Peter E. Gordon reviews Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age:
Perhaps the greatest perplexity of Taylor’s book is its bold-yet-paradoxical conviction that even within the immanent frame some of us will nonetheless manage to remain open to an experience of genuinely religious transcendence. What is surprising about this idea is that it seems to conflict with Taylor’s own description of what it is like to be modern: if to be modern is to live within an immanent frame then how would a transcendent God show up at all? The difficulty here derives from the concept of a background itself, according to which our very experience of what there is was said to be premised upon a shared framework of tacit or taken-for-granted beliefs. The background is what gives us our ontology. And Taylor’s narrative was meant to demonstrate that the background changed over time: the background of traditional society permitted God to show up in a complicated way as both transcendent to our world yet also immanent within it. For the Christian God was ‘‘out there’’ yet also ‘‘in here,’’ both Father and Son; both celestial and embodied in a manifold of social practices and institutions from the Holy See to the parish priest. Thanks to the background our pre-modern ancestors felt their social bonds to be charged with sacred meaning. But on Taylor’s account the background understanding of the modern world is different, since it is one that tells us that what there is will show up as immanent. How, then, does a modern ontology of immanence permit transcendence to shine through?
Read Gordon’s full review in the Journal of the History of Ideas.
