Is that all there is?

Charles Taylor examines our attempts to fill the God-shaped hole left by the death of belief in his weighty tome A Secular Age, says Stuart Jeffries

Stuart Jeffrie
The Guardian, Saturday 8 December 2007

A Secular Age
by Charles Taylor
874pp, Harvard, £25.95

In March this year, Charles Taylor joined Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn as a winner of the Templeton prize for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities. Not only did the award make the professor emeritus of philosophy at Montreal's McGill University nearly £800,000 richer, it also brought him into the crosshairs of Richard Dawkins who, in his 2006 bestseller The God Delusion, argued that the Templeton involved "a very large sum of money given [...] usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion". The implication was that any professor prepared to have their palm thus greased was intellectually dishonest.

Now comes Taylor's thumping great volume (weighing in at 1.3 kilos to The God Delusion's 730g) in which he traces the story of faith's decline and of how learned despisers of religion such as Dawkins became not only possible but popular. It has one big question. "Why," asks Taylor at the outset, "was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in say, 1500 in our western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?" In 1500, our ancestors thought the natural world testified to divine purpose. Floods, plagues, periods of fertility and flourishing were seen as acts of God. Now "acts of God" is a dead metaphor used by lawyers. How did that happen? In the following 800-plus pages he tries to provide an answer that only a fool would deride as intellectually dishonest.

The Templeton guys probably really like A Secular Age. True, it hardly amounts to research into spiritual realities (whatever that means), but Taylor hints obligingly at a time in which secularism's "hegemony of the mainstream master narrative" could be over (a great elucidator of Hegel, Taylor doesn't so much turn a phrase as let it curdle in philosophical jargon). They will also no doubt like the fact that Taylor is highly critical of so-called "subtraction stories", those Whig versions of secularism's history, whereby human nature steadily casts off its shackles of ignorance and superstition, finally emerging from a Bastille of the mind into the bright morning of truth.

Taylor's account is much more complicated. There is chronology, but hardly a straightforward narrative that might explain why the only recent bestseller about religion was written by a vituperative atheist. One might think that the cumulative impact of the Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment and myriad scientific revolutions was to make it possible to think about the material world without reference to any transcendent power (Taylor calls this the "immanent frame"), but that is not the whole story. He argues that the west has been changed by what he calls a "nova effect": once a humanistic alternative to the transcendent frame established itself, it spawned an ever-widening variety of moral and spiritual positions, in the professor's words, "across the span of the thinkable and perhaps even beyond".

Let's stay with the thinkable. What's especially compelling about Taylor's, admittedly sometimes long-winded, book is his charge that cracks in Christianity provided places where secularism's weeds flourished. In this he's not just talking about the reformation, but, for example, the movement called deism, prominent in 17th- and 18th-century Britain, France and America, which rejected the theistic position (common in Judaism, Islam and much Christianity) that relied on revelation in sacred scriptures or the testimony of others. Instead, deism drew the existence and nature of God from reason and personal experience. Deism, of course, for some became a way-station from theism to atheism, but not for all.

From deism, Taylor shifts focus to what he calls the west's current age of authenticity. By this he means an individualistic era in which people are encouraged to find their own way or do their own thing. The idea that one had to use one's own reason and experience to find God instilled a sense of intellectual autonomy that led some to abandon God altogether. "As a result," writes Taylor, "the nova effect has been intensified. We are now living in a spiritual super-nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane."

Paradoxically, that gallop leads some of us back to communal worship and to yearn for something more than the self-sufficient power of reason. Some long for ultimate meaning, and that longing may end with God. God, Taylor tells us, is always breaking in, stepping through the immanent frame of secularism. But when God makes his appearance, Taylor finds, he sounds just like Peggy Lee, singing "Is That All There Is?". Secularism, he charges, has left us leading hollow, atomised lives, devoid of what he (to my mind bafflingly) calls "fullness". To be sure, Taylor allows that some atheists find "fullness", by which he may mean human dignity and meaning, in the absence of a comprehensible God. Camus, for instance, suggests in his writings that this sense of humans facing a meaningless, hostile universe and rising to the challenge of devising our own rules of life can be inspiring. It may even serve to fill the God-shaped hole Taylor sometimes implies lies in the atheist's breast.

He is at his best when finding God breaking into art, eloquently analysing the intimations of transcendence in Wordsworth's poetry and Wagner's music and why those two artists might be so important in our increasingly godless times. Intriguingly, he argues too that there are certain works of art - Dante, Bach, Chartres cathedral - "whose power seems inseparable from their epiphanic, transcendent reference. Here the challenge to the unbeliever is to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to them, without impoverishment." But the unbeliever needn't respond to that challenge: even secularists, if we have learned anything from Taylor's book, must realise that we are haunted by the ghost of God. As a result, we are capable of responding in a theistic register to Bach, Dante and Chartres without (necessarily) believing in God.

On such occasions, Taylor is too shrill in insisting on secularism's purported impoverishment of sensibility. It recalls Keats's accusation that Newton destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by explaining it. In Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow, the zoologist retorted that science does not destroy, but rather discovers poetry in the patterns and laws of nature. It is at least arguable that godless science is enchanting rather than disenchanting.

What's more, the godless may not be in the sometimes glum state Taylor fears. He should have attended more closely to Peggy Lee. She didn't only ask "is that all there is?". She also answered her own question, singing "if that's all there is, then let's keep dancing". It is not a song lamenting a lack of God or ultimate meaning. Instead, it was an indomitable, scornful, humanistic shrug at a world abandoned by God and filled with other disappointments. It wouldn't have won Peggy Lee the Templeton prize, true; but, if it isn't quite atheistic, then it's in tune with the secular age that Taylor diagnoses, for the most part, well.

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