Throughlessness

 


Right at the beginning of A Secular Age Taylor makes the assertion, which underpins much of what follows, that there was an earlier age in which ‘the political organisation’ was ‘connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality’ where ‘the modern Western state is free from this connection.’ I’m not fond, to be honest of the addition of ‘some notion of ultimate reality’, here, which seems to me to me tendentious, even a bit slippery. For one thing I challenge Taylor to name a pre-secular society grounded in anything other than God[s], however God[s] was/were conceived—which is to say: to name a pre-secular society that pledged allegiance to a non-personified ‘notion of ultimate reality’ like an 18th-century Deist rather than a good old-fashioned God or pantheon of Gods (I know he has quite a bit to say about Deism later in the book). The phrase though, or variants of it, recur through the introduction: public spaces nowadays have been ‘allegedly emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimate reality’ he says, tendentiously on p.2. Nowadays he accepts that many good people lack faith ‘in God, or the transcendent’ [3]—but the second term here is not the same as the first, and many atheists would be perfectly comfortable with it, I think. When he quotes Bede Griffiths on p.5 experiencing what Wordsworth would call a spot-of-time, and Joyce would an epiphany, on seeing a blossom-laden tree:

'I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. …..As I walked on I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and ...I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before....A lark rose suddenly from the ground … and poured out its song over my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then drew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth.  I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me.  I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.’ [this is from Griffiths’ memoir, The Golden String, p. 9]

Taylor says that Griffiths’ ‘sense of fullness came in an experience which unsettles and breaks through our ordinary sense of being in the world’ [5] … this seems to me to carry the imprint of a Christian man’s assumptions about the nature of such experience. But maybe it worked otherwise. What I mean is: putting it Taylor’s way implies that there is a through into which we can break. But maybe there isn’t, and maybe that fact grounds rather than invalidates Griffiths’ epiphany—maybe epiphanies are perfectly possible in a through-less universe.

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