Secular Enigmas (2): Ancient to Modern
During the 300’s A.D., the Roman Emperors who were Christian gradually disfavored pagan sacrifice and finally made it illegal. Christian asceticism (e.g., living on the tops of columns as stylites or in the desert as hermits), being thought to inculcate spiritual virtue, served as a substitute for the increasingly limited opportunities for Christian martyrdom. Ultimately, an “athletes of God” movement arose, based on Biblical sources (e.g., Heb. 12:1, II Tim. 2:5; 4:7-8). Some would-be ascetics withdrew from the world by living in monasteries under the administration and discipline of an abbot, who enforced the terms of written monastic rules (regulae). Benedict of Nursia (480-563 A.D.) and others wrote alternative sets of rules defining various monastic orders. For non-ascetically inclined Christians, however, parishes were set up as subsets of geographical areas known as dioceses, which were administered by bishops and intended jointly to cover the entire surface area of all Christian kingdoms world-wide.
Some of those Christians set apart according to a regula could also become ordained clergy, and those so ordained were known as regular clergy. In contrast, clergy in local parishes - - or “out in the world,” from the monastic perspective - - belonged to no monastic order and were known as secular clergy. But at this point, one is left wondering why the word “secular” was chosen as an adjective meaning “out in the world,” or “belonging to no monastic order.” Today, as we saw in the first blog posting in this series, “secular” means either not religious, or adhering to the theory of the separation of church and state, or espousing civil religion, or emphasizing a naturalistic or metaphysical worldview. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to call the local clergy irregular?
We can start to unravel this puzzle by referring to the etymology of the word secular mentioned in the first blog posting in this series. The English word “secular” derives from the Latin word “saecularis,” which means belonging to an age, era, or epoch. An age in this sense is in Latin a “saeculum,” carrying with it the possible connotations of a human generation, or a characteristic time for a civilization to be transformed, or an average longevity of a particular cohort (group of people sharing a common characteristic such as year of birth).
The Latin nouns “saeculum” (singular) and “saecula” (plural) had a long and venerable history, stretching back into Etruscan times centuries before Christianity. The great Roman scholar, Marcus Terentius Varro (116 – 27 BCE), wrote about saecula in his treatise, De Saeculis. Saecula are periods of historical time, typically endowed with mythic importance. For example, some previous Roman writers had interpreted the appearance of twelve vultures at the founding of the city of Rome as implying that Rome would last 1200 years. Varro himself associated the passing of the saeculum with the passing of the Roman Republic in the first century BCE. The Roman Republic lasted from 509 BCE (overthrow of last Etruscan king) to either 31 BCE (Battle of Actium) or 27 BCE (Octavian designated as Caesar Augustus). Thus, the Republic’s saeculum was either 478 or 482 years long, and its passing was an earth-shattering event.
Evidently, no one thought about declaring a saeculum in 509 BCE: That saeculum was comprehensible only ex post facto. But there were also to be saecula of shorter length defined a priori by Roman Emperors. In each case, the Imperial goal was to promote the idea that the incoming dynasty would promote an era of peace, prosperity, and stability worthy of celebration in games, coinage, and inscriptions. Each new Emperor and his Pax Romana were optimistically projected to issue in a new era, or saeculum. Because of its association with the political power of the incoming Emperor, the saeculum came to signify “the present age (era) of the world.” Events occurring in an Imperial saeculum were said to be secular. The first Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus, reinvented an obscure series of public games, of mythical origin, as new-fangled “games of the saeculum,” or the “Secular Games” (“Ludi Saeculares”).
Regrettably, however, these new saecula were quite a bit shorter than the approximately 480 years of the Republic’s saeculum. From 235 to 285 CE there were perhaps 25 individuals technically rising to the level of Emperor, which averaged out to a very paltry two years per Emperor or per saeculum. Early Christians came to contrast the new, and increasingly ephemeral, Imperial saecula with an eternal, heavenly realm and with an eschatological view of history, in which there would be a very lengthy Christian saeculum, possibly terminated by an event even more earth-shattering than the Battle of Actium. Alternately, Augustine would later say that Christians are already living in the last period of history.
Recapitulating, we now see that the word “secular” came to be the designator for time in the current age (era) of the world and its Pax Romana. Clergy in local parishes, belonging to no monastic order and receiving no direct benefits from the supposedly strict rules and religious purity of the monasteries, were deemed to be clergy of the saeculum, or secular clergy. Most Christians not only lived in geographical areas beyond the monasteries’ cloistered walls but were also immersed in the flow of time beyond those walls. In other words, the saeculum came to refer to both the space and time in the ordinary world.
Temporarily digressing from our analysis of the word “saeculum,” we observe, generally, that grammar is the overall set of rules for a language. Its elements include subjects and verbs, etc.; its syntax governs word order; and its semantics provide a study of meaning. Moreover, Latin is a so-called declined language. Declensions are variations in the form of a noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, or article by which grammatical case, number, and gender are specified. The grammatical case labels a subject, possessed object, indirect object, or direct object as nominative, genitive, dative, or accusative, respectively. (Two Latin cases are omitted here.) For the declension of the word, saeculum, both the nominative and accusative cases have saeculum for singular and saecula for plural. The corresponding genitive singular and plural are saeculi and saeculorum, respectively. Hence, the Latin phrase “in saecula saeculorum” translates literally as “into ages of ages”; or, figuratively, as “into centuries of centuries” or “world without end.”
The “in saecula saeculorum” became part of Christian liturgy as early as the 500’s CE via the short hymn “Gloria Patri,” which affirms glory to the Holy Trinity using the Latin text “Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in secula seculorum. Amen.” The most familiar English version renders this as “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” The glory due to God extends in saecula saeculorum, or into ages of ages, or [as] a world without end. The strength of any one Imperial saeculum is truly puny compared to that of the Christian secula seculorum.
The increasing Christian asceticism over the course of centuries beginning in the 300’s A.D. may be characterized as secularization of type #1: Cutting-edge, regular clergy saw the secular clergy, and other Christians generally, as existing in the world and its saeculum; and ipso facto separated from the regular domain of asceticism, purity of belief, and eternity prefigured. Secularization #1 envisioned a truly purified Christian life splitting off from an inferior saeculum.
With the advent of the French, Russian, and other radical revolutions, however, a truly purified intellectual and political life was to be split off and freed from the influence of any clergy whatsoever. Beyond regular clergy, beyond secular clergy, beyond every possible impediment to the revolutionary life, there seems to have arisen a blessed vision of a Hegelian-style Absolute Beyondism, in which a political order would rule the world with liberté, égalité, and fraternité.
The increasingly radical political revolutions of 1789 or later may be classified as secularization of type #2: Cutting-edge revolutionaries see both regular and secular clergy, and Christians generally, as existing in a saeculum populated by individuals suffering from “false consciousness,” as in Marx. Such individuals are incapable of acting in their own best interest. For example, if someone comes into equilibrium with his or her world by adopting theistic beliefs as one part of a web of basic beliefs, then those theistic beliefs are attributed to false consciousness, abetted by a presumed ignorance of the Marxist theory of the opiate of the masses. In contrast, some of today’s revolutionaries believe that they can act in the best interests of everyone: “Woke” individuals, analogous to the ghosts in Dicken’s Christmas Carol, exist and are experts in reparation of inequities past, detection of inequities present, and prevention of inequities future. “Ideological rigorism” has thereby replaced “Christian asceticism.” Secularization #2 envisions a truly rigorous intellectual and political life splitting off from an inferior saeculum and its befuddled masses.
In conclusion, there may be many types of secularization, but in each of the two historical types of secularization discussed here, I have argued that there are two common factors: an exalted class of leaders (ascetic or monastic in the first case, intellectual or political in the second) and a rationale for the second-class status of all non-leaders. In other words, secularization, as here described, is the splitting and distancing of an elite class from the hoi polloi.