Review of Charles Taylor’s «A secular age»

[by Charles, Larmore. April 8, 2008. Taken from here]

Charles Larmore is W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities at Brown University.

Taylor centers his story around what appears to be a striking shift in the very nature of religious belief. In the past, nearly everyone believed in God as a matter of course. Atheism was well-nigh unimaginable. Today, by contrast, many reject the existence of God out of hand, quite routinely, and even the staunchest defenders of faith know that they might have chosen otherwise. How did so momentous a change come about? What happened between 1500 and 2000 to turn belief from a norm into an option?

Each of us, according to Taylor, relies on some answer to this question, however tacit or superficial. We cannot live in a secular age without some view about what it means to have left behind an age of faith. The trouble is that these views generally take the form of «subtraction stories.» They portray the modern world as having come into being by sloughing off the illusions of religion and letting the human condition finally appear for what it has been all along. Accounts of this sort, Taylor maintains, embody a fundamental mistake about modernity. They miss the fact that to see nature as operating by laws of its own, not by God’s purposes, and to see society as bound together by human interests, not by sacred ritual, depends on a substantive set of values, cognitive and moral, that are by no means the universal property of mankind, but have come to be espoused in the West for historically contingent reasons. Our secular age did not arise by a process of subtraction, but through the creation of a whole new conception of man and world.

Secularization can mean three different things, all of them distinctive features of modern Western society. First, there is the separation between church and state, emerging in the seventeenth century after one hundred years of religious war in Europe and transferring the basis of political authority from divine will to notions of consent and individual rights. No longer sustained by public affirmation and enforcement, religion has turned into a private affair, and as a result it has lost its influence over more and more people. And so secularization also involves–this is its second sense, for Taylor–the all-too-familiar decline of religious belief in the West.

Yet these two developments could not have occurred, he claims, without a fundamental alteration in worldview. There had to emerge a conception of nature and society which Taylor dubs «the immanent frame.» This is his third, and decisive, notion of secularism. The natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine, came to be so sharply marked off from one another that making sense of the world around us appeared possible in this-worldly terms alone. Only within such a framework could political community dispense with the aura of religious unity, and people find ways of giving meaning to their lives without looking beyond the human realm. Only on this basis could belief in God cease to be the immediate and uncontroversial certainty that it once was, the inescapable backdrop to every thought and endeavor, and become instead a possibility that on reflection people might either endorse or reject–«one option among others and frequently not the easiest to embrace.»

How, according to Taylor, did this intellectual revolution take place? Obviously, the rise of modern science played a great role. But in order for scientific inquiry to take off in the form that we recognize today, nature had to be emptied of the spirits, portents, and cosmic purposes that once seemed a fact of everyday experience. It had to be conceived as fundamentally an impersonal order of matter and force, governed by causal laws. This conception of nature was itself the expression of a new attitude toward the world that Taylor calls «disengagement,» the distancing outlook of «the buffered self.» People learned to stand back from the forces of nature around them (as well as within them), and to regulate their actions so as no longer to feel at the mercy of hidden powers, and thus to turn the vast expanse of matter in motion before them into a domain for prediction and control. Nature ceased to be mind- like, full of the signs and wonders invoked in Shakespeare’s plays, and became instead a neutral object of sober inquiry for the only minds there are, namely our own.

What inspired this shift was not, Taylor insists, a decision to dispel the mists of religion and look reality at last squarely in the face. It was instead a new ethic of self-possession and instrumental manipulation, which exalted «the independent, disengaged subject, reflexively controlling his own thought- processes, ‘self-responsibly,’ in Husserl’s famous phrase.» Contrary to one well-known but naive sort of subtraction story, modern science did not arise through the substitution of observation for fantasy. It involved the systematic combination of experiment and mathematics, designed (as Bacon and Kant said) to «put nature on the rack» and «constrain it to give answers to questions of reason’s own devising.» Epistemology, Taylor claims, is ultimately rooted in ethics. We form our beliefs in accordance with conceptions of method and evidence that tell us in effect how we should respect our dignity as thinking beings in dealing with a world where truth is elusive. And these ideals of intellectual virtue vary from one historical epoch to the next.

A corresponding sea-change occurred in the understanding of society and indeed in the very structure of social life, a transformation that Taylor calls the «Great Disembedding.» Beginning in the sixteenth century, the institutions and the rituals of a hierarchical community, its different orders united by their respective positions in God’s creation, gave way to the conviction that each person is responsible for his own conduct and tied to others by relations of mutual benefit. No longer defined by their rank and station, people now viewed their various roles as so many obstacles or opportunities to be tackled on the way to becoming themselves. Thus there arose the modern idea of the individual, self-directed and encountering society from without, the sort of protagonist we begin to meet in such early novels as Moll Flanders and Tom Jones. Here again, even more clearly, the change cannot be understood as the recovery of what we have always been like, buried beneath the deceptions of religion. Modern individualism is an innovation, a disciplining of mind and body aimed at our becoming able to think for ourselves.

Such, according to Taylor, are the values that have created the new picture of nature and society characteristic of the modern mind. The processes of disengagement and disembedding have bleached away the sacred from the fabric of the world. They have left in its wake a framework of immanence, in which belief in God now appears optional, no longer essential to the understanding of life and reality. But this is only part of Taylor’s tale. A further dimension brings us to the moral of his story.

So little did our secular age take shape by casting off the illusions of religion, he continues, that its sources lie in the very effort to live up to the ideals that the age of faith espoused. Long before the Protestant Reformation, beginning already in the eleventh century, Western Christianity grew increasingly dissatisfied with the institutions and the practices that it had acquired over the years. In a number of ways, the church found itself caught up in the same basic conflict: it preached a religion of individual salvation, addressed to all and invoking a transcendent God, but it had compromised these essential tenets by allowing the masses of the faithful to go on living in habits of mind typical of the pagan world that the Christian faith was supposed to have overthrown.

As a result, medieval Christendom became imbued with the spirit of reform. Aiming to bring the lives of all into line with true Christian doctrine, it attacked magical views of nature as idolatrous and rejected conformity to custom in favor of personal devotion. Not only the radical Lollards and Hussites, but a host of movements operating within the bosom of the Church–the Franciscans, for instance, or the Brethren of the Common Life, inspired by Thomas à Kempis’s manual The Imitation of Christ–all sought in their different ways to narrow the gap between elite and laity, between the asceticism of the monastic orders and the superstitions of ordinary priests and believers. In place of the veneration of saints and relics, worship was refocused on developing a proper awe before God’s majesty. Miracle-mongering was reined in, and pagan rites such as dancing around the maypole were discouraged. More and more the principle gained ground that the routines of everyday life are a domain in which everyone, whatever his place in society, is able to practice the virtues of the Gospel.

Modern secularism, in Taylor’s account, has its roots in this centuries-long effort to make the Christian faith a reality for all, not in the dawning realization that God is an illusion. The new attitude toward the world characteristic of modern science, reducing all of nature to matter in motion, would not have taken hold without the religious significance that it seemed then to embody. In banning from creation every trace of magical power and natural purpose, it glorified God’s supremacy, and promised man the means to master the environment so as to be better able to do God’s work. So too, the individualist ethic of self-discipline and personal responsibility began as the pursuit of godliness, commanding each person to stand back from the ways of the world, take his own life in hand, and make himself into the servant of the divine will.

«The irony,» Taylor notes, is that the «rage for order» and the investment of everyday life with a new significance and solidity, «so much the fruit of devotion and faith, prepare[d] the ground for an escape from faith, into a purely immanent world.» But this irony is not a cause for dejection. It is the peg on which Taylor hangs his deeply apologetic project. Bringing out the Christian sources of our secular age is meant to show that secularism does not really close off the possibility of faith. Science, Taylor declares, cannot refute belief, because science rests on attitudes toward the world whose original rationale was religious in character. The same is true of modern individualism. It is possible to regard our autonomous conceptions of nature and society as sufficient unto themselves–to give them, as he likes to say, a «closed spin»; but we need not do so. We can also go for an «open spin» and regard them as part of a more encompassing spiritual reality. In Taylor’s view, «exclusive humanism» is an option, no more–just as belief itself has become one.

Moreover, he holds, there are good reasons to think that a life lived in strictly human terms, closed off to a deeper dimension, cannot prove satisfying in the end. Western culture has for several centuries now been racked by a distinctively modern malaise. «One can hear,» Taylor observes,

all sorts of complaints about «the present age» throughout history: that it is fickle, full of vice and disorder, lacking in greatness or high deeds, full of blasphemy and viciousness. But what you won’t hear at other times and places is one of the commonplaces of our day … that our age suffers from a threatened loss of meaning. This malaise is specific to a buffered identity, whose very invulnerability opens it to the danger that not just evil spirits, cosmic forces or gods won’t «get to» it, but that nothing significant will stand out for it.

We moderns tend to live at crosspurposes with ourselves. Committed to the values of rational control and individual fulfillment, we find it difficult to acknowledge, though we long for it all the same, some commanding vision of man’s place in the world that would show us the point of these ideals and serve as our ultimate object of allegiance. This inner division shows forth clearly in the poetry of the Romantic era, and ever since. Beauty is no longer thought to be part of nature in itself, awaiting imitation by the poet. It has to be revealed through the work of the imagination. But the imagination being creative as well as responsive, the deeper harmony with nature the poem evokes is no sooner glimpsed than it is lost or ironized, rendered «ontologically indeterminate,» Taylor says, as the objectifying stance of the modern mind reasserts its right to define what is real.

Wordsworth is Taylor’s prime example, and rightly so. In a famous passage of The Prelude he asserts that it was the imagination that revealed to him «the invisible world» beyond the brute reality of the Alps he was crossing:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home,
Is with infinitude–and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about
to be….

We cannot tell, and nor could he, whether this invisible world really exists independent of him or only within his mind. Its infinitude is precisely the inability to nail it down.

This posture of ambiguity is hard to maintain. It easily tips over into an aestheticism that substitutes art for the world, and practices art for art’s sake, as in Pater or Mallarmé. But it can also yield a different sort of resolution. Art can turn the suggestion of hidden depths into an epiphany of the divine, pushing beyond the bounds of immanence to an affirmation of God’s presence in creation, as in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur
of God.
It will flame out, like shining from
shook foil.

Taylor’s sympathies lie clearly in this direction–not with aestheticism, but not with ambiguity either. Hopkins is the poetic hero of his book, the center of the last chapter, aptly titled «Conversions.»

Commitment, not hesitation, is the language that Taylor prefers. The crucial question for him is whether to take the immanent frame as closed or open. Either way, he contends, we rely on a «leap of faith … [an] over-all sense of things that anticipates or leaps ahead of the reasons we can muster for it.» Taylor shows little patience with vacillation. That would be failing to heed those intimations of a deeper transcendent reality that we feel when we are moved in every fiber of our being by the power of the good or by the beauty in the world. «Can you really give ontological space for these features short of admitting what you still want to deny, for instance, some reference to the transcendent, or to a larger cosmic force, or whatever?»

Taylor’s answer is no. And there is no «whatever» about it. It is, he says ecumenically, «the God of Abraham» we are then encountering. Even those who cleave unhesitatingly to the immanent frame, provided that they too experience moments of «fullness,» are responding to the reality that is God. They are simply «misrecognizing» it. At times, demurely, he calls this a «theistic hunch. » But for Taylor it is not really a hunch at all. It is a guiding conviction.

II.

Plainly, A Secular Age is an extremely ambitious book. But how convincing is its story about the origins of our world? How persuasive is its claim that religious faith provides the best answer to the many cross pressures of modernity? To readers familiar with the classics of modern social theory, Taylor’s historical account will sound familiar, almost banal. Though covering an immense array of figures, texts, and cultural movements, it follows closely in the footsteps of the theory of secularization pioneered by Max Weber at the beginning of the last century. For Weber too, our secular world was the unintended consequence of religious forces aiming to practice a purer Christianity. Moreover, the «disengagement» and «disembedding» in which this dialectic, according to Taylor, played itself out, are none other than the processes that Weber famously described as «the disenchantment of the world» and the triumph of «the Protestant ethic.»

True, there are some differences. Instead of tracing, like Taylor, a continuity between the Reformation and the reform movements of medieval Christianity, Weber located a decisive turning point in the «innerworldly asceticism» of the early Protestant sects. And indeed, did not the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witness a dramatic rupture with the age of faith that had come before? Weber did not deny that the Reformation sprang from the tensions inhabiting the medieval compromise between a monotheistic Gospel and a semi-pagan devotion to miracles and saints. In fact, the term by which Taylor refers to this mix, «the unstable post-Axial equilibrium» which provided a constant impetus for reform, derives from Karl Jaspers, who was Weber’s disciple. Jaspers’s theory of the «Axial Age,» or the last millennium B.C.E., when universalist and rationalizing religions arose to challenge the cult of magic and the worship of local gods, drew upon the grand themes of Weber’s sociology of religion expounded in his monumental Economy and Society. So to a certain extent, this first difference is one of emphasis–Weber stressing the Reformation’s break with the past, Taylor the medieval background that made it possible. No doubt the difference has something to do with the fact that Weber was a lapsed Protestant and Taylor is an ardent Catholic.