What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?

Sociologists, political theorists, and historians have written copiously on secularism. It is part of a vigorous public debate in many parts of the world—especially in the Middle East.

In contrast to the salience of such debates, anthropologists have paid scarcely any attention to the idea of the secular, although the study of reli­gion has been a central concern of the discipline since the nineteenth cen­tury. A collection of university and college syllabi on the anthropology of religion prepared recendy for the Anthropological Association of America,^{[15] [16] shows a heavy reliance on such themes as myth, magic, witchcraft, the use of hallucinogens, ritual as psychotherapy, possession, and taboo. Together, these familiar themes suggest that “religion,” whose object is the sacred, stands in the domain of the nonrational. The secular, where modern poli­tics and science are sited, makes no appearance in the collection. Nor is it treated in any of the well-known introductory texts.3 And yet it is common knowledge that religioh and the secular are closely linked, both in Our thought and in the way they have emerged historically. Any discipline that seeks to understand “religion” must also try to understand its other.}

A number of anthropologists have begun to address secularism with the intention of demystifying contemporary political institutions. Where previous theorists saw worldly reason linked to tolerance, these unmaskers find myth and violence. Thus Michael Taussig complains that the Weber­ian notion of the rational-legal state’s monopoly of violence fails to address “the intrinsically mysterious, mystifying, convoluting, plain scary, mythi­cal, and arcane cultural properties and power of violence to the point where violence is very much an end in itself—a sign, as Benjamin put it, of the existence of the gods.” In Taussig’s opinion the “institutional interpen­etration of reason by violence not only diminishes the claims of reason, casting it into ideology, mask, and effect of power, but [it is] also... pre­cisely the coming together ofreason-and-violence in the State that creates, in a secular and modem world, the bigness of the big S—not merely its apparent unity and the fictions of will and mind thus inspired, but the auratic and quasi-sacred quality of that very inspiration... that now stands as ground to our being as citizens of the world.”⁴ Once its rational-legal mask is re-

3. Take, for example, Brian Morris’s Anthropological Studies of Religion, Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, and Roy Riippaport’s Ritual and Reli­gion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, neither of which makes any mention of “secular,” “secularism,” or “secularization,” but both, of course, have extensive references to the concept of “the sacred.” Ben­son Saler’s survey entitled Conceptualizing Religion, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993, refers only—and symptomatically—to “secular humanism as a religion,” that is, to the

i secular that is also religious.

4. M. Taussig, The Nervous System, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 116, ital­ics in original.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like! 23 moved, so it is suggested, the modern state will reveal itself to be far from secular. For such critics the essential point at issue is whether our belief in the secular character of the state—or society—is justified or not. The cat­egory of the secular itself remains unexamined.

Anthropologists who identify the sacred character of the modern state often resort to a rationalist notion of myth to sharpen their attack. They take myth to be “sacred discourse,” and agree with nineteenth­century anthropologists who theorized myths as expressions of beliefs about the supernatural world, about sacred times, beings, and places, be­liefs that were therefore opposed to reason. In general the word “myth” has been used as a synonym for the irrational or the nonrational, for attach­ment to tradition in a modern world, for political fantasy and dangerous ideology. Myth in this way of thinking stands in contrast to the secular, even for those who invoke it positively.

I will refer often to myth in what follows, but I am not interested in theorizing about it. There are several books available that do that.⁵ What I want to do here is to trace practical consequences of its uses in the eigh­teenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in order to investigate some of the ways the secular was constituted. For the word “myth” that moderns have inherited from antiquity feeds into a number of familiar opposi­tions—belief and knowledge, reason and imagination, history and fiction, symbol and allegory, natural and supernatural, sacred and profane—binaries that pervade modern secular discourse, especially in its polemical mode. As I am concerned with the shifting web of concepts making up the secular, I discuss several of these binaries.

The terms “secularism” and “secularist” were introduced into English by freethinkers in the middle of the nineteenth century in order to avoid the charge of their being “atheists” and “infidels,” terms that carried sug­gestions of immorality in a still largely Christian society.⁶ These epithets

5. For example: Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Levi-Strauss and Malinowski, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987; Robert Segal, Theorizing About Myth, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999; and Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, Chicago: Univer­sity of Chicago Press, 2000.

6. The word “secularism” was coined by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851. “Secularism was intended to differentiate Holyoake’s anti-theistic position from Bradlaugh’s atheistic pronouncements, and, although Bradlaugh, Charles Watts, G. W. Foote, and other atheists were identified with the secular movement, Holyoake always endeavoured to make it possible that the social, political, and mattered not because the freethinkers were concerned about their personal safety, but because they sought to direct an emerging mass politics of social reform in a rapidly industrializing society.^{[17] [18] Lorig-standing habits of indif­ference, disbelief, or hostility among individuals toward Christian rituals and authorities were now becoming entangled with projects of total social reconstruction by means of legislation. A critical rearticulation was being negotiated between state law and personal morality.[19] This shift presup­posed the new idea of society as a total population of individuals enjoying not only subjective rights and immunities, and endowed with moral agency, but also possessing the capacity to elect their political representa­tives—a shift that occurred all at once in Revolutionary France (excluding women and domestics), and gradually in nineteenth-century England. The extension of universal suffrage was in turn linked—as Foucault has point­ed out—to new methods of government based on new styles of classifica­tion and calculation, and new forms of subjecthood.}

What follows is not a social history of secularization, nor even a his-

tory of it as an idea. It is an exploration of epistemological assumptions of the secular that might help us be a little clearer about what is involved in the anthropology of secularism. The secular, I argue, is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest ’ phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the op­posite, an essence that excludes the sacred). I take the secular to be a con­cept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life. To appreciate this it is not enough to show that what appears to be necessary is really contingent—that in certain respects “the secular” obviously overlaps with “the religious.” It is a matter of showing how con­tingencies relate to changes in the grammar of concepts—that is, how the changes in concepts articulate changes in practices.^[20] My purpose in this initial chapter, therefore, is not to provide the outline of a historical narra­tive but to conduct a series of inquiries into aspects of what we have come to call the secular. So although I follow some connections at the expense of others, this should not be taken to imply that I think there was a single line of filiation in the formation of “the secular.” In my view the secular is nei­ther singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity, although it works through a series of particular oppositions.

I draw my material almost entirely from West European history be­cause that history has had profound consequences for the ways that the doctrine of secularism has been conceived and implemented in the rest of the modernizing world. I try to understand the secular, the way it has been constituted, made real, connected to, and detached from particular histor­ical conditions.

The analyses that I offer here are intended as a counter to the tri- umphalist history of the secular. I take the view, as others have done, that the “religious” and the “secular” are not essentially fixed categories. How­ever, I do not claim that if one stripped appearances one would see that some apparently secular institutions were really religious! I assume, on the contrary, that there is nothing essentially religious, nor any universal essence \ that defines “sacred language” or “sacred experience.^¹ But I also assume that there were breaks between Christian and secular life in which words and practices were rearranged, and new discursive grammars replaced pre­vious ones. I suggest that the fuller implications of those shifts need to be explored. So I take up fragments of the history of a discourse that is often asserted to be an essential part of “religion”—or at any rate, to have a close affinity with it—to show how the sacred and thè secular depend on each other. I dwell briefly on how religious myth contributed to the formation of modern historical knowledge and modern poetic sensibility (touching on the way they have been adopted by some contemporary Arab poets), but I argue that this did not make history or poetry essentially “religious.”

That, too, is the case with recent statements by liberal thinkers for whom liberalism is a kind of redemptive myth. I point to the violence in­trinsic to it but caution that liberalisms secular myth should not be con­fused with the redemptive myth of Christianity, despite a resemblance be­tween them. Needless to say, my purpose is neither to criticize nor to endorse that myth. And more generally, I am not concerned to attack lib­eralism whether as a political system or as an ethical doctrinefHere, as in the other cases I deal with, I simply want to get away from the idea that the secular is a mask for religion, that secular political practices often simulate religious ones.)I therefore end with a brief outline of two con­ceptions of “the secular" that I see as available to anthropology today, and I do this through a discussion of texts by Paul de Man and Walter Benjamin, respectively.

A reading of origins: myth, truth, and power

West European languages acquire the word “myth” from the Greek, and stories about Greek gods were paradigmatic objects of critical reflec­tion when mythology became a discipline in early modernity. So a brief early history of the word and concept is in order.

In his book Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln opens with a fascinating early history of the Greek terms mythos and logos. Thus we are told that Hesiod’s Works and Days associates the speech of mythos with truth (alethea) and the speech of logos with lies and dissimulation. Mythos is powerful speech, the speech of heroes accustomed to prevail. In Homer, Lincoln points out, logos refers to speech that is usually designed to placate some­one and aimed at dissuading warriors from combat.

In the context of political assemblies mythoi are of two kinds— “straight” and “crooked.” Mythoi function in the context of law much as lo-

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? vj got do in the context of war. Mutkos in Homer, “is a speech-act indicating authority, performed at length, usually in public, with a full attention to every detail.”^{[21] [22] It never means a symbolic story that has to be deciphered— or for that matter, a false one. In the Odyssey, Odysseus praises poetry— asserting that it is truthful, that it affects the emotions of its audience, that it is able to reconcile differences—and he concludes his poetic narration by declaring that he has “recounted a mythos.”' '·}

At first, poets tended to authorize their speech by calling it mythos— an inspiration from the gods (what moderns call, in a new accent, the supernatural world)·, later, the Sophists taught that all speech originated with humans (who lived in this world). “Whereas the Christian world­view increasingly separates God from this world,” writes Jan Bremmer, “the gods of the Greeks were not transcendent but directly involved in nat­ural and social processes.... It is for such connections as between the hu­man and divine spheres that a recent study has called the Greek world-view ‘interconnected’ against our own ‘separative’ cosmology.”^[23] But there is more at stake here than the immanence or transcendence of divinity in re­lation to the natural world. The idea of “nature” is itself internally trans­formed.^[24] For the representation of the Christian God as being sited quite apart in “the supernatural” world signals the construction, of a secular space that begins to emerge in early modernity. Such a space permits “nature” to be reconceived as manipulatable material, determinate, homogeneous, and subject to mechanical laws. Anything beyond that space is therefore “su­pernatural”—a place that, for many, was a fanciful extension of the real world, peopled by irrational events and imagined beings.¹⁴ This transfor­mation had a significant effect on the meaning of “myth."

The mythoi of poets, so the Sophists said, are not only emotionally af­fecting, they are also lies in so far as they speak of the gods—although even as lies they may have a morally improving effect on an audience. This line is taken up and given a new twist by Plato who argued that philosophers and not poets were primarily responsible for moral improvement. In the course of his attack against poetry, Plato changed the sense of myth: it now comes to signify a socially useful lie.¹⁵

Enlightenment founders of mythology, such as Fontenelle, took this view of the beliefs of antiquity about its gods. Like many other cultivated men of his time, he regarded the study of myth as an occasion for reflect­ing on human error. “Although we are incomparably more enlightened than those whose crude minds invented Fables in good faith,” he wrote, “we easily reacquire the same turn of mind that made those Fables so at­tractive to them. They devoured them because they believed in them, and we devour them with just as much pleasure yet without believing in them. There is no better proof that the imagination and reason have little com­merce with each other, and that things with which reason has first become disillusioned lose none of their attractiveness to the imagination.”¹⁶ Fon­tenelle was a great naturalizer of “supernatural” events, in the period when “nature” emerges as a distinctive domain of experience and study,¹⁷

But in the Enlightenment epoch as a whole myths were never only objects of “belief” and of “rational investigation.” As elements of high cul­ture in early modern Europe they were integral to its characteristic sensi­bility: a cultivated capacity for delicate feeling—especially for sympathy— and an ability to be.moved by the pathetic in art and literature. Poems,

14. Amos Funkensteins Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, traces the new scientific worldview, with its ideals of the univocation of signs and the homogeneity of nature, as well as of mathematization and mechanization, that emerged in the seventeenth century. Funkenstein shows—especially in Chap­ter 2, entitled “Gods Omnipresence, Gods Body, and Four Ideals of Science”— how this required of theology a new ontology and epistemology of the deity.

15. Lincoln, p. 42.

16. Cited in Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 186.

17. Fontenelle’s debunking Histoire des oracles (1686) was rapidly published in English as The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of Pagan Priests, London, 1688.

F

paintings, the theater, public monuments, and private decoration in the homes of the rich depicted or alluded to the qualities and quests of Greek gods, goddesses, monsters, and heroes. Knowledge of such stories and fig­ures was a necessary part of an upper-class education. Myths allowed writ- »■ ers and artists to represent contemporary events and feelings in what we modems call a fictional mode. The distanced idealization of profane love, the exaggerated praise for the sovereign, were equally facilitated by a fabu­lous style. And this in turn facilitated a form of satire that aimed to un­mask or literalize. Ecclesiastical authority could thus be attacked in an in-. direct fashion, without immediately risking the charge of blasphemy. In general, the literary assault on mythic figures and events demonstrated a preference for a sensible life of happiness as opposed to the heroic ideal that was coming to be regarded as less and less reasonable in a bourgeois society. But, as Jean Starobinski reminds us, myth was more than a deco­rative language or a satirical one for taking a distance from the heroic as a social ideal. In the great tragedies and operas of the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, myths provided the material through which the psychol­ogy of human passions could be explored.¹⁸

So the question of whether people did or did not believe in these an­cient narratives—whether (as Fontenelle suggested) by appealing to the imagination untruths were made attractive—does not quite engage with the terrain that mythic discourse inhabited in this culture. Myth was not merely a (mis) representation of the real, It was material for shaping the possibilities and limits of action. And in general it appears to have done this by feeding the desire to display the actual—a desire that became in­creasingly difficult to satisfy as the experiential opportunities of modernity multiplied.

Some modern commentators have observed that statements such as Fontenelle’s signaled a mutation of the older opposition between sacred and profane into a new opposition between imagination and reason, prin­ciples that inaugurate the secular Enlightenment.¹⁹ This change, they sug­gest, should be seen as the replacement of a religious hegemony by a secu­lar one. But I think what we have here is something more complicated. The first point to note is that in the newer binary Reason is endowed with the major work of defining, assessing, and regulating the human imagination to which “myth” was attributed. Marcel Detienne puts it this

18. Starobinski, p. 182.

19. Among them, Starobinski.

way: “exclusionary procedures multiply in the discourse of the science of myths, borne on a vocabulary of scandal that indicts all figures of other­ness. Mythology is on the side of the primitive, the inferior races, the peoples of nature, the language of origins, childhood, savagery, madness—always the other, as the excluded figure.”²⁰ But the sacred had not been endowed with such a function in the past, and there was as yet no unitary domain in social life and thought that the concept of “the sacred” organized. Instead there i

were disparate places, objects, and times, each with its qualities, and each re- |

quirihg conduct and words appropriate to it. This point requires elaboration, I

so I will now discuss the sacred/profane binary before returning to the theme of myth.

i

A digression on the “sacred” and the “profane”

In the Latin of the Roman Republic, the word sacer referred to any­thing that was owned by a deity, having been “taken out of the region of the profanum by the action of the State, and passed on into that of the sacrum.”²' However, even then there was an intriguing exception: the term homo sacer was used for someone who, as the result of a curse {sacer esto), became an outlaw liable to be killed by anyone with impunity. Thus while the sacredness of property dedicated to a god made it inviolable, the sa­credness of homo sacer made him eminently subject to violence. This con­tradictory usage has been explained by classicists (with the acknowledged help of anthropologist colleagues) in terms of “taboo,” a supposedly prim­itive notion that confounds ideas of the sacred with those of the unclean, ideas that “spiritual” religion was later to distinguish and use more logi­cally.²² The conception that “taboo” is the primordial origin of “the sacred”

20. Detienne, pp. 46-47, italics in original.

21. W. W Fowler, “The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer,” in Roman Es­says and Interpretations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920, p. 15.

22. “If this is the right meaning of the word sacer in sacer esto, we may, I think, trace it back to the older stage in which it meant simply ‘taboo’ without ref­erence to a deity, and we have seen that it seems to be so used in one or two of the ancient laws” (Fowler, p. 21). But the evolutionary explanation offered here is at once dubious and unnecessary. Giorgio Agamben has more interestingly argued

"* that the “sacred man,” object of the curse sacer esto, must be understood in relation to the logic of sovereignty, which he regards as the absolute power over life and i

death in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni­versity Press, 1998.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 31 has a long history in anthropology, from which it was borrowed not only by classics to understand antique religion but also by Christian theology to reconstruct a “true” one. The anthropological part of that history is critically examined in a study by Franz Steiner in which he shows that the notion "taboo” is built on very shaky ethnographic and linguistic foundations.²³

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “sacred” in early modern English usage generally referred to individual things, persons, and occa­sions that were set apart and entitled to veneration. Yet if we consider the examples given in the dictionary—the poetic line “That sacred Fruit, sa­cred to abstinence,” the inscription “sacred to the memory of Samuel But­ler,” the address-form “your sacred majesty,” the phrase "a sacred con­cert”—it is virtually impossible to identify the setting apart or the venerating as being the same act in all cases. The subject to whom such things, occasions, or persons are said to be sacred does not stand in the same relation to them. It was late nineteenth-century anthropological and theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages rooted in changing and heterogeneous forms of life into a single im­mutable essence, and claimed it to be the object of a universal human ex­perience called “religious.”²⁴ The supposedly universal opposition between

23. In fact Steiner claimed that the problem of taboo was a Victorian inven­tion, occasioned by ideological and social developments in Victorian society itself. See Franz Steiner, Taboo, London: Cohen & West, 1956.

24. The classic statement is Durkheim’s. “All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic,” writes Durkheim. “They presuppose a classification of all things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred {profane, sacrT). The division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought; the beliefs, myths, dog­mas and legends are either representations or systems of representations which ex­press the nature of sacred things, the virtues and powers that are attributed to them, or their relations with each other and with profane things. But by sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred. A rite can have this character; in fact, the rite does not exist which does not have it to a certain degree. There are words, expressions and formulae which can be pronounced only by the mouths of consecrated persons; there are gestures and movements which everybody cannot perform” {Elementary Forms of the Reli­gious Life, 1915, p. 37). Critics have objected that Durkheim was wrong to claim that “sacred” and “profane” finds no place in premodern writing. In medieval theology, the overriding antinomy was between “the divine” and “the Sa­tanic” (both of them transcendent powers) or “the spiritual” and “the tem­poral” (both of them worldly institutions), not between a supernatural sa­cred and a natural profane.

In France, for example, the word sacre was not part of the language of ordinary Christian life in the Middle Ages and in early modern times.²⁵ It had learned uses, by which reference could be made to particular things (vessels), institutions (the College of Cardinals), and persons (the body of the king), but no unique experience was presupposed in relation to the ob­jects to which it referred, and they were not set apart in a uniform way. The word and the concept that mattered to popular religion during this entire period—that is, to practices and sensibilities—was sainted, a beneficent quality of certain persons and their relics, closely connected to the common people and their ordinary world. The word sacrt becomes salient at the time of the Revolution and acquires intimidating resonances of secular power. Thus the Preamble to the Declaration des Droits de I’homme (1789) speaks of “droits naturels, inalienables et sacres.” The right to property is qualified sacri in article i/. ^L’amour sacrd de la patrie” is a common nineteenth­century expression.²⁶ Clearly the individual experience denoted by these usages, and the behavior expected of the citizen claiming to have it, were quite different from anything signified by the term “sacred” during the Middle Ages. It was now part of the discourse integral to functions and as­pirations of the modern, secular state, in which the sacralization of indi­vidual citizen and collective people expresses a form of naturalized power.²⁷

Francois Isambert has described in detail how the Durkheimian profane and sacred are mutually exclusive domains because profane things can be­come sacred and vice versa. (See William Paden, “Before ‘The Secular’ Became Theological: Rereading The Durkheimian Legacy,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 3, no. 1,1991, who defends Durkheim against this charge.) More re­cently, critics have protested that in ordinary life sacred and profane are typically “scrambled together.” But even such critics accept the universality of the sacred, which they represent as a special kind of power. What they object to is the idea of its rigid separation from “the materiality of everyday life” (see Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, chapter 1).

25. See Michel Despland, “The Sacred: The French Evidence,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 3, no. 1,1991, p. 43.

26. Ibid.

27. See the excellent history of universal suffrage in France: Pierre Rosan- vallon, Le sacre du citoyen, Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

school, drawing upon Robertson Smiths notion of “taboo” as the typical form of primitive religion, arrived at the scholarly concept of “the sacred” as a universal essence.^[28] The sacred came to refer to everything of social in­terest—collective states, traditions, sentiments—that society elaborates as ^r representations, and was even said to be the evolutionary source of cogni­tive categories.^[29] The sacred, constituted first by anthropologists and then taken over by theologians, became a universal quality hidden in things and an objective limit to mundane action. The sacred was at once a transcen­dent force that imposed itself on the subject and a space that must never, under threat of dire consequence, be violated—that is, profaned. In brief, “the sacred” came to be constituted as a mysterious, mythic thing,^[30] the fo­cus of moral and administrative disciplines.

It was in the context of an emerging discipline of comparative reli­gion that anthropology developed a transcendent notion of the sacred. An interesting version of this is to be found in the work of R. R. Marett,^[31] who proposed that ritual should be regarded as having the function of regulat­ing emotions, especially in critical situations of life, an idea that enabled him to offer a well-known anthropological definition of the sacraments: “For anthropological purposes,” he wrote, “let us define a sacrament as any rite of which the specific object is to consecrate or make sacred. More ex­plicitly, this means any rite which by way of sanction or positive blessing invests a natural function with a supernatural authority of its own.”^[32]

This notion of the sacrament as an institution designed to invest life­cycle crises (“mating,” “dying,” and so forth) with “supernatural authority,” of its being essentially a “religious psychotherapy” as Marett also puts it, is presented as having general comparative application. But it stands in marked contrast, for example, to the medieval Christian concept of the sacrament. Thus the twelfth-century theologian Hugh of St. Victor, responding to the question “What is a sacrament?” first considers the conventional defini­tion: “A sacrament is a sign of a sacred thing,” but then goes on to point out that it will not do, because various statues and pictures as well as the words of Scripture are all, in their different ways, signs of sacred things without being sacraments. So he proposes a more adequate definition: “A sacrament is a corporeal or material element [sounds, gestures, vestments, instruments] set before the senses without, representing by similitude and signifying by institution and containing by sanctification some invisible and spiritual grace.” For example, the water of baptism represents the washing of sins from the soul by analogy with the washing of impurities from the body, signifies it for the believer because of Christs inaugurating practice, and conveys—by virtue of the words and actions of the officiat­ing priest who performs the baptism—spiritual grace. The three functions are not self-evident but must be identified and expounded by those in au­thority. (Medieval Christians learnt the meanings of elaborate allegories used in the mass through authorized commentaries.) Thus according to Hugh, a sacrament—from the moment of its authoritative foundation— was a complex network of signifiers and signifieds that acts, like an icon, commemoratively. The icon is both itself and a sign of what is already pres­ent in the minds of properly disciplined participants; it points backward to their memory and forward to their expectation as Christians.³³ It does not make sense to say, with reference to the account Hugh gives, that in the sacraments “natural” functions are endowed with “supernatural” authority (that is, a transcendent endowment), still less that the sacraments are a psy­chotherapy for helping humans through their life-crises (a useful myth). Hugh insists that there are conditions in which the sacraments are not rec­ognized for what they are: “This is why the eyes of infidels who see only visible things despise venerating the sacraments of salvation, because be­holding in this only what is contemptible without invisible species they do not recognize the invisible virtue within and the fruit of obedience.”³⁴ The authority of the sacraments is itself an engagement of the Christian subject

33.1 discuss Hugh of St. Victor’s account of the sacraments in some detail in Genealogies of Religion, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 153-58.

34-Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, ed. R. J. Defarrari, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951, p. 156.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 35 ■with, ■what his eyes see as an embodiment of divine grace.^[33] Grace is con­ceived of as a particular state of unawareness within a relationship, not as a divine payment for ritual assiduity.

What facilitated the essentialization of “the sacred” as an external, transcendent power? My tentative answer is that new theorizations of the sacred were connected with European encounters with the non-European world, in the enlightened space and time that witnessed the construction of “religion” and “nature” as universal categories. From early modern Eu­rope—through what is retrospectively called the secular Enlightenment and into the long nineteenth century, within Christian Europe and in its. overseas possessions—the things, words, and practices distinguished or set apart by “Nature Folk” were constituted by Europeans as “fetish” and “taboo.”^[34] What had been regarded in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­turies in theological terms as “idolatry” and “devil-worship”^[35] (devotion to false gods) became the secular concept of “superstition” (a meaningless sur­vival)^[36] in the framework of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evolu­tionary thought. But they remained objects and relations falsely given truth status, wrongly endowed with virtuous power. They had to be con­stituted as categories of illusion and oppression before people could be lib­erated from them, as Freud knew when he used “fetish” and “taboo” to identify symptoms of primitive repressions in the psychopathology of modern individuals.

It may therefore be suggested that “profanation” is a kind of forcible emancipation from error and despotism. Reason requires that false things be either proscribed and eliminated, or transcribed and re-sited as objects to be seen, heard, and touched by the properly educated senses. By suc­cessfully unmasking pretended power (profaning it) universal reason dis­plays its own status as legitimate power. By empowering new things, this status is further confirmed. So the “sacred right to property” was made universal after church estates and common lands were freed. And the “sanctity ofconscience” was constituted a universal principle in opposition to ecclesiastical authority and the rules casuistry authorized. At the very moment of becoming secular, these claims were transcendentalized, and they set in motion legal and moral disciplines to protect themselves (with violence where necessary) as universal.³⁹ Although profanation appears to shift the gaze from the transcendental to the mundane, what it does is re­arrange barriers between the illusory and the actual.

Developing a Durkheimian insight, Richard Comstock has suggested that “the sacred, as a kind of behaving, is not merely a number of immedi­ate appearances, but a set of rules—prescriptions, proscriptions, interdic­tions—that determine the shape of the behavior and whether it is to count as an instance of the category in question.”⁴⁰ This is helpful, but I think one also needs to attend to the tripartite fact that (i) all rule-governed be­havior carries social sanctions, but that (2) the severity of the social sanc­tions varies according to the danger that the infringement of the rule con­stitutes for a particular ordering of society, and that (3) such assessments of danger do not remain historically unchanged. Attention to this fact should shift our preoccupation with definitions of “the sacred” as an object of ex­perience to the wider question of how a heterogeneous landscape of power (moral, political, economic) is constituted, what disciplines (individual and collective) are necessary to it. This does not mean that “the sacred” must be regarded as a mask of power, but that we should look to what makes cer­tain practices conceptually possible, desired, mandatory—including the everyday practices by which the subject s experience is disciplined.⁴¹ Such

39. Thus Durkheim on secular morality: “Ainsi le domaine de la morale est comme entoure d’une barrière mysterieuse qui en tient à l’ecart les ptofanateurs, tout comme le domaine religieux est sustrait aux atteintes du profane. C’est un domaine sacre.” Cited in Isambert, p. 234.

40. “A Behavioral Approach to the Sacred: Category Formation in Religious Studies,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. XLDC, no. 4,1981, p. 632.

41. It is of some interest that attempts to introduce a unified concept of “the sacred” into non-European languages have met with revealing problems of trans­lation. Thus although the Arabic word qadasa is usually glossed as "sacredness” in English, it remains the case that it will not do in all the contexts where the English term is now used. Translation of “the sacred” calls for a variety of words (muhar-

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 37 an approach, I submit, would give us a better understanding of how the sa­cred (and therefore the profane) can become the object not only of reli­gious thought but of secular practice too.

Myth and the Scriptures

I referred above to some functions of myth as secular discourse in Enlightenment art and manners. The part played by myth as sacred dis­course in religion and poetry during the nineteenth and twentieth cen­turies is more complicated. Inevitably, in what follows I must select and simplify.

It has been remarked that the German Higher Criticism liberated the Bible from “the letter of divine inspiration” and allowed it to emerge, as “a system of human significances.”⁴² We should note, however, that that lib­eration signals a far-reaching change in the sense of “inspiration”—-from an authorized reorientation of life toward a telos, into a psychology of artistry whose source is obscure—and therefore becomes the object of speculation (belief / knowledge).⁴³ It was a remarkable transformation. For in the for­mer, the divine word, both spoken and written, was necessarily also mate­rial. As such, the inspired words were the object of a particular person’s rev­erence, the means of his or her practical devotions at particular times and places. The body, taught over time to listen, to recite, to move, to be still, to be silent, engaged with the acoustics of words, with their sound, feel, ram, mutahhar, mukhtass ‘bi-l-’ibada, and so on), each of which connects with dif­ferent kinds of behavior. (See below, my discussion of the self-conscious resort to myth in modern Arabic poetry.)

42. E. S. Shaffer, "Kubla Khan” andThe Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770-1880, Cambridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 1975, p. 10.

43. In the middle of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot attempted a formula­tion that embraced both religious and secular senses of the notion: "if the word ‘in­spiration’ is to have any meaning, it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something which he does not wholly understand—or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him. This is certainly true of poetic inspiration.... [The poet] need not know what his potetry will come to mean to others, and a prophet need not understand the meaning of his prophetic utterance.” “Virgil and the Christian World” [tyfi], in On Poetry and Poets, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957,

and look Practice at devotions deepened the inscription of sound, look, and feel in his sensoritim. When the devotee heard God speak, there was a sensuous connection between inside and outside, a fusion between signifier and signified. The proper reading of the scriptures that enabled her to hear divinity speak depended on disciplining the senses (especially hearing, speech, and sight).

In contrast, the mythic method used by the Higher Biblical Criticism rendered the materiality of scriptural sounds and marks into a ipmtwzz/poem whose effect was generated inside the subject as believer independent of the senses. An earlier change had assisted this shift. As John Montag has argued, the notion of “revelation” signifying a statement that issues from a supernat­ural being and that requires mental assent on the part of the believer dates only from the early modern period. For medieval theologians, he writes, “revelation has to do primarily with one’s perspective on things in light of one’s final end. It is not a supplementary packet of information about ‘facts’ which à㸠round the bend, as it were, from rational comprehension or phys­ical observation.”⁴⁴ According to Thomas Aquinas, the prophetic gift of rev­elation is a passion to be undergone, not a faculty to be used, and among the words he uses to refer to it is inspiration A neo-Platonic hierarchy of medi­ations linked divinity to all creatures, allowing the medium of language to facilitate the union of the divine with the human.

With the Reformation (and the Counter-Reformation) an unmedi­ated divinity became scripturally disclosable, and his revelations pointed at once to his presence and his intentions. Thus language acquired the status of being extra-real, capable of “representing” and “reflecting”—and there­fore also of “masking” the real. “The experiment, in the modern sense of the word,” notes Michel de Certeau, “was born with the deontologizing of lan­guage, to which the birth of a linguistics also corresponds. In Bacon and many others, the experiment stood opposite language as that which guar­anteed and verified the latter. This split between a deictic language (it shows and/or organizes) and a referential experimentation (it escapes and/or guarantees) structures modern science, including ‘mystical sci­ence.’”⁴⁶ Where had once been a virtue, it now acquired an epistemo­

logical sense. Faith became a way of knowing supernatural objects, parallel

44. John Montag, “Revelation: The False Legacy of Sudrez,” in Radical Ortho­doxy, ed. J. Milbank, C. Pickstock, and G. New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 43.

45. Montag, p. 46.

46. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable; Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992, p. 123.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 39 to the knowledge of nature (the real world) that reason and observation provided. This difference in the economy of “inspiration” needs to be in­vestigated further, but it may be suggested that the modern poetic concep­tion of “inspiration” is a subjectivized accommodation to the transforma­tions here referred to.

Of course, I do not intend a simple historical generalization. For on the one hand the idea of an inner dialogue with God has deep roots in the Christian mystical tradition (as it has in non-Christian traditions), and on the other, a fusion between physical and significant sound has been a part of modern evangelical experience since at least the eighteenth century.^[47] But my interest is in genealogy. I do not claim that Protestant culture was uniquely interested in inner spiritual states—as though medieval Christ­ian life, with its tich tradition of mystical experience, had had no interest in them. My concern is primarily with a conceptual question: What were the epistemological implications of the different ways that varieties of Christians and freethinkers engaged with the Scriptures through their senses? (Discounting, suppressing, marginalizing one or more of the senses are also, of course, ways of engaging with its materiality.) How did Scrip­ture as the medium in which divinity could be experienced come to be viewed as information about or from the supernatural? Alternatively: In what ways did the newly sharpened opposition Between the merely “mate- rial”sign and the truly “spiritual” meaning become pivotal for the recon­figuration of “inspiration”?

Robertson Smith, theologian, anthropologist, and devotee of the Higher Criticism, provides an example of the shifting direction and char­acter of inspiration in his essay on the Old Testament as poetry, where he distinguishes poetry as force from poetry as art. This enables him to speak of all genuine poetry, whether secular or religious, as “spiritual.” For when poetry moves "from heart to heart”⁴⁸ it becomes the manifestation of a

48. Contrasting Robert Lowth, who was among the first to approach the Old Testament as poetry, with Johann Gottfried Herder, Robertson Smith writes: “While Lowth busies himself with the art of Hebrew poetry, the theologian of Weimar expressly treats of its spirit. If the former professed only to commend a choice poetry to students of polite letters..., the latter seeks to introduce his readers, through the aesthetic form, into the inmost spirit of the Old Testa­ment.... Lowth proposed to survey the streams of sacred poetry, without as­cending to the mysterious source. Herders great strength lies in his demonstration of the way in which the noble poetry of Israel gushes forth with natural uncon­strained force from the depths of a spirit touched with divinely inspired emotion. Lowth finds in the Bible a certain mass of poetical material, and says: ‘I desire to estimate the sublimity and other virtues of this literature—i.e. its power to affect mens minds, a power that will be proportional to its conformity to the true rules of poetic art.’ Nay, says Herder, the true power of poetry is that it speaks from the heart to the heart. True criticism is not the classification of poetic effects according to the principles of rhetoric, but the unfolding of the living forces which moved the poet’s soul. To enjoy a poem is to share the emotion that inspired its author” (William Robertson Smith, “Poetry of the Old Testament” in Lectures and Essays, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1912, p. 405, italics in original). All early poets, says Robertson Smith, united inner feeling with outer nature, and among the an­cient Greeks and heathen Semites this union is differently reflected in each reli­gion. In the latter “Always we find a religion of passionate emotion, not a worship of the outer powers and phenomena of nature in their sensuous beauty, but of those inner powers, awful because unseen, of which outer things are only the sym­bol” (ibid., p. 425). The evolutionary thought here is that the Semitic worship of inner (spiritual) powers as opposed to outer (material) forms enabled them to be­come the recipients of divine revelation (a communication from the deity), al­though the advance of the Hebrews from formal to spiritual religion was continu­ally retarded by lapses into idolatry.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 41 transcendent force that secular literary critics now refer to by the theologi­cal term “epiphany.”

But as skepticism about the source of inspiration thought of as com­munication led to a questioning of the idea that the scriptures were di-, vinely given, a concern with their historical authenticity—with true ori­gins—became increasingly urgent. If God did not directly inspire the Gospels, then Christian belief demanded that at least the accounts of Jesus they contained should be “reliable,” because only then would they guaran­tee the life and death of Christ in this world, and thus bear witness to the truth of the Incarnation.⁴⁹

Much has been written on the way Protestant historians helped to form the notion of history as a collective, singular subject. “If the new view of History and the historian secularized revealed religion,” observes John Stroup, “it also tended to sacralize profane events and the universal historian.... By the end of the Enlightenment sacred and profane history were so intertwined that it was hard to disentangle them.”⁵⁰ In the same vein, Starobinski writes of the mythicization of modern history as pro­gress: “It is not enough to note, as many have done, the existence of a ‘sec­ularizing’ process in enlightenment philosophy, a process in which man claims for reason prerogatives that had belonged to the divine logos. An opposite tendency also existed: myth, at first excluded and declared to be absurd, was now endowed with full and profound meaning and prized as revealed truth.”⁵¹ I

But I turn from the old themes of historical teleology and of the sacralization of history to focus on the project of historical authenticity. In that connection one should note that it was not an already constituted dis-

49. “If the question is whether the Christian religion is divinely inspired,” noted the eighteenth-century theologian Johann David Michaelis, “authenticity, or lack of authenticity, of Scripture turns out to be more important than one might assume at first glance,..; Assuming that God did not inspire any of.the books of the New Testament but simply left Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul the freedom to write what they knew, provided only that their writings are old, au­thentic and reliable, the Christian religion would still be the true one” (cited in Pe­ter Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modem Age, Leiden: Brill, 1994, p. 315-16).

50. J. Stroup, “Protestant Church Historians in the German Enlighten­ment,” in H. E. Bodeker et al., eds., Aufklärung und Geschichte, Gottingen: Van- denhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986, p. 172.

51. Starobinski, p. 192.

cipline of secular history that was endowed with sacredness. On the con­trary, it was Christian doubt and anxiety⁵²—the discontinuities of Christ­ian life—that drove biblical scholars to develop textual techniques that have since become part of the foundation of modern, secular historiogra­phy.⁵³ Herbert Butterfield, in his history of modern historiography, puts it this way: “the truth of religion was so momentous an issue, and the con­troversies about it so intense, that the critical methods were developing in ecclesiastical research before anybody thought of transposing them into the field of modern history.”⁵⁴ But this move should not, strictly speaking, be thought of as a transposition. A secular critique developed, accidentally as it were, out of a concern with the apparent unviability of Christian tradi­tional practice and that in itself helped to constitute the field of written secular history. The result was a clearer split between “scientific” history

52. There were other conditions as well. “The rise of the central state im­plied the emergence of a literate group whose horizons were not determined by the ideas of particularistic society,” writes Stroup. “In accord with this emergence was the origin of the Pietist and Enlightenment Christianity placing great emphasis on public toleration and private religiosity: the institutional church and its dogma were to be of secondary importance. What mattered was arriving at a Christianity that transcended existing factions: one immune from the machinations of the cler­ical estate. The related attack on the divine legitimation, apostolic foundation, and juridical privilege of the existing institutional church and its dogma and clergy, utilized an appeal to history. The effort was made to reshape Christianity so as to remove any rough edges disturbing to the central state and its social allies” (op. cit., p. 170). However, it is not so much the alleged motives of theologians that in­terest me as the techniques they devised—such as “source criticism”—-that helped to produce the field of modern secular history.

53. There were, of course, earlier moments in the construction of modern history that can be identified retrospectively. Thus, significant steps were taken in that direction during the Counter-Reformation by the Dominican theologian Melchior Cano when he sought to defend the traditional authorities under assault (see Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History, New York: Columbia, 1963, “Chapter VII. Mel­chior Cano: The Foundations of Historical Belief”). But my concern here is with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments when the idea of “secular” his­tory separated itself definitively from “religious.”

• 54. Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Histor­ical Scholarship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955, pp. ij-r6. Butter­field is summarizing Lord Acton.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 43 (including ecclesiastical history)^[55] that depended on an attitude of skepti­cal inquiry in pursuit of authenticity, and “imaginative” literature (or reli­gion and the arts generally) that depended on setting aside the question of propositional validity. This growing split was what consolidated “secular history”—history as the record of “what really happened” in this world— and in the same moment, it shaped the modern understanding of “myth,” “sacred discourse,” and “symbolism.” As textualized memory, secular history has of course became integral to modern life in the nation-state. But al­though it is subject, like all remembered time, to continuous re-formation, reinvestment, and reinvocation, secular history’s linear temporality has be­come the privileged measure of all time. The rereading of the scriptures through the grid of myth has not only separated the sacred from the secu­lar, it has helped to constitute the secular as the epistemological domain in which history exists as history—and as anthropology.

In the mythic rereading of the scriptures, Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection could still be represented as foundational. But in the course of this reconstruction, Christian faith sought a reconsideration of the question of inspiration. God might not have literally dictated to the Old Testament prophets and to the apostles of the New, but the faithful Christiani sought some sense in which they could still be said to be “in­spired”—that is, literally breathed into by the Holy Spirit. Herder had ini­tiated an answer by attributing to the Old Testament prophets a gift for giving expression to the power of the spirit, but it was his follower Eich­horn who applied this thought systematically. It was Eichhorn, too, who provided a new solution to the irreconcilable claims of skeptics and believ­ers—the claim, on the one hand, that the prophets were charlatans, and on the other, that they were spokesmen for the divinity. Prophets, Eichhorn proposed disarmingly, were inspired artists. But what appears to have gone largely unnoticed was that while prophets were called, artists were not. Artists might commune with God’s creation—but they could not hear his voice. Not, at any rate, in their capacity as poets.

Given that inspiration was no longer to be thought of as direct di­vine communication, romantic poets identified it in a way that could be accepted by skeptics and believers alike. Elaine Shaffer observes that Cole­ridge used sleep, waking dream, and opium (which he took for the relief 44 SECULAR

of pain) to suspend normal perception and to attain to a state that could be described as an illuminated trance.⁵⁶ In this, as in other cases, there was more than a simple attempt to reassure skeptical opinion: a new twist was given to prpblematize further the notion of a unitary, self-conscious sub­ject by attributing to fragmented states access to radically different kinds of experience.⁵⁷

According to Coleridges theory of imagination, poetic vision pre­supposed the alteration of ordinary perception, regardless of how it might be attained.⁵⁸ No longer opposed to reason, as in the secular Enlighten­ment, “imagination” now acquired some of reasons functions, and stood in contrast to “fancy.”⁵⁹ For Coleridge, himself deeply read in German Bibli­cal Criticism, prophets were not men who sought to predict the future but creative poets who expressed a vision of their community’s past—the past both as a renewal of the present and as a promise for the future. And a “re-

56. There is an interesting discussion of “anaesthetic revelation” in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Fontana Books, i960 [1902], Lectures XVI and XVII. James is agnostic about the source of the mystical experiences re­ported by many subjects who had undergone total anesthesia for a surgical opera­tion. But commenting on the ecstasies of Saint Teresa, he writes: “To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life” (p. 398). James’s reli­gious philosophy requires that the idea of a governing consciousness be retained so that actions attributed to a unitary subject can be assessed overall on a pragmatic basis. In his assumption of a unitary subject James is closer to Freud—with his concept of a consciousness that misreads the language of its suppressed uncon­scious, an unconscious that needs to be unmasked through the practice of analy­sis—than either is to the notion of a decentered self whose successive experiences can never be recovered. True, Freud greatly complicated his earlier picture of id and ego as occupying respectively the domain of the unconscious and of con- »

sciousness, so that ego eventually came to be seen as itself partly unconscious. But it remains the case that the therapeutic work of analysis cannot take place if the self ' is taken to be horizontally decenteted. |

57. Eighteenth-century sensationalist psychology of Condillac and Hartley i

had begun, in its own way, to do this. JI

58. E. S. Shaffer, p. 90. jjjl

59. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria [1817].

newal,” as the Durkheimian Henri Hubert was to point out much later, is a repetition, a participation in mythic time.⁶⁰

Not only was it conceded that prophets and apostles were not super­human, they were even credited with an awareness of their personal inad- ’ equacy as channels of revelation. In the romantic conception of the poet, the tension between authentic inspiration and human weakness allowed for moments of subjective illusion—and thus accounted for evidence of exaggeration and insufficiency. In this regard the prophets and apostles were no different. What mattered was not the authenticity of facts about the past but the power of the spiritual idea they sought to convey as gifted humans.⁶¹

I now move from the history of Christian theology briefly to the his­tory of ethnography, where we find changing concepts of inspiration en­tangled with an emerging experimental physiology and concepts of artistic genius.

Shamanism: inspiration and sensibility

An accumulating ethnography of shamans in the eighteenth century contributed to the recrafting of the idea of “inspiration” in secular terms.

60. See Francois Isambert, “At the Frontier of Folklore and Sociology: Hubert, Hertz and Czarnowski, Founders of a Sociology of Religion,” in The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology, ed. P. Besnard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

61. As the Hegelian David Strauss wrote in the preface to his epochal Lift of Jesus (1835): “Orthodox and rationalists alike proceed from the false assumption that we have always in the gospels testimony, sometimes even that of eye-witnesses, to fact. They are, therefore, reduced to asking themselves what can have been the real and natural fact which is here witnessed to in such extraordinary ways. We have to realize that the narrators testify sometimes, not to outward facts, but to ideas, often most practical and beautiful ideas, constructions which even eye-witnesses had un­consciously put upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflections upon them, reflections such as were natural to the time and the author’s level of culture. What we have here is not falsehood, but misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naive, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of the truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in narrative, leg­endary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic statement could achieve” (cited in W. Neil, “The Criticism and Theological Use of the Bible, 1700-1950,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 276).

This involved not only the shifting of all causation from outside the world of material bodies entirely into that world, but also an “inside” that had to be progressively redefined. That shift also served to separate healthy from unhealthy states of mind and behavior, and led—in the thought of Enlightenment rationalism—to the doctrine that morality be based on medical science rather than the other way around, as the older Christian view had it.

From the very beginnings of the encounter between Europeans and aboriginal peoples, Christian doctrine and rationalist skepticism tended to describe shamans⁶² as demon worshipers, magicians, charlatans, or quacks, and the shamanic stance, with its drumming, its contorted gestures and strange cries, as merely grotesque attempts at deception. The shamans claims to be able to divine and prognosticate were invariably dismissed and classed with the priests and soothsayers of antiquity who had pretended to commune with gods and spirits. But Enlightenment demystification did not preclude a curiosity, in some reports at least, about shamanic healing abilities. Greater attention was therefore given to the theatricality of stances, which were sometimes acknowledged to be remarkable perform­ances in which music and rhythm helped to enrapture an audience and soothe the sufferer. There was some interest, too, in the natural substances used by shamans to cure or alleviate pain or illness.⁶³ However, such inter­est came from a culture in which pain was increasingly regarded as having an origin entirely internal to a mechanistic world and therefore susceptible only to the action of elements in that world. The shaman was a striking ex­ample of occult powers that appeared to elude the world of nature. As in­habitants of the supernatural they had to be explained—or explained away.

In eighteenth-century Europe the understanding of pain was under­going momentous changes that have been retrospectively labeled “secular­ization.”⁶⁴ Roselyne Rey, in her medical history of pain, describes a signif-

62. Michael Taussig has written an interesting study, partly historical and partly ethnographic, on the subject in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. Taussig’s book is one of the sources of in­spiration for Caroline Humphrey’s Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power Among the Daur Mongols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

63. Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century, Princeton:.Princeton University Press, 1992.

64. A triumphalist history of the secularization pf pain describes the process as a move from the premodem resignation to suffering and cruelty justified or condoned by religious beliefs, to the accumulation of scientific knowledge and the

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 47 leant transformation in the deliberations of physicians belonging to the vi- talist school; The myth of punishment for original sin was translated by the latter into the myth of punishment for transgressions against the laws of nature (for example, following a wrong diet or failing to exercise.)^{[64] [65] This was a simple metaphorical translation, by which Nature was personified and endowed with an agency originally possessed by God.[66] But there was another and more interesting shift that Rey also identifies, one that was not merely a matter of metaphorical substitution but of a change in the gram­mar of the concept.}

Citing attacks by the philosophes on the Christian justification of. pain (a celebration of pain that begins with the myth of Christs suffering) she notes that the discourse of sin and punishment was being set aside in favor of another.^[67] In this newer discourse pain began to be objectified, set in the framework of a mechanistic philosophy, and sited within an accu­mulating knowledge of the living body acquired through the discipline of vivisection: “even a religious or indeed devout figure such as Haller,” writes Rey of one of the great early experimenters, “could approach the question of pain without introducing religious obsessions; it is true that this was eas­ier for someone whose work involved experimenting on animals, rather than being a physician [that is, being someone who cultivated in himself the arts of healing and comforting]. With Haller and the beginning of the experimental method, the definition of sensibility and the respective func­tions of the nerves and the muscles found themselves based on more sci­entific foundations.”⁶⁸ That is to say, activity and passivity are distinguished in empiricist terms, by which feelingis attributed to the former and denied to the latter.

In this example the secularization of pain signals not merely the abandonment of a transcendental language (“religious obsessions”) but the shift to a new preoccupation—from the personal attempt at consoling and curing (that is, inhabiting a social relationship) to a distanced attempt at investigating the functions and sensations of the living body. Pain is in­flicted in systematic fashion on animals in order to understand its physio­logical basis.⁶⁹ So on the one hand we have pain inhabiting a discourse be­tween patient and physician; on the other, pain is the reading made through experimental observation in a context where—as de Certeau noted—language has become de-ontologized. It is this latter model that in­forms Enlightenment skepticism toward the shaman’s curative claims (mixed up as they are with ecstatic displays and “inspiration” by invisible spirits) and helps to constitute the secular domain of physiological knowl­edge through written reports of experimental results.⁷⁰ The contrast is not properly described in terms of “disenchantment” when what is at stake are different patterns of sensibility about pain, and different ways of objectify­ing it. Thus a question that preoccupied Haller in his animal experiments was whether pain was the product of the stimulus or of the body part to which it was applied: “It was in order to resolve this problem that, in his experiments, Haller multiplied and diversified the types of reagent and means used to stimulate a given part, using a process of elimination: thus he successively applied thermal stimulants, mechanical stimulants (tearing,

68. Ibid., p. 91.

69. “In Hallers work,” Rey observes, “the animals pain became an instru­ment of physiological investigation which allowed him to establish that only the nerves and the innervated parts are sensitive, whilst only muscle fibres are irrita­ble” (ibid., p. no).

70. Ibid., p. 109. In a review article on Roy Porters history of medicine, Thomas Laqueur notes ruefully the counterpoint of violence, the pain inflicted ex­perimentally on animals and on humans, that has accompanied the triumphant story of modern medicine (T. Laqueur, “Even Immortality,” London Review of Books, July 29,1999).

cuts, etc.) and chemical stimulants (oil of vitriol, spirit of nitrate) to each part. Electricity, and particularly galvanism when it was discovered, also provided a means of measuring the irritability of the parts and their resid­ual vitality after death. The entire body was thoroughly investigated from, head to toe: membranes, cellular tissue, tendons and aponeuroses, bones and cartilages, muscles, glands, nerves, etc.” The concept of “experience” that had from early on had the sense of putting something to the test was now being used to identify an internal state through an external manipu­lation (“experiment”).^[68]

However, the claims of quacks (to whom shamans were often likened) were not always dismissed. Jerome Gaub, member of the Royal Society and professor of medicine, regarded their rhetoric and the credulity it addressed as valuable for healing: “It is this faith that physicians greatly wish for, since if they know how to procure it for themselves from the ill, they render them more obedient and are able to breathe new life into them with words alone, moreover they find the power of their remedies to be in­creased and the results made more certain.” The extravagant performances of mountebanks who promised cures aroused wonder, and wonder led to hope. “The arousal of the bodily organs is sometimes such diat the vital principles cast off their torpidity, the tone of the nervous system is restored, the movements of the humors are accelerated, and nature then attacks and overcomes with her own powers a disease that prolonged treatment has op­posed in vain. Let those fortunate enough to have more rapidly recovered by means of these empty arts than by means of approved systems of heal­ing congratulate themselves, I say, on having regained their health, regard­less of the reason!”^[69] For Gaub healing was a social process in which the in­spiration of the healer was validated not by its occult source but by its salutary effect.

Interest in the mind-altering substances used by shamans was to de­velop much later.^[70] But in the eighteenth century another aspect of the shaman figure was being taken much more seriously: the shaman as poet, myth-recounter, and performing artist. Gloria Flaherty summarizes the re­ports of Johann Georgi, who described Central Asian shamanism and con­nected it to the origin of the verbal arts. “Like the oracles of antiquity, he wrote, contemporary shamans and shamankas [women shamans] spoke in an extraordinarily flowery and unclear language so that what they said could be applicable in all cases, whatever the outcome. Actually, he added, it was necessary that they did so because their believers, who had only hi­eroglyphs, no alphabet, themselves only knew how to communicate by sharing images and sensations. The litany was one favored form because its rhythms and tones affected the body directly, without appeal to the higher faculty of reason.... Georgi cited their particular kind of nervous system as the cause: ‘People of such makeup and such irritability must be rich in dreams, apparitions, superstitions, and fairy tales. And they are, too.’”^[71] Shamans, far from being mere charlatans were, as Herder more famously declared, oral poets, sacred musicians and healing performers who—for all the tricks they might use—enabled their audiences to sense in their own souls a force greater than themselves.^[72]

If shamanic rhetoric and behavior were to be viewed as art, some artists could be viewed as shamans. If ecstasy had been a sign of man tic in­spiration, it was becoming an indication of artistic genius. Flaherty writes of the evolving theory of genius in eighteenth-century Europe that drew on the classical myths of Orpheus as well as the ethnographic descriptions of shamans, a theory that eventually focused on the extraordinary interna­tional phenomenon of Mozart.^[73] That he was often likened to Orpheus by his audiences was, says Flaherty, part of the mythologization of the great artist, of his healing and “civilizing” powers acquired through inspiration. Thus she cites, among other contemporaries, the physician Simon Tissot, who described “the stamp of genius” that Mozarts music making dis­played: “He was sometimes involuntarily driven to his harpsichord, as by a sudden force,” Tissot wrote, “and he drew from it sounds that were die liv­ing expression of the idea that had just seized him. One might say that at such moments he is an instrument at the command of music, imagining him like a set of strings, harmoniously arranged with such art that a single one cannot be touched without all others being set in motion; he plays all the images, as a Poet versifies and a Painter colours them.”⁷⁷ This idea of inspiration was thus deduced from the artist’s extraordinary performance, best described as a consequence of his being seized by an external force.

Johann Sulzer, a theorist of the fine arts, wrote in more general terms: “All artists of any genius claim that from time to time they experience a state of extraordinary psychic intensity which makes work unusually easy, images arising without great effort and the best ideas flowing in such pro­fusion as if they were the gift of some higher power. This is without doubt what is called inspiration. If an artist experiences this condition, his object appears to him in an unusual light; his genius, as if guided by a divine power, invents without effort, shaping his invention in the most suitable form without strain; the finest ideas and images occur unbidden in floods to the inspired poet; the orator judges with the greatest acumen, feels with the greatest intensity, and the strongest and most vividly expressive words rise to his tongue.”⁷⁸ Such statements, Flaherty argues, are strongly remi­niscent of accounts of shamanism—in this case of a shaman described not skeptically but in wonderment. They employ the idea of inspiration metaphorically—as control of an “instrument” from outside the person, or as a “gift” from a “higher power.” But these remain metaphors, covering an inability to explain a this-worldly phenomenon in natural terms.

But when the physician Melchior Weickard locates his explanation entirely in terms of human physiology, a genuine change in the language has taken place: “A Genius, a human being with exalted imaginative pow­ers, must have more excitable brain fibers than other human beings,” he speculates, “Those fibers must be set into motion quicker and more easily, so that lively and frequent images arise.”⁷⁹

Regardless of the adequacy of such explanations from the perspective of a later century, a secular discourse of inspiration now referred entirely to the abilities of “the natural body” and to their social demonstration. The genius, like the shaman, was at once object, performer, and reproducer of myth. For Immanuel Kant, a genius was simply someone who could natu­rally exercise his cognitive faculties wonderfully without having to be

77. Cited in ibid., p. 159.

78. Cited in ibid., pp. 1^1-52.

79. Cited in ibid., p. 153.

taught by anyone: “We say that he who possesses these powers to a supe­rior degree has a head; and he who has a small measure of these faculties is called a simpleton, because he always allows himself to be guided by other persons. But we call him a genius who makes use of originality and pro­duces out of himself what must ordinarily be learned under the guidance of others.”⁸⁰ A genius was the product of nature, and what he produced was “natural,” albeit singular. For this reason it could be appreciated by a cultivated audience exercising judgments of taste.

Myth, poetry, and secular sensibility

Poets from Blake and Coleridge on, “geniuses” in the romantic tradi­tion, experimented with the mythic method in their own religious poetry.⁸¹ Myth was regarded in much early romantic thought as the original way of apprehending spiritual truth. If biblical prophets and apostles—as well as shamans in “the primitive world”—were now to be seen as performing, in mythic mode, a poetic function, then modern geniuses could reach into themselves and express spiritual truths by employing the same method. For this the virtue of faith was not necessary; all that was required was that one be sincere in one’s intention, that one represent the deepest feelings truthfully in outer discourse. This may help to explain the prevalence among Victorian unbelievers of what Stefan Collini calls “a rhetoric of sin­cerity.”⁸² For not only was the idea of being true to oneself conceived of as a moral duty, it also presupposed the existence of a secular self whose sov­ereignty had to be demonstrated through acts of sincerity. The self’s secu- larity consisted in the fact that it was the precondition of transcendent (po­etic or religious) experience and not its product.

Poets like Browning, who struggled to retain their religious convic­tions in an increasingly skeptical age, saw in mythic patterns a way to har­monize the findings of psychology and history—that’s to say, to harmonize internal reality with external. Robert Langbaum observes that it was

80.1. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978, p. 22.

81. Coleridge’s uncompleted epic Kubla Khan was a landmark—as Elaine Shaffer has so ably shown—in the development of modern religious poetry. But Blake (who was, incidentally, an inspiration for Coleridge) is also important here, although his work is not discussed by Shaffer.

82. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 18^0—igjo, Oxford: Clarendon, 1991, p. 276.

Browning who first outlined “what has come to be the dominant twenti­eth-century theory about poetry—that it makes its effect through the as­sociation in the reader’s mind of disparate elements, and that this process of association leads to the recognition, in what has been presented sue- » cessively, of static pattern. The recognition in the twentieth century is of­ten called epiphany’”^[74]—the sudden showing forth of the spiritual in the actual.

The mythic method continued to be important even among twentieth-century writers who disclaimed any religious faith, such as James Joyce. T. S. Eliot, in his laudatory review of Ulysses, writes that “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contempo­raneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.... [The mythic method] is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method al­ready adumbrated by Mr. Yeats.... Psychology... ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythi­cal method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward... order and form.”^[75]

T. S. Eliot famously used what he called the mythical method in his own poetry. However, this use of myth is not to be confused with Starobinski’s reference to the mythicization of modern history that I cited earlier. There is no yearning for a lost plenitude in this literature. Here myth is invoked explicitly as a fictional grounding for secular values that are sensed to be ultimately without foundation.^{[76] [77] It therefore marks a very different sensibility from the one to be found in the use of myth by Cole­ridge and other romantics. (Ironically, the fictional character of myth that led Enlightenment writers like Diderot to place “myth” together with “tra­dition” is precisely what leads early twentieth-century writers to link mythic fabrication to "modernity.”815)}

The importance of myth as a literary technique for imposing aes­thetic unity on the disjointed and ephemeral character of individual expe­rience the poet encounters in modern life has frequently been noted.⁸⁷ By a curious inversion, the “New” Arab poets, strongly influenced by mod­ernist European poetry, have resorted to ancient Middle Eastern mythol­ogy in order to signify the authentically modern, indicating in this way their desire for escape from what they regard as the stifling traditions in the contemporary Islamic world. The most prominent among these poets is Adonis,· the Phoenician pseudonym of the most eminent member of the shir group,⁸⁸ a self-declared atheist and modernist. Using devices familiar to Western symbolist and surrealist poetry, Adonis alludes to mythic fig­ures in a self-conscious effort to disrupt Islamic aesthetic and moral sensi­bilities, to attack what is taken to be sacred tradition in favor of the new— that is, of the Western.⁸⁹' (These myths, incidentally, have had to be translated into Arabic from the writings of modern European scholars who transcribed and re-narrated them.) But in this respect Adonis’s technique is figural rather than structural; it aims primarily to dislocate settled feel­ings, not to impose a sense of order and form where these are lacking. This use of myth in modern Arabic poetry is part of a response to the perceived failure of Muslim societies to secularize, and it is infused with a conscious­ness of “the West” as an object of emulation.

For Adonis, myth arises whenever human reason encounters per­plexing questions about existence and attempts to answer them in what

“Tradition Mythologique,” and end with “Tradition” in the jurisprudential sense (the action of transferring, giving up, a thing).

87. See Michael Bell and Peter Poellner, eds., Myth and the Making of Modernity: The Problem of Grounding in Early Twentieth-Century Literature, Am- sterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998.

88. So called after the periodical with that title, founded in 1956 in Beirut.

89. See the extended interview conducted by Saqr Abu Fakhr, “A Dialogue with Adunls: Childhood, Poetry, Exile,” especially Part 9, in al-Quds al-‘Arabi Daily, Friday, July 14,2000, p. 13, which deals with enlightenment, secularism, re­ligion, and tradition—and the role of myth (astiira) with respect to them. At one point, referring to a three-volume work on pre-Islamic myths edited by Adonis, the interlocutor asks him why myths and epics are absent in Islam. Adonis answers that Islam rejected prior texts as expressions of idolatry or superstition and magic, but it did, nevertheless, adopt many myths connected with Judaism—such as sto­ries about the miraculous rod of Moses, the parting of the Red Sea, and so forth— which are themselves rewritings of earlier myths in the region.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 55 can only be a non-rational way (bi-tanqa Id ’aqlaniyya), thus producing a combination of poetry, history, and wonderment. The freedom to think in this way, to recognize publicly that myth is a necessary product of the sec­ular mind, Adonis regards as integral to modernity. Hence in his poetry ex­istential questions and historical ones are addressed in mythic terms. More specifically, his desire for salvation of the Arab people, held for a millen­nium in the grip of a “sacred language,” is acted out through myths of alienation, of resurrection, and of redemption.^[78] And yet in classical Islamic discourse the Arabic language of the Qur an is never called “a sacred lan­guage” (lugha muqaddisd) as it is in modern secular discourse. For the lat­ter idea presupposes an abstraction called “language” that it can then com­bine with a contingent quality called “sacredness.”

Typically, Adonis uses the term myth both to celebrate human cre­ativity (ibda') and to unmask the authority of divine texts. His concern is with Reason, and with restoring to humanity its essential sacredness {qadasd). Echoing an earlier European (Feuerbachian) discourse, Adonis de­clares “Here the logic of atheism (ilhad) means the restoration of human­ity to its true nature, to faith in it by virtue of its being human.... The sa­cred (al-muqaddas) for atheism is the human being himself, the human being of reason, and there is nothing greater than this human being. It re­places revelation by reason, and God by humanity.”^[79] But an atheism that deifies Man is, ironically, close to the doctrine of the incarnation. The idea that there is a single, clear “logic of atheism” is itself the product of a mod­ern binary—belief or unbelief in a supernatural Being.

Although the fundamentalist (asult) form of Islamic thought that prevails today is itself mythic, he argues, it is a form of myth that has ac­quired for believers the character of law—of commandment—and so is not apparent to them as myth. For Adonis myth is plural, even anarchic, while the religious law is monotheistic and totalitarian. In marking the un­conscious truth of contemporary religious discourse, myth clearly has a very different function from the one modernist European poets give it when they use it to ground secular experience.^[80]

Democratic liberalism and myth

I began this chapter with the view of radical anthropologists who criticize the modern liberal state for pretending to be secular and rational when in fact it was heavily invested in myth and violence. I then proceeded to problematize the secular as a category by investigating its transforma­tions. I now conclude with a contemporary liberal political theorist who ar­gues that a secular, liberal state depends crucially for its public virtues (equality, tolerance, liberty) on political myth—that is, on origin narratives that provide a foundation for its political values and a coherent framework for its public and private morality. This brings us back to secularism as a political doctrine, and its connections with “the sacred” and “the profane.”

Margaret Canovan maintains that if liberalism gives up its illusion of

being the party of reason, it will be better placed to defend its political val­ues against its conservative and radical critics.⁹³ The central principles, of liberalism, she reminds us, rest on assumptions about the nature of mankind and the nature of society that are frequently questioned: “all men »■ are created equal,” “everyone possesses human rights,” and so on. But no dispassionate observer of the human condition would find these descrip­tive propositions unproblematic, says Canovan. For men and women are not in feet equal, they do not all exercise human rights in the world as we know it.

Canovan points out that in the eighteenth century the ideas that eventually formed the core of liberal thinking were attached to a distinctive conception of nature as deep reality. In the succeeding century liberals in­voked nature as a realm more real than the social world, an understanding that gave them grounds for optimism about political change. The termi­nology of natural rights referred not simply to what men (and later women too) should have, but to what they do in fact possess in the reality of human nature that lies beneath the distorted world as it now appears. However, for the conservative opponents of liberalism the inequalities and injustices in the world direcdy reflected the unregenerate nature of human beings.

Why did the ancestors of liberalism employ the terminology of na­ture in this way? Simply because in their thought the idea of “nature” served to explain and justify things. To insist that manifest social inequal­ities and constraints were “unnatural” was in effect to invoke an alternative world—a mythical world—that was “natural” because in it freedom and equality prevailed. But over time their assumptions about the nature of “man” exposed liberals to uncomfortable criticism. This weakness emerged most fully at the turn of the nineteenth century with the rise of sociologi­cal realism, and the simultaneous emergence of a new vision of nature as essentially violent and conflict ridden. What eventually resurrected the lib­eral idea of natural rights in the face of the vision of an essentially ruthless nature was not more effective theorization but Europe’s experience of its own horrors in the shape of Nazism and Stalinism in the first half of the twentieth century. Thus the liberal myth has facilitated the entire project of human rights that is so much a part of our contemporary world, and that brings with it a moralism wrongly said to be uncongenial to secular­ism as a system of political governance.

93. Margaret Canovan, “On Being Economical with the Truth: Some Lib­eral Reflections,” Political Studies, vol. 38,1990, p. 9.

Canovan concedes that there are skeptical liberals who admit the fragility of liberal institutions and who stress the importance of secular cit­izenship and the need for conscious commitment to secular political arrangements in which religion is kept separate from the state. For them myth might seem less important. But there is no doubt—she insists—that in the beginnings of what we now recognize as liberalism, the myth of na­ture was inspirational, and that as such it enabled gteat transformations to be effected. Yet now liberal political discourse is again being exposed to at­tack. She thinks that liberal principles such as the universality of human rights are difficult to defend in the face of a sociologized nature. For when nature is interpreted positivistically in terms of statistical norms, then dif­ferent norms of behavior and sentiment can claim to be equally natural. The result, we are informed, is a crippling relativism.

The defense of liberal principles in the modern world cannot, Canovan argues, be effectively carried out by making abstract arguments more rigorous, as Rawls has tried to do. This anticipates—albeit in another register—Stuart Hampshire’s distrust of the use made of “reason” and “rea­sonable” in Rawls’s exposition of political liberalism. “Why should an over­lapping consensus among ‘reasonable’ persons about basic liberal values be either required or expected?” asks Hampshire. “The answer is to be found in the history of the myth of reason itself. Plato, discussing justice in The Republic, threw off the brilliant and entertaining idea that the soul is di­vided into three parts, just as the city-state is to be divided into three social classes, and in a just person’s soul the upper part, reason, ensures harmony and stability, and in a just city the upper class, philosophers trained in mathematics, will impose order in a well-ordered society.... The corollary in ordinary and conventional speech has been that the desires and emo­tions of persons are supposed to issue from the quarrelsome and insubor­dinate underclass in the soul, and that they should be left in their proper place and kept away from the serious business of self-control.”⁹⁴ The pic­ture of human nature that has sustained liberalism from its inception, says Hampshire, is one in which passion and struggle, not reason and order, are central. Thus while Hampshire wants to do away with the myth of Reason in contemporary liberal theory, Canovan appeals to the reason of myth.

Canovan believes that liberalism can be defended only by recogniz- ■* ing and drawing openly on its great myth. “For liberalism never has been

94. S. Hampshire, “Liberalism: The New Twist,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 40, August 12,1993, pp. 45-46.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? $9 an account of the world,” she writes, “but a project to be realized. The na­ture’ of early liberalism, the ‘humanity’ of our own day, may be talked about as if they already exist but the point of talking about them is that they are still to be created. The essence of the myth of liberalism—its imaginary construction—is to assert human rights precisely because they are not built into the structure of the universe. The frightening truth con­cealed by the liberal myth is, therefore, that liberal principles go against the grain of human and social nature. Liberalism is not a matter of clearing away a few accidental obstacles and allowing humanity to unfold its natu­ral essence. It is more like making a garden in a jungle that is continually en­croaching.... But it is precisely the element of truth in the gloomy pic­tures of society and politics drawn by critics of liberalism that makes the project of realizing liberal principles all the more urgent. The world is a dark place, which needs redemption by the light of a myth.”^ The liberal proj­ect of redemption in a world of injustice and suffering that Canovan urges us to recognize in mythic terms allows once again the sacred character of humanity to be affirmed, and the liberal project re-empowered. It permits the politics of certainty to be restored, and retrieves the language of prophecy for politics in place of moral relativism. Thus what has often been described as the political exclusion of women, the propertyless, colo­nial subjects, in liberalism’s history can be re-described as the gradual ex­tension of liberalism’s incomplete project of universal emancipation.

The image Canovan employs to present and defend liberalism is striking: “making a garden in a jungle that is continually encroaching” and a “world [that] is a dark place, which needs redemption by the light of a myth.” This image is not only an invitation to adopt a mythic approach; it is already part of the myth. It fixes on (explains and justifies) the violence lying at the heart of a political doctrine that has disavowed violence on principle. That is not to say, incidentally, that this violence is “intrinsically mysterious, mystifying, convoluting, plain scary, mythical” and “a sign of the existence of the gods,” as Taussig has proposed. The liberal violence to which I refer (as opposed to the violence of illiberal regimes) is translucent. It is the violence of universalizing reason itself. For to make an enlightened space, the liberal must continually attack the darkness of the outside world that threatens to overwhelm that space.⁹⁶ Not only must that outside there-

95. Canovan, p. 16, italics added.

96. The gardening metaphor can also be found in nineteenth-century colo­nial discourse. Thus Lord Cromer, virtual British ruler of Egypt from 1883 to 1907, fore be conquered, but in the garden itself there are always weeds to be de­stroyed and unruly branches to be cut off. Violence required by the culti­vation of enlightenment is therefore distinguished from the violence of the dark junglg. The former is to be seen as an expression of law, the latter of transgression. Political and legal disciplines that forcefully protect sacred things (individual conscience, property, liberty, experience) against what­ever violates them is thus underwritten by the myth. Liberalism is not merely the passion of civility, as Hampshire and others have asserted. It claims the right to exercise power, through the threat and the use of vio­lence, when it redeems the world and punishes the recalcitrant. There is no fatality in all this—as Adorno and Horkheimer claimed—no necessary un­folding of an Enlightenment essence. It is just a way some liberals have ar­gued and acted.

The liberal political scientist and Middle East specialist Leonard Binder reaches the same conclusion about the necessity of violence as Canovan but he does so through an explicit set of propositions about the possibilities and limits of rational discourse, apparently not through the in­vocation of myth: “i. Liberal government is the product of a continuous process of rational, discourse. 2. Rational discourse is possible even among those who do not share the same culture nor the same consciousness. 3. Ra­tional discourse can produce mutual understanding and cultural consen­sus, as well as agreement on particulars. 4. Consensus permits stable polit­ical arrangements, and is the rational basis of the choice of coherent political strategies. 5. Rational strategic choice is the basis of improving the reviewing the reforms carried out under his authority, concludes, with imperial confidence: “Where once the seeds of true Western civilisation have taken root so deeply as is now the case in Egypt, no retrograde forces, however malignant they may be, will in the end be able to check germination and ultimate growth. The seeds which [Egyptian rulers prior to the British occupation] planted produced lit­tle but rank weeds. The seeds which have now been planted are those of true civil­isation. They will assuredly bring forth fruit in due season. Interested antagonism, ignorance, religious prejudice, and all the forces which cluster round an archaic and corrupt social system, may do their worst. They will not succeed. We have dealt a blow to the forces of reaction in Egypt from which they can never recover, and from which, if England does her duty towards herself, towards the Egyptian people, and towards the civilised world, they will never have a chance of recover­ing” (Modern Egypt, vol. II, London: Macmillan, 1908, pp. 558-59). This trope of garden making in the heyday of imperialism clearly lacks the melancholy of Canovan’s postimperial gardening myth.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 61 human condition through collective action. 6. Political liberalism, in this sense, is indivisible. It will either prevail worldwide, or it will have to be de­fended by nondiscursive action.”^[97] But what Canovan calls the liberal myth is, I would suggest, part of the deep structure of Binders abstract argu­ment. Liberal politics is based on cultural consensus and aims at human progress. It is the product of rational discourse as well as its precondition. It must dominate the unredeemed world—if not by reason then, alas, by force—in order to survive.

In fact liberal democracy here expresses the two secular myths that are, notoriously, at odds with each other: the Enlightenment myth of pol­itics as a discourse of public reason whose bond with knowledge enables the elite to direct the education of mankind, and the revolutionary myth of universal suffrage, a politics of large numbers in which the representation of “collective will” is sought by quantifying the opinion and fantasy of in­dividual citizen-electors. The secular theory of state toleration is based on these contradictory foundations: on the one hand elite liberal clarity seeks to contain religious passion, on the other hand democratic numbers allow majorities to dominate minorities even if both are religiously formed.

The thought that the world needs to be redeemed is more than merely an idea. Since the eighteenth century it has animated a variety of intellectual and social projects within Christendom and beyond, in Euro­pean global empires. In practice they have varied from country to country, unified only by the aspiration toward liberal modernity. But the similarity of these projects to the Christian idea of redemption should not, I submit, lead us to think of them as simple restatements of sacred myth, as projects that are only apparently secular but in reality religious. For although the New Testament myth may have assisted in the formation of these secular projects it does not follow that the latter are essentially Christian. They embrace a distinctive politics (democratic, anticlerical), they presuppose a different kind of morality (based on the sacredness of individual con­science and individual right), and they regard suffering as entirely subjec­tive and accidental (as bodily damage to be medically treated, or as corrective punishment for crime, or simply as the unfinished business of universal empowerment).

In secular redemptive politics there is no place for the idea of a re-

deemer saving sinners through Air submission to suffering. And there is no place for a theology, of evil by which different kinds of suffering are iden­tified. (“Evil” is simply the superlative form of what is bad and shocking.) Instead there is a readiness to cause pain to those who are to be saved by being humanized. It is not merely that the object of violence is different; it is that the secular myth uses the element of violence to connect an opti­mistic project of universal empowerment with a pessimistic account of hu­man motivation in which inertia and incorrigibility figure prominently. If the world is a dark place that needs redemption, the human redeemer, as an inhabitant of this world, must first redeem himself. That the worldly project of redemption requires self-redemption means that the jungle is af­ter all in the gardener’s own soul. Thus the structure of this secular myth differs from the one articulating the story of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice, a difference that the use of the term “sacred” for both of them may obscure. Each of the two structures that I touch on here articulates different kinds of subjectivity, mobilizes different kinds of social activity, and invokes different modalities of time.

And yet Christianity’s missionary history managed to fuse the two— to fold the spiritual promise (“Christ died to save us all”) into the political project (“the world must be changed for Christ”)—making the modern concept of redemption possible.