IINTERFAKULTÄRER STUDIENGANGRELIGIONSWISSENSCHAFT

Narratives of Disenchantment andSecularization:
Origins, Contexts, Transformations

International Conference
October 28-29, 2017
Organized by Robert A. Yelle and Lorenz Trein
Interfaculty Program for the Study of Religion
LMU Munich

Venue:LMU Munich, Historisches Seminar
Schellingstr. 12, K 001

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Conference ThemeThe year 2017 marks the centenary of Max Weber’s famous lecture “ScienceAs a Vocation,” given at Munich, in which he announced the“disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of the modern world. On the occasion ofthis event, this conference will explore narratives of secularization inhistorical and historiographical discourses on religion, beginning with thequestion of origins. This question concerns not only the historical derivationof the idea of disenchantment as understood by Weber and others, but also,
and more broadly, notions of genealogical continuity as well as of “newbeginnings,” by which religion has been assigned a temporal position (often
as part of an outmoded past) within competing narratives of modernization.
Although the question of which historical sources may have shaped Weber’s
understanding of disenchantment remains unresolved, some recent
arguments suggest that his sociology of religion echoed themes inProtestant theology that were significantly older than such immediate andwell-known influences as Rudolph Sohm and Adolf Harnack. Revisiting theinfluence of Protestantism, not only on Weber, but also on historicalnarratives of modernization and periodization more broadly, seems
especially appropriate at this time, since 2017 will also be the “Luther-Jahr”
or 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation in Germany.
If disenchantment describes a moment of rupture with a primitive past, thisis a trope that can be found, in various forms, not only in the idea of a“radical Enlightenment” that broke with a religious (and superstitious) past,
nor only in the idea of a “dis-godded world” (entgötterte Welt) shared bynumerous Romantics, but also in early Christianity, where the decline oforacles and cessation of miracles were regarded as positive events andattributed to Christ’s Incarnation or Passion. These early Christian tropes
drew upon even older pagan narratives, such as Plutarch’s account of the
Greek oracles’ decline and the idea of the cessation of prophecy in ancient
Judaism. The early Christian versions were taken up at the beginning of theReformation, a movement, the name of which itself implies not a radical
rupture, but instead a continuity and a return to origins.
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It is not only the historical event of disenchantment (if this ever happened)
but also the very idea, or narrative, of such an event that appears to have atheological genealogy. While reinforcing Weber’s central insight regarding
the influence of the Reformation on modernity, this recognition alsoheightens the crisis over the “legitimacy” of modernity to which Hans
Blumenberg responded by criticizing Weber’s (and Karl Löwith’s and Carl
Schmitt’s) idea of secularization as a continuity between modernity and its
religious past, and by characterizing modernity conversely as an overcomingof inherited problems.
Moving beyond the narrow question of Weber’s influences, the conference
aims to contribute to a sharpening of his diagnosis of what modernity
represents, particularly vis-à-vis religion, through an investigation of theorigins, dissemination, nature, and function of narratives of secularization.
The conference will examine tropes of continuity and discontinuity, and ofdisenchantment and Enlightenment, in historical and historiographicaldiscourses on religion in order to evaluate the function that such narratives
play in an overall philosophy of history.

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Keynote Speaker
Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Speakers
Egil Asprem, Stockholm University
Joydeep Bagchee, LMU Munich
Gustavo Benavides, Villanova University
Wolfgang Eßbach, Freiburg University
Ernst van den Hemel, Meertens Institute, Amsterdam
Jason Josephson-Storm, Williams College
Hans G. Kippenberg, Jacobs University Bremen
Michael Saler, University of California at Davis
Lorenz Trein, LMU Munich
Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Leipzig University
Robert A. Yelle, LMU Munich

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Conference Programme
Saturday, 28 October 2017
9.15

Welcome and Introduction

9.30

Hans G. Kippenberg: Dialectics of Disenchantment.
Devaluation of the Objective World ─ Revaluation of
Subjective Religiosity

10.30

Coffee Break

11.00

Egil Asprem: Science as a Commodity:
Disenchantment and Conspicuous Consumption

12.00

Robert A. Yelle: Disenchantment as a Secularized
Theological Narrative

13.00

Lunch

14.30

Gustavo Benavides: The Production of Enchantment

15.30

Wolfgang Eßbach: Probleme einer
religionssoziologischen Typologie europäischer
Religionen

16.30

Coffee Break

17.00

Jonathan Israel (keynote): Radical Enlightenment andthe Secularization of the Western World (1650-1850)

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Sunday, 29 October 2017
9.30

Lorenz Trein: Multiple Times of Disenchantment in
the Study of Historical Thought

10.30

Coffee Break

11.00

Ernst van den Hemel: Postsecular Nationalism?
Appeals on the Judeo-Christian Roots of Secularity in
the Dutch “Turn to the Right”

12.00

Jason Josephson-Storm: The Rationalization of Magic

13.00

Lunch

14.30

Monika Wohlrab-Sahr: Counternarratives: Critiques ofSecularism, Holistic Ideals, and Their History

15.30

Michael Saler: “Fictionalism” and the Disenchanted
Enchantments of Western Modernity

16.30

Coffee Break

17.00

Joydeep Bagchee: Myth, History, Religion

18.00

Closing of the ConferenceINTERFAKULTÄRER STUDIENGANGRELIGIONSWISSENSCHAFT

Abstracts
Egil Asprem: Science as a Commodity: Disenchantment and Conspicuous
Consumption
Weber’s most evocative pronouncement on the disenchantment of the worldcame in the context of spelling out the internal, vocational calling of“modern empirical science.” The dissipation of irreducible mystery rapidly
progresses as the scientist, dispassionately and value-neutrally, uncovers themechanisms of nature and paves the way for rational-technologicaldomination. But there were clouds on the horizon: the polemical aspect ofWeber’s lecture bears witness of the fashionably anti-intellectual
Lebensphilosophie movement as well as the constant failure of some naturalscientists to shy away from extrapolating grand theological claims from their“pure facts.”
The unwillingness of certain intellectuals to play by disenchanted rules
need, however, not be a problem for the thesis that disenchantment willcontinue; as a social process, it is driven less by the attitudes of a miniscule
subculture of academics than by the material products of science that
restructure society along utilitaristic and rational lines. If we want to know
how science and technology impact on the place of religion, spirituality, and“magic” in the modern world, then, we must not only consider theirprofessional and vocational aspects, but also the role of the consumer ofscience. In short, we must consider science as a commodity.
The first theorist to systematically look at academia from the perspective ofconsumerism was Weber’s eccentric critic from across the Atlantic, thetheorist of the “leisure class,” Thorstein Veblen. This lecture will establish adialogue between Weber and Veblen on the characteristics of “science
consumption”, relating it to recent debates on the “disenchantment” or “reenchantment” of science in the modern and contemporary world. Viewing
science as conspicuous consumption may help explain the behavior of someof the unruly intellectuals in Weber’s 1917 audience.
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Joydeep Bagchee: Myth, History, Religion
A discussion of narratives of disenchantment and secularization requires us
to first thematize the relationship of narrative to history. Before we can ask
whether Weber's analysis of religion either presupposes or justifies us inassuming a historical event of disenchantment, we must first clarify the
relationship of religion and history. Robert Yelle pointedly asks: “To what
extent is religion ‘in’ history, and to what extent is history ‘in’ religion?” If
history, especially as secular, world history exists “in” religion and,moreover, a specific religion (Christianity), then the question of thehistorical reality of disenchantment is already prejudicial. This paper
attempts to unravel the relationship of history and religion by relating them
to a third term: myth. I will argue that the stability and autonomy weattribute to secular, world history prevents us from recognizing its mythic
features, above all, that it has the common structure of a narrative recounted
to organize experience, provide meaning, and orient us toward a salvifictelos.

Gustavo Benavides: The Production of Enchantment
Entzauberung, Entgötterung and similar expressions presuppose that aworld populated by gods and suffused by magic lost its gods and its magicat some point. That such processes do regularly take place is undeniable,
just as it is undeniable that processes of disenchantment seem to havereached their most extreme form with the development of Westernmodernity. At the same time, we must consider that just as a world becomesentzaubert, it can become verzaubert, and, more generally, that there is aback and forth between discourses of disenchantment and those of
enchantment that does not follow a linear development. We must also be
mindful of the interplay between enchanted and disenchanted views of theworld found outside the Western tradition, particularly in India, as shown by
the Buddha’s ridiculing of Brahmin claims and, more radically, by the Indian
materialists. After a brief consideration of Indian developments, we willconcentrate on the Western tradition. We will examine Lucian of Samosata’s
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INTERFAKULTÄRER STUDIENGANGRELIGIONSWISSENSCHAFT“On sacrifices” and “On funerals,” and will compare those disenchanted
second-century texts with two composed almost seventeen centuries later,
namely, Joseph de Maistre’s Éclaircissement sur les sacrifices (1810) andFranz von Baader’s Theorie des Opfers (1836). Having examined specificinstances of the interplay between enchantment and disenchantment, we
will address the problem of origins and will examine whether it is possible toidentify the processes whereby a world becomes suffused by magic andinhabited by gods in the first place—in other words, whether we can identify
the mechanisms through which a kind of original Verzauberung occurs. This
will be done in a speculative manner by focusing, first, on the transition
from immediate to delayed consumption among hunter gatherers, and,second, by examining the process of material and symbolic accumulation by
the early states.

Wolfgang Eßbach: Probleme einer religionssoziologischen Typologie
europäischer Religionen
In meinem Beitrag setze ich mich zunächst mit zwei
religionstypologischen Modellvorstellungen auseinander. Zum einen
geht es um binäre Typisierungen, wie die Selbstbeschreibungen von„wahrer Religion“ und anderen „falschen Religionen“, die für den
europäischen Religionsbegriff prägend gewesen sind. In Diskursen
der Fremdbeschreibung kehrt die binäre Typisierung als
Unterscheidung von Religion und „Nicht-Religion“ bzw. Religion und„Pseudoreligion“ nach Maßgabe der jeweiligen Definition vonReligion wieder. Auch die Rede von Säkularisierung oder
Entzauberung folgt einem Binarismus. Eine zweite Gruppe vonTypisierungen orientiert sich an Modellen einer Evolution religiöser
Vorstellungen in einer universalgeschichtlichen Perspektive z.B. von‚primitiven‘ Religionen zu Erlösungsreligionen. Verflochten sind dieseModelle mit der Typisierung der hochkulturellen Lokalisierung vonWeltreligionen und ihren diversen Untergliederungen. Gegenüberbinären und an religiöser Evolution orientierten Modellvorstellungenplädiere ich für eine Historische Religionssoziologie, die die
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vergangenen Semantiken des Religiösen, ihre Schichtungen und
Konkurrenzen, diskursanalytisch aufnimmt underfahrungsgeschichtlich zu den epochalen Zeiterfahrungen dereuropäischen Moderne und ihrer Aktualisierbarkeit in Beziehung
setzt.

Ernst van den Hemel: Postsecular Nationalism? Appeals on the JudeoChristian Roots of Secularity in the Dutch “Turn to the Right”
During the 2017 parliamentary elections, the leader of the Christian
Democrats was asked about the importance of Judeo-Christian values,
a hotly debated topic during these elections. His response: “This isabout who we are. Things that we’ve had for thousands of years likethe equality between man and woman. These are the things we should
protect.” The claim that the Netherlands have been characterized byreligiously inspired equality for thousands of years might seem a bit
outlandish, but it is a telling example of an important and influential
phenomenon: appeals on Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch society andclaims about the origin and nature of Dutch secularity figure
prominently in contemporary political debates. Roughly since thebeginning of the millennium, Dutch society has experienced a “turnto the right.” Exemplified by the rise of the populist PVV, which,amongst other things, has proposed to devote the first article of the
Dutch constitution to the Judeo-Christian origins of Dutch society,religion and secularity have been hotly debated in this turn. The
populist PVV, the liberal VVD and the Christian Democrats have all
claimed the importance of highlighting and protecting the religious
roots and values of Dutch society. Remarkably, all sorts of secularvalues are associated with this “Judeo-Christian” tradition: from theseparation of church and state to gay rights and feminism, values
associated with progressive secular Dutch self-image have been
reframed as illustrative of the “superiority” of “Judeo-Christianity.”
Whereas frequently a secular framework is used to make sense of the9INTERFAKULTÄRER STUDIENGANGRELIGIONSWISSENSCHAFT

turn to the right in the Netherlands, this paper argues that a
postsecular reflection on history, secularity and religion is at work
which is actively reframing the social imaginary of Dutch secularnational identity.
By close-reading recent Dutch political discourse on “Judeo-Christianity,”and by contrasting this with dominant historiographies of secularity, thispaper maps the many ways in which narratives of the origins of Dutch
secularity and its religious past and present are actively rewritten during therise of Dutch nationalism. The paper concludes with a short comparison of
the Dutch context with other Western European contexts, including Franceand Germany.

Jason Josephson-Storm: The Rationalization of Magic“Magic, for example, has been just as systematically ‘rationalized’ as physics”
Max Weber, Der Sinn der "Wertfreiheit," 1917

Many nonspecialists understand disenchantment as a poetical synonym forsecularization; and even most Weber scholars take the phrase “thedisenchantment of the world” (Die Entzauberung der Welt) at face value andassume that a disenchanted world has absolutely no magic in it. It is often
assumed that Weber thought that the death of magic was the naturalconsequence of rationalization.
But as evidenced in Weber’s own writings (including the quote above),
Weber not only believed that magic persisted in modernity, but that it waspossible for magic itself to be rationalized. This paper will begin byrecapping some of my new book The Myth of Disenchantment todemonstrate both the contemporary persistence of belief in spirits andmagic and also to show that Weber himself was no stranger to the occult
milieu. Indeed, as I interpret Weber, we live in a disenchanting world inwhich magic is embattled and intermittently contained within its own
cultural sphere, but not a disenchanted one in which magic is gone.
After laying out this background, I will deploy Weberian theory to
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reconstruct what it can tell us about the rationalization of magic.

Hans G. Kippenberg: Dialectics of Disenchantment. Devaluation of
the Objective World – Revaluation of Subjective Religiosity
Max Weber was interested in the fate of religion precisely in the modern
period, but he did not apply the concept of secularization for this. Richard
Swedberg did not include “secularization” in the lexicon of Max Weber’s
key words, but he did include “disenchantment.” For Weber, “secularizing”
and “secularization” are concepts from the history of law that had been
employed since classical antiquity to denote the transfer of land, institutions,and persons from ecclesiastical to secular law. When we inquire into
Weber’s understanding of religious history in the modern period, it is“disenchantment” that occupies the central position. Highly pithy remarksby Max Weber have favored this thematic concentration. For example, in his
celebrated discourse about “Science As a Profession” (Wissenschaft als
Beruf) in 1917 in Munich, he observed:“The world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magicalmeans in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whomsuch mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform theservice. That is all what intellectualization means.”

The advantage of this way of looking at things is that there is acorrespondence between progress in scientific knowledge and thebases of religion. Religions divesting the world of magic and denying
any inner-worldly salvation change their own basis of existence. The
notion of a disenchantment of the world generates a dialectics ofreligion different from the notion of secularization.
“In a world increasingly divested of magic (‘mit zunehmender Entzauberung der
Welt’), religiosity must take on increasingly (subjective) irrational meaning
relationships (ethical or mystical, for instance).”“Categories of Interpretive Sociology” - (1981 [1913]), 155.

This is the notion used by Max Weber when he turned to comparative11

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religious studies. Hence my paper addresses:
1. Weber’s concept of the process and consequences of disenchantment in
his “Religious Communities” and other contemporary texts.
2. Dialectics of disenchantment of religion in recent approaches to history,nature and society.

Michael Saler: “Fictionalism” and the Disenchanted Enchantments ofWestern Modernity
Max Weber’s 1917 invocation of the “disenchantment of the world”
expressed the ambivalent view that modern science and rationality had
superseded traditional religious and supernatural outlooks, evacuating theworld of divine purpose and universal meaning. Instead, different forms of
reason and morality prevailed in multiple cultural domains, with rationality,
efficiency and calculability as the impersonal keywords of the age. Weber’semphasis on modernity as both inherently disenchanted and secular,
however, has been challenged in recent years. Scholars have shown how
contemporaries addressed the problem of disenchantment by attempting to
re-enchant the world in a variety of ways. They have also demonstrated thatsecularism did not mean the subtraction of religion from everyday life, butrather the proliferation of religious and spiritual options (including that ofnon-belief).
Such reconsiderations have also allowed us to revisit the dominantparadigm of Western modernity as being founded upon the
Enlightenment emphasis on reason. Intellectual histories of theeighteenth century increasingly acknowledge the importance of theimagination and feelings to the philosophies and practices of the age,and from a twenty-first century perspective it is clear that the
Romantic stress on the imagination has been no less constitutive ofmodernity than the Enlightenment faith in reason. This has resulted ina world that is simultaneously disenchanted by reason and reenchanted by the imagination: modernity permits “disenchanted
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enchantments,” combining both. “Enchantment” has always had thedual meaning of “to delight” and “to delude”; an ideal, andspecifically modern, form of enchantment would be one that fostereddelight while forestalling delusion.
My talk will focus on one important tributary to modern disenchanted
enchantment: the rise of “Fictionalism” beginning in the late nineteenth
century. Fictionalism signifies the use of “story” as a master metaphor for
how we understand the world and ourselves. It maintains that all domains ofthought, including science and religion, are necessarily provisional andcontingent constructs, narratives that differ in their types of truth claims.
Fictionalism is an ironic, self-referential discourse applied to all discourses,
which can be found in Nietzsche’s perspectivism, American pragmatism,
scientific “descriptionism” and “conventionalism,” and varieties ofexistentialism and postmodernism. It was also found in the new massculture of the fin de siècle and after. Novels, comic strips and films often
commented on their status as fictions, just as new genres appeared that
consciously merged fiction and non-fiction (e.g. “Autobiografiction,” which
was coined in 1906 to reflect the constructed, artifactual nature of life
narratives).
I will focus on how Fictionalism expressed itself in modern fantasy fiction
since the late nineteenth century, which tended to be “stories about stories,”
training its readers to see all other discourses in fictionalist terms. Christianbelievers, such as G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, depicted
God as the Supreme Artist, humanity as sub-creators, and existence as agreat Story. Their religious outlook represents a form of disenchanted
enchantment, in that they stressed the provisional and contingent, “humanall-too-human” understanding of transcendent and universal truths. A
similar disenchanted enchantment characterized fantasy works by theirsecular contemporaries Oscar Wilde, Hope Mirrlees and James BranchCabell, who found marvels and meaning in aesthetic fictions rather thanreligious doctrines. I will conclude that Fictionalism has become a common
ground between allegedly oppositional outlooks, such as science andreligion, secularism and spirituality – just as modernity unites other seeming
binaries, such as reason and the imagination, enchantment and13

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disenchantment.

Lorenz Trein: Multiple Times of Disenchantment in the Study ofHistorical Thought
Following both historical and philosophical arguments, the rise anddissemination of modern concepts like “progress” and “history” has often
been told as closely intertwined with transformations of particular religious
legacies. Therefore, secularization and disenchantment are frequently
depicted and conceived of as historical conditions of modernity andcorresponding temporalities. Meanwhile, this interpretation was challenged
only recently by an argument in the study of historical thought, according towhich the emergence of distinct modern notions like “progress” and“historicity” rather appears to be a problem of synchronizing “different” or“multiple times.” One implication of this approach to understanding thehistory of historical ideas is a historiographical displacement ofsecularization and disenchantment from our religious imagination ofmodernity. Instead of reifying such a modernist claim, my paper aims to
invert this criticism of a supposedly monolithic secular time by musing on amultiple temporalities approach to disenchantment and secularization. The
main focus will be on differentiating a few layers of inquiry for retelling thecomplex overlap of its various temporal dimensions in the study of historical
discourse on religion, modernity, and a disenchanted world.

Monika Wohlrab-Sahr: Counternarratives: Critiques of Secularism,
Holistic Ideals, and Their History
Whereas concepts of secularization and disenchantment have been
central elements of modernization theories for decades, in themeantime they seem to be widely discredited, especially when they
are used to make sense of non-European developments. Diagnoses ofsecularization have been demystified as “myths” of modernity, andconcepts as well as instititions of secularism have been discredited as
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INTERFAKULTÄRER STUDIENGANGRELIGIONSWISSENSCHAFT– often violent – Western impositions to the non-Western world. Not
only their political imposition, it is argued in these counternarratives,
but also the narratives of secularization and the conceptual divide
between the secular and the religious as such, are alien to the worlds
to which they have been imposed.
The paper takes a closer look at central strands of this critique,especially with regard to the Islamicate world and to India. The thesisis that parts of this critique implicitly or explicitly employ concepts ofwholeness and totality that are juxtaposed to the divisive nature of
secularisation and secularism. This resonates with early – e.g.
Romantic – critiques of secularization in the European history. It
leads, it is argued, against the very intentions of the critics, to an“othering” of the non-European world. And it leaves the question for
the existence of distinctions and differentiations between thereligious and the non-religious in this part of the world chronicallyunanswered.

Robert A. Yelle: Disenchantment as a Secularized Theological Narrative
In the past century since Max Weber delivered his Munich lectures on“Science As a Vocation” (1917), his characterization of European
modernity as the result of a process of rationalization,“disenchantment” (Entzauberung), and the decline of charisma has
been enormously influential. In recent decades, however, thishistorical account has come under attack from various directions.
Some scholars, including Wouter Hanegraaff, Egil Asprem, and Jason
Josephson-Storm, have provided rich intellectual histories detailingthe many ways in which modernity, even in some of its most scientificand critical dimensions, has been nourished by currents ofesotericism and indeed remains enchanted. Others, such as Talal
Asad and Michael Saler, have argued that the very idea of
disenchantment represents a retrospective construction of anenchanted past, one that is possibly no older than Romanticism. Both15

INTERFAKULTÄRER STUDIENGANGRELIGIONSWISSENSCHAFTof these critiques pose significant challenges to still-dominantaccounts of the origins of modernity through a break with a religious
past, as forcefully articulated by Jonathan Israel in Radical
Enlightenment (2001) and other works. My argument will be that, as
Josephson-Storm shows in his recent book, The Myth of
Disenchantment (2017), and as I indicated already in my earlier book,
The Language of Disenchantment (2013), Weber’s idea of
disenchantment is a late iteration of one of the charter myths ofmodernity. Indeed, this myth is far older than has been recognized;
its origins are to be located in early Christian supersessionist
narratives, according to which Christ silenced the pagan oracles bydriving demons from the world, and the Gospel ushered in a newdispensation, one that replaced Mosaic law and witnessed the last
miracles. Each of these tropes was taken up by Protestants early in
the Reformation, well before their adaptation by the radical or
skeptical Enlightenment. The idea that miracles ceased was normative
doctrine in English Protestantism already by 1600, long before theDeist period, and developed in ways that directly anticipated not only
Weber’s idea of disenchantment, but also his related idea of theroutinization of charismatic authority, as further detailed in myforthcoming book, Sovereignty and the Sacred. Although thewidespread dissemination of such narratives makes the question ofWeber’s specific sources somewhat beside the point, it is also clearthat he was familiar with the idea of the cessation of miracles, an idea
to which he refers in Economy and Society and which he may havetaken from either Rudolph Sohm or Adolf Harnack. Much of what
Weber reported as scientific history now appears deeply indebted toProtestant theological polemics. From a broader perspective, what ismost important is to understand the phenomenon to which Weber
directed our attention: the manner in which modernity reflects thelegacy of its own, Christian past. My contribution, then, issimultaneously a critique of and an homage to this great scholar of
the past century.

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