Is Secularism an offspring of Christianity?

Reflections on Hans Blumenberg, a thinker who survived the Nazi Germany in a library.

As a byproduct of writing an endless paper on historicism, I find myself more and more engaged with the question of secularization—what it means, and its implications. One of the most fascinating insights I came across while reading on the subject can be formulated in a somewhat sensational way, which might help maintain the high level of attention writing on Substack requires. Here it goes.

First, we need to understand, at least operationally, what secularization refers to. Secularization is a historical or philosophical thesis that attempts to understand the contemporary world as the result of the religious world that preceded it. While some attribute the rise of this thesis to the emergence of the philosophy of history with Voltaire or Hegel (as we shall soon see), it's worth noting that what emerges in their works is not, in the strong sense, historical. In my view, actual historical analyses of this kind begin with the left-Hegelians. I usually argue that much of 20th-century post-structuralist and Marxist philosophy borrowed many of its concepts from the German conservative revolutionaries. However, here it seems we face the reverse process: what began with the left-Hegelians as a form of historical analysis of the contemporary world and its relation to the past, turned by the late 19th and early 20th centuries into a fundamental assumption about modernity, especially among conservative historians and scholars. Notable examples of this shift include Max Weber's monumental work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Auguste Comte's impressive historical analyses, Emile Durkheim's various works, and even, to some extent, Freud. As the 20th century progressed, many of these analyses became increasingly academic, while philosophical or historiographical inquiries into their meaning continued. Today, prominent figures such as Peter Berger, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre, each in their own domain, continue to advance the thesis of secularization.

In philosophy, this thesis was readily accepted, particularly by the faction known as "revolutionary conservatives" in the 20th century. Ernst Jünger, for example, explicitly saw the nihilistic nature of our contemporary world as the result of secularization (incidentally, using "nihilism" as it was understood by Jacobi in the Spinoza controversy). Spengler also understood the transition to the instrumental "civilizational" phase of our world in terms of departing from the religious paradigms of the Middle Ages. Heidegger, from a much earlier stage than one might expect, saw the unique historical time in which we find ourselves as the product of a stripping away of medieval religious illusions. Carl Schmitt (and later Taubes) viewed the crisis of modern authority as the result of an attempt to replace divine authority with human authority. Even after World War II, in Germany, one of Heidegger's students, Karl Löwith—who doesn’t belong to the aforementioned group—published a book titled Meaning in History (1949), which gained "canonical status in the German intellectual climate."

In his book, Löwith focuses on one theme of the secularization process, the concept of progress, or "progressivism." He systematically demonstrates how the idea of progress, shaped by the hybridization of the New Testament and Stoic traditions of antiquity, evolved over time. Löwith's writing makes it quite clear that the modern concept of progress, which emerged from such disparate traditions, is inherently unstable. On the one hand, progress is quasi-obligated to the Christian eschatological vision, yet on the other, its vision of advancement offers no convincing guarantee of the proposed progress. On the one hand, the modern notion of historical progress partly originates in the singularity of Jesus' appearance, yet on the other, it incorporates older philosophical notions of cyclical explanation (e.g., social explanations). On the one hand, the concept of progress renders Christian dogmas unnecessary, but on the other, it adopts the notion that the past is always some form of preparation, and the future, a fulfillment of the promise or realization. "The modern overemphasis on secular history as the arena of human fate is a product of its alienation from both the natural theology of antiquity and the supernatural theology of Christianity."

There are many chapters in Löwith's book that are, in themselves, brilliant intellectual history. Others, in my opinion, suffer from excessive schematism. Nonetheless, his central thesis, the secularization thesis, provides a highly effective explanation for the origins of the modern concept of progress. Löwith writes in a historical context where it seems that the concept of progress had lost any reasonable historical legitimacy in the aftermath of the horrors of war. Löwith does not limit himself to criticizing secular philosophers or thinkers. His broader claim is that even theologians began to use the secularization thesis in a way that undermines, in his view, the authentic theological foundations of their systems. Into this one-sided scene enters a brilliant young thinker named Hans Blumenberg, whose sharp critique of the dogmatism inherent in the secularization thesis has held up even to this day. Blumenberg's hefty book, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, was published in 1966.

Blumenberg's book—unlike Löwith's—is not easy, and I cannot claim to have read more than the first part relevant to our discussion. In this work, Blumenberg launches a sophisticated, comprehensive, and extremely productive critique of the secularization thesis in its various forms. In the introduction to the first part, Blumenberg shows how the different formulations of the secularization thesis are, in fact, variations of de-legitimization claims against secularism and, by implication, modernity as a whole. He demonstrates how, historically, discussions of secularization began with questions of legal legitimacy regarding the transfer of church property to secular spheres, in the medieval sense of the term. Very quickly, these questions became a comprehensive metaphor for a broader process called "secularization," which no longer required the usual limitations of historical writing to establish itself. Secularization became an intellectual concept by which almost any claim could be justified. For example, modern work ethics were seen as the secularization of medieval ascetic ethics; the authority of the modern state was seen as the secularization of God's political authority; science took on the traditional roles of the church, and so on.

Blumenberg's critique is sophisticated and multi-faceted, and his skill as a critic far exceeds his ability as an independent thinker—something quite rare in the history of philosophy. His critique touches on almost every area of philosophy that was prevalent in Germany at the time, as well as historical writing and even theological discourse. He shows how the different methodologies underlying the secularization thesis assume the religious world as a "source" in relation to which the secular world is nothing but an illegitimate illusion or imitation. The first part of his book is dedicated to an extensive critique of the secularization thesis, with a particular focus on an explicit and implicit discussion of Löwith's work. But he also shows how the secularization thesis allows theologians to develop strange theories regarding the phenomenon, ultimately rendering it empty of independent content—ranging from "crisis theologies" that identify crises with theological solutions to "corrective theologies" that suggest secularization is, in fact, a tool for the correction of religious life and the fulfillment of God's purposes. Löwith, too, shares this last critique.

Blumenberg offers an alternative account of the modern concept of progress in the form of ideas formulated during the scientific revolution. He acknowledges that the modern notion of progress underwent inflation, especially in times of crisis, where redemption was eventually promised. But he argues that this inflative concept is not faithful to the scientific spirit in which progress was initially understood. From what I can tell, this part of Blumenberg's book (and others I've had the chance to skim) is the weakest in historical terms. But we shouldn't blame Blumenberg: his project, as mentioned, was to tame or dismantle a multi-headed hydra that had grown over several generations. Blumenberg's historical account of the development of the modern concept of progress recalls, as some have noted, parallel notions found among neo-Kantians like Ernst Cassirer. However, unlike the neo-Kantians, Blumenberg offers a much more modest concept of progress, one that lacks the theoretical ambitions of his predecessors. He suggests that progress, in practical terms, is focused on securing humanity's peaceful place in history, without presuming a comprehensive redemption of the human condition.

I myself used to hold firmly to various secularisation thesis’. However, after reading Blumenberg, I can vouch that no reflection on the subject is complete with taking his thought into account.