After the Future:

Part 2. Reform: The Rage for Order

Many societies have moments of 'reform', but Taylor wants to make the case that the rage for Reform in the Latin West was unique and was central to the emergence there of the secular society Westerners introduced to the world. As described in Part I, before the reform bug bit elites in the West, a system of spiritual hierarchical complementarity developed in Christian societies in which almost everyone was nominally Christian, but some Christians, a minority, felt compelled to leave the world to go into monasteries, while ordinary householders, tradesmen, magistrates, soldiers, etc., lived with varying degrees of religious commitment in the secular world.

There was in that ancient Catholic arrangement a sense of higher and lower vocations--or vocations at different speeds--that correlated with spiritual/secular. There was always a tension between the two because of the disembedding challenge that the spiritual posed to the secular, but the arrangement remained fairly stable until a shift began around the turn of the first millennium, and a desire arose among educated elites to raise the standards of Christian practice in the secular world.

The secular majority, like humans everywhere, was concerned primarily with ordinary human flourishing, and its spiritual practice was for the most part subordinated to those ends. Everyone, secular and spiritual alike, lived in an enchanted world, but the religious practice for those who lived in the secular world focused mainly on the need to contend with malign spirits and to propitiate benign ones in order to obtain the good health, long life, prosperity, and other forms of success that are important for humans everywhere.

For the majority of European Christians, Germanic or Celtic pagan practices and beliefs were merged syncretically with Christian practices and beliefs, but in a way that tipped more toward pre-Axial concerns than toward the post-Axial challenge posed by the gospels. These practices were more about ordinary human flourishing than about spiritual transformation. And so the religious practice for most Christians was mostly concerned with managing their lives in an enchanted economy in which you engaged in ritual practices--beating the bounds, Ember Days, the veneration of relics, and the propitiation of spiritual beings--the Virgin, the saints, etc., and all of these practices came to be seen by the Reformers as a 'white magic'.

The monastic minority also lived in an enchanted world, but the religious task for those in it was to transcend secular concerns with ordinary human flourishing by aligning their lives with a higher "Good", and that required living according to different norms defined by values that were outside the secular worldly system, so to say. As early as the 3rd century, this minority faction left the "world" to live as hermits in the Egyptian desert, and then later, as the Roman Empire in the West collapsed, they went into the monasteries founded on the Benedictine Rule.

These spiritual 'virtuosi', to use Weber's term, were a sign to everyone living in the secular world that there was a higher possibility, that there was something more to which one could aspire that lay outside secular preoccupations. But since that life in pursuit of the higher had stricter moral norms and required renunciatory practices and disciplines, it was a life chosen only by a minority. (It's the same in Buddhist societies.) As with all things human, some who rose to this post-Axial, soul-transformative challenge were more successful than others. But that some were successful cannot be denied: great saints, mystics, and philosophers were nurtured in that old system, from Hildegard of Bingen and Hugh of St. Victor, to Francis, Bonaventure, Catherine of Sienna, and Aquinas, through Eckhart--and later John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.These are all people who climbed to the mountain top, breathed in its cold, thin air, and returned to tell the rest of us what they experienced about the transcendent Real there.

There was an assumption among elites, carried to an extreme later with Calvinist ideas of predestination, that most people were damned, and the proof of it was the dissolute, quasi-pagan lives most ordinary people lived in the secular world. As suggested in Part I, the impulse for top-down reform to raise the standards of practice for secular Christians began in the 11th Century as Europe emerged from the "Dark Ages". (There were also popular spiritual movements that arose from below, but we'll talk about those in Part 4, "The Anthropocentric Turn".)

And so a well-intended desire on the part of elites began to take hold, which was to close the gap between the "higher" spiritual life lived by those in the monasteries and the spiritually lax lives of ordinary people in the secular world. The emergence of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the 13th Century was largely impelled by this desire to take the spirituality out of the monasteries and into the world, out of the spiritual sphere and into the secular. Instead of demanding that everyone go to the mountain top, they sought to find ways to bring the mountain top to those living in the lowlands.

Calvinist elites continued the reform traditions of the late Middle Ages in societies where they had control, but on a much more ambitious level. The first task was to completely eliminate whatever remained of the enchanted world in Christian practices. The second task was to eliminate the two-tiered vocational system; and a third challenge lay in maintaining an attitude of humility as this new kind of 'saint' took on this ambitious task of radical reform. The best among the reformers, whether Catholic or Protestant, knew how difficult it was to zealously take on ambitious projects, which though consciously justified as for the greater glory of God, in reality very often were unconsciously ego-driven causa sui projects that were motivated for the greater glory of one's self.

So the first step is to complete the disenchantment project:

. . . we reject the sacramentals; all the elments of "magic" in the old religion. They are not only useless, but blasphemous, because they are arrogating power to us, and "plucking" it away "from the glory of God's righteousness". This also means that intercession by saints is of no effect. In face of the world of spirits and powers, this gives us great freedom. Christian liberty for Calvin consists in this: that one see salvation in faith; that one serve God with one’s whole heart; and that one no longer be scrupled by indifferent things. We can cast aside all the myriad rituals and acts of propitiation of the old religion. Serving God now in our ordinary life, guided by the spirit, we can re-order things freely. We don’t need to be too impressed by custom; this can lead us terribly astray.

The energy of disenchantment is double. First, negative, we must reject everything which smacks of idolatry. We combat the enchanted world, without quarter. At first, this fight is not carried on because enchantment is totally untrue, but rather because it is necessarily ungodly. If we are not allowed to look for help to the sacred, to a “white” magic of the church, then all magic must be black. All spirits now are ranged under the devil, the one great enemy. Even supposedly good magic must really be serving him. . . .

The more so, in that the second energy was positive. We feel a new freedom in a world shorn of the sacred and the limits it set for us, to re-order things as seems best. We take the crucial stance for faith and glory of God. Acting out of this, we order things for the best. We are not deterred by the older tabus, or supposedly sacred orderings. So we can rationalize the world, expel the mystery from it (because it is all now concentrated in the will of God). A great energy is released to re-order affairs in secular time. (79-80)

That sense of freedom derived from opposition to these forces of enchantment, now all of which are by definition malign, is a key element in understanding the attractiveness of becoming a buffered self, the kind of self that filters the supernatural out. The buffered self lives in a mystery-free zone, except for the occasional frisson he experiences when passing by a graveyard, so to say, or more recently when he watches a supernatural horror film. When he leaves the theater, he leaves the imaginative re-creation of that eerie, enchanted world. People living in an enchanted imaginary cannot leave it because their whole world is their 'theater'.

Becoming a buffered self gradually becomes an attractive option in early modernity, first for elites, then for everyone else, because it becomes a way of leaving the enchanted theater, which brings with it, understandably, great relief and a sense of control. But with that control also comes a flatness and deadness of soul, because it's not only the eerieness of the spiritual world that is filtered out. It also filters out a vital sense of connection to the life world. Humans begin to "forget Being". The world becomes Hamlet's 'sterile promontory', and a sense of felt meaning becomes rarer the more buffered one becomes. Another kind of free-floating anxiety becomes common. Existential dread becomes common. And neurosis, a breakdown in the filtering system, becomes a possibillity for moderns in a way that was not possible for premoderns. The psychotherapist replaces the priest, and his job is to help the patient patch up the filtering system and get him back into buffered control, i.e., back into alignment with the disenchanted social and cosmic imaginary.

The second task for the Calvinist Reformer is to eliminate the two-tiered system--the radical Calvinist Reformers utterly rejected the idea of Christianity being lived at different levels (or speeds) because they were committed to the idea of equality of all before God--how can there be first- and second-class Christians? But that meant that they had to pick one level and expect everybody to live at it. So where do you set the level? Clearly not everyone, even in the Age of Faith, is equally pious or serious in his spiritual commitments. And even for the pious householder who wants to live a righteous life, there seems to be a bedeviling paradox: On the one hand, he is told that God wants him to flourish and be happy, and on the other that he must distinguish himself from the quasi-pagan, drunken, fornicating, relic worshipping, saint-propitiating nominal Christians who were more or less the norm in medieval Christendom. Be happy, but not too happy. But where do you draw the line? And how--

. . . do you hold the two together? The dilemma was faced first by the late medieval Catholic reformers who wanted to raise standards of practice:

Any attempt to tie it down faces two opposite dangers. One is to set the element of renunciation so high as to make the life of flourishing a travesty of itself [e.g., no festivals, dancing, no pleasure or joy from sex]. The other is, to set a bare minimum. Think of the minimum necessary for salvation: keeping certain important commandments. But then we know even these will often be broken; so in the end the minimum demands simply that you repent in time.

The end result here is that an inherent danger built into this tension itself now befalls us. We clearly set the renunciative vocations above the ordinary lay ones. There are first- and second-class Christians; the second being in a sense carried by the first. We fall back into hierarchical complementarity.

Whereas the crucial truth that we wanted to hold on to was the complementarity of all lives and vocations, where we all serve under God, and can't put some above others.

So there seems to be a dilemma here, between demanding too much renunciation from the ordinary person on one hand, and relaxing these demands, but at the cost of the multi-speed system, on the other. (81)

So the late-medieval Catholics tinkered with reforms here and there, but pretty much stayed with the multi-level system of hierarchical complementarity, and do so to this day. They compromised by trying to bend some pagan practices to more Christian ends, endorsed relics and other sacramentals as a substitute for pagan talismans, maintained and further developed propitiatory practices to the saints and the Virgin, whose merit the people could call upon for their own benefit--and we all know how this kind of thinking went off the rails with the indulgences controversy. But--

Radical Protestantism utterly rejects the multi-speed system, and in the name of this abolishes the supposedly higher, renunciative vocations; but also builds renunciation into ordinary life. It avoids the second horn but comes close to the first danger above: loading ordinary flourishing with a burden of renunciation it cannot carry. It in fact fills out the picture of what the properly sanctified life would be with a severe set of moral demands. This seems to be unavoidable in the logic of rejecting [hierarchical] complementarity, because if we really must hold that all vocations are equally demanding, and don't want this to be a leveling down, then all must be at the most exigent pitch.

Here is where it becomes significant that Protestantism is in the line of continuity with medieval reform, attempting to raise general standards, not satisfied with a world in which only a few integrally fulfill the gospel, but trying to make certain pious practices absolutely general.

But in view of the importance now given to social order, the generalization of moral demands involved not only placing high moral demands on one's own life, but also putting order into society. This was not seen as involving a watering down of the standards of personal morality, but as completing them. Calvin held that we have to control the vices of the whole society, lest the vicious infect the others. We are all responsible for each other, and for society as a whole. (81-82)

In other words, for the Calvinists, the high standards of conduct the best of them followed would become the same standard for the worst of them. They demanded that everyone live in the thin mountain air, even if most had no real experience of transcendence in living there. And the ideal exemplar for holiness changed from the extraordinary holiness of the saint to the very ordinary moralistic righteousness of the good burgher. Theosis as a possibility is no longer on the table.

The Puritan notion of the good life . . . saw the "saints" as a pillar of a new social order. As against the indolence and disorder of monks, beggars, vagabonds, and idle gentlemen, he "betakes himself to some honest and seemly trade and [does] not suffer his senses to be mortified with idleness" (106)

The goal was to avoid leveling, but leveling was exactly what happened. The model Christian in Calvinist societies became the model bourgeois. The Calvinists rejected the Catholic two-tiered model, and they rejected sectarian or separatist models, as well--e.g., those developed by Anabaptists like the Amish and Hutterites. The Calvinists were bent on reconstructing the whole system so that it would align with their idea of a righteous society. Reformers looked to the theocracy of ancient Israel as a model, and from this followed the radical experiments in Geneva in the 1550s, Boston in the 1630s, and London in the 1650s.

So the Calvinist reform project has, first, to eliminate completely enchantment in Christian practice; second, to get rid of the two-level Catholic system of hierarchical complementarity. The Calvinist impulse was not just to tinker with this or that problem or adapt to local customs, but to wipe the slate clean and start anew. The goal was to destroy the whole magical, superstitious, enchanted superstructure root and branch. But to do this effectively, one had to re-order the entire society.This impulse to reform the whole of society is a significant turning point, and one has to ask what motivated it. Taylor suggests these reasons:

First, there was a sense that God judged the whole community, and that the eternal fate of the best was linked to the eternal fate of the worst, so it was incumbent on the best to discipline the worst. (How this jibes with predestination, I'm not sure.)

Secondly, Puritans feared the unruly and irreligious and saw them as a threat to civil order, peace, and prosperity. The Puritan desire for reform jibed with a broader civil interest to reduce crime, brigandage, social violence for reasons that have little to do with religious reforms, but the civil reforms that were increasingly common throughout Europe in the early modern period were almost always framed in religious terms.

Third, it's very difficult for someone who lives a life of renunciation to live cheek by jowl with those who don't. If you're not going to leave secular society, as monks or sectarians do, to live in an environment where the temptations will be fewer, then you have to demand that the society live according to your high standards, assuming you have the power to do it.

So much of what constrained the earlier Catholic reformers was simply jettisoned by the radical Reformers. We are left with a much starker world, one in which there is God alone in his heaven who must be obeyed, and on whom we must rely, but the world is otherwise evacuated of mystery, of spiritual beings and spiritual forces, except as they are evil forces. The ambition, if not hubris, of this broad social reform project is really astonishing. Just to believe that it would be possible to succeed with the intractable, depraved material that these Puritan "saints" believed they had to work with in the broader population alone would discourage lesser men. And for a while, in New England and Geneva, they succeeded.

But in the long run this project was doomed to fail on religious grounds and to morph into something unintended. For such a society to persist in maintaining a lively sense of its ideals, the motivation had to be maintained from generation to generation, and that proved impossible.

First, the one-level solution proved impossible to sustain. The tension between renunciation and flourishing was challenging for the most gifted, but impossible to maintain in the long term by ordinary people. The challenge of holding the two together was bound to break down, and it's not hard to understand why the flourishing side of the tension won, and it's not hard to understand why, except for a gifted spiritual minority, the spiritual component became an empty form, a repressive code that later generations threw off.

In the end, most people can't live in the thin mountain air, and a levelling takes place; lowland pursuits take precedence without much thought of there being mountains to ascend. Puritan societies morphed into good capitalist societies where success in business for individuals was proof of God's favor and of their being among the elect--so long as they kept up pious appearances. Whited-sepulcher syndrome becomes common if not the norm. It is a fact of human nature, but perhaps more so in matters of religion and politics, that those who are most aggressively and confidently wrong rise to positions of power and shape the narrative the rest of us must live by. This is as true in Catholic societies as in Protestant ones.

Then there was another dilemma posed by the tension between ambition and humility that eventually proved too difficult to hold in balance.

Puritan spiritual life moved between a Scylla and a Charybdis. On one hand one had to have a confidence in one's salvation. Too much anxious doubt amounted to a turning away of God's gift, and could even be a sign that one was not saved after all. But at the same time, an utterly unruffled confidence showed that you were altogether forgetting the theological stakes involved, forgetting that one was a sinner who richly deserved eternal damnation, and was only saved from this by God's gratuitous grace; that one was in fact hanging over a cliff, and was only held back by God's outstretched hand. . . .

Consequently, a third level of order-building arises in Protestant (and also some Catholic) spirituality: building the right inner attitude. Being able to avoid despair or paralyzing melancholy, on one side, and a facile, unthinking confidence on the other. (83) . . .

So as long as the ambition that motivates the social reform is balanced by the humility of one's awareness of himself as a sinner, a genuine spiritual idealism can be at work here, but that is an inner attitude that is difficult enough for extraordinary individuals to maintain in balance--and surely some individuals maintained it--but it is much more difficult for an entire society to maintain it, and so a facile, unthinking confidence won out in the end:

. . . the reversal is prepared in the fact that as an order is built in conduct, and at least seen as within our power to encompass in society, and more crucially, as people learn the secret of a kind of motivational equilibrium whereby they can keep themselves on the track to both of these external orders [personal moral conduct and moral social order], the possibility is opened to slide de facto, without even feeling it, into the Scylla mentioned above, that is, into a confidence that we have this under control, we can pull it off. (84)

In other words, the good burghers know what's best because they believe that they have God and his grace because they are the pillars of their community--the flourishing, well-heeled elect. But it becomes a bubble reality, and bubbles by definition are extraordinarily resistant to influences outside of it, including grace. And so from this lived reality, since grace is no longer really a primary factor, conformity to external moralistic codes is all that matters, and spiritual authority in the community correlates with behaving according to a strict moral code and being rich and successful.

Of course, we go on holding to the express belief that only God's power makes this possible; but in fact the confidence has grown that we, people like us, successful, well-behaved people, in our well-ordered society/stratum are beneficiaries of God's grace--as against those depraved, disordered classes, marginal groups, Papists, or whatever. It is hard to dent this confidence as long as we can keep the triple-level order in being. As a general proposition, of course, it remains true that the majority of humankind is destined for damnation, and that the minority of the saved are very lucky; but in practice, we are confident that we belong in this minority; and that the universe is unfolding as it should. The declarations that we are helpless sinners become more and more pro forma. (84)

And an us-against-the-world attitude develops: We are the holy society, a light shining unto the nations, and bright island in a sea of darkness and depravity. But with such a sense of oneself, one loses perspective and humility, and forgetfulness of grace, and what's left is the smug, priggish moralism that we have come to associate with Puritanism. Instead of creating a space for a genuine, lighthearted Christian freedom by clearing away all the medieval clutter, the Puritans simply replace it with another kind of bric a brac, and a kind that is dehumanizing compared to pre-reformation enchanted-world tolerance.

A humorless determination to castigate sin and disorder takes over, a denial of ambiguity and complexity in an unmixed condemnation, which reflects the attempts by controlling elites to abolish carnivalesque and ludic practices, on the grounds that they see disorder, mix pagan and Christian elements, and are a breeding ground of vice. (We are witnessing the birth of what will become in our day p.c.) Delumeau relates this to a parallel shift in the attitude to madness, where previously this could be seen as the site of vision, even holiness, it now comes more and more to be judged unambiguously as the fruit of sin. (87)

There was more tolerance for diversity, for the poor, and the 'cunning' women in an enchanted world, but not for them in one that was so radically disenchanted.

So in the short run this could lead to an intensification of certain of the old beliefs, particularly in witches, who were now redefined in a much more sinister role as helpmeets of the devil. Salem becomes possible. But in the longer run this attack could not but undermine the whole outlook within which these persecutions made sense. (80)

As Puritan societies became more repressive, their projection of what they repressed demonized the Other. Anybody with any common sense or common decency--even at the time--was repelled by the inhumanity of it. And in the second half of the 17th century, in the wake of the religious wars on the continent and England, parallel to developments in natural philosophy and alternative religious ideas emerged that rejected both Catholic enchanted medievalism and austere Protestant moralism.

Providential Deism embraced an even simpler understanding of God and his purposes than the revisions proposed by Calvin--the Deists' God was so much more reasonable; he didn't interfere in human affairs, and a belief in such a reasonable god avoided all the ridiculous confessional strife. For the Enlightenment rationalists, a pox on both houses--Catholic and Protestant--wan an attitude that we looking back should find quite understandable. And the de-legitimization of ecclesial authority from then on progresses to a point now where only right-wing fanatics take it seriously. The churches have nobody to blame but themselves because in their delusional sense of their institutional prerogatives, they allowed those who were most aggressively wrong to take control.

But a certain rage for order had been unleashed on the world, and its influence is something that we feel to this day. If its religious motivations have faded, its need-for-control motivations have not, and in many ways what was begun then was the harbinger of the police, technocratic, and surveillance states. Taylor talks about how this impulse to reform from its earliest manifestations was characterized by four basic traits:

There are certain common features running through all these attempts at reform and organization: (1) they are activist; they seek effective measures to re-order society; they are highly interventionist; (2) they are uniformizing; they aim to apply a single model or schema to everything and everybody; they attempt to eliminate anomalies, exceptions, marginal populations, and all kinds of non-conformists; (3) they are homogenizing: although they still operate in societies based on differences of rank, their general tendency is to reduce differences, to educate the masses, and to make them conform more and more to the standards governing their betters. . . . (4) they are “rationalizing” in Weber’s double sense: that is, they not only involve an increased use of instrumental reason, in the very process of activist reform, as well as in designing some of the ends of reform (e.g., in the economic sphere); but they also try to order society by a coherent set of rules. (86)

But the takeaway for now is that the disembedding process that began in the Axial Age comes to a kind of culmination in the Calvinist reforms, and disembedding is the essential condition that makes secularism possible. For secularism is the social condition in which enchantment is quite thoroughly abolished from the social imaginary. The impulse that drove this for both the late-medieval and post-Renaissance Reformers was to clear the ground for a purer kind of faith in the One God. That the purity of this kind of faith is authentically achieved at an altitude where the oxygen is rather thin I do not question. But if most people cannot live at that altitude, that doesn't mean that many of these remarkable men and women in the 16th and 17th century did not truly live there.

The mistake they made was not in their misinterpeting the profundity of their experience, but in expecting to shape a whole society based upon it. People need to run at different speeds and to live at different altitudes. And while there are different qualities of depth and intensity with which people experience the transcendent Real, grace is nevertheless to be found everywhere, high and low. The gospels couldn't be clearer about that. Because pagan practices interweaved with Christian ones in the old enchanted order does not mean that grace wasn't also interwoven with them as well.

Although their reforms, like many human projects, were at first impelled by genuine idealistic motivations, they sour into something relentlessly repressive, and the idealistic rationale becomes an ex post facto justification for other less idealistic motivations. For what we are seeing emerge here is the fundamental top-down reform dynamic that, while it was motivated in its earliest manifestations by a sincere desire for spiritual reform, ironically becomes later the dynamic that manifests in the secular, anti-Christian revolutions that start erupting in the late 18th century and into the 20th century.

While these revolutions are secular, immanentizing, social-engineering projects through and through, they would not have been possible if the Calvinists had not cleared away all the medieval clutter that otherwise stood in the way, at least for the elites who wanted to effect the reforms. Paris of the 1790s would not have been possible without similar projects already undertaken in the Geneva of the 1540s, Boston of the 1630s, and London of the 1650s. (But also Charles Borromeo's Catholic Milan in the 1560s.) I think Taylor makes the case powerfully that this is why Latin Christendom was uniquely suited to usher in secular modernity for the rest of the world. There is something in its application of the Axial Hellenic/Judaeo cultural code that impelled this remarkably ambitious disembedding "rage for reform" in ways that would be unimaginable if not repellant to other societies.

And while I think there are good arguments made mostly by Catholics and conservatives of a Burkean stripe that the Reformers were fundamentally mistaken in attempting to do it the way they did, it's really rather a moot point at this juncture. We are where we are, and we have to work within the historical reality in which we find ourselves. And I am inclined to think that the reform impulse, even its secular revolutionary manifestations, no matter how flawed in their execution, is consistent with post-Axial ideals, insofar as it is an impulse to disembed us from the constraints of the old, enchanted, customary social imaginary to clear the way for the emergence of something transcendently new. This historical challenge is to hold the reform impulse in a kind of tension with existing practice understanding that the influence of the first on the second over time has a transforming effect. Problems arise when existing practice rigidifies or when the reform impulse becomes a radical, top-down social engineering project.

So one final thought along these lines to be developed in a future post. I have for a long time thought of secularism as not an attack on Christianity, but as a chapter in its development. I think of it as a collective, culture-wide Dark Night of the Spirit. It's a time when everything is stripped away except what is essential, and it's up to us to grope around in the darkness until we find the one thing needful. But dark it is, and grope we must. But because what we grope for is not easily found does not mean it isn't there. It's just that we haven't learned where to look, and Taylor in his treatment of what he calls the 'anthropocentric turn' points us, I think, in the right direction. But that's for another post.

Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part III

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

The Communion of Saints

Metaxis

Disembedding and Theosis

The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

The Meaning of History in 25 Theses

Part 1: Disenchantment: Post Axial Disembedding

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age seeks to answer the fundamental question: How is it that if five hundred years ago it would have been very unusual to profess yourself an atheist, today it is no longer the case, and among intellectuals it's arguably the majority position. Another way of saying it is that there were always the impious or people for whom religion meant little, but before the modern age, they were marginal. During modernity meant that impious ideas have become not only acceptable, but in some precincts--inhabited these days by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and their fellow travelers--the new orthodoxy.

Taylor is at pains to reject classical secularization theory as a subtraction story that is too simplistic, and wants to tell instead a story about secularization that is much more complex and interesting. By subtraction he means that as the powers and characteristics ascribed to God fell away--were subtracted--when science developed alternative explanations, very little was left that one could say about God, especially the biblical God, that anyone could take seriously. Taylor grants that rendering irrelevant of God is true insofar as religion is conflated with the practices and beliefs--the social imaginary--of an 'enchanted' society, but 'disenchantment' has been the project of the post-Axial 'higher religions' for at least the last 2500 years. Disenchantment is not a bug of the post-Axial religions, but a feature.

A basic premise of this blog is that we are on the cusp of another shift in our imaginaries. As we shifted from premodern to modern, we are now in the process of shifting from modern to whatever comes next. Our current condition described as 'postmodern' is the last gasp of modernity in its reductio ad absurdum of individualism and freedom understood in an unbalanced way. It's an age in which debunking for the sake of debunking is the rule, and we have nothing positive--except a kind of groundless freedom--that can be affirmed. It is The Age of Whatever, a period of ontological vertigo in which any belief or practice is defensible. This can't last; nobody, even intellectuals, wants to live in a world like that, and it's not the only intellectually legitimate option, even if many intellectuals haven't been persuaded of that yet. Taylor's book I think will be seen as important for laying a foundation for what comes next. It sifts what is essential from the Western religious heritage, and discards what is not.

If modernity mainly identified itself over against pre-modernity, we are moving into a new phase. If all goes more or less well, I believe that we will find a way to synthesize what is essential from modern developments--science, critical consciousness, equality ideals, the importance of the free individual--with much of what modernity rejected as irrational and delusional--a sense of the sacred, the sacrament, the movement of grace, a renewed sense of the Deep Real as personal, perhaps even a retrieval of lost knowledge/wisdom that persists in the not-quite-extinguished "enchanted" shamanic and totemic cultures that persist mostly in the global south. There is no going backwards, but the way forward involves retrieval and reintegration of much of what has been lost or forgotten.

Taylor isn't concerned to talk about what comes next so much as he is to explain how we got here, and also to create an intellectual space for legitimate belief, and I believe, a space for the development of a positive ontology in a post-Axial key that can be broadly accepted, even by philosophers. I see his work as foundational, something that must be understood and assimilated before moving forward. In what follows in this post and in three posts that follow, I want to provide a summary with my own glosses of his analysis of the factors that so profoundly shifted the social imaginary of Latin Christendom.

But before talking about the dramatic shift in the social imaginary that occurred during the modern era, I want to provide a broader historical context, which for Taylor begins with what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. This was the extaordinary time around 500 BCE when various higher forms of religion emerge seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such founding figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets.

The 'axial' impulse begins a process of disembedding. In "embedded" societies human beings are enmeshed in their surroundings to such a degree that their identity and sense of personal agency are severely limited by "outside" factors that surround them. The embedded human being has what Taylor calls the 'porous self', one where the boundaries of his individuality are very permeable to outside social and spiritual influences. His personal identity is deeply merged with that of his tribe, clan, polis, and he is broadly vulnerable to the influence of spirits and spiritual forces, both malign and benign that, though invisible, are all around him and with which he must contend.

For the porous self, the cosmos is enchanted not as a matter of belief or theory, but as a matter of experience. Think of the way the gods influence the fates of the Greek heroes in Homer's enchanted world. The hero's personal prestige is linked to how he performs in battle, but that performance is determined by whether he is favored by the gods or not. Paris let's loose his arrow, and Apollo guides it to its mark in Achilles' heel. It's Apollo's achievement, not Paris's skill that effects Achilles' demise.

Moderns call it luck; premodern called it good or bad fortune. But good or bad fortune is not random; it is personally intended by the gods. Humans act, but they are mostly reacting to outside spiritual influences that have the larger role in determining the outcomes. Julian Jaynes talks about this way of experiencing the world in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). The point here is not whose interpretation what was going on then is correct, but simply to establish that the premodern experience of porous selves was very different from the experience of the world that we buffered moderns accept (naively?) as real.

So religion in its pre-Axial modality is about trying to navigate in such an enchanted environment, appeasing or propitiating the malign spirits and enlisting the support of those who are benign. The goal of pre-Axial religion is to develop rituals and practices in an enchanted world that are designed to promote ordinary human flourishing--long life, prosperity, success in all one's worldly projects.

Societies that live in an enchanted social imaginary are embedded societies, but a shift toward disembedding begins in the Axial period. Taylor explains:

Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine. What I've been describing as the Axial transformation breaks this chain at least at one point, if not more. Oakley argues that the break point which was particularly fateful for our development in the West was the rupture, as it were at the top, the Jewish idea of (what we now call) the creation ex nihilo, which took God quite out of the cosmos, and placed him above it. This meant that potentially God can become the source of demands that we break with "the way of the world"; that what Brague refers to as "the wisdom of the world" no longer constrains us.

But perhaps the most fundamental novelty of all is the revisionary stance towards the human good in Axial religions. More or less radically, they all call into question the received, seemingly unquestionable understandings of human flourishing, and hence inevitably also the structures of society and the features of the cosmos through which this flourishing was supposedly achieved. The change was double. . . . On the one hand, the “transcendent” realm, the world of God, or gods, spirits, or Heaven, however defined, which previously contained elements which were both favorable and unfavorable to the human good, becomes unambiguously affirmative of this good. But on the other hand, both the crucial terms here, both the transcendent and the human good are reconceived in the process.

We have already noted the changes in the first term. The transcendent may now be quite beyond or outside of the cosmos, as with the creator God of Genesis, or the Nirvana of Buddhism. Or if it remains cosmic, it loses its original ambivalent character, and exhibits an order of unalloyed goodness, as with the “heaven” guarantor of just rule in Chinese thought, or the order of Ideas of Plato, whose key is the Good.

But the second term must perforce also change. The highest human good can no longer just be to flourish, as it was before. Either a new goal is posited, or a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as human flourishing. Or else Heaven, or the Good, lays the demand on us to imitate or embody its unambiguous goodness, and hence to alter the mundane order of things down here. This may, indeed usually does, involve flourishing on a wider scale, but our own flourishing (as individual, family, clan, or tribe) can no longer be our highest goal. And of course, this may be expressed by a redefinition of what “flourishing” consists in.

Seen from another angle, this means a change in our attitude to evil, as the destructive, harm-inflicting side of things. This is no longer just part of the order of things, to be accepted as such. Something has to be done about it. This may be conceived as an escape through self-transformation, or it may be seen as a struggle to contain or eliminate the bad, but in either case evil is not something just to be lived with as part of the inevitable balance of things. (152-53)

The Axial Age introduces a new idea that things are not what they seem; that what people have always accepted as normal reality, enchanted as it might be, is not necessarily the best reality, and that 'normal reality' is something from which we need to be liberated. Something more and better--higher--is possible. A tension is created between this idea of a transcendent Good and the life most people live in pursuit of ordinary human flourishing. And this tension is destabilzing. But the "higher" life is not for everybody because leaving normal reality, like Abraham leaving Ur, is not easy. (Ask Lot's wife.)

But for the ancient Israelites, to live according to a higher law required disembedding from the enchantment-saturated fertility cults that shaped the societies around them. That this was extraordinarily difficult, even unnatural, is repeatedly attested to in the Hebrew scriptures. To 'disembed' is to 'disenchant'; the austerity that comes with disenchantment isn't and end in itself; it's a means to an end, which is to live something at a higher, freer level of human possibility. Socrates' project in Athens had a similar purpose, to disembed the youth of Athens from their naive acceptance of their enchanted cultural download.

The goal for both Socrates in Athens and the prophetic tradition in Israel was not just to debunk worldview seeped in enchantment, but to point to something that was higher and better. Both Plato and the religious traditions of the book--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--get a bad rap in post-Freudian/Darwinian societies that have largely reverted to materialism and celebration of the sensual. These traditions are perceived as unnaturally, repressively anti-body and anti-life.

But disembedding is misunderstood if it's thought to be only about repression because some vindictive father god in the sky demands it for whatever capricious reasons he may have. It makes no sense to repress what is lower if you don't believe there's anything that higher. The problem in a secular society lies in that the higher is something hardly anyone, especially among its educated elites, believes is a possibility. Now whether an ascetic path is the only path to realize the higher is a legitimate question, and I am inclined to think not--the choice is not binary. The more important concern is to retrieve the Axial understanding of the "higher", but now in a postmodern key.

But back to our story: In some post-Axial societies, those shaped by Buddhism and Christianity for instance, a stabilizing compromise was developed in which some people left the world of ordinary human flourishing to live in the wilderness or in monasteries. It's a compromise because these individuals who responded to the Axial challenge and who left the ordinary world of flourishing behind to live austerely in pursuit of this higher good, still remained in relationship with the old world. And the people left behind looked to those who went into the monasteries as having a special role to play as 'holy' men and women who could provide spiritual benefit to those who remained in the 'world'. A spiritual/secular dyad develops, and with it a sense of complementarity:

So that those who are fully dedicated to the "higher" forms, while on one hand they can be seen as a standing reproach to those who remain in the earlier forms, supplicating the Powers of human flourishing, nevertheless can also be seen as in a relationship of mutual help with them. The laity feed the monks, and by this they earn "merit", which can be understood as taking them a little farther along the "higher " road, but also serves to protect them against the dangers of life, and increases their health, properity, fertility. (154)

There were those who pursued the spiritual life in a purer, more demanding form in the wilderness or monasteries, and there were those who lived in the secular world, but who drew strength and inspiration from those who lived outside of it. This compromise as it worked in Latin Christendom was rejected by the Reformers in the 16th Century. The Reformers insisted that a Christian society is one in which everyone is equal before God, and so there should not be 'special' vocations: such vocations only lead to spiritual pride. Their model was more that of ancient Israel, in which the whole society was expected to live a rigorous spiritual life, and this led to experiments like those in Geneva or Boston.

These experiments failed for a complex of reasons that we'll explore in more detail later. But it's interesting to note that an unintended consequence ensued: in a world where the spiritual and secular were collapsed into one another, a new social construct was created in which a sense of higher, spiritually transformative possibilities were de-emphasized and replaced by a rigorist, if not suffocating, moralism, i.e., a focus on codes of behavior more than on spiritual transformation. This causes a significant flattening of human possibiliites, especially in Protestant societies.

Not all, or even most, monks achieved significant (or any) levels of spiritual transformation, but some did, so the possibility of a monastic vocation always held out the possibility of that kind of transformation. That disappears in Protestant societies. And in the long run the moralistic rigor of the Puritan societies breaks down, because most people, unless particularly spiritually gifted, have little reason to remain religious once the spell of primitive enchantment has been broken.

That's why the early Puritans insisted on a conversion experience to be a church member. If you were not so gifted, you were only going through the motions. But the problem for subsequent generations of Puritans was that fewer experienced such authentic conversion, and so maintaining such a theocratic society became extraordinarily difficult in a burgeoning, modern, commercial society. Too many other options were becoming available to those who were not particularly pious or gifted and who didn't feel particularly at home in these strait-laced New Jerusalems. In such a pluralizing social context, if there is no spiritual/secular dyad, then everything tends to collapse into the 'secular' by default. It's not hard to see how a loss of a sense of the "higher" as a human possibility follows for the the broader, un-gifted population.

And it's not hard to see how a reversion to older, pre-Axial understandings of human flourishing develop as the norm for Christian societies who gradually lose any sense of the post-Axial challenge to aspire to a higher, transcendent Good, especially in Calvinist societies. For the Calvinist, God who is Good wants our good; he wants us to flourish, and we will flourish if we follow his commandments. We must live ordinary lives in the ordinary, daily, disenchanted world; we must be good householders, i.e., we must work hard, take care of our families, be responsible and productive.

If there is no "higher" to be achieved in this life except to live righteously in this sense, then human purposes become focused on flourishing in the ordinary sense--long life, prosperity, victory over one's enemies (mostly papists and other infidels). Taylor says that Weber, if not in every detail, was fundamentally right about his connecting the rise of capitalism with the Protestant work ethic.

The Protestant model was still post-Axial, but more in the mode of ancient Israel, where the whole society had to live righteously in conformity with the Law. We can see how this attitude persists among the "theocrats" on the religious right in the U.S. today. They want to transform Washington into Jerusalem, or an updated Geneva. But we can see how the murky boundary between the spirit of capitalism and the spirit of the gospels leads to a kind of assimilation to, rather than contradiction of, the mores of a society whose idea of flourishing is 'consumption'. After a while the consumer capitalist impulse crowds out the Christian impulse, which is what we see today in much of what we call the evangelical Right.

The Catholic model, insofar as it maintains the tension in the spiritual/secular dyad, also maintains a tension between pre-Axial and post-Axial, between concerns about everyday flourishing in the world and the aspiration to be spiritually transformed. But while most Catholics, now as always, are more assimilated to pre-Axial concerns with flourishing than with spiritual transformation (growth in holiness), at least it's one place in a secular society where it is broadly revered as a possibility. (But less so with each generation.)

But we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. The point for now is to understand that for the first thousand years of Christianity, if one was serious about pursuing a higher Christian spiritual life in the Latin West, one had to leave society--the secular world. Even if that society was nominally Christian, it was still largely enchanted and "superstitious" in its popular piety--more Celt or German pagan than Christian. And such nominal Christians concerned themselves primarily with how spiritual beings and forces--saints, relics, sacramentals, rituals like beating the bounds, etc., could be used to promote human flourishing in the pre-Axial sense.

A shift in which spiritual elites move toward reforming the 'secular' realm begins in the 11th Century--the Hildebrandine reforms, the Lateran Councils, the evangelical mission of the Dominican preachers, Franciscan mendicants, and the Waldensians, Wycliffe & the Lollards, Hus, etc., and all of that culminates in the Reformation in the 16th. The nature of this reform dynamic is arguably unique in the Latin West, and while it has led to the secularized society in which we now live, it's important to undestand how it was in its roots religiously motivated. But more about that in future posts.