‘A Secular Age’: God’s Long Goodbye
A review of ‘A Secular Age’, by Charles Taylor; Harvard University Press, 2007.
Riddle me this, reader: why was it almost impossible not to believe in God in 1300, or 1500, but is such a struggle to believe in Him today? That is the question Charles Taylor puts at the centre of A Secular Age, which at times seems less a book than a long, meandering walk, rather like a pilgrimage we did not quite mean to take. Along the way, we encounter beautiful landscapes and luxurious thickets through which we have to hack away. But in the end we find ourselves with muddy boots right where we need to be, and Taylor waving with cheery patience from the summit of a hill.
This is not the usual dreary history in which Progress marches in with a great big banner and Religion, embarrassed, slips out the back. Taylor — a philosopher, Catholic, and, astonishingly, an optimist — has something else in mind. Religion has not disappeared. Rather, it has changed shape. Finding itself in a secular age, it discloses its presence with whispers instead of trumpets, and though it has grown smaller and quieter, it has become, on Taylor’s view, infinitely more precious. His long history traces five centuries of slow subtraction: the world, once alive and full of colour, grows more and more grey. We begin with the ‘porous’ medieval self — open, enchanted, vulnerable — and arrive at the modern ‘buffered’ self: cut off, sceptical, self-satisfied. On the way, we enter the company of Augustine, Weber, Herder, and Foucault, each of whom has a piece of the puzzle we are attempting to put together.
Taylor attempts to chart the path from a time when believing in God was as natural as breathing air to a time like now.
It is Taylor’s aim to proceed through history in order but in practice, as I have already suggested, he meanders. He tells us that to call the world secular is to mean three different things: first, that religion no longer anchors public life; secondly, that fewer people believe in God; and thirdly — this is key —that the overall cultural mood has changed. Belief has become more difficult. Not because people have new arguments, but because something in the air has shifted. Taylor is much less concerned with counting heads in church than with attempting capture the texture of faith in an age in which doubt does not, if you like, stand outside the door but, slides in beside you in the pews and asks if he can share your hymnal.
Enter Taylor’s grand idea: the immanent frame. This is a sort of invisible casing around modern thought, a casing inside of which even belief seems faintly like unbelief. We live in a state of tension, says Taylor: torn between a longing for the beyond and the stale reality of the here-and-now. The upshot is something like a spiritual migraine. He calls it ‘cross-pressure.’ You may call it ‘exhausting’. But just as night is closing in—just as Taylor has finished daubing his grey little mural of our drained and joyless age, he dares to light a candle. The real curse of our time, he says, is not godlessness, but the thinning of things. We have rights but not reverence; we skim the surface of life like a kid on a jet-ski. Our world is, in short, shallow. He does not attack us for this, not claims he has found a way to plunge into the depths of experience. But he does seem to sigh.
We live in a state of tension: torn between a yearning for the beyond and the sterile reality of the here-and-now. The result is something like a spiritual migraine.
But as I have already said, our narrator is an optimist, and so he does not despair. A Secular Age has its elegiac passages but it is, on the whole, no mournful dirge, no loft lament for our terribly fallen world—no, in the end it dares to do that very Christian thing, which is: to hope. For though we have ‘thingified’ our world, coming to see it more as a heap of dead things fit for use rather than an animate whole, deserving of our reverence, we still yearn for depth, resonance, fullness. The great wave of secularism may well have rolled over our world and carried all that intensity out to sea, but it is not lost forever: it is there, still, bobbing on the swell, waiting to be brought to shore again. And human nature demands that we will, sooner or later, get it back
There is much to respect in this account. Taylor’s range his vast, his prose clear, his mind clearer still, and his tone hopeful and humane. His goal, it seems to me, is to understand, not to win over or even to inspire. Even after 800 pages he remains eminently readable. But let us not be coy: 800 pages is still quite a few; and we have the sense by the end that Taylor has circled his prey so many times it has begun to rot. One finds oneself asking what re-enchantment might look like. I suppose it is not his job or his duty to tell us, any more than it was MacIntyre’s job to set out exactly what he meant by our needing ‘another Saint Benedict’. But like After Virtue, like The Master and His Emissary, this is one of those books that seems to say, ‘You are not alone in thinking this.’
