Morris's Review of Charles Taylor's Presentation

Professor Charles Taylor has written what is certainly the most important book about religion and spirituality in our world today. His work, A Secular Age, gives a history and a very detailed description of how our own age has become a secular one. It won the world’s most prestigious prize for a work on religion—the Templeton Prize, worth 1.5 million dollars in 2007, and marvelous to say, it also won the 2008 Kyoto prize, worth 0.5 million dollars, which was presented at the Kokusai Kaikan in northern Kyoto on November 10. I attended his lecture the following day, and his Workshop the next day, Nov. 12., and was able to meet him and speak briefly with him during a coffee break. Since we of the Kyoto Cosmos Club have devoted two of our monthly meeting to discussions of A Secular Age I believe that it is worthwhile reporting on his lecture and workshop and my meeting with him.
During our May Kyoto Cosmos Club our member, Gordon Maclaren gave his presentation on the first three Parts of Prof. Taylor’s mammoth book—those three Parts are actually the contents of his 1999 Gifford Lectures. The first point Taylor makes is to define what he means by the word, “secular”. He says it has three meanings: 1) The first is “public spaces . . .allegedly emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimate reality. . . economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational…” However, this in no way presumes that God or religion is not present. In fact it simply means that Church and State, etc. are separated. 2) A second meaning does indeed imply “a falling off of religious belief and practice, of people turning away from God and no longer going to Church.” 3) Taylor himself prefers a third meaning that is closely related to the second, but also connected to the first. “ The change I want to define and trace [in this book] is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God to one in which faith . . . is one human possibility among others.”
Taylor’s genius in these “Parts” of the book is to simply but very carefully and in great detail trace how Europe and American went from almost universal believe in the early Renaissance where every natural event from storms to droughts, to floods, to fertility of both fields and living creatures were direct—almost magical—acts of God, to the rise of science from Galileo to Newton and onwards where slowly these things were seen as natural events, even while belief in God was never questioned. He shows how the Protestant Reformation broke the strangle hold on doctrine and morality held by Pope and allowed religious people to begin to be free to think for themselves. From St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas eight hundred years later, Christians relied on the ancient Greek philosophers from Plato to Aristotle and “baptized” their notion of the immaterial soul as the seat of reason and natural truth. But Part Two shows us how Protestant brought Christian faith and morality into existence as “disciplines”. The “natural law” had been basic to Aquinas, but now people like Locke and Descartes saw it as coming primarily from the human mind—Cogito ergo sum”. It was truly natural and voluntaristic: people had to want to do these things. Divine Providence still oversaw everything and urged Christian behavior but God did these things from far away. The notion of God as winding the natural cosmic clock as a mechanical thing, and men as slowly understanding through science what makes it tic and more and more exactly how it tics.
Part Three, The Great Disembedding, tells the story of how science and philosophy in the seventeen and eighteenth century slowly disembedded the sacred from the cosmos. Democracy beheaded sacred kings, and made the people themselves to be sovereign. At first, as Kant taught, the phenomenal world of mathematics and mechanics, explained things, but Kant was convinced that the divine noumenal was still there behind it all, overseeing it all in a sort of deistic manner. Slowly, however, after the French Revolution threw out the Church and its Cardinals and Bishops as the other half of the divine order of king and Church, a religious vacuum began to grow in Europe. In America it was for religious as well as for political reasons that the U.S. Constitution declared that religion and politics as well as other non-religious cultural systems should be separate. Religion therefore remained a positive element during the ensuing century and a half, but in North American too, religion slowly began to lose out to science as the important mode of understanding the ultimate nature of reality.
I, Morris Augustine, offered a presentation on the next part of the book during our June meeting. Taylor explains that he felt that many important aspects of the “secular age” and how it came to be was not adequately dealt with in his Gifford lectures, so when he decided to publish them he added and additional two more Parts, and they were made up of Chapters 12 through 20, plus an Epilogue. Chapter 12, The Age of Mobilization, deals with the very wide range of changes and developments that occurred after the French and American revolutions. First, he notes how secularism in the third sense of people ceasing to go to Church, even in the “new world” of the Americas. On the other hand he takes note of a secession of “Great Awakenings” that brought back religious fervor, especially in the New World. A third sign of mobility took place in the 1960s. He deals with the phenomena of the hippies, “free speech movements” and the anti-Vietnam movements. Then there was the “death of God” movement; it got its start at the time of Friedrich Nietzsche and then Dostoevesky’s Notes from the Underground in the mid and late nineteenth century. A new wave of the same sentiment and thought took place with the rise of the existentialist movement so that in the twentieth century one saw not only blatantly anti-religion writing of Jean-Paul Sartre, but even Christian theologians who saw the old God of the Old and New Testaments to be more or less dead, but Christianity still vibrant via a large wave of de-mythologization in the light or our new understandings of nature of the cosmos and the evolution of life on our planet. All this was seen as a coming to head of the ideas launched by John Locke and Decartes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of Rousseau’s The Social Contract in the eighteenth century and finally the revolt of Karl Marx against the excesses of labor abuses during the Industrial Revolution, followed by the founding of the anti-religious Communist Party by Lenin and its victory in Russia at the time of the First World War—which party promptly demonstrated that a religionless party would not only not cure the ills of abuse, but foster a whole new set of them, especially under Stalin.
Chapter 13, The Age of Authenticity, deals with the rise of a new wave of literature, typified by Marcel Proust and Rilke, but also with a new understanding of Emile Durkheim’s notion of the anthropology of religion. Clifford Geertz and his friend Robert N. Bellah brought fourth a notion of a neo-Durhheimian motion of religion as a type of symbolic but sui generis truth; this was similar to the notion of Thomas S. Kuhn that even scientific truth literally changes and develops. Kuhn’s notion was developed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chapter 14, Religion Today, dramatizes the difference the above new insights made in modern religion. In both Protestant and Catholic theology the slavery became immoral—even though not apparently accepted in the Scriptures, whereas usury of taking interest on money lending ceased to become sinful and became an essential part of accepted economic systems. Many other rejections, such as the 77% of Catholics who simply rejected Pope Paul VI’s declaration that any form of birth control was immoral. The New Age of Religion has arrived, and included Christians and Buddhists coming to recognize that they were in a sense brothers and sisters.
The last major segment, Part Five, The Conditions of Belief, centers around the notion launched in Chapter 15, The Immanent Frame. Since magic and various kinds of supernatural beings like demons, angels and the like have lost their hold on most educated and informed people Christians of the “Latin West” live, today in the “Immanent Frame” of the world that science has slowly revealed to us. This by no means excludes the existence of God as in some way the creator or the immanent driver of this cosmos, but it has had the effect of leaving most people in Europe and more and more in America no longer feeling that Church attendance is importance, and has left vast numbers if not the majority of people simply without any religious believe at all, or at least with anything more than a vague sense of some indefinable transcendent Ultimate. Taylor explains that he felt that many important aspects of the “secular age” and how it came to be was not adequately dealt with in his Gifford lectures, so when he decided to publish them he added and additional two more Parts, and they were made up of Chapters 12 through 20, plus an Epilogue. Chapter 12, The Age of Mobilization, deals with the very wide range of changes and developments that occurred after the French and American revolutions. First, he notes how secularism in the third sense of people ceasing to go to Church, even in the “new world” of the Americas. On the other hand he takes note of a secession of “Great Awakenings” that brought back religious fervor, especially in the New World. A third sign of mobility took place in the 1960s. He deals with the phenomena of the hippies, “free speech movements” and the anti-Vietnam movements. Then there was the “death of God” movement; it got its start at the time of Friedrich Nietzsche and then Dostoevesky’s Notes from the Underground in the mid and late nineteenth century. A new wave of the same sentiment and thought took place with the rise of the existentialist movement so that in the twentieth century one saw not only blatantly anti-religion writing of Jean-Paul Sartre, but even Christian theologians who saw the old God of the Old and New Testaments to be more or less dead, but Christianity still vibrant via a large wave of de-mythologization in the light or our new understandings of nature of the cosmos and the evolution of life on our planet. All this was seen as a coming to head of the ideas launched by John Locke and Decartes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of Rousseau’s The Social Contract in the eighteenth century and finally the revolt of Karl Marx against the excesses of labor abuses during the Industrial Revolution, followed by the founding of the anti-religious Communist Party by Lenin and its victory in Russia at the time of the First World War—which party promptly demonstrated that a religionless party would not only not cure the ills of abuse, but foster a whole new set of them, especially under Stalin.
Chapter 13, The Age of Authenticity, deals with the rise of a new wave of literature, typified by Marcel Proust and Rilke, but also with a new understanding of Emile Durkheim’s notion of the anthropology of religion. Clifford Geertz and his friend Robert N. Bellah brought fourth a notion of a neo-Durhheimian motion of religion as a type of symbolic but sui generis truth; this was similar to the notion of Thomas S. Kuhn that even scientific truth literally changes and develops. Kuhn’s notion was developed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chapter 14, Religion Today, dramatizes the difference the above new insights made in modern religion. In both Protestant and Catholic theology the slavery became immoral—even though not apparently accepted in the Scriptures, whereas usury of taking interest on money lending ceased to become sinful and became an essential part of accepted economic systems. Many other rejections, such as the 77% of Catholics who simply rejected Pope Paul VI’s declaration that any form of birth control was immoral. The New Age of Religion has arrived, and included Christians and Buddhists coming to recognize that they were in a sense brothers and sisters.
The last major segment, Part Five, The Conditions of Belief, centers around the notion launched in Chapter 15, The Immanent Frame. Since magic and various kinds of supernatural beings like demons, angels and the like have lost their hold on most educated and informed people Christians of the “Latin West” live, today in the “Immanent Frame” of the world that science has slowly revealed to us. This by no means excludes the existence of God as in some way the creator or the immanent driver of this cosmos, but it has had the effect of leaving most people in Europe and more and more in America no longer feeling that Church attendance is importance, and has left vast numbers if not the majority of people simply without any religious believe at all, or at least with anything more than a vague sense of some indefinable transcendent Ultimate.
On November 12 I met Professor Charles Taylor, one of the three winners of Kyoto Prize; I met and spoke with him briefly during an intermission to his Workshop. Taylor had begun his lecture by a brief biography. He had majored in philosophy at McGill University and then went on to the Ph. D. in Philosophical Anthropology on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford. Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger were chief influences, but they were always seen in the light of his Catholic faith. The mind-body complex became the center of his interest for a time: was the “soul” really a separate entity from the human brain, as had been presumed since Plato and Aristotle and baptized by the Christian Church? This dilemma was part of his first major book: The Stages of the Self. Soon religion in our secular age became the center of his interest and was the heart of his Gifford Lectures in 1999 and his A Secular Age in 2007.The remainder of his lecture centered on his ideas concerning place of the spiritual in today’s secular world.

The Workshop consisted of a brief introductory talk by Taylor followed by comments on A Secular Age and his comments from a panel of Japanese professors from major universities in Japan. The centers of Taylor’s brief introductory talk was what he called the “Stadial Theory” regarding the development of cultures, and the development of religion in these cultures. It is generally agreed among anthropologists that early humans proceeded from the hunter-gather stage, through the agricultural stage and on though the industrial age and now the information age. Taylor agued against the “subtraction theory: that once one stage has moved into the next it leaves behind the former stage. . He also argued against the “ Linear Theory” whereby the human race goes in a straight line from one of these stages to the next. Hence he argued that religion was by no means dead in the secular age, but that it had developed very new forms of many kinds. Many of his panel of professors took basic issue with his insistence that religion could really have a place in the new “Immanent Frame” of the scientific understanding of our cosmos and of the human brain. Taylor never argued in his responses to each of the panelists. Rather he apologized that his explanations were poor and his writing less than clear and easily misunderstood.

My golden change came to meet him personally during a coffee-break at the Workshop. We talked about his pages in the book that won him both the Templeton Prize and the Kyoto Prize: A Secular Age. Our brief discussion focused on New Age Religion, and what he had written on this subject on pages 495 and 520. This is the last part of Chapter 13, The Age of Authenticity, and Chapter 14, Religion Today. The Age of Authenticity focused on the 1960s with such things as the Free Speech movement, the Sexual Freedom movement, and the Anti-Vietnam War movement that raged not just in Berkeley, CA but all over the U.S. especially on university campuses but in the streets as well--in Germany (the Red Army), in France, in England and in many other countries as well.

But what Taylor notes is that this was a period of a New Age in the Catholic Church and well as many of the Protestant churches but in Buddhism and Hinduism as well. The Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council declared, that every human being and every country should have freedom of religion and freedom of conscience as well. The Council's Declaration on Non-Christian religions declared that all religions must be respected for the vast amount of truth and high moral teachings that each contains. The Protestant World Council of Churches has already declared much the same thing. Major Protestant and Catholic theologians went much further and many began to have close links with various sects of Buddhism and Hinduism and began a series of major encounters together. Professor Taylor agreed that this phenomena too were a part and parcel of New Age Religion.

In the U.S. Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago launched the “Call to Action” movement which continues today. But it has gone far beyond the Bernadin's original vision. It sees birth control not only as not bad but a necessary thing, recognizes the right of homosexual love between consenting individuals, and their marriage. It also has a rather large number of married priests, as well as a small number of woman priests as well. Its annual meeting in Milwaukee draws thousands of Catholics from every State. European Catholicism and Protestantism have similar movements. So Professor Taylor agreed that New Age Religion take many forms. Of course New Age Religion has brought back forms of witchcraft, shamanism, polytheism and many other forms. Basically New Age religion, we agreed, often has "belief but not community" Taylor quotes Robert Bellah as saying that "nothing ever really dies" in the many ages of religious evolution that has always proceeded in a non-linear fashion.

I invite the comments of both members and anyone else. These will be judged as to suitability and decency and published on our blog-page.

Morris Augustine, President