How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

paradoxical:

living in all the practices and institutions of [‘this-worldly’] flourishing, but at the same time not fully in them.

the high expectations of sanctification now spill beyond the walls of the monastery.7

This version of Reform “levels” two-tiered religion by actually expecting everyone to live up to the high expectations of disciplined, monastic life.

disburdening a society of the expectations of transcendence,

Pelagian assumption of human powers and thus an inadequate appreciation for the radical grace of God and for God’s action in salvation.

It is the (relatively immaterial) spoken Word of God and not magical things like the Host that is the means of grace.10

“sanctification of ordinary life”

camel’s nose in the tent of enchantment

this entails a kind of disenchantment:

“we reject the sacramentals; all the elements of ‘magic’ in the old religion” (p. 79). If the church no longer has “good” magic, “then all magic must be black” (p. 80); all enchantment must be blasphemous, idolatrous, even demonic

once the world is disenchanted and de-charged of transcendence, we are then free to...

rejection of sacra...

is the beginning of naturalism, or it at least opens the door...

evacuation of the sacred as...

was this “rage for order,” Taylor suggests, that unwittingly contributed to the disenchantment of the world:

Richard Wilbur

It is religious Reform that calls for secular reform, which in turn makes possible exclusively humanist reform. The Reformation has some explaining to do.12

Creation, Nature, and Incarnation: A Zigzag Path to Exclusive Humanism

Our anachronistic hindsight tends to impose a secularist trajectory on earlier shifts whereas, in fact, they might have been “pointed” in a very different direction.

Now, from the vantage point of secular humanism, this new interest in nature can look like the next logical step on the way to pure immanence:

first distinguish God/nature, then disenchant, then be happy and content with just nature and hence affirm the autonomy and sufficiency of nature.

Such a story about the “autonomization” of nature posits a contrast or dichotomy between belief in God and interes...

This was primarily a revolution in devotion, not metaphysics.

exclusive humanism

pure immanence,

and could have gone o...

rise of nominalism,

which is a metaphysical thesis.

was not a proto-s...

metaphysically honoring a radical sense of God’s sovereignty and power.

God must always remain free to determine what is good.” So if one were going to preserve God’s absolute sovereignty, one would have to do away with “essences,” with independent “natures.” And the result is a metaphysical picture called “nominalism” where things are only what they are named (nom-ed) (p. 97). “But if this is right,” Taylor comments, “then we, the dependent, created agents, have also to relate to these things not in terms of the normative patterns they reveal, but in terms of the autonomous super-purposes of our creator [which can’t be known a priori].

An Independent Telos

God must always remain free to determine what is good.” So if one were going to preserve God’s absolute sovereignty, one would have to do away with “essences,” with independent “natures.” And the result is a metaphysical picture called “nominalism” where things are only what they are named (nom-ed) (p. 97). “But if this is right,” Taylor comments, “then we, the dependent, created agents, have also to relate to these things not in terms of the normative patterns they reveal, but in terms of the autonomous super-purposes of our creator [which can’t be known a priori].

Only what they are named with no Platonic "essence". This removes the divine Telos or Nature of the thing to CONFORM to a metaphysical idea of God's Sovereignty.

God must always remain free to determine what is good.” So if one were going to preserve God’s absolute sovereignty, one would have to do away with “essences,” with independent “natures.” And the result is a metaphysical picture called “nominalism” where things are only what they are named (nom-ed) (p. 97). “But if this is right,” Taylor comments, “then we, the dependent, created agents, have also to relate to these things not in terms of the normati...

I.e. Their Nature or Telos, reason deter.

final causality

“pulls”),

eclipsing any t...

Understanding something is no longer a matter of understa...

t...

we get the “mechanistic” universe that we still inhabit today, in which efficient causality (a cause that “pushes”) is the only causality and can only be discerned by empirical observation. This,

Not longer a Metaphysical Causality=telos,nature, but a Scientific determined Pushing Causality.

discerning “essence”

but by empirical observation of patterns,

“a new understanding ...

all intrinsic purposes having been expelled, final causation drops out, and efficient causat...

incarnational interest

“mixed” with another development, nominalism, does it seem to head in that direction. There

between the two that generates a by-product that neither on its own would have generated

It involves a struggle to reshape ourselves”

no longer the search for Aristotelian or Platonic form,

The result is a monster: a Christianized neo-Stoicism that appends a deity to Stoic emphases on action and control.

sanctification