by John Patrick Diggins
Dec. 16, 2007
We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,” the Russian critic Belinsky once shouted across the table at Turgenev, “and you want to eat!”
Charles Taylor would prefer that we feast upon the 874 pages of his new book “A Secular Age,” which offers musings and perceptions from every field of knowledge except knowledge of God, which he leaves off the menu. Taylor’s quarrel is with secularism — the idea that as modernity, science and democracy have advanced, concern with God and spirituality has retreated to the margins of life. Calling this thesis “very unconvincing,” Taylor seeks to prove that God is still very much present in the world, if only we look at the right places and allow the mind to open itself to moral inquiry and aesthetic sensibility rather than traditional theology as the gateway to religion.
Taylor, an emeritus professor of philosophy at McGill University, is the author of “Hegel” (1975) and “Sources of the Self” (1989) and the winner of this year’s prestigious Templeton Prize, awarded for advancement and research of spiritual matters. A Roman Catholic who is convinced that life lacks meaning without belief in God, Taylor is also a communitarian who questions the value of an individualism supposedly indifferent to the concerns of the larger society. He commands wide admiration for his ecumenical attitude toward world religions, his favorable view of identity politics and his commitment to the idea of human beings as contesting agents, always situated in conflict and thereby deserving of rights. He also appeals to postmodernist thinkers who trust less in the power of philosophy to prove the existence of truth than in the power of language to persuade us of the possibility of belief.
Some postmodernists speak of the “end of philosophy,” since it supposedly can no longer tell us anything about the world independent of its relation to us — about that which exists “out there” and derives, as Taylor puts it, “from a power which is beyond me.” At present, he writes, “we live in a condition” in which we suspect our own beliefs as having been influenced by sources other than the self and its reasons, with the human subject the mere effect of forces alien to our being. “We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time,” he writes, “looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.” Has religion, then, come to end in doubts about ourselves?
In “A Secular Age,” Taylor answers with a resounding no. He argues for “the ‘deconstruction’ of the death of God view” proclaimed by Nietzsche. To see secularization as simply the separation of church and state, the alienation of truth from power, and the rise of skepticism and worldliness, he writes, is to miss the deeper and more enduring residues of religion and the spiritual life, the true “bulwarks of belief” that in his view have hardly eroded. Taylor argues against the “subtraction stories” of modernity, in which religious belief and other “confining horizons” are “sloughed off,” leaving the mind without faith or piety. Instead, he argues, “Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.” Even the old distinction between the sacred and the profane has taken on new meaning. Instead of disappearing, God is now “sanctifying us everywhere,” including “in ordinary life, our work, in marriage, and so on.”
Philosophy, in Taylor’s estimate, also enjoys a certain sanctification of mind and will. He cites Descartes to suggest how we are rational beings demanding to be ruled by reason governed by will. Freud’s sense of the proud solitariness of the ego is also an example of the inner truth of the emotions asking to be controlled apart from formal religion, and William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” indicates how people everywhere have a need to believe that can be determined by the will.
Taylor’s case for the moral authority of “self-sufficient reason” may claim too much for mind and will. Descartes could scarcely break free from the Calvinist conviction that the will, rather than exercising sovereign control over the body, remained in bondage to the sins of the flesh. Freud saw religion as an illusion born of the need to deny death; and James gave us the right to believe, but not necessarily the reasons for it. The most Taylor succeeds in arguing is that secularization did not kill off religion, since the depths of humanism have survived as spiritual values.
Taylor’s deconstruction of the death-of-God thesis rests on his conviction that “the arguments from natural science to Godlessness are not all that convincing.” He has no patience with atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who argue that science, particularly the theory of evolution, has consigned religion to the ash heap of history. Taylor, in contrast, sees science as reinforcing religion, since God is implicated in a social existence where the contemplation of meaning and order suggests “something divine in us.” For Taylor, belief is not what science finds but what religion hopes for. Yet, in the larger perspective of intellectual history, the validity of belief may turn less on the clash of science and religion than on a concept of a deity in all its paradoxes. “An omniscient and omnipotent God who does not even take care that his intentions shall be understood by his creatures,” Nietzsche wrote, “could he be a God of goodness?” But Taylor seems uninterested in explaining the ways of God, and he argues that religion needs no justification on the basis of its good works while secularization, which some thinkers argue is necessary for tolerance, endangers the religious values that may save us from the temptations of our selfish desires.
A word repeated in Taylor’s book is “disenchantment,” derived from Max Weber, who saw Enlightenment reason turning into modern rationalization as intelligence is used not to get to the bottom of things but to organize life from the top down, through structures of hierarchy, specialization, regulation and control. Taylor agrees that this “disenchantment of the world” leaves us with a universe that is dull, routine, flat, driven by rules rather than thoughts, a process that culminates in bureaucracy run by “specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart” — what Weber called the “iron cage” of modern life.
The Weberian outlook is bleak, and Taylor puts it aside to find a far more hopeful vision in the sociology of Emile Durkheim. In contrast to Weber, Durkheim saw the forms of society as containing not impersonal functions but deeply implanted sacred practices, and he saw religion rooted in the roles and rules of modern social systems resisting the chill of alienation. Whatever intellectuals may think, people value religion as providing a framework of meaning, a realm of unifying symbols and a sense of belonging. Some observers have been surprised by the resurgence of religion in recent years. “In a sense,” Taylor observes, “part of what drove the Moral Majority and motivates the Christian right in the U.S.A. is an aspiration to re-establish something of the fractured neo-Durkheimian understanding that used to define the nation, where being American would once more have a connection with theism, with being ‘one nation under God.’”
Contrary to Taylor, the American founders felt they had to deal with a young republic consisting not of one nation but of a series of contending factions. Religion, in their view, would do more to divide the country into zealous sects than to unify it under “God,” who, after several polite appearances in the Declaration of Independence, is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Jefferson, in fact, subscribed to the “subtraction” theory of history that Taylor denies. “Priests,” wrote the author of the Declaration, “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight.”
“A Secular Age” is a work of stupendous breadth and erudition, even if repetitious. While Taylor’s main purpose is to salvage religion from the corrosive effects of modern secularism, he would also like to see the Anglo-American world reconsider its liberal legacy. The Federalist authors taught that government was about safeguarding life, liberty and land. “The transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God,” James Madison wrote, “declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.”
Taylor believes that Western liberal thought, beginning with Hobbes and Locke, Hume and Adam Smith, is on the wrong track. For some Catholics in the intellectual tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, the meaning of history is not the preservation of life but the salvation of the soul, not the right to labor and own property but the duty to abide by moral order, not the greed of the market but the grace of the cathedral. To resist the ubiquity of liberal individualism, Taylor draws on such dubious historical sources as classical republicanism, in which citizens subordinate private interest to public virtue, and the theory of public space, where citizens supposedly long gathered to discuss the issues of the day and render politics an act of conversation and dialogue. Taylor also draws upon the literature of Romanticism to demonstrate that spirit lives on in the imaginations of mind whatever the material forces of secularization. “A new poetic language can serve to find a way back to the God of Abraham,” he exhorts.
Some 19th-century New England Transcendentalists may have felt the presence of God in a blade of grass, but they sought to escape the Abraham who would have murdered his own son at God’s command, along with America’s own killer of innocence in the name of authority, Captain Ahab. Taylor’s effort to resurrect intellectual respect for religion is commendable without being credible. A new poetic language led Emerson to see American religion as “corpse-cold” as the sublime gave way to the mundane and the
“thingification” of life. What threatened religion was not only secularization but society itself, with its anxieties about status and lack of self-reliance. Yet Taylor looks to society for religious redemption, one possibility being “to recover a sense of the link between erotic desire and the love of God, which lies deep in the biblical traditions.” Whatever our desires, we are drawn to God. “Our access to the will of God, through his design,” Taylor writes, “is crucial to the story of the modern moral order and to the new neo-Durkheimian understanding of God’s presence among us.” Taylor assumes that we can “find a way back” to God by re-enchanting society with the mysteries of spirit and even sensuality. Since we cannot get to God by means of philosophy, Taylor sees the Deity’s “design” in the social world as we experience it in its moral and erotic dimensions. Can the same faith be trusted to history as to society? To insist that the “will of God” can be seen in history, one would have to deal with thinkers from Thucydides to Tolstoy, who saw “design” as the domination of reason by power and freedom by fate.
Emerson called society “a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” its material pleasures the very soil of secularism itself. Durkheim expected that such insatiable pleasures would be restrained by society, the role once assumed by religion. Taylor, for his part, promises an understanding of “God’s presence among us” in the fullness of ordinary life. But the belief that God inheres in life itself suggests Taylor’s Hegelianism and the dialectical fantasy that an indwelling “spirit” governs the material world. To see the sacred within the profane, to derive God from the sentiments of society, does little to relieve us of Weber’s secularized world where politics is no longer an ethical calling and religion no longer an ascetic ideal. Taylor may locate the drama of the soul in society, but the meaning and mystery of God remain as elusive as the enigma of existence and religious morality becomes little more than social convention. There are many reasons to read the profound meditations in “A Secular Age,” but waiting for God to show up is not one of them.
