A Secular Age

Charles Taylor

• Editorial: Belknap Press
• Año: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780674976221
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy of Religion

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Tablet Best Book of the Year
Winner of a Christianity Today Book Award "One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society."
— The Economist What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we—in the West, at least—largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean—of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion—although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined—but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.
What this means for the world—including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence—is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

PART I

The Work of Reform

1 The Bulwarks of Belief

1

One way to put the question that I want to answer here is this: why 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?

Part of the answer, no doubt, is that in those days everyone believed, and so the alternatives seemed outlandish. But this just pushes the question further back. We need to understand how things changed. How did the alternatives become thinkable?

One important part of the picture is that so many features of their world told in favour of belief, made the presence of God seemingly undeniable. I will mention three, which will play a part in the story I want to tell.

(1) The natural world they lived in, which had its place in the cosmos they imagined, testified to divine purpose and action; and not just in the obvious way which we can still understand and (at least many of us) appreciate today, that its order and design bespeaks creation; but also because the great events in this natural order, storms, droughts, floods, plagues, as well as years of exceptional fertility and flourishing, were seen as acts of God, as the now dead metaphor of our legal language still bears witness.

(2) God was also implicated in the very existence of society (but not described as such—this is a modern term—rather as polis, kingdom, church, or whatever). A kingdom could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than mere human action in secular time. And beyond that, the life of the various associations which made up society, parishes, boroughs, guilds, and so on, were interwoven with ritual and worship, as I mentioned in the previous chapter. One could not but encounter God everywhere.

(3) People lived in an “enchanted” world. This is perhaps not the best expression; it seems to evoke light and fairies. But I am invoking here its negation, Weber’s expression “disenchantment” as a description of our modern condition. This term has achieved such wide currency in our discussion of these matters, that I’m going to use its antonym to describe a crucial feature of the pre-modern condition. The enchanted world in this sense is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in.

People who live in this kind of world don’t necessarily believe in God, certainly not in the God of Abraham, as the existence of countless “pagan” societies shows. But in the outlook of European peasants in 1500, beyond all the inevitable ambivalences, the Christian God was the ultimate guarantee that good would triumph or at least hold the plentiful forces of darkness at bay.

Atheism comes close to being inconceivable in a world with these three features. It just seems so obvious that God is there, acting in the cosmos, founding and sustaining societies, acting as a bulwark against evil. So part of the answer to my opening question, what happened between 1500 and 2000? is that these three features have vanished.

But that can’t be the whole story, as I argued in the previous chapter. The rise of modernity isn’t just a story of loss, of subtraction. The key difference we’re looking at between our two marker dates is a shift in the understanding of what I called “fullness”, between a condition in which our highest spiritual and moral aspirations point us inescapably to God, one might say, make no sense without God, to one in which they can be related to a host of different sources, and frequently are referred to sources which deny God. Now the disappearance of these three modes of God’s felt presence in our world, while it certainly facilitates this change, couldn’t by itself bring it about. Because we can certainly go on experiencing fullness as a gift from God, even in a disenchanted world, a secular society, and a post-cosmic universe. In order to be able not to, we needed an alternative.

And so the story I have to tell will relate not only how God’s presence receded in these three dimensions; it also has to explain how something other than God could become the necessary objective pole of moral or spiritual aspiration, of “fullness”. In a sense, the big question of what happened is, how did alternatives to the God-reference of fullness arise? What I’ll be concerned with is the Entstehungsgeschichte of exclusive humanism.

A common “subtraction” story attributes everything to disenchantment. First, science gave us “naturalistic” explanation of the world. And then people began to look for alternatives to God. But things didn’t work that way. The new mechanistic science of the seventeenth century wasn’t seen as necessarily threatening to God. It was to the enchanted universe and magic. It also began to pose a problem for particular providences. But there were important Christian motives for going the route of disenchantment. Darwin was not even on the horizon in the eighteenth century.

Then, of course, society comes to be seen in secular terms. People make revolutions. In certain cases, this involved rebelling against churches. But it could be in the name of other church structures, as in the 1640s, and with a strong sense of Providence guiding us.

A fuller subtraction story holds that not just disenchantment, but the fading of God’s presence in all three domains made us look afresh at the alternative possible reference-points for fullness. As though these were already there, just waiting to be invited in.

My point is that, in an important sense, they weren’t yet there. True, there were various doctrines, which some people had imagined, even which orthodox writers had inveighed against; in some cases, which ancient authors had spelled out. But these weren’t yet really available alternatives. I mean alternative construals of fullness which could really make sense to people, outside of a few very original spirits.

Negatively, it was very hard to see how an exclusive humanism could fill this role, as long as people had an enchanted view of the universe; that is, saw us human beings as in a field of spirits, some of whom were malign. In this respect, of course, science in helping to disenchant the universe, contributed to opening the way for exclusive humanism. A crucial condition for this was a new sense of the self and its place in the cosmos: not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers, but what I want to call “buffered”. But it took more than disenchantment to produce the buffered self; it was also necessary to have confidence in our own powers of moral ordering.

But surely, the resources for that were available, in the non-theistic ethics of the pagan ancient world? Only very partially, I believe. First, some of those views also placed us in a larger spiritual or cosmic order. Platonism, Stoicism, for instance. True, they had no necessary truck with magic and wood spirits, but they resisted disenchantment and the mechanistic universe in their own ways. They were not really exclusive humanisms in my sense. I would argue this even for Aristotle, because of the important role for contemplation of a larger order as something divine in us.

Where an exclusive humanism was undoubtedly available was in Epicureanism. And it is no surprise that Lucretius was one of the inspirations for explorations in the direction of naturalism, e.g., with Hume. But Epicureanism just as it was couldn’t really do the trick. It could teach us to achieve ataraxia by overcoming our illusions about the Gods. But this wasn’t what was needed for a humanism which could flourish in the modern context. For this was becoming one in which the power to create moral order in one’s life had a rather different shape. It had to include the active capacity to shape and fashion our world, natural and social; and it had to be actuated by some drive to human beneficence. To put this second requirement in a way which refers back to the religious tradition, modern humanism, in addition to being activist and interventionist, had to produce some substitute for agape.

All this means that an acceptable form of exclusive humanism had to be imagined. And this couldn’t be done overnight. Nor could it arise in one leap, but it came to be in a series of phases, emerging out of earlier Christian forms. This is the story I’m going to try to tell.

As of the late nineteenth century, indeed, we have fully-formed alternatives which are there before us. And people can be influenced towards one or the other, partly in terms of their views of science—even though, as I shall argue, here too, a crucial role is still played by their moral ontologies. But today, for instance, when a naturalistic materialism is not only on offer, but presents itself as the only view compatible with the most prestigious institution of the modern world, viz., science; it is quite conceivable that one’s doubts about one’s own faith, about one’s ability to be transformed, or one’s sense of how one’s own faith is indeed, childish and inadequate, could mesh with this powerful ideology, and send one off along the path of unbelief, even though with regret and nostalgia. But it is wildly anachronistic to project this very familiar scenario of Victorian times, or today, onto earlier centuries, when the rival outlooks between which we hesitate today were still being forged.

2

My opening question stated a contrast, between the conditions of belief in 1500 and 2000. And then I talked about the story I want to tell to clarify this contrast. But why tell a story? Why not just extract the analytic contrast, state what things were like then, and how they are now, and let the linking narrative go? Who needs all this detail, this history? Haven’t I already made a satisfactory start on such an analytic contrast in identifying the three ways of God’s presence then which have faded by now?

Now in a way, the ultimate goal is to arrive at such a contrast, or at least to get into focus our situation in 2000 by means of such a comparative description. But I don’t think it can properly be done if one tries to elide the history. I hope the reasons for this will become clearer and more convincing as I proceed. But just to give the general shape of them here: it is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predicament that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition. Thus we are widely aware of living in a “disenchanted” universe; and our use of this word bespeaks our sense that it was once enchanted. More, we are not only aware that it used to be so, but also that it was a struggle and an achievement to get to where we are; and that in some respects this achievement is fragile. We know this because each one of us as we grew up has had to take on the disciplines of disenchantment, and we regularly reproach each other for our failings in this regard, and accuse each other of “magical” thinking, of indulging in “myth”, of giving way to “fantasy”; we say that X isn’t living in our century, that Y has a “mediaeval” mind, while Z, whom we admire, is way ahead of her time.

In other words, our sense of where we are is crucially defined in part by a story of how we got there. In that sense, there is an inescapable (though often negative) God-reference in the very nature of our secular age. And just because we describe where we are in relating the journey, we can misdescribe it grievously by misidentifying the itinerary. This is what the “subtraction” accounts of modernity have in fact done. To get straight where we are, we have to go back and tell the story properly.

Our past is sedimented in our present, and we are doomed to misidentify ourselves, as long as we can’t do justice to where we come from. This is why the narrative is not an optional extra, why I believe that I have to tell a story here.

That enlarges the task, potentially without limit. The story of what happened in the secularization of Western Christendom is so broad, and so multi-faceted, that one could write several books this length and still not do justice to it. This is the more so, in that my chosen area, Latin Christendom, is not homogeneous. As we will see below, there is more than one path here, and different nations and regions have trodden their own way at different speeds and times. I can only give the barest bones of the story, and touch on some of the major transitions. My hope is that a general picture of the dynamic involved will emerge from this skeleton account. But some such diachronic account is indispensable.

3

Telling the story can’t be elided; but it isn’t sufficient of itself. In fact, the whole discussion has to tack back and forth between the analytical and the historical. And at this point I want to start by laying out some broad features of the contrast between then and now, which will be filled in and enriched by the story. They fall in the range of the three big negative changes I alluded to above, but I’ll be proceeding from last to first, and in fact I want to mention five changes.

The first is disenchantment, the undoing of obstacle 3 above to unbelief (I). Then entering the terrain of obstacle 2 (II), I want also to look at the way in which earlier society held certain profound tensions in equilibrium (III). This in turn was linked to a common understanding of time, which has since been done away with (IV). And lastly, I want to deal with the erosion of obstacle 1, in the way in which the old idea of cosmos has been replaced by the modern neutral universe (V).

I. Let me start with the enchanted world, the world of spirits, demons, moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged. The process of disenchantment is the disappearance of this world, and the substitution of what we live today: a world in which the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spiritual élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are those of humans (grosso modo, with apologies to possible Martians or extra-terrestrials); and minds are bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, etc., are situated “within” them.

This space within is constituted by the possibility of introspective self-awareness. This doesn’t mean that everything within is capable of being brought to this awareness. The possibility remains that some things “in the mind” are so deep, and perhaps hidden (repressed), that we can never bring them to consciousness. But these belong to this inner space, because they lie beyond and help shape the things we can grasp introspectively; as the things just beyond the horizon we see have their place in the world of the visible, even though we may never be able to go there to witness them. The “inward” in this sense is constituted by what I have called “radical reflexivity”.¹

What I am trying to describe here is not a theory. Rather my target is our contemporary lived understanding; that is, the way we naïvely take things to be. We might say: the construal we just live in, without ever being aware of it as a construal, or—for most of us—without ever even formulating it. This means that I am not taking on board the various philosophical theories which have been offered to explain and articulate the “mind” and its relation to the “body”. I am not attributing to our lived understanding some kind of Cartesian dualism, or its monist materialist rivals, identity theory, or whatever; or even a more sophisticated and adequate theory of embodied agency. I am trying to capture the level of understanding prior to philosophical puzzlement. And while this modern understanding of the mind certainly opens itself to Cartesian type theories in a way that the earlier “enchanted” understanding does not, it isn’t itself such a theory. Put another way, the modern idea of mind makes something like the “mind-body problem” conceivable, indeed, in a way inescapable, where on the earlier understanding it didn’t really make sense. But by itself it doesn’t offer an answer to that problem.

I am interested in the naïve understanding, because my claim will be that a fundamental shift has occurred in naïve understanding in the move to disenchantment. This is unlike what I said above on the issue of the existence of God and other spiritual creatures. There we have moved from a naïve acceptance of their reality, to a sense that either to affirm or deny them is to enter a disputed terrain; there are no more naïve theists, just as there are no naïve atheists. But underlying this change is the one I am now talking about in our sense of our world, from one in which these spirits were just unproblematically there, impinging on us, to one in which they are no longer so, and indeed, in which many of the ways they were there have become inconceivable. Their not so impinging is what we experience naïvely.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we experience them naïvely as being non-existent. The scope of the negative operator is broad here. We do not (no longer...