“Beds Inlaid With Silver”

It is striking that none of pagan Rome’s jurists felt that the term ‘secularity’, or ‘secularization’, might be necessary to describe a mode of Roman life, or a function of Roman law. Where then do these words originate? ‘Secularity’ is a coinage of medieval Christian writers. When ‘secularity’ occurs in a text by a twelfth-century monk, for instance, it is sharply contrasted with the monastic form of life (conversatio monachorum). And ‘secularization’ is a creation of medieval canon law. Originally, ‘secularization’ signified the protocols for laicizing a monastic in the Roman Church. Though both terms are medieval, this chapter argues that they may ultimately derive from a European Ur-text in which the concept of an ‘age’, or saeculum, is decisive: the Latin New Testament. This chapter seeks to show that the saeculum is a motif in Jesus’ sayings in Luke and in Paul’s letters (in their continent-shaping Latin translations).