What does it mean to say we live in “a secular age” and how did we get here in the first place? These two questions between them form the “structuring principle” of Charles Taylor’s massive and, for the most part, absorbing book of the same name.

Taylor is not especially well known in the UK. Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University in Canada and recent winner of the prestigious Templeton Prize, he is best known, if at all, for Sources of the Self, in which he analyses how we came to conceptualise our identity in the way we do today. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is those parts of A Secular Age that explore the way we understand ourselves in relation to our environment – or our moral, social and cosmic “imaginaries”, in Taylor’s own terminology – that are the book’s best.

A Secular Age is divided into five parts, the first four exploring the complex path towards our secular age, and the last, longest and weakest examining the “cross pressures” and “dilemmas” of living in that age. It opens with several careful definitions of secularity, with Taylor choosing the broadest to focus on: “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.”

In tracing this change, he repeatedly rejects the traditional narrative of secularisation, in which modernisation, industrialisation, scientific progress, etc. make a turning away from the divine inevitable. This, he argues, is an erroneous narrative of “subtraction”, in which not believing is our true state, which simply awaits modernity to be revealed. On the contrary, he argues, “exclusive humanism” is rather more substantive, indeed quite an achievement in itself. “Exclusive humanism wasn’t just something we fell into, once the old myths dissolved…. It opened up new human potentialities, viz. to live in those modes of moral life in which the sources are radically immanentized.”

That achievement was made possible by the intellectual developments of late Christendom. The Reformation disenchanted the world and gave rise to what Taylor calls “the buffered self”, human identity that was separated and protected from “a world of spirits and forces which [could] cross the boundary of the mind.” This helped develop our “interiority” and also the sense that, properly disciplined, we could reform not only ourselves but also society as a whole. This provided the raw materials for “Providential Deism”, which, in turn, paved the way for a humanism that was open to the possibility of transcendent, and finally one that was not (i.e. “exclusive humanism”).

The story is not as simple as that, however (just in case you were worried). As a reaction against what it deemed to be the shallow, sterile and often arrogant conception of a wholly “immanent” world, one which “seemed to draw the compass of human life too narrowly,” the 18^th and 19^th centuries witnessed a variety kind of counter reformations, in which our sense of the sublime, whether in nature, art, morality, or religion, re-opened paths to the transcendent. These paths did not necessarily, however, lead back to orthodox Christianity, which, prior to the rise of the “immanent frame” was the only viable transcendent position to hold. Some did, of course, but many others led to quite new forms of “religious life” (defining that term as broadly as possible), a fact that was compounded by a growing emphasis on authenticity or “expressive indivualism”, the idea that “each one of us has his/ her own way of realizing our humanity.” The result was what Taylor calls the “Nova effect”, in which “the original duality, the positing of a viable humanist alternative [to Christianity], set in train a dynamic… spawning an ever-widening variety of moral/ spiritual options.”

Taylor’s conclusion is that we all, religious or not, live within an “immanent frame” or “order”, in which “the buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular.” That recognised, this order still “leaves the issue open whether, for purposes of ultimate explanation, or spiritual transformation, or final sense-making, we might have to evoke something transcendent.” Or, in the words of the singer Peggy Lee, whom Taylor quotes, “Is this all there is?”

It is this tension between what Taylor terms “open” and “closed” immanent frames that shapes the fifth section of the book. Regrettably, this meanders more than the others and is the least satisfying. Taylor’s conclusion is that “our age is very far from settling in to a comfortable unbelief,” not least because “our religious lives… are responding to a [genuine] transcendent reality.” Unfortunately, this conclusion is somewhat obscured by an overlong final section, in which you get the impression he is discussing topics because they interest him rather than because they contribute to the flow of his argument.

As several of the quotations in this review will indicate, A Secular Age is not an easy book to read. Long, dense, academic, and often obscured by Taylor’s idiosyncratic terminology, it is not for the faint-hearted. Nevertheless, it is original, thoughtful, provocative and immensely erudite. Above all, it is quite unlike any other book on secularism you are likely to read in this age, or any.

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor is published by Harvard University Press (2007) 

This review first appeared in Third Way.