Introduction

In the previous three chapters I outlined how a proper historical understanding of the Christian past is neither a question of faith nor lack of it, but of method. This method should be able to deliver the Christian past on its own terms. The method must deliver a sacramental view, not a secular view, because it is the former that better approximates the view of the inhabitants of the Christian past. To reach that understanding, I suggested an ontological turn that has already been incorporated in the work of two historians and is currently at work in other disciplines outside history. I also proposed the framework of a mutual assistance between history and theology on the basis that both disciplines are necessary, but neither sufficient, in addressing the Christian past. The same call of mutual integration was raised almost a century ago, as I will better explain in the final chapter. Across the next four chapters I move my study from theoretical discussion to an example of the sort of distorted accounts that the existing methodology produces, which is to say the work of R. A. Markus on Augustine's saeculum.

There likely exists no better example of the secularization of a supernaturally infused Christian past than the work of Robert A. Markus on Augustine and more specifically, Markus's interpretation of the saeculum. Markus's Saeculum represents the conviction that the saeculum is a transitory state before the Kingdom. It also represents a great example of the misleading effects of an extrinsic view of the secular on the interpretation of the Christian past. Markus interpreted Augustine's political thought as totally oriented toward the world, ad seculum, because he (Markus) read Augustine's theological thought through an extrinsic prism. I will show that Markus did not find the secular in late antiquity; he constructed the secular by reading the past through a specific extrinsic lens. It is on the premise that supernatural is added to an autonomous secular, in fact, that Markus “discovered” the equivalence between the end of prophecy and the beginning of the secular. These extrinsic lenses are particularly evident in his reading of Augustine's relationship between the order of nature and that of human will. According to Markus, Augustine separated the two orders of eternal law (lex aeterna) and temporal law (lex temporalis).