SECULARIZATION

Understood as a retreat of the sacred under the onslaught of the profane, and as the relaxation of religious control in face of the widening reach of the state, secularization manifested itself before 1789. But it was the French Revolution, and above all the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, published on 26 August 1789, that initiated a period, lasting until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, during which the process of secularization accelerated and touched every corner of European societies. It affected the churches by radically transforming the role of religion, which lost ground in public life and was increasingly confined to private life.

Article 10 of the Declaration is indeed an essential starting point for understanding the nature of secularizing tendencies in the nineteenth century. "No one," it states, "shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law." The change implied by this Article was tantamount to a Copernican revolution. It meant that religion, hitherto the central reference point of civilization, became a mere matter of opinion, a function of the free exercise of individual consciousness. State religion, by extension, was destined to disappear.

three phases of secularization

Over the course of the "long nineteenth century," secularization went through three main phases. The first coincided with the Romantic generation. The Revolution, especially its antireligious violence, was severely criticized by some (Edmund Burke, Louis de Bonald) who sought to rehabilitate Christianity and what François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) called its "genius" as the creator of civilization. In Germany, Novalis (Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg; 1772–1801), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) exalted experience, including religious experience, as opposed to the reason acclaimed by the Enlightenment.

This reaction in its turn precipitated a second phase, influenced by a radical criticism of religion epitomized by Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity), a work that opened the way to Karl Marx (1818–1883) and atheist materialism. At the end of the century Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) went so far as to announce "the death of God" while the anarchists, following the recommendation of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), declared their intention to "have done with God. " To such philosophical and political challenges were added the development of positivism (Auguste Comte; 1798–1857) and of "scientism" (Joseph-Ernest Renan's L'avenir de la science, 1890; The Future of Science), according to which religion must give way to reason and science.

In a third phase, between 1890 and 1914, the certainties of the proponents of scientism were contested by philosophers such as Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941) and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938; in his 1913 Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie; English translation, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, 1931) and by a number of intellectuals, among them Maurice-Édouard Blondel (1861–1949), all of whom were concerned to restore faith and spirituality as well as experience and action to the religious sphere.

three main areas of secularization

During the period with which we are concerned, secularization may be said to have occurred in three main areas: in social life, in the relations between the churches and the state, and in the sphere of intellectual and artistic activity.

Traditional religious authority over social life was eroded by the combined forces of technological progress, urbanization, and scientific advance. Meanwhile, the creationist theory of the scriptures was cast into doubt, first by Charles Lyell (1797–1875) and then by Charles Darwin (1809–1882).

As for the relationship between the churches and the state, secularization took the form of a long confrontation with two aspects: on the one hand, states gradually disentangled themselves from religious control in the name of civil rights and freedom of thought; on the other, they sought to impose their own authority on the religious institutions, as in the case of the established churches of the United Kingdom, Prussia, and Scandinavia. A cardinal shift was the channeling of religious fervor into patriotism, into a kind of secular religion committed to the service of the nation.

In the cultural realm, the newly emerging social sciences lent secularization a dimension that was deeply troubling to the main European religions. In the wake of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), a historicist approach intruded on fields such as scriptural exegesis and sacred history, hitherto considered the preserve of religious teaching. A tendency of German origin, represented by the French Catholic priest Alfred-Firmin Loisy (1857–1940), promoted the reading of the Bible, and especially the New Testament, with the methods of critical history, going so far as to separate a historical Jesus Christ from the Christian one. Sociology, meanwhile, from John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) to Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), acknowledged religion's importance as a social phenomenon but announced its ineluctable relegation to the realm of private life, as one form of cultural identity among others. Such changing attitudes were intimated in Gustave Courbet's realist painting A Burial at Ornans (1849–1850), a work deemed scandalous in 1851.

reactions

Threatened, the Catholic Church reacted to these challenges either by condemning or by looking for new ways to reconcile religious traditions with modernity. In 1791 Pope Pius VI (r. 1775–1799) vigorously rejected the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, denouncing the very idea of liberty—especially the freedom to choose one's religion or to do without one—and the retreat of the divine right of kings in face of electoral democracy. God alone had rights, according to the pope; man had only duties. This was the foundation of Roman Catholic intransigentism, a posture upheld subsequently by the popes Pius IX (r. 1846–1878), Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903), and Pius X (r. 1903–1914), reflected by the doctrine of papal infallibility, declared by the Vatican Council I (1869–1870).

Another religious response to secularization was the clinging of the faithful to the rites and practices surrounding the most important events of life (birth, marriage, burial), or likewise to the tradition of pilgrimage. The manifest advances of social secularization in no way ruled out the survival of traditional expressions of faith, often reinforced by conversions or by collective outpourings of piety (as in Germany and Italy on the great liturgical feast days). For some scholars such survivals represented a process of re-Christianization driven forward by women, by dissident movements (Revivalism or English nonconformism), and by such enthusiasms as that attending the mystical experience of Thérèse de Lisieux (1873–1897).

Despite its extent, then, secularization in Europe was not a linear process. Though it provoked serious conflicts in the nineteenth century, especially those between church and state, it was continually subject to reverse tendencies and movements of resistance. This was as true of Protestants and Jews as of Catholics, especially when modernization, in conjunction with national unification and pressure for assimilation into new forms of collective life, gave the faithful cause to fear for their identity.

See alsoBergson, Henri; Catholicism; Chateaubriand, François-René; Comte, Auguste; Darwin, Charles; French Revolution; Marx, Karl; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Religion; Renan, Ernest; Young Hegelians.

bibliography

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B. Delpal