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Beyond Secularized Eschatology Introductory Remarks

Part of: Forum: History's Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2021

Jonathan Sheehan ,
Henning Trüper  and
Mario Wimmer
Jonathan Sheehan*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of California, Berkeley
Henning Trüper
Affiliation:
Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, Berlin
Mario Wimmer
Affiliation:
Department of Arts, Media, Philosophy, Seminar for Media Studies, University of Basel
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: sheehan@berkeley.edu
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Extract

History as a body of knowledge, a loose bundle of working routines and writing practices, of genres, memories, imaginaries, and institutions, has struggled with its relationship to “religion” for a long time. In the European tradition, but also elsewhere, historical writing often served to fill the gaps in the knowledge about the past that had been, in the main, supplied by scriptural tradition. At the same time, historical writing also became a competitor with this tradition. The resulting relationship was, and continues to be, uneasy. In its familiar present-day form, for example, the quality of being “historical,” i.e. “historicity,” requires the exclusion of divine agency as a permissible explanation of events in the course of worldly affairs. In what François Hartog calls the modern “regime of historicity,” the culture of historical writing after 1750 became dominated by scholarship and aligned with mechanist understandings of the philosophy of nature. Enlightenment-era historical writing increasingly conceived of the world as a nexus of cause–effect relations that afforded space to the divine agency only in the function of “prime mover.” History then appeared to fall in line with the other forces of reason-driven “secularization” that stripped religious knowledge of the privilege of explaining things in the world, ultimately transforming it into “dogma” and “belief,” both only tenuously connected to reality. Knowledge based on the divinely “revealed” texts and the divinely “inspired” thought of traditionally recognized religious authorities lost its previous epistemic standing. Yet this loss occurred, to the extent that it did, in the form of a highly complicated negotiation, with compromises stacked on top of other compromises, generating a continuously confusing and mobile state of affairs.

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Type
Forum: History's Religion
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 1182 - 1190
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 See, for a model account of this situation, Yerushalmi, Yosef H., Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982)Google Scholar, Ch. 4.

2 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saska Brown (New York, 2015; first published 2003).

3 On this see still Reill, Peter Hanns, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, 1975)Google Scholar; and Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, 2005); see further Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2015).

4 Thus destroying the cultural “embedding” of reason that Charles Taylor highlighted in A Secular Age (Cambridge, 2007). For a critique of secularism from a more directly political point of view see, moreover, Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton, 2017).

5 See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993), esp. Ch. 1; Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, 1998); Hent de Vries, Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York, 2008); Brent Nongrbi, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013); Barton, Carlin A. and Boyarin, Daniel, Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York, 2016)Google Scholar.

6 For the most sophisticated and sustained effort to explore some of these issues see Nancy Levene, Powers of Distinction: On Religion and Modernity (Chicago, 2017).

7 Hardtwig, Wolfgang, “Geschichtsreligion—Wissenschaft als Arbeit—Objektivität: Der Historismus in Neuer Sicht,” Historische Zeitschrift 252/1 (1991), 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For a similar approach see e.g. Hunter, Ian's contribution on “Charles Taylor's A Secular Age and Secularization in Early Modern Germany,” Modern Intellectual History 8/3 (2011), 621–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, 2000).

10 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephrott et al., vol. 4 (Cambridge, 2003), 389–400.

11 Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, trans. Barbara Harshav (Stanford, 2008); Peter E. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley, 2003).

12 See Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Mali, Joseph, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago, 2003)Google Scholar.

14 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago, 1949). For a comprehensive analysis of the interlinkages of secularization arguments and philosophies of history in the German tradition see Jean-Claude Monod, La querelle de la sécularisation: Théologie politique et philosophies de l'histoire de Hegel à Blumenberg (Paris, 2002).

15 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1997), 57–123.

16 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1950).

17 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, 1985).

18 Franz Overbeck, How Christian Is Our Present-Day Theology?, trans. Martin Henry, foreword by David Tracy (London and New York, 2005).

19 Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, 2009).