Charles Taylor's Critique of "Secularisation"

Michael Paul Gallagher, SJ

Issue 388, vol.97, Winter 2008

He situates the crucial change, however, on the level of the “social imaginary” of people - involving deeper shifts of spiritual sensibility (e.g., a shrinking of the desires and horizons of the self).

He regards the birth of atheism as less a cognitive crisis than a complex transformation of moral sensibility. He would wish to see people’s horizon enlarged : from the world of ideas to the world of imagination – where assumptions are lived out in “practices” or ways of life. He distances himself from a narrowly “epistemological model” which assumes that only “explicit” knowledge is dependable, and which therefore forgets the tacit zone of understanding (so prized in the search for truth mapped out by John Henry Newman).

Modern atheism was born, holds Taylor, when defenders of the existence of God adopted an apologetic which was basically deist – and which abandoned Christological revelation, or “religious experience”, or anything resembling the (e.g., Franciscan) affective response to the Christ-figure. A sense of fully human relationship with the mystery of a God reaching out to us, was diminished – and in its place came an emphasis on human benevolence as a human ideal. The horizon of hope, then, became closed in on the human person – “immanentised”, and excluding love as God’s gift (or ‘grace’). Soon, the image of an indifferent God was widespread. Human beings came to visualize themselves as obeying a divine monarch through their own moral dispositions. Deism had become a halfway house on the road to contemporary atheism.

With the Romantic movement, an older sense of transcendent mystery was relocated “within us” as “anthropological depth”. Over time, people succeeded in imagining full human flourishing detached from any transcendent desire…“What I’m interested in”, argues Taylor, “is how our sense of things, our cosmic imaginary, our whole background understanding and feel of the world has been transformed”.

Despite everything, Taylor is adamant that “the human aspiration to religion” survives all types of secularisation – and that what is needed is to create “forms of spiritual practice” in tune with the sensibility of today. “The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development”. Today’s cultural climate may seem totally secular – but it can often be expressing a spiritual hunger for fullness : what is called for, is a creative discernment of those underlying hungers.

Michael Paul Gallagher, S.J. lectures in theology at the Gregorian University, Rome