My dear Josiah of Lothian,
I am cross with you. Twice I have written to you and asked you to explain Augustine’s distinction between sacred and secular time, and twice you have not answered me. This even after I further said that I wanted to compare Augustine’s views with Luther’s revision of the sacred/secular distinction in terms of space, because I think it is easily one of the most consequential conceptual shifts in Christian history, of intrinsic interest to Christians themselves and of at least historical interest to everyone else.
Why have you not written back? Perhaps the topic seems too large, and the demands on your time are too numerous: a parish to administer, a flock to shepherd, papers to publish, lectures and sermons to deliver, a wedding to plan, and a vicarage to prepare for married life, not to mention the occasional sailing expedition down the River Forth to the North Sea. Surely, I must forgive your silence.
I cannot. The matter is too urgent! What seems like an abstract intellectual distinction can in fact determine the course of our lives. In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff observes that:
The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.
To be sure, one can take this kind of thing too far. No matter how many metaphors of flight I unfurl, I will never be able to soar by flapping my arms, so one must always beware of succumbing to the charms of free-floating linguistic idealism. Even so, in this case, I believe that metaphors for the sacred and secular can in fact structure what we perceive, how we relate to others, and, most importantly, how we understand our final ends.
So, you can see why I became impatient and had to figure it out for myself, as follows…
I. Two Kingdoms and the Wall Dividing Them
Ask Americans to describe the relationship between religion and public life and they will almost invariably mention the separation of church and state. Some will mention a wall, which makes the spatial metaphor unmistakable. Still others might point out that while the separation metaphor does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, the establishment clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise”), certainly suggests that religion and government must remain apart.
The division of religion and political life into separate spheres is indicative of a much larger phenomenon. It is part of Max Weber’s classic theory of secularization. Unlike vulgar theories of secularization, which measure something like a decline in religious belief or adherence, Weber meant something quite specific: secularization occurs when different areas of life—education, economics, politics, scientific research—move “from ecclesiastical or religious to civil or lay use, possession, or control.” Setting aside possible technological or economic causes of secularization, I submit that such a thing is thinkable, and then sustainable in daily life, only after a certain set of spatial metaphors have been adopted, as they were in the early 16th century. The very idea of secularization (differentiating spheres) rests on an older spatial metaphor.
The spatial metaphor emerges clearly with Luther. The high medieval Papacy claimed authority in both spiritual and temporal matters, while Luther aimed to break both monopolies. To undermine the Roman church’s temporal authority, Luther developed his doctrine of the “two kingdoms,” the Kingdom of the World and the Kingdom of God.
Luther’s two kingdoms doctrine appears quite clearly his book The Sermon on the Mount. Luther had to explain—like many before him—the apparent tension between the Gospel According to Luke (“blessed are the poor”) and the Gospel According to Matthew (“blessed are the poor in spirit”). His solution was to introduce a split into every human life, between the inner man and the outer man. Inner and outer corresponded to religious and secular, the Christian within and the secular person without: “The man who is called Hans or Martin is a man quite different from the one who is called elector or doctor or preacher. Here we have two persons in one man. The one is that in which we are created and born, according to which we are all alike [before God]… But once we are born, God adorns and dresses you up as another person.”[1]
The metaphor of clothing nicely illustrates Luther’s inner/outer split. The interior space is the kingdom of God, where all must stand (spiritually) naked before the Lord. The sermon on the mount only applies to the spiritual self, the inner person. But God also dresses us each up in some secular uniform, as a judge, a firefighter, a politician, a professor, a scientist, a hangman, and so on. The exterior person, in his or her function as a judge or hangman, follows and indeed enforces the rules of the wider society. Politics and economic life both belong to the kingdom of this world.
All across the Reformation, spatial metaphors drew lines between the secular and sacred authority. In England, Henry the VIII performed a daring act of secularization in 1536: he turned church land, mostly monasteries, into state land. It had been sacred space, now it was secular.
Other reformers rejected Luther’s inner/outer man model while keeping his spatial metaphors intact. For instance, continental reformers decided that the real split was not within each person; it was between a holy community of saints and a sinful world at large. Although one could find this split in Calvinism, it showed up most clearly in the so-called “radical reformation.” In 1527 a group of Swiss Anabaptists adopted “The Schleitheim Confession,” a list of seven rules to govern their society. One was “Separation from the Abomination”—meaning from everyone who wasn’t one of them: “A separation shall be made from the evil and from the wickedness which the devil planted in the world; in this manner, simply that we shall not have fellowship with them (the wicked) and not run with them in the multitude of their abominations.” Anyone who fraternized with the wicked faced “the ban,” an expulsion from the bounds of the community.
The spatial metaphor then hopped the pond. The conflict between the Baptist Roger Williams and the magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was in part over where to draw a line between the church and world. According to the 17th-century Puritan John Cotton, ministers and magistrates alike must enforce God’s laws, meaning there should be no separation between political and religious spheres. The proper place to draw the line was between the Christian commonwealth and the heathen wilderness beyond it.
Williams disagreed. He insisted that churches should rigorously separate themselves from secular authority, even when that authority claimed, like the Puritans, to be ordained by God. Why so? Because the state would corrupt the church. According to him, whenever the Israelites or early Christians “have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself … & made his Garden a Wilderness.” In order to restore the garden, “all that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the Wilderness of the world, and added unto his Church or garden.” Once again, spatial metaphors abound: hedges, transplanting, and (most familiar to American ears) a wall.
Historically, Williams won the debate. His “wall of Separation” appears verbatim in Thomas Jefferson’s famous “Letter to the Danbury Baptists.” In adopting the spatial metaphor, Jefferson assured that it would become the dominant American way of thinking about the relationship between the sacred and secular. It remains so today, for the religious and secular alike.
The consequences of these spatial metaphors would be hard to overestimate. They govern the everyday functioning of the faithful by cordoning off areas of life where their religion has no relevance. The secular realm includes politics, to be sure, but it also extends to professional and family life and just about everywhere else; in fact, at least in wealthy European and North American nations, any place that doesn’t explicitly belong to a religious community is now secular by default. The spatial metaphors are hegemonic. They are accepted without question, to the extent that imagining an acceptable alternative is difficult.
II. Two Cities, Two Loves, Two Timelines
Though seemingly inescapable today, the spatial metaphors underlying everything from Luther’s theology to American jurisprudence have a history, as detailed above. If they have a history, then something came before them.
In the ancient world, a saeculum was the span of a lifetime or, more metaphorically, the span of an age. Augustine of Hippo, among other Christian commentators in the 5th century, divided human history into seven ages, based on Biblical chronology: 1) from Adam to the flood, 2) from the flood to Abraham, 3) from Abraham to King David, 4) from David to Babylonian exile, 5) from the return of the Jews to Israel to the birth of Christ, 6) the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and 7) the return of Christ and the end of all things, the eschaton.
Augustine believed himself to be living in the latter days of the 6th age. His magnum opus, The City of God Against the Pagans, defends Christianity against the charge that it has robbed Rome of its traditional virtues and is therefore responsible for Alaric the Goth sacking the city in 410 (lousy slave morality), and yet the book quickly becomes a far more wide-ranging meditation on Christian life during an odd interregnum; that is, after Christ has triumphed over death on the cross but before He has returned for the millennial victory parade that inaugurates the 7th and final age.
Augustine thinks that a chief feature of this age, which we still occupy today, is that Christians must live in two cities at once: the earthly city and the city of God. The main thing that distinguishes these cities is their manner of love. “Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly city by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self” [De Civ. Dei, 14.28].
Another important thing that distinguishes these cities and their residents is their sense of time. Although both are unfolding at once, Biblical and ordinary history have different frames of reference. Secular history passes from moment to moment without discernable direction, whereas Biblical history follows the pattern laid down in the Bible and flows inexorably toward its promised end.[2] The pagans measure their time by their lives, or on a societal level by the history of Rome or some other great empire, while the Christians, despite living in the same saeculum as everyone else, also measure their lives and the heavenly city on a timeline that runs from creation to eternity. In brief, the pagans live on a single timeline, the pilgrims on two at once.
The residents of the city of God do not belong, ultimately, in the earthly city. Indeed, they must regard every earthly city as fleeting. They are time-travelers, only passing through the present age, and “while it sojourns on earth [the heavenly city] calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers a society of pilgrims” [De Civ. Dei, 19.17]. Christians ought to be conscious of their place on this pilgrimage, living in the present while also remembering their beginnings and looking forward to their arrival in the New Jerusalem, their true and final home.
It sounds like it should be easy to tell the pilgrims from the local pagans, but it is not. Spatially, the two cities overlap: “In truth, these two cities are entangled together in this world, and intermixed until the last judgement effect their separation” [De Civ. Dei, 1.35. Cf 18.54]. In fact, here and now it is humanly impossible to say, for sure, who belongs to which city. Citizens of the city of God can hold public office, even be rulers or lawmakers; citizens of the earthly city may go to church, or even hold high ecclesial offices. Then one day, at “the last judgement,” the two cities and their citizens will be separated for good.
We can distinguish Augustine from two other possibilities. In one, the progress of a Christianizing empire just is the city of God. This was popular with Augustine’s student Paulus Orosius, who saw the Christianization of the Roman empire and its conquest of pagan tribes as recognizable steps toward the 7th age. In the other, the earthly and heavenly cities should be rigorously separated here and now. This was popular with the Donatists, a sect that regarded Rome as not just pagan, but positively diabolical. They wanted to segregate the citizens of heaven from the citizens of the earthly city. Both of these positions use spatial metaphors, overlap for the former, strict separation for the latter, whereas for Augustine “what defined [the city of God] over against ‘the world’ was not sociological separation, but its eschatological orientation.”[3]
Unlike Paulus Orosius or the Donatists, Augustine’s church has an ambivalent relationship to the secular order of its day. It regards earthly peace and justice as good things and cheerfully works with the with the local pagans to bring peace and justice about. At the same time, those who think of themselves as Christians must never enjoy temporal peace and justice for their own sakes; rather, they are used as means to the church’s larger end of a faithful pilgrimage. To quote Augustine, the heavenly city “while in its state of pilgrimage, avails itself of the peace of earth, and, so far as it can without injuring faith and godliness, desires and maintains a common agreement among men regarding the acquisition of the necessaries of life, and makes this earthly peace bear upon the peace of heaven” [De Civ. Dei, 19.17].
Certain modern critics insist that because Christians care about eternity, they cannot consistently care about this life, too. That does not follow. Instrumental and secondary goods are real goods and worth pursuing. They just shouldn’t get in the way of ultimate goods, or the life necessary to pursue them.
What is that life? As far as Augustine is concerned, a Christian’s earthly pilgrimage should principally consist of Gospel proclamation, sacramental worship, and works of love for one’s neighbors, Christian or not, which can include criticizing and reforming the temporal order or buttressing it, as the need may be.[4]
III. Redeeming the Time
Many Roman Catholic polemicists have blamed Protestantism for secularization. Whatever the genealogical truth of this charge, Protestants are hardly the only ones to conceptualize the relationship between religion and the secular in terms of walls, separate spheres, and so on. In America, even the Catholics are Protestants in this way, as are the atheists. The spatial metaphors cross denominational and religious lines, to the extent that there is little point in blaming one group or another for the world and lives that the metaphors enable.
Plus, Josiah, who would profit by another round of the old Catholic-Protestant polemic? I am more interested in what it would take to readopt the old temporal metaphors, and what difference it would make.
Perhaps surprisingly, I think little would change in politics. Christians who understand themselves to be living on two simultaneous timelines and holding two passports, one for the earthly and one for the heavenly city, should not want Orosius’ theocracy. The City of God never suggests that the church can turn secular society into the New Jerusalem. The 7th age will arrive in God’s good time. On the contrary, by collapsing the earthly and heavenly cities into one, a theocratic state would constantly tempt the pilgrim church to commit idolatry: to stop its journey and worship the state rather than pressing on into an uncertain future. “Christian nationalism” ought to be a contradiction in terms.
The pilgrim church shouldn’t retreat from public life either. That would be staying within the imaginary of the spatial metaphor, only moving to the opposite extreme of disengagement and vilification, like the Donatists or Anabaptists. Instead, the pilgrims should pursue peace and justice for themselves and their neighbors, supporting whatever policies and parties they judge most conducive to those ends, while never forgetting that temporal peace and justice, while good things, are not ends in themselves, but only means by which they are freeing up most of their time to do something more important.
Such as? Ideally, living in the city of God would mean keeping its whole timeline ever before you, from beginning to promised end. This knowledge would suffuse every moment of your life, and be present no matter where you went; every mundane detail, every human encounter, everything you perceived, would be a part of the story. Can anyone but monks and saints live that way? I certainly can’t, though I find artistic representations of these lives inspiring.
For the rest of us, we must find less demanding ways to redeem the time. Reading, for one. Just carving out time every morning to read the lectionary, or poetry, or a snatch of theological reflection—something that can, if not structure what we perceive, then at least color our perceptions. In order to see oneself as part of a larger drama, it would help to keep in closer touch with the church year, a calendar of saints, and both fixed and moveable feast days. Especially the feast days. Living in the city of God should not be chore. It should be fun. And I know you will agree that nothing is as fun as feasting. I would not mind if it were more common than divine service.
Which brings me back to the most heavenly festivals of all. Weddings. In innumerable Biblical and theological sources, weddings prefigure the dawn of the 7th age, when Christ arrives as the bridegroom to meet the bridal church. It is the end of all the striving and anxious hope and waiting. A wedding is the beginning of a new union, when the space between the two parties finally collapses. (No jokes, now.) In the company of family and friends, enjoying food and music and dancing, there is no other earthly situation which so closely approximates reports of the heavenly city.
Which is why I so look forward to yours,
Paul
[1] Translation: Jaroslav Pelikan, Luther’s Works. vol. 21 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1956), 596.
[2] Markus, R.A. Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 9.
[3] Ibid, 167.
[4] Ibid., 185-6.