The Modern West in the History of Religion

Beezone Basket of Tolerance Series

Journal of the American Academy of Religion,

LII/1 American Academy of Religion,

Annual Meeting 1983:

The Presidential Address

The Modern West in the History of Religion

Wilford Cantwell Smith

“The task of scholars, he asserts, is to correct the intellectual error of secularism and recover a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.”

 

Summary:

Wilfred Cantwell Smith critiques the intellectual and spiritual isolation of Modern Western secularism, arguing that it represents a historically eccentric and flawed worldview when placed in the broader context of human religious and cultural history. He proposes that the West’s tendency to see itself as the normative center—whether through superiority, relativism, or romanticization of other cultures—has led to intellectual and moral impoverishment.

Smith introduces five “stages” of Western engagement with other cultures:

1. Superiority – Viewing the West as the paradigm of rationality and progress, judging other cultures by Western standards (e.g., colonialism, modernization theory).

2. Relativism – Accepting all cultures as equally valid but denying the possibility of shared truth, leading to nihilism.

3. Adulation – Idealizing non-Western cultures as inherently better, though failing to recognize their historical embeddedness.

4. Self-reflective learning – Using knowledge of other cultures to critically reassess and illuminate the limitations of the West’s own worldview.

5. Transcultural mutuality – Recognizing a shared human condition, learning from all traditions, and moving beyond the “we/they” distinction toward global human community.

Smith argues that modern secularism—the dominant Western worldview—is a conceptual error that distorts human nature by denying or trivializing the transcendent dimension of life. Rather than seeing “religion” as a human construct superimposed upon an otherwise secular nature, Smith claims that human beings have always lived between the mundane and the transcendent. The modern Western notion that religion is a separate, optional, or even pathological feature is, he asserts, historically anomalous.

He emphasizes that:

• Most human cultures do not draw a sharp line between “secular” and “religious.”

• Concepts like “religion,” “belief,” and “conversion” are Western constructs shaped by secular ideology.

• Secularism has misinterpreted other traditions through its own narrow categories, much like religious traditions once distorted each other’s views.

Smith critiques modern Western individualism, its objectification of truth, its shallow treatment of history, and its detachment from community and transcendence. He urges that transcendence—though hard to define—is not a fringe notion but central to the human condition, evident in culture, art, ritual, and community. He calls on modern intellectuals, especially academics, to rethink secular assumptions and restore conceptual access to transcendence as a remedy to the West’s spiritual malaise.

Closing Message:

Smith’s ultimate call is for the Modern West to “rejoin the human race” by recognizing its historical and spiritual particularity, overcoming its self-imposed isolation, and contributing to a global, shared, transcultural future. The task of scholars, he asserts, is to correct the intellectual error of secularism and recover a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

***

Last year, in his strikingly forceful presidential address, Professor Gordon Kaufman treated the threat of nuclear war, and its implications both for religion and for the study of religion. This year in my lower- keyed talk I will look from a comparative historical perspective at some of the developments that have brought Western society to its present pass.

The three major attitudes to other cultures that the Modern West has developed are all deficient, and a fourth is both requisite and possible, Robert Bellah has contended,1 and I begin by agreeing strongly with him. I will attempt this afternoon to proffer a particular filling-in of that fourth for which he calls; and will move on to a fifth which subsumes and then transcends it.

The three have been attitudes, respectively, we might say, of superi­ ority, of relativism, and of adulation. In the first the Modern West saw itself as the paradigm of rationality and progress, and judged the others by how closely they approached it or how soon they would manage to do so. Linked with magnanimity, the nineteenth-century version of this was “the white man’s burden”; the mid-twentieth-century version, “moderni­ zation theory,” as Bellah notes. Both forms, though not baseless, have proven arrogant and inept. Without magnanimity, they were cruel. The second view, partly in reaction, partly based on more recent, deeper, knowledge, was that of cultural relativism. Every society has its own system of values, this position has held; and there is none beyond each, by which all may be judged. This achieves tolerance, by affirming that nothing is really valuable. Full cultural relativism is one form of nihilism.

The third outlook of Westerners, still more recent, has been adopted by only isolated individuals and by a few small groups, disillusioned with the manifest or subtle failures of the Modern West. It sees at least one of the other cultures as better, or, idealized, as right: it feels that, far from Western modernity’s teaching the rest of the world how to progress, rather we should learn from them and adopt their ways. Quite apart from other issues, often intractable, it turns out that here also, as with the first thesis, the march of history stands in the way of so simple a solution. Their “ways,” and the forms of their values, are embedded in their particular historical ongoing matrix, as we and our institutions and our approaches are in ours. Desiderata are not loose enough to be simply exchanged.

1 Robert Ν Bellah, “Other Cultures Journeys we must take” Humanities, vol 1, no 3 (May/June 1980), pp 1-2 

 

None of the three positions is ridiculous. Yet also, none is adequate. The fourth position, just beginning to be recognized among some thinkers as much more promising, is to profit from our increasing aware- ness of other cultures so as thereby to illuminate our own: to understand better what we in the West have been doing (and indeed what has been done to us), and accordingly to put ourselves in a position to transcend where we have been and are. Knowledge of the rest of the world may contribute thus to critical self-awareness.

The title of my talk, therefore, may be given as “The Modern West in the History of Religion.” I will revise this title as we proceed, for rea- sons that will become clear; but this will do for a start. And even here I must stress that I do not mean the History of Religion as an academic discipline, which is one rather recent and tiny subsector of one particular development, the academic, within the large complex that I am calling The Modern West. On the contrary, I am suggesting that we can better understand the Modern West as a whole (including its historiography of religion and many another of its several parts) if we learn to see that whole as one development in the complex world history of humankind’s religious and spiritual life.

For the word “history” is ambiguous. We may say, for instance, that the economic history of England is long, complicated, and intricately intertwined with other dimensions of English life, and indeed of Euro- pean and, lately, of the world’s, life. Or, we may say that this economic history of England is brief, oversimplified, and weighs two pounds. I am a realist about the past. Some think of history as our image of the past, and may treat the past itself as effectively non-existent. “Where is it?” has been asked, which commits the anhistorical fallacy of imagin- ing that reality subsists all at once—right now, even solipsistically. How vastly simpler everything would be if that were the timeless case!—if the universe were somehow given, rather than everywhere and always in ineluctable process. And with the past of it, simply given in our minds! No; the history that I am interested in transcends our knowledge of it— and ever will; even though we may keep whittling away at the partiality of that yet exhilarating knowledge. And the millenia-long, world-wide, history of human religiousness which we are just beginning to apprehend in some of its fullness can, we find, illuminate each little segment within it. The history of which I speak, far from being merely an aspect of the present—our awareness of our heritage—is rather vice-versa: it is that of which the present is, and must be felt to be, one small aspect, unstable, unautonomous. It is the matrix within which the present day, like every other, is subsumed, and in the light of which it can be understood. Spe- cifically for our purposes here: The more we know of humanity’s global religious development, the better we can understand the Modern West. This introduces my fifth perspective, which subsumes and transcends the first four, preserving merits of each and moving beyond their limita- tions. In the prospect of learning not only about other cultures and other ages but also from them, including especially learning from them about ourselves, we profit most, as well as being intellectually most correct, as we discover that their very otherness is a stage that we are today in pro- cess of leaving behind.

This is so, both in practice and theoretically. For each sector of our planet today, other cultures are becoming daily less “other” as “the global village” increasingly becomes a reality. And even more strikingly at the intellectual level: we are now able to see—difficult though it be at first to appreciate—that human history has all along been a whole, its admittedly variegated parts never fully disparate; and that whole is growing more and more unified as we approach the twenty-first century. One of the most important things about any person or group is whom one means when saying “we.” Stage four is when the Modern West can say: “We have something to learn from them. By knowing other cultures, we can come to know our own culture better, and can make it better.” Stage five arrives when we recognize that the we/they business is today outgrown: we are all in this together, and can all learn from each other. “We” now means “us human beings”—in our diversity and yet our overriding humanity, even community. We are all heirs now of many cultures, and we face the future together: our common future, multicultural. (An aside. The fundamental fallacy of the Reagan admin- istration’s foreign policy is that it perceives the Russians as the enemy, with them threatening us. The real enemy is, rather, nuclear war, threat- ening us all, both Russia and the West. Conceptualized that way, the problem is potentially soluble; in we/they terms, it is not.)

Each of these five outlooks regarding the world’s plurality of civili- zations and cultures pertains equally, it is instructive to note, to the more specifically religious scene. Western Christians too have evinced a series of attitudes to “other religions”—of superiority; co-ordinate relativism; attraction; learning from; and, finally, perceiving particularities as within a transcending whole. In this case the technical concept “conversion” gives form to the first and the third: the idea of an individual “convert- ing” from one religion to another is part of the Modern West’s special intellectual equipment.

The parallelism between the cultural and the religious is by no means gratuitous. Nor does it result merely from the fact that outside the Modern West “cultural” and “religious” tend often to co-incide, signifi- cant though that fact be. My thesis includes as a central point that once one attains a clear synoptic view of world history, Western culture too, including its secularism, is seen to be a phenomenon most adequately understood as a quite special and somewhat bizarre development within the dynamic panorama of the world history of religion. Even: no other way can this culture be seriously understood at all. But I anticipate. Before I elucidate that thesis, let us begin at a lower and simpler level.

One of the things that we learn about the worldviews of religious complexes historically is that they have tended to interpret, firmly, other communities’ positions in terms of their own basic categories. Of course!—This is hardly surprising. Yet it can seriously—or amusingly— distort. Muslims, to take a conspicuous example that I have studied, oper- ate ideologically and understand their own position in terms of a line of prophets, culminating in Muhammad, through whom God has sent reve- lations to humankind in the form of books, in their case the Qur’an. Internally this has provided a framework for a consistent, subtle, com- prehensive, and for many centuries highly effective, Weltanschauung. Externally, however, it does not work so well: they subordinated to it their understanding of, for instance, the superficially perhaps somewhat similar but in fact subtly and deeply different Christian position. The Qur’an plays in Islamic thought the role that Christ plays in Christian, with the Muslim Hadith (their so-called “Traditions”) in some ways com- parable then to the Christian Bible, an historical written report on a prior transcendent revelation. Muslims, however, have not only seen Jesus as a prophet (and they make a point of honoring him as such) but have blandly presumed that Christians have done so too, with the Gospel as a pre-existent, heavenly book that he brought from God—and to which therefore he personally is subordinate; that his role was to transmit that verbal revelation, that book, to his fellows. That is, they think of the written Gospel as divine, of him as emphatically not so.

And so it goes. Other communities—for instance, Hindus—have in turn misinterpreted Islam. I mention this matter by no means to poke fun at Muslims or others, but on the contrary because this is the sort of point where Westerners can learn from them something important also about ourselves. Every comprehensive Weltanschauung, insofar as it achieves the coherence at which it aims, therein reduces every alterna- tive one: misunderstanding, distorting, its neighbors’ world-view. The immediate point here that I wish to make is that modern Western secu- larism has been doing this distorting too; and my thesis is that discerning and explicating the errors into which this has been leading us enable us to see part of what is wrong with our Western outlook—and how it can be remedied.

The Christian Church has been learning to profit from this new situation. It has begun—too slowly, some feel; but it has begun—with great seriousness to address theologically the question of pluralism: to recognize that an awareness of other communities’ visions, with their divergent conceptualizations of the cosmos and of human destiny, forces a reconsideration, perhaps drastic, of some of the Church’s own tradi- tional positions, as these have been intellectualized, even the seemingly most central and cherished. It has done this with a result that, though a loss in coziness, is a gain in truth. The West’s secular ideology lags well behind the Church—surprisingly enough, some would say—in this mat- ter. What group of major secular thinkers has yet evinced a comparable seriousness in recognizing pluralism as a genuine issue?—that is, as a challenging one, in the sense that their own secularism, even if seem- ingly apt for them, is a conceptualization that is at best not valid abso- lutely, is not simply the truth. How many spokesmen or spokeswomen of secularism recognize that to interpret other civilizations and the world at large, in its terms, much as Christians or Muslims or others used to do in theirs, thereby imposing one’s own categories for analysing and under- standing alternative positions, is not merely morally but intellectually out of date, at least; not to say, morally and also intellectually wrong? At the very least, I would invite you to consider a thesis that (as the Church, and Japanese Buddhist circles, and others, are doing) Modern Western culture should make the explicit endeavor to hammer out an understanding of the universe that makes effective sense of the fact that, seen in global historical perspective, its traditional theory not only is, but intellectually deserves to be, a minority worldview among others. To achieve this it, like them, may have to sacrifice what until now have seemed some of its most central tenets. I shall be suggesting in particular one such tenet, until now indeed central, that in such perspective is then seen to be untenable.

I am not propounding sheer relativism, however: the second of my five attitudes to pluralism. One of the saving truths that awareness of the history of religion and of culture makes evident is that every religious system and conceptual Weltanschauung is in process. A task then of its intellectuals is to enable each, nowadays by learning also from the oth- ers, to move forwards—towards a truer next phase, and in principle now a converging phase for all. For truth is one, while each of us can but approximate, yet in theory approximate gradually more closely—both to it, and therefore over time to each other.

For a time traditional religious ideologies were disparaged here- abouts as having misunderstood the natural world, and Modern Western- ism prided itself on being true because with science it knew how to understand that. It scored quite a substantial point there. Every major worldview has its virtues, and this was a massive one; but also, every one has too its limitations. The limitation of Western secularism was, as we are coming to recognize, that it has misunderstood people; and that is serious. Some are beginning to wonder whether its brilliant success at the level of the natural world was not perhaps too high a price for its inepti- tude at the personal level. It has demonstrably misunderstood other people. A synoptic view of human history as a unitary whole lets us recognize that the modern secular Westerner has misunderstood also her- and himself.

Specifically—and this point I wish to develop—the Secular Modern West has postulated that human nature is fundamentally secular; and that truth is. This postulate, of course, is basic. Religion, then—a West- ern concept—is conceived as an addendum, something that some people have tacked on here and there in various forms, for one or another rea- son. This ideology has forged a series of concepts in line with its own basic presuppositions and in terms of which it could explain to itself the data of other ideologies, other cultures, other ages; could interpret, with- out disturbing its own central convictions, the rest of humankind—just as we have seen Muslims and others doing. As in the other cases, this ploy—this intellectual device for insulating one position against others— works reasonably smoothly so long as one does not get to know those alternative positions too closely. But in due course one discovers, if one be informed and sensitive, that to interpret others within one’s own cate- gories is to misinterpret, is an intellectual error. A true understanding of the world presently induces at least a recognition of genuine plurality, and eventually a revision of one’s own primary intellectual categories; even, as I say, the most cherished. An intelligent modern Muslim has (perhaps painfully) arrived at the awareness that prophethood and heav- enly books are Islamic categories, not cosmic ones, and that other sound religious complexes operate through other conceptual frameworks: that ideologies are human constructs, however much they may mediate transcending reality. Similarly, an intelligent Modern Westerner comes to recognize that secularism is one ideology among many others; that it has been not discovered but concocted; that its apprehension of the human and of the universe is not a matrix within which the history of religion may be subordinately understood—but rather, vice-versa. We now know enough about the long and wide history of human religious- ness that we can understand modern Western secularism as a special historical development: one that is highly interesting, certainly eccentric, and, like other ideologies in that total story thus far, wrong in some of its central theoretical presuppositions (especially, about other people; and therefore, about human nature; and therein, on this point at least, wrong also about itself).

I suggested above that Modern Western secularism posits that human nature is essentially secular, with “the religions” as, at best, addenda. This view has tended to be assimilated even by religious peo- ple, so unwittingly pressurized are they by their cultural ambience. Less sympathetic minds have seen “the religions” as, not addenda to, but distortions of, basic human nature and truth. In either case one is reminded of the classical Islamic hadith, according to which every child is born a Muslim; the parents make some of them Jews and Christians. This also can be, has been, benign or disparaging, but anyway narrow, like the secularists’ comparable dogma—and similarly wrong. Since I shall presently be criticizing Modern Western culture, let me at this point applaud one important facet of it: namely, its indomitable curiosity, its resolute will to know. Ever since the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, at least, the West has felt and honored the impulse to find out: about this, that, and everything. In this case, secular reductionism in regard to human religious history has had in the end to answer to the saving grace of that drive that goes on knowing that his- tory more fully, more penetratingly, and presently ascertains that the secularists’ own view has left out something of moment. The imperious urge to understand is eventually forcing us to revise our categories, as it becomes clear that only so can we understand more adequately; only so can we avoid intellectual error.

For the fact is that reasonably well-informed perceptive awareness of the history of our planet over the past thirty or so millenia makes clear that modern Western secularism is an aberration; and that its attempt to inter- pret religion as some sort of extra in human life is dogmatic, is ideological eisegesis. The notion that human nature and truth are fundamentally secu- lar, are the norm, from which most human beings have, whether for good or other reason, deviated, is sheer projection.

By this I do not mean that humanity is, rather, fundamentally homo religiosus. That is an error that further illustrates my thesis, by its perpe- tuating the idiosyncratic outlook that the Modern West has defensively constructed. It took us some time to detect this. The concept “religion” has itself been developed by Western secularism as naming something that is supposedly over and above the standard everyday. Religion is in fact not something special, the historian can now see; it is secularism that is odd. “Religion” is a secularist notion, a conceptual element in that particular worldview—but a misleading one, setting up a dichotomy that secularists need in order to justify their own separate peculiarity, but normal people do not and cannot. The dichotomy is retained, in inverted form, in that phrase homo religiosus. Actually, there is rather just plain homo sapiens, and then a minority of those not quite sapientes enough to have sensed what kind of universe we live in and what kind of being we are.

Certainly the vast majority of human beings in all times and places, certainly including the outstandingly intelligent and perceptive among them, and all cultures, civilizations, and ages other than our own, have recognized what some would see as three levels in the environment: what the West calls the natural world, around us; secondly, the human world, in which persons are both social and individual; and thirdly, a higher realm to which we humans, indeed to which both the other two levels, are related. The relations among the three, and especially between the second and third, have been variously conceived, but there has been unanimity that the third, the transcendent realm, is the most important, the most ontologi- cally firm, the most valuable; that we are indeed fortunate to be related to it; that those relations are the most significant thing about us. The most highly intelligent and thoughtful in every case have recognized, not only like everyone else that the third realm is real and is higher than we (and more basic; both metaphors have been used) but that it transcends us also conceptually, so that our ideas about it, which differ, are at best approxi- mations, never fully adequate.

The concept “religion” distorts what it seeks to illuminate. Most West- erners, even historians of religion for a time, thinking of something called Hindu religion, have perceived India as a place where people in addition to being human beings have for this or that reason also been Hindus. In fact, however, of those whom outsiders call Hindus, the overwhelming majority are, and until the other day they all were, quite unconscious of being Hindus; and no one has ever tried to be Hindu. They have simply been human beings, aspiring to be human in the most reasonable or best way possible. There are many ways of being human. Being a man and being a woman are two among them; being a child is a nowadays sometimes over- looked third. The chief panoply of ways in India outsiders call “Hindu”; just as we call a Japanese way “Shinto” (an incongruous usage that only secularists could have thought up); and just as we call the widespread Islamic set of ways “Muslim” (unconscious that muslim is a common noun in Arabic, not a proper noun. The term, which we transliterate rather than translate, has its Islamic meaning as a concept within their worldview, and is derived from it, is not logically prior to it). And so on.

The Buddhist, the Christian, the Jewish, are salient ways of being hu- man. The innovative secularist way is at most one more such experiment. It is amusing (though also sad) to see this movement repeating the Western heresy of imagining that it alone is the only way that is cos- mically justified, alternatives being self-deceptions of one sort or another. This is a heresy in world-history terms, one that the Christian Church is now, though only now, learning slowly to outgrow. One hopes that its secularist counterpart will think as hard, and do as well.

The notion of religions, and the concept homo religiosus as inversion of the secular/religious dichotomy, have misled the Modern West in its understanding of the rest of the world, certainly; but more seriously, in its understanding of itself. For the outlook has distorted perception of all three strands in the West’s heritage today: the ancient two—that is: the one from Greece (and Rome), and the one from Palestine, respectively— and the modern, the secularist orientation itself. I will not pursue the non-Western matter here, for most of you are not historians of that field: and even on the first two Western matters I will just touch; for it is to an analysis of modern secularism that I wish to devote the bulk of the time remaining to me. The study of the history of religion illuminates, of course, the life of the communities, chiefly Asian, that it primarily has observed; but illuminates also, and massively, then Christian (and Jew- ish) matters, which we now see cannot be reasonably understood except in this wider context. Also it illuminates, innovatively, the Greek tradi- tion in Western life, of which the same, I suggest, can be said. Finally, it illuminates, but disturbingly, that third and most recent Western ideol- ogy, the secularist.

Modern Western Christians (and somewhat less, Jews) have them- selves succumbed to the secularizing drive in their culture by being manoeuvered into adopting its very categories even for their self- interpretation. That culture with great adroitness developed the objecti- fying concept “religion” and its counterparts “Christianity,” “Buddhism,” and the like; and then went on with even greater skill to develop the concept “believe,” as an explanation of what religious people do. If one fails to see that that transcendent realm is indeed there, and indeed if with missionary zeal one be resolute to deny it and to decry those who revere it, what more effective move than to reduce their apprehension of it to beliefs within their minds? The notion that religions are things that certain people believe, that believing has been what religious people primarily do, is a subtly devastating one, serving secularist coherence and self-confidence. To believe in God—to believe that God exists—is a somewhat blasphemous attitude to the Deity, although it has taken me a long time to see this, an arduous wrestling with Asian data to recognize what was happening to us here. For I too, of course, began with the standard modern outlook, and only slowly have been forced to modify it as I have come increasingly to know and gradually to understand more discerningly other ways of living in and perceiving our universe.

Yet let us turn to the first major strand in traditional Western civili- zation. By developing a concept called “religion” and applying it to only one of its two great human inheritances—namely, the tradition from Palestine—the West has been manoeuvered into under-appreciat- ing or neglecting the extent to which awareness of and response to transcendence have permeated, even constituted, its rationalist-idealist humanist tradition from Greece and Rome. I have in press at the moment a piece dealing at some length with the Western classical tradition as one of the great spiritual visions of humankind, a point that becomes clear once one sees it in world-history perspective; I shall therefore not elaborate that thesis here beyond noting that beauty, truth, and justice have served succeeding generations compellingly as transcendent, not simply empirical, ideals, as have the concept of hu- manity itself and that of reason, all foundational to Western humanism. Rationality was of will as well as of intellect; it, like truth and justice and the rest, has in this tradition been seen—and felt—as cosmic, not merely mundane, as something to which we human beings are privileged to aspire, in community as well as individually; and to which it is indeed our high duty to aspire. Reason thus is something transcendent that can become to a degree incarnate among us; and that alone can save us. In other words, this tradition is part of the general human consensus of which I have spoken, in recognizing transcendence within and among and around us; in seeing and being responsive to that third and higher realm in which the natural world and saliently we are embedded. The West began its modern period by re-emphasizing and revivifying this powerful heritage from Greece. This tradition too has been dubbed “secular,” which is why I have been at pains throughout this talk to speak rather of modern secularism, which is a much more recent development emerging once the transcendence in this older tradition has been slowly drained out. For a time the secular/religion dichotomy dis- criminated between two forms of Western spirituality: distinguished the Graeco-Roman from the Palestinian. Only gradually and inadvertently has it come to designate instead—yet ineptly—the split between the modern rather nihilistic outlook and all forms of the normal human orientation. With our modern awareness of more than one kind of “reli- gion,” and given the modern sense of “secular,” we may see that the Graeco-Roman and the Palestinian have been the West’s two religious traditions, both now being eroded or even rejected, whereas traditionally our best minds have in Chinese fashion participated in both (as do many of us in this room).

At this point, then, I advance my title from “The Modern West in the History of Religion” to a more accurate “The Modern West in Human History.” One might wish perhaps to add, “with special refer- ence to the awareness of and aspiration towards, response to, transcendence”; yet one does not wish to distract from the point that human life is, and over the ages has been, inherently (not peripherally, not as something “special”) lived betwixt the mundane and that transcendent. That is what human history is. That is what makes it human. (There is plenty of the mundane in the history of what passes for a religion.)

So long as one’s academic appointment be at a Western institution, and one’s audience modern, one acquiesces in a phrase like “The Study of Religion” as the name for our academic program; and for a time even “The History of Religion” for a field within it—though in fact there is no other field within it, no religious study outside it. The movement is per- force towards transcending these phrases. Already, at Harvard, in our new doctorate—a drastically revised pattern—in The Study of Religion, the “History of Religion” is not named, as some special area. We have introduced “The Modern West” as one of the several “religious traditions or historical-cultural complexes”—the Christian is another; as are the Islamic, Hellenistic, Chinese, etc.—among which students select one within which to pursue their particular specialty, but about whose place vis-à-vis the others they must also be equipped to speak comparatively. Secularism is, of course, but one element in the Modern West, as we shall be exploring a little presently; but no more than anything else in the human story, or indeed in the universe, should it be taken for granted; and especially not, by academics.

Rather than stress what Westerners have seen as the “religious” quality of every other civilization’s history (but we Westerners have regularly not had an adequate concept of “religion” to enable us to understand it), my topic, now “The Modern West in Human History,” will focus on the salient eccentricity of the Modern West in this matter, which is also its most fate- ful flaw. Accordingly, we could almost shift my title once again, to now a final formulation. From here on I will speak simply of “modern secular- ism”; will address myself, as a world historian, to the Modern West’s deci- sion intellectually not to perceive or to respond to transcendence; or, at least, to this culture’s thus-far conceptual feebleness in this regard. I have at times been asked to define what I mean by “transcendence.” The request is a typically positivist one, involving a contradiction in terms. Without over-exploiting the classicist adjective, one might say that one essential characteristic of the transcendent is that it transcends. Certainly it transcends what J mean by it, my idea being the relatively minor apprehension of one paltry individual: each of us can apprehend, none comprehend. Moreover, to define is to order within the conceptual, even the verbal, limits of particular persons in some particular language and always within one or another worldview. To know transcendence (I choose carefully the phrase “to know” [and of course I do not mean to understand the word “transcendence,” which is a quite distinct, miniscule, enterprise])—to know transcendence is to be consciously in touch (pardon the metaphor) with what is largely beyond one’s grasp; with what one is aware is both beyond one’s grasp and yet not beyond one’s reach. At a mundane level, to speak of quite limited things as petty analogies of what is unlimited: seven transcends six, includes it but goes beyond it; Harvard University transcends Harvard College, suffusing and subsuming and going beyond it; being human transcends being male or female, adult or child; the material world transcends our awareness of it. These are feeble illustrations from what is in comparison minor, to substitute for definitions of what is in principle ultimate. (Perhaps, however, the minor and the ultimate instances form a nondualistic sequence?)

It is because conceptualizations or other formalizations of the higher transcendent are themselves human and limited and historical— potentially useful, but also potentially drastically inadequate—that they differ among themselves. For a time a typical secularizing argument ran that the falsity of all the religions—or at least of all but one—was logi- cally proven by the fact that they differed from each other; from a mun- dane point of view, contradicted each other. This overlooked the fact that if the transcendent finally transcends, as each averred, of course human depictions of it will all be partial. Those blind persons and that elephant!

Could one almost say: the fact that religious conceptualizations differ proves that in this point they are basically right? (In the transcendence matter, that is.)

If someone really does not know what “transcendence” means—or for that matter, if one imagines that one more than very partially does know—the answer must be ostensive: study with perceptive care what the great cultural traditions of the world have reported it to be, have indicated how or where they have sensed it, in ways that others there have then found rich and have corroborated. Within a given commu- nity, intelligent people have probed their whole community’s best appre- hensions, to nurture, to confirm, to correct, or to supplement their own; the same principle applies globally.

But to return to Modern Western secularism; from speaking of what is involved in discerning the universe as having a transcendent dimen- sion, to what happens in the case of an ideology that fails to discern it. One of the fascinating things about human worldviews as one meets them throughout history is the extent to which each tends towards force- ful coherence, so that at their best every perception takes its form, every word its meaning, every judgment its rationale, within that particular whole. Secularism began by rejecting one item of one particular religious complex, but has moved towards rejecting transcendence across the board. And this, since transcendence (so the standard view) is a dimen- sion of everything, has become serious. Nothing is unaffected. Examples abound. I have time to mention—not to develop—two or three salient ones only. A person’s separateness is transcended in commu- nity. The secularized Modern West, in its extreme individualism, has tended strongly to underrecognize this, to put it mildly. Every society on earth has noticed that each of us is constituted of the double involvement of the individual and the group—multiple involvement, rather; since we participate in a series of groups, from family on out, each embedded in and in essential part comprised of the others. Societies have varied in the relative emphasis put on these several dimensions of our personhood. No society, however, has ever approached the singularity of the modern secular, which tries to locate both the value and even the reality of per- sons exclusively in finally atomistic individuals. It is unable or unwilling to see and to honor the communal transcendence that permeates and sustains, is ontologically integral to, each of us. This conduces to bleak- ness: on the one hand to bleak loneliness of isolated persons, and on the other hand to corporate structures that are bleakly impersonal. Society continues, but gradually ceases to be community; individuals continue, but gradually cease to be full persons.

Moreover, since worth is not seen to be conferred by one’s participa- tion in the transcendent, regularly mediated by community, each is doomed to struggle, less or more desperately, to acquire worth; chiefly— again through society—by getting others to concede or to imagine it. Mod- ern secularism tends to acknowledge the worth only of those, to let feel their own worth only those, who demonstrate that they have accomplished things that that society deems worthwhile: mundane things, such as mak- ing money or having what it calls power. In theory, everyone is worthy, but in practice few are enabled to feel that they are. All this is linked, of course, to the fact that value is itself an ultimately transcendent matter, even a transcendental concept. Instrumental value is acknowledged, and society sees some of its members as instrumentally valuable; but intrinsic value is transcendently given—and has to be transcendently recognized. Another illustration is the historical. We have already alluded to the current academic tendency to reduce history to merely one of the “disci- plines,” to something intellectually dominated, an object which is known, one among others. At most, history is thought of as the past, rather than as that great process in which the present is subsumed. Every moment, every generation, is in fact embedded in that encompassing reality, which is a component part not only of its actuality but also of its mean- ing and value. Our participation in that form of transcendence gives no negligible measure of our significance. Most cultures, through ritual and other treatment of their traditions, have remembered a past in order to incorporate it into themselves, it has been observed. We might say, equally: in order to incorporate themselves into it. Through ritual enact- ment, they participate in, and are themselves participated in by, that therein ongoing and transcending reality. Modern secularism, rejecting ritual and disparaging traditions, distances itself from the past, objectify- ing it in order to overcome it.

Not that it thereby enhances the present. This too, rather, ends up being reduced, de-transcendentalized. That is where the secularist begins, cutting oneself off from awareness of the richness to which all others have know us humans to be related. History in our sense subsumes and transcends the otherwise somewhat paltry present. Yet at every moment also human life subsumes and transcends history, or what for the mundane secularist passes for history: the movement of things and of ourselves through time. To be a human person is to live in the complicated intersection between the eternal, as it is sometimes called, and time-and-place: between the infinite, more or less dimly perceived, and the moving stream of the mundane, its current phase perceived by moderns as by others as not quite right. Modern Western sensibility for a while, using its concept of progress, transcended a present by finding it significant in relation to a promising future: a solution no longer so read- ily available to our youth.

I have said that human life is lived “between” the eternal and time; better, in both. Secularism no longer recognizes that the imperfections and the evanescence of each moment are redeemed by both their hori- zontal and their vertical contexts; that transcendence has entered our lives, and we its, both through the traditions that we inherit, the groups that we constitute and that help to constitute us, and directly. Neither is secularism willing to see that this has always been so. Every person who has ever lived has transcended his or her time and place. It is the primary reward of the so-called “historian of religion” to learn both that this has been so, and how. Others see it at least in art and music and literature: every great work of art is retrievably and firmly a product of the particular time and place in which its human maker produced it, as well as transcending them so that it is able to speak also to the rest of us, to add significance to our lives. Thus the humanities have traditionally proffered the education by which we lesser folk are introduced to the vision and work of greater, and are thereby enabled to overcome in part our lessness.

Transcendence, however special (to be a human being is to be spe- cial), is yet for humans an altogether ordinary, everyday affair. Secularist moderns are forbidden by dogma or presupposition from acknowledging this, and finally from discerning it; hence they have imposed a naturalis- tic ceiling on the interpreting of even human history. I have noticed that graduate students even in Divinity Schools assume a firm divorce between what they call historical and what they call theological or even moral judgments—as if there could be any grounds either for theology, or for good and evil, other than historical grounds. After all, all evidence is historical. Everything that exists, exists historically.2 It is sometimes said that certain otherworldly mystics are not interested in history; this presumably means that they are interested only in that narrow slice of it through which they for a rapturous moment are going. The revelation, 2 I am using the word “exist” here, it should be evident, in the sense in which theists aver that God transcends existence, Buddhists that nirvana and dharma do, etc. too, that various peoples have talked about has occurred, if at all, within the temporal process (in addition to the fact that the very concept “reve- lation” has arisen and developed as a particular human construct). The overwhelming evidence for the reality of the transcendent is human history. It is also the only evidence; though of course it includes one’s own life at the present moment, as well as all philosophy, poetry, and Neanderthal burial.

Our third example, after individualism and history, was to have been the secularist objectifying of truth, its forceful transfer conceptually from something higher than us to which it is ennobling to aspire, to something lower than us that it is the new business of academe to produce and to distribute for society to use, the way our factories produce cars for con- sumption. That, however, is an hour’s exploration in itself, worth perhaps an article someday to be entitled “Universities: From the Pursuit of Truth to the Production of Knowledge.” Moreover, the first draft of this talk, before it became clear that this would make it too long, touched on the objectifying of other human involvements also, each now being conceived impersonally. All these have come to be treated impersonally, as things to be detached from those who evince them: as something that individuals or societies have, rather than that persons or communities are; or that we use rather than participate in. Instances of this were the conceptualizing of sexual relations, recently named “sex”; more academically, of language, values, scriptures, power. (Each of these would be worth an hour, too. The last, power, is a recent Western notion; tracing its development as a con- cept, and its current popularity, proves fascinating.)

I leave such matters aside, however, to close rather with an observation on a turning of the tide. Doubtless, unless you already felt it yourself, I could anyway hardly in the hour persuade you that modern secularism, whatever its virtues, and of course it has many, has been simply wrong in its conceptual negativity, its failure to recognize intellectually the transcendent realm. Nor in that case would another hour be perhaps the answer; though I would hope that one might note, in good scientific fash- ion, how profusely fruitful the contrary hypothesis can be, might note of what a wide range of data a more positive view makes coherent sense, rendering intelligible and integrated much that is otherwise scattered and often markedly opaque.

In any case, my concluding observation is that not everyone, of course, in the Modern West is personally secularist. The ideology that I have been criticizing is this society’s orthodoxy, particularly regnant in the universities. It has been the academic establishment’s credo. Yet deviants, as often, are numerous, and have been becoming of late less reticent or cowed. The deficiencies of our society, increasingly manifest, are being increasingly aired. Human beings here as elsewhere, now as elsewhen, are in fact in transcendence in relation to themselves, to each other, and to the universe, however much the elitist theory of their times may tell them otherwise. And although those relations—of human beings to the transcendent—are fragile, or at least wilt badly when not care- fully nurtured, nonetheless they persist somehow; and persons inchoately know and feel that something is wrong when they have wilted. Many matters in the West have helped to keep the spirit alive. The classical humanist tradition, the Christian and Jewish traditions, innate moral sensitivities and humane perceptions, manifold new and often bizarre developments, and within the universities that undying imperative to discern the truth, even when it be unorthodox: all these and more have meant the perdurance also in this society of the universally human. Explicitly, the sense of transcendence has been under attack and has waned. Or it has been forced to be privatized. Especially in some corpo- rate bodies and many sectors of society impersonalism has become strong. Yet in personal life, however wounded, and whatever the theory, implicitly the higher dimensions have persisted.

The problem is that they may find expression in misguided forms because of conceptual weakness. The rise of the religious right in significant degree marks the failure of secular and of secularizing liberals. It is the task now of intellectuals, as it has always been, to clarify the situa- tion conceptually; to provide the theoretical aspect of the wholeness that the West seeks, and will flounder if it does not find. This culture will not find it easily—though it is in our past; and is all around us, in of course diverse forms; within us; and, if one be permitted hope, in the future: the only sort of future that holds promise. The West’s fifth phase is to “rejoin the human race,” after the isolationist detour; with a renewed enhancement of the sense of what it means to be truly human.

Modern secularism is an intellectual error. It is so important an error as to be socially and historically disruptive; not to say, disastrous. And as an intellectual error, it is the task of intellectuals to correct it.

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