Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

-----

Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Charles Taylor - Review of Book: "A Secular Age" by Wikipedia



A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor


A Secular Age
Taylor-COVER-A-Secular-Age.jpg
AuthorCharles Taylor
LanguageEnglish
SubjectSecularity
PublisherHarvard University Press
Publication date
2007
Media typePrint
Pages874
ISBN978-0-674-02676-6

A Secular Age is a book written by the philosopher Charles Taylor which was published in 2007 by Harvard University Press on the basis of Taylor's earlier Gifford Lectures (Edinburgh 1998–99). The noted sociologist Robert Bellah[1] has referred to A Secular Age as "one of the most important books to be written in my lifetime."[2]


Background and Overview
In recent years, secularity 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 a historical construction. In this book, Taylor looks at the change in Western society from a condition in which it is almost impossible not to believe in God, to one in which believing in God is simply one option of many. He argues against the view that secularity in society is 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 world 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: one, an anthropocentric shift in now conceiving of Nature as primarily for people; two, the idea that God relates to us primarily through an impersonal order that He established; and three, the idea that religion is to be understood from Nature by reason alone. Deism is considered the major intermediate step between the previous age of belief in God and the modern secular age.[3] Three modes of secularity are distinguished: one, secularized public spaces; two, the decline of belief and practice; and three, cultural conditions where unbelief in religion is a viable option. This text focuses on secularity three.[4]

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.[5]

Outline

Preface/Introduction

Taylor is "telling a story… of 'secularization' in the modern West" (p.ix), and what the process amounts to, i.e., 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)." (p. 15)

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" (p. 5). 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. For unbelievers, it is within the power of reason (Enlightenment) or Nature, or our inner depths (Romanticism). Also, postmodernism wants to stand outside reason and sentiment, on the idea that fullness is a projection that cannot be found.

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 or do not 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." (p. 13)

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?" (p. 25). God's presence retreated in three dimensions. (1) People no longer see natural events as acts of God. (2) Society "could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than human action in secular time." (p. 25) (3) People lived then in an enchanted world, now 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, caused the move to secularization. The disciplined Reformed self replaced the "porous" self, which was vulnerable to external forces like spirits and demons, with a new "buffered" self, a disciplined and 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 CarnivalCalvinists and Puritans were "industrious, disciplined... mutually predictable... With such men a safe, well-ordered society can be built." (p. 106) The success of the project encouraged an anthropocentrism that opened the gates for a godless humanism. (p. 130) "So disengaged discipline frames a new experience of the self as having a telos of autarky." (p. 138)

Early humans were embedded into the world in three ways: into their small-scale social group in which religious ritual was identical with social ritual; into the cosmos, the enchanted world of spirits and forces; and 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." (p. 152)

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." (p. 152) 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." (p. 159) 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" (p. 163) or the organization of society "around a notion of hierarchy in society which expresses and corresponds to a hierarchy in the cosmos." (p. 163)

Taylor sees "three important forms of social self-understanding." (p. 176) "They are, respectively (1) the "economy", (2) the public sphere, and (3) the practices and outlooks of democratic self-rule." (p.176) 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." (p. 178)

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." (p. 209)

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" (p. 213).

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." (p. 221) 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." (p. 251)

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." (p. 259) 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." (p. 270) This is the subtraction story, but Taylor believes that it is more complicated than that.

The official Enlightenment story is that "people started using Reason and Science, instead of Religion and Superstition" (p. 273) 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." (p. 294) 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." (p. 294) "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" (p. 299) 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 fifty 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." (p. 325) Through the idea of the sublime and recovery of the "well-springs of sympathy" (p. 344) 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." (p. 348) The new imaginary sustains a range of views, from "the hardest materialism through to Christian orthodoxy." (p. 351) 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." (p. 353) 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." (p. 358) It creates an unspecified space "between religious commitment and materialism." (p. 360)

In the 19th century, two additional factors influenced people in renouncing their faith in God: advances in 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." (p. 369) 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" (p. 372) i.e., that "our highest goal is to preserve and increase life, to prevent suffering... Life properly understood also affirms death and destruction." (p. 373)

Thus, it is possible for people to live in a world encountering "no echo outside." This view experiences "its world entirely as immanent." (p. 376)

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" (p. 378) 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" (p. 380) 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." (p. 384) Darwin and evolution changed everything, but the "need to articulate something fuller, deeper" (p. 391) 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" (p. 395) in Leslie Stephen and John Stuart Mill, a "humanism of altruism and duty." (p. 398)

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." (p. 401) 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 aestheticism.

Bloomsbury was another approach, an ethic of "personal relations and beautiful states of mind." (p. 405) It carried immanence another step, identifying the intrinsically valuable with the internal experience and sensibility. Then along came World War I. Here was a war fought for "civilization... the protection of life from violence through order and law." (p. 407) Yet the war was a "greater negation of civilized life than any foe threatened." Thus Ezra Pound's notion of "a botched civilization" and T. S. 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" (p. 411), 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" (p. 412) and becomes radicalized in Marxist socialism. Opposed to this imaginary was "Reaction", a vertical hierarchy "where differences of rank were respected" (p. 413) 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." (p. 414) 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." (p. 415) 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." (p. 417)

The crisis of civilization dealt a body blow to established Christianity, and provoked "new, unbelieving variants of the vertical ideal of order" (p. 418) 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." (p. 419)

Part IV: Narratives of Secularization

The Age of Mobilization

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" (p. 435), 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." (p. 471) 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." (p. 472)

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" (p. 449), an organizing force to help people struggling to find their feet in the market economy.

The Age of Authenticity

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." (p.473) 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." (p. 475)

This affects the social imaginary. To the "horizontal" notion of "the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people" (p. 481) 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'" (p. 484), 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." (p. 489) This has "undermined the link between Christian faith and civilizational order." (p. 492)

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." (p. 501) Now people are not bound by moralism: "they form, break, then reform relationships;" (p. 496) 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." (p. 503)

Religion Today

Today, the "neo-Durkheimian embedding of religion in a state" (p. 505) and a "close interweaving of religion, life-style and patriotism" (p. 506) 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." (p. 507) 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," (p. 514) although a core (vast in the United States) will remain in neo-Durkheimian identities, with its potential for manipulation by such as "Milosevic, and the BJP." (p. 515)

Assuming that "the human aspiration to religion will [not] flag" (p. 515), spiritual practice will extend beyond ordinary church practice to involve meditationcharitable workstudy groupspilgrimage, 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." (p. 518)

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." (p. 522)

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." (p. 524) 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 U.S. never had an ancien régime, so there has never been a reaction against the state church. Next (4) the groups in the U.S. have reacted strongly against the post-1960s culture, unlike Europe. A majority of Americans remain happy in "one Nation under God". There are fewer skeletons in the family closet, and "it is easier to be unreservedly confident in your own rightness when you are the hegemonic power." (p. 528) Finally (5) the U.S. 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" (p. 551) 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." (p. 562) Taylor argues that the Closed World Structures do not really argue their worldviews, they "function as unchallenged axioms" (p. 590) 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." (p. 595) 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" (p. 609) 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". (p. 640) It aspires to wholeness and transcendence yet also tries to "fully respect ordinary human flourishing." (p. 641)

Taylor imagines a two-dimensional moral space. The horizontal gives you a "point of resolution, the fair award." (p. 706) 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" (p. 708) 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." (p. 725)

"Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief." (p. 727) "The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured." (p. 727) Against unbelief, Taylor presents a selection of recent spiritual conversions or "epiphanic" experiences in Catholic artists and writers, including Václav HavelIvan IllichCharles Péguy, 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." (p. 767) "[I]n our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality." (p. 768) Our seeking for "fullness" is our response to it.

Secular belief is a shutting out. "The door is barred against further discovery." (p. 769) But in the secular "'waste land'… young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries." (p. 770) It will, Taylor believes, 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." (p. 772)

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, while also elucidating the distinctiveness of his own approach. He calls the tale told by Radical Orthodoxy thinkers the "Intellectual Deviation" story, which focuses on "changes in theoretical understanding, mainly among learned and related élites," (p. 774) whereas the story he relates, which he names the "Reform Master Narrative," is more concerned with how secularity "emerges as a mass phenomenon." (p. 775) Both these stories are complementary, "exploring different sides of the same mountain." (p. 775) In his review of the book, Milbank agreed that Taylor's thesis "…is more fundamental… because the most determining processes are fusions of ideas and practices, not ideas in isolation.[6]

Criticism

Charles Larmore was critical of A Secular Age in its approach, especially with it having too many references to Catholic theologians and a noticeable absence of Protestant figures (see section I paragraph 7 within the cited article).[7] Larmore also sees A Secular Age offering nothing new and is simply an extension of Max Weber's work on secularization theory (Section II, paragraph 1) with Weber and Taylor having differences that may be attributable to Weber being "a lapsed Protestant" and Taylor being "an ardent Catholic" (section II, paragraph 2). Larmore feels Taylor, in his book, may have "an adequate basis for jumping to metaphysical or religious conclusions" concerning the understanding of a secular view of the world, but to do so is "precisely what we ought not to do" (Section II, paragraph 5). Larmore disagrees with Taylor's insistence that people, having adequate information, should take a stance on God's presence throughout the world (Section II, paragraph 7). In Larmore's opinion, Taylor is wrong in not recognizing that "We have never been, and we will never be, at one with ourselves" and, therefore, should not jump to conclusions that are based on faith - which Larmore believes Taylor did in his book (Section II, paragraph 12).

Reviews

A Secular Age has been reviewed in newspapers such as The New York Times[8] and The Guardian,[9] magazines such as The New Republic[7] and The American Prospect,[10] and professional journals such as Intellectual History Review,[11] Political Theory,[12] Implicit Religion,[13] and European Journal of Sociology.[14]

References
  1. ^ "2000 National Humanities Medal Winners". National Endowment for the Humanities. Archived from the original on 23 January 2015. Retrieved 23 January 2015.
  2. ^ "Secularism of a new kind"The Immanent Frame (blog), SSRC, 19 October 2017
  3. ^ p 221
  4. ^ p 20
  5. ^ Meaney, Thomas and Mounk, Yascha. Spititual Gains Archived2010-10-04 at the Wayback Machine, the Utopian, December 7, 2010
  6. ^ Milbank, John (2009). "Review Article: A Closer walk on the Wild Side: Some Comments on Charles Taylor's a Secular Age". Studies in Christian Ethics22 (1): 100. doi:10.1177/0953946808100228S2CID 143046007.
  7. Jump up to:
  8. ^ John Patrick Diggins (16 December 2007). "The Godless Delusion"
  9. ^ Stuart Jeffries (7 December 2007). "Is that all there is?"
  10. ^ Aziz Huq (October 2, 2007). "Keeping God Out of It [review of A Secular Age by Charles Taylor]"The American Prospect. Jay Harris. ISSN 1049-7285. Retrieved 2 January 2013.
  11. ^ Bill Cooke (2009). "Charles Taylor and the return of theology-as-history". Intellectual History Review. Routledge. 19 (1): 133–139. doi:10.1080/17496970902722999ISSN 1749-6977S2CID 170254091.
  12. ^ Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (2008). "Books in review: A secular age, by Charles Taylor". Political Theory36 (3): 486. doi:10.1177/0090591708315144ISSN 0090-5917.
  13. ^ Vaughan S. Roberts (2009). "A Secular Age by Charles Taylor". Implicit Religion12 (1): 121. doi:10.1558/imre.v12i1.121ISSN 1743-1697.
  14. ^ Craig Calhoun (2008). "A Secular Age [review of book by Charles Taylor]". European Journal of Sociology. Cambridge Journals Online. 49(3): 455–461. doi:10.1017/S0003975609000186ISSN 0003-9756


Charles Taylor - Review of Book: "A Secular Age" by HUP


Harvard University Press


Charles Taylor - Review of Book:
"A Secular Age"



“A Secular Age is a work of stupendous breadth and erudition.”—John Patrick Diggins, The New York Times Book Review

“In a determinedly brilliant new book, Charles Taylor challenges the ‘subtraction theory’ of secularization which defines it as a process whereby religion simply falls away, to be replaced by science and rationality. Instead, he sees secularism as a development within Western Christianity, stemming from the increasingly anthropocentric versions of religion that arose from the Reformation. For Taylor, the modern age is not an age without religion; instead, secularization heralds ‘a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others.’ The result is a radical pluralism which, as well as offering unprecedented freedom, creates new challenges and instabilities.”—London Review of Books

“A Secular Age represents a singular achievement… Taylor is somehow uniquely able to combine chutzpah and good manners, making bold and imaginative claims, yet always attending respectfully to the whole range of disciplines that touch on the philosophical trajectory being drawn, whether that be history, sociology, theology, art theory, cultural studies, anthropology or social theory… A Secular Age succeeds in the same way as his previous work: in illuminating through complicating. At the same time, this book seems to step up the ambition somewhat: by attempting to provide a final definitive account of all the narratives and complications that make up our contemporary age, as they implode on themselves and interact with one another… Hegel knew, of course, that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’; or, in other words, that philosophy can only fathom the truth about an age in hindsight, when the day has passed. But then again, that didn’t stop Hegel having a go; and we should be glad that it hasn’t stopped Charles Taylor, either.”—Christopher J. Insole, The Times Literary Supplement

“One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society… A vast ideological anatomy of possible ways of thinking about the gradual onset of secularism as experienced in fields ranging from art to poetry to psychoanalysis… Taylor also lays bare the inconsistencies of some secular critiques of religion.”—The Economist

“Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers a uniquely rich historical and philosophical overview of how we came to take a disenchanted world for granted—quietly inviting us to reflect that if disenchantment and the absence of the divine were learned habits of mind, they might not necessarily be the self-evidently rational truths so many think they are.”—Rowan Williams, The Times Literary Supplement

“It is refreshing to read an inquiry into the condition of religion that is exploratory in its approach. Charles Taylor, a Roman Catholic as well as one of the world’s leading political theorists, does not aim to attack or defend any system of belief in his new book, A Secular Age. Rather, he wants to elucidate the very idea of a secular world. For Taylor, the difference between the pre-modern Western world and the modern West is not simply that beliefs held then are no longer accepted today; it is that the entire framework of thought has changed.”—John Gray, Harper’s

“Charles Taylor’s remarkable book A Secular Age achieves something quite different from what other writers on secularization have accomplished. Most have focused on decline as the essence of secularism—either the removal of religion from sphere after sphere of public life, or the decrease of religious belief and practice. But Taylor focuses on what kind of religion makes sense in a secular age… Taylor is asking not only how secularism became a significant option in a civilization that not so long ago was explicitly Christian, but what that change means for the spiritual quest, both of those who are still religious and those who consider themselves secular. I doubt many people have even perceived that aspect of secularism, and Taylor’s book should be as much of a revelation to them as it was to me.”—Robert N. Bellah, Commonweal

“In an idiosyncratic blend of the philosophical, the historical, and the speculative, Taylor describes the shift from a world brim-full with spirits and magic to a world where divinity is absent. His account resists the idea that the rise of secularism is a process of subtraction, of loss, and of disenchantment. Rather, Taylor describes secularity’s birth as the migration of ideas, subtle changes in those ideas, and the opening of new possibilities. If Taylor’s communitarian scholarship celebrated historical and social rootedness, A Secular Age is an encomium to the sheer happenstance of how those circumstances arose.”—Azziz Huq, The American Prospect

“[A] thumping great volume.”—Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“A rich, complex book, but what I most appreciate is [Taylor’s] vision of a ‘secular’ future that is both open and also contains at least pockets of spiritual rigor, and that is propelled by religious motivation, a strong and enduring piece of our nature.”—David Brooks, The New York Times

“[A Secular Age] may become an enduring contribution to understanding religious belief, the evolution of the secular order, and the defining characteristics of modern secularism and contemporary spirituality. Like Charles Taylor’s earlier books, it is a product of prodigious erudition. Its 874 dense pages brim with original observation, cogent argument constructed from sources in a wide array of disciplines, and generous ecumenical gestures, even towards humanists. His story is complex, somewhat repetitious and yet unflaggingly interesting: it is loaded with so much novel detail and insight that the reader will be grateful for each scrap of familiar ground.”—Tamas Pataki, Australian Review of Books

“Sophisticated, erudite…with excursions into history, philosophy and literature, A Secular Age is a weighty and challenging tome. It is also a brilliant account of the ‘sensed context’ in which secularization developed. And a moving meditation, by a believer, on the ‘ineradicable bent’ of human beings to respond to something beyond life, to keep open ‘the transcendent window.’”—Glenn C. Altschuler, The Baltimore Sun

“If you are, as I am, often puzzled by the landscape of contemporary religious belief and unbelief, you will regard Charles Taylor’s huge and hugely rewarding intellectual history of the secularization of European and North American culture as a marvelous gift. A Secular Age is a first-class map of the spiritual terrain of Western modernity as well as the road that got us here.”—Robert Westbrook, The Christian Century

“A culminating dispatch from the philosophical frontlines. It is at once encyclopedic and incisive, a sweeping overview that is no less analytically rigorous for its breadth. Its subject is a philosophical history of the past, present and future of Western Christendom. As such, it begins with a deceptively simple question: How did it become possible for anyone to not believe in God? …A Secular Age recounts the history of an idea, in other words, but in it the past is not an inert, settled fact, but a reservoir to be drawn upon to shatter the sameness and the apparent inevitability of the present. As a history it clarifies crucial intellectual and theological divisions that continue to structure debates about divinity, but with the aim of reforming the way we think about them, ‘to show the play of destabilization and recomposition.’ Though this isn’t a book you take to the beach, it remains eminently readable. As philosophers go, Taylor is a kind of behaviorist, more concerned with elaborating the implications of a way of thinking than with showing its contradictions. Unlike most philosophers, though, Taylor seems at pains to remain accessible to a general audience to capture complex philosophical debate in ordinary language. An important part of Taylor’s argument is that religion and the belief in God, most particularly the experience of transcendence, are not at all outmoded… Though it avoids predictions or prescriptions, A Secular Age leaves us with the sense that the future will be a far poorer, less human place, if we do not discover some expression for that transcendent otherness.”—Steven Hayward, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“It is, simply, the most comprehensive account of the process and meaning of secularization… Taylor’s depiction of the past two centuries is rich with insights and subtle analyses… Familiarity with Taylor’s book is now the entry ticket for any serious discussion of secularization.”—Peter Steinfels, Commonweal

“Very occasionally there appears a book destined to endure. A Secular Age is such a book… A Secular Age is an important and deeply interesting work. Its central thesis is that secularization must be understood not simply as the decline of certain beliefs and institutions, but as a total change in our experience of the world… There are subtle, original discussions of the modern self, of changing conceptions of time, of the religious landscape of art, and much else besides. Taylor has a great gift of empathy, an ability to inhabit and bring to life the mental world of both believers and unbelievers. A true Hegelian, he sees the goal of philosophy as understanding, not judgment.”—Edward Skidelsky, The Daily Telegraph

“A Secular Age offers an invaluable map of how the modern religious–secular divide came into being.”—Andrew Koppelman, Dissent

“Though this essential Canadian intellectual may overstate the triumph of secularity, his huge and elegant work takes on the transformation of the world from 1500, when it was almost impossible not to believe in a Creator, to 2000, when religion was simply one choice on a menu of belief systems. He finds the answer in ‘exclusive humanism,’ which sees ‘no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing.’”—Donald Harman Akenson, The Globe & Mail

“In A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor takes on the broad phenomenon of secularization in its full complexity… [A] voluminous, impressively researched and often fascinating social and intellectual history…Taylor’s account encompasses art, literature, science, fashion, private life—all those human activities that have been sometimes more, sometimes less affected by religion over the last five centuries.”—Jack Miles, The Los Angeles Times

“The real genius of this erudite and profound book resides in its grandeur of theme and richness of detail. For all its imposing intellectual density, it is a delight to read; at times, it was literally impossible to put down. Yet it is also a work that ought to be read by degrees—one chapter at a time, with ample pause for reflection.”—Lorenzo DiTommaso, The Montreal Gazette

“A salutary and sophisticated defense of how life was lived before the daring views of a tiny secular elite inspired mass indifference, and how it might be lived in the future.”—Michael Burleigh, The New York Sun

“Taylor reminds us that we remain spiritual creatures in our most essential natures, and that what we take for granted—our age’s lack of religious faith—is, in fact, an anomaly of history. Our forefathers did not live this way and our grandchildren might not either. Considering the doubts about extreme secularism, it is possible we are entering a new Age of Spirit. If so, Taylor’s latest magnum opus serves as a comprehensive guide to the reemergence of religious sensibility.”—Robert Sibley, The Ottawa Citizen

“The focus here is neither on the role of religion in public institutions nor on the extent of religious beief, but rather on its conditions… It is the slow emergence of secularity in this sense that Taylor sets out to explain, at formidable length, and in remarkable historical and philosophical detail. Binding all that detail together is an argument that Taylor manages to sustain over nearly eight hundred pages. Simply put, A Secular Age is a magisterial refutation of what Taylor calls the ‘subtraction story’ of secularisation.”—Jonathan Derbyshire, Philosopher’s Magazine

“Taylor’s gargantuan philosophical history of modernity, which complicates the flattering and simplified story we like to tell ourselves about secularization, is a major intellectual event.”—Jonathan Derbyshire, Prospect

“Taylor is arguably the most interesting and important philosopher writing in English today… What makes Taylor so important? Over more than 40 years, four large books, four or five slimmer essays and several volumes of articles, he has worked out a distinctive network of arguments and an exceptionally rich analysis of the modern self and its values—an analysis that reveals us to be altogether deeper and more interesting, but also less self-aware, than we tend to suppose… A Secular Age sets out to offer a richer characterization of secularization and the nature of contemporary belief, both religious and skeptical… Taylor writes brilliantly about the new social forms—the nation state, the market economy, the charitable enterprise—and the ideals of altruism and public service that have emerged with them… A Secular Age is effectively a polemic against dogmatic atheism… It is full of insights, and many of its component parts—notably Taylor’s discussion of the ‘pressures’ that make a settled view on the big ontological questions hard to sustain—are as good as anything by this magnificent philosopher.”—Ben Rogers, Prospect

“Taylor’s masterful integration of history, sociology, philosophy, and theology demands much of the reader. In return you will be convinced that Charles Taylor is one of the smartest and deepest social thinkers of our time.”—Tyler Cowen, Slate

“Taylor makes a strong case for the presence in ordinary moral life of something like Plato’s idea of the Good, however little acknowledged… A Secular Age carries the story further, into the question of the role of religion in constituting a person’s identity. Taylor wants to lay out what it takes to go on believing in God, in the absence of any equivalent to the intellectual, cultural and imaginative surroundings in which pre-modern religion was quietly embedded. This is what he calls our ‘social imaginary’: how we collectively sense what is normal and appropriate in our dealings with one another and with the world around us. This is something deeper and more diffused than philosophical theories or thought-out positions.”—Fergus Kerr, The Tablet

“Grapples with the Christian–secular relationship, and with admirable nuance (unlike most theology).”—Theo Hobson, The Tablet

“A Secular Age is a towering achievement… It shows the ways we have traveled from the automatic certainties of 1500 to the fragile alignments of today. It transforms the secularization debate.”—David Martin, The Tablet

“[A] big, powerful book… [Taylor’s] book is massive in its historical and philosophical scope. Penetrating and dense, it would take months to fully digest. Loosely structured, it’s crammed with original insights. Taylor, 75, can pack more into one of his complex paragraphs than most prevaricating, deconstructing academic philosophers can say in a chapter, or even a book… The book explores the immense ramifications of how the West shifted in a few centuries from being a society in which ‘it was virtually impossible not to believe in God’ to one in which belief is optional, often frowned upon.”—Douglas Todd, The Vancouver Sun

“If the author had accomplished nothing more than a survey of the voluminous body of ‘secularization theory,’ he would have done something valuable. But, although Taylor clearly articulates his disdain for the view that modernity ineluctably led to the death of God, he goes far beyond a literature review… In addition to its conceptual value, this study is notable for its lucidity. Taylor has translated complex philosophical theories into language that any educated reader will be able to follow, yet he has not sacrificed an iota of sophistication or nuance. A magisterial book.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“In his characteristically erudite yet engaging fashion, Taylor takes up where he left off in his magnificent Sources of the Self (1989) as he brilliantly traces the emergence of secularity and the processes of secularization in the modern age… Taylor sweeps grandly and magisterially through the 18th and 19th centuries as he recreates the history of secularism and its parallel challenges to religion. He concludes that a focus on the religious has never been lost in Western culture, but that it is one among many stories striving for acceptance. Taylor’s examination of the rise of unbelief in the 19th century is alone worth the price of the book and offers an essential reminder that the Victorian age, more than the Enlightenment, dominates our present view of the meanings of secularity. Taylor’s inspired combination of philosophy and history sparkles in this must-read virtuoso performance.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This is Charles Taylor’s breakthrough book, a book of really major importance, because he succeeds in recasting the whole debate about secularism. This is one of the most important books written in my lifetime. I am tempted to say the most important book, but that may just express the spell the book has cast over me at the moment.”—Robert N. Bellah

“Taylor’s book is a major and highly original contribution to the debates on secularization that have been ongoing for the past century. There is no book remotely like it.”—Alasdair MacIntyre

RELATED LINKS