HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
17
difficult to establish a connection between it and almost any other
idea. In other words, if we assume that something like an inde–
pendent realm of pure ideas exists, all notions and concepts cannot
but be interrelated, because then they
all
owe their origin to the
same source: the human mind in its extreme subjectivity, unaffected
by experience and with no relationship to the world, whether the
world is conceived as Nature or as History.
However, the point is not whether Hegel's "cunning of reason"
was a secularization of divine providence or whether Marx's classless
society represents a secularization of the Messianic Age, but rather
that the separation of Church and State eliminated religion from
public life, removing all religious sanctions from politics and causing
religion to lose that political element it had acquired in the centuries
when the Catholic Church acted as the heir of the Roman Empire.
(It does not follow that this separation converted religion into an
entirely "private affair." This type of privacy in religion comes about
when a tyrannical regime prohibits the public functioning of churches,
denying the believer the public space in which he can appear with
others and be seen by them. The public-secular domain, or the po–
litical sphere, properly speaking, comprehends and has room for
the public-religious sphere. A believer can be a member of a church
and at the same time act as a citizen in the larger unit constituted
by all belonging to the City.) This change was frequently brought
about by men who did not doubt in the least the truth of traditional
religious teaching (even Hobbes died in mortal fear of "hell-fire"
and Descartes prayed to the Holy Virgin) and nothing in the
sources justifies us in considering all those who established anew an
independent secular sphere as secret or unconscious atheists. All that
we can say is that whatever their faith or lack of it, it was without
influence on the secular. Thus the political theorists of the seventeenth
century accomplished secularization by separating political think–
ing from theology, and by insisting that the rules of natural law
provided a basis for the body politic even if God did not exist. As
Grotius put it, "even God cannot cause two times two not to make
four." This necessarily attributes to the secular an independent, im–
manent meaning.
It has been pointed out before that the most important conse–
quence of the rise of the secular realm in the modem age was that
