De la sécularisation comme dialectique de la préservation et du dépassement : rupture et résurgence chez William Hale-White (« Mark Rutherford »)

• Published in: LISA (Caen, France) Vol. 16; no. vol. XVI-n°2
• Main Author: Yvard, Jean-Michel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses universitaires de Rennes 10.09.2018
• Subjects: autobiography; biblical critique; hagiography; Hale-White William; Hegel Georg Wilhelm; Rutherford Mark
• ISSN: 1762-6153; 1762-6153
• DOI: 10.4000/lisa.10297

Nowadays, two conceptions of secularization oppose each other. The first one perceives the “exit from religion” as well as the advent of a radically new moral and intellectual order as a process of iconoclastic abolition and complete inversion of the initial, foundational religious order. Largely inherited from the Enlightenment and the positivist tradition, it hypostatizes the oppositional paradigm of a radical break with the past and places the advent of modernity under the aegis of the tabula rasa and of a radical inversion of the inaugural religious determinations. On the other hand, the second one tends to understand the development of ideas as well as of psychological and social realities by reducing them to more essential continuities. It addresses the question of the preservation of structural schemes that have been inherited from the original religious logic by referring to a few examples borrowed from White’s writings, showing, among other things, how he was tempted to make of science -- and even of professional involvement -- a genuine inner-worldly substitutionary vocation, of secular literature a source of moral and axiological inspiration.