Finding our voice.

A Catholic Modernity?
Charles Taylor's Marianist Award Lecture with Responses
Edited and with an
Introduction by
James L. Heft, S.M.
Oxford University Press, $22, 130 pp.

This short book contains a remarkably succinct and explicit statement of the most basic religious commitments of philosopher Charles Taylor, responses by four fellow Catholic scholars, and Taylor's concluding reflections and comments. Given Taylor's stature, and the restrained academic idiom in which he usually writes (echoing the style of analytic philosophy even while drawing on much broader and deeper sources), this alone would make the book worthy of note. However, the importance of the text is more than autobiographical.

Saul Bellow once said that the advantage of living in Chicago was that the city was so far behind the cutting edge of ideas on the coasts that by the time those ideas reached us their limitations were already obvious. Taylor may see the church's reluctance to embrace modernity fully for all these centuries as a similar good fortune, perhaps a providential one. It is a history that uniquely gives a post-Vatican II church an opportunity to distinguish between what is providential in modernity and what has proved disastrous.

Taylor's project holds out hope of a Catholicism that does not define itself in opposition to the core of modernity. God is present, says Taylor, not only in the church's past, not only in the achievements of medieval culture, and not only in the centuries of monastic spirituality that still in many ways form the sensibilities of the church's clerical leadership, but also in the distinctive achievements of the modern age, achievements that already reflect the life of God. On the other hand, he cautions, Catholics need not "go all the way with the boosters of modernity and become fellow travelers of exclusive humanism." It is essential that Catholics find their "voice from within the achievements of modernity."

As Taylor argued in his magisterial Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, we all live by the goods of modernity even when we deny them. The modern world relies on a multiplicity of competing moral sources: a celebration of nature, distinctive forms of inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life, romantic expressiveness, and a modernism that, in its higher embodiments (Rilke, Proust, Mann, Eliot, and Kafka), sought contact in the idiom of "personal resonance" with an older order of transcendence. The hope with which Taylor ended Sources is for a path that achieves contact with that order without a mutilation of the goods that modernity has identified and embodied, a hope he saw as implicit in "Judaeo-Christian theism (however terrible the record of its adherents in history), and more total than humans can ever achieve unaided."

The historical record does not provide a cause for optimism in the search for a dynamic engagement between Catholicism and modernity. Taylor analogizes the relationship of Catholics within modernity to that of Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit genius who attempted to discern the finger of God in Eastern beliefs and customs and to create a restatement of Catholicism that was respectful of that presence. Ricci's efforts, and those of others, occasioned the Chinese rites controversy and ultimately foundered on the shoals of Vatican politics. In Taylor's account, developed more fully in Sources, modernity's moral core involves the affirmation of universal human rights and the value of ordinary life, together with a dedication to reducing human suffering and cultivating human enhancement. Taylor takes these developments as authentic expressions of a gospel ethic and suggests provocatively that their development required the shedding of the cultural skin of Christendom. Indeed, modern culture, in breaking with the structures and beliefs of Christendom, also carried certain facets of Christian life further than they ever could have been taken within Christendom. From this perspective, "secularization" is the appearance of the Kingdom of God in the full range of human practices and institutions (the human saecula), and no longer only in the church's internal life. Taylor implies, though he does not argue at length, that this vision is especially consistent with the deepest genius of Catholicism.

That is not, of course, the way many modern secularists see it, and for good historical reasons. Secular humanism is wary of religion because of what Taylor calls our "postrevolutionary situation." Just as past revolutionaries have insisted on right-speak (citoyen or comrade), secular humanists see any reemergence of talk about God as backsliding. Exclusive humanism argues that a transcendent horizon, "pie in the sky when you die," saps our energy for the struggle to reduce real human suffering, to save real lives, and to achieve the bit of justice of which we are concretely capable. In other words, religion threatens the highest accomplishments of modernity.

Taylor wants to contest this widely held view. He argues that a nuanced judgment will conclude that the continued vitality of secular humanism's universal ethic and emphasis on benevolence requires the "moral sources" that only an incarnational and transcendent religion can provide. "High standards need strong sources," he has written, while making a suggestion that we may be living "beyond our moral means." Here Taylor reminds us that modernity has a dark side as well. While this is the century of Amnesty International and Doctors without Borders, it is also the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Taylor warns against the way the ever-increasing reach of instrumental reason squeezes out meaningful forms of human action and relation. ("We tend in our culture to stifle the spirit.") An exclusive humanism also invites an "immanent negation of life." By this Taylor means that there is a dissatisfaction, that militant secularism cannot drive away, with anything merely human. Man's natural religiousness may be an expression of the universal quality that Hegel called "negativity" (itself a theoretical restatement of Augustine's account of the restlessness of the human spirit until it rest in God). And modern culture's frustration of the religious impulse invites the contempt for ordinary life found in fascism and antihumanist thinkers like Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, and Derrida.

Echoing Dostoyevsky, Taylor argues that the humanitarianism and philanthropy on which the modern world prides itself are precarious. Faced with the disproportion between the vast, indeed global, demands that our knowledge of the world's woes imposes on us and the thinness of the moral sources that modernity provides, our benevolence can easily turn to disgust or indifference. That can begin with a gradual hardening of our attitude toward the human stubbornness and foolishness that continually frustrate philanthropic efforts to relieve suffering. The people we seek to help won't see how they are victimized, or will not give up the consolations of traditional beliefs that are clearly self-destructive. This can lead to "contempt, hatred, and aggression" toward the former objects of our concern. Or "in the register of justice rather than benevolence," as with Jacobins and Bolsheviks, the quest for justice can become a lust for revenge that places all evil outside ourselves. Exclusive humanism "leaves us with our own high sense of self-worth to keep us from backsliding, a high notion of human worth to inspire us forward, and flaming indignation against wrong and oppression to energize us"--all of which threaten to "slide into something trivial, ugly, or downright dangerous and destructive."

In short, when we are acting, even for the good, we are always in danger of identifying the good with all our subtle forms of self-aggrandizement. "Wherever action for high ideals is not tempered, controlled, and ultimately engulfed in an unconditional love of the beneficiaries, this ugly dialectic risks repetition," Taylor writes.

He goes on to argue that both Christianity and Buddhism demonstrate in the lives of their highest practitioners a necessary relationship between a form of renunciation of self that honors a value beyond life, and a person's ability to realize the "fullness of life." We have to be willing to fail, if success comes at too high a cost to "those things that man cannot change at will," as Hannah Arendt put it in discussing the moral economy in which we live and move.

Liberal toleration, founded either on agnosticism about higher goods or on pessimism concerning their realizability, seems to be contemporary humanism's highest ideal. Taylor suggests that this ideal is impossible in real life, or at least cannot be combined with the moral energy necessary to address actively the vast miseries of which it is our fate to be aware. A "stripped down secular" outlook is an available method of living with the "appalling destruction wrought in history in the name of faith," Taylor wrote in Sources. It is possible to live "without any religious dimension or radical hope in history" to avoid repeating that destruction. But this, too, involves a kind of "mutilation" of the spirit by "stifling the response in us to some of the deepest and most powerful spiritual aspirations that humans have conceived. This, too, is a heavy price to pay." A Catholic Modernity? urges us to think hard before paying that price.

Robert Burns is a professor of law at Northwestern University.