church to the state (sometimes the city-state) level, and hence a fresh fusion of
religion with political power. In a larger organizational frame, the Protestant-
Catholic struggle added another dimension of conflict to the underpinnings of
intellectual life; for several generations it was Catholic intellectuals who were
best positioned to take advantage of this.
Secularization of the Intellectual Base
Secularization is more structural than doctrinal. Secularization does not mean
that no one is concerned with religion any longer. Religious movements may
still flourish, but now they become private movements. Secularization means
removing control of intellectual production from the authority of the church.
That authority had been backed up by the coercive power of the state; church
and aristocratic rule were organizationally intertwined. The same families
made careers in both; church property was a portion of aristocratic property;
in daily life the church provided the means of ritual production, enacting the
ceremonial impressiveness of the political classes. Accordingly, secularization
began as a type of political revolution; as with all revolutions, its structural
key was breakdown at the top, caused by internal struggle among the elites,
and brought to a crisis by costly escalations and exhaustion of resources.^1
Secularization was the result of stalemate. The papacy itself first underwent
an insidious secularization during the Renaissance period, for it was a center
of worldly wealth but also uncontrollable worldly debts (above all from its
untenable geopolitical position); its far-flung networks and its riches made it
the center of factional strife and the target for plundering by adventurers. The
Reformation translated the strife and plunder to a new level—wholesale confis-
cation and religious war. In each phase the structural pattern is the same:
conflict among church-state elites, politicized churchmen and politicians with
religious slogans on their tongues, whose protracted struggles eventually ex-
haust the power of the church, materially and emotionally. Ritual impressive-
ness and the capacity for legitimation are lost as the struggle winds down in
political maneuver and compromise. In sociological conflict theory, the process
of exhaustion and de-escalation of conflict is as important as the original
mobilization and polarization.
On the macro-level, the structural situation of church politics was a bal-
anced conflict of cross-cutting powers, a gridlock of political alliances and
religious factions. That was the formula for political stalemate, and, because
of the exhaustion of resources as conflict escalated in this unwinnable situation,
for eventual breakdown of the old church-state. But with one added ingredient:
it was also the formula for intellectual creativity which we have seen in so
many parts of the world, the intersection of rival circles at a center of attention.
Secularization and Philosophical Meta-territoriality • 573