In his "Beliefs" column in today's NYT, Peter Steinfels addresses the question of secularization. A good part of the piece is taken up with a synopsis of a book by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, which seems to be an analysis of various ways in which social transformations have reduced the salience of religious belief in the West. Steinfels uses this as a foil to assert a "believer's" understanding that, ultimately, secularism is " an illusion about the world," presumably because it denies the believer's faith in the truth of God.
All of this made me think immediately of Confucius (I know I keep bringing him up here. It's not because I take his thought as an ideal for my own life - I personally tend more toward the Taoist side of things - but only because he is such a wonderful font of ideas). And, especially, Herbert Finagrette's wonderful little book, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. This volume answers Steinfels complaint that Norris and Inglehart "suffer from depending too much on the history of the West," but also demonstrates how a sophisticated mind dissolves the rigid distinction of secular and sacred.
It is fairly easy to interpret Confucius as a straight up secularist. His philosophy is often described as "this-worldly" and he does not invoke an omnipotent God in the manner of monotheism. He is famously silent on the question of Heaven: it exists for him, but it is beyond his description, perhaps even his comprehension. Modern secularists can therefore count him as a teammate in the great secular v. religious intellectual contest.
Finagrette pushes against a narrowly secularist interpretation of Confucius. He argues that, while silent about Heaven, Confucius did have a sense of the supernatural, the "magic" quality associated with intuition and spontaneity and "the power of a specific person to accomplish his will directly and effortlessly through ritual, gesture and incantation" (3).
The genius of Confucius, from this point of view, is that he located supernatural potential not in a distant God, but in the myriad daily interpersonal activities that define a common life. Ritual is not simply a matter of grand life transitions - birth, death, marriage, etc. - but it is also enacted in our everyday duties, like washing a child. When we fulfill our responsibilities to those closest to us, and then use those relationships to extend Humanity to others, and when we do this without strategy or calculation but from wordlessly loving impulse, we are touching the supernatural, creating something magical.
So our social relationships are sacred, without reference to God. Social forces, the source of secularization by Steinfel's reckoning of Norris and Inglehart, are the media of "holy rites," a connotation of the Chinese term for "ritual." As Figarette describes ritualized social bonds:
It is in this beautiful and dignified, shared and open participation with others who are ultimately like oneself that man realizes himself. Thus perfect community of men - the Confucian analogue to Christian brotherhood - becomes an inextricable part, the chief aspect, of Divine worship - again an analogy with the central Law taught by Jesus. (16)
Of course, we must transform the pronoun "man" into the gender-inclusive "person," but the dissolution of the standard secular v. sacred distinction is obvious.
And this strikes me as potentially difficult for modern day religionists. It is common rhetorical practice these days for Christian activists to complain that secularism has gone too far, that the public square needs to be reclaimed for religion. A Confucian response is a sort of Jujitsu move, shifting the weight of the argument in the opposite direction and claiming not that the secular must be protected from the sacred but that the secular is sacred, the social is holy. And it can be sacred and holy without reference to a supreme God. I wonder how Steinfels would respond to that?
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