INTRODUCTION TO SECULAR GENOLOGY

Abstract

The search for the origins of the secular is important for science because it clarifies the concept of “secular” as a category of modern thought against the background of rethinking the classical theory of secularization and uprising of post-secular concepts. The article argues that despite many different approaches to the definition of the secular there is a common thing that unites them — the recognition of religion as a finite area and the existence of the “non-religious”. The article presents the positions of well-known scientists who tried to explain the origin of the category of the secular within social sciences, including those who challenge the classical theory of secularization. In search of the signs of uprising the “secular” in culture a researcher can consistently dive into history and find them in almost any historical era. But such a search inevitably leads to the final borders of social sciences beyond which the theological discourse begins. Even those researchers who consistently defend secular principles (Berger) face this problem. In this regard some researchers continue their studies in the theological plane (Trostnikov, Milbank). There is also a potential problem here — artificial construction of new concepts of “secularities” which would have no relation to the “secular” itself. Therefore the reconstruction of the genealogy of the secular makes sense only if it helps to explain the logic of modern social and ideological processes. From this point of view the researcher has no choice: even before he determines where the secular begins, he already states that the secular has become itself in the Christian paradigm (theological, geographical and chronological); right here it has acquired the problem field in which the culture of modernity and the paradigm of modern scientific knowledge exist. The author concludes that the development of secular discourse is also a theological process.