Spiritual Excercises

Trudging through heavy wind- blown snow across St. Catherine Street and then down St. Urbain, heading toward the Palais des congrès de Montréal for one of the final public hearings of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, I could not help but note the number of languages I heard: Arabic, Cantonese, Tamil, Spanish, and of course French, often spoken in accents so thick, and with grammar so butchered, that they were virtually unintelligible. Buried beneath this mid-December storm, with trees and buildings festooned with lights and church crèches ablaze, lies, for many, an uncomfortable fact: Montreal at least, if not La Belle Province, is palpably diverse. It is neither a Catholic society under the thumb of a powerful church, nor the secular society envisaged during the Quiet Revolution, but a society of immigrants, a society of Catholics, Pentecostals, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and atheists, all of whom cleave to their faiths.

Set in the spacious conference hall, congested with television cameras, MacBook-wielding journalists, and burly security guards (who searched everyone at the door), the Palais hearings were a combination of formal ceremony and circus. Dressed in suit and tie and escorted through a back door to shield him from journalists, Charles Taylor settled in beside Gérard Bouchard at the front of the rag-tag assembly of native Quebecers and recent immigrants. He looked exhausted and gaunt, every bit his seventy-six years. This distinguished pair had been on the road for ten weeks — from Quebec City to Trois-Rivières to Rimouski to Montreal — putting in twelve-hour days listening to individuals and organizations air their views about cultural difference, and it had clearly taken its toll. Speaking only rarely in his high French, with a kind of distant, patrician stoicism, Taylor listened and took notes. “You have to understand,” an elderly woman said, “that Quebec is a Christian society, that the majority of us are believers.” A Muslim man complained, “The Québécois, they do not respect the Prophet.” A young blond woman chimed in, “People with absolute values cannot be integrated into a democracy; only an interiorization of belief allows for the respect of others.” And so it went — for three hours.

It may seem surprising that an emeritus professor at McGill, 2007 winner of the $1.8-million Templeton Prize for the study of spirituality, and author of eleven books — including Hegel, the magisterial Sources of the Self, and most recently A Secular Age, an 874-page opus on secularism and religion in the West — would undertake something as gruelling as this consultation, but Taylor has always been politically engaged. He was an ndp candidate in Montreal on four occasions in the 1960s, famously losing to Pierre Trudeau in 1965. As one of the intellectual forces behind the Quiet Revolution, he wrote extensively on Quebec’s transition from the Church-dominated Duplessis era to the more secular and cosmopolitan society of today. And in a very real sense, A Secular Age is continuous with the spirit of the commission and its rowdy hearings. In this, perhaps his most controversial book, Taylor argues that the secularization of modern Western societies does not so much render religion irrelevant as lay the groundwork for the respectful coexistence of a diversity of religions and approaches to spirituality, including atheism. In fact, according to Taylor, “We are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee.” The commission, whose report is scheduled to be delivered in March, appears to have borne this out.

In contrast to pre-modern societies, where political structures were mandated by religion, in modern Western societies the principles that govern the various spheres of public life — Taylor mentions economic, political, cultural, and educational — are based on instrumental reason, the means by which they most effectively achieve their goals. But the movement toward secularism he explores in A Secular Age is different and more nuanced. “The change I want to define and trace,” he writes in the introduction, “is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.”

Although Taylor is himself a practising Roman Catholic and his vast knowledge of the history of religion and theology is mostly rooted in Christianity, he is careful to define religion in the broadest possible terms. He contrasts a religious perspective with what he calls “exclusive humanism.” Whereas in exclusive humanism our ends and values are entirely oriented toward human flourishing — having a decent, comfortable life in reasonably just communities where people can fulfill their own potential, for instance — the religious point of view entails the possibility of higher ends and aspirations that transcend ordinary human life. Taylor writes:

We should see religion’s relation to a “beyond” in three dimensions. And the crucial one, that which makes its impact on our lives understandable, is the one I have just been exploring: the sense that there is some good higher than, beyond human flourishing. In the Christian case, we could think of this as agape, the love which God has for us, and which we can partake of through his power. In other words, a possibility of transformation is offered, which takes us beyond merely human perfection. But of course, this notion of a higher good as attainable by us only makes sense in the context of belief in a higher power, the transcendent God of faith which appears in most definitions of religion.

For Taylor, transcendence, and the sense of fullness and wholeness that rare experiences of transcendence provide, involves contact with a form of goodness beyond ordinary human life, and whose source is a power greater than ourselves, however that may be conceived. Indeed, there are moments in Taylor’s writings where he seems to imply that any form of higher moral end requires the possibility of transcendence.

The spiritual predicament of modern life, Taylor tells us, is that transcendent religion, whether organized or not, and exclusive humanism are equally available and attainable. However, even believers may find the character of their own faith unstable. Speaking of his own faith in an unusually personal passage in A Secular Age, Taylor writes, “I am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all doubt, untroubled by all objection — by some experience which won’t fit, some lives which exhibit fullness on another basis, some alternative mode of fullness which sometimes draws me, etc.” But such writers and intellectuals as Christopher Hitchens, in God Is Not Great, and Edward O. Wilson, in Consilience, take for granted that the cumulative force of scientific knowledge over the past 500 years, from Galileo to Newton to Darwin to the present, has rendered religion straightforwardly irrational. “The more scientifically disposed of the Enlightenment authors agreed that the cosmos is an orderly material existence governed by exact laws,” Wilson writes. “It can be broken down into entities that can be measured and arranged in hierarchies, such as societies, which are made up of persons, whose brains consist of nerves, which in turn are composed of atoms.” Secularism and unbelief are the inevitable result of the advance of reason and knowledge; religion, finally, is the result of ignorance and superstition.

Taylor’s response is twofold. First, he shifts the question away from whether belief in God or some higher power is reasonable to whether belief or unbelief are appropriate interpretations of one’s experience of the world, whether they provide coherent frameworks within which one understands one’s life. Second, and making up the bulk of A Secular Age, Taylor launches into an elaborate historical narrative in which he argues that secularization was by no means the inevitable result of the development of scientific knowledge, but rather gradually emerged through forces internal to the religious perspective.

The first chapter of A Secular Age, entitled “The Bulwarks of Belief,” opens with a simple and arresting question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” Taylor points out that many features of pre-modern societies allowed people to experience the world as suffused with the divine. Such catastrophic events as floods, famines, and plagues were seen as acts of God; social life centred on parishes and churches; and people lived in an enchanted world populated by angels and the magical properties of religious relics. This had two important consequences. First, human beings lived in two dimensions of time, the secular and the sacred — the sequential flow of time in everyday life, from dawn to dawn and winter to summer, and the high time of the eternal order of God. Higher time erupted into the world at sacred events and places, such as Mass or the shrine of a saint. Second, the pre-modern self was porous, its meanings and spiritual significance not limited to individual thoughts or subjectivity, but open to things external to it, such as the influx of grace from God. The pre-modern world, according to Taylor’s broad-stroked account, was that of a hierarchical cosmos — the “great chain of being” — that shaped human life and institutions from the higher, sacred, eternal order.