Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" - A Review

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007), hereafter noted as SA, with almost 800 pages of written text, is an ambitious undertaking for any intrepid reviewer, or author, but my task here is not only to convey some understanding to a broader audience, but also to contextualize the author and argument – and to offer possible critique where some may be missing. Anyone wanting to read Taylor in the original, without attempting his magnum opus should consider purchasing (at about the same cost, mind you) Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard, 2010), hereafter referred to as VSSA, a series of articles edited by Warner, Vanantwerpen and Calhoun. With a titular turning on William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, VSSA critiques and expands on dimensions of A Secular Age and concludes with Taylor’s own significantly succinct Afterword “Apologia pro Libro Suo,” a worthwhile summary and the best around, counting at about 21 pages.

While A Secular Age has a strong philosophical and historical bent, it is largely written in colloquial English, but the numerous and widespread intellectual references and ideas could make the work a difficult read for a general audience, plus the book is not as concise as it could be. This loquaciousness puts sometimes him the same league as fellow Canadians John Ralston Saul and Donald Savoie, only Taylor almost always has something stimulating to say, and for this reader, at least, there were many pleasant cranial explosions along the way, all gratefully received.

Taylor outlines his thesis in A Secular Age on page 3: “the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even among the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.” Taylor slowly travels through each century, beginning around 1500, explaining the development of secularism as an historical phase, and this composes the first half of the book, amounting to a fascinating intellectual history of growing European “disenchantment”, a central theme and term borrowed from the German sociologist, Max Weber.

According to Jon Butler in VSSA this section attracted little attention from early reviewers: “A Secular Age glosses so many different and possible explanations for secularity so discursively that it would be nearly impossible to say that Taylor has missed something important, though his reader may have.” [VSSA, 197] Butler goes on to say, and here I agree, “Taylor is at enormous pains to dissect the complicated nature of both belief and unbelief before and after 1500.” [VSSA, 199] Indeed, this very early section of A Secular Age is extremely laboured, even painful, especially when Taylor goes to great lengths to discuss changing conceptions of death [SA 61-84, approximately], but there is clearly no mention of anything like the Bubonic Plague, or Black Death, which ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. Estimates vary, but up to 20 million people, approximately one third of Europe’s population, perished. Given that no one knew why so many were dying en masse, and that even priests were running away from admitting last rites, there is no wonder we see an early weakening of religion. So we see the dangers of philosophy literally glossing over history, but otherwise Taylor (true to his Oxford mentor, Sir Isaiah Berlin) does succeed in the “historicity of our contemporary options, about the sedimentation of the past in the present.” [SA 268]

Taylor’s omission of the Black Death helps explain his use and development of the concept of the “buffered self” as “the agent who no longer fears demons, spirits, magic forces.” [SA 135] It is a “disengaged, disciplined stance to self and society” which one finds in the development of manners, for example, and it is central to modernity and secularity. [SA 136] In turn it has the reverse effect of allowing for “the greater intensity of intimate relations” within for example the family.[SA 140] “But in general, we relate to the world as more disembodied beings than our ancestors” [SA 141] Briefly speaking, it contributes to the “great disembedding” (to coin a term, perhaps) of us from the “social sacred” – especially by Christianity, for “God so loved the world.” (John 3.16) [SA 157,158] This can be found in our “social imaginaries” which speak of freedom and mutual benefit (Locke, especially), and the rise of "humanism” which can be considered rather typical of Enlightenment thinkers, bordering on paganism (Diderot and Kant, perhaps, and before them Bayle and Spinoza). Christianity is sanitized “but it doesn’t quite know what to do with suffering”; aristocratic heroism wanes, and all (referring to not just a few, but “all”) we may do is wrestle with the tattered remains of a (secular) honour code. In any event Taylor reveals a sense of Romanticism, resonating with Herder’s central notion of “humanity as the orchestra.” [SA 318; VSSA 320]

The second half of A Secular Age is less historical, more analytical. Of particular interest is his treatment of the “Age of Authenticity”: I mean the understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late-eighteenth century, 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, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority. [SA 475] Taylor makes an interesting connection between this expressivism, the rise of “choice” and the growth of consumer culture where “commodities become vehicles of individual expression, even the self-definition of identity.” [SA 483] Not because of the scientific "facts" themselves, but because of autonomous and geometric reason (starting with Hobbes and Descartes) pushed by science, our materialism has united with a moral perspective that results in "exclusive humanism" which is atheistic. [SA 569]

In his Chapter “Religion Today” Taylor writes with delicious irony: “Some great realizations of collective life are lost, but other facets of our predicament in our relation to God come to the fore; for instance what Isaiah meant when he talked of a “hidden God”. In the seventeenth century you had to be Pascal to appreciate that. Now we live it daily.” [SA 531,532] Here we also see that A Secular Age is primarily concerned with (as one reviewer called it) "elite discourse" (when I thought it was philosophy). [VSSA 187] Nonetheless, there are only a few nods to social historians, notably Natalie Zemon Davis, probably the only female writer mentioned in the book, author of The Return of Martin Guerre.

But Taylor is not alone in arguing that secularism belongs to a general period of “modern” history, that we now belong in a post-secular age. The eminent German thinker Habermas, long the exponent of Enlightenment rationalism, has recently given up on “methodological atheism” [VSSA 50]. Taylor also offers sacrificial crumbs for George Bush (the lesser) and his “crusade” in Afghanistan, along with identifying with Obama’s message of “Hope” [VSSA 84]. More importantly, Taylor resembles a modern-day St. Augustine whose own classic City of God was written after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410 - a shock to the Roman Empire and its classical consciousness. It is worth pointing out that Taylor makes explicit references to Augustine and what he calls “the hyper-Augustinian juridical-penal framework,” in other words the Christian notions of original sin and atonement [SA 651]. Broadly speaking A Secular Age can be seen as a cathartic and “spirited” response following the attack on New York’s World Trade Towers on 11 September 2001, or even as an answer to the relative decline of the West. Today Augustine, too, is very much in fashion, especially as the world’s economy shifts toward the engine of China, where (the Jewish thinker) Spinoza’s groundbreaking “atheism” and secularism go well with so-called neo-Confucianism, a topic Taylor ignores or does not anticipate.

Nonetheless Taylor is well prepared. His own doctoral research was on Hegel (fixed as he was on the “world historical” figure of Napoleon) who in turn had strong affiliations with Augustine’s thinking. Both Hegel and Augustine rely on theories of mediation. (See also Religion, Politics and Law (Brill, 2008), 71-96 – or just read City of God). For Augustine, the Church mediates between “the city of man” and “the city of God,” and so knowledge of God brings mediation, as Augustine “Christianizes” Cicero and the classical tradition of the middle and the balanced sense of virtue, or Horace’s “golden mean.” (John Ralston Saul please take note). [cf. VSSA 275]

Moreover, Augustine talks of the value of “the opposition of contraries” and the “antithesis” which feed well into Hegel’s own Trinitarian doctrine of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Augustine begins this Trinitarianism (with Hebraic antecedents) where God is considered the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and we find it reproduced throughout history in the West: for example, Montesquieu’s tri-fold division of government as the legislative, executive and judicial in The Spirit of the Laws (1748); the American “life, liberty, and happiness”; the French Revolution’s “liberty, equality, fraternity” (mindful of the constitution of 1789 which was more conservative and liberal than that of 1793); and Canada’s “peace, order and good government.” We also find it in Auguste Comte’s positivism and his “law of three stages,” his spiritual calling on Industrialists, perhaps a French complement to Hegel in the mid-nineteenth century.

Trinitarianism lends itself to ”middle way” thinking – and is at the root of much Western self-reflective, or even self-critical, culture, also expressed by Augustine’s Confessions, a work which in turn was anticipated by Greek classical thinking and Socrates’ dictum: “Know thyself”. In other words, there are reasons for the appearance of democracy first in the Judeo-Christian West, and we can find it expressed in Canada (“a country nourished on self-doubt,” according to Al Purdy) but it is also in Augustine, who made his way into our secular political culture with the Constitution Act of 1867. So while our culture is either secular or post-secular, it could be argued that (Judeo) Christianity’s greatest offspring is democracy, and Taylor himself raises the point when he identifies the “welfare state” as implicitly Christian. The question is, however, as we move away from the welfare state ... whither Christianity? And whither our democracy?

But there is another reason why Taylor refers to Augustine. He asks the profound question in his Confessions: “What, then, is time?” (Book XI, 14) It is actually the French (Protestant) philosopher Paul Ricoeur, in Volume One of his magisterial three-part series Time and Narrative (Chicago, 1984), who dissects Augustine’s notions of time. Ricoeur translates Augustine as: “How can time exist if the past is no longer, if the future is not yet, and if the present is not always?” (Time and Narrative, 7) Ricoeur’s thesis is that Augustine holds to a “threefold present” – the trinity of the past, present and future live in the present. Perhaps I digress, and here it is best to consult Augustine directly in order to gain an understanding of Taylor’s own thinking:

Nevertheless, O Lord, we are aware of periods of time. We compare them one with another and say that some are longer and others shorter, and the result of our calculations tells us that it is twice or three times the length of the one which we take as the unit of measurement, or that two are of equal duration. If we measure them by our own awareness of time, we must do so while it is passing, for no one can measure it when it is past and no longer exists, or when it is future and does not yet exist – that is, unless he is bold enough to claim that what does not exist can be measured. The conclusion is that we can be aware of time and measure it only while it is passing. Once it has passed it no longer is, and therefore cannot be measured. (Confessions XI,16)

Augustine’s conclusion is: ”we can only be aware of time and measure it only while it is passing,” and it is this deep sense of something passing that seems to have moved Taylor to write A Secular Age. In other words, time is not homogenous. It cannot be secularized (despite the best attempts of the French Revolutionaries, who resorted to Terror). At the end of the nineteenth century three figures – Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust (a little later) – all tried to come to terms with the passage of time, its “inner” and “outer” duration (and here I simplify for the sake of brevity). Things are “never still.” Ever since Huysmans “decadent” novel A Rebours [Against Nature] (1884) the general public’s reading of Cicero (who had a significant influence on Augustine) went into steep decline, putting an end to the classical tradition of moderation, paving the way for twentieth-century extremism (and the revenge of Caesars, so-to-speak). By invoking Augustine at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Taylor is not only reliving an apparent loss of hegemony, but summoning the rather athletic memory of the Christian tradition, along with it an exceptional conversion experience and its great soul seeking – and the Trinitarian legacy of mediation. The past is no guarantee for the future, but in promoting the memory of Augustine’s thought Taylor offers us some continuity - and perhaps guidance.