tayloring christianity (from first things dec. 2014)
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by Matthew RoseTRANSCRIPT
TAYLORING CHRISTIANITYCH ARL ES TAYL OR IS A TH EOL OGIAN OF TH E S ECUL AR S TATUS QUO
by Matthew RoseDecember 2014
W hy was it once virtually impossible not to believe in God, while today many
of us find this not only easy, but inescapable?” The question is Charles
Taylor’s, and his nine-hundred-page answer has arguably been the academic
event of the decade. Seven years after its publication, A Secular Age has done more than
reignite the debate over secularization and its religious roots. It offers to change the very
terms in which Christians profess belief.
One of the world’s leading philosophers, Taylor is known for the expansive breadth of
his interests in a discipline whose research programs have shriveled in scope. He has
written commandingly on German romanticism, ethics, hermeneutics, and the
philosophies of mind and action, and has done so in a relaxed style that draws smoothly
on literature and history.
Taylor has done little to disguise his religiosity, something that also sets him apart from
the philosophical establishment. He describes himself as a “believer” and “person of
faith” and without affecting embarrassment. A professed Catholic, he has made
occasional sorties into the Church’s intellectual life, quietly signaling his sympathies for
liberal movements in theology. Following the publication of Sources of the Self in 1989, abook that credited Augustine with inventing inner selfhood, Taylor’s writings took a
soft theological turn. A Secular Age is the kind of work readers probably should have
seen coming.
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seen coming.
Monumental in scope, heroic in ambition, and serenely neglectful of scholarly
conventions, the book is in no way a spiritual autobiography. It is something more
revealing—an invitation to experience, by way of historical epic, the emergence of a
modern Christian spirituality and its fraught relationship with unbelief. Taylor has been
both celebrated and faulted for authoring an apology for Christianity. I regret to say he
has done nothing of the sort. Although the advocacy is indirect and the theology
implied, Taylor instead encourages readers to embrace a modern mode of faith that
accommodates itself to contemporary culture.
A Secular Age has been read as a sweeping account of the Christian past, when it is in fact
a very parochial book about the Catholic future. I think it fair to say that itaspires to be
for a coming generation of liberals what Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue was for a
previous generation of conservatives. Neither are simply histories of the origins of
modern moral identities; they are scripts for how those identities ought to be enacted
today. They are opposing charters, if you will, for Catholic communities in a post-
Christian age.
acIntyre famously petitioned for another St. Benedict to found communities
of virtue capable of withstanding secular erosion. Taylor intends to
demonstrate the impossibility of the Benedict Option by showing the
impossibility of being other than secular.
Taylor made his name with Hegel, a major book reintroducing its subject to English-
language scholars in 1975. His debts to Hegel are apparent in his notion that the history of
Western thought is sedimented into our experience of the present. The past remains
active because our historical consciousness is shaped by the concepts and thought-forms
inherited from earlier modes of human experience.
This conviction about how the past informs contemporary life guides the method and
content of A Secular Age. It involves Taylor in a careful description of the contents of
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content of A Secular Age. It involves Taylor in a careful description of the contents of
our experience. He wants to bring into focus the “background conditions” that frame
our knowledge but usually escape notice. Most of us think we are aware of what most
matters to us and that we formulate those concerns into explicit beliefs. Taylor maintains
that this overlooks the hidden judgments, motives, and feelings that size up our world
before we conceptualize it. These, he believes, have shifted.
The mark of a secular society is that believers can no longer enjoy a “simple” or “naïve”
faith. The “conditions of belief” have changed such that Western Christians are now
unable to believe without reservations, without uneasily looking over their shoulders.
The honest believer must concede, “I am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all
doubt, untroubled by some objection—by some experience which won’t fit.” In sum:
Secularism means that our Christian experience is now shaped by a lurking uncertainty.
To be secular is therefore neither to deny the existence of God nor to affirm the triumph
of science over religion. This view wrongly supposes that secularization is marked by the
substitution of one set of beliefs for another—in this case, new rational or scientific ones
for the old religious beliefs that dominated in the past. The most influential version of
this theory was articulated by Max Weber, who held that religious prejudices wither as
intellectual maturity develops, a process he named “disenchantment.”
he problem with this view is that it is an inaccurate description of our
experience. Our culture has experienced a fundamental shift, and in that sense
Taylor agrees that we live in a quite different thought-world from those of
previous centuries. But the important change is not what we believe—there are indeed
many religious believers in secular societies—but how. To be secular is to be a participant
in a society that makes uncritical belief in God nearly impossible.
Taylor’s claim is not simply that Christians must acknowledge pluralism. He means that
religious convictions themselves have been inwardly “destabilized.” Even if we regard
our faith as firm, we know that it is considered implausible, even irrational, by rival
perspectives that we know to be credible. Perhaps we have read Freud and his view of
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perspectives that we know to be credible. Perhaps we have read Freud and his view of
mono theism as the cultural residue of an Oedipal drama. We don’t have to agree with
Freud for his pyschosocial categories to become a part of our religious self--
consciousness. The same is true of other religions, if we learn about them. None of this
necessarily weakens faith, but it does layer our religious identities with competing
perspectives.
Hence the “titanic change” of secularism: “We have changed . . . from a condition where
most people lived ‘naïvely’ in a [Christian outlook], . . . to one in which almost no one is
capable of this.”
How did this transformation come to pass? What is it about our inherited modes of
thought and experience that opened up our religious convictions to competing
perspectives and thereby shifted the how of belief? Taylor’s answer: We are living in a
culture shaped by a history of unresolvable theological disagreement.
Others have argued that secular modernity is rooted in theological dispute, and indeed a
popular thesis maintains that bitter and deadly conflicts after the Reformation led
European intellectuals to seek a nonreligious basis for social consensus. Taylor’s account
is unusual, however, for the principal role played by Christian moral teachings. He
contends, provocatively, that secularism is a direct product of developments within
Christian ethics.
Taylor begins with the reforms of Hildebrand and the Fourth Lateran Council,
continues through the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and covers the rise of
Evangelicalism and Deism. As he sees it, what drove these movements was a shared moral
passion: the conviction that an ethically disciplined life is the vocation of all the faithful
rather than only a spiritual or clerical elite.
he success of these reforms, however, depended on a lowering of expectations.
Where Christians had once preserved a tension between the pursuit of
supernatural perfection and the promotion of worldly flourishing—
Tsupernatural perfection and the promotion of worldly flourishing—
distinguished as “perfect” and “imperfect” vocations—reformers wished to make
spiritual ideals more accessible. This led them to deemphasize the goal of divinization in
favor of habits of self-control, industry, and thrift.
Two things followed. First, Christianity became increasingly identified with a
bourgeois moral code. Taylor chronicles the ways in which Christianity was
transformed from a message of salvation into a bulwark of “civilization” and a guarantor
of social order. Second, the idea that God has intentions for human life infinitely
beyond worldly flourishing went into eclipse. For many, the answer to “What are God’s
purposes for us?” was simply “To preserve life, bring prosperity, and reduce suffering.”
The collapse of Christianity into a conventional ethics midwifed something new: the
ability to interpret the world nontheistically. As the goals for life became immanent,
Christians began asking if appeals to God were necessary to ground morality and pursue
human flourishing. Aren’t reason and natural human desires sufficient to motivate us to
preserve life, bring prosperity, and reduce suffering? In pressing these sorts of questions,
Taylor argues, Christians slowly cultivated the ability to conceive of themselves and the
natural world apart from divine purposes. Life without God became imaginable, and
some even wondered if Christian faith might be an obstacle to human well-being. The
idea of a Supreme Being who issues commandments and promises salvation needlessly
complicated utilitarian calculations. The self-undoing of Western Christianity had
effectively begun. Soon, all striving for something beyond human welfare—the pursuit
of holiness—came to be regarded by many as fanatical or absurd.
Where are we now? Taylor grants that modernity’s turn toward immanent goals
encouraged the development of new capacities, such as the ability to find deep meaning
in art and nature. But a world closed to transcendence cannot support our need for
“fullness.” As a result, nonbelievers also experience “cross pressures” of the sort that alter
the experience of religious believers. They are aware that their views are vulnerable to
intelligent critique, and not just from religious apologists but from figures like
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intelligent critique, and not just from religious apologists but from figures like
Nietzsche. Hence our common secular lot: “There are no more naïve theists, just as there
are no naïve atheists.”
ere we reach the Evangelical moment, ignored by many, for which the book’s
lengthy history is prelude. Although there is no escaping secularism, it does
remain open to “purified” forms of Christian thought and life. Taylor invites
those trapped within the “immanent frame” to consider the Christian “take” on death,
beauty, and moral obligation, experiences particularly open to theological illumination.
But his ambitions go beyond addressing nonbelievers, and considerably so.
A Secular Age encourages nothing less than the reform of Catholicism, whose message of
radical agapē, Taylor believes, has been long suppressed by dogmatic metaphysics.
Advancing this line of argument requires Taylor to challenge the classical theological
tradition, most notably its understanding of the relationship between speculative and
practical reason. Christian life has been impaired by a theoretical concern with certitude
and rational justification; its renewal, he maintains, can be found only through a
spirituality of transformative love.
Taylor supports this shift from dogma to love by stressing the modesty of properly
Christian claims to understanding. Secularity and Christianity are, in one sense,
mutually reinforcing. From the former we realize that our commitments are fragile,
biased, and defeasible. From the latter we find religious confirmation of this condition,
but also a way of avoiding nihilism: “I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief.” Taylor says
that Christians can be at home in a secular culture because they take a “leap of faith” that,
they admit, is not (nor could be) grounded in reason.
The strategy is not obviously objectionable. It bears a faint resemblance to Augustine’s
argument that all know ledge involves belief and trust, a reading strongly encouraged by
James K. A. Smith’s admiring primer, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.
But that is not Taylor’s move. Instead, he focuses on the “contingency” of both Christian
and non-Christian perspectives.
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and non-Christian perspectives.
To appreciate the difference between Taylor and Augustine, consider the very different
ways in which they express an awareness of human finitude.
aylor might say: “I am uncertain and sometimes even uneasy about my own
religious ‘construal.’ My doubts are only compounded when I realize how easily
I could see the world differently. I do have a sense of God’s reality—it seems a
compelling explanation of my personal experiences—but I’m not absolutely sure I’m
right, especially when I consider the ‘construals’ of non-Christians, some of which are
reasonable and which I could adopt without dramatically altering my life.”
Augustine might say: “I experience a world shot through with the mystery of existence.
In all that I know about the things of this world—how they come into and pass out of
being—I do not see any reason why they should be at all. So why are things so? If the
world seems undeniably good, it also seems undeniably unnecessary. There are things
that once were but are not now; there are things that are not now but will be; and there
are things that are not, but presumably could be. In face of this mystery, I conclude that
the existence of worldly things must be given to them from outside—from an absolutely
transcendent God.”
The two views appear to share a concern with the perplexing nature of contingency, the
fact that some things are, strictly speaking, metaphysically unnecessary. They are,
however, fundamentally opposed. The first locates it in our deepest beliefs and the second
in the world as such. The difference could scarcely be more significant, since
Catholicism’s signature philosophical achievement was to affirm the latter.
Which brings me to a remarkable fact about A Secular Age. It features generous and
often dazzling readings of virtually every Western philosophical tradition—except the
one it seeks to depose. That tradition is Christianity.
For thinkers working in this tradition, Augustine and Aquinas preeminent among them,
the fundamental philosophical problem was that of contingency—how and why
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the fundamental philosophical problem was that of contingency—how and why
anything exists at all, when it plainly need not. In the course of wrestling with this
question, Christian philosophy arrived at its great insight: that contingent beings
depend on a God whose very nature simply is to be. Its central theses, clarified over a
millennium of philosophic labor, comprised what Étienne Gilson called the “existential”
character of Christian theism. They included the demonstration that God does not
“have” existence but is himself the pure act of existence; that contingent things are not
identical with their existence and are sustained in being by God; and that to know the
nature of any finite thing is to know its likeness to its divine cause. These claims, and the
conception of rationality embedded within them, provided the metaphysical
infrastructure of Catholic Christianity, whose intellectual history is unintelligible apart
from it.
aylor discards this tradition, arguing that it misconceives God as an object of
speculative knowledge. He makes superficial criticisms of scholasticism and
neo-Thomism, as well as of its papal supporters. This is of no moment, however,
since his conclusions about the tradition of philosophical reflection in the Christian
West are foreordained. He claims that Christianity, as a historical reality, wrought a
transformation not in our speculative life but in our practical life. His goal, accordingly,
is to reorient Christian faith around what he calls, in possibly the most important phrase
of the book, “the practical primacy of life.”
Taylor’s theology sees human life in terms of “practices,” a concept that aims to capture
something richer than mere behavior. The basic idea is that our relationship to the world
is not theoretical, not something that arises from our capacities for rational insight and
argument. Instead, it is one of involvement and concern. The primacy he gives to the
practical is not without warrant. The New Testament is not a primer in philosophy, and
he is surely right that our concerns—our loves—often exercise greater power than our
ideas. As Augustine observed, love is our weight. However, Taylor’s rejection of the
speculative dimension of Christian thought is consequential in ways he does not
acknowledge.
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Historically, Catholicism has made use of philosophical traditions like Platonism and
Aristotelianism that emphasize our unique capacity for theoretical knowledge. This was
no accident of history, as some allege, but rather an attempt to understand how we are
ordered to a God who is truth itself. Taylor effectively denies that human perfection is
found in knowledge of God. He instead claims that we are drawn to communion with
God through transformative experiences of value and beauty. And this anthropology
requires him to reinterpret the nature of religious belief.
or those who know the modern theological tradition, Taylor is covering
recognizable ground. In ways that echo Albrecht Ritschl, a nineteenth-century
German liberal theologian who systematically turned Christian truth claims into
statements about value judgments, Taylor argues that Christian faith is a unique kind of
activity: a way of being-in-the-world that embodies an experience of divine love. “God’s
intervention in history, and in particular the Incarnation, was intended to transform us,
through making us partakers of the communion which God already is and lives.”
This Christology hovers vaguely on the margins of the book, but it frames Taylor’s
arguments at every point. He seems to mean that Jesus brought into human history
something so mysteriously transcendent that it cannot be expressed in a philosophical
system, formulated into a doctrine, or transmitted by an ecclesial authority.
Taylor is right to emphasize God’s transcendence and the human intellect’s natural
incapacity to know God in himself. The peace of God in Christ passes all understanding.
But whereas the classical Christian tradition sees the mystery of God as transcending our
capacity for theoretical know ledge, Taylor sees this mystery as other than and in an
important sense opposed to understanding. Jesus inspired his followers to read all of
reality through the “mood” of agapē. To be a Christian is to exist in this fundamentally
altered awareness, a revolution in human consciousness that leads believers to regard
Jesus as God’s presence in history. A traditional focus on theological truth claims
wrongly confuses the how of faith with the what of belief.
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wrongly confuses the how of faith with the what of belief.
This sharp distinction between how and what Christians believe plays a central role in
Taylor’s thought. In an obvious way, it allows him to harmonize secularism with
Christianity: Both are modes of belief, not conflicting systems of belief. It also guides
Taylor in his reform of Catholic practice.
hose who adopt a “modern Christian consciousness” will reject doctrines that
“deny what is essential to our humanity.” Taylor’s doctrinal proposals are
undeveloped, but for those familiar with the modern theological project their
outlines are predictable. He mentions the penal theory of atonement, the existence of
hell, divine wrath, and traditional teachings on human sexuality as ideas offensive to
modern believers. Where does Taylor get theological criteria so casually
anthropocentric? It would seem from Enlightenment critiques of dogmatic religion,
which claim to help us see through outmoded images of divine authority. As he remarks,
“God is slowly educating mankind, slowly turning it, transforming it from within.”
A reader cannot help but wonder why Taylor hesitates to engage theology openly. ASecular Age contains almost no discussion of theologians like Bonhoeffer, Bultmann,
and Tillich, who thought deeply about secularization. Indeed, the latter two make
arguments about the positive ways in which modernity purifies faith that are quite
similar to Taylor’s. Curiously, the book contains little explicit theology at all, which is
breathtaking given the ambition of its claims.
Although there are nods to Henri de Lubac in the epilogue, it is unclear to what degree
Taylor realizes he is traveling a well-worn theological path. In the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, many theologians set faith against dogma and love against doctrine.
Taylor often identifies himself as an heir of the Romantic tradition, and there is
considerable truth in that, but he also fits comfortably among Catholic modernists, who
argued that the special conditions of modern life render premodern theology obsolete.
It is instructive to notice how many of Taylor’s positions are addressed in Pius X’s 1907
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It is instructive to notice how many of Taylor’s positions are addressed in Pius X’s 1907
encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, written to alert Catholics to “the most pernicious of
all the adversaries of the Church.” The adversary was not a person, but a philosophical
mindset. It held that philosophy must be “agnostic” since God cannot be an object of
rational knowledge; that religion is a “form of life” expressive of human capacities; and
that human beings can be drawn to faith “only through personal experience.” For those
disoriented by Taylor, Pius provides a clear and concise guide.
Where then can Catholics look for guidance if not from the Church and its intellectual
traditions? Taylor prefers a magisterium in accord with the how of faith. He commends
exemplary Catholics who embody a religious “sensibility” or “feel” that illuminates
contemporary spiritual longings. The book concludes with Taylor writing in a personal
voice about his attraction to the piety of Paul Claudel, Thérèse de Lisieux, Ivan Illich,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Charles Péguy. What they share, Taylor claims, is an
ecstatic spirituality open to radical transcendence and hostile to reducing faith to
conventional morality.
hus does Taylor’s vision of the Catholic future come into focus. In a secular
culture, genuinely traditional forms of thought and life are impossibilities. One
may of course choose to adopt such habits and attitudes, but one does so as a
quintessentially modern act of self-expression. We cannot be traditional; we can only be
traditionalists. Yet the unsettled secular soul is open to new and richer spiritual
fulfillments. The cunning of history is at work in a secular age, and what seems like a
threat to faith can liberate it for higher possibilities. Believers can now come to faith as a
free and authentically personal response to a need for “fullness” construed as God’s love.
And with that conclusion we realize that Taylor has written a book to explain why he is
Catholic. “I am a Catholic,” our author is saying in so many (many) words, “because my
experience of God is best explained by the spirituality found in radically holy Catholic
lives. Such lives help me better understand the imperfect glimpses of a transcendent
perfection that I perceive as God’s love. Christianity is true in that it is true to—faithful
to—what is most evident in my life: its need for fulfillment and transformation by God’s
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to—what is most evident in my life: its need for fulfillment and transformation by God’s
love.”
John Milbank insists that Taylor “does not in any way contest creedal orthodoxy.”
Perhaps, but Hegelians never contest. They comprehend and transcend, and in this
respect Taylor is a true Hegelian. He denigrates the Christian past by seeing it merely as a
dogmatic stage in our advance to the progressive present.
The failure here is not that Taylor sets aside the authority of dogma and discourages us
from entering more deeply into the wisdom of the Christian past. That’s something
we’re all familiar with, not just in our secular culture that can do without the Church’s
teaching, thank you, but in our own thinking as well. Taylor rightly describes our
experience of modern faith as riven with contingency. Those committed to the Church
have lots of interior ways to set aside the authority of dogma, even as we affirm it.
o, the failure is much greater and potentially more debilitating. By assimilating
a secular way of believing with the essential content of Christian faith, ASecular Age sanctifies and makes absolute precisely what we should regard as
contingent—the age in which we live. This is not to say that much of what Taylor writes
about the ways secularity has altered our culture and our sense of self is wrong and
should not shape academic debates. His descriptions of the secular age are compelling
and deserve the wide discussion they have inspired.
But if it is true that we have reached the end of an era and now live in a secular age, it will
be even more important for Christians to know what has been lost and why. This Taylor
will not and perhaps cannot teach us. Instead, he makes secularism invincible to the
radical criticism it most needs. Like all Hegelians, Taylor is an apologist for the present, a
theologian of the secular status quo.
Alasdair MacIntyre also diagnosed our culture as fatigued by the mutual antagonisms of
rival traditions. MacIntyre, however, maintained a chastened confidence in the power of
human reason to guide us toward the perfected understanding that is the end of all
inquiry. Our confusions and disagreements, he wrote in his Gifford Lectures, “can be a
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inquiry. Our confusions and disagreements, he wrote in his Gifford Lectures, “can be a
prologue not only to rational debate, but to that kind of debate from which one party
can emerge as undoubtedly rationally superior.”
MacIntyre combated the prejudice, uncritically affirmed by Taylor, that secular
modernity is a historical dispensation from which there is no intellectual escape. He
called his work a “radical renovation” of classical traditions of thought. Its most
important consequence has been a growing confidence that the work of human reason
can be undertaken in a context broader than that of modernity.
We would do well to listen to Taylor, but apprentice ourselves to MacIntyre. For
Christians in a post-Christian culture will need to think in terms of the most expansive
of all temporal horizons—a time, bounded by the beginning and the end of God’s holy
purposes, that Augustine, writing at the end of another epoch, called the saeculum.
Matthew Rose is director and senior fellow at the Berkeley Insitute.
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