Modern Age - Winter 2016 - 139

REVIEWS

onstrate over and over how the European mind couldn't easily
distinguish the boundaries between evangelizing and civilizing
newly discovered peoples. In fact, it's altogether unclear which
one is the ultimate objective. For Vergil, "civilization, in the form
of more temperate manners, was the true purpose of the Christian faith," and "by equating civility with Christian gentleness and
courteousness, [Botero] made Christ the apostle of courtesy." Was
becoming civilized the preamble to and the benefit of receiving
the Christian faith, or was propagating Christianity merely the
convenient tool for civilizing non-Western peoples? Which was
more important? This was an open question to the early modern
European mind, yet Headley masterfully demonstrates that the
emergence of "civilization" in modernity had a uniquely secular,
worldly, and extra-religious dimension to it.
In what, then, lies the uniqueness of Western civilization? Headley argues that the West alone in world history best understands
how to optimize the ordering of this world-the realm of the
secular. In fact, one might say the West invented the notion in
its modern sense. His use of the term "secular" largely avoids the
polemical and negative denotation (i.e., a humanly oriented philosophy with a principled hostility toward the religious). Rather,
secularity, or secularization, entails an "ability to create a neutralizing medium with expanding frontiers-a medium that rejects
the inevitable particularisms harbored or generated by religion,
no matter how universal and all-inclusive that religion may understand itself to be." This neutralizing medium is the social and
political space of communal worldly human life, one not immediately derived from any sectarian religious perspective. Secularity
is characterized by a commitment to the following attributes: a
common humanity, universal human rights, the legitimacy of
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Modern Age - Winter 2016

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