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THE ADVENT of THE THIRD millennium finds this planet still rocked by the conflict between the sacred and the secular that began in the ancient world two millennia ago. The ancient world did not have a secular-sacred conflict prior to the appearance of Christianity. Aristotle had viewed the Greek polls as wholly selfsufficient, within which man could find intellectual and bodily fulfillment. There could be no life outside the polls.
It is the task of the modern scholar to unravel the tangled history of secularism in our times. Once rational norms of moral discourse are dismissed as merely "religious" discourse, we abandon the field to all forms of contemporary "constructions." Nominalism questioned the correspondence of our abstract ideas to anything in the real world (something which "moderate realism" affirms). And the Enlightenment excluded most references to the supernatural from serious consideration. How did we get to this state of hostility between rationality and religiosity that so characterizes our times, especially in the academy?
The religious of the classical world were, of course, animistic or anthropomorphic, but above all civic. As described by the nineteenth-century historian, Fustel de Coulanges, the ancient city "was a religious community, the king a pontiff, the magistrate a priest and the law a sacred formula."1 The major challenge to the state was not, then, a church because there was no religion apart from the state, but rather philosophy. The Athenians condemned the philosopher Anaxagoras to death, banished the sophist Protagoras, condemned Socrates for questioning polytheism and corrupting the youth. The philosophers, insofar as they were "atheists" or critics of polytheism, were opposed to the polls rather than to a church that did not exist. The polls was the upholder of orthodoxy.
The conflict between the prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah with the rulers of ancient Israel compares more closely to the conflict between sacred and secular in European history, except that Israel was really a theocracy and so the delineation between the two powers was not developed nearly so clearly as it would be in Europe.
The birth of Christianity changed the entire relationship of religion to the public. In the first three centuries A.D., Christianity relativized the ancient city, which was distended as the Roman Empire, by repudiating the...