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P    I S E X I S T E N T I A L T H E I S M C       O   The Affirmation of Existential Life in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age        .        S In a recent review essay, John Milbank, initiator of the “new theological imperative”known as Radical Orthodoxy and author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, calls Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age a “magnificent, epoch-making work” and says that, on its basis,“one could attach the label‘radically orthodox’ to Taylor with still more justification” than to Milbank himself.1 This last claim may come as a surprise to those familiar with Taylor’s work, which probably strikes most readers as neither “radical”nor particularly“orthodox.”Indeed, Taylor has a well-earned reputation for caution and breadth and for balanced judgments of philosophical and cultural history, in which he is exceedingly well-read.Sources of the Self, Taylor’s first masterwork, remains unequalled in its poised uncovering of the roots of the modern experience of personhood.With penetrating insight, Taylor addresses the most strident critics of our time, acknowledging the depth of their diverse concerns, and yet ably eliminates the need for a shrill tone in even the most polarizing debates. 13 14 J U S T I N D . K L A S S E N Near the end of Sources, the debate in question is that between “proponents of disengaged reason” and proponents of what Taylor generally calls “Romantic expressivism,” two facets of the essentially modern destiny .2 The former worry that contemporary expressivists elevate the anthropological significance of the“personal”to irrational and therefore inhuman heights, while the latter question the capacity of disengaged reason to sustain a living connection with nature,in which human beings are to be included. Taylor’s book is a wide-ranging effort to complicate the assumed disjunction between these two positions, culminating in an imperative to see more of ourselves than what is proffered by ostensibly more certain (because narrower) views. Taylor thus points out the connection between expressivism and the “fulfillment” that no scientific rationalist really wants to deny, as well as that between “instrumental reason and the affirmation of ordinary life” that is so dear to those faithful to various iterations of Romantic expressivism (SS, 504). In the end, what is important for Taylor , and what the stridency of critical voices often obscures, is “the search for moral sources outside the subject through languages which resonate within him or her, the grasping of an order which is inseparably indexed to a personal vision” (SS, 510). The uniquely modern constellation of the various “sources” of selfhood makes this kind of search possible, according to Taylor, and it requires a balancing of the objective and the subjective , outer significance and inner resonance. Taylor’s capacity for exposing what we might call the dependent coarising of such extreme positions on the destiny of the modern subject, and his imperative to use their interrelation to deepen our overall view, can make it hard to pinpoint Taylor’s own normative conclusions about modern selfhood and the possibility of fulfillment. This is precisely what makes John Milbank’s review surprising, since Taylor’s whole method, especially in Sources, neither advocates any“radical”position nor moves very far beyond a vague “theistic perspective” (SS, 518). Is there something in the trajectory of Taylor’s work from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age that would justify Milbank’s boldly sympathetic claim? It is clear from Milbank’s own recent work,and especially from his sustained engagement with self-proclaimed “Christian atheist” Slavoj Žižek, that Radical Orthodoxy seeks to address what it sees as a distinctly modern need for a robust affirmation of material creation.3 Milbank’s percep- tion of the woes of modernity stems from his diagnosis of “secular reason” as an abstracting force that works to separate the locus of truth (words) from the material site of actual human lives. For Milbank, the Christian theological imagination,which begins with a wager that the Word has been made flesh, can overcome the divisive wager of secular reason and thus reconcile truth with life. Indeed, only for such thinking, wherein truth is inseparable from material-temporal performance, is the whole of material creation (not only those parts of it valorized by an abstract philosophy) available to human beings in the mode of fullness.4 The catch, so to speak, is that...

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