Taylor writes about our modern age of western secularization from a Catholic perspective. He begins, “I would like to claim that the coming of modern secularity in my sense has been coterminous with the rise of a society in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing…. The general understanding of the human predicament before modernity placed us in an order where we were not at the top. Higher beings, like Gods or spirits, or a higher kind of being, like the Ideas or the cosmopolis of Gods and humans, demanded and deserved our worship, reverence, devotion or love.”
Taylor posits that a series of successive stages were necessary to enable the intellectual and psychological leaps to a secular society. The first major step was the Protestant Reformation. Reform consisted primarily of a “return to a more inward and intense personal devotion, a greater uneasiness at “sacramentals” and church-controlled magic, and then laterally the new inspiring idea of salvation by faith, which erupted into a world riven with anxiety about judgment and a sense of unworthiness…. One issue which was hard to settle by reform was that of the sacred in the church. In the term ‘sacred’, I'm pointing to the belief that God's power is somehow concentrated in certain people, times, places or actions. Divine power is in these, in a way it is not in other people, times, etc., which are “profane”. The sacred played a central role in the practices of the mediaeval church. Churches were holy places, made more so by the presence of relics; feasts were holy times, and the sacraments of the church were holy actions, which supposed a clergy with special powers…. Lutherans and moderate Catholics could've agreed on this whole range of issues, even the Eucharist, and various formulae were even worked out. But the temptation to see the other on both sides in the perspective of irreconcilable difference—as rejecting the sacrament utterly, or else falling into Papist idolatry—was too strong.”
Along with the Reformation, another crucial turn on the path to secularism was the embrace of the divinity of nature. “I've been identifying two spiritual motives for the renewed interest in nature as autonomous: devotion to God as the creator of an ordered cosmos, whose parts themselves exhibited standing marvels of micro-order (this applies, of course, especially to human beings, but not only to them); and a new evangelical turning to the world, to bring Christ among the people…. Living a godly life in this world is something very different from living in the ordered Aristotelian Cosmos of Aquinas or the hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysios. It is no longer a matter of admiring a normative order, in which God has revealed himself through signs and symbols. We rather have to inhabit it as agents of instrumental reason, working the system effectively in order to bring about God’s purposes; because it is through these purposes, and not through signs, that God reveals himself in his world. These are not just two different stances, but two incompatible ones. We have to abandon the attempt to read the cosmos as the locus of signs, reject this as illusion, in order to adopt the instrumental stance effectively…. The same crucial features recur here as in the story of the ultimate effects of the Reformation: disenchantment, the active instrumental stance towards the world, and the following of God’s purposes, which means beneficence. And these are the key features of the new emergent exclusive humanism.”
The turn away from orthodox Catholicism was also, for some, a return to Neo-Pagan belief. “The ideal of civility, with its core image of taming raw nature, already involves what we might call a stance of reconstruction towards ourselves…. The great ancient ethics, those of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, called for the subordination, or even, in the case of the Stoics, the elimination of baser desires (in the Stoic case, passion, as a kind of false opinion, disappears altogether from the soul of the wise). But the dominant image of virtue was that of a soul in harmony. The master idea was of a form which was already at work in human nature, which the virtuous person has to help emerge, rather than of a pattern imposed ab extra.” Justus Lipsius, in fact, around 1590, proposed a Neo-Stoicism, which he merged with Christianity. Taylor explains, “Christianity sees us as in need of God’s grace, as needing God’s help to liberate the good will which is potentially ours; where Stoicism appeals purely to our powers of reason and self-control…. Christianity sees the fullest realization of the good will in us in agape, our love for our neighbor. Stoicism sees the wise person as having attained apatheia, a condition beyond passion…. Christ in the Gospels is portrayed as being moved “in the bowels” by compassion (splangnizesthai); and his cries on the cross were hardly manifestations of apatheia…. [Lipsius] rejects miseratio, or misericordia, the compassion of feeling, in favour of the compassion of active intervention, but on the basis of a fuller inner detachment…. Everything that happens comes about through the Providence of God. God has his own purposes in putting us through the trials we suffer. It is vain and foolish to resist. Rather we should obey…. Lipsius, in a way, which is typical of this whole modern epoch, departs from Stoicism in his activism. We might say he is closer to the Roman, or Senecan, version than to that of Epictetus…. It is not a matter just of doing one’s duty in the world, but of waging active struggle for the good…. Lipsius firmly believes in our free will.” Taylor explains how this turn was a very different kind of Christianity. “The eclipse of certain crucial Christian elements, those of grace and of agape, already changed quite decisively the centre of gravity of this outlook. Moreover, there didn’t seem to be an essential place for the worship of God, other than through the cultivation of reason and constancy; that was in a sense, the strength of this philosophy…. God is still very crucial, because he is the source of reason, and in following it we are following his image in us. But it appears that what we have to do to do his will is to become an excellent human being, and nothing further.”
At this point, Taylor makes a useful turn back to Augustine, to contrast his conception of the City of God with the City of Man. “The earthly city was the site of sin. It had an inherent tendency to violence and strife. Government itself could be conceived as an agent of violence on a grander scale. But it was nevertheless indispensable…. On this rather low view of the state, its role was to keep some kind of order within a fallen world…. A Christian state could help the church, repress heretics and false cults, but it couldn’t improve its citizens; only the city of God, represented by the Church, could aspire to that…. For Augustine, and he was followed in this by late mediaeval Catholicism, and even more by Calvinism, the number of the saved was very small. They were a small elite among the mass of the damned…. They saw a dispensation in which the elect would rule, and discipline the whole society.”
Next, Taylor moves on to the conception of Natural Law, as formulated by Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke. “Grotius’ derivation of Natural Law doesn’t follow the path of an Aristotelian-Thomist definition of the ends of human nature. It proceeds almost more geometrico. In the first pages of De jure belli ac pacis, Grotius derives natural law as what “suits” (convenit) a being who is both rational and sociable…. No form is proposed as already at work here, but there is a way that things (in this case, humans) fit together “rationally”…. The Law would hold, “etsi Deus non daretur” [even if God did not exist]…. Locke brings the stance of reconstruction to a new pitch, with his psychology of the human mind as a tabula rasa…. Why did the reconstructors need something like natural law? Why didn’t they just develop a theory of human nature as malleable (as Locke most strikingly did) and leave it at that? Because they needed a firm underpinning for an agreed public order….. One of the most important things it was meant to offer was a basis for rational agreement on the foundations of political life, beyond and in spite of confessional differences.”
Many would argue that Descartes was the philosopher who definitively ushered in the age of modernity. “The emphasis shifts from the notion of a form which tends to realize itself, but requires our collaboration, to that of a form imposed ab extra on our life by the power of will. In the seventeenth century, this move towards an ethic of poiesis is consummated in a new coherent theory of disengaged agency, and a new understanding of virtue as dominance of the will over passion…. The transition can be conceived as one which takes us from an ethic grounded on an order which is at work in reality, to an ethic which sees order as imposed by will…. Forms and their expression belong exclusively in the domain of minds. Matter is to be explained by mechanism…. Both science and virtue require that we disenchant the world, that we make the rigorous distinction between mind and body, and relegate all thought and meaning to the realm of the intra-mental. We have to set up a firm boundary, the one, as we have seen, which defines the buffered self.” Descartes’ dualism setup a separate mechanistic realm for the body, apart from the workings of the soul.
The next big shift in Christian thought was the move to Deism. “The plan of God for human beings was reduced to their coming to realize the order in their lives which he had planned for their happiness and wellbeing. Essentially, the carrying out of the order of mutual benefit was what God created for us. The sense that there is a further vocation for human being, beyond human flourishing, atrophies in the climate of “Deism.” This shift in turn is set in a very long-lasting bent in European culture towards Reform, in the widest sense. I mean by this, the attempt by elites to make over society, and the life and practices of non-elites, so as to conform to what the elites identify as higher standards…. First, the modern image of human flourishing incorporates an activist, interventionist stance, both towards nature and to human society. Both are to be re-ordered, in the light of instrumental reason, to suit human purposes…. Secondly, the new humanism has taken over universalism from its Christian roots; or else moves to retrieve it from Stoic sources…. By this, I mean that it accepts in principle that the good of everyone must be served in the re-ordering of things…. But more, the new humanism supposes that we are motivated to act for the good of our fellow human beings. We are endowed with a specific bent in that direction…. What has always been stressed in Christian agape is the way in which it can take us beyond the bounds of an already existing solidarity…. This active charity, stepping beyond the bounds of community can be placed in the context of a super-community of all the children of God, thus replicating something close to the Stoic cosmopolis. But this is seen more as something to be built, an eschatological concept. And the paradigmatic stepping beyond of agape, the incarnation and submission to death of Christ, is not motivated by pre-existing community or solidarity. It is free gift of God. This active, community-transcendent beneficence is reflected in the moral psychologies of modern exclusive humanism, in the frequently recurring idea that human beings are endowed with a capacity of benevolence…. The idea is there that human motivation includes a bent to act for the good of others, just in virtue of their being fellow humans, independently of any perception of common inner purpose…. Its scope is in principle universal. This is the historical trace, as it were, of agape…. It not only shuts out God, it attributes this great power of benevolence or altruism to humans…. The main thrust of modern exclusive humanism has tried rather to immanentize this capacity of beneficence, and this is very far from being a return to ancient wisdom…. The successor to agape was to be held strictly within the bounds of measure, instrumental reason, and perhaps also good taste.”
Taylor continues by veering back to the roots of Deism proper, “There is a drift away from orthodox Christian conceptions of God as an agent interacting with humans and intervening in human history; and towards God as architect of a universe operating by unchanging laws, which humans have to conform to or suffer the consequences.” There was a definite anti-orthodox strain that sparked Deism. “The slide to Deism was not just the result of “reason” and “science”, but reflected a deep-seated moral distaste for the old religion that sees God as an agent in history….. The prevailing doctrines of majority damnation and divine grace were calculated to make God look an arbitrary tyrant, playing favourites in a capricious manner, and more concerned with arcane points of honour than with the good of his creatures.” Deism, in this way, strove to explain away the paradox of theodicy. One must remember that, at that time, Deism, now seen as a stepping stone to secularism, was itself a radical doctrinal move. “God's relation with us comes to be seen as mediated by an impersonal, immanent order. As an immanent order, it is self-contained; that is, apart from the issue of how it arose, its workings can be understood in its own terms. On one level, we have the natural order, the universe, purged of enchantment, and freed from miraculous interventions and special providences from God, operating by universal, unrespondent causal laws. On another level, we have a social order, designed for us, which we have to come to discern by reason, and establish by constructive activity and discipline. Finally the Law which defines this order, whether as political/constitutional law, or ethical norms, can be expressed in rational codes, which can be grasped quite independent of any special relationship we might establish with God, and by extension with each other. The human relationships which matter are those prescribed in the codes (e.g., Natural Law, the Utilitarian principle, the Categorial Imperative). These codes, of course, centre on the purely human flourishing.”
Taylor comes back time and again to the theme of the disenchantment of the world. It becomes a world firmly rooted in the immanent and stripped of all its transcendence. “Where our ancestors used to see their world as a locus of spirits and forces, and understood it as a fixed, ordered cosmos, independently of whether they grasped and accepted any particular picture of this cosmos, we experience the universe as limitless, that is, unencompassable in imagination, but only at best in highly abstract theory, which is beyond most of us; and we feel it to be changing, evolving. Where our ancestors were able to ignore without difficulty the signs which point us to these two features—vastness and evolution—they stand out for us…. We live in a nature of deep time and unfathomable spaces, from which we emerged. It is a universe which is in many ways strange and alien, and certainly unfathomable. This nourishes on one hand a sense of kinship and filiation. We belong to the earth; it is our home. This sensibility is a powerful source of ecological consciousness. It also means that we are led to think of ourselves as having a deep nature, which we need to retrieve, or perhaps overcome, something which we can find out how to do by examining our dark genesis…. This complex of theories, unreflective understanding and moral imagination is the dominant one in Western Civilization in our time. It saturates our world.” For Taylor, the certainty of science is a position modernity has come to have accepted as objective fact, rather than as just one lens for viewing a deeper reality. “We can see from all this how much the appeal of scientific materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findings as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons. It is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality.”
Modern man has become excarnated. The life of the mind has replaced the life of the body. At the same time, instead of looking out at the world, man has turned inward. Truth has come to be found in the interiority of the Self. “The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from Descartes to Rorty; but also the growth of a rich vocabulary of interiority, an inner realm of thought and feeling to be explored. This frontier of self-exploration has grown, through various spiritual disciplines of self-examination through Montaigne, the development of the modern novel, the rise of Romanticism, the ethic of authenticity, to the point where we now conceive of ourselves as having inner depths. We might even say that the depths which were previously located in the cosmos, the enchanted world, are now more readily placed within.”
Modern ethics has come to be defined by duties, rather than the ancient search for the best life and best society. “A lot needs to be said as well about the widespread take on moral philosophy today, with its exclusive focus on questions of obligatory action, the question of what is the right thing to do. It in fact abandons wider issues of the nature of the good life, of higher ethical motivation, of what we should love…. Underlying this change are massive shifts in the understanding of human agency and the human good…. The basis of ethics is seen as something obvious, and there seems no call to examine the understanding of the incomparably higher underlying all this, much less raise the question whether it points to something transcendent…. If the transcendental view is right, then human beings have an ineradicable bent to respond to something beyond life. Denying this stifles. And in fact, even for those who accept the metaphysical primacy of life, this outlook can itself come to seem imprisoning.”
Finally, Taylor looks at the modern trend towards distancing. “Now in a certain way a strategy of distancing is implicit in the modern disengaged stance. You see the problem, but you don't allow it to get to you. You can allow in a certain compassion, concern, but you don't let yourself be overwhelmed by it…. So distancing works both by holding oneself back from being engulfed by suffering, and also by exclusion based on the limits of practical action…. The positive side, what this distancing preserves, is the sense of yourself as disengaged subject, moved by impersonal benevolence; the liberal self, benevolent towards all mankind, but within the limits of the reasonable and possible…. Another form that this distancing can take we see, for instance, in the Bolshevik stance. This has similar roots to the liberal, the benevolent disengaged sense. But there also is a tremendous sense of power, in exercising titanic control over history. All benevolence is now invested in this all-powerful ameliorative action; so that what is out of reach of this can be sacrificed or ruthlessly set aside…. Moving along a spectrum from the Bolshevik, we can come to a stance which has abandoned universal benevolence and the moral order of mutual benefit. This is a Nietzschean stance, which rejects equality and benevolence because it sees them as leveling, and catering to the lowest in us, to comfort and security. It seeks heroism…. Here the first positive part of the answer is no longer benevolence, but the idea that the human type demands realization of its excellence, and only the few can do this; so they must go ahead. The rest can perhaps get some satisfaction in knowing that they subserve this, but if not, they have to be sacrificed. The enemy here is not suffering, but a sinking into sloth, mediocrity, meaninglessness.” For Taylor, a life in search of transcendence is the only logical response in an attempt to find the fullness in each life. “Running through all these attacks is the spectre of meaninglessness; that as a result of the denial of transcendence, of heroism, of deep feeling, we are left with a view of human life which is empty, cannot inspire commitment, offers nothing really worth while, cannot answer the craving for goals we can dedicate ourselves to. Human happiness can only inspire us when we have to fight against the forces which are destroying it; but once realized, it will inspire nothing but ennui, a cosmic yawn. This theme is indeed special to modernity.”
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