A Secular Age
By Charles Taylor. Belknap Press. 2007. 874 pages

The Unintended Reformation
By Brad Gregory. Belknap Press. 2012. 574 pages

We have two rather different books from very different thinkers: Charles Taylor, Canadian philosopher, sociologist, and historian of ideas; Brad Gregory, American historian with a philosophical background. Taylor, discussing the origin of our secular age, rather as he discussed the Sources of the [modern] Self in his groundbreaking 1989 masterpiece; Gregory, discussing the origins and unintended reverberations of the Reformation.

Taylor’s 800-page work is a much-expanded version of his Gifford Lectures in 1999, Living in a Secular Age. It tells the story of secularisation in the modern West, wending its way through the “drive to Reform” which characterises second-millennium Christianity, and which he sees as the ultimate cause of the development of secularism, to the emergence of an impersonal Deism, the age of Romanticism and the co-existence of unbelief with spiritual awareness, the co-existence of great horrors with humanitarian concerns on a previously unheard-of scale.

Every aspect of modernity is treated in a fascinating, thorough and very personal conversation. He concludes that the perceived flatness of modernity is calling for a spiritual inspiration, and his final prognosis is that secularist ideology has not been able, and will not be able, to cure the malaises it blamed on religion.

Gregory’s Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society deals with the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation in chapters about religion, Church and state, morality, consumerism, and the universities. But he begins (and the present review focuses on this) with a chapter on an unintended fore-runner of the Reformation, in the philosophical and theological theories of Blessed Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who both unwittingly laid the foundations of a worldview in which God is just another being, albeit almighty and infinite, subject to the same canons of proof as other objects of our knowledge.

Secularism's religious origins

Taylor and Gregory both take issue with the “substitution” theory, the “obvious idea,” espoused by New Atheists, etc., that “superstitious religion waned, lost its inspiration, and was ‘found out’ by something better – science, rationalism, and technological progress – leading to secularism. But for both writers, there wasn’t anything else waiting in the wings. In common with other recent narratives, they maintain rather that it was religious thinking and religious concerns that gave rise to secularity, much as Tom Holland, author of Dominion, has claimed that humanism is simply a Christian heresy, cashing in on some particular aspects of the Christian message such as freedom, human dignity, or equality.

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor explains that “the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.” Secularity in this sense is not an opinion or an ideology: it is a matter of the whole context of understanding (“social imaginary” as he also calls it) in which our moral, spiritual, and religious experience and search take place.

For Taylor, we transitioned from living within a “cosmos”, a hierarchically graded universe full of symbolic meaning and order, to inhabiting an “infinite universe” that is vast, infinite and seemingly devoid of divine meaning. The pre-modern self was a “porous” self, open to the divine, perceiving it in the cosmos, the calendar, full of special times and seasons; in the sacraments and sacramentals of the Church; in the presence of relics and other material witnesses or even generators of the numinous presence of God. This is contrasted with the advent in modern times of what Taylor calls the “buffered self”, which is able to take a detached and self-contained distance from everything outside the mind.

At the heart of all this, he finds, within Christianity itself, a drive for reform, personal and ecclesial, running right through the second millennium – from the medieval reforms of Hildebrand to the devotio moderna of Erasmus, Thomas à Kempis, and Thomas More, to the Reformation, to Trent, to Vatican II, which led to a more inward devotional life, a suspicion of the external and popular piety so popular in pre-modern times. The whole centre of gravity of religious life changes: the power of God doesn’t operate through various “sacramentals” or locations vested with sacred power. Sacraments become occasions rather than causes of grace, and religion becomes the individual’s private responsibility, permitting the emergence of a “buffered”, self-contained self.