The Myth of Secular Europe

Perhaps the predominant reason for dismissing the Byzantine le-gacy has to do with the secular account of European and world history that has dominated academic and public discourse in the last few decades or so. Indeed, secularism equates Byzantium with the oppressive, reactionary settlement of Late Antiquity and the Dark Ages which the progressive forces of secular modernity and the Enlighten-ment purportedly swept away. Since the ХIХ^th century, social theorists of religion such as Durkheim, Comte or Weber claimed that the rise of modernity is synonymous with the decline of religion and the spread of secularism. From the 1960’s onwards sociologists claimed that secular Europe would set the trend for the rest of the world – a pioneer of progress in the forward march of modernisation. Yet thro-ughout the second half of the XX^th and the early XXI^th century the globe has witnessed a religious resurgence, which is really about a greater visibility and prominence of faith in politics rather than a re-turn – for religion had never gone away[18]. Since then, sociologists writing about religion in Europe have opted to talk about the «Euro-pean exception», with the old continent sliding towards ever greater secularisation while faith is proving to be far more enduring elsewhere around the world[19].

Today Europe may be in many ways the most secularised conti-nent in the world in terms of religious practice, personal observance, and public political discourse[20]. But this is neither a necessary nor a normative nor even a long-standing process. To take these points in reverse order, the secularisation of European politics and culture is far more recent than commonly supposed and can be traced to the second half of the XX^th century (except for state-sponsored atheism in a number of regimes following the First World War). For example, in Western Europe – despite violent clashes between state and church in France up to separation in 1905 – the population remain-ed predominantly Catholic until the late 1950’s, when «French Chri-stendom» (chrétienté) began to disappear from the regions and coun-tryside, as depicted in the writings of George Bernanos. In Britain, the «de-christianisation» of the public sphere and social life did not take off until the late 1960’s[21]. Scandinavia and the Mediterranean countries only became markedly more secular from the mid-1970’s onward. After decades of atheist rule, the historic Byzantine lands of central/eastern Europe and Eurasia are now characterised by profo-und contrasts between a strong and sustained religious revival in co-untries such as Poland and Russia, on the one hand, and a growing tendency toward agnosticism and atheism in countries such as the Czech Republic, on the other hand[22].

By contrast with popular practices, secular ideas promoted by certain elites have a much longer history but even so the rise to po-wer of secularism (over against Christendom in both the Byzantine «Greek East» and the Roman «Latin West») was not inevitable or progressive. Indeed, there is no historical determinism according to which secularism will remain always hegemonic in Europe or that other parts of the world will necessarily follow the European «exceptional example». Rather, the logic of secularism is linked to a certain kind of historicism that views the peculiar history of religion and politics in Western Europe as an exemplification of a fated and all-determining evolution – an idea that is closely correlated with Auguste Comte’s positivist trajectory from revelation to metaphysics to science[23].

In reality, the emergence of secularism as the dominant modern mode was the gradual outcome of historical contingency, linked to the XIV^th century passage to modernity, the XVI^th- and XVII^th-cen-tury Protestant Reformation and «wars of religion» as well as the triumph of liberalism that started in the XVIII century[24]. The theolo-gical and philosophical shifts, which helped bring about these modern conceptions of the secular and the sacred, coincided with profo-und political changes particularly linked to the history of Byzanti-um. Following the final demise of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the nascent Protestant Reformation in the West accelerated the slow di-sintegration of pan-European political Christendom and the rise to power of sovereign nation-states.

However, this did not inaugurate a linear process of secularisati-on that has supposedly culminated in European «exceptionalism». On the contrary, certain strands of Renaissance Humanism and the Enli-ghtenment provided a religious corrective to secular ideas and practi-ces such as the early modern doctrine of the «divine right of kings»[25]. That doctrine was secular insofar as it departed from the patristic and medieval opposition to the sacralisation of secular power, as evinced by the writings of St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostome and St. Thomas Aquinas – as I will indicate in the following section.

For now, a few more points need to be made about the peculiar, non-normative nature of secularisation. The end of Byzantium coin-cided with the split of the Mediterranean by Islam and the rise emer-gence of new political powers. Broadly speaking, the ancient and medieval idea of real, embodied relations between persons and gro-ups that compose the polity was progressively supplanted by the no-minalist poles of the individual and the collective that have structu-red modern international relations since the 1648 Treaty of Westpha-lia and the rise of the secular West: the dialectic between the sovereign ruler and the sovereign people is inextricably intertwined with the subsumption of virtually all mediating institutions of «civil soci-ety» to the power of the national state and the transnational market.

The primacy of the modern central state and the modern «glo-bal» market coincided with the marginalisation of the three instituti-ons that structured late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: the city, the empire and the Church[26] – as first embodied by Rome and later exemplified by the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Indeed, statehood and the market mechanism increasingly undermined the auto-nomy of «free cities», the complex imperial links and the transnatio-nal ties of the Church – including the Byzantine commonwealth (to which I will return shortly), the supranational papacy in Rome, and all kinds of cross-border Christian networks that were variously more monastic or more lay (e.g. guilds or universities)[27]. Moreover, both the late medieval doctrine of the «divine right of kings» (linked to monarchic absolutism) and the modern notion of state sovereignty (associated with revolutionary republics such as the USA or France) are predicated not only on the supremacy of political over religious authority but also on the power of the sovereign to redefine the sacred[28].

Indeed, European secularism is not limited to the functional differentiation of religious and political authority and/or the public sett-lement of the relationship between church and state that write faith out of international relations. By subordinating religion to secular categories, the secularist logic does not merely de-sacralise the public square. It reinvests it with quasi-sacred meaning by sacralising secularity – the king, the nation, the state, the market, the individual or the collective. As such, secularism does not so much mark the de-mise of faith or the exit from religion as it represents an alternative sacrality – a secular capture of the sacred.

The modern «revolution in sovereignty» has had far-reaching implications for religion in international relations. Instead of binding together believers in a universal community of shared beliefs and practices within and across national borders such as Byzantium, faith is increasingly tied either to individuals or to nations (or both at once). Apparently universal ideas and structures such as the global system of national states and transnational markets, which underpin modern international relations, can thus be traced genealogically to particular periods such as the Protestant Reformation or the religious wars in the «long sixteenth century» (ca. 1450-1650). Far from being isolated events or absolute breaks in history, they were part of an era spanning the early XIV^th to the late XVII^th century during which both ideas and practices already nascent during the Middle Ages achieved fuller maturity and developed into the modern model of international affairs[29].

That is why, in the words of the English political and IR theorist Martin Wight, «[a]t Westphalia the states system does not come in-to existence, it comes of age»[30]. Certain new ideas such as national sovereignty came to shape the way that international relations were conceived and instituted[31]. Likewise, new institutions and practices like the national state or inter-state warfare led to changes in conceptions of international affairs that still shape contemporary theory of global affairs[32]. Both the Christian faith and different associations of nations like Byzantium have either been reduced to historical anomalies or else been bracketed altogether out of the picture.