A Secular Age (2007), by Charles Taylor, and God’s Funeral (1999), by A N Wilson
Authors: Charles Taylor, A N Wilson. Review by Neil Morgan
There is a (probably apocryphal) story of a meeting between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pierre-Simon Laplace, the astronomer and physicist, in 1802. Napoleon comments that he has heard that Laplace has written ‘a large book on the system of the universe’ without mentioning God at all. Laplace’s cool, perhaps even dismissive, reply is: ‘Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là’ (‘I had no need of that hypothesis’).
A N Wilson’s God’s Funeral takes this story forward into the late nineteenth century, mostly concentrating on England. This was the time when Matthew Arnold set down his description of the ebbing of the ‘Sea of Faith’, in his famous poem ‘Dover Beach’. (In the twentieth century, Don Cupitt, the philosopher of religion, would go on to use ‘Sea of Faith’ as a title for his network exploring the idea of religion as a human creation.) The ebbing of this sea culminates in the ‘death of God,’ as proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche, also in the nineteenth century. Wilson gives an interesting account of numerous Victorian luminaries, including Herbert Spencer, T H Huxley, W K Clifford (who wrote an influential book called Ethics of Belief), Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, A Swinburne, Karl Marx (‘religion is the opium of the people’), and Sigmund Freud (who wrote The Future of an Illusion).
The ‘subtraction’ story of secularisation presents secularism as the result of just subtracting away superstition, ignorance, authoritarianism, or anything else irrelevant or pernicious. Hereby we are supposed to witness, via the Enlightenment and science, humanity gradually shuffling off the detritus of God – of belief and superstition. God equates to belief in spirits, fairies, and demons. These things evaporate in the battle between science and religion. Moreover, as we strengthen and become rational (as Clifford’s book argued), we can increasingly come up with ‘correct’ naturalistic explanations of phenomena. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is a famous example here. In a way we are meant to sign up to a sort of scientific exorcism, which simply withers religion way. That is the story. So far so good?
But stop; hold on a moment. Are we allowed to ask whether any of this story is true? Certainly one gets the sense that Wilson, at the end of his book, is not at all convinced. Nor is Charles Taylor in the other book here, A Secular Age.
Taylor, in a long, and very deep, study of the secular, is not convinced by the subtraction story. Rather, he construes the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as active constructions of a radically different worldview. This has occurred, he says, in a process he calls ‘immanentization’ – the process whereby meaning, significance, and a sense of fullness of lived experience, are sought within an enclosed, self sufficient and naturalistic universe, without any reference to transcendence. (This is, I think, akin to what David Boulton, in a nontheistic Quaker description, calls up in his Real Like the Daisies or Real Like I Love You: Essays in radical Quakerism). It is a sort of ontological and metaphysical barbed-wire enclosure, with a sign saying ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’.
Taylor describes the modern psychological self as ‘buffered’. He means that it is carefully insulated, like a person in an armour-plated tank – no longer available or vulnerable to the sense of the transcendent. He contrasts this with an earlier ‘porous’ historical sense of being, which is open to such experience.
Therefore, a picture emerges in these accounts of a sort of enormous religious faux pas. As both Wilson and Taylor describe it, by the end of the nineteenth century almost all the great writers, artists, and intellectual leaders seemed to have deserted and abandoned religion. (Not quite all, if we remember Leo Tolstoy.) But what was no longer creditable, what had been abandoned, was not, argue Wilson and Taylor, the call of the transcendent, but the more populist, anthropomorphic (and possibly idolatrous) concept of God. This was the ‘God Upstairs’ as James Robinson would come to call it, in Honest to God.
On the other hand, theologians such as Paul Tillich argued that the collapse of this concept did not imply the collapse of the reality of God. Rather, the modern mind must be encouraged to think and feel in less ‘univocal’ ways. While the ‘death of God’ had indeed led many to atheism, for Tillich, it rather led to a different – indeed deeper – faith, to a God who emerged from the other side of doubt. Karl Barth, radicalising the notion of transcendence, went so far as to write, ‘One cannot speak of God, simply by speaking of Man in a loud voice’.
Once we start to drop, or to beat the truth out of, transcendence (which is for many simply part of the phenomenology of religious life), our hearts can seem to harden, and our minds to deaden and flatten out. If these deep intuitions and elemental matters are simply excluded by reason, we seem to be forced to abandon,what is really closest to our hearts. Need this be the case?
Charles Taylor describes this as a sort of subtle – or not so subtle – propaganda, by what he calls ‘The Desdemona analogy’. This refers to Shakespeare’s Othello. Desdemona, the faithful wife, is killed by her estranged husband, Othello, because he only listens to the information provided by Iago. Iago convinces Othello that Desdemona is an adulteress. The point of the analogy, of course, is that other sources and accounts have been silenced. Othello is overwhelmed by Iago, and can listen to nothing else.
Yet, there have always been those who swam against the ebb-tide. To take one example, Gerald Manley Hopkins tried successfully to construct a completely new language that went against it, in his poetry. Does God mean anything positively? Or is he/she/it just a piece of made up nonsense? Neither theism nor atheism can simply be asserted, but many people become persuaded that reductionism does not convince.
We are, according to Wilson and Taylor, in a postmodern world where faith has been, in Taylor’s words, ‘fragilized’ – put in question, and marginalised. But it is an ironic fact that, even where transcendence is denied, a sense of it remains as a potential backcloth, a frame for aesthetic, moral and spiritual experiences as they are lived. As George Steiner argued in Real Presences, transcendence seems to be just what makes things matter, so that art, in his view, is a response, rather than just a self-expression. Lived experience seems to point to it, as a signpost points to a place.
So, should we leave transcendence behind us? Does it need to be deflated, like a child’s party balloon that needs popping, as many try to convince us? I want to suggest the opposite. It needs to be refitted, to take us beyond the ‘God upstairs’. It should be deepened, and expanded rather than deflated.
‘Dover Beach’ misses the point. Every day the sea comes back in. This is a simple fact of lunar physics. The phenomenology of the transcendent is there to be experienced. Transcendence – and therefore of course the concept of God – does not go away. Tides turn.
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