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A Secular Age
Almost everyone would agree that the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly over the years. This book 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 is only one human possibility among others.
874 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
About the author
Charles Taylor
215 books543 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
Other authors with this name:
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic
Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)
Other authors with this name:
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic
Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)
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August 5, 2016
This is a monster of a book, and I am taking my sweet time with it, setting it aside at intervals to digest what I've encountered and partake of other books in order that there not be a vast gulf in which Taylor and I are lost in a slow dance. As for what is inside the tome: it's an intellectual tour de force, thoughtful, insightful, generous, an utter masterpiece; but it must be said that Taylor loves his digressions and perambulations and topical palimpsests. Each individual page reads as half again as many due to the sheer density of the word count, and Taylor is meticulously thorough in establishing all of the requisite foundational bases for the erecting of his brilliant and profound interpretation of how, over the course of some five centuries, we went from being a society wherein unbelief in God was nigh unthinkable to one in which such unbelief is but one of a competing spread of options; and, in many cases and locales, the most prevalent and momentous and sustaining of them all.
To hell with any complaints about its derivation from Taylor's Gifford Lectures of 1998 and consequent need for firmly executed editing and thematic coherence; though I'm only halfway through, I can confidently declare that this is one of those landmark tomes that will forever permeate and reconfigure the subject thoughts of its readers. Taylor has put together the singularly most considered, persuasive, and humane work on the evolution of unbelief in modernity that I've yet encountered—its causations, constituents, teloses, benefits, ills—and one with an eye ever to the dialectical workings of a human-engirding history rife with contradictions. It's a beautiful, wise, erudite gift from Canada's great philosopher emeritus.
PRECIS OF PARTS ONE AND TWO:
The opening two sections of Taylor's extraordinarily rich work of historic reflection establish the overarching chain of causes and effects, operating at a variety of levels and fields, in which he espies the motive and evolutionary forces of the turn towards a secular culture in Western society. Having perused the prevailing accounts of how this spread of disbelief came to be, Taylor was left unsatisfied—he does not hold that theories of subtraction such as Darwin refuting the Bible or Science unseating God sufficiently account for modern secularism. This being the case, he takes the constituent elements of those subtractive theories and adds several more into the mixture of both broader and narrower gauge, arranging their ordering that he can examine and explain the individuated and combinatory effects, often extended forward to our present age in their generality and morphology while ending at the turn of the nineteenth century as regards their specificity and stepped progression.
We have gone from the state of being an enchanted world—hierarchical, complementary, moving in a dialectic of structure/unstructure, sacred/profane with things like Carnival, the Feasts of Misrule, which could be seen as a pressure outlet for society, or the awareness of the need to turn things over that the cycle might begin again. In this world, our individual selves are porous. From such a configuration we have moved into being a disenchanted world under the aegis of a disciplined and directed Reform that has made us buffered individuals. This movement saw the doing away of the supernatural, a world of spirits where God was in everything as the ideator of Form that worked as symbols of a perfectly functioning and self-realizing/self-fulfilling cosmos. Ironically, the drive to bring each individual closer to God initiated a series of evolved changes that resulted in the spread of a secular mindset.
We used to have a Cosmos, in which there was a connected all to everything via the Chain-of-Being that led downwards from God to his physical creations. There was a teleological purpose to this existence, in which time moved both linearly through history and vertically via Kairological Time, such that two events—like Easter 2011 and the Resurrection of Christ in 32 AD—are closer in this form of time than Easter 2011 and the previous summer's holiday. What we have now is a Universe, vast, purposeless, non-anthropomorphic, Godless, in which a mechanistic design drives things in systemic fashion but without any manner of eschatological or teleological endpoint.
We were previously socially constructed, concerned with the whole, and had the externalized emotion and intimacy with others that helped us situate ourselves as human beings—but with the Reform those have been turned inwards, such that our level of fastidiousness has been continuously elevated, so that intimacy and emotional sharing is reserved for only one's immediate family and closest friends. We are now all equals, but not in a way the promotes sharing but rather minimizes it. This burgeoning individuation was of a one with the elevation of the self in the modern era. This is because Reform, filled with dialectical contradictions, in its effort to make with God a fuller connexion to each individual—salvation through faith—stressed personal understandings of God, the rational apparatus that allows us to see the mechanistic system God has created but without human-limited purposes or powers for the Deity. We also see the turn away from Platonic and Aristotelian Harmony, in which we find ourselves by aligning to the forms within and without such that our being reaches accord with the natural world, towards the elevation of the human Will, in which we can impose our rational interpretation of the natural world—expunged of spirits, supernatural forces, etc, anything that detracts from God's singular designed omnipotence—so that we can purify ourselves, remodel and remake society, perfect ourselves and our human systems/constructs/creations, move towards an endpoint of fully realized man imposing his reason upon a pliable nature. This serves to strip the outer world of its enchantment and leave it merely functional, while our interior minds become more occupied with man's potential and power and less with that of an unrelatable and unrecognizable God.
In this way, we move from a Naive Faith to a self-sufficient Exclusive Humanism.
The Social Imaginary is the societal norms that grew along a triple-axis: from a niche conception to widespread implementation; from theory to an accepted manifestation of society; and, in the moral order, from a status of being realizable (in theory, over time) to implementable anon, and this latter along two further axes. The SI is viewed through its strains of The Economy, The Public Sphere, and Popular Sovereignty. The first named concerns evolved understandings of the use of markets and commerce as a way of imposing order and progress upon society—God's perfection as a mechanism for disciplined and flourishing human society by means of rational outcomes of self-interest and public interest working in the dialectic. The second is the creation of the concept of a non-political, nationwide forum of human agency via discourse in some form of medium (print, radio, television, computer) in which ideas and desires for policy are debated and made known in influential ways to the political forces that are not explicitly a part of this sphere, totally unlike any previous polities. The third is the individuating meme that comes from the evolved conception, via Reform, of Natural Law that provides sovereign rights to the individual apart from any political structure or hierarchy, in Profane Time—not the Higher Time of eternity, mythological origins, holy events that infused previous understandings. This Natural Law reflects the order and purpose God has endowed man with in nature, a will to foment order and progress and human flourishing, in odd paradox at times, but capable of being discerned through Reason. Whereas in past societies there was hierarchy and complementarity, where roles like King and duke and Pope carried a dual body—one the human being currently so titled, the second the function of the role that perdured no matter who held the position—now society consists of individuals who are their own agents via their unique identity endowed with rights through Natural Law.
Two modern political competitors are republic/democracy vs absolute monarchy. The French Revolution was more violent and chaotic than the American because the latter had an avowed political structure, precepts, and theory derived from Grotius/Locke that was widely accepted and grasped by the public, whereas the French was driven by Rousseau's ideas and which posited disinterested Reason as a vice, a corrupting meme; so he proclaimed the synthesis of self-interest with public good that reflected the Virtuous Man, but which endowed the Revolution with religious imagery and tones and made the political structure imperfectly formed, with a minority of Virtuous Republicans attempting to glean the Public Will via verbose public theatre.
The moral order was also highlighted by the growing trends of Civility, Courtesy and Self-Discipline as part of the mode of Civilization that was perceived to be the enlightened state for man promised through the application of reason that God had inhered within his creations, natural and living. This taming of violence, disorder, chaos, and the overawing by spirits and the supernatural reflected man moving from his previous state of being unaware of God's mechanistic purpose into a modern perception that ordered living and the subduction of the passions under the cool regimen of dispassionate rationality allowed for the flourishing of man, society and world as per the unfolding, regimented plan of God. The latter would not interfere with the progression of his structured creation via the likes of miracles or blessings because it would be at cross-purposes with the plan gleaned from natural law. His Grace was no longer salvation as much as the unveiling of this order available to be implemented by man; and the prodding of the reward of eternal life in Heaven began to outdistance its converse, the threats of eternal punishment in Hell, as another goad to Godlike adherence and behaviour.
This evolution is not a conflict of Idealist as against Materialist interpretations of history, but rather, as Taylor stresses, an intermingling of the two in which neither can be elevated at the expense of the other. Material situations and environs influenced ideas and desires, but those same material settings came about from ideas and desires whose working out had a participatory effect. So neither side is the truth, but Taylor is concentrating on how ideas came to influence their own furthering and material outcomes.
The mid-stage of this evolution was Providential Deism, of which there were four driving forces:
1: Loss of a sense of purpose—the world was ordered such as to reveal itself to our enquiry, with no transendent aims for ourselves.
2: That God's grace was no longer a necessary component of our end, but solely our flourishing.
3: A loss of a sense of mystery about the world.
4: The determination that there was no transformation of ourselves as part of a teleological communion or endpoint transcendent union with God, either in this world or the afterlife.
This change, taking place in part due to exhaustion from 150 years of religious strife, saw an antagonism towards both fundamentalism, the sureness of belief that one holds, and enthusiasm, the belief that one has found a superior way to achieve God's grace or carry out his purposes, through such as monasticism, celibacy, preaching revelation, etc. There is also the growing assuredness that our immanent sense of bienfaisance (beneficience) would, through disinterested application of reason, drive our motive actions.
Deism is also sparked by the Enlightenment antipathy to Christianity in the form of its obscurantist and supernatural trappings, particularly in the Catholic church—wine and bread, saintly intercession, possession, etc. But the modern acceptance of Reason suborning faith in an inevitable manner, once science was in ascendance, cannot explain the entirety. Indeed, Taylor states that Exclusive Humanism could not have become so widespread via any form other than the Reform -> Deism -> Secular evolution, in which the vital elements of flourishing, order, and beneficience were morphed into God's natural plan for his created beings, lending the the ability to supplant God with mankind as both the author, actor, and enabler of these changes.
Taylor then details how this impersonal distancing arose within elites, such as Gibbon and Hume, in the seventeenth century, and which very distancing allowed them an ironical tone that seemed convincingly and superlatively set against the hot-headed fire of fundamentalism. The framework of Modern Moral Order realized through structure, discipline, commerce—the entirety of Man finding answer for his life in a mechanistic universe whose purposes, workings, and societal constructs can all be calmly reasoned from within—allowed the stadial shift in consciousness in which Deism could spread; and of the latter, via its conception of a Jesus stripped of all qualities but the moral and paradigmatic—and a God who cannot interfere with the perfect machine he has created—opened the door by means of this stadial shift to forthcoming and widespread unbelief. Taylor also does a solid job of presenting how ancient philosophy was at conflict with Christianity in several ways, and how the inhering communion with God, hierarchical relationships, oneness in a universe whose purposes could be touched and joined through Higher Time, produced a mindset whose workings became totally unconvincing, because unattainable, to the new consciousness evolved/shifted to through the Reform efforts and the new concepts of progressive society in history.
To hell with any complaints about its derivation from Taylor's Gifford Lectures of 1998 and consequent need for firmly executed editing and thematic coherence; though I'm only halfway through, I can confidently declare that this is one of those landmark tomes that will forever permeate and reconfigure the subject thoughts of its readers. Taylor has put together the singularly most considered, persuasive, and humane work on the evolution of unbelief in modernity that I've yet encountered—its causations, constituents, teloses, benefits, ills—and one with an eye ever to the dialectical workings of a human-engirding history rife with contradictions. It's a beautiful, wise, erudite gift from Canada's great philosopher emeritus.
PRECIS OF PARTS ONE AND TWO:
The opening two sections of Taylor's extraordinarily rich work of historic reflection establish the overarching chain of causes and effects, operating at a variety of levels and fields, in which he espies the motive and evolutionary forces of the turn towards a secular culture in Western society. Having perused the prevailing accounts of how this spread of disbelief came to be, Taylor was left unsatisfied—he does not hold that theories of subtraction such as Darwin refuting the Bible or Science unseating God sufficiently account for modern secularism. This being the case, he takes the constituent elements of those subtractive theories and adds several more into the mixture of both broader and narrower gauge, arranging their ordering that he can examine and explain the individuated and combinatory effects, often extended forward to our present age in their generality and morphology while ending at the turn of the nineteenth century as regards their specificity and stepped progression.
We have gone from the state of being an enchanted world—hierarchical, complementary, moving in a dialectic of structure/unstructure, sacred/profane with things like Carnival, the Feasts of Misrule, which could be seen as a pressure outlet for society, or the awareness of the need to turn things over that the cycle might begin again. In this world, our individual selves are porous. From such a configuration we have moved into being a disenchanted world under the aegis of a disciplined and directed Reform that has made us buffered individuals. This movement saw the doing away of the supernatural, a world of spirits where God was in everything as the ideator of Form that worked as symbols of a perfectly functioning and self-realizing/self-fulfilling cosmos. Ironically, the drive to bring each individual closer to God initiated a series of evolved changes that resulted in the spread of a secular mindset.
We used to have a Cosmos, in which there was a connected all to everything via the Chain-of-Being that led downwards from God to his physical creations. There was a teleological purpose to this existence, in which time moved both linearly through history and vertically via Kairological Time, such that two events—like Easter 2011 and the Resurrection of Christ in 32 AD—are closer in this form of time than Easter 2011 and the previous summer's holiday. What we have now is a Universe, vast, purposeless, non-anthropomorphic, Godless, in which a mechanistic design drives things in systemic fashion but without any manner of eschatological or teleological endpoint.
We were previously socially constructed, concerned with the whole, and had the externalized emotion and intimacy with others that helped us situate ourselves as human beings—but with the Reform those have been turned inwards, such that our level of fastidiousness has been continuously elevated, so that intimacy and emotional sharing is reserved for only one's immediate family and closest friends. We are now all equals, but not in a way the promotes sharing but rather minimizes it. This burgeoning individuation was of a one with the elevation of the self in the modern era. This is because Reform, filled with dialectical contradictions, in its effort to make with God a fuller connexion to each individual—salvation through faith—stressed personal understandings of God, the rational apparatus that allows us to see the mechanistic system God has created but without human-limited purposes or powers for the Deity. We also see the turn away from Platonic and Aristotelian Harmony, in which we find ourselves by aligning to the forms within and without such that our being reaches accord with the natural world, towards the elevation of the human Will, in which we can impose our rational interpretation of the natural world—expunged of spirits, supernatural forces, etc, anything that detracts from God's singular designed omnipotence—so that we can purify ourselves, remodel and remake society, perfect ourselves and our human systems/constructs/creations, move towards an endpoint of fully realized man imposing his reason upon a pliable nature. This serves to strip the outer world of its enchantment and leave it merely functional, while our interior minds become more occupied with man's potential and power and less with that of an unrelatable and unrecognizable God.
In this way, we move from a Naive Faith to a self-sufficient Exclusive Humanism.
The Social Imaginary is the societal norms that grew along a triple-axis: from a niche conception to widespread implementation; from theory to an accepted manifestation of society; and, in the moral order, from a status of being realizable (in theory, over time) to implementable anon, and this latter along two further axes. The SI is viewed through its strains of The Economy, The Public Sphere, and Popular Sovereignty. The first named concerns evolved understandings of the use of markets and commerce as a way of imposing order and progress upon society—God's perfection as a mechanism for disciplined and flourishing human society by means of rational outcomes of self-interest and public interest working in the dialectic. The second is the creation of the concept of a non-political, nationwide forum of human agency via discourse in some form of medium (print, radio, television, computer) in which ideas and desires for policy are debated and made known in influential ways to the political forces that are not explicitly a part of this sphere, totally unlike any previous polities. The third is the individuating meme that comes from the evolved conception, via Reform, of Natural Law that provides sovereign rights to the individual apart from any political structure or hierarchy, in Profane Time—not the Higher Time of eternity, mythological origins, holy events that infused previous understandings. This Natural Law reflects the order and purpose God has endowed man with in nature, a will to foment order and progress and human flourishing, in odd paradox at times, but capable of being discerned through Reason. Whereas in past societies there was hierarchy and complementarity, where roles like King and duke and Pope carried a dual body—one the human being currently so titled, the second the function of the role that perdured no matter who held the position—now society consists of individuals who are their own agents via their unique identity endowed with rights through Natural Law.
Two modern political competitors are republic/democracy vs absolute monarchy. The French Revolution was more violent and chaotic than the American because the latter had an avowed political structure, precepts, and theory derived from Grotius/Locke that was widely accepted and grasped by the public, whereas the French was driven by Rousseau's ideas and which posited disinterested Reason as a vice, a corrupting meme; so he proclaimed the synthesis of self-interest with public good that reflected the Virtuous Man, but which endowed the Revolution with religious imagery and tones and made the political structure imperfectly formed, with a minority of Virtuous Republicans attempting to glean the Public Will via verbose public theatre.
The moral order was also highlighted by the growing trends of Civility, Courtesy and Self-Discipline as part of the mode of Civilization that was perceived to be the enlightened state for man promised through the application of reason that God had inhered within his creations, natural and living. This taming of violence, disorder, chaos, and the overawing by spirits and the supernatural reflected man moving from his previous state of being unaware of God's mechanistic purpose into a modern perception that ordered living and the subduction of the passions under the cool regimen of dispassionate rationality allowed for the flourishing of man, society and world as per the unfolding, regimented plan of God. The latter would not interfere with the progression of his structured creation via the likes of miracles or blessings because it would be at cross-purposes with the plan gleaned from natural law. His Grace was no longer salvation as much as the unveiling of this order available to be implemented by man; and the prodding of the reward of eternal life in Heaven began to outdistance its converse, the threats of eternal punishment in Hell, as another goad to Godlike adherence and behaviour.
This evolution is not a conflict of Idealist as against Materialist interpretations of history, but rather, as Taylor stresses, an intermingling of the two in which neither can be elevated at the expense of the other. Material situations and environs influenced ideas and desires, but those same material settings came about from ideas and desires whose working out had a participatory effect. So neither side is the truth, but Taylor is concentrating on how ideas came to influence their own furthering and material outcomes.
The mid-stage of this evolution was Providential Deism, of which there were four driving forces:
1: Loss of a sense of purpose—the world was ordered such as to reveal itself to our enquiry, with no transendent aims for ourselves.
2: That God's grace was no longer a necessary component of our end, but solely our flourishing.
3: A loss of a sense of mystery about the world.
4: The determination that there was no transformation of ourselves as part of a teleological communion or endpoint transcendent union with God, either in this world or the afterlife.
This change, taking place in part due to exhaustion from 150 years of religious strife, saw an antagonism towards both fundamentalism, the sureness of belief that one holds, and enthusiasm, the belief that one has found a superior way to achieve God's grace or carry out his purposes, through such as monasticism, celibacy, preaching revelation, etc. There is also the growing assuredness that our immanent sense of bienfaisance (beneficience) would, through disinterested application of reason, drive our motive actions.
Deism is also sparked by the Enlightenment antipathy to Christianity in the form of its obscurantist and supernatural trappings, particularly in the Catholic church—wine and bread, saintly intercession, possession, etc. But the modern acceptance of Reason suborning faith in an inevitable manner, once science was in ascendance, cannot explain the entirety. Indeed, Taylor states that Exclusive Humanism could not have become so widespread via any form other than the Reform -> Deism -> Secular evolution, in which the vital elements of flourishing, order, and beneficience were morphed into God's natural plan for his created beings, lending the the ability to supplant God with mankind as both the author, actor, and enabler of these changes.
Taylor then details how this impersonal distancing arose within elites, such as Gibbon and Hume, in the seventeenth century, and which very distancing allowed them an ironical tone that seemed convincingly and superlatively set against the hot-headed fire of fundamentalism. The framework of Modern Moral Order realized through structure, discipline, commerce—the entirety of Man finding answer for his life in a mechanistic universe whose purposes, workings, and societal constructs can all be calmly reasoned from within—allowed the stadial shift in consciousness in which Deism could spread; and of the latter, via its conception of a Jesus stripped of all qualities but the moral and paradigmatic—and a God who cannot interfere with the perfect machine he has created—opened the door by means of this stadial shift to forthcoming and widespread unbelief. Taylor also does a solid job of presenting how ancient philosophy was at conflict with Christianity in several ways, and how the inhering communion with God, hierarchical relationships, oneness in a universe whose purposes could be touched and joined through Higher Time, produced a mindset whose workings became totally unconvincing, because unattainable, to the new consciousness evolved/shifted to through the Reform efforts and the new concepts of progressive society in history.
November 4, 2014
If I'd had any idea that this book devolves, in its second half, into a tendentious, straw-man-targeting apologetic for the necessity of Christianity for modern civilization, I wouldn't have cut it so much slack for its lazy distortions of Foucault, Nietzsche, and other thinkers (not to mention its gender essentialism) in its engaging first half. The narrative assumes that (western European and USian) individuals are either humanists (i.e., "unbelievers," a designation used mostly in the second half--and which, to the ear of someone who was raised by fundamentalist christians, is traditionally pejorative) or "believers" (meaning, for the most part, Christians). If the reader isn't a "believer," in other words, then s/he must be a "humanist" (and, according to the author's simple dualist classifications, classical Lockean liberal).
This is certainly not the book for any reader who has experienced oppression at the hands of religion (unless they confine themselves to the first half, which largely deals with the history of christianity, with interest). No doubt those who have experienced religion as damaging and oppressive are among those the author sneers at when he uses the "PC" label to dismiss those who object to racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Finally, I can't help wondering how the author could, in good faith, ignore (except in passing) the powerful rise and influence of religious fundamentalism in the late 20th & early 21st centuries. The power of religious hatred in our time must surely have something to do with attitudes toward and assessment of the state of religion today. A failure to address that in a book of this size and scope strikes me as disingenuous.
This is certainly not the book for any reader who has experienced oppression at the hands of religion (unless they confine themselves to the first half, which largely deals with the history of christianity, with interest). No doubt those who have experienced religion as damaging and oppressive are among those the author sneers at when he uses the "PC" label to dismiss those who object to racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Finally, I can't help wondering how the author could, in good faith, ignore (except in passing) the powerful rise and influence of religious fundamentalism in the late 20th & early 21st centuries. The power of religious hatred in our time must surely have something to do with attitudes toward and assessment of the state of religion today. A failure to address that in a book of this size and scope strikes me as disingenuous.
March 18, 2024
In my Fall 2013 semester at Baylor, I formed and organized a reading group to keep each other accountable and plow our way through. Taylor's organization is often hard to follow, partly because of his repetition. Taylor is Catholic, so his anti-Reformation attitude is expected. Taylor is also unashamedly modern (meaning that he is willing to jettison traditional/biblical doctrines in favor of a more palatable modern sensibility), so despite many insights of the book deserving five stars, he balances the good parts (e.g., his resistance to facile subtraction theories, his definition of secular3 and the attendant cross-pressures, etc.) with puny Christianity (see pp. 646–56 for examples). And if I evaluate A Secular Age as a trustworthy book that can lead other Christians through our secular age, I can't give it more than three stars (and even the 3-star "it was good" rating is generous). The final few pages (pp. 770–76) convinced me that my theory (that Taylor is a Brad Gregory in sheep's clothing) is correct. Both Taylor and Gregory are happy to lay the blame for contemporary (exclusive) humanism at the feet of the late medieval drive for Reform, but if we're telling a story here, let's not forget the reason that so many people thought that wide-spread reform was necessary in the first place: the theological and moral corruption of late medieval Catholicism.
James K. A. Smith blogs through his reading here and even wrote a guidebook: How (Not) to Be Secular, which I reviewed in Modern Reformation.
Alan Jacobs on "Fantasy and the Buffered Self."
Taylor as a theologian of the secular status quo.
Brief information at The Gospel Coalition (mainly on Sources of the Self); see more extensive review here.
Review of literature re: the post secular and literature.
Some random notes:
Introduction
5–8: desire
17–18: Stoicism (also 112, 114ff., 116 [Senecan and Epictetian Stoicism are different])
Ch. 1: The Bulwarks of Belief
30: mind (cf. Idea in Platonism vs. "I have an idea" [in my head])
42: Rogation Day is April 25; connected to Ascension Day
46: longing/Carnival (also 130–32, 135)
51: May 15
52–53: Utopia
55–56: time (cf. Leithart's Deep Comedy); Augustine's Confessions
58: place vs. space; Hamlet/Marcellus
60: Ideas—thoughts of the creator
69: negation of personal holiness; metanoia—repentance; Purgatory; merit; indulgences
70: devotio moderna; Kempis; individual
71–72: Erasmus
75: Luther on reversing fear (negation)
76: Erasmus was not in favor of a "raging" Reformation
77: anti-Reformation; vocation
78–79: only a few saved
83: paralyzing melancholy (cf. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy)
85: anti-Reformation
86–87: carnival (turning the world upside down); also 101, 103, 109, 123–24, 129, 135
87: Brant's Ship of Fools
Ch. 2: The Rise of the Disciplinary Society
92: God as artist—cithar
99: man as genius
100: Aristotle—fullness in the city
108: Foucault and madness/insanity/fools
114: artists and imitation/creation (cf. p. 99)
115: reason; Providence
116: free will
117: political order and state activism (also 107, 130)
119: neo-Stoicism and Calvinism—connect with Donnelly (Hobbes/Calvin)
119–20: Calvinist eschewal of violence; golden society; innovation?
122: Augustine didn't assume total reform was possible
126: Natural law
132–33: Plato and reason / free will (and Descartes)
Ch. 3: The Great Disembedding
Ch. 4: Modern Social Imaginaries
161: realized (also 166); already but not yet
163: Ancient Constitution
164: oratores, bellatores, laborates—medieval hierarchy
165: all callings are equal in God's sight; Plato's Republic
167: egalitarianism vs. complementarianism
168: law of lesser magistrates; Charles I
169: resisting the subtraction theory
178: absolute rule (Louis XIV)
179: vocation (see p. 165?)
181: Pope's Essay on Man
184: economics desplaced war
195: gathered time
197–98: resistance (see p. 169?)
Ch. 5: The Spectre of Idealism
Ch. 6: Providential Deism
231/233: more Reformation bashing
262: Calvin bashing (also 274); see p. 804n59 (Jefferson and Paine equate Calvinism with atheism, because "Calvin's God" is so repulsive); at p. 262, Taylor seems to agree with Enlightenment thinkers that the concepts of original sin and the juridical-penal version of the atonement are deeply flawed
266: upset about Reformed vocation
268–69: litotes nature of present society; described as disenchanted; perfect tense
Ch. 7: The Impersonal Order
275–79: Platonism
277: history enters eternity as gathered time (see p. 195); felix culpa
278: anti-Calvin
282: ethics (Grotius, Utilitarianism, Kant, Aristotle, Christian, Locke, Rousseau)
284: Lovejoy and plenitude
Ch. 8: The Malaises of Modernity
299: Romantic period and authenticity
305–7: theodicy
312: Kant sounds theistic, but he turns towards anthropocentrism
Ch. 9: The Dark Abyss of Time
323: social imaginary
324: Aristotle thought the world was eternal (also p. 332)
324–25: things as signs
335–36: man as steward of creation (cf. p. 266?)
339: arcadia; wilderness
346: Kant vs. Schopenhauer
334: ruins
Ch. 10: The Expanding Universe of Unbelief
352: mimesis vs. creation (also p. 353)
354–55: modern art as disembodied for original activities
355: two kinds of disembedding
337: see Flannigan's Milton anthology (p. 67n17)
359: Romantics prized creativity—didn't preclude God
362: anti-Reformation; vocation (also p. 370)
364: Reformation—>disenchantment
364: connection between materialism and adulthood (weak faith to begin with)
367: no responsibility
370: questioning the quest for "the good life"
369: immanent counter-Enlightenment
372: literature departments
374–76: 1500–2000 summary (order)
Ch. 11: Nineteenth-Century Trajectories
379: myth/Mythus
380–84: Arnold and culture
388–89: theodicy
389: Calvin/puppet
394: synthesis
395: Victorian self-control—see earlier in the book?
397: English Romanticism
398: humanism and altruism
412: problem of democracy
413: anti-Reformation (fission)
417: justification for war seemed weak; war to end all wars—promised a better future
402–07: Bloomsbury group
Ch. 12: The Age of Mobilization
425: patronizing Calvinism
427–28: presuppositional apologetics (also p. 436)
427–29: defining religion (also p. 437)
439: folk ritual ≠ manipulation
440–41: elite Reformers trashed popular rituals without replacing them with anything
442: Reformers = destroyers
445: English Reformers = bullies
448–50: denominationalism
459–60: ancient regime vs. mobilization
464–65, 468–69: feast/celebrations being suppressed or cleaned up
470: anti-Puritan
471–72: confessional age / Christian ghettos
Ch. 13: The Age of Authenticity
473: expressivism/Romanticism (also 474–75, 478, 480–81, 483–84, 486–87, 489–92, 506–7, 510, 512, 527, 825)
474: consumer and youth culture; private space
481: mutual display
484: tolerance
487–88: Moral Majority and the Christian Right
488–89: emotion vs. reason
489: Schleiermacher
494–95: gender issues
496: seven deadly sins
496–97: fear and threats
497: Calvin bashing—no assurance? (more positive on p. 499)
498–99: reasons for the focus on sexuality
499–50?: features of the sexual revolution
500: anti-Puritan
503: the turn of Vatican 2
Ch. 14: Religion Today
510: Reformation bashing?
511: Loyola story (saints)
508–13: religion vs. spirituality (Taylor likes the nova effect?)
514: retreat of Christendom (also 518)
518: festive resists immanence (cf. Pieper?); more festival on p. 519
522: reference to McLuhan and hot/cool theory
527: culture wars
530: desire (also 495)
530: another subtraction theory
531: great summary paragraph
532: separation of church and state
532: another shot at Calvinism
Ch. 15: The Immanent Frame
542: Reformation/Puritan bashing; grace vs. nature
546: festive
546–47: Protestant-bashing and vocation
547: Christian Fundamentalists
548: Victor Hugo felt cross-pressured
549: 20c materialism wasn't all great either
550: open or closed "spins"; leap of "faith"; "natural" to be closed? (also pp. 551 and 553)
552: "atonal banshee of emerging egomania
554–55: Enlightenment ethics (Hume and Kant)
555: the immanent frame tips us in a certain direction, but we feel cross-pressures
557: Wittgenstein (cf. Tolkien's "Mythopoeia"); p. 549 too
561–62: pusillanimity vs. courage
563: Taylor resists the idea that a moral outlook bowed to brute facts
564: Barrie (Peter Pan) and the holding on to a childishness; Hardy's poem about oxen kneeling
566: science is part of the story, but not all of it (p. 564)
566: "Our stance entrenches us in a picture…" (Wittgenstein?)
567ff. issue of "Science has refuted God"; Othello analogy
568: "Desdemona's voice" as a metaphor
570: Arnold's "Dover Beach"
571: individualism
572: the subtraction theory doesn't account for the universal claims of exclusive humanism
573: "master narratives"; more "story" language on pp. 574–75, 579–86
574–75: Kant/Enlightenment/daring to know
583: Camus and absurdity
586: Camus and revolt
586–87: Nietzsche's Will to Power—exhilaration, not loss
591: hard to erase religion, because the subtraction story necessarily retains it
Ch. 16: Cross Pressures
594: master narrative (see p. 573)
594: immanent frame definition
595: 2 kinds of materialism
595: B.F. Skinner
596–97: 3 issues materialists can't account for
597: me: difference between ethics and morality
597: Freud—morality is self-evident
598: caught between extreme positions, and hesitancy to choose
599: Romantics and creativity/spontaneity
606: Dawkins and piety/wonder
609: Romantics and creativity (see p. 599)
610: desire (also pp. 612/614)
611: Reformation bashing
613: excarnation
609–17: modern aspiration to wholeness
Ch. 17: Dilemmas 1
618: evil as a sickness; therapy
624: Taylor says Calvin thinks that most people go to Hell
625: Odysseus/Calypso [Sarah Clark: Christ chose Penelope]
626: Christian disgust at the body?; few people want to follow Nietzsche
627–28: Reformed vocation connected to sexual revolution via "homecoming" to simple pleasures
630: war and human courage
634: Plato and the turn to the good
634–36: Nietzscheans oppose "normalizing" humanism as well as Christians
640: Plato vs. Aristotle
643: Taylor doesn't think that Christianity has any lasting answers for this life
643–44: misprision
644–45: Socrates and Jesus
646: transformed desires
648–56: anthropocentric turn/climate; wrath; atonement theories; decline of Hell; suffering
648: Reformation vocation
652: Calvin's horrible doctrine of double-predestination
653: Taylor is happily modern; violence justifies the crusades?
654: felix culpa; modern view of suffering
655: very Catholic views
652: analogical vs. univocal
653: Taylor tips his hand on the atonement issue
656: Hell is empty
659: carnival
663: sola fide
665: several literature authors mentioned
670–71: on Hell
Ch. 18: Dilemmas 2
697: solidarity?
696–99: paradox of human potential
701–02: Camus and heroism; cf. Christian reciprocity/community
708–10: program to overcome violence
Ch. 19: Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity
711: Romantic art
712: King's Two Bodies and Carnival (Carnival also on p. 715)
715: ringing key chains
716: July 4, July 14, May 3
711–20: issues of secular time vs. higher time
720–21: all joy strives for eternity
720–26: death and meaning
727: how is it not a contradiction for Catholics not to obey the pope's moral injunctions?
Ch. 20: Conversions
728: interconnectedness of Bede G., Vaclav Havel, etc.
729–30: fullness
733: Maritain vs. Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau
734: Eliot and Christian culture
846: postmillennialism
735–37: anti-Luther (2 Kingdoms); Christianity and moral order
738: Good Samaritan—moral rules (also p. 742)
741: frisson
742: Reformation bashing?
737–44: attack on Christendom?
744: two ways of responding to the present order
745: no "golden age" of Christianity
748: inevitability of decline
749: anti-force; universalism (no Hell); Péguy thought that the Catholic Index was absurd
750: religion ≠ morality; hope as the highest virtue?
752: Trent vs. Vatican 2
753: Vatican 1 vs. Vatican 2
752–55: Taylor seems too relative
754–55: new itineraries
755–58: post-Romantic theory of poetry; symbols; reflexive turn
758–59: fragility of language
761–65: Hopkins
766: Kulturkampf
768: two views of the future
768–69: too much reality
769: fullness
770–72: Reformation bashing (homogenizing)
771: danger of excoriation
Epilogue: The Many Stories
773: nominalism and mechanistic science (and Reform) destroyed the medieval-Christian cosmos
774–75: Intellectual Deviation (ID) and Reform Master Narrative (RMN) as complementary theories
Radical Orthodoxy
Endnotes
818: definition of "Master Narrative"
822: Imperialism
826: subtraction story
830: Casanova's book on secularization theory
833–34n19: faith is stronger when it arises amid alternatives
James K. A. Smith blogs through his reading here and even wrote a guidebook: How (Not) to Be Secular, which I reviewed in Modern Reformation.
Alan Jacobs on "Fantasy and the Buffered Self."
Taylor as a theologian of the secular status quo.
Brief information at The Gospel Coalition (mainly on Sources of the Self); see more extensive review here.
Review of literature re: the post secular and literature.
Some random notes:
Introduction
5–8: desire
17–18: Stoicism (also 112, 114ff., 116 [Senecan and Epictetian Stoicism are different])
Ch. 1: The Bulwarks of Belief
30: mind (cf. Idea in Platonism vs. "I have an idea" [in my head])
42: Rogation Day is April 25; connected to Ascension Day
46: longing/Carnival (also 130–32, 135)
51: May 15
52–53: Utopia
55–56: time (cf. Leithart's Deep Comedy); Augustine's Confessions
58: place vs. space; Hamlet/Marcellus
60: Ideas—thoughts of the creator
69: negation of personal holiness; metanoia—repentance; Purgatory; merit; indulgences
70: devotio moderna; Kempis; individual
71–72: Erasmus
75: Luther on reversing fear (negation)
76: Erasmus was not in favor of a "raging" Reformation
77: anti-Reformation; vocation
78–79: only a few saved
83: paralyzing melancholy (cf. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy)
85: anti-Reformation
86–87: carnival (turning the world upside down); also 101, 103, 109, 123–24, 129, 135
87: Brant's Ship of Fools
Ch. 2: The Rise of the Disciplinary Society
92: God as artist—cithar
99: man as genius
100: Aristotle—fullness in the city
108: Foucault and madness/insanity/fools
114: artists and imitation/creation (cf. p. 99)
115: reason; Providence
116: free will
117: political order and state activism (also 107, 130)
119: neo-Stoicism and Calvinism—connect with Donnelly (Hobbes/Calvin)
119–20: Calvinist eschewal of violence; golden society; innovation?
122: Augustine didn't assume total reform was possible
126: Natural law
132–33: Plato and reason / free will (and Descartes)
Ch. 3: The Great Disembedding
Ch. 4: Modern Social Imaginaries
161: realized (also 166); already but not yet
163: Ancient Constitution
164: oratores, bellatores, laborates—medieval hierarchy
165: all callings are equal in God's sight; Plato's Republic
167: egalitarianism vs. complementarianism
168: law of lesser magistrates; Charles I
169: resisting the subtraction theory
178: absolute rule (Louis XIV)
179: vocation (see p. 165?)
181: Pope's Essay on Man
184: economics desplaced war
195: gathered time
197–98: resistance (see p. 169?)
Ch. 5: The Spectre of Idealism
Ch. 6: Providential Deism
231/233: more Reformation bashing
262: Calvin bashing (also 274); see p. 804n59 (Jefferson and Paine equate Calvinism with atheism, because "Calvin's God" is so repulsive); at p. 262, Taylor seems to agree with Enlightenment thinkers that the concepts of original sin and the juridical-penal version of the atonement are deeply flawed
266: upset about Reformed vocation
268–69: litotes nature of present society; described as disenchanted; perfect tense
Ch. 7: The Impersonal Order
275–79: Platonism
277: history enters eternity as gathered time (see p. 195); felix culpa
278: anti-Calvin
282: ethics (Grotius, Utilitarianism, Kant, Aristotle, Christian, Locke, Rousseau)
284: Lovejoy and plenitude
Ch. 8: The Malaises of Modernity
299: Romantic period and authenticity
305–7: theodicy
312: Kant sounds theistic, but he turns towards anthropocentrism
Ch. 9: The Dark Abyss of Time
323: social imaginary
324: Aristotle thought the world was eternal (also p. 332)
324–25: things as signs
335–36: man as steward of creation (cf. p. 266?)
339: arcadia; wilderness
346: Kant vs. Schopenhauer
334: ruins
Ch. 10: The Expanding Universe of Unbelief
352: mimesis vs. creation (also p. 353)
354–55: modern art as disembodied for original activities
355: two kinds of disembedding
337: see Flannigan's Milton anthology (p. 67n17)
359: Romantics prized creativity—didn't preclude God
362: anti-Reformation; vocation (also p. 370)
364: Reformation—>disenchantment
364: connection between materialism and adulthood (weak faith to begin with)
367: no responsibility
370: questioning the quest for "the good life"
369: immanent counter-Enlightenment
372: literature departments
374–76: 1500–2000 summary (order)
Ch. 11: Nineteenth-Century Trajectories
379: myth/Mythus
380–84: Arnold and culture
388–89: theodicy
389: Calvin/puppet
394: synthesis
395: Victorian self-control—see earlier in the book?
397: English Romanticism
398: humanism and altruism
412: problem of democracy
413: anti-Reformation (fission)
417: justification for war seemed weak; war to end all wars—promised a better future
402–07: Bloomsbury group
Ch. 12: The Age of Mobilization
425: patronizing Calvinism
427–28: presuppositional apologetics (also p. 436)
427–29: defining religion (also p. 437)
439: folk ritual ≠ manipulation
440–41: elite Reformers trashed popular rituals without replacing them with anything
442: Reformers = destroyers
445: English Reformers = bullies
448–50: denominationalism
459–60: ancient regime vs. mobilization
464–65, 468–69: feast/celebrations being suppressed or cleaned up
470: anti-Puritan
471–72: confessional age / Christian ghettos
Ch. 13: The Age of Authenticity
473: expressivism/Romanticism (also 474–75, 478, 480–81, 483–84, 486–87, 489–92, 506–7, 510, 512, 527, 825)
474: consumer and youth culture; private space
481: mutual display
484: tolerance
487–88: Moral Majority and the Christian Right
488–89: emotion vs. reason
489: Schleiermacher
494–95: gender issues
496: seven deadly sins
496–97: fear and threats
497: Calvin bashing—no assurance? (more positive on p. 499)
498–99: reasons for the focus on sexuality
499–50?: features of the sexual revolution
500: anti-Puritan
503: the turn of Vatican 2
Ch. 14: Religion Today
510: Reformation bashing?
511: Loyola story (saints)
508–13: religion vs. spirituality (Taylor likes the nova effect?)
514: retreat of Christendom (also 518)
518: festive resists immanence (cf. Pieper?); more festival on p. 519
522: reference to McLuhan and hot/cool theory
527: culture wars
530: desire (also 495)
530: another subtraction theory
531: great summary paragraph
532: separation of church and state
532: another shot at Calvinism
Ch. 15: The Immanent Frame
542: Reformation/Puritan bashing; grace vs. nature
546: festive
546–47: Protestant-bashing and vocation
547: Christian Fundamentalists
548: Victor Hugo felt cross-pressured
549: 20c materialism wasn't all great either
550: open or closed "spins"; leap of "faith"; "natural" to be closed? (also pp. 551 and 553)
552: "atonal banshee of emerging egomania
554–55: Enlightenment ethics (Hume and Kant)
555: the immanent frame tips us in a certain direction, but we feel cross-pressures
557: Wittgenstein (cf. Tolkien's "Mythopoeia"); p. 549 too
561–62: pusillanimity vs. courage
563: Taylor resists the idea that a moral outlook bowed to brute facts
564: Barrie (Peter Pan) and the holding on to a childishness; Hardy's poem about oxen kneeling
566: science is part of the story, but not all of it (p. 564)
566: "Our stance entrenches us in a picture…" (Wittgenstein?)
567ff. issue of "Science has refuted God"; Othello analogy
568: "Desdemona's voice" as a metaphor
570: Arnold's "Dover Beach"
571: individualism
572: the subtraction theory doesn't account for the universal claims of exclusive humanism
573: "master narratives"; more "story" language on pp. 574–75, 579–86
574–75: Kant/Enlightenment/daring to know
583: Camus and absurdity
586: Camus and revolt
586–87: Nietzsche's Will to Power—exhilaration, not loss
591: hard to erase religion, because the subtraction story necessarily retains it
Ch. 16: Cross Pressures
594: master narrative (see p. 573)
594: immanent frame definition
595: 2 kinds of materialism
595: B.F. Skinner
596–97: 3 issues materialists can't account for
597: me: difference between ethics and morality
597: Freud—morality is self-evident
598: caught between extreme positions, and hesitancy to choose
599: Romantics and creativity/spontaneity
606: Dawkins and piety/wonder
609: Romantics and creativity (see p. 599)
610: desire (also pp. 612/614)
611: Reformation bashing
613: excarnation
609–17: modern aspiration to wholeness
Ch. 17: Dilemmas 1
618: evil as a sickness; therapy
624: Taylor says Calvin thinks that most people go to Hell
625: Odysseus/Calypso [Sarah Clark: Christ chose Penelope]
626: Christian disgust at the body?; few people want to follow Nietzsche
627–28: Reformed vocation connected to sexual revolution via "homecoming" to simple pleasures
630: war and human courage
634: Plato and the turn to the good
634–36: Nietzscheans oppose "normalizing" humanism as well as Christians
640: Plato vs. Aristotle
643: Taylor doesn't think that Christianity has any lasting answers for this life
643–44: misprision
644–45: Socrates and Jesus
646: transformed desires
648–56: anthropocentric turn/climate; wrath; atonement theories; decline of Hell; suffering
648: Reformation vocation
652: Calvin's horrible doctrine of double-predestination
653: Taylor is happily modern; violence justifies the crusades?
654: felix culpa; modern view of suffering
655: very Catholic views
652: analogical vs. univocal
653: Taylor tips his hand on the atonement issue
656: Hell is empty
659: carnival
663: sola fide
665: several literature authors mentioned
670–71: on Hell
Ch. 18: Dilemmas 2
697: solidarity?
696–99: paradox of human potential
701–02: Camus and heroism; cf. Christian reciprocity/community
708–10: program to overcome violence
Ch. 19: Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity
711: Romantic art
712: King's Two Bodies and Carnival (Carnival also on p. 715)
715: ringing key chains
716: July 4, July 14, May 3
711–20: issues of secular time vs. higher time
720–21: all joy strives for eternity
720–26: death and meaning
727: how is it not a contradiction for Catholics not to obey the pope's moral injunctions?
Ch. 20: Conversions
728: interconnectedness of Bede G., Vaclav Havel, etc.
729–30: fullness
733: Maritain vs. Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau
734: Eliot and Christian culture
846: postmillennialism
735–37: anti-Luther (2 Kingdoms); Christianity and moral order
738: Good Samaritan—moral rules (also p. 742)
741: frisson
742: Reformation bashing?
737–44: attack on Christendom?
744: two ways of responding to the present order
745: no "golden age" of Christianity
748: inevitability of decline
749: anti-force; universalism (no Hell); Péguy thought that the Catholic Index was absurd
750: religion ≠ morality; hope as the highest virtue?
752: Trent vs. Vatican 2
753: Vatican 1 vs. Vatican 2
752–55: Taylor seems too relative
754–55: new itineraries
755–58: post-Romantic theory of poetry; symbols; reflexive turn
758–59: fragility of language
761–65: Hopkins
766: Kulturkampf
768: two views of the future
768–69: too much reality
769: fullness
770–72: Reformation bashing (homogenizing)
771: danger of excoriation
Epilogue: The Many Stories
773: nominalism and mechanistic science (and Reform) destroyed the medieval-Christian cosmos
774–75: Intellectual Deviation (ID) and Reform Master Narrative (RMN) as complementary theories
Radical Orthodoxy
Endnotes
818: definition of "Master Narrative"
822: Imperialism
826: subtraction story
830: Casanova's book on secularization theory
833–34n19: faith is stronger when it arises amid alternatives
October 11, 2021
Who Should Read this Book - Anyone who wants to understand how the secular modern world came into existence in the centuries following 1500.
What’s the Big Takeaway - The story of secularism and modernity that people learn science and reject religion, is deficient and not grounded in reality. Taylor offers a much more nuanced story that portrays the secular world as one in which there are many live options from belief to unbelief and no option is uncontested.
And a quote - How do I pick a quote from an 800 page book like this?
How about - “But the expressivist outlook takes this a stage farther. The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this. . . But if the focus is going now to be on my spiritual path, thus on what insights come to me in the subtler languages that I find meaningful, then maintaining this or any other framework becomes increasingly difficult” (486).
I read this book exactly ten years ago. I was blown away by the breadth and depth of the work. It is probably not too much to say Taylor’s work here completely changed how I understood what it meant to be secular and living in the modern world. I’ve overheard SO MANY discussions on podcasts and at coffee shops and churches where I want to just chime in, “you should read Charles Taylor.”
Of course, most normal people do not have the time or energy to read a mammoth book like this. I’m not sure what it says about me that I’ve now read it twice.
But in the last ten years, I have often wondered how much I missed in this book. Since then, I have read plenty of other books on the same subject. Further, I have seen plenty of authors interact with Taylor. I think CS Lewis said something about how great books are ones that demand rereads. Usually I only reread fiction. Yet, I felt 2021 was the year to dive back in to Taylor. I read his other magnificent work, Sources of Self, over the summer. This one took quite a bit longer because its longer, and I work on a university campus so I’ve been busier.
That said, I got so much more out of this reread. Actually, come to think of it, I wish I had underlined in a different color so I could come back in another ten years!
Taylor’s question is how come in 1500 belief in God was taken for granted and today it is highly contested. He presses back against the common “subtraction story” that we just learned science and discarded religion. Its nowhere near this simple. His definition of a secular age is where all beliefs are contested. Even we who believe the ancient doctrines of Christianity will inevitably experience them differently for we know we have choices and other “live options”. We are, as Taylor says, cross-pressured. But so too are those who reject belief in God; they are haunted by a lack of transcendence.
We’re all secular.
The story Taylor tell of how we got there focuses on Reform. I’ve seen some reviewers accuse Taylor of blaming secularism on the Reformation. This demonstrates a simple failure to get his point (which is okay, its a long book and I’m sure I didn’t always get his point) because he explicitly says the Reform movement as he is speaking of predates the Protestant Reformation. He speaks of the decision at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that all Catholics must take communion once a year. Prior to this, the Church had settled in to two tracks towards spiritual growth - a fast track for monks and other mystic types and a slower track for the rest of us. Space was given for people to let loose (Carnival) and not everyone was expected to live like Jesus all the time (be “radical” as we might put it today). But the church began to desire to elevate all of culture.
Eventually though, this elevation could not be sustained. Plus, this-worldly ends came to be seen as the primary ends. There has always been a tension in Christianity between human flourishing and self-denial - Jesus healed and fed people but also called people to give it all up. The call for all people to move up ended up sort of leveling out and kind of bringing people down.
There is a lot more to the story! Taylor speaks of disenchantment which is another HUGE point. The premodern world was enchanted, filled with spirits and angels and all sorts of things. It was a cosmos full of life. Now we look out and just see a natural world. Closing off the supernatural, we live “buffered” selves in an “immanent” frame.
The great thing about Taylor is that this is not esoteric mumbo-jumbo. You can see the practical, real world truth. I think of communion as we non-Catholics take it. We see it as remembering which implies all that is happening is happening inside our heads. Rather than seeing power out there in the elements, bringing God into us, its just in our minds, disembodied from participating in creation the way the ancients did.
At one point, Taylor was talking of how people were questioning religion and moving away from the faith of their parents. But this is a cycle, where the next generation may move back to the faith. I had just been in a conversation with friends about “deconstruction” and “exvangelicals” and “ex-Christians” and realized all this has been going on for centuries. There were numerous other moments where Taylor pinpointed things that were happening and even pointed to changes that have come about in the 15 years since the book was published.
Overall, its a brilliant book. Its certainly work. If anyone wants encouragement, know that Taylor does write it almost as a story (at least the first half or so). That said, he does meander and go off on tangents and could have made the same basic argument in 3/4 the pages. But its a feast and worth the time.
2011 review:
Wow. Absolutely fantastic. This is certainly one of the best, most challenging, books that I have ever read. I am still turning over in my mind many of the points Taylor makes. Reading this book reminds me why I read difficult books - I am sure I did not get all of it, but being stretched in reading it was a joy in itself.
Taylor basic goal is to answer why it was next to impossible not to believe in God in 1500 whereas today it is very difficult to believe in God. What caused this change in our culture, almost a complete reversal, in the last 500 years?
Many have said the answer is simple - we discovered science and thus rejected religion. You see this answer from atheists who sell a lot more books then Taylor does, people like Dawkins and Harris. While the rise of science did play a part, Taylor convincingly argues...strike that, he shows historically that this explanation is way too simple. There were many reasons that led tot his change - the Reformation leading to disenchantment, the rise of a discipline culture and more.
Today it is difficult to believe, though Taylor does show that any position one takes is fraught with some difficulty. We live in a world with many live options.
There is a lot more to say, though that would require me going back with a fine-tooth comb over my highlights. Maybe some other day...
What’s the Big Takeaway - The story of secularism and modernity that people learn science and reject religion, is deficient and not grounded in reality. Taylor offers a much more nuanced story that portrays the secular world as one in which there are many live options from belief to unbelief and no option is uncontested.
And a quote - How do I pick a quote from an 800 page book like this?
How about - “But the expressivist outlook takes this a stage farther. The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this. . . But if the focus is going now to be on my spiritual path, thus on what insights come to me in the subtler languages that I find meaningful, then maintaining this or any other framework becomes increasingly difficult” (486).
I read this book exactly ten years ago. I was blown away by the breadth and depth of the work. It is probably not too much to say Taylor’s work here completely changed how I understood what it meant to be secular and living in the modern world. I’ve overheard SO MANY discussions on podcasts and at coffee shops and churches where I want to just chime in, “you should read Charles Taylor.”
Of course, most normal people do not have the time or energy to read a mammoth book like this. I’m not sure what it says about me that I’ve now read it twice.
But in the last ten years, I have often wondered how much I missed in this book. Since then, I have read plenty of other books on the same subject. Further, I have seen plenty of authors interact with Taylor. I think CS Lewis said something about how great books are ones that demand rereads. Usually I only reread fiction. Yet, I felt 2021 was the year to dive back in to Taylor. I read his other magnificent work, Sources of Self, over the summer. This one took quite a bit longer because its longer, and I work on a university campus so I’ve been busier.
That said, I got so much more out of this reread. Actually, come to think of it, I wish I had underlined in a different color so I could come back in another ten years!
Taylor’s question is how come in 1500 belief in God was taken for granted and today it is highly contested. He presses back against the common “subtraction story” that we just learned science and discarded religion. Its nowhere near this simple. His definition of a secular age is where all beliefs are contested. Even we who believe the ancient doctrines of Christianity will inevitably experience them differently for we know we have choices and other “live options”. We are, as Taylor says, cross-pressured. But so too are those who reject belief in God; they are haunted by a lack of transcendence.
We’re all secular.
The story Taylor tell of how we got there focuses on Reform. I’ve seen some reviewers accuse Taylor of blaming secularism on the Reformation. This demonstrates a simple failure to get his point (which is okay, its a long book and I’m sure I didn’t always get his point) because he explicitly says the Reform movement as he is speaking of predates the Protestant Reformation. He speaks of the decision at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that all Catholics must take communion once a year. Prior to this, the Church had settled in to two tracks towards spiritual growth - a fast track for monks and other mystic types and a slower track for the rest of us. Space was given for people to let loose (Carnival) and not everyone was expected to live like Jesus all the time (be “radical” as we might put it today). But the church began to desire to elevate all of culture.
Eventually though, this elevation could not be sustained. Plus, this-worldly ends came to be seen as the primary ends. There has always been a tension in Christianity between human flourishing and self-denial - Jesus healed and fed people but also called people to give it all up. The call for all people to move up ended up sort of leveling out and kind of bringing people down.
There is a lot more to the story! Taylor speaks of disenchantment which is another HUGE point. The premodern world was enchanted, filled with spirits and angels and all sorts of things. It was a cosmos full of life. Now we look out and just see a natural world. Closing off the supernatural, we live “buffered” selves in an “immanent” frame.
The great thing about Taylor is that this is not esoteric mumbo-jumbo. You can see the practical, real world truth. I think of communion as we non-Catholics take it. We see it as remembering which implies all that is happening is happening inside our heads. Rather than seeing power out there in the elements, bringing God into us, its just in our minds, disembodied from participating in creation the way the ancients did.
At one point, Taylor was talking of how people were questioning religion and moving away from the faith of their parents. But this is a cycle, where the next generation may move back to the faith. I had just been in a conversation with friends about “deconstruction” and “exvangelicals” and “ex-Christians” and realized all this has been going on for centuries. There were numerous other moments where Taylor pinpointed things that were happening and even pointed to changes that have come about in the 15 years since the book was published.
Overall, its a brilliant book. Its certainly work. If anyone wants encouragement, know that Taylor does write it almost as a story (at least the first half or so). That said, he does meander and go off on tangents and could have made the same basic argument in 3/4 the pages. But its a feast and worth the time.
2011 review:
Wow. Absolutely fantastic. This is certainly one of the best, most challenging, books that I have ever read. I am still turning over in my mind many of the points Taylor makes. Reading this book reminds me why I read difficult books - I am sure I did not get all of it, but being stretched in reading it was a joy in itself.
Taylor basic goal is to answer why it was next to impossible not to believe in God in 1500 whereas today it is very difficult to believe in God. What caused this change in our culture, almost a complete reversal, in the last 500 years?
Many have said the answer is simple - we discovered science and thus rejected religion. You see this answer from atheists who sell a lot more books then Taylor does, people like Dawkins and Harris. While the rise of science did play a part, Taylor convincingly argues...strike that, he shows historically that this explanation is way too simple. There were many reasons that led tot his change - the Reformation leading to disenchantment, the rise of a discipline culture and more.
Today it is difficult to believe, though Taylor does show that any position one takes is fraught with some difficulty. We live in a world with many live options.
There is a lot more to say, though that would require me going back with a fine-tooth comb over my highlights. Maybe some other day...
Read
December 11, 2021Warning: this is a long and dense book, best read a chapter at a time. Charles Taylor does a masterful job of explaining why the West (Europe, and increasingly the U.S.) has moved from the center of Christian faith to the most secular place on earth. I also recommend his equally dense "Sources of the Self."
February 13, 2020
Unlike most people, I enjoy it when Jehovah Witnesses come to my door. The first thing I do is take them out of their "closed world system" (a term used by this author) and try to figure out why they believe the book they have in their hand is the "inerrant word of God". I want to know how they justify their original premises before I give their selective scripture reading any merit. Similarly, Freudian Psychology (Psychoanalysis) can never be argued against effectively if you grant their major premises, such as "we our all repressed, because after all you even deny that your repressed". In the end Psychoanalysis was refuted when data was brought in from outside the paradigm and started showing how much more effective CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy) was (for a marvelous book on that topic I would recommend "Shrink").
The fault I have with this book is the author always presents the secular arguments in terms of his belief systems. He just assumes that Objective Morality is a real thing, that "why are we here", "what's our purpose", and how do we practice 'agape' are valid questions. For people who think those kind of questions are meaningful and for people who think faith ('pretending to know things you don't really know without sufficient reason or evidence") is what makes us special and gives us goodness this book would be a definite recommended read.
As for me, I think Objective Morality is an oxymoron ('objective' means taking man and his opinions based on feelings out of the definition, and morality is the act of doing good and not harm within humanity, and when you combine the two concepts you get a contradiction since morality is subjective and can't be understood without humans). People of faith belong at the children's table, because they think like children and haven't yet learned to embrace rational narratives based on reason, empirical data, and models that predict (and retrodict). I think that Steinback is right when the preacher says to Tom Joad, "there ain't no virtue, there ain't no sin, there's just people doing things. "That's a very Epicurean way of seeing the universe. The author sees the world from a stoic perspective. He would believe that sin and virtue are part of the universe and exist independent of man. The author will step the listener though on how Christianity (or using his Transcendent Transformational belief system as a generic stand in for Christianity) comes about through Stoic thought and the immanent (once again using the author's nomenculture) flows from Titus Lucretius Epicurean thought.
The author really did not seem to like Evolutionary Psychology (he calls it Socio-biology which is fine) and its power to explain. He thought that God designed it or made it so were better explanations for altruism and groups working together or even difference between the genders. That's fine. The book was published in 2007 and obviously written over a long period of time before it was published and Evolutionary Psychology has just only recently come into it's own. I was irritated by his trivializing the Western Allies in WW I and implying that both sides were to blame for the war and how it wasn't worth the sacrifice. He did that multiple parts throughout the book. I really would recommend he read Max Hastings book, "Catastrophe: 1914". Germany started the war with it's "blank check" to Austria, Germany wanted complete hegemony through out Europe, they really did kill Belgium babies, and systemically were hierarchically ordered to put Belgian civilians on bridges as shields against attack, and made the war about total conquest. As for me, I believe the sacrifice the allies made in WW I were noble, and necessary as a bulwark against German Hegemony and to state differently goes against well respected historians such as Max Hastings.
The author really doesn't seem to like "The Age of Enlightenment" (1700s France, Germany and Britain). Most of the book is reaction against enlightenment thought. He'll quote Edmund Burke and always seems to fall back on respecting authority over science, and question the importance of the scientific process in the dismantling of the "Enchanted World". The author definitely downplays the role that science, diversity, and questioning knowledge based on authority alone has in the development of secular thought. Also, he keeps asking why during the 16th and 17th century there were so few self confessed secular believers. I suspect it had something to do with being put to death or ostracized or imprisoned if you stated you were a non-believer. It would be equivalent to asking today "why are there so few atheist in Saudi Arabia". It's obvious, if you say you are or talk about why secularism might be reasonable you can get 1000 lashes (yes, that is the current penalty in Saudi Arabia for thinking outside of the norm).
Even though, the author argues his points completely within the context of his major premises, I can still strongly recommend this book. He never talks down to the listener and is constantly teaching the listener. He doesn't miss a major thought from the Masters of Suspicion (Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche) or the users of Hermeneutics (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Camus). The best way to really learn a subject is not to study it in the original form but to see it applied in another form. I didn't really understand algebra until I took calculus, and I didn't understand calculus until I took real analysis. This book is full of complex applications within the context of the author's major premises. I definitely don't agree with his premises, but I love putting my previous understandings into application in order to further understand. I fully understand more about Nietzsche than I learned from listening to an 8 hour lecture series from the Great Courses after having listened to this book.
The author also appeals to the 'lived' time that Bergson creates as a reaction to Einstein taking time out of the universe by doing away with simultaneity and making the universe as a whole part of 'block time' instead. That leads to Heidegger's (who this author definitely likes and quotes throughout the book) "Being and Time" which I've been currently reading and this book has given insights into what I had been reading.
I can recommend this book for those who have faith and believe that is a good thing, or for those who think faith is a silly thing. The only warning I would give is the author is going to use words like Hermeneutics and just expect the listener knows what is meant by that. I don't think I would have been able to read this book in book form since the author appeals to his Hermeneutics of Divine Reason as a given through out the book, but while listening to it I found it easy to zone out and wait for the story to edify me about so many different schools of modern philosophy.
The fault I have with this book is the author always presents the secular arguments in terms of his belief systems. He just assumes that Objective Morality is a real thing, that "why are we here", "what's our purpose", and how do we practice 'agape' are valid questions. For people who think those kind of questions are meaningful and for people who think faith ('pretending to know things you don't really know without sufficient reason or evidence") is what makes us special and gives us goodness this book would be a definite recommended read.
As for me, I think Objective Morality is an oxymoron ('objective' means taking man and his opinions based on feelings out of the definition, and morality is the act of doing good and not harm within humanity, and when you combine the two concepts you get a contradiction since morality is subjective and can't be understood without humans). People of faith belong at the children's table, because they think like children and haven't yet learned to embrace rational narratives based on reason, empirical data, and models that predict (and retrodict). I think that Steinback is right when the preacher says to Tom Joad, "there ain't no virtue, there ain't no sin, there's just people doing things. "That's a very Epicurean way of seeing the universe. The author sees the world from a stoic perspective. He would believe that sin and virtue are part of the universe and exist independent of man. The author will step the listener though on how Christianity (or using his Transcendent Transformational belief system as a generic stand in for Christianity) comes about through Stoic thought and the immanent (once again using the author's nomenculture) flows from Titus Lucretius Epicurean thought.
The author really did not seem to like Evolutionary Psychology (he calls it Socio-biology which is fine) and its power to explain. He thought that God designed it or made it so were better explanations for altruism and groups working together or even difference between the genders. That's fine. The book was published in 2007 and obviously written over a long period of time before it was published and Evolutionary Psychology has just only recently come into it's own. I was irritated by his trivializing the Western Allies in WW I and implying that both sides were to blame for the war and how it wasn't worth the sacrifice. He did that multiple parts throughout the book. I really would recommend he read Max Hastings book, "Catastrophe: 1914". Germany started the war with it's "blank check" to Austria, Germany wanted complete hegemony through out Europe, they really did kill Belgium babies, and systemically were hierarchically ordered to put Belgian civilians on bridges as shields against attack, and made the war about total conquest. As for me, I believe the sacrifice the allies made in WW I were noble, and necessary as a bulwark against German Hegemony and to state differently goes against well respected historians such as Max Hastings.
The author really doesn't seem to like "The Age of Enlightenment" (1700s France, Germany and Britain). Most of the book is reaction against enlightenment thought. He'll quote Edmund Burke and always seems to fall back on respecting authority over science, and question the importance of the scientific process in the dismantling of the "Enchanted World". The author definitely downplays the role that science, diversity, and questioning knowledge based on authority alone has in the development of secular thought. Also, he keeps asking why during the 16th and 17th century there were so few self confessed secular believers. I suspect it had something to do with being put to death or ostracized or imprisoned if you stated you were a non-believer. It would be equivalent to asking today "why are there so few atheist in Saudi Arabia". It's obvious, if you say you are or talk about why secularism might be reasonable you can get 1000 lashes (yes, that is the current penalty in Saudi Arabia for thinking outside of the norm).
Even though, the author argues his points completely within the context of his major premises, I can still strongly recommend this book. He never talks down to the listener and is constantly teaching the listener. He doesn't miss a major thought from the Masters of Suspicion (Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche) or the users of Hermeneutics (Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Camus). The best way to really learn a subject is not to study it in the original form but to see it applied in another form. I didn't really understand algebra until I took calculus, and I didn't understand calculus until I took real analysis. This book is full of complex applications within the context of the author's major premises. I definitely don't agree with his premises, but I love putting my previous understandings into application in order to further understand. I fully understand more about Nietzsche than I learned from listening to an 8 hour lecture series from the Great Courses after having listened to this book.
The author also appeals to the 'lived' time that Bergson creates as a reaction to Einstein taking time out of the universe by doing away with simultaneity and making the universe as a whole part of 'block time' instead. That leads to Heidegger's (who this author definitely likes and quotes throughout the book) "Being and Time" which I've been currently reading and this book has given insights into what I had been reading.
I can recommend this book for those who have faith and believe that is a good thing, or for those who think faith is a silly thing. The only warning I would give is the author is going to use words like Hermeneutics and just expect the listener knows what is meant by that. I don't think I would have been able to read this book in book form since the author appeals to his Hermeneutics of Divine Reason as a given through out the book, but while listening to it I found it easy to zone out and wait for the story to edify me about so many different schools of modern philosophy.
June 13, 2023
Charles Taylor's Secular Age
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written extensively on the interplay between the religious and secular attitudes towards life. His recent book, "A Secular Age" explores this relationship in great and thoughtful detail from both a historical and a deeply personal perspective. The book is based in part on the Gifford Lectures that Taylor delivered in Edinburgh in 1997. (William James, a philosopher Taylor admires, also delivered a set of Gifford Lectures which became "The Varieties of Religious Experience".) But the book was expanded greatly from Taylor's Gifford lectures, and he aptly advises the reader "not to think of it as a continuous story-and-argument, but rather as a series of interlocking essays, which shed light on each other,, and offer a context of relevance for each other." (Preface) Taylor's book received the 2007 Templeton Prize. The Templeton Prize is awarded "for progress toward research or discovery about spiritual realities." It carries with it the largest cash award of any major prize or honor.
A good deal of Taylor's book is devoted to understanding the nature of secularism and the different contexts in which the word "secularism" is used. For the larger part of the book, Taylor describes a "secular age" as an age in which unbelief in God or in Transcendent reality has become a live option to many people. He describes our age as such a "secular age" especially among academics and other intellectuals. He wants to give an account of how secularism developed, of its strengths and weaknesses, and of its current significance.
Taylor's book is written on a personal, historical, and contemporary level. Taylor is a believing contemporary Catholic, and much of his treatment of religious belief reflects his own Catholic/Christian commitments. At times, I thought that Taylor's description of the religious life (necessary to his consideration of secularism) was focused too much in the nature of specifically Christian beliefs, such as the Incarnation and the Atonement, which would be of little significance to non-Christian practitioners of religion, such as Jews, Buddhists, or Zoroastrians. Taylor is, in fact, fully aware of the diversity among religious traditions, but his discussion of the religious outlook still at times tilts greatly towards Christianity. The advantage of Taylor's approach (in emphasizing his own religious commitment)is that it gives the book a sense of immediacy and lived experience. The key difference between secularism and religion for Taylor is that the former tends to see human good and human flourishing as focused solely in this world, in, for example, a happy family, a rewarding career, and service to others, while the religious outlook insists that these goods, while precious are not enough. The religious outlook is Transcendent and sees the primary good in life as beyond all individualized, this-worldly human goods.
From a historical perspective, Taylor tries to reject what he calls the "subtraction story". This story sees secularism as resulting purely from the discoveries of science -- such as Darwin's evolution -- taking away assumptions basic to religion leaving a secular, nonreligious world view by default. He offers learned discussions of the medieval period, the reformation and the Enlightenment, of Romanticism and Victorianism as leading to the development of secularism but to new forms of religious awareness as well. The "subtraction story" for Taylor is a gross oversimplification. Secularism, and the religious responses to it, has a complex, convoluted history with many twists and turns. The impetus for both views, Taylor argues is predominantly ethical -- developing views on what is important for human life -- rather than merely epistemological.
Taylor's approach seems to me greatly influenced by Hegel. He offers a type of dialectic in which one type of religious belief leads to a resulting series of secularist or religious responses which in turn result in other further variants and responses. In spite of his own religious commitments, he acknowledges, and celebrates, the diversity of options people have today towards both secularism and religion. The book is also deeply influenced by Heidegger (and Wittgenstein) in its emphasis on the unstated and unexamined views towards being in the world that, Taylor finds, underlie both religion and secularism.
I found the best portions of the book were those that specifically addressed modern life, as Taylor assesses the importance of an "expressivist" culture, which emphasizes personal fulfillment especially as it involves sexuality, of gender issues and feminism, of this-worldy service to others, and of fanaticism and violence upon issues of secularism and religion. Taylor emphasizes that people today tend to be fluid in their beliefs and to move more frequently than did people in other times between religions, between alternative spiritualities, and, indeed between secularism and religion. He attributes this to the plethora of options in a fragmented age and to a search for meaning among many people that did not seem as pressing in earlier times. Peggy Lee's song "Is that all there is?" is a theme that runs through a great deal of Taylor's book.
Taylor has written a difficult, challenging work that is unlikely to change many people's opinions about their own secularism or religion but that may lead to an increased understanding of individuals for their own views and for those of others. This book is not for the casual reader. It will appeal to those who have wrestled for themselves with questions of spirituality and secularism.
Robin Friedman
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written extensively on the interplay between the religious and secular attitudes towards life. His recent book, "A Secular Age" explores this relationship in great and thoughtful detail from both a historical and a deeply personal perspective. The book is based in part on the Gifford Lectures that Taylor delivered in Edinburgh in 1997. (William James, a philosopher Taylor admires, also delivered a set of Gifford Lectures which became "The Varieties of Religious Experience".) But the book was expanded greatly from Taylor's Gifford lectures, and he aptly advises the reader "not to think of it as a continuous story-and-argument, but rather as a series of interlocking essays, which shed light on each other,, and offer a context of relevance for each other." (Preface) Taylor's book received the 2007 Templeton Prize. The Templeton Prize is awarded "for progress toward research or discovery about spiritual realities." It carries with it the largest cash award of any major prize or honor.
A good deal of Taylor's book is devoted to understanding the nature of secularism and the different contexts in which the word "secularism" is used. For the larger part of the book, Taylor describes a "secular age" as an age in which unbelief in God or in Transcendent reality has become a live option to many people. He describes our age as such a "secular age" especially among academics and other intellectuals. He wants to give an account of how secularism developed, of its strengths and weaknesses, and of its current significance.
Taylor's book is written on a personal, historical, and contemporary level. Taylor is a believing contemporary Catholic, and much of his treatment of religious belief reflects his own Catholic/Christian commitments. At times, I thought that Taylor's description of the religious life (necessary to his consideration of secularism) was focused too much in the nature of specifically Christian beliefs, such as the Incarnation and the Atonement, which would be of little significance to non-Christian practitioners of religion, such as Jews, Buddhists, or Zoroastrians. Taylor is, in fact, fully aware of the diversity among religious traditions, but his discussion of the religious outlook still at times tilts greatly towards Christianity. The advantage of Taylor's approach (in emphasizing his own religious commitment)is that it gives the book a sense of immediacy and lived experience. The key difference between secularism and religion for Taylor is that the former tends to see human good and human flourishing as focused solely in this world, in, for example, a happy family, a rewarding career, and service to others, while the religious outlook insists that these goods, while precious are not enough. The religious outlook is Transcendent and sees the primary good in life as beyond all individualized, this-worldly human goods.
From a historical perspective, Taylor tries to reject what he calls the "subtraction story". This story sees secularism as resulting purely from the discoveries of science -- such as Darwin's evolution -- taking away assumptions basic to religion leaving a secular, nonreligious world view by default. He offers learned discussions of the medieval period, the reformation and the Enlightenment, of Romanticism and Victorianism as leading to the development of secularism but to new forms of religious awareness as well. The "subtraction story" for Taylor is a gross oversimplification. Secularism, and the religious responses to it, has a complex, convoluted history with many twists and turns. The impetus for both views, Taylor argues is predominantly ethical -- developing views on what is important for human life -- rather than merely epistemological.
Taylor's approach seems to me greatly influenced by Hegel. He offers a type of dialectic in which one type of religious belief leads to a resulting series of secularist or religious responses which in turn result in other further variants and responses. In spite of his own religious commitments, he acknowledges, and celebrates, the diversity of options people have today towards both secularism and religion. The book is also deeply influenced by Heidegger (and Wittgenstein) in its emphasis on the unstated and unexamined views towards being in the world that, Taylor finds, underlie both religion and secularism.
I found the best portions of the book were those that specifically addressed modern life, as Taylor assesses the importance of an "expressivist" culture, which emphasizes personal fulfillment especially as it involves sexuality, of gender issues and feminism, of this-worldy service to others, and of fanaticism and violence upon issues of secularism and religion. Taylor emphasizes that people today tend to be fluid in their beliefs and to move more frequently than did people in other times between religions, between alternative spiritualities, and, indeed between secularism and religion. He attributes this to the plethora of options in a fragmented age and to a search for meaning among many people that did not seem as pressing in earlier times. Peggy Lee's song "Is that all there is?" is a theme that runs through a great deal of Taylor's book.
Taylor has written a difficult, challenging work that is unlikely to change many people's opinions about their own secularism or religion but that may lead to an increased understanding of individuals for their own views and for those of others. This book is not for the casual reader. It will appeal to those who have wrestled for themselves with questions of spirituality and secularism.
Robin Friedman
February 26, 2009
A Secular Age. By Charles Taylor. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. 874 pages, Parts IV and V, pp. 423-772. $39.95.
Where does religion stand in a world of science and materialism? In the final two sections of Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age, he tackles this question. Does religion have a chance against the modern day sciences and temptations, and if so, what does religion have to do to survive? Taylor’s intention for the book is to follow up his 1989, Sources of the Self, in which he articulates a historical account of the meaning of human life. Taylor includes the final two sections, parts IV and V, in his book in order to “deal with matters” that he wanted to discuss during his 1999 lectures (which make up Parts I-III), “but lacked the time and competence to treat properly”(ix). Taylor, a Canadian Philosopher, won the Templeton Prize for the works that he put into his 1999 lectures and A Secular Age, which shined light on spirituality and violence. A Secular Age is a substantial book that requires some time and concentration while reading. Part IV, Narratives of Secularization, is broken up into three chapters, The Age of Mobilization, The Age of Authenticity, and Religion Today. Through these chapters, Taylor explains the vital concepts that have controlled religion and society during the past seven centuries. The Age of Mobilization illustrates the glory days of the “Ancien Régime” when religious hierarchy ruled the nations and political figures were venerated as divine appointees. And, consequently, Taylor illustrates that the end of the glory days of the “Ancien Régime” were followed by the “Age of Mobilization” which was driven by moral ideals and the desire for personal spirituality. In the The Age of Authenticity, Taylor explains the pros and cons of the “pursuit of (individual) happiness” (484). In the final chapter of part IV, Religion Today, Taylor draws on the western phenomenon of being “spiritual but not religious” (535). Part V includes six chapters, The Immanent Frame, Cross Pressures, Dilemmas 1, Dilemmas 2, Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity, and Conversions. In Part V, Conditions of Belief, Taylor delves more deeply into the world that often conflicts with religion, particularly science, materialism, sexual pleasures, and violence.
Throughout the chapters, Taylor uses the terms, neo-Durkheimian, paleo-Durkheimian, and post-Durkheimian. These terms are meant to illustrate the relationship between the church and the state. In a neo-Durkheimian culture, people make their own moral decisions in relation to their church life; for example, they choose to join a denomination “because it seems right” to them (486). In paleo-Durkheimian cultures, people are forced to integrate into the religion of the state; they are “connected with God against their will” (486). Post-Durkheimian culture is what Taylor calls the mode of today; similar to the neo-Durkheimian, people have the right to choose their own church, but in post-Durkheimian cultures, “joining a church you don’t believe in seems not just wrong, but absurd” (489). Taylor quotes a post-Durkheimian speaker at a New Age festival as saying, “Only accept what rings true to your own inner Self” (489).
Taylor tackles some tough philosophical issues, like that of Nietzsche’s “death of God” and Weber’s end of the “Enchanted World.” The “death of God” and science’s refutation of religion have left society with nothing to believe in. People have lost the ability to love and have devotion for a God that Taylor says sometimes “just seems obvious” (569). This atheistic, “modern humanist culture,” faces four major problems; first, to agree with Nietzsche’s “death of God” means that “one can no longer, honestly, lucidly, sincerely believe in God”; second, the rise of “subtraction stories” of modern humanism has eliminated the mythical stories that have thus far defined humanity; third (and I would say most importantly) “religion simply becomes unnecessary when technology gets to a certain level: we don’t need God any more, because we know how to get it [anything that we need:] ourselves”; and finally, forth, religion is simply suppressed by science, creating the gradual recession of religion in the modern secular age (573-4). This all leads to the end of the “Enchanted World”. In the 1500s, God was everywhere and the world was “enchanted”; it was full of hope and security (25). But the modern world is “Disenchanted”; it is a “world without meaning” (680). The “disenchanted world” is a world without hope or purpose; the evils of the world are overwhelming and without a sense of God there is no protection from the “loss, dispersal, evil, blindness… dullness, emptiness, [or:] flatness” (681). The reactions to the “disenchanted world” are either to shut the world out and turn off the news, or to become part of the solution and to do something to “heal the world.” Taylor’s solution is exemplified in “those who connect themselves to God” like Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who serves as an example of love and hope in the “disenchanted world” (684).
Taylor also tackles some hot topic issues, or dilemmas, such as sexual pleasures and violence. He refers to Hugh Hefner several times, and not in a negative way. His point is that the roots of asceticism and self-denial in Christianity have deprived the faithful of even healthy sexual relationships. He explains that “what we call today sex and violence could also be ways of connecting to the spirits/gods or higher world” (612). Some people have “rejected Christianity altogether” because it sacrifices “the joys of ordinary sensual, bodily existence in the name of illusory ideals of abstinence and renunciation” (627). Thus the neglecting of natural desires (Taylor differentiates the natural from the promiscuous) causes people to reject religion. The second dilemma is that of violence. Taylor explains that the problem with mixing religion and violence is that far too often, religious people think that God is on their side, and that their violence is justifiable because they are doing the will of God. Seeing this as a flaw in the ideals of the religious, Taylor challenges Christians to use the “Gospel picture” to form “Christian counter-violence” (708). He proposes talking over fighting, and commends Nelson Mandela for creating space for the good to triumph in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (705-7). Taylor also proposes two necessities to overcome violence; first, non-violence must be ordered by “democratic polities”; and second, “try to make their [democratic:] benefits spread as wide as possible, e.g., by preventing the formation of desperate, excluded groups; particularly young men” (708). Taylor’s presupposition is that equality will lead to peace, and by not ostracizing any groups, there will be no need to fight or rebel.
My response to Taylor’s, A Secular Age, is one of great respect. He is undoubtedly correct when he says, “The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured” (727). Much of the secular society yearns to have faith but struggles with the refutation of the divine by science; their hearts want to believe but their minds won’t let them. There is no better word for this cultural phenomenon then that of societal schizophrenia. My only critiques are that Taylor uses too much French without translation into English, and that A Secular Age is slightly hard to get through; the academic language makes it a challenge to read at times, forcing the reader to stop and reread what he/she has just read. For those who are pressed for time, I would recommend concentrating on chapters thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen, for they are the most fascinating chapters in the final parts of A Secular Age, dealing with the hot topic issues discussed above. My final thought comes from Taylor’s last chapter, Conversions; the Christian Church of the “ancient world” focused its energy on “service institutions, like hospitals and hospices for the needy” (737). Faith was learned and spread through the practice of charity. Today, however, churches have handed charitable work over to the secular bodies, losing its practice of caring for those in need. Together with Taylor, I believe that for churches to survive in this Secular Age, they need to practice what they preach and turn their words into actions. Otherwise, science will trump religion and the personal desire for spirituality will cause the nations to grow even more schizophrenic than they are now. Science may have some of the answers, but the rest of the answers can come only through faith.
Elizabeth Keyes
Boston University School of Theology
Where does religion stand in a world of science and materialism? In the final two sections of Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age, he tackles this question. Does religion have a chance against the modern day sciences and temptations, and if so, what does religion have to do to survive? Taylor’s intention for the book is to follow up his 1989, Sources of the Self, in which he articulates a historical account of the meaning of human life. Taylor includes the final two sections, parts IV and V, in his book in order to “deal with matters” that he wanted to discuss during his 1999 lectures (which make up Parts I-III), “but lacked the time and competence to treat properly”(ix). Taylor, a Canadian Philosopher, won the Templeton Prize for the works that he put into his 1999 lectures and A Secular Age, which shined light on spirituality and violence. A Secular Age is a substantial book that requires some time and concentration while reading. Part IV, Narratives of Secularization, is broken up into three chapters, The Age of Mobilization, The Age of Authenticity, and Religion Today. Through these chapters, Taylor explains the vital concepts that have controlled religion and society during the past seven centuries. The Age of Mobilization illustrates the glory days of the “Ancien Régime” when religious hierarchy ruled the nations and political figures were venerated as divine appointees. And, consequently, Taylor illustrates that the end of the glory days of the “Ancien Régime” were followed by the “Age of Mobilization” which was driven by moral ideals and the desire for personal spirituality. In the The Age of Authenticity, Taylor explains the pros and cons of the “pursuit of (individual) happiness” (484). In the final chapter of part IV, Religion Today, Taylor draws on the western phenomenon of being “spiritual but not religious” (535). Part V includes six chapters, The Immanent Frame, Cross Pressures, Dilemmas 1, Dilemmas 2, Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity, and Conversions. In Part V, Conditions of Belief, Taylor delves more deeply into the world that often conflicts with religion, particularly science, materialism, sexual pleasures, and violence.
Throughout the chapters, Taylor uses the terms, neo-Durkheimian, paleo-Durkheimian, and post-Durkheimian. These terms are meant to illustrate the relationship between the church and the state. In a neo-Durkheimian culture, people make their own moral decisions in relation to their church life; for example, they choose to join a denomination “because it seems right” to them (486). In paleo-Durkheimian cultures, people are forced to integrate into the religion of the state; they are “connected with God against their will” (486). Post-Durkheimian culture is what Taylor calls the mode of today; similar to the neo-Durkheimian, people have the right to choose their own church, but in post-Durkheimian cultures, “joining a church you don’t believe in seems not just wrong, but absurd” (489). Taylor quotes a post-Durkheimian speaker at a New Age festival as saying, “Only accept what rings true to your own inner Self” (489).
Taylor tackles some tough philosophical issues, like that of Nietzsche’s “death of God” and Weber’s end of the “Enchanted World.” The “death of God” and science’s refutation of religion have left society with nothing to believe in. People have lost the ability to love and have devotion for a God that Taylor says sometimes “just seems obvious” (569). This atheistic, “modern humanist culture,” faces four major problems; first, to agree with Nietzsche’s “death of God” means that “one can no longer, honestly, lucidly, sincerely believe in God”; second, the rise of “subtraction stories” of modern humanism has eliminated the mythical stories that have thus far defined humanity; third (and I would say most importantly) “religion simply becomes unnecessary when technology gets to a certain level: we don’t need God any more, because we know how to get it [anything that we need:] ourselves”; and finally, forth, religion is simply suppressed by science, creating the gradual recession of religion in the modern secular age (573-4). This all leads to the end of the “Enchanted World”. In the 1500s, God was everywhere and the world was “enchanted”; it was full of hope and security (25). But the modern world is “Disenchanted”; it is a “world without meaning” (680). The “disenchanted world” is a world without hope or purpose; the evils of the world are overwhelming and without a sense of God there is no protection from the “loss, dispersal, evil, blindness… dullness, emptiness, [or:] flatness” (681). The reactions to the “disenchanted world” are either to shut the world out and turn off the news, or to become part of the solution and to do something to “heal the world.” Taylor’s solution is exemplified in “those who connect themselves to God” like Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who serves as an example of love and hope in the “disenchanted world” (684).
Taylor also tackles some hot topic issues, or dilemmas, such as sexual pleasures and violence. He refers to Hugh Hefner several times, and not in a negative way. His point is that the roots of asceticism and self-denial in Christianity have deprived the faithful of even healthy sexual relationships. He explains that “what we call today sex and violence could also be ways of connecting to the spirits/gods or higher world” (612). Some people have “rejected Christianity altogether” because it sacrifices “the joys of ordinary sensual, bodily existence in the name of illusory ideals of abstinence and renunciation” (627). Thus the neglecting of natural desires (Taylor differentiates the natural from the promiscuous) causes people to reject religion. The second dilemma is that of violence. Taylor explains that the problem with mixing religion and violence is that far too often, religious people think that God is on their side, and that their violence is justifiable because they are doing the will of God. Seeing this as a flaw in the ideals of the religious, Taylor challenges Christians to use the “Gospel picture” to form “Christian counter-violence” (708). He proposes talking over fighting, and commends Nelson Mandela for creating space for the good to triumph in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (705-7). Taylor also proposes two necessities to overcome violence; first, non-violence must be ordered by “democratic polities”; and second, “try to make their [democratic:] benefits spread as wide as possible, e.g., by preventing the formation of desperate, excluded groups; particularly young men” (708). Taylor’s presupposition is that equality will lead to peace, and by not ostracizing any groups, there will be no need to fight or rebel.
My response to Taylor’s, A Secular Age, is one of great respect. He is undoubtedly correct when he says, “The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured” (727). Much of the secular society yearns to have faith but struggles with the refutation of the divine by science; their hearts want to believe but their minds won’t let them. There is no better word for this cultural phenomenon then that of societal schizophrenia. My only critiques are that Taylor uses too much French without translation into English, and that A Secular Age is slightly hard to get through; the academic language makes it a challenge to read at times, forcing the reader to stop and reread what he/she has just read. For those who are pressed for time, I would recommend concentrating on chapters thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen, for they are the most fascinating chapters in the final parts of A Secular Age, dealing with the hot topic issues discussed above. My final thought comes from Taylor’s last chapter, Conversions; the Christian Church of the “ancient world” focused its energy on “service institutions, like hospitals and hospices for the needy” (737). Faith was learned and spread through the practice of charity. Today, however, churches have handed charitable work over to the secular bodies, losing its practice of caring for those in need. Together with Taylor, I believe that for churches to survive in this Secular Age, they need to practice what they preach and turn their words into actions. Otherwise, science will trump religion and the personal desire for spirituality will cause the nations to grow even more schizophrenic than they are now. Science may have some of the answers, but the rest of the answers can come only through faith.
Elizabeth Keyes
Boston University School of Theology
March 4, 2024
This was the longest I have ever spent reading one book by far. For perspective, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (which is a little longer than the Bible) took about 2-3 months. This book literally took a year. I think it would take me another month just to write a worthy review, so instead I will just write a brief, erratic, not comprehensive, and completely unworthy review:
In short, Taylor sets out to explain how, over the course of the last 500 years, we transitioned from a world in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God (or at least the reality of the spiritual realm) to a world where no single worldview can be considered axiomatic, and (in his opinion) everyone is at least somewhat aware that their own worldview is merely one possibility among many. He does so mainly by providing a history of Western thought, particularly in the last 500 years.
I found about 50% of this historical account (which comprised the bulk of the book) to be illuminating and profound. Another 30% was well written, but it was either dull, overgeneralized, or disagreeable in some other way. Then the last 20% or so was difficult to track either because Taylor couldn’t wrap words around his ideas, or I couldn’t wrap my brain around his words (probably a combination of the two).
This book had more flaws than any other book I’ve given five stars. I think it was unnecessarily long, dense, and esoteric. I often spent an hour trying to grasp a 3-5 page section only to come away thinking “that really was not that complicated after all”. Taylor assumes his audience has a deep literary and philosophical background (deeper than my own) as he’ll simply end a sentence with something like “… which makes sense in light of the work Seneca was producing concurrently”. Well 99% of us don’t know what work Seneca was producing concurrently. At times, the book was so heady that I was not sure if I was grasping anything well enough to actually be affected by it at all.
Nevertheless, I have to give this book 5 stars because it ultimately increased my understanding of my own beliefs and those of the world around me more than anything else I have ever read.
I realized that many beliefs I assumed to be artifacts of the past (ie. a need for protection from evil forces) are actually deeply human, and many beliefs that I assumed to be deeply human (ie. a search for individual meaning) are actually quite modern and exceptional.
This book gave me a new lens through which to view any old book or historical work. Just the other day, Talia and I watched All Quiet on the Western Front - a film about young boys being sent to WW1 - and all of the dialogue and speeches had a new level of meaning viewed in light of the conflict of beliefs and values that was unfolding in the early 20th century.
So I’ll stop there. I could write a book about this book (as several others have), but here are two facts to sum it all up:
1. This was the hardest book I have ever read
2. I think 7 of the 10 most profound paragraphs I have ever read were in this book
In short, Taylor sets out to explain how, over the course of the last 500 years, we transitioned from a world in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God (or at least the reality of the spiritual realm) to a world where no single worldview can be considered axiomatic, and (in his opinion) everyone is at least somewhat aware that their own worldview is merely one possibility among many. He does so mainly by providing a history of Western thought, particularly in the last 500 years.
I found about 50% of this historical account (which comprised the bulk of the book) to be illuminating and profound. Another 30% was well written, but it was either dull, overgeneralized, or disagreeable in some other way. Then the last 20% or so was difficult to track either because Taylor couldn’t wrap words around his ideas, or I couldn’t wrap my brain around his words (probably a combination of the two).
This book had more flaws than any other book I’ve given five stars. I think it was unnecessarily long, dense, and esoteric. I often spent an hour trying to grasp a 3-5 page section only to come away thinking “that really was not that complicated after all”. Taylor assumes his audience has a deep literary and philosophical background (deeper than my own) as he’ll simply end a sentence with something like “… which makes sense in light of the work Seneca was producing concurrently”. Well 99% of us don’t know what work Seneca was producing concurrently. At times, the book was so heady that I was not sure if I was grasping anything well enough to actually be affected by it at all.
Nevertheless, I have to give this book 5 stars because it ultimately increased my understanding of my own beliefs and those of the world around me more than anything else I have ever read.
I realized that many beliefs I assumed to be artifacts of the past (ie. a need for protection from evil forces) are actually deeply human, and many beliefs that I assumed to be deeply human (ie. a search for individual meaning) are actually quite modern and exceptional.
This book gave me a new lens through which to view any old book or historical work. Just the other day, Talia and I watched All Quiet on the Western Front - a film about young boys being sent to WW1 - and all of the dialogue and speeches had a new level of meaning viewed in light of the conflict of beliefs and values that was unfolding in the early 20th century.
So I’ll stop there. I could write a book about this book (as several others have), but here are two facts to sum it all up:
1. This was the hardest book I have ever read
2. I think 7 of the 10 most profound paragraphs I have ever read were in this book
March 8, 2024
I don’t know where to begin with this review. A Secular Age is something I would never have picked up to read if it wasn’t a required reading for my doctoral class. This book was by far the densest read of my life. I can recall no other book in my educational journey that was a La tough to make through. I will say that finishing the book was a major accomplishment. Not to be dramatic but I want to put the fact that I read it on my resume haha. Now to the actually review part of the review and not just my ranting. Taylor outlines the rise of secularity in the modern age through walking us through the history of Latin Christendom. He makes it clear that he is looking at the secular age through Latin Christendom and not attempting to be an all encompassing review of secularism in every religious context. Throughout the book he makes his argument that we are now in a secular 3. Not where secularity is simply belief vs unbelief.
I would recommend if you like:
Philosophy
A challenging read
To know more about belief and secularism
Knowing more about how people came to believe what they believe in the modern age
I would caution you if:
Don’t like a lot of details or historical references that disrupt the flow of the author’s thoughts
You want a quick or easily digestible read
You don’t want to stop often to look up other words to keep following the author’s train of thought
Philosophy is not a major intellectual interest you hold
I would recommend if you like:
Philosophy
A challenging read
To know more about belief and secularism
Knowing more about how people came to believe what they believe in the modern age
I would caution you if:
Don’t like a lot of details or historical references that disrupt the flow of the author’s thoughts
You want a quick or easily digestible read
You don’t want to stop often to look up other words to keep following the author’s train of thought
Philosophy is not a major intellectual interest you hold
December 23, 2023
This book rewired my brain (coming back to write an overview)
April 25, 2008
I read most of this book (I skipped some chapters...I'll probably read it again more thoroughly this summer), and I have to say, it's fascinating, and one of the best accounts of secularization out there.
Taylor's basic question is: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500, but it is quite easy now to not believe in God? Going against the typical secularization narrative, i.e. that modern science made it impossible because we have been "disenchanted" and have finally "matured" beyond religion, Taylor argues that there were a whole bunch of different factors. These include the Reformation, which in reality started the "disenchantment" (thus he believes this is one part of the story), the rise of the modern disciplinarian society, the "nova" of various elite possible challenges to religion, which became mass challenges after the disillusionment of WWI, etc. In other words, as opposed to someone like Dawkins or Sam Harris, Taylor actually looks historically at the many factors that have lead to a "decline" of religion.
In the second half of the book, Taylor tries to argue that the "closed world system" (CWS) view of many scientists and others, which argues that there is nothing which transcends the world, is untenable. This CWS view stays entirely within what he calls an "immanent frame", i.e. a frame that cannot see anything beyond this world. His arguements against this CWS are quite convincing, but his postive argues for his version of transcendence are not.
In any case, this is a very important book, and will probably be quite influential in religious studies for quite some time.
Taylor's basic question is: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500, but it is quite easy now to not believe in God? Going against the typical secularization narrative, i.e. that modern science made it impossible because we have been "disenchanted" and have finally "matured" beyond religion, Taylor argues that there were a whole bunch of different factors. These include the Reformation, which in reality started the "disenchantment" (thus he believes this is one part of the story), the rise of the modern disciplinarian society, the "nova" of various elite possible challenges to religion, which became mass challenges after the disillusionment of WWI, etc. In other words, as opposed to someone like Dawkins or Sam Harris, Taylor actually looks historically at the many factors that have lead to a "decline" of religion.
In the second half of the book, Taylor tries to argue that the "closed world system" (CWS) view of many scientists and others, which argues that there is nothing which transcends the world, is untenable. This CWS view stays entirely within what he calls an "immanent frame", i.e. a frame that cannot see anything beyond this world. His arguements against this CWS are quite convincing, but his postive argues for his version of transcendence are not.
In any case, this is a very important book, and will probably be quite influential in religious studies for quite some time.
January 24, 2016
This purports to be an account of what it means to believe in god today versus, say, the year 1500. It's a hodgepodge of philosophy & history, almost 800 pages, at times sloppy and meandering. Certain chapters almost seem like book reports on whatever the author happened to be reading.
Charles Taylor is himself a brilliant philosopher and practicing Catholic. Before reading this book I knew him through his remarkable essays on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer (in the Cambridge companions to all three he arguably steals the show); surely one of their greatest heirs and interpreters writing in English. Part of what intrigued me, then, was discovering what reasons an extremely intelligent person has for believing in god.
In this respect the book was a bit of a disappointment. Taylor flatly dismisses any logical arguments for god as beside the point. The most he can offer is a 'deconstruction' of the epistemology that's supposed to undergird atheism; which is well and good, but even if atheism is less certain than many of its proponents claim, god may still seem like a wildly improbable proposition to many (to me, in fact). Discussing this with a friend of mine who's a former-Protestant-seminarian-turned-unbeliever, my friend suggested that as a Catholic Taylor himself doesn't actually have to believe ; he has the convenience of having the Pope believe for him.
(Incidentally I've since discovered the Protestant philosopher Alvin Plantinga; while he doesn't have anything like Taylor's erudition, he's able to give highly compelling arguments to defend belief from the charge of being irrational.)
Nonetheless, I recommend A Secular Age. It's brimming with interesting ideas. Even if the author doesn't come to any definite conclusions, he's able to draw attention to a number of fascinating modern dilemmas.
Charles Taylor is himself a brilliant philosopher and practicing Catholic. Before reading this book I knew him through his remarkable essays on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer (in the Cambridge companions to all three he arguably steals the show); surely one of their greatest heirs and interpreters writing in English. Part of what intrigued me, then, was discovering what reasons an extremely intelligent person has for believing in god.
In this respect the book was a bit of a disappointment. Taylor flatly dismisses any logical arguments for god as beside the point. The most he can offer is a 'deconstruction' of the epistemology that's supposed to undergird atheism; which is well and good, but even if atheism is less certain than many of its proponents claim, god may still seem like a wildly improbable proposition to many (to me, in fact). Discussing this with a friend of mine who's a former-Protestant-seminarian-turned-unbeliever, my friend suggested that as a Catholic Taylor himself doesn't actually have to believe ; he has the convenience of having the Pope believe for him.
(Incidentally I've since discovered the Protestant philosopher Alvin Plantinga; while he doesn't have anything like Taylor's erudition, he's able to give highly compelling arguments to defend belief from the charge of being irrational.)
Nonetheless, I recommend A Secular Age. It's brimming with interesting ideas. Even if the author doesn't come to any definite conclusions, he's able to draw attention to a number of fascinating modern dilemmas.
July 31, 2022
Recently over dinner a friend asked what I was reading, and I said this book. He made a face. During grad school, he said, he'd ground through it, but found little novelty to justify the effort. "Isn't it basically just Max Weber with extra steps?"
Well, sort of. This book emerged in a time when atheism and the dangers of fundamentalism were ubiquitous topics in the public sphere (or at least the nerdier corners of the internet) - what Scott Alexander has referred to as the "golden age of the New Atheism", with its Four Horsemen. (One especially pragmatic reviewer of this book noted that it is "1.3 kilograms to The God Delusion's 730 grams".) It even inspired a blog - the still-existing The Immanent Frame.
And although much of Taylor's thinking is based on Weber, the fact that he is, unlike Weber, a believer - "not just a Christian writing for Christians, but a Catholic writing for Catholics", as Charles Larmore says - is significant. Weber's story of disenchantment and loss of belief was grim (for him, life is a "polar night of icy darkness" or an "iron cage"), but he thought we should face up to it. Taylor, of course, disagrees.
The other major difference between them is the origin of this transformation. Weber placed it in the Reformation, the "Protestant ethic" emerging from one's lack of place in the world without the Church to guarantee salvation. Taylor goes much farther back, to the Axial Age (a concept created by Weber's student Jaspers), in which individualism, a sense of remove from the world, and an anthropocentrism - all precursors of what Taylor calls the "buffered self" - first emerged.
In his telling, secularisation really got going in the early Middle Ages. Until then the Christian world had functioned with much of the magic, demonology and raucous Appolonianism of the pagans it had supplanted, with just a small elite grasping the Axial worldview of a clockwork world, amenable to inquiry by an individual self standing at a remove. It was the leveling religious instinct, exemplified by the Lollards and Hussites and various religious sects, which sought to bring this to the masses. The gradual disenchantment had begun; the Reformation, followed by the Enlightenment and Deism, were the natural consequences.
Taylor has seemingly read everything, and is eager to show it. Having developed a paradigm, he now wants to orient every thinker or writer he's ever encountered in relation to it. (A feeling I also got reading Sexual Personae.) This book is far, far too long, and replete for no good reason with phrases like "ontic logos", or "telos of autarky". In the midst of telling a sprawling history of the Western mind over a millennium, he is ever eager to digress on topics such as Norbert Elias' history of table manners, the Chartist movement, or the poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins (this last actually one of the best things in the book, tucked away near the end).
The standard version of the secularism story Taylor wants to refute is the "subtraction hypothesis": religion fell away, leaving everyone as they were, but with more liberty and free time. His version is instead one of an evolving social imaginary wherein "pagan self-assertion" began to have equal and then greater weight to "Christian self-denial" (borrowing John Stuart Mill's phrasing), with a resulting "disenchantment" and a trade-off between human flourishing and human meaning. The other, related side of this story is the idea, in the words of a Harrow schoolboy in the 1890s, that "Darwin refuted the Bible". Taylor says that "epistomology is rooted in ethics", which reads to me like a Levinasian idea (one of the few thinkers not quoted in this book), but Taylor seems to mean it more in the fuzzy, postmodern sense that all scientific paradigms are contingent on social constructs, something which is true, hard to refute, and not really all that relevant. The philosophy is the weakest part of this book; but the sociology and history is where it shines.
Taylor uses the term "nova" (and later "supernova") to describe the major secularisation beginning in the 18th century. The Enlightenment was, in Peter Gay's term, modern paganism; it left a vacuum of meaning that the 19th century found different ways to fill, from the secular religion of positivism proposed by Auguste Comte, to the search for inner depth and personal meaning of Romanticism, to the various religious revival movements more rational (Methodism) or less (the Great Awakening).
One key figure of this period for Taylor is Matthew Arnold, who like many of his generation reacted against the hyperrationalism of Mill and Spencer, but couldn't bring himself back to his childhood faith, which he described in poems such as Obermann Once More and Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse:
Other artifacts of this time were aestheticism, the elevation of aesthetic value over political and moral considerations (although many of them ended up becoming Catholics [Wilde] or always were [Huysmans]), as well as the Scottish Enlightenment's "stadial theory" of history, under which all nations exist somewhere on the same developmental trajectory, going from paganism to cultic religion to natural religion and finally to decadence. Many saw the First World War (an "intellectual as much as a political crisis") as the solution to Western malaise, a rupture which would restore a sense of purpose and manly virtue to a decadent civilisation. Instead, the senseless horror and mechanised slaughter just deepened the crisis of meaninglessness. One representative figure from this period is G.M. Trevelyan, who grew up in a pious Victorian household but drifted into a kind of sceptical liberalism. "As regards the Christian religion, the only thing I can believe in for certain is the progress of the human race. What people usually call religion, the immortality of the soul and so on, I am in absolute darkness about these things. But in Democracy I have got hold of something definite."
The next big shift was the 1960s, when individualism and self-fulfillment - neo-Romanticism - once again began to dominate. In a sense this age has not ended, although its wilder excesses have been tamed. Today's "bobos" (as David Brooks called them) have made peace with capitalism but want to combine material thriving with spiritual fulfillment during work and leisure.
So today, we are in a situation of ambient secularism, the "immanent frame" where the transcendent may or may not be involved, where being an atheist is not merely an option, as it has been at least since Lucretius, but a default. People may choose many ways of flourishing, and many do not choose religion. Note that this "secularism" is separate from the levels of religious practice, which have fluctuated during this period and are just generally complicated: Europeans claim they attend church less than they actually do, Americans more. The reasons for the decline of religion (and the rise of the "nones") are debated by sociologists, and Taylor is willing to fight over whether it is even true. "We can’t just identify 'religion' as twelfth-century Catholicism, and then count every move away from this as decline". He also cites the Easter vigil beginning "O felix culpa", Happy sin - happy because it brought such a response from God to redeem it. Secularisation could just be another phase of God's plan.
In the 19th century it was common to defend religion as the last bastion of decency and morality. This fear seems to have passed, and today the more common argument made is about ennui, about lack of community and purpose and "bowling alone". (Taylor's friend Robert Bellah wrote about this in his landmark Habits of the Heart, and its more apologetic form can be regularly found in First Things.) Having surveyed the dawning of the modern mind, through medieval stirrings to counter-Enlightenment to today's immanent frame, Taylor hopes to at least open the possibility that we are still religious, and that our practice should reflect that more; that although we cannot and should not go back, we ought to lead lives built more around Divine inspiration than human thriving. He probably will not convince anyone strongly opposed, but this book is worthwhile for anyone interested in the topic.
Well, sort of. This book emerged in a time when atheism and the dangers of fundamentalism were ubiquitous topics in the public sphere (or at least the nerdier corners of the internet) - what Scott Alexander has referred to as the "golden age of the New Atheism", with its Four Horsemen. (One especially pragmatic reviewer of this book noted that it is "1.3 kilograms to The God Delusion's 730 grams".) It even inspired a blog - the still-existing The Immanent Frame.
And although much of Taylor's thinking is based on Weber, the fact that he is, unlike Weber, a believer - "not just a Christian writing for Christians, but a Catholic writing for Catholics", as Charles Larmore says - is significant. Weber's story of disenchantment and loss of belief was grim (for him, life is a "polar night of icy darkness" or an "iron cage"), but he thought we should face up to it. Taylor, of course, disagrees.
The other major difference between them is the origin of this transformation. Weber placed it in the Reformation, the "Protestant ethic" emerging from one's lack of place in the world without the Church to guarantee salvation. Taylor goes much farther back, to the Axial Age (a concept created by Weber's student Jaspers), in which individualism, a sense of remove from the world, and an anthropocentrism - all precursors of what Taylor calls the "buffered self" - first emerged.
In his telling, secularisation really got going in the early Middle Ages. Until then the Christian world had functioned with much of the magic, demonology and raucous Appolonianism of the pagans it had supplanted, with just a small elite grasping the Axial worldview of a clockwork world, amenable to inquiry by an individual self standing at a remove. It was the leveling religious instinct, exemplified by the Lollards and Hussites and various religious sects, which sought to bring this to the masses. The gradual disenchantment had begun; the Reformation, followed by the Enlightenment and Deism, were the natural consequences.
Taylor has seemingly read everything, and is eager to show it. Having developed a paradigm, he now wants to orient every thinker or writer he's ever encountered in relation to it. (A feeling I also got reading Sexual Personae.) This book is far, far too long, and replete for no good reason with phrases like "ontic logos", or "telos of autarky". In the midst of telling a sprawling history of the Western mind over a millennium, he is ever eager to digress on topics such as Norbert Elias' history of table manners, the Chartist movement, or the poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins (this last actually one of the best things in the book, tucked away near the end).
The standard version of the secularism story Taylor wants to refute is the "subtraction hypothesis": religion fell away, leaving everyone as they were, but with more liberty and free time. His version is instead one of an evolving social imaginary wherein "pagan self-assertion" began to have equal and then greater weight to "Christian self-denial" (borrowing John Stuart Mill's phrasing), with a resulting "disenchantment" and a trade-off between human flourishing and human meaning. The other, related side of this story is the idea, in the words of a Harrow schoolboy in the 1890s, that "Darwin refuted the Bible". Taylor says that "epistomology is rooted in ethics", which reads to me like a Levinasian idea (one of the few thinkers not quoted in this book), but Taylor seems to mean it more in the fuzzy, postmodern sense that all scientific paradigms are contingent on social constructs, something which is true, hard to refute, and not really all that relevant. The philosophy is the weakest part of this book; but the sociology and history is where it shines.
Taylor uses the term "nova" (and later "supernova") to describe the major secularisation beginning in the 18th century. The Enlightenment was, in Peter Gay's term, modern paganism; it left a vacuum of meaning that the 19th century found different ways to fill, from the secular religion of positivism proposed by Auguste Comte, to the search for inner depth and personal meaning of Romanticism, to the various religious revival movements more rational (Methodism) or less (the Great Awakening).
One key figure of this period for Taylor is Matthew Arnold, who like many of his generation reacted against the hyperrationalism of Mill and Spencer, but couldn't bring himself back to his childhood faith, which he described in poems such as Obermann Once More and Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse:
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,Arnold's compromise was his ideas of "culture" (I wrote more about this reviewing Trilling's biography here), which he summarised as "a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly and mechanically".
And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,
Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?
Forgive me, masters of the mind!
At whose behest I long ago
So much unlearnt, so much resign'd—
I come not here to be your foe!
I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,
To curse and to deny your truth;
Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone—
For both were faiths, and both are gone.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side.
Other artifacts of this time were aestheticism, the elevation of aesthetic value over political and moral considerations (although many of them ended up becoming Catholics [Wilde] or always were [Huysmans]), as well as the Scottish Enlightenment's "stadial theory" of history, under which all nations exist somewhere on the same developmental trajectory, going from paganism to cultic religion to natural religion and finally to decadence. Many saw the First World War (an "intellectual as much as a political crisis") as the solution to Western malaise, a rupture which would restore a sense of purpose and manly virtue to a decadent civilisation. Instead, the senseless horror and mechanised slaughter just deepened the crisis of meaninglessness. One representative figure from this period is G.M. Trevelyan, who grew up in a pious Victorian household but drifted into a kind of sceptical liberalism. "As regards the Christian religion, the only thing I can believe in for certain is the progress of the human race. What people usually call religion, the immortality of the soul and so on, I am in absolute darkness about these things. But in Democracy I have got hold of something definite."
The next big shift was the 1960s, when individualism and self-fulfillment - neo-Romanticism - once again began to dominate. In a sense this age has not ended, although its wilder excesses have been tamed. Today's "bobos" (as David Brooks called them) have made peace with capitalism but want to combine material thriving with spiritual fulfillment during work and leisure.
So today, we are in a situation of ambient secularism, the "immanent frame" where the transcendent may or may not be involved, where being an atheist is not merely an option, as it has been at least since Lucretius, but a default. People may choose many ways of flourishing, and many do not choose religion. Note that this "secularism" is separate from the levels of religious practice, which have fluctuated during this period and are just generally complicated: Europeans claim they attend church less than they actually do, Americans more. The reasons for the decline of religion (and the rise of the "nones") are debated by sociologists, and Taylor is willing to fight over whether it is even true. "We can’t just identify 'religion' as twelfth-century Catholicism, and then count every move away from this as decline". He also cites the Easter vigil beginning "O felix culpa", Happy sin - happy because it brought such a response from God to redeem it. Secularisation could just be another phase of God's plan.
In the 19th century it was common to defend religion as the last bastion of decency and morality. This fear seems to have passed, and today the more common argument made is about ennui, about lack of community and purpose and "bowling alone". (Taylor's friend Robert Bellah wrote about this in his landmark Habits of the Heart, and its more apologetic form can be regularly found in First Things.) Having surveyed the dawning of the modern mind, through medieval stirrings to counter-Enlightenment to today's immanent frame, Taylor hopes to at least open the possibility that we are still religious, and that our practice should reflect that more; that although we cannot and should not go back, we ought to lead lives built more around Divine inspiration than human thriving. He probably will not convince anyone strongly opposed, but this book is worthwhile for anyone interested in the topic.
December 6, 2014
A hugely disappointing mess. Unfocused history, propped up strawmen, and rambled arguments. If the topic itself weren't so lush with fascinating vistas this would have been amongst the worst books I can remember reading. The author consistently misconstrues those philosophers with which he disagrees (could he get Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Foucault, etc. more wrong?), injects his religious beliefs into all the wrong portions of the text (while honest, generally unnecessary), and does not satisfactorily present, respond to, or contend with any of the material he trots out for examination (just when he thinks you're in, he pulls you back out). I am sorry to say that this reads more like the notes some partly-interested layperson has been making their whole life than a thoroughly researched book by an academic.
I've waffled on the ultimately arbitrary rating to give it (three for sheer size, two for sheer interest), but have decided to use that horrible beyond horrible measure at my disposal and gone with a one star rating. If this book were two hundred pages long, no one would praise it. If it were four hundred pages long, no one would hate it. But at eight hundred plus pages people feel compelled to justify their time and effort, inflating their rankings, and giving this book far more credit than it deserves. I am sorry to say that in terms of insight, of philosophical presentation, of historical recreation, and of enjoyment, this book was as bad as a book could get. I'm so sorry. I wanted to like this so much. And I can't. And I don't.
I've waffled on the ultimately arbitrary rating to give it (three for sheer size, two for sheer interest), but have decided to use that horrible beyond horrible measure at my disposal and gone with a one star rating. If this book were two hundred pages long, no one would praise it. If it were four hundred pages long, no one would hate it. But at eight hundred plus pages people feel compelled to justify their time and effort, inflating their rankings, and giving this book far more credit than it deserves. I am sorry to say that in terms of insight, of philosophical presentation, of historical recreation, and of enjoyment, this book was as bad as a book could get. I'm so sorry. I wanted to like this so much. And I can't. And I don't.
February 1, 2021
Overall, I really enjoyed this study. The same dead horse occasionally shows up for a fresh beating throughout, hence the length, but the new insights were worth it for me. Though Taylor offers many explanations for social and cultural phenomena that may or may not hold water (I’m convinced of most of them myself, but one doesn’t have to reach far for counter arguments most of the time), I think the greatest success of this book is demonstrating that modernity is not just the world sans superstition. Modernity didn’t just shake off or abandon its metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality, it changed them, displaced them. Thus, modernity, like the pre-modern world, also has its blind spots. Some of my favorite moments were those that held up difficult questions and showed the traditional answers of both faith and atheism to be lacking; these moments demonstrate the work that still needs to be done in philosophy and theology (they also demonstrate that, at root, God or the belief in God has never been the problem—“religious” issues just take on new shapes when religion leaves the picture).
As so many have said, though, it could and should have been shorter. 100 pages could have been knocked off with ease, 200, maybe more, with some good editing/revision. I don’t feel as though I’ve wasted my time, though, and I will most likely be returning to this book in some capacity at a later date.
As so many have said, though, it could and should have been shorter. 100 pages could have been knocked off with ease, 200, maybe more, with some good editing/revision. I don’t feel as though I’ve wasted my time, though, and I will most likely be returning to this book in some capacity at a later date.
March 6, 2021
Well, I made it through this massive book that I am in no way going to be able to summarize in a few paragraphs. However, it is clear that this is vital reading for anyone who wants to try to understand how unbelief became not necessarily the primary belief system in the Western world but how it became an acceptable alternative in the marketplace of ideas. Every book that has been written on secularization since Taylor's publication seems to either refer to his ideas, build off of them, or respond to them in some way.
Taylor's scope is immense, but that is a consequence of the topic that he is exploring. I think that is one of the things I admired most about his work. Taylor does not settle for simple answers. He understands that asking why the world has become disenchanted is not just a one-dimensional question. He doesn't just say that modern science came around and therefore no one believed in God anymore. Many factors interacted to make it possible for someone to deny that the assumption that the natural is somehow tied to the supernatural.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand secularism better, but certainly be prepared to have to read this book either very slowly or multiple times. I tried to take my time reading this book in small batches to digest it. Even with that plan, I am very confident I have not really wrapped my head around everything that until it conveys. Nevertheless, this book is a cornerstone of the study of secularism, and it is certainly a must read.
Taylor's scope is immense, but that is a consequence of the topic that he is exploring. I think that is one of the things I admired most about his work. Taylor does not settle for simple answers. He understands that asking why the world has become disenchanted is not just a one-dimensional question. He doesn't just say that modern science came around and therefore no one believed in God anymore. Many factors interacted to make it possible for someone to deny that the assumption that the natural is somehow tied to the supernatural.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand secularism better, but certainly be prepared to have to read this book either very slowly or multiple times. I tried to take my time reading this book in small batches to digest it. Even with that plan, I am very confident I have not really wrapped my head around everything that until it conveys. Nevertheless, this book is a cornerstone of the study of secularism, and it is certainly a must read.
September 6, 2013
There is a great thin book hidden somewhere in this overweight book. I don't blame Charles Taylor, I blame his editor. Someone should have told him that he didn't really have to repeat himself so often. That if the book had been more concise his readers would have remembered what he wrote at the beginning and he would not have to repeat himself.
A good editor might have told him to use simpler words and add a lexicon in the back. Might have translated the notes that are in German and French.
An editor would have explain, in simple terms, what's an Aristotelian or Durkheimian. A good editor would have told him that he didn't have to write down everything that he knew about the subject. Would have stopped him from writing, has he often does throughout the book, that he doesn't have enough room to properly expand on a subject. He's been given 800 pages! How many does he need?
I'm still glad I've read it. I feel more intelligent and a better person for having read it. It's a book that is better read with a ready access to Wikipedia To look up the philosophers, mystiques and authors mentioned. I will definitely read more philosophers. Charles Taylor made me want to know more about the place of religion in society.
He opened a door in my mind. I am much less judgmental about people who's beliefs are different than mine. I also understand better my own beliefs, where they come from, how they are shared by others. I accept my need for transcendence and my confusion and I'm a little less embarrassed by both.
Right now in Quebec the debate on laity has been open once again and, as usual, Charles Taylor brings knowledge, intelligence and moderation to this debate. I saw him on television where he managed to be interesting in concise so I know he can be both. Thanks to him I can add my humble voice to the conversation.
A good editor might have told him to use simpler words and add a lexicon in the back. Might have translated the notes that are in German and French.
An editor would have explain, in simple terms, what's an Aristotelian or Durkheimian. A good editor would have told him that he didn't have to write down everything that he knew about the subject. Would have stopped him from writing, has he often does throughout the book, that he doesn't have enough room to properly expand on a subject. He's been given 800 pages! How many does he need?
I'm still glad I've read it. I feel more intelligent and a better person for having read it. It's a book that is better read with a ready access to Wikipedia To look up the philosophers, mystiques and authors mentioned. I will definitely read more philosophers. Charles Taylor made me want to know more about the place of religion in society.
He opened a door in my mind. I am much less judgmental about people who's beliefs are different than mine. I also understand better my own beliefs, where they come from, how they are shared by others. I accept my need for transcendence and my confusion and I'm a little less embarrassed by both.
Right now in Quebec the debate on laity has been open once again and, as usual, Charles Taylor brings knowledge, intelligence and moderation to this debate. I saw him on television where he managed to be interesting in concise so I know he can be both. Thanks to him I can add my humble voice to the conversation.
May 29, 2015
Well probably the most rambling incoherent book I ever read. Had to read it for my class. What an enormous tome with no consistent flow. Just when you think he is actually making a point he reverses course and repeats. This book had so much babbling fluff in it. The book was like a giant thesaurus an exercise of how many times I can repeat myself using as many variations of the Queens English as possible. I did however learn a lot of new uses of the english language. I personally could have written this book in two chapters or less. Totally useless I can not believe I got assigned this book to read what a waste of my time and money.
October 9, 2022
While I'm glad I decided to read this beast of a book that has been so influential, it was probably one of the most difficult books I've ever read. There would be long stretches of desert where I didn't really understand what I was reading. But then there would be an oasis of intelligibility that was interesting enough to keep me going. And as many have done, I leaned heavily on James K.A. Smith's helpful guidebook "How (Not) to be Secular" (read a few years ago) to help me interpret much of what Taylor was saying.
Taylor argues that we used to live in an age where it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, in the transcendent. We used to inhabit an ordered, enchanted cosmos that provided meaning. Over time, this gave way to being a part of a disenchanted universe, where belief in God was one of many options. In this new immanent frame, exclusive humanism became a dominant belief, one that understands that our own flourishing is paramount.
The problem is, this leads to flatness and a loss of meaning. In this space, the modern buffered self desperately tries to create meaning without reference to the divine. And we all live in this cross-pressured middle space, "on the one hand drawn towards unbelief, while on the other, feeling the solicitations of the spiritual – be they in nature, in art, in some contact with religious faith, or in a sense of God which may break through the membrane.”
And I think Smith gives a great summary of how Taylor thinks about this cross-pressured space: "Taylor presses the closed, immanentist ‘take’ not by pointing out logical inconsistencies or questioning the veracity of premises, but rather by suggesting that the closed take can’t seem to get rid of a certain haunting, a certain rumbling in our hearts...The upshot will be that Christianity (the ‘open’ take) can provide a better way to account for this -- not necessarily a way to quell it so we can all live happily ever after, but a way to name it and be honest about this dis-ease.”
Taylor argues that we used to live in an age where it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, in the transcendent. We used to inhabit an ordered, enchanted cosmos that provided meaning. Over time, this gave way to being a part of a disenchanted universe, where belief in God was one of many options. In this new immanent frame, exclusive humanism became a dominant belief, one that understands that our own flourishing is paramount.
The problem is, this leads to flatness and a loss of meaning. In this space, the modern buffered self desperately tries to create meaning without reference to the divine. And we all live in this cross-pressured middle space, "on the one hand drawn towards unbelief, while on the other, feeling the solicitations of the spiritual – be they in nature, in art, in some contact with religious faith, or in a sense of God which may break through the membrane.”
And I think Smith gives a great summary of how Taylor thinks about this cross-pressured space: "Taylor presses the closed, immanentist ‘take’ not by pointing out logical inconsistencies or questioning the veracity of premises, but rather by suggesting that the closed take can’t seem to get rid of a certain haunting, a certain rumbling in our hearts...The upshot will be that Christianity (the ‘open’ take) can provide a better way to account for this -- not necessarily a way to quell it so we can all live happily ever after, but a way to name it and be honest about this dis-ease.”
October 21, 2020
This book seems to cover a lot of ground: why the secular worldview is the default one these days, what it means to be a Christian and why is so difficult to be one these days, what the main secularist/Christian issues are, how secularization started in the past and what were the main events/actors, what options are out there and what the multitude of options means to us, and so on?
In some way, the book follows Foucault genealogical approach applied to secularization; however Taylor is deeply involved and attached to the Christian/Catholic side. In this respect, I found Taylor's personal experiences and preferences more interesting and relevant when compared with the predominant and abstract theoretical and philosophical approaches.
In some other way, Taylor just follows Weber's disenchantment process in the modern societies and carries them a little further in this book: the instrumentalization, flattening of everything, lack of meaning/depth, uniform time, and so on.
An interesting topic is the secularization unintentionally produced by the reforms initiated by churches in the past: elites and their interest in the masses, Luther, rationalization, counter-reforms, disembodiment, the opposition to carnival-like events, Kant, and so on. This reminds one of Nietzsche's nihilism: the postulation and affirmation of higher values inevitably ends in their destruction - mainly through the effect of truth and rational who eventually turn against all others and themselves. In this respect, I found interesting how often and in how many different pro or against positions Nietzsche pops-up in the disputes presented in this book.
One important topic is the self-sustaining and complete background/horizon (Heidegger) or picture (Wittgenstein) of both the religious and secular worldviews. In this respect, aesthetic, moral, available practices, and other non-theoretical and non-rational considerations sustain worldviews and not arguments, proofs, reasons, or facts. The conversion or losing faith stories are in fact moral or aesthetic decisions, and not rational-factual ones. Again, Nietzsche emphatically declared that in the end all our ideologies and strong opinions are a matter of taste or that maybe they just emanated from our muscles/digestion.
According to Taylor, modern language may also be responsible for secularization; while poetic, old, or enriched language may help us to grasp God. Objective, technological, pragmatic, one-to-one logical-positivist, and other similar languages may be quite appropriate for our modern pursuits; but not for faith.
My problems with this book are that it is way too long, tries to cover a lot of material and consequently is not focused, it is repetitive, it is too scholastic and with many references, and – against its own principles – way too objective and impersonal.
In some way, the book follows Foucault genealogical approach applied to secularization; however Taylor is deeply involved and attached to the Christian/Catholic side. In this respect, I found Taylor's personal experiences and preferences more interesting and relevant when compared with the predominant and abstract theoretical and philosophical approaches.
In some other way, Taylor just follows Weber's disenchantment process in the modern societies and carries them a little further in this book: the instrumentalization, flattening of everything, lack of meaning/depth, uniform time, and so on.
An interesting topic is the secularization unintentionally produced by the reforms initiated by churches in the past: elites and their interest in the masses, Luther, rationalization, counter-reforms, disembodiment, the opposition to carnival-like events, Kant, and so on. This reminds one of Nietzsche's nihilism: the postulation and affirmation of higher values inevitably ends in their destruction - mainly through the effect of truth and rational who eventually turn against all others and themselves. In this respect, I found interesting how often and in how many different pro or against positions Nietzsche pops-up in the disputes presented in this book.
One important topic is the self-sustaining and complete background/horizon (Heidegger) or picture (Wittgenstein) of both the religious and secular worldviews. In this respect, aesthetic, moral, available practices, and other non-theoretical and non-rational considerations sustain worldviews and not arguments, proofs, reasons, or facts. The conversion or losing faith stories are in fact moral or aesthetic decisions, and not rational-factual ones. Again, Nietzsche emphatically declared that in the end all our ideologies and strong opinions are a matter of taste or that maybe they just emanated from our muscles/digestion.
According to Taylor, modern language may also be responsible for secularization; while poetic, old, or enriched language may help us to grasp God. Objective, technological, pragmatic, one-to-one logical-positivist, and other similar languages may be quite appropriate for our modern pursuits; but not for faith.
My problems with this book are that it is way too long, tries to cover a lot of material and consequently is not focused, it is repetitive, it is too scholastic and with many references, and – against its own principles – way too objective and impersonal.
November 29, 2021
Not for the faint of heart. Trueman draws heavily from Taylor in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self so I was eager to get into this. Taylor sets about answering the question of why, say, 500 years ago, it was a given that you would profess belief in God, but today, it's one option among many (and not necessarily the easiest option). He traces the history of Western thought, philosophy, and politics, showing how implications of the renaissance, the reformation, the enlightenment, deism, and Darwinism have led to where we are today. I think in all honesty I understood 45-50% of the book, which I boil down to my own need to read more philosophy and history, and Charles Taylor assuming waaaay too much of the reader and name dropping legions of thinkers as though the common reader will understand the nuances of each system that these names represent. I'm happy to meet in the middle. So I got the gist, but I need to read more I suppose. I was encouraged yesterday to chat with a dude I respect as being extremely intelligent who told me that he had been excited to read Taylor also (as Tim Keller cites him often) and that he couldn't make heads or tails of the book either. I was also encouraged by this person to hear that James K.A. Smith has written a book pretty much explaining this book, which makes me think I'm in the same boat as a lot of people. Looking forward to it.
Read
August 24, 2016This book was WAY TOO LONG. Insightful and very knowledgeable. But encrustation upon encrustation. So many long-winded summaries of previous arguments that just build up atop each other and prevent striking insights from hitting their mark and sticking.
April 22, 2021
A massive slog, and repetitive at some points, but incredibly insightful.
May 4, 2024
Charles Taylor er den store filosofen og tenkeren som dessverre måtte klare seg uten en redaktør... Så boken er alt annet enn lett tilgjengelig. Når det er sagt, så er dette en bok som kryper under huden på en og former videre forståelse og tenkning. Slik sett fortjener den toppkarakter. Men selve leseopplevelsen får sine klare begrensninger av en relativt kaotisk bok.
Read
April 20, 2021It's hard to know how to rate this book when I'm still sorting through my thoughts and struggling to process what my takeaways are. This book has generated a lot of buzz in the past few years and contains some important thoughts. That said, I found Taylor very difficult to follow and regularly had to retrace my steps to try to understand what he was saying. That was also reflective of my inexperience reading philosophy, though. I definitely disagreed with some of his conclusions, but all in all, I'm eager to reflect more on this book in the coming days.
December 20, 2021
What did I just read? This book, with some crucial breaks, took me seven months to slog through, and much of it was just that-- a slog. How can I attempt to summarize a book that attempts to "summarize" the entire Western historical move towards secularization, down to the present, which Taylor calls "The Secular Age"? There are other books that summarize Taylor, e.g. Jamie Smith's "How (Not) To Be Secular", which I am tempted to read immediately, but will hold off and see how much I myself can chew on of the source material before I get it sifted through another's mind. In other words, I will not really attempt a summary here, because in order to do that I would have to have a complete understanding of what I read. I don't.
Why the five star rating, then? Because the work is actually not impenetrable. It's just that it is so damn long and such an earnest attempt at being thorough, that I have forgotten more of what I have read than I have retained; and will need some time to go back though my highlights and annotations to recover most of the story laid out here.
What I will try to provide here is what are the main takeaways of the work. 1) Forget the modern idea that science/reason displace God/faith. The story of secularization is much more complex, and is not even close to being linear. What we do have, instead, is what Taylor calls "disenchantment", in which scientific discovery does tell us important things about our material realities that dispelled us over centuries of certain superstitious conceptions of our temporal reality. This gives rise to a "buffered self" in which we can be relatively certain of a good amount of things concerning human health, nature, and to a very limited extent, the universe. In other words, we are buffered from primitive notions of the forces at work on our material realities. I don't need to fear fairies or goblins in a dark wood (though I may--and do!- fear a number many other things) 2) The buffered self has given rise to many of the ideas that we hold in Western societies of government, the moral order, ethics, metaphysics, the individual, and so on and so forth. 3) None of these ideas are un-contested, meaning that none of them tell the complete and whole story-- any basic understanding of continental philosophy will tell us this much (and Taylor explores a lot of this). 4) What we have, rather, are what Taylor calls "cross pressures"-- that there are a dizzying number of social imaginaries that we both have access to and are constantly confronted with, and again, none of these are uncontested, that they all in some way require some kind of commitment. 5) While there is a spectrum and a multitude of commitments that we may have, we can categorize our commitments into either an "immanent frame" or a "transcendent frame". I'll let Taylor define this:
"And so we come to understand our lives as taking place within a self-sufficient immanent order; or better, a constellation of orders, cosmic, social and moral… these orders are understood as impersonal. This understanding of our predicament has as background a sense of our history: we have advanced to this grasp of our predicament through earlier more primitive stages of society and self-understanding. In this process, we have come of age… The immanent order can thus slough off the transcendent. But it doesn’t necessarily do so. What I have been describing as the immanent frame is common to all of us in the modern West, or at least that is what I am trying to portray. Some of us want to live it as open to something beyond; some live it as closed. It is something which permits closure, without demanding it." (543)
In other words, we come to understand our buffered self in a way that we can ultimately take or leave any idea of something beyond, or transcendent of, what we can know, through science and reason alone. In this sense, religious faith, for all of us, becomes something extra, and once being extra, can appear to not be very important. It doesn't, in a reductive sense, help us to stay alive or to to arrange society or take care of our daily, on the ground projects. In this sense, we are all living in a secular age, and are thus all secular. Don't get this wrong-- I don't mean that our conception of everyday life cannot be infused with transcendent meaning; it's just that the space that we all share is built on the secular paradigm, i.e the secular age.
That last statement is a claim, and again, that is where you, dear reader, would have to dive into this tome to gather sufficient (or not) support for that. If nothing more can be said about this book, it is that Taylor does some serious heavy lifting here to try to understand how we all got to where we are now. Even if one disagrees with his assessement, and I don't disagree, one would be remiss to not applaud the genuine effort.
I'll finish with the insight I appreciate most, and this is probably just because it's what I most recently read. And this is certainly me reading through my own lens, and probably taking too many liberties, so feel free to skip this. But it is this: As believers, we are invited into communion with the sacred, and part of that manifestation is in history. That history spans other "ages"-- enchanted ages, enlightened ages, modern and postmodern ages. The communion Taylor speaks of is a kind of unity that stretches across time but each occupying a paradigm, or frame, in which it is both embedded and which it attempts to transcend. As Christians, we have history to be conversant with-an extremely abridged list might include Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Jonathan Edwards, Flannery O'Connor, C.S. Lewis, and on and on and on and on. In so doing, we are "communing" with the "saints"-- each of whom got some Thing right, but not Everything right. We are not their disciples, but rather disciples of that Thing which their own understanding was grafted onto. This is God, His Church, His Word (you know, that thing that will not pass away?) This Thing (my words, not Taylor's) calls us through all ages, not merely Enchanted ages, or bygone ages, or backwards ages, or the present age, the secular age. The Thing then, is not the codes of being that emerge out of a certain age (like Church laws, extra-biblical Christian ethics, and so on), but an orthodoxy unto the Thing itself: trying to be faithful even in an age that tells us that this is not the natural. thing to do. This is not merely rejecting the age that we live in, as some fundamentalists might attempt, but being faithful from and within that age. Set aside, yes, as in not succumbing to every milieu; but also being an incarnated human in that very age.
We can deal with this poorly, especially as believers when belief is no longer the default. Think of "fundamentalism": it might just be that we've overstepped in our identification with a "present or past order". We may identify with an age, rather than as God's Church. I may think the Reformation period was a golden age, or 1620's or 1950's America were golden ages that we must fight to push the culture "back" to. Taylor writes that if this is the case, then "faith can all too easily become defined in terms of certain codes and loyalties (or these codes and loyalties are boosted by their consecration in religion), and those who fall outside these tend to appear more easily as renegades than fellow Christians from whom one may have something to learn. And so we have the contemporary Kulturkampf, particularly in the U.S.A. , in which some churches are induced to take on the 'secular world' on some issues of sexual ethics, often narrowly defined; which leads to a condemnation of other Christians who are reluctant to be recruited into this Crusade, and hence to a kind of civil war in the Church" (766).
What's the point? If I identify too strictly with say, Augustin, or Aquinas, or Calvin, or the SBC, or Paul Tillich, or Reformed theology, over and above the body of Christ (the Church, the Gospel), then I have overstepped into the same kind of idolatry that I may suspect of my secular brothers and sisters. I have over-identified with the codes which define a paradigm, one both embedded in and resistant to, an Age. I have reverted into the scapegoat mechanism that a genuine, mystery-filled orthodoxy tells me that Christ occludes. And that may just be the most important insight of the book for me: Both the fundamentalist and the exclusive humanist have "barred the door" of meaningful conversation of the transcendent with absolute certainty. As Taylor reminds us, "It should be obvious by now that human culture doesn't work that way (i.e. extreme positions based on over-simplified certainty): it always involves some interpretation and redefinition, but against a background of human constants" (767). And this is why I recommend this book for anyone, believer, agnostic, progressive, fundamentalist, atheist, etc., who is trying to navigate what belief is in our secular age.
Why the five star rating, then? Because the work is actually not impenetrable. It's just that it is so damn long and such an earnest attempt at being thorough, that I have forgotten more of what I have read than I have retained; and will need some time to go back though my highlights and annotations to recover most of the story laid out here.
What I will try to provide here is what are the main takeaways of the work. 1) Forget the modern idea that science/reason displace God/faith. The story of secularization is much more complex, and is not even close to being linear. What we do have, instead, is what Taylor calls "disenchantment", in which scientific discovery does tell us important things about our material realities that dispelled us over centuries of certain superstitious conceptions of our temporal reality. This gives rise to a "buffered self" in which we can be relatively certain of a good amount of things concerning human health, nature, and to a very limited extent, the universe. In other words, we are buffered from primitive notions of the forces at work on our material realities. I don't need to fear fairies or goblins in a dark wood (though I may--and do!- fear a number many other things) 2) The buffered self has given rise to many of the ideas that we hold in Western societies of government, the moral order, ethics, metaphysics, the individual, and so on and so forth. 3) None of these ideas are un-contested, meaning that none of them tell the complete and whole story-- any basic understanding of continental philosophy will tell us this much (and Taylor explores a lot of this). 4) What we have, rather, are what Taylor calls "cross pressures"-- that there are a dizzying number of social imaginaries that we both have access to and are constantly confronted with, and again, none of these are uncontested, that they all in some way require some kind of commitment. 5) While there is a spectrum and a multitude of commitments that we may have, we can categorize our commitments into either an "immanent frame" or a "transcendent frame". I'll let Taylor define this:
"And so we come to understand our lives as taking place within a self-sufficient immanent order; or better, a constellation of orders, cosmic, social and moral… these orders are understood as impersonal. This understanding of our predicament has as background a sense of our history: we have advanced to this grasp of our predicament through earlier more primitive stages of society and self-understanding. In this process, we have come of age… The immanent order can thus slough off the transcendent. But it doesn’t necessarily do so. What I have been describing as the immanent frame is common to all of us in the modern West, or at least that is what I am trying to portray. Some of us want to live it as open to something beyond; some live it as closed. It is something which permits closure, without demanding it." (543)
In other words, we come to understand our buffered self in a way that we can ultimately take or leave any idea of something beyond, or transcendent of, what we can know, through science and reason alone. In this sense, religious faith, for all of us, becomes something extra, and once being extra, can appear to not be very important. It doesn't, in a reductive sense, help us to stay alive or to to arrange society or take care of our daily, on the ground projects. In this sense, we are all living in a secular age, and are thus all secular. Don't get this wrong-- I don't mean that our conception of everyday life cannot be infused with transcendent meaning; it's just that the space that we all share is built on the secular paradigm, i.e the secular age.
That last statement is a claim, and again, that is where you, dear reader, would have to dive into this tome to gather sufficient (or not) support for that. If nothing more can be said about this book, it is that Taylor does some serious heavy lifting here to try to understand how we all got to where we are now. Even if one disagrees with his assessement, and I don't disagree, one would be remiss to not applaud the genuine effort.
I'll finish with the insight I appreciate most, and this is probably just because it's what I most recently read. And this is certainly me reading through my own lens, and probably taking too many liberties, so feel free to skip this. But it is this: As believers, we are invited into communion with the sacred, and part of that manifestation is in history. That history spans other "ages"-- enchanted ages, enlightened ages, modern and postmodern ages. The communion Taylor speaks of is a kind of unity that stretches across time but each occupying a paradigm, or frame, in which it is both embedded and which it attempts to transcend. As Christians, we have history to be conversant with-an extremely abridged list might include Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Jonathan Edwards, Flannery O'Connor, C.S. Lewis, and on and on and on and on. In so doing, we are "communing" with the "saints"-- each of whom got some Thing right, but not Everything right. We are not their disciples, but rather disciples of that Thing which their own understanding was grafted onto. This is God, His Church, His Word (you know, that thing that will not pass away?) This Thing (my words, not Taylor's) calls us through all ages, not merely Enchanted ages, or bygone ages, or backwards ages, or the present age, the secular age. The Thing then, is not the codes of being that emerge out of a certain age (like Church laws, extra-biblical Christian ethics, and so on), but an orthodoxy unto the Thing itself: trying to be faithful even in an age that tells us that this is not the natural. thing to do. This is not merely rejecting the age that we live in, as some fundamentalists might attempt, but being faithful from and within that age. Set aside, yes, as in not succumbing to every milieu; but also being an incarnated human in that very age.
We can deal with this poorly, especially as believers when belief is no longer the default. Think of "fundamentalism": it might just be that we've overstepped in our identification with a "present or past order". We may identify with an age, rather than as God's Church. I may think the Reformation period was a golden age, or 1620's or 1950's America were golden ages that we must fight to push the culture "back" to. Taylor writes that if this is the case, then "faith can all too easily become defined in terms of certain codes and loyalties (or these codes and loyalties are boosted by their consecration in religion), and those who fall outside these tend to appear more easily as renegades than fellow Christians from whom one may have something to learn. And so we have the contemporary Kulturkampf, particularly in the U.S.A. , in which some churches are induced to take on the 'secular world' on some issues of sexual ethics, often narrowly defined; which leads to a condemnation of other Christians who are reluctant to be recruited into this Crusade, and hence to a kind of civil war in the Church" (766).
What's the point? If I identify too strictly with say, Augustin, or Aquinas, or Calvin, or the SBC, or Paul Tillich, or Reformed theology, over and above the body of Christ (the Church, the Gospel), then I have overstepped into the same kind of idolatry that I may suspect of my secular brothers and sisters. I have over-identified with the codes which define a paradigm, one both embedded in and resistant to, an Age. I have reverted into the scapegoat mechanism that a genuine, mystery-filled orthodoxy tells me that Christ occludes. And that may just be the most important insight of the book for me: Both the fundamentalist and the exclusive humanist have "barred the door" of meaningful conversation of the transcendent with absolute certainty. As Taylor reminds us, "It should be obvious by now that human culture doesn't work that way (i.e. extreme positions based on over-simplified certainty): it always involves some interpretation and redefinition, but against a background of human constants" (767). And this is why I recommend this book for anyone, believer, agnostic, progressive, fundamentalist, atheist, etc., who is trying to navigate what belief is in our secular age.
October 22, 2015
This book is premised on a seemingly straightforward question: how did the western world change in the last 500 years from one in which belief in god was the clear starting place for everyone to one in which blief in God of some form is just one of many possible starting points and in which starting positions of atheism, secular humanism, or other shades of non-belief are major options. This latter situation is what Taylor cals a "secular" age.
What follows from this question is an interesting and rich book that is unlike any others I can recall. It is an intellectual history of the West, framed in terms of how issues progressed through discussion and conflict. It is a history of religion that both takes account of current and past debates among scholars but also presents the history in terms that relate to the experiences of thoughtful general readers -- more or less. It is a book about philosophy and philosophical arguments. It is also a social history of the shared background assumptions that people at a given time share as they think about themselves and their place in the world. It is a book about what happens to religion when it becomes institutionalized and how the gap between the original intuitions of a faith and its institutional embodiments drives history further. It is a book about how sciem and sects come about. ... This is only a partial list. It would be foolish to try to summarize what is going on in this massive work.
Overall, I found the book highly effective in its general arguments. There are lots and lots of more specific arguments and the ones I was able to keep track of were wonderful. Potential readers should be careful. Every part of this book is carefully organized and the arguments show the signs of a lifetime of honing. It is not a book to skim, unlcss one plans to return. The syllable count is quite high and Taylor drops names and summarizes arguments where he finds it necessary. He seems to get it right. Some people might not like working through a series of 50 well crafted and integrated lectures or so, but if one can enjoy working through big argumentative book, you, then this book will provide a huge payoff.
This is also not a book advocating secularism or any particular variant of religion. If anything, Taylor's case is that people today are dealing with issues relating to morality, death, the basis for ethics and action, trouble around determining right and wrong (and then acting on that), and how to deal with outsiders of various stripes just as people deallt with these issues 500 years ago. The context has changed, the world looks different, science and tecchnology are triumphant, and the like - but the tensions around sorting out what is sacred and what is secular remain as they did in earlier ages. It is unlikely that they will be going away anytime some. Taylor''s book is a massive effort to make sense of this to some extent - and he has done a very good job.
What follows from this question is an interesting and rich book that is unlike any others I can recall. It is an intellectual history of the West, framed in terms of how issues progressed through discussion and conflict. It is a history of religion that both takes account of current and past debates among scholars but also presents the history in terms that relate to the experiences of thoughtful general readers -- more or less. It is a book about philosophy and philosophical arguments. It is also a social history of the shared background assumptions that people at a given time share as they think about themselves and their place in the world. It is a book about what happens to religion when it becomes institutionalized and how the gap between the original intuitions of a faith and its institutional embodiments drives history further. It is a book about how sciem and sects come about. ... This is only a partial list. It would be foolish to try to summarize what is going on in this massive work.
Overall, I found the book highly effective in its general arguments. There are lots and lots of more specific arguments and the ones I was able to keep track of were wonderful. Potential readers should be careful. Every part of this book is carefully organized and the arguments show the signs of a lifetime of honing. It is not a book to skim, unlcss one plans to return. The syllable count is quite high and Taylor drops names and summarizes arguments where he finds it necessary. He seems to get it right. Some people might not like working through a series of 50 well crafted and integrated lectures or so, but if one can enjoy working through big argumentative book, you, then this book will provide a huge payoff.
This is also not a book advocating secularism or any particular variant of religion. If anything, Taylor's case is that people today are dealing with issues relating to morality, death, the basis for ethics and action, trouble around determining right and wrong (and then acting on that), and how to deal with outsiders of various stripes just as people deallt with these issues 500 years ago. The context has changed, the world looks different, science and tecchnology are triumphant, and the like - but the tensions around sorting out what is sacred and what is secular remain as they did in earlier ages. It is unlikely that they will be going away anytime some. Taylor''s book is a massive effort to make sense of this to some extent - and he has done a very good job.
February 28, 2012
It takes a long time, and a certain amount of patience, but it is possible to finish Charles Taylor's long, heavy book A Secular Age. And it's really worth it. Taylor's is in many ways the most insightful account of the genesis of modernity that I have ever read. For it is more than an examination of the "conditions of belief" in our age; it's an examination of the way moderns see and imagine themselves and society and the universe, and how this way of seeing and imagining came about. A lot of goodreads reviews have complained about the sheer length, the meandering, and the repetitiveness of this work, but I found the length necessary for his point, and the repetitions helpful to avoid getting lost. The meandering hesitating style is there for rhetorical reasons it seems to me. It a trifle irritating at times, but it allows Taylor to make his conclusions really plausible without having to strictly prove them.
What I find most unsatisfying about Taylor are some of his own philosophical and theological positions. He's able to see the power in all the positions he analyzes so clearly that he ends up conceding too much to them. Take for example his analysis of the modern idea of "authenticity" his analysis is brilliant, but whereas my reaction to the analysis is, "OK, now we can see why this ideal has such a powerful hold on so many people and why it has to rejected root and branch and opposed with all our might", Taylor's conclusion is along the lines of "this has a powerful hold on us, so we can't really reject it entirely, so let's say it's partly right and try to correct it through all these other crazy ideas that are also partly right." Or to take another example, Taylor has some brilliant passages analyzing the difference between modern and pre-modern views of political order, and showing how apparent agreement deceives. I recently used them to argue that the modern view is just really bad, but Taylor, despite seeing the modern view very clearly for what it is has a very ambivalent attitude towards it.
What I find most unsatisfying about Taylor are some of his own philosophical and theological positions. He's able to see the power in all the positions he analyzes so clearly that he ends up conceding too much to them. Take for example his analysis of the modern idea of "authenticity" his analysis is brilliant, but whereas my reaction to the analysis is, "OK, now we can see why this ideal has such a powerful hold on so many people and why it has to rejected root and branch and opposed with all our might", Taylor's conclusion is along the lines of "this has a powerful hold on us, so we can't really reject it entirely, so let's say it's partly right and try to correct it through all these other crazy ideas that are also partly right." Or to take another example, Taylor has some brilliant passages analyzing the difference between modern and pre-modern views of political order, and showing how apparent agreement deceives. I recently used them to argue that the modern view is just really bad, but Taylor, despite seeing the modern view very clearly for what it is has a very ambivalent attitude towards it.
July 23, 2020
Fascinating. Dense. Brilliant. Massive. Unbelievably influential. Insightful. And did I mention it’s super-dense?
A Secular Age is the ultimate "How We Got to Now" book (which is my favorite genre). How did we go from the 1500’s, when it was almost impossible to NOT believe in God, to now when belief in God is completely against the grain?
I’d recommend reading A Secular Age paired with a couple other books that apply and explain it:
I’d recommend this reading order:
1) How NOT to be Secular
2) A Secular Age
3) Our Secular Age
How Not To will give you the framework needed to digest Taylor’s massive and dense A Secular Age. Our Secular Age will help you apply it (and, especially if you are protestant, interpret it).
The most common question I get re Secular: Is this worth reading? The answer: yes, because I think it’s worth reading "source books".
There are very few original thinkers. And even the most original thinkers are derivative. They are getting their ideas from someone.
I think one of the most helpful practices in reading is to try to read the source, the headwaters of the derivative streams.
Not only are Source books long, they’re often pretty difficult reads. But I think they're still worth the energy and time even if you only understand a 1/10 of what the author is saying. As you read the derivatives, you will begin to better understand the source.
And deeply understanding the source book will give you greater insight as you read the derivatives. It’s a virtuous cycle.
AND you will become a better reader. I’m not saying don’t read the derivatives. We learn through repetition. It really helps to hear an author apply an idea (especially helpful to read Christian authors applying secular ideas). But you will get so much more out of derivative books if you have wrestled with the source.
A Secular Age is the ultimate "How We Got to Now" book (which is my favorite genre). How did we go from the 1500’s, when it was almost impossible to NOT believe in God, to now when belief in God is completely against the grain?
I’d recommend reading A Secular Age paired with a couple other books that apply and explain it:
I’d recommend this reading order:
1) How NOT to be Secular
2) A Secular Age
3) Our Secular Age
How Not To will give you the framework needed to digest Taylor’s massive and dense A Secular Age. Our Secular Age will help you apply it (and, especially if you are protestant, interpret it).
The most common question I get re Secular: Is this worth reading? The answer: yes, because I think it’s worth reading "source books".
There are very few original thinkers. And even the most original thinkers are derivative. They are getting their ideas from someone.
I think one of the most helpful practices in reading is to try to read the source, the headwaters of the derivative streams.
Not only are Source books long, they’re often pretty difficult reads. But I think they're still worth the energy and time even if you only understand a 1/10 of what the author is saying. As you read the derivatives, you will begin to better understand the source.
And deeply understanding the source book will give you greater insight as you read the derivatives. It’s a virtuous cycle.
AND you will become a better reader. I’m not saying don’t read the derivatives. We learn through repetition. It really helps to hear an author apply an idea (especially helpful to read Christian authors applying secular ideas). But you will get so much more out of derivative books if you have wrestled with the source.
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