How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

Not surprisingly, where Barnes really appreciates the haunting of immanence is in the realm of the aesthetic.6 Barnes’s appreciation for religious art — both painting and music — is one of the best aspects of the book, and leaves him a little spooked. “Missing God is focused for me,” he confesses, “by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art” (p. 54). He seems, if not tempted by, at least a bit intrigued by an aesthetic argument never entertained in Aquinas’s “Five Ways”: that religion might just be true simply because it is beautiful. “The Christian religion didn’t last so long merely because everyone believed it” (p. 53), Barnes observes. It lasted because it makes for a helluva novel — which is pretty close to Tolkien’s claim that the gospel is true because it is the most fantastic fantasy, the greatest fairy story ever told.7 And Barnes, a great lover of both music and painting, knows that much of what he enjoys owes its existence to Christianity. Without the madness of the gospel, Mozart would never have composed a requiem, Giotto would never have left us the treasures in the chapel of Padua. Thus he finds himself asking, “What if it were true?” — a question never entertained by the dogmaticians of the new atheism. What would it be like, he asks, to listen to Mozart’s Requiem and take it as nonfiction?