How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

This is pictured in François Mauriac’s classic, Vipers’ Tangle, trans. Warren B. Wells (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1957). In a Christopher Hitchens–like preemptive note, the curmudgeonly, miserly Louis warns his family that should he, upon his deathbed, call a priest, they should merely chalk this up to irrational weakness. But he later makes a confession: “it is, on the contrary, when I study myself, as I have been doing for the past two months, with a curiosity which is stronger than my disgust; it is when I feel myself most fully in possession of my faculties that the Christian temptation torments me. I can no longer deny that a route exists in me which might lead me to your God” (p. 104).