1.

The Impossibility of
Secular Society
Without a transcendent horizon, society cannot endure. by Rmi Brague October
2013

There is no such thing as a secular society. My claim is a brutal and paradoxical one:
The question about the possibility of a secular society resolves itself, or rather it
dissolves itself.

To defend this claim I would like to submit two-and-a-half theses. First, a purely secular
society simply cannot survive in the long run. As a consequence, leaving behind
secularism is a necessary move, indeed a vital one. Second, the term secular society is
tautological, because the ideal of secularity is latent with the modern use of the term
society. Third is the half thesis, which I wont develop here: Whatever comes after
secularism, it wont be a society any longer but rather another way for us to think
about and give political form to the being-together of human beings.

The use of the term secularism in English began in the middle of the nineteenth century.
George Jacob Holyoake (18171906) may have coined the word as early as 1846,and
one of his main works, published in 1870, bears the title The Principles of Secularism.
In 1859, the philosopher John Stuart Mill was still treating the word as a neologism. In
On Liberty, after mentioning the religious principles that can motivate human action, he
speaks of secular standards (as for want of a better name they may be called).

Mill used the term because he was eager to avoid atheistic, which is the more fitting
term to describe the opposite of religious. But atheism was hardly the thing in Victorian
Britain, and the word was felt to be rude. In the same intellectual atmosphere, the
biologist T. E. Huxley, Darwins famous bulldog, coined agnosticism during a
memorable discussion that took place at the Metaphysical Society in 1869. In present-
day Britain, a third word, humanism, is often used with the same meaning and with the
same intention: to evoke the possibility of a nonreligious basis for a morally animated
society.

The debate for which the word secularism was coined is a false one. Advocates of
secularism assume they are proposing a novel possibility, which is that moral precepts
can be known without any particular revelation by God. Yet this is precisely what
Christianity has taught, explicitly since Pauls Epistle to the Romans and, implicitly,
since Jesus himself. This was lost sight of in the modern era, when many Christians
defended religion against skeptical and rationalist attacks by arguing that it is necessary
for ensuring the moral basis of society. Men without religion, it was argued, could not
be trusted to behave in an upright fashion. So advocates of secularism were drawn into
the false debate.

Ironically, and perhaps inevitably, the words that are meant to express secularization are
themselves Christian words that have been secularized. One prominent premodern use
of secular was to distinguish between religious priests, who were members of
mendicant or monastic orders, and diocesan clergy, or secular priests. These terms
continue to be used, often confusing those unfamiliar with the Churchs particular -
language: a secular priest?

Another example is the French adjective for secularity, lac, or the Italian equivalent,
laico. Both are derived from the Greek adjective that designates a member of a people
or nation. But not just any people or nation: The Septuagint translated the Hebrew
`amthe people of God, the holy nationwith laos, the Greek source of both
adjectives. Thus even the advocates of secularism are unable to escape the biblical
sources of so much of Western culture.

The root of secular, secularism, and secularity is saeculum. From this Latin word the
Romance languages derived their words for century : sicle, secolo, siglo. It receives
from Christianity a particular shade of meaning. In the vocabulary of the Church
Fathers, saeculum designates the world as Christianity conceives of it. They were
profoundly influenced by the Hebrew word olam and the Greek aion, which is often
used to render it. These terms stress the transitory, provisional character of the present
state of the world. Saeculum is thereby diametrically opposed to the Greek kosmos, the
beautiful world order that was believed to be everlasting.

The word also came to designate a century, one hundred years. This semantic evolution
did not happen by chance, for one hundred years is not just any length of time.
The sum of seventy plus thirty, it was understood in a symbolic way as the average
length of a generation, a bit longer than the traditional human lifespan according to the
Psalms: The years of our life are threescore and ten.

This use of the term was not uniquely Christian. In ancient Rome, the herald who
announced the secular games, ludi saeculares, proclaimed with great solemnity that
nobody who witnessed them saw them already or would see them one more time. The
formula is quoted by Suetonius in a highly ironical context: ludos, quos nec spectasset
quisquam nec spectaturus esset. Another historian, Herodian, wrote: People then called
these games secular because they had heard that they were celebrated only after three
generations had elapsed. Heralds would go all over Rome and Italy, inviting people to
come and see a spectacle that nobody ever saw and nobody would see again.

The ancient usage draws on the fact that a saeculum, a century, is the temporal limit of
living memory. It is the halo of possible experience that surrounds the life of the
individual. I can keep a remembrance of my grandparents and, more seldom, of my
great-grandparents. What my grandfather told me I can tell my grandchildren. I can
reach back two generations and forward two, but rarely more, to a period spanning what
amounts to a century.

One century is also the limit of the concrete care we can give. I very well can, nay,
should think about the future situation of my children, of my grandchildren, possibly of
my great-grandchildren. But I cant care in anything but a highly abstract way about the
generations that will come after them. If by some miracle our remote forebears came
back to life, or if our remote posterity were now called to life, they wouldnt mean a
great deal to us.

Jonathan Swift drew attention to this century-long limit of human concern in Gullivers
Travels. In Book 3, he depicts the struldbrugs, wretched immortals of the country of
Luggnagg. Till their thirtieth year, they behave like normal mortals. Then they begin to
suffer from a melancholy that keeps growing till they reach the age of eighty years,
considered the usual limit of life expectancy. Although the struldbrugs live on, in
Luggnagg after eighty they are considered legally dead and forfeit every right to their
property, which falls to their heirs. Moreover, their own natural affection doesnt extend
beyond their grandchildren. After two hundred years, they hardly understand the
language of their fellow countrymen anymore. Their lives outrun the existential limits
of the saeculum.

Our intuitive sense of the outer boundaries of living memory and concern finds
expression in the field of law. One hundred years, what is known as the tempus
memoratum, constitutes the longest possible duration for a contract. For example, the
longest possible land lease holds good for ninety-nine years. Beyond that, one enters the
field of the immemorial, rights held not by natural persons but by legal entities such
as monasteries, universities, civic organizations, and of course the state itself. In a
certain brocard, or common saying of ancient French law, He who has eaten of the
kings goose gives back a feather a hundred years later, which means that for crimes
against the state there is no temporal limit. The king remembers forever.

What does all this have to do with the idea of a secular society? A great deal. The
French language possesses two different adjectives meaning secular: on the one hand
sculier, on the other sculaire. Sculaire means what lasts for more than one century
say, a tree, or a custom. Sculier originally designated a secular, a cleric who, as we
have seen, doesnt live according to the rule of a monastic or religious order but instead
pursues his vocation in the world as a diocesan functionary. In the modern era, as Mill
recognized and imported into English, it acquired the added meaning of an outlook, a
person, or a body of people that renounces the transcendent.

There is a profound irony of language here, for the sense of secular that denotes one
hundred years is implied in the later, more recent sense that denies the transcendent. Put
bluntly: A secularist is a person the inner logic of whose position compels him to act as
if mankind were not to last longer than one century. And even: A secularist is a person
whose behavior, if universalized, would make it so that mankind would in fact not last
more than one century. It is telling that Holyoake, the first to import the term into
English, was notorious among his contemporaries for advocating contraception.

Why is this the case? Why is the secularist limited to a hundred-year horizon? For an
answer, let us now turn to my second thesis: that the term secular society is tautological
because secularity is entailed in the ways in which early modern political philosophy
turned toward society as the fundamental expression of the being-together of
humanity.

Earlier, one spoke of the cityin Greek, polis; in ancient and medieval Latin, civitas;
and in Arabic of the same period, madinah. St. Thomas spoke of the ideal of political
unity ordered toward the common good as a communitas perfecta. In this context, the
idea of society was limited to practical arrangements for the sake of particular goals,
often economic in nature. A societas was a grouping of men who agreed to unite their
abilities and their efforts, and the word was used in much the same way as we use
company today.

Later, the meaning began to shift, and society replaced city as our most fundamental
term for human unity. In the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Christian
Wolff wrote, When men unite with each other in order to promote their greater good
by uniting their forces, they enter with each other into a society. This use draws on the
older meaning of practical unity for the sake of common ends. But Wolff makes a
further move, dropping the indefinite article a societyand conjuring a universal
form. As a consequence, he continues, society is nothing else than a contract
between some people for them to promote therein their greater good by uniting their
forces.

Speaking of society as Wolff didand we do todaylends reality to the fiction of

the social contract. This fiction has deep roots in ancient Epicureanism. Men are
supposed to have been produced from the earth by spontaneous generation. They then
roam the earth and meet almost by chance, or are driven together by negative reasons,
such as the necessity to repel wild beasts. They form a company, a societas dedicated
to collective defense, and this mode of being together is taken as a sufficient basis and
explanation for political community.

It is strange that this extension of the meaning of society should have taken place, for it
obscures reality in a profound way. A commercial society or company results from the
agreement of its members and dissolves itself when the interests of the members
subsequently diverge. To some degree or another, the same holds for other forms of
society as envisioned in the classical use of the term.

But peoples and nations arent like that. On the contrary, properly speaking, human
communitiessocieties, as we now use the termnever constitute themselves. At each
moment they discover themselves as already extant; they perpetuate themselves by
renewing themselves through a process of intussusception of new members. Only
exceptionally do new members come from outside. By and large, they arise from the
society itself. The accretion of new members presupposes that there already exists a
society that can welcome them.

Of course a body politic also has agency, and the idea of a contract between governor
and governed is well known. We have examples of rulers who had their subjects swear
allegiancefor example, the caliphs in Baghdad or, more recently, John Calvin when
he founded the new polity in Geneva. This and other elements of contractual practice
express political duties and responsibilities that presuppose an important role for human
freedom. Yet in every case these duties and responsibilities also presuppose an already
existing political community. Never has a human community constituted itself by the
aggregation of independent individuals who predated it. Never anywhere else than in
fiction, that is. Revolutions, constitutions, and declarations of rights may have
inaugurated states, established new polities, and transformed nations, but they have
never brought a people into being.

In its use of society as the foundational term for human community, modern political
philosophy conceives of civic life on the pattern of a group of acting subjects in a purely
human space. The ever recurring image of such a group is one of players around a table.
As Thomas Hobbes wrote, It is in the laws of a commonwealth, as in the laws of
gaming: Whatsoever the gamesters all agree on, is injustice to none of them. It is to be
found again in the work of Adam Smith, who speaks of the great chess-board of
human society. The image loses its metaphorical self-consciousness and becomes
conceptually foundational in later authors. John Rawls description of the original
position provides a good example. And history takes political theory seriously. Our
political communities have become societies resembling ever more closely a club of
gamblers.

For the game to be fair, it must be secular. The space of our democratic societies is flat.
Nobody is allowed to stand higher than others. The first to be excluded is the One
Above, especially when people claim to have received from him some message or
mission that puts them closer to his divine realityand thus higher. Democratic space
must remain inside itself. To put it in Latin: It must be immanent. Tocqueville noticed
that aristocratic man was constantly sent back to something that is placed outside his
own self, something above him. Democratic man, on the other hand, refers only to
himself.

The democratic social space is not only flat but closed. And it is closed because it is has
to be flat. What is outside, whatever claims to have worth and authority in itself and not
as part of the game, must be excluded. Whoever and whatever will not take a seat at the
table at the same level as all other claims and authorities, however mundane, is barred
from the game. Again, the Great Outsider must be dismissed.
This is illustrated by a famous anecdote, although its authenticity is not above doubt.
When in 1787 the Congress of the United States had painted itself into a corner, leading
Benjamin Franklin to suggest that prayers be said to the Father of lights, Alexander
Hamilton guffawed that he did not see the necessity of calling in foreign aid.

Hamilton was more far-sighted than he knew. A democratic society, not insofar as it is
democratic but insofar as it is a society, must be atheistic. We come here to an
antinomy: Insofar as a political community governs itself in a democratic way, it must
be open to transcendence, because we all have a moral conscience that refers us to the
transcendent. But insofar as a political community views itself as a society, it must on
the contrary be closed in on itself, and therefore must exclude the moral authority
claimed by the consciences of its members. Thus our present democracies in the West.
They are dominated by a technocratic elite that bases its right to govern on its claim to
be able to manage the game expertly, ensuring utilitarian and therapeutic results for all.

There is a further and more fundamental antinomy. The central task of modern political
philosophy is to guarantee the peaceful coexistence of such a group of human beings.
This means contriving rules to enable each person to maximize his self-interest without
harming others. This is all very well, but this coexistence and the perpetual peace
promised by the rules of the game presuppose, by definition, that men exist already, and
that they or others will continue to exist. This presupposition modern political
philosophy fails to provide; indeed, its characteristic strategy for ensuring peace works
against it.

Immanuel Kant provides an apt illustration. In a famous passage from Perpetual Peace,
Kant explains that the problem of building a just society can be solved, even in the case
of a society of devils. It is enough that those utterly evil and utterly egoistic beings are
intelligent. This will allow individual devils to see the true nature of their self-interest,
which of course includes neutralizing the self-interest of others to the extent that it
threatens their own, which in turn requires agreement about neutral rules. Even devils, if
rational, can be peaceful players of the game of society.

What Kant did not recognize is that, far from being a harder case than humans, devils
are easier. They are fallen angels, to be sure, but angels all the same. As a consequence,
they are pure spirits that soar in a special kind of elongated temporality, the so-called
aevum. This enables them to shirk the need to reproduce, so they can focus all their
energies on the game of self-interest.

By contrast, the existence of men is limited and lasts, as we have seen, at most one
century. And so the human species, the same as the other living species, keeps going by
replacing the individuals that disappearreplacing them with new individuals, which
are begotten by individuals and born to them. A civitasa nation, culture, or people
is, so to speak, constantly surfing on individuals. If it ceases to do so, it wont last
longer than a century.

In other words, without new life, Kants peace wont be perpetual. And because his
peace is perfect only if the players of the game see themselves and their lives in terms of
their own rational self-interest, its not at all clear why they wont cease to have
children. Indeed, many will say that its a positive duty not to reproduce.
Human communities are not made of pure spirits. And so we face a fundamental
political question for societies: What makes human beings beget children? What will
make mankind want to go on existing? One could mention many things different in
nature: economic and social conditions, legal measures, the psychological atmosphere
of a society. But above all there is the need for two things: a vision and a choice. No
society will endure if some people do not look farther than one century, beyond what an
individual can experience. We must see beyond the saeculum. Equally necessary is a
choice, one I call metaphysical. This choice consists in saying that it is good that there
exist human beings on Earth: good in itself, not just fun for the present generation
which I, by the way, dont doubt.

Who is empowered to pronounce our existence good? Certainly not man himself. We
should remember Jean-Paul Sartre on this point: We cant admit that a man might
pronounce a sentence on Man. The only being who can pronounce it is the One who
declared at the last day of creation that whatever He had created was not only good
but, taken in its whole, very good.

Rmi Brague is professor emeritus at the Sorbonne and Romano Guardini Chair at the
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. A version of this essay was presented at the
Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

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