‘A Secular Age’: Has the World Lost Its Magic?

A review of ‘A Secular Age’, by Charles Taylor; Harvard University Press, 2007.

The central question of A Secular Age is this: Why was it almost impossible not to believe in God in 1300, or 1500, but such a struggle to believe in Him today? The philosopher Charles Taylor has a few suggestions. For one thing, he is unconvinced that God has retreated in the face of modernity, science and democracy; in fact, he says, God is everywhere you look — if you look in the right way. To put it differently, belief and unbelief are not ‘rival theories’ for Taylor, but ‘different kinds of lived experience.’ We can understand the world as enchanted, or disenchanted; and a disenchanted world is dull: it is a world of rules and not thoughts, a bureaucracy run by ‘specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart.’

Like Iain McGilchrist, whose The Master and His Emissary makes the case that the dominance of the manipulative left hemisphere of the brain has ‘thingified’ the world, Taylor suggests that our problem, fundamentally, is one of attention. By seeing the world as a collection of dead things, to be used for our gratification, we strip the world of its divine gloss, and in doing so we lose our sense of meaning. For Iain, the right hemisphere sees the world as living, mysterious: a synthesised ‘whole,’ not the sum of its parts. You could perhaps say that the right hemisphere’s understanding of the world is as something enchanted.

Taylor suggests that our problem, fundamentally, is one of attention. By seeing the world as a collection of dead things, to be used for our gratification, we strip the world of its divine gloss.

Taylor makes his case in well over 800 pages and over five parts, an introduction and epilogue. It is a book not just to take your time over, in other words, but a book you will have to take some time over. When it was first published in 2007, some claimed the book was too complex; and I concede that from time to time a point seems over-made, which is to say that there are parts which seem to repeat what has already been said. In a book of this length, discussing a subject of this size, this is not necessarily a bad thing. There is, after all, quite a bit to take in.

More than anything, Charles Taylor’s book is bound to give believers a bit more hope that the prevailing secular order — what Pope Francis has said is at risk of becoming a ‘hegemonic uniformity’ — will not abolish religion entirely. But I also suspect that the book will give some nourishment to those who find that the Western world, at least, lacks a certain romance. Iain McGilchrist has said that the vast majority of those who wrote to him after The Master and His Emissary was released said more or less the same thing: ‘I’ve always felt there’s more to the world than this. You’ve given me the language to explain that.’ (I paraphrase.) At any rate, for Taylor, hope is not lost, and perhaps this is reflected in the rise of the ‘spiritual but not religious’, if not (yet?) in full-blooded religious revival.