Paying Attention To The Sky

These are my reading notes and selections from the opening chapters of A Secular Age which lay out the framework for the rest of the book. It’s 872 pages and although I found it readable and will return to it, I’ve decided to take the advice of another reader to read the shorter A Catholic Modernity? (Oxford University Press, 1999) The latter is a published version of the Marianist Lecture that Dr. Taylor gave in Dayton where he casts the issue of how the Catholic Church should relate to the modern world. In the meantime these reading selections give a good overview of A Secular Age and function as a companion post to the interview and selections from the 2007 Templeton Prize speech I featured yesterday.

I think A Secular Age is one of the most important books for those of us who think about the religious landscape in America because it has wonderful concepts like “the buffered self” and “subtraction stories” that go a long way to explain the secular society Catholics live in. Elsewhere on this blog you will find many references to Michael Novak’s No One Sees God,  another book that helps Catholics understand the phenomena of atheism in relationship to their faith.

Belief And Unbelief: Living Lives That Have A Certain Moral/Spiritual Shape
I want to talk about belief and unbelief, not as rival theories, that is, ways that people account for existence, or morality, whether by God or by something in nature, or whatever. Rather what I want to do is focus attention on the different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding your life in one way or the other, on what it’s like to live as a believer or an unbeliever….

We all see our lives and/or the space wherein we live our lives as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness: that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, or admirable, more what it should be. This is perhaps a place of power: we often experience this as deeply moving, as inspiring. Perhaps this sense of fullness is something we just catch glimpses of from afar off; we have the powerful intuition of what fullness would be, were we to be in that condition, e.g., of peace or wholeness: or able to act on that level of integrity or generosity or abandonment or self-forgetfulness. But sometimes there will moments of experienced fullness, of joy and fulfillment, where we feel ourselves there. Let one example, drawn from the autobiography of Bede Griffiths, stand for many:

“One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I though that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before, If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song over my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth, I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.”

Modern Unbelievers: The Power Within
For modern unbelievers…the power to reach fullness is within. There are different variations of this. One is that which centers on our nature as rational beings. The Kantian variation is the most upfront form of this. We have the power as a rational agency to make the laws by which we live. This is something so greatly superior to the force of mere nature in us, in the form of desire, that when we contemplate it without distortion, we cannot but feel reverence (Achtung) for this power.

The place of fullness is where we manage finally to give this power full reign, and so to live by it. We have a feeling of receptivity, when with our full sense of our own fragility and pathos as desiring beings, we look up to the power of law-giving with admiration and awe. But this doesn’t in the end mean that there is any reception from outside; the power is within; and the more we realize this power, the more we become aware that it is within, that morality must be autonomous (functioning independently without control by others) and not heteronomous (subject to another’s laws or rule).

Later a Feuerbachian theory of alienation can be added to this: we project God because of our early sense of this awesome power which we mistakenly place outside us; we need to appropriate it for human beings. But Kant didn’t take this step. …There may be a more rigorous naturalism…but within this kind of naturalism, we often find an admiration for the power of cool, disengaged reason, capable of contemplating the world and human life without illusion and of acting lucidly for the best in the interest of human flourishing.

A certain awe still surrounds reason as a critical power, capable of liberating us from illusion and blind forces of instinct, as well as the phantasies bred of our fear and narrowness and pusillanimity (timidity, cowardliness, irresolute; faintheartedness). The nearest thing to fullness lies in this power of reason, and it is entirely ours, developed if it is through our own, often heroic action. (And here the giants of modern “scientific” reason are often named: Copernicus, Darwin, Freud. ….

The sources of power are not transcendent (existing apart from the material universe: said of God). They are to be found in Nature, or in our own inner depths, or in both. We can recognize theories of immanence (present throughout the universe: said of God) …most notably certain ecological ethics of our day, particularly deep ecology (ecology = relations between living organisms and their environment; deep ecology= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology) …(These) views have certain analogies to the religious reaction to the unbelieving Enlightenment, in that they stress reception over against self-sufficiency; but they are views which intend to remain immanent, and are often as hostile, if not more so, to religion than the disengaged ones.

The Presumption Of Unbelief
We have changed from a condition in which belief was the default option, not just fit for the naive but also for those who knew, considered, talked abut atheism; to a condition in which for more and more people unbelieving construals seem at first blush the only plausible ones. They can only approach, without ever gaining the condition of “naïve” atheists, in the way that their ancestors were naive, semi-pagan  believers; but this seems to them the overwhelming plausible construal, and it is difficult to understand people adopting another. So much so that they easily reach for rather gross error theories to explain religious belief: people are afraid of uncertainty, the unknown; they’re weak in the head, crippled by guilt, etc.

That is not to say that everyone is in this condition. Our modern civilization is made up of a host of societies, sub-societies and milieu, all rather different from each other. But the presumption of unbelief has become dominant in more and more other milieu; and has achieved hegemony in certain crucial ones, in the academic and intellectual life, for instance; whence it can more easily extend itself to others….To put the point in different terms, belief in God isn’t quite the same thing in 1500 and 2000.

The Shift In Background: Understanding The Differences In Terms Of Experience And Sensibility
It is this shift in background, in the whole context in which we experience and search for fullness that I am calling the coming of a secular age….How did we move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naively 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?…

We have to understand the differences between these two options not just in terms of creeds, but also in terms of differences of experience and sensibility. And on this latter level, we have to take account of two important differences: first, there is the massive change in the whole background of belief or unbelief, that is the passing to the earlier “naïve framework, and the rise of the “reflective” one. And secondly we have to be aware of how believers and unbelievers can experience their world very differently….

We have moved from a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of “beyond” human life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is challenged by others which place it (in a wide range of different ways) “within” human life.

An Immanent Order In Nature: The Great Invention Of The West
The great invention of the West was that of an immanent order in Nature, whose working could be systematically understood and explained on its own terms, leaving open the question whether this whole order had a deeper significance, and whether, if it did, we should infer a transcendent Creator beyond it.

This notion of the “immanent” involved denying – or at least isolating and problematizing – any form of interpenetration between the things of Nature on one hand and the “supernatural” on the other, this understood in terms of the one transcendent God,  or of Gods, or magic forces, or whatever.

The Resources That Society Offers
Every person, and every society, lives with or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is: What constitutes a fulfilled life? What makes life really worth living? What would we most admire people for? We can’t help asking these and related questions in our lives. And our struggles to answer them define the view or views that we try to live by, or between which we hover.

At another level these views are codified, sometimes in philosophical theories, sometimes in moral codes, sometimes in religious practices and devotion. Those and the various ill-formulated practices which people around us engage constitute the resources that our society offers each one of us as we try to lead our lives….

Buddhism and Christianity
In both Buddhism and Christianity, there is something similar to spite of the great difference in doctrine, This is that the believer or devout person is called on to make a profound inner break with the goals of flourishing in their own case; they are called on, that is, to detach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of the extinction of self in one case, or to that of renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God. The respective patterns are clearly visible in the exemplary figures. The Buddha achieves Enlightenment; Christ consents to a degrading death to follow his Father’s will….

In the Christian case, the very point of renunciation requires that the ordinary flourishing forgone be confirmed as valid. Unless living the full span were a good, Christ’s giving of himself to death couldn’t have the meaning it does. In this it is utterly different from Socrates’ death, which the latter portrays as leaving this condition for a better one.

Here we see the unbridgeable gulf between Christianity and Greek philosophy. God wills ordinary human flourishing, and a great part of what is reported in the Gospels consists in Christ making this possible for the people whose afflictions he heals. The call to renounce doesn’t negate the value of flourishing; it is rather a call to center everything on God, even if it be at the cost of forgoing this un-substitutable good; and the fruit of this forgoing is that it become on one level the source of flourishing to others, and on another level, a collaboration with the restoration of a fuller flourishing by God. It is a mode of healing wounds and “repairing the world” (Here I am borrowing the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam).

This means that flourishing and renunciation cannot simply be collapsed into each other to make a single goal, by as it were, pitching the renounced goods overboard as unnecessary ballast on the journey of life, in the manner of Stoicism. There remains a fundamental tension in Christianity. Flourishing is good, nevertheless seeking it is not our ultimate goal. But even where we renounce it, we re-affirm it, because we follow God’s will in being a channel for it to others, and ultimately to all….

Buddhism also has this notion that the renouncer is source of compassion for those who suffer. There is an analogy between karuna and agape. And over the centuries in Buddhist civilization there developed parallel with Christendom, a distinction of vocation between radical renouncers, and those who go on living within the forms of life aiming at ordinary flourishing, while trying to accumulate merit or a future life.

Self-Sufficient Humanism And The Secular Age
Now the point in bringing out this distinction between human flourishing and the goals which go beyond it is this. I would like to claim that the coming of modern secularity in my sense has been coterminous with the rise of society in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true. …

A secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing become conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of people. This is the crucial link between secularity and self-sufficing humanism.

A Polemic Against “Subtraction Stories”
I will be making a continuing polemic against what I call “subtraction stories”. Concisely put, I mean by this stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier confining horizons , or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.

What emerges from this process –modernity or secularity – is to be understood in terms of underlying features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside. Against this kind of story, I will steadily be arguing that Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.

Three Modes Of God’s Felt Presence That Disappeared
One important part of the picture (why it was virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500 while in 2000 many find this not only easy but inescapable.

(1)  The natural world they lived in, which had its place in the cosmos they imagined, testified to divine purpose and action; and not just in the obvious way which we can still understand and (at least many of us) appreciate today, that its order and design bespeaks creation, but also because the great events in this natural order, storms, droughts, floods, plagues, as well as years of exceptional fertility and flourishing were seen as acts of God, as the now dead metaphor of our legal language still bears witness.

(2)  God was also implicated in the very existence of society (but not descried as such — this is a modern term – rather as polis, kingdom, church or whatever). A kingdom could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than mere human action in secular time. And beyond that, the life of the various associations which made up society, parishes, boroughs, guilds, and so on, were interwoven with ritual and worship…. Once could not but encounter God everywhere.

(3)  People lived in an “enchanted” world. This is perhaps not the best expression; it seems to evoke light and fairies, But I am invoking here its negation, Weber’s expression “disenchantment” as a  description of our modern condition. …The enchanted world in this sense is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in.

…Now the disappearance of these three modes of God’s felt presence in our world, while it certainly facilitates this change, couldn’t by itself bring it about. Because we can certainly go on experiencing fullness as gift from God, even in a disenchanted world, a secular society, and a post-cosmic universe. In order to be able not to, we needed an alternative.

And so the story …will relate not only how God’s presence receded in these three dimensions; it also has to tell how something other than God could become the necessary objective pole of moral or spiritual aspiration of “fullness.” …What I’ll be concerned with is the Entstehungsgeschichte (developing history) of exclusive humanism.

Modern (Exclusive )Humanism Produced A Substitute For Agapē: The Buffered Self
In this respect, of course, science is helping to disenchant the universe, contributed to opening the way for exclusive humanism. A crucial condition for this was new sense of the self and its place in the cosmos: not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers, but what I want to call “buffered.” But it took more than disenchantment to produce the buffered self; it was also necessary to have confidence in our own powers of moral ordering…

It had to include the active capacity to shape and fashion our world, natural and social; and it had to be actuated by some drive to human beneficence. To put this second requirement in a way which refers back to the religious tradition, modern humanism, in addition to being activist and interventionist (like Epicureanism, that taught ataraxia — ataraxia was synonymous with the only true happiness possible for a person. It signifies the detached and balanced state of mind that shows that a person has transcended the material world and is now harvesting all the comforts of philosophy had to produce some substitute for agapē. …This couldn’t be done overnight.