Where to begin? This question might be harder for me than it should. Certainly, I can begin by simply stipulating all of the praise in the previous reviews, generous, well-deserved praise. But in fact, it would be more honest to begin with the phenomenon of frustration. If A Secular Age wants to offer a phenomenology of secularism and the “immanent frame,” the experience of reading this book was first puzzling—rarely has a book provoked in me such a mix of exasperation and appreciation—and later telling.
From the opening pages, my historical antennae quickly began to quiver. Taylor’s book works in a space far removed from what I understand (speaking perhaps parochially) as proper historical argument. I say this with due caution: Taylor has always believed in the importance of a historical setting for his arguments. And from the outset of A Secular Age, he specifically addresses the issue of history. “Who needs all this detail, this history?” he asks, to insist that indeed “our past is sedimented in our present.” The movement between the analytical and the historical is thus essential to the entire argument, Taylor makes clear. The origins of the secular age lie, after all, in what he calls “Reform,” an urge to purify and renovate a past unacceptable to the modern moment. In a sense, then, the secular age as he understands it is defined historically: it is a “move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged…to one in which it is understood to be one option among others.” It is as an exercise in historical contrast, too, that Taylor sets into relief the characteristics of our immanent frame. Before, “people lived naively within a theistic construal.” Now they are reflective in their belief. Before, the self was “porous,” open to the influences of demonic and angelic forces alike. Now it is buffered. Before, religion was incarnated in bodily practices. Now it has been excarnated, has been removed from the corporeal, the ritual, and the practical. And so on. Disenchantment needs a prior state. It is an essentially contrastive category.
But as Simon During notes in a previous post, this is conjectural history, a history built around a mobile, at times heuristic distinction between yesterday and today. Conjectural history in the Enlightenment deployed a set of labile chronologies, which slipped along at different rates depending on the culture, people, nation, or what have you. In this way, empirical questions—was it really true that all or even most people in medieval Europe assigned meaning to extra-human subjects? What kind of data set would give us good information about this? What percentage translates into “most”?—were (and are) made irrelevant. Instead, the empirical counterexample is transformed into the “not yet” or the “not here.” So, for example, the fact that the quintessential reformer, John Calvin, worked stupendously hard not to excarnate Christianity—struggled long with the nature and mystery of Christ’s body—is not a counterexample to the Reform narrative. Rather it represents the “not yet” of a story. The Middle Ages in Europe look, on this account, much like primitive societies the world over, stadially defined along a stream from earlier to later. For this reason, it is very hard to chart Taylor’s chronologies: they metamorphose into vague befores and afters that slide from the dawn of the post-neolithic age to the Treaty of Westphalia, and beyond.
Now this is, I admit, a bit unfair to Taylor. He consistently marks the world’s plural developments, the heterogeneity of religious cultures, and the specificity of his claims about what he calls Latin Christendom. Moreover, his depiction of the various subject positions available inside this secular age is simply beautiful: to be secular, for Taylor, is never just one thing, but an immensely variegated experience, marbled with difference. And yet his “before,” that “old enchanted cosmos,” is as homogeneous as the modern is various, and the evidence for this is suspiciously thin, more anthropology than history. Pre-modern Europeans look quite a bit like Durkheim’s primitive Australians, who also look like so-called “pre-Axial Age” religious peoples. The fit between the theoretical claim—that to be modern is to be differentiated and plural—and the historical narrative is suspiciously close, so much so that the latter looks like an excuse for the former.
What does this matter? Maybe not much, I thought: Taylor is a philosopher, after all, and need be subject to none of my guild demands. But as I read on, it became clear that what I at first mentally called the anthropological a priori was in fact crucial to this project. The book in fact begins with such an a priori: that “we all see our lives… as having a certain moral/spiritual shape” that is governed by a sense of “fullness, a richness.” What supplies this shape distinguishes between believers and non-believers. Believers find this shape in a “beyond,” a transcendent something. Non-believers look downwards, to society, law, human relations, the here-and-now. Fullness defines the very possibilities of ethical, political, and social life. Its origin, not its facticity, creates the conditions of, and possibilities for, belief, and in turn creates the distinctions between the various subject positions enabled by a secular age.
Now there is a familiar critique to make here. What looks like an anthropological a priori, after all, looks suspiciously like a theological one. That is, the ideal of “fullness” that cannot be encompassed by what During calls the mundane is not neutral in respect to belief. Taylor imagines that for “unbelievers” the ideal of fullness works in “analogous” ways to that of believers, but I am not sure this is true at all. Indeed, one might easily argue that the unbeliever makes very little use of the idea of fullness at all. It simply does not govern his or her phenomenal life the way it supposedly does the believer—the mundane, to follow During, might be the far more important category for the life of the unbeliever. In contrast, “fullness” sounds much like a generalization of the Christian religious imagination—with its insistence on a call from beyond and transcendent value, its insistence that ethical and social life demands transcendence, and its focus on the primal loss of a synthesis of man and God—to an entire people, culture, world. And Taylor knows this. The argument that “God is still a reference point for unbelievers” because even atheists need to define their rationality against him confirms it. It says that “fullness” demands transcendence, at the very least as background. As Taylor concludes, “modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms, and others that remain within the immanent frame, are… responding to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it.” Real recognition comes only from the sphere of religion. And not just any religion, I suspect, but one most powerfully expressed in the Romantic and Catholic writers that Taylor finds so compelling.
But here is where my (admittedly secularist) exasperation became telling. At first I suspected that there was a kind of sleight-of-hand at work and that my job would be to show the gnome of theology at work behind sober description. But when I reached these concluding comments in the last chapters of the book, the tables turned. For in these, Taylor reveals that in fact this is a theological argument, that indeed the book is an explicit brief for a theological critique of secularism and the immanent frame. The violation of guild norms that made me so suspicious of the historical project was not accidental, but an integral part of the positive project of this book. The book ends with a moving confession of faith, something unremarked by most reviewers that I have read (see chapter 20). It is a faith in a future where depth and profundity reinvigorate and moderate a shallow, violent, and over-rationalized secular age, a future prophesied by Taylor’s admired authors, Bede Griffiths, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, Ivan Illich, Catholics to a man.
There is a name in the Christian tradition for this combination of theological argument and historical narrative. The name is apologetics, and its history is, in fact, one of the stories that Taylor recounts in this book. It is a history whose modern center lies in the seventeenth century, a century when Christians synthesized theological practice and the demands of an autonomous reason, insisting with ever more sophistication that Christianity was the religion of reasonable people. In the age of religious wars, the prime real estate lay exactly in the middle. It lay in that space of reasonableness between the extremes of atheism and heterodoxy, on one side, and ossified religious tradition, on the other. In the tradition I know best—Protestant apologetics—thinkers from Hugo Grotius to Edward Stillingfleet to John Locke placed reason in equidistance from both Catholicism and the specters of Spinozist and Hobbsian materialism. They, in turn, wielded historical argument as a weapon for carving out the middle space, for showing how modern religion (that is, Christianity) might universalize its particular history into one applicable to the entire human race. Doing this demanded a daring balancing act. Against atheists and Catholics alike, it stipulated the historical reality of church corruption, and yet promised a future Christianity in harmony with reason and universal human freedom. It assigned the historical Church responsibility for many modern evils, and revealed its Christian core as the cure for a civilization plagued by greed, violence, and tyranny.
In his own way, Taylor performs a similar rhetorical work, positioning the common experience of reasonable modern people in between “extreme” poles of “orthodox religion” and “materialist atheism”. The “cross-pressure” between these poles “defines the whole culture,” as he puts it. The poles are heuristics against which we, the Latin West, define our senses of meaning and fullness. But they also have their real partisans, whether atheists like Richard Dawkins or fundamentalists like Pat Robertson. Between these extreme “partisans” (and the list could be expanded, and also, incidentally, made isomorphic with similar partisans in the seventeenth century), lies a territory that is most consonant with the nature of human striving, experience, and insight. This territory is, no surprise, also consonant with Christianity. Indeed, Christianity provides its original map, insofar as it holds onto both transcendence and immanence, mixing them in the originary figure of its tradition, Christ himself. Christianity does not just offer resources for this territory, furthermore. In fact, it governs its historical development. “Modern civilization,” Taylor wants to argue, “is in some way the historical creation of ‘corrupted’ Christianity.” And yet it is only Christianity (or “religion,” as Taylor at times calls it) that offers an escape from the culture that its dissolute forms created. As in the seventeenth century, the balancing act is delicate here. But the balancing act is essential to the apologetic enterprise, for it is through this careful arrangement of forces that Christianity comes to occupy all of the available sites of intellectual responsibility. It is both the history and the future of the West. It serves as the origin of the secular, and the source of its overcoming. It dwells in the sphere of reason and carries the promise of incarnated passion. It critiques our past and promises a future unlike the one in which we live. Small wonder that, for an atheist, materialist, secular historian, this book was both provocative and frustrating.
[For more from Jonathan Sheehan, read his remarks at an SSRC colloquium on the varieties of secularism. —ed.]
This is a very interesting critique. Of course, the mere fact that a book is reminiscent of 18th Century “philosophical” or “conjectural history,” or recapitulates in its argument that of 17th Century Christian apologetics, doesn’t necessarily impugn its value, does it? Isn’t it possible the social philosophers of the institutional Latin West peaked at some point, perhaps in the 17th or 18th Century, and the greatness of this book of Taylor’s is that it almost succeeds in reviving that great flowering? If the Muslim Brothers in Egypt can reach into their history and adopt the slogan “Islam is the answer,” reflecting its social appeal in their milieu, why can’t Taylor preach “Transcendence is the answer” reflecting a similar appeal in his milieu?
Which if we can cut the issue down to size in this way, opens us into a different area entirely, namely inter-ideological dialog, implicitly raised here by Robert Bellah in his brief remarks on “global solidarity” (unfortunately in a somewhat obscure way). These very pressing inter-cultural issues cannot be undertaken in a spirit of this versus that, unless it is humility and listening versus cultural arrogance and solipsism.
Jonathan Sheehan’s post is yet another opportunity for us to discover whether members of the history guild and people of Taylor’s more inclusive interests can find themselves into the same conversation.
At first blush, Sheehan’s remarks suggest “no.” Taylor’s discourse can only show up for him as apologetics, a dogmatic species of special pleading for a perspective under siege.
But digging a little deeper, it is clear to me that Sheehan—a very sensitive reader indeed—sets the stage for a fusion of horizons between discourse communities with different hermeneutical standpoints but large common concerns.
Representing the historians’ interest in verifiable historical propositions, and sound historical argument, Sheehan asks Taylor to defend the historical claims in the book, and say why they are not overdetermined by the “anthropological a priori.” A fair question to put to someone like Professor Taylor, who aspires to an argument that satisfies validity-claims in the “human sciences.”
Sheehan also—perhaps unwittingly—sets the stage for a relevant philosophical discourse to enter his own historical terrain, a terrain (as he implies) unaccustomed to unabashed “apriori” argument. Unclear whether Professor Sheehan is aware that—for Taylor—the “anthropological apriori” does not emerge from fideistic belief, a ground bound to look irrational (“apologetic”) to most of us, historians and non-historians alike. On the contrary, from early in his career, Taylor has been advancing a “transcendental argument,” a neo-Kantian style argument that discerning persons can determine the “conditions for the possibility of” the phenomenal world.
A phenomenal world which includes among other things the historians guild Professor Sheehan belongs to: for this reason Sheehan’s interpretation of the intended reach of Taylor’s “anthropological apriori” is to my mind incorrect.
He writes: “one might easily argue that the unbeliever makes very little use of the idea of fullness at all.” One might, but he would be running up against forty year’s of Charles Taylor’s argumentation to the contrary.
Here is an opportunity to see some constructive clash between historian and philosopher on philosophical terrain, terrain so seldom co-inhabited.
Sheehan’s review has definitely taken the measure of this book. In a previous response, I myself wondered, as Sheehan does here, why reviewers seem to neglect the book’s final chapters. He is thus absolutely right to say:
“in these, Taylor reveals that in fact this is a theological argument, that indeed the book is an explicit brief for a theological critique of secularism and the immanent frame.”
I would say that this fact does not impugn the book’s value, but in fact bolsters it: the candor is refreshing. And the testimonial or confessional register in which Taylor puts this argument, I think, allows him to (potentially, anyway) steer clear of the obvious pitfalls of hubris or triumphalism.
But Sheehan is surely right to see that the temptation to assume this posture is there, and his annoyance I think stems with the fact that Taylor’s rhetoric at times flirts quite openly with it. Sheehan quotes the key passages here. I can easily see how a secular thinker would feel marginalized by this rhetoric: Christianity defines all the options between corruption and redemption, will be the cure to its own poison, and leaves no room for the potential contribution of other voices.
The question we need to ask is whether Taylor’s book invites or discourages pluralistic dialogue concerning a common cultural need to face and overcome all those pathologies that can be included under the heading “the malaise of modernity.” I can imagine different answers to that question, positive and negative, and Taylor’s oftentimes vexing book invites both. Since Sheehan has argued the negative conclusion so well, let me risk arguing a way in which one can imagine a positive answer to that question.
Let’s imagine that Taylor’s “confession of faith,” which Sheehan admits to finding “moving” (to wit: “a faith in a future where depth and profundity reinvigorate and moderate a shallow, violent, and over-rationalized secular age”), puts an equally significant challenge to believing Christians as it does to secular humanists. As a protestant Christian, I can get past my annoyance over the fact that Taylor’s prophets of this faith are Catholics “to a man,” when I understand the radical and tenuous relationship many of these authors had with respect to the Catholic tradition itself. As I read the book’s final chapter, I was even forced to ask myself, ‘how many Christians seriously and authentically entertain the sort of eschatological vision for human flourishing and healing put forward by Taylor and his heroes?’ I’m afraid the answer is, and hope it is not: not very many. But the challenge to Christians is clearly there.
So Taylor could simply be pointing to resources from his own tradition that allow him to envision a path out of our malaise, and even to testify to the worth of those resources, their teaching potential, without necessarily thereby claiming that nothing can be learned from non-Catholics, or no solidarity established between Catholics and their others. In fact, by carving such a self-critical space within his own tradition, Taylor could even be read as inviting a potential conversation with other non-Catholic critics of secular modernity.
But does the book actually succeed in doing this? Sheehan comes away with a much different conclusion: For Taylor, he says, “Christianity comes to occupy all of the available sites of intellectual responsibility.” If true, that is a serious indictment, and one I’m afraid Taylor’s book on its own merit does little to dissuade. I see this as an unfortunately missed opportunity for building solidarity between those of whatever religious or secular orientation who desire, as much as Taylor does, to re-narrate the story of “Latin Christendom,” and thereby imagine an alternative possibility to its unjust and overbearing actuality.
Unfortunately I cannot offer a lengthy comment today as I have other engagements. I was so excited about the book, which my son-in-law has been reading, and will endeavour to purchase it at the first possible moment. My interest in it derives from my professional lifetime in the classroom teaching history (modern and ancient), English literature and, recently, religious and values education. In October I will be addressing a conference on what I see as the unnecessary polarisation of the sacred and the secular. I will write a much longer submission soon to elucidate my position in this vital discussion. Meantime, I would like to make the following introductory comments:
(1) the ancients saw the sacred and the secular as one seamless whole (even when they were skeptical about it – Dawkin’s comment about scientists having the edge on ‘believers’ in terms of ‘awe’ surely beckons us to this all-inclusive landscape) – why shouldn’t we?
(2) to polarise (and to polemicise) the discussion is the least interesting thing to do – it is more satisfying (and it is possible) to create a circle of inquiry that allows for all voices to be heard and understood and respected (as the book is already demonstrating despite the criticism that it is a polemical work (I would describe it as ‘exploratory’); and yes, in the arc of inquiry, concessions will be made, because ‘truth’ always lies annoyingly in the middle somewhere in ‘no person’s land’, falling between the stools of the various disciplines – so why should we be surprised?
(3) in my view, life and life experience, critical and self-critical reflections (whether they take place in the laboratory or elsewhere) are all subject to the bar of life and the reality of what life is, and all of us, whether we name ourselves ‘secularists’ or ‘believers’, will be judged by it. And all of of us are limited by the constraints imposed by the quality and reliability of our current instruments of mind and measurement and other ‘aids’ that we employ to determine what we think life is all about – so why should we cut ourselves off from speculation, and why shouldn’t we fling open the doors and windows of inquiry where all the best research is going on – in an inter-disciplinary direction? Thank you so much for this site and the valuable interchange of ideas that is taking place here!