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«Studia Religiologica» Ordo temporis Stefan Klemczak IR UJ 2012 “Secularization” as a Historiographic Category

People become accustomed to words; they circulate among people daily, and when these words are problematized, they are sometimes defended like a property which people are unprepared to relinquish. Theoretical concepts most frequently derive from foreign, classical languages. Some, derived from Homeric language, were later borrowed by other languages and repeatedly adopted, while still creating the impression of being domestic – the local speech. Through habitual use, similarity of sound, and the numerous contexts in which they appear, they gain the status of members of the household, both familiar and comprehensible. Some experts, including theorists, believe that they express themselves “clearly” when they speak of nature, reality, facts, history, the mind, matter, freedom, symbols, values, theory, truth, etc., regardless of the analysis of the notion’s function, the historical changeability of significance, and the history of the debate on their comprehension.

Apart from such notions as “reality” and “the world,”1 particularly troublesome concepts are those attempting to “grasp social processes, historical epochs, or the laws governing history: to order a vast sprawl of subjects from various departments in a space of time.2 Their convenient and abstract force of expression comes at a cost: they involve many assumptions. This is the price of the comfort that facilitates the introduction of a structure to history, the grasping of a historical breakthrough, the recognition of “one’s own” place in time and space, the definition of the future of the human species, or the explanation of principles to which all people should be true, regardless of the cultural circumstances of their lives (Lebensstil). The problem becomes more serious when we realize that we build various theoretical constructions on these often “basic” notions, pretending to explain the rules of the human world. It is as if permanent foundations that sometimes lack “visibility” at every step of the way supported complex theories. They are entirely based on etymology or psychoanalysis, or simply belong entirely to another epoch, such as the language and images of the medieval world,3 outside of which they “wilt before one’s eyes;” and yet, it would seem, not before the eyes of all philosophers. The life of concepts also has its own “local” customs, which are sometimes worth respecting. At other times, pulled from their “native” environment, they are reborn in another context, acquiring new and astonishing meanings, as is the case with the notion of “secularization.”

The problems we wade into in searching for a way to grasp long-term processes, epochal shifts, or tendencies rooted in a certain period require reflection upon the tools we ought to use for

1 H. Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, Frankfurt am Main, 2007, pp. 68-74. 2 “How easily a man maneuvers through the great and the remote, and how difficult to conceive of the near and the singular,” F. Grillparzer, za: L. Wittgenstein, Uwagi różne, przeł. M. Kowalewska, Warszawa, 2000, s. 30. 3 The philosophical language of the Middle Ages – as stressed by Hans Blumenberg, among others – came about through shifting the meanings of Greek words or creating new ones. Before being replaced by the national languages, which, like Latin, did not come about through simple extensions of “old” concepts, it only superficially created a uniform system. The naturalism of the Averroists and the metaphysical personalism of the Thomists, transcendental realism and nominalism – they all used the same linguistic apparatus. It appears that some “secular theses” situated in the Middle Ages refer to the medieval mythology as a uniform “center point” of history, and not as knowledge on a subject of historically and theoretically diverse “epochs.”

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“measuring and “diagnosing them. This concerns, incidentally, one contemporary debate on method: between “concepts and “metaphors, the history of concepts and metaphorology.4 When we speak of “secularization,” the metaphor of the “disenchantment of the world” immediately follows in its wake. Both the first and the second, the concept and the metaphor, should help us to understand the subject of the debate, after we scrutinize the contexts in which they occur. As a historiosophical category, secularization is theoretically invalid when it makes claims to knowledge, as it presupposes an insight into the structure of history based on patterns that originate in the theology of history, and presupposes the invalidity of Early Modernity. What is the relationship between the metaphor of disenchantment and the notion of secularization?

What, indeed, does it mean to “disenchant the world”? What characterizes the “disenchanted world,” if, at present, we can recognize so many new layers of “buffering,” surrounding our lives with their hermetic spheres, and if we are witness to new religious movements and a widespread conviction that the planets and stars have an impact on our individual lives? Does “disenchantment not signify merely a discreet and excessively optimistic reference to the Kantian notion that conceives the Enlightenment as a departure from the adolescence, “into which man fell of his own accord”? Perhaps “disenchantment signifies a withdrawal “already,” “now,”5 from the mythical or magical way of conceiving oneself and one’s surroundings that characterizes the pre-modern history of mankind? Is it a “rational” break with the emotional and intellectual habits that had accompanied man for the many hundreds of thousands of years preceding “modernity”?6 The metaphor of “disenchantment and the context of its creation lead to another image: the “world as a cave,”7 an absolute metaphor, petrifying records of attempts to extricate oneself from inside toward “the light of truth, “reality itself, or “pure rationality, like some amber does insects. When we speak of “secularization” or of “the disenchantment of the world, what do they truly designate: a concept and a metaphor, i.e. an “image”?

It is not only in the sphere of philosophy that linguistic reality requires, at the very least, reflection, and this concerns not only Aristotelian “virtue (arete), but also knowledge of language, its genesis and function, and, most importantly for the present subject, our ways of using it.8 Apart

4 Hans Blumenberg named his new method “metaphorology” in 1957, precisely conceiving it through historical breakthroughs and the main subjects of European philosophy. The subject of secularization and the quarrel about Early Modernity inspired him to trace the history of “absolute metaphors” as a criterion for crossing historical thresholds and the particular significance of important historical transformations, around which have grown topical, repeating images, from which concepts draw their meaning. Metaphorology operates in the foreground of the history of concepts. Blumenberg drew from phenomenology, creating something like an anthropologically directed historical phenomenology, stressing the epistemological significance of “essential” (i.e. irreducible) concepts of absolute images/metaphors and their variants. He did not undermine the significance of Historischebegriff, but he did consistently indicate its limitations, along with the epistemological limitations of the concepts themselves. In: Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, Bonn, 1960, and “Ausblick auf eine theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit,” in Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer, Frankfurt am Main, 1979, pp. 57-106. 5 In the anticipation of an “immediate” change of a cognitive situation one hears an echo of “reverse” Jetztzeit – in the sense of an epiphany of “reason.” When M. Weber articulates his great metaphor, which presently lofts on its shoulders the concept of the so-called post-secular society – the definition of a post-modern society through the sacrum-profanum dialectic – works arise that are no less metaphorically burdened in the modern world’s reception. In 1922, two years after Weber’s death, Kafka began working on The Castle, a “treatise” on rationality, having already written the unfinished Trial, which is, in Gershom Scholem’s interpretation, a secularized cabala, or more precisely, a halakha. The issue of lying to or “fooling a man who wants to see the “law, “court, and “writing through reason, is found in Chapter 9. This might be seen as a “counter-metaphor for “disenchantment, revealing new “enchantments” in the world and attempting to “set the individual within them. 6 We might join Blumenberg in finding the beginning of Early Modernity in the doubly significant date of 1543, when Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and Vesalius’s De corporis humani fabrica were both published. “Modernity,” conceived as an acceleration of Early Modernity, begins in the latter half of the eighteenth century. See: Reinhart Koselleck, “Nowożytność,” in Semantyka historyczna, trans. W. Kunicki, Poznań, 2001, pp. 305-358. 7 H. Blumenberg, Höhlenausgänge, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, pp. 719-727. 8 Among the concepts of the sign conceived as a human form of reality, formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce, language seen as Entlastung by Gehlen, Words and Things by Foucault, and the concept of a “cognitive niche” put forward by

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from fishing out clear meanings and reconstructing question/answer games, philosophers also delve into the hidden premises in concepts and theories. This allows them to contend with a given concept, joining the recognition of empirical falsifications, assumptions, and their consequences as one of the few methods of “checking” what someone claims, alongside the cohesion criterion, the logical continuity of various statements, etc. At any rate, the philological/historical grounding of the subject suggests what precisely we are dealing with, particularly when we have before us an extreme (or horizontal) subject or concept.

Ever since the development in modern research on language, the mind, and the mutual relationships between these realities and the “hard reality” of the world, philosophers have also been exploring the worlds of the subconscious. It is no longer language alone, but each of the above-mentioned elements – treated historically, moreover – that problematize our knowledge, creating new aporias, which pile up when we attempt to join everything into a whole. It was not Descartes who “divided reality into res extensa and res cogitans, though he was one of the first to perceive that the development of science was leading to paradoxes in holding the two “orders together. And if today we attempt to join them in the debate over “human nature, this is by no means a return to the pre-Cartesian vision of man. In spite of all appearances, we have not departed from our man topic.

From Socrates to Wittgenstein, philosophers have posed questions to problematize issues that seem “clear.” Questioning the seemingly “obvious is a major topos of any philosophical reflection. What do I really “know” when, for example, I am convinced that someone has behaved “rationally,” or that an institution is “rationalizing” its employment? Or when we listen to Schubert’s arpeggione a-minor sonata9 (D.821), can we be sure that we hear “the same thing” as others? Naive questions, which swiftly lead to others, guiding us toward various fields of knowledge, creating an expanding (philosophically derived) space for exploration, which requires increasing (theoretical) effort: thus, the metaphor of the philosopher as a stuntman.10 With the subject of secularization, the philosopher becomes a stuntman doubling for experts from the worlds of political theory, theology, sociology, aqnd the theory of history, history of law, and religious studies. (S)he also is drawn into ancient philosophical debates on the nature of time, the nature of substance (ousia), the order of history, and our future on the planet Earth: plenty of risks for a “single” subject. But is this not how (s)he “pays” us?

Pinker, for one, in Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007), sprawls a wide terrain of linguistic, cognitive, and neurobiological research problematizing the classical subordination of verba-res. 9 Is the music of Schubert or Shostakovich “secularized” in relation to J.S. Bach, or the vocal music of the Middle Ages? Can we interpret a work of music, painting, or literature through the concept of “secularization,” grasping movements or particular works in their autonomy, if their genesis reaches back to art conceived religiously? “Shostakovich is, to a large extent, based on church scales. Above all he uses the Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian scales, in addition to some Plagal modes, and his own created from modifications of the above,” stresses one authority: Karol Meyer, Szostakowicz, Krakow, 1986, pp. 284-285. The work of Shakespeare has almost no religious aspects – what, then, is its status in the light of secularization theory? In turn, “Kafka’s texts can be understood as a center of the dispute that is underway in the cabala.” Is the work of Kafka a “secularized” cabala, if we follow the interpretations of Grözinger and Scholem? (See: Karl Erich Grözinger, Kafka i Kabała, trans. J. Güntner, Krakow, 2006, p. 19.) Was Franz Kafka not a brilliant writer, who ought not to be subordinated to the category of secularization if we should truly seek to understand his work? What are we doing if we accept the “secular perspective” of all modern processes, as Charles Taylor does for P. Celan’s Psalm, or others, such as In Ägypten and many of his other poems? If literature, music, painting, etc. have significance for faith (religion), politics, the life of the individual, etc., it is only maintaining their distinctness, their differences, that “sharpens the contingency of orders.” Their collapse or reduction to other systems, in the name of stabilizing meaning, is an attempt to control the creative arbitrariness of art. Attempts to introduce a “symbolic authority” can also occur through the category of “secularization.” 10 Odo Marquard half-jokingly states that the philosopher is the expert’s stuntman, his stand-in in dangerous situations, such as crossing the borders of disciplines. See: Farewell to Matters of Principle, trans. Robert M. Wallace, Oxford University Press, 1989.

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This is why some philosophers became more cautious after a “critical threshold11 was set in the latter half of the eighteenth century, which was like the appearance of a reef that was meant to divide the ocean of the imagination from the emerging archipelagoes of knowledge.

If “one can say: where there is no doubt nor is there knowledge”, then we may doubt; and we have a basis to doubt (“Need we not have a basis for doubt?” – Wittgenstein again) given what happened with the “Copernican revolution” and our contingent nature that constantly limits our cognitive capacities.

For the above-mentioned reasons, skepticism12 conceived as “cognitive Copernicanism”13 postulates the avoidance of succumbing to the concepts uncritically dominating the market (idola theatri), whether because of their linguistic “construction,”14 the criterion of fashion, which spares not even philosophers,15 the ease in planting presuppositions in the collective consciousness, or the statistical consent to “the obvious.” This final threat is the most serious, as demonstrated by some philosophical and sociological studies written on our subject.

Though“ not as old as the Greek concepts of “theology” or “soul” (psyche), the very notion of “secularization” has been repeated, i.e. processed, for a sufficiently long time in the most diverse variants to become rooted in the general consciousness as a “factual description” or “explanation” of processes characteristic of modernity. It has become its shadow, which is cast if we correctly light the violent changes of the last four centuries of the “Western world. One of the perplexing qualities of the category of secularization is the appearance of a sense of theoretical “unwinding” or cognitive “domestication” in the modern world. This is done through “indicating the main attributes, genesis, and “logic of the development of “new times” and even the future, now situated in the “post-secular era.

11The reception of the postulates of “critical reason” (which can be reduced to the formula: What can I “know” as a “person,” and how?), encounters problems not unlike the description of the life of “small animals” (which we now call bacteria), executed by Antonio van Leeuwenhoek in 1676. It had to wait 200 years before it was discovered and received widespread acceptance (published in “Philosophical Transactions” in 1677). The blossoming sciences – we are merely in the phase where they are sprouting – will continue to force self-restrictions onto philosophy, turning on a critical alert. In many subjects they force philosophers to clip the wings of their theories of confrontation or to shift outside of criticism, toward literature, theology, historiosophy, etc. 12 Modern skepticism, unlike that of the classical and early modern periods, is characterized by a “sense of the division of authority,” a sense of what is customary, and the irrevocability of worn-out practices, for we do not live long enough to take on an absolute perspective. It is a “readiness to accept one’s own contingency.” It is the consciousness that “we people are more the work of accident than our own work,” while living with what is accidental, not as a “failed absolute, but our historical state of normalcy,” which also explains the “skeptical” postulate “renouncing effort means remaining stupid.” See: Odo Marquard, “Skeptics: A Speech of Thanks,” in: In Defense of the Accidental, trans. Robert M. Wallace, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 3-7. 13 The thesis of “Copernican cognitivism,” declared by Nicholas Rescher, presumes that our position in time is not cognitively privileged. Translating it into the debate on secularization, we would have: all epochs are just as far from/near to God (circle that which applies), and so there is no distinguished time that could be a gauge for the theory of secularization. 14 “The knowledge of the user of a language is the knowledge of the grammar of that language. (S)he must, therefore, master a certain assortment of conventionalized language units, and know how to create a construction, i.e. which units can enter the make-up of the organization. A unit […] is a structure fully mastered by the language user, and thus requires no conscious analysis of its internal make-up. As such, it is a routine structure […]: phonologically, semantically, and symbolically,” E. Tabakowska, Gramatyka i obrazowanie, Krakow, 1999, p. 93. There are many constructivist perspectives – I am quoting one of the less complex. 15 One fashionable subject concerning our present subject – strains of political theology in reflections on history – is the commentaries of the texts of St. Paul, in the hopes of discovering the key to understanding modernity in the “apostle.” Apart from A. Badiou, E. P. Sanders, J. A. Fitzmyer, and the Gnostic and swindler J. Taubes (see: H. Jonas, Erinnerungen, 2003), a philosophical commentary has been made by the presently very fashionable Giorgio Agamben, polemicizing with a classic text by K. Barth, among others. Apart from fashionable subjects in which the subject of secularization in post-secular times recurs with inevitable certainty, there are also fashionable authors. Precious little philosophy can be culled from these debates, but attempts at new political theologies soothe the need to create coherent images of the historical world after the breakdown of Marxian formulae and the weakness of “purely” theological constructions. Schopenhauer was probably correct in saying that the real luminaries of humanity share the fate of stars in the heavens, whose light needs many years to be perceived by people on Earth.

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A condescending tone should sometimes evoke mistrust, at the moment when we are to explain a process as complex as the appearance and development of a new epoch. Moreover, each of the above-mentioned subjects, particularly genesis and the future, is problematic. In addition, the complex category of the “secularization” of the order of time (ordo temporis) is anachronistic in every sense of the word. The “empirical” attempt to research an already-named “phenomenon” is a separate question. Narrowly conceived and acknowledged as statistical data that reflects dynamic transformations occurring in the sphere of modern civilizations, “secularization” does indeed indicate a characteristic phenomenon.16 In the case of a description embracing all of modernity, however, is distinguishing the theological perspective as a criterion for profound shifts in culture justified? If we seek to know and not to believe in what truly characterizes “our” times, can we trust this catchphrase that is presently so loaded, which most often transcends the narrow understandings of the notion of secularization? Should we stretch the notion of “secularization” beyond the clerical sphere, to cover such numerous modernizing, political, or spiritual processes, i.e. those contained in the nineteenth century metaphor of Geist? On the other hand, apart from this ideological fencing with the category, we observe foundering and helplessness in using the terms and metaphors of “disenchantment” and “globalization,” as a result of the multiplicity of contradictory interpretations, the tangling of theoretical positions which have led to its “blackout.”17

Therefore, owing to the sprawl of the subject, we shall attempt to cover the meaning of the concept of “secularization” in a concise three parts, before turning our attention to the issue of time and establishing its fluctuating orders. With the remarks below we conclude our remarks with the “duel of the dwarves.”

If such all-encompassing analyses of the issue (such as Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age,18 which attempts to deal holistically with the history of the modern world in its religious and political dimensions and in terms of the birth of the individual) are still being made under the category of “secularization,” then we ought to wonder what, precisely, this concept means. For what are we so seriously arguing in claiming that we ought to use this concept with care? Another voice in the discussion, occupying almost one thousand pages, might raise our curiosity, but also our suspicion, and even a sense of the category being wearying and burdensome.19 The most important issue in

16 Condensing the issue, Marquard states that, “the modern world is rationalization plus pluralization – thus it has been and still is,” in: Aesthetica i anaesthetica, trans. K. Krzemieniowa, Warsaw, 2007, p. 3. H.R. Jauss, in turn, reconstructs the category in detail, concluding that “the consciousness of modernity, which, in the historical self-construct of Romanticism, reaches back to the Middle Ages as a sovereign establishment with its own origins, and by the same token occupies the largest historical scope of time, begins to change in a peculiar way in the nineteenth century. […] A new consciousness of modernity appears, one that wants to be more modern than Romantic, and moreover, something appears which we had never before encountered in the history of ideas. Thus, the scope of the word ‘“modern,’ which envelops the Christian epoch, gradually narrows to the lifetime of a single generation, and ultimately withers to the current fashion in the field of literary taste; meanwhile, the newly-forged concept of the modern no longer opposes a defined past in the sense of any one epoch. […] In reflecting upon this process of hastened transformations in art and taste, a consciousness of modernity is shaped which ultimately only cuts itself off from itself.” Historia literatury jako prowokacja, trans. M. Łukasiewicz, Warsaw, 1999, pp. 33-34. 17 Guizzardi characterizes the debate on secularization as “theoretical mush.” Gustavo Guizzardi, “Sekularyzacja a ideologia eklezjalna,” trans. J. Chrapek, in: Socjologia religii, ed. W. Piwowarski, Krakow, 1998, p. 336. 18 Taylor distinguishes three kinds of secularization: he states that in pre-modern societies political organizations were founded out of faith in God, while the modern state, in Taylor’s view, is free from such affiliations, as in our secular societies we can fully engage in politics without once encountering God. The second meaning of secularization is that it is the demise of faith and religious practices in Western countries. Thirdly, it is a transition from a society in which a faith in God is unquestioned and unproblematic to a society in which “faith in God is merely one of the options,” and often, Taylor believes, not the easiest one. The breakthrough point of Taylor’s vision is the appearance of “self-sufficient humanism,” one of the sources of “modern secularism.” Taylor accuses this originally “Epicurean” option of striving for “happiness” as man’s success, but no longer through “God’s agency.” As with many Templeton Prize winners, his solutions more resemble theology than philosophy in places. 19 The discussion is being held in various fields. There are variants on soft debates, suggesting that secularization is a particular attribute of European society. See: D. Daniele, “Rola religii w integracji społecznej,”trans. A. Lipszyc, in: ResPublica, 1/2006, pp. 42-52. Hervieu-Léger’s article is an example of a vague use of the category of “secularization,”

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“salvaging or discarding a given theory is defining its limits and presumptions. Marking the limits of an issue means preventing the search for superficial regularities, and the temptation to build overarching historical or cultural schemata. This is especially true when the subject has already become a “routine structure,” a “theoretical rut” from which it is hard to extract oneself without concentrated historical and theoretical, i.e. philosophical, reflection. The lead-in question is therefore: Does the category of “secularization” describe the “disenchantment” of the modern world? Or, rather, does this concept “enchant” it in a sleek, historiosophical form? Is secularization the secret essence of the early modern epoch? Or is it only one of its numerous attributes, whose distinction serves a different function than that declared by its users? 1. The concept of secularization – an attempt to establish family resemblances

Nietzsche once said that only that which has no history is definable. Things might not be quite as bad as all that, but the similar meaning of “family resemblance”20 and the history of the concept appear to be a convenient starting point for investigating the premises of the metaphor of “disenchantment.” Revealing the game of questions and answers in which the theory/concept of “secularization” is bound first requires a historical reconnaissance. What, then, is the origin of this secularization? In the beginning was the Latin word: saecularis, from which the concept of secularization developed. It derives from the no-less-Latin

theoretically and historically. Understood as a weakening of the “religious foundation of Europe,” secularization engenders more questions than answers. In a short work of 2002, the above-mentioned Charles Taylor understands secularization as a “departure” or “exit” of societies from a state, “in which the presence of God was inevitable; authority itself remained connected to the divine, and various references to God were inextricably linked with public life.” In the past, however, such links were more numerous. Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries we went from the departure model that obliged in the Middle Ages, and in many other cultures outside of the West, to an entirely different model. The former was tied to what we might call the “enchanted world.” This is borrowed from Max Weber, with the introduction of the antonym of the Weberian term “disenchantment.” In an enchanted world, Taylor believes that there is a sharp contrast between sacrum and profanum. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, Harvard University Press, 2003. The quoted formula for secularism might pass as a model theoretical construction with the following dialectic: sacrum over profanum conceived as a real, substantial historical tension. In spite of the fact that this dichotomy is not recognized in all societies, and that in the Middle Ages there were also groups (peoples) who did not know this distinction, as claimed by K. Modzelewski for one, adherents of the secularization thesis depict it as an early modern breakthrough, as a departure from “enchantment” through the very “sanctity” of the world. This thesis presupposes medieval people’s “familiarity” with God and the “presence” of God Himself in early modern public life. Characteristically, Taylor’s ideas involve quoting constructions that support a secular historiosophical thesis, based on Hegel’s vision, such as Kantorowicz, Eliade, and the above-mentioned Hervieu-Léger. We could multiply the historical and theoretical difficulties that Taylor’s theses stumble upon, the most serious of which was formulated by Schopenhauer vis-à-vis Hegel, in doubting Hegel’s intimate information on God and the in-depth knowledge of His plans for the future. Apart from the problem of the simplified and solely theologically conceived vision of the Middle Ages, we might also note a direct polemic problematizing Taylor’s method and theoretical premises: Clifford Geertz, “The Strange Estrangement: Charles Taylor and the Natural Sciences,” in: Available Light, Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 143-159. 20 I am using Wittgenstein’s idea for establishing meaning to avoid the accusation that can be put before most concepts of secularization: a substantialist understanding of concepts. It would seem that we can infer common elements, methods of use, functions, and meanings that do not reduce meanings to an original “essence” (or “substance”). We can research etymology, various receptions of concepts, examining historical plays on meanings in which a concept participates, without assuming its constant historical essence. This is how we reconstruct meaning without appealing to the “original sin.” Applying “family resemblances,” we avoid the temptation of “word confiscation,” performed by many enthusiasts of our subject.

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saeculum, which means era,21 generation, or even passing trend. Having adopted the word, Christian writers often used it in the last sense, using it to name the earthly time passing us by, the mortal earthly life, the worldly life “here.” The meaning of the concept can be reduced to the “time of the world,” as distinct from what does not belong to the “world.

Nonetheless, the category of secularization (secularisatio), with which we are preoccupied, appeared in the Early Modern Era. All the ancient and medieval concepts – if they survived to the Early Modern Era – were redefined. It was precisely in the sixteenth century, as G. Marramao puts forward in a study devoted to the history of the concept, that a shift took place in the meaning that had been entangled with the subject of time since antiquity.22 In the early modern conception this becomes a notion derived from the legal language of the Church. The Italian philosopher claims:

From the point of view of the history of ideas in its strictest definition, we must state that this term has an unambiguous point of reference (as saecularisatio) in canonical law (Codex Juris Canonici).23

Applied in other contexts, it gradually crossed beyond canonical law, 23 until this

non-theoretical word achieved the status of a skeleton key, opening almost all the chief problems of the modern world. How has it come to this? Or to put it differently: What needs does this transformation satisfy? According to the opinion that has reigned until recently – also shared by some lexicons that enjoy recognition – the term séculariser was first used in Münster, 8 May 1646, by a French Minister named Longueville, during the Westphalia Peace Treaty arrangements, to signify the transfer of Church properties to secular hands.24 The neologism was to signify the acquisition of the Church properties by the crown or the reformed national Churches. A similar point of view came from the link (very suggestive in terms of its chronology and symbolism) introduced between the origination of the new term and the birth of the modern state. Its “inner-worldly” sovereignty - as Max Weber later phrased it – put an end to the long and bloody chapter of religious civil wars in Europe. In reality this conviction – whose only philological basis comes from Johann Gottfried von Meiern’s mention, in his self-published Acta Pacis Westphalicae Publica of 1734 – was, as recently proven, erroneous.

As Marramao suggests, modifying the thesis of the previous researchers:25

[…]reference to saecularisatio appears as early as the late sixteenth century in French discussions on canonical law (particularly in such lawyers as Jean Papon and Pierre Grégoire), but in an entirely different sense: it means a transitus from regularis to canonicus, i.e. a shift from a ‘“regular’ clergyman to a secular state; or more in general, as indicated by other documents:26 ‘“the transfer to secular life of one who has been blessed as a clergyman or who

21 The Roman history of the word is a separate topic; in the ceremony of the “age-old holiday” (ludi saeculares) or other holidays of the “golden age” (saeculum aureum) and other socio-religious (mythical) contexts, the concept of saeculum appears in pre-Christian Rome. See: P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, University of Michigan Press, 1990. 22 G. Marramao, Cielo e terra. Genealogia della secolarizzazione, Bari, 1994.

23 “For what makes them [concepts] presently attractive is often not what they – in the present context – currently mean, but what they additionally mean, and most often subconsciously. Of this hidden potential, so profound in its effects, we generally find out only because we trace their histories, the histories of concepts. What first love is for people is the first application for concepts: It blazes a path for concepts or even leaves its mark within them,” O. Marquard, Aesthetica i anaesthetica, pp. 123-124. 24 The Peace Treaty of Westphalia did not end the history of religious wars, but it did set a precedence to open up the chance to bring about political order, after the Peace of Augsburg, through the granting of autonomy to various duchies, sanctioning religious pluralism. Much like Copernicus’s theory, it did not describe the planets’ movement accurately, but its significance was in allowing for the introduction of a new model in mathematics and physics that allowed for the improvement of the model of the cosmos in place of an “image of the world.” 25 Given the scope of our topic, we must bypass the details of historio-source reconstructions, aiming for as wide a grasp of the basic outlines of the issue as possible. Apart from the cited book, the bibliography also includes G. Marramao: “Säkularisierung” in: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, eds. J. Ritter i K. Gründer, Vol. VIII, Basel, 1993. 26 E.g.. Bergantini, 1745. See also the secolarizzare entry in: Devoto-Oli, 1990, p. 1747: “To transfer a clergyman from the regular clergy to the worldly, i.e. to go from one of these states to the other, requesting the annulment of religious vows taken by a person belonging to the regular clergy.”

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lives in accordance with the rules of the clergy.’ From the first appearance of the term ‘“secularization,’ it appears to be marked by an antithetical outline: the dualism of the regularity (the state of the ‘“regular’ clergyman) and secularity (the state of spiritual withdrawal), which now includes (albeit only in potential for the time being) the modern

metamorphosis of the Pauline dichotomies: heaven/earth, contemplative/active, spiritual/worldly.27

The term “secularization” came about within the rhetoric of canonical law, whose remains are also visible after the transformation in meaning has been completed. Apart from the legal significance, it “includes a “political aspect in its history, tied to the transfer of Church possessions to the newly created, secular, Modern State. Before 1803 the legal/political realm mostly used this category, until the Napoleonic decrees extended the space of the State (séculariser 1586 and sécularisation 1567) into most walks of the modern society’s life, taking control of the sphere of education, among others. The Peace Treaty of Westphalia,28 which marked a borderline for our category, closed off a historical space which, from our perspective, was opened in 313 with Constantine’s Edict of Milan, bestowing imperial privileges upon the Church auctoritas. These were used to expand the Christian doctrine, and helped bring about its historical success. After the proclamation of Theodosius I in 380, Christianity could become a lawful, and ultimately, the dominant religion of the Empire. This fact could be the main tie joining the dynamically developing ecclesia and the collapsing Roman Empire. Late Antiquity had already seen the birth of the “theological/political archetype” of age-old (secular) tension between the “worldly” and “spiritual” authorities. The doctrine of “two swords” formulated by Pope Gelasius I in 494 settled a division between the holy authority (auctoritas) of the pope and the royal power (potestas). From then on, the metaphor was used literally. The “two swords” fought for power with varying advantages, until the Peace Treaty of Westphalia was drafted, after which the Church’s political power began to slip. Much earlier, before this historical shift occurred, some authors, such as Dante Alighieri, postulated the separation of the two orders, seeking to bring about peace on Earth. Among others, Dante was polemicizing with Giles of Rome’s De ecclesiastica potestate, and appreciating secular authority. In a political treatise29 that swiftly landed on the Church’s black list, where it remained till the nineteenth century,30 the poet designed “worldliness,” holding to the dichotomous division between earthliness (temporality) and eternity. “Temporal monarchy, then, which men call Empire, is a single sovereign authority set over all others in time, that is to say, over all authorities which operate in those things and over those things which are measured by time.”31 Centuries were needed to appreciate the “modernity” of the Florentine poet’s ideas, centered on the Roman model.32 He was constantly in discord with the political and moral decisions of the papacy of the time, for which he paid a high price, as he tried to mete justice in a work of literature.33 The Church/State scales, once emphatically tipped to one side (which is not to say that the world was radiant with the glory of the sacrum) began slowly shifting the other way, leading to the process of the “nationalization of the Church and the “sanctification of the State, as described by Kantorowicz, among others.34 The concept of secularization, both in the sense of canonical law, and in the sense of state law, reflects the opposition between the spiritual (holy) and the secular. It also reflects the division outlined by Augustine between the two civitas. It comes from the need for a historiosophical/theological/political/practical construction for a teleological ordo temporis,

27 G. Marramao, op. cit., p. 16. 28 There were two Westphalian treaties, signed in Münster and in Osnabrück. See: Thomas Munck, Seventeenth-Century Europe, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2005, p. 23. 29 E. Malato, Dante, Roma, 1999, pp. 179-200. 30 The touchiness of the issue addressed by the poet is proved by the fact that Monarchy was removed from the black list only in 1881, while believers could read Copernicus’s main work in 1835 without breaking a prohibition. 31 Dante, Monarchy, trans. Prue Shaw, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 4. 32 Augustus’s Monarchia perfecta. 33 Dante was unable to forgive the papacy for, among other things, crushing the Franciscan Revolution. 34 E. H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, a Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton, 1957.

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conceived as an ordo amoris. The Augustinian divisions hold traces of Gnosticism, as this was one of the main opponents of the Church’s adapting to survive in the thinker’s time. After the birth of a new concept of time in the eighteenth century, reducing things to a single historical time, the category of “secularization” was implanted into history to name the processes characteristic of the modern transformations: emancipation, industrialization, the development of capitalism, the autonomy of sciences and art, the birth of the modern state, laws, etc. The suggestion is that they came as the result of a “departure,” and that their genesis is buried in the “image of the Middle Ages. Following this movement of conceiving time, there was a “shift in the significance of two opposing categories: spiritual/worldly.35

When a total historicization of the world (Welt-geschichte) took place in the nineteenth century, the category of secularization was yoked to historical time to create a “description of a threshold event, constituting the genesis of early modernity. World and “temporal history was “secularized, allegedly “distancing itself from transcendence, in part through the loss of the ability to see – in the framework of history – such “stable” points of reference as eschaton.36

From then on secularization began to adopt various theoretical and categorial masks, often appearing as a synonym of “worldliness.”37 Verweltlichung acquired the rank of philosophical significance through the work of G. W. F. Hegel, though we should stress it was deeply saturated with theology. 38 It then made repeated returns in other constellations, in the philosophy of Feuerbach and Marx, the theology of Overbeck, and almost the entire philosophical/theological tradition of the twentieth century.

The above-mentioned structure – worldly ergo secularized – was stressed in the system of Hegel, and this decided on the further reception of the concept. Defining philosophy as a Theodicy whose task is to unite (Versöhnung) the spirit and the world,39 he opened wide the floodgates of theological/metaphysical speculation that had been slammed shut by Kant.

An understanding of philosophy as the only, necessary path in “revealing” God40 and His universal and rational “self-knowledge” resulted in an ambiguous use of the term “family resemblances,” for which we are searching.“ On the other hand, if the logic of the soul’s development led to the creation of Neuzeit, this meant, for Hegel, that the Zeitgeist needed to become “worldly” and historical, giving birth to the (Prussian) State and law, among other things. On the other hand, Hegel stresses that the Geist initially attempted to carry out its task in the framework of the Church, but then found another, better path, through worldliness (Weltlichkeit), beyond Catholicism. Nonetheless, as Löwith has observed, Hegel tried to overcome the

35 G. Marramao, p. 26. 36 Eschaton is a biblical concept, signifying God’s ability to bring eternal peace unto the world. Ruling the heavenly kingdom means shifting from the present time to time eternal – in everyday or apocalyptic time. In this sense eschaton co-constructs the “order of the times.” The movement of this category, both in Christianity and in Judaism, is quite interesting, as it ultimately splits into the concept of the “past time,” i.e. “salvation in time” or “suspending of time” in the eternity of God. 37 The issue of the assumptions carried in “worldliness” are outlined by Blumenberg at the beginning of his study on the “validity of early modernity,” to which we shall return. The suggestion that the world has become more “worldly” over the course of its development, instead of less so, as it should be, until it reaches a state of “pure” worldliness, leads us at once toward the theory of secularization. In tandem there appears the issue of the finality of a certain process, from whose perspective we see the past. The lexicon of describing the world as “unworldly” is also interesting. Blumenberg ultimately states that “worldliness” is a curse cast upon what transpired after the Middle Ages, now to be “history,” stressing a “separation.” H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace, The MIT Press, 1983. 38 Some contemporary authors claim that Hegel’s philosophy is the greatest Christian philosophical system, bearing comparison only to the philosophy of St. Thomas. Hegel’s Geist “shows the attributes of the Holy Spirit.” The history of the world is a process of unification (Versöhnung) in love between the absolute and the short-lived, as a consequence of exteriorization, the establishment of the original “difference” in its creation. Hegel’s basic “speculative figure” is essentially theological and draws from the Holy Trinity. See: H. Schnädelbach, Hegel, trans. A. Noras, Warsaw, 2006, pp. 40-45. 39 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane, University of Nebraska Press, 1995. 40 Ibid.

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contradictions between absolute knowledge and its worldly incarnation, thus “admitting” the Absolute into the historical world – under certain conditions.41

Thus conceived, Christianity entered a necessary phase in its “development: Verweltlichung, fulfilling itself, in accordance with The Science of Logic in Weltgeschichte.42 To Hegel’s mind, philosophy as history reveals temporal movement, which contains the germ of something irremovable from the logic of history: secularization. The storm unleashed by the philosopher’s successors, declaring the “end of history”43 – which was laid to rest beside Fichte in 1831 in the Dorotheen Cemetery – did not dash all hopes of finding the hidden “logic” of history. Regardless of whether history is conceived materialistically or spiritually, the secularization Hegel “implanted in world history “bore its fruit, and was joyfully greeted as a show of “progress that confirmed the Enlightenment’s hopes, or fearfully, as a sign of “crisis and “the end.”

A belief in the “rationality – the rationalist determinism – of Hegel’s philosophy allows for the recognition of a historical process in a framework he defined, using a dialectical compass or a “speculative figure.” It still burns brightly in such authors as the above-mentioned Charles Taylor. Alongside the secularization vector, ordo temporis marks some perspectives in the “demagnetized” (post)modern world. It is ultimately under Hegel’s influence that all the categories tied to modernity, such as democracy, have been interpreted as an expression of secularization. Sometimes it is understood as a show of political emancipation or an improvement of the Christian State, distancing it from religion (Marx interpreted Hegel this way), indicating the world’s universal contradiction, from which “revolution” provides an escape.44

By the new project of philosophy and the attempts to constitute it – after the loss of truth “from the world beyond” in favor of truth “from this world” – the task of history was to create a substructure of “earthly truth,” and this was taken up by Marx and Engels. In shifting from theology to anthropology, Feuerbach, too, and numerous other philosophers followed in Hegel’s footsteps. 45 These bore fruit in dichotomous oppositions, already enumerated by Marx: the “critique of heaven” reconfigures into a “critique of earth,” after the “critique of religion” came the “critique of law,” and further, after the “critique of theology” one could turn to the “critique of politics.”46 This binary construction imitated the theological vision and pushed it into new realms, with “secularization” hot on its heels.

In the theological visions of the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century we find the concept of the historical shift from the “Catholic/Christian epoch” to the “Protestant epoch” conceived as “worldly” (weltlich), i.e. “ethical and political.” The basic result of this process again was meant to be the secularization of the Church and desecularization of the State (Entsäkularisung des Staates). The competing (dialectic) theological opposition between original

41 «Zepsucie panujące w Kościele zrodziło się z niego samego.» i dalej «Od tej chwili Kościół pozostaje w tyle za duchem świata. Duch ten wyprzedził go już, ponieważ doszedł do świadomości, że zmysłowe jest zmysłowym, zewnętrzne –zewnętrznym, że w świecie skończonym trzeba działać jak w świecie skończonym», G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. II, trans. E. S. Haldane, University of Nebraska Press, 1995, s. 296 i następne on the subject of secularization (the spirit becoming worldly) in early modernity. 42 G. Marramao, pp. 34-37. 43 The Hegelian topos of the “end of history” has often returned in modernity, marking the closure (or “exhaustion”) of a subject, the end of a historical chapter, the exhaustion of a paradigm, the fulfillment of a historical development; and, on every occasion, as in the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, Fukuyama, etc., it reconstructs a variant on the “logic of history” or a fragment thereof. It theoretically situates the author as a “witness” of a breakthrough, through the recognition of a signum temporis phenomenon characteristic of the end. See: E. Domańska, “Dyskusje o końcach historii,” in: Historia niekonwencjonalna, Poznań, 2006, pp. 35-51. The problem is that historical breakthroughs have no witnesses. 44 In, among others, the fourth thesis on Feuerbach, Marx includes a record of this “contradiction,” involving the self-division and self-contradiction of the earthly stance through the doubling of the world into religious (imagined) and real. The unification of the two orders (or contradiction) should occur through a practical revolution. The critique (theses 6, 7) also features a shift of Feuerbach’s anthropological reflections toward religion conceived as a “social product,” and thus susceptible to change, through transformations in the “form of society.” 45 Leszek Kolakowski, The Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P. S. Falla, W. W. Norton & Co., 1978. 46 This thesis comes from Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” K. Marx, F. Engels, Cambridge University Press, 1977.

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Christianity (Urchristinetum) and worldly Christianity (verweltetes Christentum) shaped the concept of the alternative “logic of the times.” Both constructs, as today’s historical scholarship shows, are ahistorical by nature, like all dialectical “games.” The two times – the original one, prior to the Reformation, and the worldly post-reformation – led toward a “third time,” which was meant to begin in modern times. Variations on the category of secularization theoretically organized almost every ordo, regardless of whether the stress was apocalyptic, messianic, or fundamentalist, contesting the inevitable transformations as unjustified.

The “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt) metaphor appeared as a broadening of the category of secularization.47 The demythologization of the world was meant to describe the modern social processes and simultaneously legitimize the liberation of the world from faith. Another shift in the meaning of secularization, for which we chiefly have Max Weber to thank, took place at the beginning of the twentieth century. The term “secularization process” (Säkularisationsprozess) was meant to sum up the nineteenth century social transformations that had begun in the historical times of the Bible, thus creating a new “philosophy of history.”

Weber broke with the nineteenth century philosophy of history in its idealist and materialist versions.48 He linked the secularization process with rationalization,49 which, to his mind, favored the “control” of the world (worldliness). As an expression of Western rationalism, capitalism facilitated the recording of empirical, legal, and technological changes taking place in society and altering the practical/rational lives of its participants. Capitalism, conceived as a “cash economy,”50 an economic system “neutralizing ambiguity,” a rationally organized labor system, produced a special fruit, found in no other societies: the secularization of all the components of life. This included law and authority. With Weber’s analyses conceived on the widest of theoretical scales, the category began to be implanted, with one of the effects of this diairesis being sociological research, using critical tools, and replaced religion in the modern world. It would seem that Weber’s

47 Before the “disenchantment of the world” became the main metaphor for modern transformations, appearing parallel to or alternately with the concept of secularization, it was used by Weber in the sense of “the exclusion of magic as a source of finding salvation, [which] was not introduced as consistently in Catholicism as it was in the Puritan religion, and before it, Judaism,” in: M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells, Penguin, 2002. In its narrow definition the “disenchantment of the world” means its loss of magic. From a wider take – as a historio-religious process – the “disenchantment of the world” is born, according to Weber, together with the Old Testament prophets, entering the Greeks’ scientific thought, and after a Christian phase, reconstitutes itself as capitalism. To reconstruct this category it is essential that we trace the opposition between prophet and priest as a “historical” source of rationalizing tension. See: Max Weber, Economy and Society, Univ. of California Press, 1978, p. 354. The clearly historiosophical shape of the thesis on secularization was disseminated with so-called “empirical methods” by Weber’s followers, who stood on his shoulders to “see further and more clearly.” 48 G. Marramao, p. 59. 49 “No one can deny that our science, technology, and art of organizing various collective activities are more developed than the analogous abilities of the Inuit or Bushmen. I see no basis to confirm that our culture and our social order – conceived as a whole – are more rational than theirs.” And further: “One factor explaining the light-heartedness with which Weber attributed irrationality to foreign beliefs was the fact that he was writing prior to a period of great progress in research on ‘primitive cultures’,” Stanislav Anderski, Max Weber’s Insights and Errors, Routledge, 2006. The effort to master the category of “rationality” creates a modern debate parallel to that of secularization, on the subject of a notion fundamental to the Western man’s “self-determination.” 50 «Racjonalna gospodarka związana jest bowiem z realnym przedsiębiorstwem, uwzględnia ceny wyrażone w pieniądzu, powstające na rynku i będące wynikiem walki interesów miedzy ludźmi. Bez tej walki, a więc bez wyceny pieniężnej, niemożliwa jest żadna kalkulacja. Pieniądz jest rzeczą najbardziej abstrakcyjną i bezosobową w życiu człowieka, dlatego też kosmos nowoczesnej racjonalnej kapitalistycznej gospodarki stawał się tym bardziej wyobcowany od wszelkich relacji, jakie niesie ze osobą religijna etyka braterstwa», M. Weber, Rozważania między tekstami w: Racjonalność, władza, odczarowanie, przeł. M. Holona, Poznań, 2004, s. 105. “The greatness of Weber’s discovery concerning the origins and development of capitalism,” Blumenberg writes, “comes from revealing the mechanisms of activity directed toward itself, the concern and interest in changing one’s position in the world at the cost of alienation (or distance) from the world, and the process of coming closer to oneself (the reverse of Marx’s claim). What Weber calls a ‘“rational capitalist economy’ is one of the most important elements of the early modern maturation to self-determination, along with the development of the natural sciences.”

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and Hegel’s concepts remain the two main “centers of thought” generating the topic of secularization.51 Variants on the subject returned, both weakly (Dilthey) or more strongly (e.g. in Troeltsch,52 who designates the secularization of the State as the most important event for modernity), and are present in early twentieth century thought, expressing concern for the future of the modern. Apart from this anxiety, there also appeared hope for the “disenchantment of the world,” though the two emotions shared a theoretical source. Historiographical constructions presumed to find the structure of the times, which seemed to bear “positive” or “negative” fruit, depending on the needs of the architect.

Apart from the Hegelian and Weberian meanings and the theologians’ variants, Carl Schmitt was another figure who skillfully used the category of secularization to “analyze history, though without unnecessary philosophical prudery – with which phiolsophy had theretofore amused itself, as a result of critical thinking. Schmitt’s famous thesis declaring that “all the essential concepts in contemporary thought on the State are secularized theological notions” became a paradigm for those who loved to bring order by restoring the Earth to the center of the cosmos. These were thinkers, whether “from the right” or “the left,” regardless of their declared ideology or the philosophy they cultivated, who denied early modernity its legitimacy.““ The above principle proved Schmitt’s opinion that:

it was not only the historical evolution of these concepts which were transferred from theology to the science of the State – and thus, for example, the all-powerful God became the all-powerful law-giver – but their

systemic structure also testifies to this point, a knowledge of which is vital for their sociological grasp.53

Carl Schmitt – whose political/theological thoughts are enjoying a second wind – thought

that the concept of secularization could serve as a model for legal concepts that arose from theological concepts, and testify to the source of a category, to a historical shift from a divine law-giver to an earthly one. The historical metamorphosis of theological concepts, in the legal, Christian concept of man and the theological/political construct of history, served as the basis of his thought, which led the author of Das Nomos von der Erde to a concept of the ruler as the only decision-maker competent to introduce a state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand). The decisiveness of the “leader” vis-à-vis democracy’s tendency for tardiness and weakening decisions through parliamentary rhetoric roused Hitler’s admiration for Schmitt.

In Schmitt’s vision, a ruler finds himself beyond the legal order and behaves as though he can defy the “laws of nature,” or more precisely, the “nature of law,” while remaining in a legal framework. Like a “miracle in theology, a state of emergency in politics is the highest extreme of a

51 The difference between these giants on whose shoulders the theorists of secularization climb can be grasped by tracing the interpretation of the issues both take up, such as Judaism and the appearance of Christianity. Hegel contrasts the vertical, servile Judaism stripped of a “soul and its own need for freedom,” characterized by God’s total control over the nation, with horizontal Christianity, based on “love,” “freedom,” and “ethics.” “Jezus sam zatem wzniósł się ponad żydowski los i starał się wznieść ponad niego swój naród,” claims Hegel, dialectically “straining” the order of history (s. 321). G. W. F. Hegel, Pisma wczesne z filozofii religii, przeł. G. Sowiński, Krakow, 1999, s. 278-408. Weber, in a different theoretical epoch, interprets Judaism as a historical product, which was “designed to give way again to the truly God-ordained order. The whole attitude toward life of ancient Jewry was determined by this conception of a future God-guided political and social revolution.” Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martinsdale, Free Press, 1967, p. 4. Weber situates the dawn of secularization – i.e. rationalization – significantly earlier in history than Hegel does, shifting the weight of “responsibility” (and significance) onto the believers in Yahwe, a god of “political-military history,” as he defines it (p. 224). These two ahistorical visions, based on different presuppositions, merge the concept of “secularization” to explain the logic of “historical” processes. 52 Among the greatest achievements, he counted the emergence of a “truly early modern spiritual world, born from the internal development of the Middle Ages, from the movement that was the Renaissance, and from Protestantism, etc.” The Modern State “rationalized and secularized all of ethos and religion, reducing them to the form of objective reason, to the figure of organizing all values from a general understanding.” Ernst Troeltsch, Religia, kultura, filozofia, trans. A. Przyłębski, Poznań, 2006, p. 129. 53 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

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“legal act. In Schmitt’s view, the development of the Modern State strikes at this main principle of power, stripping the ruler of this quasi-supernatural force. This process, according to our German lawyer, indicates the deist nature of the transformations whose legal/philosophical foundations were set by Locke and Kant. Liberalism – the liberal bourgeoisie and the emancipation of minorities – and the legal positivism of the State lead it toward political degradation, expressed through history by secularization. Establishing its rule without a ruler, and law without a single sovereign, the bourgeoisie “degenerated” the medieval construct, which, for Schmitt, is the model of domestic relations. The decisionist concept of power in Schmitt’s thought is intimately linked with the notion of secularization, which is also stressed by Marramao, our Cicerone, on his journey through the history of the category’s reception.54

The distinction between legal and normative – the ruler’s decision is super-normative, but not super-legal by Schmitt’s reckoning, while the ruler holds a monopoly on final decisions, much like God – brings us to a paradox: the principle of norms “founded on nothingness” (auf Nichts gestellt), as the sovereign needs no law to create the law. For Schmitt, another attribute of diplomacy, apart from stressing the expiring right to “self-defense,” is the amicus-hostis opposition. He joins Weber in seeing Western culture as a symptom of the “will to secularization,” shifting from the “theological to the “metaphysical, and from a “moral to an “economic order, ending its nihilistic march with the “era of technology. As a result of this process, the political becomes the norm, and the basis of the friend/enemy opposition that gives us a sense of “diplomacy starts to blur.

The neutralization of diplomacy is only one element of a migration process, after which comes the conquest of the “new,” the search for neutral ground after another crisis. Schmitt’s dialectic (of circular moments) has been used to explain “historical events: in the “center, at the point of departure, stands theology; then the religious wars lead to a shift in the point of gravity, toward the metaphysical, expressed by the scientific and political conflicts of the seventeenth century, to enter the grounds of morality during the Enlightenment, bringing us to economics and the neutral-agnostic state of the nineteenth century. The next stage was to be the “global time,” which would ultimately collapse statehood. It is characteristic of the concept of the secularization of the order of history and the times that it allows us to see the “logic” of the development of “Western culture, and how it tries, like the author of Die Diktatur, to prevent liberal destruction, in part through Catholicism’s real “intensification (against the neutralizers, the aesthetic decadents, against the abortionists, corpse burners, and pacifists).”55

Depoliticization, neutralization, decentralization, and technology are, according to this lawyer with philosophical ambitions, whose influence spans both the right and the left, a secularized derivative of classical metaphysics.56 In other words, the symptoms of the process of the development of western rationalism are geared to progress driven by such thinkers as Spinoza, the “first liberal Jew.”57 This was a philosopher whom, in Schmitt’s view, others followed in search

54 Marramao, p. 79. 55 Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind, New York Review Books, 2003, p. 74. As an apology for armed resolution of conflicts in the issue of “diplomacy” Schmitt wrote: “every human being is symbolically a combatant.” Thus, “a world without war would be a world without politics; a world without politics would be a world without enmity; and a world without enmity would be a world without human beings.” See: Lilla, p. 58. 56 “Secularization,” conceived as the separation of theology and politics, the Church and the State, began with the breakdown of the dual, oppositional “nature” of the ruler. “The king’s two bodies,” natural/mortal and political, imitating the dual nature of God (God-man), according to Ernst Kantorowicz, guaranteed the ruler a maintenance of his relation with divinity (the sacrum) and the continuity of the institution. Schmitt desired an analogous state for modernity, which, he believed, would effectively legitimize a ruler. A pivotal work for the future of legislation theory is Hobbes’s Leviathan, which founded a basis for the State and law in the anthropological (nominalist) space, constituted by a human “contract,” so as to quell fears. It would seem, to use Cassirer’s turn of phrase, that the debate concerns the essence of history: the myth of the State, but not the comprehension of the history of the State. 57 For Schmitt, Spinoza’s choice of the “black nature” of early modern history is characteristic of this most uncompromising of early modern philosophers, while Descartes’s philosophy is traditionally blamed for “bringing ruin.”

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of liberal peace, which was a symptom of rebellion against God.58 Traces or direct influence of Schmitt’s thought can be found in the reflection of the early Jünger and the whole of Heidegger, among others.

Competing variants of “diplomacy,” taken in the Hegelian spirit (with discreet theology) and opting for secularization as a desirable process, were created by representatives of the Frankfurt School and numerous thinkers who drew from this fashionable tradition. A counter-proposal to Schmitt’s project was put forward by the anthropologically rooted work of H. Plessner.59 The debate possesses significantly more modern branches, where a plethora of variants tend to make us forget about the “trunk” of the discourse.

To recapitulate, this process of extending theological and legal language, the whole process of the emergence of modernity in which the metaphor of Entzauberung becomes a description of a historical transition between the “religious experience” and the “worldly experience,” is often conceived as “demythologization.”60 The category of secularization also began to be applied in the early twentieth century to explain the ideologies that were appearing, showing what was seen to be their theological source of derivation.

Karl Löwith, who was schooled by two such different historiosophers as Weber and Heidegger, took up the subject of secularization by analyzing an important early modern movement in philosophy: the philosophy of history (Geschichtsphilosophie). Löwith’s thesis goes as follows: there is a straight line from the philosophy of history, whose vector is “progress, to the theology of history created in the framework of Christianity.61 It presupposes that:

the early modern man invented the philosophy of history to secularize theological principles in the sense of an onward march toward a fulfillment of sorts, and applying it to an ever-growing mass of empirical knowledge, which questions both the unity of general history and its progress.

Löwith then claimed: It seems as though both these great concepts of antiquity and Christianity, cyclicality and eschatological linearity, have exhausted the basic capacity to understand history.

He concluded by saying: “Even the latest attempts to interpret history are no more than variants on those two principles, or a mixture of them.”62 The secularization of history as an “investigation of time is, in his opinion, future-centric.63 The German philosopher believes that the modern phenomenon of temporalizing everything has Judeo-Christian origins. Historicism (Historismus), like the philosophy of existence (Existenzphilosophie), is derived from Christian secularization. The “secularization” key, much like “Gnosticism,” can be used to unlock the genesis of all theoretical and historical processes, but at what cost?

As a result of its joining concepts from the philosophy of history, ‘secularization’ has become as widespread

today as it is vague and disputable as a catchphrase: its generality allows it to be applied both to politics and to ‘spiritual education,’ to theology, and the history of culture, to philosophy as well as sociology.

58 Ibid., p. 66. 59Anthropology, “derived from the spirit of politics, intends to shake philosophy at its deepest level in order to understand politics in its human necessity, and not its divine (theological) necessity, as C. Schmitt proposed.” See: Helmuth Plessner, Władza a natura ludzka, trans. E. Paczkowska-Łagowska, Warsaw, 1994, pp. 6-7. 60 “The history of the process of demythologization is, in my opinion, itself a myth; and the fact that, in this way, the death of myth itself becomes a myth goes some way toward demonstrating myth’s relative immortality.” Odo Marquard, trans. Robert M. Wallace, “In Praise of Polytheism,” in: Farewell to Matters of Principles, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 89. 61 “The fact that the Christian saeculum became secular puts early modern history in a paradoxical light: it is Christian by origin and anti-Christian in effect.” Karl Löwith, Historia powszechna i dzieje zbawienia, trans. J. Marzęcki, Kęty, 2002, p. 196. 62 Karl Löwith, Historia powszechna i dzieje zbawienia, trans. J. Marzęcki, Kęty, 2002, p. 22. 63 G. Marramao, p. 108.

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This is why establishing the meaning of categories is a laborious duty, without which further

investigations are condemned to failure; and thus the hope remains that we shall settle something. The impossibility of grasping this concept from a single point of view does not, however, depend (as it does

with other concepts characteristic of modernity) on simple ambiguity and semantic multi-functionality (otherwise the

significance of the term would change, depending on the context). It depends, rather, on the structural ambivalence of meaning, Marramao stresses, “which allows

for antithetical, or at least extremely divergent connotations.”64 Sometimes interpreted as dechristianization, i.e. early modernity’s shattering and profanation

of the principles of Christianitas, and sometimes as desacralization, whose essence was present from the very beginning in Christian teaching on salvation, the category of secularization supplies arguments for Christians and anti-Christian social critics alike. It can be given positive or negative attributes both from a secular perspective and from a religious one. It can just as well serve to make optimistic formulations, in the Leibnizian sense (optimus), and pessimistic ones (pesimus) on the subject of the present time, often accompanying proof and examples. Often the dialectical game of “secularization” involves reducing the “Middle Ages to a common denominator, understood as a result of their historical transfer.65 The perspective of rebellion against God, for instance, as the genesis of the modern, declared by K. Barth among others, blamed the Enlightenment for its “declaration of independence” vis-à-vis the theology of the Middle Ages; this was a typical facet of the discussion held in the field of theology. We are presently recording a whole palette of secularizing variants,66 emphasizing anthropology or historicity, social ethics (as a product of the secularization of theological ethics), or dialectics: sacrum through profanum, transcendence and immanence, then the theology of the death of God, and the theology of hope – the strengthening and ennobling of faith should come through its secular purification.67

The Hegelian movement in its right- or left-wing variant, which has fertilized an extraordinarily broad historiosophical space of secularization debate, and the Weberian tradition, which has borne equally ample fruit in its sociological reception, form the basis for the Sociology of Secularization.

Conceived as a transformation from community (Gemeinschaft) to society (Gesellschaft), secularization presumed a shift from essential-substantive will (Wesenswille) to elective will (Kürwille). According to Marramao, five main sociological subjects of the secularization theory emerged from the analysis of this movement: secularization conceived as 1) the twilight of religion, 2) a worldliness, a grounding in the world, evaluation of temporality, 3) the desacralization of the world, 4) the privatization of religion, and 5) the transfer of religious models from the religious sphere to the secular (the genesis of the invisible religion).68 Each of these subjects has sparked its own debates and questions, creating a lively debate on the position of religion in the modern world, most often presupposing the point of departure – the secularization process – as a “given.”

The problem with secularization partly depends on how we understand this social transformation. Is it a simple transfer of Judeo-Christian religious practices into the sphere of “rationalization,” to law and the Secular State, or are we merely dealing with a functional similarity whose content is essentially different, which only gives the impression of continuity? Sociologists themselves perceived the difficulty in the broader secular model of modernity, indicating the internal limitations of the process, such as the individual or collective need for meaning (Peter

64 Ibid., p. 14. 65 Ibid., p. 55. 66 Among the theologians themselves emerge anti-secular doctrines, presuming that “man is incurably religious,” and therefore the “secularization” of religion cannot triumph, as G. Weinrich concludes, with reference to the theories of Jung and N. Berdyaev. See: Praeceptores, eds. E. Piotrowski, T. Węcławski, Poznań, 2005, pp. 732-736. 67 G. Marramao, pp. 128-129. 68 Ibid., p. 142.

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Berger), 69 the search for a sense of “identity,” or the modern proclivity for “heresy,” fundamentalism as a sign of religious vivacity.70 The pluralization of the world of religion does not mean its disappearance, but a change in the way religion and religiousness occur, having become more socially “flexible.” The slogan of the polytheism (or pluralism) of values, ethical relativism, and the provisionality of “lifestyles,” led toward a less theoretical labile basis for the issue addressed: contingency.

The “risk situation” is not only, in sociologists’ opinions, limited to modernity71: on the one hand the pluralism of the “worlds of life,” on the other a unified model of rationality, are points of departure for several variants of the secularization concept, including those of Habermas, Luhmann, and Gehlen. The last-named author declared the concept of “post-history,” which was raveled in the secular debate. Gehlen claimed that we had found ourselves in an epoch where the secularization of the idea of progress had occurred72 – a second secularization after the first of the Enlightenment – leading to a “crystallization of culture” which also embraced the stabilization of religion. According to Gehlen, the developing sciences, without whose help we can put forward no sensible “picture of the world,” and technological evolution have led to a historical rupture in modern times, forcing limitations upon the “great philosophical narratives.” 73 The ultimate conclusion from a theory of secularization thus described led him to a startling discovery. In Gehlen’s view, what occurs is a strengthening of religion as one of few institutions unifying a concept of the world, constructing morality. This is because neither philosophy nor the sciences any longer ensure these most “weighty” elements of life. As a force stabilizing culture through institutional ethics, religion is perceived by German philosophy as the only “exit” from the prevailing crisis of institutions. Responsible for providing meaning, it is also a force, which, in an era of the pluralism of ethics, can stabilize basic human needs. This issue, recognized by Gehlen, can be reduced (in its technical interpretation) to the early modern shift between a substantive and a nominal concept of the world. Religion was meant to soothe a lost, “qualitative” need (in Gehlen’s terms), which is not fulfilled by the “quantitative” matrix of the modern world. This is more or less the concept of post-history, containing a hidden historiosophical thesis, also lurking in Herder’s famous concept developed by Gehlen: Mängelwesen.

69 The case of Peter Berger (The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, 1999) is symptomatic of the contemporary secularization debate. Once an advocate of the “modernity = secularization” thesis, he presently stresses its local dimension. This typically modern phenomenon occurred for him after many years of wading in the ruts of “empirical theory” and “pluralism,” and not “secularity.” Berger points out the lack of “unanimity” (the multiplicity of world views) in the frames of modern societies, and stresses that today the majority of the world is deeply religious. He claims that atheism has become the European “creed,” thus weakening his thesis on the secularized essence of “European-ness.” The “explosion of religiousness” (Islam, Evangelists – the Pentacostals, the Catholic Church in undeveloped countries) leave, in his opinion, only Western Europe untouched. He introduces Levi-Strauss’s metaphor of bricolage, which the French anthropologist built to describe the “work of myth.” Berger uses it to characterize modern forms of religiousness (the “privatization of religion”). On the global map of dynamic religious social processes that he sketches, there remains the perplexing blank spot of “Euro-secularity.” Berger might have been partially able to fill it, had he deepened his reflections on myth and its function (bricolage). 70 D. Motak, Nowoczesność i fundamentalizm, Krakow, 2002, pp. 50-66. 71 As troublesome as extracting the meaning of the concept of secularization is grasping the concept of modernity, as mainly displayed in the multiplicity of names. “Our age has many names. It is supposed to be the age of ‘industrial society’ or ‘late capitalism’ or ‘scientific and technical civilization,’ or the ‘atomic age’; it is supposed to be the age of the ‘work society’ or the ‘leisure society’ or the ‘information society’; it is supposed to be the age of functional differentiation,’ or the ‘epoch of epochal breaks,’ or the ‘post-conventional age,’ or the ‘post-European age’ (already), or simply ‘modernity’ (or even ‘post-modernity already).” See: Odo Marquard, In Defense of the Accidental, trans. Robert M. Wallace, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 69. This modest catalogue of names reminds us of the multiple vectors of the epoch, which tries to reduce secularization, computerization, etc. to a single “hard” (i.e. substantial) core. 72 For Gehlen, “progress” means an increasing lack in a person’s personal sense of a permanent social order. 73 Undoubtedly, the concept of “post-modernism,” the disappearance of the “great narratives” which Lyotard developed, is anticipated by Gehlen, among others. The basic difference is that Gehlen tried to give the topic an “anthropological” basis, departing from research on the problematized “human nature.” Through this lens, modernity is the end of the opportunity for a “new man.”

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There is no unambiguous way to define the concept of secularization outside of the range of particular theories, in whose framework related meanings serve defined functions. The history of concepts reveals a family of meanings that historically and theoretically derive from a common source, and subsequently spill into a wide and swiftly flowing river of categories. The swampy and sometimes malarial territory,74 risen through the flood of meanings, leaves us often with only an impression as to what the subject of the debates on secularization really is. Niklas Luhmann, for instance, defending himself against the danger of unbounded theories, has narrowed the concept of secularization – ambitiously trying to avoid disqualifying it by its ambivalence of meaning – to researching the state of religious systems, and in its framework, the high degree of diversity that contemporary society has attained.75 He defined secularization as the “socio-structural relevance of the privatization of religious choices,”76 stressing that secularization is a perspective of a religious system from which an observed society can emerge as secularized. Thomas Luckmann, in turn, distanced himself from this category, stressing that secularization is, above all, a mythological discourse, i.e. a historical story that contains many fictional elements.77

Sociologists are presently investigating the issue of secularization mainly through collecting global data, to see if and how the phenomenon can be “empirically” grasped.

The application of “measures of secularization”78 indicates theoretical helplessness, or it leads us on an entirely different course than we supposed. The new and plentiful data collected by American scholars, for example, indicates that “one of the major factors driving religiosity is the need for a sense of certainty in a world where existence is full of danger and uncertainty.”79 It turns out that when one danger is brought under control, others appear. Thus the following conclusions summing up twenty years of data collection: “a massive body of empirical evidence,” write Norris and Inglehart, “points to a very different conclusion [than they had assumed]. As a result of contrasting demographic trends in rich and poor countries, the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before – and they constitute a growing portion of the world’s population.”80 Does the fact that there are religious people (or those who regard themselves as such) on the Earth allow us to undermine the basis of the debate by appealing to

74 If we listen in on some secularization discourses, we note the ideological sharpening of rhetoric aimed against the enemies of religion or the Church. There is also the triumphalism of the apologists, who believe they themselves are liberating society from the darkness of its superstitions. Both the first and the second standpoints involve “working in myth,” a trace of which is the concept of secularization serving as a double-edged malleus maleficarum. 75 N. Luhmann, Funkcja religii, trans. D. Motak, Krakow, 1998, p. 230. 76 Ibid., p. 224. 77 Quoted in G. Guizzardi, “Sekularyzacja a ideologia eklezjalna,” trans. J. Chrapek, in: Socjologia religii, ed. W. Piwowarski, Krakow, 1998, p. 349. 78 Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 33-53. Problems with “measuring the process appear at every step: “long-term trends cover a period of around 20 years in this work, and research on “values” gets tangled up in significantly more complex theoretical difficulties than trouble with the notion of secularization. “Measures of secularization take two indicators into account: participation in practices and the analysis of “religious values, which are meant to confirm the process of the “erosion of the basic beliefs for the various theological systems of the world.” Contemporary sociological research generally does not take into account the categories of myth and its dynamics or the possibility of “silent” “transmission” from traditional systems to new religious movements. Capturing a global “process, the disappearance of traditional religions through the slow extinction of “small” cultures, the creation of new beliefs, and the overlapping of religious systems present further difficulties for measurement. It appears that sociological records are incapable of coming to terms with the declaration of the erosion of “spirituality” (p. 215 – Can a non-religious person be “spiritual”?). P. Berger retracted previous secular theses owing to a lack of precise data. The conclusion, which is characteristic of certain types of sociological research, illuminates little: “This means that the total number of religious people continues to expand around the globe [?], even while secularization is also taking place in the more affluent nations” (p. 65). Thus we return to the point of departure and mark down the dynamic processes of modern transformations in the sphere of religion, explaining them through the category of contingency: “Growing up in societies in which survival is uncertain is conducive to a strong emphasis on religion” and the reverse (p. 219). The sacrum and profanum dialectic and the category of “secularization” have embroiled historiosophical scholars outside of America as well. 79 Ibid., p. 231. 80 Ibid., p. 240.

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“hard” data? Does the research showing a rise in the majority of the world’s countries religions overthrow the construct explaining modern societies’ “right” to develop, and undermine the empirical side of the theory? It would seem not – for in this debate something else is probably at stake.81

Concluding our overview of the history of the concept and selected standpoints, we can claim, as Marramao notes, that “the concept of secularization is a glaring example of the transformation from a term with a concrete referent to one of the more important catchphrases of our time. Originally appearing as a terminus technicus of canonical law (saecularisatio, from saecularis, saeculum), it then underwent a remarkable widening of meaning: first in the legal/political sphere, later in the field of the philosophy (and theology) of history, and ultimately in ethics and sociology. Because of the shift and expansion of meaning, it gradually achieved the rank of a genealogical category, capable of summarizing or single-handedly signifying the historical development of the modern society of the West, beginning with its Judeo-Christian roots.”82

Leaving the history of concepts behind us, it is time to search for the meaning of the metaphor of “disenchantment” and the main premises in this category that have proven “unsinkable” for reasons we shall try to explain. 2. Time and Its Changing Order

Time that is situated in history and measured “by humans, is a decisive element for

self-comprehension. Our historical personal and societal situations allow us to say: we were “this” before we became “that” through “our” history;83 and if this does not happen only because of history, its “reconstruction” plays a fundamental role that is existential in part.84 Due to the weight

81 One of the few sociologists who suspected this is Thomas Luckmann. “One seldom sees the fact that the relationship between industrialization and secularization is mediated. This is why the relevant formulae are too structurally narrow, deriving a change in one institution from changes in another that is allegedly more ‘“fundamental,’ or remain restricted to the history of ideas, interpreting this process as the replacement of a single system by another which is ‘“presumably more powerful.’ By suggesting that the link between industrialization and secularization is indirect, we take a different perspective in seeing the process.” Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion, MacMillan, 1970. 82 Marramao, op. cit., p. 15. 83 Outside of Dilthey and the hermeneutics tradition, Georg Simmel has devoted attention to the historical self-determination of the individual, stressing the “anthropology of creating certainty” through history. He indicated the “synthesis of imagination” that constitutes “values” and the “significance of meanings.” The recently deceased French philosopher Paul Ricoeur made a philosophical effort to grasp the history/individual relationship in his later trilogy, Temps et Récit (1983-1985), and in Memory, History, Forgetting, University of Chicago Press, 2006. The latter concludes with a poem that opens the subject once more: “Under history, memory and forgetting. / Under memory and forgetting, life. / But writing a life is another story. / Incompletion.” Trans.: Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer. 84 Robinson Crusoe was not born on the desert island where he was tossed by the catastrophe at sea. He remembered the past, which was not a fantasy, and it allowed him to reconstruct the world that was familiar and lost. Using what he found on the island and what he recalled, he reconstructed a place to live and then looked out for help. He lived there

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of its function (historical understanding co-creating “identity”), historiography (much like biography) is susceptible to mythical and ideological interpretations. Superstitions, deformations, confabulations, and myths are inseparable elements of attempts to “recreate” the past.85 Of course, we cannot “take a step backward,” a statement first made during the first staging of Philoctetes by Sophocles in 409 B.C.E. This is why, to “recompense for the losses incurred, we write “histories, to draw from the past, to strengthen our fragile position. With some simplification, it is who we want to be that decides who we were. As Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The past needs to be established, not so that it becomes set, but so that we can tread firmly upon it “now.”86

As M. Sommer writes, 87 in the process of “mediated” self-interpretation in the interpretation of history, the problem of boundaries, the definition of epochs, and the crossing of epochal thresholds take on a special significance. We also put “our own” caesurae in our self-interpretations, dividing periods of our lives, creating a temporal/topographical order, through our various addresses: cities, streets, homes, etc. In these constructions the understanding of the “new” as “present”88 is of special importance, and this is only possible through a “boundary-line” approach to the past.

The “new” is the “time we participate in “now.” Our epoch is the Early Modern Period, which we distinguish from the later phase, as “modern,” or “post-modern,” as we have already performed a sturdy historical distinction between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.89 In this fashion, the Middle Ages became the main point of reference for Early Modernity and for all the historiosophical constructs created within it. Questions on the relationship between Early Modernity and the Middle Ages gave rise to the issue of “secularization,” as an attempt to say who we are, by showing the sources of our “identities.”

in expectation of rescue, of an “event” which he would not have expected had he been born on the island. See: Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, p. 97. 85 “Life being a process of decay and of continual repair and a struggle throughout against dangers,” wrote Bradley, “our thoughts, if we are to live, must mainly go the way of anticipation.” The narrator continues, summarizing Bradley’s train of thought from 1887, and applying it to historical memory: “What happened in the past only matters inasmuch as it enables us to anticipate what lies in store for us. Seen in that light, the memory is focused not on the past but on what is yet to come, and that is also why our recollections face the future. [...] Remembrance serves expectation.” Quoted in D. Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older, trans. Arnold Pomerans, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 57. 86 We may speak of the “dynamics of validation” as a form facilitating every act of forming identity, whether individual or social, as well as of “political will,” which in terms of the category of “secularization” plays an essential role. “Historical times” or the “order of the times” can be, or, perhaps are most often constructed in the framework of an ideology or myth. The debate on secularization may also be a debate on “rule.” 87 M. Sommer, “La secolarizzazione come metafora in Blumenberg,” in: Fenomenologia e Societa, XII, No. 2, Milan, 1989, p. 27. 88

The debates on the topic of rinascita are telling from the very beginning, since the term appears as an antonym to

“dark collapse” or “middling times,” functioning in the sphere of myth as a return to a “golden age.” Marsilio Ficino presented things in the same spirit in a letter to Paola di Middelburg. The collapse/renewal opposition, which stands at the basis of the Renaissance mythology, is expressed in the “propaganda” art of this period in the form of light as renovatio, appearing in eras of darkness from behind the clouds of the Middle Ages. In much the same way, the construct of the Middle Ages as an era of ignorance begins in the Renaissance so as to mark a new epoch against the old “historical” backdrop, reconstructing the “good,” as the “sacral” Middle Ages negatively “defines” early modernity. Without the “work of myth,” collapse, return, restoration, progress, transition, departure, etc., it is difficult to “locate oneself” in time. 89 In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a consciousness of rinascita meant a perception of a deep rupture between the present “rebirth” and the past “Middle Ages. The future defined through such a situation in history assumes development and progress to overcome the intensive stagnation of the Middle Ages. The rulers of the time, Julius II, Leon X, Charles V, or Francis I, numerous families such as the Estes, etc., represent a new, august era, and their weaknesses are mollified by the classicist rhetoric applied to this aim. An evaluation of a historical moment is an expression of longing, and also soothes conservative desires to deny the possibility of potential revolt, balancing the present time and antiquity in “harmony.” On the other hand, the apologia of Renaissance thinkers, writers, and artists, in spite of a desire to return to the embryonic burden of the notion of historical “progress,” is clearly expressed only in the seventeenth century querelle des anciens et des modernes.

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Man’s position in the face of “liquid modernity” (as the sociologists would have it) “ transforms in many ways in its relationship toward history. In our debate we can note the appearance of a stance negating the Middle Ages and enthusiastically practicing modernity, or the reverse. We might observe the origins of the former stance in the Renaissance. The latter which negates “civilized” modernity, clearly emerges in the Enlightenment. In this way a construct that rejected the Neuzeit was formed parallel to the apologist one. This is why attempts to define modernity as “post-modernity” (in the sense of overcoming it) easily overlap with attempts to “return to the Middle Ages” as a residue of “spirituality.” The model construct of “post-modernism (post-secularism) as a “flight forward” shares points with negation of early modernity (or modernity), much like the “flight to the Middle Ages,” which are often linked by the latch of secularization. The negation of early modernity (or modernity) can be aimed in line with “time’s arrow” or the reverse.

What attracts critics toward the ideal type that the Middle Ages become in this narrative? It turns out that in this epoch “all of reality” was focused on God, unifying everything as a téolos, in which every meaning is fulfilled, with God as a causa exemplaris omnium rerum, guaranteeing all earthly and heavenly ordo. The medieval world, conceived as theological and theocentric, provided every thing with its essence (essentia), making it rational, intelligible, and cognitively accessible to the human mind. The relationship between intellectus humanus and essentia rerum presupposed a providential, causative intellectus divinus, writes Sommer, in explaining the nature of the construct.

The collapse of this order in early modern times involved the undermining of all the pieces that had made up the medieval construct of the “picture of the world.”90 There are no more recognizable essences of things, only their human representations. Things hold no ultimate aim, and the relationship between them is directly defined using the sciences of mathematics and physics. God no longer plays the deciding role in the relationship between man and things,91 and man, according to the famed Cartesian formula, becomes maître et possesseur de la nature. By this declaration, man comes to build the world on his own terms, according to his own representations and plans. As such, we can see the early modern world as a “human kingdom” governed by limited autonomous points of view. From the perspective of the secularization optic, the early modern world was made “worldly” so that man could arbitrarily run it. The critical appraisal of the output of the early moderns turned against this proclamation of autonomy. It undermined the suitability of this path, and ultimately, the basis of the entire early modern epoch. As such, the metaphor of “secularization” – for this is how we should treat one of the basic meanings of the category – interprets and evaluates the modern history of the “West.92 According to this apparently discrete response given in metaphor, there are two essential presumptions made for understanding our present “position. The opponents of early modernity say that a historical injustice has occurred, and the secularization process should never have

90 H. Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle,” in: Nachrichten der Gissesner Hochschulgesellschaft, Vol. XXX, Giβen, 1961, pp. 67-75. 91 “Because God is an absolutely perfect being, He cannot lead man into error; if He provides him with such-and-such ideas of objects, then these ideas are true, for God has established an unambiguous correspondence between these ideas and the objects of the outside world, and between the relationships between the sphere of ideas and those which occur in the world of objects,” sums up K. Pomian, Człowiek pośród rzeczy, Warsaw, 1973, pp. 21-22. 92 Apart from fundamental metaphors, J. Topolski has isolated a few kinds of mythical narratives in historiography, appearing as a tale of the origins of the world, as a projection of the future, the factographic (narrative), and the fundamental (i.e. fundamental metaphors). The metaphor of secularization joins the fundamental metaphors, much like the myth of revolution, the sublime, coherence (causality and determinism), and evolution, or else succumbs to their influence. Topolski claims these are most difficult to recognize, as they are raveled in a range of other theories and exert various kinds of force. In the case of the secularization concept, we have a category “explaining or describing reality […] as ‘immobilized’ knowledge, which has no clear boundary.” Any knowledge can become myth “if set in its deformation, when it ‘immobilizes.’” However, the Poznań historian opines that it is impossible to define certain fundamental metaphors in the body of academic knowledge. J. Topolski, Jak się pisze i rozumie historię, Warsaw, 1998, pp. 205-218; see also: K. Pomian, “Fikcje w historii,” in: Historia, nauka wobec pamięci, Lublin, 2006, pp. 37-48.

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happened at all. As a historical injustice, early modernity should be discarded. The second assumption involves the conviction of the existence of the “substance” of things. This makes the medieval clerical/spiritual heads and their successors the rightful owners of goods and the overseers of the “natural order of things” (whence the category of “natural law” also draws its strength), with the State rule presently at their disposal. However, they are not usurpers of the rights to secular institutions. Following early modern conclusions, the world is no longer “personally governed by God,” as the critics suggest, but has been transferred to unsafe, secularized human hands, resulting in all our misfortunes in human power, knowledge, and faith.

The position at the base of early modernity, like a cornerstone of historical injustice, radiates onto all aspects of life, which do not see their “proper” theological genesis. The lack of ties in the work of early modern institutions to their “natural place” encourages proponents of secularization (political theology, etc.) to remind the “early moderns where they come from, and the “order to which they should pertain. The conception of early modernity as an appropriation of the “essence” immanently belonging to the medieval world and its metaphysics (theology) has made the debate on the authenticity of its own existence and rights to autonomy one of the basic polemics of early modern philosophy. In discarding or accepting these accusations, we essentially magnetically attract an interpretation of “our” historical situation. It decides not only on the concept of man, but also on his duties toward the State and the Church. It projects itself onto concepts of politics, law, and philosophy. Conceived as a secularization of theological substance, a secular metamorphosis, early modernity can even be comprehended as Christian heresy.

The right to “self-affirmation,” or the negation of that right, is one of the main points in the dispute on secularization. What, then, compelled people in Europe to change their approach to reality and to recognize a new order? Why did they not remain in the perfect ordo, which built the medieval world, much as people in other cultures held onto their “images of the world?

Hans Blumenberg’s response to the argument stressed the late scholastic, theological absolutism that divided (distanced) man from God, nominalism, and medieval voluntarism that stressed the contingency of the world.93 To the extent that the genesis of the complex process of liberating ourselves from the growing sense of contingency, the nominalist loss of a sense of the world’s rationality (resulting in early modernity’s doubled efforts to rebuild “rationality) is debatable, the process of self-establishment appears to be a historically forced necessity, and not a groundless usurpation. Having lost a sense of immanent or transcendental (metaphysical) security, Renaissance man began to create his own orders out of nominalist necessity.

Early Modernity was an epoch of nominalism “in full stride. The difficulty in finding the essentiae rerum so evident in Kant’s philosophy “as a result of the immanent forms with which, to his mind, man is equipped, became widespread. Kant’s transcendentalism here, too, was an about-turn for philosophy, like Newton’s discovery and his mathematicization of the world of physics. The structures we “read94 today in the framework of the natural sciences are our own “work,” albeit inscribed in the “book of nature,” and the world which adopts “another form (“another nature) through culture (technology and industry) is the work of “good” and “bad” autonomous human decisions. Meanwhile, the “principle of rationality, to which we try to subordinate everything, marks out a space of the spontaneous “creation” of the human world. Hans Blumenberg has not negated the ties between Early Modernity and the Middle Ages. He has stated, however, that these ties are functional, and not “substantive. An unquenchable thirst for knowledge that was present in the Middle Ages95 survived into the early modern era and continues to drive humans to make discoveries. The Middle Ages did not satisfy this uncontrollable desire, which partially explains the reason for people turning against the answers provided by the medieval systems of knowledge. The inquiries and curiosity are “constants” that characterize the worlds of the ancients and the Middle Ages, but the responses given by the early moderns were

93 H. Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, Frankfurt am Main, 1985, pp. 205-233. 94 H. Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, Frankfurt am Main, 1983, pp. 162-179. 95 Dante, Commedia, Inf., XXVI. The canto about Ulysses is a cautionary one, a hymn on theoretical curiosity.

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indeed new.96 The same functions and needs remained, but in Blumenberg’s view, there was no community of substantive concepts on whose basis a secular model of history could be built, presupposing the inheritance of the theological essences.97 The early modern attempt to find legitimacy is not a rejection of the Middle Ages. Unlike the Renaissance figures, they did not try to deprecate the previous epoch – quite the contrary. There is a consciousness of the great contributions the Middle Ages made in its attempts to answer the fundamental human questions, without denying the Middle Ages its autonomy vis-a-vis Greco-Roman antiquity, from which it borrowed so much – functionally, not substantively.98

The genesis of the construct of secularization appears comprehensible. Not finding the “happiness” he was promised, having a sense of injustice (revolution, the shattering of old orders, the loss of “meaning in the framework of sciences creating various “models,” etc.), man felt that the new governments were not fulfilling his raised expectations. The verdict on Early Modernity as an epoch that disappointed expectations is hidden in the metaphor of “secularization.” Nonetheless – how precisely did the connection between epochs assumed by the category of secularization take shape? Is it historical?

Philosophical attempts to create an “order of the times as attempts at “self-definition appeared in antiquity. A methodological problem appeared in tandem, as indicated by R. Koselleck: how to understand the source language by which the characteristics of a time are articulated, and the language in which we grasp the past from a historical distance through concepts created and defined ex post, and which are absent from the source texts.99 Here the history of the concepts we tried to address through recalling the genesis of the category of secularization comes to our aid, involving the establishment of its source or theoretical meaning in the framework of a historical explanation. At the same time, it allows us to grasp the difference or convergence of older ideas in relation to today’s cognitive categories. The name of a time or an epoch – for instance, “medieval” or “Renaissance” – refers to historical events, to a process of which we know little until we reveal, as Koselleck believes, our “expectations” and “experience.” Our expectations hold more than just hope, and experience delves deeper than recollections, as they constitute both history and knowledge of it. They produce “the inner relation between past and future or yesterday, today, or tomorrow. [...] Experience and expectation are two categories appropriate for the treatment of historical time because of the way that they embody past and future.” 100 The problem of reconstruction is susceptible to extra-historical influences, and not only in the “recreation” of a distant ordo. Additional questions are required, about people’s expectations in a given epoch and how they experienced “temporality,” for instance.

In Plato’s dialogues we clearly find two dimensions of time. The first is cosmic, and the second historical/human.101 The first is cyclical, most often described in the “probably” mythical narrative (Timeaus), sometimes ironically, as in the case of the muses’ tale of Book VIII of Politeia. The second comes about through a break with the mythical beginning, and is thus a time of disorder, degeneration (moral, political, etc.), and brings about a need for a new introduction of order. This dimension is no longer cyclical, but is inscribed in a dialectical movement because of

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Fear of the new also has its biblical roots. Ecclesiastes wrote: “What has been will be, and what has been done is what

will be done. And there is nothing new under the sun.” (Eccl. 1:9-10). He then goes on to ask rhetorically: “Is there a thing of which it is said: ‘“See, this is new?’” He responded: “It has already been in the ages before us.” The wisdom of Ecclesiastes was long forgotten through the translation. The reception of this passage has been used as a weapon against “new things.” The word “new” (Latin: novus) had to wait to earn itself a good name. New things still raise anxiety, though we have grown used to their inevitable appearance. We have Augustine to thank for the evaluation of the concept of “novelty,” as well as the censure of “curiosity,” another category fundamental to the understanding of historical and theoretical processes. 97 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, pp. 531-557. 98 Ibid., p. 295. 99 R. Koselleck, Futures Past, trans. Keith Tribe, Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 255. 100 Op. cit., p. 258. 101 Mario Vegetti, “Il tempo, la storia, utopia,” in: Platone, La Repubblica, Vol. VI, libro VIII-IX, Naples, 2005, p. 153.

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hidden oppositions. In addition to these two dimensions, there is also a third: the time of the “perfect future,” of a utopia expressed in the Platonic construct of Callipolis. The above-mentioned “times” long ruled the imaginations of philosophers and others. The Greek concepts of tyche, moira, kairos, ananke, theion, etc. created a network of meanings from which the “naturally” mobile history was fished, to establish our position in its framework. They outlined the conditions of the “tragic” (experience) and simultaneously “cosmic” existence (expectation) – i.e. inscribed in a complex order. The breakthrough in this time construct was the Augustinian reflection combining the biblically patristic order with a classically rhetorical one. As a result, all the categories were redefined. The Greek opposition between barbarians and civilized people (in speech), slaves and free men, was collapsed in a project grasping totum genus humanum.102 A new division took the place of the old ones: inhabitants of civitas terrena, who are on their way (on a pilgrimage) to civitas Dei. The journey to “eternal time” can take place in the new Noah’s Ark, which for Augustine is the Church, or by oneself. “History comes to be as a result of this “individual journey, and contrary to the Stoic or Neo-Platonic theory, it is linear. But this is not of the greatest importance, as linear time was also known previously.103 A journey has a goal, there is no turning back, but it does possess the element of novum, the possibility to begin “progress” at every moment on the road to “happiness,” freeing oneself from the ballast of the past.104 This dynamic aspect of the capability of the “new” in life and in history (the about-face) had significance in the further reception of Augustine – in the Early Modern Era inclusively.105 The theological perspective of history, the attempt to mark stages on the road to eternity, the construct of the “third kingdom,” which should lead to the final judgement, built a sense of historical meaning.

In the Early Modern Era, the issue of ordo complicates significantly, mainly because of astronomical discoveries and the development of the natural sciences. A fundamental issue emerges for the subsequent history: understanding the beginnings and creation of the Early Modern Era.

The issue of the “reception” of the “Renaissance” (which today seems a natural concept) allows us to see the extended line of questions concerning various strategies of situating ourselves in (temporal106) history. The history of responses to the question, “What is the Renaissance?” runs

102 St. Augustine, City of God, XII, 28, 22. There is division in unity. Whoever does not belong to the Civitas Dei is condemned for centuries. But the outcome will only be known on the day of Final Judgement, as divine verdicts are secretively just and justly secret. “The End of the World is only an integrating factor as long as its politico-historical meaning remains indeterminate. The Church integrates the future as the possible End of the World within its organization of time; it is not placed at the end point of time in a strictly linear fashion. The end of time can be experienced only because it is always already sublimated in the Church. The history of the Church remains the history of salvation so long as this condition held.” See: Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 13. 103 G. J. Whitrow, Time in History, Barnes & Noble, 2004. 104 St. Augustine, City of God, Vol. II, trans.: Marcus Dods, Hendrickson Pub., 2009. 105 “Hegel used the concept of modernity first of all in historical contexts, as an epochal concept: The ‘“new age’ is the ‘“modern age.’ This corresponded to contemporary usage in [the] English and French, ‘“modern times’ or temps moderns, denoted around 1800 [and] the three centuries just preceding. The discovery of the ‘“new world,’ the Renaissance, and the Reformation – these three monumental events around the year 1500 constituted the epochal threshold between modern times and the Middle Ages. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel used these expressions to classify the German Christian world that had issued from Roman and Greek antiquity. The division, still usual today (e.g. for the designation of chairs in history departments) into the Modern Period, the Middle Ages, and Antiquity (or modern, medieval and ancient history), could take shape only after the expression ‘“new’ or ‘“modern’ age (‘“new’ or ‘“modern’ world) lost its merely chronological meaning and took on the oppositional significance of an emphatically ‘“new’ age. Whereas in the Christian West the ‘“new world’ had meant the still-to-come age of the world of the future, which was to dawn only on the last day, and it still retains this meaning in Schelling’s Philosophy of the Ages of the World. The secular concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: It is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future.” Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, MIT Press, 1999, p. 5. 106

One interesting example of mythologization as a reconstruction of history was made by Heidegger. This included its

“Renaissance” fragment. The Romanticization of Greece was the subject of Heidegger’s analyses in the years 1942-1943, with the secularization formula. He initially blamed Renaissance man for discovering the “will to power.” He then introduced a renascentia romanitatis turn as a characteristic of the beginnings of the early-modern world,

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between such extreme positions as that which states there were many renaissances –between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries – to that which claims there was no Renaissance at all, with the reservation that the latter thesis has two variants, coming from different premises. The presence of many manners of reception, depending on historical needs and on the expectations of the public, complicates a synthetic grasp of the separate epochs on the verge of the early modern world – of the certain whole, as it is normally treated – which is literally hidden behind the concept of the “Renaissance.” In a fragment of a letter to Herder from his Italian voyage, Goethe wrote immediately after arriving in Rome that, along with his arrival he experienced a real rebirth (rinascita), thus establishing a new private epoch, and showing how the metaphor works. In creating a linear order running from the day of creation, when “God said,” as it was memorably put, “let there be light,” to the moment of the anticipated judgement, new turning points were gradually introduced. The same went for marking out the individual “epochs” of a life – compressing or stretching them depending on the needs, much as Laurence Sterne did in his novel Tristram Shandy.

Obviously the “Renaissance period did not bring about a rebirth of the world of antiquity. This was the first misunderstanding, much like that which befell Columbus. It resulted from the assumption that it was a return to the concept of the Greek cosmos, which would return the sense of order lost in the Middle Ages. In spite of the reiterated self-interpretations as a rebirth, we were dealing with a limited reception of antiquity and a redefinition of its remaining categories in the most diverse contexts, in the main, however, with growing changes in all spheres of historical and theoretical life.

Cesare Vasoli is among those who suggest107 that the notion of the “Renaissance, as contemporary historians use it to name a certain strictly identifiable and definable historical period, has relatively recent beginnings, reaching back to 1860, when Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt managed to convince numerous generations of readers to understand it as he outlined in the study entitled Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. The vision (reception) proposed by Burckhardt was taken up several years later by Jules Michelet, thus, as Vasoli states, ringing the praises of the rediscovery of man and the world with the word “Renaissance.”

Both nineteenth century receptions dominated the understanding of the epoch in the French and German languages, stressing the holy conviction that the early modern world with its fundamental transformations has its roots in the thirteenth/fourteenth century culture of Italy. Of course, the category of rinascita had appeared prior to the nineteenth century historians, but, depending on the historical context, it explained various impromptu questions. It built expectations for those who created Enlightenment and Romantic temporal orders.108

The influence of Burckhardt and Michelet was essential in that it shaped the concept (the reception) of the Renaissance in the general historiographical consciousness, to such a degree that today we can no longer free ourselves of certain “evident truths” about the epoch. However, as we noted at the outset, learning comes when we free ourselves of “evident truths.”

It is interesting that the reception proposed by Burckhardt, theoretically geared against the Hegelian philosophy of history and the providential idea of progress,109 included other strong historiosophical assumptions, constructing the modern myth of the Renaissance as the founding epoch of early modernity. Against its creator’s intent it facilitated the building of the category of “secularization,” conceived as liberation from the limitations of the medieval world. Was the

upholding the opposition between homo humanus and barbarians. As contemporary researchers stress, the word humanitas, interpreted by Reitzenstein, Pfeiffer, Baron, and Heidegger (for this was the road it took), fit many mutually exclusive concepts. Or, seen from another angle, it behaved like a chemical compound that could link with other compounds theoretically to negate all the antagonisms of a stormy epoch that philologists and philosophers were given to inhabit. The word humanitas entered the university vocabulary in the first half of the twentieth century, but it was only at the end of the latter half that the possible historical “emptiness” of the concept was realized. 107 Cesare Vasoli, Le filozofie del Rinascimento, Milan, 2002, pp. 3-25. 108 “Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europeo,” Vol. I, Storia e storiografia, ed. M. Fantoni, Vicenza, 2005. 109 “We, however, are not indoctrinated in the goals of eternal wisdom, and we do not know them,” wrote Burckhardt, quoted in Odo Marquard, Aesthetica i anaesthetica, p. 27.

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Renaissance a “less” religious epoch than the Middle Ages? Did the process of secularization touch the Renaissance?

A standpoint negating the nineteenth century vision is provided by Jacques Le Goff, for one, who feels that the “Renaissance is a machine for hampering history.”110 He draws from Erwin Panofsky’s famous work of 1960,111 demonstrating the difficulty in finding a single formula for the entire epoch. Introducing the plural form to analyze the phenomenon, Panofsky stressed that there were many renaissances, and that the very logic of the “Renaissance” remains inextricably linked with the history of the Middle Ages. Le Goff modifies the thesis; while he does single out the “Great Renaissance,” he sees it as one of many renaissances in the framework of the Middle Ages. According to the French medievalist, the Middle Ages conceived as a coherent vision of the world begins to fall apart beginning from the time of Copernicus (1473-1543) until the model constructed by Newton (1642-1727) and continues as a whole almost until the early eighteenth century. As Le Goff stresses, apparently social life and technology began to undergo change only under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, which ousted the traditional farming economy. From an economic point of view, according to this expert on the medieval culture of Europe, there was no “Renaissance.” He also questions a thesis that was widespread in the latter half of the nineteenth century, on the decisive role of Italy, with which Burckhardt had identified the Renaissance.

Our remarks thus far only hint at the difficulties in creating a temporal or historical order. Any initial attempts to set a relationship between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as a start to Early Modernity must build disquiet; but it is only a remote edge of the continent of historiography, which we must not neglect for the theoretical risk to the whole expanse.

Regardless, however, of the results of the historians’ and art theorists’ debates, the topic of the characteristics of the epochs and their ties built up to a fundamental shift in the concept of time in the Early Modern Era.

In the mid-eighteenth century an irrevocable division took place between the “world time” and “life time.” Pascal had already grasped this. Blumenberg captured the “splitting of times” in the image of the spreading blades of scissors, drawing from an old Hippocratic metaphor. Except that here we are no longer speaking of “life” and of “art,” but of “time,” recalling infinity in the inconceivable confrontation with the finished “life time.” 112 One of the most important functions extracted from the modern philosophy of history is the mediation between the increasing difference between “life time” and “world time.” “Secularization” has an essential role to play in this mediation.

In distinction, Blumenberg’s “world time” has three main historical shapes, each of which actively affects the human imagination, requiring a response. After the divide of a uniform, eschatological concept of time based on biblical chronology – one which Descartes was still using – at least three concepts of time emerged. The first is the cosmic time – already mentioned by Kant – counted in the millions and then in the billions,113 transcending all human measures (not only life). The second is the time of general history. Measured in centuries, it fits the individual human life, which seldom lasts more than a century. The third kind of time is of human capabilities and expectations. The tension between what is achievable and what is designed organizes numerous

110 Jacques Le Goff, W poszukiwaniu średniowiecza, trans. M. Żurowska, Warsaw, 2005, p. 55. 111 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renaissainces in Western Art, Uppsala, 1965. Panofsky stressed the difficulty in getting used to “separating the history of the Western world into three main periods, where the Renaissance is the beginning, as the first age which defined and named itself, [and] assigned itself a return to nature and the classical past.” See: Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, University of Chicago Press, 1983. 112 H. Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, Frankfurt am Main, 1986. 113 Ernest Rutherford paved the way, introducing the concept and outlines of a “time of semi-decay.” It was only in the early twentieth century, as a result of discoveries in radioactivity, that the age of the Earth began to shift into the billions of years. In the 1920s/1930s the age of the Earth and life on it was joined with the theory of evolution. One “linear” course thus came about, satisfying the need for unity. After combining the cosmological time with geology and the theory of evolution, the time of an individual human life was situated “beyond” the scale of time, inspiring further departures “beyond the system,” with a relapse into Gnosis, for example.

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constructs of the “order of time,” secularization inclusive. This is why ever-new projects have come about in modernity attempting to make a bridge over the chasm between the “world time” and the “life time,” or to undermine the division by reducing the “world time,” for instance, to a “moment.” Attempts to unify the times also have a dark side.114 The time of endless yearning clashed with the time of finished human life. And then, too, the modern category of “secularization” sprouted and bloomed in historical tension.

The subject of conditio temporalis is essential if we want to see the logic of “secularization” from another perspective. Given, as far as we can see, that the debate also concerns man, despite recognizing his finitude, it designs historical time as legitimized by providence, or independent of it. The concept of secularization also writes human ties back into the world time, giving it a set significance. Satisfying our need for “meaning” is one source of building ordo.

The “classic” division adopted by many advocates of the theory of secularization is based on the clash between two traditions: biblical/patristic (a.k.a. Judeo-Christian) and classically rhetorical, i.e. Greco-Roman. The former is typically assigned a linear concept of time, and the latter a cyclical “eternal return.” These constructs were solidified by philosophers holding a modern debate between the advocates of positivism or Hegelianism and enthusiasts of Nietzsche’s thought, which appeared to solve the antinomy of the times.

Conceived in a linear fashion, time was meant to lead to the appearance of a modern epoch, whose significance could only be understood through revelation. A secularized “perception of time allowed for the transcendence of the “aporia of the beginning,” despite the fact that “history has no beginnings after the beginning.”115 Adherents of a circular version of time can also use the theory of secularization as a sign of crisis or change marking a “return.”

In addition to recognizing the order of the time, the concept of secularization is, as we have said, a judgement on modernity, a diagnosis of the spiritual state of the whole epoch, which rejects “spirituality.” Do we stumble once more upon theoretical difficulties?

Apart from civilization, which is often put in the defendant’s chair and blamed for the environment, and was previously sentenced for other reasons,116 modernity is also on trial, as the quintessence of “Western civilization’s worst possible variants. To put it more mildly, it is a warped model of European cultural development. (Early) Modernity has both its sympathizers, who trust in progress and democracy (communication), and its enemies. The latter believe that the source of civilizational “evil” lurks within its relatively new, “secularized” loins.

A curious mechanism – the growth of criticism from a reasonably safe place secured by late modernity – conducts the choir longing for a return to the onetime orders or revolutionaries urging for a “leap forward.”117 “The more the modern world removes previous terrors, the more it ascribes them to itself; the more effectively technology functions to make our life convenient, the more powerfully it is felt as a complication in our lives; the more effectively capitalism produces prosperity, the more energetically it declares it to be a state of evil; the more secure the State against civil war, the less scruples the citizens have toward seeing it as the cause of civil war; the more the repressions spared [the] people by parliamentary democracy, the more easily it is declared repressive in itself.”118 The line of accusers and accessory accusers thus stretches from the left to the right. The argument in this fight for a better world is often “secularization.”

The above-mentioned Blumenberg took up the function of advocate in defense of the “principles of self-determination,” often impeded through the accumulation of accusations. One of the main accusers (back in the 1920s) was a professional lawyer we have also had cause to mention

114 H. Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, pp. 80-85. 115 H. Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, p. 356. 116 L. Kołakowski, Cywilizacja na ławie oskarżonych, Warsaw, 1990, pp. 195-214. 117 “The more hostility culture takes from the world, the more culture itself is considered an enemy. At work here is a certain nostalgia for a bad state of things felt by the world of prosperity, to which it is all the more easy to impute evil the more it liquidates that evil, and against which fear consumes us in defense of our state of possession; and the more it consumes us, the more we remove causes for fear in the world.” Odo Marquard, Apologia przypadkowości, p. 94. 118 Ibid., s. 94.

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– Carl Schmitt, a theologian and politician by passion.119 Modernity was suspected of “corruption” by Western rationalism in the accuser’s view, changing the “role between the Catholic Church and the ‘State’ conceived as Jus publicum europeum.”120

Blumenberg devoted the eighth chapter (“Political Theology I and II”) of the above-mentioned comprehensive volume entitled The Legitimacy of Modernity to the polemic. First published in 1966, 121 the book gathered arguments in favor of the modern man’s right to self-determination (Selbstbehauptung). 122 Blumenberg’s theoretical and historical discourse boils down to showing that Christianity, much like the previous Greco-Roman world, “left a formal system for explaining the world.”123 The crisis and subsequent breakdown of the image of the medieval world meant that the answers provided no longer satisfied the needs of those asking the questions. Yet the questions remained, and demanded new responses. In Blumenberg’s opinion, what happened in the move from the Middle Ages to Modernity was an act of occupying the free spaces of the answers. Indeed, a “change in cast” (Umbesetzung) was historically performed, rather than a simple “shift” (Umsetzung)124 in the old answers provided by the Middle Ages, as the adherents to the concept of secularization would have it. The debate could be closed were it not for Blumenberg’s highly developed historical argumentation presenting a vision of the history of Western philosophy, which emphasizes the lack of theoretical continuity or foregrounds a certain continuity, as Schmitt once did. To Blumenberg’s mind, historical continuity has its place in serving a function, but does not have the “content” of a response. He stated that responses entirely different from those preceding can fill predetermined places in a system for interpreting the world, a procedure man has done constantly, at least since ancient Greece.125

The transition between the Middle Ages and Modernity, conceived in terms of the philosophy of history as “secularization,” that causes historians so much grief,“ comes from Hegel, as we have said. Vermittlung and Aufhebung are based on the difference Hegel saw in the secularizing (dialectical) conflict between the epochs. Blumenberg judged the category of “worldliness” that was among those to come from this “historical movement” as ahistorical and evaluative (as he did the eschatology of Israel, seen as a compensation and a Christian conception of compromise, and thus, indeed, “worldly”). The world is not a constant; the “worldly” pagan world (resembling the ancient one) did not appear at the end of the process composed of combined and overlapping theological categories. Modern “worldliness” should be described neither as a return to a desacralized pre-Christian reality nor as a shift to a desacralized post-Christian reality. The metaphors of “worldliness” and secularization” presuppose, as we have stated, substantive and historical constants, which, through “immobility,” push both categories into the wide-open arms of myth.

In other words, the category of “secularization” is a stylistic (rhetorical) form possessing the sacral language, and from a close perspective with the sacrum, is rooted in the imagination of the

119 Schmitt’s response is characteristic. The theoretical helplessness draws our attention. In his review (rebuttal) of Blumenberg’s book, he argued for the unity of the systemic will of the Middle Ages, creating a concept of the “new man” of modernity ad hoc, based on an interpretation of the biblical “Adam. A response to this analysis, allegedly reaching back to the “beginnings,” is Blumenberg’s Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt am Main, 1979. Here he shows the formation of myth and how it functions, claiming that myths often speak of the “beginnings,” while through them, numerous traces of free variants, to which society could have long succumbed, are freed from the burden of a “beginning.” In Blumenberg’s view, a “myth” does not arise from its illusory beginning established by a researcher, but by its historical reception, as the only manner of access to the content of myths. In this functionalist variant, what is basic for the understanding of myth is not what is imagined as existing “at the beginning,” but the reverse, what remains “from the work of myth.” Finally, as the author of Matthäuspassion concisely puts it, myth is not accessible to us as a terminus a quo, but as a terminus ad quem. Without such remarks, it is hard to follow the logic of Schmitt and other political theologists and philosophers (Heidegger) locating the beginnings in “primordial” Greek times. 120 Carl Schmitt, Obecny stan: prawowitość nowożytności, ibid., p. 191. 121 A second, greatly expanded edition was published in 1988. 122 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, pp. 99-113. In Fall 2007 the correspondence between Blumenberg and Schmitt was published, shedding new light on this debate held in the 1960s. 123 H. Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, p. 74. 124 Ibid., p. 75. 125 Ibid., p. 74.

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medieval world, in an attempt to bring order to the times. Furthermore, the same was true in pre-Christian times. Blumenberg sees “secularization” as stylistic will, which contains the need to maintain the basic values of the religious sphere, to draw advantage from it. The problem remains the incapacity to identify the goods that the adherents of secularization (e.g. Schmitt) use so authoritatively, claiming the right to represent them.

Blumenberg consistently tried to show the author of summa mithologica126 that by the method he called “metaphorology,”127 we could precisely record vital epochal changes while dismissing accusations of modernity’s historical illegitimacy. He believed that prior attempts to “define” it were based on fallacious premises. In the introduction to Die Legitimität der Neuzeit he isolated two elementary types of secularization: quantitative (vague) and qualitative.

According to the familiar scheme of reasoning, the world becomes increasingly “worldly.” The quantitative process of acquiring “worldliness” (how is it measured?) in the world is one of the theoretical models of “secularization.” There is also a precise model. Blumenberg believes a formula for secularization might be written as follows: “B is A secularized.”128 What has come is comprehensible through what has preceded it. By this way of thinking a world revolution is a secularized consequence of the “end of all time” (the president of a country is a secularized king, etc.), presuming a substantive link between the destination point and the point of departure, and an unambiguous relationship. By this formula succession and results are comprehensible only through what “came before.” The problem is that what we know is our situation, and we always draw conclusions about the past from this position, and not the reverse. The German philosopher subsequently lists other assumptions: the historical world is essentially stable, multiplying paradigmatic models through which we can isolate the nature of historical processes. It further assumes that human “spiritual” behavior is only possible through (Christian) faith, and the existence of a “meaning” of history recognizable “from the perspective of the Middle Ages (which is particularly pertinent here). It would seem that all these presumptions are problematic enough to keep us from applying the secularization theory to historiographical discourse.

In Blumenberg’s view, it is also untrue that the modern idea of progress is “substantively” identical to the idea of eschatology. Eschatology is focused on the “event” (Ereignis), which cuts through history from the outside, while progress is understood as an immanent attribute of history. The transcendence of eschatology and the immanence of the idea of progress do not permit the combination of the two ideas into one “substantial,” joint continuity. As in Blumenberg’s view, historical substantialism presumes that history does not hold a “logic” unbroken by the epochal changes, whose basis is theology and Christian revelation. This is another source of the historiographic power of the category of “secularization.” The critical accusation, however, concerns the rejection of the law’s self-determination, which presupposes the idea of secularization. The epochal shift, metaphorically called the “Copernican Revolution” (kopernikanische Wende), brought about the capacity for “human self-determination” (humane Selbstbehauptung). Self-determination, in turn, is legitimately affiliated with the immanent idea of “progress” as people’s means of self-organization through science (rational scientific methods) and technology.

Hannah Arendt also perceived the significance of the modern threshold, stressing the “discovery” of America, the Reformation, and the birth of modern science.129 This “conquering of the world” for secular concepts would be an illegitimate appropriation.

126 H. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt am Main, 1979. 127 R. Konsermann, “Vernuftarbeit. Metaphorologie als Quelle historischen Semantik,” in: Die Kunst des Überlebens, eds. F. J. Wetz and H. Tamm, Frankfurt am Main, 1999, pp. 121-141. 128 H. Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, p. 12. 129 Three significant events at its threshold defined the modern epoch. These were: the “discovery” of America and the later exploration of the entire Earth; the Reformation, whose confiscation of church and monastery properties began a double process of individual dispossession and the growth of social wealth; and finally, the invention of the telescope and scientific progress, regarding the Earth and nature from the perspective of the universe. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1998. Jared Diamond views things differently, adopting a cultural studies

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In his polemic with Schmitt, Blumenberg isolated “legitimacy,” which appears as self-determination (Selbsbehauptung) in the autonomy of the mind, and as self-confirmation (Selbstbegründung), and legality as self-legitimacy (Selbstermächtigung).130 Modern man has fulfilled all of these criteria, as he attempts to persuade us in his article. The legality of a given epoch, he stated, depends on its capacity to participate actively in the formation of its own stable identity (what belongs to it and what is foreign to it), and on its capacity to build alliances and oppositions.

As such, “secularization” rejects the “authenticity” of modernity, which it strips of its legitimacy, imputing it with the usurpation of ancient laws. In this theory the modern world is “secularized goodness” (säkularisiertes Gut), which, as part of the legacy of theology, is blamed for its success.131

Adopting Luhmann’s metaphor, we note that the category of secularization presupposes the “dislocation” of the modern world. It appears where it ought not to, or drifts in the wrong direction. Yet, how are we to recognize the “correct” stream of historical development (transformation) if not in the framework available to us as humans and given that we cannot predict or precisely forecast what will be happening on Earth within the next few decades?

If we insert the concept of “secularization” into the theoretical “accelerator,” we begin to break it down into tiny historico-theoretical components, finally achieving “historical substance,” ordo temporis based on theological foundations, a metaphysical concept of man, and a theological concept of politics. Moreover, we find that the main epoch to which European history “should” hearken is the Middle Ages (in its partial conception). Without shattering the category, we have the impression that we are dealing with a concept with an empirical basis, thoroughly tested by theory and, most importantly, allowing us to grasp the whole of the process that founded modernity in its essence. This “shattering” of the concept (mentioned earlier in very general terms) was one aspect that revealed the premises and the concept of “secularization” to Blumenberg as a “category of historical illegitimacy.”132

We might ask further, however: Why does man push to the edge of absolute knowledge? What is the source of the temptation to describe the order of history as theologically established? Does it come from a sense of the uncertainty of one’s own condition, or are there other reasons for a tendency toward “weaving the rainbow”? 3. The Duel of the Dwarves

and evolutionary perspective. From this anthropological slant, modernity comes across as a “leap,” comparable to the “Neolithic Revolution,” during which the cultural differentiation of societies occurred. The question of why the development of humanity ran its course at different speeds on various continents leads the author to search for historical causes of diversity, sometimes appearing as the conquest of other continents by Europeans. The birth of “technical civilization,” alongside modernity and the conquest of the Americas, had a major effect on how the new cultural order was formed. See: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, W. W. Norton & Co., 2005. The three perspectives cited come from three different presuppositions. 130Legitimität der Neuzeit, pp. 105-113. 131 It would seem that the secularization historiographic formula chiefly concerns the above-mentioned fields of philosophy and sociology. And yet, we encounter traces everywhere in the humanities where the issue of understanding history crops up, such as the History of French Literature, published by PWN in 2005, and the History of French Culture, from the same publisher. 132 The thesis was formulated earlier: H. Blumenberg, “«Säkularisation».Kritik einer Kategorie historischer Illigitimität,” in: Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt. «Philosophie und Fortschritt,» eds. H. Kuhn and F. Wiedemann, München, 1964, p. 265.

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The history of philosophy knows two great “dwarf” metaphors – one appeared in the

Middle Ages and the other in modern times. The story of the automaton in Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”133 has been quoted and commented upon to exhaustion.134 The same goes for the medieval metaphor of dwarves climbing on the shoulders of giants. In either case the dwarf, despite his dependency or concealment, fills the role as a weak or strong “subject” who changes the rules of the game. The metaphor of the dwarf under the table as a figure for theology, discreetly pulling the strings of philosophy, stresses the weakness of historical reflection that is unable to escape from the vice of myth.135

The metaphor of dwarves on the shoulders of giants (auctoritas) expresses hope for improvement through the knowledge of predecessors’ horizons.136 It outlines the relationship between the “new” and the “old,” their codependency, and the advantage of the “new” era. When Isaac Newton declared: “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” he was using the medieval metaphor of Bernard of Chartres, who quoted John of Salisbury: “We are like dwarfs (nanos) sitting on the shoulders of giants (gigantium). We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”137 The image sets a relationship between “new” and “old” philosophers, and comes from the first half of the twentieth century. The metaphor sounds less than modern because it emphasizes a dependency, as opposed to the early modern notion of self-determination, but as adopted by the Early Moderns, it accentuates one aspect: we see further and more.138

The subject of “secularization” prompts us to oppose the two metaphors. On the one hand we have an image of theological dependency in the conception of early modern history, along with

133 W. Benjamin, Anioł historii, przeł. K. Krzemieniowa, Poznań, 1996, pp. 413-425. 134 Benjamins Begriffe, Her. M. Opitz, E. Wiziska, Frankfurt am Main, 2000, Vol. I, pp. 399-440, Vol. II, pp. 793-804, 817-821. 135 The idea goes back earlier. Nietzsche warned: “history is still a disguised theology.” In: On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss. Walter Benjamin himself compared the influence of theology upon his philosophy to paper soaking with ink. “My thought is to theology as paper is to ink. Entirely saturated. If it depended on the paper, however, nothing would remain of what was written.” In: The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eilan, Kevin MacLaughlin. In theses on the history of the link between theology and history conceived in the spirit of historical materialism, he creates extreme concepts of history. In Benjamin’s view, we cannot grasp the “whole” without the influence of theology, which stands as the “dark side” of historicity. Benjamin’s reflection goes further when he considers the tie between the “time of memory” and the “time of historical construction.” This tie constitutes the Jetztzeit, in whose shine the two irreconcilable orders melt together in a sense of a joint constellation between past and present. In one “picturesque” moment there is a “piercing through” from the present to the past, revealing “historicity.” Erinnerungsbild is also an opening toward the immaterial side of history, which Benjamin believes possesses a messianistic continuum. “The real concept of a general history is messianistic.” The Arcades Project. “The ‘mysterious conspiracy’ between the generations past and ours cannot be understood without the ‘secret indicator’ of the past, which steers our attention toward salvation,” claims Benjamin in his theses on the philosophy of history (1939-1940). F. Desideri, La potra della giustizia, Bologna, 1995, pp. 139-165; B. Maj, “La teoria della storia di Walter Benjamin,” in: Discipline Filosofiche, IX, 1, Macerata, 1999, pp. 177-212. 136 “In the humanities – in their widest possible definition – in philosophy, art, literature, and political and social theory, everything we regard as original almost always is a variant or innovation of form, of execution, of available means. Such innovations and the discoveries that facilitate them are extremely important, even marvelous. It is they that shape our civilization. But which of them truly possesses originality in the true meaning of the word?” says George Steiner, developing the metaphor. In: Dziesięć (możliwych) przyczyn smutku myśli, trans. O. & W. Kubiński, Gdańsk, 2007, p. 43. 137 John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, quoted from Phrase Finder, http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/268025.html. The words of the medieval philosophers have nothing to do with a “faith in progress,” much as the philosophy of Lord F. Bacon is not yet the ideology of progress, as Pope Benedict XVI inaccurately claimed in the Spe salvi encyclical. 138 “At present, a youth finishing school, after having studied in-depth and made brilliant discoveries, knows mathematics better than Newton. The same applies to all the sciences, though to various degrees,” the philosopher wrote in 1794, in his final work, while hiding from the Security Committee, before he took poison in prison on 29 March. Antoine-Nicholas Condorcet, Outlines of a Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. Anonymous, G. Langer, 2009. Condorcet’s remark does not mention Bernard of Chartres, though it takes the metaphor to the entire education system. He expresses the hope in “progress” that was widespread at the time.

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its “final” stage, the one that interests us here, which we call Late Modernity. On the other hand, is the toppling of limitations in knowledge, along with the development of knowledge – whether historical or not – which ultimately, contrary to the intentions of Bernard of Chartres and Isaac Newton,139 turns against theology or gains independence from it. Through the efforts of the legions of “dwarves climbing the giants’ backs, the explanation of the rules governing the world is presently occurring outside of the realm of theology – and so, why ought philosophy to continue to succumb to its discreet authority? Is there no chance for a divorce, ensuring philosophy theoretical autonomy, and a fling with fields holding more certain (better) roots of knowledge?

Early modern philosophy is saturated with religious thinking. Evident or concealed theological strains of every stripe can be found in all the great philosophers.140 Nonetheless, from the seventeenth century onward, a tradition with a great deal of theoretical autonomy began to emerge: a consciousness of the “work of myth”141 and increased methodological reflection, trying to mark the boundaries of what reason could acknowledge and maneuver cautiously in its sometimes vague territory.

The majority of contemporary, clearly theological philosophers are mainly philosophical paupers, more deserving of a Dantean treatment of guests in purgatory (gurda e passa) than a polemic, due to their disavowal of skeptic virtues, critical conditions of reflection, and the autonomy of reason as a point of departure142 instead of a conclusion. If earlier philosophers had a historical “alibi” – there were no autonomous sciences or critical methods, etc. – then what could justify today’s holders of knowledge on the meaning of (the end of) history, the order of history, the “twilight of the West”? Should the answers be sought in mythical forms of legitimization, as only they can still build a “whole,” as opposed to the modern “fragments of discourses”?

Walter Benjamin’s above-mentioned thesis goes more or less as follows: there is no escaping the influence of theological thinking if we are dealing with macro-history or the philosophy of history. If we seek to discover the order of history, the game of establishing the “order of time” (theology) lurks in wait, inevitably creeping into our understanding. In the case of Benjamin, it is conceived messianically. The counter-thesis would go: there is the possibility of perceiving unjustified assumptions in the theoretical constructs of history if we appeal, for example,

139 Newton, a deeply religious man, did not expect that his discoveries would serve the Romantics for the model of their “disenchantment of the world” metaphor. “Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy?/ There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:/We know her woof, her texture; she is given/ In the dull catalogue of common things.” Newton was accused of “destroying all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors,” quoted in: Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford University Press, 1953, p. 307. But the debate concerned not only the rainbow: “‘“Knowledge’ has killed the sun, making it a ball of gas, with spots; ‘knowledge’ has killed the moon […]. How are we to get back Apollo and Attis, Demeter and Persephone, and the halls of Dis?” moaned D. H. Lawrence (M. H. Abrams, p. 312). Secularization themes do not strictly appear on the Christianity-Modernity axis. We can note a parallel discourse grounding Christianity and Early Modernity in the “secularization” of the original Greek spirit. The secularization of the “essential” concepts of Greek religion and philosophy has evoked historical reflection of many contemporary thinkers, locating theological (religious) nostalgia beyond Christianity. There is also a variant of biblical “secularization” that sidesteps Christianity, rooted in the cabala and its reception. 140 The search for religious themes is interesting in each of the outstanding philosophers; here Edmund Husserls’s rigorous method of phenomenology calls our attention as it was meant to be seen, as a hard science. See: H. Blumenberg “Husserls Gott,” in: Beschreibung des Menschen, Frankfurt am Main, 2006, pp. 378-453. 141 In Blumenberg, myth is not a symbolic form; it is above all defined as a vague “form as such.” This form should be understood less epistemologically than anthropologically as a means of self-preservation for maintaining the stability of the world through giving it meaning. The Enlightenment and Romantic concepts of myth have flawed premises. They presuppose an absolute order in the form of “terror” (dread) in the Enlightenment, or in poetry (in Romanticism). Enlightenment thinkers considered “myths” to be superstitions, equivalent to religious “dogmas.” To be precise, they called them “archaic reasoning.” They provided stories of mankind’s infancy, giving faulty answers to his curiosity towards nature. The Romantics’ error was to construct an absolute beginning and a corresponding lack of consciousness of reception. The substantialization of the “beginnings” is an oft-repeated error in the history of ideas. 142 One example of the blurring of the boundaries between religion and philosophy is a reflection by Tillich. See: Paul Tillich, Pytania o Nieuwarunkowane. Pisma z filozofii religii, trans. J. Zychowicz, Krakow, 1994. Nota bene: Tillich is the author of the “secularized providence” doctrine – in its theological, harmonistic, and dialectical form. See: Paul Tillich, “Chrześcijańskie rozumienie opatrzności,” in: Praeceptores, eds. E. Piotrowski, T. Węcławski, Poznań, 2005, p. 211.

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to contemporary anthropological debate – prompting from the sciences that ground our knowledge – and we take into consideration the theory of history and its methodological disputes. If we try to apply “critical” procedures, they do not allow us access to absolute truths, but they prevent us from constructing theoretical “MacGuffins.” What is a MacGuffin? And is there any cure for the noble “disease” of requiring “significance”?

Scanning the basics of theories of some giant figures, such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, upon whose shoulders generations of thinkers have climbed and continue to climb, we might be struck by another philosophical image, one that resembles the “dwarf.”

A famous trick, the MacGuffin, appears in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In his conversations with Truffaut, the British director explained the game as follows: “The MacGuffin is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or to discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to find out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point.” More precisely: “MacGuffin might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says: ‘What’s that package up there on the baggage rack?’ And the other answers: ‘Oh that’s a MacGuffin, an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish highlands,’ and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin.’ So you see,” comments Hitchcock, “that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.”143 H. Blumenberg used this model to interpret the philosophy of Heidegger.144 The intangible, suspense-building concept of the meaning of the “being of being” (Sein), which the author of Being and Time promised to illuminate in his second volume, built one of the twentieth century’s most important discourses. Is Heidegger’s tale of 1926/1927 not one of the most spectacular and “engrossing” philosophical works of the past century? In reading him, do we not feel the tension of discovering one of the greatest mysteries: the meaning of existence? Perhaps for this reason precisely, Being and Time is considered by mystery lovers to be the most important philosophical text of the past century. It remains capable of firing the imagination with its impenetrable mystery left somehow “ajar.” The journey to the center of “existence” was not a failure,145 but attempts to build suspense, with the identicality of “being and nothingness,” for example, which the passenger carrying the MacGuffin also freely interchanges, continue to find a loyal public. If the “empty” tune in The Lady Vanishes builds the suspense, entertaining the viewers, some philosophical concepts are equally effective in engaging reflection and supporting debate, as testified to by the lively reception of some theses of Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger. If, as Krzysztof Pomian claims, the task of the historian is to provide knowledge, create understanding, and evoke feelings, then philosophers generate similar effects in their narratives. In some theories, however, the desire to raise emotions takes precedence over the knowledge, simultaneously satisfying the need to understand, insofar as we keep from carefully studying the means by which the therapeutic goals have been reached.

143 Hitchcock, Touchstone, 1985, p. 138. 144 H. Blumenberg, “Ein MacGuffin,” in: Die Verführbarkeit des Philosophen, Frankfurt am Main, 2000, pp. 96-99. 145 After his turn, Heidegger mainly addressed the subject of being (Sein), but in subsequent explanations he drew from the classical metaphor of “truth as light” (Lichtug), or fell back on the mystical formula of “nothingizing.” He shields himself behind the poets and the pre-Socratics. He consistently maintains a sublime (Nietzschean) tone of revelation, with the central mysteries “at his disposal.” “Theological” pathos is also found in some secularizing discourses. Heidegger’s extreme attempt to salvage substantive thinking involves reversing Hegel’s reflections. Geist (the substantive life raft) emerges as imperceptible to the untrained eye, it is in everything that exists, and has been overlooked by all of Western philosophy as Sein/Nichts. It may not steer history, but it does decide upon the “profound order” of the world, revealed not by a philosopher but by a thinker, in the rarified climes of the peaks where silence reigns. Pierre Bourdieu sees things even more sharply: “Making the experience of the singular Dasein as ‘being-for-death’ the only authentic route to the past, [Heidegger…] distances himself from the historical sciences, which, because they are linked to a particular image of the world (Weltbild) and accept only the truth provided by human methods of explanation, forget the limits of human reflection and the opacity of Being.” Later, the author undermines Heidegger’s distance from the social sciences, creating the incredible “authenticity” and a range of other categories. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice, Polity Press, 2000, p. 27.

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Should we seek to comprehend how and why the category of secularization “works,” this time, too, we should place the traditions in opposition. As we have managed to observe, secularization serves a pre-established role. It legitimizes a historical situation and gives meaning to history. If we study its functions in depth, we see that where it presently appears as theory, we might recognize the “logic” of secularizing analysis, recreating a myth of the Golden Age or trying to “close history,” isolating a historical éschaton, or grasping history as a transit between the banks of sacrum and profanum, and invalidating historical hiatuses or defining modernity as “nihilism,” thus casting curses upon it. “Secularization” serves not one party, but many.

In Hegel’s systemic construct the attempt to legitimize Protestantism catches our attention – from the perspective of an epochal shift – as constituting the third epoch of history, the Germanic world,146 and all through the category of secularization. He recognizes the character of “modernity” and casts a bridge between the epoch crowning history and the spirit that was providential for the philosophy of Hegel itself. In the equally theoretically powerful reflections of Max Weber (though these use critical tools), we find attempts to legitimize the processes of emancipation, including the Jewish society, to which Weber attributes the secularization process being set in motion, perceiving its source in biblical Judaism. Carl Schmitt played a different game of constructing “identity” and legitimacy. At its basis was “right,” conceived, substantively, at the expense of the right, as we have said, to legitimize modernity and “reason.” “Secularization” for him was the proper genesis of the modern nihilistic crisis. Discarding the Weberian categories (much like Heidegger), he shifted the stress of the secularization discourse into the ideologized zone of political theology. Three examples of the theoretical models of secularization and the various receptions of the categories will allow us to see similar attempts at functions attempting to create legitimacy, or those denying it – the greater or lesser identity “interests” expressed through “secularization.”

Transforming the subject of secularization in yet another fashion, we can scan the great world view disputes. These concern the adoption of the main models/matrices of interpretations of the world as a whole. None of these can be grasped entirely rationally. After all, no one encompasses the “whole.” The choice of one of these “images of the world” is generally inspired by “mythic rights,” caused by hope, anxiety, or resignation more than analytic discourse. At most, there are hints in certain academic models that incline one toward some “images.” “Models” differ from “images of the world,” after all, in that they ought not to decide upon issues of “meaning” or “ultimate” truths, apart from the horizon of knowledge shifted by the constant climbing on shoulders.147

But what if the theory of “secularization” is often the MacGuffin of historiography? People are effortlessly able to find immanent or transcendental divine powers to pierce through reality or to join scientific models and religious beliefs (of various cultures) into a single image – thus achieving a model both reassuring and “rational.” The narrative invention of the Homo mentiens is, in this respect, inexhaustible, which is why the tales concerning our position in the cosmos and in history are plentiful. As Odo Marquard put it: narrare necesse est.

The aim of this text has been to have a peek at the cards held by the spokespeople for the historiographic discourse that says: all the misfortunes of early modernity result from the “secularization” process. Or: “Secularization” is an expression of society’s progress toward becoming free of prejudice. Summing up then, for both options secularization is the essence of processes occurring in the modern world. The main premises constructing various variants of the theory of secularization, sometimes reduced to the metaphor of “disenchantment,” from which the concept springs, “are not even fallacious.” If we take into consideration anxiety from the consequences of human activities, the “redefinition” of reality, the sense of the loss of meaning (not only in the historical sense), and the modern impression of drowning in the ocean of the

146 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, op. cit. 147 H. Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle,” in: Nachrichten der Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft, Vol. XXX, Gieβen, 1961, pp. 67-75.

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world, we can suppose that both of the aforementioned “dwarves” – whether operating in secret or striving for knowledge – will be long kept in check. In both the world of philosophical thought and in the humanities, a selection of theories does, after all, take place.148 It is invisible in the short term, without any distance, while from afar it is undeniable and effective.149 Even if the concepts return, adapted to their reception, they are no longer “themselves.” This may indeed be the fate that awaits secularization, functioning as a joint to set the “logic” of history in order. When forgotten, it will dry out in the showcase of ideas, or will be limited to a narrow sphere of society, filled with “clear” contents, which will no longer cleave and stitch the past and present “through and through.”

148

We can, for example, take a narrow understanding of the category, as a weakening of the public role of the Catholic

Church, i.e. its loss of a dominant position in society. This use, too, is problematic. If we consistently use “right” and “substantively,” then how to reconcile the appearance of Christian buildings in ancient Rome and beyond its borders, using the foundations of previous temples? How to determine the theological validity of Christianity? In the secularizing interpretations, the world of antiquity is “not a world.” Alternately, in the philosophical variants of the secularization logic, it is the only truly essential “world” (Greece). The secularization formula has a historiosophical tie with the subject of Christianization. Does it pertain strictly to the shift from the Middle Ages to Early Modernity, and does it not encompass other cultures or earlier historical events? The explanatory formula built by Pierre Bourdieu is interesting, naming the process of the Church’s loss of position in Europe with a psychoanalytical metaphor: “the great repression.” See: Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 17-24. Perhaps “secularization” is a form of “compensation” conceived as the “main figure of historical processes”? Does secularization merely compensate for the “breach between the past and the future”? 149 This has nothing to do with the visions conceived by Nietzsche on someone searching for a basis, for whom “it is as though the beholder of these things began to wake, and it had been only the clouds of passing dreams that had been weaving about him. They will at some time disappear; and then it will be day.” F. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. Adrian Collins, Digireads, 2009, p. 151. This is not about supporting the essential illusion, but the historical process of theory selection, which brought theoretical failure. Examples might be some claims of Henri Bergson, which publishers “censor” to protect the memory of this once so fashionable and influential philosopher. As Einstein once commented on his comments on reality and time in particular: “God will forgive him.” Human theory selection is not so merciful. Perhaps in subsequent receptions some of Bergson’s “scientific” thoughts will live on, but he partially already belongs to the history of ideas, as an example of convictions going against knowledge.