A Secular Age

A Secular Age CHARLES TAYLOR The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England ■ 2007 Nineteenth-Century Trajectories It would be ideal if we could follow the development of the nova in the late nine teenth and early twentieth centuries, because it is then that the alternatives open to unbelief are multiplied and enriched, prior to their diffusion to society as a whole in the process I’m calling “super-nova”, which mainly takes place after the Second World War. Here the trajectories differ significantly between national cultures. A really satis factory account would have to follow all of these. But alas, I lack the space and the competence, and probably the reader lacks the patience, to accomplish this. And so I want to concentrate on a couple of interesting, illustrative cases. I will look first at England (sometimes also Britain, but mainly England) from roughly 1840 to 1940. And then I will take a brief look at France around rhe turn of rhe twenrieth century. After which I will rurn in the next part to try ro draw some general conclusions about the coming of the “secular age” in the West. I The early nineteenth century saw a resurgence in belief and practice associated with the Evangelicals, and partly driven by the shock of the Revolutionary and Napole onic Wars. Bur in the 1830s, orthodox belief among intellectual and social dites comes once again under pressure. Some of the same philosophical considerations were at work as earlier. Philosophical Radicalism, with its Utilitarian principles, was very much an intellectual product of the eighteenth century. But as I mentioned earlier (Chapter 10, section 2), we should perhaps see the new regression of Chris tian faith rather as a reprise than as a simple continuation of the developments of the previous century. That’s because the line of attack was in some ways new. The old arguments continued, but they were supplemented by a new approach. An important retreat occurred; so that by mid-century John Stuart Mill (true, not quite a neutral observer) could say that “the old opinions in religion, morals and politics, are so much discredited in the more intellectual minds as to have lost the A SECULAR AGE 378 T described in the previous section between the seeming y in p -Iiuon.1 we„. Sv“. ;ie (.ha. of i„=,f tap US — hu. :"ll.t:S?oT.h“rrofa^ ■” a c».,al ».e,. a™ dev„d„g f.o» wHa. is ofa-=-*» theory didnt emerge in wo Z“i.8ue„.ialfo.-ado„had.„adytau given .o..^l.c».e« tianity by a cosmic vision of impersonal order, that of Carly . NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRAJECTORIES 379 This doesn’t mean that Darwin was without impact. His theory gave an impor tant push towards a materialist, reductive view of the cosmos, from which all teleol ogy was purged (because explained away on a deeper level). But it enters a field in which many people had already felt the pull of the primacy of impersonal order; it did not initiate this pull on its own. Carlyle, formed in large part by Goethe, and partly through him by Schiller and the German Romantics,^ reacted against all those features of Christianity un- combinable with impersonal order: the crucial importance of a personal relation to God, particular providences. Divine judgment as a personal decision of God, and above all, miracles (those “old Hebrew clothes”).^ Moreover, he didn’t understand this as his own personal reaction. He shared the view which I described in an earlier chapter, based on a stadial conception of history, that the pieces he rejected were ba sically unacceptable to the mind of his age, however much some people, in their failure to understand their times, hung on to them. Whatever could be saved in Christianity couldn’t be preserved in that form. “The Mythus of the Christian Reli gion looks not in the eighteenth Century as it did in the eighth”; who will help us “to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live?”^ As we can already guess from the invocation of the term ‘myth’, the doctrines of this new form were not very definite, but they seemed to involve the existence of some not purely hu man spiritual force, which could help humanity to move forward to higher forms of life. They involved some form of Providence, History, Moral Absolutes, as Wilson puts it.® These higher forms would allow us really to affirm the goodness and right ness of all being, in what Carlyle called “the everlasting Yea”. This faith was of the greatest importance to Carlyle, because otherwise the trends of the time pointed towards a degradation of human life: the ugliness and egoism of commercial-industrial society, the atomism and lack of common concern that this society bred, held together only by the “cash nexus”, the absence of any larger, more heroic perspective on life, beyond a myopic hedonism, which it tends to inculcate in us. (Carlyle, prefiguring Nietzsche, sarcastically defines organized philanthropy as “the Universal Abolition of Pain Association”.) In this age, the universe and soci ety appear as merely mechanical, devoid of meaning. “To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, im measurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O the vast. Gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death. Everything, even the sublimest issues, are being reduced to calculation: “Benthamee Utility, vir tue by profit and Loss; reducing this God’s-World to a dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures and pains on.”® All this would be unbearable, if there weren’t some assurance that we could move 380 A SECULAR AGE to a higher stage. We can see here reflected a broad brace of those dissatisfactions with the buffered identity and modern order that I distinguished in the different “axes” of an earlier chapter. But in particular, we see reflected in the last quote axis 1.2 in my scheme, the need to rescue some sense of the human potential for spiri tual/moral ascent, in face of the degrading theory and practice of utilitarian-com mercial-industrial society. One had thus to be both against Christianity and for it. Carlyles (not very definite) doctrine was a resolution of this cross-pressure. And the tension was reflected in his own life, in his inability to tell his devout mother straight out that he had abandoned his faith. The formulation he offered, that he had not aban doned, but redefined it, gave some colour to the attempted deception (but not much). Arnold follows after, in his own way, and responds to the same pulls. The old faith is unbelievable, but much of what it offered is essential. An atomized commer cial society is threatened with “anarchy”, and only the diffusion of high culture can combat this. The inculcation of this culture by a clerisy is very much like the main tenance of certain forms of worship by a national church. The two enterprises can be seen as overlapping, and in this way Arnold too could tell his mother that he was carrying on the work of his Broad Church father. Arnold lost the faith he was brought up in during his early 20s, and that for the reasons which we have already seen in Carlyle. But this was not an easy step for him, for reasons analogous to Carlyle’s. On the personal level, he was distancing himself from his father, who was a strongly committed Broad Church Anglican. But more, he felt that the decline of that faith he could no longer accept had brought terrible consequences in its wake. Arnold felt acutely a sense that the modern world lacked depth, and the modern self, wholeness. We tend to live on the surface, and are therefore cut off from the greater currents of meaning which could transform our lives: you must plunge yourself down to the depths of the sea of intuition; all other men are trying as far as in them lies to keep you at the barren surface.”^ This sense of being cut off from some great source can also be felt as a divi sion from self: “The misery of the present age is not in the intensity of men s suffer ing—but in their incapacity to suffer, enjoy, feel at all, wholly and profoundly... in their having one moment the commencement of a feeling, at the next moment the commencement of an imagination, & the eternal tumult of the world min gling, breaking in upon, hurrying away all. The disease of the world is divorce from oneself”.*® As Honan puts it, Arnold concluded that “man lacks a deep identity; he suffers from disorientation and ennui, shifting and unsatisfying feelings, shallowness of be- NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRAJECTORIES 381 ing, dissatisfaction with his own endeavours ... debilities caused by the lack of any compelling authority for the spiritual life”.’* Arnold felt to the full what I called in Chapter 8, section 2, the absence of reso nance in the modern world, and he felt it particularly through the axes of the “Ro mantic” dimension; a sense of ourselves as divided, cut off from a great stream of life without. Like Carlyle, an important source for him was Goethe and the thinkers of the Romantic period.

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