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Once There Was No Secular

Once There Was No Secular

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am by Peter Leithart

Once There Was No Secular 2017-09-07T00:05:26+06:00 Peter Leithart

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What follows is a summary of the first part of Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Political Profiles) .

Once, Milbank begins, there was no secular.

And the appearance of the secular is not merely a matter of removing something superfluous, as sociology generally tells it in its theories of “desacralization,” the image of the stripping of a sacred covering so that some realm of pure humanity and nature is brought into the open. That portrayal assumes that there is such a thing as a pure humanity, which is always there under the surface of the sacred and of religion, which has nothing to do with the sacred, and it assumes that humanism is the natural destiny of history, the inevitable telos toward which all human societies move. Both of these assumptions must be contested.

This is an important theme throughout Milbank’s book: there is no “natural” human ordering of life.

All human life is ordered by some beliefs, codes of conduct, symbols, rituals. What political philosophy (Rousseau) has treated as a “natural state” of equality would simply be another way of coding and organizing reality. We cannot peel off the layers of cultural coding and belief and get back to a human nature that is pure and undefiled.

Milbank applies this general claim to the specifically secular ordering of modern life. The secular is one particular coding/organization of human social life, no more natural than another ordering, just different. The secular was not waiting under the covers of sacrality to be discovered, but had to be imagined, instituted and constructed. When it was imagined, it was imagined as “natural,” but as a natural sphere of sheer power, a sphere where egotistical self-interest governed, free of moral and religious constraints and guidance. Political science did not discover this political sphere, but had to construct the object of its investigation imaginatively and intellectually.

To accomplished this construction, several moves have to be made. First, there had to be a spatializing of the secular. The saeculum in medieval theology was considered a “time,” the time between the fall and the second advent of Christ. To construct the modern secular, it had to be imagined instead as a space, a sphere of sheer power. For Christianity, the “secular” was a period of imperfect realization of the kingdom. Perfect peace had not been achieved, coercive measures and warfare are still necessary at times; but this is considered by Christainity do be a period of time between fall and eschaton. For Christianity, this “secular” time is not original in creation. Though there would have been governance without the fall, it would not have been coercive and violent. Modernity imagined the secular as a space.

Second, the sacred has to be privatized. Religion has to be reduced to a private sphere. By bounding off religion or the sacred, a sphere is created in which religious or moral considerations have no place, a public sphere of pure power and pragmatism, the secular space of power and profit.

Third, the secular had to be imagined as natural. It was not natural in the sense of Aquinas and the scholastics (for whom nature participated in the eternal law of God) but natural in the Grotian sense: Even if God did not exist, the natural laws of the universe could be known. Key to this development is the stoic notion of conatus, the universal drive to self-preservation. For modernity, this is the hermeneutical key to the understanding of nature, and it can be known regardless of revelation or Christian truth. The secular realm is governed by the pursuit of self-interest and self-preservation. The logic and rationality of the secular realm is a matter of calculating what will best serve one’s own interests, without consideration of moral or religious factors.

Fourth, the realm of factum, the made, of humanly constructed, had to be construed as a secular realm, a realm of sheer power and instrumental and mechanical rationality. The secularity of the “factum” is based on a couple of assumptions. It begins with the basic observation that most of our environment, is the product of human labor. The building, the chairs, the microphone and mp3 recorder, that make up a lecture hall is the realm of the “made.” None of it occurs naturally. It is wholly contingent, not essential to the existence of the world. To put it another way, the order of the world we live in is not, moderns believe, ordained and established directly by God. It is a product of human labor and experimentation. Because it is contingent, not natural and ordained by divine authority, it is therefore secular. The realm of human manufacture is a secular realm.

The other assumption which underlies this is that human making has a purely instrumental purpose. We make things in order to achieve ends of efficiency and self-preservation. We build houses simply in order to keep out the elements, airplanes and automobiles for faster travel. We make things only as means to achieve the ends of efficiency, self-preservation, or comfort. The realm of the made is not thus a realm of a human striving after God, but an arena of instrumental reason and egotistical pursuit of self-interest. Thus, again, the realm of the made is secular.

Milbank challenges this equation of the made and the secular, but he does it first by conceding that the realm of the “made” is contingent and not natural. Our social order, our technological achievements, did not drop from heaven. They are products of human labor and experiment. But in Christian theology, this creative effort of man is a human “cooperation” with the creative work of God. Milbank acknowledges that humans do not create ex nihilo, and he admits that history is the outworking of what is already in the mind of God. But he also insists that human creativity is truly creative, not merely an organization of matter, but a real making of new things. Seeds do “create” new plants, humans produce new humans, humans build bridges, roads, etc. In Van Tillian terms, he is combating a univocal, zero-sum understanding of creation, that would assume that if God is creative, we cannot be. Rather, he insists (very explicitly) on analogy: because God is creative, so are we.

Thus, in place of a view that says the made is merely “instrumental” and “secular,” Milbank insists that making should be understood instead as a striving toward self-transcendence, as “poesis.” We don’t make only for instrumental purposes, simply for the use we can put our products to, simply to promote our self-preservation. We make in order to fulfill ourselves as human beings in the image of the Creator. There is a transcendental dimension built into human making.

More provocatively, Milbank suggests that it is residual Platonism that leads us to believe that our “ideas” exist prior to and independent of our cultural products and formations. Milbank insists that we don’t make merely to bring to public expression pre-existing ideas. Instead, the idea is conveyed through the thing made. Partly this is a point about language: We know and have ideas through the medium of l

anguage, which is a cultural product. But he is also making the point that the things we make are not just expressions of what already existed perfectly formed in my mind. There is a surplus in the actual making of things beyond our prior conception of them. Our thoughts come to realization in the material world of human construction.

The general point is simply: the modern assumption that the humanly constructed is a secular realm governed by instrumental and pragmatic concerns can be and ought to be challenged. There is nothing “natural” about the equation of the made with the secular. The fact that the social and material world in which we live is a product of human labor does not render it devoid of religious significance

Milbank stresses two historical points about the construction of this secular space. First, he explores the contribution that theology made to the construction of the secular as a sphere of sheer power and instrumental reason. This was done in part by a redefinition of the concept of dominion. In classical and medieval thought there were two contesting views of dominion. The first linked dominion to the mastery of passions by reason, and this was related to the control and use of external objects. Clearly, there is an ethical component built into this idea of dominion. Competing with this was the Roman conception in which dominion meant absolute lordship over whatever lies within one’s power. From the late middle ages to the 17th century, the Roman conception became dominant, and moved from the household to the public realm. Political dominion came to be identified with absolute lordship.

The Roman conception of dominion receives a Christian gloss in the nominalist conception of God as pure will. The anthropology that underlies modern liberalism and absolutism won out because it was promoted by a nominalist, voluntarist theology. Man is most God’s image when he is exercising absolute property rights and absolute political dominion. This is a retreat from a full Trinitarianism. God is conceived more as radically simple, without differentiation, and this bare divine unity stood over against the simple unities of individual human wills.

Voluntarism grounds political absolutism because, it is argued, the sovereign cannot bind himself. At the same time, voluntarism grounds liberalism (not as opposed to “conservatism,” but as the post-Enlightenment order): The freedom of individuals depends on their being left alone by the law to do what they will, and individuals have more or less absolute power to do what they will with what lies within their dominion. The two political implications of voluntarism come together when we ask how there is to be peace and some semblance of social unity in a liberal society. We need some sort of unity to preserve freedom. What brings unity to a collection of people who are left alone to pursue whatever they will? The modern answer is, either consensus (but this may not come) or a sovereign direction by the state (which is more secure). Thus liberal freedom requires absolutism and tends to fall into it.

With the public realm defined as a realm of absolute will and sheer power, theologians had to conclude that the church played no public role. On this definition of power, the church could not be associated with power, and therefore, it cannot be associated with public life.

The other contributor to this secular space was a renewed paganism, which Milbank particularly associates with Machiavelli. Machiavelli revives a pagan view of virtue as heroic manliness particularly exercised in war, and promotes a manipulative political practice, which sees a social good coming out of the fostering of social conflict. External conflict is also socially useful, since it preserves an independent spirit. Machiavelli explicitly sees the public sphere as a sphere of sheer power, manipulation, self-seeking calculation. The Machiavellian fosters conflict among rivals in order to promote himself; and this “science of conflict” becomes the scientific approach to politics. The public sphere is a secular sphere, as a sphere of sheer power and self-promoting manipulation.

Thus, the modern secular was imagined and constructed by cooperation between heretical theology and paganism. As a result, Milbank says, Christianity cannot find a place for the “secular.” It has to simply reject it.

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