Enlightenment secularization also sacralized profane history and myth in new ways.
Evidence
Much has been written on the way Protestant historians helped to form the notion of history as a collective, singular subject. “If the new view of History and the historian secularized revealed religion,” observes John Stroup, “it also tended to sacralize profane events and the universal historian… . By the end of the Enlightenment sacred and profane history were so intertwined that it was hard to disentangle them.” In the same vein, Starobinski writes of the mythicization of modern history as progress: “It is not enough to note, as many have done, the existence of a ‘secularizing’ process in enlightenment philosophy, a process in which man claims for reason prerogatives that had belonged to the divine logos. An opposite tendency also existed: myth, at first excluded and declared to be absurd, was now endowed with full and profound meaning and prized as revealed truth.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 195
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the theme of secularization as not merely subtraction but re-enchantment; parallels the book’s broader argument against the subtraction narrative of secularism.
Related
- Secularization of history simultaneously sacralized profane events into a singular subject (similarity 0.93)
- Reading scripture as myth helped constitute the secular as an epistemological domain (similarity 0.81)
- Reading scripture as myth constituted the secular domain of history. (similarity 0.81)
- The Enlightenment’s sacred-profane to imagination-reason shift was no simple hegemonic transfer (similarity 0.80)
- The secular Enlightenment replaced one conceptual binary rather than ending binary thinking (similarity 0.80)