Secularization of history simultaneously sacralized profane events into a singular subject

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

• XREF: Directly parallels Cooper’s claim that secular modernity smuggles Christian teleology in — here the ‘secular’ historian inherits the singular-subject providential role. — connects to: The Western idea that history moves toward an endpoint descends from Christian eschatology — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 159