This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

This Afterword responds to each of the foregoing chapters in relation to the postsecular nature of the sacred. It begins by redirecting the question of the sacred from one of definition to one of enactment, and then proceeds by reflecting on how each chapter might enact the sacred in its own way, even if implicitly, and so often by rummaging in poetry, literature, visual art and language. It finishes by reiterating a possible sacred place in our contemporary deserts in which all opposites might be reconciled in Total Presence.

In the titles and subtitles of David Jasper’s ‘sacred trilogy’ the word ‘sacrament’ appears only in his third book, but Jasper adopts the language of sacrament throughout to designate the way that transcendent reality becomes wholly immanent and gives rise to silence. Sacrament is thus no longer understood to be a manifestation of the divine through a material thing but as the silence of what Jasper names as “Total Presence”, instantiated in both the textual body of the world and in human bodies that make a journey into the desert place. This sacramental phenomenon comes to a focus in the text of poetry, novels, the visual arts and music. This chapter reflects on the extent to which this refiguring of sacrament might enable us to re-think the boundary between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ which seems to persist in our late-modern age. It does so by developing five themes in relation to sacrament: the death of God and universality; the sacred; inside/outside of the text; participating in Christ; and community.

This introduction marks out the space of the following volume, as it takes its bearings from David Jasper’s Sacred Trilogy and explores its implications through various sacred modes of being. It sets out the terms of a now questioned antagonism between religion and the secular by looking at a renewed relationship, as reconstituted by the postsecular, between religion and theology. It suggests that theology, as a cultural practice, must now reckon not only with the secular but also with an increasingly contested religious conception, and it does so through the concept of the sacred. In looking at how the sacred has been recently modulated through such theorists as Girard and Agamben, and then through the poetics of Rilke and Nietzsche, a new understanding emerges, one in which theology takes on, necessarily, a cultural mode, and culture, necessarily, a theological mode. The contributing chapters are then positioned around these modes, to suggest and exemplify, in their interdisciplinary approach, a new sense of living and dwelling in the sacred.

In the ongoing irresolution between religion and the secular, this chapter looks at the notion of the sacred as something always and already resolved to its counterpart, the profane. In defining the sacred as the opening of the world to its own outside, the chapter explores the reaches of this opening in relation to David Jasper’s Sacred Trilogy. Across Jasper’s texts the sacred opens us to a mystical possibility embodied in spaces both real and imagined – such as desert, body or community – where the ascetic and the aesthetic come together. The chapter shows how this embodiment inhabits or dwells within a liturgical space by looking at liturgy’s “ergon” as cultural and communal poesis, which takes both individual and community to their own outside. This “ergon” is thus also a movement, a traversing with reverent care and a respectful silence towards “the impossible possibility of absolute vision” (Jasper). That vision enfolds together literature, art, religion, philosophy and sacrament in order to make possible within our world an impossibility that opens up our world, an opening that is both discovery and loss, both voice and silence, both all and nothing.

The Introduction lays out the book’s main argument about the uses to which accounts of the Bible’s origins were put in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It sketches the historical context for this phenomenon, discussing how the period was characterized by heightened attention on the Bible’s ultimate divine origin, transcendent of all historical contexts, and at the same time by a new focus on the human and historical mediations shaping Scripture’s extant forms. The Introduction proceeds to a critical analysis of how modern scholars have understood these modes of biblical reception according to theories of secularization and modernity, with some arguing that the early modern Bible’s transcendence, and some its immanence, played important roles in the development of secularity, disenchantment, and modernity. Through engaging this scholarship, the Introduction develops arguments that challenge contemporary thinking about secularity. Following a discussion of the scholarly field of political theology and the present book’s relationship to it, the Introduction ends with an overview of the book's chapters.

This chapter considers how Spinoza’s treatment of scriptural origins in the Theological-Political Treatise is used to found his political argument. It argues that concepts of secularity and secularization have been inaccurately applied to Spinoza’s discussion of the Bible’s textual history, and that Spinoza cannot be viewed simply as a debunker of Scripture, even as his treatment of Scripture is theologically radical and has profound political implications. It shows how his claim that the Bible’s origins lie in the human imagination undergirds his argument that religious belief can be separated from religious conduct, a distinction not only central to his argument for the political state’s control over religion, but also central to the secular states associated with modernity. The chapter proceeds to show the oppressive and illiberal implications of Spinoza’s political-theological argument for religious minorities. Spinoza’s non-traditional account of the Bible and religion thus both founds a distinction which proved fundamental to modern secularity, even as, it is argued, Spinoza’s theological-political argument itself resists a straightforward identification as secular.

Chapter 4 picks up where the previous chapter ends the (failed) option of constructing non-Jewish Israeliness as a solution to this Jewish identity problem. This, again, is done by a reconstruction and deconstruction of a public debate – and publicly available texts. The roots of this anti-Jewish Israeli stance are quite old in terms of Zionist history (Yadgar correctly traces it back to the “Young Hebrews”). Yadgar shows the very shallow and limited sense in which this stance (mis)understands Judaism. He shows it to be based on an anti-Semitic view of Judaism as anti-humanist, primitive and benighted (this is most clearly apparent in the writing of Uzi Ornan, who figures prominently in this debate and in the chapter as a whole). Even more interestingly, Yadgar exposes the Israeli left’s (this stance, again, is a case of a unidimensional identification of Judaism with the right) inability to engage productively with its Jewish history. There is no doubt that (as Yadgar insists) the anti-Jewish Israeli stance is a minority position among Israelis, especially Israeli Jews. Just like its predecessor (anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist “Hebrew” nationalism), it is extremely useful in forcing the logical inconsistencies of the Israeli and Jewish claim to Jewish identity to come to the fore.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

‘Secularity’ is here taken to involve matters which are lay and earthly as opposed to otherworldly and spiritual. Personal experience was being allowed its own authority, a principle which often features in Chaucer’s poetry, as when he portrays a woman with much experience of marriage and a marquis who obsessively tests his wife’s virtue. Certain marvels were acknowledged to have natural rather than miraculous causes; this belief features in the tales told by the Squire and Franklin. Chaucer condemns false alchemists who dupe victims into believing that they are seeing precious metals being created. As far as astrology/astronomy is concerned, he makes use of secular science whilst disassociating himself from the pagan beliefs held by its ancient proponents. His sociopolitical values often reflect those associated with recently recovered works by Aristotle. Secularity and religiosity were not invariably in opposition, but sometimes the strains showed – as in Chaucer’s Retractions.