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PARTISAN REVIEW
manence can be found in it and therefore it cannot be expected to
disclose truth. To think, with Hegel, that truth resides and reveals
itself in the time-process itself is characteristic of all modern historical
consciousness, however it expresses itself, in specifically Hegelian
terms or not. The rise of the humanities in the nineteenth century
was inspired by the same feeling for history and is hence clearly dis–
tinguished from the recurrent revivals of antiquity that took place
in previous periods. Men now began to read, as Meinecke pointed
out in
Die Entstehung des Historismus,
as nobody had ever read
before. They "read in order to force from history the ultimate truth
it could offer to God-seeking people"; but this ultimate truth was
no longer supposed to reside in a single book, whether the Bible or
some substitute for it. History itself was considered such a book,
the book "of the human soul in times and nations," as Herder
defined it.
Recent historical research has shed much new light on the
transitional period between the Middle Ages and modern times,
with the result that the modern age, previously assumed to have
begun with the Renaissance, has been traced back into the very
essence of the medieval spirit. This greater insistence on an unbroken
continuity, valuable though it is, has one drawback, that by trying
to bridge the gulf separating a religious culture from the secular
world we live in, it bypasses, rather than solves, the great riddle of
the sudden undeniable rise of the secular.
If
by "secularization" one
means no more than the rise of the secular and the concomitant
eclipse of a transcendent world, then it is undeniable that modern
historical consciousness is very intimately connected with it. This,
however, in no way points to the doubtful transformation of religious
and transcendent categories into immanent earthly aims and stand–
ards on which the historians of ideas have recently insisted. Seculari–
zation means first of all simply the separation of religion and politics,
and this affected both sides so fundamentally that nothing is less
likely to have taken place than the gradual transformation of re–
ligious categories into secular concepts which the defenders of un–
broken continuity try to establish. The reason they can succeed to
some extent in convincing us lies in the nature of ideas in general
rather than in the period with which they deal; the moment one
separates an idea entirely from its basis in real experience, it
is
not
