Secularization

Secularization occupies a complex, often agonized place across the depth-psychology corpus. The term designates not merely the sociological recession of institutional religion but a deeper psycho-historical process in which the sacred is progressively evacuated from lived experience, leaving the modern subject—as Eliade diagnoses—to regard himself as the sole author of history, freed from transcendence yet unmoored from any cosmos of meaning. Corbin reads secularization as the direct consequence of the suppression of esoterism within both Christianity and Islam: once initiatory gnosis is expelled, laicization becomes inevitable, and the very question of the relation between temporal and spiritual power becomes irresolvable. Tarnas traces secularization’s planetary rhythms, noting how Uranus-Pluto alignments catalyzed successive waves of dechristianization, from Henry VIII’s schism to the French Revolution’s Temples of Reason. For Thomas Moore, secularization names the specific pathology of the contemporary moment—the loss of enchantment that soul-care must remedy through artful attention. Vernant and Detienne locate an archaic prototype of the process in the Greek transformation of inspired poetic-religious truth into secular rhetoric and mnemotechnics. The corpus as a whole treats secularization ambivalently: as historical loss, as necessary developmental transition, and as the very wound that depth psychology itself was convened to address.

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the refusal of all the spiritual forms that can be designated by the term initiationism or esoterism marks the starting point of laicization and socialization… this laicization or secularization goes far deeper than the separation or non-separation of the ‘temporal power’ and the ‘spiritual power’

Corbin argues that secularization originates not in political church-state separation but in the systematic rejection of esoteric and initiatory spirituality within both Christianity and Islam.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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Modern nonreligious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence… Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world.

Eliade characterizes the modern secular condition as a radical refusal of transcendence in which the human becomes the exclusive author of history, defining himself through progressive desacralization.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis

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the Revolution’s early anticlericalism moved through increasing degrees of secularism to a stringent athei… Parish churches were reopened as Temples of Truth and Reason, and Christianity was replaced by ‘natural religion.’

Tarnas traces the French Revolutionary dechristianization program as an archetypal Uranus-Pluto expression of secularization reaching its extreme limit in militant state atheism.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis

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Henry VIII’s divorce-driven schism from the Roman Catholic Church that brought the Reformation to England and a vast shift towards the secularization of society.

Tarnas identifies the English Reformation as a world-historical secularizing event driven by the convergence of political, erotic, and religious emancipatory energies under a specific planetary alignment.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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it might be tempting to see in Hippias’s mnemotechnics the transposition and secularization of the power of omniscience traditionally connected with Mnemosyne… He claims to be able to do this thanks to techniques of memorization, which for him have a purely positive character.

Vernant identifies the sophist Hippias’s conversion of divinely inspired poetic memory into teachable mnemonic technique as a paradigmatic early instance of the secularization of sacred knowledge.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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Once missionaries or secularization eroded this faith the equilibrium between men and animals was disturbed, and the damage done affected both the animals and human society.

Bremmer documents how secularization, by dissolving sacred prohibitions against overkilling game, produced concrete ecological and social destruction in hunter communities.

Jan N. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting

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Some saw Western secularism as the answer, but what was positive and invigorating in Europe could only seem alien and foreign in the Islamic world, since it had not developed naturally from their own tradition in its own time.

Armstrong argues that Western secularism, when transplanted into the Islamic world through colonialism, produced disorientation rather than emancipation because it lacked organic roots in that tradition.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

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secularization of, 11, 71… and desacralization of knowledge, 107

Vernant’s index entry for secularization in the Greek polis points to the twin phenomena of the desacralization of political thought and of knowledge as foundational to the emergence of rational philosophy.

Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 1982supporting

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The real chasm was between the political authority of the church and the individual authority of experience… the latter became Protestantism and, in its rationalist aspect, what we have come to call the Scientific Revolution.

Jaynes interprets the Galileo conflict as a pivotal moment in the secularizing transition from divinely authorized truth to individually grounded empirical experience.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting

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We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past.

Jaynes frames contemporary religious institutions as survivals of the bicameral mind, suggesting that secularization is merely the surface expression of an incomplete transition from divine-voice authority to subjective consciousness.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting

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the human community must offer a structure in which esoterism is an organic component; or else it must suffer all the consequences implied by a rejection of esoterism.

Corbin articulates the structural precondition for resisting secularization: only communities that integrate esoteric gnosis as an organic component can avoid the drift toward laicization.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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the reduction of mystery to secular explanation, including the reduction of the puer archetype itself to a mother-complex.

Hillman identifies the reductive secular-explanatory impulse as a Sethian desecration of sacred mystery, with psychoanalytic reductionism as its modern form.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015aside

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