After the Future

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

 

 

Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part 2

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

On Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part 1

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. 

[This completes Part 1. Parts Two, Three, Four, etc., will follow in posts written over the next weeks discussing Reform and the Disciplinary Society, more on the Buffered and Porous Self, the Enlightenment and the Anthropocentric Turn, Deism and the Impersonal Order, more on the modern social imaginary and modern moral order, and other topics I have yet to consider.]

[Part 1 was revised to reduce wordiness and improve clarity 5/23/20]

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

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso

I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Léon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible—a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth—but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part-time novelist, Christian, pig.

Frederick Buechner

In the Third Canto of Inferno, Dante says there "...trailed so long a file of people--I should never have believed that death could have unmade so many souls". Vergil tells Dante that they are the  sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise because they never chose sides. They are the "moderates," the nowhere men, those who take refuge in the mushy middle and praise themselves for their prudence and good sense. They now commingle with the cowardly angels, those who were neither rebels nor faithful, but stood apart, afraid to choose. 

It wouldn't surprise me if Buechner was thinking of this passage or of Eliot's allusion to it in The Wasteland.  But I would qualify it somewhat. I don't think the objective is to be heroic, because more often than not the pursuit of heroism devolves into a crude causa sui project. Muscular Christianity has little to do with the spirit of the gospels. I'd argue that the normal is ok, but that being normal is not normative; for the Christian impulse is about loving the normal and yet not accepting it as all there is, and from time to time acting in such a way as to subvert it. Whether those actions are modest ones or heroic matters less than whether they were inspired by grace. 

Despite the pejorative connotations, I don't think it's such a bad thing to be a pig.  It's simply a metaphor for our normal, natural life in a fallen world. There is so much that is good about that. Going to ballgames and hoping your team wins. Raising your kids to do well in school and to get decent jobs. Normal is the ordinary joys and sorrows, the tedium and excitement of a life lived through its different rhythms. It means arguing about politics and mowing your lawn. It's about falling in and out of love, and about our dreams for a better future. It's our life as talking, self-aware animals, piggies if you will, living on the earth, and if we see our normal life in this way, it's hard to take it too seriously, because really it shouldn't be.

This is not an argument for complacency, because while there is much in the normal that is truly good, it's not the only possibility. We may be little piggies, but we are capable being more. We want to be more or to think of ourselves as more, but there is a right way and a wrong way of going about it. The normal route people take to being more has to do with ambition and pride, this always leads to problems. The non-normal route is to recognize oneself for the piggy one is and then work with something that we don't think of as natural, but which is as much a part of our daily experience as the air we breathe. 

You know the movie A Day without a Mexican?  It tries to show how important to the life of L.A. is the mostly taken-for-granted presence of Mexicans. Well imagine the world without the taken-for-granted presence of grace. Maybe Quentin Tarrantino could be hired to do the movie about a world without grace--or maybe he already has.  For surely he has a knack for showing us the lives of people who live in a world of banal vileness, banal and vile to the degree that they are closed off from the reality of grace.

I believe there is a principle of metaphysical evil that operates in the world, and its purpose is to close humans off from the possibility of grace. Hell is the soul's state when it has become completely impenetrable by grace. But I doubt anybody takes up permanent residence in downtown Infernoville.  There are, though, plenty of people who live in its suburbs.  And there are people who likewise live in the suburbs of Paradiso.  But most of us live in the murky, in-between burb, which is downtown Purgatorio. It's the place we call normal, neither filled with grace, nor completely cut off from it. Dante puts the nowhere men in Inferno and they belong there if their indecision was a purposeful refusal of grace, but while sometimes it does, mostly it doesn't require of us heroic reaction to choose grace rather than to refuse it.

And so while these are metaphorical places, they are also metaphysical ones.  It's the condition of all of us who live in a fallen world. Paradiso is not a physical place, but the physical world is changed when it is within the gravitational pull of those people who have Paradiso within them. Non-normal things can happen.

Natura est vulnerata, non delenda.  Nature is wounded, not destroyed. I'm going from memory here, so I'm not sure, but think it's Aquinas who said it. It makes a difference if you think of the world as we live in it as wounded, because it suggests that health and wholeness was something lost and also that it can be regained. It suggests that what we have come to take for granted as normal is not necessarily healthful. It makes a difference because it contrasts with the naturalistic understanding that accepts the normal, natural world as the only possibility. And it makes a difference in contrast with the view, Eastern or Western, that understands the world as a prison with no possibilities other than to be a prison, so therefore a place that must be escaped.

It makes a difference because it frames for us the nature of the "heroic" work that we are called to do--the work that truly makes us more than piggies eating at life's trough.  And it defines what heroic means in ways that circumvent all the recognition-driven motivations that are at the heart of the traditional meaning of heroism. Natural heroism is piggy heroism, insofar as it's driven by adrenaline and testosterone. It is in my view morally neutral because it's natural and it’s instinct driven, even if prodigious in its accomplishment. It's usually nothing more than bucks bashing one another in a battle for dominance. Such heroism that is neither here nor there. For the heroism about which Bloy and Buechner speak is not about the performance of tasks that require extraordinary gifts. It is a heroism inspired by grace.

Heroism in this sense is the cumulative record of a life lived, usually obscurely, in response to the presence of the possibility of true freedom or grace. It is about the development of the kind of character, which, because it is capable of responding to grace in small ways over the course of a lifetime, is then also capable, if the occasion arises, of responding in a big way. It is only because of a lifetime of small decisions, small gestures, and the habits of soul that are developed as a result, that if something big comes, and even if notoriety comes with it, there is enough ballast to keep him or her from being blown over.