Spiritual Excercises

Indeed, according to Taylor’s historical account, the process of secularization in the West began as part of a reform movement within the Church itself, and long before the scientific revolution became ascendant and exclusive humanism became an even remotely viable option. The “disenchantment” of the old, medieval world involved breaking down the idea that spiritual purity was the exclusive domain of monks rather than ordinary people, weeding out practices that had survived from the pagan world, like carnival and various forms of magic, and divorcing the idea of grace and redemption from human activity — one could no longer purchase absolution from sins or a place in heaven. By the time of the Reformation, and especially in the writings of John Calvin, God’s presence had largely withdrawn from the world, piety had become a matter of individual faith, and the task of human existence had become that of leading a reasoned, orderly life within time as measured by clocks. We had entered an age often associated with Protestantism and such figures as Benjamin Franklin, a world in which work and thrift and temperance were valued above all else.

This disengagement from the extra-physical world has several important implications that open the door to exclusive humanism. As the world “becomes progressively voided of its spirits and meaningful forces,” as Taylor puts it, the human subject or self ceases to be vulnerable to meanings outside itself, becomes a “buffered self” separate from nature, and lives in purely secular time. The creation of this separate, buffered self, whose development Taylor traces at length through such figures as Locke, Rousseau, and Schiller, set the stage for an interest in nature that led to the scientific revolution, typically regarded as the death blow to the possibility of religious belief. But Taylor says:

The new interest in nature was not a step outside of a religious outlook, even partially; it was a mutation within this outlook . . . That the autonomy of nature eventually (after a number of further transpositions, of which more anon) came to serve as grist to the mill of exclusive humanism is clearly true. That establishing it was already a step in that direction is profoundly false. This move had a quite different meaning at the time, and in other circumstances might never have come to have the meaning that it bears for unbelievers today.

In fact, the sublime autonomy of nature can provide the occasion for reverence for the works of God.

The central claim of A Secular Age is that the historical forces behind modern secularism are complex and multi-layered, and that, while they open up the possibility of different interpretations of the world, they in no way predetermine them: religion, in its multifarious forms, remains an intellectually and emotionally viable point of view. But however much Taylor insists upon shifting the question from belief or unbelief to interpretations of one’s experience, the question of the truth of a particular religious outlook — whether that involves the existence of a loving God, or the primacy of a particular Middle Eastern prophet, or some less easily definable higher power — still matters. We need to know whether our readings are true or not, whether our ecstatic experiences of transcendence actually refer to something beyond us. In the end, it makes little difference whether the secularization of Western societies is rooted in earlier religious movements or in the ascendancy of the natural sciences. So long as one is not a relativist — and Taylor is no relativist—the truth of a particular world view becomes urgent. And that is the question Taylor has remarkably little to say about, indeed seems to avoid at all cost, throughout A Secular Age.

Toward the end of the book, Taylor meditates on the role of religion and spirituality in the twenty-first century:

Now if we don’t accept the view that the human aspiration to religion will flag, and I do not then where will the access lie to [the] practice of and deeper engagement with religion? The answer is the various forms of spiritual practice to which each is drawn in his/her own spiritual life. These may involve meditation, or some charitable work, or a study group, or some special form of prayer, or a host of such things.

We are the product of a long historical arc in which religion has withdrawn from both the cosmos and society, and in which greater and greater weight has been placed on the individual, on his or her subjectivity and inner depths, yet the longing for a source of meaning that transcends ordinary human life remains as powerful and necessary today as it was in 1500. The difference is that now this longing can be fulfilled in any number of ways, depending upon the individual: he or she might turn to Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or some less traditional path. We may be “just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching,” but this searching will take place in a pluralistic context in which different approaches to spirituality should, Taylor believes, both respect and inform one another.

Taylor’s ecumenical attitude is admirable, but he skirts what may be one of the most important aspects of the modern spiritual predicament. Given what most of us already believe — i.e., that all life forms on earth evolved over the course of hundreds of millions of years by natural selection — not only is it difficult to understand what it means to come into contact with a transcendent order, but different understandings of that order seem to entail radically conflicting claims of what the good is, and radically different understandings of how we should live. How are we to incorporate this dynamic, those fundamental conflicts, into a pluralistic society? “People with absolute values cannot be integrated into a democracy,” the young woman at the hearing in Montreal said, and the very idea of a transcendent order of the good seems to require some form of absolute values. After all, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and even atheism don’t just instruct individuals on what is important and how to live; they instruct all human beings. What is something “incomparably higher,” to use Taylor’s phrase, if it is relative and merely personal? He seems to have no answer to this question, though the sometimes convoluted prose of A Secular Society — and its sprawling length — suggests that he is frantically struggling with it.

Religion was very much in the air that December night at the Palais des congrès, as was the diversity of contemporary Quebec. An Algerian woman took the microphone and, ripping off her hijab, decried the ways in which women are infantilized in Muslim societies; another woman proclaimed that Christianity is the fundamental form of Occidental civilization; and a tva journalist muttered, “This has to be the weirdest hearing yet.” Taylor continued to takes notes, if a little morosely, and at the end of the hearing, rising to his considerable height, he made very general and not especially illuminating remarks on the place of religion in a multicultural society. Given the wild diversity of viewpoints aired with varying degrees of coherence and passion during the previous three hours, and presumably during the previous weeks, it is hard to imagine what sort of useful recommendations he and Bouchard will be able to come up with.