Faith's fate

The Stillborn God

Religion, Politics, and the Modern West

Mark Lilla

Alfred A. Knopf: 334 pp., $26

--

TO a scientist, "secularization" means that God no longer explains nature; to an artist, that the Bible no longer provides subject matter; to a businessman, that the shop stays open on Sunday -- and so forth. In "A Secular Age," philosopher Charles Taylor takes on the broad phenomenon of secularization in its full complexity. In "The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West," Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, asks only what secularization means to the prime minister.

It's a process with a long history. In AD 391, when Roman Emperor Theodosius established Christianity as the state religion, church officials became, at a stroke, officers of the empire. Less than a century later, when the last emperor ruling from Rome was deposed, a remnant of imperial power devolved upon the most important church official in the West: namely, the pope. For several centuries, successive popes maintained quasi-imperial jurisdiction over the princes of Europe; gradually, however, as powerful nation-states took shape, their rulers sought to subordinate church authority to their own. During and after the Reformation, they finally succeeded, and by the 17th century there had arisen the doctrine of the divine right of kings, according to which kings derived their powers not from any pope but from God himself. But when rulers thus divinely empowered went to war over religion, who could adjudicate among them? The religious wars of the first half of that century were accordingly ferocious, and among the fiercest was the English Civil War that ended with the beheading of Charles I.

As that war raged, an exiled English royalist writing in Paris made the darkest of inferences -- that the chaos and violence engulfing England, Scotland and Ireland showed humankind in its natural condition: "There is . . . continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Having fled his homeland in terror, Thomas Hobbes saw human nature itself as defined by terror. And as many in the United States have done since Sept. 11, he saw terror as at its worst when driven by religion. "Homo homini lupus," he wrote in Paris: Man is a wolf to his fellow man. Fortunately, the wolves of the human pack had an expedient, he argued: They could create an all-powerful superwolf, a political sovereign monstrous enough to protect them from their own monstrosity. Whence the title of Hobbes' masterpiece, "Leviathan."