A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 665 A Secular Age. By CHARLES TAYLOR. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 874. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-674-02676-6. Charles Taylor's most recent book is surely his magnum opus in every sense. He is a man who has always written long (a 600-pager on Hegel in the 1970s; the 600-plus-page classic Sources of the Self in the 1990s), and here he writes very long indeed, so long that reading the book in bed is uncomfortable. As usual with Taylor, however, length does not mean a turgid waste of words: he is stylistically more like Gibbon than Hegel, and it is not much of an exaggeration to say that A Secular Age is a book difficult to abandon once begun. It has a story-line (how did we get to our present secular condition?), fascinating characters (Rousseau, Schiller, Weber, Peguy, Hopkins), and a relaxed, urbane, sometimes chatty style, unafraid of the sentence-fragments characteristic of the demotic oral, and capable, too, of vivid coinages ("fragilization," "excarnation") and of elegant summary formulations ("this hubristic rage to define," "the manichean rigidities of embattled orthodoxy"). One of the greatest strengths of the book-and one which contributes greatly to its readability and interest-is that Taylor engages with literature, prosaic and poetic, as much as he does with philosophy and theology. There are conversations with Baudelaire, Mallarme, Camus, Rilke, Jeffers, and others; and Taylor's readings of these works show a finely developed literary sensibility working in close harness with precise analytical and distinction-making skills. The book has diagnostic and prescriptive threads, each present at every stage ofthe argument and often very closelywoven together. The diagnostic, however, performed usually in genealogical mode, is dominant; the prescriptive, while very much present (and very Catholic in tone and substance), is given many fewer words, and arrives at prominence only toward the end of the book. In spite of this, the prescriptive is the book's engine. Taylor can, he thinks, identify mistaken responses to secularity and is happy to say what they are and what is wrong with them. This also means that he has ideas about how secularity ought be responded to, both by the non- or anti-religious, and by the religious, especially Catholics, upon whom (being one himself) his interest is focused. These recommendations, fueled as they seem to be by something approaching moral indignation, are what make it important for him to perform the diagnosis. Only, Taylor thinks, if we understand the etiology of our condition (it is not, for him, exactly a disease) can we respond rightly to it. Hence the length and detail of the genealogical diagnosis. It is difficult to avoid the impression that there is a fallacy lurking here somewhere, perhaps that of misplaced historicism: it is not the case that a particular condition, cultural or physiological, requires attention to etiology for understanding what it is, or for recommending treatment. Genealogical understanding is only one kind among others, and treatment doesn't require it. But even if Taylor overemphasizes the necessity of the kind of analysis productive of such understanding, his performance of that analysis is nevertheless of a very high order. He has read enormously, thought deeply, and 666 BOOK REVIEWS cares to communicate what he knows even to those, like me, who have read and thought much less than he Taylor wants primarily to show his readers how the inheritors of Western (Latin) Christianity-that is the "we" of the book, and it comprises the vast majority of those who live now in Western Europe and North America, no matter the extent of their ignorance of their heritage-have arrived at the secularity which he takes to be our current condition. This secularity is not, however, some settled set of attitudes or beliefs or institutional arrangements, whether the retreat of religion in public life (what he calls secularity 1), or the decline of religious belief and practice (secularity 2). It is, rather, the current conditions for religious belief and practice (secularity 3), conditions deeply effective no matter the particulars or extent of religious belief and practice in any actual case. It is notorious...