A Secular Age [Hardcover]

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher who has written extensively on the interplay between the religious and secular attitudes towards life. His recent book, "A Secular Age" explores this relationship in great and thoughtful detail from both a historical and a deeply personal perspective. The book is based in part on the Gifford Lectures that Taylor delivered in Edinburgh in 1997. (William James, a philosopher Taylor admires, also delivered a set of Gifford Lectures which became "The Varieties of Religious Experience".) But the book was expanded greatly from Taylor's Gifford lectures, and he aptly advises the reader "not to think of it as a continuous story-and-argument, but rather as a series of interlocking essays, which shed light on each other,, and offer a context of relevance for each other." (Preface) Taylor's book received the 2007 Templeton Prize. The Templeton Prize is awarded "for progress toward research or discovery about spiritual realities." It carries with it the largest cash award of any major prize or honor.

A good deal of Taylor's book is devoted to understanding the nature of secularism and the different contexts in which the word "secularism" is used. For the larger part of the book, Taylor describes a "secular age" as an age in which unbelief in God or in Transcendent reality has become a live option to many people. He describes our age as such a "secular age" especially among academics and other intellectuals. He wants to give an account of how secularism developed, of its strengths and weaknesses, and of its current significance.

Taylor's book is written on a personal, historical, and contemporary level. Taylor is a believing contemporary Catholic, and much of his treatment of religious belief reflects his own Catholic/Christian commitments. At times, I thought that Taylor's description of the religious life (necessary to his consideration of secularism) was focused too much in the nature of specifically Christian beliefs, such as the Incarnation and the Atonement, which would be of little significance to non-Christian practitioners of religion, such as Jews, Buddhists, or Zoroastrians. Taylor is, in fact, fully aware of the diversity among religious traditions, but his discussion of the religious outlook still at times tilts greatly towards Christianity. The advantage of Taylor's approach (in emphasizing his own religious commitment)is that it gives the book a sense of immediacy and lived experience. The key difference between secularism and religion for Taylor is that the former tends to see human good and human flourishing as focused solely in this world, in, for example, a happy family, a rewarding career, and service to others, while the religious outlook insists that these goods, while precious are not enough. The religious outlook is Transcendent and sees the primary good in life as beyond all individualized, this-worldly human goods.

From a historical perspective, Taylor tries to reject what he calls the "subtraction story". This story sees secularism as resulting purely from the discoveries of science -- such as Darwin's evolution -- taking away assumptions basic to religion leaving a secular, nonreligious world view by default. He offers learned discussions of the medieval period, the reformation and the Enlightenment, of Romanticism and Victorianism as leading to the development of secularism but to new forms of religious awareness as well. The "subtraction story" for Taylor is a gross oversimplification. Secularism, and the religious responses to it, has a complex, convoluted history with many twists and turns. The impetus for both views, Taylor argues is predominantly ethical -- developing views on what is important for human life -- rather than merely epistemological.

Taylor's approach seems to me greatly influenced by Hegel. He offers a type of dialectic in which one type of religious belief leads to a resulting series of secularist or religious responses which in turn result in other further variants and responses. In spite of his own religious commitments, he acknoledges, and celebrates, the diversity of options people have today towards both secularism and religion. The book is also deeply influenced by Heidegger (and Wittgenstein) in its emphasis on the unstated and unexamined views towards being in the world that, Taylor finds, underlie both religion and secularism.

I found the best portions of the book were those that specifically adressed modern life, as Taylor asseses the importance of an "expressivist" culture, which emphasizes personal fulfillment especially as it involves sexuality, of gender issues and feminism, of this-worldy service to others, and of fanaticism and violence upon issues of secularism and religion. Taylor emphasizes that people today tend to be fluid in their beliefs and to move more frequently than did people in other times between religions, between alternative spiritualities, and, indeed between secularism and religion. He attributes this to the plethora of options in a fragmented age and to a search for meaning among many people that did not seem as pressing in earlier times. Peggy Lee's song "Is that all there is?" is a theme that runs through a great deal of Taylor's book.

Taylor has written a difficult, challenging work that is unlikely to change many people's opinions about their own secularism or religion but that may lead to an increased understanding of individuals for their own views and for those of others. This book is not for the casual reader. It will appeal to those who have wrestled for themeselves with questions of spirituality and secularism.

Robin Friedman

I endured this book, because it contains many insightful perspectives on an important subject. In particular, the development of a broader picture of the secularisation of Western societies than the simplistic subtractive story of religion receding in the face of rationalistic science is both convincing and thought provoking. The author is clearly not a secularist himself, but does not duck any of the important criticisms of the religious world view.

However, and this is the unfortunate reason why I felt moved to write this review, the prose of this 700 page volume is amongst the most impenetrable and abstruse I have ever read. I found myself frequently reaching for the thesaurus, which on no fewer than 11 occasions was unable to assist me, and I am not talking about the technical philosophical terms. This in addition to the various neologisms scattered through the text, and the authors habit of using the same word in several different contexts, which had me re-reading whole passages to clarify their sense.

Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that I am not a professional philosopher, but I think that any book providing a history and overview of a subject such as this for the conventionally educated lay person, ought to do so in as clear and consise a manner as possible, and this has definitely not been attempted here. In many places the same argument is re-stated multiple times, and I often found myself having to go back several pages or even chapters to remind myself what 'sense 3' of a previously discussed topic was.

I would not even attempt this book if you are not at least passingly familiar with most of the works of the western philosophical tradition. A smattering of romance languages will also speed up your reading of the various untranslated quotations from almost all of them.

My conclusion, oft reapeated to myself during the month of evenings I spent reading this work, is that the important information it contains could have been conveyed in less than half the space, and should have been conveyed with greater clarity.

Charles Taylor is often regarded as one the most under-rated philosophers of the twentieth century and this book explains why. He is the intellectuals' intellectual, forever dealing in the abstract with occasional forays into facts to buttress an argument that could be made in a single sentence but takes an age to proclaim. Part of this is down to Taylor's individual style of writing and the fact that the book was based on a series of lectures which he failed to transfer from intimate discussion into coherent written argument. Those present at the Gifford Lectures in 1999 must have had great difficulty staying awake.

Taylor claims that public spaces have been emptied of God in a relatively brief period of time, to the extent that belief in God is no longer axiomatic for social existence while, for some, faith "never seems an eligible possibility". His book seeks to explain why and how that occurred and in doing so re-interprets the shift from the sacred to the profane. "The change I want to define and trace 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". History is essential to our understanding as, "our past is sedimented in our present, and we are doomed to misidentify ourselves as long as we can't do justice to where we come from."

He points out that in 1500, the moral order was anchored in religious beliefs and practice. The idea of a morality without God would have been difficult for most people to understand, especially since God (via the Church) was the guarantee of protection against evil spirits at a time when eternal damnation was a cause for concern. In medieval times society was held together by the idea of the Great Chain of Being, "which implied a hierarchical order beginning at God, and descending through royalty, to nobility and the clergy and finally down to the peasantry". Christianity adopted, "an instrumentalism that served to reduce the sinner's anxiety", allied itself with paganism and enriched the Church and its leaders. The Reformation was a measure of the disenchantment with such traditions and resulted in the "great disembedding, where a person's identity no longer derived exclusively from their role in society."

Taylor argues that Western Christendom underwent "a series of new departures" with each one replacing earlier forms of religious life. Amongst these new departures were the Providential Deism of the eighteenth century and the exclusive humanism of the twentieth, each of which sort to subtract powers previously ascribed to God. Life became the pursuit of "life, liberty and happiness" rather than the fulfillment of God's purposes, while the separation of Church and State was designed to protect the individual's right to find their own spiritual pathway free from external interference. It was also accompanied by "the decline in hell" or, perhaps more correctly, "decline in the fear of hell." There are other departures which Taylor discusses at length which make interesting reading for anyone willing to see beyond themselves into the realm of historical social existence.

Taylor suggests that while traditional belief and practice may have declined since the 1960's religion has continued in our "expressivist" culture with redefinitions and recompositions of Christianity existing alongside new options in which people seek to find a spiritual dimension to their existence. Therapists, doctors and others represent the new priesthood whose function is to maintain the superiority of the intelligentsia over the peasantry. This is reinforced by an artificial ideological division between religion and secularism which conveniently allows the latter to blame religion for all past ills and expresses itself in narrow and fanatical scientism.

Taylor attempts to justify Christian ethics in the modern world even if, in doing so, he is critical of the Catholic Church of which he is a member. He writes, "what Vatican rule-makers and secularist ideologies unite in not being able to see, is that there are more ways of being a Catholic Christian than either have yet imagined." The implication is that there are wrong versions of the Christian faith and he is critical of those who consider their God is the only right one. He also denies that those who have sought to create a God-free closed world order to provide a relativistic replacement for transcendent reality have answers that are any more convincing than their opponents. As the nineteenth century Russian philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov, pointed out, " Man descends from the apes, therefore we must love each other."

Although Taylor argues that it was Christendom rather than Christianity which has declined his failure to identify the conversion of Constantine as the primary source of the creation of the institutionalised and political Church limits his understanding of the origins of the discontent which bedeviled (no pun intended) the medieval Church. Taylor misunderstands the corrupting nature of politics. The world did not start at 1500 and failing to understand this salient point remains a weakness of a book which some proclaim as a masterpiece but which leaves a lot to be desired even after 800 plus pages.