Symposium: Reflections Before, During, and Beyond COVID-19
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SYMPOSIUM: REFLECTIONS BEFORE, DURING, AND BEYOND COVID-19
Symposium: Reflections Before, During, and Beyond COVID-19 Reflections on a Secular Age: Dharmaśāstric and Confucian Social Orderings Jason Morgan 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The modern world is often described as highly secularized. This secularization can distort our view of the past, and also of societies in which secularization holds less sway than in other places. In this essay, I examine Confucianism and Dharmaśāstra as two paradigms for the study of pre-secular or non-secular societies, comparing and contrasting Confucian and Hindu societies while comparing and contrasting both with the current, “secular age”. Keywords Dharmaśāstra . Confucianism . St. Louis IX . Rigveda . Veda . Manu . Hindu law . Secularization . Japan . China . India
One of the rare points of agreement among most people of whatever political or religious persuasion is that we live, as Charles Taylor wrote, in a secular age.1 It is not only that people are leaving organized religions in droves that affirms this, but the tone of the Zeitgeist itself. The Enlightenment is the idiom of our social interactions. Even the Vatican has become a champion of religious freedom, while other iterations of 1789 and 1776—human rights, free speech, personal autonomy, self-ownership, and many more—are embedded in institutions once antithetical to such deistic, or even agnostic, conceptions of the human person.2 The age is a secular one, and while there is deep division over how the various terms are to be interpreted and implemented in our lives, there is near unanimity on the basic foundation of our globalized world. The gods, if anyone chooses to believe in them, have been forced to yield the stage to the political philosophers. But is it possible to reclaim the sacred, to re-enchant the universe, to un-twilight the gods? In a world in which the arrow of time is said to parallel political “progress,” such that there is
even a right and a wrong side of history itself, is there any way to re-canopy the world with the presence of the divine, even allowing divinity being an idea that many in the secular milieu have dismissed? One glimpse of how such a reconfiguration of our modern mental framework might be effected comes from a recent book by Andrew Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of the Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX.3 Jones, a Faculty Fellow at Franciscan University in Steubenville and an emerging light in the study of medieval Europe, has written a beautiful meditation about the realities of the spiritual and the political in thirteenth-century France. Jones’ finding is that secularity and modernity have basically reprogrammed the way we think about church and state. The state and the secular are now assumed to be almost the ground of existence for institutions that call themselves “religious” in inevitable counter-distinction to the secular. In St. Louis’ time, however, Jones asserts, there was a holistic im
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