The Bible as a "Memory-Narrative" or "Mnemo-Narrative"

[Wikipedia] Hermeneutics /hɜrməˈnjuːtɪks/ is the theory of text interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts.^[1][2]

 

The terms hermeneutics and exegesis are sometimes used interchangeably. Hermeneutics is a wider discipline that includes written, verbal, and nonverbal communication. Exegesis focuses primarily upon texts.

 

Hermeneutic as a singular noun refers to a single particular method or strand of interpretation. (See double hermeneutic.)

 

Modern hermeneutics includes both verbal and nonverbal communication as well as semiotics, presuppositions, and preunderstandings.^[3]

 

Hermeneutic consistency refers to the analysis of texts to achieve a coherent explanation of them.

 

Philosophical hermeneutics refers primarily to the theory of knowledge initiated by Martin Heidegger and developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his work Truth and Method. It sometimes refers to the theories of Paul Ricoeur.^[4]

 

 

Introduction

 

The inclusion of biblical stories in the bible used to be thought of as Israel's "oral history." Or, as the disciples of Jesus' "remembered history" with Him. Now, the reconstruction of the Old and New Testaments are being thought of as a "Memory-Narrative" (or Mnemo-Narrative like the cute, orange, Disney fish by the same name). In past articles (see the sidebar under Bible - Development and Canon) we have talked about the construction of the OT through the centuries (and millennia) of Israel's long, long history; and here is yet another good reminder that the church's "literalistic" reading of the Bible may not be the most appropriate way to read its ancient narratives and histories. Why? By way of a simple example, think of how hard it would be to reconstruct what happened in your church fellowship group from a year ago without revising it according to those who are listening to you (what you think they may be interested in hearing), or the topics you may wish to emphasize (and think may be worth remembering to your listeners). The upshot? Remembering a story isn't as "objective" a process as you may think. And repeating that story might not have the same affect upon a different group of listeners, like say, a humorous story, that works for one set of friends but doesn't quite work in the same way for another set of friends, falling flat when told.

The reason for this is because we, the storyteller, can get in the way of a good story. Any Sunday School teacher knows this: should they recite a bible lesson factually? Or colorfully? Or even as a funny homily from a similar life experience? My first pastor, John White, was very good at embellishing his youth raised in the corn fields of Iowa and teaching some very fine lessons from the bible (it also would hold our attention because many were humorous). Mostly, to my way of thinking, God thought that allowing us to use our colorful retelling about Him and His works amongst the nations would be a more useful pedagogic tool than a straight, boring, recitation of dry, factual history (sic, what high school history teacher can you remember? My guess is "not many!"). Left with the choice of His Holy Spirit dictating event-after-event ad naseum, or with the retelling of those events from a human author's perspective (as inspired by the Holy Spirit), God chose the latter (and really, let's be honest, could He chose any other process than ourselves? Not really).

As a result of this process of "remembering of the biblical event" through subjective, personal narration, we get into the academic disciplines of historic reconstruction known as "historical criticism" and "redactionary criticism". The former takes a hard comparative look at world history as we think we know it today from archaeological finds, while the latter analyzes how an author places his - or her's - outlook upon the world within their remembered experience, or, the experience of another.... Speaking of which, how many times have you "remembered" someone else's experience and told it back to that same person who had experienced it first-hand and found out that that wasn't how they remembered it? Perhaps you - or they - making little embellishments or wholesale storyline changes on the second and third times around?

So, you can see the depth of the problem here when it comes to interpreting God's Word.... especially as inerrant history rather than as remembered narrational (not national, but narrational) history that is historical but told from a personal viewpoint. Or remember from a collective viewpoint (by Israel, by her priests, her tribes, her people, etc). But, you say, God's Word is without error! That's true insofar as we interpret it correctly allowing for narrational oversight, undersight, cultural contextualization, ancient historical and educational knowledge (Iron Age, late Empire), etc and etc. But the biblical reader would do much better in asking "why God said this," or "why God was remembered in that fashion" than to get into the mindset of flatly stating "God's Word is without error." This would be to confuse its inspired spiritual authority in our lives pertaining to all things salvific and redemptive. And trying to equate its historical recount as errorless. The former understands that within 1500 years of historical commentary development there may be room for interpretive freedom. When we do my argument would be that we gain a much more interesting, and more complex Bible, in the process. One that isn't so locked down by dogmatic or religious statements. One that can (and well) allow for movement within our own cultures and lives about how we think about God and His revelation to us as given through human agency. Especially as our cultures today have become more dynamically complex than they were in Moses' day, or in the disciple's day, given the massive populations living today as versus the much smaller human populations living back 2000 - 4000 years ago.

Moving forward... a third category (and there are many more as I will shortly suggest) would be "literary criticism" that looks at the speech and language patterns found within a text; the kinds of literary themes present; and even the ambiguity of language itself in delving into topics we seek to dogmatize  rather than leave open lest we unduly restrict God's Word. Much can be said about this but I will leave it open for now as simply another observation.

Another redactive category is that of looking at the Scriptures existentially through ourselves as a necessaryinterpreters of God's profound Word. Or, viewing it through our modern day cultures which may be more pluralistic, multi-ethnic, educated, and certainly quite unlike the socio-cultural contexts of the ancient societies found in the Bible. Or even, by our "era-specific contexts which means how the church in the Medieval, or Enlightenment, eras may have looked at various biblical texts differently than how we do now as Modern, or Postmodern, people of the 21st Century. Thus, individual and societal views do affect how we read the Bible and its meaning of Jesus and the gospel in our lives.

 

Consequently, interpreting the Word of God as a living document (rather than as a static, dead artifact) is not necessarily a simple a process, as many in-the-pews and pulpits today have made it out to be when using the approach of reading the "plain meaning of the word" within the Bible's historical pages. A literalistic, wooden reading of the Bible simply becomes unhelpful as we discover question-after-question that must lie unanswered by this method. An approach that can make God even more distant from ourselves when approached in this haphazard way. Mostly, our street-level, uninformed, pedestrian-way-of-thinking is unhelpful when interpreting the Bible as an ancient document that is believed to be relevant for mankind today. As such, we would do well to listen to the experts rather than using ourselves as reliable guides.

Too, we would do well to remember that Jesus is the Bible's center. Should our Lord and Savior become lost within the Bible's pages than we should consider some other process or interpretation that would see Jesus-theology as the focus of its history.... This would be known as a Christo-centric hermeneutic (or method of interpretation). If not, the Bible becomes a cold, impersonable, history book rather than as a living document for our spiritual lives (kinda like American history when remembered apart from its personal stories). The Bible is God's living word into our lives today. As Paul once said to Timothy, we must enter in carefully to the study of the Word lest we be found fools and false prophets, alarmists and unworthy shepherds. And this is good advice both for the Christian as well as for the non-Christian analyst who would tell us of the Jesus of our faith. I don't expect the non-Christian to be able to tell me of Jesus as my Savior.... Perhaps for that person Jesus may be seen as a political zealot, or as a Jewish insurrectionist, but to understand the God of the universe as become incarnate as my Savior and Lord, will be out of their reach. Which doesn't mean that they don't know what their talking about historically, but that its spiritual impact is beyond them. As believers we listen, we discern, we think, we ask questions at all times. Both to those outside the house of God as well as to those within the house of God. We are at all times culpable (accountable, but flawed) for our interpretation of God and life.

At the last, the Bible for the Christian must be as theological as it is historical, as personal as it is reflective. But it must be historical if it is to be theological. That is, the Jesus of history must also be the Jesus of my Christian faith. The trick is to know what kind of Jesus and Bible we as Christians read. Thus my plea today to divide God's Word carefully using all the resources at hand, and not just our favorite dogmas that reinforce our views (say a preferred church view, for example). For me, literalism doesn't work. It misleads. It misinforms. It doesn't quite fill out the complexity of God's story blending with His creation and with humanity's movement and change.

Hence, the external factors cited above are just some of the observed influences that help open-up and recreate a storyteller's story. By transference, by the time Israel began codifying its Hebraic canon (or Old Testament) in the Second Temple period (600-500 BC) many of its historical events, social movements, and personal experiences of God had already occurred as complete. By the time of its codification Israel had suffered exile into Babylonian lands and there God used this time of "wilderness experience" to teach His people again about Himself (thus the stories of the Exodus, and cycles of judgment in Judges and the prophetic books). These stories held RELEVANCE to Israel's shattered faith as it began to purposefully reconstruct what was left of her belief in God and disbelief in themselves as final anchors in the world of men. At the last, through Daniel and Nehemiah, God restored His people to the land of Canaan, but as a broken people broken into a thousand different pieces, belief groups, and religious viewpoints about God as found in her Intertestamental period between Malachi and Matthew (400BC - 6 BC).

Each of Israel's collective histories paid homage to her belief that God had not abandoned them. That He would lead them to a more sure salvation than by the works of her own hands. To a Messiah that would come, filled with the Spirit of God, declaring by word, deed, and very life, God's love and mercy, justice and wisdom, forgiveness and hope. Each of these collective stories having been preserved by the priests of the restored Second Temple wishing to tell about their God who redeemed them. Their recommitment to this God of their faith. And Israel's place in the world as herald-and-banner to the Messiah to come. As they reconstructed the Old Testament Scriptures they were reconstructing their spiritual beliefs and assurances. Which was not an easy task considering that the worship of God and His Word was not written down in whole, but in part (at best it resided in incomplete fragments and disseparate scrolls). Or dependent upon faded oral stories from long, long ago. Whose temple scrolls had been lost, or ill-preserved, or had undergone desperate times of regional/national upheaval in Israel's life. Times like being forgotten for decades - neither rehearsed nor practiced. Disobeyed. Lost by war, by pride, by Baal worship. And by dominating selective religious interests (sic, Aaron's desire to make an image of God; Joshua and Judges cycles of rebellion and doubt; Samuel's laxity as a great high priest before God; Northern Israel's separation from the Kingdom of Judah, etc).

This was Israel's history. A history filled with societal turmoil amid its spiritual development, and redemptive evolution, from Abraham to Jesus through 1500 years of historical formation. As an example, try retelling America's story of colonialization to its citizens living within the period of the Revolutionary War 350 years ago.... Our modern stories of America's birth will probably sound very unlike how those living in the 18th Century would have retold America's early history. What worked for those early American societies does not have the same impact upon us here today. Even so, Israel's view of itself had changed over the long years of its societal birth and formation. Let us, as readers of God's Word, become then more careful discerners to the Word of God, and not be so easily swayed by pulpit or press just what is, or what is not, God's Word.... My guess is that it is a lot more complex and forgiving than we would like to make it out to be by our pet theories or interpretations. My guess is that God is amazing even as His re-creation in our lives can be too. If anything, Israel's history is one of recreation at the hands of an amazing God. One they misunderstood and didn't count on. Of a God who lifted them up to praise His name even as King David had raised his banners to his God in Psalms, and hymns, and on musical instruments. This is the kind of redeemer God who is beyond our imagination. Who forgives our sin. Our shortcomings. Our disbelief. Who tells us that He loves us as no other. Who will give us life by His life in Jesus. And spiritual assurance. And presence when we had none but ourselves, lost and alone in our own wilderness of sin and turmoil. This is the kind of God that the Scriptures do testify of. To this we may only proclaim Amen, and Amen. Thus is Israel's testament to her own remembered history even as we do today with ours.

 

R.E. Slater

August 2, 2013

 

* * * * * * * * * *

 

 

 

Archaeology and the Exodus Story as a “Mnemo-Narrative”

(and no cracks about “finding mnemo” please)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2013/07/archaeology-and-the-exodus-story-as-a-mnemo-narrative-and-no-cracks-about-finding-mnemo-please/

 

by Peter Enns

July 30, 2013

24 Comments

 

Below is a half-hour video passed on to me a while back by an archaeologist friend of mine. It is of a lecture given by Israeli archaeologist Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan University.

 

The lecture is entitled, “Can Archaeological Correlates for the Mnemo-Narrative of Exodus be Found?” I think I embed the video properly, but if not, you can click the link above.

 

 

I find this sort of thing fascinating. Maeir’s main point is that the exodus story in the Bible is the end product of  narratives (plural) that came down to the biblical writer from different times and which he compiled into a narrative (singular). He compares the exodus story to an archaeological tell–dig down and you go further back in time to earlier stages of the story.

 

Part of Maeir’s lecture focuses on what he feels are misuses of archaeology by those who seek to find correlation between archaeological findings and the biblical narrative. One of the problems with that approach is that the “biblical narrative,” though still capable of depicting history, is nevertheless a memory–a “mnemo-narrative.”

 

Following the work of such scholars as Jan Assmann, Maeir points out that memories are not simply reports of events but reconstructions of events.

 

Common experience will bear this out when we think of how we recall the past as individuals. We, often unwittingly, shape our retelling of the past to reflect how we see the past and ourselves in general. We collapse together discreet events, we invent dialogue, etc., not to deceive but to in an effort to bring the past into our current experience of ourselves.

 

Understanding the biblical story of the exodus as a mnemo-narrative, Maeir argues, helps explain why there is no archaeological support for it–even though an event of this magnitude could not stay in hiding for long.

 

Based on how these things are normally handled in the ancient world, one would expect Egyptian sources not to ignore the departure of about 2,000,000 slaves and the crippling of the Egyptian power base (as in the plagues). They would need to explain it, i.e., they would have to spin it, as, say, an indication that their gods were angry with them for some failure. That is a common way that ancient cultures “explained” military defeat. The worse the defeat, the better an explanation was needed.

 

Maeir reasons that archaeology and the biblical narrative do not match up not so much because nothing happened, but because of the nature of the biblical narrative as a mnemo-narrative. The exodus story that we have is the result of a process of “remembering” the past through ongoing reception and appropriation over time. Those memories were–as are all memories–transformed and shaped by those very communities that embrace and transmit them.

 

Seeking correspondence between archaeology and the biblical narrative of the exodus is, therefore, misguided, for it treats the biblical narrative is a single-layered report handed down essentially unchanged from early on and that can be placed side-by-side with potential archaeological remains.

 

Put another way, the exodus story we have in the Bible, whatever its historical foundation might be, is a story that is not open to archaeological verification because the story reflects more how later Israelite communities came to understand the past in view of their present purposes for remembering.

On one level, there is nothing tremendously new here, though Maeir helpfully brings the study of memory to bear on the perennial issue of archaeology and the Bible.

 

Any thoughts on this, especially from those who might be abreast of biblical archaeology and the process of memory?
 

 

 

For Further Reading:

 

Reviews of Konrad Schmid's "A Literary History of the Old Testament" - How the OT was Compiled

 

 

 

 

Part 2 - How Modernity's Secularism Changed the World: Charles Taylor, "A Secular Age"

Below is Part 2 of the Series "How Modernity's Secularism Changed the World." In Part 1 we looked at the formation of the biblical tradition received from Augustine and Aquinas, and how this tradition informed the Medieval and Reformation church as it progressed forward in doctrine and dogmas. We also looked briefly at the separate traditions of analytic and continental philosophy that was birthed out of the Enlightenment/Modernistic Eras, and how those disciplines affected subsequent biblical doctrine and study. Today, in the Wikipedia article below I wish to examine more particularly how secularism has affect our societal outlook for Western civilization and what this means for the church as it progresses towards an anti-secular, postmodern mindset. Since I wish to place directional emphasis towards Continental Philosophy, and because Charles Taylor comes from this philosophical branch of study, I believe it may be helpful to our future discussions of Postmodern Christianity. Especially as it relates to the church's hermeneutical traditions as they too will progress away from modernism's influences into postmodernism's narrative readings of Scripture.

 

R.E. Slater

August 9, 2013

 

* * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

Part 1 - How Modernity's Secularism Changed the World:

An Introduction to Postmodern Hermeneutics

 

 

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

 

A Secular Age

by Charles Taylor

Amazon - click here

Author's Bio - click here

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[with select commentary by R.E. Slater]

 

A Secular Age is a book written by the philosopher Charles Taylor which was published in 2007 by Harvard University Press. The noted sociologist Robert Bellah has referred to A Secular Age as "one of the most important books to be written in my lifetime."^[1]

 

Background and Overview

 

In recent years, secularism has become an important topic in the humanities and social sciences. Although there continue to be important disagreements among scholars, many begin with the premise that secularism is not simply the absence of religion, but rather an intellectual and political category that itself needs to be understood as an historical construction.

 

In his book, Taylor looks at the change in Western society from a state in which it is almost impossible not to believe in God, to one in which believing in God is simply one option of many [as a result of secularity].

 

He argues against the view that secularity in society [has been] caused by the rise of science and reason. He argues that this view is far too simplistic and does not explain why people would abandon their faith.

 

Taylor starts with a description of the Middle Ages and presents the changes to bring about the modern secular age. The Middle Ages were a time of enchantment. People believed in God, angels, demons, witches, the Church's sacraments, relics, and sacred places. Each of these types of things had mysterious, real effects on individuals and society. The early Middle Ages were content to have two speeds for people's spiritual development. The clergy and a few others were at the faster, more intense speed. Everyone else was only expected to plod along at a slower spiritual speed. The High Middle Ages had a strong focus on bringing everyone along to a higher realm of spirituality and life.

 

Up until a few hundred years ago, the common viewpoint of the North Atlantic was basically Christian. Most people could not even consider a viewpoint without God. The culture has changed so that multiple viewpoints are now conceivable to most people. This change is accomplished through three major facets of Deism (*the belief that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of God, accompanied with the rejection of revelation and authority as a source of religious knowledge):

 

(1) an anthropocentric shift in now conceiving of Nature as primarily for people,

(2) the idea that God relates to us primarily through an impersonal order that He established,

(3) the idea that religion is to be understood from Nature by reason alone (Naturalism).

 

Deism is considered the major intermediate step between the previous age of belief in God and the modern secular age's [skepticism of God].^[2]

 

The book focuses on three modes of secularity:^[3]

(1) secularized public spaces,
(2) the decline of belief and practice,
(3) cultural conditions where unbelief in religion is a viable option.

In his previous work, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Taylor focuses on the developments which led to the identity of modern individuals in the West. This work focuses on the developments which led to modern social structures. The content of Sources of the Self is complementary to A Secular Age. Taylor discussed the political implications of A Secular Age in an interview with The Utopian.

 

Outline

 

Preface/Introduction

 

Taylor is "telling a story... of 'secularization' in the modern West[,]" and what the process amounts to:. i.e., he describes religion as: "that which is retreating in public space (1), or as a type of belief and practice which is or is not in regression (2), and as a certain kind of belief or commitment whose conditions in this age are being examined (3)."(p15)

 

Taylor does not believe that the decline in belief occurred because "'Darwin refuted the Bible", as allegedly said by a Harrow schoolboy in the 1890s." So he wants to discuss belief and unbelief "not as rival theories... but as different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding your life in one way or the other[.]"(p5) Where is the place of richness or fullness, and its opposite, the place of absence or exile? There is also the "middle condition," the daily activities between the extremes, and their meaning.

 

For believers the place of fullness is God (Religion). For unbelievers it is within, the power of reason (Enlightenment) or Nature, or our inner depths (Romanticism). Whereas postmodernism is [skeptical of all things said to bring fulfillment and looks at how society places value on things and between each other].

 

In the old world people could have a naive belief, but today belief or unbelief is "reflective," and includes a knowledge that other people do not/do believe. We look over our shoulder at other beliefs, but we still each live a "background," with our beliefs "held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted... tacit... because never formulated."(p13)

 

Part I: The Work of Reform

 

"[W]hy was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?"(p25) God's presence retreated in three dimensions. (1) People no longer [were willing to] see natural events as acts of God. (2) Society "could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than human action in secular time."(p25) (3) People lived then in an enchanted world, but now [in Modernism], in disenchantment.

 

Rejecting the "subtraction" theory of secularization, Taylor believes that a movement of Reform in Christianity, aiming to raise everyone up to the highest levels of religious devotion and practice, [actually propelled] the move to secularization. The disciplined Reformed-self replaced the "porous"-self [which was] vulnerable to external forces, spirits and demons, with a new "buffered-self", a self disciplined by free agent living in a progressively disenchanted world.

 

The success of Reform and the propagation of successful disciplined selves leads to a disciplinary society that starts to take action against rowdiness and indiscipline: controlling the poor, taming the warrior aristocracy, suppressing "feasts of misrule" like Carnival. Calvinists and Puritans were "industrious, disciplined... mutually predictable... With such men a safe, well-ordered society can be built."(p106) The success of the project encouraged an anthropocentrism that opened the gates for a godless humanism.(p130) "So disengaged discipline frames a new experience of the self as having a telos of autarky."(p138)

 

Early humans were embedded into the world in three ways: (1) into their small-scale social group in which religious ritual was identical with social ritual; (2) into the cosmos, the enchanted world of spirits and forces; and, (3) the cosmos into the divine, so that the gods are intimately involved with the project of human flourishing. Thus: "Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine."(p152)

 

This embedding is broken, for an elite, by the "higher" religions of the Axial Age:

---

 

What Does Jaspers Mean by his "Axial Age"?

by R.E. Slater and Wikipedia

 

[Though Jasper's subjective observation correlates with historical periods, it is not necessarily a true observation made by other historians who have noted market forces as bare explanations for human societal evolution. As such, it may be considered but an adjectival description much as we would use the term renaissance or enlightenment depicting eras of great change. - R.E. Slater]

 

... for the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, he posited  three Axial Ages marked as epicenters within China, India, Greece, and Judea, each an epicenter for religious and philosophical creativity. "For China there was Taoism and Confucianism; in India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism; in Persia, the religion of Zoroaster (which led to monotheism); in Canaan, Judaism; and in Greece, sophism (the teaching of wisdom, esp. as it related to human affairs) and other classical philosophies."

... Anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out that "the core period of Jasper's Axial age corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What's more, the three parts of the world where coins were first invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived...."^[15] With the rise of the markets came a rise in the spheres of human enterprise and religious/spiritual thinking that correspondended with the sharing of ideas and the transference of knowledge.

... Religious historian Karen Armstrong explored Jasper's Axial period in her The Great Transformation,^[19] and the theory has been the focus of academic conferences.^[20] Usage of the term has expanded beyond Jaspers' original formulation. Armstrong argues that the Enlightenment was a "Second Axial Age", including thinkers such as Isaac Newton, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein,^[21] and that religion today needs to return to the transformative Axial insights.^[22] In contrast, it has been suggested that the modern era [and postmodern eras are] a new axial age, wherein traditional relationships between religion, secularity, and traditional thought are changing.^[23]

 

^---

... Return to Article:

... This embedding is broken, for an elite, by the "higher" religions of the Axial Age: Humans are individuals, no longer embedded in society, God is no longer embedded in the cosmos, but separate, and the notion of human flourishing becomes transformed, e.g., in "a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as human flourishing."(p152) In the Reformation and after this disembedding extended more and more from the elite to the whole population.

 

More and more, in recent times: "Humans are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit."(p159) This modern social imaginary is the Modern Moral Order, and it is a radical break with the two pre-modern moral orders, the idea of "the Law of a people"(p163) or the organization of society "around a notion of hierarchy in society which expresses and corresponds to a hierarchy in the cosmos."(p163)

 

Taylor sees "three important forms of social self-understanding."(p176) "They are, respectively (1) the "economy", (2) the public sphere, and (3) the practices and outlooks of democratic self-rule."(p176) Both the economy and the public sphere are conceived as existing independent of the political power. In the notion of economy is the "invisible hand" and the exchange of advantages in a relationship of interlocking causes. The state becomes "the orchestrating power that can make an economy flourish."(p178)

 

This new moral order is no longer a society of "mediated access" where the subjects are held together by an apex, a King, "We have moved from a hierarchical order of personalized links to an impersonal egalitarian one, from a vertical world of mediated access to horizontal, direct-access societies."(p209)

 

Taylor anticipates that his approach might be attacked as "idealism" against the Marxian requirement of "materialism." But ideas and material conditions are inseparable. "'Ideas' always come in history wrapped up in certain practices[.]"(p213)

 

Part II: The Turning Point

 

The program of Reform, by creating a disciplined, ordered society, in which the vulnerable "porous self" became the disengaged "buffered self", created a distance between humans and God. Thus exclusive humanism became an option through the "notion of the world designed by God... God relates to us primarily by establishing a certain order of things... We obey God by following the demands of this order."(p221) A true, original, natural religion, once obscured, is now to be laid clear again.

 

Christianity always provided for ordinary human flourishing, but included inscrutable divine grace. With Deism grace became eclipsed, for people endowed with reason and benevolence need only these faculties to carry out God's plan. God's Providence, once a mystery, is just God's plan. Eventually we come to Feuerbach: "that the potentialities we have attributed to God are really human potentialities."(p251)

 

Taylor makes a threefold claim. First, that "exclusive humanism arose in connection with, indeed, as an alternative set of moral sources for, the ethic of freedom and mutual benefit." Second, that "it couldn't have arisen in any other way at the time."(p259) Third, that today's wide range of unbelief still originates "in the ethic of beneficent order."

 

The usual interpretation of the changing understanding of God in recent centuries is a move from a "supreme being with powers... [of] agency and personality" to God as creator of a "law-governed structure" to "an indifferent universe, with God either indifferent or non-existent."(p270) This the subtraction story. Taylor thinks that it's more complicated than that.

 

The official Enlightenment story is that "people started using Reason and Science, instead of Religion and Superstition"(p273) to explain the world. The social order can be organized by rational codes, and human relationships which matter are prescribed in the codes. But the motive force behind this development was reformed Christianity and its move to a designer God in the early modern period.

 

In the new epistemic predicament, humans "acquire knowledge by exploring impersonal orders with the aid of disengaged reason."(p294) They form "societies under the normative provisions of the Modern Moral Order." In the secularist understanding, "human beings discover that they just are humans united in societies which can have no other normative principles but those of the MMO."(p294) "It is a massive shift in horizon."

 

Part III: The Nova Effect

 

Taylor sees three stages of a nova effect, an explosion of secularity beginning with "an exclusive alternative to Christian faith"(p299) in the 18th century. It was followed by diversification in the 19th century, even to the Nietzschean break with the humanism of freedom and mutual benefit. Finally in the last 50 years the nova has exploded to reach beneath elites to whole societies and includes "a generalised culture of 'authenticity', or expressive individualism," of doing your own thing.

 

But there are cross pressures. Against the freedom from "unreasoning fears" there is a feeling of malaise, of something lost. Heroism is lost in the leveling down of aspiration; utilitarianism is thought too flat and shallow. There is no room for death.

 

Unbelief in the middle to late 19th century began to take up the profound new sense of the universe, its vastness in space and time, and in the lack of a plan. Taylor calls this the modern "cosmic imaginary" (the natural version of the modern "social imaginary"). "Our present sense of things fails to touch bottom anywhere."(p325) Through the idea of the sublime and recovery of the "well-springs of sympathy"(p344) in Herder and Rousseau lost to disengaged reason we reach eventually the Will of Schopenhauer. We experience a universe maybe without a "rational, benign plan", bottomless, and the "locus of our dark genesis."

 

This leads to the theories of Freud, that the "highest functions, thinking, willing, are... the product of neuro-physiological functions in us."(p348) The new imaginary sustains a range of views, from "the hardest materialism through to Christian orthodoxy."(p351) This has confounded the war between belief and unbelief.

 

The opening up of different ways in experiencing the world includes a shift in the place of art. Instead of mimesis, the retelling of the Christian world-view through its standard symbols and reference points, we have a creative art that must develop its own reference points. Artists "make us aware of something in nature for which there are as yet no established words... In this 'subtler language'... something is defined and created as well as manifested."(p353) This applies to poetry, painting, and music taking an "absolute" turn, decoupled from story and representation. Yet they still move. But why? The mystery provides a place of the spiritual and the deep for the unbeliever.

 

Taylor invokes Schiller and his notion of "beauty as an aid to being moral", a "stage of unity as a higher stage, beyond moralism" obtained through play, the way we "create and respond to beauty."(p358) It creates an unspecified space "between religious commitment and materialism."(p360)

 

In the 19th century two additional factors influenced people in renouncing their faith in God: advances and science and Biblical scholarship, and the new cosmic imaginary.

 

People came to feel that the "impersonal order of regularities" was a more mature standpoint than the faith in a personal God. The new cosmic imaginary of a universe vast in time and space also argued against "a personal God or benign purpose." A materialist view is adult; faith in a personal God is childish.

 

Another view is associated with Nietzsche, the "post-Schopenhauerian" vision that notices the "irrational, amoral, even violent forces within us."(p369) These "cannot simply be condemned and uprooted, because our existence, and/or vitality, creativity, strength, ability to create beauty depend on them." This rebels against the Enlightenment in a way that echoes the old aristocratic and warrior ethos, a "revolt from within unbelief... against the primacy of life"(p372) i.e., that "our highest goal is to preserve and increase life, to prevent suffering... Life properly understood also affirms death and destruction."(p373)

 

Thus it is possible for people to live in a world encountering "no echo outside." This view experiences "its world entirely as immanent."(p376)

 

After a resurgence of belief driven by the Evangelical movement, by the 1830s elites began to experience again the cross-pressure between "the inescapable idea of an impersonal order"(p378) and the need to avoid a flattened world shorn of the values of Christianity. Carlyle attempted his own faith in "the human potential for spiritual/moral ascent"(p380) in the face of "utilitarian-commercial-industrial society." In Matthew Arnold this becomes a faith in culture, "the best that has been thought and said in the world."(p384) Darwin and evolution changed everything, but the "need to articulate something fuller, deeper"(p391) continues.

 

The high cultural trajectory was accompanied by the slow replacement of the vertical understanding of society into the modern horizontal idea of rights-bearing individuals related in mutual benefit, a combination of constitutional monarchy, rights and freedoms, Protestant religions, and British "decency", i.e., character and self-control. This strenuous ethic of belief set up "an unbelieving philosophy of self-control"(p395) in Leslie Stephen and John Stuart Mill, a "humanism of altruism and duty."(p398)

 

But this moralism provoked a rebellion by the young at the end of the century. It was too materialistic and too stifling. The new rebels were opposed not only to the "ethic of self control in its altruistic, public-spirited facet, but also in its individualistic, self-improving, "self-help" aspect."(p401) In one version, with G.M. Trevelyan, it teeters on the edge of the material/transcendent divide, in another, with Walter Pater, it replaces the transcendent with aetheticism.

 

Bloomsbury was another approach, an ethic of "personal relations and beautiful states of mind."(p405) It carried immanence another step, identifying the intrinsically valuable with the internal experience and sensibility. Then along came the World War I. Here was a war fought for "civilization... the protection of life from violence through order and law."(p407) Yet the war was a "greater negation of civilized life than any foe threatened." Thus Pound's notion of "a botched civilization" and Eliot's "Waste Land." For intellectuals it was impossible to inhabit the mental world of Rupert Brooke. Educated people could not deploy images of dedication and patriotism without distance and irony. "The will was suspect"(p411) a "formula for destruction rather than virtue". We get to the post-war consensus of an interventionist state. There is an option to believe that is wisely refused, and a confident, buffered identity.

 

The trajectory took different forms in the Catholic cultures. In particular in France the modern order of mutual benefit, in its Rousseau version, becomes Republican and anti-Christian if not always clearly atheist. The notion of humans as innocent and good requires a political order opposed to the Christian original sin. The social imaginary "is grounded in exclusive humanism"(p412) and becomes radicalized in Marxist socialism. Opposed to this imaginary was "Reaction," a vertical hierarchy "where differences of rank were respected"(p413) and each had his place under monarchy, albeit justified by its beneficial consequences rather than an ontic logos.

 

An ideal order "stressing rights, liberties and democracy, squares off against a counter-ideal which stresses obedience, hierarchy, belonging to, even sacrifice."(p414) But there can be crossovers, with Comte and a scientific "religion to provide social cohesion" and an unbelieving Nietzsche with heroes, suffering as an ineradicable dimension that "heroes learn to face and surmount".(p415) By 1912 Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde write of a generation of youth needing a new discipline to create order and hierarchy and commitment against the dilettante generation of 1885. This movement was shattered in World War I. Many went into the war celebrating the opportunity for "heroism and dedication" only to be "sent wholesale to death in a long, mechanized slaughter."(p417)

 

The crisis of civilization dealt a body blow to established Christianity, and provoked "new, unbelieving variants of the vertical ideal of order"(p418) in fascism and Nazism. Thus the struggle between belief and unbelief "has been connected with ideals and counter-ideals of the moral order of society. But this conflict has disappeared, as religion has delinked from society into "a new kind of niche in society."(p419)

 

Part IV: Narratives of Secularization

 

To combat the standard narrative of secularization, e.g., Steve Bruce's proposal that the endpoint of secularization is a widespread indifference to religion, and "no socially significant shared religion"(p435) Taylor proposes an age of mobilization, from about 1800 to 1960 where religious forms of the ancien régime type suffered decay, but new forms that fit the age "recruited and mobilized people on an impressive scale."(p471) Churches organized their members' lives and inspired intense loyalty, so that "people would be schooled, play football, take their recreation, etc., exclusively among co-religionists."(p472)

 

In France this process played out as a direct combat between the ancien régime church and the secular Republicans in which the Church began organizing lay people in new bodies for fundraising, pilgrimages, and "Catholic Action." In the Anglophone world this mobilization occurred through "denominations" (e.g. Methodists) that "are like affinity groups"(p449), an organizing force to help people struggling to find their feet in the market economy.

 

But with the cultural revolution of the 1960s the age of mobilization came to an end, at least in the modern West. The last half century has seen a cultural revolution in the North Atlantic civilization. "As well as moral/spiritual and instrumental individualisms, we now have a widespread "expressive" individualism."(p473) Taylor calls this a culture of "authenticity," from the Romantic expressivism that erupted in the late 18th century elite, "that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own."(p475)

 

This affects the social imaginary. To the "horizontal" notion of "the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people"(p481) is added a space of fashion, a culture of mutual display. The modern moral order of mutual benefit has been strengthened, mutual respect requires that "we shouldn't criticize each other's 'values'"(p484) in particular on sexual matters. Since "my" religious life or practice is my personal choice, my "link to the sacred" may not be embedded in "nation" or "church." This is a continuation of the Romantic move away from reason towards a "subtler language" (Shelley) to understand individual "spiritual insight/feeling." "Only accept what rings true to your own inner Self."(p489) This has "undermined the link between Christian faith and civilizational order."(p492)

 

The revolution in sexual behavior has broken the culture of "moralism" that dominated most of the last half millennium. Developing individualism was bound to come into conflict with moralism, but in the mid 20th century the dam broke. Thinkers started to think of sexual gratification as good, or at least unstoppable, especially as "in cities, young people could pair off without supervision."(p501) Now people are not bound by moralism: "they form, break, then reform relationships;"(p496) they experiment.

 

It is a tragedy, however that "the codes which churches want to urge on people" still suffer from "the denigration of sexuality, horror at the Dionysian, fixed gender roles, or a refusal to discuss identity issues."(p503)

 

Today, the "neo-Durkheimian embedding of religion in a state"(p505) and a "close interweaving of religion, life-style and patriotism"(p506) has been called into question. People are asking, like Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?" They are heirs of the expressive revolution, "seeking a kind of unity and wholeness of the self... of the body and its pleasures... The stress is on unity, integrity, holism, individuality."(p507) This is often termed "spirituality" as opposed to "organized religion."

 

This has caused a breaking down of barriers between religious groups but also a decline in active practice and a loosening of commitment to orthodox dogmas. A move from an Age of Mobilization to an Age of Authenticity, it is a "retreat of Christendom." Fewer people will be "kept within a faith by some strong political or group identity,"(p514) although a core (vast in the US) will remain in neo-Durkheimian identities, with its potential for manipulation by such as "Milosevic, and the BJP."(p515)

 

Assuming that "the human aspiration to religion will [not] flag"(p515) spiritual practice will extend beyond ordinary church practice to involve meditation, charitable work, study group, pilgrimage, special prayer, etc. It will be "unhooked" from the paleo-Durkheimian sacralized society, the neo-Durkheimian national identity or center of "civilizational order" but still collective. "One develops a religious life."(p518)

 

While religious life continues many people retain a nominal tie with the church, particularly in Western Europe. This "penumbra" seems to have diminished since 1960. More people stand outside belief, and no longer participate in rites of passage like church baptism and marriage. Yet people respond to, e.g. in France the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, or in Sweden the loss of a trans-Baltic ferry. Religion "remains powerful in memory; but also as a kind of reserve fund of spiritual force or consolation."(p522)

 

This distancing is not experienced in the United States. This may be (1) because immigrants used church membership as a way to establish themselves: "Go to the church of your choice, but go."(p524) Or (2) it may be the difficulty that the secular elite has in imposing its "social imaginary" on the rest of society vis-a-vis hierarchical Europe. Also (3) the US never had an ancien régime, so there has never been a reaction against the state church. Next (4) the groups in the US have reacted strongly against the post-1960s culture, unlike Europe. A majority of Americans remain happy in "one Nation under God." There are less skeletons in the family closet, and "it is easier to be unreservedly confident in your own rightness when you are the hegemonic power."(p528) Finally (5) the US has provided experimental models of post-Durkheimian religion at least for a century.

 

After summarizing his argument, Taylor looks to the future, which might follow the slow reemergence of religion in Russia in people raised in the "wasteland" of militant atheism, but suddenly grabbed by God, or it might follow the "spiritual but not religious" phenomenon in the west. "In any case, we are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee."

 

Part V: Conditions of Belief

 

We live in an immanent frame. That is the consequence of the story Taylor has told, in disenchantment and the creation of the buffered self and the inner self, the invention of privacy and intimacy, the disciplined self, individualism. Then Reform, the breakup of the cosmic order and higher time in secular, making the best of clock time as a limited resource. The immanent frame can be open, allowing for the possibility of the transcendent, or closed. Taylor argues that both arguments are "spin" and "involve a step beyond available reasons into the realm of anticipatory confidence"(p551) or faith.

 

There are several Closed World Structures that assume the immanent frame. One is the idea of the rational agent of modern epistemology. Another is the idea that religion is childish, so "An unbeliever has the courage to take up an adult stance and face reality."(p562) Taylor argues that the Closed World Structures do not really argue their world views, they "function as unchallenged axioms"(p590) and it just becomes very hard to understand why anyone would believe in God.

 

Living in the immanent frame "The whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other".(p595) Materialists respond to the aesthetic experience of poetry. Theists agree with the Modern Moral Order and its agenda of universal human rights and welfare. Romantics "react against the disciplined, buffered self"(p609) that seems to sacrifice something essential with regard to feelings and bodily existence.

 

To resolve the modern cross pressures and dilemmas Taylor proposes a "maximal demand" that we define our moral aspirations in terms that do not "crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity".(p640) It aspires to wholeness and transcendence yet also tries to "fully respect ordinary human flourishing."(p641)

 

Taylor imagines a two-dimensional moral space. The horizontal gives you a "point of resolution, the fair award".(p706) The vertical hopes to rise higher, to reestablish trust, "to overcome fear by offering oneself to it; responding with love and forgiveness, thereby tapping a source of goodness, and healing"(p708) and forgoing the satisfaction of moral victory over evil in sacred violence, religious or secular.

 

Taylor examines the Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity, how we follow the Romantic search for fullness, yet seem to respond still to our religious heritage. We replace the old "higher time" with autobiography, history, and commemoration. Many moderns are uncomfortable with death, "the giving up of everything"(p725)

 

"Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief."(p727) "The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured."(p727) Against unbelief, Taylor presents a selection of recent spiritual conversions or "epiphanic" experiences in Catholic artists and writers, including Václav Havel, Ivan Illich, Charles Peguy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The path to the future is a rich variety of paths to God in a unity of the church and a new approach to the question of the sexual/sensual. The disciplined, disengaged secular world is challenged by a return to the body in Pentecostalism. There is a "profound interpenetration of eros and the spiritual life."(p767) "[I]n our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality."(p768) Our seeking for "fullness" is our response to it.

 

Secular belief is a shutting out. "The door is barred against further discovery."(p769) But in the secular "'waste land'... young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries."(p770) It will, Taylor thinks, involve a move away from "excarnation," the disembodying of spiritual life, and from homogenization in a single principle, to celebrate the "integrity of different ways of life."(p772)

 

Epilogue: The Many Stories

 

In a brief afterword Taylor links his narrative to similar efforts by e.g., John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy movement.

 

Reviews

 

A Secular Age has been reviewed in newspapers such as The New York Times^[4] and The Guardian,^[5] magazines such as The New Republic^[6] and The American Prospect,^[7] and professional journals such as Intellectual History Review,^[8] Political Theory,^[9] Implicit Religion,^[10] the European Journal of Sociology,^[11] and in many other publications.^[12]

 

References

1. ^ The Immanent Frame » Blog Archive » Secularism of a new kind
2. ^ p 221
3. ^ p 20
4. ^ John Patrick Diggins (16 December 2007). "The Godless Delusion"
5. ^ Stuart Jeffries (7 December 2007). "Is that all there is?"
6. ^ Charles Larmore (2008, April 9). "How Much Can We Stand? [review of A Secular Age by Charles Taylor]". The New Republic (Chris Hughes). ISSN 0028-6583.  (accessed 2 Jan 2013)
7. ^ Aziz Huq (2007, October 2). "Keeping God Out of It [review of A Secular Age by Charles Taylor]". The American Prospect (Jay Harris). ISSN 1049-7285.  (accessed 2 Jan 2013)
8. ^ Bill Cooke (2009). "Charles Taylor and the return of theology-as-history". Intellectual History Review (Routledge) 19 (1): 133–139. doi:10.1080/17496970902722999. ISSN 1749-6977. 
9. ^ Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (2008). "Books in review: A secular age, by Charles Taylor.". Political Theory 36 (3): 486. doi:10.1177/0090591708315144. ISSN 0090-5917. 
10. ^ Vaughan S. Roberts (2009). "A Secular Age by Charles Taylor". Implicit Religion 12 (1): 121. doi:10.1558/imre.v12i1.121. ISSN 1743-1697. 
11. ^ Craig Calhoun (2008). "A Secular Age [review of book by Charles Taylor]". European Journal of Sociology (Cambridge Journals Online) 49 (03): 455–461. doi:10.1017/S0003975609000186. ISSN 0003-9756. 
12. ^ For listings of many additional reviews, see a Google Scholar search.