‘A Secular Age’: God’s Long Goodbye

A review of ‘A Secular Age’, by Charles Taylor; Harvard University Press, 2007.

Riddle me this, dear reader: why was it almost impossible not to believe in God in 1300, or 1500, but such a struggle to believe in Him today? That is the question Charles Taylor puts at the centre of A Secular Age, which is less a book than a long, uphill walk—800 pages of slow steps and switchbacks, each one thoughtful, many of them slightly exhausting. One does not so much read it as endure it, like a pilgrimage one did not quite mean to take. And yet, here we are, boots muddied, knees sore, and Taylor waving from the summit with all the cheerful patience of a man who has read everything and remembered most of it.

This is not the usual dreary fable in which Progress marches in, waving a great big banner, and Religion slips out the back, embarrassed and weeping into its sleeves. Taylor—philosopher, Catholic, and, astonishingly, an optimist—offers something else. Religion, he says, has not disappeared. It has changed shape. It no longer trumpets; it whispers. It has grown smaller, quieter, and, oddly, more precious. His long history traces five centuries of slow subtraction: the world, once full of colour, grows more and more grey. We begin with the ‘porous’ medieval self—open, enchanted, vulnerable—and arrive at the modern ‘buffered’ self: sealed, sceptical, and a bit self-satisfied. En route, we pass through the company of Augustine, Weber, Herder, and Foucault—each one carrying a piece of the map.

Charles attempts to chart the path from a time when believing in God was as natural as breathing air to a time like now.

In theory, Taylor moves through history in order. In practice, he meanders. He tells us the word secular has three meanings. First: religion no longer anchors public life. Second: fewer people believe. Third — and this is the key — the cultural mood has changed. Belief has become harder. Not because people have new arguments, but because something in the air has shifted. Taylor is less concerned with counting heads in church than with describing the texture of faith in an age where doubt does not stand outside the door but slides in beside you, quiet and constant, sharing the hymnal.

Enter his grand idea: the ‘immanent frame.’ This is a sort of invisible casing around modern thought, inside which even belief seems faintly like unbelief. We live in a state of tension: torn between a yearning for the beyond and the sterile reality of the here-and-now. The result is something like a spiritual migraine. He calls it ‘cross-pressure.’ I call it exhausting. But just when the gloom thickens, when Taylor has finished daubing his grey little mural of a drained, joyless age, he dares to light a candle. The curse of our time, he says, is not godlessness, but the thinning of things. We have rights without reverence, he says: we skim the surface of life like a child on a jet-ski. He doesn’t scold, but he does seem to sigh.

We live in a state of tension: torn between a yearning for the beyond and the sterile reality of the here-and-now. The result is something like a spiritual migraine.

But as I have already said, our narrator is an optimist, so he does not despair. A Secular Age is no mournful dirge, so loft lament for a fallen world. No, in the end it dares to hope. For though we have ‘thingified’ the world, coming to see it more as a heap of dead things fit for use instead of reverence, we still ache for depth, resonance, fullness. The great wave of secularism may well have rolled over our world and carried all that richness out to sea, but it is not lost: it is there, bobbing on the swell, waiting to be found again. And human nature demands that we will, sooner or later.

There is much to respect here. Taylor’s range his vast, his mind clearly formidable, and his tone hopeful and humane. His aim is to understand, not to win or even to inspire. Even after 800 pages he remains readable. But let us not be coy: 800 pages is quite a few; and we have the impression by the end that Taylor has circled his prey so many times it has begun to rot. More still: there is scant discussion of, say, all the pointless cruelty that was dressed up in ecclesiastical garb or even encouraged by the powers that be, that is to say that although our Charles mistrusts disenchantment, he does not dwell for long on why enchantment got such a bad rep in the first place. But I am nitpicking. In the end, what Taylor is offering is a better map.