A Secular Age Quotes

“There is a widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning.”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from Descartes to Rorty;' but also the growth of a rich vocabulary of interiority, an inner realm of thought and feeling to be explored. This frontier of self-exploration has grown, through various spiritual disciplines of self-examination, through Montaigne, the development of the modern novel, the rise of Romanticism, the ethic of authenticity, to the point where we now conceive of ourselves as
having inner depths.”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“But an important point is that, once again as with "scientific" proofs of atheism, it is not the cast-iron intellectual reasoning which convinces, but the relief of revolt.”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“Our sin is our resistance to going along with God's initiative in making suffering reparative. We are deeply drawn towards God, but we also sense how following him will dislocate and transform beyond recognition the forms which have made life tolerable for us. We often react with fear, dismay, hostility. We are at war with ourselves, and responding differently to this inner conflict, we end up at war with each other. So it is undoubtedly true that the result of sin is much suffering. But this is by no means distributed according to desert. Many who are relatively innocent are swept up in this suffering, and some of the worse offenders get off lightly. The proper response to all this is not retrospective book-keeping, but making ourselves capable of responding to God's initiative.

But now if that's what sin is, then one can sympathize with a lot of the modern critique of a religion which focuses on the evil tendencies of human nature, and the need for renunciation and sacrifice. This is not because humans are in fact angelic, or there is no point to sacrifice. It's just that focusing on how bad human beings can be, even if it's to refute the often over-rosy views of secular humanists with their reliance on human malleability and therapy, can only strengthen misanthropy, which certainly won’t bring you closer to God; and propounding sacrifice and renunciation for themselves takes you away from the main points, which is following God's initiative. That this can involve sacrifice, we well know from the charter act in this initiative, but renunciation is not is point.”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty just dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one's faith.”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“Many felt a profound malaise at the idea that the sources of benevolence should be just enlightened self-interest, or simply feelings of sympathy. This seemed to neglect altogether the human power of self-transcendence, the capacity to go beyond self-related desire altogether
and follow a higher aspiration. This”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“One way to put the question that I want to answer here is this: why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?

Part of the answer, no doubt, is that in those days everyone believed, and so the alternatives seemed outlandish. But this just pushes the question further back. We need to understand how things changed. How did the alternatives become thinkable?

One important part of the picture is that so many features of their world told in favour of belief, made the presence of God seemingly undeniable. I will mention three, which will play a part in the story I want to tell.

(1) The natural world they lived in, which had its place in the cosmos they imagined, testified to divine purpose and action; and not just in the obvious way which we can still understand and (at least many of us) appreciate today, that its order and design bespeaks creation; but also because the great events in this natural order, storms, droughts, floods, plagues, as well as years of exceptional fertility and flourishing, were seen as acts of God, as the now dead metaphor of our legal language still bears witness.

(2) God was also implicated in the very existence of society (but not described as such-this is a modern term-rather as polls, kingdom, church, or whatever). A kingdom could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than mere human man action in secular time. And beyond that, the life of the various associations which made up society, parishes, boroughs, guilds, and so on, were interwoven with ritual and worship, as I mentioned in the previous chapter. One could not but encounter counter God everywhere.

(3) People lived in an “enchanted” world. This is perhaps not the best expression; it seems to evoke light and fairies. But I am invoking here its negation, Weber’s expression “disenchantment” as a description of our modern condition. This term has achieved such wide currency in our discussion of these matters, that I’m going to use its antonym to describe a crucial feature of the pre-modern condition. The enchanted chanted world in this sense is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in.

People who live in this kind of world don’t necessarily believe in God, certainly not in the God of Abraham, as the existence of countless “pagan” societies shows. But in the outlook of European peasants in 1500, beyond all the inevitable ambivalences, the Christian God was the ultimate guarantee that good would triumph or at least hold the plentiful forces of darkness at bay.”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“Now the story of this change is the often told one—at least a part of it—of how the Biblical cosmology was replaced by the march of science, in the form of evolutionary theory. This is an important component; scientific discovery did indeed play a salient, even decisive, role in the change-over. My problem with this story is that it tells how one theory displaced another; whereas what I’m interested in is how our sense of things, our cosmic imaginary, in other words, our whole background understanding and feel of the world has been transformed.”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“Modern “secularization” can be seen from one angle as the rejection of higher times, and the positing of time as purely profane. Events now exist only in this one dimension, in which they stand at greater and lesser temporal distance, and in relations of causality with other events of the same kind. The”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“This, plus the inherent drive of the religious reformations, made them work towards the disenchantment of the world, and the abolition of society based on hierarchical equilibrium, whether that of élite and mass, or that we find reflected in the Carnival, and the “world turned upside down”. Indeed, the hostility to Carnival and such-like remains of popular culture is one of the evident points in common between religious and secular re-orderings. In the perspective of élites of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world upside down of Carnival was neither a subject of amusement, nor a salutary correction for élite pride, nor an “air-hole” (safety valve), nor a recognition of the depth and many-sidedness of human life. It was simply an image of, and an invitation to sin. Starting with Brant’s Ship of Fools, a stream of writing, painting (Bosch, Breughel), illustrations begin to moralize this theme of reversal. It is in the end no laughing matter. Indeed, the world”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“upside down is the one we daily live in, in which sin has upset all order. A humourless determination to castigate sin and disorder takes over, a denial of ambiguity and complexity in an unmixed condemnation, which reflects the attempts by controlling élites to abolish carnivalesque and ludic practices, on the grounds that they sew disorder, mix pagan and Christian elements, and are a breeding ground of vice. (We are witnessing the birth of what will become in our day p.c.) Delumeau relates this to a parallel shift in attitude to madness;94 where previously this could be seen as the site of vision, even holiness, it now comes more and more to be judged unambiguously as the fruit of sin.”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“An age or society would then be secular or not, in virtue of the conditions of experience of and search for the spiritual.”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“And then the colossal success of modern natural science and the associated technology can lead us to feel that it unlocks all mysteries, that it will ultimately explain everything, that human science must be developed on the same basic plan, or even ultimately reduced to physics, or at least organic chemistry.
And”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

“Objectification of the world gives a sense of power, and control, which is intensified by every victory of instrumental reason.
And”
― Charles Taylor, A Secular Age