Charles Taylor’s a Secular

8/17/2019 Charles Taylor’s a Secular

1/26

Modern Intellectual History , 8, 3 (2011), pp. 621–646 C Cambridge University Press 2011

doi:10.1017/S1479244311000370

charles taylor’s a secular age

and secularization in earlymodern germany∗

ian hunterCentre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland

E-mail: [email protected]

from philosophical history to the historyof historiography

In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor’s philosophical

history of secularization, as presented in his A Secular Age . I do so by situating it

in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern

Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire.Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound

to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion

by entertaining the possibility that modern philosophical and historiographic

conceptions of secularization might themselves be outcrops of this unfinished

competition.1 Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylor’s philosophical

history of secularization is a Catholic one, and that this is bound up with a

specific (neo-Thomist) view of secularization as a theological and ecclesiological

“disembedding” of rational subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacralbody, community (church), and cosmos.2 Taylor delivers this history in his

“reform master narrative”: that certain fundamental religious and cultural

∗ Research for this article was made possible by the award of an Australian Professorial

Fellowship. I am grateful to Wayne Hudson for sharing his insights into the issues raised,

and to the journal’s two anonymous readers for their comments on the first version.1 Historiographic discussions of Taylor’s book have been somewhat thin on the ground.

But see J. Butler, “Disquieted History in A Secular Age ”, in M. Warner, J. VanAntwerpen

and C. Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2010),193–216; and J. Sheehan, “When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age”, in

ibid., 217–42.2 P. E. Gordon, “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular

Age ”, Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008), 647–73, 649–50. Cf. also R. C. Miner, “Suarez

621


2/26

622 ian hunter

reforms or changes in early modern Europe wrought the secularization

responsible for a modern epoch of “unbelief”.

Standing opposed to this neo-Thomist history it is possible to identify a rival

master narrative of a distinctively Protestant rationalist cast. According to this

competing narrative, secularization emerges not from the moral uprooting of the

rational subject from its sacral community but from a different kind of process

altogether: the progressive winnowing of the chaff of historical religious belief

from the kernel of the morally self-governing rational subject. In treating secular

rational individualism as that which remains when extraneous religious beliefand

theological doctrine have been purged by and from history, this rival narrative

conforms to what Taylor calls the “subtraction story” of secularization. This

provokes his understandable scepticism for its refusal to entertain the possibility

that secularization might itself have religious and theological conditions of historical existence. While there have been various sources of the Protestant view

of history as the progressive unfolding of man’s autonomous rationality through

time—from Locke’s uncovering of a Socinian “reasonable Christianity”, through

Warburton’s Whiggish history of the emergence of a non-political church, to

Priestley’s treatment of the Reformation as the birth of a free reason that might

even disprove Christianity itself—the version that Kant offers in Religion within

the Bounds of Bare Reason (and associated writings) has most pertinence for our

present concerns. This is because in treating the Reformation as a stage in theprocess that sees the sloughing of the historical Christ, leaving behind Christ

only as symbol of our own self-governing and self-redemptive moral reason,

Kant’s version feeds into the twentieth-century post-Protestant philosophical

rationalism that forms neo-Thomism’s main historical rival.3

Significant as they are, these observations remain curtain-raisers for

entertaining two more important possibilities that promise to put the

historiographic discussion of secularization on a more fundamental footing.

First, if the rivalry between Taylorian and Kantian philosophical histories is

in fact driven by the conflict between their underpinning theologies—Catholic

neo-Thomist versus Protestant rationalist—then it is possible that their success in

sublimating theology into philosophy has been overestimated, and that they are

as Founder of Modernity? Reflections on a Topos in Recent Historiography”, History of

Philosophy Quarterly 18 (2001), 17–36.3 See, in particular, W. Sparn, “Kant’s Doctrine of Atonement as a Theory of Subjectivity”,

in P. J. Rossi and M. Wreen, eds., Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered (Indianapolis,1991), 103–12. See also I. Hunter, “Kant’s Religion and Prussian Religious Policy”, Modern

Intellectual History 2 (2005), 1–27; and, more generally, J. Milbank, “The Invocation of

Clio”, in his The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, OR, 2009), 175–220,

187–97.


3/26

charles taylor’s a secular age 623

in fact ways of continuing to wage theological war by other means.4 Second, if the

rival philosophical–historical constructions of secularization are not themselves

foundational—in the sense of arising either from the historical disembedding of

reason from man’s “embodied nature”, or from the progressive refinement of his

“rational being”—then they will have no necessary pre-eminence over other

constructions of secularization: specifically, jurisprudential and contextual–

historiographic ones. Rather, they will sit alongside the latter, jostling for position

as competing conceptions attached to autonomous concrete cultural and political

programmes.

This way of framing discussions of secularization—which seems to me the

one most finely tuned to the contextual nexus linking academic constructions to

concrete religious and political programmes—I have drawn principally from two

fundamental studies by Martin Heckel.5 Surprisingly absent from anglophonediscussions, and perhaps more cited than exemplified in germanophone work,

Heckel’s studies have the potential to shift the axis of the historiography of

secularization. This is not least because they are written from a perspective

that combines public-law jurisprudence and a non-philosophical (contextual)

historiography within a broadly German–Lutheran cultural tradition, making

Heckel’s approach significantly different from both neo-Thomist and neo-

Kantian philosophical historiographies. As the pre-eminent historian of German

Staatskirchenrecht —constitutional law of the church and religion—Heckelprovides an insider’s history of secularization as a combined juridical and

theological response to early modern confessionalism. This proves to be an

invaluable corrective to the rival philosophical histories even if, as some have

argued, Heckel’s intimate history brings with it the limits that come with

belonging to the tradition that one is investigating.

At the risk of oversimplifying Heckel’s nuanced and wide-ranging discussion,

we can encapsulate three of its key outcomes, orienting them to the task at hand.

In the first place, Heckel shows that secularization in early modern Germany did

not refer to an epochal cultural “worldlification” (Verweltlichung ) or sublimation

of religion, whether viewed negatively, as by the right Hegelians Löwith and

Schmitt; or positively, as by Hegel, the left Hegelians, the neo-Kantians, and

Blumenburg. Rather, it referred to something far more domain-specific and

4 See Milbank, “The Invocation of Clio”, 175–81.5 M. Heckel, “Das Säkularisierungsproblem in der Entwicklung des deutschen

Staatskirchenrechts”, in G. Dilcher and I. Staff, eds., Christentum und modernes Recht.Beitr¨ age zum Problem der S¨ akularisation (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 35–95; and M.

Heckel, “Säkularisierung: Staatskirchenrechtliche Aspekte einer umstrittenen Kategorie”,

in Martin Heckel Gesammelte Schriften: Staat, Kirche, Recht, Geschichte , ed. K. Schlaich

(Tübingen, 1989), 773–911.


4/26

624 ian hunter

contextually relative, namely to the transfer of church property and church

jurisdiction from ecclesial to civil authority, especially in the context of the

settlement of Protestant princely claims in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War.6

At stake was not a totalizing secularization or rationalization of the zeitgeist, but

a limited and contextual political secularization of the judicial and civil domains

that left large swathes of religious life quite untouched. Religious institutions

were, of course, in the throes of their own “reformations” during this period,

but this typically led to the intensification rather than the dilution of religious

life, even if these religious changes interacted in complex ways with political

secularization.

Second, the intellectual discipline that formulated the conceptual and

ethical parameters for this political secularization was neither philosophy

nor theology but public-law jurisprudence.7 Specifically it was the Germanpublic-law discipline of Staatskirchenrecht , embracing both the imperial public

church law flowing from two fundamental religious peace treaties—of Augsburg

(1555) and Osnabrück (Westphalia) (1648)—and the array of decrees and laws

through which these treaties were received, interpreted, operationalized, and

also transformed in the religious constitutions of the princely territorial states. 8

Here secularization did not take place as an epochal shift in the culture

and consciousness of humanity brought about by profound philosophical–

theological transformations. It occurred rather as a historically specific alterationin the religious and political order of the German Empire and its estates. This

was brought about by more than a century of protracted jurisprudential and

diplomatic activity, and was manifest in a specific ensemble of developments.

The most important of these were the establishment of balance and parity in

the treatment of the Catholic and Protestant confessions at the level of imperial

law and politics; the gradual and uneven emergence of indifference towards

competing religious truths at the level of territorial law and government, which

was the condition of religious toleration and “freedom”; and the capacity of this

constitutional order to permit a multiconfessional system of public churches and

schools grounded in public law.9

Third, the epochalist philosophical conceptionsof secularizationcharacteristic

of modern philosophical histories did not emerge for a further two hundred

years, in the middle of the nineteenth century. At this point, the specific

6 Heckel, “Das Säkularisierungsproblem”, 35–49; Heckel, “Säkularisierung”, 773–6.7

Heckel, “Das Säkularisierungsproblem”, 50–55; Heckel, “Säkularisierung”, 789–93.8 For an overview see M. Stolleis, Geschichte des ¨ offentlichen Rechts in Deutschland. Erster

Band: Reichspublizistik und Policeywissenschaft 1600– 1800 (Munich, 1988), 126–267.9 M. Heckel, “Religionsbann und landesherrliches Kirchenregiment”, in H.-C. Rublack, ed.,

Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland (Gütersloh, 1992), 130–62.


5/26


public-law construction of secularizationas an array of constitutional enactments

fororderingtherelationbetweenstateandchurchwasactivelyforgotteninaseries

of expansionist philosophical–historical reconstructions. The most important of

these were Kant’s construction of secularization as the progressive realization

of rational being; Hegel’s conception of the “worldlifying” sublimation of

transcendent Christianity into philosophy and thence into the historical state;

and the neo-Thomist narrative of a worldlifying loss of transcendent Christian

beliefs, begun by the Reformation, but culminating in the “liberal” system of

an indifferent state supervising a plurality of equally valid confessions, and

now lamented as the de-Christianization of public life and the loss of the

state’s moral foundations.10 In attempting to deal with the chasm between these

philosophical histories of secularization and the empire’s historical public-law

religious constitutions, their authors oscillated between two adjacent strategies.Some followed Kant in insisting on the “theoretical” correctness of their

philosophical history regardless of empirical history and the “practice” of public

law, thereby contenting themselves with the role of juridically inconsequential

moral prophets.11 Others attempted to incorporate their philosophical histories as

Weltanschauungen into the ideological platforms of rival religious and secularist

political parties—such as those championed (respectively) by the right and left

Hegelians—with a view to overturning the constitutional religious order by

installing either a Christian or a secularist party state.12

Heckel’s public-law historiography thus provides us with a framework

capable of linking the philosophical history of secularization to the contextual

historiography of secularization in early modern Protestant Germany. It does

so by situating philosophical history as a nineteenth-century philosophical

erasure of the public-law history of secularization. This was executed through the

construction of secularization as a (positively or negatively conceived) epochal

“worldlification” of religion affecting the entirety of state and society and

possibly humanity, which was then anachronistically projected backwards onto

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political secularization. For its part, political

secularization had a quite different focus, namely establishing public-law parity

of treatment between the rival confessions, within a political order characterized

not by a Christianizing or secularizing state, but by one whose indifference to

rival religious truths issued in a system of state-managed multiconfessionalism.

In both its structure and its function, Taylor’s account of secularization is a

monolithic outcrop of the towering ranges of nineteenth-century philosophical

history. Extruded from both Hegelian and neo-Thomist magma flows, it juts

10 Heckel, “Das Säkularisierungsproblem”, 59–72; Heckel, “Säkularisierung”, 793–89.11 Heckel, “Säkularisierung”, 800–22.12 Ibid., 822–62.


6/26

626 ian hunter

from the plains of twenty-first-century scholarship in a manner that reminds

us that we have not yet escaped the combative ideological milieu of that form

of historiography. In elaborating on this characterization of Taylor’s A Secular

Age , I will begin by outlining the main features of his philosophical history

of secularization—focusing in particular on his account of the crucial early

modern period—then move on to contrast this with the very different contextual

historiography of secularization in early modern Germany, before concluding

with some reflections on the cultural role of Taylor’s philosophical hermeneutics.

taylor’s philosophical history

Taylor introduces his account by distinguishing between three conceptions

of secularity: political secularity or the constitutional separation of church andstate; secularity conceived sociologically in terms of declining patterns of church

attendance and religious observance; and the secularity that he is interested in,

understoodintermsoftheconditionsresponsiblefortheonsetofamodernepoch

of “unbelief”.13 Demonstrating the ease with which a philosophical taxonomy

can collapse disparate histories, Taylor declares that the third conception holds

the key to understanding the first two, as only it captures the underlying

conditions of the “whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual

or religious experience and search takes place” (3). Taylor thus envisages thatthe (philosophical) conditions supposedly responsible for the rise of modern

unbelief—in fact the conditions of the “worldlification” of religion—are also

foundational for political and sociological constructions of secularity.14 In doing

so, he retrospectively imposes the model of nineteenth- and twentieth-century

philosophical history onto early modern public-law political secularity. Having

effected this absorption of historical jurisprudence into philosophy, Taylor can

then pose what purports to be a fundamental historical question: “How did we

move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naı̈vely within a

theistic construal, to one in which we all shunt between two stances, in which

everyone’s construal shows up as such; and in which moreover, unbelief has

become for many the major default option?” (14). Taylor’s way of posing his

central question is thus a way of assimilating the early modern political and

public-law historiography of secularization to the preoccupations of nineteenth-

and twentieth-century philosophical history.

Taylor’s all-consuming question thus issues in an account in which a

philosophically and theologically driven movement of “Christian Reform”

inverts—or is sublimated—into an epochal secularization of consciousness that

13 C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 1–3. All further references given in text.14 Jon Butler makes a similar point. See Butler, “Disquieted History”, 195–6.


7/26


carries with it the totality of culture, society and state. This account contrasts

strongly not just with Heckel’s juristic studies but also with important research

in the history of religion and theology, which stresses the regional and plural

character of secularity and secularism. When focused on Europe, this research

has tied secularization to the historical forms of religious settlement that took

place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following various religious

civil wars. As a result, it views both the forms of secularity and the ways

in which it is theorized as subject to significant differences, depending on

the character of regional and national settlements, and their long intellectual

aftermath.15 In treating modernity as an epochal totality arising from the

secularization or “worldlification” of its supposed theological or metaphysical

foundations, Taylor’s account ignores the historical existence of different forms

of secularization and the “multiple modernities” to which they have given rise.Conversely, discussions that recognize a plurality of secularizations tied to diverse

early modern religious settlements typically entertain a plurality of modernities,

treating them as projections of particular religious and political programmes

designed to configure the present in their image.16 Our discussion of public-law

secularization in early modern Protestant Germany will thus exemplify only a

particular historical form of secularization and the modernity that it projects.

Rather then encompassing the possibility of multiple modernities, Taylor’s

history is a single linear before-and-after narrative in which the “before” hasboth normative and chronological priority in relation to the “after”. It thus

has the form of a philosophical history in which a lost normative order with

a metaphysical character supplies the hermeneutic key to a single general

history of secularization. This leads to a single modern condition—a “spiritual

predicament”—in which “we” are all supposedly caught: “it is a crucial fact of our

spiritual predicament that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves

and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we

are, of having overcome a previous condition” (28). The several epochs of this

history unfold as the lapsarian retreat or “disembedding” of metaphysical forms

from the temporal domain—and vice versa—the crisis moment for which is

provided by the Protestant Reformation. In this regard, like Alasdair MacIntyre’s

similar construction, Taylor’s Thomistic lapsarian history is the inverted image

15 For a helpful overview see D. Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory

(Aldershot, 2005), 47–90.16

On the theme of multiple modernities see J. G. A. Pocock, “Perceptions of Modernity in Early Modern Historical Thinking”, Intellectual History Review 17 (2007), 79–92; D.

Martin, “Secularisation and the Future of Christianity”, Journal of Contemporary Religion

20 (2005), 145–60; and, more generally, S. N. Eisenstadt, “Mulitple Modernities”, Daedalus

129 (2000), 1–29.


8/26

628 ian hunter

of progressivist Kantian philosophical history;17 as for Kant, the Protestant

Reformation begins the positive and progressive process of winnowing the husks

of historical sacramental religion from a “pure religion of reason”.18

Taylor’s pre-lapsarian era is characterized by the embeddedness of temporal

phenomena in transcendent principles or realities—God, the Platonic forms, the

spiritual community of gods and men—and vice versa (25–7). He asserts that

there was a time—possibly from late antiquity until the late Middle Ages—when

these “ontic” transcendent principles were embedded in the temporal sphere in

a threefold manner: in the form of a human essence or entelechy whose bodily

realization connected man to the higher order of transcendent essences or goods;

in the form of the enchanted cosmos where things were understood in terms

of transcendent “forms realizing themselves in nature”; and in the form of a

sacralized society whose hierarchical order was understood as a reflection of thespiritual hierarchy of the cosmos (25–7):

I have been drawing a portrait of the world we have lost, one in which spiritual forces

impinged on porous agents, in which the social was grounded in the sacred and secular

time in higher times,a society moreover in which the play of structure and anti-structure

was held in equilibrium; and this human drama unfolded within a cosmos. All of this has

been dismantled and replaced by something quite different in the transformation that we

often roughly call disenchantment. (61)

According to Taylor, some version of this order was still present in 1500, and

accounts for the taken-for-granted character of medieval religious belief, which

wasembedded in themoral cultureand ritualobservances of community, cosmos,

and social order.

Contrasting term-for-term with this earlier embedded metaphysical order,

Taylor’s post-lapsarian “modern moral order” consists of, first, a “buffered self”,

or a self turned in its own mentality, dislocated from its bodily realization,

and rendered impervious to transcendent forms and magical forces; second,

a disenchanted world in which science has replaced the transcendent forms

realizing themselves in nature with an objectified universe governed by purely

mechanical Newtonian laws; and third, a disciplinary society in which social

order no longer reflects transcendent hierarchy and is conceived as subject to

laws imposed by instrumental human reason for the purposes of a merely

human flourishing (28–75). Taylor characterizes the modern moral order as

17

For MacIntyre’s version see A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (NotreDame, 1981); and, for germane comment, K. Reames, “Metaphysics, History, and Moral

Philosophy: The Centrality of the 1990 Aquinas Lecture to MacIntyre’s Argument for

Thomism”, The Thomist 62 (1998), 419–43.18 See Hunter, “Kant’s Religion”.


9/26


secular in the sense of being grounded in a “exclusive humanism”, focused

solely on autonomous man’s temporal flourishing, from which all transcendent

realities have been banished. He also insists that this development cannot be

understood as a “subtraction story”—with secularity treated as the residuum

left after the stripping away of religion—as secularity is itself the sublimated

form of a particular (Protestant) kind of religion (22). Here we again encounter

Taylor’s version of the nineteenth-century philosophical history of secularity as

the outcome of the “worldlification” of religion. Taylor’s account of the unfolding

of this order of unbelief from theprior orderof temporally embodied metaphysics

has three main stages and is underpinned by a single philosophical–historical

hermeneutic.

The first of Taylor’s epochal stages is characterized by what he calls the

rise of disciplinary society and the “great disembedding” of self and society from their place in a cosmos characterized by “forms realizing themselves in

nature” (146–58). At first sight it appears that many empirical historical factors

contribute to his epochal transformation: Newtonian science, new conceptions

of civility and social discipline, and the pedagogical programmes of reforming

churches and states. It turns out, though, that the multiplicity of ostensibly

historical factors is itself dependent on a far simpler double-sided philosophical–

historical transformation. On one side of this putative process, Taylor argues

that disciplinary society and the great disembedding flowed from the rise of “Reform Christianity”. Beginning with the religious reforms of the twelfth

century, but picking up speed in early modernity—where Reform crystallizes

into the Protestant Reformation—Reform Christianity is understood in quasi-

Weberian terms. It is thus characterized in terms of the transfer of previously

elite forms of Christian asceticism into daily life, such that salvation will be

pursued outside its sacramental precincts, via a “worldly asceticism” that seeks

the virtuoso religious disciplining of quotidian life and ordinary selves (75–88).

On the flip side of this process, Taylor claims that the religious disciplining of profane life was reciprocally dependent on a profound theological transformation

taking place in Latin Christendom, namely the emergence of a nominalist and

voluntarist theology of the will from the Scotist and Occamite traditions (96–

9).19 This was at variance with the embedded intellectualism of Thomism, and

supposedly issued in the disciplinary ferocity of Lutheran Reform.

On this familiar neo-Thomist account, theological nominalism and

voluntarism allow the self, cosmos, and society to be viewed as objects of

a purely willed ordering.20 This lays the philosophical–historical groundwork

19 See Miner, “Suarez as Founder of Modernity?”.20 There is a strong similarity between this account of the origins of a secularized disciplinary

society and that offered by the representatives of Anglo-Catholic “radical orthodoxy”. See


10/26

630 ian hunter

for the removal of the transcendent forms from the cosmos; the treatment of

the self in terms of its own self-disciplining moral laws; and the ordering of

society as an object of instrumental disciplinary laws aimed at only immanent

human flourishing. The other factors that Taylor discusses—Newtonian science,

neo-Stoic discipline and Elias’s taming of the warrior nobility, the pedagogical

programmes of Reformation churches and states—are thus epiphenomenal.

Their disenchanting and disciplining powers are only the instruments and

effects of the Christian–ascetic reform of daily life and the nominalist–voluntarist

theology that is supposed to have driven the Reform process.

Taylor’s second historical stage in the unfolding of secularity and modern

unbelief is a transitional one that he associates with the seventeenth-century

English Deist movement—Blount, Toland, Collins, Tindal, and Herbert of

Cherbury—albeit under a very general construal (221–69). For Taylor, the roleof Deism is to function as the tipping point—the moment of “worldlifying”

inversion or sublimation—at which Reform Christianity, having launched the

self and society as objects of willed shaping, can begin to leave God out of the

picture. According to Taylor, Deism plays this role by acting as the agent of

epochal dissemination for two supposed consequences of Reform Christianity:

first, the anthropomorphizing of religion that allowed a theology of grace to

be replaced by a self-sufficient morality of rational self-control and mutual

benevolence; and second, the creation of a sense of “impersonal order” in whichGod was relegated to the margins of a Newtonianized cosmos and precluded from

manifesting himself in a now profane history (221–34). Through its powers of

dissemination, Deism is ascribed the role of helping to transform these otherwise

elite theories into a global Weltanschauung or zeitgeist that Taylor calls a “social

imaginary”: “what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by

large groups of people, if not the whole society” (172). As a result of the Deist

anthropomorphizing and moralizing of religion, Taylor argues, self and society

came to be generally conceived as objects of a purely human reform programme.This was aimed at self-discipline and mutual benevolence, and at the ordering of

society in accordance with the immanent end of mutual benefit, hence a wholly

human flourishing with no transcendent dimension. Taylor thus portrays Deism

as a carrying forward of the inner dynamic of voluntarist Reform Christianity

into an epochal secular conception of the self and society.

In discussing Deism’s creation of an impersonal cosmic and historical order,

Taylor focuses on two powerful cultural forces that he argues permitted it to

execute its appointed historical task. In the first place, Deism was supposedly

informed by Galilean–Newtonian physics and cosmology whose objectifying

C. Pickstock, After Writing (Oxford, 1998), 121–66; and J. Milbank, “A Closer Walk on the

Wild Side”, in Warner, VanAntwerpen and Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism, 54–82, 71–9.


11/26


treatment of the universe removed the transcendental dimension of “forms

realizing themselves in things”, and with it the conception of historical time as

the temporal unfolding of a Platonic or Christian eternity (270–95). This, Taylor

argues, is what allowed the Deists to deny God’s immediate personal presence

in the cosmos and in the events of history, and to treat him as an impersonal

principle or force that had set the universe in motion but then allowed it to

run on Newtonian laws. Second, though, and even more importantly for Taylor,

Deism was informed by an anti-metaphysical and de-sacralizing historiography

of theology and the church (272–75). According to Taylor, this historiography

is characterized by its will to treat the church as a purely immanent historical

institution no different from other social institutions, but also by its deployment

of a method in which theologies are treated as historical events and, as such,

incapable of being either true or false.It is a significant pointer to Taylor’s own combative method that he ascribes

this anti-metaphysical historiographic sensibility not just to Gibbon and the

Deists, but also to Gibbon’s twentieth-century editor, the historian Hugh Trevor-

Roper (272–3).21 This in turn is a pointer to the fact that, unlike the case of

Newtonian science, Taylor is not content simply to describe the anti-metaphysical

historiography of theology and the church, and feels compelled rather to contest

and displace it with an opposed historiography. In fact he does this by focusing on

a crucial nexus that had first been identified by this early modern historiography itself. As we shall see below, it was during the seventeenth century that an array of

humanist historians of philosophy sought to dismember scholastic metaphysics

by situating it at an impossible nexus: between a Greek metaphysics—in which

the world arises when a philosophical god imbues prime matter with the forms of

his divine intellection—and the Christian religion, according to which the world

is created ex nihilo by a God who maintains personal relations with man through

the redemptive mysteries of faith. For the moment, it is important to observe that

the early modern historians elaborated this historical–cultural conflict in order

to undo the patristic and scholastic harmonization of philosophy and theology,

thence to expel Greek metaphysics from Christian history, and ultimately to treat

the events of this history as wholly temporal in both senses of the word.22 In

a striking symptomatic demonstration of the fact that this cultural–religious

21 Taylor does not discuss the pre-eminent modern reception of Gibbon: J. G. A. Pocock’s

Barbarism and Religion , 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1999–2005).22 See the fundamental studies by R. Häfner, “Jacob Thomasius und die Geschichte der

Häresien”, in F. Vollhardt, ed., Christian Thomasius ( 1655– 1728): Neue Forschungen imKontext der Fr¨ uhaufkl¨ arung (Tübingen, 1997), 141–64; S. Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit in der

Weltgeschichte: Philosophiegeschichte zwischen Barok und Aufkl¨ arung (Tübingen, 2004);M.

Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Fr¨ uhaufkl¨ arung in Deutschland 1680– 1720

(Hamburg, 2002); and volume 2 of Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion , Narratives of Civil


12/26

632 ian hunter

battle remains unresolved, Taylor advances along the opposed front, arguing

for the reconciliation of Greek metaphysics and Christian doctrine as a means

of reinstating the transcendent in temporal history. Roughly speaking, this is a

reconciliation in which the opposed pairs—the transcendent and the immanent,

the timeless and the temporal, the intellect and the body or emotions—are

harmonized via a notion of the temporal world as the domain in which the

transcendent is actualized through embodiment in historical events, thereby

allowing the latter to harbor transcendental meaning (275–80).

At this point, in defending a transcendentally pregnant history against

a Gibbonian anti-metaphysical historiography of theology and the church,

Taylor in effect offers a reflexive defence of his own philosophical–historical

method. This is because Taylor’s narrative itself treats historical events—such

as those associated with political secularization, Newtonian science, Deistanthropomorphizing—as filled with hidden transcendental significance, even

if this significance is that of the emptying of the transcendental. In other words,

we might say that in deploying a hermeneutic philosophical history, Taylor is

engaged in a methodological defence of metaphysics against the historicization of

philosophyundertaken by the early modern “contextual”historiansof philosophy

and their modern heirs, such as the Cambridge school.23 Here we are in the

presence of an unresolved and deeply rooted cultural and religious conflict, one

from which the present essay cannot itself find refuge in transcendental scholarly neutrality.

The third epoch of Taylor’s philosophical history concerns the deepening of

the secular humanism made available by Deism into outright unbelief or atheism.

Taylor associates this final phase in the history of unbelief with the emergence

of a new “cosmic imaginary”. In fact, this amounts to the transformation of

disembodied reason and its objectified scientific world into a kind of broad

ideological consciousness or Weltanschauung for the whole of Western European

society. At the centre of this consciousness lie two self-disquieting notions: that

the vastness of cosmic space puts the world out of God’s providential reach

(Burnet and phsyico-cosmology); and that man himself is not the product of a

divine creative act but of a “dark abyss of time” in which humanity had somehow

arisen from matter (Vico and cosmic history) (321–40).

Government (Cambridge, 1999). See also I. Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional

State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge, 2007), 61–73.23 See, in this regard, Taylor’s critique of Quentin Skinner for refusing to conceive historical

developmentin accordance withthe temporalunfoldingof transcendental truth: C. Taylor,

“The Hermeneutics of Conflict”, in J. Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner

and His Critics (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 218–28.


13/26


According to Taylor, it is this new cosmic imaginary that opens the gate to a

whole array of new positions in the field of unbelief—what he calls the “nova

effect”—in which the world and man can be treated as products of dark material

forces, ranging from geological catastrophes to the Freudian unconscious and

Darwinian evolution. At the same time, because these doctrines of unbelief

derive not from science as such, but from the miscegenation of the impersonal

Deistic universe and a scientistic world view or ideology, the cultural imagination

of the West remains in touch with the world of embedded transcendence that

has been excluded from view by the new grid of unbelief, which Taylor calls

the “immanent frame” (352–76). From this supposedly latent presence of a lost

higher metaphysical order, Taylor extrapolates what he calls the “modern malaise”

or “modern predicament”—a nagging anxiety about the lack of transcendent

meaning in quotidian life. This in turn is supposed to give birth to culturalmovements such as Romanticism that attempt to reinstate lost transcendence

minus its ontology, in the form of art and play (377–401). From this return

of repressed metaphysical belief within the new domain of unbelief arises a

whole host of Romantic and post-Romantic doctrines. Here individuals wrestle

with their unbelief and seek respite in forms of transcendence whose “ontic”

character remainsambiguous andobscure (407–12).Atthispoint,wehaveentered

Taylor’s version of twentieth-century secularity, and, even though much else is

canvassed in his omnibus, he has in fact completed his account of how “we”—all those living in the West—are supposedly now faced with an inescapable but

irresolvable choice. This takes place within the field of possibilities generated

between modern unbelief and the latent belief in transcendent principles and

beings whose worldlification brought this epoch of unbelief into existence.

We can conclude this summary with a methodological observation. In

combating the “subtraction story” of secularization—according to which secular

reason and a scientific world emerge from the negative stripping away of

unjustified or superstitious religious and metaphysical beliefs—Taylor appearsto insist that secularity must be treated in terms of positive disciplines

and intellectual inventions: such things as the forms of civility, scientific

disenchantment, religious Reform and social disciplining that he has described.

At the same time, though, we have also seen that Taylor regards these matrices

of ideas and practices as forming a kind of cognitive grid, the “immanent frame”

of “exclusive humanism”. This allows only certain things to be experienced—the

buffered self, the disenchanted or objectified world—while excluding access to

the older cultural form of embedded transcendent realities: God, the cosmos as

“forms in realization”, and the sacralized society or church. As a result, these

transcendent realities do not have positive conditions of existence in particular

intellectual disciplines, arts or “practices of the self”. Instead, Taylor ascribes

them an “ontic” character pertaining to the level of (occluded) Being, thereby


14/26

634 ian hunter

orienting his philosophical history to the “real” metaphysical world we have

misplaced. Somewhat ironically, then, Taylor’s own account assumes the form

of a “subtraction story”; for were we able to strip away the merely positive

historical conditions that have produced exclusive humanism and the secular

age of unbelief, then we would be again confronted by timeless transcendent

principles that have no positive historical conditions of existence, apparently.

In short, if—according to the “subtraction story” about which Taylor rightly

complains—the secular is what is left when religion is stripped away from a

self-grounding rationality, then, in Taylor’s inverted version, the sacred is what

is left when secular culture is stripped away from a self-grounding ontotheology.

Taylor’s philosophico-theological commitment to these supposedly ontologically

real principles, or Being, enters the content of his history through the narrative

of an abiding malaise or anxiety about the loss of higher meaning, and it entersthe form of his narrative by giving it the shape of a hermeneutic history of the

concealment of Being in secular time and its partial disclosure through prophetic

philosophical history.

secularization in early modern germany

Before turning to the historiography of secularization in early modern

Protestant Germany, we are now in a position to clarify our reasons for treatingthis as a kind of test case for Taylor’s account. Clearly this is not because the

German case is to be regarded as typical, given that we have already pointed

to the existence of a plurality of historical forms of secularization, none of

which is any more typical than the others. If we compare it with the English,

though, then there are certain features of the German case that make it better

suited to a discussion of Taylor’s arguments, regardless of the fact that Taylor

himself pays no heed to different regional histories and styles of secularization.

In England, the late seventeenth-century religious and political settlement was

achieved at the level of a single territorial kingdom. This permitted a broad-

church Anglican–Protestant confession to be enshrined in common law and

embedded in the two old universities, thereby constituting the cultural–political

centre from which various forms of religious heterodoxy and political dissent

measured their distance.24 In Germany, though, the continuing presence of the

empire as a legal and political order for a whole variety of territorial, urban, and

estate entities meant that the great religious peace treaties of 1555 and 1648 could

not impose a uniform religious and political constitution, producing instead

24 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660– 1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien

Regime , 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2000), 43–123; idem, “Protestantism, Nationalism, and

National Identity, 1660–1832”, Historical Journal 43 (2000), 249–76.


15/26


a multiform one in which different territories and cities were able to develop

their own religious settlements and cultures.25 As a result, the variegated German

political and religious landscape supported intellectual cultures that did not

survive under the “Anglican Settlement”. In particular it supported a full-blooded

metaphysical Protestant scholasticism that drew on Thomist sources and that

sat uncomfortably alongside both an anti-metaphysical “voluntarist” Lutheran

Pietism and equally anti-metaphysical juridical and political cultures, some of

which were inspired byHobbes.26 Early modernGermany thus providesthericher

array of theological and political cultures—in particular the clashes between

realist metaphysics and theological voluntarism, transcendent and immanent

conceptions of political society—that is presumed by Taylor’s wide-ranging

account, making it into a source of revealing cruces. As it turns out, the regional

and contextual character of the recent historiography of early modern Germanconfessionalization and secularization—its focus on interactions of religion,

politics, law and philosophy in a series of open-ended religious and political

struggles—makes it highly corrosive of Taylor’s philosophical history of a secular

epoch.

Let us go straight to Taylor’s first and central argument: that the combination

of Reform Christianity and theological voluntarism was responsible for a

transfer of religious discipline into daily life, which in turn resulted in the

disembedding of the transcendent forms and the emergence of the autarkicself, the disenchanted universe, and disciplinary society. To the extent that

this argument does make contact with the recent historiography of religion

and politics in early modern Germany then it is via the phenomenon that

historians have called confessionalization. For by confessionalization historians

do indeed refer to a concerted effort made by early modern churches and states

to intensify the religious disciplining of daily life through an array of pedagogical,

juridical, and political programmes.27 From the middle of the sixteenth century,

central Western Europe was subject to a series of overlapping rival waves of

25 For a revealing overview seeR. von Friedeburg and M. J. Seidler, “The Holy Roman Empire

of the German Nation”, in H. A. Lloyd, G. Burgess and S. Hodson, eds., European Political

Thought 1450– 1700: Religion, Law and Philosophy (New Haven and London, 2008), 102–72.26 Illuminating insights into this variety are provided in H. Dreitzel, “Politische Philosophie”,

in H. Holzhey and W. Schmidt-Biggemann, eds., Die Philosophie des 17 . Jahrhunderts, Band

4: Das heilige R¨ omische Reich deutscher Nation, Nord- und Ostmitteleuropa (Basel, 2001),

607–726; and W. Sparn, “Die Schulphilosophie in den lutherischen Territorien”, in ibid.,

475–97.27 For helpful overviews of the main forms of confessionalization see H. Schilling,

“Confessional Europe”, in T. A. J. Brady, H. A. Oberman and J. D. Tracy, eds., Handbook

of European History 1400– 1600: Latin Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation , vol. 2,

Visions, Programs and Outcomes (Leiden, 1995), 641–682; E. W. Zeeden, Konfessionsbildung:


16/26

636 ian hunter

“reformation”—Lutheran, Catholic, and Calvinist—in which religious activists

and “godly princes” sought to intensify the spiritual governance of territorial

populations in accordance with a dense mix of religious and political imperatives,

resulting in the phenomenon of the confessional state.28 A number of the key

features of these confessionalizing programmes are at radical variance to some

of Taylor’s central claims.29

In the first place, while a voluntarist and anti-intellectualist theology did

indeed play an important role for some confessionalizing groups—especially for

the fideist and pietist wings of the major confessions—this elevation of the will

over the intellect does not provide the theological key to what Taylor presumes is a

fundamentally Protestant confessional disciplining of daily life. On the contrary,

a number of key studies have shown that realist and intellectualist metaphysical

theologies—theologies teaching that the temporal world is shaped by God’stranscendent intellection of its forms—played a no less important role in many

of the confessionalizing programmes, including Protestant ones, which were

supported by a Protestant scholasticism.30 This is particularly clear in the case of

seventeenth-century Lutheran Saxony, where a highly realist and intellectualist

official confession—the Formula of Concord—was centred on an authoritative

metaphysical explication of how divine being is united with human being in

Studien zur Reformation, Gegenreformation und katholischen Reform (Stuttgart, 1985); and

Rublack, Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland .28 W. Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des

konfessionellen Zeitalters”, Zeitschrift f¨ ur Historische Forschung 10 (1983), 257–77; H.

Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich: Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in

Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620”, Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988), 1–45. Reinhard’s

and Schilling’s approach has been criticized by scholars questioning their emphasis

on the state and top-down confessionalization, and arguing instead for the self-

confessionalizing capacity of local religious communities. See, for example, R. C. Head,

“Catholics and Protestants in Graubünden: Confessional Discipline and ConfessionalIdentities without an Early Modern State?”, German History 17 (1999), 321–45; and

H. R. Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Pläydoyer f ̈ur das Ende des Etatismus in

der Konfessionalisierungforschung”, Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1997), 639–82. While

significant, these modifications of the confessionalization paradigm have no direct bearing

on the present argument.29 The following remarks also largely apply to the similar claims of the “radical orthodoxy”

writers mentioned in note 20 above.30 For important analysis and evidence regarding the confessionalizing deployment of

intellectualist metaphysical theologies in Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran programs,

consult Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17 . Jahrhunderts, Band 4,specifically the sections by P. R. Blum and V. Mudroch, “Die Schulphilosophie in den

katholischen Territorien” (302–91); W. Schmidt-Biggemann, “Die Schulphilosophie in

den reformierten Territorien” (392–474); and W. Sparn, “Die Schulphilosophie in den

lutherischen Territorien” (475–587).


17/26


Christ, and contained in the corporeal being of the Eucharistic host. Designed

to combat Tridentine Catholicism and to distinguish orthodox Lutheranism

from its Calvinist rival, in states like Saxony the Formula of Concord provided

confessional definition for a wide array of religious pedagogies and judicial

statutes, establishing the contours of a sacralized confessional state.31

Second, this is a pointer to the fact that programmes for the confessional

disciplining of daily life were not the material expression of the theological

or metaphysical ideas advanced within them, as is assumed in Taylor’s claim

that the elevation of the will in Protestant voluntarism allowed society to

be viewed as an object of willed disciplinary transformation, rather than as

the sacral embodiment of a cosmic hierarchy. As Taylor himself sometimes

observes, it is not the pure thinking of theological ideas that is decisive here,

but the manner in which thinking them forms part of specific practices of piety,ways of life, and religious comportments.32 What this means, though, is that

social and political effects cannot be read off from theological doctrine. Such

effects must instead be approached via the concrete historical circumstances

in which particular religious practices and comportments are articulated to an

array of pedagogical and juridical programmes, where their spiritual authority

can be exercised in the register of ecclesial and civil authority, or not. It thus

transpires that while the voluntarist theology informing the austere authority

of reborn “earthly saints” could indeed be exercised as disciplinary authority,33

so too could the realist metaphysics of a clergy rendered holy by privileged

31 For the circumstances in which early Lutheran voluntarism and fideism were academically

contested though the confessionally driven return of a fully fledged “ontological”

metaphysics see the classic study by W. Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: Die ontologische

Frage in der lutherischen Theologie des fr¨ uhen 17 . Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1976). On the use

of the Formula of Concord in confessionalizing programmes see I. Mager, “Aufnahme und

Ablehnung des Konkordienbuches in Nord- Mittel- und Ostdeutschland”, in M. Brecht,R. Schwarz and H. W. Krumwiede, eds., Bekenntnis und Einheit der Kirche (Stuttgart,

1980), 271–302. For the manner in which the Formula of Concord was embedded in Saxon

consistorial and criminal law—including the law of heresy and witchcraft—see P. Landau,

“Carpzov, das Protestantische Kirchenrecht und die frühneuzeitliche Gesellschaft”, in G.

Jerouschek, W. Schild and W. Gropp, eds., Benedict Carpzov: Neue Perspektiven zu einem

umstrittenen s¨ achsischen Juristen (Tübingen, 2000), 227–56.32 For more on the depreciation of doctrinal theology and the appreciation of the historical

importance of practices of piety, see the essays in H-J. Nieden and M. Nieden, eds., Praxis

Pietatis: Bietr¨ age zu Theologie und Fr¨ ommigkeit in der Fr¨ uhen Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1999).33

See the fascinating study of the exercise of Calvinist ecclesial and civil discipline in Emdenby a presbyterial town council, in H. Schilling, “Sündenzucht und frühneuzeitliche

Sozialdisziplinierung: Die calvinistische, presbyteriale Kirchenzucht in Emden vom

16. bis 19. Jahrhundert”, in G. Schmidt, ed., St¨ ande und Gesellschaft im Alten Reich

(Stuttgart, 1989), 265–302. For a parallel exercise of ecclesial and civil authority by the


18/26

638 ian hunter

access to the transcendentals.34 Equally, where these same spiritual practices

and comportments were not articulated to powerful pedagogical and juridical

institutions, they could issue in forms of spiritual authority—contemplative,

quietistic, monastic—with little relation to the driving centres of ecclesial and

civil power.

Third, if metaphysical theologies (viewing the cosmos in terms of the

manifestation of divine intellection) and voluntarist theologies (viewing it in

terms of inscrutably willed laws) were related to each other principally via the

confessionalizing programmes in which they were articulated, then they must

be regarded as contemporaneous in early modern Europe. Taylor’s neo-Thomist

before-and-after story—in which transcendental intellectualist theologies have

both normative and chronological priority over the voluntarist theologies that

have supposedly excluded them from the “immanent frame”—can thus only be understood as a lapsarian narrative designed to constitute modernity in

terms of longing for the metaphysical world we have lost. For the same reason,

post-Protestant and neo-Kantian narratives of the emergence of enlightened,

rationally self-governing individuals and societies from a prior dark age of

religious authoritarianism simply substitute a progressivist rationalist modernity

fortheThomisticlapsarianone.Inbothcases,theattempttoconstituteanepochal

modernity as “our” defining present entails the collapsing of normative and

chronological priority (or posterity), as part of an effort to project a modernity suited to a particular religious, cultural or political agenda.35 Taylor’s account of

modernity as a secular age of exclusive humanism and unbelief should thus be

seen as an attempt to imbue the present with a liberal Catholic conception of

it as the domain of lost transcendence and community, which remains locked

in rivalry with the post-Protestant conception of modernity as the “unfinished

enlightenment project”. From the viewpoint of a properly detached intellectual

historiography, however, this spectacle of multiple or rival modernities can only

point to the fact that history has no fundamental sense of direction, suggesting

that the present is better approached as a domain of unfinished struggles and

unintended outcomes.

anti-metaphysical Prussian Pietists see C. Hinrichs, Preußentum und Pietismus: Der

Pietismus in Brandenberg-Preußen als religi¨ os-soziale Reformbewegung (Göttingen, 1971).34 See the discussion of the role of the Jesuit political theologian Adam Contzen as spiritual

confessor and political adviser to Maximillian of Bavaria during the Thirty Years War, in R.

Bireley, “Hofbeichtv ̈ater und Politik im 17. Jahrhundert”, in M. Sievernich and G. Switek,

eds., Ignatianisch: Eigenart und Methode der Gesellschaft Jesu (Freiburg, 1989), 386–403.See also the account of the political deployment of Lutheran scholastic metaphysics in

Saxony in Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State , 34–45, 54–83.35 Cf. Pocock, “Perceptions of Modernity”; and Martin, “Secularisation and the Future of

Christianity”.


19/26


From these all-too-brief remarks on the first stage of Taylor’s argument, a

picture of secularization in early modern Germany begins to emerge that looks

quite unlike his. Programmes to intensify the religious disciplining of ordinary

life between 1550 and 1700 did not betoken the secularization of religion in

Taylor’s sense; that is, the “worldlifying” inversion of “Reform Christianity”

into the blueprint for a desacralized disciplinary society inhabited by atomistic

selves. Rather, driven by both realist and voluntarist theologies, and present

in Lutheran, Catholic and Calvinist territories, these programmes represented

concerted religious– and civil–pedagogical attempts to superimpose the ecclesial

and civil communities in the form of the confessional state, estate, or community.

It seems likely, then, that the prototypes of Taylor’s sacralized or sacramental

society—in which civil authority is imbued with a cosmic religious significance—

are to be found not in ancient magical societies or medieval Christendom, but insuch early modern confessional states as Saxony and Bavaria: states that possessed

the means of combining spiritual and civil authority, and aspired to superimpose

universal ecclesial community and territorial political citizenship.36 If specifically

political programs of secularization began to emerge in this context—that is,

programmes characterized by various attempts to disarticulate the forms of

spiritual and civil authority, the ecclesial and political communities—then these

cannot be understood in the Taylorian manner as reflex effects of a “deeper”

secularization viewed as the worldly sublimation of religion: a conception whichlay far ahead in the nineteenth century. Rather, they must be understood

as autonomous programmes and campaigns, targeted on the early modern

confessional states whose juridical and political institutions they sought to purge

of ecclesial imperatives, and groundednotin fundamental theology or philosophy

but in the disciplines of public law (Staatskirchenrecht ) and politics.37

Several of these points can be further developed by returning to the second

main stage of Taylor’s narrative; that is, his argument that early modern

“Deism” was the means by which the “disembedding” effects of Reform

Christianity were transformed into an epochal “social imaginary” or spirit

of the age. It will be recalled that Taylor thinks Deism was responsible for

the creation of this secular humanist spirit in part through its spread of an

36 H. Schilling, “Confessionalisation and the Rise of Religious and Cultural Frontiers in Early

Modern Europe”, in E. Andor and I. G. Tóth, eds., Frontiers of Faith: Religious Exchange

and the Constitution of Religious Identities 1400– 1750 (Budapest, 2001), 21–35.37 Cf. M. Stolleis, “Religion und Politik im Zeitalter des Barock. ‘Konfessionalisierung’ oder

‘Säkularisierung’ bei der Entstehung des frühmodernen Staates?”, in D. Breuer, B. Becker-Cantarino, H. Schilling and W. Sparn, eds., Religion und Religiosit¨ at im Zeitalter des

Barock (Wiesbaden, 1995), 23–42; H. Dreitzel, “Christliche Aufklärung durch f ̈urstlichen

Absolutismus. Thomasius und die Destruktion des frühneuzeitlichen Konfessionsstaates”,

in Vollhardt, ed., Christian Thomasius , 17–50; and Heckel, “Das Säkularisierungproblem”.


20/26

640 ian hunter

anti-sacramental anthropomorphic ethics—in which God enunciates rational

moral rules already implicit in man’s self-governing reason—and in part through

its embodiment of a disenchanting natural science and a detranscendentalizing

empirical historiography. Understood as a further step in the “worldlification” of

Reform Christianity, Taylor’s Deism supplies him with the cultural agency that

he needs in order to gather together the disparate threads of secularization into

a single Weltanschauung and disseminate this to an entire “age”. Yet the pressures

that this places on Deism—the requirement that its rational religiosity provide

the unifying basis for the secularizing effects of intellectual cultures as diverse as

the natural sciences and a profane historiography—prove to be far greater than

this somewhat fragile construct can bear.

It is beginning to look as if even in England there was no Deism of the kind

posited by Taylor—a movement unified by a shared ethico-religious sensibility and rationalistic outlook—and that this cultural and religious identity was in fact

retrospectively imposed on a rather diverse group of early modern thinkers by

Romantic writers in search of precursors.38 Setting aside the (important) issue of

whether Deism existed as a coherent movement even in England, we must focus

on the question whether something like a generalized Deistic sensibility can be

found in early modern Germany, as the rationalist anthropomorphic basis of

an epochal secularization. There are good reasons for scepticism in this regard.

On the one hand, to the extent that the ideas of Toland, Collins and Tindal didcirculate in Protestant Germany, they did so not as a circumambient zeitgeist

or “social imaginary”, but through narrow clandestine intellectual networks

interested in exploiting the (anti-confessional) political–theological possibilities

of anti-Trinitarian thought.39 On the other hand, if we look at the public faces of

political secularization in late seventeenth-century Protestant Germany—figures

such as Johann Becmann, Samuel Pufendorf, and Christian Thomasius—then

their theological outlook bears little resemblance to Taylor’s Deism. Far from

accepting a rationalist ethical Christianity modelled by an anthropomorphic

God, in their religious lives these figures remained committed to a fideistic and

pietistic style of Lutheranism: one in which divine rationality remains inscrutable

to man’s corrupted understanding, and in which salvation is to be sought in

gratuitous grace.40

38 See the illuminating studies by W. Hudson, The English Deists: Studies in Early

Enlightenment (London, 2008).39 M. Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund , 85–114.40 On Pufendorf’s theological outlook see D. Döring, Pufendorf-Studien. Beitr¨ age zur

Biographie Samuelvon Pufendorfsund zu seiner Entwicklung als Historiker und theologischer

Schriftsteller (Berlin, 1992). For Thomasius’s see T. Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the


21/26


This anti-rationalist pietistic Lutheranism was in part associated with

Pufendorf’s and Thomasius’s campaign against Protestant scholastic rationalism:

an array of metaphysical doctrines teaching that man can participate in divine

intellection through a rational substance shared with God; for they identified

this with a philosophical doctrinalization of religion that allowed it be coercively

imposed as a confession (the Formula of Concord) in the confessional state.

But their pietism was also symbiotically related to the political and public-

law constructions through which they pursued the political secularization of

the confessional state by restricting the end of politics to the maintenance of

social peace alone, thereby relocating the church outside the domain of political

coercion in the domain of the free collegial pursuit of grace.41 Taylor is thus right

to insist that the forms of rationality driving (certain kinds of) secularization

can indeed be shaped by particular theological cultures and outlooks, makingthem inaccessible to a historiography that seeks to approach secularization by

subtracting religion. In the case of Pufendorf and Thomasius, however, this

shaping took place not through the agency of an all-encompassing rational

religiosity, but through the maintenance of an anti-rationalist pietism that

allowed them to reconfigure religion as a domain of faith incapable of doctrinal

formalization and political enforcement. Political secularization in early modern

Protestant Germany was thus not the result of an epochal Deistic rationalizing

of religion but of highly contextualized cultural and political circumstances inwhich anti-rationalist political jurists sought to undo the articulation of ecclesial

and civil authority in a particular kind of confessional state. They did so by

deploying a fideistic and pietistic conception of religion alongside a “Hobbesian”

public-law construction of the state, in what was in fact a distinctive regional

form or style of secularization.

Given this, there is no reason to presume that the public-law champions of

political secularization in early modern Germany should have had any particular

relation to the Galilean–Newtonian scientific revolution, with its supposed

objectifying disenchantment of the cosmos. Thomasius, for example, remained

attached to a version of Renaissance Platonic–Hermetic natural philosophy—

according to which the cosmos is ordered by the “spirits” of light and air

understood as active and invisible parts of the corporeal world—even if he

German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian

Thomasius (Rochester, 2006).41

On the contextually specific reciprocity between Pufendorf’s and Thomasius’s anti-metaphysical pietistic theology and their “Hobbesian” politics and public law, see D.

Döring, “Säkularisierung und Moraltheologie bei Samuel von Pufendorf”, Zeitschrift f¨ ur

Theologie und Kirche 90 (1993), 156–74; Dreitzel, “Christliche Aufklärung durch f ̈urstlichen

Absolutismus”; and Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State , 113–41.


22/26

642 ian hunter

put this doctrine to an anti-metaphysical use too: as a means of denying that the

world is ordered by immaterial substances or transcendental intelligibles.42 To the

extent that public-law political secularization was generalized, then this was not

through any alliance withthe newnatural sciences, cementedby a shared (Deistic)

rationalism. Rather this took place through its incorporation into a distinctive

kind of philosophical culture, that of “eclecticism”. Here, jurisprudence itself, in

combination with the pietistic critique of the limits of human reason, resulted

in an empiricistic and probabilistic approach to knowledge.43 Considering that

Taylor offers no concerted argument in favour of a Mertonian or Weberian

link between Protestant anti-sacramentalism and the development of Galilean–

Newtonian mechanics and cosmology, there is perhaps no need to pursue the

notion of some such epochal link any further here. We can observe, though,

that, as in the historiography of moral and political thought, so too in the recenthistoriography of early modern science, the emphasis increasingly falls not on

epochal changes of consciousness but on regional contexts or specific milieus.

Here, new techniques of calculation and observation, and the improvisation of

new scientific personae and institutions, give rise to sciences whose durability

is secured by favourable cultural and political circumstances rather than by an

epochal change of consciousness.44

Similar remarks apply to the second of Taylor’s “Deistic” secularizing

instruments: the anti-metaphysical historiography of theology and the churchthat Taylor identifies with Gibbon and to which he ascribes “disembedding”

effects through its historicizing of the church and its relativizing of theological

truth and falsity. In early modern Protestant Germany this radically anti-

metaphysical historiography—among whose leading exponents were Jacob

Thomasius, Johann Mosheim, Gottfried Arnold and Isaac de Beausobre—was

the not the expression of an epochal anthropomorphic religiosity. It arose instead

from the unexpected coalescence of two quite different intellectual sources,

taking place in “regional” (Dutch and north German) cultural and political

circumstances. On the one hand, this historiography drew heavily on the new

humanistic forms of textual philology and biblical criticism through which

previously sacred texts were treated as the historical products of particular times

42 Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State , 69–71.43 See H. Dreitzel, “Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart der ‘Eklektischen Philosophie’”, Zeitschrift

f¨ ur Historische Forschung 18 (1991), 281–343; and U.J.Schneider,“EclecticismRediscovered”, Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998), 173–182.

44 See the illuminating studies in S. Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science

and the Shaping of Modernity 1210– 1685 (Oxford, 2006); and K. Park and L. Daston, eds.,

The Cambridge History of Science , vol. 3, Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2006).


23/26


and places, often with devastating consequences for their prior holy status.45 In

treating texts in this manner the new philology was certainly anthropocentric, but

it was not anthropomorphic in the theological sense of treating the divine intellect

and will as similar to or continuous with man’s. On the other hand, in Protestant

Germany this anti-metaphysical philology converged with the anti-metaphysical

theology of Protestant pietism. This meant that philological–scientific insistence

on the historicity of all texts found strong cultural–religious support in pietistic

doctrines of man’s incapacity to comprehend God’s supposedly transcendental

intellection of the cosmos.46 Far from being anthropomorphic, in defending its

theology of faith and grace, German pietism insisted that God’s intellect and will

were separated from man’s by an unbridgeable gulf, and it attacked scholastic

metaphysics as anthropomorphic for positing a continuity here.47 In a typical

outcome of this coalescence, Jacob Thomasius thus took over Lorenzo Valla’sphilological demonstration that Dionysius the Areopagite was a fifth-century

(CE) neo-Platonist—hence that he could not have been converted by the apostle

Paul, as claimed in Catholic tradition—and then used this to repudiate the

(anthropomorphic) Platonist theology of the ‘pseudo-Dionysius’ as a post facto

philosophical corruption of Christian faith.48

It was a result of this convergence between philology and pietism that

university metaphysics—the scholastic teaching that the cosmos is shaped

through God’s intelligizing of its transcendent forms—was itself historicized.In the new historiography this doctrine was viewed as the historical product

of the patristic miscegenation of Greek metaphysics (doctrine of the divine

mind) and Christian faith (God’s ex nihilo creation of the cosmos), and

was tied contextually to the historical existence of the Greek philosophical

schools and the scholastic universities.49 In treating metaphysical theologies

as purely historical phenomena, incapable of truth (or falsity), this profane

“contextual” historiography of philosophy provided a powerful weapon against

the metaphysics used in such confessional formulas as the Formula of Concord

and the Tridentine decrees. It allowed such metaphysics to be viewed not in

45 Häfner, “Jacob Thomasius and die Geschichte der Häresien”.46 R. Häfner, “Das Erknenntnisproblem in der Philologie um 1700. Zum Verhältnis von

Polymathie und Aporetik bei Jacob Friedrich Reimman, Christian Thomasius und Johann

Albert Fabricius”, in his Philologie und Erkenntnis: Beitr¨ age zu Begriff und Problem

fr¨ uhneuzeitlicher Philologie (Tübingen, 2001), 95–128.47 W. Sparn, “Philosophie”, in H. Lehmann, ed., Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten (Göttingen,

2004), 227–63.48 J. Thomasius, Schediasma historicum (Leipzig, 1665), §52. Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit in

der Weltgeschichte , 77–82.49 Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit in der Weltgeschichte , 7–21; Mulsow, Moderne aus dem

Untergrund , 261–307.


24/26

644 ian hunter

terms of its own self-understanding—as the claimed participation in divine

intellection—but as a purely historical teaching with effects in civil society:

the doctrinalization of religion, for example, and the facilitation of mutually

persecutory confessionalization.

In other words, despite the durability and importance of this historicization

of theology and the church—which in certain regards parallels the durability of

the natural sciences—early modern profane contextualizing historiography was

not the instrument or effect of an epochal dislocation of church or society from

their transcendent ontologies or archetypes. Rather, it emerged as a regional

combat discipline one of whose key objectives was to show that the very notion

that church or society might have such transcendent grounds is itself a historical

product of the clericalist philosophical corruption of Christian faith. Seen in

this light, Taylor’s bid to reinstate the harmonization of Greek metaphysics andChristian doctrine—and to do so as a means of showing how the transcendent

can still be understood as manifesting itself in empirical history—should be

regarded as a counterattacking defence of metaphysics against its historicization,

symptomatic, then, of a protracted and unfinished cultural battle.

In light of the preceding discussion, the third main phase or epoch of

Taylor’s narrative—the transition to a modernity characterized by the oscillation

between unbelief and longing for a concealed transcendence—may be regarded

as using a hermeneutic philosophical history to project a particular religiousor cultural comportment onto a common “modernity” occupied by a collective

“we”. Taylor achieves this by presenting an array of intellectual cultures that are

themselves organized in terms of longing for concealed transcendence: Victorian

cultural criticism, Schiller’s philosophical aesthetics, and Romantic “sublime”

symbology. He then treats these movements as half-conscious symptoms of

the real disembedding of the transcendentals that he has ascribed to the

“worldlification” of Reform Christianity during the Deistic epoch. Taylor can

thus treat this aesthetic array as instrument, effect and evidence of the manner inwhich a banished transcendence, excluded by the secularizing “grid” of exclusive

humanism—the “immanent frame”—nonetheless persists in manifesting itself

as a disquieting presence in the empirical present, in the form of a “modern

malaise” or “modern predicament”.

If, however, we attend to the regional character of such intellectual cultures—

that is, to their grounding in concrete intellectual arts or “spiritual exercises”

designed to establish a particular relation to and cultivation of the self—then

a different picture comes into focus.50 In the case of Schiller’s programme for

harmonizing sensuousness or emotion with abstract reason, for example, there

50 On this approach to the history of philosophy and aesthetics see P. Hadot, Philosophy

as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault , trans. M. Chase (Oxford,


25/26


is no need to follow Taylor in treating this as if it were an attempt to re-embed

the rationalism of the “buffered self” in a sacral body or community (312–17).

In fact Schiller’s aesthetic programme only makes sense as a local improvisation

on and critique of Kant’s ethical programme: one that substitutes the inner

task of “balancing” reason and emotions for Kant’s inner task of subjecting the

“sensuous inclinations” to the commands of man’s noumenal or rational being.51

Seen historically, neither of these regimens is any closer to the truth of humanity

(or the cosmos) than the other, as each only represents a particular way of

grooming an aesthetically or ethically elevated personality, initially regional to

the north German academic circles and sectarian aesthetic cults. Neither of them

has any relation to a lost “ontic” human essence, as each is a discipline of ethical

self-formation rooted in a moral pedagogy rather than in a moral ontology.52 As a

result, we can suggest that far from being felt as a “malaise” by all “moderns”, thelonging for a lost transcendence, or the pining for a lost embodiment in sensuous

feeling, are felt only by those highly educated groupings whose members have

learned to cultivate themselves through the duplex anthropology of reason and

feeling in order to shape themselves in accordance with it.

Can we apply the same sort of historicizing approach to Taylor’s own longing

for the disembedded transcendentals, embodied self, sacral community, and

metaphysically significant cosmos? Taylor would, of course, reply that, unlike

Schillerian sensuousness or Kantian noumena , his transcendentals—such thingsas the Aristotelian conception of virtue or the Platonic conception of the cosmos

as the “Forms in realization’”—are “ontic”. This would mean that his longing

is no mere practice of self-cultivation but an authentic orientation to a real

metaphysical “world we have lost”. Hopefully the preceding discussion will have

shown the insufficiency of such a response. After all, since at least the middle

of the seventeenth century there has been a historiography in which Taylor’s

transcendentals—the Aristotelian embedded forms, the Platonically emanated

forms of the divine intellect—have themselves been treated as local historical

teachings. In the light cast by this historiography, the lost transcendentals appear

not as the founding lapsus in a history of secular modernity, but as the initiating

1995); and M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France

1981– 1982, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell (New York, 2006).51 For more, see I. Hunter, “The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant’s Groundwork as Intellectual

Paideia ”, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002), 908–29; and idem, “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies”,

in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York, 1992),347–67.

52 This issue is also discussed, from a different perspective, in S. During, “Completing

Secularism: The Mundane in the Neo-Liberal Era”, in Warner, VanAntwerpen and

Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism, 105–25.


26/26

646 ian hunter

precept in a spiritual exercise designed to form the prophetic hermeneut who

will find them.

In situating itself as heir to that early modern anti-metaphysical historiography

of philosophy, the present essay has sought to show that Taylor’s philosophical

history of secularization as the “worldlification” of “Reform Christianity”

should be treated as an extended “spiritual exercise” in which the loss of the

transcendentals is presented in the form of an imaginal narrative history. Taylor’s

mythopoeic narrative provides the discursive means for his readers to relate to

themselves as beings whom the “great disembedding” of the transcendentals has

stranded in a desacralized disciplinary society inhabited by atomistic individuals:

provides them, that is, with the discursive means of shaping their ethical

selves around longing for membership in a lost, hence recoverable, sacralizing

community. In renarrating a key part of Taylor’s history we have canvassedan extensive and multifaceted empirical historiography which indicates that

rather than being symptomatic of an epochal sublimation of religion, political

secularization in early modern Germany represented a regional and contested

response to the phenomenon of the confessional state. If Taylor’s book is heir to

that contestation then so too is the present paper, but from the other side, leaving

us with the question whether an empirical contextual historiography might yet

have roots in a regional anti-metaphysical cultural politics.53

53 For some relevant discussion, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Quentin Skinner: The History of

Politics and the Politics of History”, Common Knowledge 10 (2004), 532–50, 547–50; C.

Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago, 2004); I. Hunter, “The State of History and the

Empire of Metaphysics”, History and Theory 44 (2005), 289–303.

Charles Taylor’s a Secular

Documents

Transcript of Charles Taylor’s a Secular