Excursus: Desacralization and Secularization

Traditional Greco-Roman public spectacles boasted a plethora of associations with the worship of the gods, and not only on account of the rites of sacrifice and ritual processions of divine effigies that often preceded and closed the events. The idea that many institutions such as games were rooted in archaic sacred dramas and rites, which the ancient antiquarian lore helped to sustain, is now so widely accepted among scholars as to be a commonplace. The general underpinning theory is that historical societies typically develop from an archaic state, often preliterate, to a more modern form, often literate and urban; a supposition that informed the works of influential social thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim, as well as those of their innumerable modern followers. This development involved in turn a progressive desacralization or secularization, whereby a society’s largely sacral vision of life was replaced by a more secular orientation (Dobbelaere 1981). The supposed shift from the sacred to the secular or profane underpins Max Weber’s celebrated idea of Entzauberung or disenchantment, whereby an archaic, religiously oriented society gradually divests itself of its original belief that every aspect of life is suffused by the presence of the divine, and embraces in turn more individualistic and utilitarian (that is, more secular) values and outlook (Weber 1930; Flavio Pierucci 2000).

The notion of secularization as a necessary stage in the grand unfolding of history has informed and in turn been bolstered by the modern study of the development of European society. The changes whereby the cultural and institutional dominance of the Catholic Church came to be relaxed as a consequence of, among several factors, the rise of modern science and a sophisticated urban culture in the late medieval period, led to the emergence of a secular domain containing alternative forms of thought and practices that competed with the Christian church over the hearts, minds, and social habits of individuals within society (Luckmann 1967; Hammond 1985). Historians have since generalized this original European model of secularization in such a way as to suggest that it applies to all societies as part of their progress toward modernity. In this generic formulation, ‘‘secularization theory’’ refers to the historical process whereby a society, and specifically its nonpriestly power elite, develops an autonomous set of cultural forms and institutions that challenge the overall dominance of the priestly or religious elite and its control over the real and symbolic capital of a society (Lubbe 1965; Martin 1978; Marramao 1983).

Historians of religion have recently questioned whether ‘‘secularization’’ admits of a single definition or always displays unbroken continuity. According to Rodney Stark, for example, secularization should rather be regarded as just one element in the cyclical transformation of societies that undergo stages of desacralization (secularization) and sacralization (religious revivals) (Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Stark, 1996; Klutz 1998). Whereas earlier scholars have associated the notion of an immanent sacrality with the past and the secular with the present, the current, more nuanced approach posits that both sacralization and desacralization (as well as secularization) are dynamics that may be at play in any society at any given time (Butler 1990).

The allure of being able to assess, through the lens of desacralization and secularization, the stage of historical development that a given society happens to have reached at a certain time has even encouraged a few scholars to devise a set of metrics that gauges the presence or absence of particular attributes associated with religious and secular ‘‘normative orientations’’ (Fenn 1986). Here is where historical positivism becomes most strongly evident in the course of this ongoing scholarly discussion.

Yet all the already mentioned approaches not only accept a certain historical teleology but also the fundamental premise that the ‘‘sacred’’ and the ‘‘secular’’ represent essential givens and that they are real, even observable, states (Devisch 1973). But many societies in fact did not maintain a (strong) distinction between the two, and may even lack words that could allow the culture to conceptualize or mark the difference (Roosens 1963). Still, in the final analysis, the most substantial critique of these approaches has to do with their failure to give due consideration to the texts that represent (or do not represent) the distinctions between what is sacred and what is secular. References in texts to the ‘‘sacred’’ and the ‘‘secular,’’ where they do appear, have to be read first and foremost as exercises in moral categorization rather than as transparent representations of the conceptual categories that historical actors employed.

Antiquarian texts that discuss the traditional origins of ideas and institutions of a given society are typically places where one finds a strong articulation of the idea that the archaic past is more religious or sacral and the putative present less so. Such a representation conforms to the ancient intellectual paradigm of progressive decline. Yet a historical theory that simply accepts this rhetoric of decline at face value fails to appreciate the politics at work in the representation of nostalgia and loss. Take, for instance, the use of Roman antiquarian texts in Tertullian’s On Spectacles (Waszink 1948; Cortesi 1984). The Christian author drew freely on the learned representations of the res antiqua found in these earlier works, all of which seem to validate a strong temporal disjuncture between now and then, the present and the past. But Tertullian did so in a manner that precisely inverted the intellectual Tendenz of the original antiquarian works. In wanting to argue that all spectacles were and still remained firmly tied to the worship of the gods, he sought in fact to collapse the difference between now and then, past and present, at least where the sacrality of the games was concerned. How should a modern historian read Tertullian’s work? It is clearly not advisable to read in it some kind of proof that there had been no desacralization of the games. But it is just as inadvisable to read this text, or any other text, as suggesting that there was desacralization. Texts function poorly as proof-texts in such instances.

Tertullian had not expected his fellow Christians to accept his argument readily. His heaping on of recherche references to antiquarian writings merely underscores how unrepresentative his work was of the general attitude among Christians who were his contemporaries. One might conclude that most Christians who attended the shows paid little attention to their history and were not at all inclined to believe that they had any religious (or cultic) associations at all. Yet textual sources simply do not allow us to form a sound judgment regarding the degree of desacralization or secularization of a given society. Literary traditions tend to generate their own narratives of change, and the dominant ancient literary ideology is that of decline and progressive decadence, which serves to reify the notion of a golden past. It is easy to be seduced into accepting such paradigms as descriptive rather than normative. But if we find Roman authors speaking of their own society as one that had been desacralized over time, it merely shows that such was the belief among the literary and literate elite. Whether indeed there had been desacralization in a broader historical sense is a question that could likely never be answered. Also, what some might characterize as desacralization can often just as easily be described by others as a shift in the religious imagination or the loci of the divine. Desacralization, then, has dubious value in historical analysis, save as an aspect of ancient and modern ideology. A literary representation that presents the past as past and another that renders the past as very much like the present, while they are diametrically opposite in character, have in common the quality of being ideological constructs that do not provide a single set of data from which a theory of desacralization, or religious change more generally, can be constructed.