This is a book about methods and assumptions in the historical study of, especially, the late antique and medieval Christian past by a scholar whose intellectual bearings are both theological and theoretical. Unfortunately, it appears at an unpropitious moment, considering the growing strength in recent years and in many countries of far-right political leaders, parties, and movements that wield aggressively assertive religious ideologies, whether Christian, Islamic, Jewish, or Hindu. This trend has understandably alarmed persons of many persuasions, religious and non-religious alike, but particularly those ideologically committed to secularism in the public square and in academic discourse. Given this context, the scholars that Enrico Beltramini seeks especially to persuade are probably less likely to consider his important, sophisticated arguments. In intellectual terms, that would be a mistake. His principal claim, which is far broader than the reference to the late Robert Markus (1924–2010) in the subtitle might suggest, is that the secular presuppositions with which most historians of Christianity do their work inherently distort their understanding of past Christians whose horizon of experience included an irreducibly supernatural, transcendent dimension. Beltramini criticizes and rejects approaches that either render this horizon of lived experience in immanent, naturalist terms (cf. Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame”), or that conceive it in dualist terms as a cultural superstructure superimposed on a given, secular base (the latter approach being evident even among some avowedly Christian historians). In his concern with “reframing the conversation on the Christian past” (214), he advocates instead a “post-secular history” that acknowledges the “sacramental ontology” of the Christian subjects studied by historians and that seeks to explicate their experience rather than predictably reflecting historians’ assumptions. This proposal stands in contrast to histories based on what has become, in the secularized academy, an uncritically embraced ideology as though it were somehow neutral, self-evident, or an ineluctable outcome of modern science or philosophy. He seeks in his “preliminary study on the secular investigation of the Christian past” (30) a historical “third way” between rightly rejected, old-fashioned confessional history and insufficiently self-reflective, secularist histories of Christianity: “a proper historical understanding of the Christian past is neither a question of faith nor lack of it, but of method. This past should be able to deliver the Christian past on its own terms” (115).

Structurally, the book’s seven chapters comprise an intellectual diptych framed by an Introduction and a Conclusion. In the first three chapters, Beltramini articulates his methodological critique by taking as his point of departure two recent (and very different) books and the controversies they have generated: Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (2012) and Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (2017). He rightly recognizes both as works of history, not “theology” or “confessional history,” seeing in such reactions by some scholars an unwillingness to entertain the possibility of a post-secular religious history that is simultaneously non-confessional. In effect, for such critics, religious women and men are not to be taken too seriously on their own terms. Chapters 4–7, viewed narrowly, apply Beltramini’s critique to Robert Markus’s central—and very influential—argument about the ways in which Augustine’s ostensible affirmation of a late-antique saeculum was subsequently “desecularized” until it had become sacralized, totalizing Christendom without room for the secular by the time of Gregory the Great’s pontificate (590–604). Markus first articulated this interpretation in Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (1970), developed it further in The End of Ancient Christianity (1990), and continued to refine and defend it against critics in Christianity and the Secular (2006). In broader terms, however, Chapters 4–7 situate the Catholic-convert Markus, and his desire to appropriate Augustine for the purposes of a post-Vatican-II Church seeking to find a modus vivendi with a secularizing world, in relation to twentieth-century theological ressourcement and Vatican II’s aggiornamento—from its philosophical roots in Maurice Blondel to its theological uptake in Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, and others, to contemporary debates about the nature of the secular in the work of Radical Orthodoxy theologians such as John Milbank. Beltramini’s central argument is that Markus’s point about the discarded (pre-Christendom) and recovered (post-Christendom) secular aligns with Arquillièrian “Augustinian Scholasticism” that both distorts Augustine and, however unintentionally, renders the secular in a manner that actually prevents either recognition or manifestation of the sacred, thereby itself exercising a secularizing influence.

Desecularizing the Christian Past is directly relevant for scholars interested in or influenced by Markus’s work; it will also be engaging for scholars interested in twentieth-century Catholic theology, particularly in relationship to secularism and post-secularist theory. More broadly, however, the book is especially intended for historians of premodern Christianity. Whatever their receptivity to Beltramini’s methodological arguments, apart from those trained as traditional historians of theology, they are likely to find the author insufficiently attentive to the particularities, complexities, and real-world three-dimensionality of the human past. The book refers repeatedly to sweeping abstractions (“Christendom,” “Christians”) without countervailing alertness to the variety, diversity, and contested character of late antique or medieval Christian theology, spirituality, or religious experience as such, let alone Christians high and low, rich and poor, powerful and vulnerable, and exploitative and exploited. The subject matter of social, economic, environmental, and political history, too, was part of God’s creation (as conceived in Christian terms) between Constantine and the Reformation. These bear on the substance of some of Beltramini’s central concerns, such as the relationship between the exercise of divine sovereignty and human authority, whether ecclesiastical or lay, in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Much of Beltramini’s methodological intervention could be achieved through recourse to anthropology—rigorously and non-prejudicially applied—rather than to theology (which again, especially in our current circumstances, is apt to alienate some readers). Unfortunately, in addition to a certain repetitiveness, the book is marred by more typographical and compositional errors than is tolerable in any publication by a university press. That said, this is a significant work. It would be a mistake for historians of Christianity not to read and thereby to profit from it.