will not allow that there can be any publicly rational adjudication as to the common good and the shared ends of human flourishing. This seems to take no account of the current revival of the claims of virtue-ethics – which has now, at least in the United Kingdom, reached the public political sphere – and indeed to rule them out of the court of public discussion. Secondly, Reder argues that, following Schleiermacher, we can understand ‘feeling’ as a category intermediate between faith and reason. Schleiermacher is indeed helpful here, so long as we cleave to the most radical suggestion of his Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers, namely that the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ which defines ‘religion’ is actually the entire horizon of our human condition, both cognitive and practical, and concerns, not a subjective interiority, but (here building upon the Spinozan conatus) our primarily affective and concretely physical connections to other things, persons and the whole of reality.14 Unfortunately, Schleiermacher himself eventually dilutes this position in a Kantian direction that reduces religion to a mere ‘region’, albeit an integrating one, alongside the cognitive, aesthetic and ethical. But an extension of Schleiermacher’s more radical insight, combined with a revisionary reading of Hume,15 can allow us to see that reason and faith, as modulations of our affective insertion into the world – which involves both apprehension and trust – are always thoroughly entangled, and thus provide a model for social freedom of opinion and practice that takes account of this entanglement. But before articulating such a perspective I shall try to suggest reasons why Habermas’s notion of public discursive neutrality, or of the legitimacy of a purely secular public order, is philosophically incoherent.

1.3 Questioning secular legitimacy As already stated, Habermas is acutely aware that we live in a period where the humanist consensus is being challenged both by naturalisms and by more militant forms of faith. In the face of this circumstance he proposes that we need to reinstate a firm Kantian distinction between what belongs to discursive reason on the one hand, and to ineffable faith on the other.16 Discursive reason should recognize that it operates within strict limits, and therefore is not competent to pronounce against either metaphysically naturalist or religious positions. Both must be allowed to speak in their own voices in the public domain and yet – problematically from the point of view of democratic inclusion – official constitutional debate and decision-making must be conducted within the terms of ‘neutral’ discourse. The latter is notably an emotion-free discourse, following Kant’s views about the moral law.17

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It might be questioned, however, whether this adherence to a basic Kantian principle really does justice to the double novelty of the cultural situation in the twenty-first century, of which Habermas is so acutely aware. For today, the seemingly contradictory simultaneous return of naturalism and religion puts both intellectual and sociological pressure upon the very possibility of a ‘neutral’ and so sheerly and normatively ‘secular’ – discursive space. In contrast to Habermas, Quentin Meillassoux has suggested two intractable reasons for the current collapse of methodological agnosticism.18 The first reason is intellectual: the terms of ‘transcendentalist’ and ‘foundationalist’ neutrality have been deconstructed within both Analytic and Continental philosophies, and therefore ‘post-metaphysical’ philosophy is itself metacritically collapsing. It no longer seems plausible, without appeal to metaphysical speculation, that there is a transcendental ‘correlation’ between the way our minds work and objectively given appearances. The second reason is sociological. Speculative metaphysics is not a leisurely pastime – to the contrary, it is directly linked to people’s pragmatic need to direct their life by certain definite beliefs about reality. Metaphysically agnostic philosophy, one can argue, has allowed religious extremism to fill a certain void, because it supplies a hunger that is as much one for a meaningfulness of reality as for an emotional and expressive dwelling within the world. Moreover, simply formal discursive conditions for politics and formal respect for rights does not deal with the fact that certain substantive choices and views have necessarily to prevail – this being the reason why ideology and terror tend to rush in to fill the void which liberal formalism fondly imagines does not need filling at all.19 Hence if one restricts reason to the imposition of formal rules and insists that it operates only within knowable boundaries, one will encourage entirely irrational and uneffectively emotive political movements to take centre stage by exploiting procedurally rational norms against the intentions of those who set up those norms in the first place. The sharp separation of reason and faith is therefore dangerous for a politics that is ‘liberal’ in the more traditional double-sense of generous and constitutional. It implies that faith at its core is ‘non-rational’ and beyond the reach of any sort of argument, while also and equivalently implying that reason cannot really have a say on issues of crucial substantive preference. But we do not need to be resigned to this double sterility of castrated virtue and impotent formality. In reality, reason and faith are always intertwined in a beneficial way, even if this is hard to formulate theoretically. Reason has to make certain assumptions, and has to trust in the reasonableness of the real. Faith has continuously to think through the coherence of its own intuitions in a process that often modifies those intuitions themselves. So if critical faith has to become a more reflective mode of feeling, then reason has always to some degree to feel its way forward. What reason at first seeks to know, it already knows obscurely, as Plato taught in the Meno – which is to say that it feels it: Plato says through the reach of eros. To think at all, reason must affectively intimate through its experience of all relatively discrete things the whole to which it is itself linked not as a mere part, but through a deep microcosmic affinity,

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since we are, after all, fully down to our depths, the products of nature, only sustained in existence by her entire cosmic reach. This is something like Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ which lies at the heart of our rational inhabitation of reality. Our inward experience of ourselves and of our external connections is directly an experience of a portion of nature, and thereby of the truth common to the natural as such – as Goethe and Schopenhauer both rightly taught, against the exaggerated claims of external experimental observation.20 This mediating role of feeling gives the lie to the Habermasian idea that one requires a content-neutral formal framework in order that arguments between apparently incommensurable positions may take place. For all arguments short of tautology have to assume an area of given agreement in a merely ad hoc fashion, and to win an argument usually means (following Socrates) that one shows someone that something he imagines he thinks contradicts something which he thinks more habitually and fundamentally. Outside a horizon of shared faith no arguments would get off the ground, and here shared faith means something like ‘common sensing’ or ‘common feeling’.

1.4 Mediation by feeling The Kantian agnostic notion of public space is feeling-neutral; yet this is not the only ‘enlightened’ model to hand. Both the Scottish and the Italian Enlightenments saw the public sphere as primarily one of ‘sympathy’.21 Often this just meant imaginative projection or animal instinct, and this predominantly Stoic perspective tended to neglect questions of teleology or of shared ‘ends’ and shared attitudes as to substantive human goods. However, in the case of Hume, in the long-term wake of the first ‘Cambridge Platonist’ Benjamin Whichcote, through the Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘sympathy’ at times seems to be a self-grounding end in itself, and the sympathetic links between people to be something occult that reason cannot really grasp. So while, according to Hume, we are to ‘sympathize’ with public ‘utility’, the ‘public’ is itself only composed through the reciprocal bonds of sympathy, which are irreducible to any mere ‘original instincts of the human mind’, or to any projected egoism, since for Hume, self-identity and motivation is not something originally given, but is itself a narrative construct, necessarily mediated by a publicly constructed discourse.22 One can suggest that our current situation is ‘Humean’ and not Kantian, both in intellectual and sociological terms. For Hume, sympathy or shared feeling is a middle term between reason and faith. As a defender of Church establishment he took it that the unity of interest between monarch and people has to have sacred sanction if people are really to feel its force.23 For he considered that human society only exists as a construct through the ability of monarchic or aristocratic families to combine the particular with general sympathy – otherwise the range of human sympathy is too restricted to accommodate justice.24 Hence he considers, unlike Locke, Rousseau or Kant, that the core of political society is a matter of substantive and yet artificial feeling – no mere formality and no mere given animality (as we glimpse animality in animals) could ever at bottom move human beings to collective cultural action. Just

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for this reason, sympathy has ceased in Hume to be in any way secondary – the ‘added’ gesture of a fundamentally self-centred creature – but has become paradoxically primary, like a Derridean ‘original supplement’. We sympathize before we are ourselves and in order to be ourselves Likewise, in his ethics, Hume’s comparison of promise as ‘fiction’ to Eucharistic transubstantiation as ‘fiction’ is not meant in a merely sceptical sense.25 Rather, by carrying the sceptical critique of religion in a proto-Nietzschean fashion through also to ethics and to aspects of our ‘magical’ belief in cause and substantial unity, Hume is at once chastening our all-too human assumptions, and yet at the same time indicating how religion as ‘natural’ is in continuity with the rest of human natural and cultural existence. It secures our sense of the diversity, unity, order and mystery of life in terms of the polytheistic, the monotheistic, the extra-humanly designed and the apophatic – all of which aspects of religiosity Hume explicitly affirms as integral to the very possibility of cultural constitution.26 Here one might note that many historians of ideas horrendously underestimate the degree to which an early modern and Enlightenment appeal to ‘universal reason’ did not by any means always take the form of appeal to an emotionally neutral, merely logical or instrumentalizing reason. To the contrary, many currents, such as those of the Quaker tradition, were (and remain so up to the present day) – in despair both of Christian bigotry and the modern Christian tendency to disenchant the cosmos27 – more interested in a universally mystical reason, involving a continued sense that reason is a ‘divine spark’ of spiritual light. (Indeed one can ask whether the very notion of ‘enlightenment’ was ever altogether free of just this assumption.) Yet these currents have always faced the aporia according to which, if reason itself is ‘more than rational’, but also affective and intuitive and so forth, then it must be attached to specific cultural traditions. The solutions here have often been framed in terms of ‘secret’, ‘universal’ and ‘perennial’ traditions – and this is one reason for the great importance of freemasonry within the Enlightenment28 and the invention of ‘esotericism’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and we only pretend to ourselves, against all the historical evidence, that these things were merely marginal). The alternative here was to insist – like Nicholas of Cusa, Thomas Browne29 or Hume’s friend and fellow countryman the Chevalier de Ramsay30 – that it was the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity which themselves fulfilled in a hyperbolic degree universally intimated mysteries. A kind of ‘Christian perennialism’ is implied here – later articulated in his own (and by no means necessarily unorthodox way) by the Romantic English poet William Blake.31 But curiously enough, David Hume’s strong sense that shared sympathy is always culturally specific, leans, by implication of its realism and rooted traditionalism, in the direction of a modern Christian version of the ‘perennialist’ desire to combine a new cosmopolitian universalism with a non-reduction of the depths of the human mind. Hence, for all his genuinely ‘Enlightenment’ predilections (which are yet arguably perhaps both ‘proto’ and ‘post’) he argued for the continued establishment of the Christian Church in the modern Western state.

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1.5 Feeling against fanaticism It follows from the above that the Humean view that what binds us together is shared sympathy cannot possibly make any easy discriminations between what belongs to the realm of reason and what belongs to the realm of faith. For just as political society at its core must in some sense retain a monarchic/aristocratic dimension (or a body of people whose very personal existence is bound up with the survival of the political whole – even if this be the entire people, as in ancient Athens) so, also, religion must always be in some degree established. In Europe we disallow public bloody sacrifice and we tend to ban Scientological offers of high-cost chemical salvation not simply because we are ‘enlightened’, but because at bottom our mode of ‘enlightenment’ still retains a Christian colouring. If the risk then seems to be that fanaticism could win through the democratic process if the latter is not ‘transcendentally’ bound to the formal use of reason, as Habermas requires, then one needs to reflect further. First, how could one ever legislate for this without in reality suppressing freedom of speech, and forever excluding those perfectly rational voices who do not accept the Kantian terms of settlement? And indeed, one can argue here that contemporary Germany is now promoting in Europe a new mode of totalitarianism (a neoliberal-communist hybrid)32 that is ironically based upon an overly dogmatic liberal formalism which it has embraced (as archetypically with Habermas) precisely in order to guard against any sort of repetition of the Nazi episode. Because something substantive always fills the formal void, in this case a formal rigidity about rules permits an inflexibly ‘Prussian-style’ temperament and an iron legal positivism once more to re-emerge. But in the third coming of Germanic dominance there is a new twist: the discipline is mainly for export, allowing Germany to continue internally to bask in a more organicist and vocational reality, which the rest of us might well seek to emulate and to learn from. However, the undertheorization of this reality in terms of a virtue-theory (to which it is naturally cognate) aligns with the ways in which this reality remains arguably too statist and too ordoliberally subservient to the ‘free’ market: suggesting that the organic is here co-opted and rendered somewhat ‘kitsch’ – like a Gothic square surrounded by gleaming industrial parks on the outskirts. Just because a modern absolute sovereignty cunningly operates through a somewhat (but by no means entirely) fake subsidiarity, increasingly little tolerance is shown in Germany and throughout Europe in general for group rights, especially those of religious groupings, and for informal, interpersonal arrangements, free of over-intrusive legal surveillance. Secondly, and concomitantly, if formalism gives substantive claims the licence to be unreasonable and unaccountable because, once more, something substantial always rules in the end, then Habermas encourages rather than guards against a dangerous positivity also on the part of these non-state formations. Faith placed behind an unpassable sublime barrier is encouraged to be dangerous faith – as much to be barbarous fanaticism as to be a cultivated Wittgensteinian fideism. Habermas indeed allows that religious claims can be ‘translated’ into public terms, but few religious people will accept the adequacy of such translation, since it leaves the

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rational aspect of specifically religious content redundant, and suggests that faith makes no difference at all to the shape of genuine human action. And if religious people are not encouraged to explicate their own specific faith-based logic in the public domain, then their (publicly of course debatable) sense that their faith makes ‘all the difference’ may take on a virulently fideistic and fundamentalist form, and indeed increasingly does so. Moreover, if ‘translation’ means merely into the terms of the norms governing fair communicative discourse, this translation must always mean the loss of substantive ‘ethical’ content as well as of religiosity – contents, for example, like Christian notions of atonement, forgiveness, substantive relationality and Incarnation, which non-believers can often appreciate, and even partially embrace, without acknowledging the full reality of Christian truth. After all, if even believers discern but in part and haltingly, then it is also bad theology to suppose that religious belief is simply an allor-nothing affair. Conversely, reason is never purely reason. To define it quite apart from faith is to place it also quite apart from feeling, since it can be convincingly argued after Hume that reason, as much as faith, arises only as a specific variant upon the experience of feeling, which is always to do with reciprocal recognition of an ‘other’ and the interiorization of this reflection as a doubling of emotion. If this is the case, then reason partakes of the obscurity as well as the clarity that is always involved in any affective experience. The latter presents itself as a horizon to be explored and as something which has to be reflexively sifted in terms of how far it is to be trusted. Reason cannot therefore escape being situated within a prospective horizon, nor be exempted from the requirements of trust and risk that require a certain exercise of faith. Because discursiveness is always inextricably bound up with our affections and is not austerely trapped within a series of apprehensible procedural criteria, there can be partial degrees of assent to rational as well as to religious truths – as John Henry Newman rightly recognized.33 For this reason, the shared horizon of feeling – our sensus communis – with its inherent fluidity, permits of many substantive outlooks shared in various degrees and actually fosters less conflict (as the recent history of the United Kingdom tends to attest) than a situation where one must endlessly debate (as in the recent history of the United States or France) whether formal barriers between faith and reason have been transgressed or not.

2 How did secularization arise? 2.1 Theoria as the guarantor of freedom In the light of these considerations one can see how the clash of naturalistic and religious visions is capable of mediation. For the fact is that a certain Enlightenment was already concerned to renew that supra-political space which had been ‘the Church’, under the new guise of ‘civil society’ – to the degree (only partial) that this did not simply reduce to a necessarily supplementary sphere supporting both the ‘free’ market and

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the sovereign liberal state. And its goal of binding together in ‘sympathy’ was at least a distorted echo of the earlier binding together in charity. Once one has grasped this double point one can then see that Habermas’s alternative between the metaphysical and the post-metaphysical, the premodern and the modern, and then between the modern secular and the ‘postmodern theocratic’ is not an exclusive one after all. For the idea of a ‘community of feeling’ is both a Christian and a post-Christian notion. It allows for a certain latitude within which freedom can flourish and substantive religious positions can be politically articulated in the public sphere. At the same time, it also sustains an evolving shared sense of the bounds of religious and ideological tolerance – of exactly which religious or ideological practices and views are intolerable even in private: such as human or animal sacrifice, polygamy, female circumcision, racism and support for slavery. It would be foolish and inauthentic to pretend that these bounds are not ultimately to do with a Platonic, Judaic, Christian and to a degree Islamic variant of the axial which has progressively coloured also the axial legacies of the Orient.34 By this I mean the sense (that was less originally marked in the Oriental variants) that a free and critical turning away from the rigidity of archaic kingship with a certain recuperation of the values of tribal equality (as Habermas himself has noted, in the wake of earlier writers like Dawson and Voegelin)35 is a specifically ethical appeal to a transcendent goodness in which we participate – a goodness which is ontologically plenitudinous and so social in character, as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity especially well articulates. Here Robert Bellah tends to evade the issues of the uniqueness to the West of theoria, and the related ideas of vertical participation in a plenitudinous ultimate unity, horizontal mediation between the one and the many, and the absoluteness of ethical relationality. He actually shows intriguing signs at the end of his final book of strongly embracing this Platonic vision himself – but then he could be held academically guilty of too much approximating the East to these Western norms.36 Indeed one can conclude that ‘axiality’ is probably a Christian or at least a Western religious thesis, because if one refrains from altogether conforming Confucianism and Buddhism to Platonic and Hebraic idioms and, still more, if one more refuses altogether to read them in terms of a remote approximation to these idioms (an approximation which I would theologically favour) then one is likely to deny the axial thesis outright, because one will recognize in the Eastern ‘axial variants’ either a much greater continuity with the archaic imperial past (China) than in the case of the Western examples, or else a failure entirely to link critical theoretical innovations with a new mode of political existence (India – where even the new Buddhist political formations still predominantly echo either archaic kingship or archaic priestly theocracy, simply tempering an adherence to traditional ritual social norms of dhamma with a strengthened advocacy of ahimsa, which is a somewhat strategic practice of non-violence.) If the aims of the Eastern variants remain overwhelmingly practical, ritual, individualist or collectivist (rather than relational) and intra-cosmic, then it becomes arguably invalid to speak of a radical critical rupture in the case of the East after all. For the notion of a rupture is surely predicated upon the supposition of a leap towards a truly theoretical, ethical, relational and transcosmic moment.

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Here one can say that Bellah fails to historicize the notion of ‘theory’, because he is too captivated by the bland evolutionary scheme of Merlin Donald, which sees humanity as moving from an ‘episodic’ through a mimetic to a mythical and then a theoretical consciousness, both at onto and phylogenetic levels.37 Since the first two stages are shared with higher forms of animal life, this theory really states extraordinarily little. Homo Sapiens as a cultural animal coincides entirely with the mythical, which involves a highly sophisticated capacity to classify, to think about the whole of perceived reality and to reflect critically. The Hebrew example, at least, shows how this can extend to a self-critique of myth, without any exiting of the narrative idiom. No doubt it is nonetheless true to say that progressive abstractions of the mythical mode, tending towards ‘philosophy’, ‘logic’, ‘mathematics’ and ‘literature’ are the products, if not the inevitable developments of time and lengthy reflection down the generations. However, Bellah himself would seem, in the course of his book, to but half-heartedly suggest (with a wise if telling restraint) that the axial shift is universally to do with the development of the theoretic, itself regarded as evolutionarily adaptive – even though it has proved biologically as destructive as useful, and the natural timescale of culture is still far too short for us to be able to judge whether the theoretical shift will be ‘naturally selected’ (to entertain a debatable Darwinian perspective which Bellah does not really question) in terms of an actual physical, biological mutation. And in so far as he does appear to entertain this evolutionary hypothesis, he provides no warrant for explaining why theoretical abstraction should show a bent for linking mind to transcendence and would not rather favour an immanentist monism, combined with a sense of the autonomy of its own power that would tend to sunder cultural nomos from given circumambient physis. What is more, we know that, in the case of Greece, with the sophists, and to an extent in certain instances in the Orient, a reflective retreat from myth could indeed initially take this form. But the Western bent for theory as revealing the truth is not to do with this tendency, nor with any inevitable evolutionary shift. It is rather the case, as we just outlined, that it arose from a new religious vision of the far beyond, partially visible for the eyes of the soul. It is this contingent, novel apprehension or revelation, whether couched in relatively abstract terms (Greece) or relatively narrative and symbolic ones (Israel) which paradigmatically defines the axial shift as bringing together transcendence, interiority (which is also a radically ecstatic exteriorization of the interior towards the divine and the human other) and a critical and revisionary reference of the political to transcendent norms. By comparison, the Oriental cultures can only be considered ‘axial’ (which in neutral terms need not be regarded as either better or inevitable) insofar as they approximate towards this threefold combination. But their mere evolved capacity for abstraction by no means rendered them in itself liable to do so, and in fact in their case it promoted a primarily practical spiritual bent, concerned overwhelmingly with individual release and control, or else with the sustaining of politically collective norms. The West has been by comparison far more theoretical – but not thereby more abstracting or logically developed. Rather, more theoretical in a sense that never quite sunders theory from theoria. Something that has nothing discernibly to do with biological evolution.

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Because the dual Platonic and Hebraic legacy has most acutely brought the political together with the ultimate and salvific, it has also most radically insisted (even if there are elements of this in both the Confucian and Buddhist legacies) that individual freedom, which was everywhere born from the quest for spiritual liberation, must be accommodated also within the regimes of this world. At the same time, this Western variant of the axial (which is also the very paradigm of axiality), by linking salvific freedom to an eternal plenitude which we see by an act of theoria, as opposed to an eternal and blissful void to which we cleave by a process of habituated practice (in the Oriental axial variants), has sustained the notion, from Plato’s Republic onwards, that just and appropriate relations between people in the city might also practically participate in this theoretical gaze and even start to incarnate its object. It is in this way, as Eric Voegelin argued, that the West has particularly come to see the ‘order of history’ as ‘the history of order’, or the history (for ‘believers’) of our increasing perception of a transcendent realm, which is at one (for Greek as well as Hebraic understanding, albeit in a more muted mode) with the divine revelation of that realm to us.38 It is for this reason that the West – through a lineage from the Near Eastern empires through both Israel and Greece – has eventually embraced a view that links the transcosmic with historical disclosure, fusing both in terms of the vision of a final eschaton or apocalyptic.39 In this way, it is specifically Western tradition that has most tended to see freedom and political order as compatible and then, in addition, freedom and justice as compatible, in terms of the appropriate interrelating of free people. This has been possible precisely because practice has been understood as subordinate to vision, and yet has been regarded as a mode of partially realizing and even instigating true vision. The desire to see the Good and then the desire to realize the Good have been paramount and conjoined. By contrast, for Confucianism the strictly practical aim to erect a sustainable and harmonious political ritual in this world has been foremost, with its admitted link to an always rather vague discernment of a still much more intracosmic ‘heaven’ playing a comparatively weaker role, thereby ensuring that any complete identification of the Confucian tao or ‘way’ with the Platonic ‘Good’ – that is the source of our Western, ‘ethical’ good, entirely independent of and prior to any cosmic sharing in this quality – remains problematic and debatable.40 Equally Daoism tended towards a sort of Rousseauian apoliticism and asociality which was not merely relatively indifferent to ethical action, but could also often (as Bellah well notes) align itself with the antiConfucian amoral realpolitik of the ‘Legalists’, which was of a very extreme kind.41 In the case of Buddhism, the once more mainly practical aim of individual liberation from suffering desire has been foremost, with an admittedly much reformed political process subordinate to this private practical aim. Again, any assimilation to the Platonic good and thereby the Western ethical remains problematic, because the primary Indian ‘Hindu’ desire (lying ‘beyond good and evil’) to seek power through release and release through power is not hereby abandoned, but rather seen as requiring a universal practice of non-violence and mercy, since their opposites are no longer (by contrast with the Bhagavad Gita, for whom the dharma of warfare remained as compatible

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with the ultimate power and release of the dharma of detachment as the dharma of the householder) seen as compatible with non-desiring.42 By contrast, the double and simultaneous Western desire to see and to realize the good has in the long term secured the cultivation of feeling as that which links the celestial and primary ‘theoretical’ to the terrestrial and secondary ‘practical’, and also as that which links person to person without the primary imposition of an extrinsic, third, totalizing force of the state. It was for this reason that, as Bellah well describes, the freedom of Athens consisted in the immediate identity of the Athenian city with the body of its citizens, and ancient Jewish civic identity in a covenant at once of the whole people with God and of each and every individual with God.43 But this process was taken considerably further with the establishment of the Christian ecclesia, which is immanently composed of nothing beyond the free and mutual assent of its members, committed to limitless forgiveness and mercy, outside even the extrinsic impositions of law, force or coercion. It is the inherited subordination of the coercive political unit to this new society – as also, to a degree, the subordination of the state to the Buddhist sangha or the Islamic umma – that has truly enshrined religious freedom at the heart of the political, by making it constitutive of the social body and not something merely concessionary.

2.2 The metahistory of Marcel Gauchet An alternative viewpoint would regard the acknowledging of religious freedom as simply an aspect of the emerging process of secularizing substantive differentiation and overall formal indifference – in which case the allowance of specifically religious liberty is likely in time to fade in favour of a mere liberty of belief in general, guaranteed to the only valid possessor (for liberalism) of open free will, who is the individual, and not the corporate body. For this argument, as presented with the greatest cogency by Marcel Gauchet, the entire history of the world is the history of secularization.44 This longue durée is not, however, undergirded by any evolutionary or dialectical theory about inevitable progress, nor by any claim for social or economic determinism. Rather, Gauchet (one of a group of contemporary French neo-humanist and neoliberal intellectuals in the tradition of Benjamin Constant) stresses the role of human freedom and fortuitous contingency which nonetheless operate within a certain fixed set of a priori possibilities: nothing has to happen, but only certain kinds of thing can happen.45 These possibilities derive from the universal circumstances of the insertion of human subjectivity within the world. First of all, the human subject is orientated towards the other, because she is reflexively capable of thinking of herself as if from another person’s perspective; secondly, human subjects are collectively situated in time and may orientate themselves either to the unalterable givenness of the past or else the new immediacy of the present, or else again the open horizon of the future; and thirdly, human subjects are driven to speculate about the invisible and yet unavoidably implied undifferentiated whole of reality.

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Within this a priori repertoire, history is played out. So-called primitive tribal religion is not, for Gauchet, primarily to be accounted for in terms of restricted technological capacity and objective knowledge taken as engendering the substitutes of religion and magic. Nor is it to be understood in terms of some sort of early necessity to represent the whole of society and duties of social solidarity in disguise. In this way, the entire Comtian-Durkheimian legacy is admirably refused by Gauchet, who denies any ‘necessity’ for religion and insists, instead, that it was always and everywhere a contingent invention – though this leaves him with the problem of why the same early inventive course should have been so universally taken (see further below). There is then for him no reason why primitive people should have resorted to magical instead of to simple naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. Nor is there any reason why they should not have resorted to merely pragmatic accounts of the need for social cohesion.46 However, the justifiable rejection of positivist or sociological necessity for religion becomes hyperbolic insofar as Gauchet fails to allow, first, that merely scientific explanations can never fulfil an existential need to comprehend the meaning of the whole of reality and that this includes a desire for a meaningfulness within nature. Thus he effectively overlooks the attestations of Evans-Pritchard and others that tribal people typically account for things in a double idiom: naturalistic on the one hand, but magico-religious on the other. Secondly, Gauchet fails to see that, because the social is always realized through the symbolic, and because the symbolic is not self-legitimating but needs authorizing from ‘elsewhere’, a genuine criticism of the Durkheimian foundational sacred as an unexplained requirement for primitive self-mystification (so far Gauchet is right) points to the yet stronger thesis that human culture requires the sacred in the full-blown sense of belief in a ‘divine elsewhere’ in some sense or other. This argument will be further expounded below. Given his rejection of any human necessity to be religious, at any stage of development, the collective adoption of religion becomes for Gauchet a deliberate if semi-conscious choice within the permanent repertoire of human possibilities: a choice for the priority of the past, which ensures absolute security and a consequent absence of self-questioning and uncertainty. Thus ‘societies without a State’ are governed by an unchanging ritual order which is taken as reflecting a now inaccessible primordial foundation. For Gauchet it is such an arrangement which most of all defines ‘the religious’, since here everything legitimate within the human realm is attributed to a non- or trans-human, sacred ‘other’. In this way he correctly reverts to a ‘Tylorian’ supernatural alterity, as against Durkheim’s ‘sacred’ which need not, and did not primitively have any such reference. However, he questionably renders belief in such an alterity not primordial, but rather grounded in an anonymous political strategy. These (for Gauchet) alone fully religious early societies were tribal or ‘compact’ ones (in Voegelin’s terms), where religious ritual suffused the whole of life and expressed an entire unity of the social with the cosmic order. In doing so, it usurped in advance the place of law and government, because its function was precisely to secure, by sacralization, an untrammelled primitive communism and rule of egalitarian giftexchanging reciprocity. Hence the reign of the all-religious was secretly motivated by a

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primacy of the political and its social exigencies. But once the purely political escaped and differentiated itself in the archaic kingships of the Neolithic to the Bronze age, then one had already the first and still the most decisive ‘secularization’. For ritual now leaches away from everyday life to concentrate round the royal court and was itself desacralized to the degree of becoming more dependent upon the king’s arbitrary and at root sheerly political will.47 But once more, this arrival of ‘the state’ (though the term is anachronistic before early modern times), with its imperative for totalizing enclosure, and often also for conquest and ever-widened domination, is not to be accounted for by any deterministic mechanism or response to prior contradiction. Instead, the persistence of the primitive through and beyond the neolithic discovery of agriculture would rather seem to suggest that the superstructural is all important. Hence ‘the state’ represents a different fundamental choice: this time for the authority of the present. Here the subjective, willed and capricious power of the monarch usurps the invariable and impersonal power of the inherited ritual order. Such power is correlated with, and for Gauchet brings into being through a choice at once political and existential, an equivalent displacement of the sacred from a founding past forever re-presented, to a perpetual presence projected into a remote transcendence. The distance and control of space is substituted for the distance and control of time. A Fortiori the axial shifts involved an intensification of this process, whereby a ‘critical’ appeal of the psychic to the transcosmic (Voegelin’s ‘differentiation’) ensured a further desacralization of the cosmos and eventually of the political order. This is the case, Gauchet argues, because the ‘presentification’ of the sacred renders it less permanent, more associable with change. Mediation via a human sovereign in the archaic era had in principle opened the possibility of a direct appeal by the subjected, in the name of the mediating capacity of their own subjectivity to the godhead, over the heads of the reigning power. Now, the initial bypassing of this sovereign by the charismatically inspired figure (Zarathustra, Socrates, Hosea, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha), communicating directly with transcendence, starts to realize this possibility, while bequeathing a tension between the neo-archaic project of ‘the philosopher ruler’ and the protomodern one of a democracy of Enlightenment.48 The later history of Christianity, including the events of Reformation, Enlightenment and Revolution, are simply for Gauchet the outworking of the axial understood as the release of the purely political as the triumph of the unalienated human will.49 No ‘inevitabilities’ are however involved even here (as one might suppose) but merely contingent choices – for pure religion in order to ensure spiritual equality; for the release of the practical possibilities of hierarchic power, for the democratic effort somewhat (and perhaps forlornly, as Gauchet has increasingly seen)50 to materialize the egalitarian impulse and so to tame and distribute that power. The framework of empire is, therefore, for Gauchet, an overwhelmingly crucial prior archaic condition for the emergence of monotheism, and, to a lesser degree, for the monisms of Eastern religions. Yet here he is forced to confront the fact that Israel began as a counter-imperial resistance which brilliantly improvised a god more universal than any king, who assisted her in her weakness. (And one can stress again

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here that there are ‘neotribal’ elements also in the case of Greece, and, to a lesser extent, in the case of the Orient.) Gauchet insists that, nevertheless, messianism eventually relinked this higher and more perfectly achieved transcendence to a yet more universal project of empire. Christianity then repeated the counter-imperial Mosaic origin, but only by rendering God yet more other-worldly, such that he was now primarily manifest to a human interiority itself removed from the mundane. Divine Incarnation curiously confirmed this increased duality, because a God who can only reveal himself by becoming human is a God who (supposedly – but in denial of many explicit words of the New Testament) cannot really be mediated. This doctrine, according to Gauchet, left a permanent legacy of tension in Christianity between world-rejection in favour of an unknowable deity on the one hand, and affirmation of a world so good in itself that God once deigned to inhabit it in person, on the other. In this way Christianity intensified the axial tension between royal worldaffirmation in the name of a realizable good, and democratic world-refusal in the name of a remote good elsewhere, unrealizable in the current reality. (Gnosticism being the most extreme exemplification of this tendency, and hence its deep kinship with the modern, as Voegelin diagnosed.)51 The upshot of this legacy was an increasing autonomy of secular power and knowledge, which to begin with was grounded in a divine handing over of a limited sovereign realm to human control. Here Gauchet rightly argues that the doctrine of the divine right of kings was paradoxically a major agent of secularization. For the absolute monarch does not incarnate or analogically mediate the deity; rather he echoes, via divine decree, God’s absolute will and right to command what he likes. In consequence, the terrain of the absolute monarch becomes one increasingly governed by immanent, self-referencing norms and structures which already foreshadow their later democratic capture. Thus from the shell of Christianity the ‘non-religious’ is finally hatched. This does not mean necessarily an absence of private belief: because the third a priori precondition of human subjectivity – the necessary arising of the question as to the nature of the invisible totality – still pertains. Nevertheless, all speculation on this issue has now ceased to be of public, political, social or scientific relevance – and herein lies the essence of the secular, since personal and ‘present’ authority undergirded by the sacred has collapsed under this new aegis. Instead of the king we now have the de-subjectivation of rule: the confinement of power purely to certain procedures whose function is disinterestedly to represent diverse social interests as they emerge, and to mediate their inevitable conflicts according to standard rules. This separated and depersonified realm of ‘power’, which is the modern political, is also, for Gauchet, the new and finally secularized site of ‘the other’, which was once the forever lost yet determining (and transhistoricized) past, and then later the all-present and yet remote sacred subjectivity. Since this secular ‘other’ rules with an all-pervasive certainty unparalleled in history and yet has no specific concern of its own, it exists only to ensure the maximum promotion of human diversity with the minimum of disturbance. This shows that human beings have now taken the third choice, for the future. To do so is to prefer the release of all potentiality over the security originally favoured, and this results inevitably in massive individual anxiety and loss of identity.

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However, collectively speaking, the orientation to the future, through a neutral representation of diverse substantive wishes, has proved and will prove, according to Gauchet, to be the most stable of all human orders. For it is now, he contends (a contention that looks evidentially less and less sustainable), so long as this choice holds, no longer possible for substantive religions or ideological preferences to intrude in the public arena. All goals of collective agreement and of the merging of power with personhood and social actuality are now abandoned; indeed, even the liberal hope of ‘progress’ is now left behind, since liberalism is, strictly speaking, incompatible with any admissible criteria for assessing something humanly ‘better’. And all hold some defensive interest in sustaining this negative consensus. So with the option for the future, we have, surprisingly, arrived at the absolutely given and unalterable. By finally disclosing the indeterminate human essence which archaic society concealed, we have, after all, fulfilled the archaic longing to abide by the given. In the end then, Gauchet sounds a Comtian note after all.

2.3 Critique of transcendentalist secularism Yet this association of secularization with the longue durée and so with the normative is questionable for two reasons: 1. There is an inherent philosophical problem about erecting any a priori categorical framework for human choice. This requires that, amongst the infinite mass of possible human choices, we recognize a finite list of options as ‘fundamental’, such that all other choices merely exemplify these basic options in a subordinate fashion. But the act of recognizing such a list cannot itself as yet be governed by such ahistorical subordination; hence that which sets up the hierarchy is not itself within a hierarchy which is supposed to be all-inclusive. It follows that every act of supposedly ‘recognizing’ a list of a priori categories is an arbitrary, contingently and historically situated act and could be rivalled by an alternative selection, since there exists no ahistorical a priori framework to which we have access. Here Gauchet offers, like Habermas, another forlorn attempt to ‘retreat to Kant’ as a way of heading off postmodernism. Indeed one can say that transcendentalism and the claim of inevitable secularization mutually support each other in a viciously confirming circle: transcendentalism must be true because of secular closure; transcendentalist closure proves the truth of the secular. So Gauchet’s own transcendentalist preference for the past, present or future as ahistorical framing categories is clearly a questionable selection reflecting his modern prejudices. As his concrete analyses show, it renders the ‘present’ option merely a transitional one destined to fade away: the real framing choices are between an absolutely closed ‘beautiful’ security and an equally absolute, open and ‘sublime’ freedom. But another construal of our human situation (which seems equally rational) might argue that the fundamental ‘framing’ choices are (as perhaps for Voegelin, and even, at times Bellah in his more ‘Platonic’ mood) between a certain developing ‘picturesque’52 mediation of a nonetheless finally unknown reality on the one hand,

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and any form of fixing a sharp boundary between the familiar and the strange (or the beautiful and the sublime) on the other. From this perspective there swims into view a circumstance that Gauchet, in a clearly Comtian lineage, as just pointed out, partially admits: a kinship between the substantive and local fixity of the ‘primitive’, and the universal and abstract fixity of the modern. Cannot we interpret the latter, anthropologically, as the maximum instance of ‘taboo’, since it adopts the most absolutely reliable fashion of rendering the ‘strange’ (here the indeterminable and unknowable totality) as ‘off limits’: namely by surrounding itself with the carapace of a normative procedure without substance which is most exactly repeatable and predictable precisely on account of its emptiness? From this same perspective it would appear arbitrary for Gauchet to locate the ‘real’ human essence in the option for the future. Since archaic societies related their fixed rituals to the warding off of ‘dangers’, it is clear, as he allows, that they did already have a rational sense of a more anarchic future-orientation, and in a certain fashion refused it in the name of a supposed intuition of certain objective supra-human constraints which should prevail over us. Even if their registering of such constraints was, from a post-axial perspective, over-absolute and fetishized, what neutral ‘reason’ possesses the right to pronounce them wrong, or to claim that this intuition was the illusory or even deliberate mask for an essentially ‘natural’ political and existential choice? Indeed it is near impossible to imagine what agency, individual or collective, conscious or subconscious, could have been responsible for this politically functional ‘invention’ of religion. And to say that humans are ‘essentially’ indeterminate and unrestricted involves just as much of an existential wager on our ‘proper’ relation to unknown totality as that contained in the primitive preservation of sacral limits. For Gauchet the ‘natural’ experience of the latter is as a sublimely unknown void, but this is itself a ‘religious’, supra-rational claim. Instead, one must say that there is no humanly pre-interpreted experience of the invisible unknown, and hence (by this measure) no inherently more natural or rational delineation of it. 2. Gauchet’s neo-humanism (in a riposte to the postmodern ‘death of man’) is in consequence implausible, because humanity is a historical and cultural phenomenon and cultures have to place their ultimate normativity outside themselves, since the logic of their existence is not justifiable in purely self-referential, transcendentalist terms. The final basis of a society, therefore, has to be ‘sacralized’ in terms of a reference to a supposed source external to that society. Equally, in order to be able to develop and adapt, cultures have to leave their ultimate norms somewhat incomplete, vague and debatable. In this fashion also they have to refer to something outside and beyond themselves – in such a way that a self-critical reference to what transcends culture is paradoxically what closes and defines it. For these reasons, as post-structuralist theorists of religion tend to argue, religion is inescapable and necessary to human existence, and ‘secularization’ is inherently problematic.53 It is for this reason that Régis Debray substitutes a ‘mediology’ for a ‘sociology’ with respect to the critical treatment of religion.54 The latter cannot

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be referred to any pre-religious social basis, since society is a symbolic reality only secured as a symbolic system through anchorage upwards in a sacred ‘elsewhere’, which Durkheim’s sacral precinct within the social order only symbolically reflects and does not initially constitute – as if this originally constitutive social duality of sacred and profane were simply a more intense celebration of the profane by the profane. For what Durkheim could never explain in his own terms was just why human beings had not invented the French Republic with its civil religion at the very outset. Nevertheless, for the somewhat still Marxist Debray, the religious is always and inevitably ‘mediated’ by concrete and historically changing material practices. At times, as Camille Tarot argues, he presents this too reductively, as if, for example, the Hebrew focus upon writing fully accounted for their monotheism, whereas other alphabetically based cultures have clearly developed its alternative ideological potentials.55 And yet, more profoundly, Debray always balances material mediation by the still more fundamental mediation that religion must itself perform between all cultural objects and signs, in the fashion already described. One could read his work as implying that any sane culture must respect this double mediation – denied at once by dogmatic atheism forlornly seeking to be done with religion forever, and also by excessive religious iconoclasm which seeks to occlude its material involvements and need to indicate finite participations in the ‘elsewhere’ if this is not to remain either sheerly ‘missing’, or else to be inflexibly invoked – whether by a rigid code or an arbitrary will. Thus in the case both of extreme atheism and of iconoclasm, one has a source of the operation of terror seeking to eradicate entirely what it regards as ‘untruth’.56 Debray does not himself quite enunciate this ‘Catholic’ gloss on his own theorizing, yet it would validly seem to open out in just this direction. The double aspect of mediation (of the spiritual by the material, but also the material by the spiritual) would seem to be instanced by the way in which the most advanced archaeological historical and ethnographic evidence does not support the idea of a simple material determination of religious practice. It is certain that there are broad correlations between material, political and religious practices – for example, between hunter-gatherer societies and the sacralization of immanent nature as ‘other’, and by contrast between settled agricultural societies, centralized temple cults, sacral kingship, relatively transcendent sky-gods and the practice of animal sacrifice. However, these correlations are by no means universally consistent, and the lack of a perfectly exemplified homology falls in line with an evidenced lack of a sheer priority for material exigency. Hence sites like Gobekli Tepi in Turkey suggest an antecedence of temple and celestial invocation over the birth of agriculture, which accords with the evidence that agriculture was itself born as a ritual practice, just as the taming of animals may plausibly have begun as a bringing of animals within the human ritual circle.57 Indeed, because of the relative lack of intentionality and purposiveness found in animal life one could perhaps only have ‘attracted’ them in the first place through a ‘pointless’ adjustment of their habits. Given the implications of a mediological, rather than a naively sociological critical approach, the project of deconstructing religion would now have to become also the project of dismantling the human as the cultural, in favour of an elusive purely animal

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humanity (yet seen ‘religiously’ as that which we have fallen away from) as Giorgio Agamben seems obliquely to advocate.58 If one wishes now, by contrast, to salvage the human project, then the sheerly humanist, Feuerbachian path remains no longer open to us, and one must rather acknowledge that, in founding itself outside itself, every culture has been truly both discerning the divine and responding to its providential prompting. This reading of history in terms of participation in, and representation of eternal order, or in terms of ‘divine government’, as advocated by Eric Voegelin, can even be seen as more logical than Agamben’s counter-religious (in a double sense) post-humanism, to the degree that it gives an account of why there is a cultural creature at all. For once one has, with post-structuralists like Debray, denied that religion can be traced to any extra-religious motivation, since the religious logic of providing a missing but essential mediation is constitutive of all cultures, then short of affirming the reality which religions invoke, one has no way of explaining why a certain animal should have inaugurated a shared symbolic practice (‘culture’) which cannot be closed in its own immanent and ‘natural’ terms. If one does, instead, affirm transcendent reality, then inevitably one cannot be neutral as between all the different versions of this reality which different cultures have sought to represent, but must seek to discriminate between their different discernments and the degrees of authenticity of different divine manifestations. (This is exactly how Voegelin and Christopher Dawson thought that metahistory should be written.) It might be objected here that some non-human species clearly possess both language and culture. However, animal language seems to be mostly functional in terms of stimulus-response, not necessarily ‘committing itself ’ to the ‘magical’ invocation of thing simply as thing through the utterance of a word.59 To the apparent degree that animal language surpasses this (as perhaps with birdsong) and to the degree that other species possess culture, then they also seem to possess something like religion, or ritual practices responding to no ascertainable practical exigency and appearing as if, for the animal concerned, they ‘magically’ connected it to something or ‘religiously’ invoked something.60 In which case Robert Bellah’s appeal to animal and early human ‘play’ explains nothing, because he freely admits that, while play may prove evolutionarily adaptive, it does not arise for that reason.61 This conclusion logically requires that he must assent to Aristotle’s impenetrable biological circle of function and flourishing, which inexorably points to the priority of the latter insofar as a pure self-manifestation like play does not originate for functional reasons, and also insofar as we cannot define any biological reality in terms of its function as opposed to its mode of self-manifestation and specific flourishing, given that no higher biological reality is essential to the biosphere as such, and no biological reality whatsoever is essential to the physical cosmos, unless we were to embrace a vitalist teleology that would itself undo any functionalist evolutionism.62 It follows that one cannot plausibly see the gratuity of play as the matrix of the religious, but must rather regard the seriousness with which it is undertaken as always already ritual and religious in character. Once more then, the metacritical conclusion

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has to be that there is no culture, nor humanity, nor perhaps even any higher animality, prior to the religious impulse. In which case, contra Gauchet, religion is more primary than the political.

2.4 Questioning secular genealogy If the transcendentalist suppositions of Gauchet’s Kantian (rather than Hegelian or Nietzschean) metahistory are in these ways questionable, then so is its substantive content. In the course of this further critique, I will also call into question other formulations of a secular genealogy of the secular. 1. To revisit the already mooted question of ‘primitive agency’, Gauchet is somewhat coy about the degree of deliberation that he is here prepared to recognize. If one refers the specific mode of tribal closed being to freely-chosen option and not to developmental inevitability, then why did everyone, at first, choose the same social path? To sustain his courageous voluntarism, Gauchet would have to be prepared to entertain the idea that an alternative choice – for ‘the state’ – was primordially latent or semi-emergent. Such a position would also begin to break up the still evolutionist uniformity of Gauchet’s picture of the primitive: perhaps one should rather say that in some compact societies a more purely ‘ritual’ rule pertains, while in others there is something more like ‘personal and political’ rule. Likewise Gauchet’s account of rule by the past somewhat suppresses the variety of primitive construals of time: as cycle, lapse, perpetual presence and expected return. If anything is constant here it is perhaps rather this classification of time ‘intensely’ in terms of significant moments and differentiated periods rather than as a linear sequence of empty instances.63 This ‘intense’ construal does not always take the form of privileging the absolute past, as opposed to a hovering eternity or an ideal time that is to return – prophetic, eschatological perspectives are recorded for many primitive cultures and could sometimes assume hegemony.64 Conversely, it is by no means clear that imperial states always moved away from the lure of the ancestral: on the contrary, they typically augmented the debt which we owe to ancestors and gods. This suggests that increasing spatial distance was sometimes accompanied by increasing temporal distance, contrary to Gauchet’s universal narrative. 2. The fact that, in terms of archaic empires, the priestly function is a later doubling of the monarchic one, apparently rendering the political function primary over the religious, must be balanced by the point that monarchy would seem first to have evolved from the chiefdom, whose rule, by Gauchet’s own arguments, was exercised in more priestly terms of reminder of shared ritual norms and Shamanic invocation of the source of those norms.65 Here it is also legitimate to question whether the chiefly function was not, in terms of giving judgements etc, somewhat more ‘kingly’ than Gauchet, in the wake of Pierre Clastres allows.66 Equally one can wonder whether the element of ‘deliberate’ refusal of political hierarchy in tribal societies was less a matter of a fearfully negative (and mysterious) anticipation, than of resistance to the presence and actual formation of proto-kingships and empires in neolithic times – as Deleuze

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and Guattari once suggested.67 This would connect with the idea that the chiefdomkingship contrast should not be regarded as an absolute one. 3. Gauchet’s account of primitive reciprocity assumes, after the structuralists, that this was primarily a secular matter of reinforcing shared symbolic norms. But if we return to Mauss and acknowledge that the gift was at once thing and symbol, thereby embracing the real material economy as well as the ritual one, then we can see how the symbolic order could not be readily confined to a collective self-awareness of culture over against nature, or to nature culturally regarded, but was also seen as the extrahuman ‘gift’ of nature herself. It is for this reason that Mauss saw the primitive gift as a somewhat subjective reality which demanded ‘of itself ’ to be returned, according to the hau, or ‘the spirit of the gift’, while equally the Maussian giver is somewhat objectified, such that he only exists within webs of physically realized mutuality where each is ‘materially’ bound to each and each to all.68 All this assumes a vitalized cosmos for which mind and matter are not alien to each other, in a manner that owes much more to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (whose researches have often been much misunderstood) and his ideas of primitive ‘participation’ than is usually allowed.69 It furthermore assumes that gift-exchange systems include also supernatural forces, such that the original obligation to return is to repay a debt to the divine realm and its human representatives, often themselves virtually identified with gods and spirits – an overarching circumstance that Mauss firmly noted, while not fully developing its import.70 However, the fact that this debt can never fully be repaid is not, as yet, in primitive society, an inevitably sinister circumstance, since for the logic of gift-exchange this condition also pertains between humans and has in either case a positive valence as guaranteeing the perpetuity of giving and exchanging in relationship.71 To argue instead, with Gauchet and many others, including (perhaps surprisingly) members of MAUSS72 like Alain Caillé, that gift-exchange was initially a mechanism to ward off the threat of hierarchy and violence, is to beg the question as to where such a threat might ‘originally’ have come from?73 Since ‘violence’ as intentional and subject to judgement is an entirely cultural reality (we do not judge the wolf for snaring her prey), the notion of an original contagion of violence must be considered to be a Hobbesian or a Girardian fantasy. By the same token, Camille Tarot is surely wrong to consider sacrifice as older than gift, with sacrifice taken as a mutation of a Girardian scapegoating mechanism.74 It would rather seem that the pre-agricultural tribal gifts to divine forces were generally unbloody, or else sought to honour and placate the hunted animal.75 Tribal evidence of sacral violence against humans looks more like sheer judicial excluding or else indeed scapegoating, but not really like sacrifice – even if we can by no means be sure of the exactitude of these symbolic boundaries which are fixed in terms of our Western terminology. But overwhelmingly human sacrifice seems to be something commanded by later sacral kings in archaic empires, or in extreme instances to involve the reverse sacrifice of the kings themselves. Both measures assume an extension of the logic of debt-paying, now turned darker and more unilateral – if not, one wants to say, outright diabolical. If indeed scapegoating can now sometimes

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merge with sacrifice, then the contamination passes from sacrifice as exorbitant gift to more drastic scapegoating and not in the opposite, Girardian direction. 4. The primacy of religion does not, however, as we have already seen, imply the primacy of the Durkheimian sacral which Gauchet questions, in the name of the primacy of the political. Ultimately Durkheim wished to explain the sacred in terms of a preservation of a social solidarity which somehow antedates the religious, even if (aporetically) and as Mauss much more emphasized, this solidarity is only itself constructed through the religiously symbolic. In order to avoid the logical drift of Maussianism towards either a structuralist primacy of a priori symbolic structures, or a post-structuralist primacy of contingent and unfounded ones (in consequence less abstractable from the religious than structuralist thinkers like Lévi-Strauss supposed) Camille Tarot is forced to retreat from the sheerly transcendental and atemporal ‘givenness’ of society for Durkheim, and to resort to a Girardian account of the genesis of the social as such.76 But this assumes once more an incoherent pre-cultural contagion of violence, rooted in a mimetic rivalry that must already presuppose signifying systems and therefore culture and society. In addition, it only saves the Durkheimian primacy of the social over the religious at the price of surrendering the ur-primacy of the social to a Hobbesian original individualism, thereby ensuring (despite Tarot’s denials) that, as with Gauchet, it is really the political which explains the social and not vice versa. If, instead, one grasps the post-structuralist point about the ineffability and inexactitude of cultural foundations, alongside the belonging of gift-exchange to specifically religious belief and ritual, then one will see that the always symbolically mediated ‘sacred’ is after all a not-so-clever academic surrogate for the divine. Nor is the Roman ‘ambivalence’ of the sacer as both holy and appalling universally attested. At the same time, the very blankness of the ultimate signified, as already diagnosed (implicitly beyond structuralism) by Lévi-Strauss, requires the shift from the areligious primary symbolic order of the structuralists towards the post-structuralist realization (that is truer to Mauss’s real trajectory) that the symbolic is always present through the more concrete and contingent imaginary, and equivalently that the linking symbol is also the imperative to return that mystically attaches to the material gift. It is true that some post-structuralisms read simply like anarchic structuralisms in their still-cleaving to formality, but just the questioning of a closed formal system must logically require a renewed attention to contingently occasional and material mediation that can involve a certain reengagement with Marxist thematics. This applies supremely to Mauss’s gift-exchange which first re-links sign to its always concrete signvehicle ‘the thing’, and secondly is proclaimed to be a ‘total social fact’. Even if he failed to recognize this, such a concept departs from the field of sociology to which his uncle’s notion of religion as ‘a fundamental social fact’ belongs, since it grounds the social order neither in an a priori synchrony, nor in an apriorism of psychological action, à la Weber. Instead, irreducibly relational giving and receiving coincide with all human historical processes, including production and use, while the imperative always to give back more and differently also coincides with history as non-identical repetition, and

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society as an asymmetrical reciprocity that lacks any social ‘foundations’ outside this relational non-quantifiability. In consequence, the Victorian ethnographer E. B. Tylor was after all nearer the mark in considering ‘religion’ as being to do with belief in supernatural beings that are part of, and paradigmatic for fundamental social processes, and it is extraordinary the lengths to which sociologists will go to dissimulate the point that the sacred almost always and everywhere is bound up with a belief in ‘another’ and not normally visible reality – a supernatural or a preternatural sphere, or even the cosmic totality itself whose closed wholeness never presents itself to our apprehension. To be sure, as Bellah stresses, early tribespeople believed in ‘powerful beings’ rather than something like Olympian gods, but perhaps we only withhold the name ‘divinities’ from these beings out of a failure to see that the ‘primitives’ may have been more sophisticated than our ancients with respect to their lack of anthropomorphizing. Similarly, we maybe too readily refuse (as does Bellah) to these people the categories of ‘worship’ and ‘prayer’, failing to reflect that their ‘magical’ invocation of cosmic forces is perhaps more readily comparable to Christian liturgy which seeks synergistically and theurgically to ‘call down’ the body of God, to ‘attune’ the people to the Divine Trinity and thereby to channel its power according to its own decree, rather than to the paganarchaic flattery of God with a praise of which he has no need, or attempts to persuade him to change his mind which, being God, he cannot do.77 More comparable then, to this post-axial practice and reasoning than to archaic prostrations before wilful personified cosmic forces, such as dwelt on Olympus. Finally, the evidence of the awareness for primitive peoples of a ‘high god’ entirely beyond their ken is often now unreasonably played down, with an excess of Durkheimian and evolutionist zeal. Thus Robert Bellah’s claim that the Amerindian talk of ‘the great spirit’ was the result of missionary contamination, ironically pays scant tribute to the sophistication of oral memory and its ready capacity to distinguish between what came before and what came after the arrival of the white man.78 Similar considerations apply to the Australian aborigines, whose primal dream most certainly (if obscurely) seems to have implied a primal dreamer.79 5. One cannot plausibly interpret the switch to archaic kingship to be a secularizing liberation of the political as the more ‘natural’ human reality, unless one dogmatically doubts the reality of any sacral cosmic order, or else fails to see the perennial human cultural necessity to ascribe to one. Here Gauchet fails to allow that religion’s manner of describing and explaining cosmic forces is not to be regarded as a proto natural science which is secondary to its main, political function, since this is an integral aspect of its other function (admitted by Gauchet) of interpreting existential perplexity.80 Nor is the shift to sacral kingship already a qualification of sacral cosmos, because it is rather the beginning of a more personal and free apprehension of this sacrality as rooted in something unattainable and ineffable. The focus of such a sense for a long historical moment in the person of the king allowed this more personal aspect still to be blended with a more diffused and impersonal social embodiment of the cosmic. It is certainly true that kingship could assume terrifying aspects and could

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tend, as in Hawaii and other Pacific islands, to a cult of pure force; yet this could also be tempered, as Bellah stresses, by a new sense of care, justice and mercy that originates with the kingly function itself.81 For while tribal gift-exchange could secure a balanced relationality in terms of collectively acknowledged goods (of all kinds, both material and symbolic), it was less adept at attending to situated individual needs and to providing specialized attention. For this one required the more elevated social perspective, just as only kingship (in the first ‘social democratic’ instance of the ‘state’ balancing the ‘market’) could counteract the always threatened monopoly achieved by the hoarder of gifts who later became their main provider. It was Near Eastern kings (long before the Hebraic ones) who first offered a compensating ‘justice’ to widows and orphans, just as it was the kingly function that was more able to consider a just apportioning and distribution in terms of needs and abilities and functions, whereas primitive gift-exchange either secured a literal base equality or rapidly encouraged inequities. The same tendencies ensured that it was unable to resolve early tendencies to endemic warfare and indeed often exacerbated them, when gift-giving assumed a predominantly agonistic character. This is not to say that gift-exchange did not remain in the archaic period the primary ‘social fact’ (in Maussian terms) – it did, but it was now blended with elements of top-down unilaterality and distributive fairness (according to shifting historical and local criteria). Indeed one can argue here that one requires the advent of hierarchy in order to safeguard the initial, unprompted ‘imposition’ of the gift as a very condition of its generosity (even if the return gesture tends to invert this hierarchy under the same conditions) – whereas pure equality inexorably tends to cause gift to deteriorate simultaneously towards both conflict and contract. But all these functions of monarchy – as biblical and earlier Near Eastern texts make clear – were most certainly regarded as sacral ones. 6. One can also probe Gauchet’s overhasty treatment of the axial religions’ ambivalent relation to ‘the state’. Although they (including Israel) deployed state thematics, they also invoked many ‘neo-primitive’ themes: attention to the ancestral, to the oral, to gift-exchange, to recollection, to entirely sacralized and ritualized legality (as in Plato’s Laws). These stresses actually went clean against the tendencies of many empires like the Babylonian towards the secularization and codification of law, plus the growth of private property rights, which were indeed correlated with a simplification of the divine pantheon and concentration of political power. In the Babylonian case one seems to have the beginnings of a kind of proto-axial ‘monotheistic’ voluntarism, where a fearful divine will is mediated by a sovereign centre.82 But Israel, Platonism and Buddhism were not like this: here, instead, the remoteness of the transcendent principle seems to inhibit sovereign earthly reflection, and yet on the other hand the newly stressed qualities of the transcendent (such as justice, love, mercy, karma and so forth) are mediated by complex ritual patterns. Charles Taylor in his foreword to the English translation of Le Désenchantment du Monde percipiently points out that the role of these qualities is absent from Gauchet’s account.83 Thus if we may indeed say that there is a proto-axial ‘monotheist’ legacy which nurtures the mega-state, it is

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equally plausible to characterize the axial religions as attempts to discover a medium between local custom and prejudice on the one hand, and a universality of abstract and therefore arbitrary power on the other. And equally to discover a medium between the endemic tribal disposition to war and the endemic imperial disposition to the despotic. And to reiterate – the really key issue not posed by Gauchet is: What precisely forbids one from erecting an alternative framing contrast in which this axial ‘picturesque’ mediation between ‘beautiful’ dogmatism and ‘sublime’ agnosticism is the real mark of the Vichian acme at once of religion and civilization, avoiding on the one hand the selvaggio of idolatry, and on the other hand the new urban wilderness of excessive scepticism that must dissolve all human along with all sacral bonds?84 Nothing would seem to critically rule out the idea of the axial rather than the primitive as ‘the most religious’ and much to argue for it. 7. This reasoning would suggest that the axial shifts cannot be regarded as secularizations either. For they indeed assumed a certain ‘retribalisation’ and blending of the primitively ‘compact’ with the imperially expansive, especially in what are really the paradigmatic cases of Greece and Israel. Meanwhile, in the case of India, one may detect in the long- term an influence of nomadic Indo-European elements, which may have influenced the lack of emergence there of a unified empire. And in the case of China one can note how Confucius came from a more provincial quarter, and how his qualification of the bureaucratic with the familial and so more interpersonal may be linked to this. Yet, far more emphatically, the axial moment in the West was long preceded, ever since the Bronze Age, by a novel blending of nomadic warrior cultures of the north with the settled imperial cultures of the Near East. In the case of Greece, the Oriental fertility cults of the Mother Goddess and her son as reflected in the personage of the king became merged with hyperborean, warlike and shamanic cults of more predominantly male and celestial deities: the Saturnian and the astral returned to consort with the sedentary obeisances to the moon and the sun. The political version of this fusion was the unique polis, or city-state, which merged a sacral temple focus with a military clan-gathering and encampment.85 In the case of Israel, the Oriental focus on the temple remained in tension with a more dispersed, pastoral and wandering focus on the domestic worship conducted by every patriarch. The political result was again a city-state with its circumambient rural commune.86 This tribalization brought with it not only a certain return, if now universalization and defetishization (all is now sacred, all can be exchanged) of the reciprocally face to face, but also some return of a more democratically and densely enchanted cosmos, even if this tended to become blended with the king-and-temple versions. Thus it is notable that Judaism, Neoplatonism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Chinese religion all tend to exhibit two versions of the axial split. According to one, mediation of the trans-cosmic is mainly psychic – since all are now accorded a privileged ‘royal’ personal access to the transcendent – and the cosmos is relatively desacralized (much Rabbinic Judaism, Plotinianism, various modes of ‘Augustinianism’, most Sunnism, Theravada, some modes of Confucianism). According to the other, both soul and

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cosmos are equally referred to a transcendent beyond, which is mediated to the soul partly by the cosmic, through a retaining of more rural, peasant-preserved pansacrality, fused with the more outward-orientated, cultic aspects of royalty (Kabbalah, theurgic Neoplatonism, most currents of Catholicism, Shi-ism and Sufism, Mahayana, Daoism). It is surely false and anachronistic to see the former variant as the ‘real’ one, destined inevitably to triumph in the end. Yet equally, the new stress on psychic ‘interiority’ cannot in itself be regarded as predominantly a secularization, because this was rather an intimation of a ‘beyond’ from which ensued at once cosmic order and the inner human imperative towards a right social and individual ordering. (As Voegelin pointed out, the degree zero of the purely psychic version is the various forms of ‘gnosticism’, for which the soul is dualistically sundered from a cosmos whose very existence is an affront to the true eternal order.)87 On Gauchet’s view one might be tempted to regard the Christian redefinition (by Tertullian) of the Roman religio, which probably meant the ‘re-reading’ (re-legere) crucial to the character of ritual tradition, as now ‘binding to the true God’ (re-ligio) as a secularization, since it seems to define ‘religion’ as a matter of belief apart from culture, in a way that is alien to almost all human societies.88 Yet in point of fact the Latin Christian grasp of ‘religion’ by no means abandoned the Roman ritual dimension (so that collective liturgy came to enjoy a much more important para-liturgical extension in the Christian West than in the Christian East)89 and tended to imply already that ‘other’ religious practices are false or distorted discernments of an ‘elsewhere’ that now only the ecclesia brings clearly into view. In one sense then, Christianity is the first and only ‘religion’, but in a second sense, it validly recognizes the ‘founded in an elsewhere’ dimension of all human cultures. In yet a third sense, as Giorgio Agamben has implied, one can objectively regard Christianity as ‘the most religious religion’ because, if every ‘religion’ links norms of action with the nature of reality, then Christianity takes this to an extreme degree by first identifying (in the wake of the Jewish philosopher Philo) metaphysically theoretical norms of being with politically active ones of governance of action at the very highest transcendent level (where many cultures leave this level as either unknown or depoliticized; not directly relevant to human society) and then seeking to reflect this dual normativity in a pattern of life that shatters any distance between norm and nature (by living according to the ‘naturalness’ of love).90 From this perspective Christianity offers not secularization (save of the political, which is in any case measured in its validity by its religious surpassing, according to Augustine)91 but rather a kind of immanent supernatural saturation. 8. For such an interpretation of Christianity, this religion is supremely a ‘picturesque’, mediating intellectual and social phenomenon. Yet it is this more catholic reading of the Christian religion that Gauchet adamantly opposes. To do so, he must in effect, in order to be a historian of religion, speak as if he were a theologian, even though he is an unbeliever. For he claims that Christianity happened, contingently, to be the religion that removed the sway of religion. To substantiate this claim he must give an interpretation of Christianity, indeed endeavour to circumscribe its ‘essence’. But the only way to perform this task is to measure Christianity’s diverse development against

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its origins and the deepest logic of those origins. This, of course, is also at the centre of the theological task, and it follows, in consequence, that Gauchet’s account may fall prey to rival theologies. So he is required to be a good ‘theologian’ if he is to be a good universal historian. Unfortunately, he is only good by the questionable canons of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. Thus, he considers that Christ’s salvific presence is something ‘past’ and ‘over’, which can in consequence only be reflected in the pious memory of individuals. The Church is merely the gathering together of individuals possessed by such a memory. For many centuries, thanks to contamination by the lingering residue of archaic religion, Roman Catholicism obfuscated these essential elements, but at the Reformation they emerged into full light. Yet a cursory reading of the New Testament makes it abundantly clear that Christ’s Incarnation involves the divine infusing of his body such that it ceases to be a merely ‘present’ body and becomes an utterly communicable body, co-extensive with all future time; Augustine’s Christus totius. Here the salvific event is the feeding of the Church with the Eucharist, which itself brings the Church into being. To be a Christian is to be a member of the body of Christ, which is to participate in the ecclesial community. No ‘essential’ individualism is concealed by this understanding, any more than, as Gauchet claims, the Incarnation secretly validates this world on its own terms. It is clear in this instance that, to the contrary, Jesus’s divinity assumes only in order to transform every aspect of our humanity, such that we are now to live always as sons in relation to the father, abandoning our ‘own’ space altogether. Nor, as Gauchet claims, is the need for Incarnation a proof that God cannot be analogically mediated. Here he speaks like an early twentieth-century ‘dialectical’ theologian, ignoring the fact that the Incarnation is not occasioned mainly by our ignorance, but rather by our contingent, self-induced blindness which has concealed the participatory ordering of the creation to its source. Only God, as the Logos according to the New Testament, can restore to us this ordering by living a human life: but it is this ordering which he restores, else the details of his life and the imperative to follow them would be of no relevance. Moreover, the ordering he shows us is a corporate ordering, a pattern of relating, which institutes the Church. What Gauchet neglects to emphasize is that the latter is the enterprise of a different sort of sociality to that of the state: an enterprise aimed at a consensual reconciliation through the subordination of the temporal to the eternal. There was never any refusal of the temporal involved here, as Gauchet imagines, and to suppose that ‘subordinated’ implies that this world is less valued by the Christian than by the atheist makes the assumption that this world is ‘more itself ’ when taken solely on its own terms. But for the Christian (or the Jew or Muslim) it would, of course, be less than itself. In Gauchet’s treatment of Christianity, his handling of the mediaeval era is crucial. This, as mentioned, is supposedly the time of catholic concealment of Christianity’s real essence. Thus sacral cosmology, analogical hierarchy and sacramental participation are all regarded as unstable ‘hybrids’ of archaic religion with a purified monotheism which would render God an utterly remote, unknowable and absolute power. (In actual fact later voluntarist theology makes God more ‘distant’ because

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this is the only way to preserve transcendence once God, after Duns Scotus, became more immanently understood as merely ‘a being’ in just the way that we are beings, and no longer as Being as such, for Aquinas’s version of monotheism, which one could argue was thereby at least as ‘pure’ and biblical.)92 Likewise, mediaeval villages and town guilds are regarded by Gauchet as unstable compromises between individualism and collectivism. But to speak of hybrid and compromise here is to assume that ‘the religious’ is antithetic to change and individual diversity because it is paradigmatically tribal rather than paradigmatically axial and synthesizing. All of the above points in this section and the previous one leave secularization as a contingent event in Western history – which has the initial advantage (lost to Gauchet) of not appearing to assume that all other cultures must regard the Western course as revealing the normative and inevitable ‘end of history’. (To nonetheless claim a variant of such a thing in theological terms is more honestly not to hide one’s values behind a supposed reading of the facts.)

2.5 Building on Charles Taylor This is why Charles Taylor has secularization basically right. To my sketch of the theoretical side of its contingency earlier in the chapter – the triumph of univocity and then nominalism – can be added Taylor’s account, in part derived from Ivan Illich, of the loss of the festive and para-ethical dimension of religion in favour of ethical discipline that degenerated into a purely pragmatic institutional one.93 This appeared to render religion at once superfluous (Why not just have the ethical?) and in addition sinister and authoritarian (Why not do all this in a gentler and humbler, merely ‘human’ mode?) What can perhaps be thought to link the two accounts is the history of the Franciscan order. For from this order is in large part derived the theoretical shifts which tended eventually to divide the sacred from the profane and (perhaps ironically) to desacralize the cosmos. But these are complementary to Franciscan shifts of ritual and ascetic practice which, beginning with Francis himself, sought mainly to imitate the perfection of Christ’s humanity, this being itself debatably defined in terms of a near-refusal of all human culture – of property, government and learning (especially in the extreme Spiritual Franciscan versions). In this way being a true Christian came to be understood as the imitatio Christi in a manner that tended to cut off the human material economy, the human political order and also everyday human living and rejoicing from sacral significance. (Francis tames birds in the wild, but was not a ploughman or a gardener – unlike either Adam or Jesus in his resurrected guise.)94 A division consequently resulted between ordinary fallen or even created nature on the one hand, and the realm of grace often curiously blended with a sheerly acultural nature on the other. Not just the extreme spiritual Franciscan Joachites, but even Bonaventure himself saw Francis as inaugurating a new, more spiritual era that had been foretold in the book of Revelation.95 So, on the one hand, Francis had stressed his almost literal copying of Christ’s humanity rather than (a necessarily more oblique and uncertain) participation through the humanity in his divinity, and, on the other

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hand, he was taken to have also interpreted this humanity (as humanity) as a kind of rarefied, more spiritual humanity, involving a direct and not participated apprehension of the divine presence. The very curious resonances of both Franciscanism and Joachimism with the phenomenon of Mohammed as a ‘prophet after Christ’ are clear, and may partially explain the greater affinity of Franciscan thought with Avicennian positions (that give the germ of the Scotist innovations) than is the case for that of the Dominicans. These points broadly concur with the general structure of Taylor’s argument (which perhaps owes something to Hegel’s ‘beautiful soul’) whereby a falsely pious elevation produces secularization as a negative dialectical effect. In the case of the influence of Francis, as again Voegelin argued, the implication of his ‘re-Nestorianisation’ of Christology (and Franciscan scholastic Christology certainly veers towards Nestorianism)96 is that the sacramental participation of the whole body of Christ (the Church) in Christ’s divinity, despite this body’s flaws, and indeed through their complex and slow healing, is now effectively denied. Voegelin is refreshingly non-superficial here – kingship and lordship and ploughing and trading may not look Christ-like, but then the true participatory imitation of Christ is a non-identical repetition just because it is a personal and not a mechanical or external one. One can conclude from this that the secularization of the West was not, initially, a subtractive release of the political into its inevitable true nature, as for Gauchet, but rather the result of a perverse and unique depoliticization, desocialization and deculturization of religion on the part of a confused current of Christianity. One can also argue that complete secularization is impossible, because of the way in which religion is required to ‘close the foundational gap’, as already argued. Thus with the recent collapse of quasi-religious ideologies capable (in part) of playing this role, has come some inevitable resurgence of an older pure religiosity in the public sphere. Moreover, one can suggest that the secularizing effect of over-idealized and moralized religion can also operate in reverse, and perhaps is bound, in due course, to so operate. For if, initially, the separation of religious ideals from the ordinarily liveable (as with the Franciscans) tends dialectically to drain material, customary, economic and political processes of their collectively thick ethical dimension, confining them to utility and instrumental calculation, after a while and unsurprisingly, idealism starts to be invested in this now secularized sphere itself, as with all liberal and then communist and fascist idealisms in the wake of Rousseau. This idealization of the secular can also have an unintended dialectical consequence in terms of a revivification of the religious as the more ineffable, atavistic and local. That is to say, once it becomes clear that secular ideals will not really work, people may fall back upon older pagan traditions and sometimes in an angry manner which renders these traditions more poisonously self-aware and intransigent. If this twofold compromising of the secular is inevitable, since the quasi-religious must arise to fulfil the essential culture-constituting function of the religious, then this would suggest that a post-secular dialectical oscillation between secularization and religious revival is actually inevitable and that no secular end of history will ever be reached.

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One can interpret the most striking example of current religious revival – Islamism – in precisely these terms. Overwhelmingly, as Elie Kedourie and others have shown, twentieth century British foreign policy in the Near East assumed that European social categories of economic class division applied in this area also.97 In consequence, they thought in terms of encouraging middle-class enterprise and mass democracy. Equivalently they assumed that as (so they thought) in Europe, there must be ‘natural’ national boundaries in this part of the world. Finally, they assumed that a wider cultural and ethnic identity must in reality be more primary than a religious one, and so they encouraged both pan-Arabism and the hegemony of Sunni Islam (for ironically the same reasons that they supported Zionism) on the false assumption that the latter was a kind of surrogate for a more basic Arabic ethno-cultural coherence. The result of this deluded policy in practice was arbitrarily to place in power certain corrupt local elites who dominated economic and political processes alike, since in Near Eastern terms ‘class’ follows more upon political position and economic from political privilege. No Western-style representative democracy could possibly ensue, while equally the promotion of pan-Arabism (also enabled over the long term, ever since the nineteenth century, by the increasing disaffection, much encouraged by the Russians, of Arab Orthodox Christians with the culpable disdain if the Greek orthodox)98 could only in reality mean the encouragement to Sunni Islam to begin an extirpation of all other Near Eastern religious groupings – Shi’ite, Jewish and Christian. The final and premature dismantling of both the Ottoman legacy and of British and French imperial overarching structures meant that whether at the national or the panArab level, the only source of political legitimacy was now religion, if it was not pure oligarchic secular dictatorship (to which oriential christians sometimes gravitated). Anger at the latter combined with a tacit, if unintended, encouragement of the former has resulted, as we now to our cost know, in an extensive politicization of Islam and the rise of more virulent and intolerant modes of Islamic practice. The current attempt by ISIS to erect a new, near-eastern caliphate is the latest outcome of our longterm folly. To refer both Illich and Kedourie to Debray’s thinking, one could say that where religion, through a false purism seeks ‘iconoclastically’ to deny its materially mediated character (‘mediation through the earth’) then a dogmatic and self-enclosed secularization can ensue in reaction. Inversely, where secularity denies all need for ineffable religious mediation (mediation ‘through the skies’) and seeks to substitute for this function through an idealization of secular processes (international government through national autonomy, human rights and the United Nations, for example) then a religious revival in a virulent guise can ensue. Perhaps one can also argue that Wahabi and other purist currents had already induced some secularizing reaction in the Near East, if only among elites and christians, and if only under Western influence. And then in addition that the operation of this first process has been ‘stalled’ by the operation of the second and opposite process. A premature imposition of sheerly immanent secularization in religious countries has promoted a violent reaction. From this perspective, a purified Sunnism would be a kind of synthesis of modernizing tendencies (iconoclasm) with anti-modernizing ones (religious dogmatism and denial of any secular sphere).

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The example of Islamism illustrates how the outcome of secularization has never, right up to the present day, gone uncontested. To the contrary, modern times (to pick up and extend Taylor) have seen a constant fourfold fight between: (1) a continued disenchanted monotheism which mechanizes the world, the market and the state (and sometimes in terms of reworked Oriental despotism) while offering private, familial and local religion both as ethical obedience for useful social discipline and affective consolation (today much of Sunnism, much of Pentecostalism etc.); (2) outright disenchanted immanentisim today exemplified by Darwinists, who in effect uphold ideologically the market-state; (3) exponents of various non-Christian perennialisms which tend, though not exclusively, to an enchanted immanence, after the example of Goethe; this group usually fails to have any clear social programme; (4) The dark Romantic version of this after Nietzsche, whose followers futilely wish to push modernity to new extremes in order to engender the post-human and (5) The current stemming from early Romanticism after Coleridge, Hamann, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel etc which seeks to restore a broadly catholic enchanted transcendence, but in a more pansacramental and perennialist guise. This broad group (including Ratzinger) have tended to offer the only serious critiques of political liberalism that are neither ultra-liberal (Marx) nor merely reactionary. The victory or loss, partial or total victory of any of these groups is neither guaranteed nor impossible. Equally secularization could be either confirmed or reversed – though currently it is being broadly confirmed by a hybrid Western-Eastern, neoliberal-Communist, charismatic-yogic blend. Secularization is a real fact (short of the rather comic appeals by some French and English empirical sociologists to the rise of ‘spirituality’ etc. which proves the fact all the more) but only ideologically can it be considered to be an inevitable one.

3 Beyond the secular 3.1 For a post-secular metahistory We have seen that there are powerful reasons to support Charles Taylor’s denial of the ‘subtraction’ theory which renders the secular a normative human deposit, merely overlain by religion which is that which needs to be explained. Instead, Taylor explains secularization itself as a contingent event in Western history. But this reversed priority of explanation requires an overall reversal of normativity, for it would seem that religion is therefore ‘the human usual’, harbouring no secreted non-religious kernel. It no longer requires any extra-religious explanation, since it tends to coincide with the cultural and the human, for reasons which we have seen. But thus to question the secular as normative and religion as explanationworthy is metacritically to demand an entirely inverted metahistory to that of the Enlightenment legacy. It is to suggest one for which religion itself is regarded as most disclosive of the human and cultural essence and then perhaps of transcendent, metaphysical reality.

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Post-Enlightenment metahistories took idealist or materialist forms. They either saw history as the outworking of a human or divinely immanent mind, or else as the outworking through human beings of material exigencies. Alternative, counterEnlightenment metahistories began, during the Enlightenment period, with Vico’s prodigious view that what is most characteristically human is not thought or technology, but rather myth and ritual – whose patterns and logics can vary between different civilizations. (And as already suggested, Hume may intimate something like this also – to some degree German Idealism actually resurrected a Baroque rationalism that the eighteenth century, as in Hume’s case, could be prone to question.) This perspective, sustained by Friedrich Schlegel in his catholic phase and to a degree by Schelling, is returned to by the catholic writers Christopher Dawson and Eric Voegelin in the twentieth century, much boosted by ethnographic researches. It suggests that human existence is rooted in something normative, which, though apparently invented by human beings, they nonetheless cannot fully get hold of.99 Linked to this originating contingency is the insistence of both writers that not every civilization must pass through the same logical or material processes. A covert methodological ethnocentrism is thereby removed from the metahistorical programme. The obscurely defining circumstance of ritual constitution can be historically suppressed in two ways: either by tribal dogmatism which tends blindly to rigidify specifically fetishistic modes of ritual and gift-exchange as unquestionably normative, or else by an excessive rationalism that tries fully to explain human foundations and to replace the paradoxical and religiously undergirded binding obligation to give, receive and return, with the apparently clear human liberty to form contracts and enter into agreements.100 I have already suggested how the axial can be understood as sustaining a non-obscuring poise in this respect. To proffer this reading is surely to exit from the strict canons of ‘social science’ towards those of the substantive philosophy of history – which turn out to be metacritically more rigorous. For how can one speak of a balance, unless in some sense one ascribes to the notion that myth and ritual truly do disclose a normative elsewhere, that cannot (as for philosophical Idealism) be rendered either fully immanent or fully comprehensible? The only third option here, apart from rationalist rejection of ritual foundations (which I have already argued is incoherent) is to embrace the post-human, or the idea that the entire human venture is indeed founded on untruth. This option can be as religious as it is irreligious and exhibit affinities to both Buddhism and Gnosticism. But to espouse the balance (the acme) may even be more Christian than it appears. For the balance between myth and reason involves also one between immanence and transcendence, time and the beyond-time, soul and cosmos, the theoretical and the practical, the retired and the civic life, nature and urbanity. I have already indicated why, in these respects, Greece and Israel appear more paradigmatically axial, with Christianity as their synthesizing heir. One can also now note how the metahistories of the Oriental and even the Islamic realms do not follow an equally post-axial pattern. They remain mainly pivoted on the archaic monarchic oscillation between in and out, belonging or not belonging to a state formation, with all class struggles and tensions

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between town and country being mediated through this matrix.101 The same applies to ideological struggles between ritual traditionalism on the one hand and corporate rationalization or else mystical individualism (or a combination of both) on the other.102 In the end, for the East, social conflicts tend to surface as factional ones, because factionality here is never merely superstructural.103 These remarks link back to my earlier invocation of Bellah’s endorsement of the view that the Greek polis uniquely was its citizens. For this circumstance gave rise to a different, ‘Polybian’ metahistory in which history really is more the history of class struggle, or of the groups of the one, the few and the many, which are social classes as much as, or before they are gradations of inherence in the state. Thus, beyond the Oriental oscillations between ruler and ruled, town and country, custom and reason, thriving and decadence, one has overlain here a specifically sociopolitical struggle between democratic, aristocratic and monarchic forces. Moreover, this struggle can be understood in non-Marxist or material terms which allow the integrity of theoria and its ritual interaction with corporeal concerns and interests. For, in line with Plato and Aristotle, besides Polybius, the desirability of the triumph of either the one, the few or many was viewed in relation to the relative distribution of virtue, while the cycles of their relative triumphs through time were understood in terms of the decadence and collapse that would follow upon an entire lack of the same. There is an arguable sense in which this Polybian scheme offers more possibility of sustainable balance than does Oriental metahistory (as both lived and narrated),104 since conflicts that are ultimately factional and to do with a struggle for state control by forces that are equally legitimate or illegitimate (equally may be either ‘in’ or ‘out’) and in this sense are finally ‘individualist’, admit of less resolution than those between social forces that can in theory be mediated, as Plato suggests in the Republic, in terms of an organic division of labour.105 Here the more relational perspective of the West, beyond an Oriental oscillation between single and collective bodies, offers a greater possibility of final pacification. Yet Western pagan authors were generally resigned to the fatal operation of the cycles. This was in part because they did not envisage any complete democratization of virtue, and so no perfect overcoming of the tensions between a basely desiring mass and a more aspiring minority. Here the Christian democratization of virtue as love, which is within the reach of all, offered a new conceivability of a stable acme, even if the educative and governing roles of the one and the few were still strongly advocated. Accordingly, a new possibility of history as stable progress in relational love – if, equally, of continuous disintegration and decline – was realized by Augustine and others. A continued decline (on account of our fallenness) would tend to catch us back within the Polybian cycles. Today it is mostly assumed that these have been instead escaped in a post-Christian, secular fashion, through the mechanisms of the free market and of civility, which keep perpetual peace through fear, desire and promise, rather than through any exercise of virtue. Yet, to the contrary, our economism

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looks, metahistorically, like a parody of the Christian rule – divine and human – through the economia of love, and was indeed encouraged originally by a Jansenist theology of extreme postlapsarian depravity which newly conceived of a providential and self-regulating order distilled from selfishness and vice, thereby bequeathing to all liberalism a hypocritical notion of private liberty and pleasure that must always both mask and serve an utterly impersonal and universally enslaving mechanism.106 And it is by no means clear that such a parody of divine government can in any way escape a purely pagan cyclical fate. Thus liberal and democratic excesses have once already led to a totalitarian reaction and today it looks as if they could easily do so again, albeit in new ways. For this reason, the liberal-secular ‘end of history’, or arrival at a sustainable and incremental plateau, seems implausible compared to the Christian version, which was comparatively more able to link individual intentionality to overall social order, by means of a transcendent ‘third’ in which both were held to participate, in line with the general religious logic of human culture as such. And the Christian version, by potentially stabilizing the Polybian cycles through the democratization of virtue, thereby augmented and consummated their already existing greater potential for incremental balance, as compared with the incessantly irresolvable agonisms of the Oriental axial variant, which equally and oppositely assumed the much greater impersonal stasis of a state tending to eminent domain and coincidence with its own ruled territory. One can add here that it may well be that the modern West has not merely parodied the Christian economia, but also ingested (largely from Islam) elements of the Oriental mega-state, besides Oriental and African slavery (this institution having lapsed during the medieval West) which later literally mutated (beyond Marx) and especially in the United States, into capitalist wage-slavery.107 In this fashion we now have one, doubly warped global metahistory: the degree of our stability is not, after all, that of liberal contract and the hidden hand, but is rather borrowed both from the Eastern state monolith and the Eastern reduction of social to factional (and now largely mediadriven) struggle. Equally, the West has loaned in seeming perpetuity its parodied economia to the East. Therefore one can conclude that: (1) To reject secularization as subtraction implies rejecting the secular metanarrative for a religious one, or else an anti-humanist one that may well be also religious. (2) Any metanarrative of axial normativity will tend to be Western and probably Christian, or else (which is perfectly justifiable in strictly objective terms) the affirmation of the axial becomes qualified. (3) Christianity uniquely offers the real possibility of a relative pacification of history and so of humanity even in the course of time. (4) It is now Christianity alone that can, against the diabolical Occidental-Oriental hybrid of late modern lived metahistory both revive the Western pagan Polybian metahistory of precarious balance and at the same time reach beyond it towards the possibility of a linear progress in love and relationality. The celebration of secularization as inevitability only exists to prevent us from seeing this real salvific chance.

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4 Conclusion 4.1 Christianity and liberty Equally, the celebration of secularization as emancipation and source of value only exists to prevent us from seeing how it is Christianity which supremely upholds both religious liberty and freedom as such. For it is not depoliticization in a Franciscan mode that is Christianity’s most authentic social achievement, but rather, as we saw in Section 2.1, an older attempted systematic subordination of both law and money to purposes of charitable association – an intensified repetition of the axial blending of the just and merciful with revived (‘tribal’) reciprocity. By endeavouring to make this free associating the multiple heart of the polity itself beyond itself, it is as if for Christendom the transcendent elsewhere is also here and now, in keeping with the logic of the Incarnation, also fully within our midst. The unprovable, uncertain and necessarily vague to which we must critically appeal and which we must constantly reinterpret is now also that which is most proximate to us as the Eucharistic and ecclesial body that should now compose even our most physical matrices. For this reason, we need today in Europe to embrace the idea that the best way to sustain religious liberty in the future is to sustain and further allow a certain primary ‘establishment’ (however legally and culturally realized) of Christianity that will shelter also the prerogatives of other post-axial – and therefore politically critical and freedom-promoting – religions which have always been present, or else have arrived from afar in our midst. For the ‘body of Christ’ is the very paradigm of a constitutive and constitutional liberty, both religious and political. It has transported through time the notion that religious liberty matters, because it brings into being a social realm above and beyond the purposes of the state, which nurtures that ‘free association’ which may evolve into civil society. At the same time, where such liberty is linked to theoria or the contemplation of the truth, it is pursued with a particular responsibility and seriousness. At its heart it sustains the equation, central to the Western legacy, that the truth is what freely discloses itself without need for forced pressure, while inversely freedom is only free when it sees the truth which ‘sets us free’, since it needs no auxiliary persuasion. By comparison, a rights-based, merely formalistic guarantee of religious freedom, on the Kantian model, will not in the long run sustain the liberty of non-Christian, besides Christian bodies and individuals. For one thing, it offers no criterion for distinguishing valid from invalid public and corporate religious expressions, whereas the substantive axial traditions, especially when informed by Western axiality, offer the criterion of ethical seriousness in pursuit of the truth, besides the coincidence of truth with goodness. (It scarcely need be said that the idea of protecting merely a private ‘right of belief ’ must severely inhibit all but the most minimalist religious practice. Today we see that, as such a criterion gets more seriously enforced, it is immediately experienced as intolerable persecution by religious bodies.)

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For another, the formal demand that religious liberty not impinge upon the liberty of others or upon public secular neutrality must progressively diminish allowance for visible or even traceable religious expression, such as the public use of religious symbols, the influence of adults upon children, or the elective religiosity of public educational and other bodies. It must also tend to deny that religious bodies have any power to impose on their members standards or prohibitions other than those sanctioned by law and the state. The same formality will indeed encourage ever more the attitude that what is not illegal should be permissively allowed, while equivalently all that is now deemed undesirable by a prevailing media consensus should be made illegal. It follows that, in the face of palpable contemporary threats to religious liberty, religious people would be unwise to appeal overhastily to offended ‘rights’. For by their very logic these will not in the end save their liberties. Instead, they should continue to promote the collective role of religious bodies in public life as the best guarantor of the freedoms of their individual members. And since, for reasons I have tried to indicate, it is the Christian Church which is above all the historical matrix of religious liberty, this consideration must apply most of all to the public role of the Church in historically Christian lands.

Notes 1 See, for example, James Noyes and Phillip Blond, Holistic Mission: Social Action and the Church of England (London: Resurgo/Respublica, 2013). 2 See John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 66–77. 3 This is why ‘anti-psychologism’ – or the separation of the reality of truth from mind or soul (something not envisaged by the ancients and the medievals) ironically reduces to that very naturalism which it seeks to resist. 4 Contra the fond imaginings of liberalism, the growth in state tyranny is demonstrably the direct result of the representatively democratic state and its agreement only to promote negative freedom, and not the result of a democratic or liberal deficit. 5 One can argue that this is also Aristotle’s view in the De Anima. 6 Jürgen Habermas, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, in Jürgen Habermas et al. (eds), An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Secular Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 15–23. 7 See Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: RKP, 2010); Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age [Order and History, Volume 4] (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1974). 8 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 9 See Tracey Rowland, Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2010). 10 Habermas, ‘An awareness of what is missing’, 22–3. For an earlier debate between Habermas and Ratzinger, see The Dialectics of Secularisation: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006).

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11 See Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People, 19–113. 12 See John Milbank, ‘The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi’, in J. Milbank, C. Pickstock and G. Ward (eds), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), 21–37 and John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). 13 Michael Reder, ‘How can Faith and Reason be distinguished? Remarks on Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion’, in Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing, 36–50. 14 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 15 See John Milbank, ‘Hume Versus Kant: Faith, Reason and Feeling.’ Modern Theology, 27, 2 (April 2011): 276–97. 16 Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2009). 17 For my own understanding of Kant at this point see John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–25. 18 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2009). 19 One wonders just how many more millions of people would need to be slaughtered before the average Guardian columnist would realize that their liberal remedies have long ago been tried and have always resulted in this bloody outcome. 20 Yet one may agree here with Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis’s Romantic modification of Goethe: their ‘lifting of the veil of Isis’. Just because there are hidden – and for them ultimately transcendent – powers behind nature, as not for the immanentist Goethe, an approach to the truth of nature may come about more through an interplay of inner and outwards – including experimentally scientific – apprehension of the physical world. 21 See Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 77–122. 22 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), III, XII, vi, p. 619 and pp. 618–621. 23 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (New York: Liberty Press, 1987), VII, VIII and XI, ‘Whether the British Government inclines more to absolute monarchy or to a republic’, ‘Of parties in general’ and ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, pp. 47–72. 24 Treatise, III, II, vii–x, pp. 534–67. 25 Treatise, III, II, v, pp. 524–5. 26 David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), passim. 27 For example, Lord Herbert of Cherbury is usually seen as the father of ‘deism’. This tends to imply an etiolated faith and a remote, minimal deity. Yet to the contrary Herbert was a man of fervent piety, rooted in a Neoplatonic and Hermetic tradition, while his relationship to Christianity remains hard for scholars precisely to discern. 28 See Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (Lafayette, LA: Cornerstone, 2006). 29 Author of the Religio Medici, Urne-Buriall, Garden of Cyrus and so forth.

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30 Ramsay combined an Origenist Christianity with Freemasonry and Jacobitism. See Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, Les principes philosophiques de al religion naturelle et révélée dévoilés selon le mode géométrique (Paris: Honoré Champio, 2002), and André Kervella, Le chevalier Ramsay: Une fierté ecossaise (Paris: Véga, 2009). 31 For a defence of Blake’s orthodoxy, see John Milbank, ‘The Ethics of Honour and the Possibility of Promise’. Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 82 (2008), issue on ‘Forgiveness’, 31–65. 32 See Alain Supiot, The Spirit of Philadelphia: Social Justice versus The Total Market (London: Verso, 2012). 33 See John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1979). 34 What follows in the main text is implicitly and sometimes explicitly a commentary on the late Robert N. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). This is a superb book, full of fine insights and attentive to the latest research and exact and telling detail, while not losing hold of a mostly plausible comparative perspective. I have learnt a huge amount from it, as will be clear, despite my several critical remarks to come. 35 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism’, in Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 163. 36 Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 567–606. 37 See, for example, Religion in Human Evolution, 272–3. 38 See Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 1–58. 39 The Ecumenic Age, 1–58. 40 One can indeed debate as to whether the Platonic and Aristotelian divine was truly supra-cosmic. Less clearly so, certainly, than the vision of Creation ex nihilo. Nevertheless, if the stars for them pertained to the heavens (as they still did to the created spiritual heavens for the Christian Middle Ages), the heavens still reached beyond the stars to a truly transcendent spiritual realm. 41 Religion in Human Evolution, 456–7. 42 See John Milbank, ‘The End of Dialogue’, in John Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 279–300. 43 Religion in Human Evolution, 265–398. 44 Marcel Gauchet, La Condition Politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 43–6, 9–204. 45 Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 21–97. 46 Gauchet, La Condition Politique, 50–7. 47 The Disenchantment of the World, 33–76; La Condition Politique, 45–89. 48 The Disenchantment of the World, 43–6. 49 Ibid., 76–207. 50 La Condition Politique, 42–3. 51 Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1997). 52 In terms of the history of ideas, the proto-Romantic ‘picturesque’ concerned a refusal of any absolute division between the sublime and the beautiful, such as eighteenth-century classicism had tended to espouse, and of which Kant’s account

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Radical Secularization? is but one variant. Imaginatively, one can think here of the experience of viewing a wild scene in the distance through a more ordered, domestic frame, with the aesthetic experience resulting from just this contrast and fusion. See Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Verso, 2004), 277–81; Le Feu sacré: Fonctions du religieux (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Camille Tarot, Le Symbolique et le sacré: theories de la religion (Paris: Découverte/MAUSS.: 2008), 98–116. Tarot’s monumental volume stands alongside that of Bellah as an unparalleled work of recent illumination of the study of religion. An enormous amount can be gleaned from it, even if in the end one dissents from his new Durkheimian-Girardian synthesis, whose elevation of sacrifice over gift renders him a somewhat aberrant member of the MAUSS group. One can also note how extraordinary it is that though both Bellah and Tarot share a Durkheimian perspective, the former cites scarcely a work in French, and the latter scarcely a work in English. A reading of both is for this reason a supremely valuable exercise. God: An Itinerary, passim. Tarot, Le Symbolique et le sacré, 135–42. On iconoclasm and terror, see James Noyes, The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence and the Culture of Image-Breaking in Christianity and Islam (London: IB Tauris, 2013). See Charles C. Mann, ‘The Birth of Religion: The World’s First Temple’ in National Geographic, June 2011, 39–59; A. M. Hocart, The Life-Giving Myth and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1970). Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). See also Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche (London: Verso, 2014). See Giorgio Agamben, The Open; Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1987), 232–50. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, xxi–xxii, 74–83, 587–90. For Aristotle in these respects see his De Anima. See Henri Hubert, Essay on Time: A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and Magic, trans. Robert Parkin and Jacqueline Redding (Oxford: Durkheim Press, 1999). See Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 206–7, 575–6. See Tarot, 813–16. Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein (New York: Zone, 1987); Archeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010). If, in reality, primitive religion as saturating ritual was always inconceivable without the chief-king figure, then this would lend weight to A. M. Hocart’s revised Frazerian contention that there is no evidence of any religion that does not in some way have to do with sacral kingship. It is extremely notable that both Tarot and Bellah emphasize this linkage to a great degree. Perhaps it is the only really valid generalization that the history of religions have brought to light. See A. M. Hocart, ‘The Origins of Monotheism’ in the The Life-Giving Myth, 66: ‘The earliest known religion is a belief in the divinity of kings’. Hocart is here referring to

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the historical record, with an implication that ethnography can never for provable certainty reveal anything about antiquity. Does he hint at the original primordiality of empire? In any case, his claim would hold if every sacral chief operated in some sense as a king – as a point of normative reference and as an upholder in some fashion or other of the tribal customs and shared imperatives. 67 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 357–61. Deleuze and Guattari also stress, in the wake of Clastres, that tribal society sustained itself in isolation in the face of the state through a constant state of war – both internecine, in a fashion that ensured constantly renewed segmentation (following Clastres), and against the state or the proto-state itself. Thus ‘societies without the state’ were very far from being idyllically peaceful, and evidence suggests that their rates of internal homicide was also high. All this might imply that a Hobbesian thesis needs to be moved forward one notch: political government is not a remedy for natural violence and anarchy, but for cultural violence and anarchy. But neither is political government a remedy for religious violence and anarchy, even though all cultures are religious, because the political remedy is also a reworking, and arguably an intensification of the religious impulse. See also Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilisation: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 68 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). 69 In his work on magic Mauss seems to embrace something like Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of a different primitive logic of participation. When he later criticizes his anthropological colleague he significantly oscillated between attacking the idea of a primitive logic of participation and a primitive experience of the same, and later seems himself to embrace the latter, with respect to the hau. Lévi-Strauss’s later criticisms of Mauss in effect echo Mauss’s own criticisms of Lévy-Bruhl, and call attention to this same oscillation in his own work. Lévi-Strauss opts for the side of ‘logic’, though he suggests that ‘the savage mind’ operated according to the same logical constraints as ours. However, insofar as he also thought that this mind applies this logic in an inverse fashion to ours, by classifying the domestic or cultural in terms of the wild or natural, and in such a fashion that knows no clear culture-nature divide, it is not so clear that Lévi-Strauss has escaped the idea of ‘primitive mentality’. Nor of a problematic oscillation: Is ‘the savage mind’ the result of a different experience, or a different way of thinking? But the solution here (escaping Lévi-Strauss’s refusal to see religion as of any great import) is surely to see that horizontal participation was also a vertical one and that the ‘confusion’ of subject and object applied equally to both logic and experience, since the world was both received and understood as sharing in a transcendent donating source of both things and people. Therefore one can argue that all three thinkers in differing degrees played down the religious dimension and accordingly failed to see a basic continuity between primitive mentality and most ways of thinking before the onset of modernity in the Western later Middle Ages. See Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (London: RKP, 2001), 120–50. Mauss, The Gift, 104n54. (Note that the index to this edition confuses Lucien with Henri) Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres, vol. 2, ed. V. Karady (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 125–31; vol. 3, 560–5. Lucien Lèvy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, trans. P. Rivière (New York: Macmillan, 1923). The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, trans. P. Rivière (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).

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69 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), III, 45–67. 70 Mauss, The Gift, 16–17: ‘it is they [the spirits of the dead and the gods] who are the true owners of the things and possessions of this world’. 71 See Jacques Godbout, Ce qui Circule entre Nous: Donner, Recevoir, Rendre (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 162–73; Alain Caillé, Anthropologie de Don: Le Tiers Paradigme (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), 93–120, 131. 72 The acronym, besides invoking the eponymous inspirer, stands for the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste des Sciences Sociales. 73 Caillé, Anthropologie du Don, 123–81. 74 Tarot, 631–41. 75 Marcel Hénaff, Le Prix de la Vérité: le don, l’argent, la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 209–68. 76 Tarot, 857–67. 77 See Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic; On Prayer, trans. Susan Leslie (New York: Berghahn, 2003). 78 Bellah, 146–74. 79 I am indebted here to correspondence with David Bentley Hart. See also Winifred Corduan, In the Beginning God: A Fresh Look at the Case for Original Monotheism (Nashville, TN: Academic, 2013). For the African evidence see Basile Kligueh, ‘Le Dieu de L’ Afrique’ in Histoire de Dieu, ed. Marcel Ruby (Paris: Rocher, 2002), 91–120. 80 Gauchet, La Condition Politique, 50–7. 81 Bellah, 210–64. 82 See John Milbank, ‘History of the One God’, in The Heythrop Journal (October, 1997), 371–400. 83 Charles Taylor, ‘Foreword’ to Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, ix–xv. 84 Giambattista Vico, New Science, §§1097–1112; Eric Voegelin, ‘Giambattista Vico – La Scienza Nuova’ in History of Political Ideas, Vol VI, Revolution and the New Science (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 82–148, esp. 123. 85 For all this European prehistory, see Christopher Dawson, The Age of the Gods: A Study in the Origins of Culture in Prehistoric Europe and the Ancient East (London: Sheed and Ward, 1933), 311–84. 86 For the temple aspect see Margaret Barker, The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple of Jerusalem (Sheffield: Phoenix, 2008). 87 Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism. 88 Tarot, 130–5. 89 See Maurice Sachot, L’Invention du Christ: Genèse d’une religion (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2011), 167–225. 90 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenza Chiesa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Opus Dei: Archéologie de l’office, trans. Martin Rueff (Paris: Seuil, 2012); The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Forms of Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 91 Augustine City of God, Book XIX. 92 See Section I of the current article. 93 See John Milbank, ‘A Closer Walk on the Wild Side’, in Michael Warner et al. (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 54–82.

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94 See Eric Voegelin, ‘Saint Francis’, in History of Political Ideas Vol II: The Middle Ages to Aquinas, B. 8 (Columbia: Missouri University Press, 1997), 133–43. 95 See Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes O.F.M. (Chicago: Franciscan Press, 1971). 96 See Aaron Riches, Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014). 97 Elie Kedourie, ‘The Chatham House Version’, in Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), 351–94. 98 Kedourie, ‘Religion and Politics’, in The Chatham House Version, 317–342. Kedourie’s evidence suggests the astonishing degree to which the dysfunctional division of Eastern Orthodoxy may have precipitated the current Islamic revival – vastly more now in evidence than when he wrote. 99 Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Inquiry (Washington, DC: CUA Press: 2001); Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987). ‘New Science’ would seem deliberately to echo Vico’s Scienza Nuova. 100 For the best account of the paradoxes of gift-exchange, see Alain Caillé, Anthropologie du don. 101 A sense of ‘nation’ apart from state-construction is also weaker in the Orient. This is partly why China today finds it hard to risk democracy: it fears that the losers in an election would not feel that the government was ‘their’ government. 102 Even though the Oriental development of the person as ‘character’ has been weaker than in the West, this is the result of a certain individualism for which status tends to be arbitrary (as state-granted) and in dialectical or collusive oscillation with an equally prevalent collectivism. Western personalism arises not from outright individualism but from a historically prevalent relationalism and organicism. 103 Of course I plead guilty to every ‘orientalism’ in the book. I am simply not convinced that many very careful scholars were merely offering caricatures. 104 My perspective assumes that lived history is also a perception of the past and therefore itself a continuous narration and writing of history, while inversely every written history is always in itself a new historical action in the present. 105 I am indebted to the reflections of my son, Sebastian Milbank here. 106 See Serge Latouche, L’Invention de l’économie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 139–52; Simone Meyssonnier, La Balance et l’Horloge; La Genèse de la pensée libérale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Les Editions de la Passion, 1989), 35–51. 107 Again I am indebted for these insights to Sebastian Milbank.

8

Beyond Radical Secularization and Radical Orthodoxy? Guido Vanheeswijck

Belief in God isn’t quite the same thing in 1500 and 2000. I am not referring to the fact that even orthodox Christianity has undergone important changes. Even in regard to identical credal propositions, there is an important difference. (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 13) In many ways one could attach the label ‘radical orthodox’ to Taylor with more justification than to those, including myself, who have traded intellectually under this logo. (John Milbank, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 55) Charles Taylor can be read as arguing that only a good secularist can be a good Christian, and only a Christian can be a good secularist. (Eduardo Mendieta, Spiritual Politics and Post-Secular Authenticity, 308) Traditionally religion and secularization have been strongly opposed to each other. Not only from a historical perspective – first there was religion, then came secularization – but also from an ideological angle, both were generally presented as antipodes. Recently, however, a remarkable change – particularly in sociological and philosophical circles – has taken place. Instead of highlighting the contrast, many scholars now emphasize the intimate relation between religion and secularization and, in particular, between Christianity and secularization. They claim that secularization is a typically Western and originally even an exclusively Western European phenomenon, confined to those countries in which the contrast between Protestant Reformation and Catholic CounterReformation has gained momentum. These scholars include a lot of famous names of philosophers and sociologists alike all over the world. It was then no surprise that, on 19 January 1999, the Collège de Philosophie of the Sorbonne University invited two famous scholars, Luc Ferry and Marcel Gauchet, for a debate on the status of the ‘religious after religion’ in a secular society.1 They both agreed that, although the political and institutional impact of Christian religion has definitely disappeared in Western Europe, the phenomenon of the religious as

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related to the human quest for meaning and meaningfulness still plays a central role in our current societies and in contemporary Western philosophy and sociology. But they disagreed on the specific relation between Christian religion and modern philosophy. According to Ferry, modern philosophy is nothing but a rational translation in a secular terminology of the religious stories of Christianity. In a similar fashion, he did not consider the Declaration of Human Rights as the discovery of completely new values and of a new morality in eighteenth-century Europe, but rather as a secularized form of traditional Christian values (Ferry and Gauchet 2004, 32–3). Gauchet made a proviso pertaining to this interpretation. In his view, it would be more accurate to see modern philosophies in general and modern secularization in particular as the outcome of catholic heresies. In order to underpin that interpretation, he referred to a (largely forgotten) book of Henri de Lubac on the spiritual and philosophical heritage of Joachim of Flore, La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (Ferry and Gauchet 2004, 123). If Gauchet’s view on secularization – as the (un)intended result of catholic heresies – is correct, it may be obvious that such an analysis has decisive repercussions for the understanding of our current predicament. In this chapter, I would like to elaborate these repercussions in five sections. First, I intend to show that Gauchet’s position is strengthened by interpretations as divergent as those of Löwith, de Lubac (stressing Joachite millenarism) or of Blumenberg and Ratzinger (stressing nominalist voluntarism). Second, I confront Gauchet’s interpretation of secularization with that of Charles Taylor’s, focusing upon the question how to assess the specific roles of Reformation and Incarnation within the process of secularization. Although they both underline their decisive role in the rise of a secular age, their interpretations are, if not opposite, strongly divergent. If the process of secularization is not radical and Reformation’s role is rather contingent, as Taylor believes, do we then, in order to understand the contemporary predicament of Christian religion, have to resort to the radical orthodox position of Catholicism, intimately related to onto-theological metaphysics? The third section is devoted to Charles Taylor’s and Leszek Kolakowski’s positions regarding this question. In the fourth section, I oppose Taylor’s negative answer to this question with that of Brad Gregory’s. The final section is devoted to the role of hermeneutics and in particular to that of subtler languages so as to elucidate the quintessential specificity of Christianity amidst the ‘super nova’ effects of our secular age.

1 Modern philosophy: Secularized Christianity or secularized heresy? Traditionally, the names of Joachim of Fiore and William of Ockham are related to the growth of secularization within the womb of orthodox tradition. It was first Karl Löwith (Löwith 1949) and later Henri de Lubac (De Lubac 1978) who portrayed Joachim of

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Fiore, the Calabrian monk from the twelfth century, as a key figure in the transition from an eschatological belief towards a secular belief in progress. Indeed, Joachim was the very first in Western history to emphasize how eschatology is incarnated within history, thereby unwittingly giving the impetus to the breakthrough of modern belief in progress. Actually, he distinguished three different realms or dispensations within human history: that of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It was already in the dispensation of the Spirit – of which Joachim thought that it had started in his own era – that he believed that the eschatological belief would find its historical consummation. In that respect, Karl Löwith speaks in Meaning in History of a double eschaton: Joachim’s eschatological scheme consists neither in a simple millennium nor in the mere expectation of the end of the World but in a twofold eschaton: an ultimate historical phase of the history of salvation, preceding the transcendent eschaton of the new aeon, ushered in by the second coming of Christ. (Löwith 1949, 151)

Additionally, the two authors underline that the deeply religious monk could not have foreseen the long-term consequences of his revolutionary ideas upon Western culture, that is, opening the way to an ever increasing secularization in Western modernity.2 Even more explicitly than Löwith, de Lubac, influenced by Ratzinger’s theological writings on Bonaventura, stresses the heretic character of Fiore’s undertaking. De Lubac and Ratzinger alike emphasize that, although the Fraticelli and the more strict movements within the Franciscan order were persistently inspired by Joachim’s eschatological expectations, there remained a basic difference between the views of Bonaventura – the superior general of the Franciscans – and Joachim’s (cf. Löwith 1949, 146). Following the example of Francis, Bonaventura granted a central place to the figure of Jesus, whereas in Joachim’s view the era of the Son only found its consummation in the era of the Holy Spirit. While Bonaventura’s ‘christocentric’ interpretation became the Church’s orthodox position, Joachim’s ‘pneumatocentric’ reading was rejected as heretic.3 Another source of secularization within the womb of orthodox tradition is that of the late medieval nominalist philosophy and theology. According to Hans Blumenberg, the influence of nominalism has initially led to the view of God as the totally Other, and in the long run, to the view of a world without God, the world as an ‘immanent frame’ (Blumenberg 1966). Therefore, Blumenberg, unlike Löwith, does not regard modern belief in progress as a secularized form of belief in a transcendent ultimate goal, but rather as the answer of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanity to the gradual modifications in the nominalist interpretation of the view of God which have occurred during the late Middle Ages. The nominalist view of an almighty, fully transcendent God whom we cannot know, who is at any moment able to change the natural laws, whose traces in the operation of nature are no longer recognizable and who therefore operates as a ‘deus absconditus’, makes human confidence in an order established by God almost impossible and incredible. Because man can no longer rely on God and his order, he has no other

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alternative than to take his fate in his own hands so as to survive in an indifferent universe. In short, the aspiration for progress of modern humanity must be read as an answer to the provocative view of a basically unfathomable God, inherent in late medieval theological absolutism. The restless activism of modern Western man and his rampant urge for progress have, according to Blumenberg, arisen from a deep loneliness of man, completely abandoned by God and therefore left to his own fate.4 Blumenberg is equally sensitive to the unintended impact of nominalism. He underlines how Ockham’s deathblow to realism was originally due to his intention to rescue belief. The acute awareness that we do not fully understand or know what we believe is precisely what reinforced our belief ’s purity. In fact, nominalism confirmed simultaneously three theses: God’s incomprehensible, mysterious greatness, man’s vulnerability and the world’s unpredictable capriciousness. But – and this is the heart of Blumenberg’s alternative thesis of secularization – Occam’s razor has a double edge. Due to the Almighty God’s unattainability, humanity is left alone in the world and is forced to protect itself against the surrounding, often threatening world. Whereas at the outset, God’s mystery (‘Deus absconditus’) was the symbol of his absolute omnipotence, it gradually becomes an alibi for humanity to devote its full attention to an enquiry into nature. Humanity sees itself as given the task of creating a world in which it feels at home. The three central tenets of nominalism have been gradually modified in the process of transition to modernity. Humanity, initially powerless, makes itself, out of bitter necessity, into an autonomous agent and researcher. The elusive world, full of unpredictable capriciousness, is progressively subsumed under natural laws, construed by humanity and becomes more and more mechanized. And the Almighty God who is first presented as a master-designer, later as a creator with his back to his creation (‘deism’), in the end finally disappears: a mechanized world no longer needs the hypothesis of a creating god. Obviously, nominalist voluntarism has been considered as heretic as well. On 12 September 2006, Joseph Ratzinger, then Pope Benedict XVI, gave his famous lecture at the University of Regensburg. Whereas the media were focusing upon a controversial statement regarding the Islam, the Pope’s central message was a critique of contemporary rationality and particularly of the nominalist influence in the passage from Greek to modern rationality.5

2 Secularization: Radical or not? Given that orthodox heresies as Joachite millenarism and nominalism have played a decisive, albeit unintended role in the process towards secularization, the question arises whether that evolution has a logical or a contingent character. In order to answer that question, I confront Gauchet’s genealogical interpretation of secularization (Gauchet 1985) with that of Taylor’s (Taylor 2007).6 Gauchet defines The Disenchantment of the World as an example of a ‘transcendental socio-anthropology’. However, the transcendental impetus of his endeavour is nuanced

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from the outset by Gauchet’s repeated emphasis on the historical interaction between logic and contingency, between the transcendental structure and the vicissitudes of history. Every historical situation contains a limited set of possible historical developments. It is up to history’s contingency to determine what possibilities will eventually prevail. Gauchet’s historical approach can therefore be characterized as ‘transcendental a posteriori’. Nonetheless, his ‘transcendental a posteriori’ method seems to hide a stricter ‘transcendental a priori’ scheme.7 More precisely, the rift between the transcendent or invisible and the immanent or visible serves as such a transcendental a priori scheme. This scheme then recurs in history according to two general dynamic patterns. The first dynamic is to try to overcome the rift between the visible and invisible. A variant of this first dynamic can be found in Eastern religions in and after the Axial Age: they recognize the duality of reality, for example, the gulf between ‘appearance’ and ‘real being’, but try to overcome it. The second dynamic of the transcendental schema consists in widening the gap. This turns out to be the dominant path in the West. For Gauchet, this second dynamic of the transcendental scheme leads to a ‘recalcitrant logic’ in the Western history of religion. This history unfolds from the stage of pure religion, denying any spatial separation between a transcendent and immanent level, towards the exit from religion, as the consequence of a gradual deepening of the spatial rift between immanence and transcendence ending in a purely immanent world. Notwithstanding his repeated emphasis on history’s contingency, Gauchet claims that, in the West, the dynamics of transcendence – provoked in the Axial Age – have ‘inexorably’ led to the vanishing of transcendence at the level of societal organization. It was precisely this disappearance of transcendence which gave Western modernity its specific form. Taylor’s writings also reflect an interplay between transcendental logic and historical contingency. But they do not show a clear demarcation between transcendental schemes and historical vicissitudes. According to Taylor, transcendental schemes are also fundamentally prone to historical change (Taylor 1995, 20–33). In this context, Taylor distinguishes between what he calls a ‘linear master narrative’ and his own ‘reform master narrative’, two divergent stories to frame the genesis of secularization. The predominant linear story relates how modernity should naturally result in secularization. As an explanation, one points to a direct causal line which runs from modern revolutions to the decline of religious customs, or from the rise of science to the disappearance of transcendence. Taylor’s alternative account, by contrast, focuses more on the multiplicity of aspects involved and the capricious pathways which eventually lead to the current philosophical and religious differentiations we now assemble under the flag of ‘secularization’. Of course, Gauchet does not tell a linear story either. He also pays attention to the important diversity of philosophical, cultural and social vectors leading to Western modernity. But with Gauchet, this development is defined more strictly in terms of a logical essence. Historical change may run in any direction, but remains captured within the scheme ‘transcendent-immanent’. Though Taylor also bespeaks a kind of logic in his ‘reform master narrative’, he refuses to reduce the history of religion to

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the ‘transcendent-immanent’ scheme. What are the repercussions of this difference for understanding the status of secularization? Put differently, is secularization radical and irreversible or not? Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor attach only relative importance to nominalism and its theological offspring, Protestant Reformation, since both authors consider it to be only one specific phase in the larger movement from the axial religions to modernity. The Reformation is in Gauchet’s view a historical stage in the inner dynamics of transcendence, which starts off in the Axial Period, continues in Christianity and then takes the specific forms of Protestantism. Taylor, unlike Gauchet, refuses to place the Reformation within an essentialist logic of transcendence. But just like Gauchet, he sees the Reformation as part of a broad historical movement of reform, which is inaugurated in the Axial Period, but only really breaks through from the eleventh century onwards, taking full force with and after the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. As a result, society gets increasingly caught up in a rage for order and discipline. So whereas Gauchet sees the Protestant Reformation as the embodiment of one logical possibility of the dynamics of transcendence, namely, an extreme ontological separation between the human and the divine level, Taylor focuses more on the practical consequences of the large historical movement of reform. Gauchet believes that the dynamics of transcendence gradually leads to so large a rift between divine and immanent reality that divine involvement with the political and social level is rendered superfluous. As transcendence deepens, divine reality is increasingly seen as the ‘Ineffable Other’. This evolution was further strengthened in late medieval nominalism and Protestantism (Gauchet 1985, 133–4). Gauchet situates the meaning of Incarnation in Christianity against this backdrop. Because God has become the ineffable Other, all kinds of mediation arise to close the widening gulf between this world and the hidden God, the Deus absconditus. Christ mediates the tension between transcendence and immanence in that He incarnates the presence of God in the visible, immanent world: The true originality of the relation to the world established by Christianity lay in this axiomatized ambiguity, which was a direct refraction of the union of two natures in Christ. It made the Christian into a being torn between a duty of belonging and of distancing, between forming an alliance with the world and being estranged from it. (Gauchet 1985, 131)

Christianity then developed two variants revolving around this ‘axiomatized ambiguity’. The orthodox catholic variant stresses the intimate connection between the transcendent and immanent pole, whereas the ‘Protestant’ variant emphasizes the distance between the two poles: Not only do faith’s official expressions represent only one aspect of western religion, they are the heritage, especially in Catholicism, of its conservative side, of its long-term attempt to contain divine exteriority within extremely narrowly

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defined limits. But transcendent religion’s basic characteristic is to be found rather in its innovative attempt to provide increasingly sophisticated versions of God’s difference and to display their consequences. The reality of the process initiated by the advent of the Christian concept of the deity should not be sought in something that appeals to an explicit continuity with tradition. We must rather look for it in what broke with institutional repression in the Church – that is, the reformation – in response to the structural split contained in the notion of a unique creator god. This response became autonomous in the guise of rational divine purposes accessible to the human subject, and finally attained such self-sufficiency that it could do away with any reference to God. (Gauchet 1985, 61; italics mine)

In Gauchet’s view, the Protestant Reformation played a key role in the transition from a religious society to a disenchanted world. As Protestantism highlighted at the same time both human subjectivity and humanity’s dependence on an unknowable God, thereby increasing the distance from God, it unintentionally proved the impossibility of reconciling both poles: It marked a decisive change by making the logic of otherness explicit, which would in turn make the compromise increasingly difficult, and eventually, impossible to maintain. (Gauchet 1985, 211, footnote 12; italics mine)

Catholicism tried to turn back this ‘logic of otherness’ by its relentless quest for all kinds of mediation, for instance during the Counter-Reformation. The Reformation by contrast deepened otherness by dismissing any form of mediation between God and man. The gap between the ‘visible’ and the ‘invisible’ widens. The visible can no longer be considered as the palpable expression of God (Gauchet 1985, 61, 78, 211; footnote 12). In line with Blumenberg, and because of the deepening of transcendence, Gauchet regards late medieval nominalism as an important breakthrough in the historical evolution of, and out of, religion, since it broke the traditional bonds between Greek philosophy and Christianity (Gauchet 1985, 144–51, especially 150–1). The deepening of transcendence also explains why ‘disenchantment’ manifested itself first in Calvinist countries, and only later in catholic countries. Gauchet’s original way of thinking is to be located exactly at this point. Mainstream theories of secularization state that modernity came about as a reaction against religion, whereas Gauchet argues that modernity is the product of religion itself, and more specifically of the religious ‘logic of otherness’: So powerful is this process in laying foundations that we can say there is at least as much, if not more, religious inspiration behind what has flourished since the sixteenth century outside established dogma, than in what has been preserved inside it. This, in any case, brings us nearer to the full truth of transcendence understood as a dynamic process with an in-built capacity to unfold beyond its rigid doctrinal formulation. In other words, religious history extends beyond a narrowly conceived history of religion. (Gauchet 1985, 61–2)

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This dynamic process of transcendence gradually dissolved the tension between higher (‘the beyond’ or l’au-delà) and lower (‘the here-now’ or l’ici-bas) reality, at least at a social and political level. When this happens irreversibly, society is disentangled from the religious domain. Gauchet leaves open the possibility for religious openness to transcendence at a personal level, but even on that level, the tension between ‘the beyond’ and ‘the here-now’ will fade. Contemporary individuals are, rather, subject to another tension, the tension between the visible and invisible within the individual person herself. As an individual person, the human being remains open to the invisible. However, the concrete embodiment of this openness no longer has to refer to a religious form of transcendence, to a source external to the human being, but nowadays predominantly refers to what is sometimes called ‘immanent’ transcendence (Gauchet 1985, 200–7).8 In that sense, secularization has become radical. By contrast, Taylor notes that Christianity’s specificity resides in the continuous effort to live within the tension between the transcendent (‘the beyond’) and the immanent (‘the here-now’). Paradoxically enough the Protestant Reformation – and in its wake, the Catholic Counter-Reformation – annulled this tension in an attempt to model individuals into perfect Christians. At odds with the initial and traditional sensitivity to a diversity of ways of dealing with the relation to the divine, for example, by the medieval model of complementarity between so-called religious virtuosi and lay people’s profane way of life, Protestantism aimed at a perfect Christian way of life for everyone. To comply with this ideal, Protestantism greatly increased the disciplinary orientation of society, which had been inaugurated by Gregorian reform. This very intensive disciplining of society eventually led to the dissolution of the tension between transcendence and immanence, and hence to the exit from religion, against the initial intention of Protestant reforms (Taylor 2007, 85–8, 156, 243–4). Taylor also holds to a different interpretation of the meaning of Incarnation. Incarnation should not primarily be seen as an attempt to draw closer the gap with the ineffable Other, but as an expression of God’s vulnerable love, pre-eminently manifested in the figure of Jesus Christ. Hence Taylor never develops a religious ‘logic of otherness’. Taylor identifies God, from the axial religions onwards, with a benign force, which in Christianity expresses itself as a vulnerable love through Jesus Christ and which calls the human being into a new way of life ‘beyond flourishing’, in short, which calls for a transformation of ordinary life and thus for conversion. However, such an ideal is hard to live up to. Endemic to (axial) religion and specific to Christianity is the awareness that humans always fail in their attempts to give shape to their faith. Modern forms of Christianity pre-eminently endeavoured to amend this human failure: both Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation testify in Taylor’s view to the same drive for reform. But oddly enough, this very rigorous execution of all kinds of disciplinary measures in order to shape the Christian to the mould of flawless perfection gradually obscured and hollowed out the meaning of the divine love of Incarnation: The two orders in which the Christian lived, the City of God and the earthly city, to use Augustine’s expression, could never be totally in true with each other. There

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were strains. . . . Within the then-regnant outlook there was no totally comfortable way of smoothly combining the demands of the two orders. . . . A central part of my story is the way in which the drive to Reform tended to bring these demands closer to each other. The distance between the ultimate City of God and the properly Christian-conforming earthly one has to be reduced. If one carries this rapprochement of the two orders to its ultimate end point, one falls into a kind of Deism, in which the Incarnation loses its significance. Jesus becomes a great teacher expounding the demands of God, and what these demands consist in is a morality which allows us to live here in peace and harmony, a version in other words of the modern moral order. The whole point of true religion is to propound this morality; this sets the limits of the transformation we are called to. The ‘next world’ now has a different function, not to complete a path of ‘theiosis’ begun here, but to provide rewards and punishments which fulfil the demands of justice on our actions in history. The tension between the two orders quite disappears. My claim was that, although few went on to this logical conclusion, and orthodox Christianity maintained the understanding of two non-coincident orders, nevertheless mainline Christianity in the West was deeply affected by this narrowing of the gap, especially but certainly not only in Protestant societies. (Taylor 2007, 735–7)9

So Catholicism augmented, way before the Protestant Reformation, its criticism of black magic and enforced its rigour in sacramental matters, for instance with Gregorian reform, followed by the establishment of personal confession at the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215. Taylor thus shows how different disciplinary attempts at amending religious doctrine and practice, in Catholicism and after the Reformation, have, at least within Western Christianity, oddly enough led to the erosion of a ‘loving transcendence’, to the gradual loss of the transformative power of religious belief and eventually to the utter dominance of exclusive humanism. In Taylor’s view, the collapse of orthodox Christianity is due to a contingent evolution rather than to a ‘logical’ operation of the dynamic of transcendence. This ‘radical insistence on the historical rule of contingency’ (Milbank 2010, 81) entails at once the recognition of secularization as a sociological phenomenon and the rejection of radical secularization as being irreversible.

3 Radical orthodoxy and metaphysical horror If the phenomenon of secularization is not as radical as often suggested, if its rise is dependent on contingent factors, among which ‘much Church practice and teaching’ (Milbank 2010, 55), must we then, in order to understand the quintessence of Christian religion, return to a ‘radical orthodoxy’, strongly related to classic metaphysics? That seems to be Ratzinger’s position in the last parts of his Regensburg lecture, presented as an antidote to the one-sidedness of modern reason and modern philosophy:

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In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was an initial inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not simply false, but it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.10

Obviously, since Christianity has been strongly related to Greek philosophy from its earliest days, the contemporary debate does not turn around the issue of whether or not Christianity is intertwined with Greek heritage; the main topic is how to convert parts of the Greek heritage into an idiom which might be understandable to Christians today.11 In that context, many authors have been focusing upon an ethical change in understanding the relation between God and man since the era which was coined by Jaspers as the ‘Axial Period’ (Jaspers 1949). That change was double. Whereas the gods in primitive religion often adopted an ambivalent stance towards humans, the higher powers of the axial religions unambiguously supported human welfare and foster human flourishing. And whereas human fulfilment in the pre-axial religions was invariably connected to merely human flourishing, the axial religions inaugurated the conception of a higher good or deeper meaning beyond the prerequisites of flourishing (health, welfare). This deeper good sometimes even thwarted the ‘lower’ ones, requiring an ethical transformation of the person (Taylor 2011, 367–79). This double change in understanding the relation between God and man is equally found in both the Platonic metaphysical tradition and the Bible: the highest idea is equivalent to the Good and the search for the Good often demands an ethical transformation beyond the prerequisites of human flourishing. However, the problems arise when this view of the Good is transformed into philosophical concepts: The idea of intrinsic goodness, not unlike many other crucial concepts in philosophy, may be made intelligible by its hypothetical mythological origin. The gods in various mythologies are not necessarily good either in the sense of being kind and helpful to people or that of providing us with models of moral conduct; some are, some are not, and many display both good and evil sides in their adventures. But good in mythologies seems to be invariably linked with peace and harmony, evil with war, chaos and destruction. Once the myths are sublimated into metaphysical speculation, these elementary insights naturally tend to achieve a complete conceptual consistency: if good equals peace and harmony, perfect good equals perfect peace and harmony, and this means the perfect absence of tension,

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and thus, ultimately, absolute undifferentiation and immobility, or One. The more unity, the more goodness – this is Proclus’ and the Platonists’ unquestionable axiom. And so, when the good reaches the point of completeness, it loses any recognizable quality of goodness; by achieving perfection, the goodness vanishes. Since the One remains impassible in its total unity, it seems to be severed from any reality other than itself. Life, at least in the sense we are able to conceive, involves differentiation and tension; one reaches a complete peace by reaching lifelessness. Therefore, the Absolute that was supposed to explain the very act of existence, is reduced, as a result of its own perfection, to non-existence and sinks into irrelevance. By being supremely real, it converts into unreality. (Kolakowski 1988, 39–40)

This very tension between the biblical view of a loving God – who is able to communicate with people, to accompany them in the course of their history, to feel mercy and to comfort them – and the Absolute of metaphysics – which does not tolerate change, evolution and modification – inevitably leads to what Kolakowski coins as ‘metaphysical horror’: the fateful awareness that the metaphysical Absolute is eventually reduced to nothingness and sinks away into irrelevance (see also Taylor 2007, 270–95, esp. 275–9). But there is another side of ‘metaphysical horror’, which has to do with the conceptualization of the notions of ‘creation’ and of ‘good and evil’: If it were not the case that we add something to creation by trying to avoid evil and to spread love – however tiny the scale of our effort might be – then it would probably be wrong to say that we can ‘do good’ in a recognizable sense (assuming that goodness and being are co-extensive). To be sure, in terms of traditional wisdom whatever good there is in us, or is performed by us, is a reflex or an outflow of the divine goodness. But even then, it seems that by our choice and effort we make actual the goodness that was previously only potential and this amounts to saying that we do create something. If goodness is by definition always actual – which is the dogma of the perfect actuality of God and of God’s being the fullness of the good entails – the idea of human free choice is not tenable any longer. Moreover, the very idea of creation becomes doubtful if those two dogmas are valid. The act of creation cannot add anything to the perfection and infinite goodness of God. . . . Strictly speaking, no fiat of his can bring anything new into being, for the being is there, timelessly, eternally actual, infinite, consummated. The name ‘God’ becomes a sobriquet for the supreme Nothingness of the Absolute. Therefore, not only is evil nothing: good is equally nothing, as whatever good is, or might be, produced, does not augment the existing amount. This discloses another side of the horror metaphysicus: if God is the Absolute, there is no good and no evil and a fortiori no distinction between them. (Kolakowski 1988, 89–90)

How to deal with these two sides of ‘metaphysical horror’? Is it true that modern philosophy did arise out of reaction against this twofold ‘metaphysical horror’? And

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was it inevitable that, if the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ disappears due to the conceptual equivalence of the ‘Absolute’ and ‘Nothingness’, the only route escape was first taking refuge to a completely incomprehensible God (nominalism) and then rejecting God as the Absolute in favour of exclusive humanism (radical secularization)? Or are we invited, as we are by John Milbank, to ‘return reflexively to the older tradition, knowing indeed that we must reinvent it with Shelley’s ‘subtler languages’, as invoked by Taylor’ (Milbank 2010, 81)? And what would that invitation to a reflexive return to orthodoxy imply with regard to the position of Christianity in contemporary (Western) world? In order to answer these questions, the next section is devoted to a comparison between Brad Gregory’s recent book, The Unintended Reformation and Taylor’s approach in A Secular Age. In my view, there is a strong kinship between Gregory’s and Milbank’s approach towards the relation between radical secularization and radical orthodoxy. Because Milbank elaborates his own position somewhere else in this book, I shall only marginally refer to his remarks on Taylor’s approach and mainly focus on Gregory’s.

4 Beyond ‘Radical Orthodoxy’: Charles Taylor versus Brad Gregory Brad Gregory’s monumental and erudite book, The Unintended Reformation is comparable to Charles Taylor’s, A Secular Age. What is at stake in their stories? Gregory and Taylor alike defend the view that religion has not been left behind or refuted on scientific grounds, but rather that religious ideas, aspirations and norms are rejected as intellectually untenable, due to certain (philosophical, theological, social, political, economic, academic) presuppositions, without, however, having been disproven. The central thesis of both A Secular Age and The Unintended Reformation 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 rather 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. It is not only the general framework of their philosophical accounts of modern history that both authors have in common. There are also similar passages related to specific historical moments that Gregory and Taylor select in order to underpin their respective analyses. They both stress, for instance, the unintended but strong influence of the disciplinary revolution brought about by the Reformation and CounterReformation, and inseparable from the rise of capitalist society. Due to the threat of heterodoxy and the undeniable failure of the clergy and many Christians to live by the ideals of Christianity, secular and ecclesiastical leaders alike sought to ‘create more disciplined and self-disciplined laity compared to the laypeople of pre-reformation

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Christendom’. They both refer to the proliferation of religious and secular truths along with related practices, eventually giving way to what Gregory describes as ‘contemporary hyperpluralism’ and Taylor terms the ‘supernova effect’. And of course the Reformation plays an important role in both books. Whereas for Gregory the Protestant Reformation functions as the critical watershed, Taylor, as already mentioned, ascribes only relative importance to its influence. In his eyes (as in those of Marcel Gauchet and Robert Bellah (Bellah 2012)), the Reformation is only a minor part of what he designates the ‘Reform’, that is, a much larger development that began as far back as the axial religions and which gradually moved through different stages towards modernity. Put differently, modernity does not only arise from (reformed) Christianity but is also indebted to earlier forms of religion, in which the Axial Period plays a central role. But even this difference of emphasis does not take away the impression that both authors suggest similar conclusions at the end of their genealogical stories. The immanent frame that Westerners inhabit in the twenty-first century is not the product of an inevitable, logical evolution, any more than secularization is the conclusion of an intellectual argument. They are rather the upshot of what Taylor describes in Wittgensteinian terminology as ‘a view that holds us captive’, or what Gregory defines as ‘metaphysical assumptions’. Therefore, we have to acknowledge that the contemporary ‘view that holds us captive’ derives from a historically contingent process rather than to give it the status of a scientifically demonstrated fact. We must become aware that our reigning views are always (philosophical, political, economic, academic, religious) assumptions and not selfevident and ideologically neutral data. Against this background, it is rather at once surprising and significant that Gregory criticizes Taylor for ultimately assuming much of the structure of supersessionist stories on secularization, that is, that Taylor is determined by the view that ‘the distant past is assumed to have been left behind, explanatory important to what immediately succeeded it but not to the present . . . its structure tends to conflate the past’s intelligibility with a quasi-inevitability conceived in holistic and supersessionist terms – as if, all things considered, of course we find ourselves where we are’ (Gregory 2012, 9). According to Gregory, Taylor in his exploration of the passage towards our secular age, unduly characterizes the medieval era as naively acknowledging the transcendent by contrasting it to the modern, reflexive era of multivalent secularity (Gregory 2012, 11). I think this interpretation is wide of the mark. It neglects Taylor’s thesis that we are always doomed to misunderstand ourselves, if we cannot do justice to where we come from. Put differently, the fact that the medieval era was naively acknowledging the transcendent while modern people turn more self-reflexively to their belief in transcendence does not imply that the Middle Ages were simply superseded by modernity. On the contrary, it only designates, in Taylor’s eyes, that new embodied understandings and social imaginaries in the rise of Western modernity (e.g. affirmation of ordinary life, subtler languages, growth of reflexivity, etc.) have played an important role, particularly in relation to the redemptive force of religious belief, however optional that may be in contemporary Western society.

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In order to underline the differences between Gregory’s and Taylor’s approaches, I quote two passages in Gregory’s conclusion. The first passage focuses on the status of John Rawls’s notion of ‘overlapping consensus’: What remains in the absence of shared answers to the Life Questions is a hyperpluralism of divergent secular and religious truth claims in contemporary Western states, and of individuals pursuing their desires whatever they happen to be. . . . Appeals to a Rawlsian ‘overlapping consensus’ are akin to reminders of the fact that antagonistic Christians nevertheless continued to share many beliefs in common in the sixteenth century. Indeed they did. But it hardly conduced to their moral agreement or political cooperation. (Gregory 2012, 377–8)

Taylor often appeals to Rawls’s notion of ‘overlapping consensus’ as the basis of our contemporary sense of a liberal order of equality, rights and democracy. Like Gregory, he is fully aware that this consensus is justified by a host of different reasons and that it is extremely difficult for a number of people to think across these different forms of justification. Unlike Gregory, however, he considers the tension between the ‘overlapping consensus’ and the widely incompatible justifications for this consensus as a challenge, rather than as a testimony to its complete failure. Taylor’s work is an abiding call for mutual understanding and a plea for the promotion of a society ‘in which all the differences between human beings could ultimately sound together in harmony’. But this harmony can no longer be the harmony of a unified answer to life questions, as Gregory seems to suggest. The second quote from Gregory focuses on the theological or religious justification of human rights: Rights and dignity can be real only if human beings are more than biological matter. The modern secular discourse on human rights depends on retaining in some fashion – but without acknowledging – the belief that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God, a notion that could be rooted in nature so long as nature was regarded as creation, whether overtly recognized as such or not. But if nature is not creation, then there are no creatures, and human beings are just one more species that happened randomly to evolve, no more ‘endowed by their creator with unalienable rights’ than is any other bit of matter-energy. Then there simply are no rights, just as there are no persons, and no theorizing can conjure them into existence. The intellectual foundations of modernity are failing because its governing metaphysical assumptions in combination with the findings of the natural sciences offer no warrant for believing its most basic, political, and legal claims. (Gregory 2012, 381)

Since the failure of medieval Christendom was not due to the falsity of its metaphysical and doctrinal truth claims, but derived rather from its ethical failure to live up to its own confessional ideals,12 Gregory’s final suggestion is that we have to return to the rejected – not refuted – metaphysical assumptions of old and face up to the challenge of

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making our individual lives and our society more genuinely Christian. Put differently, the metaphysical assumptions of medieval Christian belief ought to supersede the assumptions underlying the most basic of modern beliefs. Genuine Christianity is tantamount to a return to ‘radical orthodoxy’. Taylor’s view is clearly different here. According to him, the foundation of modern ethics can even be detached from a theistic anchorage. Its governing principles (e.g. the universality of human rights) may be justified by a host of different reasons, both secular (Kantian, utilitarian, ecological, etc.) and religious. Taylor makes it clear that, although the shift towards secularization has undoubtedly made religious belief optional, it has yielded a number of positive changes as well, like the affirmation of ordinary life, a deeper notion of the self, a more egalitarian order of society, etc. Whereas Gregory stresses the negative aspects of the unintended consequences of the Reformation, Taylor sees both positive and negative aspects intertwined on the balance sheet of the passage to modernity. Here is one final example as an illustration of this difference. Both Gregory and Taylor refer to the proliferation of religious and secular truths since the Reformation that have gradually led to what Gregory describes as ‘contemporary hyperpluralism’ and Taylor coins as a ‘supernova effect’. Now, Gregory is very sensitive to the dangers inherent in ‘hyperpluralism’. He knows (like so many others) that it is hard for people to think across their ideological gaps and that it is tempting to imagine that their views are the only plausible and valid ones. And he in fact argues that this kind of attitude endangers democracy, since it always threatens to degenerate into a kind of Kulturkampf. Consequently, his explicit aim is to find a remedy for modernity’s failure. Like Taylor, he acknowledges the fact of ideological hyperpluralism. Unlike Taylor, however, he is much less confident – even incredulous – that this ‘supernova effect’ might lead to a society in which it remains possible for religious belief to take on new meaning from its embattled optional position.13

5 Hermeneutics, subtler languages and the ‘Historical God’ Against the background of that difference, I conclude by focusing upon the possible role of hermeneutics as to the place of religion (and Christianity in particular) in a secular age. In particular, I would like to assess the role subtler languages may play in this respect. Within a hermeneutical perspective, the philosopher’s aim is no less than ‘reading the world’. Such capacity of ‘reading the world’ requires a subtle sensitivity for the opportunities and the pitfalls of language, intimately related to the awareness that the resonating force of language may go dead or become outdated, particularly in the fragile case of religious liturgy and ritual. Taylor is fully aware of that menace: ‘Come Holy Spirit, our hearts inspire,’ sing generations of worshippers, everrenewing the fullness of meaning. But these same prayers can become dead,

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routine; people just go through the motions when saying/singing them; or else they take an aura of comfort, of familiarity of links with family, lineage, and the past, which has little to do with their original revelatory force. (Taylor 2011, 60)

What is revealed by resonation can become routine. But the force of religious language can also be renewed in rephrasing the fullness of its meaning, in finding subtler words and living metaphors. And it is here that the reflexive turn may be of utmost importance. Albeit aware of the unintended implications of the reform (underlined by Gregory and Milbank), Taylor appears to be highly sensitive as well to the religious (and secular) possibilities afforded by the immanent frame, to the possibility of transformed religious commitments and experiences, transfigured by the reflexive turn: The fruit of the reflexive turn (italics mine) can be that this deadness, routine, which used to be seen as a lack in the worshipper, can now come to be blamed on the language. The very demand for authenticity – quintessentially modern – seems to drive us toward new languages, which can resonate within us. (Taylor 2011, 60) (italics mine)

In a hermeneutical perspective, whatever exists within the horizon of our perception, speech and thought is being interpreted as a part of the world the meaning of which we try to read. But then, two questions arise. The first pertains to the status of meaning. Is meaning something merely created by man, relating the world to his practical, cognitive and aesthetic aspirations or is it rather something that we may discover? Taylor’s answer is unambiguous: Language makes possible the disclosure of the human world. There is a combination here of creation and discovery, which is not easy to define. (Taylor 1995, ix–x)14

Such an interpretation of the double status of meaning implies two things. First, that hermeneutics never yields definite results; that its interpretations are provisional and tentative, that its truth is always historical, that it cannot appeal to universal standards of validity. Second, that the hermeneutic stance, although neither resorting to classic metaphysics nor to a scientific world view (Kolakowski 1988, 118), is not metaphysically neutral. If hermeneutics expands the domain of ‘meaning’ beyond the intentions of individuals, then it simultaneously accepts the metaphysical presupposition that there is ‘a Mind which is not ours, even if it is not necessarily the fully-fledged, perfectly self-conscious, divine ruler of the universe or the timeless Absolute’ (Kolakowski 1988, 118). It is rather that, in Kolakowski’s terminology, ‘the meaning-generating Mind is being made actual in the very process of revealing itself to our mind, or that the meaning-endowed Being is “becoming what it is” thanks to human understanding of what it is. This comes closer to the idea, discussed above, of the “historical god” (italics mine)’ (Kolakowski 1988, 117). The second question derives from this answer to the first. If current hermeneutical philosophy’s aim is to embrace the entire realm of nature, it cannot but explore the

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barriers of traditional (religious) language. Due to the disappearance of the classic cosmological and metaphysical framework (The Great Chain of Being, Divine History, the Metaphysical Absolute), the ‘cosmic imaginaries’ of yore, hermeneutical philosophers can no longer take resort to a mere (philosophical and theological) repetition of the orthodox tradition. They are invited to search for a form of language ‘that addresses the fragility of what all of us, believers and unbelievers alike, most value in these times’ (Taylor 2011, 186). In Taylor’s view, to envisage transcendence surely demands exposing the Absolute of classic metaphysics as the idol of many believers’ traditional religious language: Many believers (the fanatics, but also more than these) rest in the certainty that they have got God right (as against all those heretics and pagans in the outer darkness). They are clutching onto an idol, to use a term familiar in the traditions of the God of Abraham. (Taylor 2007, 769)

Therefore, in order to break through the barriers of classical religious language, Taylor is searching for a ‘subtler language’ which is capable of ‘opening a new space, revealing a new reality, making contact with the hidden or lost. And this power only comes against a whole background of complementary meanings, which is itself altered by the introduction of the new word’ (Taylor 2007, 760). Put differently, it is by means of exploring ‘subtler languages’ that the ‘forgotten’ reality of the ‘historical God’ might become visible again in our current Western culture. In particular, this exploration has to take issue with a threefold linguistic ‘deformation’: (1) that our language has lost, and needs to have restored to it, its constitutive power. (2) that the loss of this power means that we can indeed, deal instrumentally with the realities which surround us, but that their deeper meaning, the background in which they exist, the higher reality which finds expression in them, remain ignored and invisible; put in different terms, (3) it means that our language has lost the power to name things in their embedding in this deeper/higher reality. (Taylor 2007, 761)

The loss of this power to name things in their embedding of a deeper/higher reality is mainly due to what Taylor designates the phenomenon of ‘excarnation’. Excarnation is the upshot of a twofold evolution, in which radical orthodoxy and radical secularization have been acting as unexpected and unintentional allies. Whereas the metaphysical Absolute within radical orthodoxy eventually has led to metaphysical horror, the metaphysical Ineffable within nominalist tradition has ultimately yielded radical secularization. In both cases, language lost its subtle power to make visible the incarnated reality of the ‘historical’ God. Admittedly, the issue of ‘subtler languages’ is a complex one and is in need of further elaboration. Undoubtedly, Taylor is fully aware of both the different ramifications of this project and of the challenging prospect to find new tools for its accomplishment.

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It is not only related to linguistic topics, but equally to epistemological, ethical and metaphysical ones. Above all, it is situated on the level of what Taylor coins as ‘social imaginaries’: starting from the experience that belief and unbelief are options in current Western societies, he aims at retrieving current social imaginaries as a background condition of this experience of fragility. These background conditions of belief and unbelief are diverse. Here, I would like to focus upon only one aspect: the image of God. Taylor is fully aware that this ‘transcendental’ level of social imaginaries is an area where no ready-made formulations are available in ordinary speech: Our language has to be inventive to do so. . . . We have to innovate in language, and bring the limits of experience to clarity in formulations that open up a zone normally outside our range of thought and attention. (Taylor 1995, 32)

Searching for the deeper/higher reality of transcendence, he therefore neither harks back to the traditional Christian terminology nor envisages the possibility of rehabilitating ‘classic ontology’ or ‘radical orthodoxy’. Taylor’s aim is to elaborate a ‘moral ontology’ which he defines as a tentative search for an ‘objective order through personal resonance’. In subtler words, he is in search of what it might mean that our being in the image of God is also our standing among others in the stream of love, which is that facet of God’s life we try to grasp, very inadequately (italics mine), in speaking of the Trinity. (Taylor 2011, 185)

It is here, I think, that Brad Gregory (and John Milbank) and Charles Taylor are parting ways. Although Milbank, as already mentioned, agrees with Taylor that we must return reflexively to the older tradition and ‘reinvent it with Shelley’s “subtler languages”’ (Milbank 2010, 81), he simultaneously modifies its impact by disputing Taylor’s suggestion of ‘a continuation of a secular age’. Milbank, by contrast, still believes that only a more benign, more festive Christianity could ever hope to re-establish a new and now global Christendom. Hence the deepest, if latent and unacknowledged, implication of A Secular Age is that a festive Christianity, in the face of the aporias of secular liberalism that I have outlined, could still in the future stake its claim to be the true enlightenment and the true romance. Equivalently, the ecclesia could stake its claim to be the true site of a general will based on a charitable and just distribution. (Milbank 2010, 82)

That is definitely not Taylor’s position. Religion and Christianity have not been extinguished in the secular age, but they have been transformed and transfigured. Standing in the Jamesian open space, where the winds are blowing from all directions, Taylor acknowledges Heidegger’s word that ‘man cannot fall to his knees in awe before the causa sui, nor dance and play music before this god’. Standing in that open space, he acknowledges the fragility that all of us, believers and unbelievers alike, experience.

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Since that experience is part of our ‘social imaginary’, as a condition of contemporary forms of belief, we have to invent languages so as to capture something of the everreceding mystery of the ‘historical God’. But in doing that, we can make gross mistakes, as for instance Heidegger did and Paul Celan painfully realized (Taylor 2011, 63–4). Among many other poets, Celan wished at all costs to avoid making mistakes. Since he knew that our social imaginary with regard to God lies embedded in the experience of God as being absent, believers and unbelievers cannot evade the hesitations and uncertainties, deeply entrenched in that experience. Precisely these hesitations are, according to Taylor, refiguring and transforming the incarnated significance of our deepest experiences. Put differently, the continuation of ‘a secular age’ is inseparable from our present condition.15 Of course, one can read the poems of Paul Celan against the background of the Holocaust-experience. But that is not the only possible reading. The experience of what Kolakowski coins as ‘metaphysical horror’ remains present with Celan as a general hidden framework of the particular experience of the Holocaust: it is the very experience that God is no one (‘Niemand’) and that we have to relive and to transfigure that very experience in the open space of our secular age.16 Psalm Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, niemand bespricht unsern Staub. Niemand. Gelobst seist du, Niemand. Dir zulieb wollen wir blühn. Dir entgegen. Ein Nichts wahren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die Nichts-, die Niemandsrose. Psalm No one kneads us again out of earth and clay No one incants our dust No one. Blessed art thou, No One. In thy sight would We bloom.

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In thy Spite. A Nothing We were, are now, and ever Shall be, blooming: The Nothing-, the No-One’s Rose. Es war Erde in ihnen Es war Erde in ihnen, und sie gruben. Sie gruben und gruben, so ging Ihr Tag dahin, ihre Nacht. Und sie lobten nicht Gott, der, so hörten sie, alles dies wollte, der, so hörten sie, alles dies wusste. Sie gruben und hörten nichts mehr; Sie wurden nicht weise, erfanden kein Lied, erdachten sich keinerlei Sprache. Sie gruben. There was earth inside them There was earth inside them, and they dug. They dug and dug, and so their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God, Who, so they heard, wanted all this, Who, so they heard, witnessed all this. They dug and heard nothing more; They did not grow wise, invented no song, Devised for themselves no sort of language. They dug. ...

Do we hear an echo of Nietzsche’s madman in The Gay Science: Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?

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Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? (par. 125)

Although the reference to Nietzsche is not explicit, the ‘social imaginary’ of being alone, of being deserted of God is articulated here. But how to read, Taylor wonders, the concluding stanza of ‘Es war Erde in ihnen’, where there seems to be, breaking through despair, a faint light of tentative affirmation? O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du: Wohin gings, da’s ging nirgendhin? O du gräbst und ich grab, und ich grab mich dir zu, und am Finger erwacht uns der Ring O one, o none, o no one, o you: Where did it go then, making for nowhere? O you dig and I dig, and I dig through to you, And the ring on our finger awakens.

And how to read this poem of Rilke, an attentive reader of Nietzsche, a subtle poet of our social imaginaries, inventing new images to evoke the fragility of a secular age, where faith is ‘one possibility among others’, a fragile, tender option in an embattled position?17 Herbst (Rilke) Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit, als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten; sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde. Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt. Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält. Autumn The leaves fall, fall as if from far away, like withered things from gardens deep in sky; they fall with gestures of renunciation.

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And through the night the heavy earth falls too, down from the stars, into the loneliness. And we all fall. This hand must fall. Look everywhere: it is the lot of all. Yet there is one who holds us as we fall eternally tender in his hands

Notes 1 The revised and corrected account of this debate was published in 2004 (Ferry and Gauchet 2004). 2 Löwith 1949, 158–9: ‘Joachim, like Luther after him, could not foresee that his religious intention – that of desecularizing the church and restoring its spiritual fervor – would, in the hands of others, turn into its opposite: the secularization of the world which became increasingly worldly by the very fact that eschatological thinking about last things was introduced into penultimate matters, a fact which intensified the power of the secular drive toward a final solution of problems which cannot be solved by their own means and on their own level. And yet it was the attempt of Joachim and the influence of Joachism which opened the way to these future perversions’; de Lubac 1978, 18: ‘Sans que leur auteur [Joachim de Flore] ait pu s’en rendre compte, l’Esprit allait être dressé contre l’Eglise du Christ et par une conséquence fatale contre le Christ lui-même, pour un “dépassement” du Christ et de son Eglise, ou du moins pour cent façons tout autres de les comprendre. Dès lors cet Esprit, dont il célébrait d’avance le règne, ne serait plus l’Esprit-Saint.’ 3 de Lubac 1978, 134–5: ‘Ce qui, dans les Collationes in Hexaemeron aussi bien que dans le Breviloquium sépare absolument Bonaventure de Joachim de Flore, nonobstant leur penchant commun à une théologie de l’histoire impliquant un progrès dans le processus objectif du salut, c’est ce qu’on peut appeler son christocentrisme accentué.’ For a detailed comparison between Joachim and Bonaventura see de Lubac 1978, 123–39; cf. Joseph Ratzinger 1959. 4 For an informative survey of the Löwith-Blumenberg debate, see: Robert M. Wallace, ‘Progress, Secularization and Modernity: The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate’. New German Critique 22 (1981): 63–79. For Blumenberg’s elaboration of the relation between late medieval nominalism and the rise of modernity, see in particular Blumenberg 1966, 181–204. 5 Pope Benedict, ‘Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections’. Lecture at the University of Regensburg, 12 September 2006, http://www.vatican. va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006. Consulted on 6 June 2012, 5: ‘In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s

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Radical Secularization? freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which . . . might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which – as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated – unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos, and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3.19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos.’ This comparison is elaborated in Cloots, André, Latré, Stijn and Vanheeswijck, Guido, ‘The Future of the Christian Past: Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor on the Essence of Religion and its Evolution.’ The Heythrop Journal. Forthcoming, first published online November 2013. Gauchet 1985, 104: ‘The possible orientations and content of the historical change are determined by a rigid logic; on the other hand, the very fact that the change occurred depended on the event’s contingency and on a sort of freedom at work in the midst of becoming. Its essence was determined, but its existence was a matter of choice.’ Cf. Marcel Gauchet, ‘What have we lost with Religion’, Diogenes, 49 (2002): 40: ‘Yet surely it is this dispossession, whose source is not external to us but which seeps from within our ownership of ourselves, that is the true name of the dehumanization of the world.’ For Gauchet’s treatment of the role of Trinity, see Gauchet 1985, 217, note 39. Pope Benedict, ‘Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections’. Lecture at the University of Regensburg, 12 September 2006, http://www.vatican.va/holy_ father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006. Consulted on 6 June 2012, 8. Kolakowski 1988, 39: ‘Even if we assume that everything that matters in philosophy has been said by the Greeks and humbly accept, without being upset, our position of epigons, there is still a never-ending job of converting old insights into an idiom which might be intelligible today to our fellow men, and this perhaps enough.’ Cf. Taylor 2007, 17. Cf. Milbank 2010, 79 for a similar and in my view mistaken reading of Taylor: ‘According to this reading, with which I largely concur, the Church has failed in practice to be orthodox enough.’ I elaborated this topic in my review of Gregory’s book, The Unintended Reformation. Beyond Supersessionist Stories. see http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/10/24/beyondsupersessionist-stories/. Cf. Kolakowski 1988, 117: ‘My guess is that in the perspective of hermeneutics the answer is: both. If so, the meaning is neither freely produced by us nor simply readymade, embedded in nature or history, and awaiting a discoverer.’ Taylor focuses for instance on Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poetry heavily relies on Duns Scotus’ nominalism, as a pioneer of such new itinerary (Taylor 2007, 755–65).

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16 The following two poems were selected and analysed by Taylor in Taylor 2011, 72–3. The translations of the poems are from John Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York: Norton, 2001), 135, 157. 17 The English translation is mine, based on different translations made by Walter A. Aue, G. G. Pinter, Cliff Crego, A. W. Tüting and Robert Bly.

References Bellah, Robert N. and Hans Joas (eds). 2012. The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1966. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (erweiterte und überarbeitete Neuausgabe). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag; The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. De Lubac, Henri. 1978. La postérité de Joachim de Flore. I: De Joachim à Schelling. Paris: Editions Lethielleux (Le Sycomore). Ferry, Luc and Gauchet, Marcel. 2004. Le religieux après la religion. Paris: Grasset. Gauchet, Marcel. 1985. Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Oscar Burge, 1997. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gregory, Brad. 2012. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jaspers, Karl. 1949. Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. München: Piper. Kolakowski, Leszek. 1988. Metaphysical Horror. Oxford: Blackwell. Löwith, Karl. 1949. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Milbank, John. 2010. ‘A Closer Walk on the Wild Side’, in M. Warner, J. VanAntwerpen and C. Calhoun (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ratzinger, Joseph. 1959. Die Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura. Munchen/ Zurich: Schnell und Steiner. Taylor, Charles. 1995. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. —. 2011. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

9

Apologetics and Anti-Apologetics in Taylor’s A Secular Age Charles Lockwood

1 Introduction At the heart of contemporary debates about secularization is the question of how to characterize the process of secularization itself. Is it a radical process that entails religion’s steady decline and the arrival (sooner or later) of a post-religious age? Or is it instead a much more open-ended process in which religion has an enduring, if changing, role? Charles Taylor, one of the most notable voices in this debate today, clearly takes the latter view, and he presents his monumental book, A Secular Age, as a corrective to the hegemonic embrace of the former view in mainstream secularization theory. For Taylor, secularization involves not religion’s demise, but rather its ongoing transformation, and in neglecting religion’s continuing role, mainstream accounts tell a one-sided story. Taylor challenges the mainstream master narrative of secularization with his own counter-narrative, and the rich historical details of that narrative take up many pages in A Secular Age, offering a sweeping account of the emergence of Western modernity. Yet, in the book, Taylor presents not only his own master narrative, but also an explanation of why the mainstream narrative has left so much out of the story. This explanation involves an interrogation of the presuppositions that underlie mainstream theory. He is right to call attention to these presuppositions, since they do so much to shape the mainstream account but are often articulated only implicitly, rather than explicitly. In his examination and criticism of these presuppositions, moreover, Taylor makes clear that his own alternative account is built on a different set of commitments. Yet there has been significant disagreement among Taylor’s readers about exactly what these commitments are. Many of the initial responses to A Secular Age took it to be at bottom a work of Christian apologetics, a defence of belief against unbelief. The intellectual historian Peter Gordon has spoken of ‘the religious or apologetic purposes that quicken A Secular Age,’ and he stresses what he takes to be ‘the book’s unabashedly confessional character’ (Gordon 2008, 651; see also Gordon 2011).1 Gordon’s response and others in the same vein are mentioned in the editors’ introduction to a recent edited volume about Taylor’s book. Yet the editors of that volume, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, see such responses as misreading Taylor’s intentions: ‘It is difficult to

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clearly identify any passage in A Secular Age that might support such claims of either outright dogmatism or apologetic intent’ (Warner et al. 2010, 6–7).2 Taylor’s purpose, they claim, is not to defend belief against unbelief, but rather to chart how the process of secularization has changed the conditions of belief and unbelief alike. I want to suggest here that there is some truth to each side in this interpretive dispute, for each gets at a distinct line of thought in A Secular Age. There are moments when Taylor claims that the distinction between his approach and that of mainstream secularization theory comes down to a distinction between religious belief and unbelief, and these moments do have a certain apologetic character. Yet much of the book’s engagement with secularization centres not on the opposition between belief and unbelief, but rather on the common circumstances that characterize both of these stances in our secular age.3 I argue, then, that while there is indeed an apologetic strand of thought in the book, there is also another strand that serves to undercut such apologetic moves, whether in the service of either belief or unbelief. I want to propose, therefore, that while Taylor does make apologetic moves at points, he also shows a keen awareness of the dangers of these sorts of moves. On these grounds, I find that his central argument in the book is not reducible to a set of apologetic or dogmatic commitments. Taylor’s book would have been clearer and more coherent without its apologetic moments, but their presence in the book is not damning for his undertaking, and indeed such moments provide evidence for why it is important to resist the temptation to engage in such moves, on behalf of belief or unbelief. I begin with a sketch of Taylor’s own master narrative of secularization, focusing especially on how it differs from the mainstream account. I move then to examine the apologetic strand of his thought and afterwards turn to what I see as the anti-apologetic strand. My intention is to make clear that while there is indeed a tension in Taylor’s book, that tension should not be taken as grounds for rejecting what I take to be the central aim of A Secular Age: to reframe our thinking about how to understand secularization itself. On the contrary, Taylor’s efforts offer important insights and pose a compelling challenge to the assumption that secularization has brought merely religion’s decline.

2 Taylor’s master narrative At the heart of Taylor’s book is the claim that mainstream accounts of secularization are flawed because they fail to recognize religion’s continuing role in Western modernity. Such accounts tend to hold that secularization is radical in character, that ‘the world is proceeding towards an overcoming or relegation of religion’ (Taylor 2007, 594). Taylor argues, moreover, that such claims about religion’s decline and marginalization are themselves rooted in the presupposition that religion no longer has its own independent status as a factor, or ‘motivating force’ (Taylor 2007, 433), in human life. Religion is instead reduced to other, non-religious factors. And if religion is reducible to other factors, the thinking goes, why expect it to endure? Taylor finds that this presupposition is a central feature of mainstream secularization theory, which

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stands in a tradition stemming from thinkers such as Marx and Weber.4 Yet, rather than engaging at length with those thinkers, Taylor focuses on more recent ones, such as Steve Bruce, a noted sociologist of religion. Like many theorists, Bruce contends that familiar features of modernization, such as the rise of science, as well as urbanization, industrialization, migration, have steadily undermined religious faith during the past two centuries, and he expects this decline to continue even further. As Bruce puts it: ‘There is no need for religious rites or spells to protect against ringworm when you can buy a drench which has proven over and over to be an excellent cure for the condition’ (Bruce 1995, 132–3).5 Bruce denies, then, that religion might still have its own motivating force. Although Bruce does not issue this denial explicitly, Taylor surmises that this is nevertheless an implicit assumption in Bruce’s treatment of historical cases and his prediction for the future. In response to the suggestion that the recent strength of Irish and Polish churches might undercut his claims about religion’s ongoing decline, Bruce contends that such cases are not in fact exceptions to his theory, because the relevant religious bodies are no longer serving in a specifically religious role. Bruce is arguing, in other words, that ‘religion is not functioning on its own, but as a support to something else’ (Taylor 2007, 433). The same assumption guides Bruce’s prediction for the future: he envisions that as secularization continues, religion will increasingly be regarded with little more than indifference. For Bruce, then, religious aspirations have been stripped of any independent status, and thus religion’s decline can be expected to continue apace. Taylor takes Bruce’s position as representative of the mainstream approach to secularization theory. This approach presupposes at the outset that religion must decline, and thus any suggestions to the contrary are ignored or dismissed. Taylor rejects this presupposition, however, and this places him in the ‘revisionist’ (Taylor 2007, 432) camp. Like other revisionists, Taylor does not rule out the possibility of religion’s continuing role. Yet Taylor is not denying that something called secularization has occurred in Western modernity. Rather, his intention is to offer a more accurate account of the process. Instead of treating secularization merely as a story of religion’s decline, as in mainstream theory, Taylor characterizes it in terms of religion’s transformation. More specifically, he proposes that secularization marks a decisive shift in the conditions that structure our search for ‘fullness’ (Taylor 2007, 5), or moral and spiritual fulfilment. The point is not that religion has declined or been marginalized as such, but rather that the conditions shaping our search for and experience of fullness have shifted in an important sense. This shift is what Taylor is getting at when he observes that it was almost ‘impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but inescapable’ (Taylor 2007, 25). A secular age is an age in which this shift has taken place, in which ‘belief in God is no longer axiomatic’, for ‘there are alternatives’ (Taylor 2007, 3). This shift entails a dramatic proliferation of different approaches to fullness. These approaches cover a spectrum from belief to unbelief, from the transcendent perspective of orthodox Christianity to the immanent perspective of exclusive or self-sufficient humanism. Although the approaches to fullness that Taylor identifies are enormously diverse, they all partake of a common condition in which the experience of and search for

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fullness occurs. This condition of secularity is ‘something we all share, believers and unbelievers alike’ (Taylor 2007, 19). Taylor describes it in terms of ‘the immanent frame’, or ‘a “natural” order, to be contrasted to a “supernatural” one, an “immanent” world, over against a possible “transcendent” one’ (Taylor 2007, 542). It may seem that in referring to our secular age in terms of the immanent frame, he is suggesting that only immanence is now possible, that there is no longer any place for transcendence in Western modernity. Yet that is not Taylor’s claim. Rather, he wants to suggest that the immanent frame is as a kind of baseline that is common to everyone in our secular age, while still allowing for belief as well as unbelief: The immanent order can . . . slough off the transcendent. But it doesn’t necessarily do so. What I have been describing as the immanent frame is common to all of us in the modern West, or at least that is what I am trying to portray. Some of us want to live it as open to something beyond; some live it as closed. It is this something which permits closure, without demanding it. (Taylor 2007, 543–4)

Religion can no longer be taken for granted. It now stands as one option among others. Taylor’s master narrative serves not only to highlight that this shift to a condition of secularity has taken place, but also to show how it has done so over time. Thus Taylor must tell a historical story. One of the central lessons of that story is that secularization, as Taylor understands it, could only occur with the rise of an alternative to belief in God: ‘I would like to claim that the coming of modern secularity in my sense has been coterminous with the rise of a society in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option’ (Taylor 2007, 18). Only once this exclusive humanism came on the scene could belief in God no longer seem axiomatic. Yet Taylor also acknowledges that this exclusive humanism itself emerged through historical stages, and that once it developed, a whole range of options opened up that continues to this day: Exclusive humanism in a sense crept up on us through an intermediate form, Providential Deism; and both the Deism and the humanism were made possible by earlier developments within orthodox Christianity. Once this humanism is on the scene, the new plural, non-naïve predicament allows for multiplying the options beyond the original gamut. (Taylor 2007, 19)

Over the course of his book, Taylor tells the story of how orthodox Christianity paved the way for Deism, which then itself opened up the possibility of exclusive humanism. Taylor then devotes a great deal of attention to the range of religious and nonreligious options that have proliferated since the rise of exclusive humanism in the eighteenth century, including the growth of new outlooks and movements as well as the reform of existing ones throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He finds that the process of secularization has seen the decline of certain forms of religion

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and the rise of many outlooks opposed to Christianity, and indeed to any religion, but it has also included the rise of many new religious forms, both through ‘the founding of new denominations, such as Methodism and its off-shoots’, and also through ‘new modes of organization and new spiritual directions in older established churches, the Catholic Church for instance’ (Taylor 2007, 436). And today, new forms continue to evolve. Taylor concludes: My own view of ‘secularization’ . . . is that there has certainly been a ‘decline’ of religion. Religious belief now exists in a field of choices which include various forms of demurral and rejection; Christian faith exists in a field where there is also a wide range of other spiritual options. But the interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life. This new placement is now the occasion for recomposition of spiritual life in new forms, and for new ways of existing both in and out of relation to God. (Taylor 2007, 437)

Thus secularity is marked not by religion’s absence, or its imminent demise, but rather by the ongoing development of many different religious and non-religious possibilities. Taylor’s master narrative suggests, then, that the process of secularization has entailed not the steady decline of religion, as mainstream theorists such as Bruce have tended to maintain, but rather, the emergence of a condition in which religion can no longer be taken for granted. This condition is, again, the immanent frame. The emergence of this condition has involved a dramatic widening of possible outlooks and approaches to fullness, including many kinds of belief and unbelief. This is what Taylor means when he says that the immanent frame can be given both open and closed interpretations. This emphasis on the range of possibilities in Western modernity is precisely what distinguishes Taylor’s master narrative from the dominant one that he opposes. For, while the narrative that has been hegemonic in mainstream theory has cast secularization as a radical process, involving the ongoing decline of religion and the arrival of a post-religious age, Taylor’s own master narrative casts secularization as a far more open-ended process in which religion has continued to develop and mutate over time.

3 Apologetics Taylor presents his secularization narrative as a more accurate story than the one found in mainstream accounts. Rather than merely sidelining religion’s presence in Western modernity, Taylor insists on taking that presence seriously, and his dense historical narrative is intended to document religion’s presence while situating it in relation to the many non-religious (and anti-religious) outlooks found in our secular age. Moreover, he sheds light on how the tendency to equate modernization with religion’s decline is itself based on the prior supposition that religion cannot have any independent motivating force, or no longer has such force in modernity. Taylor clearly

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rejects this presupposition. It is fair to say, then, that the commitments animating Taylor’s own approach to secularization are different from those that underlie the mainstream account. Gordon and many other readers have seen the commitments driving Taylor’s efforts in A Secular Age as fundamentally apologetic in character. On their reading, Taylor provides his own secularization narrative in order to play up religion’s significance, as a foil to the mainstream accounts that have tended to downplay it. The thought here is that Taylor’s book is, at its core, not so much a historical investigation of the shifting character of religion in Western modernity (and premodernity), as it is an attempt to provide a defence of religion, to show the superiority of belief to unbelief. To the extent that Taylor’s narrative gives detailed attention to non-religious outlooks alongside religious ones, this is done less out of an interest in doing justice to both perspectives, as different expressions of fullness, than out of a desire to show how unbelief cannot measure up against belief. As Gordon puts it: ‘An operative assumption throughout the book is that those who deny religion are missing something, and that, even if they do not recognize it themselves, their lives are lacking in a certain fullness, an awareness of higher meaning or dimensionality’ (Gordon 2008, 654; Gordon’s emphasis). This reading suggests that while Taylor may engage with non-religious outlooks and grant them some sense of fullness, he still finds them inferior to religion, since religion is where the most profound sense of fullness lies. I think that there is some truth to this reading. For there are moments in the book, when Taylor seems to be doing more than just providing a corrective to mainstream accounts of secularization. Rather than just giving religion its proper due, he seems to going so far as to privilege religion over non-religious outlooks. It is worth noting here that when Taylor introduces the concept of fullness early on in A Secular Age, he takes as his exemplary case is this stirring recollection from the Christian monk Bede Griffiths: A lark rose suddenly from the ground behind the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God. (Griffiths 1994, 9)

To be sure, Taylor indicates that this religious epiphany is but one specific instance of the kind of experiences that he has in mind when he speaks of fullness. Moreover, he makes it clear that he wants to use the concept in a way that applies to the experiences of non-believers as well as believers: ‘For believers, the account of the place of fullness requires reference to God, that is, to something beyond human life and/or nature; where for unbelievers this is not the case; they rather will leave any account open, or understand fullness in terms of a potentiality of human beings understood naturalistically’ (Taylor 2007, 8).

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Yet Taylor does at times give the impression that fullness of the most profound sort attaches to belief alone, leaving unbelief to provide (at most) a mere substitute for the genuine article. This point comes through, for instance, when Taylor describes that moment in his historical narrative when it becomes possible to conceive of an immanent order utterly shorn of transcendence, once unbelief has come into its own as an alternative to belief: It is the sense of an absence; it is the sense that all order, all meaning comes from us. We encounter no echo outside. In the world read this way, as so many of our contemporaries live it, the natural/supernatural distinction is no mere intellectual abstraction. A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent. In some respects we may judge this achievement a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless. (Taylor 2007, 376)

Here Taylor clearly gives the sense that something is missing. He also suggests that even those who embrace immanence may still find some yearning for transcendence. He observes, for instance, that atheists and humanists may still try to ‘cling’ to an experience of mystery and depth as they ‘go to concerts, operas, read great literature’ (Taylor 2007, 356). In moments such as these, Taylor seems to suggest that religion places us in contact with a reality that non-religious outlooks cut themselves off from to their detriment. To be a non-believer is to lack something, some insight into reality, some sense of fullness, that the believer possesses. The contrast between belief and unbelief comes across most starkly near the end of the book, when Taylor refers to these two perspectives as two fundamental (and indeed opposing) assumptions about our spiritual condition. On the one side is the stance of the non-believer, encapsulated in the conviction that ‘religious, transcendent views are erroneous, or at least have no plausible grounds’, and on the other, that of the believer, expressed in the contrasting conviction that ‘in our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality’, that ‘modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms, and others that remain within the immanent frame, are therefore responding to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it’ (Taylor 2007, 768). The contrast between these two perspectives is implicit earlier in the book, but it is made fully explicit here. Taylor identifies himself here with the stance of belief and mainstream secularization theorists such as Bruce (named specifically) with unbelief. In doing so, he signals that he sees the difference between his approach to secularization and that of the mainstream theorists as resting on two opposing outlooks. Although Taylor suggests a certain symmetry between the two outlooks, in the sense that each sees the other as missing crucial elements of reality, he makes clear that one surpasses the other in accounting for religion’s ongoing role in Western modernity. For, as he notes earlier in the book: ‘One or other view about religious aspiration can allow us to make better sense of what has actually happened’ (Taylor 2007, 436). Taylor conveys, then, that because Bruce and other mainstream theorists are non-believers, they are not inclined

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to acknowledge the thought that religion could have independent motivating force in modernity, while Taylor, the believer, is strongly committed to that thought. As he notes: ‘My own view . . . has been shaped by my own perspective as a believer’ (Taylor 2007, 437). The point here is that the two opposing perspectives, belief and unbelief, are not of equal merit. Taylor, the believer, can notice things that are much more elusive for non-believers, since ‘being in one or other perspective makes it easier for some or other insights to come to you’ (Taylor 2007, 436). Insofar as Taylor thinks that his approach to secularization is more accurate, more true to reality, than those of mainstream theorists, his claims here can be seen as further indications of an apologetic impulse in A Secular Age, for he is suggesting that the superiority of his approach over the mainstream one is a kind of argument for belief over unbelief. His account of secularization is framed as profiting from the insights about religion that are available to him due to his insider status: as a believer, he takes religion to be true and thus grants it its own status as a motivating factor in human life. The result is that he can recognize the reality of religion as it continues to exert its presence in Western modernity. Mainstream theorists, however, approach religion merely as outsiders: they already assume that religion is false and must therefore be explained away in terms of non-religious factors, and thus they miss the sign of its ongoing presence.6 Yet, if the mainstream approach is one-sided on account of its bias against belief, the concern arises that Taylor’s own contrasting approach could be charged with onesidedness from the other direction, for displaying a bias against unbelief.7 This concern about the one-sidedness of Taylor’s own undertaking lies at the heart of the charge that A Secular Age is at bottom an apologetic enterprise. For, if Taylor is presenting a historical narrative that is filtered through his own religious commitment so as to vindicate belief over unbelief, rather than to take the relevant history on its own terms, then how can his effort even count as properly historical work? Is Taylor offering an account of secularization that anyone, believer or non-believer, should be able to access (and to find persuasive), or is he doing something else entirely? The same worry could of course be raised against historical narratives intended to vindicate unbelief over belief, but that does not diminish the urgency of the concern as it relates to Taylor’s undertaking. Gordon gets at exactly this sort of worry when he remarks: ‘The striking conclusion of this brilliant yet perplexing history is that when it comes to the most ultimate matters history may not matter at all’ (Gordon 2008, 673).

4 Anti-Apologetics I think Taylor himself is aware of this worry. For, as I want to argue, there are a number of points in A Secular Age where he signals that adopting an apologetic perspective, either on behalf of belief or unbelief, poses problems. Thus, I find that, while there is undoubtedly an apologetic strand of thought in Taylor’s book, there is also what could be called an anti-apologetic strand. If the first strand of thought privileges belief over unbelief and calls for the story of secularization to be narrated accordingly, the

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second centres instead on the claim that both belief and unbelief can be construed in a way that blinds us to certain dimensions of reality, thereby making it impossible to narrate the process of secularization on its own terms. To the extent that Taylor engages in apologetics, then, I find that such moves stand in tension with another line of thought in his book, a line of thought which would rule out apologetic moves altogether, whether in the service of belief or unbelief. Put simply, I find that Taylor’s apologetic moves violate a standard that he himself has laid out. There is, moreover, a depth to Taylor’s thinking on this issue that has gone unnoticed by Gordon and other readers. I want to suggest that Taylor’s argument against apologetics emerges in the course of his discussion of how believers and non-believers alike should approach our shared condition in this secular age. He emphasizes throughout A Secular Age that for all the diversity that characterizes our moral and spiritual landscape today, from the transcendent perspective of orthodox Christianity to the immanent perspectives articulated in humanistic as well as non-humanistic stances, these many outlooks have something in common: they all stand within the immanent frame. He also stresses that this frame allows for both open and closed interpretations, both belief and unbelief. Yet this range of possible outlooks means that our stances are harder to take for granted than they once were: they have been undergoing a process of ‘mutual fragilization’ (Taylor 2007, 595). The result is that at least some sense of instability has now become a feature of most stances: We live in a condition where we cannot help but be aware that there are a number of different construals, views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on. We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time, looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty. (Taylor 2007, 11)

In our secular age, then, it is increasingly hard to avoid this sense of doubt and uncertainty. Indeed, ‘the whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other’ (Taylor 2007, 595). To be sure, some of us experience this more than others, and there may remain contexts in one stance or another is the default option. Given these cross pressures, however, it is less common now for many of us to inhabit our own stance in a completely naïve or unreflective manner, as if no doubt were present. For we increasingly recognize that our own outlook is but one option among others in the immanent frame and indeed that more than one outlook may make a claim on us. Taylor captures this situation with a striking image, that of an ‘open space where you can feel the winds pulling you, now to belief, now to unbelief ’ (Taylor 2007, 549). Taylor refers to this open space as a ‘Jamesian’ space, after William James’s sensitive rendering of the experience of being torn between belief and unbelief. In addition to his discussion in A Secular Age, Taylor has also given a series of lectures, Varieties of Religion Today, drawing on James’s insights (see Taylor 2002). Gordon makes note of these lectures, but he maintains, oddly, that attention to this Jamesian space is absent in

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A Secular Age. Gordon considers this alleged absence a ‘pity’, for he finds that this space is familiar to many moderns and is perhaps the position that most Westerners occupy today: it is that of ‘an “ironist’s faith,” the divided consciousness of simultaneously believing and not believing’ (Gordon 2008, 655).8 Yet this line of thought is present at a number of points in A Secular Age, and it is what provides Taylor with an argument against the sort of apologetic moves that Gordon considers so central to the book. Having provided us with the image of the Jamesian open space, a space in which there is no longer any default moral or spiritual option, Taylor nevertheless acknowledges that we may still fail to enter or even acknowledge this space. We may remain committed to a default position, ‘not even able to imagine what an alternative could look like’, or we may be ‘in somewhat better shape: capable of seeing that there is another way of construing things, but still having great difficulty making sense of it’, but few of us truly inhabit the Jamesian space: ‘this feat is relatively rare’ (Taylor 2007, 549). To some degree, then, many of us remain sheltered from the cross pressures that characterize this space. Yet, to fail to move past a naïve or unreflective approach to our stance is to engage in what Taylor calls ‘spin’. To engage in spin is to miss the fact that the Jamesian space admits of both closed and open readings, while demanding neither. Spin is, then, ‘a way of avoiding entering this space, a way of convincing oneself that one’s reading is obvious’, and as such, it is a ‘disability’, for it entails that ‘one’s thinking is clouded or cramped by a powerful picture which prevents one seeing important aspects of reality’ (Taylor 2007, 551). To engage in spin is thus to have a blind spot with respect to certain aspects of reality, and in doing so, to fail to take it on its own terms. Taylor observes, moreover, that one can engage in spin with respect to either belief or unbelief. For ‘those who think that the closed reading of immanence is “natural” and obvious are suffering from this kind of disability’, and the same is true of ‘those who think that the open reading is obvious and inescapable, because, for instance, the existence of God can be “proven”’ (Taylor 2007, 551). This is a crucial point for Taylor to make, for instead of pitting belief and unbelief against one another (and favouring the former over the latter), he is acknowledging here that both stances can fall prey to the temptation that spin represents.9 He makes clear, furthermore, that he sees spin as a failing, as a disability. I want to suggest that in his apologetic moments, Taylor is engaging in the same sort of spin that he is criticizing here. For, as I have been arguing, Taylor does in those moments give the impression that he sees belief as obvious and inescapable: that believers have access to a reality that non-believers are also responding to, but misrecognizing. In such moments, then, he is no different than non-believers who take their own stance as obvious and inescapable. This is why it is so problematic for Taylor to claim, as he does at times, that the difference between his account of secularization and that of mainstream theory is just a difference between belief and unbelief. For if the trouble with mainstream theorists is that they engage in spin (either implicitly or explicitly) in the service of unbelief, then Taylor’s effort is no better if he engages in spin from the other side, in the service of belief. If both sides are simply engaging in spin, then neither is taking reality on its own terms. Rather than developing nuanced

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accounts of secularization that strive for fidelity to the relevant history, both run the risk of merely using that history for their own purposes and producing one-sided narratives as a result. I am not claiming that Taylor himself sees the apologetic elements in A Secular Age as instances of spin. For if he did see this, then presumably he would not have been engaging in such moves. Yet I think it matters that Taylor himself identifies spin as a problem, for in doing so, he is laying down a standard that should rule out apologetic moves on behalf of either belief or unbelief. Indeed, Taylor characterizes spin as a failing. Yet some readers have taken Taylor to be giving spin not a negative valence, but rather a positive one.10 Taylor’s position is, however, precisely the opposite. Given that Taylor himself lays down this criticism of spin and thus sets out a standard that should undercut apologetic moves, I part ways with readings that take those apologetic moments in A Secular Age as fundamental to Taylor’s undertaking in the book. Instead, I see those as moments when he is transgressing his own standard and thus succumbing to a temptation that he himself sees as troubling. This transgression is perhaps understandable, for as he observes, avoiding spin is a rather rare feat. Yet it is a transgression of Taylor’s own standard, nonetheless. The standard that Taylor sets for himself is perhaps most clearly articulated near the beginning of the book. He states there that his ambition is to get past ‘the naïvetés on all sides: either that unbelief is just the falling away of any sense of fullness (what theists sometimes are tempted to think of atheists); or that belief is just a set of theories attempting to make sense of experiences which we all have, and whose real nature can be understood purely immanently (what atheists are sometimes tempted to think about theists’ (Taylor 2007, 14). He is saying, in other words, that he wants to get past spin of any kind. Such statements indicate to me that Taylor does intend to present an account of secularization that is responsive to all the relevant history, that does try to do justice to the varieties of belief and unbelief in our age, rather than merely favouring one perspective over the other. To the extent that he fails at this, as he does at times, his failures should be seen as regrettable violations of his own standard. I therefore submit that Taylor’s apologetic moments should not be taken as indicators of his central purpose in A Secular Age, but rather as unfortunate deviations from that purpose, as violations of his own standard. The book’s central contribution is not to score points for belief over unbelief, but rather to show, contra mainstream theory, that an adequate secularization narrative must take seriously religion’s place in Western modernity, while also taking account of the many non-religious (and antireligious) outlooks that now exist in our age. In other words, Taylor aims to get past one-sided treatments, so as to offer a more even-handed approach. Thus, while he does at times seem to privilege belief over unbelief, he also shows great sensitivity to why someone might be drawn to unbelief rather than belief. While he presents us with Bede Griffiths’s experience of nature as a feeling of transcendence, he also recognizes how nature can be experienced instead as drawing us towards a feeling of immanence: There is a strong attraction to the idea that we are in an order of ‘nature,’ in which we are part of this greater whole, arise from it, and don’t escape or transcend it,

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even though we rise above everything else in it. One side of this attraction is the sense of belonging, being part of our native land; we are one with this nature. We feel this most palpably on summer days, as we sit in a garden, hearing the birds singing and the bees humming. We belong to the earth. Camus evokes this sense most powerfully in his Noces. This feeling can only be further strengthened when we reflect how believing we are above this has often pushed us to inhumanity. Another facet of this same belonging is our sense of wonder that something like ourselves arose out of lower nature. There is a mysterious process here; something deep to understand. (Taylor 2007, 547)

Taylor’s aim is misunderstood if moments such as this are not accounted for; if his undertaking is treated simply as an apologetic enterprise. Yet, even if it is granted that Taylor’s aim is to tell a nuanced story that can do justice to religious and non-religious outlooks alike, there might still be concerns that Taylor cannot carry it out while remaining a committed believer. Gordon is getting at this when he remarks that ultimately, for Taylor, history may not matter at all. For, if an even-handed account of secularization requires an honest engagement with all the relevant history, and some elements of that history may undercut the privilege attaching to religion (say, if history shows the development of criticisms against religion and the rise of non-religious outlooks), then can the believer succeed at such a task? Or is the believer’s account always going to retain an apologetic cast? Although Gordon raises this point in reference to Taylor’s commitment as a believer, the same concern might also be applied to non-believers, insofar as history might also seem to pose challenges to their stance. For, just as Gordon expresses the worry that Taylor, the believer, may be writing off the experiences of non-believers, Taylor himself worries from the other side that non-believers (such as Bruce and other mainstream secularization theorists) are dismissing the experiences of believers. On both sides, there is a concern that some element of the relevant history, some element of reality, is not being given its due. Both sides are worried about spin. The concern here is that committed belief (or unbelief, for that matter) is always going to involve spin. Yet I think that Taylor has resources to address this concern. For, in his discussions of spin, he holds out a contrasting way of inhabiting one’s stance. He calls this ‘faith’, and with this concept he refers not specifically to religion, but rather to any awareness of that Jamesian space in which both belief and unbelief are possible. To have faith, in this sense, is to reject spin: it is to adopt a stance for oneself while also recognizing that stance not as something obvious, as simply given, but rather as a commitment that involves ‘a step beyond available reasons’ (Taylor 2007, 551). Since the immanent frame is indeterminate, allowing both open and closed readings, while not requiring either one, Taylor thinks that faith is the proper way to inhabit one’s outlook in our secular age: ‘If you grasp our predicament without ideological distortion, and without blinders, then you see that going one way or another requires what is often called a “leap of faith” ’ (Taylor 2007, 550). This talk of a leap, of an ‘anticipatory confidence’ (Taylor 2007, 551), conveys that faith entails a sense of uncertainty, a sense that neither history, nor our own experience, can definitely settle things in favour

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of belief or unbelief. No matter which stance we take, ‘our over-all sense of things anticipates or leaps ahead of the reasons we can muster’, and thus ‘it is something in the nature of a hunch’ (Taylor 2007, 550). Taylor does not deny that experience can make some difference, that we can develop insights over time that can change or further develop our commitment to our stance. Yet, our stance cannot be rendered simply as the sum of those experiences or insights. To return, then, to Gordon’s concern about whether Taylor can retain a commitment to history and thus disavow apologetics while still remaining a believer, I think Taylor would say that he can, and that a non-believer could do the same. The key is to take one’s stance as a matter of faith, rather than as mere spin. In those moments when Taylor is trying to help us see the appeal of immanence, alongside that of transcendence, I think he is treating his own stance as a matter of faith, for he is recognizing the appeal of both outlooks, while still committing to his own stance in the end. In drawing this distinction between faith and spin, moreover, Taylor is getting at the importance of coming to terms with the diverse and even disorienting character of our current moral and spiritual landscape. To inhabit the stance of belief or unbelief as a matter of faith, rather than as spin, is to be committed to that stance, while nevertheless seeing it in relation to other options. I think this is the approach that Taylor has in mind when he remarks: ‘We all learn to navigate between two standpoints: an “engaged” one in which we live as best we can the reality our standpoint opens us to; and a “disengaged” one in which we are able to see ourselves as occupying one standpoint among a range of possible ones, with which we have in various ways to coexist’ (Taylor 2007, 12). This nuanced approach is incumbent upon all of us in a secular age, believers and unbelievers alike. The problem with mainstream secularization theory, however, is that it is premised on a failure to take this approach. For the unbelief upon which it rests is a matter of spin, rather than faith. It is true, of course, that the apologetic moments in A Secular Age prevent Taylor from achieving complete success with this approach. Yet, he still makes it clear that success is his goal. Success for him would mean that he is able to take his own belief as a matter of faith, rather than succumbing to the temptations of spin. The point is not to replace closed spin with open spin, to shift from naïve unbelief to naïve belief, but rather to move beyond such spin altogether, in order to do justice both to the history that has brought us to our secular age, and to the many-sided character of that age itself.

5 Conclusion I have tried to argue here that there are two competing strands of thought in Taylor’s A Secular Age: one that is apologetic in character, and another that serves to undercut apologetic appeals. I acknowledge, therefore, that there is a tension in the book. Yet I do not think this tension is fatal for Taylor’s project. For Taylor’s book is not divided between two incompatible but equally fundamental objectives. Rather, his apologetic moments should be seen as deviations from book’s single fundamental objective: to

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provide a more nuanced and even-handed account of secularization than mainstream theorists have been able to offer. This aim involves taking seriously religion’s role in Western modernity, in a way that most theoretical accounts have failed to do, while also giving just as much serious consideration to the range of non-religious outlooks that have come to be essential features of our moral and spiritual landscape. Taylor intends for his project to be accountable to all of the relevant history and to the experiences of believers and non-believers alike, and given the enormity of this task, it is perhaps not surprising that Taylor is not completely successful in carrying it out. This is one reason why Taylor may not fully succeed. Yet I think that Taylor himself helps to uncover another reason. He notes that the kind of even-handedness he strives for is, in a certain sense, appropriate for our secular age, since he recognizes the simultaneous pull of belief and unbelief as one of our age’s defining features. Yet he also observes that it is relatively rare for someone to truly feel the force of these opposing positions, to truly inhabit the Jamesian open space. If this is true, if a profound sensitivity to both belief and unbelief is hard to come by, then perhaps it is not so surprising that even Taylor sometimes stumbles in his effort to do justice to the range of religious and non-religious outlooks that exist alongside one another in our age. Nevertheless, I think that Taylor takes it as his goal to do all he can to consider each outlook on its own terms. Taylor helps us to see, moreover, that such a goal is not (or does not have to be) incompatible with a strong commitment to one’s own stance, whether as a believer or a non-believer. This is, of course, where his helpful but often overlooked distinction between faith and spin comes in. Taylor comes at his project as a believer, but I take it that he intends to approach his own belief not as matter of faith rather than as spin: as a stance that he commits himself to while being aware of and engaging with other possible stances. This suggestion finds confirmation in the comments that he offers at the end of the edited volume that I referred to at the outset. There he offers this striking statement: Let me come out of the closet and tell you what it means to be my kind of Catholic. I think that we have a calling to understand very different positions, particularly very different understandings of fullness. One important reason is that is that if one doesn’t do that, one hobbles around on crutches. That is, you give yourself a sense that your position is right because of some caricature of the alternative that you entertain, and you say, ‘Well, I mean, I can’t be that kind of thing’. . . . We all need to get over those crutches by really coming to experience the power and attraction of different understandings of the world, atheist and theist. (Taylor 2010, 319)

This call to take different positions on their own terms, so as to see them as their own adherents see them, is one of Taylor’s distinctive contributions. Although it is perhaps understandable that he slips at times into apologetics and thus does not completely succeed at this task, these moments have had the unfortunate effect of obscuring his contribution, for they have given many readers license to assume that he is simply

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another foot soldier in the ongoing polemics between the opposing camps of belief and unbelief. I have taken the time to examine the apologetic elements in Taylor’s book because I want to acknowledge their presence, while making clear that they stand in tension with what I take to be the more fundamental thrust of the project. In fact, their presence illuminates precisely what is at stake in Taylor’s own nuanced distinction between faith and mere spin. They are perfect examples of why spin is a problem. Taylor does address the charge of apologetic intent in the comments just mentioned. He responds: ‘Well, I suppose that I’m offering reasons for a certain kind of Christian position’ (Taylor 2010, 320). Yet if in giving such reasons, Taylor is not trying to engage in spin, but rather to speak out of faith, then his intent is not apologetic in the sense that many of his readers have assumed. Even if the reasons that Taylor gives for his position are not found to be persuasive, his monumental effort still has the great merit of forcing us to interrogate our own presuppositions about what it might mean to live in a secular age.

Notes 1 Gordon makes specific reference to what he sees as the catholic orientation of A Secular Age, and this theme has been given further elaboration by Ian Hunter. Taylor’s account, according to Hunter, presents a neo-Thomist view of secularization as ‘the moral uprooting of the rational subject from its sacral community,’ in opposition to a Protestant rationalist (and Kantian) view of the process as ‘the progressive winnowing of the chaff of historical religious belief from the kernel of the morally self-governing rational subject’ (Hunter 2011, 622). Hunter thus sees significant overlap between Taylor and neo-Thomists such as Alasdair MacIntyre and John Milbank. 2 For other responses to Taylor’s book that make similar charges of apologetic intent, see Jay 2009 and Larmore 2008. 3 This latter theme goes unrecognized in most of the readings that emphasize Taylor’s apologetic intent. Hunter, for instance, reads Taylor as indulging in neo-Thomist nostalgia for a lost era when belief could be taken for granted and unbelief was not yet a threat on the horizon. Hunter thus misses Taylor’s concern with the conditions shaping both belief and unbelief in a secular age, and in neglecting this theme, Hunter misses the features of Taylor’s project that distinguish it from those of MacIntyre and Milbank. 4 Taylor at points refers to these mainstream secularization narratives as ‘subtraction stories’, which explain Western modernity in terms of a decline of religion, in terms of ‘human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge’ (Taylor 2007, 22). Such stories assume that religion must be sloughed off because it can no longer be (or, according to an even stronger version of the story, has never been) a true motivating factor in human life. 5 In addition to Bruce 1995, Taylor also makes reference to Bruce’s other writings on secularization, including Bruce 2002 and Bruce 1992.

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6 Taylor makes a similar point in his foreword to the English translation of Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (see Taylor 1997). Taylor finds much to praise in Gauchet’s account but nevertheless concludes that it is not ‘ultimately right’ about secularization, a fault traceable back to the fact that Gauchet’s account is that of an ‘atheist’ (Taylor 1997, xiv). That is to say, Gauchet is seen as approaching religion merely from the outside, as reducing religion to the non-religious, and thus he misses something crucial: his account is like ‘Hamlet without the Prince’ (Taylor 1997, xv). By contrast, Taylor identifies himself as standing on the inside, and he suggests that the stance of belief would allow for a richer account than Gauchet’s unbelieving stance is able to provide. Given how closely these remarks align with claims that Taylor makes 10 years later in A Secular Age, the foreword can be seen in retrospect as offering a kind of promissory note for Taylor’s own book. 7 Another way to express this charge is to say that Taylor seems to be relying on his own sort of subtraction story, except that in his version of the story, it is unbelief rather than belief that is denied a place among the true motivating factors in human life. 8 For a similar point, see Larmore 2008. 9 Taylor would seem to be suggesting, then, that there can be subtraction stories skewed in favor of belief or unbelief, and that both versions of the story are problematic, because both are based merely on spin. Both screen out relevant dimensions of human life. 10 For instance, Larmore reads Taylor to be saying that ‘we need to give our dilemma a “spin”’ (Larmore 2008: 44).

References Bruce, Steve, ed. 1992. Religion and Modernization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bruce, Steve. 1995. Religion in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2002. God is Dead. Oxford: Blackwell. Gordon, Peter E. 2008. ‘The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 69(4): 647–73. —. 2011. ‘Must the Sacred be Transcendent?’ Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 54(2): 126–39. Griffiths, Bede. 1994. The Golden String. London: Fount. Hunter, Ian. 2011. ‘Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Secularization in Early Modern Germany’. Modern Intellectual History, 8(3): 621–46. Jay, Martin. 2009. ‘Faith-Based History’. History and Theory, 48(1): 76–84. Larmore, Charles. 2008. ‘How Much Can We Stand?’ New Republic, 238(6): 39–44. Taylor, Charles. 1997. ‘Foreword’, in Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Translated by Oscar Burges. Princeton: Princeton University Press, ix–xv. —. 2002. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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—. 2010. ‘Afterword: Apologia pro Libro suo’, in Michael Warner, Jonathan Van Antwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 300–24. Warner, Michael, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun. 2010. ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1–31.

10

Religion, Modernity and the Notion of Subtler Languages Gerbert Faure

In his introduction to the translation of Marcel Gauchet’s Le désenchantement du monde, Charles Taylor famously criticizes the latter’s view on the meaning of religion (Gauchet 1999, xi–xiv). Gauchet argues that religion manages to establish human identity by grounding it in an unchangeable past. In this way, the unbearable insight into the contingency and nothingness of our lives cannot arise. Our human identity is justified because it is completely absorbed by the divine order.1 Taylor replies that religion might indeed be a way to give meaning to our otherwise contingent existence, but that we can’t possibly maintain that religious feelings are initially motivated by this abstract hunger for meaning. The specific objects of religious faith cannot be interpreted as a means to make our lives meaningful. Their significance cannot be grasped in external, functional terms, but can only be understood from within the experience of these objects themselves. I can’t explain in a theoretical way what distinguishes my Christian faith from other ways to give meaning to life. But when I am praying to God and when I am singing for Him in church, I know in a very specific sense what Christian faith means. This position can be characterized as ‘internal realism’. Religious attitudes are oriented towards specific realities, which is why we can speak of religious insights. Nevertheless, the objects of religious belief only become significant or meaningful from within religious experience itself and consequently their relevance cannot be articulated by an independent theory (see, for example, Taylor 2002, 26–7). Especially in his more recent work, Taylor attempts to show in a subtle way how the Christian option remains meaningful in secularized modernity. What are the implications of his internal realism for such an attempt? On the one hand, this view presupposes a certain powerlessness, because we can’t offer an external argument that could convince someone of the importance of religion today, even though Taylor sometimes seems to try this in a problematic way.2 On the other hand, Taylor’s internal realism enables him to introduce the notion of ‘subtler languages’, which points to a different, non-theoretical way of speaking about the significance of the Christian option.

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Taylor introduces the notion of subtler languages in the context of his discussion of the Romantic poets – the term comes from Shelley – but it has a much broader significance.3 We can elucidate the fruitfulness of this concept in the debate on religion today by making an analogy with the appreciation of artworks. Aesthetic experience is clearly oriented towards certain properties, but they only become significant or meaningful from within a subjective sensitivity or familiarity. Hence one can only appreciate the properties if this sensitivity is awoken. However, we are not entirely powerless when it comes to the attempt to induce it in the other. We can talk about the properties of the work of art in such a way that the attention of the other shifts, so that they will appear in a different light to him. For instance, at first I dislike Wagner’s Die Walküre. The music strikes me as pathetic and bombastic. But then my friend starts speaking tenderly about the family tragedy and about how the system of leitmotifs manages to capture the psychological mood of the characters. Admittedly, these words can’t directly affect my appreciation of the work. Yet they can indirectly incite me to see the work from a different angle. The same could be said about religious sensitivity. Artworks, for instance, can themselves function as a subtler language for religious sensitivity. Bach and Rembrandt have the ability to put the content of the Bible in a different light, which can indirectly prompt us to have another look at it and henceforth see its relevance. How is this notion of subtler languages related to an internal realism with regard to meaningfulness in general and religion in particular? Taylor’s internal realism implies that religious faith and meaning in general do indeed require a subjective sensitivity, but that this sensitivity is oriented towards specific realities with an objective content. It is precisely because we are dealing with a meaningful reality that we have the possibility to describe objective properties in such a way that they become saturated with meaning. In other words: since the subjective sensitivity is oriented towards something objective which can be grasped by all of us, we have a point of departure from which we can indirectly induce it. Of course, we have no guarantee that our attempt will be successful, because our internal description of the reality might not awaken anything in the other, even though he completely understands the objective content of the description. This is different in the case of a completely external argument: as soon as one has grasped and accepted the argument, one is also convinced of its validity.4 Now, Taylor has often stressed a development that has taken place in modernity and which seems to make these subtler languages fragile: ‘[M]odern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are “in the mind”. They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm’ (Taylor 2011, 219). Taylor often refers to this development with the terms ‘buffered self ’ and ‘disenchantment’. Modernity has given rise to the idea that the systems that allow us to give meaning to reality – art, religion and morality – cannot be shared by everyone from a neutral perspective, since they are not grounded in an independent reality. They give meaning to reality, yet they are not intrinsically present in it. It is very likely that the rise of this idea is closely connected to the acceptance of modern science as the model of what counts as true knowledge. Scientific truth can ideally be confirmed from a neutral perspective.5 Since the meaning of religion, art and morality cannot be

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confirmed in such a way, they come to be considered as merely subjective. This contrast between purely subjective meaning and objective knowledge was not drawn so sharply before the modern period, as Taylor indicates. The objects of knowledge were fraught with meaning, while the objects of what we would now call ‘meaningfulness’ were an essential part of reality. Hence, it is only when the scientific model of knowledge has come up that one is able to identify subjective meaning as such. From a retrospective point of view, we now say that in the premodern era meaning and knowledge were profoundly intertwined. This is true, but the premoderns could not have made such an assertion. Also in modernity, however, our experience of meaningfulness remains marked by this mixture of subjective sensitivity and objective content. Kant has shown that we experience beauty as if it is a property of the object, which is why we expect that the other will necessarily agree with our judgement. This all the more so applies to morality: when I sincerely say that some act is wrong, I can’t simultaneously entertain the thought that the truth of my utterance is contingent. Also in the case of religion, this remains an essential part of our experience: if one is sincerely religious, one does not simply interpret religion as a symbolic system which enables the human being to give meaning to suffering, death, and so on, but one takes the objects of belief seriously in themselves. We could say that this fusion of subjective sensitivity and objective content is itself a subtler language. In our experience, we don’t make a clear distinction between the naked objective reality and the meaning that we project as subjects. The objective reality is saturated with meaning and the subjective meaning is incarnated in reality. Subtler languages, in the strict sense, appeal to this mixed character of our experience. A subtler language describes objective properties in such a way that the other might become sensitive to them. This implies that our experience of meaningfulness doesn’t clearly distinguish the purely objective and what we add as subjects. So far, we can conclude that there is a contrast between these kinds of subtler languages and the strict distinction we moderns tend to make between purely subjective meaning and objective knowledge. Nevertheless, the awareness of this distinction does not seem to be so disturbing that it eliminates the experiences that are marked by the subtle mixture of subjective sensitivity and objective content.6 Yet the case of religion might be an exception. If we come to realize that the deep revelation which we experience in art is essentially grounded in subjective sensitivity, this does not seem to undermine the meaningfulness of aesthetic experience. By contrast, in the domain of morality this awareness seems to be more problematic. However, as soon as we attempt to provide a foundation for our experience of moral objectivity, we realize that it is impossible to ground the normative rightness of moral utterances in empirical knowledge of facts (cf. Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’). This is somewhat different in the case of religion. Religious belief seems to be connected to concrete contents which are in some way related to the empirical world. If we say that we believe in the existence of God, we cannot avoid thinking about an entity which actively influences the empirical world in some way or another, be it in the present or only in the past by means of its creation.

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This leads to a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, religious feelings are not originally motivated by the desire for theoretical knowledge. It would be absurd to conceive of religion as a kind of pre-scientific hypothesis which has been refuted by the more advanced modern science, even though this seems to be a very popular point of view.7 On the other hand, a truly religious attitude seems to presuppose that one believes in realities which could in principle be subjected to empirical investigation. What remains of Christian faith if one strips away the belief in a benevolent God, His creations and eternal life? Being religious cannot simply be identified with the adherence to particular forms of symbolic practice, but it also entails a commitment to representational contents. It is impossible to think of God without thinking about an entity that occupies space and that has performed actions in time. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to assume that these representations of God functioned as primitive theoretical hypotheses about the first principles of the universe. I contend that the emergence of modern science has generated an attitude which deeply disturbs this subtle balance of a ‘belief without theory’. I have explained that the scientific perspective has caused us to draw a sharp distinction between the empirical truth that can be grasped without subjective interference and the systems that allow us to give meaning to our lives. As soon as one adopts this attitude, the realities towards which religious belief is oriented become an object of potential empirical investigation. We begin to wonder if it is really plausible to believe in such supernatural realities which influence the natural course of events. In other words, Taylor is right to maintain that religion is no primitive version of science, but this does not yet mean that the development of modern science hasn’t played a crucial role in the decline of belief. Hence we have to wonder how it is possible that, in the premodern era, the objects of faith were neither mere symbolic entities nor objects of empirical theory. How can we explain the paradoxical situation of ‘belief without theory’, which means that one is attached to specific realities without critically examining whether they exist? It is well known that the philosophers of the medieval period held extensive debates on the nature of the angels, the immortal soul, miracles, etc. Yet it is not very likely that they could have ever called into question the framework within which these discussions appeared, namely, the reality of the Christian God with all its existential implications. When these philosophers offered a proof for the existence of God, this by no means served to awaken their religious attitude, but only to strengthen it from a different, rational point of view.8 A similar attitude is adopted by many non-Western intellectuals today. I was spending some time with a Togolese friend of mine, who has a PhD in law from a Western university. After a while, I got the feeling that the cultural difference between us was rather minimal. But when we were waiting for a taxi in the evening and I began whistling, he turned to me angrily and said in all seriousness: ‘Do not whistle in the dark, because this attracts evil spirits’. I saw a discrepancy between the critical attitude which he generally adopts and his particular attachment to certain beliefs which he could nevertheless never subject to a critical investigation. Our contemporary Western mentality is so deeply influenced by the model of empirical scientific investigation that it seems unthinkable to us that one can be

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sincerely oriented towards specific realities without wanting to investigate their empirical truth. Nevertheless, this attitude also persists in our culture. Many people still tend to light a candle in church when their son or daughter has an important exam coming up, or when some beloved will make a long journey. Suppose that we confront these people with the implications of their actions: ‘Apparently, you are assuming that the burning of a candle can exert causal influence on the result of an exam or the course of traffic. Do you really believe this?’ They would probably admit that they don’t. But at the same time, this question will perhaps strike them as meaningless and irrelevant. It introduces a perspective of investigation which is excluded by the nature of the practice they are involved in. Or, consider the practice of praying at someone’s grave. When our family prays before dinner, this clearly has a purely ritual or symbolic meaning. We don’t tend to think about a reality which answers our prayer and blesses our food. If we forgot to pray at my aunt’s grave after our holiday in her house, however, it would appear as if she is really wronged, as if she can notice it. Again: if you introduced the critical perspective and asked me if I really believe that the soul of my aunt has left her body and is listening to us, I would not know how to answer. However, my inability to answer does not issue from any uncertainty as to whether she is really listening. I am not praying ‘just in case’, ‘because you never know’. Rather, I am not wondering whether the object of my meaningful practice exists at all. Yet my attachment to this object can’t be reduced to the importance of a symbolic ritual either. In this way, we come to see that religion is a ‘very subtle’ subtle language. The religious attitude is oriented towards realities which can in principle be subjected to empirical investigation. However, because the attachment to these realities does not issue from the desire for knowledge but from something entirely different (call it the quest for meaning), it becomes irrelevant to subject them to a critical examination. What does this all imply for Taylor’s hope that subtler languages might indirectly awaken our sensitivity for the Christian option in secularized modernity?9 From our modern perspective, we can’t help applying the sharp distinction between objective knowledge and subjective meaning to the phenomenon of religion. As a result, religion comes to be regarded as a subjective way to give meaning to our lives and the world around us. At the same time, however, we must acknowledge that this subjective practice only works if one is attached to realities, whose importance cannot be reduced to the hunger for meaning. Religion paradoxically only manages to give meaning to our lives if we don’t see the objects of faith as a means to this more general end. There can be no talk of religion without belief, except if one is willing to erode the meaning of the term ‘religion’.10 It is precisely because these objects of faith remain a crucial part of the religious attitude that the modern development of disenchantment affects religion more deeply than other systems of meaning. Modernity has generated an attitude that cannot help seeing the attachment to realities with an empirical content as a kind of theoretical hypothesis. In this way, the objects of faith become absorbed by an investigation that undermines their meaning. Religion consists in a subtle mixture of subjective sensitivity and objective commitment that has become problematic due to the modern climate. Again: religion is no primitive theory, but the balance of ‘belief without theory’ has been made fragile by the modern disposition towards theory.

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Consequently, Taylor might be a bit too optimistic when he hopes that the immanent frame can be reopened with an appeal to subtler languages. After all, subtler languages have the power to indirectly influence our sensitivity because they make use of an objective point of departure. However, it is precisely the supernatural object of religious belief which has become subjected to our modern critical mentality. In other words, because religion is itself a subtler language that has become fragile in modernity, subtler languages in the strict sense have great difficulties to be heard in the present climate. How is it possible that Taylor recognizes the modern situation of disenchantment, but nevertheless doesn’t draw such a radical conclusion from it? Taylor connects the idea that meanings are in the mind with a development that has taken place within religion. Christianity continues a development that had begun with the rise of the ‘axial’ religions, which stress the importance of religion as a form of personal commitment that calls into question existing social structures. This also involves the idea that the divine is no longer located in the concrete, sacred order of things but has become more abstract and transcendent. If one joins both ideas together, one ends up with the model of an individual who relates to an abstract notion of the divine from within an inner space. Taylor argues that, from the late medieval period onwards, a movement of reform has taken place within Christianity, which served to eliminate the older, preaxial forms of religion. The truly religious life does not revolve around external rituals and magical practices that are executed at a particular moment and (very often) by particular persons, but it rather consists in a personal, inner rapport with God in our daily lives. Consequently, ‘we have moved from an era in which religious life was more “embodied”, where the presence of the sacred could be enacted in ritual, or seen, felt, touched, walked towards (in pilgrimage); into one which is more “in the mind”, where the link passes more through our endorsing contested interpretations – for instance, of our political identity as religiously defined, or of God as the authority and moral source underpinning ethical life’ (Taylor 2007, 554). Taylor writes that this change within religion doesn’t necessarily have to lead to a decline of religion altogether. Even in the present ‘age of authenticity’, when the number of believing people has greatly diminished, many people remain plagued by an implicit sense of dissatisfaction with a purely immanent reading of the universe, even though we can never return to the original religion which presupposes an enchanted world (see Taylor 2011, 255–6). However, perhaps it is not entirely appropriate to apply the notions of ‘buffered self ’ and ‘disenchantment’ to both the movement of Christian reform and the idea that meanings can no longer be embedded in objective reality.11 Both developments are deeply interrelated, but they don’t have the same impact. I have explained that the idea that meanings are in the mind probably originates in the emergence of modern science. This development might, in its turn, have been caused by changes within Christianity, but it has a much greater impact than the Christian reform can ever have in itself. After all, even if one interprets the truly religious life as a personal rapport with God, one is still relating to a supernatural entity that causally influenced the natural course of events by means of its creation, even though it is not directly present in the world anymore. If meaning is considered to reside in the mind, this

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personal belief in a transcendent God should be undermined just as well as the belief in magical practices. The attitude that has been generated by the emergence of modern science seems to undermine every rapport with the supernatural in the form of a ‘belief without theory’. Taylor, however, seems to identify this attitude with the less radical movement of Christian reform, which allows him to open up the possibility of a religious attitude within a disenchanted world. Taylor is probably reluctant to associate the decline of religion too closely with the emergence of modern science because this might give the impression that religion is a kind of pre-scientific hypothesis, which is indeed incorrect. But perhaps Taylor underestimates the indirect influence of modern science on a climate where the subtle balance of ‘belief without theory’ becomes problematic.12 In sum, Taylor attempts to demonstrate that the development of disenchantment and the significance of a religious attitude are not mutually exclusive. I have been trying to show that this combination might be unproblematic in other domains, but that religion is, due to its involvement with empirical contents, particularly vulnerable to the idea that meanings cannot reside in reality anymore. This is not to say that there can be no modernized people who are at the same time sensitive to the subtle balance of belief without theory. I have only contended that this combination has a problematic character, that there might be a tension between modernity and religion that is of a more radical nature than Taylor is perhaps willing to acknowledge.

Notes 1 See especially Gauchet’s introduction and the very last chapter of the book: ‘the religious after religion’. 2 In A Secular Age, Taylor only seems to argue in a negative way that religion and modernity are not mutually exclusive: ‘I will not be arguing either for or against an open or closed reading [of the immanent frame, G.F.], just trying to dissipate the false aura of the obvious that surrounds one of these’ (Taylor 2007, 551). However, in A Catholic Modernity? Taylor does seem to argue in a positive way that only the perspective of the Christian agape can underpin our modern ethical demands. I believe that we can distinguish two arguments. On the one hand, Taylor thinks that the transcendent perspective allows for ‘the highest degree of philanthropic action with the minimum hope in mankind’ (Taylor 1999, 35). On the other hand, Taylor claims that ‘the only way to escape fully the draw toward violence lies somewhere in the turn to transcendence – that is, through the full-hearted love of some good beyond life’ (Taylor 1999, 28–9). However, Taylor’s internal realism obliges him to say that the awareness that we are in need of a God does not yet make us believe in God. 3 For Taylor’s discussion of the notion of subtler languages in the romantic poets, see chapter 21 of Sources of the Self (Taylor 1989) and chapter 8 of The Ethics of authenticity (Taylor 1991). 4 In the third chapter of Sources of the Self, on the ‘Ethics of inarticulacy’, one can find a clear outline of Taylor’s internal realism with regard to meaningfulness in general (Taylor 1989).

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5 Of course, this idea has been deconstructed by many contemporary philosophers of science. For my argument, however, it suffices to say that it is at work in modernity, whether it corresponds to reality or not. 6 We can now understand why Taylor introduces the notion of subtler languages in the context of the emergence of a new poetical language in the romantic era. The disappearance of a generally accepted order of meaning compelled the romantic poets to invent a new symbolism that originates in their personal sensitivity. However, the absence of firmly established, publicly shared meaningful relations is directly related to the development of disenchantment: ‘what could never be recovered is the public understanding that angels are part of a human-independent ontic order, having their angelic nature quite independently of human articulation . . .’ (Taylor 1999, 86). Taylor tries to show that this development does not necessarily have to lead to a mere subjectivism, but that it rather brings about a mixture of subjective sensitivity and objective relevance. I am inclined to argue that this mixture has always been present, but that it is only in modernity that one is able to understand that two separate things were profoundly intertwined. The experience of meaning has always been mediated by subjective sensitivity. Yet it is only with the rise of a purely objective notion of reality that one is able to identify the subjective element as such. In the premodern era, the publicly shared meanings were not regarded as ‘meanings’ but they were an essential part of reality. This reality, however, can in its turn not be equated with the neutral object of modern science. 7 Consider the success of the novel by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. Many people were delighted to discover that many of the alleged historical truths which formed the basis of the doctrines of the church turned out to be fictional. We can also think of the enormous success of Dawkins’ work outside academic circles. For Taylor’s rejection of the view that the decline in religion has an epistemological basis, see for example Taylor 2007, 563. 8 This is the reason why, in Thomas Aquinas’ view, someone can be convinced of the existence of God and yet be an unbeliever. This reveals that he does not view religious belief as a theoretical opinion at all. Walter Van Herck has pointed this out to me in an illuminating Dutch article (Van Herck 2012, 45–64). Incidentally, Van Herck’s article draws on the ideas of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, which are in many ways similar to the position I am arguing for here. Van Herck repeats some of these insights in his contribution to the volume at hand. 9 When I am using the word ‘hope’ I am thinking of the last paragraph of Sources of the Self, which can be read as an announcement of his A Secular Age: ‘There is a large element of hope. It is a hope that I see implicit in Judaeo-Christian theism (however terrible the record of its adherents in history), and its central promise of a divine affirmation of the human, more total than humans can ever attain unaided. But to explain this properly would take another book’ (Taylor 1989, 521). 10 It is only when the religious attitude has lost its evidence, namely, when it has become an option, that one is able to analyse the function of religion from an external point of view. If one carries out such an analysis, one will discover that religion managed to deal with issues such as vulnerability, suffering and death, which are also recognizable from a non-religious point of view. This is the reason why it is not altogether nonsensical to speak about an ‘immanent religion’, which can be found in Spinoza and (perhaps also) Nietzsche. These philosophers speak of an attitude that

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greatly resembles the traditional religious point of view, although it does not share the latter’s metaphysical commitments. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to call the ‘immanent religion’ religious in the strict sense, since the metaphysical commitment to the supernatural deeply changes the nature of the attitude in question. This is why I am inclined to agree with Gauchet’s position in his debate with Luc Ferry on this issue (see Ferry and Gauchet 2004). The same could be said about Taylor’s mentioning of the enduring presence of the festive in an individualized culture, for instance in rock concerts and football matches. Taylor doubts whether this can be called religious in a strict sense (Taylor 2011, 260–1). 11 Compare page 216 of The Future of the Religious Past with page 226 (Taylor 2011). 12 One could say that Taylor might still be too attached to the Weberian notion of disenchantment as the disappearance of magic, even though he criticizes the latter’s identification of disenchantment and secularization (see Taylor 2011, 216). As soon as one gives a broader definition of disenchantment, as Gauchet seems to do, one comes to see that disenchantment and secularization might be directly related after all (see Gauchet 1999, 3).

References Ferry, Luc and Gauchet, Marcel. 2004. Le Religieux après la Religion. Paris: Grasset. Gauchet, Marcel. 1999. The Disenchantment of the World. Translated by Oscar Burge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1999. A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture: With responses by William M. Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2002. Varieties of Religion Today. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. —. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. —. 2011. Dilemmas and Connections. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Van Herck, Walter. 2012. ‘Tranformaties van geloof ’. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 74: 45–64.

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Wilfred Cantwell Smith on the History of ‘Religion’ and ‘Belief ’ Walter Van Herck

Wilfred Cantwell Smith isn’t really a name one would associate with the topic of secularization. However, his work, which mainly concerns the comparative study of religion, throws some light on the implications of the secularization process. His analysis demonstrates that secularization isn’t merely a sociologically traceable process, but that it also involves a restructuring of our thinking. One could describe the practical effect of secularization as an increase of the number of atheists (or religiously indifferent people) in a given society – an increase at the expense of a decreasing number of believers. This way of presenting things is, however, too simple. For, secularization also changes the presuppositions of our thinking in consequence of which the meaning of religion and belief shifts. As such, secularization is an acid that affects each and every one – Church leaders, theologians, teachers cannot escape its effects. The power of Smith’s work consists in drawing attention to this invisible process. After a short biographical note, I will focus on the concepts that underwent the most important transformations, according to Wilfred Cantwell Smith. These two concepts are ‘religion’ and ‘belief ’.

1 Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) Wilfred Cantwell Smith was born in 1916 in Toronto. He studied Eastern languages. From 1940 till 1946 he was teaching in colonial India (Lahore, now Pakistan). In 1948 he received his PhD from Princeton University. He taught subsequently at McGill University, Harvard University, Dalhousie University in Halifax and again in Harvard from 1978. After his retirement in 1985, he remained active in Toronto. He died in 2000, on the same day on which his brother Arnold, a famous diplomat, had died 6 years earlier. Smith was an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada, the largest Protestant denomination in that country. Some think that this personal involvement had a (too) strong influence on his academic work.1 Smith wrote some 15 books. Most of them are related to Islamic studies and comparative religious studies. In this chapter, we take three of these into account, namely, his comparative and diachronical studies of religion and belief.

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2 Shifts in the meaning of religion Smith’s book The Meaning and End of Religion (Smith 1991) appeared for the first time in 1962. Both John Hick in his preface (Smith 1991, v) and Talal Asad (2001) regarded it as a classic of religious studies. His criticisms aim at what he calls the ‘reification’ of religion. It has become evident in contemporary culture to take for granted that, in human life and in human society, there is something separate which is called religion. It is to such a degree a presupposition of modern thought that questioning it is considered an absurdity. Of course Smith doesn’t want to raise scepticism concerning the existence of those phenomena which we call religions, but he does want to question whether they really are separate entities. There aren’t that many non-Western languages in which the term ‘religion’ and its plural form ‘religions’ have an equivalent. It seems that the world can be religious without the help of a special term to denote that. Smith even suggests that it might be easier to be religious without such a notion. Religion can reveal itself as an enemy of devotion, or, to put it differently, too much emphasis on religion can distract the attention from God and the divine. Indeed, historically speaking there is a clear correlation. The surge of the notion religion is connected to a decreasing religious practice (Smith 1991, 19). In the original Latin religio Smith sees a reference to powers which transcend the human and oblige man to worship. ‘Religio mihi est’ says that something is religion to me, that something has power over me and can force me. ‘Religiosae locae’ are holy places and ‘viri religiosi’ are pious, devout men. The adjective seems to have a more stable meaning than the substantive. According to Smith, that is an interesting detail since it indicates that it is more about a quality, which a person or a life possesses, than about an independent entity. So, an oath, a promise, cultic observances are religio for someone. The ceremonies themselves are called religiones.2 In the philosophical works of Lucretius (De rerum natura) and Cicero (De natura deorum) Smith traces the first intellectualization of the concept of religion. Their philosophical criticism places itself at a distance and describes religion not as something one does or feels or as something that obligates, but as a theoretical entity that can be abstracted from the practices of others. Another recalibration of concepts takes place when Christianity is introduced. Up until the fourth century there is frequent Christian use of the term religion. In the plural, one uses it to denote the Greek and Roman cults which are condemned. Its singular form refers to the own, Christian cult. Christian exclusivism gives rise to the use of expressions like ‘nostra religio’, ‘vestra religio’, ‘vera religio’ and ‘falsa religio’. These worries about demarcations are new. They produce an unexpected alliance between the philosophical criticism of traditional cults mentioned above and the Christian criticism of paganism. More concretely put: there is something of Cicero and Lucretius in for example, Lactantius’ critique of the ‘falsa religio deorum’. Augustine is well known for a book entitled De vera religione. This title is often incorrectly translated as On the True Religion. Better and more correct are the following suggestions for translating that title: On True Religion (without the definitive article);

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On Genuine Piety or On Genuine Worship. According to Augustine, ‘vera religio’ is the worshipping in awe and love of the true God. After him the word ‘religion’ is given little use. In the Middle Ages it refers mainly to the monastic life. Living as a monk is ‘religio’. One can compare the French expression still in use: ‘entrer en religion’ (literally: to enter religion) by which is meant entering a monastery. When in the fourteenth century ‘the various religions of England’ are mentioned, the expression doesn’t refer to (world) religions in our sense, but it does refer to the different monastic orders (Smith 1991, 31). Thomas Aquinas devotes eight articles to the virtue of ‘religion’ (De Religione, Sum. Theol., IIaIIae, Q. 81). Furthermore, he gives a spiritual explanation by way of a threefold etymology: relegere (rereading), re-eligere (re-electing, in contrast to negligere) and religare (connecting). With the dawn of modernity, the most important transformation in the concept of religion announces itself. At first, its association with devotion and a personal attitude is maintained. In 1474 Marsilio Ficino’s De Christiana Religione is published. An adequate translation of its title would be according to Smith (Smith 1991, 34): On the Christ-Oriented Nature of Universal Human Religiousness, in its Ideal Form. It is not a book about Christianity in the sense which we now give to that term. Also the title of Zwingli’s publication De vera et falsa religione commentarius (1525) is treacherous. It is not about Christianity in its opposition to other religions, but about the true and false religion (i.e. some kind of devotion) of Christians. By false religion is meant a submission to religion instead of to God. Smith suggests the following translation: An Essay on Genuine and Spurious Piety (Smith 1991, 37). By the year 1600 the use of the term ‘religio’ is completely popularized and established. A book that has contributed to this is the publication in 1536 of Calvin’s Christianae Religionis Institutio. Again it is not about religion in the sense of a world religion, not even in the sense of an institution (institutio rather means instruction here) and surely not in the sense of an abstract system or belief system. Religion is here the inborn sense of devotion which stimulates man to worship – something which elevates man above animals and barbarians. Calvin’s title could therefore be accurately translated as Grounding in Christian Piety. It is not incidental that in these contexts the phrasing is not ‘the Christian religion’ – as a world religion, which is of a later date – but only of ‘Christian religion’. The word ‘religion’ refers to devotion. In the seventeenth century, the usage starts to take hold to use ‘religion’ to refer to an abstract system or belief system. While in Calvin the doctrines, scriptural interpretations, church practices and so on have to establish ‘religio’ in a person, a century later these elements which could instigate ‘religio’ are now referred to with exactly that same word. The meaning shifts from a personal attitude to a system, from a personal revering recognition of God to a belief system. The system is now the Christian religion. Smith notes: ‘The difference is momentous’ (Smith 1991, 39). A thinker on this road is Hugo Grotius. His De Veritate Religionis Christianae (1627) really poses the question of which religion is true (in the epistemic sense). The truth of doctrines is, in this way, made equivalent to the truth of a religion. This is the identity which is constructed in the Enlightenment: religion is doctrine.3 And now also the notion of ‘natural religion’ is introduced. It refers to the convictions about

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God, man and world which are attainable by the natural light reason. The opposition which is thus created to revealed religion is new and revolutionary. Revelation is fundamental to Christianity, but nobody before the seventeenth century would have said that what is revealed is a religion. God doesn’t reveal religions; He reveals himself (Smith 1991, 128). Smith sees two main developments. The first concerns the beginning of the use of the plural. The plural was an impossibility as long as religion was about an inner attitude. Also, in cases like obedience, piety and awe the plural form is non-existent. Because authors change their point of view from an internal to an external approach, the plural becomes possible. Second, this is the origin of the generic concept ‘religion’ as the sum total of all belief systems or as a kind of umbrella term. Originally the term is even used with some hostility. Christianity which is not called ‘religio’, but ‘fides’ is opposed to a plurality of religions and tries to refute these. The idea that one can and must refute religion is a modern Christian thought. Later, atheism only had to take it up and extend it to all religions including Christianity. Schleiermachers Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion. Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1799) seems to have been the first book that uses the term religion in its broad, generic sense. The external appearances of a religion become to be the inadequate and particular expressions of a universal religion of the heart. Through Hegel the reification becomes total in the work of Feuerbach who published in 1851 Das Wesen der Religion (The Essence of Religion). What counts for Smith is not so much Feuerbach’s concrete analysis of the essence of religion, but the fact that he thinks that there is such an essence. In sum, there are four meanings of religion. The first is an indication of personal piety within a religion. An example: ‘He is now more religious than earlier in his life.’ Religion is here opposed to indifference and laxity. The second and third meanings refer to a system of beliefs and practices which is set forth according to its ideal structure (second meaning) or as a factually given phenomenon (third meaning). In both cases, one specific religion is opposed to another. The last, fourth meaning is generic where religion is an umbrella term and is set against other domains of life like art, economics and politics. Religion is therefore an extremely confusing concept which is moreover, according to Smith, unnecessary. The next question is how other cultures have conceptualized what the West has been calling ‘religion’, and how the reification process has developed within specific traditions. The words that refer to a personal attitude seem to be – in any case – universal. In most cultures one can find equivalents for religion, awe, devotion, piety and faith. Less universal is the idea that there are in the world a number of entities which can all be called religions. In so-called primitive cultures, every tribe or community has its own religious system, but there is in these communities no name to refer to this system and neither is there a name for religion in general. The tribe members just talk about the customs, traditions and usages they have. Also the religion of Ancient Egypt for example was no separate entity (Smith 1991, 55). According to Smith, there is no evidence that the Christians of the New Testament had the idea they were involved in a new religion.

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The only exception seems to be Islam, but for most other ‘world religions’ there do not seem to be names available before the nineteenth century (Smith 1991, 64–71). In English the term ‘Buddhism’ dates from 1801, ‘Hinduism’ from 1829, ‘Taoism’ from 1839 and ‘Confucianism’ from 1862. Earlier on, when one wanted to refer to these traditions, one just spoke about for example, ‘the religion of the Japanese’. This way of referring was retained when religion and nation remained integrated. In this way, we still speak of ‘the religion of the Inca’s’. Often, however, a religion was disseminated outside its original community or part of the nation left the original tradition. Not only are all these names for world religions of very recent date, but also they can be very misleading or confusing. The classical Hindus didn’t know the term ‘Hindu’. In fact, the word ‘Hindu’ is an Islamic invention which dates from their invasion of India. Also the separation between certain practices in China as being either Confucian or Taoist is misleading. The Western amazement at the Chinese or the Japanese who combine several religions at the same time, says more about the Western notion of religion than it does about Chinese or Japanese eclecticism. Within Christianity one notices huge shifts from the medieval expression fides Christiana to, for example, John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity, where Christianity has become a doctrine which can be tested for its rationality. Twentieth-century changes mainly concern a shift from the ideal to the given, and from a theoretical system to a sociological entity. The conclusion can be that we know nowadays much more about religions, but seemingly less about religion. Many believers have started to look at their own ‘religious’ activities with very external eyes. Smith concludes from his conviction that the concept of religion can only bring confusion and mislead, that it is better to delete the notion of religion altogether and to replace it by more adequate concepts like ‘the cumulative tradition’ and ‘faith’. We don’t need to follow this revisionist enterprise here. It would, moreover, make sense to claim that the transformations which Smith traces, point to a kind of selfalienation which cannot easily be reversed. Is the replacement of a problematic concept more than a purely symptomatic therapy? In two of his other books Smith offers a diachronical analysis of ‘belief ’.

3 Shifts in the meaning of belief In the discussion about secularization and collective loss of belief, the meaning of the term ‘belief ’ and the verb ‘to believe’ is crucial. In contemporary language use these terms are often used in a way which is the complete opposite of what religious people mean when they say they believe. Instead of trust, involvement and inner certainty, ‘belief ’ now seems to express distance and cognitive auto-relativity. To believe means then something like ‘to surmise’ or ‘to suspect’. One says for example, ‘You only believe it, so you don’t know’. This type of believing or surmising doesn’t imply involvement. In this conjectural way one can believe something and yet remain untouched by it. But indifference towards God is difficult to combine with religious belief.

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The huge differences in the use of the notion ‘belief ’ may play tricks on the language user. The way in which outsiders perceive religiosity and the image that religious people have of themselves have gradually been determined by the confusions between these many uses. The semantic fields of ‘belief ’ are – just like the concept of religion – a matter of historical evolution. Smith sees in these diachronical shifts of meaning a development with a dramatic ending. The transformations of meaning of the concept belief illustrate, according to him, the secularizing forces which produce an internal erosion of religious experience – an erosion which goes unnoticed for most believers. Wilfred Cantwell Smith devoted two books to the concept of belief: Believing – An Historical Perspective (Smith 1998a) and Faith and Belief: The Difference between Them (Smith 1998b). According to him, there are historical reasons for the tensions between the everyday use of the term belief and its religious uses. This semantic divergence resulted in an enormous confusion in which conjectural believing and religious believing are lumped together. What brought belief to the foreground in the modern history of Western culture? Belief – in that conjectural, secular mode – doesn’t play any role of significance in the Quran or in the Bible, according to Smith. Although Christianity has a preference for intellectual expressions of its faith (next to ritual, artistic, moral, narrative, . . . expressions) – which has a lot to do with the Christian absorption of elements of Greek thought – nevertheless, Smith thinks that this preference ‘has been maneuvered by modern conditions into strikingly novel forms’ (Smith 1998a, 39). The meaning of ‘to believe’ has gone through an enormous transformation. This transformation process can be divided into several sequential phases. I bring all evolutions down to three stages, thereby somewhat simplifying Smith’s account. First phase: the premodern meaning of ‘belief ’. In the premodern concept of belief, belief is loyalty. The medieval meaning of the English verb to believe is akin to German words like ‘belieben’, ‘liebe’ and Dutch words like ‘loven’ (to praise), ‘beloven’ (to promise), ‘zich verloven’ (to engage), ‘gelofte’ (an oath), ‘liefde’ (love). The meaning of to believe is: to cherish, praise, hold in high esteem, honour and to be loyal. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for example, the expression ‘accepte my bileve’ is to be equated with ‘accept my loyalty’ (Smith 1998a, 42).4 The Latin verb is ‘credere’, which holds a reference to the heart (cor, heart ⫹ ⫺ dare, to give). Belief in God indicated a deep involvement and a faithfulness to God. The utterance ‘I believe in God’ testified to this loyalty and to the firm resolution not to betray God. The confession ‘I believe in God’ is therefore directed against the possibility of sin and against the possibility of unfaithfulness and betrayal. This confession is not directed against the possibility that God doesn’t exist or would not exist. This is not an affirmation in the light of a threatening atheism, but is an affirmation in the light of the possibility to lead a sinful life as if there was no God. ‘I believe’ therefore resembles the ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony: it is a vow. It is not a description of my opinions or views. Noteworthy is also the fact that the bond of trust is entirely reciprocal. ‘I believe’ is not to be rendered solely as ‘I place my trust in God’, but more importantly as ‘God can place his trust in me’. The ‘unbeliever’ is in this perspective not an atheist, but an unwilling

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servant who doesn’t recognize the honourability of his master (possibly because of disobedience). The object of premodern belief is mainly a person. One believes someone. The subject of this believing is mostly indicated in the first person singular or in the second person (prominently in the imperative: believe me!). Textual research reveals that the third person is hardly ever encountered in premodern texts. In Shakespeare for example, 90 per cent of the use of ‘to believe’ is in the first- and second-person singular (Smith 1998b, 105–27). Second phase: the modern meaning of ‘belief ’. First of all, there is a change in the object of belief. Quantitative textual analysis can show that, while premodern belief mainly concerns a person, a shift occurs towards belief in things (I believe your word) and to propositions (I believe that . . .). For Hobbes for example, ‘to believe in God’ means ‘to hold all for truth they heare him [i.e. God] say’ (Smith 1998a, 47). This last definition is an intermediate form between believing a person and accepting a proposition. On the basis of trust in the virtue of a person, one believes his utterances. Nowadays this is no longer a precondition. It is no longer a contradiction to believe someone’s utterances and at the same time not to trust him as a person. In the nineteenth century, belief is reduced to propositional beliefs: I believe that A is B. Next to the object, the subject also changes. The prototypical premodern use was in the first person singular, but now what others believe is in focus. The differences between first person singular use and use in the third person are tremendous. ‘I believe’ inaugurates an involvement and an engagement. Furthermore, such a statement isn’t merely about a state of mind. ‘I believe that it rains’ is about the weather, while ‘he believes that it rains’ only reflects his opinion about the weather. The difference also shows in the possibility of saying that ‘what he believes is false’ as opposed to the impossibility of saying ‘what I believe is false’. The increased frequency of the use of the third person indicates that believing has become something which is typically done by others. A third shift in modern times concerns the relation to truth. Smith quotes a dictionary (Random House) in which the first example given in the entry for ‘belief ’ is telling. The example is: ‘The belief that the earth is flat’. The first ‘belief ’ the editors of the dictionary can think of is false. Indeed, the conviction that the earth is round would nowadays never be called ‘a belief ’. The former usage indicated an addition to, or a reinforcement of, our knowledge, but now the use of the word ‘belief ’ rather points to uncertainty or doubt. In many cases the word signals falsity. Smith writes: ‘Belief, once meaning trust, and adding something to knowledge, designating the difference between knowing inertly and knowing responsively, came increasingly to denominate rather a situation where lack of trust is in order. So-and-so knows that Canberra is the capital of Australia; so-and-so believes that Sydney is.’ (Smith 1998a, 65) The modern meaning of belief can be rendered in Latin with ‘opinio’. These categories played a negligible role in Christian medieval thought. Third phase: believing presuppositions. The most recent developments tend, according to Smith, to take implicit or tacit presuppositions as objects of belief. An example could be: teenagers believe in social media. Everybody knows that most teenagers haven’t been reflecting about these matters and never have formed an outspoken opinion about them. If this is ‘believing’, then we believe millions of things. Here the evolution

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towards the impersonal is complete. The object of belief is not even a proposition, but only a presupposition. Parallel changes show on the subject side. The subject of this type of belief isn’t an active self. ‘I presuppose that . . .’ is a contradiction in terms unless in a context of auto analysis and reflection, but in that case the utterance should be in the past tense. Once a presupposition has been made explicit, it turns into a proposition which can be promoted to the ranks of founded convictions or which can prove to be indefensible and no longer be ‘believed’. For an overview, see Table 1. Smith is not alone in propagating the idea that throughout Western cultural history

Table 1 phase I

phase II

phase III

subject

I, you

he, she, they

unconscious self

object

person

proposition

presupposition

description

loyalty

what is false

the implicit

(to know⫹to love)

the concept of belief has been distorted.5 The consequences of the transformation discussed here show themselves daily in the media. The core of being religious would consist in affirming God’s existence. All other religious practices and convictions would be based on this core conviction. Religion would, for that matter, be essentially a convictional or theoretical system. The tendency is to see religion as a rational practice like, for example, the building of a bridge. In order to build a bridge, one needs first to acquire important theoretical insights in physical laws which govern the power vectors of a bridge; one has to design on the basis of empirical studies concerning building materials, local variables and soil. In a rational practice the practical application follows antecedently acquired insights. Contrary to a rational practice is a traditional practice like speaking English (for a native speaker). This linguistic practice is not based on any antecedently acquired insights. We don’t speak our mother tongue after designing and constructing it. What does being religious resemble the most: the rational practice of building a bridge or the traditional practice of speaking one’s mother tongue? If one wants to see in religion mainly a rational practice – as so many do today – then the difference between the religious and the non-religious person would consist in nothing more than the fact that they started out with different theoretical persuasions. In this view, being religious comes down to holding a certain number of opinions of which the first and most fundamental is the existence of God. Because opinions are mostly constructed on the basis of meditation, reading and conversation, it follows that being religious is seen as the result of an individual quest. Religion is the personal selection of appealing ideas which form the basis for specific actions and a specific lifestyle. If cognitive perseverance is too limited for such a spiritual adventure, then this attitude translates in a more romantic emphasis on inner perception and outward expression of religious feeling.

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When we confront these transformations with the concept of belief in De Fide (Sum. Theol., IIaIIae, Q. 1–16) by Thomas Aquinas, then it is striking how far removed the modern conceptualization is from Aquinas’ views. That which seems to be, according to many of our contemporaries, the central question, namely, whether or not God exists – for that is what is meant today by ‘believing in God’ – is for Thomas not really an issue. Only in passing does he discuss in the first 16 quaestiones the belief that God exists (credere Deum esse). He only speaks about it to inform that recognizing or believing that God exists is not part of the act of faith. Why? ‘Believing that God exists, can also be said of the unbelievers. It must therefore not be counted among the acts of faith.’6 This may sound like a contradiction in our ears: unbelievers believe. To believe that God exists, is neither part of religious faith, nor part of the articles of faith. In Aquinas’ view one can know that God exists and that it can even be proven. It is part of the so-called preambles of faith. Believing that God exists doesn’t turn a person into a religious person. The existence of God is in Aquinas’ time part of a kind of ‘scientific’ knowledge. God is still a quasi-physical or cosmological concept to him and his contemporaries. It is possible to know it exists or – if cognitive faculties are lacking – believe it exists. In Q. 5, Art. 2 Thomas Aquinas reminds us that devils also believe in God’s existence and tremble according to the word of James (2, 19). The belief of the devils is however enforced and therefore the act of will with which they believe is without merit. The articles of faith themselves can only be believed. Reason can take away all obstacles for belief. It is noteworthy that belief is conceptualized by Thomas in a holistic way. It can, according to him, never be the object of individualistic choices and selections. Even the stubborn rejection of only one single article of faith turns a person into a heretic (Smith 1998b, 87). Such a person would, however much they accept many or all other articles of faith, not possess the required faithfulness (Q. 5, Art. 3). A heretic is an infidel. He knowingly rejects what is true and right. The English term ‘infidel’ is therefore much more appropriate than the term ‘unbeliever’, because what is the issue is the attitude of loyalty. This way of judging the heretic can sound rather harsh in our ears. Thomas reproaches the heretic for a kind of egotism. The willingness to surrender, which the loyalty of faith demands, is in his case limited. The heretic resembles the man who thinks his wife deserves his honour and his love in everything, except when it comes to one tiny point – perhaps even an unsightly point. For this point he sees fit to reserve his honour and devotion for another woman. However insignificant this element may be, it proves sufficiently that the last criterion lies with him and that his surrender is not complete. Heretics can have religious convictions, but they lack the loyalty of faith. Heretics tinker with their own religion: they believe what they like. Genuine religious faith is however a unified and indivisible attitude. Whoever follows his own will in a single point, fractures the heteronomy. Heresy is therefore a matter of the will, not of the intellect. Who doesn’t reject faith wilfully, but holds convictions which are not in accordance with the faith, errs, but is not a heretic (non haereticus, sed solum errans). So it is possible to have the loyalty of faith without having the right set of religious convictions (i.e. the erring person) and conversely, it is possible to have a significant

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number of correct religious opinions, but without faithfulness (i.e. the heretic). The second is far worse. By giving the intellect a major role in matters of faith, Thomas tends to intellectualize faith. But on the other hand it is clear that he remains tributary to premodern intuitions. Religious belief can certainly not be reduced to believing that this or that is the case, nor to the mere affirmation that there is a God. Faith as a form of religious loyalty which is an attachment in love and devotion to God in and through the creed, the traditions and the symbols of the church, is crucial for him. We must not forget that for Thomas ‘. . . faith is a habit of the mind, whereby eternal life is begun in us’ (Q. 4, Art. 1). Faith is the beginning itself of what it believes. Belief is no conjectural groping, but the pre-possession of the beatific vision (Walgrave).

4 Conclusion Smith reminds us of a much deeper and richer notion of belief which threatens to slide into oblivion. The impoverishment of the notion of belief which reduces it to nothing more than a collection of opinions and convictions is accompanied by another development, which can perhaps be described as a ‘sentimentalization’ of religious belief.7 Since the late medieval period, scholastic theology and sensitive spirituality (Verdeyen 2004; Vandenbroucke 1950) have tended to drift apart. Modern man believes, more than in anything else, in what he thinks and feels, in his opinions and emotions. Ideology and sentiment go hand in hand. Given these shifts in the meaning of religion and belief it is perhaps not surprising that many people say not to believe and not to desire to be part of ‘a’ religion. But the fact that secularization doesn’t result in full-fledged atheism, but rather, in what in Europe is sometimes called ‘cultural Christianity’ (Kulturchristentum) points to a last remnant of loyalty (the original meaning of belief) which still binds. The reduction of religious belief to religious convictions has also reduced religious doubt to questioning the shared opinions one holds. In the light of the original meaning of ‘to believe’ any religious doubt is not so much a doubt about the existential proposition that God exists,8 but rather a questioning of the power with which one is attached to God in and through the religious traditions of one’s ancestors. The diachronical transformation of ‘belief ’ has not been without consequences. Smith mentions the tragic mistake by Christian, mainly Protestant, believers who think that the sola fide concerns their religious convictions or beliefs, rather than their loyalty or faith.9

Notes 1 Asad 2001, 220: ‘My concern is to argue that various questions about the connection between formal practices and religiosity cannot be addressed if we confine our perspective to Smith’s – to what is in effect a pietistic conception of religion as faith

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4

5

6

7 8

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that is essentially individual and otherworldly.’ For more critical reactions, see Wiebe 1979. For more on Smith’s writings, see Cracknell 2001. Smith 1991, 21: ‘The religio of a specified God could then designate the traditional cultic pattern at his shrine.’ Smith 1991, 40: ‘A legacy of it is the tendency still today to ask, in explanation of “the religion” of a people, What do they believe? – as though this were a basic, even the basic question.’ Compare also the feudal relation as expressed in the French vow of the vassal called faith and hommage: ‘Foi et hommage: le serment de fidélité que le vassal prêtait entre les mains du seigneur.’ Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue Française, par P. Robert, Paris, 1970, 3ième tome, 52. In the article ‘Glaube’ in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Vorster 2007, 628) a similar thought is expressed: ‘Aus Gewißheit wird Sicherheit. Für diese Umkehrung ist ein christliches Glaubensverständnis mitverantwortlich, in dem der Glaube zum Fürwahrhalten übernatürlicher Sachverhalte entartet ist, die als Tatsachen behauptet werden, obgleich es für sie mit den Mitteln, mit denen in der Neuzeit Tatsachen erhärtet werden, keine zureichende Begründung gibt.’ (my translation: ‘Certainty develops into security. For this reversal a Christian understanding of faith is co-responsible in which faith is distorted to the acceptance as true of supernatural “facts” although – using the means provided in modernity to establish facts – there is insufficient evidence for them.’) IIaIIae, Q. 2, Art. 2: ‘Sed credere Deum esse convenit etiam infidelibus. Ergo non debet poni inter actus fidei.’ (English translation: Objection 3. Further, that which can be said of unbelievers, cannot be called an act of faith. Now unbelievers can be said to believe in a God. Therefore it should not be reckoned an act of faith.) In his answer Thomas corrects this: ‘Reply to Objection 3. Unbelievers cannot be said “to believe in a God” as we understand it in relation to the act of faith. For they do not believe that God exists under the conditions that faith determines; hence they do not truly imply believe in a God, since, as the Philosopher observes (Metaph. ix, text. 22) “to know simple things defectively is not to know them at all.”’ The Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, Second and Revised Edition, 1920, Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Online Edition Copyright © 2008 by Kevin Knight. For an elaboration, see Van Herck 2008b. Pouillon 2002, 91: ‘. . . a believer believes in (croire en, “trusts in”) God, he feels no need to say that he believes in (croire à) God’s reality; he believes in (croire à) it, one would say, implicitly. But is this certain? In fact, the believer not only need not say that he believes in (croire à) the existence of God, but he need not even believe in it; precisely because in his eyes there can be no doubt about it: the existence of God is not believed (crue), but perceived. On the contrary, to make God’s existence an object of belief, to state this belief, is to open up the possibility of doubt – . . . So one could say that it is the unbeliever who believes that the believer believes in the existence of God.’ Smith 1998a, 66: ‘. . . some Christians seemingly came almost to imagine that salvation is by belief (rather than by faith, the divergent meaning of which had tended to get lost), so that some then tried to believe propositions for ulterior purposes.’

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References Asad, Talal. 2001. ‘Reading a Modern Classic: W. C. Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion’. History of Religion, 40(3): 205–22. Cracknell, K., ed. 2001. Wilfred Cantwell Smith: A Reader. Oxford: Oneworld. Pouillon, J. 2002. ‘Remarks on the Verb “to believe”’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. London: Blackwell, 90–6. Smith, W. C. 1991. The Meaning and End of Religion. Foreword by John Hick, Minneapolis: Fortress Press (19621). —. 1998a. Believing – An Historical Perspective. Oxford: Oneworld [first published as Belief and History] (19771). —. 1998b. Faith and Belief: The Difference Between Them. Oxford: Oneworld (19791). Vandenbroucke, F. 1950. ‘Le divorce entre théologie et mystique: ses origines’. Nouvelle revue théologique, 82: 372–89. Van Herck, W. 2008a. ‘Faith, Belief and the Internal Transformation of Religion’, in M. L. L. O. Xavier (Coord.), A Questão de Deus na História da Filosofia. Vol. II: A Questão de Deus. História e Crítica. Sintra: Zéfiro, 1287–94. —. 2008b. ‘Lift up your hearts: On emotionalism in religious experience’, in Willem Lemmens and Walter Van Herck (eds), Religious Emotions: Some Philosophical Explorations. New Castle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 75–86. —. 2012. ‘Transformaties van geloof ’. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 74(1): 45–64. Verdeyen, P. 2004. ‘La séparation entre théologie et spiritualité: Origine, conséquences et dépassement de ce divorce’, in J. Haers and P. De Mey (eds), Theology and Conversation: Developing a Relational Theology (BETL). Leuven: Peeters & Leuven University Press, 675–87. Vorster, H. 2007. ‘Glaube’, in J. Ritter (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Basel/ Stuttgart: Schwabe, vol. 3. Wiebe, D. 1979. ‘The Role of “Belief ” in the Study of Religion: A Response to W.C. Smith’. Numen, 26: 234–49.

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The Axial Age and the Dynamics of Transcendence Stijn Latré

1 Introduction In 1949, Karl Jaspers depicted the period of roughly 800–200 BC as the period of ‘axial religion’ in his famous book The Origin and Goal of History. ‘Axial religion’ has received ample attention ever since, not only with regard to historical studies of the religions concerned, but also with regard to its fundamental dynamics and scope. The French sociologist and political philosopher Marcel Gauchet is among those embracing the concept of axial religion. In 1985, Gauchet published The Disenchantment of the World, in which he took the era of axial religion as a key period for the development of social and political autonomy. Philosopher Charles Taylor underlined the importance of axial religion in a similar fashion in his iconic volume A Secular Age, and deepens his interest in axial religion in Dilemmas and Connections, most conspicuously in the chapter entitled ‘What Was the Axial Revolution?’ (Taylor 2011, 367–79) It is not surprising that sociologist of religion Robert Bellah, in his congeniality to Taylor, equally emphasizes the Axial Period as a cornerstone of our cultural selfunderstanding in general, and of the historical evolution of politics and religion, in particular (Bellah 2011). Bellah ascribes a crucial role to axial religion in his central thesis as a sociologist of religion, that is, the thesis that modern theoretical thinking as well as contemporary political and social practices are greatly indebted to transformations within religion, be it in a Western or non-Western cultural context.1 Appreciations of the religious evolutions in the Axial Period tend to go in a positive direction. However, some appreciations are more critical. Egyptologist Jan Assmann, referring to the Jewish figure of axial religion, points to the connection between truth and violence inherent in the development of Jewish religion. The monotheistic principle of the one true God would by nature end in a societal system based on exclusion. The God of the Jewish people reigns above all other gods – or rather, idols – so that the latter are to disappear from the cultural scene (Assmann 2008). Much of contemporary (French) deconstructionist philosophy recognizes the connection between religious truth claims and violence, but also underlines the deconstructionist nature of Jewish monotheism (Nancy 2005). De Kesel (2010)

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highlights that the monotheistic principle of Judaism is rather to be seen as an instrument for religious and sociopolitical criticism, than as the beginning of a new species of religion adhering to violent principles of exclusion. When Moses sees the bigotry of his people with the golden calf, he smashes the sacred tables of stone with the Ten Commandments to the ground. The perpetual meaning of the JudeoChristian tradition resides in its potential of criticism towards any image of God or of the gods that takes too concrete forms.2 Gauchet, Bellah and Taylor designate the ‘axial revolution’ rather positively. Gauchet considers axial religion as a stepping stone towards a society based on autonomy and secularity. Taylor views the axial revolution primordially as a moral transition. The association between moral perfection and divinity substitutes for the ambivalence of morally capricious gods in the pre-axial era. Gods can only be worshipped if their conduct is unequivocally good. Bellah describes how the axial story plays an important role in telling the larger narrative of human culture and cognition (Bellah 2011, 272). In the light of the obvious congeniality between Bellah and Taylor, and Taylor’s centrality in other chapters of this volume, we will omit Taylor in the further discussion presented in this chapter, which will entail a comparison between Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution and Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World. We will first discuss the anthropological presuppositions that scaffold Bellah’s and Gauchet’s interpretations of the Axial Period (Section 2). The next section (Section 3) will dwell on the periodization which they use to describe the historical evolution of religion and politics. The last section concludes with critical remarks addressed to Bellah, and situates his theory within the broader debate between internalism and externalism in the philosophy of religion (Section 4).

2 Anthropological presuppositions Both Gauchet and Bellah purport to offer a historical-sociological analysis of religion, with a focus on the interplay between religion and politics. This interplay even constitutes the thread of Gauchet’s argument in The Disenchantment of the World, as is obvious from the subtitle, A Political History of Religion. However, Gauchet’s analysis of the connection between religion and politics leans heavily on a number of anthropological presuppositions. Elsewhere, Gauchet has depicted his philosophical and sociological views as antroposociologie transcendentale (Gauchet 2003, 10). We will now dwell on the connections Gauchet establishes between anthropology, sociology and transcendental theory. Gauchet’s anthropology bears Sartre’s signature. According to Sartre, the human being is always squeezed between the mere givenness of reality (en-soi) and human freedom, the capacity to transcend the merely given (pour-soi). When the human being chooses to hand over its freedom to some other authority, it objectifies itself and becomes en-soi. This is what Sartre called the state of mauvaise foi (Sartre 1943, 81–106). The human betrays her identity as pour-soi when giving up her freedom

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in order to surrender to the security and comfort of a given identity. According to Gauchet, this is exactly what collectively happens at the dawn of mankind. Without having a clear conscience of the event, humanity so to speak collectively ‘chose’ in favour of dépossession, dispossession, the misappropriation of what is most intimate to human existence: freedom as autonomy. Hence humanity has ‘chosen’3 to hand over its freedom to the gods. So-called primitive religion is born. Gauchet thus applies the Sartrian fundamental anthropology to the way people organize their living together in groups. The first groups of hunter-gatherers surrender their freedom collectively to the gods. For Gauchet, religious evolution will consist of the gradual recovery of this ‘freely’ sustained dispossession. This form of anthropo-sociology is transcendental, because the basic scheme of human subjectivity sketched above will set the preconditions from which human history unfolds. Once the original dispossession is questioned, human political history will continue to oscillate between the choice for a founding alterity and heteronomy on one hand, and freedom and autonomy on the other. As soon as this transcendental scheme is applied to the history of politics and religion, it may create the impression that Gauchet is trying to explain, in a Hegelian fashion, every phase of history as the consequence of logical antecedents. Gauchet’s transcendental analysis of history does indeed intend to demonstrate how, in view of a given historical relation between religion and politics, only a limited number of possibilities lie open for realization in the future. However, it is entirely open to historical contingency which possibilities will eventually prevail. In addition, Gauchet’s transcendental analysis is not a priori, but a posteriori: logical structures of history can, in most cases, only be revealed a long time after events take place, because causes and consequences are then easier to track, albeit never without difficulties and methodological restraints. I emphasize the status of Gauchet’s transcendental method because the reader may eventually be surprised about the various convergences between the ‘transcendental’ Gauchet and the ‘empirical’ Bellah that I will lay bare below. Bellah’s anthropological views do not depart from the tension between givenness and freedom, but are rooted in scientific knowledge about the development of human capacities. In a few brief notes, Bellah situates the evolution of humanity within a much larger framework of the evolution of life on earth. He adheres to an ‘emergentist’ view, which he contrasts with a ‘determinist’ view (Monod, Weinberg). The emergentist view holds that apparently chaotic phenomena contain the capacity for self-organization (Bellah 2011, 57), under circumstances which are not entirely reducible to mere coincidence. Bellah names the supposedly accidental transition from the unicellular bacteria prokaryotes to the multicellular organism eukaryotes as an instance of such an ‘emergence’ (Bellah 2011, 57–8). The emergentist view equally holds that newly composed forms of life show a complexity and creativity that cannot be explained by mere reference to their composing parts. The determinist view, by contrast, asserts that all organisms can be reduced to their constituting parts, and that nothing genuinely new can emerge (Bellah 2011, 97–104).

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Bellah’s account of the development of human capacities like play and ritual enactment seamlessly fits into the emergentist view. Whereas small organisms showcase a baffling capacity for adaptation, to the degree that new developments cannot be explained away by mere reference to accidental material conditions, cultural products such as play, ritual and religion display a similar capacity for adaptation and creativity. Although every transition builds on preceding developments, religious transformations testify to that remarkable capacity for adaptation, a capacity overlooked by Gauchet in his account of so-called primitive religion. I will return to that below. Despite the wide variety of human cultures, Bellah seems to discern a common denominator. He considers the dialectics between what he calls ‘the world of ordinary life’ and ‘some other world’ in which concerns of everyday existence can be temporarily set aside, as crucial to the human species. Bellah refers to Alfred Schutz’ contrast between ordinary reality and non-ordinary reality (Bellah 2011, xv and 147). Sports, play and religion pertain to the ‘other world’. Bellah sustains this hypothesis with findings from psychology. Maslow speaks about ‘Deficiency cognition’ (D-cognition), related to the world of everyday needs, whereas ‘Being cognition’ (B-cognition) refers to an experience of the fullness of being, to a world where daily needs are fulfilled and in which there is time and space for other activities that are at first glance non-instrumental to survival. Religion and symbolic representation take place at the level of B-cognition’. It goes without saying that the two levels are not entirely independent. What happens in times of ‘leisure’ may also have useful effects in ‘real’ life. Children imitate adults while playing. Medieval tournaments are for sport, but are equally training sessions for real war situations. Boundaries are permeable from the other side as well. In the middle of D-cognition activities, such as harvesting the crops, a sudden experience of B-cognition may emerge, when the farmer looks at the crops he is harvesting as a symbol of his intimate connection to nature, or of his fragile dependence on natural phenomena. Like Charles Taylor (2007, 728–9) in A Secular Age, Bellah refers to the tree described by Vaclav Havel during his imprisonment in Hermanice. The tree becomes a symbol of a higher fullness of being, breaking the daily routine of life in prison (Bellah 2011, 5–8). Although Bellah does not depart from a transcendental axiom, but develops an at first glance merely empirical description of the evolution of human capacities, his point of view eventually comes close to Gauchet’s: human beings are capable of transcending the surroundings in which they are initially fully embedded. This happens in activities of the B-cognition type. Within this eventually isomorphic anthropological framework, Bellah and Gauchet disagree about the role of religion. According to Bellah, religion is of the B-cognition type, practised in times of leisure and abundance, though rituals may strengthen group cohesion and thus contribute to the efficient organization of activities centred around D-cognition. Gauchet, by contrast, does not define religion as pertaining to the realm of ‘time off ’ or ‘free play’, but as dispossession, that is, as the refusal of freedom. At least he does so while writing about so-called primitive religions. Gauchet allows freedom within the heart of religion as soon as the state has emerged in human history. That brings us to our next section, about the issue of the periodization of human history with regard to the relation between religion and politics.

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3 The evolution of religion and politics Dividing history into distinct phases is always tricky, and both Gauchet and Bellah are well aware of the pitfalls on this route. Despite these difficulties, they both end up with similar results, which is surprising, in the light of the very few references both thinkers make to each other’s work.4 Nonetheless the scope of the books by Bellah and Gauchet discussed here differs: Gauchet covers in Disenchantment the entire history of the relation between religion and politics, whereas Bellah confines himself in Religion in Human Evolution to the period extending from the Paleolithicum to the Axial Age.5 In view of this difference in scope, I will only take into account these parts of Gauchet’s Disenchantment that correspond to Bellah’s range. Gauchet and Bellah look at human history from different angles. Gauchet studies the rise of Western democracy. In his narrative, he needs the ‘logic of the religious’ to account for political changes, and vice versa. Bellah’s focus lies on religion itself, though he cannot neglect the interplay between religion and politics. Up to the axial religion, religious history has unfolded in three stages, according to both scholars. The first phase is called ‘tribal religion’ by Bellah and religion primitive by Gauchet. Bellah names the second stage ‘archaic religion’, whereas Gauchet speaks of ‘the emergence of the State’ or ‘hierarchic society’. Both authors refer to axial culture as the third stage in human history.6 I will briefly discuss these three stages.

3.1 Tribal religion As mentioned above, Bellah’s account is based more on empirical evidence than Gauchet's. His argument proceeds by presenting specific cultures as case studies, from which he derives generic features overarching these different cultures. As examples of tribal religion, Bellah presents the Indian tribes from North and South America, the Navajo and Kalapalo tribes respectively. Another case study is the Walbiri, aboriginals from the desert in Australia. From the outset, Bellah demonstrates his allegiance to the model of Merlin Donald (1991), who depicted the evolution of cultures in terms of transitions from mimetic to mythic and finally to theoretic culture. Cultures with Bellah’s label of ‘tribal religion’ pertain, in Donald’s vocabulary, to the broader notion of mimetic culture, a cultural form wherein members of the tribe learn by imitation and repetition of what other members demonstrate. In this way, rituals are passed meticulously from one generation to the next. Gauchet equally emphasizes that early, primitive religion mainly consists of ritual enactments and repetitions. In this respect, Bellah is more sensitive to the power of adaptation inherent to primitive religion. Whereas Gauchet views primitive religion as sheer repetition of the same acts and myths, according to the principle of ‘dispossession’, Bellah concludes that the capacity for cultural adaptation is already inherent in tribal religion. In a footnote containing his sole reference to Gauchet, Bellah argues that the former is too strict in his definition of tribal or primitive religion as ‘the reign of the absolute past’ (Bellah 2011, 655n3).7 Bellah’s criticism of Gauchet is to the

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point. The French sociologist does depict primeval religion as taking the form of eternal loyalty to a founding alterity. The world of humans and gods is shared and ontologically identical, provided that the gods are responsible for this eternal order between men and gods by their foundational acts. So there is a temporal transcendence of the divine after all, ending up in a universe where boundaries between gods and humans are porous, and resulting in an ‘enchanted’ world where persons and natural phenomena participate in the divine and are even identical to the gods – apart from the latter’s temporal transcendence (Gauchet 1985, xv and 54). This temporal transcendence is the very reason for characterizing primeval religion as the reign of the absolute past. Bellah, by contrast, demonstrates in his case study of the Walbiri that the rituals of that tribe do not repeat an absolute past, but in a way found this very past. The separation between, on the one hand, the primal foundational acts of history, djugurba in the language of the Walbiri – ‘world of dreams’, to be conceived of as Schutz’ level of ‘nonordinary reality’ – and, on the other hand, yidjaru or ‘everyday existence’ should not be interpreted in a temporal way. Both levels continuously overlap. Our categories of time and space simply fail to understand this complex interplay.8 Bellah agrees with Gauchet that tribal societies can be considered as egalitarian. Nobody exercises authority over someone else. Primeval societies are ignorant of hierarchy. In Gauchet’s interpretation, this egalitarianism resides in the equal distance of every individual to the founding (religious) origin. No one stands closer to the primal foundational origin than any other person, including shamans and priests who possess the religious knowledge and skills to carry out rituals and narrate myths. Political power is still absent from the scene. Bellah’s account is somewhat different. Primeval religion does involve a dimension of power. The genetic link of human beings with chimpanzee alpha males installs an inclination to dominate in human nature. This inclination to dominance, however, is countered by the disposition to nurture. Leaders must take care of the group, like a mother for her child. Bellah remarks in agreement with Marcel Mauss that every form of giving, including caring for someone, includes dominance patterns: she who provides care is superior to the person receiving care. On these conditions, egalitarianism within tribes can only be accounted for by referring to some form of interdependence of all group members (Bellah 2011, 191–2).

3.2 Archaic religion and the emergence of the state The egalitarianism in tribal societies crumbles away during the next stage in the evolution of religion and politics, the archaic society. Essential features of this stage are, according to Bellah:

1. the focus of ritual on one single person: priest or king, or both at the same time; 2. a spectacular increase in population, enlarging societies to the number of millions;

3. the direction of ritual attention and energy to a being or god that demands for its veneration, by worshipping its representative among humans, the political leader. (Bellah 2011, 265)

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The third feature implies that participants of the ritual do no longer participate directly in the divine, but by their participation enable and strengthen the bond between the realm of the gods and the political leader, who acts as their intermediate. The larger scale of archaic societies requires new and more efficient modes of administration. In this respect, Gauchet deems the emergence of the state the crucial event in making these larger societies possible. He speaks about the most decisive breakthrough in human history. For the first time, a limited number of people, or even one person – for example, the Egyptian pharaoh – exercises political power over other people. Though this power is still justified along the lines of the ancient religious foundation, it creates different classes within a society formerly united around the divine: one class which has access to the divine and represents it, and literally, secondclass citizens who are henceforth denied such access. For the first time in history, it becomes possible to conceive of politics and religion as separate spheres of human existence, though this separation, at the practical level of administration, is far from being established. Nonetheless the emergence of the state creates ‘a hole into being’. The unity between gods and humans is breached. Some people hold power and incarnate the divine, others don’t. The temporal transcendence inherent in the former stage now deepens into a spatial transcendence, because the transcendent justification of the immanent order now becomes palpable, and hence spatially present in the world of humans – in the physical person of the ruler, his court and palace. The once given and unquestionable order is now open to inquiry. Is the pharaoh the true representative of the divine here on earth? The unity between humans and gods is broken, hierarchy is substituted for egalitarianism. In Bellah’s account, this unity is not yet broken with the emergence of the hierarchic state. Bellah situates this rupture in the Axial Period. In the context of the transition from the Ancient Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom in ancient Egypt, Bellah (2011, 236) writes: Because in archaic societies, there is no such thing as ‘religion’ or ‘politics’ (we use those terms only analytically to describe dimensions of what was concretely a single whole), societal collapse and religious crisis are two ways of describing the same phenomenon.

This quotation clearly demonstrates why Gauchet and Bellah ascribe a different cultural impact to the stage of archaic religion. For Gauchet, the emergence of the state means no less than a ‘hole in being’, the fundamental drama in the cultural history of the West. This event leads to a rift between religion and politics, albeit more on a structural level than on the empirical level of existing societal order. Where the sacred is concentrated in one single political ruler, it is simultaneously placed at a distance and made more accessible. Even if the ruler may be beyond the reach of ordinary people on a political and social level, the fundamental question about the legitimate representation of the divine can never be foreclosed again. The Incarnation of the sacred in the political ruler makes political power and religious origin to a certain extent more fragile by rendering them more accessible (Gauchet 1985, 33). The possibility of social criticism

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is born. Religion can be criticized by politics, and vice versa. Henceforth, religion can become the dynamic motor of change and emancipation oriented towards the future, instead of endlessly repeating the past in a conservative way. Religion itself starts its own departure from primeval religion, and disentangles itself from its intimate identity with politics. Bellah clearly holds different views. Of course, he is right to see religious crisis and societal evolution as two sides of the same coin in the archaic phase of history, as he does in the quotation cited above. On the surface of everyday societal practice and political institutions, religion and politics are far from being separated yet. But Gauchet sees with great acuity that at a structural and logical level, the distinction between politics and religion is irreversibly made, and that the rift between the two is likely to grow in the future. So far, we have neglected one important issue: the explanation for the ‘sudden’ transition from tribal to archaic religion (Bellah) or from primeval religion to the emergence of the state (Gauchet). Gauchet has no tailor-made explanation. With phrases such as surgissement de l’État and surgissement de la transcendance (Gauchet 1985, 47 and 54), he stresses the ultimate contingency of this transition. This does not prevent him from pointing in the direction of more materialist explanations, like the evolution of agriculture enabling a more sedentary way of life, thus making the expansion of society possible. Bellah also names these material factors, and adds a drive toward conceptual clarification burgeoning in mimetic cultures, forcing these cultures to transform to mythical and theoretic cultures in later stages of history. As to the question for the origin of this drive, Bellah’s answer is not satisfactory.9

3.3 Axial religion According to Bellah, the period of axial religion constitutes the most fundamental rupture in cultural history. He quotes Erik Voegelin, who depicted the Axial Age as a ‘leap in being’,10 words that were probably rephrased by Gauchet as fracture dans l’être (1985, 47), albeit in the context of the emergence of the state. The ‘leap in being’ is essentially the rift between the world of gods and the world of men, the breaking of the unity that Gauchet already saw at work in the previous stage, and that leads to a gradually increasing separation of religion and politics. Bellah’s account of the Axial Period can be summarized in four features, whereby the first three explain why this fundamental shift in culture came about. The fourth one is rather a formulation of this cultural breach than an explanation of it. The first characteristic of axial religion is the immediate relation of God to his people or to religiously moved individuals, as we can find them in the Jewish tradition, and more specifically among the Jewish prophets (Bellah 2011, 303 and passim). The king is no longer divine, and the access to the divine is no longer necessarily mediated by the king or the priest. Moses never becomes king, but remains a prophet of God. The distance between politics and religion is growing (Bellah 2011, 309). Whereas Egyptian pharaohs typically had built large pyramids, no one knows where Moses is buried. Worldly and religious affairs are increasingly separated (Bellah 2011, 311).

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A similar process occurs in the Eastern traditions. Bellah quotes a famous proverb from Taoism, which utters a dire social critique on imperial authority and its Confucianist legitimation: ‘Follow the Dao and not the ruler, follow justice and not the father’ (Bellah 2011, 471). Bellah explores the Jewish tradition, Ancient Greece in its Golden Age of the fifth-century BC, India and China as examples of the axial spirit. Gauchet (1985, 141– 55) likewise refers to the Jewish prophets, and to Greek thinking. He also highlights the immediate relation to the divine as a social innovation. One can bring to mind the classic example of Sophocles’ Antigone, telling the story about the dilemma between loyalty to divine laws and loyalty to political authority. In European culture, Lutheran Protestantism is another example of an immediate relation to God that provokes social critiques. ‘Second-order thinking’ is, according to Bellah, the second feature of the Axial Period. It denotes logic, thinking about thinking, and more generally, philosophy as such: all texts containing general reflections on the human being, the cosmos, the gods and their relations. Ancient Greece is the prime example of this second feature of the axial spirit. A subcategory of second-order thinking is the ability to imagine alternative social realities, to reflect on different possible political constellations (Bellah 2011, 352). Modes of human self-assessment also increase. The Greek tragedies explore the depths of the human soul (Bellah 2011, 356). The ability to think on a meta-level also takes form in the ontological dualism between the realm of mere appearance and the realm of being, which has become classic since the debates between Parmenides and Heraclites (Bellah 2011, 375). For Gauchet, the innovation of spatial transcendence that comes along with the emergence of the state already bears the germs of theoretic thinking. As soon as the divine is spatially visible and palpable, it is open to interpretation. Theology becomes possible as ‘speculation about the absent’ (Gauchet 1985, 35). The third feature of the Axial Period has also been articulated emphatically by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age and Dilemmas and Connections,11 and centres around the moral revolution of the Axial Period. The gods lose their ambivalent moral status and become morally pure and perfect. The true God can only be morally good. The morally good is henceforth connected to activities which transcend the level of ordinary life (Schutz) or human flourishing (Taylor). One can easily draw from the Jewish or (postaxial) Christian tradition in this respect, but Bellah also refers to Eastern traditions. There, sociological concepts undergo shifts of meaning as a consequence of the quest for moral perfection. The word shi from Chinese tradition originally denotes ‘lower nobility’. In the period of the Warring States (fifth- to third-century BC), its meaning shifts to ‘lower class of bureaucrats’, and gradually slides to ‘educated people’ in general in later times (Bellah 2011, 408). In order to gain access to the Chinese bureaucratic apparatus, candidates have to pass state exams, based on intellectual knowledge of Chinese language and Confucianist classics. Hence political office is, in principle, freely accessible and no longer tied to hereditary succession. Chinese culture is the first, worldwide, to incorporate these democratic principles in its political apparatus, way before Christianity and without needing the latter as ‘the religion to depart from

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religion’, as Gauchet has it. Thus, China has already developed at this early stage the bureaucratic tools Gauchet deems necessary for democracy (Bellah 2011, 479; Gauchet 1985, 260–7). The fourth and final feature that Bellah attributes to the Axial Period is the growing awareness of transcendence. At first sight, this term does not seem to add something significant to the phrasing of the ‘leap in being’. Transcendence is always linked to immanence. Schutzian ordinary life and Maslow’s D-cognition belong to the realm of immanence, our sensory daily life. Next to, above or outside this reality, a second reality exists, non-ordinary life (Schutz) or B-cognition (Maslow). I have indicated how Bellah sees these two levels already operating within tribal religion. This implicit duality of tribal religion is deepened in the Axial Period. Now the question arises as to in which levels this happens, considering transcendence against the yardstick of the three axial features mentioned above. The answer is straightforward: all three features have recourse to transcendence. In her relation to God/a god, the individual is obviously connected to what she regards as transcendent reality. The metaphysical opposition between appearance and reality appeals to a transcendent realm beyond the senses. And it goes without saying that the moral articulation of the universally good beyond human flourishing also leans on a notion of transcendence. When Bellah makes use of the concept of transcendence, it is not always clear whether he denotes the religious, logic, ontological or moral meaning of the concept. He only distinguishes multiple dimensions of transcendence on one single occasion, when he discusses the idea of ‘two worlds’ in ancient China. In this context, Bellah mentions both a formal transcendence, that is, the capacity of our thinking to transcend immediately given reality, and a substantial form of transcendence, that is, the religious belief in ‘heaven’ (Tian). In addition, this religious form of transcendence entails a moral dynamics of belief in salvation (Bellah 2011, 475–7). Gauchet dwells much longer on the deepening of transcendence in the Axial Period than Bellah. According to him, the ‘dynamics of transcendence’ plays the key role on the path to a disenchanted world. When the divine is situated in a separate world, the distance from our sensory, immanent world may grow. Gauchet primarily refers to ‘Western’ examples. In Thomistic thinking, God is the transcendent Creator, whose ratio is diffused in nature. If one wishes to understand the godly super-nature rationally, one has to study nature scientifically as the ‘book of God’. Less intellectual souls can have recourse to the Revelation. For nominalist thinking, however, God’s will and intellect are ineffable. While engaging in this world, we never know if we are dealing with the sacred, because we cannot know whether the order in nature is the result of absolute divine decree. God may will this order differently at any time. Since nature cannot simply be taken as the reflection of divine will, it is open to free scientific inquiry. If nature may not be the ‘book of the Creator’, and if we cannot defend ourselves against the capricious will of an almighty God, at least we can buffer ourselves against the whims of nature, like pestilence and other natural calamities. In Thomism and nominalism alike, the deepening of transcendence leads to growing independence of the immanent world, to a widening gap with the transcendent, and a new impetus for science.12

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Gauchet situates the deepening of transcendence within a Western setting. In his view, the Eastern traditions try to bridge the gap and restore the unity of being. They would want to return to the ‘reign of the One’.13 Here Gauchet seems to follow the interpretation of Max Weber, whose analysis is questioned by Bellah. In Konfuzianismus und Taoismus, Weber argues that China in general and Confucianism in particular, do not have any field of tension between an immanent and a transcendent realm (Bellah 2011, 476). As indicated above, Bellah does plea for a transcendent dimension in Chinese tradition: on the formal-operative level of logical thinking, and on the ontological and religious14 level by reference to the importance of ‘ Tian’ (heaven). In the context of his criticism of Weber, Bellah (2011, 476) also adds the presence of moral transcendence in the idea of salvation.15 In addition, the Confucian notion of ren does not simply refer to the inner-worldly virtues of a gentleman or junzi. Ren also contains a notion of the universal good beyond ordinary life. Reason enough for Bellah (2011, 412) to think that the Confucian Analects is not the merely secular text many interpreters presuppose it to be. Likewise, Indian texts also exhibit moral transcendence. The meaning of dharma shifts from ritual observance to the moral prescript to respect the existing metaphysical order. Ascetic renouncers even withdraw from ordinary life so as to do justice to certain dimensions of dharma (Bellah 2011, 508). No matter how, the deepening of transcendence in all mentioned areas – logical, religious, ontological and moral – made religion still be in the world, but no longer of the world. Politics could neither sustain its grip on religion, nor vice versa.

4 Critical remarks Bellah writes in accessible language and with staggering erudition about the vicissitudes of religion in human evolution, up to the Axial Period. His book is a piece of reference not only for sociologists of religion, but also for philosophers of religion and culture. Arriving at the end of this chapter, I tentatively sketch some critical remarks. First, one can wonder if Bellah, notwithstanding his prudence, does deliver a typically Western account after all. His emphasis on the development of intellectual capacities in the womb of religion, as an evolution from mimetic over mythic to theoretic cultures, seamlessly fits the classic rationalization theses, with Hegel and Weber as famous predecessors. However respectfully Bellah describes all cultures, the teleological line culminating in theoretic thinking seems to serve as a basic presupposition. Bellah’s cultural presuppositions, though, need not necessarily be problematic. Telling master narratives remains an important task for Western authors. No one can complete this task voraussetzungslos. More disturbing is the lack of conceptual clarification and logical distinctions. I mentioned above Bellah’s unsystematic use of the concept of transcendence, a key concept in his analysis. Even more problematic is his inadequate articulation of the structural duality between ‘ordinary reality’ and ‘non-ordinary reality’. The ontological status of this duality is not always clear. Does the duality describe two aspects of the

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same reality? This seems to be the case at first sight. Bellah considers play and ritual as part of B-cognition. Maslow’s B-cognition partakes in the immanent world. In Walbiri culture, djugurba and yidjaru are two levels within one and the same world. Nonetheless, Bellah expressly mentions a substantial form of transcendence in connection with China in the Axial Period. The inner-worldly distinction between an ‘ordinary’ and ‘extra-ordinary’ dimension of existence shifts to a distinction between two separate ontological realities. References to ontological dualism abound in Gauchet’s work: the deepening of transcendence in the Axial Period leads to a dualistic view of reality, to an ontological separation between nature and super-nature. Bellah is more vague in this respect. The dual structure of ordinary and non-ordinary reality can imply two levels within the immanent order, as well as an ontological tension between immanence and transcendence. Furthermore, it is not very clear whether non-ordinary reality should be conceived of as a different level of reality – inner-worldly or not –, or merely as a capacity of the human conscience and intellect to cope differently with given reality, in activities such as play, ritual or even science. Our third critical remark dwells on this dual structure of ‘ordinary’ versus ‘extraordinary’ reality. As mentioned in the section about anthropological presuppositions, Bellah sees this structure as inherent in human nature as such. So it must already have been in place in primitive religion. However, the entire book is directed towards the exciting discoveries of axial religion giving birth to theoretic cultures, as ensuing from mimetic and mythic cultures in Merlin Donald’s typology. But the germs of theoretic culture are already present in mimetic culture. Bellah’s leitmotiv ‘nothing is ever lost’ comes to mind here. It implies that no phase in cultural history can be singled out as independent from previous stages, and that it never entirely leaves behind its origin. This ‘leitmotiv’ renders Bellah’s thinking simultaneously strong and weak. Its strength lies in the fact that Bellah respects the specificity of all stages of evolution, enabling him to keep his focus broad, and fostering hope that almost nothing has been left out of the picture. The weakness of Bellah’s endeavour is that, taking that leitmotiv, he can hardly think real novelty and creativity, which was after all the ambition of his emergentist view. If the germs of every stage in history are contained in the previous one, one may wonder what the novelty of the new stage consists of, apart from undoubtedly altered historical circumstances. Bellah’s thoughts about science may serve as a further example. As Bellah (2011) explains already on page four of Religion in Human Evolution, science partakes in the sphere of non-ordinary reality. Thus science does not operate on a fundamentally different level from play and ritual in tribal societies. Seen from that angle, it also becomes hard to conceive of the novelty of theoretic culture with regard to the previous stages. The remark on science brings us to a final and more general consideration. The evolution of religion as described by Bellah and Gauchet, albeit with different emphasis, displays a path from an internalist conception of religion to an externalist view. With ‘internalist’, I mean the view that considers religion as causa sui and sui generis. Religious practices are all about themselves, not about the realization of certain societal functions that can be fulfilled in other ways. Rituals are just rituals and do not refer to an extrinsic reality. If concepts emerge which suggest reference to an outer

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world, such as the world of the gods, these references are to be seen as being part of a religious language game, and not as an ontological claim about the structure of reality. Such a view leans mainly on the theory of language games by the later Wittgenstein, elaborated in his famous Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough.16 At first glance, the narratives by Gauchet and Bellah seem to underpin internalism. For Gauchet, the worlds of gods and men merge in primeval religion. This is religion in its purest form, a form which does not yet contain the cognitive distinction between the worlds of men and gods, between nature and super-nature. Moral transcendence is out of the question. Rites and myths don’t refer to a hors texte: neither to an ontological reality, nor to underlying philosophical concepts. The same seems to apply to Bellah, albeit the latter, as already mentioned, distinguishes from the outset between everyday existence and non-ordinary reality, a distinction presupposed in the re-enactment of all rituals and the narration of all myths. This level does not yet contain an ontological separation or explicitly cognitive distinctions. Nonetheless, Bellah sees already in magical ritual the germs of later evolutions, regardless of one’s interpretation of these evolutions as ‘progress’ or not.17 However, Bellah and Gauchet continue to speak of ‘religion’ after the stage of tribal religion. Gauchet does so in a somewhat ambivalent fashion. Axial religions are the religions for the ‘departure from religion’, with post-axial Christianity as their point of culmination. Primeval religion, with its emphasis on conservative dispossession, is followed by some other type of religion, that seems to be open to change, can transform itself and unleash an ontological revolution. In short, religion can now refer to realities external to itself: philosophical and political ideas, belief in a transcendent reality. And even after traditional religions have lost their encompassing grip on society, Gauchet continues to speak about the heritage of ‘the religious’ in our days.18 Though Bellah emphatically stresses that religion develops thanks to the human capacity to withdraw temporarily from the pressing concerns of daily needs, as it first unfolds in play, his account of religious history equally shows that religion is not an isolated activity carried out for its own sake, but that it is always dependent on other human activities and domains of knowledge, such as science. Science is a product of religion. In a way, S. J. Gould’s NOMA-principle19 is entirely out of the question. It may be a useful political tool to construe a modus vivendi between religion, science and politics, in that all of them should respect the other spheres. Nonetheless, NOMA is unable to explain the enduring tensions between, for example, religion and politics, let alone to solve them. The sketch of religious history by Bellah and Gauchet does demonstrate that religion and politics became increasingly distinct spheres, as is tirelessly repeated by sociologists in their talks of ‘the differentiation of spheres’. Despite this differentiation, one cannot refrain from underlining that religion has often been historically connected with ontological, scientific and political convictions. This connection was made possible from within the very heart and nature of religion itself, and not enforced by some external influence or authority. It is precisely because religion developed cosmology, morals and social criticism from within, that these spheres eventually could claim greater independence. Religious internalists cannot account for these historical evolutions. If it is true that religion bears its meaning only within

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itself, religion would be immune to historical changes like secularization. However, ontological, moral or scientific criticisms do matter to religion precisely because they came about by religion. As a matter of fact, secularization not only implies less belief in certain ontological statements (e.g. about heaven and hell), it also refers to waning religious practice. This contradicts the assertions of religious internalists that religious practices are essentially independent from and immune to ontological, moral or scientific criticisms. Bellah’s and Gauchet’s writings can be seen as a strong antidote to this one-sided view on religion, because their hazardous and therefore brave grand narratives do justice to the complex interplay between religion, politics and science. Whether the emphasis is on the origins of our Western theoretic culture or on the origins of Western democracy, both authors persuasively prove that none of this could have happened without the self-transformations of religion.

Notes 1 For an overview of Bellah’s work, see Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton (eds), The Robert Bellah Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 2 With regard to monotheism and modernity, see also Laurens ten Kate, ‘De wereld tussen “ja” en “nee”. Monotheïsme als modern probleem bij Assmann, Nancy en Blumenberg’. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 73 (2011): 9–45. 3 Gauchet uses the word ‘choix’, but deliberately puts it between quotation marks. These marks indicate that Gauchet does not want to refer to a deliberate and fully conscious choice, nor to a necessary event. Rather, Gauchet wants to refer to a contingent event: humanity could have started otherwise, as it were with full exercise of capacities of freedom and autonomy. It was by no means necessary for humanity to take that path, but as a matter of fact, humanity did start off with dispossession (Gauchet 1985, 20–1). 4 In Religion in Human Evolution, Bellah refers only once to Gauchet. We will discuss the details of this reference below. Gauchet is generally sparing with references, but refers once to Bellah (Gauchet 1985, 28), to the letter’s book Beyond Belief. Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 5 Bellah assembled scholars of different fields to discuss what comes after the axial age in Bellah and Joas, 2012. 6 It should be noted that Gauchet does not explicitly divide his narrative into the stages I have just mentioned, but that this division imposes itself on the reader as his story unfolds. The fourth stage is Christianity as the ‘religion for the departure from religion’, as Gauchet famously put it, in continuity with the Jewish tradition. The fifth stage corresponds to our present days, in which the role of religion as the structuring principle of society has come to its end, and has given way to democratic societies based on autonomy. 7 In this footnote, Bellah’s criticism of Gauchet extends to the second stage of religious history, archaic religion for Bellah, the emergence of the state for Gauchet: ‘Marcel Gauchet . . . makes the point that the emergence of the state focusing on a

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Radical Secularization? divine or quasi-divine king destabilizes the equilibrium of what he calls “primeval religion”, which he describes as both egalitarian and immobile. Though his notion of pre-state religion as ‘the reign of the absolute past’ is hardly adequate, failing as it does to catch the openness and diversity of such religions, his emphasis on the emergence of the archaic state as the essential precondition for the axial age is surely correct.’ In the footnote mentioned above, containing his criticism of Gauchet, Bellah does not articulate any justification for his remarks. The case of the Walbiri may shed light on Bellah’s intentions, though one has to say that even in this example, Bellah remains conceptually vague. For one thing, there is this duality between djugurba and yidjaru, for another, any Western category falls short of conceptualizing this duality. No matter how, Bellah’s example of the Walbiri resists a too narrowly temporal interpretation of Schutz’ dichotomy: ‘The Schutzian terms help us overcome the idea that the difference between the two realms is primarily temporal, because although yidjaru refers to the ordinary present, djugurba also becomes present during ritual enactment or even when the myths are told. Tony Swain argues that Aborigines think of the world in terms of “rhythmed events” more than in terms of unfolding or even cyclical time, and that the Dreaming can be seen as a class of events, namely “Abiding Events” – formative events that underlie reality without respect to time but are always located in specific places’ (Bellah 2011, 147). Bellah delivers a second instance related to the Egyptian pantheon: ‘It is not at all true that in a mythic culture there is no change – even the gods change. Some are forgotten, some demoted, some elevated to primacy. In Egypt the position of highest of the gods was indeed unstable: first Horus, then Re, then Amun or Amun-Re, then Ptah, then, in Ptolemaic times Isis, and so forth’ (Bellah 2011, 276). See Bellah 2011, 133–4: ‘But why this drive toward conceptual clarification? Donald suggests that there was a need for a more coherent representation of the world than was possible through mimesis. “Therefore,” he writes, “the possibility must be entertained that the primary human adaptation was not language qua language but rather integrative, initially mythical, thought. Modern humans developed language in response to pressure to improve their conceptual apparatus, not vice versa.”’ Language may be the consequence of the pressure to improve the conceptual apparatus, the question remains why this pressure arises. Bellah seems to simply rephrase the question. Bellah 2011, 271: ‘After mentioning Max Weber as a precursor, I need to mention two other scholars who developed Jaspers’s idea further after he had put “the axial age” on the map. One of these is Eric Voegelin in his massive five-volume Order and History, where he speaks of “multiple and parallel leaps in being” in the first millennium BCE.’ See also my book review essay. Stijn Latré, ‘From the Field to the Forest: A Book Review Essay on Charles Taylor’s Dilemmas and Connections’. Bijdragen, International Journal in Philosophy and Theology, 72, 4 (2011): 456–65. Within the scope of this chapter, I am unable to delve deeper into Gauchet’s interesting thoughts on the dynamics of transcendence (Gauchet 1985, 47–80). The general line of Gauchet’s thoughts is that the deepening of transcendence progressed, so that western culture eventually lost sight of the religious as the structuring principle of society. For a more detailed account of Gauchet’s views on the dynamics of transcendence, see André Cloots, Stijn Latré and Guido Vanheeswijck, ‘The Future of the Christian Past: Marcel

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Gauchet and Charles Taylor on the Essence of Religion and its Evolution’, in The Heythrop Journal. Forthcoming, first published online November 2013. Gauchet presumably denies transcendence in the Eastern traditions in an ontological meaning, but may recognize in these traditions a moral, logical or even nonsubstantial religious transcendence. In Disenchantment (1985, xviii), he notes that the West deepens the dualism, while the East tries to deny a substantial ‘second world’ by developing the notion of ‘empty being’: ‘Elle [the development of axial religion, sl] a emprunté deux voies clairement divergentes: la voie du compromis entre le maintien de la structure religieuse originelle et l’intégration des contenus nouveaux – la voie des religions orientales et de la pensée de l’être comme vide; et la voie extrémiste, à l’opposé, de la subjectivation du divin et de la division structurale du matériel et du spirituel, . . . – le monothéisme juif.’ ‘Religious’ here denotes an impersonal concept of ‘Heaven’, not a personal God. About the notion of salvation, Bellah (2011, 477) writes: ‘If Confucianism had depended entirely on a political form of salvation, it might have met the same fate; surely its powerful personal Faith in transcendent morality at whatever cost is what allowed it to survive political failure time and time again.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. A. C. Miles (Rhees: Brynmill Pr./Humanities Pr, 1979). See Wittgenstein 1979, 13: ‘Simple though it may sound, we can express the difference between science and magic if we say that in science there is progress but not in magic. There is nothing in magic to show the direction of any development.’ Gauchet’s Disenchantment of the World develops a field of tension between la religion and le religieux, similar to the opposition between la politique and le politique with the French political philosopher Claude Lefort. La religion denotes concrete, positive religions playing their historical role, whereas le religieux refers to the structural logic of any religion: the emphasis on heteronomy, on a founding alterity. This heteronomy, at work in le religieux, will not disappear with the demise of la religion, and with the waning influence of traditional religions on public life. See also Gauchet’s reflections at the end of the book, in the section entitled Le religieux après la religion (Gauchet 2011, 292–303). See Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002). Bellah (2011, 611n23) mentions Gould’s book in a footnote and adds significantly: ‘Whether cultural spheres can ever fail entirely to overlap as they impinge on the world of daily life is open to question.’

References Assmann, Jan. 2008. Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Bellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bellah, Robert N. and Hans Joas (eds). 2012. The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Bellah, Robert N. and Steven M. Tipton (eds). 2006. The Robert Bellah Reader. Durham: Duke University Press. De Kesel, Marc. 2010. Goden breken: Essays over monotheïsme. Amsterdam: Boom. Donald, Merlin. 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gauchet, Marcel. 1985. Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Oscar Burge, 1997. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —. 2003. La condition historique: entretiens avec François Azouvi et Sylvain Piron. Paris: Stock. Jaspers, Karl. 1949. Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. München: Piper. Translated by Michael Bullock, 1953, The Origin and Goal of History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Latré, Stijn. 2011. ‘From the Field to the Forest: A Book Review Essay on Charles Taylor’s Dilemmas and Connections’. Bijdragen, International Journal in Philosophy and Theology, 72(4): 456–65. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2005. La déclosion: Déconstruction du Christianisme 1. Paris: Galilée. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. —. 2011. Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

13

To World or not to World: An Axial Genealogy of Secular Life Laurens ten Kate

1 Entanglements and spectres 1.1 A new secular bible . . . Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is becoming one of the new bibles of our time, so it seems. Apart from being one of the best-selling books in philosophy all over the world, since its publication in 2007, the impact of the book has led to the launch of a successful website: a platform for debate and exchange on secularization. It is baptized ‘The immanent frame’, borrowing a key concept from Taylor’s book.1 The debate on this immanent frame, bringing about new unexpected and complex relations between the secular and religion (Taylor 2007), is probably one of the key issues at the moment, in philosophy, political theory, history, social sciences, religious studies and literary theory. It is predominantly a debate on ‘the secular’ and on its parallel noun, ‘secularity’. These concepts designate a general condition of human existence, in which the presence of the gods as superhuman powers and the human worshipping of these gods has retreated to give way to a world in which humans are the centre of power. This definition of the secular will be further investigated in this chapter, and immediately presses a new question: Is humanism an adequate designation of this general condition? Or is it a particular world view next to others, with its own traditions, institutions and doctrine? Two terms related to secularity, namely, secularization and secularism, are equally important in the debate. However, they can be considered as deducible from the broader concept. Secularization is a historic process, usually associated with the modern era and especially with the developments in modern culture after the Second World War. Secularism is a political, or more precisely, a statist system in which the impact of religious institutions is minimalized in various degrees. Then a second question already announces itself, one that will resonate throughout this chapter as well: Should ‘the secular age’ and its historical and political ramifications (secularization, secularism) be considered as modern phenomena, or do they possess more complicated premodern roots? Whereas one can hold that secularism is strongly connected with late modernity, coinciding as it does with the rise

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of nation-states and democratic systems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, secularity and secularization may well be less easily assignable to a certain era or phase in human history.

1.2 Return of religion? But before we concentrate on new possible meanings of the secular in its relationship to religion, we have to deal with a debate that is created by the new intertwining of secularity and religion: that on the so-called return of religion on the sociopolitical scene of the twenty-first century. This second debate, unfolding in many ways from the more general and fundamental debate on the secular–religious relation in Taylor’s immanent frame, is complex and ambiguous. At first sight, the return of religion may seem to be a return to religious values, inspired by a rejection of the principles of the secular world.2 Or religion reappears as the flip side of a fierce atheist critique of religion.3 But in fact, this debate is not simply devoted to a ‘return’, nor to a new phase ‘after’ the era of secularization, usually baptized ‘post-secular’. It is rather an intricate dialogue with the secular world taking place in that world – in politics, jurisdiction, art, science and philosophy. It is a dialogue between secular and religious views, experiences, and arguments, and about their mutual relations. Return, seen in this way, is a flawed term and actually stands for a relation embarrassing and even haunting modern culture as a spectre, a ‘revenant’ (that which returns) as it is named in French.4 Taylor strongly opposes this diagnosis of our time that religion would be ‘returning’, and that we would now enter a post-secular era. Religion is not returning in our time, because it was never gone in the first place. The ‘secular age’ characterizes itself by a complex entanglement, in ever new forms, of secularity and religion, he states. This age does not indicate the triumph of the secular over religious life, but it shapes multiple new relations between them. Taylor conceptualizes this complexity as the immanent frame we already referred to above: the framework of an age in which immanence must be understood as the opening towards new experiences and ‘imaginaries’ – as Taylor calls them – of transcendence. Taylor surely is not alone in this polemic stance towards the idea of a return of religion. Many thinkers implicitly support Taylor’s outlook, and hence reject the idea of a return as being naive and ahistorical. One of them is Jean-Luc Nancy.

1.3 Return of religion or deconstruction of religion? Nancy’s intervention In his Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity Nancy questions the logic of return on a more fundamental level than Taylor: ‘Among the phenomena of repetition, resurgence, revival, or haunting, it is not the identical, but the different that invariably counts the most’ (Nancy 2008, 9). This means that the most decisive feature of a return is not what remains identical, but that which is new and differs from what remains. Precisely because religion returns, it turns into something else, and is not identical to

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what it was before. Therefore the current return of religion is not what it seems: it calls on us to return to religion – to turn towards the new, to what renews itself – instead of religion returning to us. A return is never a return backward, but forward. The new intertwining between a secular outlook in life and religious imaginaries breaks with a certain past (e.g. a certain ritual) while transforming that past. A return is always a metamorphosis, or rather, as Nancy has it, a mutation: not the same form (morphè) in a new appearance, but a radically new form that preserves its relation with the old one by destroying it (Nancy 2013, 32; Schrijvers 2014, forthcoming). But why complicate to this extent the concept of return, with regard to religion? This complicating attitude is necessary because one never knows what ‘religion’ in general is. Religion is not a stable content, it is never the same. Returning to religion implies: to religion insofar as it imposes itself anew, in ‘different’ forms on us in the secular age, while at the same time carrying its complex history and legacy. When the outbursts of religious fundamentalism or the discrepancies in religious law place themselves on the agenda of secular societies and states, this urges us first and foremost to wonder what religion means, here and now, in relation to our cultural and political history. The critical analysis of this history – of secular religion and religious secularity – is the aim of what Nancy calls a deconstruction of religion, with Christianity as its key example: Religion, its avatars, and even its metamorphosis and exit from itself all depend on the movement of culture and civilization. This is why deconstructing Christianity comes down to a close scrutiny of this movement. (Nancy 2013, 50)

Nancy’s invitation then is to assume that religion does not belong to this history as some natural phenomenon, which periodically and regularly withdraws and returns. Wouldn’t it be more productive, in view of the embarrassment of the secular world facing religion, to investigate the option that religion would be the most unnatural phenomenon humanity has engendered? This would imply that the word or name ‘God’ and the entire configuration of religious imagination, practice and experience expressed in religious art, ritual, narrative and doctrine – a configuration in which the address of God is central – has always been an intruder into history. This intruder can even no longer be called ‘religion’, for it points at the ‘other’, the ‘outside’ of secular history: Nancy sometimes calls it the alogon of human reason, the incommensurable within what can and must be measured, ordered and subjected to human life. Religion is only an assignment, an indication of this alogon, that is, of a never-closing point – literally an opening – in the secular world: The West was born not from the liquidation of a dark world of beliefs, dissolved by the light of a new sun – and this no more so in Greece than during the Renaissance or the eighteenth century. It took shape in a metamorphosis of the overall relation to the world, such that the ‘inaccessible’ in effect took shape and functioned, as it were, precisely as such in thought, in knowledge, and in behavior. There was no reduction of the unknown, but rather an aggravation of the incommensurable

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(which was no accident, if the solution to the mathematical problem of ‘incommensurables’ – the alogon that is the diagonal of the square – furnished the emblematic figure of the birth of true knowledge and, with it or in it, the modelling or mathematical regulation of philosophy). (Nancy 2008, 8)

Is this account of religion as a fundamental alogon valid for all religions, of all times? Maybe so, but this involves entering a third debate, that on axial theory, that is, on what it means to speak of the beginning of the ‘West’ or rather, of the ‘Axial Age’: of the age of logos that is usually associated with the birth of secular humanism. Nancy refers mainly to some of the complex religions that emerged in this Axial Age and contributed greatly to it: those summarized as monotheism, with a particular focus on Christianity. In monotheism the alogon becomes the ‘other of the world’ in the world: In other words, Christianity assumes, in the most radical and explicit fashion, what is at stake in the alogon. All the weight – the enormous weight – of religious representation cannot change the fact that the ‘other world’ or the ‘other kingdom’ never was a second world, or even a world-behind-the-worlds, but the other of the world. . . . (Nancy 2008, 10)

2 An axial genealogy of the secular Taylor’s A Secular Age seems like a bible, I said at the beginning, just a little provokingly. But why? This is not only due to its enormous proportions, close to a thousand pages. The impact of the book lies in the fact that Taylor opens up the concept of the secular to its roots: the book is ‘radical’ in that sense that it takes secularization to its radices (Lat. for roots), thereby claiming that these radices have little to do with a farewell to religion. On the contrary, the roots refer us to a presumed shift in world history that equally applies to secularity and to religion: the axial shift. Exploring these roots involves an axial genealogy of the secular. As Guido Vanheeswijck already indicates in an essay on Taylor’s book, it is Karl Jaspers’s idea of an ‘axial revolution’ in history, laid out in 1949 in the first chapter of The Origin and Goal of History (Jaspers 2010), that is taken up by Taylor and that structures an important part of Taylor’s argumentation (Vanheeswijck 2008, 378–9). In that so-called Axial Period, located by Jaspers between 800 and 200 BC, secularity as a new condition of human life as well as new religions are born. Our secular age, usually identified with modernity or with Enlightenment, is first and foremost an age that stands in the active legacy of the axial shift, feeding on its achievements, dilemmas and failures. The modern secular age – what is usually named the era of secularization – must be thought of in a radical way, that is: as an age of renewed axialization, not beyond axiality, but living from it and in a way continuing it. The axial theorem serves Taylor to complicate the concept of the secular, philosophically and historically.

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So what is that axial revolution? Not a sudden change, as if an old regime would have been overthrown in an immediate act of revolt, but a slow process of transformation. The Axial Period is sketched by Jaspers as a decisive shift, in which man would have broken with the world of myth, of polytheism, of the givenness of nature, of fate, in favour of a self-emancipatory path towards human individualism, creativity and responsibility, fast technological progress, the emergence of science and knowledge, of philosophy as the art of free thinking, and of new political structures resisting theocratic and tyrannical power. But most importantly, this period in which humanity centres on itself in a slow but irreversible farewell to the gods, is also the age of the emergence of new religions. These axial religions turn God into an abstract, distant principle (like monotheism, Confucianism or Buddhism): a principle of purity and perfection, of the moral Good, of omnipotence and omniscience, of absolute transcendence. The axial God is always the invisible God, he who is by not being or by being beyond being, as the rich traditions of the via negativa in all three monotheistic religions have emphasized time and again. In more philosophical terms: God becomes the name for a dimension outside this world, as opposed to the gods of non-axial civilizations, where the gods were always in the midst of humans, manipulating them. The axial God develops into the strange figuration of the alogon that, as outside and outsider, claims its role inside the world: in this sense Nancy’s thinking of the alogon as that which makes religion fundamentally unnatural – a blind spot, intruder, spectre in history – may be historically anchored in the axial shift. The turn towards secular life coincides with the rise of new religious configurations that accompany secularity, make it possible – If God is distant from the world, humanity receives freedom to rule it – but limit and haunt it at the same time. This coincidence informs Taylor’s book and enables him to think secularity as rooted in a long, complex inheritance that is open to new analyses. The immanent frame of late modern societies is neither the product nor the invention of those societies: it is part and parcel of a crucial thread of history in which secularity and religion are interwoven. Jaspers extends this axial shift beyond Western history as such, to Persia, India and China, where similar ruptures would have taken place in the same era. The rupture with the gods is evoked in Lao-Tse, in the Upanishads, in Zarathustra’s doctrine, in Buddhist meditation, in the protests of the prophets in Israel or in the Greek tragedies. This has decisive consequences. By not narrowing down the presumed beginning of the secular age to the Mediterranean West and to classic antiquity, but to a much larger Euro-Asian area, the standard distinctions between East and West are problematized and any notion of a Western supremacy in the history of civilizations is countered.

2.1 Cosmos, saeculum, world The Axial Period is the period in which the world is no longer ‘given’ as it is; it is no longer a gift from the gods. It can be explored, questioned, transformed and made by humans. Humanity no longer ‘takes from nature what nature offers’, as Jean-Luc Nancy states in the film The Ister (2004), but humanity ‘takes from nature what nature does

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not and cannot give’. This is seen as the beginning of technique and technology, the beginning of technè, or as Hannah Arendt calls it in 1958 in The Human Condition: ‘work’, as opposed to the ‘labour’ of non-axial man, focused on survival only (Arendt 1998, 236–74). In The Creation of the World, or Globalization Nancy names this development the ‘denaturation’ of the world: the ‘event of technology’ is a ‘denaturing event’ (Nancy 2007, 87). Of course, homo faber had discovered his tools way before the Axial Age as Jaspers periodizes it: the hammer, the nail or simply fire, used to scare off animals or to hunt them. But basically these first appearances of technology are still geared to life in the natural world. It is making use of nature, ‘taking what it gives’ in order to enhance the chance to stay alive. The distancing from nature means that life is no longer natural: it has to be led, individually and collectively. Hence the axial existence evolves quickly into a mode of life in which ethics is central. It is not surprising then that the axial religions are predominantly ethical religions, and are often categorized as such by scholars in comparative religious sciences. How to lead one’s life is no longer given: it has to be invented. The later Roman projects of Stoic philosophy to formulate a lifestyle, an art of living in accord with the measure of the world, form one of the examples of the axial shift to ethical questions. And axial existence evolves quickly into the emergence of politics too: of what Arendt calls ‘action’ and ‘vita activa’ (Arendt 1998, 175–326). The rise of the Athenian polis is a prime example here. In politics, or rather in political speech and action, it is not just a matter of ruling the world as such. The political as an inherent element of the secular-axial transformation is primordially a gesture, a start or beginning of which the consequences can never be controlled. The world is invented, ‘created’ in Nancy’s vocabulary, ‘begun’ in Arendt’s: she rightly draws attention to the changing political lexicon in the Axial Age – though she does not refer explicitly to axial theory, despite her close relation to Jaspers’s work –, when the Greek word archein (to begin) became a political concept (to rule) (Arendt 1998, 189). In the Axial Age man estranges himself from the world, ‘inventing’ a world that becomes his ‘other’: the other to be conquered, but just as easily the other to get lost in. The world detaches itself from its mythical, divine foundation in which humanity was grounded and to which it was submitted. This world becomes a void for axial man: ‘He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption’ (Jaspers 2010, 2). This void makes life radically insecure and unstable: the world as ground and foundation has to be engendered every moment again. It receives an essentially finite, temporary and plural status. Because the world becomes groundless it becomes limitless, and the limitlessness in turn presents itself to humans as a strong and strict limit: one can never achieve, never finish the world. The world escapes me as something that never is, but always needs to be created – the world becomes my other. ‘ The unity of the world is not one: it is made of a diversity, including disparity and opposition. . . . A world is a multiplicity of worlds, the world is a multiplicity of worlds, and its unity is the sharing out and the mutual exposure in this world of all

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its worlds’ (Nancy 2007, 109), as Nancy formulates it in almost ecstatic probing and enigmatically precise wordings. Humans are in the world, but that world is nothing else than their relation: it is what they share, it is their ‘mutual exposure’. That is, it is what they are. . . . But if the world we are in is tautological with ourselves and our world-making, then we live in a void. This self-referential world has no beginning – divine origin – nor end – divine fulfilment. It has countless beginnings and ends. So it is never ‘one’. The problem of an impossible self-foundation is probably the core problem of the mode of human life that comes into being as an axial shift or transformation. By the way, this shift certainly has occurred in Jaspers’s and Taylor’s Axial Age, but may just as well have occurred and will occur in more than one ‘age’. At the same time, Nancy as well as Arendt view this problem of self-foundation as a chance; they estimate the void as an ‘opening’, as Nancy would say. This is reflected in Arendt’s description of the polis as a relational space: The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. ‘Wherever you go, you will be a polis’. (Arendt 1998, 198)

To conclude, the axial shift encapsulates the discovery of the world as saeculum. As opposed to the world as divine cosmos ruled by the chain of fate in which we only form a tiny connection, the world becomes the other of humanity, and as such, humanity’s subject and object. We make the world and immediately we coincide with that world, living in it . . . the world makes us, ‘worlds’ us.5 It is this difficult double bind that we will have to explore further in this chapter, particularly in Section 5.6

3 A dual history: Gauchet, Nancy and the incarnated God After having deepened our understanding of the axial transformation, we can now continue the conversation with relevant contemporary thinkers on the relation between secularity and religion, thereby also returning to the debate on the return of religion. Taylor and Nancy, in various ways, treat history as a dual history. Marcel Gauchet, another thinker critical of the idea of a religious return, had first developed this concept in his The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Gauchet 1999, 104 and passim). The concept of dual history is quite important and fertile for our understanding of the axial transformation. In this dual history the secular and its other, religion, are simultaneously active within the sociopolitical complex one calls modernity. However, in portraying modernity as a dual process, Gauchet has to go back to premodern times, interpreting Christianity in a way close to Nancy’s: as an alogon in which the duality of modern culture is already announced loudly. Christianity is ‘the religion for departing from

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religion’,7 Gauchet states (Nancy speaks of an ‘exit’ in the aforementioned quotation): a religion that has many secular traits. Here, God becomes the incommensurable outsider of the world and in the world: humanity is left to its own devices in a secular world that frees itself from any outside power guiding and bearing it. . . . But strangely enough, it is again a ‘God’, now a human one, a non-God, a God as a mortal ‘body’, who affirms and enforces this secular world from which the old gods have ‘departed’ and in which humanity forms the centre: the incarnated God in Christ. Nancy supports this innovative, political rethinking of the Christian religion, and of its paradoxical God as an indispensable active trace in the dual history of modernity; Incarnation prefigures late-modern politics (that is, the process towards secularist democratic systems), for the people (demos) knows no ‘founding presence’ (God, Church, Sovereign) other than itself. There is no external power ruling the people, but the people stands for the difficult task to rule itself: and this can only mean that the place of power has to be left empty,8 as in a modern ‘kenosis’: In this sense, the Christian (or even the monotheistic) god is the god who alienates himself. He is the God who atheizes himself and who atheologizes himself, if I may for the moment forge these terms. (It is Bataille who, for his own purposes, created the term atheological.) Atheology as a conceptualization of the body is the thought that ‘god’ made himself ‘body’ in emptying himself of himself (another Christian motif, that of the Pauline kenosis . . .). The ‘body’ becomes the name of the a-theos in the sense of ‘not-of-god’. But ‘not-of-god’ means not the immediate self-sufficiency of man or the world, but this: no founding presence. (Nancy 2008, 82–3)9

So the approach to the relation between secularity and religion as a dual history places the problem of foundation and self-foundation at the heart of its analysis – an analysis that fits in well with axial theory. As we have explored in Section 2, it is in the Axial Age that humanity radically faces this problem; Taylor and Gauchet point this out explicitly; Nancy implicitly.10 Having said this, the dual approach to history also challenges any linear chronology. The presupposition of a historically progressive process from pre-secular to secular to post-secular is precisely what these thinkers deem highly problematic. But axial theory will have to open itself to this criticism as well. For it suggests a beginning of this dual history: the birth of a new, axial civilization; and in some versions, like in Taylor’s, it also suggests an end to this beginning: the decline of the Axial Age and its passage to a presumed post-Axial Age.11

3.1 Dual history and the post-secular claim: Habermas’s intervention Jürgen Habermas nevertheless draws heavily on the presupposition that the return of religion is part of a historical process from pre- to post-secularity. He is less interested

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in religion itself,12 that is, in what would be returning, than in what has to be done with this return. In this sense, the debate on the post-secular is not synonymous with that on the return of religion. According to Habermas, it was already in the early nineteenth century that the end of the secular epoch was anticipated. This anticipation would resound for example in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and his famous On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799).13 Schleiermacher proves to be one of the first modern scholars in the religious sciences, because he combines philosophical, theological and psychological perspectives on religious experience. The five speeches form an almost canonical text in the history of modern thinking on the role of religion in a secular world. Habermas stresses that Schleiermacher’s plea in favour of the acceptance of ‘the continued existence of religion in an environment that is becoming progressively more secular’, has not lost any of its relevance in the twenty-first century (Habermas 2008, 242). Contrary to Schleiermacher, however, his perspective remains that of secularism and of the secular state, to which ‘something’ has to be added. Habermas does not embrace religion as some forgotten value, as Schleiermacher tends to do. But neither does he take seriously the ‘new’, the aspect of ‘difference’ in the return of religion, as Nancy proclaims it. He simply looks for ways to incorporate religion within a secular configuration: this incorporating manoeuvre is what the postsecular condition would demand today. Facing the difficult reality of a ‘pluralism of worldviews’ characteristic of our time, Habermas states that the citizens of the present Western societies should ‘realize what the secular grounds for the separation of religion from politics in a post-secular society actually mean’ (Habermas 2003, 105).14

4 The three secularities . . . and what about humanism? From Taylor to Balibar Religion has departed from itself, as Gauchet observes. But this precisely implies that religion has never departed from modern culture – has never exited from history proper: that is the consequence of the dual history approach, as we have used it to deepen our analysis of the axial transformation. We have carried out an axial genealogy of the secular and have moved backwards, behind modern history, to retrace the secular all the way back to the first millennium BC. However, having come this far, we need to stop ourselves, for a while. We need to make a rather obvious, nevertheless necessary remark. Modern societies are more secular than medieval and ancient societies. Something in the dual history has changed into a new condition that is usually named ‘modern’, or Neuzeit in German. Modern societies may not have eradicated religion, but they surely have gradually removed it from their centre. Yet, this removal is not as straightforward as it appears to be. Here, Taylor’s conceptual analysis of secular modernity can be useful.

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In A Secular Age, Taylor distinguishes between three modes in this process of secularization. These modes traverse the entire modern era, and still they can be identified also as phases: the first mode can be associated with the earlier centuries of the modern period, the second to the middle ones and the last comes to the fore most strongly in late modern times. First, institutional religion – the church, the clerical powers, the religious movements – that determined society throughout the Middle Ages, is marginalized by the creation and enforcement of public spaces through the separation of church and state: for example, the first experiments with republican governmental structures, the rise and progress of the sciences in independent universities, or the emergence of free enterprise through a new class of merchants, and later on of the bourgeois. Taylor calls this ‘secularity 1’. A second mode consists of a more sociological, psychological and existential process: less and less people living in modern societies feel the need to believe in God, and to observe religious rituals as part of their daily existence. This ‘secularity 2’ is more profound and far-reaching, since it presents modern existence as a way of living and an experience of life without God – in this existence religion is becoming superfluous, or at least non-essential. The rise of humanism as a new, alternative and organized world view in the nineteenth century, in Europe and in the United States, accompanies this development towards secularity 2. But needless to say, secularity 2 was made possible by secularity 1. However, the apparent success of these two modes of secularization produces its own alogon as Nancy would say. Taylor formulates a rather simple but efficient hypothesis that guides him throughout his book: a life without institutional religion, and without the natural presence of God, does not necessarily entail a life in which the relation between immanence and transcendence is obliterated. On the contrary, new ‘conditions of belief ’ make their appearance, Taylor writes, that is, ‘new shapes to the experience which prompts to and is defined by belief, in a new context in which all search and questioning about the moral and the spiritual must proceed’ (Taylor 2007, 20). Transcendence, here, is nothing more than an experience that we do not ‘have’ in the proper sense, but that enters our lives as a moment, a rupture, an interruption, as Nancy would call it. It refers to an outside of human self-control and self-fulfilment, but an outside that is very active inside our daily lives. This is what Taylor calls ‘secularity 3’: new forms of secular transcendence that impose themselves, to which we have to open ourselves, and that we can and must shape and reshape playfully in symbols, narratives, rituals and imaginaries. Articulations of secularity 3 can be found in the interplay of religion and media, typical of the period we are living in now: one only has to think of the many ‘confession apps’ people can download and run on their smartphone. Here one applies a very old ritual within a brand new medial context. As a consequence, the religious ritual is transformed by the medium, and vice versa. This mutual transformation – or mutation as Nancy would name it – is crucial for the mode of secularity 3. It is the general condition of the immanent frame in the secular age.

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Taylors threefold concept of secularity is helpful to analyse the secular–religious relation characteristic of dual history. It problematizes further the opposition of secularity and religion. What are the implications then of this conceptual framework for secular humanism?

1. Secular humanism is not a neutral and universal basis for modern societies, keeping its distance from the presumed particularity and subjectivism of religious expressions and beliefs. On the contrary, secular humanism is itself a form of belief, also in its most militant, atheist versions.15 But it is a strange belief, difficult to define as a separate world view. 2. Secular humanism has quite old religious roots, that must be traced back all the way to the Axial Age. Such an axial genealogy in turn pinpoints humanism’s difficulty to define itself as neutral, universal and separate from religions. The second implication may meanwhile sound acceptable in view of our genealogical analysis of axiality above. But it is the first one we will now have to take a closer look at.

4.1 Balibar’s proposition: Secular humanism as a heretic space From this first implication would follow that the secular finds its expression in a world view among other world views. Here we need to resume one of the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter: Is humanism a designation of secularity as a general condition, or is it a more or less definable separate world view next to others? The way in which we have rethought the secular with Taylor, Gauchet and Nancy so far in fact leads to the conclusion that in our dual history, humanism is the name for this condition: ‘we’, living in the dual history, under the marks and tokens of the Axial Age, are all humanists. But in a similar vein one should add that ‘we’ are all religious . . . because ‘we’ are dual: that is the kernel of what we have described as the axial shift or transformation. But certainly, humanism is not a meta-structure overarching or underlying our private world views; it is just one of these beliefs. However, what could the humanist belief be? Is it a belief in man, or in humanity? Or in humanity’s attributes of freedom and autonomy? Already in assigning such attributes to man or humanity, one presupposes some other of humanism from which man should free himself, with regard to which he should be autonomous. And so, humanism always seems to undergo the fate of defining itself by what it is not. Human values do not provide a way out of this predicament: responsibility, rationality, self-control, compassion, care, tolerance and many more are all values that humanism must share largely with religious traditions, especially with the axial religions. And having recourse to the notion of the secular as a distinctive defining feature of humanism will end up even worse: at least if we take our analyses of dual history seriously. Maybe coining the term humanism in an inclusive way could help; in this sense, humanism is not projected as a separate world view, but considered a specific human feature in other,

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mostly religious world views. Humanism does not exclude but include other life stances. But of course, this still displaces the problem instead of solving it, for how to define this ‘feature’ across the other world views? Probably the best approach here is to simply accept that humanism’s particularity, its proper identity, consists in its having no substance of itself. The difficult question then is whether secular humanism, instead of defining itself as against religion (essentially a negative self-image), can understand and present itself as the communication between, the interstitial space between the religions and their imaginaries, convictions, experiences, doctrine and doxa, in short, between their strategies of identification. Humanism is neither a neutral ground nor a universal umbrella: it does not distinguish itself from religious world views in this way. But it is not simply one world view among others either. It is the mediating space between world views and life stances – religious ones, spiritual ones, Gnostic and even atheist ones. That brings us to a remarkable definition of humanism, one that is suggested in Étienne Balibar’s little essay entitled ‘Saeculum’ (Balibar 2012), based on an English lecture given in Beirut a few years earlier (Balibar 2011).16 Although he does not explicitly use the word humanism for his argument, Balibar develops towards the end of the lecture an emphatically non-universalist idea of cosmopolitan life, of co-existence on a planetary scale, which has important consequences for any account of humanism. In order to do so, he refines the concept of the secular that underlies secularist political systems, by emptying it out: the secular, and I would add, secular humanism, is nothing more and less than an ‘element’, a space between world views, whether religious or non-religious. This element is Balibar’s careful and restrained redefinition of the res publica, it is ‘essentially public’ without relying on a legal, moral or otherwise institutional structure (Balibar 2011, 22). It is a ‘mediator’ that ‘vanishes’17 and ‘returns’ in a ‘performative’ way (Balibar 2011, 23). However vulnerable and uncertain this element of secular humanism may be, [w]ithout this element there will be no possibility of mediating between the opposite religious axiomatics or having their interpretations agree on certain practical rules or moral and social principles. More profoundly, there would be no discursive space in which their differences could be presented as such in a comparative manner and presented to one another in a non-hegemonic manner. (Balibar 2011, 22)

Interestingly, Balibar takes his decision to leave this mediating space/event of humanism without substance and content very seriously. In the end, this humanism can only be brought about on specific moments and in specific places and contexts by the various world views, namely, when they encounter one another. The humanist element does not produce itself, but is produced by the world views it mediates and ‘expropriates’ through this mediation. In pluralizing societies like those of Europe, these encounters are multiple and frequent: sometimes exciting, sometimes painful, sometimes violent. They occur

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within singular lives, of migrants, of natives. Shall I wear a headscarf, or not? Shall I forbid someone to wear it? Will I wear it to protect my female body? Or as a protest and provocation against racism? The space of secular humanism is an agora where these dilemma’s and innumerable others are played out as intensely as possible. This space is part of Taylor’s secularity 3. It is like a square where people meet, a square in the metropolitan city Taylor calls the immanent frame: This element . . . can exist only if it comes from inside the religious discourses, revealing the contradictions within their axiomatics. But it must also ‘expropriate’ them of their own singularity and disturb their certainty of being uniquely ‘true’ and ‘just’, while not preventing them from seeking truth or justice along their own ‘path’. In this sense, the element is essentially heretic or forms the impossible ‘common heresy’ of all the religious discourses – but in a relation to be determined with each religion’s own specific historical ‘heretic movements’. (Balibar 2011, 22)

So Balibar conceives of these encountering moments as a form of heresy. He suggests that the mediating space can only ‘come from inside the religious discourses’. These discourses, when encountering one another, have to ‘reveal’ their internal ‘contradictions’. And this means they have to reveal themselves essentially as heresies: they always already ‘expropriate their own singularity’ and their ‘certainty of being uniquely “true” and “just”’. A religion is only alive if it is in itself a space of confrontation, opposition, debate and battle. To this insight Ernst Bloch has contributed greatly with his Atheism in Christianity (1968), already in the book’s apodictic epigraph: ‘The best thing about religion is that it makes for heretics’ (Bloch 2009, 1). Heresy is not some deviation from the main path; it is vital and productive within the doctrine, narrative, rituality and imagination of a religion.18 So, when world views encounter one another and open themselves to Balibar’s ‘element’ or space, they extrapolate and ‘export’ the space of contestation they internally already are: from a singular heresy they become a ‘common heresy’, which virtually comes down to sharing each other’s uncertainties. One can thus state that, ultimately, the world views themselves become heretic in their encounter, exposed as they are to a no man’s land in between the familiar and the strange. Balibar then calls on the heretical force that is present in every world view. The secular-humanist element mobilizes these heretic potentialities, gives them a temporary performative language, only to ‘vanish’ again in a flash. Maybe this is just a premature thought that needs elaboration. Balibar even suggests it may well be a ‘philosophical fiction’ (Balibar 2011, 23). Let alone this consideration, this idea of humanism is much closer to the complexities of the twenty-first century than all claims to a neutral and universal dimension that propels humanism as a metastructure of reason. For Balibar’s heretic space provides at least a way to see how the intertwining of secularity and religion might be played out and enacted in practice: the lived practice of dual history.19

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5 To world or not to world Balibar’s experimental idea of secularity as a mediating space is not only helpful to analyse the rapidly globalizing and pluralizing saeculum of the twenty-first century. It can serve as a valuable deepening and nuancing of axial theory. Let us take the example of the Greek society near the end of the fifth-century BC. The Athenian polis is close to its downfall facing military defeat in the exhausting Peloponnesian War against Sparta. Democracy is abolished, cultural creativity and free philosophical thinking are reduced, Socrates is accused of not worshipping the gods and will commit his famous suicide a few years later. The axial ‘revolution’ of which Jaspers speaks appears not at all a straightforward process towards a humane society. Human self-emancipation leading to an unstable, groundless world to be invented time and again, this radical ‘disembedding’ as Taylor baptizes it, does not simply engender a new axial order; it also produces violence and chaos. In this complex situation, axiality is not the new secular world view triumphing over the ‘old’, mythical, religious ones. It is nothing more and less than a ‘radical question’ to any world view on how it will deal with difference, plurality and confrontation in the social, political, cultural and religious arena that the Greek and later Roman empires actually were. Axiality is the mediator without substance that Balibar envisions as a new, cosmopolitan humanism. This implies that the secular, as it is traced back to the Axial Age by Taylor through his account of secularity 3, by Gauchet in his dual history approach, and by Nancy in his deconstruction of monotheism’s legacy in modernity, is not only the achievement of the axial shift, it is also its crisis. When the world becomes limitless, humanity is confronted all the more with its limits, as we stated above. ‘Selfhood’ is no longer given, it has become groundless, a ‘depth’, and the world is a ‘void’ because it is a human world. Jaspers certainly intuits this in these formulations, already partly cited above: What is new about this age . . . is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence. (Jaspers 2010, 2)

The rupture with the gods does not simply turn humans into new gods, omnipotent, limitless and infinite as the gods were. No, in the world as saeculum, as other, humanity encounters its limits and vulnerability just as well. No longer embedded, protected and limited by divine power, humanity acquires a sense of its own limits, limits it sets to itself face to face with the world it strives to invent, control and appropriate. However, humanity’s ‘powerlessness’ does not invite reconciliation with fate, articulated in the rich world of mythical narrative, but incites humanity to ‘ask radical questions’: it admonishes humans to stand in the twilight zone between human self-assertion and

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‘transcendence’. And it proposes this ‘in between’ as a new humanism: a humanism continuously negotiating between . . . humans and gods.

5.1 Euripides’s Bacchae: Axial complexities Humanism as a mediating space of questioning: one of the fascinating examples of this axial experience of the uncertainty and the state of transition it creates is Euripides’ Bacchae, a tragic play written in that difficult, disenchanting period of the Greek polis, in 406 BC, and performed in 405, just after Euripides’s death. In the conflict between the king of the axial polis Thebes, Pentheus, and the god of non-axial disorder, violence and ecstasy, Dionysus, a radical question is staged in Bacchae. This question is about humans and gods, and their possible or impossible relation. The secular ‘element’ driving the story consists in a constant indecision played out as an even constant negotiation or mediation between Pentheus’s atheist world view and a complicated mélange of religious world views: old mythical belief in fate in which humans are the toys of the gods, ecstatic abandonment close to axial mysticism in which human individualism is accentuated much stronger, and a general sense of transcendence as a limit to human self-determination. Pentheus not only resists the god, he even denies his existence; but the god won’t go away, Dionysus reclaims his presence by entering the city in mortal disguise. He intoxicates all female citizens, turning them into maenadic women – Bacchae – who perform their virulent ecstasies in the surrounding mountains. In the end, Pentheus confronts the women, in a striking ambiguity of fascination for them and passionate rejection of their moral disorder. He is humiliated and cruelly torn to pieces by his own mother. Even for a play in the Greek tradition of tragedies, this ending is extremely dark and hopeless. Bacchae is far away from a non-axial myth, explaining why things are as they are; it is an axial epos announcing new, unexpected ‘improbable’ things. However, these new things are not the victory of humanity over religion; they are a new space between humans and gods, where a new sense of transcendence, that is, of the ‘limit’ and ‘void’ articulated by and in the axial world, is due, in all its urgency. Euripides presents the human revolt against the gods as a great step, courageous and necessary, and at the same time he pinpoints the disasters that may befall an exclusively human world. That is: a world that has obliterated any sense of its ‘outside’, of what exceeds the realm of the human but still belongs to, is present and active in . . . the human world. His ‘humanism’ consists of the uncertain, indecisive negotiation between inside and outside, between the closure of the self in self-control, and excess in the loss of self. A society that loses the sense for this dilemma invokes catastrophe, Euripides seems to proclaim. So, the unexpected things announcing themselves in the axial crisis, involve a new notion of the divine: the divine not as some superhuman power or world, but as a dimension of human life in this world – as a dimension of the secular. The divine is a ‘place’, Nancy calls it, where humanity ‘exposes’ itself to its outside: it is the space between the city and the mountains. This surely is a ‘new’ notion of divinity, hinted at already by Euripides, and rephrased in so many ways in the axial religions, in

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monotheism, in Buddhism, in modern thought and into the contemporary debate on the secular we have been analysing in this chapter. The unexpected things the axial shift brings about do not simply entail a rupture with non-axiality, but they shift the non-axial to new experiences of transcendence, to ‘new shapes of things divine’. That is pronounced in the remarkable last song of the choir in Bacchae, the very last words of the play: Many are the shapes of things divine Much the gods achieve beyond expectation And what seems probable is not accomplished Whereas for the improbable, the heavens find a way.20

To conclude, Bacchae is just as well an affirmation of the axial world as a fierce protest against it. King Pentheus is not only tragic because he fails in pursuing a just cause. He is tragic because he attempts the impossible: striving for a human world without limits. Euripides, responding to the agony of his time, proposes to get rid of the gods, but still installs a space where there absence can and must be respected: an absence that haunts axial self-determination and creates a gap, or even an abyss within the human world. This space is what Euripides, in the language of his time, still largely dependent on religious symbolism, calls ‘the heavens’. Let us name this space secular, let us name its meaning humanism. In his ‘Of Divine Places’ (1987) Nancy addresses this complex entanglement of presence and absence, of humanity and divinity within a human, secular world. It is the language of a difficult, ‘radical question’: Can human self-realization, that is, presence, be understood as an exposure to absence . . . to divinity? ‘The gods went away long ago’, said Cercidas of Megalopolis, in the third century B.C. Our history thus began with their departure, and perhaps even after their departure – or else, when we stopped knowing they were present. They cannot return in that history – and ‘to return’ has no sense outside of that history. But where the gods are – and according as they are, whatever the present or absent mode of their existence – our history is suspended. (Nancy 1990, 145) If there is a place for god, if there is still room for him: that is, a place where he does not become indistinguishable from something else, and where it is consequently still worth calling him by the name of God . . ., could we then in fact be dealing with a question of place, of distinct location and not with a question of being? (Nancy 1990, 114)

5.2 The Axial dilemma: How to live in the world as outside it? The ‘suspension of our history’ evoked by Nancy as a divine place proposes to think divinity itself as a human relation to the outside, as we clarified this in the previous section. It is a notion of divinity already present in the so-called Axial Era and its complexities, as we demonstrated with the example of Bacchae.

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The relation sought here is a rapport to the ‘other world’ (‘the heavens’ in the choir’s song, ‘divine places’ in Nancy’s words) that is not a ‘second world’, or even a worldbehind-the-worlds, but the ‘other of the world’ (Nancy 2008, 10), a statement we already met in Section 1. This place is in the here and now, ‘in the midst of the world’ (Nancy 2013, 24), as the other, unexpected, ‘improbable’. Nancy presents this as a more radical and paradoxical way of thinking the duality of dual history: where immanence and transcendence (Taylor), secularity and religion (Gauchet) coincide, a new, indeed ‘improbable’ mode of existence, of existing in and as world, announces itself. He designates this mode as a ‘life in the world outside the world’ (Nancy 2013, 24) or ‘to live in time what is outside time’(Nancy 2013, 23). The importance of this formula for our axial genealogy is huge, for it is this crucial duality that lies at the heart of the axial shift, in the religions this shift brings about, and finally in modernity. It is a ‘Christian formula’ that ‘finds an echo in the statement by Wittgenstein that “the sense of the world must lie outside the world”’ (Nancy 2013, 24).21 In the axial religions, especially in Christian monotheism, this double position is mapped out in full, although they ‘never truly conform to it’ (Nancy 2013, 23). In the narrative of the Incarnation, for instance, God as the other is present ‘in the midst of the world’, as human, and he lives precisely this dual life: living in the world, ‘my Kingdom is not of this world’ (Jn 18.36), as Christ repeats in several variations. And it is this double position that renders his life, death and resurrection so unexpected and ‘improbable’, or, in the vocabulary of the gospels, so ‘miraculous’. What does this double posture in life mean? It means that life does not ‘limit itself to what is given’, Nancy writes. Indeed, the kernel, the ‘axis’ of the axial transformation is articulated here. Next to Wittgenstein, Nancy seeks support in other modern thinkers, in order to show that what is in play here, cannot be reduced to some Axial Age or to monotheism. It is in this dual position in and towards life, that the secular-religious inheritance of the axial shift weighs upon modern times: ‘Christianity’ is life in the world outside the world. Nietzsche . . . understood it perfectly. This despiser of ‘backworlds’ knew that Christianity . . . consists in being in the world without being of the world. This is to say that it does not limit itself to adhering to inherence, to what is given. . . . Two of Nietzsche’s well-known figures illustrate what he sometimes claims to be the ‘experience at the heart’ of Christianity: the tightrope dancer and the child playing with dice. Neither relates to the world as a given by which she is surrounded; on the contrary, they relate to that in the world which makes an opening, rift, abyss, game, or risk. (Nancy 2013, 23–4)

But however crucial this dual position with regard to human existence is for the axial shift, it is also axiality’s dilemma, if not its temptation. Arriving at the end of this chapter, let me briefly dwell on this dilemma. For humanity in the axial time, the world is a void and an opening. We analysed this statement at the end of Section 2, when treating the problem of self-foundation, and in our treatment of Bacchae. It means that ‘the’ world is nothing but a plurality: worlds

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that are created and recreated and that create themselves continuously between people. ‘World’ is a dynamic concept, best understood as a verb: we world the world, the world worlds us. The sense of the world lies in its finite verbality. Because there is neither (one, ultimate etc.) world grounding us nor a world we can ground, ‘world’ functions as the dual structure we have been studying. It is basically an opening towards its own outside, to itself as outside-itself. Hence, no human owns the world, although this is precisely the axial project: to invent the world always entails a logic of appropriation. And neither does the world own the humans living in it: that would be restoring the non-axial experience of the world. This essential lack of ownership from both sides marks the crisis that the axial shift engenders ipso facto. The difficulties in enduring this lack, in accepting the critical condition of duality, have stamped axial history throughout. The temptation of this history is to escape the delicate posture of duality and of the secular ‘element’ without substance Balibar aims to introduce – and that we have articulated as humanism. This escapist drive follows many possible scenarios, but one among them stands out. It is that of a new dualism of two worlds, activated in Gnosticism but largely informed by one of the great axial philosophical systems, that of Platonism and Neoplatonism (however, one should avoid reducing Plato’s works to this Platonist temptation). Here, the world’s outside is exported to another realm, that of eternity, perfection, purity, goodness, infinity, of the truth of the ‘idea’ extrapolated in Christianity to the Being above all being of God. The human world, however, is the realm of imperfection and mortality, that should strive for the other world.

5.3 Yes and no to the world: Blumenberg’s reservations This scenario of an ultimate ‘no’ to the world as it is, has been admirably analysed by Hans Blumenberg in his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. The enormous impact of this work on the philosophical rethinking of the secular can be explained by pointing at Blumenberg’s subtle strategy. While Blumenberg warns against the rigid dualisms axial history has brought about, against the ‘gnostic temptation’ of modernity (Blumenberg 1983, Part II, esp. 125–43), the ‘yes’ to the world (Weltbejahung) he advocates does never revert to a full-blooded monism in its appropriative form – the mirror side of dualism. A ‘yes’ to the world precludes any attempt to unify the other and the self, as for example in the holistic currents in mysticism, whether medieval or modern – another powerful influence in the axial inheritance –, or as in the modern rationalist objectification of the world, in which humanity posits itself as its subject claiming full self-possession – the Enlightenment in its ideological form.22 But what then can this ‘yes’ mean? To what is it a ‘yes’? It is not a ‘yes’ to the world as pure immanence, as a Diesseits excluding its other, its Jenseits. The ‘legitimacy’ of the modern age, its ‘newness’ does not consist of a reclaimed ownership of the world by humanity after a long era when religion – in particular Christianity – would have disowned humanity. ‘Man has “removed himself from the earth to a much more distant point than any Christian otherworldliness had ever removed him”’, Blumenberg cites

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Arendt, who depicts modern culture as a culture of ‘world alienation’, parallel to the axial genealogy we have been carrying out: the world as other (Arendt 1998, 320). A new ownership of the world is impossible because modernity entails the loss of the world. Rather, the secularity of modern man rests in the condition of being ‘thrust back on himself ’: a situation of radical worldlessness, in which ‘the’ world is never at hand, but lingers in the void between inside and outside, Diesseits and Jenseits characteristic of the dual history Taylor, Gauchet and Nancy investigate. And with this lingering world, human life lingers in the same void, shifting constantly between immanence and transcendence. Analysed in this way, modern life is a new, radical step in the history of axial shifts of which we studied just one example: the times of the Greek polis’s crisis, the times of Bacchae. Being ‘thrust back on itself ’, humanity is the world it can never have. Worlds are opened and closed in the void of secular life: the dynamics of worlding we need to keep going. In this dynamics the Diesseits and the Jenseits meet and dissolve in . . . us: When humanity lost its hope for a beyond [Jenseits], it has not, through the intensity of conscience freed up by this loss, entered the here and now [Diesseits]; rather humanity, thrown out of the world beyond and out of the world here and now, was thrust back on itself. (Blumenberg 1983, 9)23

Notes 1 See http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/. 2 In contemporary thought, the search for a certain return and rehabilitation of religion can be encountered in thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo (e.g. Belief. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1999; After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), who welcomes a return of religion in ‘postmodern’ times, that is, a post-Christian ‘belief ’ still strongly embedded in the ‘best’ (pluralistic, non-dogmatic) parts of the Christian traditions, and Alister McGrath who, adopting an apologetic outlook, defends the meaning of Christianity in a secular era by pinpointing the presumed shortcomings of atheism facing the complexities of modern life (See The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World. London: Random House, 2004). Another strong example we find in the so-called theological turn in phenomenology of thinkers like Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chétien and Michel Henry. However, none of these authors falls into the nostalgic manoeuvre of rejecting the secular world: they are all in an intense dialogue with it. 3 See Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking Press, 2006), or Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), who resist any return of religion in favour of a rigid atheism neutralizing religion as an illusion, albeit a ‘natural’ one. Needless to say, their project consists in a passionate dialogue with religion all the same, taking it much more seriously than they would probably have liked, precisely in their criticism of religion.

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4 For an extensive reflection on the meaning of ‘spectrality’ in modernity, from Shakespeare via Marx to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing rhetoric of the ‘end of history’, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York/London: Routledge, 2006). 5 In some etymological research, saeculum is derived from semen, the Latin word for human seed, which also exists in English. The world is the seed of humans, but this seed also conceives humans: it is the seed that we produce as well as the seed that produces us. However, this etymology is not confirmed by most scholars, and the roots of the term are judged to be unclear by most among them. See for example, Jan Bremmer, ‘Secularization: Notes toward a Genealogy’, in H. de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond the Concept (The Future of the Religious Past I) (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 432–7. For a refined cultural historical analysis of the word secular in and beyond Western boundaries, I mention Talal Asad’s inspiring Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 6 In her rich and informative study The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions (New York: Anchor, 2007), Karen Armstrong bases herself on axial theory too. However, she solely concentrates on the way ‘our’ western religions would have a joint starting point, and avoids the debate on the roots of secular culture all together. 7 ‘Une religion de la sortie de la religion’. See Gauchet 1999, esp. 101–15, and 200–7, where the author speaks of ‘The Religious after Religion’. 8 The terminology is borrowed here from Claude Lefort, for example, in his Democracy and Political Theory, trans. D. Macey (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1989). 9 Nancy refers to Bataille’s works written in the Second World War and later compiled as his Somme athéologique. Bataille, who is a constant discussion partner for Nancy since his The Inoperative Community, trans. P. Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), already worked around the intuition that Christianity’s impact on modern culture is much stronger than most of his contemporary thinkers could accept (this is why Jean-Paul Sartre, not without disdain, called him a ‘new mystic’, in the essay with the same title of 1943, taken up in Critical Essays: Situations I. London: Seagull Books, 2010). Bataille saw the secular traces in Christianity – and more generally in religion proper – in its fascination for evil, for ecstasy, for a fundamental interplay between law and transgression, and most emphatically in Christianity’s contested figure of God in Christ. In many ways his work, parallel to that of his friend Maurice Blanchot, and informed strongly by his reading of Nietzsche, entails one of the first attempts to rethink the relation of secularity and religion, or, in Bataille’s terms, still dependent as he was on early ethnology (Durkheim, Mauss), the profane and the sacred. In this sense Bataille’s work is also a first, probing proposal to carry out a deconstruction of religion, and of Christianity in particular – and such a deconstruction cannot do without a thorough rereading of Bataille. See on this also my ‘“. . . Vite néant sans retour . . .” Limite et dialectique dans la pensée de Bataille, abordées selon sa théorie de l’érotisme’, in J.-S. Gallaire (ed.), Cahiers Bataille II (Paris: Les éditions des Cahiers, forthcoming). 10 Although Taylor is less interested in the type of meticulous deconstructions of religion, like those Nancy and Gauchet apply to Christianity, all three thinkers meet in the way they rely on axial theory. See Taylor 2007, ch. 3: ‘The Great Disembedding’, and passim; Gauchet 1999, ch. 2, 43–6: ‘The Axial Age’, ch. 3: ‘The Dynamics

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of Transcendence’, in which the author describes the farewell to mythos, the emergence of logos and of the ‘distancing God’, ch. 4: ‘From Immersion in Nature to Transforming Nature’, in which he describes the axial changes in the attitude towards nature; and Nancy who never explicitly refers to axial theory, but is probably most indebted to it of all three. See for example, Nancy 2013, ch. 3, in which he describes the axial shift in human history as a ‘mutation’ within religion from ‘observance’ to ‘relation’, exemplified in the transformation of the practice of sacrifice. But axial theory is present almost everywhere in his oeuvre. See also Nancy’s contribution in the form of a monologue in the film The Ister (2004, Dir. D. Barison and D. Ross). 11 I already made a slight suggestion earlier in this chapter that axial theory cannot remain undisputed. First, Jaspers’s historical periodization (800–200 BC) is flawed seriously, since he includes the rise of monotheistic religions as important features of the axial revolution. However, Judaism is much older than 800 BC, and Christianity and Islam emerged later. Taylor seems to follow the original periodization, though, and introduces a ‘post-axial age’ as an era in which a delicate ‘equilibrium’ between ‘pre-axial’ and axial elements would be developed (Taylor 2007, 438). It remains unclear when this post-axial age would have begun, nor whether it is not simply a continuation of axial history in different circumstances. Many other scholars on axial theory more or less follow Jaspers’s periodization too, like Robert Bellah, Religion and Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2011), who mentions Jaspers and Taylor as an inspiration but for different reasons: because Jaspers and Taylor ground their thinking about the secular in relation with religion on axial theory, they teach us to ‘accept religious pluralism as our destiny without making a claim to the superiority of one tradition’ (603); or like Bruce Lerro (From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods: The Socio-ecological Origins of Monotheism, Individualism, and Hyperabstract Reasoning from the Stone Age to the Axial Iron Age. Lanham etc.: Lexington, 2000) and Steven G. Smith (Appeal and Attitude: Prospects for Ultimate Meaning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); or in the pioneering volume edited by S. N. Eisenstadt, The Origins and Diversity of Axial Civilizations (New York: State University of New York Press, 1986). All these works achieve important refinements in Jaspers’s generalistic overview, but seldom the idea of a great revolution in the middle of the first millennium BC is challenged. However, in two recent volumes: Axial Civilizations and World History, edited by Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt and Björn Wittrock (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2005), and The Axial Age and its Consequences, edited by Hans Joas and Robert Bellah (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2012), one finds more discussion on this issue. But secondly, and more importantly, in these two latter volumes the philosophical idea of an Axial Age founding the axial civilizations – while not founding others . . . – of an age that would be historically identifiable in its beginning and in its ending, is debated as well. Joas analyses the ‘axial debate as a religious discourse’ (9–29), for instance. Although research on the axial age is much more diversified, subtle and careful than I have just summarized, the issue remains quite urgent whether to speak of ‘the’ Axial Age and of the axial ‘age’ is not a reduction of complexity to an all-explanatory narrative, however appealing that may be. Why couldn’t there have been multiple axial shifts in human history, even in so-called pre-axial times, even in those regions of the earth (Egypt, the Babylonian civilization, Africa, America, Australia) that

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Radical Secularization? are too easily excluded from axial theory? And why shouldn’t the ‘axial’ or ‘axiality’ function more as an epistemological and theoretical key to thinking and analysing dual history in its entanglement of religion and secularity, rather than as a historical truth? By opting for an axial genealogy I am proposing to use axiality as a ‘tool’ for research rather than as an origin. It is more productive to view the ‘axial’ as a feature of human history throughout the ages, and into the twenty-first century: as a fundamental tension or duality between humanity and its other, between humans and gods, between God and gods, a tension that presents us the world, our world, ‘we as world’, in the form of a void and an opening. A last remark. Why, to oppose Taylor, couldn’t there be many more axial shifts in the presumed post-axial age, like the debates on revelation and reason in early Islam or the early Renaissance in Western Europe? And isn’t the axial age proper, the ‘true’ axial age, that would have already found its decline after 200 BC, with the emergence of new institutions, hegemonic powers and discipline, much more contradictory and complex? Euripides’s Bacchae is a striking example of a piece belonging to axiality and at the same time criticizing it from within, with great despair, as I will show in Section 5. As are the authors mentioned as examples in note 2. Translated by R. Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See for a discussion on the return of/to religion and on the post-secular also A. Alexandrova, I. Devisch, L. ten Kate, A. van Rooden, ‘Re-opening the Question of Religion’, in idem, Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 22–40. See on atheism as belief also my ‘Humanism’s Cry: On Infinity in Atheism, and Absence in Religion: A Conversation with Blanchot and Nancy’, in E. van den Hemel and A. Szafraniec (eds), Words: Religious Language Matters (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2014). Saeculum is an extended version of the Beirut lecture, to which has been added quite a bit of new material. I will limit myself here to the final section of the lecture. Balibar borrows this term from Fredric Jameson, in his ‘The Vanishing Mediator, or Max Weber as Storyteller’ (1973). In Syntax of History, vol. 2 of The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–1986 (New York/London: Routledge, 1988), 3–34. The Christian construction of the Trinitarian God can be seen as such an inner ‘space’ within a religious doctrinal system where truth and heresy meet to the extent that they become indistinguishable: is the Son – the crucial ‘persona’ in the Trinity – a God or is he human? Is he both? Is he neither of these? The insoluble debate on the ‘nature of Christ’ finds its way towards this construction, that is by no means a solution, but serves as a ‘platform’ – a stage, a space – where all voices, heretic ones, like that of arianism or docetism, and mainstream ones can be heard. In the unstable compromise or rather, experiment of the trinitarian figuration of God, nobody can tell what is heresy and what is mainstream doctrine. Still, the Trinity has developed itself as the most creative and influential concept and vision of God in the Christian religion. The space Balibar is seeking to think, and that I have associated here, in a preliminary way, with a new possible meaning of secular humanism, will be analysed and commented more extensively in an article by Henk Manschot, Carolina Suransky and myself, based on the discussions of an expert seminar at the University of Humanistic

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Studies, Utrecht the Netherlands, on 7 and 8 November 2013, entitled ‘Pluralism and Secularism’. The Bacchae of Euripides, trans. G. S. Kirk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 140 (1388–91). Translation slightly modified. Nancy quotes from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. Guinness, 6.41.(New York: Humanities, 1961), 145. See on the problematic of the inside-outside duality also my ‘Outside In, Inside Out: Notes on the Retreating God in Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity’. Bijdragen: International Journal in Philosophy and Theology, 69/2008/3, 305–20; and ‘Living Death: The Logic of Self-Foundation and the Problem of Transcendence in Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity’, in W. L. van der Merwe and W. Stoker (eds), Looking Beyond? Shifting Views of Transcendence in Philosophy, Theology, Art, and Politics (Amsterdam: Rodopi Publishers, 2011), 139–56. A massive example of this can be found in Jonathan Israel’s work, in particular Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2001. Blumenberg again quotes Arendt here (Arendt 1998, 320), but he uses the German edition crafted by Arendt herself, Vita activa oder Vom Tätigen Leben (Stuttgart: Piper 1960), 312. Here her formulation of the passage differs from the English version and is more precise and elaborate. I follow this version Blumenberg has used for the citation, so I modified R. M. Wallace’s translation here.

References Arendt, H. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Balibar, É. 2011. ‘Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations’. Grey Room, 4, Summer: 6–25. —. 2012. Saeculum: Culture, Religion, Idéologie. Paris: Galilée. Bloch, E. 2009. Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Translated by J. T. Swann. New York: Verso. Blumenberg, H. 1983. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by R. M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gauchet, M. 1999. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Translated by O. Burge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. 2003. ‘Faith and Knowledge’, in The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 101–15. —. 2008. Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Jaspers, K. 2010. The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by M. Bullock. New York/ London: Routledge. Nancy, J.-L. 1990. ‘Of Divine Places’. Translated by M. Holland, in The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 110–51. —. 2007. The Creation of the World, or Globalization. Translated by F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew. New York: State University of New York Press. —. 2008. Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Translated by B. Bergo, G. Malenfant and M. B. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press.

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—. 2013. Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II. Translated by J. McKeane. New York: Fordham University Press. Schrijvers, J. 2014. ‘Metamorphosis or Mutation? Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity’, in Ph. Goodchild and H. Phelps (eds), Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Today. Durham: Acumen, forthcoming. Taylor, Ch. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vanheeswijck, G. 2008. ‘Charles Taylor en het zig-zag-parcours van de westerse secularisering’. Tijdschrift voor filosofie, 70: 373–95.

Index Arendt, Hannah 212–13, 225, 229 axial 3, 51–3, 57, 59, 71, 85, 94–6, 99–100, 102, 108–10, 117, 119–20, 132–3, 135, 137, 140, 174, 190–1, 193–203, 207, 210–15, 217, 220–5 Balibar, Étienne 215, 217–20, 224 Bellah, Robert N. 2–3, 94–7, 101, 104, 108–9, 118, 140, 190–203 Bloch, Ernst 219 Blumenberg, Hans 1–2, 5, 7–11, 14, 17–18, 27–30, 32–42, 47–9, 52–5, 67, 129–31, 134, 139, 224–5 Bonaventura 130 Bruce, Steve 1, 154, 156, 158, 163 Buddhism 11, 53, 94, 96, 109–10, 117, 182, 211 Calvinism 53–4, 134 caritas 69, 72–3, 75–7, 79–80 Celan, Paul 146 Christianity as the religion for departing from religion 49–50, 59, 72, 79 as religion of interpretation 61 deconstruction of Christianity 3, 12, 208 Counter-Reformation 128, 133–5, 139 De Lubac 2, 129, 130 devotion 179–81, 186–7 disenchantment 3, 41, 47–51, 53–5, 57, 59–62, 68, 70, 72, 131, 134, 170, 173–5, 190–1, 194, 213 Durkheim, Émile 1, 61, 98, 103, 107–8 eschatology 2, 9, 11, 14, 17–24, 26–30, 40, 60, 130 Euripides 221–2 Ferry, Luc

51, 59, 128, 129, 177

Gauchet, Marcel 2–4, 29, 41, 47–62, 67–72, 77–80, 97–102, 105–14, 128, 129, 131–6, 140, 169, 190–202, 213–15, 217, 220, 223, 225 Girard, René 74–5, 106–7 Gnosticism 2, 17, 19, 21, 23–7, 29–30, 100, 111, 117, 224 Gordon, Peter 152, 157, 159–61, 163–4 Gregorian reform 58, 135–6 Gregory, Brad 129, 139–42, 143, 145 Habermas, Jürgen 1–2, 83–90, 92, 94, 101, 214–15 Hegel, G. W. F., hegelian 8, 10, 18, 61, 72, 88, 105, 114, 181, 192, 200 Heidegger, Martin 12, 72–3, 75, 145–6 heresy 23, 129–30, 186, 219 hermeneutics 129, 142–3, 150 immanence 21, 24–6, 51–2, 56, 69–70, 72, 77–9, 116–17, 132–3, 135, 155, 158, 160–2, 164, 199, 201, 208, 216, 223–5 immanent frame 4, 42, 130, 140, 143, 155–6, 158, 160, 163, 174, 207–8, 211, 216, 219 Incarnation 2, 19, 47–9, 51–7, 61, 63, 67–8, 72–5, 77–80, 87, 91, 93, 100, 112, 120, 129, 133, 135–6, 196, 214, 223 internal realism 169–70 internalism 191, 202 Jaspers, Karl 3, 52, 57, 71, 137, 190, 210–13, 220 Joachim of Fiore 10, 129, 130 Kant, Immanuel, kantian 11, 49, 50, 61, 76, 83–90, 92, 101, 105, 120, 142, 171

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kenosis 69, 72, 76–7, 214 Kolakowski, Leszek 3, 129, 137–8, 143, 146 Löwith, Karl 8–9, 11, 15, 17–18, 32, 35, 55, 129, 130 mainstream secularization theory 152–3, 164 Marquard, Odo 14, 17, 29 Mendieta, Eduardo 128 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 62, 84 Milbank, John 2, 3, 83, 128, 136, 139, 143, 145 modernity 54–5 and disenchantment 48–50 as result of Christianity 52, 56 Nancy, Jean-Luc 1, 3, 12–13, 190, 208–17, 220–3, 225 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nietzschean 8, 10–12, 25, 27, 50–1, 72–3, 91, 105, 116, 147–8, 223 nominalism 13–14, 48, 52–5, 86, 113, 130–4, 139, 199 Ockham, William of

86–7, 129, 131

participation 2, 55–6, 85–6, 94, 103–4, 106, 112–14, 196 piety 180–1 political as ‘le politique’ 58–9 post-secular 7, 116, 128, 208, 214–15 Protestantism 22, 57, 112, 133–5, 198 Ratzinger, Joseph 2, 18, 85–7, 116, 129–31, 136 Rawls, John 1, 141 re-enchantment 3, 48, 50, 54, 60 reform 132–3, 140, 143, 155, 174–5 Gregorian reform 58, 135–6 Reformation 37, 54, 56, 67, 99, 112, 128–9, 133–6, 139–40, 142 Reformers 54

religious logic 41, 52–3, 56, 58, 61, 104, 119, 199 Rilke, Rainer Maria 148 scapegoat 74, 106–7 Schmitt, Carl 1, 9, 29, 35, 38, 40, 55 separation of church and state 57, 216 Shelley 139, 145, 170 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 3, 178–87 subtler languages 3, 62, 129, 139–40, 142, 144–5, 169–71, 173–4 subtraction 119 subtraction story 41 subtraction theory 116 Taylor, Charles 1–3, 12–14, 41–2, 47–8, 50–1, 59–60, 62, 86, 109, 113–14, 116, 128–9, 131–3, 135–46, 148, 152–66, 169–75, 190–1, 193, 198, 207–8, 210–11, 213–17, 219–20, 223, 225 transcendence 2–3, 18, 20–1, 23–6, 28, 51, 56, 59, 61, 69–72, 77–9, 86, 95, 99–100, 113, 116–17, 132–6, 140, 144–5, 155, 158, 162, 164, 195–6, 198–202, 208, 211, 216, 220–3, 225 dynamics of transcendence 2, 52–4, 56, 69–72, 132–3, 190, 199 Trinity 10, 91, 94, 108, 145 Troeltsch, Ernst 57, 76 Vattimo, Gianni 2, 41, 59, 67–81 Voegelin, Eric 2, 17, 18, 20, 22–9, 94, 96, 98–101, 104, 111, 114, 117 Weber, Max 1, 36, 48–51, 54–5, 57, 61, 107, 139, 154, 200 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 51, 60, 92, 140, 202, 223