Desecularizing the Christian Past: Beyond R.A. Markus and the Religious-Secular Divide [Kõva köide]

1. It is a work of historiography that deals with the supernatural. 2. It is a book that goes beyond the secular-religious divide. 3. It connects the contemporary debates on postsecularism with the historiography of late antiquity. The essential objective of this study is to unpack the complicity between historians and secularization theory in the study of late ancient and early medieval Christianity—and then suggest a way out. In this work of historiography of religion, Enrico Beltramini argues that religious history is inherently secular and produces distorted representations of the Christian past. He suggests moving from an epistemological to a hermeneutical approach so that the supernatural worldview of the Christian past can be addressed on its own terms. This work also engages Markus’s saeculum and replaces Markus’s secularized relationship between the Kingdom and the government of the civitas with the Augustinian association of the Kingdom and divine government.