Once, there was no ‘secular’. And the secular was not latent, waiting to
fill more space with the steam of the ‘purely human’, when the pressure
of the sacred was relaxed. Instead there was the single community of Christendom,
with its dual aspects of sacerdotium and regnum The saeculum, in
the medieval era, was not a space, a domain, but a time – the interval
between fall and eschaton where coercive justice, private property and
impaired natural reason must make shift to cope with the unredeemed effects
of sinful humanity.
The secular as a domain had to be instituted or imagined, both in theory and
in practice. This institution is not correctly grasped in merely negative terms
as a desacralization. It belongs to the received wisdom of sociology to interpret
Christianity as itself an agent of secularization, yet this thesis is totally
bound up with the one-sided negativity of the notion of desacralizing; a
metaphor of the removal of the superfluous and additional to leave a residue
of the human, the natural and the self-sufficient. For this negative conception
it is convenient that there should always have been some perception of
the pure remainder, and the hybrid ‘Judeo-Christianity’ is cast in this role:
from its inception, it supposedly removes sacral allure from the cosmos and
then, inevitably, from the political, the social, the economic, the artistic – the
human ‘itself’.