A Secular Age

Why has contemporary Western society abandoned God and religion? A Canadian philosopher traces the history of unbelief.

Charles Taylor | "A Secular Age" | Cambridge, Mass | Harvard U Press | 2007 | 896 pages
ISBN: 0674026764

A Secular Age is a huge and hugely interesting work by Charles Taylor, a Canadian who has been called " the most interesting and important philosopher writing in English today".  It deals with some of the most important issues of our time. What place is there for the contribution of religious ideas, notably belief in God and God’s word, to our public discourse about social policy? It is a feature of contemporary existence that arguments based on biblical sources or pronouncements from the Vatican tend to be treated today as more or less inadmissible in serious academic discussion. They may be used for adornment, but not as proper authority standing alone; serious work has to be couched in secular language.

I have certainly found in a lifetime spent in academic philosophy that professional manners require that while faith can serve as inspiration, whatever it inspires has to pass through a secularising filter before it can be acceptable as a contribution to philosophy. So, for example, arguments about ethics and social policies relating to abortion cannot, in serious discussion, rest on religious authority.

But is it right that this should be so?

Charles Taylor’s book does not, as far as I can tell, give a direct negative answer to this question, but in a magisterial tracing of the many currents of thought that have led to our "secular age" he does retrieve the sense that this might be an open question. The central aim of his book, as he himself expresses it, is "to study the fate in the modern West of religious faith in the strong sense… the belief in transcendent reality, on the one hand, and the connected aspiration to a transformation which goes beyond ordinary human flourishing on the other."

Books attacking belief in God are best-sellers, and religious belief and practice have been on the defensive for many decades. What Taylor argues well is that the current impulses toward the marginalising of religion stem from a distorted idea of the respective roles of religion and science in the development of our current mind-set, or more particularly, our "social imaginary", which he defines as the set of shared ideas that tell us how to relate to others and what things are possible to be accomplished.

According to the simplistic narrative he attacks, science has been responsible for all that is good and progressive in the modern world, while religion has offered a series of superstitions and roadblocks in the way of science. Opposition to Copernicus and Darwin are only two of the more conspicuous examples.

This narrative obscures many vital pieces of a more complicated, but more accurate, story of the roles of religion and science in the path from an age of faith to that of secularised reason. The fuller narrative, Taylor argues, needs to take account of the way in which religious belief inspired the search for scientific truth, and the way in which both religious and atheistic thinking produced internal struggles, strands of which impacted on the other group.

Fundamentalist Christianity has its counterpart in fundamentalist atheism, each side convinced of its own truth and closed off from admitting any possibility of truth on the part of the other view. Yet when their truth claims are put under the microscope neither side is entitled to the certainty it professes.

Taylor gives many examples of atheistic dogmatism from French and Russian revolutionaries, but I’ll add to his collection the brouhaha over the famous 1925 Scopes "Monkey" trial (to which Taylor alludes, though without developing the example) in which a biology teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted (successfully) for violating a statute against the teaching of evolution. Secular thinkers cheered the defeat accorded fundamentalist Christianity in the court of public opinion. But few of the cheerers know that the book at the centre of the debate, A Civic Biology was gravely defective in treating as scientific fact the superiority of the Caucasian race and promoting eugenic views based on bad science.

Among the especially valuable concepts Taylor employs, I would highlight his expression "exclusive humanism". All too often, we accept the term "humanism" to mean ethics without God, and since one can have a highly laudable ethical set of views while not including belief in God, this acceptance seems reasonable.

But Taylor rightly notes that for the most part what is laudable in humanism is also compatible with belief in God. Moreover, belief in God gives a special incentive to love and make sacrifices for our neighbour. So we need to distinguish a humanism that includes belief in God from one that doesn’t, instead of freighting theism with all the bad things that have come out of it, while according it none of the good.Once we focus on the question: "What is it that disbelief in God makes possible that belief will not allow?" we may find that the humanism in question becomes less appealing. Using the word "humanism" to describe beliefs that more accurately warrant the term "exclusive humanism," gives an unwarranted advantage to the unbeliever.

Throughout the book, Taylor produces arguments to show that ethical advances have been generated by religious believers and are not simply the result of atheistic materialism.

We moderns are able to think about our individuality and our autonomy differently from the world before Rene Descartes and the rise of rationalism. Hence God is often viewed as subject to laws perceived as necessary by the rational self. The God of Abraham yields to scientific necessity, and Deism results. The world is created like clockwork. It’s not a great step from there to wondering why God is needed at all, if science can tell us all we need to know.

Taylor traces many strands of thinking that result in our contemporary outlook. He is particularly interested in how it came to be that debatable matters came to be one-sidedly settled, not only in the minds of the intellectual elite, but also in the thinking of the masses. Those with a Christian training will recognise the old phenomenon of believing what one wants to believe, captured in Luther’s notorious saying, "reason is a whore." Popular culture extols the kinds of things and way of life that Christianity treats as turning us away from God.

Atheism leaves us with a bleak world when we contemplate our death. Scientific materialism gives us a disenchanted world, along with the benefits of removing superstitions. Some poets sought refuge in nature and beauty. The French writer Albert Camus gives us one outlook in the stubborn refusal to accept the comforts that belief in transcendence provides. Taylor looks at many of the different responses to both theism and atheism in a sympathetic way, but always with sufficient appreciation for the attendant difficulties so that no final answer to the meaning of life emerges.

A recent visit to St Petersburg and the wealth of inspired art in the basilicas, particularly the Church of the Saviour of Spilt Blood, has reinforced my impression that Taylor has his finger on the pulse of our times. Russia has lived through an atheistic Communist phase and has rediscovered its inspirational roots with a new reverence for the treasures of its Orthodox past. Reverting to the name St Petersburg is one indication of this. But the Russian Museum also emphasises religious themes. It acknowledges the oppression of the serfs, but avoids any sense that the Revolution brought a new lasting vision. The invasion of capitalism has not succeeded any better, and one senses a search for a new vision, combined with an openness not seen for a long time.

This is a magnificent, very important study. It has its drawbacks, such as untranslated words, repetition, presumptions about the reader’s background knowledge, etc. The length is daunting but there is an excellent index, and Google can help a lot with the rest. There are so many sources enriching this work that it may be idiosyncratic to suggest some absences, but I did feel the book would have profited from a glance or two at Kierkegaard, Levinas and Jacques Ellul. There’s also a letter by Nietzsche in which he confesses to admiration of Christianity but finds it too difficult. These other sources would reinforce Taylor's history of our social imaginary. The upshot is that this social imaginary needs to be examined and re-examined in the light of how it came to be what it is and where it is.

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Comments (16)

ninjapirate said...

"There’s also a letter by Nietzsche in which he confesses to admiration of Christianity but finds it too difficult."

Which letter is that?

United States | Thursday, 3 July 2008 at 1:45 am

Randal Marlin said...

I'm currently in Europe and don't have my notes, but I'll supply the information about the letter when I get back to Canada July 8. The gist of the letter, to Overbeck as I recall, is: I hope you will believe that in my heart of hearts I have a deep admiration for Christianity, but I find its ideals to difficult to put into practice.

Canada | Thursday, 3 July 2008 at 7:22 pm

David Page said...

Nietzsche admired Jesus but not Christianity. He thought that Jesus saw his own purpose as not to redeem Humanity but to show Humanity how to live and, especially, how to die. Before anyone raises the obvious objections we must remember that Nietzsche believed that not all the words attributed to Jesus were actually spoken by him. He's not alone in that belief. Nietzsche says over and over again that the priestly class fabricated the distortions that created Christianity.

United States | Friday, 4 July 2008 at 3:03 am

Mariusz Wesolowski said...

I have not yet read Mr. Taylor's book but I would certainly like to do that. I wonder if its author mentions the Traditionalist thought which I find particularly relevant in this context (Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, etc.)

Canada | Sunday, 6 July 2008 at 1:10 am

Randal Marlin said...

Here is the letter I referred to. It is from Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, 23 June 1881:

“As far as Christianity is concerned, I hope you’ll believe this much: in my heart I’ve never held it in contempt and, ever since my childhood, have often struggled with myself on behalf of its ideals. In the end, to be sure, the result has always been the sheerest impossibility. ...Christianity...is still the best piece of ideal life which I have really become familiar with.”

Canada | Wednesday, 9 July 2008 at 1:43 am

Br Joseph said...

For David Page; I regretted that our previous conversation on faith and reason was prematurely terminated, especially since my last word in the matter consisted of some rather presumptuous prefacing to comments that had to be left unposted. So when I came across this comment, I thought I'd mention that you can find my email address at the website mentioned in the last posting, should you wish to resolve anything from that exchange. Wishing you all the best.

On a more general note, it does indeed seem like this book by Taylor will be very important and am grateful for the review of it. I agree with you and ninjapirate that it would be very interesting indeed if Nietzsche's comments referred to the Christian religion and not merely to his interpretation of Jesus of Nazareth.

United States | Wednesday, 9 July 2008 at 6:05 am

julian said...

Hmmm... great article. And as for the comments - should we believe Mr. Page, or Mr. Nietzsche, as to the latter's views on Christianity?

-- | Wednesday, 9 July 2008 at 7:28 am

Randal Marlin said...

I think it is important to answer Julian's last comment. What Nietzsche wrote in the private letter I cited is very different from his views of Christianity found in his published writings, such as the Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Antichrist, etc. So it's not so much a question of Page versus Nietzsche as of Nietzsche versus Nietzsche. I find Nietzsche to be contradictory or ambivalent on many key issues. Nietzsche himself favoured the courage to attack one's convictions, and would have agreed with Emerson about a foolish consistency.being the "hobgoblin of little minds."

-- | Wednesday, 9 July 2008 at 11:48 am

David Page said...

Brother Joseph makes a good point. I would like to see the whole letter and, perhaps, the letter he was replying to and the letters before and after that. Taken by itself, the letter contradicts almost everything else he's written on the subject. Point by point he opposes almost every notion of Christian morality. I don't agree with him on most of his points because he isn't talking about dogma in these instances and Christian morality is too similar to my personal morality. He is very complicated. He shows contempt for pity because he says it's a form of self aggrandizement. He has a point. He's not talking about compassion. Pity puts the object of pity beneath you. Compassion recognizes the equality of the Other for whom you have compassion. You see yourself in that Other. There is a story about his descent into madness which I can't confirm. His whole life was a struggle with ill health. As the story goes, he was walking up a hill in Switzerland. A man was beating an old horse to get it to pull a cart up the hill. The horse went to its knees. Nietzsche went to the horse, put his arms around its neck and was, from that moment, totally mad. If it isn't true then it should be. Nietzsche would have seen a similarity in the horse's life and his own. he was driven as the horse was driven. The difference was that, in his life, the hand that held the whip was his own. A piece of a letter doesn't tell us anything about the man when everything else he wrote contradicts it.

Brother Joseph, I'll be in touch.

United States | Wednesday, 9 July 2008 at 12:55 pm

David Page said...

Dr. Marlin, If I lived in Ottawa I'd take your course.

United States | Wednesday, 9 July 2008 at 10:34 pm

Br Joseph said...

To modify my original position, I'd note that the text of the letter that Dr Marlin does indeed seem to refer to Christianity, and that his comment about Nietzsche's lack of fear of inconsistency is important. But I'd go even further; on looking back at the text of the letter, the phrase "the result has always been the sheerest impossibility" could be interpreted in a more interesting way than saying that Nietzsche found the Christian ideal "too hard", but rather that he recognized its type of radiance as fundamentally irreconcilable with his will-to-power. That would also be reconcilable with the anecdote about the inner conflict involved in his descent into madness -- since this action of Nietzsche's was modelled (even if it is historically true, which it may be) on an action of the convert Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, whose Christian author Nietzsche found profoundly challing.

But we should also not forget about the central and valuable theses of Taylor's book. To me, it is a most interesting question: to what extent can the history of modern philosophy explain the rise of secular culture ("exclusive humanism") in the wake of Christianity? And, from a merely philosophical and political point of view, to what extent can we suppose that this radical secularism will be able to exist as a foundational support for society into the indefinite future?

United States | Thursday, 10 July 2008 at 12:29 pm

Mariusz Wesolowski said...

Br Joseph said:

"To me, it is a most interesting question: to what extent can the history of modern philosophy explain the rise of secular culture ("exclusive humanism") in the wake of Christianity?"

The reason lies not only within the history of modern philosophy but also (and, maybe, especially) within the history of Christianity which has at some point veered away from both its "gnosis" (not to be confused with gnosticism) and from Jesus' first (and the greater) commandment. This resulted in putting man before God even within the confines of religion, thus opening a back door for the influence of secular philosophy. Now Christianity is practically no more than sentimental "love of the neighbor" (with both terms misunderstood) and an assortment of social services. This is very nice but this is not religion...

Canada | Thursday, 10 July 2008 at 10:54 pm

Randal Marlin said...

In answer to Mariusz Wesolowski, I find no mention in the Index of the names Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, or Martin Lings, nor do I recall encountering them in Taylor's text. I confess that I have not heard of these names before myself, but I will keep an eye open for them.

Canada | Friday, 11 July 2008 at 7:54 am

Mariusz Wesolowski said...

Randal Marlin said...

"I confess that I have not heard of these names before myself, but I will keep an eye open for them."

I would like to recommend then the recently published "The Underlying Religion. An Introduction to the Perennial Philosophy"(ed. by Martin Lings & Clinton Minnaar, World Wisdom: 2007.)

Canada | Friday, 11 July 2008 at 9:58 am

David Page said...

Brother Joseph said: "That would also be reconcilable with the anecdote about the inner conflict involved in his descent into madness -- since this action of Nietzsche's was modelled (even if it is historically true, which it may be) on an action of the convert Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, whose Christian author Nietzsche found profoundly challing."

I've checked further and the Nietzsche anecdote probably happened. If that's true then it can't be modeled after 'Crime and Punishment', but only compared to it. If that's the case then I don't see how the comparison stands up. Because the two events share similarities does not mean that they share the same context.

-- | Saturday, 12 July 2008 at 12:42 am

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