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Review Article

Grappling with Charles Taylors A Secular Age*

William Schweiker et al. / University of Chicago Divinity School

Charles Taylor has presented us with a fascinating, rich, and unusuallythoughtful study.1 It is a very long book, and its style invites a compar-ison with a walking tour through a medieval town. One walks uphill ordownhill most of the time, and the small roads are curved so that onecannot see much ahead. Occasionally, one ends up in hidden backyardswhere people hang their laundry and play opera music. In other words,it is a book full of surprising insights, a book that gives one pause forreflection, a book that explores options rather than making exagger-ated statements. It tries to persuade rather than convince.

A Secular Age is also work of tremendous erudition and scope; it in-vites and in fact demands response from scholars engaged in all aspectsof religious studies. Its potential influence throughout the field wouldbe difficult to overstate and is surely already being felt. In brief, Taylorswork explores the meaning of the changing place of religion in Westernsociety. He asks how a society in which it was virtually impossible notto believe in God became, over the course of centuries, one in whichfaith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibilityamong others.

What follows are attempts to begin a conversation with Professor Tay-lor from the varied perspectives of theology, theological ethics, historyof Christianity and Judaism, religion and literature, and sociology ofreligion. These ideas and arguments were presented to Professor Taylorby faculty of the University of Chicago Divinity School at a conference

* Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007). Authors of this review article include William Schweiker, Kevin Hector, Hans Dieter Betz,

Willemien Otten, W. Clark Gilpin, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Richard Rosengarten, and MartinRiesebrodt.

1 Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill Uni-versity. His twenty books include Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), one of the most widely read and highly regarded phil-osophical works of the past quarter century. Its achievements were crowned by other works,including The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991) and A Secular Age.

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held on February 1213, 2008.2 They are presented here in slightlyedited form to provide an overview of Taylors important work and tosuggest productive avenues of future engagement.

William Schweiker begins the discussion with an insightful summaryof Taylors argument; he then argues for seeking a third way betweenTaylors account of human fullness, grounded in a sense of transcen-dence, and exclusively humanistic positions. In the next response,Kevin Hector argues that secularity, far from being a merely unin-tended and unwanted consequence of early modern Reform, in factenables one of Reforms essential goalsthat ones Christianity be au-thentically ones own.

We then turn to the insights of several historical perspectives on Tay-lors argument: Hans Dieter Betz looks at the de facto secular ageleft in the wake of Augustuss transformation of Roman religion into aruler cult; Willemien Otten offers some reconsiderations of Taylorsaccount of the medieval period and suggests that an awareness of me-dieval humanism enriches our sense of the Christian tradition, even ifit deepens our sense of the problems involved in doing theology in asecular age; and W. Clark Gilpin reviews Taylors account of the ageof mobilization (18001950), concluding that the disembedding offaith from communal religious culture has enabled personal religiosityto be directly negotiated with consumer culture and national identity,without necessary connection to explicitly religious institutions. Finally,a secularization narrative for modern Central and West European Jewryis offered by Paul Mendes-Flohr.

The intersection of religion and literature comes to the fore in theresponse of Richard Rosengarten: he analyzes George Eliots Middle-march to complicate Taylors view of the Victorian era as marking adecisive shift in aesthetics from mimesis to creation, which producedin turn a poetics devoted to private sensibility rather than the reflectionof public meaning. According to Rosengarten, Eliots novel presents avariety of disenchantment with Christianity that, in fact, rejects thebuffered self that Taylor views as the consequence of such disenchant-ment. To conclude, then, Martin Riesebrodt analyzes Taylors concep-tualization of secularization and of religion itself, as well as the com-parisons that Taylor draws between Europe and the United States.

2 A small colloquium led by Jean Bethke Elshtain was held on February 12, followed by apublic event chaired by Kristine A. Culp on February 13, 2008. The texts from both eventswere assembled and edited for publication by Vince Evener.

Grappling with Taylors A Secular Age

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william schweiker: theological ethics

I want to think with Professor Taylor about our religious and moralcondition, that is, the connection between religious experience and themoral space of life. My response entails, first, getting clarity about Tay-lors conception of our secular condition and thinking with himabout the idea of human fullness and, second, hinting at a way ofconceiving and inhabiting the present condition that endorses a robustreligious conception of human fullness, in my case Christian, but thatis also humanistic, in some sense. I ask how we can reclaim within West-ern religious thought a way to see the struggle for justice against de-humanizing forces as part of a conception of fullness that does notdevolve into the kind of rage for order or exclusive humanism thatTaylor criticizes. The challenge is to think beyond the seemingly irre-solvable conflict between religious and humanistic outlooks as itself away of being religious and thus to find a way to inhabit freely ourtraditions.3 There is some irony in this, I admit. As a theologian I amtrying to preserve a humanistic moment within a religious outlook andlife, while Taylor, the philosopher, is insisting on a religious transcen-dence. So, first, we need some clarity about Taylors own argument.

I

A Secular Age is a massive study of Western cultures and the place ofreligion within them. Its main puzzlement is to grasp a transition inhistory. We have moved, Taylor writes, from a world in which theplace of fullness was understood unproblematically outside or beyondhuman life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is challenged byothers which place it . . . within human life (15). The history hetells is then about human fullness and a narrowing of that fullnessunder the pressure to reform life and make people better within theimmanent frame of history. As he puts it late in the book, The urgeto reform has often been one to bring all of life under the sway of asingle principle or demand: the worship of the one God, or the rec-ognition that salvation is only by faith, or that salvation is only withinthe church (771).

The basic idea is that human identities are always tied to convictionsabout the meaning of reality, what Taylor calls elsewhere strong eval-uations. If we wish to understand ourselves, we cannot abstract from

3 See David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay onTheological Humanism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).


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those beliefs in order to reach some supposedly neutral perspective. InA Secular Age, Taylor notes that every person, and every society, liveswith or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is: What con-stitutes a fulfilled life? What makes life really worth living? What wouldwe most admire people for? (16). This is, we can note, a kind of on-tological reflection, sometimes called a weak ontology or philosoph-ical anthropology, that is, an inquiry into the meaning of being for usdrawing on the moral sources of a culture or civilization.4 The spaceof human existenceour ontological conditionis shaped by thesesources. Taylors conclusion is that present conditions of experiencetend toward an exclusive humanism, which works with a truncatedidea of fullness within the immanent frame of historical life. In termsof Christianity, the drive for reform, especially among Protestants, hasforced us into a homogenous conception of fullness, an excarnationthat is the steady disembodying of spiritual life, so that it is less andless carried in deep meaningful bodily forms, and lies more and morein the head (771). The burden of Taylors argument is to show thata different account clears up confusions and reduces errors, even whileit resonates with actual life and our experiences of transcendence andfullness. How does he make this argument?

According to Taylor the moral/spiritual landscape of human life isthree-dimensional: there is, first, the sense of fullness that reaches be-yond our ordinary experience to a depth or power in existence; second,there are moments of exile or brokenness from that fullness; and, third,there is a kind of middle condition between fullness and exile. Thevital question is how one conceives and inhabits the middle condition,the fact of our longing, and also finitude and exile. Religious peoplehave some faith and hope in a fullness as well as experiences of the in-breaking of a fullness graciously received under its own power. Yet, itis possible to dwell within the middle condition with the convictionthat human flourishing is to be found here and nowhere else and thatthe power of that fullness is wholly a human power. Recall Martin Hei-deggers insistence on resoluteness in being toward death, Hans Blu-

4 A number of thinkers, including Taylor, have addressed weak ontology or reflection onthe connection between beliefs about the meaning of reality and their place in the formationof human identities. See, e.g., Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmations: The Strengths of WeakOntology in Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); William Connolly,Neuropolitcs: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and,of course, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. Also see the special issue on the topic in theHedgehog Review 7, no. 2 (2005). It is interesting that these theorists are now discovering theinsights of earlier Christian theologians, like Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr, and stillearlier, Luther and Augustine, on the constitutive relation between self and community andsome ultimate concern about the meaning of being (Tillich) or a center of value (Niebuhr)or trust of the heart (Luther) or a decisive love (Augustine).


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menburg on self-assertion and the legitimacy of the modern age, orcurrent advocates of neohumanism and inner-worldly transcendencelike Tzvetan Todorov.5 For Taylor those outlooks easily lead to the buf-fered self, a self closed off from more radical kinds of transcendenceand thus an exclusive humanistic way to live in the middle condition.

Taylors argument for a more robust sense of fullness requires artic-ulating eruptions of forces that overturn the rationalized social order,like festival or in-breakings of a sense of higher time. Religion in-cludes a higher good beyond mere human perfection, a higher powerthat transforms human life, and life as going beyond the bounds of itsnatural scope (20). Religious resources offer views of human fullnessthat transcend the immanent frame and thereby provide perspectiveon the rage for order. Of course, Taylor grants that many religiouspeople believe that true fullness requires a profound inner break withthe goals of flourishing in their own case; they are called on, that is, todetach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of the ex-tinction of self in one case, or to the renunciation of human fulfillmentto serve God in the other (17). Yet, that is merely to say that thereligions have a complex understanding of human fullness and alsothat they can be mutilating of real, finite human life, which is, ofcourse, always the worry of humanists, exclusive or not.

II

There is little doubt that high-modern societies often truncate humanexperience and seek purely procedural answers to social problems.Similarly, human beings continue to have experiences of fullness thatdisrupt an utterly immanent secular life. And there are virulently an-tihumanistic ways of being both religious and secular. The dispute,then, is over how fullness is conceived and how to interpret and in-habit our middle condition. Without engaging antihumanistic argu-ments, I want to ask whether exclusive humanism and something likeTaylors account of fullness, formal as it is, are in fact the main or evenbest ways to conceive and to inhabit the middle condition. Let me hintat a third way in order to widen the conversation about human fullness.

First, a word is needed about fullness. As I read the Christian tra-ditionand, in fact, the outlook of other religions toothe idea ofhuman fullness, the highest good, interrelates actual human flourish-

5 See Martin Hiedegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York:Harper & Row, 1962); Hans Blumenburg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. R. M. Wallace(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); and Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy ofHumanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).


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ing with ideas about what is righteous, just, holy, or virtuous. A Chris-tian vision interweaves a robust Jewish commitment to justice withstrands of thought, Hellenistic and others, that focus on human flour-ishing. Yet, that is not quite right, either. Those traditionsJewish,other religions, and nonreligiousalso have ways of thinking aboutthese connections between flourishing and justice. The highest goodis not just one standard but a complex, synthetic idea. And this per-spective on the highest good entails, at least in a Christian vision, anaccount of our condition. The travail of history is marked by a longingfor the resolution of the collision between flourishing and righteousness,the fact that in this world those who flourish are not always righteousand the righteous too often suffer. But since the space of human ex-istence in the middle condition is the complex reflexive interaction ofinstitutions, communities, beliefs and values, as well as human fault andviciousness and also natural processes, the longing for resolution is atbest ambiguously satisfied. And this fact, even aporia, is an engine ofcreativity, the stage for human despair and fidelity, and also the sourceof endless human folly and humor. Accordingly, any idea of fullness thatis not constitutively about the relation of flourishing and righteousnessis too trimmed downeither too other worldly or too inner worldly.Trimmed-down visions lack urgency and depth, or a realistic assessmentof our condition, or they stunt human aspiration. And any account ofour condition that denies this tension, this collision, is naive about hu-man possibilities, despairing of ameliorating any woe or injustice, ordriven by a rage for order to change the world. Christians hope for theresolution of this conflict pictured in the eschatological reign of God.It is not a product of human striving alone. But, as Protestants hold,it does free one to labor responsibly and joyfully for justice and flour-ishing, since together this is what is meant by fullness.

If this is the caseor at least a lot of Christians and others seem toadopt an outlook like thisthen the quest for fullness cannot be di-vorced from convictions about what is right and holy any more thanthe love of God can be separated from the love of neighbor. This per-spective thereby indicates another take on the moral and spiritualshape of the middle condition between fullness and exile, namely,the irresolvable tension in history between flourishing and righteous-ness, happiness and holiness. The challenge of a secular age, maybeany age, is how to live within the middle condition without despair,defiance, resignation, or naive idealism but with a resolute and joyouscommitment to the integrity of life with and for others.6 This outlook

6 On the integrity of life and this stance in existence, see William Schweiker, TheologicalEthics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).


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is a way of living in a secular age that does not rage for order ortruncate human transcendence, even as it clarifies the domain of re-sponsibility and how religious convictions might help fashion a hu-mane futurein a time when the rush to flourish too often trammelshuman hope and what is just and also endangers the integrity of allrealms of life.

III

I am hinting at an outlook about how to conceive of and inhabit themiddle condition that I believe has parallels to Taylors account butthat entails a somewhat different perspective, at once religious andhumanistic. It involves ontological reflection since a conception of thehighest good is deployed to articulate conditions of experience andthe variety of responses to it. This perspective has found different ex-pressions throughout the Christian tradition. And it is one, I think,that we need to cultivate in an age in which humanistic ideals too oftentrammel religious longings and the religions can demean or mutilatethe goodness and dignity of finite human life.

kevin hector: theology and philosophy of religion

A Secular Age argues that todays secularity should be understood interms of the fact that unbelief has become thinkable for a good manyof us and, indeed, that belief in something transcendent has becomenearly unthinkable for many. This strikes me as an interesting andlargely persuasive way of characterizing where we are. I was likewisepersuaded by a good deal of Professor Taylors story of how we arrivedat this point, particularly his helpful account of the role Reformplayed in moving us toward what he calls the immanent frame. It isat precisely this point, however, that Professor Taylors account seemsto be missing a crucial ingredient. One of the conditions necessary forReform to take hold as it did, it seems to me, is an assumption thatthe so-called Magisterial Reformation shared with Medieval Catholicism,namely, the idea that members of an entire society could be counted asChristian solely on the basis of that membership. Absent this assump-tion, it seems that Reform might have proceeded very differently.

Professor Taylor characterizes Reform as a drive to make over thewhole society to higher standards, a drive that is rooted in a pro-found dissatisfaction with the hierarchical equilibrium between lay lifeand the renunciative vocations (6163). Advocates of Reform wereconcerned, then, with the fact that the higher life called for by the


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Gospel had come to be seen as a special vocation to be practiced bythe elite, rather than as a vocation to be lived by all Christians. Reformaimed to combat this sort of two-tiered Christianity by insisting thatthe so-called higher life is demanded of every Christian and by puttinginto effect all sorts of disciplinary measures by means of which to en-sure that Christians would live up to this lifes demands (51). On Tay-lors account, then, Reform played a key role in producing the sort ofdisciplinary society that contributed to the eventual development ofexclusive humanism. It is important to note, though, that Reformmay have moved in a different direction if not for the assumption thatmembers of an entire society could be counted as Christian. If oneassumes that the church is coterminous with society, it might makesense to try to hold an entire society to higher standards. This as-sumption is by no means self-evident, however. The so-called RadicalReformers, for instance, saw this assumption as, in fact, one of the keyobstacles to Reform and therefore insisted that one counts as a Chris-tian only if one is committed to living the higher life, to submittingoneself to church discipline, and so forth. The point is simply that thisassumption seems to play a nontrivial role in the move from Reform tothe institution of a disciplinary society, for without it, Reform might justas well have led to a narrower view of who counts as a member of thechurch.

This may seem a fairly minor point, especially in view of ProfessorTaylors apparent friendliness to it (see 73941), but I would arguethat, in the context of Taylors secularity narrative, it is a differencethat makes a difference. I would argue, in fact, that if we consider howthis assumption is related to the outworking of Reform, we might seethe secularism that emerges in a different light. In the space allottedto me I can only trace the contours of this claim, but to see what Ihave in mind, consider, first, that the assumption I have been discuss-ingthat members of an entire society can be counted Christian solelyon the basis of that membershipseems to conflict with one of Re-forms own aims. The Reform movement insists that the higher lifeis demanded of every Christian and accordingly rejects the idea thatcertain Christians, such as monks, can relieve others of these demandsby living this life on their behalf or carrying them, to use ProfessorTaylors term (6162). Implicit in Reforms rejection of two-tieredChristianity, then, is an insistence that the Christian life must be onesown, yet this insistence seems to be at odds, at least potentially, withthe assumption that a person can be counted a Christian simply byvirtue of his or her birth into a particular society. This becomes evidentonce certain conditions change and more and more persons born into


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Christian societies start to wonder whether their putative Christian-ness counts as their own or whether it is instead a kind of historicalaccidentsomething that happened to them, as it were, rather thanwas due to them. I can neither elaborate nor defend this claim suffi-ciently in the space of a few pages, but it seems evident that someversion of this tension played an important role in the emergence ofTaylors secularism three and that once this is brought into view, itcasts secularism in a somewhat different light.

To see this, consider a rough, overly simple sketch of some historicalchanges in the epistemic landscape. To begin with, at the time of theReformation itself, the tension just mentioned remains invisible, so tospeak, because the vast majority of persons in the relevant societiestake themselves to be Christian. The situation starts to change, how-ever, as a result of shifting conditions of belief, several of which havebeen canvassed by Professor Taylor. Two shifts should suffice to indi-cate the development I have in view. First, Reformation and Counter-Reformation polemics seem to have played a role in altering conditionsof belief, not just because they led to a revival in skepticism but alsobecause their mere existence ended up putting certain kinds of claimson a different footing: in a context in which the authority of traditionis itself at issue, it would beg the question to appeal to tradition as ameans by which to justify ones claims about tradition. The authorityof tradition was further undermined by the emergence of modernscientific inquiry, the divergence of its results at certain points fromtraditional teachings, the churchs dogmatic opposition to these re-sults, and so on. For these and other reasons, there was a shift in theprevailing conditions of belief, away from the authority of tradition andtoward thinking for oneself, the aim of which was to avoid believinganything simply because it is what one has been taught or what onehas always believed. This aim contributed, in turn, to a series of furthershifts in the conditions of belief, since it motivated several generationsto consider what it would mean to think for oneself and under whatconditions this is possible. To most, it seemed evident that one countedas thinking for oneself about some (doxastic or practical) commitmentonly if one could offer reasons for it, but this raised an obvious prob-lem: if one counts as thinking for oneself about some commitment onlyif one gives reasons for it, it follows that one is thinking for oneselfabout these reasons only if one gives reasons for them, and so on. Thecommitment to thinking for oneself thus threatens to set off an infiniteregress, which is precisely what emerged in the so-called Grundsatzkritikof the 1790s.

For my purposes, it suffices to mention just one of the novel re-


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sponses to this problem (a version of which is defended by Hegel aswell as Schleiermacher). The proposal is to understand the reasons inquestion as a kind of would-be norm and understand these norms, inturn, as authorized, administered, and shaped by an ongoing processof intersubjective recognition: to offer reasons for some commitment,on this account, is implicitly to recognize the authority of certain pre-cedent reason-givings as well as of certain persons judgments aboutwhat counts as a valid reason; when one offers reasons, one aims tocarry on the normative trajectory implicit in these precedents and thusseeks this same precedential status for ones own reason-giving; if onesreason-giving is recognized as such, it contributes to the trajectory bymeans of which still other reasons may be judged and thereforechanges that trajectory, if only slightly; and so on. In this way, one cansee ones reasons as due to oneself, since the authority, administration,and meaning of the norms in terms of which they are judged dependupon a process that includes ones use and recognition of these norms.

On this account, there is nothing more to being a norm than cir-culating as such, which obviously qualifies this account as a species ofwhat Professor Taylor calls exclusive humanism. It should likewise beobvious that this account contributes to the conditions under whichunbelief has become thinkable. It is not at all obvious, however, whatattitude one should take toward this development. Professor Taylorsnarrative may tempt us to think of secularism as the ironic undoing ofReform, that is, to think of Reform as kicking off a series of develop-ments that ultimately brought about Reforms own demise. With theforegoing sketch in mind, however, it seems equally plausible to thinkof secularism not as an unfortunate and unforeseen consequence ofReform but as in some respects its culmination or, more precisely, asthe historical achievement of certain conditions that allow for an other-wise unavailable realization of Reform. There are at least two respectsin which this is the case. First, precisely because unbelief has beenrendered thinkable, one can now stand in a different relationship tobelief; there is now a standpoint from which one can stand back frombelief in order to mediate it to oneself, to reclaim it as ones own, andso render it recognizable as due to oneself. A new kind of freedomwith respect to ones beliefs is thus made possible, a freedom whosecondition of possibility seems to include the thinkability of unbelief.It seems highly unlikely, that is, that one could achieve this kind offreedom in an age when ones holding of certain beliefs appeared self-evident or even natural due to the virtual unthinkability of unbelief(or of belief radically different than ones own). Secularism thus con-tributes a crucial condition of the achievement of one of Reforms


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goals, namely, that ones Christianity be ones own. Moreover, the va-riety of exclusive humanism sketched here makes it possible not onlyto stand back from ones faith commitments in order to reclaim themas ones own but also to see the norms to which these commitmentsanswer as themselves due to one, since these norms are authorized,administered, and shaped by ones own performances and recogni-tions. One can see our norms as ones own, in other words, and onesown norms as ours, in consequence of which one can see commit-ments constrained by these norms as due to oneself in a more robustsense than would otherwise be the case. In both of these respects, then,a variety of exclusive humanism supplies conditions that contribute tothe achievement of one of Reforms own goals, namely, that onesChristianity be recognizably and authentically ones own. Secularismintroduces new possibilities, in other words, that are retrospectivelyrecognizable as a fulfillment of Reforms own project.

I have come to the end of my allotted space, yet doing justice to anyone of these points would require considerably more elaboration anddefense. I hope, in any event, that the contours of my argument areclear enough. While Professor Taylors use of the category Reformprovides a helpful means by which to explain the shift from nonsecu-larity to secularity, I would suggest that something important is missingfrom his account, namely, consideration of the assumption that mem-bers of an entire society could be counted as Christian simply by virtueof that membership. This assumption is important because (a) it sup-plies one of the conditions necessary for the development of a disci-plinary society, (b) it engenders a kind of tension within Reform itself,and (c) the rejection of this assumption ends up altering the condi-tions of belief in such a way that an otherwise unattainable achieve-ment of Reform becomes possible. It seems to me, then, that by con-sidering the role this assumption plays in Reforms emergence anddevelopment, one can see secularism in a somewhat more positive lightvis-a`-vis religions own development.

hans dieter betz: new testament and graeco-roman religions

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor comments on neo-Stoic philosophersof the seventeenth century who were looking back on the Roman em-pire, concentrating on the historian Tacitus (ca. 55116 CE). Peoplehave even spoken of the seventeenth century as a Roman century.But for all their admiration for Roman statecraft, military discipline,and Stoic philosophy, they were increasingly aware that the pro-


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grammes which were intended to reform the mores and change theoutlook of the whole population were entering new territory (120).

If investigated to a greater detail, this general statement reveals thatTacitus, to mention only him, describes a momentous change from theolder religion of the Republic to the new Saeculum Augustum and itsconsequences. After he had defeated his last competitor, Marcus An-tonius, in the battle of Actium (31 BCE) and the conquest of Egypt(30 BCE), Octavianus profoundly reorganized the Roman state andreligion. This involved three major events: the Senates awarding himthe new title Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus (27 BCE), the found-ing of the Ludi Saeculares (17 BCE), and the occupying of the office ofPontifex Maximus (12 BCE). As Tacitus describes it, Augustus reinventedRoman religion by systematically transforming its institutions intothose of a ruler cult with himself as its center. The process began withthe deification of Augustuss adoptive father, C. Iulius Caesar, the ded-ication of a temple and priesthood to Caesar, and the restoration andconstruction of a large number of temples. Augustus moved the officialresidence from the Regia in the Forum to a new building complex onthe Palatine, including his own domus, a closely attached magnificentTemple of Apollo, and a new Bibliotheca Palatina.7

The legacy of Augustuss long reign was permanently secured by hisautobiography of the Res Gestae, copies of which were on display onbronze plates in front of his monumental mausoleum and on stoneslabs elsewhere in the empire (such as the Monumentum Ancyranum).8

The Mausoleum of Augustus on the north side of the Campus Martiuswas located vis-a`-vis the impressive Ara Pacis Augustae on the east side,with the large-size sundial (Horologium) in the middle (both 9 BCE).9

The climax of the Saeculum Augustum was the funeral of the princepswith his consecratio as Divus Augustus, carefully planned by himself andpresided over by his chosen successor Tiberius (14 CE).10

What was the result of these changes? Following Tacitus: It was thusan altered world, and of the old, unspoilt Roman character not a tracelingered. Equality was an outworn creed, and all eyes looked to themandate of the sovereignwith no immediate misgivings, so long as

7 See also Suetonius, Augustus 29.8 For the text and commentary see Klaus Bringmann and Dirk Wiegandt, Augustus: Schriften

und Ausspruche, Texte zur Forschung 91 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,2008), 22981.

9 See Orietta Rossini, Ara Pacis (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2006).10 Tacitus, Annales 1.8 and 1.10, cited according to the edition and translation by John

Jackson, Tacitus III, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UniversityPress, 1931); see also Suetonius, Augustus 99101.


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Augustus in the full vigor of his prime upheld himself, his house, andpeace.11

The problems arose with Augustuss old age and the question ofsuccession. Opinions varied about the character and impact of hisreign. Tacitus represents the two sides, the positive, corresponding tothe achievements listed in the Res Gestae,12 and the negative, focusingon the crimes, sacrifices, and losses.13 Tacitus sums it up: He left noth-ing for the honors of the gods, when he wanted to be adored in tem-ples and as an image of divine entities through flamens and priests.14

In other words, the Saeculum Augustum saw Roman religion in its en-tirety subjected to the cult of Augustus, with his apotheosis occurringin his consecratio at the conclusion of his funeral.15

Nothing left was also true in regard to Tiberius, who could barelybe persuaded to succeed Augustus. He had witnessed for some timethe discrepancy between the grandiose dimension of the empire andhis doubts about his abilities to govern it. Only the mind of the deifiedAugustus was equal to such a burden: he himself had found, whencalled by the sovereign to share his anxieties, how arduous, how de-pendent upon fortune, was the task of ruling a world.16

Tiberius was aware that his adoption and choice to succeed the prin-ceps was motivated by his fathers selfish power concerns; neither per-sonal affection nor regard for the state, he had read the pride andcruelty of his heart, and had sought to heighten his own glory by thevilest of contrasts.17 Having suspected this years earlier, Tiberius hadtried to escape by his self-chosen exile in Rhodos and a military ex-cursion to Illyricum, but Augustus, when he was dying, called him backto the city of Nola, where he devoted the last day of his life to pressingTiberius into serving as his successor.18

11 Tacitus, Annales 1.4, 249.12 Ibid., 1.89.13 Ibid., 1.10.14 Ibid., 1.10 (my translation): Nihil deorum honoribus relictum, cum se templis et effigie

numinum per flamines et sacerdotes coli vellet. I am indebted here to the important articleby Hubert Cancik, Nichts blieb ubrig fur die Verehrung der Gotter: Historische Reflexionuber Herrscherverehrung bei Tacitus, in Romische Religion im Kontext: Gesammelte Aufsatze I(Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 22745.

15 Tacitus, Annales 1.10: Ceterum sepultura more perfecta, templum et caelestes religionesdecernuntur.

16 Ibid., 1.11, 265: Et ille varie disserebat de magnitudine imperii, sua modestia. Solam diviAugusti mentem tantae molis capacem: se in partem curarum ab illo vocatum experiendodidicisse quam arduum, quam subiectum fortunae regendi cuncta onus.

17 Ibid., 1.10: Ne Tiberium quidem caritate aut rei publicae cura successorem adcitum,sed, quoniam adrogantiam saevitiamque eius introspexerit, comparatione deterrima sibi glo-riam quaesivisse. Compare Suetonius, Tiberius 23.

18 Tacitus, Annales 1.5; 1.8; Suetonius, Tiberius 1011.


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While Tiberiuss reign lasted a long time, the burdens and tempta-tions of the office in effect destroyed the man. As he had never fullyaccepted the office, he tried to delegate the functions and tasks asmuch as possible to members of the Senate and officialdom, but whenhe saw himself getting overwhelmed by government, failures, intrigues,betrayals, and abuse,19 he gradually withdrew from Rome and took res-idence on the island of Capri.20 As far as one can infer from historicalsources, Tiberius practiced little, if any, religion beyond formal staterituals.21 Except for the deification of Augustus, he tolerated but didnot promote the ruler cult. Officially, he prohibited his own deificationand even that of Livia, his mother.22

The net result of the Saeculum Augustum was, therefore, that he de-stroyed what was left of the Roman religion up until Iulius Caesar. Itabsorbed its institutions into the ruler cult and left for Augustuss suc-cessors a religious and moral vacuum, de facto amounting to a secularage. For all we can say, Tiberius was as much a secular ruler as onecould be under the circumstances. In spite of some later attempts atrestoring Roman religion, the vacuum became gradually filled by for-eign religions coming to Rome. Thus, complete secularism was pre-vented by the social transformation of the Roman people through themassive importation of slaves, members of the military, and other im-migrants, among them Christians.

History in the imperial age became increasingly dominated by dei-fied rulers exercizing their power through the military. The armiesselected their men of eminence and let them rule as long as theywere able and willing to satisfy their demands. There is no doubt thatin the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, interest in Roman historycontributed to the emergence of absolutist rulers. A royal figure likeLouis XIV (16381715) exemplified the Grand Sie`cle of France. Na-poleon I. Bonaparte (17691821) put Pope Pius VII (180023) into hisplace by arresting and deporting him to France (180814), where hewas forced to sign humiliating concordats with Napoleon. Notably, theNapoleonic Epoch (17991815) initiated the great Secularization(1803), which in its repercussions dominated the entire nineteenthcentury.23 The climax, however, was reached by the totalitarian regimesof Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and Fascism in the twentieth

19 See Suetonius, Tiberius 2426.20 Ibid., 3941.21 Ibid., 26, 27, 36, 47, 6970.22 Ibid., 27, 51, 67.23 For a recent survey, see Hartmut Lehmann, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, and James A. Math-

isen, Sakularisation/Sakularisierung, II: Geschichtlich, Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart(RGG)7 (2004): 77583.


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century. These regimes aimed at total secularism and replacement ofreligion by ideological personality cults of the leader figures Marx,Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and others.24 Though not successful in theirgoal to eradicate Christianity and Judaism altogether, they contributedsubstantially to the modern ideology of secularism.

willemien otten: theology and history of christianity(medieval)

I want to take my point of departure for this response in the cultureof medieval Christianity, which Taylor sketches in many ways as one instark contrast and contradiction with the developments leading up toour current secular age. One of my guiding questions is whether thediagnosis by modern scholars of medieval society as premodern (whichTaylor follows) marks that societys collective embrace of Christianityas somehow less complicated, for not yet prone to modernitys slideinto secularism. A closely related question is whether it is possible oreven desirable to see the religious nature of medieval society as a goodor a bad thing.

Guided by my interest in dealing with Christianity in the medievalWest in an integrated cultural rather than a confessional way, I havecome to develop a particular insight in what I call medieval humanism,borrowing an earlier insight from Richard Southern.25 As a result ofthis, my diachronic analysis of our secular age and the theologicalproblems flowing from it tends to have a different focus than Taylorsanalysis, which concentrates on the dangers of (postreformed) fideism.The aim of my response to A Secular Age is at least in part to test myhypothesis against his, in an attempt to make the most sense of me-dieval religion and theology.

A Secular Age starts with the question of why it is that Western cultureas a whole seemed to be made up of believers around 1500 CE, whereasat present those numbers have dwindled to such an extent that believ-ers comprise only a small portion of that culture, making for an eerieand somehow out-of-place kind of religious presence. The radical na-ture of the Reformation, while in many respects making faith a moreserious matter, for which one bore personal responsibility, had some-thing to do with the change, to the extent that it unleashed a rage for

24 See Michael Bergunder, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, and Michael Wermke, Personenkult,RGG 6 (2003): 113538.

25 See Willemien Otten, From Paradise to Paradigm: A Study of Twelfth-Century Humanism (Lei-den: Brill, 2004), 144; with reference to R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies(Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 2960.


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order, which while intensifying faith also led to its undermining or atleast to a loosening of the hold the Christian faith had had until thenon Western society. By the way, Taylors view in this is confirmed byDiarmaid MacCulloughs recent book, Reformation: Europes House Di-vided, 14901700,26 which argues that the medieval sacramental andpenitential system adequately met the spiritual needs of the late me-dieval people and that there was no real reason for reform, let aloneReformation, other than Luthers Augustinian impulse to enforceChristianitys consummate dependence on grace as accessible onlythrough personal faith.

Reasoning backward from Taylors take on the Reformation, it seemsas if his view of medieval Christianity to some extent represents every-thing that one could no longer be in reformed Christianity. Thus, me-dieval civilization, while very much a stratified society, is not character-ized by a rage for order. How medieval society functioned, moreorganically and more flexibly religious than our modern society, isbrought out in A Secular Age in two ways: in terms of the celebration oftime and the feasts that went with it, liturgical but always also semisecu-lar, and in terms of the practice of theology. I would like to commenton both of these issues.

I

As for the celebration of time, Taylor rightly (I think) emphasizes Godsexistential-foundational role in medieval society (43). Societys qualityof being anchored in the divine, if I can put it that way, made for a kindof equilibrium in the Middle Ages between a drive for Christian self-transcendence, on the one hand, and a fostering of human flourishing,on the other (44), reflected both institutionally and communally inthe hierarchy and complementarity of the celibate clergy and the mar-ried laity. What held medieval society together in ways that no longerworked after the Reformation was the possibility of the release of socialand hierarchical tensions in feasts like Carnival, which either func-tioned as a safety valve to support the values of the ruling classesonthis point, Taylor quotes Natalie Davis (46)or underscored the ul-timate service of community by permitting the mocking of its socialorder, as is argued by Victor Turner (47). While I generally agreewith Taylors view of the Middle Ages as a more cohesive culture vis-a`-vis the more individualistic Reformation, whose built-in religious

26 Diarmaid MacCullough, Reformation: Europes House Divided, 14901700 (New York: Pen-guin, 2004).


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tensions stress the vertical impact of the divine rather than its hori-zontal integration, I wonder if the implied contrast does not lead himto have too benign a view of the tensions underlying the medievalcooperative enterprise. Witchcraft and demonization, as well asanti-Semitism (686ff.), are terms that only feature toward the endof A Secular Age as part of an abstract discussion of religion and vio-lence, but the drift of the argument there seems to be that this vio-lence may be worse in a no-holds-barred secular society. Followingthe view of Norman Cohns Europes Inner Demons,27 however, can wenot also see the comprehensive and organic medieval conceptions oforder as being potentially suffocating in and of themselves? For didthey not push for a release of tension that may well have been aimedat a continued celebration of society but did so only at the expense ofthe victimization of many of its members, be they women, mystics,witches, heretics, or Jews? More attention to the tensions and ambi-guities involved in scapegoating and demonization as endemic ingre-dients of premodern societies, even if we acknowledge that such mech-anisms survived also afterward, might have allowed Taylor to take anequally holistic but altogether more realistic view of the Middle Agesby seeing the Crusades as the flipside of Carnival. Rather than indulg-ing in a seminostalgic view of premodern medieval religiosity, would itnot be fair to say that medieval culture had more than its share ofproblems, for which the omnipresence of the Christian God did not,in the end, make much of a difference?

II

This perhaps rather secular observation makes for an adequate tran-sition to my second point about medieval theology and what I call thetradition of medieval humanism. Let me say in all fairness thatthroughout A Secular Age Taylor does not pretend to make theologicalclaims, and it is not my intent to criticize him for something he doesnot do. But shedding light on issues of medieval doctrine helps me toclarify a larger point about medieval theology as a broader, humanistpractice, one that cannot simply be opposed to secularism because itis suffused with it.

In his chapter The Bulwarks of Belief (2589), Taylor discusses the

27 Norman Cohn, Europes Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom(1973; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The discussion has since beenbroadened by R. I. Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in WesternEurope, 9501250 (1987; repr., Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); and to some extent demythologizedby David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).


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juridical-penal system of belief, seeing this as an Augustinian-Ansel-mian tradition that was aggravated by Calvin and as such became partof the Reformations exacerbated view of human depravity, leading tothat periods peculiar rage (78). Leaving both Augustine and Calvinaside for a moment, let me briefly discuss Anselm, to whom this jurid-ical-penal view in my opinion does not apply precisely because of hismore humanist outlook. Whatever the limitations of the feudal honorcode within which Anselm operated, it was that very context that al-lowed him to avoid the kind of theology of crime and punishment withwhich Taylor unfortunately associates him in A Secular Age. When An-selm is faced with the reality of human sin in his Cur Deus Homo? theoptions that in his view are at Gods disposal are either punishment orsatisfaction. Since God chooses satisfaction in Anselms scenario, theconsequence is that punishment is no longer an option. As a result,the devil plays no role whatsoever in Anselms theology of redemption.Taylor is absolutely rightand here Calvin comes inthat the reformedtradition read satisfaction in terms of punishment (Christ dies by un-dergoing punishment for the sins of humanity, which reading may belabeled satis-passion in contradistinction to Anselms satis-faction), butthat is precisely not Anselms view. Instead, and here I get to my pointabout the tradition of medieval humanism: Anselm provides us with agreatly illuminating example of incarnate reasoning, not just in termsof standard Christian doctrine about the incarnation but, more specifi-cally, as the exact opposite of what A Secular Age elsewhere (29293) callsexcarnate reasoning.

If medieval theology but also medieval culture more broadly con-ceived can offer us anything, this offering has in my view to do withits subtle and intricate use of incarnate reason, in that we can trulysee it as the opposite of Taylors view of the excarnate reasoning ofthe Enlightenment, based on the primacy of Nature or Reason alone.Rather than configuring this difference in terms of an abstract oppo-sition between anthropocentrism, which marks the culture of Enlight-enment, and theocentrism or divine anchoring, as marking premodernmedieval culture, society, and theology, I wonder if the success of me-dieval theology was not that it was able to combineand at times evencollapseanthropocentrism and theocentrism in figures like Anselmand others (e.g. Augustine, Eriugena, Abelard). If so, does their legacynot offer us a way into a richer theological tradition that is both morehumanist, in that it embraces the role of nature and reason, and ableto withstand the excarnate pull of enlightened secular culture by en-gaging in constant self-scrutiny through the ancient technique of ex-


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ercitatio mentis? It is quite probably as a result of his relentless focusingon sola ratione that Anselm can be misconstrued in a strictly technical,excarnate way, whereas, in my view, it is only when positioned withinthe larger humanist sphere of incarnate reasoning that we can under-stand his insistence on that kind of surgical precision.28

However defensible for a general book like A Secular Age, my worryis that Taylors rather uncritical focus on the highlights of medievalRoman CatholicismThomas Aquinas intellectually and Saint Fran-cis of Assisi affectivelythrows us back to a presecular, confessionalview of Christianity and Christian theology, even if he makes allow-ances for the Victorines. The nature of my objection is that suchconfessional perceptions represent their own brand of excarnatereasoning, to the extent that the criticism of secularism they evoke,however viable and welcome, tends to reinforce older stereotypes.In my opinion, what this secular age more constructively invites usto do insteadand attention to the humanist embeddedness of me-dieval theology illustrates my pointis to take stock of the historyof Western culture, within which that of its theology (of whicheverconfession) is fully nested, as containing also and always the seedsfor such forms of incarnate reasoning.

But the fact remains that doing theology in a secular context willinevitably be fraught with problems. One of the questions I see aris-ing more generally from the reactive attitude against secularism,which is not intended by Taylors book but in which the book mayvery well come into play, is that an overemphasis on the role offaithwhich since Schleiermacher seems to have become the focalpoint of theology, phasing out the earlier self-scrutinizing Ansel-mian humanist approach that was more inclusive of nature and rea-sonmay result in a totalizing but no less false substitution theory,one in which the alternate world of faith has everything to offerthat secular, scientific society does not. The current embrace ofboth spirituality and alternative medicine by many former believersseems strongly driven by this kind of impulse, which may be no lessfideistic than the confessional stance from which secularism onceliberated them but should not, as far as theological practice is con-cerned, push us back into confessional corners.

28 I have made this point more extensively in Willemien Otten, Religion as exercitatio mentis:A Case for Theology as a Humanist Discipline, in Christian Humanism: Essays in Honour ofArjo Vanderjagt, ed. A. A. MacDonald, Z. R. W. M. von Martels, and J. R. Veenstra (Leiden:Brill, 2009), 5973, esp. 6769.


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w. clark gilpin: history of christianity and theology(modern)

How does the scholar identify and assess the leading characteristics ofthe present? The problem, writes Charles Taylor, is defining exactlywhat it is that has happened (426). In chapters 1214 of A Secular Age,Taylor proposes a narrative that resolves this problem and identifieswhat has happened. For the societies of the North Atlantic culturalsphere, the transformative path to our present-day secular age haspassed through an age of mobilization and an age of authenticityon the way to religion today. I agree with Taylor that the age ofmobilizationvery roughly, the years from 1800 to 1950was a timeduring which the very locus of the religious, or the spiritual, in sociallife has shifted and is therefore extremely important to understandingthe cultural transformation his book addresses (424, 471). In what fol-lows, I reflect with Taylor on the consequences of the age of mobili-zation for the prospects of religion in a secular age. More specifically,I appraise the significance of the age of mobilization for engaging Tay-lors worry about the contemporary possibility of experiences of tran-scendence. In a way this whole book, Taylor writes, is an attempt tostudy the fate in the modern West of religious faith in a strong sense.This strong sense I define, to repeat, by a double criterion: the beliefin transcendent reality, on one hand, and the connected aspiration toa transformation which goes beyond ordinary human flourishing onthe other (510).

In Taylors series of historical ideal types, the age of mobilization waspreceded by a long epoch in which the social imaginary presumed acosmic society whose hierarchical complementarity was grounded inthe divine will. Order flowed downward from God through the hier-archy, ordering each part of nature and society for the good of thewhole. By contrast, the age of mobilization reflected the growing sensein modernity that institutions were human fabrications, expressive ofhuman aspirations, interests, and power. The age of mobilization, saysTaylor, presupposed that any political, social, or ecclesial structures towhich humans aspired had to be mobilized into existence. That is,members of nations, professions, churches, and increasingly even offamilies did not conceive of themselves as embedded in institutionsthat were ordained by God and integrated in a comprehensive orderof the cosmos but instead as independent individuals, who associatetogether in a society structured for mutual benefit (42372).

Whatever their formal teachings about the nature of the church,Christian communities in the United States have, in fact, participatedin this mobilized framework of activism and choice. Personal adher-


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ence to a church became a choice during the American age of mobi-lization, and adherents experienced their religious communities as in-stitutionally flexible, voluntary, and self-directed, emphasizing personalchoice and the need for adaptive innovation. This mobilization was, inmany respects, spectacularly successful in fabricating new religiousforms that expanded religious adherence and practice in the trans-atlantic world and especially in the United States. And in relation tothe wider public, Americas voluntarily constituted churches and par-achurch organizations justified their continuing importance to civiclife in terms of their mission to instill the values and ideals that trainedup responsible citizens. As Taylor has summarized the process, Godwas perceived at the level of the whole society, as the author of aDesign which this society is undertaking to carry out, and the freechurches acted as instruments of mutual help in which individualsstrengthened one another in ordering their lives along Godly lines.A societal mission advanced through voluntary religious affiliationwould, in the United States, comprise one nation, under God, wherethe Republic secures the freedom of the churches; and the churchessustain the Godly ethos which the Republic requires (453).

But, whatever the consequences for political, economic, and educa-tional institutions, the age of mobilization had far-reaching, unin-tended consequences for the voluntary church because it raised a dis-tinctly theological problem. Having generated an elaborate set ofadaptive institutional forms, which stimulated and organized a long eraof numerical growth of the American churches, the social process offounding, joining, and voluntarily sustaining these institutions raised aquestion about their specifically religious status as bearers of transcen-denceas the Church, with a capital C. If religious community wasbased on the personal decision to affiliate and personal commitmentsto spiritual ideals, what social experience supported the common as-sumption that religion represented an alignment of life with transcend-ing powers or a claim upon the self that originated from beyond theself ? How would persons experience transcendence when the most im-mediate experience of religious participation arose from personalchoice and agency? How did the divine make its appearance or seemto exert its power within this mobilized sociology of religion?

One representation of the divine presence proved, in the long run,both fragile and fractious: the idea that the progress of Western dem-ocratic societies manifested a Design authored of God. During whatTaylor describes as a brief but powerful watershed moment in the1960s, the institutional innovations of the age of mobilization rapidlybegan losing their hold (42425), especially among those churches


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commonly identified as mainstream. When the myth of progress andnational destiny became suspect for many members of these main-stream denominations, it left the churches of voluntary affiliation de-nuded of a major representation of transcendence that had providedthe supporting rationale for their institutional life. In many respects,it seems to me, the popularity of secularization theory during the 1960srepresented a theoretic attempt to understand the loss of persuasivepower in the religious forms created during the age of mobilization(42537).

A second representation of divine presence during the age of mo-bilization took a quite different, noninstitutional form. Taylor notesthat, beginning in the eighteenth century, one reaction to the cool,measured religion of the buffered identity was to stress feeling, emo-tion, a living faith which moves us. . . . One can only connect withGod through the passions and through personal devotional commit-ment (488). During the Romantic period, deeply felt personal insightnow becomes our most precious spiritual resource, and versions ofpersonal, affective religious insight become a hallmark of spiritualitynot only for Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists butalso for a host of nineteenth-century revivalists (489). In Taylorsreading, the nineteenth-century Catholic Church also joined the ageof mobilization, more or less in spite of itself, because of tensionsinherent in the whole long project of reform: the whole drive of theReform movement, from the high Middle Ages, right through Ref-ormation and counter-Reformation, right up through evangelical re-newal and the post-Restoration church, was to make Christians witha strong personal and devotional commitment to God and the faith.But strong personal faith and all-powerful community consensuscant ultimately consist together (46566). The ultramontanechurch had trouble recognizing how contradictory the goal ulti-mately is, of a Church tightly held together by a strong hierarchicalauthority, which will nevertheless be filled with practitioners of heart-felt devotion (466).

We ask, as we did for churchly institutions in the age of mobilization:how does one experience transcendence when the most immediate ex-perience is of religious choice and agency? The answer, in this case, isthrough emotion. Despite what Taylor calls the modern notion of thebuffered self, which does not experience the influence of powers thattranscend the body, the emotions are frequently experienced as be-yond the power of conscious control and decision. One does not de-scribe choosing to feel sad, or angry, or ashamed. The emotions,then, allow for the possibility of modes of transcendence that operate


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within the general framework of Taylors buffered self. And experi-ences that dramatically alter ones personal disposition toward theworld and social relations become a notable feature of spirituality inthe modern West, often a feature that works independently from in-stitutional affiliations. What Taylor calls the expressive revolutionduring the age of mobilization thus gradually undermined the linkbetween the affective interiority of modern faith and the mobilizedinstitutions of modern society (cf. 49192).

Let me conclude by drawing a connection from Taylor to Talal Asadon this issue of the relation between religious faith and ecclesial insti-tutions in modernity. In Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Mo-dernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), Asad empha-sizes the role of state power in the formation of a secular order.Simplified, he argues that the interests of the nation-state swept awayany intermediating communities and authorities that stood betweenthe individual and the state, making citizen the definitive social identity,replacing identities based on religion, gender, family, and so on. Ithink there is something to this. Indeed, the religious consequencesof the general process Asad describes are, I believe, wider than herecognizes. As a concrete example, consider Leigh Eric Schmidts Con-sumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1995). In Schmidts analysis of the role ofAmerican department stores in Christmas celebration, it is not thatChristmas is secularized. Instead, its meaning is directly negotiatedbetween the commercial domain of mass consumption and the reli-gious family. If personal religiosity is directly negotiated with the com-mercial institutions (or with the nation), then the disembedding offaith from communal religious culture that worries Taylor has actuallybeen given a social structure, but it is a social structure that does notrequire (although it certainly permits and even applauds) explicitlyreligious institutions. The citizen consumer can be spiritual, but notreligious.

paul mendes-flohr: modern jewish thought

As the late Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple once observed,God is interested in many things apart from religion. I believe CharlesTaylor would agree that God is not to be confined to the precincts ofprayer and ritual. Indeed, it is the overarching theme of his magisterialstudy that God is still a presence in the space opened up by the processwe are wont to call secularization. Taylor of course means this boththeologically and culturally. But in this new space religionas a spiri-


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tual and moral resourcecoexists with other alternative, secular sys-tems of meaning that have emerged and crystallized with modernity.Hence, if faith in Godor some abiding sense of transcendencestillinforms our public and private lives, it perforce must do so in conver-sation with other nontheistic cognitive orientations. But this conver-sation, I should like to emphasize, does not only take place betweenrepresentatives of these various faith postures but also internally withineach of us as an interminable inner dialogue between a hope groundedin the transcendent and a hope grounded in the promise of quotidian,secular wisdom and well being.29

In his account of the secularization narrative, Charles Taylor ac-knowledges non-Western narratives, in the light of which he criticallynotes the enthocentricity of the Weberean master narrative of modern-ization that has decisively set the contours of the academic discourseon secularization. Nonetheless, his principal focus is the Western nar-rative of secularization. I should like to consider in broad strokes asubspecies of the Western narrative, namely that of European Jewry,more specifically, the Central and West European Jewish encounterwith modernity. The story is markedly different with Italian and EastEuropean Jewries. And oriental Jewry encountered modernity largelyunder the auspices of European colonialism and later Zionism, whichyielded yet another set of narratives. Even the Western Christian nar-rative must be inflected through the contrasting experience of Catholicand Protestant societies with secularization.30

Through the good offices of the European Enlightenment and itsideals of tolerance, the walls of the ghetto, which had restricted theJews not only to residential enclosures but also to cultural and spiritualseclusion, were torn down. As the denizens of the ghetto rushed outto embrace the opportunities afforded them by their liberation fromthe degradation of enforced isolation, they also adopted European sec-ular culture. Despite the extraordinary exuberance that they often dis-played for their new culture, it should be noted that the Jews did notenter modern European society [as did their Christian sponsors] in along process of endogenous gestation and growth, but they plungedinto it as the ghetto walls were being breached, with a bang, though notwithout prolonged whimpers.31 The oy wehs intermingled with the hal-

29 See Jurgen Habermass remarks in his exchange with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (nowPope Benedict), in Jurgen Habermas, Dialektik der Sakulariserung: ber Vernunft und ReligionU(Freiburg: Herder, 2005).

30 Compare Gabriel G. Motzkin, Time and Transcendence: Secular History, the Catholic Reactionand the Rediscovery of the Future (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer, 1992).

31 R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Changing Religions in a Changing World(London: Athlone, 1976), 42.


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lelujahs. The Jewish narrative of secularization is thus a profoundfly am-bivalent one.

This ambivalence may be analyzed from the perspective of three par-allel tracts: the integration of the Jews into modern, that is, secularEuropean society took place on cognitive, axio-normative, and sociallevels.32 Though they may overlap, each of these dimensions of theprocess is distinct. The story, of course, actually began before the Jewsformal emancipation, which, alas, turned out to be a far more pro-tracted affair than simply dismantling the ghetto. The emancipationproceeded incrementally, with many false starts, and was frequentlycontested. Accordingly, the political and social integration of the Jewslagged considerably behind their cognitive integration. Under the tu-telage of Aufklarer such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jews adopted thecognitive culture of the Enlightenment while they were still confinedto the ghetto. Led by the likes of Lessings protege and later mostintimate friend, Moses Mendelssohn, Jews hastened to participate inthe then-unfolding culture of the Enlightenment and the Republic ofReason, in which citizenship was putatively determined by intellectalone. There was a hitch, of course; admission to this Republic was tobe acquired at a far-reaching price. For the cognitive universe spon-sored by the Enlightenment posited the elimination of divine revela-tion as a source of knowledge. The epistemic dignity of Scripture andof the traditions grounded in the revealed Word of God was transferredto reason and empirical experience alone. Cognitive integration thusrequired the jettisoning of Torah and rabbinic wisdom as the ultimatearbiters of truth and meaning.

Axio-normative integration did not always follow suit, at least not inan utterly unambiguous fashion. Even before they crossed the thresh-old of the ghettos gate, Jews were apprised that political and socialacceptance would be conditioned on their Verbersserung, or self-refor-mation. Not only were they expected to shear their beards and sidelocks enjoined by the Torah, but they were to adjust their values andsocial codes to conform with modern European aesthetic and norma-tive sensibilities. Even their best friends, those passionate advocates ofextending to them human rights, assaulted them with negative imagesof themselves and their Asiatic religion. Kant, who proudly cultivatedJewish disciples, scathingly criticized Judaism as Afterdienst, a pseudo-religion, embedded in a spiritually jejune array of heteronomous or

32 This analytical perspective is developed in P. Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intel-lectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 2353.


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legally prescribed rituals.33 In his much acclaimed Dictionary of theGerman Language of 1808, the lexographer Joachim Heinrich Campesought to purge German of the many foreign terms that had vitiatedthe purity of the language; accordingly, he recommended that theword Synagoge, borrowed from the Greek, be replaced by Judenschule,which in German slang denotes a school of unruly pupils, for the Jewshouse of worship is cacophonous and restless, in which everyoneblares something out.34 In response to such criticism, Jews set out tomake aesthetic reforms; they engaged Christian composers to composenewaesthetically refinedmelodies for liturgical worship.35 Thefirst Reform congregation in Berlin in the early eighteenth centuryhired at great expense Friedrich Schleiermacher to instruct them inproper liturgical decorum and to tutor their rabbis how to constructand deliver spiritually edifying sermons.36 Jewish worship was to takeon the veneer of Sittlichkeit or Protestant respectability. But the axio-normative adjustments went far deeper and lacerated the self-image ofJews with deep fears of acting and looking too Jewish. As Sander Gilmanhas recently shown, cosmetic surgery was invented at the turn of theprevious century by Jewish surgeons for a nigh-exclusively Jewish clien-tele.37 In this context one is to appreciate the comedian Jerry Lewissdisarming response to the televised image of heroic Israeli soldiers inthe wake of the Six Days War: Now we can get our noses back.38

Ironic humor, indeed, became one of the characteristic reflexes ofthe Jewish encounter with modernity. The schlemiehl, the antihero, thearchmisfit, as Hannah Arendt and others have noted, was projected asmirror image of the axio-normative foibles of modern, secular society.

33 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), in Religion and RationalTheology, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1996), 17577.

34 Campes definition of Synagoge is entered under Judenschule. Compare Weil es in denJudenschulen bei dem Gottesdienste laut und unruhig hergehet, indem jeder vor sich etwashinplarrt, so sagt man in gemeinem Leben von einem Orte, einer Gesellschaft, wo es larmendund verwirrt hergehet, es sei da wie in einer Judenschule, oder sei da eine Judenschule.Joachim Heinrich Campe, Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Braunschweig: In der Schulbuch-handlung, 1808), pt. 2, 852.

35 Tina Fruhauf, The Organ and Its Music in German Jewish Culture (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2009).

36 Alexander Altmann, Zur Frugeschichte der judischen Predigt in Deutschland, Leo BaeckInstitute Year Book 6 (1961): 359, and The New Style of Preaching in Nineteenth-CenturyGerman Jewry, in Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History, ed. A. Altmann (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 65116ff.

37 Sander L. Gillman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 11756.

38 Compare P. Mendes-Flohr, Anti-Semitism and the Jewish-American Political Experience,in The Changing Face of America, ed. Manochehr Dorraj and Valerie Martinez-Ebers (New York:Oxford University Press, 2008), 293313.


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Through his comical ineptitude, the schlemiehl came to say that successin our achievement-oriented society is not really possible, nor is it ul-timately respectable.39

The schlemiehl thus also came to declare that there are values thattrump the Leistungsprinzip that, as Herbert Marcuse observed, insidi-ously determines the values of Western modernity.40 Indeed, the mod-ern, secularized Jews often clung to some of the more salient valuesand norms of their ancestral traditions or, rather, as Professor Taylornotes with regard to the Christian story he traces, recomposed them.The recomposition of certain features of the axio-normative culture ofJudaism functioned to allow Jews to soften the cognitive and socialdislocation that occurred consequent to their plunge into the whirl-wind of Western, secular modernity. I would point telegraphically tothree axio-normative topoi that are retained, albeit secularized: theintrinsic value of study (Talmud Torah), supererogatory ethical deeds(Gimilut Hasidim), and a pansacramental ethic that implicitly denies anontological divide between the sacred and the profane. I will beginwith the latter: the Sabbath, as observed in traditional Judaism, con-cludes with a ceremony in which God is blessed as one who distin-guishes [or separates] between the holy (qodesh) and the profane(chol ), between light and darkness, . . . between the Seventh Day andthe Six Days of Labor. The tension between the holy and the profanehighlights the significance of the Sabbath as a sacred day of rest andthe days of labor that the Jews are charged to sanctify. The Sabbathmay serve as an ultimate and eschatological [foretaste] of a world re-deemed, fulfilled, and devoid of dialectical tensions,41 but the journeyto Redemption leads through secular time, the Days of Labor, whichare to be sanctified through the ritual and moral precepts set forth bythe Torah.42 As adapted to modern sensibilities, this injunction meansthat the secular cannot be given over totally to instrumental reason.Hence, the secular valorization of supererogatory deeds, those acts ofloving-kindness (hesed), which define a righteous person, although theyare not formally prescribed but nonetheless are desired by God. Yid-

39 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition, in Arguments and Doctrines: AReader in Jewish Thinking after the Holocaust, ed. Arthur A. Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Pub-lication Society of America, 1970), 2935, 3840; and Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

40 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: VintageBooks, 1955), 45.

41 Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity, 53.42 P. Mendes-Flohr, Sakularisierung im modernen Judentum oder zur Dialektitk von Ju-

dentum und Atheismus, in Ein Bruch der Wirklichkeit: Die Realitat der Moderne zwischen Saku-larisierung und Entsakularisierung, ed. Jens Mattern (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2002), 12949.


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dish reflects the secularization of this understanding of the righteousperson when it speaks of a Mensch, a human being who gives of herselfbeyond the call of duty to others, to gestures that render the world alittle bit more decent and compassionate. And the last of these recom-posed or secularized religious virtues is Talmud Torah, the study of To-rah for its own sake as a never-ending obligation of all Jews. Havingan intrinsic merit, learning is not to be shackled to any objectives otherthan the quest for wisdom and understanding.

Undeniably Jews have adapted exceedingly well to Western moder-nity and Zweckrationalitat. Yet, I would venture to say, not without alingering unease. It is perhaps not by chance that Freud entitled oneof his last works, Civilization and Its Discontents. The original Germantitle is more telling: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.43

There is one more feature of modernity that Jews have embracedwith a seeming gusto and yet I would say also with a self-consciousequivocation, namely, history as a process that one is to engage andseek to control by the ploys of politics. Sequestered in the ghetto, theJews bowed passively to the flow of history as the will of Providence,but once they entered the world beyond they were thrust by force ma-jeure into history and confronted with the challenge to direct theirfate by human effort. The encounter with those who opposed their fullemancipation obliged them to organize politically. As this oppositionswelled and took on the ferocity of an aggressive antimodernism, morepopularly known as anti-Semitism, an ever-increasing number of Jewsconcluded that their sorry historical fate could be reversed only if theywould seek political sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. But, alas,the political restoration of their biblical patrimony has not broughtthem to the Promised Land. The seemingly intractable violent con-flictand I now permit myself as an Israeli a confessional voicewithour neighbors brutalizes us no less than the Palestinians. Notwithstand-ing its many blessings, secular modernity has thus left deep, festeringwounds on the body and soul of the Jews.

We Jews cannot return to the ghetto and its blissful detachment fromthe secular world about us, nor do we wish to, but even though manyof us may no longer believe in a personal God, we sure do look forwardto the Coming of the Messiah. And whether his name be the Son ofDavid, or perhaps Barack Obama, as the ancient Jewish prayer has it,may he come quickly in our days.

43 Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna: Internationaler psychoanalytischer,1930).


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richard rosengarten: religion and literature

In what follows, I propose that we consider two aspects of Charles Tay-lors argument in A Secular Age, with special reference to chapters 10and 11, The Expanding Universe of Unbelief and Nineteenth-Cen-tury Trajectories. In these chapters, Professor Taylor describes crucialmoves toward the realization of the age of secularism in the creationof spaces that accommodate, indeed in which can flourish, unbelief.He locates the creation of these spaces in the Victorian era and makeshis case with special reference to England and to artistic expressionmusic and painting, but especially poetry, and, to a slightly lesser butin one instance quite important case, a novel (Robert Elsmere).

In the course of this analysis, Professor Taylor posits a move in aes-thetics from mimesis to creation, by which he wants to suggest that thelanguage of art shifts from a shared set of common reference pointsto the expression of an individual sensibility. This results in a trian-gulation of artistic expression that requires the reader/auditor/viewerto decipher the artists worldview as constructed in the artifact (Taylorcontrasts this experience of art with, e.g., the Renaissance doctrine ofcorrespondences). Poetics thus reflects not public meaning but privatesensibility. Art in turn becomes a separate form of expression ratherthan an integral function of religion, politics, and so forth.

I want to complicate this picture through a brief consideration ofwhat is arguably the preeminent novel of Victorian England, GeorgeEliots Middlemarch (published in 187172 and set in 183032). Inbrief, what I hope to suggest is that Eliots fashioning of her novelssense of the ending complicates Taylors picture of poetics and aes-thetics and in turn the relationship A Secular Age posits between dis-enchantment and the buffered self.

Middlemarch is two stories in one plot, but Eliot concludes the bookby focusing the readers attention upon the ultimate implications ofthe plot for the life, and the significance of the life, of its heroine,Dorothea Brooke. Described at the opening of the novel as a Teresaof Avila in spirit and ability, we meet Dorothea in search of a greatcause to which she might devote herself. The ensuing narrative is thestory of misjudgment and miscalculation. Smitten by rumors of a trans-formative scholarly endeavor, Dorothea marries the much older Caus-abon, whose Key to all Mythologies turns out to lend new meaning to theword stultifying and whose numbing demands for devotion and sol-itude ever more steadily isolate Dorothea from the world that she soearnestly wishes to change. In the midst of this dawning discovery, Do-rothea meets a man who is her match in age as well as passionper-haps her John of the Crossnamed Will Ladislaw, an artist with great


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fellow feeling for Dorothea but whose work is in any event no moreconnected than was Causabons scholarship to the improvement of theworld. Dorothea finally puts her faith, in the form of her inheritance,in the practice of Dr. Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious physician whowishes to make a name for himself by providing modern medical careto the citizens of Middlemarch and beyond: while Lydgates ambitionmost closely approximates Dorotheas envisioned great cause, Lydgateis himself undone by a wife whose social ambition exceeds her younghusbands growing salary. A chastened Dorothea is, at the conclusionof the novel, concentrating on the poor of the community of Middle-march, doing what she can to provide housing and other public ser-vices for them.

The cumulative effect of this assault on Dorotheas ideals is renderedby Eliot as a recipe for disenchantment: no discernible Providenceguides this narrative, so that Dorothea must rely upon her own re-sources both to make sense of what has happened to her and to findher way forward in the world. And in the concluding words of thisimmense narrative, Eliot wishes to underscore both the disenchant-ment of Dorotheas world and the fact that in finding her way forward,she has in fact keyed into something broadly providential:

Her finely-touched spirit still had its fine issues, though they were not widelyvisible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spentitself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of herbeing on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good ofthe world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so illwith you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number wholived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.44

In one crucial sense this passages eloquence resides in its gracenotesif we might call them thatof disenchantment: those who as-pire, as did Dorothea, to be historic are in fact not, and the narratorscharacterizations of the implications for our human condition involvequalifications (not so ill with you and me and half owing) that donot suggest a happy default setting to the general quality of experi-ence. The tombs of these good people are not empty, just unvisited;to live faithfully a hidden life results not in beatific union but an un-tended gravestone.

This seeming melancholy is indisputably part of the lesson of Mid-dlemarch. But it is only part. The other, at least equal, part is containedin the preceding lines, in which we are told that Dorotheas staunchspirit remained, that it was incalculably diffusive, andthe key point

44 George Eliot, Middlemarch (187172; repr., London: Penguin, 2004), 838.


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for Eliotthat it issued in real and decisive change. We might put itin this way: at least for Dorotheaand by implication, for most of usthe good of the world grows because of unhistoric acts. The fact thatwe habitually forget the ritual placements that enshrine those acts doesnothing to diminish their reality. The closing sentence includes bothadmonition and affirmation: we had best never forget that our lives arebetter for those who preceded us. Never forget. And they are better.

It has been persuasively argued that this ending of Middlemarch re-flects Eliots own disenchantment with, and discarding of, her Chris-tian faith. The interesting question for students of our modern situa-tion, however, is less that indisputable datum and much more whetherthis means in turn that religion does not play a role in the novel. Iwould argue that it does, for reasons that go precisely to the questionof the individual life and its unhistoric acts. I would put the matterthis way: Dorothea is buffeted by events, but she is not buffered. Sheis in fact exemplary, by the conclusion of the novel, of Eliots religiousconviction: namely, that the world without God has a subtle and deter-mined magic of its own, no less diminished for our failures to testify toits presence. It is a world of interrelation, in which charity and loveprevail not because they will lead us directly to the heavenly host butbecause the magic resides in the affirmation of the growing good ofthe world.

All this has particular historical resonance when we remember thatthe novel was written at the end of the great upheaval of voting rightsin England and indeed is set precisely at the time of the first ReformBill, which extended the franchise to 650,000 males. While Eliots de-cision to make her protagonist female affords in the novel explicitcritique of the exclusion of women from the bill, it is also the case thatshe saw in it a move to democracy that clarified the role of charity andlent it metaphysical, if not classic theological, credence. Private sensi-bility and public meaning are, then, yoked together: the will to dogood in the world, rendered in Dorotheas indomitable if challengedspirit, has as its counterpart the affirmation that her work does indeedmatter. Middlemarch celebrates a democracy of the human spirit that pro-pounds a vision of the individual not as buffered by an absence of en-chantment but as more fully engaged with variegated humanity in all itspitfalls and its glories.

So what I suggest is that in Eliots novel we have in fact an exampleof explicit disenchantment that is not intended, so far as I can see, tocarry with it the consequence of the buffered individualindeed, Eliotseems to have envisioned something very different. And we have a po-etics of literary form that is incipiently linked with the political. We


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are invited, by the novels title as well as its execution, to think of themany towns in England that are becoming enfranchised and to con-template, in the vicissitudes of their decisively local behavior, the im-plications of the Reform Bill for wise governance. There is, Eliot wouldsuggest, ample reason for worry about instances of pettiness, greed,and insularity, but there are also myriad instancesnot merely involv-ing Dorothea, although concentrated in herof generosity of spirit.The keynote to distinguishing the one from the other is in fact thissense of interconnected individuals and of attention to the growinggood of the world.

It is at least arguable, then, that in this case the ontic space openedby what J. Hillis Miller once termed the disappearance of God didnot counsel despair but a stoicism that frames a fundamental ethic ofcharity.45 The quality of porousness becomes horizontal rather thanvertical. The immanent is rendered, in its projected effects, transcen-dent. Whether and how that ethic would be sustained is an importantquestion, and whether Eliotwhose work is deeply inflected by herknowledge of historical criticism of the Bible and intensive engage-ment with Feuerbachrepresents an unusual sensibility, is another.But it does seem to suggest a moment in the process when disenchant-ment prefigured an alternative religiosity that also comprises our sec-ular age.

martin riesebrodt: sociology of religion

Overall I am widely in agreement with Professor Taylor. Therefore Iwill comment only on three points without strongly disagreeing on anyof them.

I. Sociological Narratives of Secularization

Secularization is a complicated, complex, and often muddled concept.Taylors distinction between three kinds of secularity makes sense. Hecalls them secularity 1 (retreat of religion in public life), secularity 2(decline of beliefs and practices), and secularity 3 (change in the con-ditions of belief, or the eme

Grappling With Charles Taylor a Secular Age

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