Mackie called "The Miracle of Theism," and Sean Faircloth's "Attack of the Theocrats!," a chillingly well-researched unmasking of the contemporary political threat to America's noble secular tradition.
His work established secular poetry as a serious and noble pursuit.
The pressures of Bach's weekly grind have something in common with Haydn's professional life a few years later, the difference for Haydn being the secular setting as head musician to the noble house of Esterhazy.
The theocratic concept of the state that resulted from his notion of kingship caused Richelieu to regard heresy as political dissidence, and he harried the apparently unorthodox, such as the first Jansenists, on the ground that they disturbed the spiritual and secular orders, just as he harried the recalcitrant nobles and stamped out dueling.
The spiritual authority of the church is a higher, more noble form of authority than the coercive secular authority of the prince, but secular authority is conferred on the prince by God, not by the church.
Last comes an array of secular material: clothing, jewelry and riding gear owned by Tibetan nobles and church officials who ruled the country on a top-down feudal model, one that the Chinese communists found abhorrent.
These noble poet-composers created a rich tradition of purely monophonic secular song that furnished convenient points of departure for much of the secular polyphonic music in both 14th-century France and 15th-century Germany.
Regardless of interpretation of Cynehelm's legend, there does appear to have been dynastic discord early in Ceolwulf's reign: a document from 825 says that after the death of Coenwulf "much discord and innumerable disagreements arose between various kings, nobles, bishops and ministers of the Church of God on very many matters of secular business".
Anti-Semitic, anti-secular, misogynistic and militaristic to the bone, the Old Regime kept Europe stuck in agrarian backwardness peasants and landed nobles.
