Ordered Impersonalities and Funky Gibbons

 

Onward. After ‘Providential Deism’, the first bit of A Secular Age’s Part 2 (overarching title ‘The Turning Point’) we come to the second bit: ‘The Impersonal Order’—a brisker 25 pages that moves straightforwardly through its thesis, something of a relief after the much longer and rather more tangled ‘Providential Deism’ chapter. 

Taylor’s aim in this chapter is straightforward enough: to map ‘a change in the understanding of God and is relation to the world’, a ‘drift away from orthodox Christian conceptions of God as an agent, interacting with humans and intervening in human history’ to ‘God as an architect of a universe operating by unchanging laws, which humans have to conform to or suffer the consquences’ [p.270]. Does Taylor mean unchanging laws of physics, or unchanging laws of physics and of morality? I'm not sure.

His main business here is to find a way of retelling this narrative that does not also entail what he has previously dubbed ‘the subtraction story’. That’s because CT does not believe that the subtraction story (viz. we used to have x beliefs—God, demons, magic, science etc—and now we believe many fewer things) is true.

According to a conception widely canvassed in the Enlightenment and since, what powers the movement along this continuum, either to its half-way mark or all the way, is reason itself.  We discover that certain of the features of the original view are untenable and we end up adopting what remains after the unacceptable elements have been peeled off, be this some kind of Deism, or world-soul, or cosmic force, or blank atheism.  Each variant has its designated end-point.  That of Voltaire is not that of today’s scientific materalists.  But, whatever end-point a variant enshrines is seen as the truth, the residual kernel of fact underlying the husk of invention or superstition which used to surround it.  We’re dealing with the classic subtraction story. [p.270]

 ‘I want to contest this,’ says Taylor, although he adds: ‘not that it doesn’t contain important elements of truth.’ But he wants to contest it nonetheless, because it’s ‘too crude and global’ and ‘runs together a number of factors which we need to separate’. What are those strands, you ask? Well, I'll tell you: [1] ‘one strand is inseparable from disenchantment’, [2] ‘another strand is the new stance towards history’, which Taylor thumbnails as the shift from Herodotus to Thucydides: ‘a refusal to consider certain “legendary” events as taking place in some higher time, or on some unspecified higher plane of being, that of, say, Gods and heroes. Time is homogenized’ [p.271]. There follows a discussion of Hume and Gibbon and eighteenth-century historiography, and then—unless I misunderstand—Taylor slips in a third strand without naming it as such: ‘enthusiasm’:

So something else is operating in the making of eighteenth-century Deists like (we presume) Gibbon than simply the demands of (natural and human) science. They have a deep distaste for action (putatively) inspired by God; indeed, they have a (derogatory) word for it, “enthusiasm”. On the surface it seems obvious why. The people they pick out as “enthusiasts” are often those who make clamorous and self-assured claims to divine inspiration, and on the strength of this frequently engage in aggressive behaviour or in other ways threaten the established order. In other words, they are people who put in danger the order of mutual benefit. These people were a menace, and to be opposed or contained, wherever quietism didn’t render them harmless. But to explain Gibbon’s exclusion of God (as against fanatical or enthusiastic beliefs about God) as a factor in human history in terms of his distaste for these subversive elements is once more to beg the question. If one accepts that God can work in human history in other, less noisy and obvious (and also more inspiring) ways, then one’s reactions to “enthusiasts” will no longer determine how one reads ecclesiastical history in general. We have a phenomenon analogous to that in our day, whereby “secular” Americans judge the influence of religion on the basis of their (justifiably) negative views of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. That their paradigm of “religion” is a negative one is not the result of empirical discovery, but of their pre-existing framework. [p.274]

I don’t want to get into, yet again, my uncomfortableness with the rather unhistorical way Taylor uses ‘Deist’ as a kind of sliding signifier, but it’s certainly worth noting here that Taylor’s ‘ … the (we presume Deist) Gibbon ….’ is just wrong. Lazy, even. Rather famously, the young Gibbon converted to Catholicism—in 1753—and later, after his father threatened to disinherit him, or else, according to the story he tells in his own memoirs, after realising that his faith had been ‘corrupted’ (his word) by the ‘free thinking Deism of the Mallets’ (that is, of his friends the playwrights/poets David and Lucy Mallet) he reconverted to Anglicanism on Christmas Day, 1754, and remained a communicant for the rest of his life. Indeed, I wonder if Taylor has actually read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. When CT says he needs ‘to explain Gibbon’s exclusion of God (as against fanatical or enthusiastic beliefs about God) as a factor in human history’ he is, I suppose, saying that Gibbon is more like Thucydides than Herodotus. But that doesn’t mean that Gibbon excludes God. In point of fact, he doesn’t. Since Gibbon's own God was born in Bethlehem during the period he is writing about, it would be hard for him to do so. Here, from Decline and Fall's first vol:

During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church [...] But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world. Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence, of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phenomena of Nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect. Both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe. [Gibbon, Decline and Fall Bk 1 ch 15]

Are these the words of a historian excluding God from his account of history would you say?  

Perhaps this seems nitpicky to you. Let’s take instead Taylor’s larger point: that a distaste for ‘enthusiasm’ among secular discourses like science and history indexes ‘a deep seated moral distaste for the old religion that sees God as an agent in history’ [p.274]. This stance is not, CT argues, simply a reflection of ‘facts’, but rather flows from what he calls ‘a certain interpretive grid’. Grid seems tendentious to me (it presupposes, doesn’t it, that this distaste is a kind of procrustean bed) but OK. Taylor sketches the grid as covering a new relationship to [1] ‘the body’, from, roughly a pre-secular-age belief that we are not our bodies—that we are our souls, or perhaps ‘our heart’, and that we ‘reach our highest state in a condition beyond the body, being incarnate is a hindrance’ [p.276]—to a secular-age belief that we are indeed our bodies. [2] a new model of history: roughly, that for pre-secular-age history ‘the whole story belongs to the end, and not just the last state it arrives at’, that there is an ‘eschaton that lies beyond history’, and that this belief is replaced by a different, secular one, which in turn [3] changes the way individuals relate to the ‘stories’ of history and [4] also entails ‘a new significance for contingency’. After some discussion of these four CT tacks on two more: first [5] ‘when the body becomes central so too do the emotions’—and, finally: ‘Body, heart, emotion, history; all these make sense only in the context of (6) the belief that the highest being is a personal being, not just in the sense of possessing agency, but also in that of being capable of communion.’ I struggled with this a little, for it doesn’t look like Taylor means this last word as simply a synonym for community, collective identity or so on. It stands, rather, for a new definition of what a ‘person’ is:

Indeed, the definitions of the Trinity in Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers made central use of this notion (Koinonia). The new sense of “hypostasis” which was developed by the Cappadocians, which we translate no longer as “substance”, but as “person”, was part of this new theology. The notion of person was correlative to that of communion; the person is the kind of being which can partake in communion. God’s intervention in history, and in particular the Incarnation, was intended to transform us, through making us partakers of the communion which God already is and lives. It was meant to effect our “deification” (theiosis). In this crucial sense, salvation is thwarted to the extent that we treat God as an impersonal being, or as merely the creator of an impersonal order to which we have to adjust. Salvation is only effected by, one might say is, our being in communion with God through the community of humans in communion, viz., the church. This is the central idea which makes sense of all the other modifications of pagan thought which I have just been describing. [p.278]

So: communion ‘underlies all the other changes’ Taylor has been talking about: ‘communion has to integrate persons in their true identities, as bodily beings who establish their identities in their histories, in which contingency has a place. In this way, the central concept which makes sense of the whole is communion, or love, defining both the nature of God, and our relation to him.’

So, really Taylor is making two fairly big claims in this chapter: that this grid exists (which is to say, that it describes something substantive in our collective history, that it has explanatory power) and that it was ‘powerful’. This second claim is finessed: by p.280 Taylor simple assumes it (‘what made this grid so powerful?’) and in the remaining ten-or-so pages the reasoning starts to sound a bit circular. As per: ‘the pull towards the “impersonal” pole of this continuum becomes more understandable when one takes account of the way in which the human condition was more and more understood in terms of impersonal orders; and this process was grasped in a historical consciousness which saw the impersonal as superseding earlier, more personal forms.’ Which is to say: the pull towards the impersonal is explicable in terms of how people started to think the human condition was impersonal, instead of, as they had previously, thought, personal. Really?

A little later CT tries to finger equality as an idea as the culprit. To boil it down: we begin to like the idea of equality (all men are born equal and are endowed etc etc) and freedom, and as such we come into conflict with ‘orthodox Christianity’, since that ‘sees our highest mode of being (and also our freedom, but this is in virtue of a rather different conception) as arising in a relation, moreover one which is not equal, but on which we draw to know and be ourselves’ [p.283].

Thus here, too, modernity, as the era of freedom, can be seen to be congruent with our relating ourselves to an impersonal law, not to the goals which arise out of a personal relation. All these forms of impersonal order: the natural, the political and the ethical can be made to speak together against orthodox Christianity, and its understanding of God as personal agent. There is a certain idea of human dignity, indeed, the one propounded by, among others, Kant, which seems incombinable with Christian faith. [p.283]

I don’t think this is right, actually, although I think I see where Taylor is coming from. But ‘equality’ as a hypothetical social good is (a) much older than the Enlightenment, surely—when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? and so on—(b) surely not a Tower of Babel-y attempt to insist that human beings are the equal of God (or Weltgeist, or History, or Nature, or whatever), but an axiom that we ought to work from the assumptions that we are equal amongst ourselves, and, most importantly of all ... how to put it: say, perhaps, (c) equality, as a concept, has never pretended to be a universal solvent. It is necessarily a claim about inherent worth, not quality or ability, and not identity either. Indeed, the claim to equality is really only saying two things. Chesterton puts it well: ‘There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. There are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. They are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it.’

This, though, is not equality as Taylor sees it, viz. a sheer objectification, ‘a slide towards the impersonal … driven by our self-understanding as disengaged, rational agents’ [283]. Chesterton’s equality is intensely personal, as well as beautifully grounding our ability to empathise with others.