How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

Unfortunately, at this point Barnes constructs a false dichotomy: “The Christian,” he surmises, “would . . . have been concerned more with truth than aesthetics.” Whence the distinction? One might say that the madness of the incarnation obliterates such a dichotomy, that the logic of incarnation scandalously claims that truth and beauty kiss (cp. Ps. 85:10). Taking it to be true does not trump the beauty; receiving it as nonfiction does not de-aestheticize the work of art, reducing it to a textbook. But though Barnes’s dichotomy is misplaced, it seems laudable that he entertains what it would mean for these works of art to also be more than (merely) aesthetic. “It is one of the haunting hypotheticals for the non-believer,” he concludes: “what would it be like ‘if it were true’ ” (p. 54).