After the Future

The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

Terry Eagleton's book, Culture and the Death of God runs parallel to the parts of Taylor's book that trace out the West's march toward secularism and the possibility for atheistic humanism. Eagleton's book, however, starts at the Enlightenment and focuses more on the history of ideas than in changes to the social imaginary. It's a dynamic process, of course, Ideas change because the imaginary does, and the imaginary changes in response to new ideas. What's possible to think is limited by the imaginary, but the imaginary is in continuous development as material conditions change the world and our thinking about the world changes in response. 

So, for instance, it was not possible to think of Nature as a machine while the social imaginary was still dominated by Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas about formal and final causality. As soon as Aristotle and Plato are thrown out, efficient causality and instrumental reason become the only legitimate ways to think about the natural world, and our imagination of the cosmos changes from something humans thought of before as organic and alive with spirit to something that is disenchanted and mechanical. And the legitimacy of this mechanistic imaginary is reinforced by the material and technological advances that follow. The price we pay, however, is with the atrophying of the soul and the hypertrophying of meaninglessness that comes with what Taylor calls the  'buffered self'. This is the kind of human native to modernity who feels cut off from the social and natural worlds around him rather than feeling deeply embedded within them. Meaning comes with connection--or to use the Christian word, 'communion'. 

In Part 4 of my reading of Taylor's A Secular Age, I trace the process by which the personal God of Christian revelation becomes depersonalized, first by the way the radical Reformers stress God's remote transcendence, greatness, and inscrutability. This is a God before whom we humans skulk as depraved and inconsequential sinners all deserving of eternal damnation. This is a God, who because of his inscrutable mercy, nevertheless sees fit to predestine a few for salvation and most for the damnation we all deserve except for that selective application of his mercy.

This is a God who more closely resembles the judgmental, juridical, jealous God in parts of the Old Testament than the God who is revealed in the Gospels. After the vicious religious wars of the late 16th and early 17th century, there were good reasons for decent people to think that they needed some relief from the God in whose name everyone, Protestant and Catholic alike, were so willing to slaughter one another. So in some quarters of Latin Christendom, this deeply unattractive and un-Christian God starts to morph into the impersonal God of the Deists, a god who created the universe but who does not intervene in human affairs. 

The Enlightenment rationalists' god created a world that was benevolent in its design, but after he got things running, he left the scene. There was in it no need to be saved, and so no need of a savior or of revelation or grace or much of traditional Christianity at all. Everything that was worth knowing was knowable by reason. It was enough that humans have the wit to discern in the world's design God's benevolent intentions that humans should thrive. The human project was no longer to cravenly worship a despotic God but to assert a new sense of human dignity and autonomy. The task now was for humans to use their God-given intelligence, i.e., instrumental reason, to discern the engineering logic of the cosmos so as to exploit it for human benefit. The Lisbon earthquake in 1755 was a shock to the idea of a benevolently designed cosmos, because it was an anomaly inexplicable within its framework. A hundred years later, the educated classes have become Darwinians: the universe is no longer run by a benevolent logic, but by one that in addition to being impersonal, is random and cruel. 

And so if God didn't create a benevolent universe after all, but rather a cruel one where bad things happen to good people, who needs him? Humans can get along very nicely without him, and the possibility for an atheistic humanism emerges, one that wants to retain much of the Christian morality, but without its ontological grounding. The problems of theodicy that come with the traditional idea of God  were too big in their minds to overcome. Best just to ditch any idea of God at all. 

An 'exclusive' humanism develops that seeks to retain what the best in the religious traditions affirms: justice, goodness, truth, magnanimity, etc. These are purely human possibilities without any need of transcendent grounding. The atheist can assert in all sincerity that he strives to be a moral person, and can believe that he is morally superior to believers precisely because he does what's right for its own sake, not because he fears punishment or because it's a downpayment on one of the bigger mansions in the kingdom to come. And this idea that human decency and moral behavior are possible without any reference to God has since become a commonplace in secular societies. Well, less so in America, but certainly a commonplace among its cosmopolitan, university-educated class.

Eagleton's book traces this process to what he describes as an 'authentic atheism', which really isn't accomplished until the anti-humanist post-Nietzscheans of the last forty years or so. Eagleton shows that it's not so easy to kill God, that even Nietzsche didn't quite do it; we must keep finding substitutes for him. If for the Enlightenment rationalist the substitution was the Deist clockmaker God, for the German idealists it was the Absolute, and for the Romantics it was the creative Self and the elan inherent in Nature. For the Victorians like Matthew Arnold it was 'culture', the kind of thing that morphed later into the ethical culture movement. It seeks to  preserve what's best in human ethical aspiration and creative achievement without all the metaphysical folderol. Then Nietzsche comes along and says, I don't think so. Either there's a God or there isn't, and if there isn't, then you're ridiculous if you constrain yourself by traditional moral codes. You need to free yourself from all that b.s. Here's Eagleton on this:

Nietzsche sees that civilization is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to religious values, and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested. You cannot kick away the foundations and expect the building still to stand. The death of God, he argues in The Joyful Wisdom, is the most momentous event of human history, yet men and women are behaving as though it were no more than a minor readjustment. The time has come, then, to renounce the consoling fantasy that you can do away with God without also putting paid to Man. As Gilles Deleuze comments in Difference and Repetition, "God is retained so long as the Self is preserved." In Nietzsche’s eyes, all such essences involve some hint of celestial design or metaphysical substratum. Unless these, too, are rooted out, men and women will continue to languish in the shadow of the Almighty.

Of the various artificial respirators on which God has been kept alive, one of the most effective is morality. “It does not follow, Feuerbach anxiously insists," that goodness, justice and wisdom are chimaeras because the existence of God is a chimaera.” Perhaps not; but in Nietzsche’s view it does not follow either that we can dispense with divine authority and continue to conduct our moral business as usual. Our conceptions of truth, virtue, identity, and autonomy, our sense of history as shapely and coherent, all have deep-seated theological roots. It is idle to imagine that they could be torn from these origins and remain intact. Morality, for example, must therefore either rethink itself from the ground up, or live on in a chronic bad faith of appealing to sources it knows to be spurious. In the wake of the death of God, there are those who continue to hold that morality is about duty, conscience and obligation, but who now find themselves bemused about the source of such beliefs. This is not a problem for Christianity—not only because it has faith in such a source, but because it does not believe that morality is primarily about duty, conscience or obligation in the first place. (156-57)

And so for Nietzsche, if you are going to take the death of God seriously, you must understand that it 

must herald the death of man, in the sense of the craven, guilt-ridden, dependent creature who bears that name at present. What will replace him is the Overman. Yet in his sovereignty over Nature and lordly self-dependence, the Overman has more than a smack of divinity about him, which means, ironically that God is not dead after all. What will replace him continues to be an image of him. (159)

And so Nietzsche insofar as he substitutes the uebermensch/Overman for him, isn't quite able to kill God either, and the irony doesn't end there--

That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware. The Incarnation is the place where both God and Man undergo a kind of kenosis or self-humbling, symbolized by the self-dispossession of Christ. Only through this tragic self–emptying can a new humanity hope to emerge. In its solidarity with the outcast and afflicted, the crucifixion is a critique of all hubristic humanism. The death of God is the life of the iconoclast Jesus who shatters the idolatrous view of Yahweh as irascible despot and shows him up instead as vulnerable flesh and blood.

So much for Nietzsche's uprooting all the deepest theological roots. if you're going to claim to be an authentic, god-is-dead atheist, you have to take it even further than Nietzsche did, which is what the postmodern thinkers do. As Deleuze quoted above suggests, If you are going to kill God, you must kill the human Self:

If Romanticism seeks to replace God with the fathomless, infinite, all-powerful subject, as Carl Schmitt argues in his Political Romanticism, postmodernism, in Perry Anderson’s words, represents a “subjectivism without a subject.” If God is dead, then Man himself, who once dreamed of filling his shoes is also near his term. There is not much left to disappear. (192)

The postmodern subject, like the Ubermensch, is clay in its own hands, able to change shape at its own behest; but by the same token it lacks the indomitable will with which Nietzsche’s post-human animal bends reality to his demands.

Since Man is no longer to be seen primarily as agent or creator, he is no longer in danger of being mistaken for the Supreme Being. He has finally attained maturity, but only at the cost of relinquishing his identity. He is not to be seen as self-determining, which is what freedom means for the likes of Kant and Hegel. The self is no longer coherent enough to be so. This is certainly one way in which postmodernism is post-theological, since it is God above all who is One, and who is the ground of his own being. It follows that if you want to be shot of him, you need to refashion the concept of subjectivity itself, which is just what postmodernism seeks to do. (189-90)

The only way to kill God for good is to kill the idea of humanity. So be careful what you wish for. Is this post-modern anti-humanism something that is anything more than a thought experiment taken on by bored intellectuals who want to take the death of God idea to its logical conclusion? If you take the death of God to its necessary conclusion, then you see the kind of fatuous human being that you are left with--Nietzsche called him the Last Man. Eagleton goes on to say that the anti-human project of the postmodern thinkers is easier to accomplish --

...if the capitalist system happens to be in transit from the subject as producer to the subject as consumer. Consumers are passive, diffuse, provisional subjects, which is not quite how the Almighty is traditionally portrayed. As long as men and women are seen as producers, labourers, manufacturers or self-fashioners, God can never quite expire. Behind every act of production lurks an image of creation, and one act of production in particular—art—rivals that of the Almighty himself. Not even he, however, can survive the advent of Man the Eternal Consumer. (189-90)

Who would be insane enough to wish for a humanity fitting this description if there was another plausible option?

This alternative within the current social imaginary is not easy for many to grasp yet, but it is profound in its implications, and it brings into focus the very difficult to understand, because so profound, implications of the events from Good Friday through Easter. If, as Christians and Jews have claimed for thousands of years,  humans are created in the image and likeness of God, then what we know about being human is commensurate with what we know about God, and Christians claim to know something about God because of the way he revealed himself in Jesus Christ.

Our knowledge of God is, therefore, commensurate with our ability to know ourselves, and vice versa. Feuerbach had it half right. He thought that God was a projection of characteristics that belonged to man, and that we attribute to God what humans need to claim for themselves, i.e., that human beings, contra Calvin's view of man as depraved and powerless, need to embrace God's attributes as their own if they are to come into their own.

But it does not follow that God is therefore merely a projected chimera. For if God is a chimera, so then are humans, or at least our current understanding of what it means to be human, including the mainstream understanding of atheistic humanists, is chimerical. For Christians the reverse is true. God projects himself into us, and insofar as we work with that, we become more deeply human. This is the meaning of the Incarnation: it was the definitive projection of God into the human being. This is admittedly a heavy lift for most moderns to accept.

I would go so far as to say that most who claim to be Christians don't understand or accept it. Most Christians see Christian belief as comprising mainly a morality code that is validated by its transcendent provenance. And surely there is a Christian morality and practice, but it is not an end in itself. It has validity only as a means to an end, and it has validity as long as it promotes rather than obstructs human movement toward that end. The telos of Christian morality is the agapic achievement of communion, and any kind of Christian behavior or belief that obstructs the movement toward greater levels of communion is illegitimate. Nothing, IMO, could be clearer from any clear-headed reading of the Gospels or Paul's epistles. 

So why is communion so hard to achieve? Calvin had it partially right in that there is something deeply wrong about the human condition. But he his wrong that we are depraved. Rather we are broken, soul shattered, incapable of being what we long to be and were created to be. Genesis depicts Adam's sin as an act of disobedience. Ok, but I think of the Genesis story as very closely related to the story of Icarus's defying his father. He like Adam and Eve over-reached; they took on more than they could handle. They aspired to something that was worthy of their aspiration, but without the capacity to attain it, like swimming the English Channel without having trained for it. And the consequences that followed were not so much punishment as the result of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.

God's warning to Adam and Eve, like that of Daedelus to Icarus, was not the warning of a despot to follow arbitrarily imposed rules, but like that of parent talking to spirited teenager. He knows that certain actions are folly and lead to destruction, and he knows he's dealing with somebody who is impatient to realize his full potential but cannot do it in one giant leap. So despite all warnings he leaps, and then comes the all but fatal fall. The human condition, like Icarus's after his crash, was like Humpty Dumpty's. It is concussed, amnesiac, shattered and in need of being put together again, and all the king's horses and all the king's men can't do it. All attempts for humans unaided to assemble the scattered shards of the broken human soul create parodies of the human, from Sun Kings to tinpot dictators, to the more recent project to manufacture a new transhuman version of Frankenstein's monster. They are all cartoon humans compared to the humans we were created to become. 

Only God could effect the reintegration of the shattered image, and he achieved that by taking the human soul into himself in his Incarnation, then allowing it to be shattered on the cross, and put back together again in the resurrection. The resurrection body of Christ is the proleptic image of the human being transformed into the fullness for which it was created, the fulfillment of the promise made by the serpent in the garden--to be like God. It is the restored image and likeness of God in the God/Man. 

The process of restoration for the rest of us is what the early Greek fathers called thesois. This is an idea of the human that the radical Reformers of the 16th century gave up on. They were justifiably worried about the human tendency to hubris, but went too far in the other direction. For if we are to become human beings capable of deep communion with God, with one another, and with all of creation, that's possible only to the degree that we become transformed. We are transformed to the degree that the shards of our shattered souls are slowly reassembled so that they once again reflect in their fullness the image and likeness of the God that has projected himself into them. 

So is God dead, or is it that we're looking for a God that is our projection of what we think a God should be rather than looking for the one who has projected himself into our brokenness? Eagleton puts it nicely--

The absence of God may be occluded by the fetish of Man, but the God who has been disposed of would seem little more than a fetish in the first place. As with William Blake’s Urizen or Nobodaddy, he was a convenient way of shielding humanity eager to be chastised from the intolerable truth that the God of Christianity is friend, lover and fellow accused, not judge, patriarch and superego. He is counsel for the defence, not for the prosecution. Moreover, his apparent absence is part of his meaning. The superstitious would see a sign, but the sign of the Father that counts is a crucified body. For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary it is one of the places where he is mostly fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility. Only by living this reality to the full, experiencing one’s death to the very end, can there be a path beyond the tragic. It is not a claim that fits well with the Religion of Humanity. (159-60)

Christianity rightly understood is the Religion of Humanity. Wrongly understood it leads to mistakes that recapitulate the hubristic ur-mistake of Edenic over-reaching, of rushing in where angels fear to tread, of trying to take on something before we are ready. There is a faux-noble, naive idealism that motivates this kind of hubristic action. The French Revolution and its imitators are classic examples. But the opposite is also true, we cannot allow our fear of hubris to be an excuse for inaction. 

Because we are not ready for some things now does not mean that we are unready to do what is there for us  to do. That's the challenge--to know the difference between hubris and making excuses for complacency. That's what I struggle with, anyway. The challenge at some of the most critical turning points in our lives is to live in the tension between two impulses that pull us in opposite directions. Usually a third, deeper possibility emerges if we are vigiliant enough to discern it. The tension, for instance, between being the one without conviction and being the one driven by passionate intensity is resolved in the ability to have the capacity to discern the right thing to do, and then to do it with quiet resolve, like Tolkien's Ents.

Where is that quiet resolve found? In the part of us that has been restored by the events of the first Holy Week. Those parts are in us all, whether believer or unbeliever. Belief is only important if it leads to a greater openness to the emollient effects of grace on our too rigid and shattered hearts. Too many people who claim to be believers, like the Pharisees depicted in the Gospels, use their mineralized beliefs as a carapace that shuts out that healing balm. Better to be an egregious sinner with a heart of flesh, than a clean-living, moralistic prig with a heart entombed in stone. 

Convention Wrap Up

David Brooks, not someone I'm inclined to quote, sums it up for me:

The Democrats had by far the better of the conventions. But the final and shocking possibility is this: In immediate political terms it may not make a difference.

The Democratic speakers hit doubles, triples and home runs. But the normal rules may no longer apply. The Democrats may have just dominated a game we are no longer playing.

Both conventions featured one grieving parent after another. The fear of violent death is on everybody’s mind — from ISIS, cops, lone sociopaths. The essential contract of society — that if you behave responsibly things will work out — has been severed for many people.

It could be that in this moment of fear, cynicism, anxiety and extreme pessimism, many voters may have decided that civility is a surrender to a rigged system, that optimism is the opiate of the idiots and that humility and gentleness are simply surrendering to the butchers of ISIS. If that’s the case then the throes of a completely new birth are upon us and Trump is a man from the future.

If that’s true it’s not just politics that has changed, but the country.

I don't know if this is true--I hope not--but it might be. I loved Obama's Lincolnesque speech and how it tried to call out the better angels in the American soul, but I don't know if that's  a message that's selling to anybody except those who already believe it. Do most Americans believe it? I don't know. I guess we'll find out in the next few months what most Americans believe. 

 

Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part 4

Part 4: The Anthropocentric Turn

Let's sum up what we've presented in Parts 1 - 3. Part 1 focused on the process of disembedding from the premodern enchanted social and cosmic imaginary to one that is thoroughly disembedded and disenchanted. This disembedding process has produced the buffered selves that we have become and the radically secular society to which buffered selves are native. The radically secularized society culminates a long process that began in the Axial period starting in the first half of the first millennium BCE. 

The Axial religions, among them Buddhism, Greek ontology, Judaism--and later Christianity--are significant because for the first time they assert that there is a higher Good than ordinary human flourishing. They introduce the idea that there is a level of Being that transcends our ordinary experience of the world, and that true happiness or liberation lies in aligning with that transcendent, universal Good rather than in traditional religious practices that focus on appeasing or propitiating local gods. So while the enchanted world of spirits, demons, devas is still very much a part of the world in which the post-Axial spiritual practices are developed, the dynamics of the enchanted world are unimportant. The goal is to not worry about all that, but rather to focus on aligning oneself with the higher Good. So this starts the process of disembedding and disenchantment in these different societies, a movement from local and particular to transcendent and universal. 

Buddhism envisions liberation as deliverance from the chain of incarnations in world where the ordinary pursuit of human flourishing was considered delusion; the goal was to shed the illusion of one's individuality and to melt back into the cosmic pleroma--the Deep Real. Judaism taught that while there may be many gods, they were false gods, and there was only one that was the true God, a 'personal' Deep Real, whose existence transcended time and space and yet who cared about the people to whom he said he was betrothed. Loving Him and obeying his laws should be their only concern, and the ancient Israelites developed a society that disembedded them from the enchantment-heavy pagan fertility cults in the societies that surrounded them. No need to propitiate or appease the local gods for this and that; there was only the one God: if the good Jew loves this God and follows his law, he will flourish.

Greek ontology asserted that there was a Deep Real that transcended space/time and which provided a universal standard of truth and goodness by which the quality of things in space time could be measured. And Christianity integrates both the Jewish and Greek streams in a synthesis that paradoxically asserts that the transcendent Deep Real--the Logos--entered into space time in a way that opens up possibilities for the transformation of space time that were before impossible. The paradox of the transcendent immanentizing is something that Jews and Greeks (and their rationalist heirs) could not accept then or now. It was blasphemous for Jews and a logical impossibility for Greeks.

Part 2 focused on the unique impulse for reform that developed within Latin Christendom, which goes through two phases: the first, was/is very like the Buddhist model in which there are two levels of religious commitment. The higher level was lived by monks outside the world of flourishing and committed to the goal of living a life that sought greater levels of alignment with the transcendent Good. The second level was lived by everyone else whose lives were mostly circumscribed by concerns about ordinary human flourishing--health, prosperity, fertility-- and religious practice for them was mainly one of management of the spiritual forces that promoted or obstructed flourishing. In Buddhism and in Western and Eastern Christianity, a two-level system of hierarchical spiritual complementarity developed in which both levels worked in a larger system of hierarchical social complementarity.

This system promoted social stability to a fairly significant degree, although there was always tension because of the gap that lay between the higher and the lower levels. No one in Latin Christendom--or anywhere else--believed during the first millennium CE that society was reformable by the standards presented in the gospels. If the transcendent Good to which the gospels pointed was to have a transformative effect, it would be only in the lives of spiritual virtuosi who left society and went into literal or figurative wildernesses to find the transcendent Good there. As St. Anselm (d. 1109) said:

If thou wouldst be certain of being in the number of the elect, strive to be one of the few, not of the many.  And if thou wouldst be quite sure of thy salvation, strive to be among the fewest of the few… Do not follow the great majority of mankind, but follow those who enter upon the narrow way, who renounce the world, who give themselves to prayer, and who never relax their efforts by day or by night, that they may attain everlasting blessedness.

The elitism is pretty stark, and it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the Christ of the gospels who spent most of his ministry with ordinary folks and often society's outcasts. The wilderness and mountain fastness are places where in Jewish and Christian tradition one encounters the transcendent Good, but the goal is not to stay there, but rather to come back into society. So the second phase, which Taylor calls the evangelical turn, seeks to break out of this static, hierarchical, elitist understanding of the Christian life and to raise the standards of religious practice throughout the larger extra-monastic society.  In the 1200s the Franciscan and Dominican orders emerge to take the higher, transcendently grounded spirituality out of the monasteries and into the world. Other popular religious movements emerge, and a serious Christian life becomes a possibility for people who are not monks.

So in the late medieval period, this kind of seriousness, however, continues to be mixed in with Christianized pagan popular practices that are designed to help the everyday Christian manage in a still very enchanted world. There is this mix of enchanted religion in popular piety, but also a very strong idea that the God of Love who revealed himself in His Son wanted them all to live lives that sought to be closer to Him. In that late medieval world there was an interesting, vibrant mix of religious possibilities. So people were religious in all kinds of ways and at all different levels of seriousness, some in a more pre-Axial key, others in a more post-Axial key for whom spiritual transformation or 'theosis' was the focus of their practice. And the institutional church and its leadership reflected this hodgepodge of possibilities, sometimes leaning more post-Axial, sometimes more pre-Axial, sometimes just concerned with its own institutional prerogatives and power. The selling of indulgences was clearly more pre-Axial in its mentality, and it was this and other pre-Axial tendencies of the Roman Church that inclined a growing educated, literate class in the Renaissance period to demand radical reforms in the 16th Century. 

The Calvinist reformers rejected the Catholic pluralistic model, and adopted a model that was more like the society of the ancient Israelites. There was one norm of righteousness, and everybody had to live by it. No more pluralism of practice, no more Christianity at higher and lower levels or different speeds. Everybody was equal in the eyes of God, and Christian practice was the same for everybody. So this collapsed the two-level spiritual/secular system in the Catholic model--the spiritual as a special vocation of prayer and contemplation was eliminated completely, and with that the eventual unintended consequence of creating a much larger space for the secular. 

But to the extent that churches, and later states with churches, set themselves the goal of mobilizing and organizing and actively bringing about these higher levels of conformity to (what was seen as ) the Christian life, this latter comes to be codified, laid out in a set of norms. Reform comes to be seen as a serious business, brooking no alternatives. There is no more separate sphere of the "spiritual" where one may go to pursue a life of prayer outside the saeculum; and nor is there the other alternation between order and anti-order, which Carnival represented. There is just this one relentless order of right thought and action, which must occupy all social and personal space. 

How then does the break-out occur? Because the very attempt to express what the Christian life means in terms of a code of action in the saeculum opens the possibility of devising a code whose main aim is to encompass the basic goods of life in the saeculum: life, prosperity, peace, mutual benefit. In other words, it makes possible what I call the anthropocentric shift. Once this happens then the break-out is ready to occur. It just needs the step to holding that these "secular" goods are the point of the whole code. Pushed by annoyance and resentment at the ascetic demands of ultra-conformity, many will be willing to take this step. (266-67)

Any robust impulse within Protestant societies that sought post-Axial aspiration to spiritual transformation or theosis was de-legitimated. There was instead a focus on a piety that at its best sought genuinely to reform society according to the spirit of the gospels, but because that is so difficult to sustain, this project inevitably devolved into a rigid, extrinsic moralism that I call 'whited sepulcher syndrome'. The gospels make fairly clear that this kind of extrinsic moralism is the deepest and most difficult kind of alienation to remedy because it creates a hard heartedness that is impervious to grace.

Part 3 focuses on how parallel to these changes in the social imaginary, there were changes also in the cosmic imaginary. The early Christian thinkers used Greek thought, particularly Stoicism, Neoplatonism, and Aristotle to help them articulate a Christian ontology. The premodern order was based on ancestral heritage on one hand, but also on a Platonic hierarchical cosmic order in which the social order was implicated, and the health of the social order was dependent on its virtue, i.e., the degree to which it realized its ideal form. 

It is out of this outlook that the idea emerges that disorders in the human realm will resonate in nature, because the very order of things is threatened. [In MacBeth] The night on which Duncan was murdered was disturbed by "lamenting heard i' the air; strange screams of death", and it remains dark even though day should have started. . . .

...in these cases, it is very clear that a moral order is more than just a set of norms, that it also contains what we might call an "ontic" component, identifying features of the world which make the norms realizable.

So there was an organic sense of order in that everybody had a job to do in the way that the head, the heart and the limbs have jobs to do in the body, and that there was a greater dignity to some of those functions than others. This idea of hierarchical dignity was tossed out in the modern period as the new idea of complementarity was determined simply by the random roles people play in society with no correlation to any ontological order. In the premodern order--

…the hierarchical differentiation itself is seen as the proper order of things. It was part of the nature or form of society. In the Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions . . . this form was already at work in the world, and any attempt to deviate from it turned reality against itself. Society would be denatured in the attempt. Hence the tremendous power of the organic metaphor in these earlier theories. The organism seems the paradigm locus of forms at work, striving to heal its wounds and cure its maladies. And at the same time, the arrangement of functions which it exhibits is not simply contingent: it is “normal’ and right. That the feet are below the head is how it should be.

The modern idealization of order departs radically from this. It is not just that there is no place for a Platonic-type form at work; but connected to this, whatever distribution of functions a society might develop is deemed contingent; it will be justified or not instrumentally; it cannot itself define the good. The basic normative principle is, indeed, that the members of society serve each other’s needs, help each other, in short, behave like the rational and sociable creatures that they are. In this way, they complement each other. But the particular functional differentiation which they need to take on to do this most effectively is endowed with no essential worth. It is adventitious, and potentially changeable. . . . In one way or the other, the modern order gives no ontological status to hierarchy, or any particular structure of differentiation. (163-65)

In the Christian Neoplatonic order the impersonal Logos embraced by the pre-Socratic philosophers through to the Stoics was personalized in the person of the Cosmic Christ depicted in the Prologue to John's Gospel and the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Colossians. The enchanted world is a deeply personal and interpersonal world, and the Christian revelation of the gospels and later the emergence of idea of the Trinitarian structure of the Deep Real reinforces that sense of a deeply personal cosmos in which the Deep Real is the Deep Personal. Salvation or liberation in the Christian scheme is not release from the world, but a release from Deep Alienation--human alienation from God, from the natural world, from one another, and even from one's own sense of Self. The goal, in other words, was a liberation from deep alienation, and the cure was the achievement of a deep interpersonal communion analogous to that the Trinity enjoys within itself. 

This personal cosmos, however, is significantly depopulated by the Calvinist reformers starting a process that the Enlightenment rationalists will take further. The Calvinist reformers take the process of disenchantment to another level: gone the sacramentals, relics, images and statues, Marian devotion, the intercession of the saints, etc., and all that's left is the remote Father God in his heaven outside time and space. This is a God who must be dutifully loved and worshiped, but who doesn't really need us, and it's just his caprice that some of us he'll save and most he won't.

This is a very severe, austere God, and what it has to do with the God revealed in the gospels, I don't know. But within Catholicism, too, this severe God became embraced by the Jansenists who played a very significant role in shaping the kind of extreme juridical-penal imagination of Christianity that perversely took root in France and Ireland. And then there were the Spanish Dominicans who took this severity to a bizarre level according to their own perverse logic. And then, as if to counterbalance all this severity there was Baroque exuberance in the arts in Catholic countries, and exuberant wealth in the Protestant capitalist societies, as in Holland. There's a lot going on.

This is an important shift. The cosmos already before the dawn of the scientific revolution, especially in Protestant societies, has become disenchanted and impersonal. This is an important precondition for the development of the scientific method, which requires that the meanings of things be bracketed in order simply to understand the mechanical logic of things with instrumental reason. Aristotle and his final causality had to be eliminated. The scene is set for the clockmaker god who built the machine, started it running, and then became the deus otiosus, leaving humans in charge to figure things out for themselves using instrumental reason. 

Living a godly life in this world is something very different from living in the ordered Aristotelian Cosmos of Aquinas or the hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysios. It is no longer a matter of admiring a normative order in which God has revealed himself through signs and symbols. We rather have to inhabit it as agents of instrumental reason, working the system effectively in order to bring about God’s purposes; because it is through these purposes, and not through signs, that God reveals himself in his world. These are not just two different stances, but two incompatible ones. We have to abandon the attempt to read the cosmos as the locus of signs, reject this as illusion, in order to adopt the instrumental stance effectively. Not just on a level of popular belief, as a world of spirits, do we have to disenchant the universe; we have also to bring about the analogous shift on the high cultural level of science, and trade in a universe of ordered signs, in which everything has a meaning, for a silent but beneficent machine. (99)

The enchanted cosmos suffused by the life of the Logos stops its singing (or is it that buffered ears can no longer hear it?). The cosmos is no longer full of angelic hosts, but is now dark, cold, and silent. The earth becomes reified, a thing to be exploited for human benefit. The natural world in this new imaginary is a machine that runs according to the logic of the engineer rather than the lighthearted free play of the artist. This was Blake's lament about how the social imaginary by his time had been Newtonized. The chief human project now becomes to understand its mechanical principles, its clockwork, in order that it might better serve human utility, that is, ordinary human flourishing. We're back in the pre-Axial mode, but now science and technology replaces magic and the ritual appeasement of the gods. 

So now that we've summarized this broader historical context, let us focus on the implications for what Taylor calls the 'anthropocentric turn' and the movement to the possibility of the social imaginary embracing an exclusive humanism, i.e., a humanism completely immanent with no need of transcendent reference or grounding. This turn was driven first by the impulse for reform that began in the late medieval period that led to the radical split within Christendom after Luther and Calvin. This in turn led to the grisly confessional wars in roughly the century between 1550 and 1650 that ended on the continent with the Treaty or Westphalia in 1648 and in the Puritans' beheading of Charles I in England in 1649 and the restoration of Charles II about a decade later. This was a grisly, bloody time of so-called Christians killing one another so that confessional factions could insure control of their respective societies. 

So it's understandable that many intelligent, decent people coming out the experience of these absurd, disgusting confessional wars would view the claims of orthodox Christianity with a huge degree of skepticism. Both sides did their best to discredit themselves. And so it's understandable that there would be an attempt to retain what was best from the Christian tradition and throw overboard everything that was irrational and violent. The Enlightenment rationalists weren't anti-religion so much as they were anti-Church. As Terry Eagleton puts in in his Culture and the Death of God--

The Enlightenment's assault on religion, then was at root a political rather than a theological affair. By and large, the project was not to replace the supernatural with the natural, but to oust a barbarous, benighted faith in favour of a rational, civilized one. It was the role of ecclesial power in consecrating the ancien regimes, the unholy alliance of throne and altar, which scandalised these scholars more deeply, as the intellectual avatars of an emergent middle class. Some of them were less philosophers in the modern sense of the word than ideologues and intellectual agitators. . . .What seized their imagination was the Baconian project of harnessing knowledge and power, placing the findings of scientific reason at the service of social reform and human emancipation. (12)

A new apologetic project emerged whose goal was to take Calvin's idea of God, and to make him even more remote and 'civilized'. He would be retained as Creator and providential benefactor, but now we see him as the author of an impersonal, mechanical moral order whose code it was the human task to discern. No need for revelation. So now we see a move to understand religion in moralistic or disciplinary terms rather than in devotional or prayerful terms--too irrational (i.e., primitive, barbarous). It's not hard to see how that natural desire to restore peace and order for the pious or impious alike converges in their wanting to take the irrational out of religion. We, therefore don’t need to be soul transformed; we need simply to behave according to prescribed norms and laws. The goal was to become 'civilized' after a century of barbaric religious strife. 

So Taylor describes this new moral order that emerges in the late 17th century as having the following six characteristics:  

First, God has no other inscrutable purposes for us other than the fulfillment of our own good understood in terms of normal human flourishing. Post-axial spiritual aspiration drops out. There are no spiritually transformative aspirations, no idea of theosis. Theosis is rejected as anti-social monkishness that impedes rather than promotes the new ideal of mutual support through mutual exchange--

Our primary service to each other was thus (to use the language of a later age) the provision of collective security, to render our lives and property safe under law. But we also serve each other in practicing economic exchange. These two main ends, security and prosperity, are now the principal goals of organized society, which itself can come to be seen as something in the nature of a profitable exchange between its constituent members. The ideal social order is one in which our purposes mesh, and each in furthering himself helps the others.

The ideal order was not thought to be a mere human invention. Rather it was designed by God, an order in which everything coheres according to God’s purposes. Later in the eighteenth century, the same model is projected on the cosmos, in a vision of the universe as a set of perfectly interlocking parts, in which the purposes of each kind of creature mesh with those of all the others.

. . . Locke reasons that God gave us our powers of reason and discipline so that we could most effectively go about the business of preserving ourselves. It follows that we ought to be “Industrious and Rational”. The ethic of discipline and improvement is itself a requirement of the natural order that God had designed. The imposition of order by human will is itself called for by his scheme.

We can see in Locke’s formulation how much he sees mutual service in terms of profitable exchange. “Economic” (that is, ordered, peaceful, productive) activity has become the model for human behavior, and the key for harmonious co-existence. In contrast to the theories of hierarchical complementarity, we meet in a zone of concord and mutual service, not to the extent that we transcend our ordinary goals and purposes, but on the contrary, in the process of carrying them out according to God’s design. (165-69)

Second, the eclipse of grace. God is retained as the creator and designer of the cosmos, but the idea of a God who intervenes in the world is rejected; it is enough that he created a beneficent order and bestowed on humans reason, which, if used correctly, gives them the capacity to discern God's benevolent purposes in the world he created. If God does not intervene, then there is no grace. There is just the natural capacity of humans to use their brains. The shift to the impersonal god of Deism is not far behind. 

Third, in addition to reason, God, in his benevolence, made humans naturally inclined toward benevolence, if they would just use their reason to understand the benevolent cosmos as it is. The great obstacles to the natural flourishing of human benevolence are the irrationality of tradition and custom. Religion is fine so long as it is "reasonable" and eschews delusion (i.e., superstition), enthusiasm (i.e., mysticism), and fanaticism (i.e., inquisitions, witch hunts).  The imagination of the cosmos as dark, random, cruel will come later after Darwin. 

Fourth, God as Judge: he stands at the end of time ready to distribute rewards and punishments. Even if it be in everyone's interest to be reasonable and benevolent, the enlightenment elite, at least at the beginning, thought that the fear of punishment was still a necessary motivator for those who were not intrinsically motivated to be reasonable and benevolent. The need for extrinsic rewards and punishments eventually falls away, and it is seen as morally superior for humans to demonstrate benevolence for its own sake, not as a means to an end. 

Fifth, the sense of mystery fades. “If God’s purposes for us encompass only the fulfillment of our own good, and this can be read from the design of nature, then no further mystery can hide here." Evil is dismissed as stupidity and ignorance, and all the motivation we need to be decent human beings is innate, either in our self-interest well understood, or in our natural feelings of benevolence. There is no mystery about God. All we need to know about him is in his plan for us, which is knowable by reason. No miracles or interventions, no grace, no mystery. We're in the suburbs already of the Secular City. 

Sixth, God has no plan for human transformation or ‘theosis’. Certainly not in this life, but maybe in the next. After a while, neither in the next. The afterlife becomes a place where we are perhaps reunited with loved ones, but the idea that any kind of profound spiritual transmutation of the human being is a goal is dismissed. And eventually, for many, the afterlife is altogether dismissed as the delusional wish fulfillment of the childish who cannot face the hard truth of the finality of death. 

There are so many converging factors that contribute to this shift: increasing literacy, the civilizing of the nobles, the celebration of commerce over warfare, the strengthening nation state, increasing urbanization, the disruptions of war, and significant shifts in technology and production. Taylor spends a chapter entitled "The Spectre of Idealism" in which he argues that these changes on the material level and on the thinking or imaginative level reinforce one another dynamically. There's a lot going on. But the inevitable endpoint of it all is that while many people clearly remain religious believers, a huge space opens up for the possibility of non-belief, particularly among the culture's elite. 

There is thus no iron link, but there is also here a possible affinity, which in the absence of other factors can lead people into the sense that a more impersonal reading of Christianity, or Deism, or even something further removed from orthodoxy is more suitable to their age. This link is invoked in another form by David Martin when he remarks about the eighteenth-century British scene “that latitudinarian clergy deployed a public version of Isaac Newton to promote a separation of creation from its Creator in order the better to ensure that rationality ruled both the natural and the social universes”.

This affinity becomes stronger when one thinks of the ethical consequences of the two kinds of belief. At the heart of orthodox Christianity, seen in terms of communion, is the coming of God through Christ into a personal relation with disciples, and beyond them others, eventually ramifying through the church to humanity as a whole. God established the new relationship with us by loving us, in a way we cannot unaided love each other (John 15: God loved us first.) The lifeblood of this new relation is agape, which can’t ever be understood simply in terms of a set of rules, but rather as the extension of a certain kind of relation, spreading outward in a network. The church is in this sense a quintessential network society, even though of an utterly unparalleled kind, in that the relations are not mediated by any of the historical form of relatedness: kinship, fealty to a chief, or whatever. It transcends all these, but not into a categorical society based on similarity of members, like citizenship; but rather into a network of ever different relations of agape.

Of course, the church lamentably and spectacularly fails to live up this model; but it is the kind of society that it is meant to be. (282)

Agape is the universalizing impulse at the heart of Christian transcendental universalism, and for Christians a kind of selfless love that is impossible without a grace-nourished spiritual transformation. But Taylor wants to argue that the space created for an exclusive humanism within this impersonal cosmic imaginary needed to see itself as morally superior to what it replaces, and in order to do that it had to find a way to retain this agapic ideal without any transcendent grounding for it. And once achieved this became a possibility for a completely immanentized humanism.

Taylor argues that it was achieved in a completely new way with the celebration of dispassionate instrumental reason, which in those who have realized it come to experience non-transcendent agape, i.e., a natural, magnanimous benevolence. Modern humanism innovated in relation to the ancients in that they drew on the forms of Christian faith it emerged from, but, following the Calvinist lead, rejected the post-Axial aspiration to transcend flourishing. “The successor to agape was to be held strictly within the bounds of measure, instrumental reason, and perhaps also good taste.” (247)

The immanent resources of benevolence were found in four places:

1. Disengaged instrumental reason. Disengagement itself frees us from the confused, perturbed mass of personal desires, cravings, envy, and liberates a universal benevolence in us. He quotes the atheist Bertrand Russell who articulates this eloquently

Distant ages and remote regions of space are as real to it [disengaged instrumental reason] as what is present and near. In thought, it rises above the life of sense, seeking always what is general and open to all men. In desire and will, it aim’s simply at the good, without regarding the good as mine or yours. In feeling it gives love to all, not only to those who further the purposes of the self. Unlike the finite self, it is impartial; its impartiality leads to truth in thought, justice in action, and universal love in feeling.

No need for God or grace here. The capacity for this kind of universality and magnanimity is within the natural scope of the human being. It begs the question, of course, why humans are constructed in such a way as to have this capacity in the first place. Can it be explained by Darwin? 

2. Sense of a pure, universal will, an inner power before which we stand in awe, as with Kant. The very fact that we have the power to act by universal law is an object of wonder and infinite respect. 

3. A sense of natural, universal sympathy, which only needs the right conditions to flourish into virtue. Since the human will is naturally good, it inclines toward solidarity or sympathy with others. This natural ability has been lost and must be retrieved. It has been covered over by the false and denaturing conditions which have developed in history. The goal is to create the social conditions that will liberate and nourish it.

4. Eventually, a Feuerbachian vision that the powers we have attributed to God are really human potentialities.

Taylor is at pains to point out that this isn’t the discovery of something old that was always there, but the creation of something new, i.e., to live in these modes of moral life in which the sources are radically immanentized. The subtraction story doesn’t allow us to be as surprised as we ought to be at this achievement—or as admiring of it. 

The newness of the modern form which Russell articulates is this: that for the first time, we have such an opening to the universal which is not based on a connection to the transcendent. This purely immanent sense of universal solidarity is an important achievement, a milestone in human history. It is an achievement, because getting to the point where we can be inspired and empowered to beneficence by an impartial view of things, or a sense of buried sympathy within, requires training, or inculcated insight, and frequently much work on ourselves. It is in this respect like being moved by other great moral sources in our tradition, be they the Idea of the Good, or God’s agape, or the Tao.

These things are not just given to us by birth. Making the new sources available was thus a step in an unprecedented direction. Of course, Nietzsche, the cranky anti-humanist, comes along and says the whole project is just Christianity in disguise, and I think he's right about that. He rejects it for that reason, but I embrace it. I see it, however, as a chapter in a longer, continuously developing story. 

But what is the ontic component in this modern understanding of moral order? What makes these norms appropriate and possible of realization? The old order was anchored in the cosmos, which tends to realize itself, and reacts to any breach as the animal kingdom did to Duncan’s murder. So is it just an arbitrary construction? Taylor argues that the new order is not an arbitrary construction, that it speaks to something profound in us, so that building toward it is not like constructing sand castles. On the contrary, it can be self-stabilizing, its realization making us see how much we cherish it. There is just something in us that responds to this idea of universality, even if so much postmodern thought has striven to repudiate it. The postmoderns' attempt to deny it defies common sense and common decency, and it's just unnecessary, even if it is an eddy of thought that some had to go into and explore for a few years. 

I think there's an argument to be made, and I don't think is that hard to make, that while it's possible that this universal benevolence and capacity for reason is something that might have developed in humans as a completely random Darwinian outcome, it's not very likely that it did. It is more likely that what we experience within the human microcosm reflects the larger macrocosm, and sooner or later we'll find our collective way to embracing a social imaginary that retrieves that old idea in a postmodern key.

And whether or not a Christian version of this retrieval is broadly adopted, the whole point of Christ's incarnation was to immanentize the transcendent in the depths of the human soul. Since the incarnation, the "ontic component" is grounded as much in the human soul as it is in the cosmos. The human project, as I understand it, is to develop this interior ontic component, inchoate though it is in most of us,  so that the human soul comes gradually to live more in alignment with the cosmic "ontic component". 

This means then a retrieval of the Patristic idea of theosis, which is just another way of saying the same thing. That's for me the significance of the anthropocentric turn. The ur-anthropocentric turn actually occurred in the events that transpired between the first Good Friday and Easter. The Logos, the Deep Real, lived into human death and alienation so that humans could die into a life of communion with the Him. If before that moment transcendence was experienced by most as outside in, since then gradually it has become something experienced inside out. And the Secular Age is for us like a collective empty tomb that creates the space for that arising from within its austere darkness. No need to go out into the wilderness to find God; the wilderness has come to us. And this experience of transcendence inside out does not require that one be a Christian, but Christianity, I think, gives the most robust explanation for the why and the how of it.  

Related:

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

 

 

Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part 3

Part 3: The Impersonal Order

In Part 1, I discussed briefly Taylor's ideas about a social imaginary. I don't think the idea is hard to understand, but understanding its implications reinforces the idea I have written a lot about on this blog, which is the way we moderns imagine 'reality' is very provisional: humans did not always think/experience the world the way as they do now, and they are not likely to think/imagine it in the same way in the future.

I am persuaded that because we live in a decadent period right now, which means to be in a collective situation of neither here nor there with no collective sense of future possibility, our current imaginary is fragile, unstable, and won't last. Understanding how the premodern imaginary morphed into the modern imaginary is interesting to me because it helps us to think about how our current imaginary might morph into something else in the future--for better or worse.

We assume that we now understand the world more clearly and more accurately than our ancestors did, and we do understand the mechanics of the material world better than they. We also tend to believe if we are the typical secular modern that everything our ancestors believed about the spiritual world is superstition and delusion. Some of it was, but much of it wasn't. Knowing how to discern the difference is a new skill we shall have to learn in the future, but it's not a skill that the "buffered selves" can be much good at. Because their condition as buffered is one that filters out the "data" that must be discerned and evaluated. No data to work with, no possibiliity to develop a skill to evaluate it.

In the meantime, we are in the Age of Whatever, snd sooner or later something new will arise that will give us that sense of a positive future worth working for, a future that currently we cannot imagine. Isn't that the source of our current global, collective free-floating anxiety? The Age of Whatever is the Age of Anxiety. The cause of the anxiety is the ontological groundlessness of social and cosmic imaginaries that shape our existential experience of the world in which we live. 

Our current "postmodern" imaginaries give us no robust sense of future possibiity because there is enframed within them nothing deeply worthy of our aspiration. There are all manner of things to which we san 'No", but nothing to which we can say a deeply felt collective 'Yes'. The postmodern moment is essentially a negating one. The cultural Right says No to everything in the hope that it might preserve what has already been lost. The cultural Left continues to debunk for the sake of debunking. Negation is part of growth, but it is useless if it doesn't open up new possibilities for affirmation. 

I have deep respect for the stance "I don't know", so long as it is a stance of radical openness. And I respect the stance of embracing a refusal of hope when the hope being refused is not hope at all but a kind of bogus optimism that finds the most trivial entertainments and projects "exciting" as seems de rigeur for "unalienated" members of our pop and business cultures. At best this kind of refusal of hope is transitional, but too often I think there's a way that people get stuck in its negating temper. This is especially true when this kind of despair or pure negating oppositionalism becomes fashionable or a tribal shibboleth, because then it is just another form alienation. Seeing through what is bogus is an important step, but it is pointless if it does not open up the possibility to see more clearly what lies hidden behind the bogus.  

At some point, not any time soon, something positive, something worthy of our collective affirmation will emerge, and with it a new grand narrative and a new imaginary. I suspect that while aspects of this imaginary will be completely new in the sense of 'currently not imagined', other aspects of it will involve a retrieval of forgotten things that were once imagined by our ancestors. I suspect that one of the things that will be retrieved is a deep sense of the "personal" nature--the "Thouness"--of the Deep Real. I would at least like to argue for that as a possibility, or at least that if Christians have anything to contribute to a future social cosmic and social imaginary, it's this.

For Taylor our social and cosmic imaginaries are the pre-reflective sense we have of our world, its sense of conventional reality, its myths, norms and practices, in all their taken-for-grantedness. Although in traditional societies these imaginaries tend to be static, in the sense that they don't change significantly over relatively long stretches of time, the imaginary of the societies shaped by Latin Christendom, has undergone very significant transformations starting around the turn of the first millennium C. E. and accelerating over the last five hundred years. Taylor's project in A Secular Age is to trace out this "long march" toward our current secular age over the last millennium and to understand the complex factors that caused it. 

The social imaginary consists of the generally shared background understandings of society, which make it possible for it to function as it does. It is 'social' in two ways: in that it is generally shared, and in that it is about society. But there are also generally shared understandings about other things as well, and these are 'social' only in the first way. Among them is the ensemble of ways we imagine the world we live in. 

And just as the social imaginary consists of the understandings which make sense of our social practices, so the "cosmic imaginary" makes sense of the ways in which the surrounding world figures in our lives: the ways, for instance, that it figures in our relgious images and practices, including explicit cosmological doctrines; in the stories we tell about the other lands and other ages; in our ways of marking the seasons and the passage of time; in the places of "nature' in our moral and/or aesthetic sensibility; and in our attempts to develop a 'scientific' cosmology, if any. (323)

What I’m calling the “long march” is a process whereby new practices, or modifications of old ones, either developed through improvisation among certain groups and strata of the populations;. . .  or else were launched by elites in such a way as to recruit a larger and larger base. . . . Or alternatively, a set of practices in the course of their slow development and ramifications gradually changed their meaning for people, and hence helped to constitute a new social imaginary. . . . The result in all these cases was a profound transformation of the social imaginary in Western societies, and thus of the world in which we live. (176)

He wants to distinguish imaginary from theory. Everyone lives with an socially shared imaginary, not everyone lives with a theory. The movement from one imaginary to another, like the one that happened in the West from premodern to modern, and to whatever it is we have now (because it is no longer modern) is a movement that started as theory but then came to permeate social practice. The movement, the “long march”, traced starts from the classical/medieval  imaginaries based on Platonic/Aristotelian ideas of form and teleology and hierarchical complementarity that shaped both social and cosmic imaginaries to our modern order based on instrumental reason and utilitarian mutual benefit.

People tend not to realize how profound the changes are if they are living through them. They tend to focus on the continuities rather than the discontinuities, but when the discontinuities take hold, the imaginary changes. In more intense periods of social change there is often what has been called a generation gap. Some of this is superficial in the sense of changes in fashion that older people may not be attuned to, but some of it is deeper and contributes structurally to changes in the imaginary. The older generation is shaped by older practices and ideas that shaped the imaginary into which they were acculturated as children, and the younger generation, while deeply influenced by the imaginary of the older generations, is also shaped by new practices and ideas that introduce discontinuities that the older generation feels uncomfortable with.

In traditional societies there may be differences of opinion and temperament when it comes to dealing with certain issues, like war or peace. But there is no generation gap in the modern sense. In traditional societies the wisdom of the elders counts for something because their greater experience in a relatively stable world retains its relevance. In a rapidly changing world the experience of the elders counts for little because their knowledge has become largely obsolete and experience irrelevant. Adaptability to the rapidly changing new is prized, and that is a talent exhibited mostly by the young.

So in this post I want to follow some of Taylor's effort to trace the generation-by-generation changes in the social and cosmic imaginaries of Latin Christendom, from the hierarchical, impersonal social and cosmic imaginaries of classical antiquity to the hierarchical, personal social and cosmic imaginaries of the Latin medieval period to the flattened, impersonal social and cosmic imaginaries of the Enlightenment rationalists. 

***

Taylor argues that during the Patristic period, Christian thinkers wanted to use Greek ideas to help them to articulate their understanding of the significance of the Christian revelation. There were elements in Greek thinking, particularly from Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism that were helpful, and there were other elements that were distortive. Much of the arguing during this period focused on how much one gains or gives up in using Greek ideas to establish a Christian ontology and moral order. Taylor argues that the struggle was argued out on six axes of significance where Christian ideas using the Greek philosophical framework made significant alterations that were to have a significant shaping effect on the imaginaries of medieval Christendom:

1. The significance of the body. While Greek spirit/body dualism persisted in some Christian thought, the more significant dualism for Christians was the one articulated by Augustine's "two loves" (love of self vs. love of God), based on the Jewish dualism of the heart of stone versus the heart of flesh. It is not the body that presents a problem qua body. The problem rather is what is it that is worthy or our love, or to put it another way, what is so much as our 'ultimate concern' and what obstructs or distracts us from loving that which is worthy of it. That is a function of the predisposition of the heart. The life in the body is validated for Christians by its havng been hallowed by the Incarnation and the resurrection event. The body has been redeemed in a way impossible to embrace within the pure Greek scheme. The goal is not to escape from the body but to transform it. 

2. The significance of history. The Incarnation event gives history and the events that happen in it a significance not found in Greek thought. In addition, the Greek idea of eternity--the beginninglessness and endlessness of time--is replaced by the Jewish/Christian idea of creation and the idea of history's eschatological culmination at the end of time. History has a plot: it is  a story of falling away and return. The turning point in the plot is the Incarnation, and the end point is the eschatological gathering of all time together in the communion of the saints. The lives of the saints are the lives that depict the story of return--of alienation and reconciliation. The Prodigal Son is the archetype.

3. The significance of the individual person. Individuation was not particularly important for Greek thought. But for Christians the significance of history enhances the importance of the individual whose eternal destiny is worked out in time. This sense of the individual is not important in the Plotinian Neoplatonist ontology, for instance, for which the goal is rather Eastern in the sense of the individual overcoming the illusion of individuation and melting back into the cosmic pleroma. And while for Aristotle the physical body was important, the individual had particularity only insofar as it is secured by matter. No body, no individuation. The eternal desinty of the individuated immortal soul is a Christian preoccupation. There's a lot of murkiness about the status of the individual in his post death existence, but the ultimate destiny of the human person is to be bodily transformed as Christ's body was transformed in the resurrection. Individuation and the Body are linked in this very important sense. 

4. The significance of contingency. Stoic fatalism and Plotinian necessity requires that things are exactly as they should be because they could not be any other way because God could not have created any other world. The human task for classical Stoics and Neoplatonists is simply amor fati. The idea of changing anything for the better or that there there could be such a thing as human progress is futile and delusional. This idea is challenged by Christian ideas of freedom and grace--although Plotinian necessity is still echoed in Augustine's and later Calvin's bizarrely un-Christian doctrine of double predestination. The more authentically Christian position is that there is no total plan, God created a more interesting universe than that: 

...the Christian eschaton is made up of paths, of stories. And these are shaped by contingencies. That the sotries end well is sometimes seen as their having been rigorously scripted from the beginning. This is often what people call Providence, following the Stoics. God plans sins, so that he can script in some mercy. 

But a rather different model is suggested by the Bible. God's Providence is his ability to respond to whatever the universe and human agency throw up. God is like a skilled tennis player, who can always return the serve. We can see this mode, for instance, in the famous phrase of the Preface of [the] Easter Vigil:"O felix culpa" (happy fault), applied to Adam's sin; happy because it brought such a response from God to redeem it. . . .

[The Good Samaritan story] takes us beyond any established relation into the domain of accident or contingency: my neighbour is someone I come across, bleeding in the road. It was sheer accident that I came along at just that time; but this accident can be the occasion for rebuilding a skein of human relations animated by agape. The Samaritan's action is part of God's response to the skewed serve the robbers have lobbed into history. (275)

5. The significance of the emotions. Life in the body is good, and it is human's eternal destiny to be embodied, so the challenge is not to suppress the emotions, but to transform them. Emotion and desire are affirmed and Stoic apatheia is rejected. The idea of a compassionate, suffering God was an impossible idea for Greek thought, and a stumbling block for anyone whose thought was deeply embedded in the Greek imaginary. And unlike Buddhism, desire qua desire is not the problem so much as on what the human heart focuses its desire and its longing, on what it loves--see number 1 above. 

6. The significance of God as ‘person’ capable of ‘communion’. The Cappadocian formulation of the Trinity is of three persons in communion. God’s intervention in history, and in particular the Incarnation, was intended to transform us, through making us partakers of the communion which God already lives. It was meant to effect our “deification” (theiosis). Salvation is thwarted to the extent that we treat God as an impersonal being or as merely the creator of an impersonal order to which we have to adjust. Salvation is only effected by our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion with one another.

This understanding of communion as the telos of history is the central idea, the hermeneutic key, without which it is impossible to understand the animating spirit of the Christian Revelation.  

At the heart of orthodox Christianity, seen in terms of communion, is the coming of God through Christ into a personal relation with disciples, and beyond them others, eventually ramifying through the church to humanity as a whole. God established the new relationship with us by loving us, in a way we cannot unaided love each other (John 15: God loved us first.) The lifeblood of this new relation is agape, which can’t ever be understood simply in terms of a set of rules, but rather as the extension of a certain kind of relation, spreading outward in a network. The church is in this sense a quintessential network society, even though of an utterly unparalleled kind, in that the relations are not mediated by any of the historical forms of relatedness: kinship, fealty to a chief, or whatever. It transcends all these, but not into a categorical society based on similarity of members, like citizenship; but rather into a network of ever different relations of agape.

Of course, the church lamentably and spectacularly fails to live up to this model; but it is the kind of society that it is meant to be. (282)

If you want a basic criterion to judge whether someone who claims to be Christian is truly animated by the spirit of the gospels, you can do so by evaluating to what degree he wants to include rather than exclude, to embrace rather than shun, to give the benefit of the doubt rather than to judge, to forgive rather than condemn, to converse with the enemy rather than to attack him, to obsess about rules rather than the quality of relationship. Yes, Christians are admonished to be wise as serpents and guileless as doves. This is a warning to be not foolish or naive, but while the dove and the serpent need to be talking to one another, the dove sets the agenda. Too much church history, especially the kind that has been motivated by concerns about institutional preservation, alas, has come from the serpent setting the agenda, and for this reason its spectacular failures. 

Taylor argues that while the Fathers broke from the classical Greek positions on these axes, the Enlightenment rationalists more or less adopted/adapted the Christian positions on the first five but not the sixth. Deism was embraced precisely because of its impersonality and because a deist god does not intervene in history. So there is continuity between the Christian and Enlightenment social and cosmic imaginaries, but this one discontinuity is deeply signifiant, and it creates the space for an exclusive humanism, i.e., one that has no need of transcendence or grace. No interventions, no grace. How can there be in universe in which God has no interest in human affairs. The god of the Deists built the machine, set it in motion, and then bowed out. He gave humans reason to figure out how the machine works, and it's up to them to understand its operations so that they can exploit it for human flourishing. We fulfill God's will insofar as we prosper and help one another to prosper. 

So, how did this play out?  Again, there are many factors that contribute. Taylor lays out these five:

First, the world was already becoming very disenchanted driven by the disembedding, anti-pagan reform impulse that began in the 11^th Century. This was religiously motivated and does not require that God be relegated to impersonal status, but it creates a space for it to happen, especially in the decades subsequent to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The idea of a God who cares to intervene in human affairs has way too many problems: For instance, why do bad things happen to good people? Why didn't God intervene to prevent this disaster or that massacre? And then there was the absurd way that Christian factions in the religious wars of the preceding period insisted that God was on their side and prayed for his intervention to ensure their victory. Clearly the stalemate that ensued undermined any such beliefs in any such interventions. (The answer, btw, to these questions of theodicy lies in distinguishing the purposes of the post-Axial, transcendent God of faith with the immanent pre-Axial gods concerned with ordinary human flourishing. The transcendent Good and the immanent good are not necessarily opposed, but they are not to be conflated.)

Second, the loss of face-to-face, personal relationships in the social hierarchy that characterized premodern societies (I talk about how this played out in American society here after the revolution). This tends to create a society where atomized equals become more the norm especially as society urbanizes and industrializes. As our experience of the social world becomes gradually more impersonal and atomized, so does the way we imagine the cosmos. The two mutually reinforce one another. 

Third, in a more complex and impersonal social world, it is no longer possible to conduct business trusting people with whom we have long acquaintance. We need rules, laws, contracts, and courts. We have a society best understood by codes and rules rather than relationships. This allows for the emergence of a free individual unconstrained by authority, in the sense of deference to one's "betters". This is attractive because the new atomized man freed from his niche in the social hierarchy has ‘adult’ dignity and latitude for a more autonomous way to live in the world.  

Fourth, a process of objectification/disengagement derived from the methods of natural sciences gains huge prestige. It has created a world that has no meaning in the way the world defined by the Platonic/Aristotelian chain of being did. Gone are the days when reading nature was reading God's script. In the classical model we experienced and perceived the world through its meanings. The objectification of scientific method brackets these meanings, and they no longer animate enquiry. Descartes pushes this even further by having us not only withdraw from the old field of meanings but also from the body, i.e., into disembodied consciousness. And then because of the prestige of the scientific method, there is a spillover effect--so that what is appropriate for enquiry regarding the mechanics of the material world extends into domains that are neither mechanical nor material. And so what is not mechanical or material ceases to be interesting because it cannot be worked with and eventually ceases to have any real legitimacy. 

Fifth, a stadial consciousness develops, i.e., a new framework of thinking that sees something new developing all around, that real progress is being made, that the only thing impeding further progress is the irrational baggage of tradition and custom, and that all we need is to be reasonable so that a better world can be achieved. If we are to have a new commercial elite, a new politics, why should we not have a new religion--or no religion? This stadial consciousness is, so to speak, the ratchet at the end of this shift, which makes it (near) impossible to go back on it.

The signifcance of the shift is profound. It creates the conditions that make possible what Taylior calls the 'anthropocentric turn', and I will address that in Part 4.

Related:

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