From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular

Timelessness: Trekking the Past’s Future

and Future’s Past

Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

It can be argued that we are currently living in a time characterized by a

widespread perception of “discontinuity,” of a rupture in historical con-
tinuity. This rupture appears to have been brought about by the alleged
demise of the secular paradigm, underpinning the Enlightenment project
of modernity, caused by the outbreak of religious fervor and spirituality
at the dawn of the new millennium. The perceived rupture in the natural
progression of secular modernity has led to the questioning of the assumed
link of modernity and secularity1 and to the critique of Enlightenment
theories and postulates regarding the disenchantment of the world.
The axiomatic assumption, which held that as the world modernizes,
it also secularizes, has been cast into very serious doubt by the resurgence

1.  The link between modernity and secularity has been contested by Susanna G. Rizzo,
“Reframing the Secular Paradigm,” paper presented at the workshop “New Approaches to
Religion and Public Life,” ANU-Canberra, December 6–7, 2008, promoted by Centre of
Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University. In this paper it was argued
that the “secular” is nothing but a stage in the development of all historical religions coin-
ciding with the transcendentalization of the notion of the divine. See also Susanna G. Rizzo,
“The Religious Foundations of Secular Hermeneutics and Epistemology: Debunking the
Secularisation Myth,” in Ronald S. Laura, Rachel Buchanan, and Amy K. Chapman, eds.,
God, Freedom and Nature: Proceedings of the CIS Biennial Conference in Philosophy,
Religion and Culture (Boston: Body and Soul Dynamics, 2012), pp. 6–13; and John Mil-
bank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
Recent scholarship has also begun to question the chronology of modernity, arguing for an
earlier rise of the phenomenon. Gillespie, for instance, argues that the origins of modernity
are to be sought in the XIII century “Nominalist Revolution” and Petrarch’s individualism,
while Milbank identifies it in the theology of St. Augustine. See Michael Allen Gillespie,
The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008).

39
Telos 163 (Summer 2013): 39–60.
doi:10.3817/0613163039
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40    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

of the religious.2 However, it was on this assumption that the modern epis-
teme was constructed, with its truths and its moral and aesthetic values and
expectations. The death of the secularization narrative, only a little over
one hundred years after Nietzsche’s Gott ist tot obituary, has enormous
ramifications for how human beings, especially those human beings of
the West who have been saturated in “History,” view and understand the
past. The West understands itself in terms of History because its identity
is rooted in the idea that it inhabits a world of becoming, not of being, and
that central to that becoming has been the movement from “religious” to
“secular.” If that idea turns out to be false, the very survival of the West
is at stake and consequently Western identity, along with its underlying
discourses and metanarratives, will need to be re-thought.
In a recent work, based on demographic projections, Eric Kaufman
even hypothesized that in the end it will be the religious who will win
the race of history.3 This is based purely on the statistical evidence that
shows that it is the fundamentalists of the world who continue to have the
most children while secularists and religious liberals have relatively few
children. Whatever may happen in the future, it is clear that the idea that
secularization is the inevitable fate of humanity is no longer a viable basis
on which to construct and understand human history. A new history, one
from which this inevitability has been excised, is required.

Probing the Rise and Fall of Secular Narratives

The secularization narrative has for a long time been successfully embed-
ded in modern Western culture. If we accept, as Kathleen Davis has argued,
that there is a politics of time that finds its expression in such things as

2. For a popular account of this change, see John Micklethwait and Adrian
Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World (New
York: Penguin, 2009). There is a vast range of material dealing with secularization and the
contemporary religious situation. Significant contributions include: Charles Taylor, A Sec-
ular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007); David Martin, On Secularization: Towards
a Revised General Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and
Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Christian
Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of
American Public Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2003), Jürgen Habermas et al.,
An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2010); and in a more polemical vein, Hunter Baker, The End of Secularism
(Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009).
3.  Eric Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (London: Profile Books,
2010).
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    41

“historical periods,” then it can be seen that the secular narrative has long
established its hegemony over those politics.4 Davis has argued that these
politics operate to relegate both pre-modern European past and parts of
the non-European present to an age of feudalism and religion, an age that
is both inferior to, and preparatory for, modernity. We might add that it
has greatly contributed to the “spatialization” of time in a very different
manner than the “geography of time” and “temporal distances” identified
and purported by Fabian.5
The Enlightenment constructed history as the journey of humanity
through time from an inferior past denoted by violence, incorrect think-
ing, despotism, and barbarism to a present that is marked by refinement,
freedom, science, and civilization under the enlightened guidance of prog-
ress and reason. Subsequently this journey would be mythologized as the
passage from childhood to adulthood. Kant, in fact, defined the Enlight-
enment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,”6 while
Condorcet, a few years later, expressed it in more utopian terms by stating
“that nature has fixed no limits to our hopes.”7 Thus the myth of progress
was born.
With the coming of the Enlightenment, Europeans, or at least Euro-
pean intellectuals, dreamed that they could create a world in which peace,
prosperity, and justice could be made a permanent part of the human condi-
tion. Such a theorem postulated the existence of an inferior and immature
past and produced the corollary of a future in which human beings would
realize their full potential. It meant constructing a narrative that connected
a protology of penury with a teleology of happiness. The historical model
that emerged was thus imbued with eschatological and soteriological
expectations and was extremely optimistic in character.
Such a view was only possible within a liberal framework that
accepted the idea that human beings were, in some way, capable of being
improved. The human beings of the past had been sunk in barbarism; they
had advanced to a current condition of civilization and would eventually

4.  Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Sec-
ularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
5.  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New
York: Columbia UP, 1983), pp. 17–18.
6.  Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Per-
petual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), p. 33.
7.  Marquis de Condorcet, “Tenth Epoch,” in Outline of an Historical View of the
Progress of the Human Mind (Philadelphia: Land & Ustick, 1796), p. 253.
42    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

go beyond that to something even better. As Davis perceptively argues,

barbarism was something that belonged both to the past and to the pres-
ent.8 Consequently it is evident that, if there were to be a transition from
the barbaric past to the civilized present, this required that the past be
qualitatively different from the present. The past was a world built on dif-
ferent principles and adhering to strange and perplexing customs, just as
the wider world presented itself as something primitive and perplexing.
In many ways the picture of the past as “qualitatively different” or as
“an allotrope of the present,” was a picture first painted by Walter Scott in
Waverley,9 and is what, over time, we have come to recognize as history, as
part of the evolutionary journey that humanity has taken. It puts together
past and present and the whole of the human race as a single package and
divides the seamless flow of time into measurable yarns. Hence, as Davis
has argued, it uses terms that apply to the European past, such as “feudal,”
“medieval,” and “dark ages,” to describe the non-European present and
thus implies that other, non-western parts of the world are to be under-
stood within the framework of a single evolutionary process of historical
development. Such a strategy follows naturally from the universalism of
liberalism embedded in Enlightenment discourses and metanarratives,
as liberalism provides a single template for what constitutes the good,
and more importantly, the sorts of flourishing that constitute the model
of human excellence. As John Gray has pointed out, liberal universalism
only allows for a number of such models to exist under a liberal order.10 It
copes by relegating other models to the past, either triumphantly in order
to denounce them as products of a barbarous past, or wistfully and nostal-
gically, as a great expression of the human spirit that is no longer possible.
Consequently it locks “modernity” into a particular type of society, one
that is characterized by the sovereign state and the creation of a public
sphere within that state that is understood as “secular.” In the secular
state, matters of public importance are to be discussed without reference
to religious doctrines, although the discourse of the secular does assume

8. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, pp. 33–34.

9. On Scott as historical novelist, see David Morse, Romanticism: A Structural
Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 141–90. On the presentation of the past gen-
erally in nineteenth-century England, see Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study
of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1984).
10. John Gray, Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge,
1989), p. 260.
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    43

all the connotations of a religious doctrine or, as Carl Schmitt argues, of a

“secularized theology.”11
There is, however, a paradox underlying the modern-secular historical
narrative. The Enlightenment, as it embraced the legacy of Cartesian ratio-
nalism, posited itself and was eminently anti-historical. In his Discours
(1637), Descartes had argued for the impossibility of a truthful, “verifi-
able” historical account: history was not an exact science and therefore
tended to inevitably falsify its contents.12 Truth was to be sought in the
abstract principles of reason and not in the inconsequentiality and partial-
ity of history. This belief was echoed by Hume, who stated that “mankind
are so much the same in all times and places, that history informs of noth-
ing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the
constant and universal principles of human nature.”13 It was for this very
reason that history came to be envisaged by Enlightenment thinkers as
the gradual progress of mankind from a state of barbarism to a state of
civilization in which cultural diversity was superseded by the belief in
the existence of a “generic humanity.” A dualistic or dialectic view of his-
tory began to emerge, hinged on the antinomies barbarism-civilization and
civilization-culture, which merely replaced the traditional Augustinian
dualism of the two cities. Modern secularism merely juxtaposed Augustin-
ian secularism.14
It was through the above mentioned process that the notion of “his-
tory as progress” became central to modernity’s self-understanding. All
Enlightenment thinkers from Vico to Montesquieu, from Voltaire to Gib-
bon and Condorcet, believed that history was the process by which human
beings employed reason to create a free world. History, the realm of the
Pascalian “thinking reed,” was the playground of freedom and the source
of an inherent, universal, moral imperative. In the secular conceptualiza-
tion of history, there is, in fact, a sense of inescapable inevitability, a sort
of lingering or diffuse neo-Pelagianism in which human will wrestles with

11.  Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,
trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 36.
12.  René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Other Writings, trans. Desmond M.
Clarke (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 8.
13. David Hume., “Enquiry concerning Human Understanding,” in On Human
Nature and the Human Understanding (New York: Collier, 1962), p. 94.
14.  Robert A. Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre
Dame Press, 2006), pp. 44–45.
44    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

the deterministic entelechy of its own worldview. It is in this very paradox

or aporia that the essence of modernity resides.
An attentive analysis reveals that this “secular” understanding of
history appears to be nothing but a reflection of the Christian concept of
providential history minus God, as Schmitt pointed out: most of the attri-
butes of the divinity, in fact, have been transferred to human beings, while
Christian eschatology, which is founded on an inherent Manichean view
of the world, has been incorporated into the interacting ideas of progress
and historical dialectics. Much of the secular ideas about, and represen-
tations of, the world have been in fact possible and intelligible because
mediated by a religious language. The notions of progress, pragmatism,
and rationality, which underpin the genealogy of secularism, are residues
or relics of a religious discourse so that secularism can be regarded as a
form of religion, a pool of ultimate beliefs about first things. Carl Becker
was correct nearly eighty years ago when he referred to the “Heavenly
City of the Eighteenth century Philosophers.”15
Becker looked forward to a time when all religious ideas have been
banished from public discourse so that it becomes “essentially” naturalis-
tic. Steven Smith has recently argued that this sort of secular discourse can
only function when non-secular ideas are “smuggled” in to provide some
backbone and depth to the discussion.16 It can be said that the same is true
of secular historical discourse. A purely naturalistic history may turn out
to be no more than a chronicle of events that meanders meaninglessly
through time. History, like many other forms of intellectual activity, only
really functions when something else is “smuggled” in to give it some
structure and purpose. History thus becomes a meaning-making process in
which historiography and historicism coincide.
This can be seen clearly in the fact that there is a contradiction at the
heart of the secularization narrative. It proclaims itself to be a process
whereby primitive and false religious beliefs will be replaced by true and
naturalistic ones. In reality, it is founded ultimately on eschatology, on a
faith that we stand on the brink of an old imperfect religious age that will
be destroyed and replaced by a new messianic age in which humanity will
stand tall as secular beings.

15.  Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New
Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1932).
16.  Steven D. Smith, Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (New Haven, CT: Yale
UP, 2010), especially chapter 5.
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    45

This faith that we stand at the end of an older age and on the brink of
a new one that will see the birth of a new world has been central to every
form of “political religion” that has manifested itself in the West from the
founding of the American republic to the modern day.17 It begins in the
French Revolution, when the revolutionaries abolished the old calendar
and instituted a new one that began with the founding of the Republic.18
Both Lenin and Mussolini believed that they were creating regimes that
would bring into existence a “new man.”19 It is equally true that in order
to destroy the “superstition” of the past these regimes had to create cat-
echisms, rituals, and liturgies of their own.20
One particular expression of this eschatology is eugenics, in both its
early twentieth-century and contemporary form. Eugenics is the founda-
tion of the eschatology of the modern liberal secular state. If, as liberalism
would have it, human beings are capable of improvement, then this
improvement must include the use of scientific techniques to create a new
type of humanity. Jean Bethke Elshtain has argued that eugenics repre-
sents the dream of the absolute sovereignty of the individual in being able
to determine his or her future.21 It is in this sense the logical extension of
the idea of state sovereignty that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to triumph over both “feudalism” and religion.
The dream of a human future characterized by human longevity,
peopled by individuals genetically enhanced saturates our culture, a cul-
ture in which morality and aesthetics collapse into one critical mass. The
phenomenon appears to foreshadow the return to the classical aesthetic
ideal of kalokagathia, whereby what is “beautiful,” namely, those things

17. Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton UP, 2006).
18.  Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: Pen-
guin Books, 2004), pp. 654–58. Cf. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988). Ozouf claims that the festivals, which marked time
in the new calendar, aimed at redesigning or restructuring the people’s sense of time and
space. The new conceptions of time and space thus introduced would have contributed in
the long run to their de-Christianization and the creation of a “new citizen.”
19.  François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twen-
tieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 175.
20.  On Italy, see Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of
Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997).
21.  Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Book,
2008), especially chapter 10.
46    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

whose value is in se et per se self-evident, is also “good.”22 Such an ethos

is complemented nowadays by a catastrophism or chiliasm that assumes
the purgative, “palingenetic” role that violence had in both communism
and fascism. This can be seen in a number of areas ranging from climate
change to the regular items in the media announcing the possibility that a
comet has just missed hitting the earth or will hit in the future.23 Although
the vision of a human future, in which catastrophe paves the way for the
rebirth of the human race as scientific, secular, and eugenically enhanced,
goes back to H. G. Wells and the Futurist movement of early twentieth
century, it is still very much with us. In a secular world, a world defined
historically by the secularization narrative, we are always standing at the
end of days. This can be seen when we look at the constant panics and
fears of the current age.24 It is amplified by the theme of much popular
culture, exemplified by the movie 2012, that anticipates a better world
once the coming catastrophe, whatever it may be, has purged us of our
weaknesses or, as in Cormack McCarthy’s novel The Road, in which a
new Prometheus lurks in the interstices of the narration who will bring the
fire back to humanity. It is the myth on which the popular Star Trek series
is based.

History and the Post-Secular

At this stage of our discussion three important elements emerge in regard
to the meaning and function of history in a post-secular context. The first
is that in its Western secular form History is as much about the future as
about the past. It maps the passage from the past to the present in expecta-
tion of a redeeming future in this world that is secular in form. The second

22.  For the treatment of the relation between the classical Greek concepts of kalón
(beautiful) and agathón (good), see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed.,
trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 472–84.
Gadamer writes: “Beautiful things are those whose value is of itself evident. You cannot
ask what purpose they serve. They are desirable for their own sake and not, like the useful,
for the sake of something else. . . . the idea of the beautiful closely approximates that of the
good, insofar as it is something to be chosen for its own sake, as an end that subordinates
everything else to it as a means. For what is beautiful is not regarded as a means to some-
thing else” (emphasis added).
23.  See for example Alastair Jamieson, “Giant Asteroid ‘heading for Earth in 2182,’”
Telegraph (UK), July 29, 2010, available online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/
space/7916088/Giant-asteroid-heading-for-Earth-in-2182.html.
24.  Christopher Booker and Richard North, Scared to Death: From BSE to Global
Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth (London: Continuum, 2009).
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    47

is that fragmenting or parsing time into periods or “circles of time” implies

an ultimate end: there are stages, as Comte argued in his Cours de Philo-
sophie Positive (1830–42) through which humanity has passed and which
have allowed for progress and improvement to occur. The third issue is
that regarding the extent to which naturalistic history, under post-secular
conditions, is possible.
Naturalism is seen both as the “normal” condition of humanity and
the goal of history that can only be achieved once the dross of religion has
been purged. Naturalism becomes the end of history, a little like the idyllic
world of communism, because once humanity has cast off the shackles of
religion the age of universal peace will finally dawn. A direct comparison
can be made between the secularization thesis and the “end of history”
proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama some twenty years ago. For Fukuyama,
the destruction of communism appeared to presage that history was at an
end with the triumph of liberal democracy.25 Not surprisingly, the end of
history pointed the way to a bleak world, a world of “men without chests”
in which passion had been drained from the human drama, a world in
which, as Nietzsche once claimed, the slave morality, namely, the moral-
ity of utility, had won.26 This world mirrored that portrayed by Charles H.
Pearson almost one hundred years earlier as he contemplated a gray and
dismal place that had attained peace but at the cost of vigor and individual
activity,27 or by Edward Gibbons who, while contemplating the ruins of
Rome gleaming in the diaphanous sun of an autumn day of 1764, nostalgi-
cally lamented the end of the intellectual and cultural achievements of
Classical antiquity under the assault of a numbing Judeo-Christian ortho-
doxy.28 It is in this sense of loss that Fukuyama identifies the absurdity and
paradoxical nature of human life or condition: “Human life . . . involves
a curious paradox: it seems to require injustice for the struggle against
injustice is what calls forth what is highest in man.”29

25. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin,
1992), pp. 39–51.
26.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (London:
Penguin Classics, 1990), aphorism 260.
27.  Charles H. Pearson, National Life and Character: A Forecast, 2nd ed. (London:
Macmillan, 1894), p. 363.
28.  Edward Gibbons, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, abridged
ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 434–43.
29. Fukuyama, The End of History, p. 311.
48    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

It was perhaps with some relief that it was only a short time later that
Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis restored religion and conflict
to the world,30 as conflict and violence allow for the perpetuation of the
“secular” and become therefore indispensable “intrusions” in a world in
which peace is ontologically foundational.31
In a way the positions of Fukuyama and Huntington appear to mirror
those of the intellectuals of the early Roman Empire. Augustus, in fact,
sought to portray his reign as the beginning of a nova aetas or saeculum, a
new age or cycle of peace, as celebrated by Virgil in his famous and often
misunderstood fourth Eclogue, in which the conflicts of the one hundred
years since the death of the Gracchi have been replaced by the equiva-
lent of the “end of history.” Augustus proclaimed that he had restored the
Respublica and consequently replaced strife by amity,32 a narrative that
reflected the needs and interests of a growing pluralistic society,33 although
the later Christian narrative saw the empire as a source of evil and conflict
in the world, which needed to be destroyed if a genuine age of peace was
to be attained.34
The mythopoeic slogan of Nova Aetas, or “New Age,” injected vigor
into the principle or discourse of Augustan restoration just as historians,
such as Livy and Sallust, had earlier bemoaned the way in which Romans
had strayed from the original principles that had made Rome great. Fuku-
yama’s “end of history” can therefore be regarded as an analogue of such
a slogan as, in an attempt to restart history, it envisages it in the sense
of movement and progress. In both cases the apparent unity, which the
“golden age” or “end of history” had created, is challenged by those who
discover conflict under the façade of peace and unity.

30.  Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), pp. 95–101.
31. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 5–6. Cf. Simon Oliver, “Introducing
Radical Orthodoxy: From Participation to Late Modernity,” in John Milbank and Simon
Oliver, eds., The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 7.
32.  Res Gestae Divi Augusti, p. 34, in P. A. Brunt and J. M. Moore, eds., Augustus’
Achievements and Velleius Paterculus (Oxford: Loeb Classical Library, 1967).
33.  For the religious pluralism characterizing Roman society of the first century
A.D. see: James B. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); Clif-
ford Ando, The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 2008); Franz Valery Marie Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman
Paganism (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1911); Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the
Roman Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1983).
34.  Allen Brent, Political History of Early Christianity (London: T & T Clark, 2009).
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    49

The secularist narrative was the key way, the new mythos, by which
democracy and the modern state had been legitimized as they moved
toward an “end of history” that is characterized by an age of peace, which
since the Enlightenment has often been characterized as an age of com-
merce or, as Benjamin Constant once termed it, of “modern liberty.”
According to Constant, in the age of modern liberty sovereignty does not
have as its purpose moral regulation and conformity, as in ancient Rome or
Sparta, but merely the function of providing the protection behind which
individuals are free to pursue their own interests and inclinations.35 The
“end of history” is a world in which religion has no place in the public
sphere and human behavior is founded on the liberal “harm principle.”
Freed from the barbarous and primitive passions that religion had fostered,
secular humanity will break the “chains,” which Rousseau had identi-
fied with civilization, and finally be free to express their inherent natural
goodness.36
The modern utopian vision proved to be in reality a dystopia and
therefore was repealed by those who spotted its inherent contradictions.
But what are the implications of a repudiation of the idea that the world
is moving inexorably toward a secular future and a new age of peace and
humanity? Is the challenge to the hegemony of the secular linked to the
gradual but inexorable retreat of the state, the reorganization of the public
sphere and its re-colonization by its religious competitors, just as Christi-
anity and then Islam colonized the space of the late Roman antiquity? Is
the World Wide Web becoming the public and “timeless” space37 or the
35.  Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (India-
napolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), ch. 16. In regard to the exercise of sovereignty, Constant
writes: “Each citizen in the ancient republics . . . had great personal importance politically.
The exercise of political rights there was everybody’s constant enjoyment and occupa-
tion. . . . Their share of sovereignty was not as in our time an abstract supposition. . . . Today
the mass of citizens is called to exercise sovereignty only in illusory fashion. The people
can only be slaves or free, but they are never in charge.”
36.  William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009).
37.  We are here referring to the thesis put forward by Arnold Gehlen according to
which the penetration of technology in every aspect of human life, besides bringing about
the secularization of the notion of “progress,” has led to an apparent “immobility” in which
the human experience of reality is reduced to an experience of images. Gehlen calls this
experience “post-historical” in which progress has become “routine,” or as “routinization
of novelty,” a process made possible by the secularization of the notion of progress itself.
See Arnold Gehlen, “Die Säkularisierung des Fortschritts,” in Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, ed.,
Einblicke (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978). Cf. Arnold Gehlen, Man in the Age of
Technology, trans. Patricia Lipscomb (New York: Columbia UP, 1980). Gianni Vattimo, in
50    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

forum of the post-secular man? James C. Bennett has argued, in fact, that
the internet has helped to create a new form of “commonwealth” and of
communication network in the English-speaking world, which he refers to
as the Anglosphere.38
In a very general sense, the post-secular simply means that the
Enlightenment narrative, based on the axiom that the history of humanity
culminates in a world that is simply secular in nature, which is based on
the Westphalian model of the sovereign state, is no longer tenable. The
inherent developments and contradictions of modernity have falsified
those very premises on which it built its narrative. The repudiation of the
secular narrative has a number of implications. One is that the secular dis-
course needs to negotiate its place along with that of the various religions
in the public sphere.39 This means rethinking what exactly is meant by the
secular and its place in public life. It means considering the nature of the
content of the “secular.”
The second implication is a need to think about the nature of history
once the secularizing element has been removed. By and large, history
in the West since the Enlightenment has been founded on the idea that
humanity was progressing toward a goal. If history has been stripped of
that goal, does it still exist as history? Is history even possible under post-
secular conditions? Such an issue can only be considered if we have some
appreciation of what exactly we mean by history.
History must be considered to be more than a set of stories or a
chronicle of events. If so, what holds it together? The obvious answer is
commenting on Gehlen’s thesis, states: “the history of ideas thus leads—through a process
which could also be described as the logical development of a line of reasoning—to its
voiding. For Christianity, history appears as the history of salvation; it then becomes the
search for a worldly condition of perfection, before turning, little by little, into the his-
tory of progress. But the ideal of progress is finally revealed to be a hollow one, since its
ultimate value is to create conditions in which further progress is possible in a guise that
is always new. By depriving progress of a final destination, secularization dissolves the
very notion of progress itself, as happens in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture.”
Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilsm and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 8.
38. James C. Bennett, The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking
Nations Will Lead the way in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Little-
field, 2004), pp. 122–23.
39.  Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on a Post Secular Society,” New Perspectives Quarterly
25 (2008): 17–29. Cf. José Casanova, Public Religions in the World (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1994), p. 225; Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent
Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1999), pp. 11–18.
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    51

a narrative, but what is the nature of this narrative? If it is teleological,

then the narrative can only run until its goal is reached, in this case when
the secular has triumphed and the religious been banished from the world.
The secular narrative is essentially eschatological in nature, and therefore
we are living in the final days before the triumph of the age of peace and
goodwill. There are however alternative types of narrative. Thucydides,
for instance, provides us with a history that reads like a contemporary
Sophoclean or Euripidean tragedy in which either a mysterious Tyche
or an envious god defeats man’s endeavors.40 Emily Greenwood, among
others, has commented on the way in which Thucydides gives the Sicil-
ian expedition a tragic dimension,41 a mode of historical writing that will
find many followers during the cosmopolitan and individualistic centuries
known as the Hellenistic period.42 But history can also be seen as a falling
away from an original state of purity to one in which the world has become
dross or as originating with a “fall” from a state of grace and happiness,
as in the biblical Genesis or in Hesiod’s myth of the five ages in his Works
and Days, a regress rather than progress.
However, one cannot fail to observe that alongside or tucked within
the folds of history there is also the story, or a multiplicity of stories, which
do not move along the road to infinity but remain forever encased in eter-
nity. The story does not presuppose, as history does, that the world has
changed, but seeks to speak across generations as if human beings inhabit
a timeless universe. Walter Benjamin links the story to eternity but also to
death:

The idea of eternity has ever had its strongest source in death. If this idea
declines, so we reason, the face of death must have changed. It turns
out that this change is identical with the one that has diminished the

40.  According to Martin Persson Nilsson, the spread of the cult of Tyche, which inten-
sifies during the Hellenistic Age, represents “the last stage of the secularizing of religion.”
As E. R. Dodds clarifies “in default of any positive object the sentiment of dependence
attaches itself to the purely negative idea of the unexplained and unpredictable, which is
Tyche.” See Martin Persson Nilsson, Greek Piety, trans. Herbert Jennings Rose (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1948), p. 86; E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1951), p. 242.
41.  Emily Greenwood, Thucydides and the Shaping of History (London: Duckworth,
2006), p. 87.
42.  Albin Lesky, Storia della Letteratura Greca, vol. 3, L’Ellenismo (Milan: Il Sag-
giatore, 1962), pp. 944–45.
52    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

communicability of experience to the same extent as the art of storytell-

ing has declined.43

There are good reasons for thinking that the decline of the story and the
rise of Enlightenment history are linked to the desire to escape death and
oblivion through the infinite progress of history. This appears to confirm
Heidegger’s conclusion, in his discussion regarding the theories concern-
ing the nature of the “historical” as purported by Wilhelm Dilthey and
Count Yorck, that the question of history and “historicality” is inherently
ontological.44 If this correlation is assumed to explain the nature of the sec-
ular narrative, one can easily understand the important role the discourse
of eugenics plays in such a narrative, as it becomes the tool for attaining
ultimate sovereignty in a secular state in which all the functional compo-
nents are perfectly functioning and coordinated to guarantee its survival.
Thus secular history always assumes a happy ending, an ultimate state in
which all will be reconciled, although in an Orwellian fashion. It rejects
the eternal story. In its place it projects itself into infinity: reconciliation
will be attained in the future even if it is necessary to break many eggs on
the road to it.
But there is always lurking behind such a narrative the possibility that
history will not have a happy ending, and that we shall be trapped by
forces outside of the control of the narrative. This must strike any reader
of Flaubert. In Salammbo the Carthaginians put down the mercenary
revolt—“Carthage was as if convulsed in a spasm of titanic joy and bound-
less hope”45—but the reader knows that such joy is just the prelude to
the triumphs, and ultimate failure, of Hannibal. There is no happy ending
to Madame Bovary. The secularizing story can also be told in terms of
Flaubert’s irony. Just as the secularists were gazing on the Promised Land,
up rode the fundamentalists of all descriptions. The story has a certain
resonance with that of Heraclius, who hardly had finished celebrating his
triumph over the Persian Empire than unexpectedly he had to face the
onslaught of a new enemy in the guise of the Islamic armies from Arabia.46

43.  Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,”
in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, London, 1973), p. 93.
44.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 449–55.
45.  Gustave Flaubert, Salammbo, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1977), p. 282.
46.  Walter E. Kaegi, Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2003).
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    53

The inherent entelechy of the narrative is always threatened by irony

and can be defeated by it, or at least deflected from its goal. The Carthag-
inians are effectively wiped from history by the Romans. The Christian
dream of the Eastern Romans is shattered by the emergence of Islam. The
“end of history” is checked because the very triumph of liberalism pro-
vides a space where those who hate it with a real passion are allowed to
flourish. What happens when the narrative that held a whole enterprise
together is first checked by irony and then shattered by failure? It no lon-
ger holds together the past, the present, and the future in a single vision.
What happens when a whole family of narratives fails in this way? We
are left sitting in the ruins of the city of failed narratives, be they Marxist,
Providential, Idealist, or scientific.
It is important to recognize, as we have argued, that the secular narra-
tive is closely related to that of the rise of the modern state.47 Advocates of
the efficient causality of state power48 argued that such power was neces-
sary to restrain religious conflict. The modern Western state still defines
itself as secular in these terms; sovereignty is a secular power that pre-
vents civilized human beings from slipping back into a state of nature, or
a barbarism, defined in terms of religious conflict. The sovereignty of the
individual, defined as the power of the individual to use whatever means
available to escape death so long as it does not harm anyone else, requires
the sovereign state for its pursuit.49

47. Schmitt, Political Theology, pp. 31–38. Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past:

On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). For a critique
of Schmitt’s position, see Antonio Negri Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern
State (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999).
48.  For a discussion regarding the origins of the theory regarding the efficient cause
of the state, see Alan Gewirth, “Introduction,” in Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, trans.
Alan Gewirth (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980), p. xxxvii.
49.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). Cf. Max Weber,
“Politics as a Vocation,” in H. H Gerth. and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford UP, 1946), pp. 77–78. Weber argues that “the state
cannot be defined in term of its ends. . . . Ultimately one can define the modern state socio-
logically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association,
namely, the use of physical force.” Weber, clearly rejecting Hegel’s teleological conception
of the state, argues that the legitimating ideology of the state is rational-legal in nature. For
a critique of the idea that the power of the state is legitimized by its capacity to suppress
religious violence, see William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2009); cf. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
54    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

This failure of this narrative, which has always been threatened since
the birth of modernity, is the post-secular condition. Using a metaphor,
humanity can be considered to have boarded a train that then hurtled
toward its destination in the future, always in the expectation that the next
station would be the terminus. The train can be considered to have jumped
the tracks. The post-secular represents an attempt to resume the journey, or
perhaps just any journey, so long as it has a purpose and a goal. The spell
of the secularization narrative has been broken, and it is no longer possible
to believe in it in a simple uncomplicated fashion. What once followed
“naturally” must now be willed into being, and the world reconstructed if
the model is again to be made viable. In all of this there is a lost innocence
that can never be recovered. It is like the desire of Charles Maurras to re-
impose Catholicism on France, not because he believed in it but because
he considered it necessary if his ideal vision of an ordered society were to
be restored.50
It is obvious that the post-secular is caught in a particular dialectic
that follows from the collapse of the established linear narrative. With the
failure of narrative the center collapses because there is a loss both of
purpose and of a sense of inevitability. If the history of the human race is
not about the emancipation of human beings from their childish, violent,
and wrong beliefs, then what is it about?
All that appears to remain are shallowness, fragments, and insufficient
arguments, a melange of interesting ideas, which lack the power to compel
belief in secularization as a coherent explanation of how human beings
came to be in the situation that they currently inhabit. Yet the desire to
believe remains. The desire for a degree of certainty, or at least clarity,
remains.
But, it can be argued, one effect of the dissolution of this narrative
is that humanity, at least in the West, has forgotten about the place from
where they set out, so fixated have they been on history as the guide to
where they hoped to arrive. This oblivion or loss of memory has enormous
implications for restarting history. Ideas and beliefs are generally embed-
ded in something that is much wider, generally, if somewhat ambiguously,
described as a culture. A culture is composed of genealogies of beliefs,

50. Charles Maurras, Mes idées politiques (Paris: Editions Albatross, 1937). See
also Sutton’s treatment of Maurras’ political Catholicism in Michael Sutton, Nationalism,
Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and the French Catholics,
1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982).
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    55

practices, and values, but it is also a larger universe that contains powerful
affective elements. The journey toward the infinite, as described by the
historical narrative of the secular, required that this wider lived experience
be left behind while the abstract ideas, the blueprints or archetypes, were
placed into portfolios or “archives”51 and carried along. The consequence
is that humanity is left with a set of plans, what Michael Oakeshott once
labelled the “sovereignty of technique,” where once they had lived experi-
ence that manifested itself in skill and practice.52 This also fits with Marcel
Gauchet’s model of the growth of the secular, whereby the development of
the state led to the sundering of heaven and earth so that individuals were
no longer embedded in the world.53 In modernity, the world is no longer
religious, only the individuals who inhabit it.
The return of the religious and the demise of secular universalism
have had the effect of bringing to the fore the inherent fragmentation of
the world. In a post-secular age one popular solution to the problem of
fragmentation is to find the answer in simple models that would seem to
provide the appearance of what that lived experience was like. Having left
behind the complex lived reality of where we once were, we now must
make do with plans, recipe books, and schematic outlines. This means
fundamentalism and pre-packaged certainties in the guise of orthodoxies
or orthopraxis, which no longer require exegetic engagement. Olivier Roy
has recently observed, in fact, that contemporary Islam, like contemporary
Christianity, is moving down the road of expelling a wider cultural educa-
tion in favor of one that is narrowly based on texts.54
51.  We use the word “archive” in Foucault’s sense, as a set of documents, discourses,
of continuities and discontinuities. Foucault states: “The archive defines a particular level
[of the language]: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so
many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated. It does not have
the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of libraries, outside time and
place; nor is it the welcoming oblivion that opens up to all new speech the operational field
of its freedom; between tradition and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables
both statements to survive and undergo modification. It is the general system of formation
and transformation of statements.” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and
the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books,
1972), p. 130.
52.  Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen,
1962), p. 16.
53.  Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Reli-
gion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997), p. 7.
54. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York:
Columbia UP, 2004), p. 162.
56    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

Is it possible that this lack of a center of authority and organizing fab-

ric is also linked to the end of sovereignty? Or is the supposedly rationalist
response to these circumstances just an updated version of sovereignty?
Sovereignty was imposed for two reasons. One was to prevent the war-
ring factions of a kingdom from tearing each other apart.55 The other was
to impose a single authority over a patchwork of practices, customs, and
ways of life.56 It sought to replace a set of locally evolved customs with
a centrally imposed set of rules that had been constructed on mechanical
and abstract principles. It is possible that these new rationalist schemes
are just another attempt to turn the screw that began with the imposition
of sovereignty.57 Just as the certainty of sovereignty meant leaving behind
the complex world of Montaigne and replacing it with the new simple
mechanical Cartesian philosophy, so the quest for certainty means aban-
doning the complexity of experience for the security of an imposed set of
rules. Is it possible to reconstruct a coherent and unified narrative under
these circumstances?
As the state wishes to impose its rules and order on the system of
human relations, so the World Wide Web opens up a space of anarchy in
which anyone can put forward his or her views on a whole range of mat-
ters, including the nature of the past. The idea that the state can impose
some sort of authority in this area by sanctioning certain institutions or
individuals no longer holds. There was a time, for instance, when the uni-
versity was a “citadel of truth” standing above a sea of opinion, but the

55.  For this account of the formation of the modern state, see Charles Tilly, Coercion,
Capital and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992).
56.  Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and
Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester,
1991), pp. 87–104. Cf. Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in
Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect, pp. 1–51. According to Foucault the major concern of
the state that finds its legitimation in the principle of sovereignty is the conduct of citizens,
or as Gordon points out the art of government is an activity “aiming to shape, guide or
effect the conduct of some person or persons” (Gordon, “Governmental Rationality,” p. 2).
57.  Walker, in fact, states that “not only does the principle of state sovereignty reflect
a historically specific resolution of questions about the universality and particularity of
political community, but it also fixes that resolution within categories that have absorbed
a metaphysical claim to timelessness.” R. B. J. Walker, “Sovereignty, Identity, Commu-
nity: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice,” in R. B. J. Walker
and Saul H. Mendovitz, eds., Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990), p. 172.
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    57

forces of democracy have long since eroded its foundations.58 Is this not
like the role of the sophists in Athens who, by destroying the ontological
foundations of language, threatened the primacy of an absolute Truth in
the name of a relative and void rhetoric? But now the university, like the
Church, the Mosque, the Synagogue, or the Sangha, is only one source of
authority among many.
In post-secular history there can no longer be an authoritative nar-
rative. There are multiple narratives among which readers have to select
and choose. The issue becomes the basis on which one makes such a
choice. The most extreme scenario is the case of weird or pseudo his-
tory, such as represented by Gavin Menzies, which comes from outside
the “authoritative” circle and simply asserts that his somewhat dubious
narrative is true.59 Menzies puts aside the criticisms of experts and appeals
to the public through the internet to supply extra evidence to prove his
case. Historicity, that is, facticity and verification of historical facts, has
become a matter of public opinion and of fabricating public consensus.
As Menzies’s “history” is useful to the Chinese government, they provide
it with a certain amount of legitimacy. In the West, it is up to the public
to decide which narrative to believe, and they appear to authenticate his
version by buying thousands of copies of his book. Expert authority, as
well as authoritativeness, has been eroded in the public domain, and the
ratbag who sets up his or her soapbox is accorded equal rights with the
person who has studied the topic for years.60 Wikipedia is probably the
best piece of evidence in support of this statement. Discussing the entry
on “neoliberalism,” Philip Mirowski has argued that Wikipedia appeals
“to the vanity of non-specialists and autodidacts who are convinced their

58. Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1978), pp. 178–213.
59.  Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (London: Bantam
Books, 2003), and 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet sailed to Italy and Ignited
the Renaissance (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008). Menzies’s books are a deliber-
ate attempt to rewrite history, replacing a Eurocentric view with an exquisitely Sinocentric
one. The author, who is not a professional historian but a former navy submarine com-
manding officer, was born in China from British parents, a biographical datum that could
reasonably have influenced his intellectual undertaking.
60. On Menzies, see Greg Melleuish, Konstantin Sheiko, and Stephen Brown,
“Pseudo History/Weird History: Nationalism and the Internet,” History Compass 7 (2009):
1484–95.
58    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

own lubrications deserve as much attention as that accorded recognized

intellectuals.”61
So the crisis of modernity reveals itself in the despicable dialectic
of the erosion of authority and the need felt by those who have been so
undermined to re-assert and re-impose their authority.62 They would like
to establish what is permissible when it comes to issues of fact and inter-
pretation, but in a ruthless and unscrupulous democratic society, which
has access to the anarchy that is the internet, which fosters and creates
virtual de-humanized communities and worlds, there is no way that any
such rules can be enforced. It is the culmination of that inexorable process
of the “massification of culture,” which began at the turn of the twentieth
century and spurred a reaction of intellectuals, such as Nietzsche.63 Under
such circumstances, how can it be possible to establish what constitutes
“real” history and what merely appears to be true? How is it possible to
distinguish fact from fiction? And what future can be built on such prem-
ises? Menzies’s books have all the appearance of real history, ranging from
footnotes to bibliographies to acknowledgements of academic experts in
the field. They look like the “real thing,” but they are mere fiction or fan-
tasy grounded in subjective imagination and not in historical or empirical
fact.

Toward a Paradigm of Post-Secular History

Secularization had proclaimed the imminent end of history and the estab-
lishment of the age of universal peace, only to discover that there is no end.
Fukuyama did the same when communism came to an end. But history has
not come to an end. We are not only trapped by the irony of history, which
neutralizes its entelechy, but we must also face the fact that we live in the
age of multiple histories, including the secular version,64 all of which jostle

61.  Philip Mirowski, “Postface: Defining Neoliberalism,” in Philip Mirowski and

Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought
Collective (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2009), p. 424.
62.  Some past and present advocates of the secularization theory, in fact, argue that
secularization is to be intended as the decline of religious authority in society. See in this
regard Mark Chaves, “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority,” Social Forces 72
(1994): 749–74.
63.  In this regard see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Preju-
dice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992).
64.  The secular has not been obliterated by the return of the religious, but it remains
as one of the many options as the emergence of a neo-secularization discourse appears
From Secular Temporality to Post-Secular Timelessness    59

for our attention. Secularization has not created the utopia of peace, but it
may well have led us down into a cul-de-sac from which we shall find it
difficult to emerge.
Our reflex action is, more than reinventing tradition, to re-traditional-
ize but in an essentially rationalistic fashion.65 This means that we move
back to a tradition that has had much of its life drained out of it. We sit in
the meaningless ruins and pretend that it still stands there in all of its glory.
We fail to recognize just how impoverished it and we have become. As we
have forgotten, we attempt to recreate the past in a simple, usable rational-
ist form but without ever properly understanding what we are doing.
The question becomes one of how we can restart history, yet knowing
all the time that it has never really stopped. Still, the rules have changed.
So how are we to escape from the dead end into which we have led our-
selves? Augustus attempted to restart history with his proclamation of a
“return to the Golden Age.”66 It was an attempt to accommodate the needs
and demands of a growing pluralist, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic soci-
ety. The history of the republic, inherently mono-vectorial, was not usable
because it seemed to lead to stasis or endless chronic conflict. Are we
now in a similar situation? Do we have to create a new future by means of
transcending our past to accommodate the constant expansion of religious
ethnic and cultural pluralism characterizing contemporary capitalist soci-
eties after the triumph of liberal democracy? And, if this is the case, how
can it be done?
If the secular called for a narrative that was predicting or promising
a “Golden Age” of peace and prosperity, the post-secular narrative has
its foundations in the discovery of the fallaciousness of such a promise
and premise by allowing for the proliferation of teleologies in competi-
tion with one another. The post-secular narrative is, in fact, essentially
to suggest. For neo-secularization, see David Yamane, “Secularization on Trial: In Defense
of a Neosecularization Paradigm,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36 (1997):
109–22.
65. The concept of re-traditionalization is coined in response to Lieven Boeve’s
concept of de-traditionalization. Boeve defines de-traditionalization as “the socio-cultural
interruption of traditions which are no longer able to pass themselves effortlessly from
one generation to the other.” Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of
Upheaval (New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 21.
66.  D. C. Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2007), pp. 131–34. Cf. Duncan Barker, “‘The Golden
Age is Proclaimed’? The Carmen Saeculare and the Renascence of the Golden Race,”
Classical Quarterly 46 (1996): 434–46.
60    Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo

counter-teleological in that it is founded on denying the validity of the

postulates regarding historical predictability on which the secular narrative
is founded. Post-secular counter-teleological narrative is multi-directional
and, hence, directionless overall since the sum of the variety of post-sec-
ular teleologies is zero, and apophatic in the sense that it can only claim
what it is not, not what it was, is or what it will be. Popper had already
stated in his critique and analysis of historicist claims that “it is impos-
sible . . . to predict the future course of history” and that “there can be no
scientific theory of historical development serving as a basis for historical
prediction.”67 Therefore the writing of a “universal history” is no longer
possible since time has become multi-vectorial. The return of God or the
“dawn of the gods,” more than interrupting history, as Boeve claims,68
destroys time while the orthodoxy and orthopraxy purported by religion,
by inherently controlling human thought and behavior, obliterate the pos-
sibility of interpretation, the exercise of human free will, the possibility
of memory and self-consciousness, thrusting humanity over the cliff of
oblivion and into the abyss of a timeless and lawless fatalism.

67.  Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. xi–xii.
68. Boeve, God Interrupts History, pp. 41–45.