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Chapter Eight: Enfleshment and the Time of Ethics
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C E Enfleshment and the Time of Ethics Taylor and Illich on the Parable of the Good Samaritan - S The law is like a ponderous speaker who cannot say everything in spite of all his efforts, but love is the fulfillment. —Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love Charles Taylor is a gifted storyteller. His elegant master narratives both thrill and frustrate scholars, sometimes at the same time. Provocative tales of disenchantment as a predicament of modern secularity are important examples of philosophical history that—alongside canonical texts in sociological theory—have been massively influential in the academic study of religion. Consider, for example, the influence of figures as diverse as Weber, Durkheim, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Habermas, MacIntyre, and Milbank.Taylor’s stories are capacious,implicating all readers in“cross pressure” rather than winner-take-all tournaments. Tacking between the 217 analytical and historical, they reach deep into pre-articulate horizons that give shape to multiple cultures. Taylor describes the“background”against which certain questions can arise and others rest forever silent, the space in which particular experiences become possible and others remain inconceivable . His narratives trade in imaginaries more than theories, practices more than doctrines, conditions of belief rather than beliefs themselves. He adopts a kind of existential genealogy that narrates “how our sense of things, our cosmic imaginary, in other words, our whole background understanding and feel of the world has been transformed.”1 Taylor’s ambitious scope invites skepticism from wary historians, anthropologists, and theologians, who look on as he races through specialist territory with (often admitted) speed and generality.Rejoinders are also heard from those who find themselves too simply caricatured or feel absent from Taylor’s narrative. Nevertheless, his contested reception seems to speak to a recurring desire for such stories. No longer naïve theists or atheists, modern Westerners, Taylor confesses , “can’t help understanding ourselves in these terms.”2 Our context breeds stories of origins, transformations, and possible futures. Of course, religious traditions have their own stories to tell, and at least one interpreter has invoked the parable of the prodigal son to describe Taylor’s ambivalent account of modernity. In response to A Catholic Modernity?, historian George Marsden suggests that“Taylor’s main argument can be seen as a proposal for Christianity to reach out to its prodigal offspring (recognizing , of course, that Christianity was not modernity’s only progenitor).”3 He praises Taylor’s balanced approach between extremes, especially in “recognizing the valuable achievements of modernity and using them as the points of contact for presenting the gospel.”4 In this evenhandedness, however, one can detect an ambivalence that is a prominent disposition in Taylor’s philosophy. Despite the presence of a theological undertow, his vagueness encourages speculation and appropriation by different theological movements seeking a new recruit. Taylor’s ambivalence is closely related to his irenic and conversational style, but also flows from his substantive commitment to dialogical pluralism as antidote to polarization. It fuels his rejection of “the straight path account of modern secularity”in favor of “a zig-zag account, one full of unintended consequences”(SA, 95). This posture of gains and losses sets him apart from many other story218 E R I C G R E G O R Y A N D L E A H H U N T - H E N D R I X tellers, especially within religious ethics, where heated disputes about rights, virtues, and moral ontology are prominent. His theological humanism resists more familiar narratives of progress or decline, ones that roughly end up compelling a choice between religion and modernity. In contrast to these linear and decisive narratives, Taylor’s Sources of the Self set out to diagnose the “unique combination of greatness and danger, of grandeur et misère, which characterizes the modern age.”5 A Catholic Modernity? found that “in modern, secularist culture there are mingled together both authentic developments of the gospel, of an incarnational mode of life, and also a closing off to God that negates the gospel .”6 Now, in A Secular Age, Taylor continues his effort to complicate secularization stories by describing how the West was transformed 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”(SA, 3). But, again, this is no story of doom and gloom. In fact, by praising the“practical primacy of life”in secular humanism...