-
367
2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights
reserved.0022-4189/2010/9003-0004$10.00
Review Article
Grappling with Charles Taylors A Secular Age*
William Schweiker et al. / University of Chicago Divinity
School
Charles Taylor has presented us with a fascinating, rich, and
unusuallythoughtful study.1 It is a very long book, and its style
invites a compar-ison with a walking tour through a medieval town.
One walks uphill ordownhill most of the time, and the small roads
are curved so that onecannot see much ahead. Occasionally, one ends
up in hidden backyardswhere people hang their laundry and play
opera music. In other words,it is a book full of surprising
insights, a book that gives one pause forreflection, a book that
explores options rather than making exagger-ated statements. It
tries to persuade rather than convince.
A Secular Age is also work of tremendous erudition and scope; it
in-vites and in fact demands response from scholars engaged in all
aspectsof religious studies. Its potential influence throughout the
field wouldbe difficult to overstate and is surely already being
felt. In brief, Taylorswork explores the meaning of the changing
place of religion in Westernsociety. He asks how a society in which
it was virtually impossible notto believe in God became, over the
course of centuries, one in whichfaith, even for the staunchest
believer, is only one human possibilityamong others.
What follows are attempts to begin a conversation with Professor
Tay-lor from the varied perspectives of theology, theological
ethics, historyof Christianity and Judaism, religion and
literature, and sociology ofreligion. These ideas and arguments
were presented to Professor Taylorby faculty of the University of
Chicago Divinity School at a conference
* Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007).
Authors of this review article include William Schweiker, Kevin
Hector, Hans Dieter Betz,
Willemien Otten, W. Clark Gilpin, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Richard
Rosengarten, and MartinRiesebrodt.
1 Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and
Philosophy at McGill Uni-versity. His twenty books include Sources
of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), one of the most widely read and
highly regarded phil-osophical works of the past quarter century.
Its achievements were crowned by other works,including The Malaise
of Modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991) and A Secular
Age.
-
The Journal of Religion
368
held on February 1213, 2008.2 They are presented here in
slightlyedited form to provide an overview of Taylors important
work and tosuggest productive avenues of future engagement.
William Schweiker begins the discussion with an insightful
summaryof Taylors argument; he then argues for seeking a third way
betweenTaylors account of human fullness, grounded in a sense of
transcen-dence, and exclusively humanistic positions. In the next
response,Kevin Hector argues that secularity, far from being a
merely unin-tended and unwanted consequence of early modern Reform,
in factenables one of Reforms essential goalsthat ones Christianity
be au-thentically ones own.
We then turn to the insights of several historical perspectives
on Tay-lors argument: Hans Dieter Betz looks at the de facto
secular ageleft in the wake of Augustuss transformation of Roman
religion into aruler cult; Willemien Otten offers some
reconsiderations of Taylorsaccount of the medieval period and
suggests that an awareness of me-dieval humanism enriches our sense
of the Christian tradition, even ifit deepens our sense of the
problems involved in doing theology in asecular age; and W. Clark
Gilpin reviews Taylors account of the ageof mobilization
(18001950), concluding that the disembedding offaith from communal
religious culture has enabled personal religiosityto be directly
negotiated with consumer culture and national identity,without
necessary connection to explicitly religious institutions.
Finally,a secularization narrative for modern Central and West
European Jewryis offered by Paul Mendes-Flohr.
The intersection of religion and literature comes to the fore in
theresponse of Richard Rosengarten: he analyzes George Eliots
Middle-march to complicate Taylors view of the Victorian era as
marking adecisive shift in aesthetics from mimesis to creation,
which producedin turn a poetics devoted to private sensibility
rather than the reflectionof public meaning. According to
Rosengarten, Eliots novel presents avariety of disenchantment with
Christianity that, in fact, rejects thebuffered self that Taylor
views as the consequence of such disenchant-ment. To conclude,
then, Martin Riesebrodt analyzes Taylors concep-tualization of
secularization and of religion itself, as well as the com-parisons
that Taylor draws between Europe and the United States.
2 A small colloquium led by Jean Bethke Elshtain was held on
February 12, followed by apublic event chaired by Kristine A. Culp
on February 13, 2008. The texts from both eventswere assembled and
edited for publication by Vince Evener.
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
369
william schweiker: theological ethics
I want to think with Professor Taylor about our religious and
moralcondition, that is, the connection between religious
experience and themoral space of life. My response entails, first,
getting clarity about Tay-lors conception of our secular condition
and thinking with himabout the idea of human fullness and, second,
hinting at a way ofconceiving and inhabiting the present condition
that endorses a robustreligious conception of human fullness, in my
case Christian, but thatis also humanistic, in some sense. I ask
how we can reclaim within West-ern religious thought a way to see
the struggle for justice against de-humanizing forces as part of a
conception of fullness that does notdevolve into the kind of rage
for order or exclusive humanism thatTaylor criticizes. The
challenge is to think beyond the seemingly irre-solvable conflict
between religious and humanistic outlooks as itself away of being
religious and thus to find a way to inhabit freely ourtraditions.3
There is some irony in this, I admit. As a theologian I amtrying to
preserve a humanistic moment within a religious outlook andlife,
while Taylor, the philosopher, is insisting on a religious
transcen-dence. So, first, we need some clarity about Taylors own
argument.
I
A Secular Age is a massive study of Western cultures and the
place ofreligion within them. Its main puzzlement is to grasp a
transition inhistory. We have moved, Taylor writes, from a world in
which theplace of fullness was understood unproblematically outside
or beyondhuman life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is
challenged byothers which place it . . . within human life (15).
The history hetells is then about human fullness and a narrowing of
that fullnessunder the pressure to reform life and make people
better within theimmanent frame of history. As he puts it late in
the book, The urgeto reform has often been one to bring all of life
under the sway of asingle principle or demand: the worship of the
one God, or the rec-ognition that salvation is only by faith, or
that salvation is only withinthe church (771).
The basic idea is that human identities are always tied to
convictionsabout the meaning of reality, what Taylor calls
elsewhere strong eval-uations. If we wish to understand ourselves,
we cannot abstract from
3 See David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, Religion and the
Human Future: An Essay onTheological Humanism (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
-
The Journal of Religion
370
those beliefs in order to reach some supposedly neutral
perspective. InA Secular Age, Taylor notes that every person, and
every society, liveswith or by some conception(s) of what human
flourishing is: What con-stitutes a fulfilled life? What makes life
really worth living? What wouldwe most admire people for? (16).
This is, we can note, a kind of on-tological reflection, sometimes
called a weak ontology or philosoph-ical anthropology, that is, an
inquiry into the meaning of being for usdrawing on the moral
sources of a culture or civilization.4 The spaceof human
existenceour ontological conditionis shaped by thesesources.
Taylors conclusion is that present conditions of experiencetend
toward an exclusive humanism, which works with a truncatedidea of
fullness within the immanent frame of historical life. In termsof
Christianity, the drive for reform, especially among Protestants,
hasforced us into a homogenous conception of fullness, an
excarnationthat is the steady disembodying of spiritual life, so
that it is less andless carried in deep meaningful bodily forms,
and lies more and morein the head (771). The burden of Taylors
argument is to show thata different account clears up confusions
and reduces errors, even whileit resonates with actual life and our
experiences of transcendence andfullness. How does he make this
argument?
According to Taylor the moral/spiritual landscape of human life
isthree-dimensional: there is, first, the sense of fullness that
reaches be-yond our ordinary experience to a depth or power in
existence; second,there are moments of exile or brokenness from
that fullness; and, third,there is a kind of middle condition
between fullness and exile. Thevital question is how one conceives
and inhabits the middle condition,the fact of our longing, and also
finitude and exile. Religious peoplehave some faith and hope in a
fullness as well as experiences of the in-breaking of a fullness
graciously received under its own power. Yet, itis possible to
dwell within the middle condition with the convictionthat human
flourishing is to be found here and nowhere else and thatthe power
of that fullness is wholly a human power. Recall Martin Hei-deggers
insistence on resoluteness in being toward death, Hans Blu-
4 A number of thinkers, including Taylor, have addressed weak
ontology or reflection onthe connection between beliefs about the
meaning of reality and their place in the formationof human
identities. See, e.g., Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmations:
The Strengths of WeakOntology in Political Theory (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000); William Connolly,Neuropolitcs:
Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002); and,of course, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self.
Also see the special issue on the topic in theHedgehog Review 7,
no. 2 (2005). It is interesting that these theorists are now
discovering theinsights of earlier Christian theologians, like Paul
Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr, and stillearlier, Luther and
Augustine, on the constitutive relation between self and community
andsome ultimate concern about the meaning of being (Tillich) or a
center of value (Niebuhr)or trust of the heart (Luther) or a
decisive love (Augustine).
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
371
menburg on self-assertion and the legitimacy of the modern age,
orcurrent advocates of neohumanism and inner-worldly
transcendencelike Tzvetan Todorov.5 For Taylor those outlooks
easily lead to the buf-fered self, a self closed off from more
radical kinds of transcendenceand thus an exclusive humanistic way
to live in the middle condition.
Taylors argument for a more robust sense of fullness requires
artic-ulating eruptions of forces that overturn the rationalized
social order,like festival or in-breakings of a sense of higher
time. Religion in-cludes a higher good beyond mere human
perfection, a higher powerthat transforms human life, and life as
going beyond the bounds of itsnatural scope (20). Religious
resources offer views of human fullnessthat transcend the immanent
frame and thereby provide perspectiveon the rage for order. Of
course, Taylor grants that many religiouspeople believe that true
fullness requires a profound inner break withthe goals of
flourishing in their own case; they are called on, that is,
todetach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of the
ex-tinction of self in one case, or to the renunciation of human
fulfillmentto serve God in the other (17). Yet, that is merely to
say that thereligions have a complex understanding of human
fullness and alsothat they can be mutilating of real, finite human
life, which is, ofcourse, always the worry of humanists, exclusive
or not.
II
There is little doubt that high-modern societies often truncate
humanexperience and seek purely procedural answers to social
problems.Similarly, human beings continue to have experiences of
fullness thatdisrupt an utterly immanent secular life. And there
are virulently an-tihumanistic ways of being both religious and
secular. The dispute,then, is over how fullness is conceived and
how to interpret and in-habit our middle condition. Without
engaging antihumanistic argu-ments, I want to ask whether exclusive
humanism and something likeTaylors account of fullness, formal as
it is, are in fact the main or evenbest ways to conceive and to
inhabit the middle condition. Let me hintat a third way in order to
widen the conversation about human fullness.
First, a word is needed about fullness. As I read the Christian
tra-ditionand, in fact, the outlook of other religions toothe idea
ofhuman fullness, the highest good, interrelates actual human
flourish-
5 See Martin Hiedegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and
E. Robinson (New York:Harper & Row, 1962); Hans Blumenburg, The
Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. R. M. Wallace(Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1983); and Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy
ofHumanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
-
The Journal of Religion
372
ing with ideas about what is righteous, just, holy, or virtuous.
A Chris-tian vision interweaves a robust Jewish commitment to
justice withstrands of thought, Hellenistic and others, that focus
on human flour-ishing. Yet, that is not quite right, either. Those
traditionsJewish,other religions, and nonreligiousalso have ways of
thinking aboutthese connections between flourishing and justice.
The highest goodis not just one standard but a complex, synthetic
idea. And this per-spective on the highest good entails, at least
in a Christian vision, anaccount of our condition. The travail of
history is marked by a longingfor the resolution of the collision
between flourishing and righteousness,the fact that in this world
those who flourish are not always righteousand the righteous too
often suffer. But since the space of human ex-istence in the middle
condition is the complex reflexive interaction ofinstitutions,
communities, beliefs and values, as well as human fault
andviciousness and also natural processes, the longing for
resolution is atbest ambiguously satisfied. And this fact, even
aporia, is an engine ofcreativity, the stage for human despair and
fidelity, and also the sourceof endless human folly and humor.
Accordingly, any idea of fullness thatis not constitutively about
the relation of flourishing and righteousnessis too trimmed
downeither too other worldly or too inner worldly.Trimmed-down
visions lack urgency and depth, or a realistic assessmentof our
condition, or they stunt human aspiration. And any account ofour
condition that denies this tension, this collision, is naive about
hu-man possibilities, despairing of ameliorating any woe or
injustice, ordriven by a rage for order to change the world.
Christians hope for theresolution of this conflict pictured in the
eschatological reign of God.It is not a product of human striving
alone. But, as Protestants hold,it does free one to labor
responsibly and joyfully for justice and flour-ishing, since
together this is what is meant by fullness.
If this is the caseor at least a lot of Christians and others
seem toadopt an outlook like thisthen the quest for fullness cannot
be di-vorced from convictions about what is right and holy any more
thanthe love of God can be separated from the love of neighbor.
This per-spective thereby indicates another take on the moral and
spiritualshape of the middle condition between fullness and exile,
namely,the irresolvable tension in history between flourishing and
righteous-ness, happiness and holiness. The challenge of a secular
age, maybeany age, is how to live within the middle condition
without despair,defiance, resignation, or naive idealism but with a
resolute and joyouscommitment to the integrity of life with and for
others.6 This outlook
6 On the integrity of life and this stance in existence, see
William Schweiker, TheologicalEthics and Global Dynamics: In the
Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
373
is a way of living in a secular age that does not rage for order
ortruncate human transcendence, even as it clarifies the domain of
re-sponsibility and how religious convictions might help fashion a
hu-mane futurein a time when the rush to flourish too often
trammelshuman hope and what is just and also endangers the
integrity of allrealms of life.
III
I am hinting at an outlook about how to conceive of and inhabit
themiddle condition that I believe has parallels to Taylors account
butthat entails a somewhat different perspective, at once religious
andhumanistic. It involves ontological reflection since a
conception of thehighest good is deployed to articulate conditions
of experience andthe variety of responses to it. This perspective
has found different ex-pressions throughout the Christian
tradition. And it is one, I think,that we need to cultivate in an
age in which humanistic ideals too oftentrammel religious longings
and the religions can demean or mutilatethe goodness and dignity of
finite human life.
kevin hector: theology and philosophy of religion
A Secular Age argues that todays secularity should be understood
interms of the fact that unbelief has become thinkable for a good
manyof us and, indeed, that belief in something transcendent has
becomenearly unthinkable for many. This strikes me as an
interesting andlargely persuasive way of characterizing where we
are. I was likewisepersuaded by a good deal of Professor Taylors
story of how we arrivedat this point, particularly his helpful
account of the role Reformplayed in moving us toward what he calls
the immanent frame. It isat precisely this point, however, that
Professor Taylors account seemsto be missing a crucial ingredient.
One of the conditions necessary forReform to take hold as it did,
it seems to me, is an assumption thatthe so-called Magisterial
Reformation shared with Medieval Catholicism,namely, the idea that
members of an entire society could be counted asChristian solely on
the basis of that membership. Absent this assump-tion, it seems
that Reform might have proceeded very differently.
Professor Taylor characterizes Reform as a drive to make over
thewhole society to higher standards, a drive that is rooted in a
pro-found dissatisfaction with the hierarchical equilibrium between
lay lifeand the renunciative vocations (6163). Advocates of Reform
wereconcerned, then, with the fact that the higher life called for
by the
-
The Journal of Religion
374
Gospel had come to be seen as a special vocation to be practiced
bythe elite, rather than as a vocation to be lived by all
Christians. Reformaimed to combat this sort of two-tiered
Christianity by insisting thatthe so-called higher life is demanded
of every Christian and by puttinginto effect all sorts of
disciplinary measures by means of which to en-sure that Christians
would live up to this lifes demands (51). On Tay-lors account,
then, Reform played a key role in producing the sort ofdisciplinary
society that contributed to the eventual development ofexclusive
humanism. It is important to note, though, that Reformmay have
moved in a different direction if not for the assumption
thatmembers of an entire society could be counted as Christian. If
oneassumes that the church is coterminous with society, it might
makesense to try to hold an entire society to higher standards.
This as-sumption is by no means self-evident, however. The
so-called RadicalReformers, for instance, saw this assumption as,
in fact, one of the keyobstacles to Reform and therefore insisted
that one counts as a Chris-tian only if one is committed to living
the higher life, to submittingoneself to church discipline, and so
forth. The point is simply that thisassumption seems to play a
nontrivial role in the move from Reform tothe institution of a
disciplinary society, for without it, Reform might justas well have
led to a narrower view of who counts as a member of thechurch.
This may seem a fairly minor point, especially in view of
ProfessorTaylors apparent friendliness to it (see 73941), but I
would arguethat, in the context of Taylors secularity narrative, it
is a differencethat makes a difference. I would argue, in fact,
that if we consider howthis assumption is related to the outworking
of Reform, we might seethe secularism that emerges in a different
light. In the space allottedto me I can only trace the contours of
this claim, but to see what Ihave in mind, consider, first, that
the assumption I have been discuss-ingthat members of an entire
society can be counted Christian solelyon the basis of that
membershipseems to conflict with one of Re-forms own aims. The
Reform movement insists that the higher lifeis demanded of every
Christian and accordingly rejects the idea thatcertain Christians,
such as monks, can relieve others of these demandsby living this
life on their behalf or carrying them, to use ProfessorTaylors term
(6162). Implicit in Reforms rejection of two-tieredChristianity,
then, is an insistence that the Christian life must be onesown, yet
this insistence seems to be at odds, at least potentially, withthe
assumption that a person can be counted a Christian simply byvirtue
of his or her birth into a particular society. This becomes
evidentonce certain conditions change and more and more persons
born into
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
375
Christian societies start to wonder whether their putative
Christian-ness counts as their own or whether it is instead a kind
of historicalaccidentsomething that happened to them, as it were,
rather thanwas due to them. I can neither elaborate nor defend this
claim suffi-ciently in the space of a few pages, but it seems
evident that someversion of this tension played an important role
in the emergence ofTaylors secularism three and that once this is
brought into view, itcasts secularism in a somewhat different
light.
To see this, consider a rough, overly simple sketch of some
historicalchanges in the epistemic landscape. To begin with, at the
time of theReformation itself, the tension just mentioned remains
invisible, so tospeak, because the vast majority of persons in the
relevant societiestake themselves to be Christian. The situation
starts to change, how-ever, as a result of shifting conditions of
belief, several of which havebeen canvassed by Professor Taylor.
Two shifts should suffice to indi-cate the development I have in
view. First, Reformation and Counter-Reformation polemics seem to
have played a role in altering conditionsof belief, not just
because they led to a revival in skepticism but alsobecause their
mere existence ended up putting certain kinds of claimson a
different footing: in a context in which the authority of
traditionis itself at issue, it would beg the question to appeal to
tradition as ameans by which to justify ones claims about
tradition. The authorityof tradition was further undermined by the
emergence of modernscientific inquiry, the divergence of its
results at certain points fromtraditional teachings, the churchs
dogmatic opposition to these re-sults, and so on. For these and
other reasons, there was a shift in theprevailing conditions of
belief, away from the authority of tradition andtoward thinking for
oneself, the aim of which was to avoid believinganything simply
because it is what one has been taught or what onehas always
believed. This aim contributed, in turn, to a series of
furthershifts in the conditions of belief, since it motivated
several generationsto consider what it would mean to think for
oneself and under whatconditions this is possible. To most, it
seemed evident that one countedas thinking for oneself about some
(doxastic or practical) commitmentonly if one could offer reasons
for it, but this raised an obvious prob-lem: if one counts as
thinking for oneself about some commitment onlyif one gives reasons
for it, it follows that one is thinking for oneselfabout these
reasons only if one gives reasons for them, and so on.
Thecommitment to thinking for oneself thus threatens to set off an
infiniteregress, which is precisely what emerged in the so-called
Grundsatzkritikof the 1790s.
For my purposes, it suffices to mention just one of the novel
re-
-
The Journal of Religion
376
sponses to this problem (a version of which is defended by Hegel
aswell as Schleiermacher). The proposal is to understand the
reasons inquestion as a kind of would-be norm and understand these
norms, inturn, as authorized, administered, and shaped by an
ongoing processof intersubjective recognition: to offer reasons for
some commitment,on this account, is implicitly to recognize the
authority of certain pre-cedent reason-givings as well as of
certain persons judgments aboutwhat counts as a valid reason; when
one offers reasons, one aims tocarry on the normative trajectory
implicit in these precedents and thusseeks this same precedential
status for ones own reason-giving; if onesreason-giving is
recognized as such, it contributes to the trajectory bymeans of
which still other reasons may be judged and thereforechanges that
trajectory, if only slightly; and so on. In this way, one cansee
ones reasons as due to oneself, since the authority,
administration,and meaning of the norms in terms of which they are
judged dependupon a process that includes ones use and recognition
of these norms.
On this account, there is nothing more to being a norm than
cir-culating as such, which obviously qualifies this account as a
species ofwhat Professor Taylor calls exclusive humanism. It should
likewise beobvious that this account contributes to the conditions
under whichunbelief has become thinkable. It is not at all obvious,
however, whatattitude one should take toward this development.
Professor Taylorsnarrative may tempt us to think of secularism as
the ironic undoing ofReform, that is, to think of Reform as kicking
off a series of develop-ments that ultimately brought about Reforms
own demise. With theforegoing sketch in mind, however, it seems
equally plausible to thinkof secularism not as an unfortunate and
unforeseen consequence ofReform but as in some respects its
culmination or, more precisely, asthe historical achievement of
certain conditions that allow for an other-wise unavailable
realization of Reform. There are at least two respectsin which this
is the case. First, precisely because unbelief has beenrendered
thinkable, one can now stand in a different relationship tobelief;
there is now a standpoint from which one can stand back frombelief
in order to mediate it to oneself, to reclaim it as ones own, andso
render it recognizable as due to oneself. A new kind of freedomwith
respect to ones beliefs is thus made possible, a freedom
whosecondition of possibility seems to include the thinkability of
unbelief.It seems highly unlikely, that is, that one could achieve
this kind offreedom in an age when ones holding of certain beliefs
appeared self-evident or even natural due to the virtual
unthinkability of unbelief(or of belief radically different than
ones own). Secularism thus con-tributes a crucial condition of the
achievement of one of Reforms
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
377
goals, namely, that ones Christianity be ones own. Moreover, the
va-riety of exclusive humanism sketched here makes it possible not
onlyto stand back from ones faith commitments in order to reclaim
themas ones own but also to see the norms to which these
commitmentsanswer as themselves due to one, since these norms are
authorized,administered, and shaped by ones own performances and
recogni-tions. One can see our norms as ones own, in other words,
and onesown norms as ours, in consequence of which one can see
commit-ments constrained by these norms as due to oneself in a more
robustsense than would otherwise be the case. In both of these
respects, then,a variety of exclusive humanism supplies conditions
that contribute tothe achievement of one of Reforms own goals,
namely, that onesChristianity be recognizably and authentically
ones own. Secularismintroduces new possibilities, in other words,
that are retrospectivelyrecognizable as a fulfillment of Reforms
own project.
I have come to the end of my allotted space, yet doing justice
to anyone of these points would require considerably more
elaboration anddefense. I hope, in any event, that the contours of
my argument areclear enough. While Professor Taylors use of the
category Reformprovides a helpful means by which to explain the
shift from nonsecu-larity to secularity, I would suggest that
something important is missingfrom his account, namely,
consideration of the assumption that mem-bers of an entire society
could be counted as Christian simply by virtueof that membership.
This assumption is important because (a) it sup-plies one of the
conditions necessary for the development of a disci-plinary
society, (b) it engenders a kind of tension within Reform
itself,and (c) the rejection of this assumption ends up altering
the condi-tions of belief in such a way that an otherwise
unattainable achieve-ment of Reform becomes possible. It seems to
me, then, that by con-sidering the role this assumption plays in
Reforms emergence anddevelopment, one can see secularism in a
somewhat more positive lightvis-a`-vis religions own
development.
hans dieter betz: new testament and graeco-roman religions
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor comments on neo-Stoic
philosophersof the seventeenth century who were looking back on the
Roman em-pire, concentrating on the historian Tacitus (ca. 55116
CE). Peoplehave even spoken of the seventeenth century as a Roman
century.But for all their admiration for Roman statecraft, military
discipline,and Stoic philosophy, they were increasingly aware that
the pro-
-
The Journal of Religion
378
grammes which were intended to reform the mores and change
theoutlook of the whole population were entering new territory
(120).
If investigated to a greater detail, this general statement
reveals thatTacitus, to mention only him, describes a momentous
change from theolder religion of the Republic to the new Saeculum
Augustum and itsconsequences. After he had defeated his last
competitor, Marcus An-tonius, in the battle of Actium (31 BCE) and
the conquest of Egypt(30 BCE), Octavianus profoundly reorganized
the Roman state andreligion. This involved three major events: the
Senates awarding himthe new title Imperator Caesar Divi Filius
Augustus (27 BCE), the found-ing of the Ludi Saeculares (17 BCE),
and the occupying of the office ofPontifex Maximus (12 BCE). As
Tacitus describes it, Augustus reinventedRoman religion by
systematically transforming its institutions intothose of a ruler
cult with himself as its center. The process began withthe
deification of Augustuss adoptive father, C. Iulius Caesar, the
ded-ication of a temple and priesthood to Caesar, and the
restoration andconstruction of a large number of temples. Augustus
moved the officialresidence from the Regia in the Forum to a new
building complex onthe Palatine, including his own domus, a closely
attached magnificentTemple of Apollo, and a new Bibliotheca
Palatina.7
The legacy of Augustuss long reign was permanently secured by
hisautobiography of the Res Gestae, copies of which were on display
onbronze plates in front of his monumental mausoleum and on
stoneslabs elsewhere in the empire (such as the Monumentum
Ancyranum).8
The Mausoleum of Augustus on the north side of the Campus
Martiuswas located vis-a`-vis the impressive Ara Pacis Augustae on
the east side,with the large-size sundial (Horologium) in the
middle (both 9 BCE).9
The climax of the Saeculum Augustum was the funeral of the
princepswith his consecratio as Divus Augustus, carefully planned
by himself andpresided over by his chosen successor Tiberius (14
CE).10
What was the result of these changes? Following Tacitus: It was
thusan altered world, and of the old, unspoilt Roman character not
a tracelingered. Equality was an outworn creed, and all eyes looked
to themandate of the sovereignwith no immediate misgivings, so long
as
7 See also Suetonius, Augustus 29.8 For the text and commentary
see Klaus Bringmann and Dirk Wiegandt, Augustus: Schriften
und Ausspruche, Texte zur Forschung 91 (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,2008), 22981.
9 See Orietta Rossini, Ara Pacis (Milan: Mondadori Electa,
2006).10 Tacitus, Annales 1.8 and 1.10, cited according to the
edition and translation by John
Jackson, Tacitus III, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, and
London: Harvard UniversityPress, 1931); see also Suetonius,
Augustus 99101.
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
379
Augustus in the full vigor of his prime upheld himself, his
house, andpeace.11
The problems arose with Augustuss old age and the question
ofsuccession. Opinions varied about the character and impact of
hisreign. Tacitus represents the two sides, the positive,
corresponding tothe achievements listed in the Res Gestae,12 and
the negative, focusingon the crimes, sacrifices, and losses.13
Tacitus sums it up: He left noth-ing for the honors of the gods,
when he wanted to be adored in tem-ples and as an image of divine
entities through flamens and priests.14
In other words, the Saeculum Augustum saw Roman religion in its
en-tirety subjected to the cult of Augustus, with his apotheosis
occurringin his consecratio at the conclusion of his funeral.15
Nothing left was also true in regard to Tiberius, who could
barelybe persuaded to succeed Augustus. He had witnessed for some
timethe discrepancy between the grandiose dimension of the empire
andhis doubts about his abilities to govern it. Only the mind of
the deifiedAugustus was equal to such a burden: he himself had
found, whencalled by the sovereign to share his anxieties, how
arduous, how de-pendent upon fortune, was the task of ruling a
world.16
Tiberius was aware that his adoption and choice to succeed the
prin-ceps was motivated by his fathers selfish power concerns;
neither per-sonal affection nor regard for the state, he had read
the pride andcruelty of his heart, and had sought to heighten his
own glory by thevilest of contrasts.17 Having suspected this years
earlier, Tiberius hadtried to escape by his self-chosen exile in
Rhodos and a military ex-cursion to Illyricum, but Augustus, when
he was dying, called him backto the city of Nola, where he devoted
the last day of his life to pressingTiberius into serving as his
successor.18
11 Tacitus, Annales 1.4, 249.12 Ibid., 1.89.13 Ibid., 1.10.14
Ibid., 1.10 (my translation): Nihil deorum honoribus relictum, cum
se templis et effigie
numinum per flamines et sacerdotes coli vellet. I am indebted
here to the important articleby Hubert Cancik, Nichts blieb ubrig
fur die Verehrung der Gotter: Historische Reflexionuber
Herrscherverehrung bei Tacitus, in Romische Religion im Kontext:
Gesammelte Aufsatze I(Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 22745.
15 Tacitus, Annales 1.10: Ceterum sepultura more perfecta,
templum et caelestes religionesdecernuntur.
16 Ibid., 1.11, 265: Et ille varie disserebat de magnitudine
imperii, sua modestia. Solam diviAugusti mentem tantae molis
capacem: se in partem curarum ab illo vocatum experiendodidicisse
quam arduum, quam subiectum fortunae regendi cuncta onus.
17 Ibid., 1.10: Ne Tiberium quidem caritate aut rei publicae
cura successorem adcitum,sed, quoniam adrogantiam saevitiamque eius
introspexerit, comparatione deterrima sibi glo-riam quaesivisse.
Compare Suetonius, Tiberius 23.
18 Tacitus, Annales 1.5; 1.8; Suetonius, Tiberius 1011.
-
The Journal of Religion
380
While Tiberiuss reign lasted a long time, the burdens and
tempta-tions of the office in effect destroyed the man. As he had
never fullyaccepted the office, he tried to delegate the functions
and tasks asmuch as possible to members of the Senate and
officialdom, but whenhe saw himself getting overwhelmed by
government, failures, intrigues,betrayals, and abuse,19 he
gradually withdrew from Rome and took res-idence on the island of
Capri.20 As far as one can infer from historicalsources, Tiberius
practiced little, if any, religion beyond formal staterituals.21
Except for the deification of Augustus, he tolerated but didnot
promote the ruler cult. Officially, he prohibited his own
deificationand even that of Livia, his mother.22
The net result of the Saeculum Augustum was, therefore, that he
de-stroyed what was left of the Roman religion up until Iulius
Caesar. Itabsorbed its institutions into the ruler cult and left
for Augustuss suc-cessors a religious and moral vacuum, de facto
amounting to a secularage. For all we can say, Tiberius was as much
a secular ruler as onecould be under the circumstances. In spite of
some later attempts atrestoring Roman religion, the vacuum became
gradually filled by for-eign religions coming to Rome. Thus,
complete secularism was pre-vented by the social transformation of
the Roman people through themassive importation of slaves, members
of the military, and other im-migrants, among them Christians.
History in the imperial age became increasingly dominated by
dei-fied rulers exercizing their power through the military. The
armiesselected their men of eminence and let them rule as long as
theywere able and willing to satisfy their demands. There is no
doubt thatin the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, interest in
Roman historycontributed to the emergence of absolutist rulers. A
royal figure likeLouis XIV (16381715) exemplified the Grand Sie`cle
of France. Na-poleon I. Bonaparte (17691821) put Pope Pius VII
(180023) into hisplace by arresting and deporting him to France
(180814), where hewas forced to sign humiliating concordats with
Napoleon. Notably, theNapoleonic Epoch (17991815) initiated the
great Secularization(1803), which in its repercussions dominated
the entire nineteenthcentury.23 The climax, however, was reached by
the totalitarian regimesof Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism,
and Fascism in the twentieth
19 See Suetonius, Tiberius 2426.20 Ibid., 3941.21 Ibid., 26, 27,
36, 47, 6970.22 Ibid., 27, 51, 67.23 For a recent survey, see
Hartmut Lehmann, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, and James A. Math-
isen, Sakularisation/Sakularisierung, II: Geschichtlich,
Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart(RGG)7 (2004): 77583.
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
381
century. These regimes aimed at total secularism and replacement
ofreligion by ideological personality cults of the leader figures
Marx,Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and others.24 Though not
successful in theirgoal to eradicate Christianity and Judaism
altogether, they contributedsubstantially to the modern ideology of
secularism.
willemien otten: theology and history of
christianity(medieval)
I want to take my point of departure for this response in the
cultureof medieval Christianity, which Taylor sketches in many ways
as one instark contrast and contradiction with the developments
leading up toour current secular age. One of my guiding questions
is whether thediagnosis by modern scholars of medieval society as
premodern (whichTaylor follows) marks that societys collective
embrace of Christianityas somehow less complicated, for not yet
prone to modernitys slideinto secularism. A closely related
question is whether it is possible oreven desirable to see the
religious nature of medieval society as a goodor a bad thing.
Guided by my interest in dealing with Christianity in the
medievalWest in an integrated cultural rather than a confessional
way, I havecome to develop a particular insight in what I call
medieval humanism,borrowing an earlier insight from Richard
Southern.25 As a result ofthis, my diachronic analysis of our
secular age and the theologicalproblems flowing from it tends to
have a different focus than Taylorsanalysis, which concentrates on
the dangers of (postreformed) fideism.The aim of my response to A
Secular Age is at least in part to test myhypothesis against his,
in an attempt to make the most sense of me-dieval religion and
theology.
A Secular Age starts with the question of why it is that Western
cultureas a whole seemed to be made up of believers around 1500 CE,
whereasat present those numbers have dwindled to such an extent
that believ-ers comprise only a small portion of that culture,
making for an eerieand somehow out-of-place kind of religious
presence. The radical na-ture of the Reformation, while in many
respects making faith a moreserious matter, for which one bore
personal responsibility, had some-thing to do with the change, to
the extent that it unleashed a rage for
24 See Michael Bergunder, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, and Michael
Wermke, Personenkult,RGG 6 (2003): 113538.
25 See Willemien Otten, From Paradise to Paradigm: A Study of
Twelfth-Century Humanism (Lei-den: Brill, 2004), 144; with
reference to R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other
Studies(Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 2960.
-
The Journal of Religion
382
order, which while intensifying faith also led to its
undermining or atleast to a loosening of the hold the Christian
faith had had until thenon Western society. By the way, Taylors
view in this is confirmed byDiarmaid MacCulloughs recent book,
Reformation: Europes House Di-vided, 14901700,26 which argues that
the medieval sacramental andpenitential system adequately met the
spiritual needs of the late me-dieval people and that there was no
real reason for reform, let aloneReformation, other than Luthers
Augustinian impulse to enforceChristianitys consummate dependence
on grace as accessible onlythrough personal faith.
Reasoning backward from Taylors take on the Reformation, it
seemsas if his view of medieval Christianity to some extent
represents every-thing that one could no longer be in reformed
Christianity. Thus, me-dieval civilization, while very much a
stratified society, is not character-ized by a rage for order. How
medieval society functioned, moreorganically and more flexibly
religious than our modern society, isbrought out in A Secular Age
in two ways: in terms of the celebration oftime and the feasts that
went with it, liturgical but always also semisecu-lar, and in terms
of the practice of theology. I would like to commenton both of
these issues.
I
As for the celebration of time, Taylor rightly (I think)
emphasizes Godsexistential-foundational role in medieval society
(43). Societys qualityof being anchored in the divine, if I can put
it that way, made for a kindof equilibrium in the Middle Ages
between a drive for Christian self-transcendence, on the one hand,
and a fostering of human flourishing,on the other (44), reflected
both institutionally and communally inthe hierarchy and
complementarity of the celibate clergy and the mar-ried laity. What
held medieval society together in ways that no longerworked after
the Reformation was the possibility of the release of socialand
hierarchical tensions in feasts like Carnival, which either
func-tioned as a safety valve to support the values of the ruling
classesonthis point, Taylor quotes Natalie Davis (46)or underscored
the ul-timate service of community by permitting the mocking of its
socialorder, as is argued by Victor Turner (47). While I generally
agreewith Taylors view of the Middle Ages as a more cohesive
culture vis-a`-vis the more individualistic Reformation, whose
built-in religious
26 Diarmaid MacCullough, Reformation: Europes House Divided,
14901700 (New York: Pen-guin, 2004).
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
383
tensions stress the vertical impact of the divine rather than
its hori-zontal integration, I wonder if the implied contrast does
not lead himto have too benign a view of the tensions underlying
the medievalcooperative enterprise. Witchcraft and demonization, as
well asanti-Semitism (686ff.), are terms that only feature toward
the endof A Secular Age as part of an abstract discussion of
religion and vio-lence, but the drift of the argument there seems
to be that this vio-lence may be worse in a no-holds-barred secular
society. Followingthe view of Norman Cohns Europes Inner Demons,27
however, can wenot also see the comprehensive and organic medieval
conceptions oforder as being potentially suffocating in and of
themselves? For didthey not push for a release of tension that may
well have been aimedat a continued celebration of society but did
so only at the expense ofthe victimization of many of its members,
be they women, mystics,witches, heretics, or Jews? More attention
to the tensions and ambi-guities involved in scapegoating and
demonization as endemic ingre-dients of premodern societies, even
if we acknowledge that such mech-anisms survived also afterward,
might have allowed Taylor to take anequally holistic but altogether
more realistic view of the Middle Agesby seeing the Crusades as the
flipside of Carnival. Rather than indulg-ing in a seminostalgic
view of premodern medieval religiosity, would itnot be fair to say
that medieval culture had more than its share ofproblems, for which
the omnipresence of the Christian God did not,in the end, make much
of a difference?
II
This perhaps rather secular observation makes for an adequate
tran-sition to my second point about medieval theology and what I
call thetradition of medieval humanism. Let me say in all fairness
thatthroughout A Secular Age Taylor does not pretend to make
theologicalclaims, and it is not my intent to criticize him for
something he doesnot do. But shedding light on issues of medieval
doctrine helps me toclarify a larger point about medieval theology
as a broader, humanistpractice, one that cannot simply be opposed
to secularism because itis suffused with it.
In his chapter The Bulwarks of Belief (2589), Taylor discusses
the
27 Norman Cohn, Europes Inner Demons: The Demonization of
Christians in Medieval Christendom(1973; repr., Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993). The discussion has since beenbroadened by
R. I. Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and
Deviance in WesternEurope, 9501250 (1987; repr., Oxford: Blackwell,
2007); and to some extent demythologizedby David Nirenberg,
Communities of Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1998).
-
The Journal of Religion
384
juridical-penal system of belief, seeing this as an
Augustinian-Ansel-mian tradition that was aggravated by Calvin and
as such became partof the Reformations exacerbated view of human
depravity, leading tothat periods peculiar rage (78). Leaving both
Augustine and Calvinaside for a moment, let me briefly discuss
Anselm, to whom this jurid-ical-penal view in my opinion does not
apply precisely because of hismore humanist outlook. Whatever the
limitations of the feudal honorcode within which Anselm operated,
it was that very context that al-lowed him to avoid the kind of
theology of crime and punishment withwhich Taylor unfortunately
associates him in A Secular Age. When An-selm is faced with the
reality of human sin in his Cur Deus Homo? theoptions that in his
view are at Gods disposal are either punishment orsatisfaction.
Since God chooses satisfaction in Anselms scenario, theconsequence
is that punishment is no longer an option. As a result,the devil
plays no role whatsoever in Anselms theology of redemption.Taylor
is absolutely rightand here Calvin comes inthat the
reformedtradition read satisfaction in terms of punishment (Christ
dies by un-dergoing punishment for the sins of humanity, which
reading may belabeled satis-passion in contradistinction to Anselms
satis-faction), butthat is precisely not Anselms view. Instead, and
here I get to my pointabout the tradition of medieval humanism:
Anselm provides us with agreatly illuminating example of incarnate
reasoning, not just in termsof standard Christian doctrine about
the incarnation but, more specifi-cally, as the exact opposite of
what A Secular Age elsewhere (29293) callsexcarnate reasoning.
If medieval theology but also medieval culture more broadly
con-ceived can offer us anything, this offering has in my view to
do withits subtle and intricate use of incarnate reason, in that we
can trulysee it as the opposite of Taylors view of the excarnate
reasoning ofthe Enlightenment, based on the primacy of Nature or
Reason alone.Rather than configuring this difference in terms of an
abstract oppo-sition between anthropocentrism, which marks the
culture of Enlight-enment, and theocentrism or divine anchoring, as
marking premodernmedieval culture, society, and theology, I wonder
if the success of me-dieval theology was not that it was able to
combineand at times evencollapseanthropocentrism and theocentrism
in figures like Anselmand others (e.g. Augustine, Eriugena,
Abelard). If so, does their legacynot offer us a way into a richer
theological tradition that is both morehumanist, in that it
embraces the role of nature and reason, and ableto withstand the
excarnate pull of enlightened secular culture by en-gaging in
constant self-scrutiny through the ancient technique of ex-
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
385
ercitatio mentis? It is quite probably as a result of his
relentless focusingon sola ratione that Anselm can be misconstrued
in a strictly technical,excarnate way, whereas, in my view, it is
only when positioned withinthe larger humanist sphere of incarnate
reasoning that we can under-stand his insistence on that kind of
surgical precision.28
However defensible for a general book like A Secular Age, my
worryis that Taylors rather uncritical focus on the highlights of
medievalRoman CatholicismThomas Aquinas intellectually and Saint
Fran-cis of Assisi affectivelythrows us back to a presecular,
confessionalview of Christianity and Christian theology, even if he
makes allow-ances for the Victorines. The nature of my objection is
that suchconfessional perceptions represent their own brand of
excarnatereasoning, to the extent that the criticism of secularism
they evoke,however viable and welcome, tends to reinforce older
stereotypes.In my opinion, what this secular age more
constructively invites usto do insteadand attention to the humanist
embeddedness of me-dieval theology illustrates my pointis to take
stock of the historyof Western culture, within which that of its
theology (of whicheverconfession) is fully nested, as containing
also and always the seedsfor such forms of incarnate reasoning.
But the fact remains that doing theology in a secular context
willinevitably be fraught with problems. One of the questions I see
aris-ing more generally from the reactive attitude against
secularism,which is not intended by Taylors book but in which the
book mayvery well come into play, is that an overemphasis on the
role offaithwhich since Schleiermacher seems to have become the
focalpoint of theology, phasing out the earlier self-scrutinizing
Ansel-mian humanist approach that was more inclusive of nature and
rea-sonmay result in a totalizing but no less false substitution
theory,one in which the alternate world of faith has everything to
offerthat secular, scientific society does not. The current embrace
ofboth spirituality and alternative medicine by many former
believersseems strongly driven by this kind of impulse, which may
be no lessfideistic than the confessional stance from which
secularism onceliberated them but should not, as far as theological
practice is con-cerned, push us back into confessional corners.
28 I have made this point more extensively in Willemien Otten,
Religion as exercitatio mentis:A Case for Theology as a Humanist
Discipline, in Christian Humanism: Essays in Honour ofArjo
Vanderjagt, ed. A. A. MacDonald, Z. R. W. M. von Martels, and J. R.
Veenstra (Leiden:Brill, 2009), 5973, esp. 6769.
-
The Journal of Religion
386
w. clark gilpin: history of christianity and
theology(modern)
How does the scholar identify and assess the leading
characteristics ofthe present? The problem, writes Charles Taylor,
is defining exactlywhat it is that has happened (426). In chapters
1214 of A Secular Age,Taylor proposes a narrative that resolves
this problem and identifieswhat has happened. For the societies of
the North Atlantic culturalsphere, the transformative path to our
present-day secular age haspassed through an age of mobilization
and an age of authenticityon the way to religion today. I agree
with Taylor that the age ofmobilizationvery roughly, the years from
1800 to 1950was a timeduring which the very locus of the religious,
or the spiritual, in sociallife has shifted and is therefore
extremely important to understandingthe cultural transformation his
book addresses (424, 471). In what fol-lows, I reflect with Taylor
on the consequences of the age of mobili-zation for the prospects
of religion in a secular age. More specifically,I appraise the
significance of the age of mobilization for engaging Tay-lors worry
about the contemporary possibility of experiences of
tran-scendence. In a way this whole book, Taylor writes, is an
attempt tostudy the fate in the modern West of religious faith in a
strong sense.This strong sense I define, to repeat, by a double
criterion: the beliefin transcendent reality, on one hand, and the
connected aspiration toa transformation which goes beyond ordinary
human flourishing onthe other (510).
In Taylors series of historical ideal types, the age of
mobilization waspreceded by a long epoch in which the social
imaginary presumed acosmic society whose hierarchical
complementarity was grounded inthe divine will. Order flowed
downward from God through the hier-archy, ordering each part of
nature and society for the good of thewhole. By contrast, the age
of mobilization reflected the growing sensein modernity that
institutions were human fabrications, expressive ofhuman
aspirations, interests, and power. The age of mobilization,
saysTaylor, presupposed that any political, social, or ecclesial
structures towhich humans aspired had to be mobilized into
existence. That is,members of nations, professions, churches, and
increasingly even offamilies did not conceive of themselves as
embedded in institutionsthat were ordained by God and integrated in
a comprehensive orderof the cosmos but instead as independent
individuals, who associatetogether in a society structured for
mutual benefit (42372).
Whatever their formal teachings about the nature of the
church,Christian communities in the United States have, in fact,
participatedin this mobilized framework of activism and choice.
Personal adher-
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
387
ence to a church became a choice during the American age of
mobi-lization, and adherents experienced their religious
communities as in-stitutionally flexible, voluntary, and
self-directed, emphasizing personalchoice and the need for adaptive
innovation. This mobilization was, inmany respects, spectacularly
successful in fabricating new religiousforms that expanded
religious adherence and practice in the trans-atlantic world and
especially in the United States. And in relation tothe wider
public, Americas voluntarily constituted churches and par-achurch
organizations justified their continuing importance to civiclife in
terms of their mission to instill the values and ideals that
trainedup responsible citizens. As Taylor has summarized the
process, Godwas perceived at the level of the whole society, as the
author of aDesign which this society is undertaking to carry out,
and the freechurches acted as instruments of mutual help in which
individualsstrengthened one another in ordering their lives along
Godly lines.A societal mission advanced through voluntary religious
affiliationwould, in the United States, comprise one nation, under
God, wherethe Republic secures the freedom of the churches; and the
churchessustain the Godly ethos which the Republic requires
(453).
But, whatever the consequences for political, economic, and
educa-tional institutions, the age of mobilization had
far-reaching, unin-tended consequences for the voluntary church
because it raised a dis-tinctly theological problem. Having
generated an elaborate set ofadaptive institutional forms, which
stimulated and organized a long eraof numerical growth of the
American churches, the social process offounding, joining, and
voluntarily sustaining these institutions raised aquestion about
their specifically religious status as bearers of transcen-denceas
the Church, with a capital C. If religious community wasbased on
the personal decision to affiliate and personal commitmentsto
spiritual ideals, what social experience supported the common
as-sumption that religion represented an alignment of life with
transcend-ing powers or a claim upon the self that originated from
beyond theself ? How would persons experience transcendence when
the most im-mediate experience of religious participation arose
from personalchoice and agency? How did the divine make its
appearance or seemto exert its power within this mobilized
sociology of religion?
One representation of the divine presence proved, in the long
run,both fragile and fractious: the idea that the progress of
Western dem-ocratic societies manifested a Design authored of God.
During whatTaylor describes as a brief but powerful watershed
moment in the1960s, the institutional innovations of the age of
mobilization rapidlybegan losing their hold (42425), especially
among those churches
-
The Journal of Religion
388
commonly identified as mainstream. When the myth of progress
andnational destiny became suspect for many members of these
main-stream denominations, it left the churches of voluntary
affiliation de-nuded of a major representation of transcendence
that had providedthe supporting rationale for their institutional
life. In many respects,it seems to me, the popularity of
secularization theory during the 1960srepresented a theoretic
attempt to understand the loss of persuasivepower in the religious
forms created during the age of mobilization(42537).
A second representation of divine presence during the age of
mo-bilization took a quite different, noninstitutional form. Taylor
notesthat, beginning in the eighteenth century, one reaction to the
cool,measured religion of the buffered identity was to stress
feeling, emo-tion, a living faith which moves us. . . . One can
only connect withGod through the passions and through personal
devotional commit-ment (488). During the Romantic period, deeply
felt personal insightnow becomes our most precious spiritual
resource, and versions ofpersonal, affective religious insight
become a hallmark of spiritualitynot only for Ralph Waldo Emerson
and the Transcendentalists butalso for a host of nineteenth-century
revivalists (489). In Taylorsreading, the nineteenth-century
Catholic Church also joined the ageof mobilization, more or less in
spite of itself, because of tensionsinherent in the whole long
project of reform: the whole drive of theReform movement, from the
high Middle Ages, right through Ref-ormation and
counter-Reformation, right up through evangelical re-newal and the
post-Restoration church, was to make Christians witha strong
personal and devotional commitment to God and the faith.But strong
personal faith and all-powerful community consensuscant ultimately
consist together (46566). The ultramontanechurch had trouble
recognizing how contradictory the goal ulti-mately is, of a Church
tightly held together by a strong hierarchicalauthority, which will
nevertheless be filled with practitioners of heart-felt devotion
(466).
We ask, as we did for churchly institutions in the age of
mobilization:how does one experience transcendence when the most
immediate ex-perience is of religious choice and agency? The
answer, in this case, isthrough emotion. Despite what Taylor calls
the modern notion of thebuffered self, which does not experience
the influence of powers thattranscend the body, the emotions are
frequently experienced as be-yond the power of conscious control
and decision. One does not de-scribe choosing to feel sad, or
angry, or ashamed. The emotions,then, allow for the possibility of
modes of transcendence that operate
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
389
within the general framework of Taylors buffered self. And
experi-ences that dramatically alter ones personal disposition
toward theworld and social relations become a notable feature of
spirituality inthe modern West, often a feature that works
independently from in-stitutional affiliations. What Taylor calls
the expressive revolutionduring the age of mobilization thus
gradually undermined the linkbetween the affective interiority of
modern faith and the mobilizedinstitutions of modern society (cf.
49192).
Let me conclude by drawing a connection from Taylor to Talal
Asadon this issue of the relation between religious faith and
ecclesial insti-tutions in modernity. In Formations of the Secular:
Christianity, Islam, Mo-dernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2003), Asad empha-sizes the role of state power in the
formation of a secular order.Simplified, he argues that the
interests of the nation-state swept awayany intermediating
communities and authorities that stood betweenthe individual and
the state, making citizen the definitive social identity,replacing
identities based on religion, gender, family, and so on. Ithink
there is something to this. Indeed, the religious consequencesof
the general process Asad describes are, I believe, wider than
herecognizes. As a concrete example, consider Leigh Eric Schmidts
Con-sumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays
(Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1995). In Schmidts
analysis of the role ofAmerican department stores in Christmas
celebration, it is not thatChristmas is secularized. Instead, its
meaning is directly negotiatedbetween the commercial domain of mass
consumption and the reli-gious family. If personal religiosity is
directly negotiated with the com-mercial institutions (or with the
nation), then the disembedding offaith from communal religious
culture that worries Taylor has actuallybeen given a social
structure, but it is a social structure that does notrequire
(although it certainly permits and even applauds)
explicitlyreligious institutions. The citizen consumer can be
spiritual, but notreligious.
paul mendes-flohr: modern jewish thought
As the late Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple once
observed,God is interested in many things apart from religion. I
believe CharlesTaylor would agree that God is not to be confined to
the precincts ofprayer and ritual. Indeed, it is the overarching
theme of his magisterialstudy that God is still a presence in the
space opened up by the processwe are wont to call secularization.
Taylor of course means this boththeologically and culturally. But
in this new space religionas a spiri-
-
The Journal of Religion
390
tual and moral resourcecoexists with other alternative, secular
sys-tems of meaning that have emerged and crystallized with
modernity.Hence, if faith in Godor some abiding sense of
transcendencestillinforms our public and private lives, it perforce
must do so in conver-sation with other nontheistic cognitive
orientations. But this conver-sation, I should like to emphasize,
does not only take place betweenrepresentatives of these various
faith postures but also internally withineach of us as an
interminable inner dialogue between a hope groundedin the
transcendent and a hope grounded in the promise of
quotidian,secular wisdom and well being.29
In his account of the secularization narrative, Charles Taylor
ac-knowledges non-Western narratives, in the light of which he
criticallynotes the enthocentricity of the Weberean master
narrative of modern-ization that has decisively set the contours of
the academic discourseon secularization. Nonetheless, his principal
focus is the Western nar-rative of secularization. I should like to
consider in broad strokes asubspecies of the Western narrative,
namely that of European Jewry,more specifically, the Central and
West European Jewish encounterwith modernity. The story is markedly
different with Italian and EastEuropean Jewries. And oriental Jewry
encountered modernity largelyunder the auspices of European
colonialism and later Zionism, whichyielded yet another set of
narratives. Even the Western Christian nar-rative must be inflected
through the contrasting experience of Catholicand Protestant
societies with secularization.30
Through the good offices of the European Enlightenment and
itsideals of tolerance, the walls of the ghetto, which had
restricted theJews not only to residential enclosures but also to
cultural and spiritualseclusion, were torn down. As the denizens of
the ghetto rushed outto embrace the opportunities afforded them by
their liberation fromthe degradation of enforced isolation, they
also adopted European sec-ular culture. Despite the extraordinary
exuberance that they often dis-played for their new culture, it
should be noted that the Jews did notenter modern European society
[as did their Christian sponsors] in along process of endogenous
gestation and growth, but they plungedinto it as the ghetto walls
were being breached, with a bang, though notwithout prolonged
whimpers.31 The oy wehs intermingled with the hal-
29 See Jurgen Habermass remarks in his exchange with Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger (nowPope Benedict), in Jurgen Habermas, Dialektik
der Sakulariserung: ber Vernunft und ReligionU(Freiburg: Herder,
2005).
30 Compare Gabriel G. Motzkin, Time and Transcendence: Secular
History, the Catholic Reactionand the Rediscovery of the Future
(Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer, 1992).
31 R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity:
Changing Religions in a Changing World(London: Athlone, 1976),
42.
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
391
lelujahs. The Jewish narrative of secularization is thus a
profoundfly am-bivalent one.
This ambivalence may be analyzed from the perspective of three
par-allel tracts: the integration of the Jews into modern, that is,
secularEuropean society took place on cognitive, axio-normative,
and sociallevels.32 Though they may overlap, each of these
dimensions of theprocess is distinct. The story, of course,
actually began before the Jewsformal emancipation, which, alas,
turned out to be a far more pro-tracted affair than simply
dismantling the ghetto. The emancipationproceeded incrementally,
with many false starts, and was frequentlycontested. Accordingly,
the political and social integration of the Jewslagged considerably
behind their cognitive integration. Under the tu-telage of
Aufklarer such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jews adopted
thecognitive culture of the Enlightenment while they were still
confinedto the ghetto. Led by the likes of Lessings protege and
later mostintimate friend, Moses Mendelssohn, Jews hastened to
participate inthe then-unfolding culture of the Enlightenment and
the Republic ofReason, in which citizenship was putatively
determined by intellectalone. There was a hitch, of course;
admission to this Republic was tobe acquired at a far-reaching
price. For the cognitive universe spon-sored by the Enlightenment
posited the elimination of divine revela-tion as a source of
knowledge. The epistemic dignity of Scripture andof the traditions
grounded in the revealed Word of God was transferredto reason and
empirical experience alone. Cognitive integration thusrequired the
jettisoning of Torah and rabbinic wisdom as the ultimatearbiters of
truth and meaning.
Axio-normative integration did not always follow suit, at least
not inan utterly unambiguous fashion. Even before they crossed the
thresh-old of the ghettos gate, Jews were apprised that political
and socialacceptance would be conditioned on their Verbersserung,
or self-refor-mation. Not only were they expected to shear their
beards and sidelocks enjoined by the Torah, but they were to adjust
their values andsocial codes to conform with modern European
aesthetic and norma-tive sensibilities. Even their best friends,
those passionate advocates ofextending to them human rights,
assaulted them with negative imagesof themselves and their Asiatic
religion. Kant, who proudly cultivatedJewish disciples, scathingly
criticized Judaism as Afterdienst, a pseudo-religion, embedded in a
spiritually jejune array of heteronomous or
32 This analytical perspective is developed in P. Mendes-Flohr,
Divided Passions: Jewish Intel-lectuals and the Experience of
Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 2353.
-
The Journal of Religion
392
legally prescribed rituals.33 In his much acclaimed Dictionary
of theGerman Language of 1808, the lexographer Joachim Heinrich
Campesought to purge German of the many foreign terms that had
vitiatedthe purity of the language; accordingly, he recommended
that theword Synagoge, borrowed from the Greek, be replaced by
Judenschule,which in German slang denotes a school of unruly
pupils, for the Jewshouse of worship is cacophonous and restless,
in which everyoneblares something out.34 In response to such
criticism, Jews set out tomake aesthetic reforms; they engaged
Christian composers to composenewaesthetically refinedmelodies for
liturgical worship.35 Thefirst Reform congregation in Berlin in the
early eighteenth centuryhired at great expense Friedrich
Schleiermacher to instruct them inproper liturgical decorum and to
tutor their rabbis how to constructand deliver spiritually edifying
sermons.36 Jewish worship was to takeon the veneer of Sittlichkeit
or Protestant respectability. But the axio-normative adjustments
went far deeper and lacerated the self-image ofJews with deep fears
of acting and looking too Jewish. As Sander Gilmanhas recently
shown, cosmetic surgery was invented at the turn of theprevious
century by Jewish surgeons for a nigh-exclusively Jewish
clien-tele.37 In this context one is to appreciate the comedian
Jerry Lewissdisarming response to the televised image of heroic
Israeli soldiers inthe wake of the Six Days War: Now we can get our
noses back.38
Ironic humor, indeed, became one of the characteristic reflexes
ofthe Jewish encounter with modernity. The schlemiehl, the
antihero, thearchmisfit, as Hannah Arendt and others have noted,
was projected asmirror image of the axio-normative foibles of
modern, secular society.
33 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
(1793), in Religion and RationalTheology, trans. and ed. Allen Wood
and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press,
1996), 17577.
34 Campes definition of Synagoge is entered under Judenschule.
Compare Weil es in denJudenschulen bei dem Gottesdienste laut und
unruhig hergehet, indem jeder vor sich etwashinplarrt, so sagt man
in gemeinem Leben von einem Orte, einer Gesellschaft, wo es
larmendund verwirrt hergehet, es sei da wie in einer Judenschule,
oder sei da eine Judenschule.Joachim Heinrich Campe, Worterbuch der
deutschen Sprache (Braunschweig: In der Schulbuch-handlung, 1808),
pt. 2, 852.
35 Tina Fruhauf, The Organ and Its Music in German Jewish
Culture (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2009).
36 Alexander Altmann, Zur Frugeschichte der judischen Predigt in
Deutschland, Leo BaeckInstitute Year Book 6 (1961): 359, and The
New Style of Preaching in Nineteenth-CenturyGerman Jewry, in
Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History, ed. A.
Altmann (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964),
65116ff.
37 Sander L. Gillman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural
History of Aesthetic Surgery (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 11756.
38 Compare P. Mendes-Flohr, Anti-Semitism and the
Jewish-American Political Experience,in The Changing Face of
America, ed. Manochehr Dorraj and Valerie Martinez-Ebers (New
York:Oxford University Press, 2008), 293313.
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
393
Through his comical ineptitude, the schlemiehl came to say that
successin our achievement-oriented society is not really possible,
nor is it ul-timately respectable.39
The schlemiehl thus also came to declare that there are values
thattrump the Leistungsprinzip that, as Herbert Marcuse observed,
insidi-ously determines the values of Western modernity.40 Indeed,
the mod-ern, secularized Jews often clung to some of the more
salient valuesand norms of their ancestral traditions or, rather,
as Professor Taylornotes with regard to the Christian story he
traces, recomposed them.The recomposition of certain features of
the axio-normative culture ofJudaism functioned to allow Jews to
soften the cognitive and socialdislocation that occurred consequent
to their plunge into the whirl-wind of Western, secular modernity.
I would point telegraphically tothree axio-normative topoi that are
retained, albeit secularized: theintrinsic value of study (Talmud
Torah), supererogatory ethical deeds(Gimilut Hasidim), and a
pansacramental ethic that implicitly denies anontological divide
between the sacred and the profane. I will beginwith the latter:
the Sabbath, as observed in traditional Judaism, con-cludes with a
ceremony in which God is blessed as one who distin-guishes [or
separates] between the holy (qodesh) and the profane(chol ),
between light and darkness, . . . between the Seventh Day andthe
Six Days of Labor. The tension between the holy and the
profanehighlights the significance of the Sabbath as a sacred day
of rest andthe days of labor that the Jews are charged to sanctify.
The Sabbathmay serve as an ultimate and eschatological [foretaste]
of a world re-deemed, fulfilled, and devoid of dialectical
tensions,41 but the journeyto Redemption leads through secular
time, the Days of Labor, whichare to be sanctified through the
ritual and moral precepts set forth bythe Torah.42 As adapted to
modern sensibilities, this injunction meansthat the secular cannot
be given over totally to instrumental reason.Hence, the secular
valorization of supererogatory deeds, those acts ofloving-kindness
(hesed), which define a righteous person, although theyare not
formally prescribed but nonetheless are desired by God. Yid-
39 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition, in
Arguments and Doctrines: AReader in Jewish Thinking after the
Holocaust, ed. Arthur A. Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Pub-lication
Society of America, 1970), 2935, 3840; and Ruth Wisse, The
Schlemiel as Modern Hero(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1972).
40 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Freud (New York: VintageBooks, 1955), 45.
41 Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity, 53.42 P.
Mendes-Flohr, Sakularisierung im modernen Judentum oder zur
Dialektitk von Ju-
dentum und Atheismus, in Ein Bruch der Wirklichkeit: Die
Realitat der Moderne zwischen Saku-larisierung und
Entsakularisierung, ed. Jens Mattern (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2002),
12949.
-
The Journal of Religion
394
dish reflects the secularization of this understanding of the
righteousperson when it speaks of a Mensch, a human being who gives
of herselfbeyond the call of duty to others, to gestures that
render the world alittle bit more decent and compassionate. And the
last of these recom-posed or secularized religious virtues is
Talmud Torah, the study of To-rah for its own sake as a
never-ending obligation of all Jews. Havingan intrinsic merit,
learning is not to be shackled to any objectives otherthan the
quest for wisdom and understanding.
Undeniably Jews have adapted exceedingly well to Western
moder-nity and Zweckrationalitat. Yet, I would venture to say, not
without alingering unease. It is perhaps not by chance that Freud
entitled oneof his last works, Civilization and Its Discontents.
The original Germantitle is more telling: Das Unbehagen in der
Kultur.43
There is one more feature of modernity that Jews have
embracedwith a seeming gusto and yet I would say also with a
self-consciousequivocation, namely, history as a process that one
is to engage andseek to control by the ploys of politics.
Sequestered in the ghetto, theJews bowed passively to the flow of
history as the will of Providence,but once they entered the world
beyond they were thrust by force ma-jeure into history and
confronted with the challenge to direct theirfate by human effort.
The encounter with those who opposed their fullemancipation obliged
them to organize politically. As this oppositionswelled and took on
the ferocity of an aggressive antimodernism, morepopularly known as
anti-Semitism, an ever-increasing number of Jewsconcluded that
their sorry historical fate could be reversed only if theywould
seek political sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. But,
alas,the political restoration of their biblical patrimony has not
broughtthem to the Promised Land. The seemingly intractable violent
con-flictand I now permit myself as an Israeli a confessional
voicewithour neighbors brutalizes us no less than the Palestinians.
Notwithstand-ing its many blessings, secular modernity has thus
left deep, festeringwounds on the body and soul of the Jews.
We Jews cannot return to the ghetto and its blissful detachment
fromthe secular world about us, nor do we wish to, but even though
manyof us may no longer believe in a personal God, we sure do look
forwardto the Coming of the Messiah. And whether his name be the
Son ofDavid, or perhaps Barack Obama, as the ancient Jewish prayer
has it,may he come quickly in our days.
43 Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna:
Internationaler psychoanalytischer,1930).
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
395
richard rosengarten: religion and literature
In what follows, I propose that we consider two aspects of
Charles Tay-lors argument in A Secular Age, with special reference
to chapters 10and 11, The Expanding Universe of Unbelief and
Nineteenth-Cen-tury Trajectories. In these chapters, Professor
Taylor describes crucialmoves toward the realization of the age of
secularism in the creationof spaces that accommodate, indeed in
which can flourish, unbelief.He locates the creation of these
spaces in the Victorian era and makeshis case with special
reference to England and to artistic expressionmusic and painting,
but especially poetry, and, to a slightly lesser butin one instance
quite important case, a novel (Robert Elsmere).
In the course of this analysis, Professor Taylor posits a move
in aes-thetics from mimesis to creation, by which he wants to
suggest that thelanguage of art shifts from a shared set of common
reference pointsto the expression of an individual sensibility.
This results in a trian-gulation of artistic expression that
requires the reader/auditor/viewerto decipher the artists worldview
as constructed in the artifact (Taylorcontrasts this experience of
art with, e.g., the Renaissance doctrine ofcorrespondences).
Poetics thus reflects not public meaning but privatesensibility.
Art in turn becomes a separate form of expression ratherthan an
integral function of religion, politics, and so forth.
I want to complicate this picture through a brief consideration
ofwhat is arguably the preeminent novel of Victorian England,
GeorgeEliots Middlemarch (published in 187172 and set in 183032).
Inbrief, what I hope to suggest is that Eliots fashioning of her
novelssense of the ending complicates Taylors picture of poetics
and aes-thetics and in turn the relationship A Secular Age posits
between dis-enchantment and the buffered self.
Middlemarch is two stories in one plot, but Eliot concludes the
bookby focusing the readers attention upon the ultimate
implications ofthe plot for the life, and the significance of the
life, of its heroine,Dorothea Brooke. Described at the opening of
the novel as a Teresaof Avila in spirit and ability, we meet
Dorothea in search of a greatcause to which she might devote
herself. The ensuing narrative is thestory of misjudgment and
miscalculation. Smitten by rumors of a trans-formative scholarly
endeavor, Dorothea marries the much older Caus-abon, whose Key to
all Mythologies turns out to lend new meaning to theword
stultifying and whose numbing demands for devotion and sol-itude
ever more steadily isolate Dorothea from the world that she
soearnestly wishes to change. In the midst of this dawning
discovery, Do-rothea meets a man who is her match in age as well as
passionper-haps her John of the Crossnamed Will Ladislaw, an artist
with great
-
The Journal of Religion
396
fellow feeling for Dorothea but whose work is in any event no
moreconnected than was Causabons scholarship to the improvement of
theworld. Dorothea finally puts her faith, in the form of her
inheritance,in the practice of Dr. Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious
physician whowishes to make a name for himself by providing modern
medical careto the citizens of Middlemarch and beyond: while
Lydgates ambitionmost closely approximates Dorotheas envisioned
great cause, Lydgateis himself undone by a wife whose social
ambition exceeds her younghusbands growing salary. A chastened
Dorothea is, at the conclusionof the novel, concentrating on the
poor of the community of Middle-march, doing what she can to
provide housing and other public ser-vices for them.
The cumulative effect of this assault on Dorotheas ideals is
renderedby Eliot as a recipe for disenchantment: no discernible
Providenceguides this narrative, so that Dorothea must rely upon
her own re-sources both to make sense of what has happened to her
and to findher way forward in the world. And in the concluding
words of thisimmense narrative, Eliot wishes to underscore both the
disenchant-ment of Dorotheas world and the fact that in finding her
way forward,she has in fact keyed into something broadly
providential:
Her finely-touched spirit still had its fine issues, though they
were not widelyvisible. Her full nature, like that river of which
Cyrus broke the strength, spentitself in channels which had no
great name on the earth. But the effect of herbeing on those around
her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good ofthe world is
partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so
illwith you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the
number wholived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited
tombs.44
In one crucial sense this passages eloquence resides in its
gracenotesif we might call them thatof disenchantment: those who
as-pire, as did Dorothea, to be historic are in fact not, and the
narratorscharacterizations of the implications for our human
condition involvequalifications (not so ill with you and me and
half owing) that donot suggest a happy default setting to the
general quality of experi-ence. The tombs of these good people are
not empty, just unvisited;to live faithfully a hidden life results
not in beatific union but an un-tended gravestone.
This seeming melancholy is indisputably part of the lesson of
Mid-dlemarch. But it is only part. The other, at least equal, part
is containedin the preceding lines, in which we are told that
Dorotheas staunchspirit remained, that it was incalculably
diffusive, andthe key point
44 George Eliot, Middlemarch (187172; repr., London: Penguin,
2004), 838.
-
Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age
397
for Eliotthat it issued in real and decisive change. We might
put itin this way: at least for Dorotheaand by implication, for
most of usthe good of the world grows because of unhistoric acts.
The fact thatwe habitually forget the ritual placements that
enshrine those acts doesnothing to diminish their reality. The
closing sentence includes bothadmonition and affirmation: we had
best never forget that our lives arebetter for those who preceded
us. Never forget. And they are better.
It has been persuasively argued that this ending of Middlemarch
re-flects Eliots own disenchantment with, and discarding of, her
Chris-tian faith. The interesting question for students of our
modern situa-tion, however, is less that indisputable datum and
much more whetherthis means in turn that religion does not play a
role in the novel. Iwould argue that it does, for reasons that go
precisely to the questionof the individual life and its unhistoric
acts. I would put the matterthis way: Dorothea is buffeted by
events, but she is not buffered. Sheis in fact exemplary, by the
conclusion of the novel, of Eliots religiousconviction: namely,
that the world without God has a subtle and deter-mined magic of
its own, no less diminished for our failures to testify toits
presence. It is a world of interrelation, in which charity and
loveprevail not because they will lead us directly to the heavenly
host butbecause the magic resides in the affirmation of the growing
good ofthe world.
All this has particular historical resonance when we remember
thatthe novel was written at the end of the great upheaval of
voting rightsin England and indeed is set precisely at the time of
the first ReformBill, which extended the franchise to 650,000
males. While Eliots de-cision to make her protagonist female
affords in the novel explicitcritique of the exclusion of women
from the bill, it is also the case thatshe saw in it a move to
democracy that clarified the role of charity andlent it
metaphysical, if not classic theological, credence. Private
sensi-bility and public meaning are, then, yoked together: the will
to dogood in the world, rendered in Dorotheas indomitable if
challengedspirit, has as its counterpart the affirmation that her
work does indeedmatter. Middlemarch celebrates a democracy of the
human spirit that pro-pounds a vision of the individual not as
buffered by an absence of en-chantment but as more fully engaged
with variegated humanity in all itspitfalls and its glories.
So what I suggest is that in Eliots novel we have in fact an
exampleof explicit disenchantment that is not intended, so far as I
can see, tocarry with it the consequence of the buffered
individualindeed, Eliotseems to have envisioned something very
different. And we have a po-etics of literary form that is
incipiently linked with the political. We
-
The Journal of Religion
398
are invited, by the novels title as well as its execution, to
think of themany towns in England that are becoming enfranchised
and to con-template, in the vicissitudes of their decisively local
behavior, the im-plications of the Reform Bill for wise governance.
There is, Eliot wouldsuggest, ample reason for worry about
instances of pettiness, greed,and insularity, but there are also
myriad instancesnot merely involv-ing Dorothea, although
concentrated in herof generosity of spirit.The keynote to
distinguishing the one from the other is in fact thissense of
interconnected individuals and of attention to the growinggood of
the world.
It is at least arguable, then, that in this case the ontic space
openedby what J. Hillis Miller once termed the disappearance of God
didnot counsel despair but a stoicism that frames a fundamental
ethic ofcharity.45 The quality of porousness becomes horizontal
rather thanvertical. The immanent is rendered, in its projected
effects, transcen-dent. Whether and how that ethic would be
sustained is an importantquestion, and whether Eliotwhose work is
deeply inflected by herknowledge of historical criticism of the
Bible and intensive engage-ment with Feuerbachrepresents an unusual
sensibility, is another.But it does seem to suggest a moment in the
process when disenchant-ment prefigured an alternative religiosity
that also comprises our sec-ular age.
martin riesebrodt: sociology of religion
Overall I am widely in agreement with Professor Taylor.
Therefore Iwill comment only on three points without strongly
disagreeing on anyof them.
I. Sociological Narratives of Secularization
Secularization is a complicated, complex, and often muddled
concept.Taylors distinction between three kinds of secularity makes
sense. Hecalls them secularity 1 (retreat of religion in public
life), secularity 2(decline of beliefs and practices), and
secularity 3 (change in the con-ditions of belief, or the eme