A Secular Age

"Charles Taylor, a Canadian Catholic philosopher, is among the most notable thinkers on these themes in North America these days. This is a massive, almost 800-page book that really attracted attention and debate. He argues that most can’t really make sense of the modern world or life today without some version or other of religion. He defines religion very broadly. He is not pointing to Christianity or Judaism or any other faith to carry all the meanings, but instead speaks in the broadest sense of how the human relates to the transcendent order, to that which is ‘beyond us’ etc. This is not what you normally expect from a philosopher. Taylor is running against the grain of much modern philosophy, since it has dispensed with such matters. He gave me a lot of reason to rethink some themes in the book I was writing about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. The notion that the 18th-century Enlightenment and its heritage had pretty well finished things off. In other words, if you reach back to the Middle Ages of Catholicism and the Anglo and Continental reformations of the 16th century, religion dominates. For instance, when the Protestant reformations were over the church was still established in England and most of Europe for centuries. The Protestants were doing the same thing that the Catholics had done before them. They couldn’t conceive of a society in which God didn’t rule through the rulers. But then came the Enlightenment – the great burst of scepticism and criticism in a time when philosophers and scientists took over and offered a new kind of accounting of the world. Most stressed the empirical, which meant that you had nothing to say unless it was based on something you could see or touch or smell. Such an outlook was predominant from the 18th century onwards, in the 19th century taking more radical forms and in the 20th century even more so. Moderns take that for granted. Bonhoeffer looked out on that world and dealt boldly with it. I am Christian and yet I know that if I want to communicate many kinds of things I do them without reference to a transcendent order. Taylor, without naming him, challenges Bonhoeffer’s description of this ‘world come of age’. He finds that to be a very unsettling settlement because it is hard to provide a basis for our decisions. What is good and what is true and what is beautiful when all is only a matter of our own emotions? Somehow or other we have to pay attention to deeper stirrings. I think Taylor’s thoughts have presented a challenge to this ‘secular’ side of Bonhoeffer. Oh, yes. Many universities are having conferences on it and elaborating on its theme. Sometimes he repeats himself but the second time around you learn something you didn’t the first time. You are never going to be quite as ready as before to lean back into a simple scientific agnosticism. Taylor is not preaching a sermon or setting out to convert you but he does want to raise deep questions as to whether we have mastered the world the way we thought we did two centuries ago."