“Reform”: Charles Taylor and Excarnational Christianity
The Lasting Impact of A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
No work of scholarship excited more discussion and Christian think-pieces in the halcyon years around 2010 than the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age (2007). For college-educated millennial evangelicals, living in a big city and working a professional job, basic familiarity with A Secular Age was mandatory. (I know; I was one.) Hip pastors in tight jeans frequently name-dropped the book in sermons. New York Times best-sellers aimed at the Christian audience cited Taylor in footnotes. Since the treatise comes in at over 800 pages, I doubt many evangelicals actually read the whole thing. But luckily, there was a short paperback abridgment (here) for those of us who wanted to sound informed.
Of course, like other touchstones of Christian culture dating from what is now termed the “neutral world” era (e.g., Tim Keller, the Gospel Coalition), contemporary Protestant voices have turned on Taylor’s book. An author at this publication, for instance, recently described it as “a ‘just so’ story about why we should all return to medieval Christianity.” Similarly, Aaron Renn calls A Secular Age “the most effective critique of Protestantism I’ve seen,” showing how Protestantism “empties Christianity of embodied aspects” and “reduces [it] to a set of propositions one believes, and a set of inward dispositions of the heart.” (Renn is sympathetic to this interpretation.)
There is a long tradition of Catholic apologists trying to disguise their anti-Protestant screeds as supposedly unbiased works of history or philosophy. For instance, this one. But to read Taylor’s A Secular Age as an anti-Protestant polemic is to misread it.
Taylor’s book is not anti-Protestant. It is anti-Christian. Probably inadvertently so, due to Taylor’s own Romantic Catholicism and repeatedly disavowals in the book, but anti-Christian nonetheless. Taylor viewed secularization and disenchantment as a congenital, even inevitable, defect in all forms of Western Christianity: Protestant and Catholic alike.
For Taylor, the great revolutionary force in Western history was not Protestantism. It was “Reform.” By Reform, Taylor means an elite-led social movement that felt “profound dissatisfaction with the hierarchical equilibrium between lay life” and the higher life of devout religious professionals and “aimed to remake European society to meet the demands of the Gospel” (61). Reform rejected two-tiered religion. It “demanded that everyone be a real, 100 percent Christian.” And it “disenchants . . . disciplines and re-orders life and society” (774) to achieve this goal.
The Reform movement, that is, insisted that all the faithful live a life of total commitment—the life of an ascetic, a mystic, or even a saint. It was no longer acceptable for most Christians to just get baptized, support religious virtuosi such as monks with their money, and attend service on a few holidays a year (or even just every Sunday). Instead, for followers of the Reform, every moment of human existence is part of a single vocation of service to God.
Taylor expressly did not equate Reform and the Reformation. Rather, Reform arose by the high Middle Ages at the latest, appearing, for instance, in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and the preaching of mendicant friars (63-64, 68). “[T]he Reformation [was] the ultimate fruit of the Reform spirit,” rather than its cause, growing out of “the very climate of Reform in which both sides bathed at the end of Middle Ages” (77). In the sixteenth century, Reform marked St. Charles Borromeo’s Milan just as much as it did John Calvin’s Geneva (104).
But Reform does not and did not mark all Christians. It was “peculiar to Latin Christendom” (52). Orthodox Christianity and, indeed, even Latin Christianity during the early Middle Ages (before the rise of Reform) was content to maintain a “two-tiered . . . dual system of religious practice, hierarchically arranged” (63), in common with other post-Axial religions. That is, for a Buddhist, or a Russian Orthodox, or an Anglo-Saxon Christian at the time of Alfred the Great, total religious commitment was only for the professional devout (for monks and sannyasis and so forth), not for ordinary laymen.
When Charles Taylor portrayed the Christian world prior to the rise of Reform, he drew on twentieth-century anthropologists of religion such as Victor and Edith Turner or Mircea Eliade: scholars whose research focused not on Christianity but rather on ancient or modern polytheisms. As a result, pre-Reform Christianity (in Taylor’s narrative) sounds suspiciously similar to paganism. Christians, until around 1200 AD, were just another example of homo religiosus (to use Eliade’s language): the archaic man of traditional societies. Pre-Reform Christians—just like Buddhists, Hindus, or Roman pagans—lived in an enchanted hierarchical universe of good and evil spirits, in which time was cyclical, apotropaic magic was widely used, and sacred communal rituals regularly broke into ordinary profane existence in order to re-enact the cosmic order. Early medieval Christianity held these features “in common with many (perhaps most) civilizations dominated by a ‘higher’ religion” (43). The understanding of the cosmos that these features expressed “would be in many ways pre-Christian, and in origin extra-Christian; but not necessarily anti-Christian” (124). There is great commonality, then, between celebrating Carnival and slaughtering Tiamat on the Babylonian New Year.
Taylor emphasized that “the main subject of this book [is] the various movements of Reform in Latin Christendom” and how that Reform brought about “‘excarnation’, the transfer of our religious life out of the bodily forms of ritual, worship, practice, so that it comes more and more to reside ‘in the head” (613). “[M]odern Reformed Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant” is built on “the partial of total denial” of “Enchantment,” causing excarnation and thus eventually secularization (554-554). But other “higher” civilizations managed to avoid excarnation and maintain their hierarchical universe.
Given this narrative, the Romantic nostalgia permeates A Secular Age. But its nostalgia is not for high medieval Latin Christianity. High medieval Christianity was already in the grips of Reform—already marred by the internal forces that birthed the disciplinary society and “crushed or sidelined important facets of spiritual life, which had in fact flourished in earlier ‘paganisms’” (771). Taylor repeatedly insists that he is not pushing for the return of the strong gods—for Pan and Valhalla, for Thuggees and Bacchants. That he is not writing an updated version of Nietzsche, Evola, or Bataille. “The point is . . . not that we need to leaven Christianity with a dose of paganism” (772). “It’s not that I’m trying to say that Christianity, for instance, is inferior to paganism in that . . . it lacks the full sense of embodiment” (771).
But a reader may be forgiven if these reassurances do not convince. At its core, A Secular Age suggests that Latin Christianity, because of its commitment to Reform (in both Catholic and Protestant forms), in practice denies the incarnation itself (771). And that only by restoring paganism to Christianity can incarnation be fully believed.
I adore A Secular Age. I have benefited greatly from its insights, both personally and professionally. And whenever I read it, I feel churning within me a powerful nostalgia for the enchanted cosmos of the pre-Reform past. And yet, I am also loyal to another book—a book that commands all Christians (not just a small number of professional devout) to present their bodies as living sacrifices and be transformed by the renewal of their minds. The apostles opposed all two-tiered religion. The adherents of Reform, Catholic and Protestant alike, may have initiated a process that would secularize Europe. But given that they believed the gospel, I do not think these Reformers could have acted differently.