The secular age

the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others

 we need to see how it became possible to experience moral fullness, to identify the locus of our highest moral capacity and inspiration, without reference to God, but within the range of purely intra-human powers

It has often been noted how secularization went along with an intensification of religious faith. The “message and driving force behind Reformation and Counter-Reformation” was that “religion was on its way to becoming a matter of intense personal decision.”

In the nineteenth century, one of the key values was understood to be altruism. And in this regard exclusive humanism could claim to be superior to Christianity. First, Christianity offers extrinsic rewards for altruism in the hereafter, where humanism makes benevolence its own reward;

 George Eliot, for instance, was inspired by Feuerbach, and believed that we have the power within us to sustain an all-encompassing love. At a certain stage of development, we can bring this power to fruition, and thus come to recognize that what we have previously attributed to the divine is really a human capacity.

a sense of universal sympathy, which only needed the right conditions to flourish into virtue. The source of the love is no longer seen here as residing in dispassionate reason, or in our own awesome capacity to act on universal principles. It lies deep in our emotional make-up; but it has been suppressed, distorted, covered over by the false and denaturing conditions which have developed in history. Our task is to find the conditions which can liberate it. Rousseau, in particular with his notion of pitié, is one of the inspirational writers in this vein. Another view which arises a little later is the Feuerbachian vision that the powers we have attributed to God are really human potentialities. This rich treasure of moral inspiration can be rediscovered within us

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Elias shows that the “civilizing process” involved our taking this distance from a whole range of powerful emotions: rage and the fascination with violence, sexual desire, and our fascination with bodily processes and excretions, which is in some way related to sexual feeling. Our ancestors permitted themselves accesses of rage, they more frankly gloried in violence, they flocked to scenes of cruel punishment, inflicted on humans and animals (…)It is not just that we tend to control our anger better, or at least to demand this of each other; we also learn to damp our feelings of rage and resentment