Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis

8. A Secular Age? Reflections on Taylor and Panikkar

119 8. A Secular Age? Reflections on Taylor and Panikkar Why do you stand looking into heaven? —Acts 1:11 At least in the Western context, our age is commonly referred to as that of “modernity”—a term sometimes qualified as “late modernity” or “post-modernity.” Taken by itself, the term is nondescript; in its literal sense, it simply means a time of novelty or innovation. Hence, something needs to be added to capture the kind of novelty involved. To pinpoint this innovation, modernity is also referred to as the “age of reason” or the age of enlightenment and science—in order to demarcate the period from a prior age presumably characterized by unreason, metaphysical speculation, and intellectual obscurantism or darkness. Seen in this light, modernity for a large number of people— including supporters of scientific and social progress—is a cause for rejoicing, celebration, and unrelenting promotion. As is well known, however, this chorus of support has for some time been accompanied by discordant voices pointing to the dark underside of modernity, evident in what Max Weber called the “disenchantment” of the world and others (more dramatically) the “death of God” or the “flight of the gods.” More recently, discontent has given rise to claims regarding an inherent “crisis” of modernity manifest in the slide toward materialism , consumerism, irreligion, and a general “loss of meaning.”1 For present purposes I want to lift up for consideration two highly nuanced and philosophically challenging assessments of our modern condition: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) and Raimon Panikkar ’s The Rhythm of Being (2010). As it happens, both texts are 120 Being in the World strongly revised versions of earlier Gifford Lectures (presented respectively in 1999 and 1989). Before proceeding, a word of caution: neither of the two thinkers belongs to one of the polarized camps— which means that neither is an uncritical “booster” or else a mindless “knocker” of the modern age.2 Both thinkers share many things in common. Both complain about certain glaring blemishes of the modern, especially the contemporary period; both deplore above all a certain deficit of religiosity or spirituality. The differences between the two authors have to do mainly with the details of their diagnosis and proposed remedies. In Taylor’s view, the modern age—styled as the “secular age”—appears marked by a slide into worldly agnosticism , into “exclusive humanism,” and above all into an “immanent fame” excluding or marginalizing theistic “transcendence.” Although sharing the concern about “loss of meaning,” Panikkar does not find its source in the abandonment of (mono)theistic transcendence; nor does he locate this source in secularism or “secularity” per se—seeing that, in view of its temporality, faith is necessarily linked with a given age (or saeculum). Instead of stressing the dichotomy between immanence and transcendence, Panikkar focuses on the pervasive “oblivion of being” in our time, an oblivion that can only be overcome through a renewed remembrance of the divine as a holistic happening in a “cosmotheandric” mode. A Secular Age At the very beginning of his massive study, Taylor distinguishes among three kinds of secularity or “the secular”: “secularity 1” involves the retreat of faith from public life; “secularity 2” denotes a diminution or vanishing of faith among certain people; and “secularity 3” involves the erosion of the very conditions of possibility of shared faith. While in the first type, public spaces are assumed to be “emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimate reality,” and whereas in the second type secularity consists “in the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from God,” the third type involves a more pervasive change: namely, “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” Taken in the third sense, secularity means more than the A Secular Age? 121 evacuation of public life or else the loss of a personal willingness to believe; rather, it affects “the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place.” Viewed on this level, an age or a society would be secular or not “in virtue of the conditions of experience of and search for the spiritual.” As Taylor emphasizes, the focus of his study is on the last kind of secularity. In his...