Becoming Children of Modernity

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).

As the benefits of Revelation disappear even more from the coming world, man
will truly learn what it means to be cut off from Revelation…. The rapid advance
of a non-Christian ethos, however, will be crucial for the Christian sensibility.
As unbelievers deny Revelation more decisively, as they put their denial into
more consistent practice, it will become more evident what it really means to be
a Christian.

—Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World

Only someone who has broken out of the restricted horizon of ideology can see
clearly what has been left behind. And only those who have fully contemplated the
abyss can be sure of having attained the spiritual truth capable of overcoming it.

—David Walsh, After Ideology

No One Gets Out of Here Alive

Christian modernists and anti-modernists,
and those falling somewhere in between,
have offered countless definitions, characterizations,
and genealogies of secular modernity.
Although trying to write its definitive biography
is an important, even necessary,
task—and of course, this has been precisely
the task of Modern Age ab initio—ultimately,
it is impossible. There is something asymptotically
elusive about modernity: the depth
and comprehensiveness of our definitions
increase its abstractness and distance; the accuracy,
nuance, and precision of our characterizations
increase its narrowness and
obscurity. Moreover, the more one studies
secular modernity, the more it presents itself
as a phenomenon not easily separable
from reality itself, as immune to exhaustive
intellectual comprehension and description,
as impossible to escape or transcend.

This is the leitmotif of Charles Taylor’s
recent magnum opus, A Secular Age, and I
think it is a defensible one. Modernity is,
in a very real sense, inescapable. As Taylor
puts it—we are in it. In other words, there
is something virtually ontological about
secular modernity. Even though what we
are talking about is, of course, an artifact of
man, not God, that is, a cultural and historical
phenomenon, not a natural or supernatural
one equivalent to a change in being itself
(I am no Hegelian)—nevertheless, cultural
and historical being is, at least for the culture-
dependent rational animals that we
are, the ineluctable mediator of any “pure”
being that we may experience. As Alasdair
MacIntyre has argued persuasively, pace the
Enlightenment’s “view from nowhere,” we
never encounter reality unmediated by tradition,
cultural artifacts of human language,
conceptual schemes, social practices, rituals,
narratives, moral norms, etc., and though
we can ultimately transcend tradition, history,
and culture to attain timeless truth, it
is only through the cultural resources and
productions that we both create and are
created by that we can do so.

Nevertheless, in light of the notorious,
anti-human weeds that have sprouted solely
in the soil of secular modernity, it feels
obligatory for both the religious and humanist
thinker to be against it—whatever
its ontological status. Should we not create
adequately anti-modern domestic, social,
cultural, political, educational, and liturgical
environments if the ones secular modernity
has occasioned threaten our salvation?
However, if secular modernity is rightly interpreted
as an ubiquitous and existentially
inescapable consciousness—that is, not a
particular ideology or structure-of-sin, but
something underlying these, then “antimodernness”
is illusory, and escape futile.
Christians are indeed obliged to resist and
ultimately “escape” from secular modernity,
but that is because Christians are obliged
ultimately to transcend all finite times and
places when they become idols preventing
the attainment of union with the timeless
and placeless God—not because modernity
is intrinsically evil.

The End of Naïveté

What should we say secular modernity is
then? Taylor attempts to define it, and it
takes him almost eight hundred pages of
historical, sociological, psychological, anthropological,
economic, political, scientific, and theological analysis to do it. It is
by far the most sophisticated and erudite
attempt I have ever read to define what
might be, along with God, being, and the
individual human person, a most indefinable
reality. Out of the many trenchant and
profound descriptions of modernity Taylor
offers us, this one is especially helpful for
our purposes:

[T]here has been a titanic change in
our western civilization. We have
changed not just from a condition
where most people lived “naïvely” in a
construal (part Christian, part related
to “spirits” of pagan origin) as simple
reality, to one in which almost no one
is capable of this, but all see their option
as one among many. We all learn
to navigate between two standpoints:
an “engaged” one in which we live as
best we can the reality our standpoint
opens us to; and a “disengaged” one
in which we are able to see ourselves
as occupying one standpoint among a
range of possible ones, with which we
have in various ways to coexist…. The
shift to secularity in this sense consists,
among other things, of a move
from a society where belief in God is
unchallenged and indeed unproblematic,
to one in which it is understood
to be one option among others…. [A]
secular age is one in which the eclipse
of all goals beyond human flourishing
becomes conceivable; or better, it falls
within the range of an imaginable life
for masses of peoples.¹

Note that his characterization of secular
modernity is eminently nonideological and
noncondemnatory; it is neither the rigid
denunciation of the traditionalist, nor the
insouciant glorification of the humanist.
Rather, Taylor identifies secular modernity
as something more akin to a radically new
paradigm or consciousness shift, in itself
neither moral nor immoral, true nor false,
pro-Christian nor anti-Christian. It is not
to be identifi ed with exclusive humanism,
managerial liberalism, and fascist fundamentalism,
on the one hand, or the resurgence
of public religiosity, the priority of
liberal democracy and human rights, and
the intolerance of religious intolerance, on
the other. For these, according to Taylor,
are only its diverse ideological interpretations
and embodiments, the structures of
thought and practice that have built upon
and with secular modernity’s peculiar consciousness
and potentiality, what he calls
the “immanent frame”:

We have undergone a change in
our condition, involving both an
alteration of the structures we live
within, and our way of imaging
these structures. This is something
we all share, regardless of our differences
in outlook. But this cannot
be captured in terms of a decline
and marginalization of religion.
What we share is what I have been
calling “the immanent frame”; the
different structures we live in: scientific, social, technological, and so
on, constitute such a frame in that
they are part of a “natural,” or “this
worldly” order which can be understood
in its own terms, without
reference to the “supernatural” or
“transcendent.”²

An age or society would then be
secular or not, in virtue of the conditions
of experience of and search
for the spiritual.³

According to Taylor, secular modernity
is the ineluctable mode, background, and
context for all thought and practice in the
contemporary West, rather than any particular
ideological or cultural expression
of it. It is, thus, a deeper reality than the
merely ideological—it is existential. We encounter
it deep within our lived experience
of reality, before we have the chance
to reflect on it. It is not so much the reflective,
philosophical description or account
we give ourselves of a more fundamental,
pre-philosophical, and pre-reflective experience,
but is itself this fundamental experience,
embodied in the warp and woof of
our lives in such a way that any attempt to
disengage or extricate ourselves from it is
equivalent to the attempt to escape reality
itself. Because secularity is so intimately
bound up with our experience of reality, it
serves as the ineluctable background to and
structure of the very form and content of
our thinking, akin to grammar and rhetoric
as the background to and structure of
the matter and expression of our words.
Although we can think about, and thus
gain some distance from, this background
and structure in an abstract, philosophical
manner, we cannot entirely escape and transcend
it.

This is a radical claim. Nevertheless,
I think there is one short and powerful
demonstration of its essential accuracy.
Ask oneself this question: does any religious
believer in the modern West experience
his religion in a naïve manner; that is,
in the way a small child raised within a
sheltered, integrally and robustly religious
home might experience it? Is it simply the
way things are, that is, a priori immune
to and exclusive of any and all alternative
interpretations? Can one completely avoid
being disengaged from one’s naïve experience
of what is and must be, losing all awareness
of what is not and might not be? Is it even
possible for a religious child to retain this
sort of naïveté nowadays? I am not suggesting
by this interrogation that modern
consciousness precludes the perennial and
epoch-indifferent capacity of human reason
to abstract from one’s lived experience
and entertain other possible philosophical
and theological accounts of reality through
and in one’s imagination and intellect. If
that were the case, there would be nothing
new in secular modernity in this respect,
for even the most sheltered and parochial
medieval peasant could thereby “escape”
from the Christianity he imbibed with his
mother’s milk. What does seem radically
unique to secular modernity, as Taylor argues,
is an entirely new incapacity to experience
the reality of a particular worldview
in a naïve way; that is, without the
consciousness of there being other viable
options.

For the Christian, then, the end of naïve
religious consciousness would entail an
ineluctable experience of reality as perpetually
open to the possibility, or at least
the awareness, of a non-Christian interpretation
and experience of the world, of
the possible absence of God. Might such a
characterization of our epoch explain the
experiences of Bl. Mother Teresa and St.
Therese of Lisieux, who, as we know from
their personal writings, experienced this
sense of the absence of God with an intensity
we cannot imagine—even in the
possession of a robust supernatural Faith?
Perhaps what Bl. Teresa experienced was a
supernaturally heightened and intensified
version of the ordinary consciousness of
the typical modern man. Some of the most
influential Christian saints in our day—St.
Therese of Lisieux, St. Edith Stein, Bl.
Mother Teresa, and St. Padre Pio—are all
representative of what seems to be a peculiarly
modern form of spiritually, what Fr.
Aidan Nichols has called existential prayer,
“accepting in a generous spirit our deprivation
of many of the conventional props and
assurances of a culturally transmitted religion…
may be ushered with peculiar immediacy
into the presence of the living God.”⁴
Obviously, these saints did escape secular
modernity; however, it occurred precisely
through a peculiarly intense experience
of the existential absence of God, written
into the very fabric of modern secular consciousness.
It would seem that these saints
escaped it by going through it.

Assuming that this characterization of
secular modernity is more or less accurate,
what would happen if one were to
deny secular modernity by attempting to
escape it by going against or around it? To
answer this question we must first attempt
to answer the more fundamental question
of why one would desire to escape secular
modernity in the first place. One reason,
perhaps, would be the conviction that it is
evil, for aversion is, as St. Thomas teaches,
the passion of the soul naturally evoked by
the presence of evil. However, if we are
correct in our assessment of the distinctly
modern condition as being something
preceding or situating morality, as being,
subjectively and experientially at least, ontological,
then this conviction and its ensuing
passion would be gravely mistaken and
disordered. What is evil, of course, are the
predominant ideological interpretations of
secular modernity, what Taylor identifies
as certain “spins” on the culture of secular
modernity that are often mistakenly taken
to be the reality itself:

But this order of itself leaves the issue
open whether, for purposes of
ultimate explanation, or spiritual
transformation, or final sense-making,
we might have to invoke something
transcendent. It is only when
the order is “spun” in a certain way
that it seems to dictate a “closed” interpretation.
⁵

This closed spin Taylor calls “exclusive
humanism.” We can see it today in both
its “right” and “left” versions: its twofold
Janus-like embodiment in “conservative,”
nation-worshipping, secular-messianic militarism,
on the one hand, and relativistic,
Protagorean, managerial totalitarianism, on
the other—relativism and fundamentalism
being equally narcissistic, practically atheistic,
and nihilistic.

If we take these “closed spins” to be
secular modernity itself, we would rightly
respond either by attacking them or by attempting
to escape them, or both. If Taylor
is correct, however, although we must
renounce and avoid all errors and evils, we
should not renounce and avoid the larger
background condition or consciousnessform—
the immanent frame—that has both
enabled their existence and our capacity to
choose radically different theoretical and
practical alternatives to them. In short, by
choosing an alternative content built upon
and within the background of secular modernity,
we do not thereby escape the background
itself—nor should we wish to. The
lack of awareness of the twice-removed nature
of secular modernity is, perhaps, a main
reason for the disordered interpretations
and embodiments of it, for fundamentalism
(both Islamic and Americanist) and relativism
(both liberal and conservative) are motivated
by a mistaken aversion to what they
consider evil—this or that particular aspect
of secular modernity itself.

Both Cause and Cure

What, then, would be the effect of embracing
modernity? As Taylor explains, attending
the peculiar consciousness shift of modernity
is a heightened capacity intimately
to feel the pull of other worldviews—especially
those we might otherwise deem
unworthy of attraction. “Living within the
frame,” Taylor writes, “doesn’t simply tip
you in one direction, but allows you to feel
pulled two ways. A very common experience
of living here is that of being crosspressured
between the open and closed
perspectives.”⁶ Modern secular pluralism,
then, before it is “spun” by some celebratory
or condemnatory ideology, provides
an unprecedented opportunity for individuals
to experience the other from the inside;
that is, not just as an abstract possibility
of thought and practice, as was possible in
preceding ages, but intimately, as a living,
breathing, concrete, coherent (or perhaps
not so coherent), historical tradition. Alasdair
MacIntyre describes this immersion in
other traditions as learning a second language,
and he judges it indispensable for
the authentic understanding and practice
of one’s own tradition. For, without such
immersion, eventually we lose the capacity
to recognize and correct the defects in our
own tradition, rendering us ineffective as
participants in its further development.

By encountering the partial truths in
other traditions, we become more able to
recognize partial truths as partial, both in
other traditions and within our own, as well
as the partialness of our appropriation and
understanding of our own tradition. Our
tradition may indeed be the true tradition,
providing incomparable and privileged access
to the whole truth, yet it can still be
perceived and grasped by us in a partial,
tendentious, and distorted way. Encountering
the truths in other traditions can
serve to expose that false dichotomy in our
mind that leads us to interpret alternative
positions as nothing more than full-fledged
errors, and our own personal position as
nothing less than the whole truth. Our
position might very well be, in an objective
sense, the whole truth, or the closest
to it, but as fi nite, fallible, sinful creatures,
our grasp of it is inevitably partial. This
was Socrates’ insight: “All I know is that
I do not know” was not a somber resignation
to skepticism towards or denial of the
truth itself, but an affirmation of the inexhaustibility
of truth in itself, a denial of its
complete transparency to us, and his joyful
resignation to this.

Modernity, of course, can cause a loss of
the capacity to feel the pull of those parts of
the truth one requires to regain wholeness.
When this occurs, any part of the truth that
we had genuinely recognized and possessed
loses its healing properties as truth, becoming
deadly to our soul. Instead of a part of
truth, it functions now as a full-fledged error,
rendering us blind to precisely those
other parts of the truth that could render us
whole again. In other words, truth, when
embraced partially but interpreted holistically,
becomes error, indeed, a lie. If the
diseased mind could learn to see the part as
part, and not simply a hateful error to condemn
and fear, and from which to escape at
all costs, it could recognize the prison into
which it has fallen. As Plato’s cave suggests,
liberation from intellectual prison can only
occur through the dawning upon our intellects
of the light of the whole, the Good,
which is both that by which all knowledge
occurs and the knowable par excellence. And
for our nonangelic, discursive, fallen intellects,
this dawning can only occur through
a persistent and often excruciating dialectical
comparison of whole and part, a dynamic
exemplified by Socrates and brought
to near-perfection by St. Thomas in his
Summa Theologiae. It is a kind of ongoing
intellectual crucifixion, with modernity as
Calvary.

None of this is meant to suggest that
there aren’t full-fledged, pernicious errors,
as distinct from merely partial truths—
indeed, modernity has provided far more
and worse ones than ever before. But often
what we perceive to be absolute error
is only distorted partial truth, perceived as
error because seen out of context. Similarly,
often what we perceive to be wholly truth
is only an exaggeration of partial truth. The
partial truths we reject as unworthy of our
consideration are sometimes precisely those
we need to embrace for the completion and
correction of our thinking. Thus, occasional
immersions in the deeply pluralistic milieu
of our secular modern culture—though
not, of course, its cesspools of immorality
and idolatry—always preceded and followed
by intensive periods of nursing at the
bosom of one’s particular religious and/or
philosophical tradition, are, I think, obligatory.
Only these encounters with the spinfree
immanent frame that is modernity iteslf
can enable us to recognize the partialness
of our own and others’ appropriation of the
truth, effectively to help end the reign of the
relativistic, exclusively humanist spin, and
to transcend whatever in modernity that
holds us back from union with the truth,
with God.

Are encounters with what one knows to
be erroneous viewpoints truly necessary for
the full appropriation of the truth? Christians,
for example, believe themselves to
have “the whole truth” through the revelation
of Jesus Christ, so why would they risk
damnation by plunging themselves into pluralism,
into alien traditions that are known
to be fundamentally in error and dangerous
to the soul? However, Christians, though
believing themselves in possession of the
whole truth through the gift of faith, are,
nevertheless, simultaneously dispossessed
of it; for they, like all of us, are always, in
a subjective sense, approaching the whole
truth. The peculiar evil of secular modernity
is that it can blind us to the fact that
what we often think to be the whole truth
is only our own partial appropriation of it,
and, even worse, a part pretending to be the
whole. This is the spiritual disease of which
modernity is both the cause and cure. Fragmentary,
partial knowledge, unrecognized
as fragmentary and partial and substituting
for comprehensive, holistic knowledge, is
the intellectual condition of our fallen nature,
and the besetting bane of modernity;
but with the intrinsic help of grace, the
extrinsic help of Scripture and Tradition,
and cooperation through courageous philosophical
analysis and dialogue combined
with contemplation, Christians can ascend,
at least partially, to the whole that awaits
them personally in the beatific vision.

Becoming Children of Modernity

Whatever modernity is, one thing we can
say for certain is that it, and it alone, was
the mid-wife for the birth of the choice-making
individual. As MacIntyre has pointed out,
the “individual” is not a natural type of human
being, but a kind of scripted role created
by modernity itself according to its own
peculiar dramatic exigencies. Whatever we
eventually become, whether postmodern,
isolated, fragmented, secularist, therapeutic,
urban connoisseurs of private self creation;
or anti-modern, communitarian,
traditionalist, paleoconservative, “back to
the land” aspirants of a neomedieval Christendom—
we do so by choice as individuals,
before we do and are anything or anybody
else. For all the alternatives that modernity
offers, modernity does not permit us to escape
this fundamental precondition for the
shaping of our identities. If Taylor is correct,
the non-chosen and communally conferred
identity of the choice-making individual is,
like secular modernity itself, neither good
nor evil in itself, but potentially both, depending
precisely on the spin we put on it.
As Taylor argues in his essay “A Catholic
Modernity?” the greatest mistake secular
moderns have made regarding their new
identity is to construe the radical responsibility
and high dignity that attends it for
radical autonomy and spiritual independence.⁷
This, and not secular modernity per se, is
arguably the main cause of the culture of
death. What, then, is the alternative to such
a construal? Josef Pieper provides a clue:

I refer of course to the life of our
fellowmen under the conditions of
tyranny. As we all know, under such
conditions no one dares trust anyone
else. Candid communication dries
up; and there arises that special kind
of unhealthy wordlessness which
is not silence so much as muteness.
Under conditions of freedom, however,
human beings speak uninhibitedly
to one another. How illuminating
this contrast is! For in the face
of it, we suddenly become aware of
the degree of human closeness, mutual
affirmation, communion, that
resides in the simple fact that people
listen to each other and are disposed
from the start to trust and “believe”
each other.⁸

“Unless you become as little children….”
Knowing in the center of his being,
before the onset of any rational reflection
or self-consciousness, that he is utterly
incapable of independent existence, the
child naïvely, immediately, and joyfully
opens himself up to the existence, influence,
and guidance of the other. Childlike,
trustful openness is the indispensable
requirement for divine faith, and faith requires
the capacity and willingness to give
assent to the authority of someone other
than ourselves. For this assent to be given
freely and with love, we must develop a
certain attitude of soul, one receptive to
the influence of others and willing to be
continually transformed by that influence.
I think what Charles Taylor is advising
as the proper response to the inescapable
existential milieu that secular modernity
is, and the irreplaceable identity of the
“choice-making individual” that it offers,
is a radical, questioning openness to what
is—for each particular person—the divine
and human other. The existence of even
one person with a genuine spirit of erotic,
Socratic questioning is the most effective
antidote to the suffocating, anti-question-
ing culture we live in, in both its traditionalist
and modernist varieties.

According to Alasdair MacIntyre, our
“enlightened, free-thinking age” is, ironically,
a culture of suffocating dogmatism.⁹
If so, it is vitally important for us to use the
great gift we have been given in these times,
a heightened capacity for god-like freedom,
for others. But to give to others the gift of
ourselves, we must first have an intimate
experience of what is not ourselves, for, as
Edith Stein has claimed, we can only know
ourselves adequately through the eyes of
others. All of this requires a willingness to
expose ourselves to the other in the most
vulnerable way, to ask, to seek, to venture
out existentially in humble questioning of
ourselves and all that is around us—even
when we think already to know the answers
given to us by the gift of Faith.

What really is important in life is
not so much to provide answers, as
to discern true questions. When true
questions are found, they themselves
open the heart to the mystery. Origen
used to say: “Every true question
is like the lance which pierces
the side of Christ causing blood and
water to flow forth.”¹⁰

Do we truly experience our spiritual answers
as answers to questions, to questions
we, ourselves, have truly asked? Those who
do not experience answers this way, who
believe themselves to have obtained the
answers without having first endured the
existential agony of searching in the darkness,
whether because one has judged that
there are no answers, or because they are
believed to be already securely possessed,
should recognize in such an attitude neither
a humble plea of ignorance nor a simple
and pious submission to God’s word—but
a type of idolatry.

Conclusion: A New Axial Age

Modernity involves the coming to
be of new kinds of public space,
which cannot be accounted for in
terms of changes in explicit views,
either of factual belief or normative
principle. Rather the transition involves
to some extent the definition
of new possible spaces hitherto outside
the repertory of our forebears,
and beyond the limits of their social
imaginary.¹¹

The essential message of Charles Taylor’s
groundbreaking A Secular Age is, I think,
this: notwithstanding the serious spiritual
dangers that secular modernity uniquely
occasions, such as the illusion of the self-sufficient, mentally invulnerable “individual,”
what Taylor calls the “buffered self,” the
virtually irresistible inclination to spin the
world according to one’s existential preferences,
or the suffocating epistemological
dichotomy of answers without questions
and questions without answers; the present
age in which Providence has blessed us to
live is, nevertheless, spiritually rich, robust,
and exhilarating. Our secular age affords a
uniquely intense existential awareness of the
primacy of questioning and an unsurpassed
urgency to discover the right questions. In
short, what Taylor is telling us is that we
are in the midst of a second—and perhaps
final?—Axial Age, one in which we are
all called to play the role of Socrates, even
when—and perhaps precisely when—our
questions have already been answered.

NOTES

1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA:
   Belknap Press, 2007), 12, 19–20.

2. Ibid., 594.
3. Ibid.,
   3.

4. Aidan Nichols, Christendom Awake (Great Britain:
   T&T Clark Ltd., 1999), 213. 5 Taylor, A Secular Age,
   594.

5. Ibid., 555.
6. Charles Taylor, A Catholic Modernity?
   (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

7. Josef
   Pieper, Faith, Hope, and Love (San Francisco: Ignatius
   Press, 1997), 41.

8. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Philosophy
   Recalled to its Tasks,” in The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected
   Essays, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
   Press, 2006), 182.

9. Archbishop Bruno Forte,
   “Religion and Freedom: Searching For the Infinitely
   Loving Father-Mother,” a lecture given at a meeting of
   the bishops of England and Wales, 12 November 2007,
   accessed on 2 May 2008, available at www.catholic.
   org/featured/headline.php?ID=5262.

10. Charles Taylor,
    “Two Theories of Modernity,” The Hastings Center
    Report 24.2 (March 1995).