The Expanding Universe of Unbelief

The Chapter 10 of A Secular Age is about the nineteenth-century, and the expansion of unbelief across the period. If unbelief starts to spread, moves from a social impossibility towards something more normative, in the eighteenth century it accelerates and expands markedly in the nineteenth. Why? Or more to the point: how?

Taylor says ‘when medieval poets write about angels, they partake of a particular sacred hierarchy, a placement and position in a divinely ordered cosmos.’ When Rilke writes about angels, ‘they cannot be understood by their place in the traditionally defined order.’ We ‘cannot get at them through a medieval treatise on the ranks of cherubim and seraphim, but we have to pass through this articulation of Rilke's sensibility’ [353]. What changed?

We could describe the change in this way: where formerly poetic language could rely on certain publicly available orders of meaning, it now has to consist in a language of articulated sensibility. Earl Wasserman has shown how the decline of the old order with its established background of meanings made necessary the development of new poetic languages in the Romantic period. Pope, for instance, in his Windsor Forest, could draw on age-old views of the order of nature as a commonly available source of poetic images. For Shelley, this resource is no longer available; the poet must articulate his own world of references, and make them believable. As Wasserman explains it, “Until the end of the eighteenth century there was sufficient intellectual homogeneity for men to share certain assumptions ... In varying degrees, men accepted the Christian interpretation of history, the sacramentalism of nature, the Great Chain of Being, the analogy of the various planes of creation, the conception of man as microcosm ... These were cosmic syntaxes in the public domain; and the poet could afford to think of his art as imitative of “nature” since these patterns were what he meant by “nature”.

There’s something here, although Taylor goes from ‘the end of the eighteenth-century’ to a much longer timescale. What, he asks, about religious liturgy? What about bardic songs, scops reciting poems in praise of heroes? ‘In chant and bardic recitation we have well understood social action. We don’t yet have “art” in the modern sense, as a separate activity from religion, praising heroes etc. The separate activity arises when we come to value creations because they allow us to contemplate, that is, to hold before ourselves so that we can appreciate whatever it is (greatness of God, or of the sense of the divine: greatness of heroes, or their admiration; the archetypes of love and suffering etc) without participating in the action they were originally embedded in, e.g. praying, or publicly praising our heroes at the feast.’ [355]

‘Art’, says Taylor, comes about via what he calls a ‘disembedding’ (he dates this to Aristotle, considerably earlier than scop hymns or liturgical singing, but alright). He says music develops through ‘heightened action’ and ‘mimesis’ to ‘semanticisation’—a notion I struggle with. Music doesn’t signify or denote in the way words do, so it's hard to see that it conveys meaning? (Semantic: conveying meaning via signs) Taylor’s examples are Mozart’s G Minor Quintet, which he calls ‘immensely sad … a beautiful story of star-crossed love’ and the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth, which, unoriginally enough, he describes as ‘the call of fate’. DUH DUH DUH DUUUHHHH! Ok. But perhaps Taylor means something idiosyncratic by ‘semanticisation’:

Semanticisation works … by capturing modes of being moved. But also perhaps by trying to express what is chthonic cosmic. Here it trades on resonances of the cosmic in us.

But ‘the modern identity and outlook flattens the world, leaves no place for the spiritual, the higher, for mystery. This doesn’t need to send us back to religious belief. There is another direction. The idea is: the mystery, the depth, the profoundly moving can be, for all we know, entirely anthropological. Atheists, humanists cling on to this, as they go to concerts, operas, read great literature. So one can complement an ethic and a scientific anthropology which remain very reductive and flat. [356]

Conveys emotions or moods is one thing; expresses the profound nature of the chthonic cosmos quite another. I'm not persuaded this explains why atheists like music as much as people of faith ... unless Taylor is suggesting that atheists like music more than religious people do, because they're groping after what they are missing? Is that what semanticisation means?

From here, Taylor quotes Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused whose dwelling is the might of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky and the mind of man’, as evidence that ‘nature has something to say to us’ [358]. It's a great poem, though Wordsworth was neither an atheist nor particularly secular.

Then Taylor adduces a number of reasons for the spread of unbelief across the nineteenth century: what he calls ‘the maturing of unbelief’—maturing because he links it with ideas of being grown-up, of putting away childish things and coming into man's, and woman's, estate. Specifically he lists five things.

1. The psychological advantages of buffering. ‘It is clear that people who felt strongly the satisfactions of the buffered identity—power, invulnerability—and were not very sensitive to its narrowing effect, tended to opt more easily for the materialist side.’ [361] Opt for makes this sound like a bloodless piece of decision making, this, a merely rational cost-benefit analysis. But not all unbelief is so rationally arrived at. And, though the unbuffered/buffered self thesis is key to Taylor’s larger argument, he is also clear that there are losses as well as gains in ‘buffering’ one’s consciousness. Here he seems to be positing a group of people for whom there are no losses, and who therefore adopt materialist atheism. This strikes me as odd.

2. A bunch of anti-Church things. ‘Then there are all the reasons which made people reject Christianity: its counter-Enlightenment doctrines of human evil and of divine punishment; the Church’s practices of exclusion, its siding with obscurantism.’ Christianity is too sweeping a designator, here. We could counter this by saying: when people find their are things in their church that they feel obliged to reject what they do is not become atheists, but set up a new church, purged of those things. This, after all, is the Protestant Reformation in a nutshell: a huge popular movement to ‘reform’ the old church. From the Renaissance to the present day, globally and often en masse, people are making new churches, new faiths.

3. Altruism. Taylor’s reasoning here is a little hard to parse. He says altruism was ‘understood to be one of the key values’ in the nineteenth century—which, I’m not sure is true, actually. The 19th-century in the West was the great era of laissez faire economics, the New Poor Laws, war, slavery, imperialism. I doubt that altruism and empathy were notables here (I have a long argument about this, too lengthy to insert here: it takes off from Charles Reade's novel Put Yourself In His Place [1870], a book about trade unionism and industrialisation, but one in which the titular empathetic gesture is presented as a radical, brilliant new way to solve industrial unrest: as if empathy as such is a kind of novelty). But alright—let's say you agree with Taylor that altruism was, suddenly, terribly important to people in the 19th-century. He says ‘in this regard humanism could claim to be superior to Christianity.’ This is because ‘Christianity offers extrinsic rewards for altruism in the hereafter where humanism makes benevolence its own reward’, which is a very puzzling thing to argue. And ‘Christianity sometimes can be tempted to exclude heretics and unbelievers’ where ‘humanism can be truly universal’. I find this hard to see. I'm reminded of contemporary humanistic (in the sense of: non-religious) dogmas of inclusivity, which do a pretty good job of actually excluding heretics and unbelievers (‘bigots, racists, transphobes, right-wingers’ and so on).

4. Science. Darwin, evolution, etc. This is, we could say, a standard argument as to the shrinkage in religious faith: that science replaced religion across the nineteenth-century because of its superior explanatory powers. Taylor, though, does not think science persuaded people to become atheists because of the science as such. Rather he argues that ‘the shift in world views turned rather on ethical considerations’.

Modern science offers us a view of the universe framed in general laws. The ultimate is an impersonal order of regularities in which all particular things exist’ as opposed to ‘Christian faith, which relates us to a personal Creator-God. [362]

Taylor seems to be suggesting that the former is more appealing to people (or to some people) than the latter because belief in a divine universe ‘introduces something arbitrary, some element of subjective desire into the picture’ where ‘the highest truths about reality must be beyond this element.’ This seems like a pretty abstruse and improbable reason to reject religion and embrace atheism I’d say. More, Taylor goes on to concede that ‘this new cosmic imaginary’ is a pretty rebarbative and inhospitable place: ‘the vast universe … impersonal in the most forbidding sense, blind and indifferent to our fate’. Why would such a vision attract people away from the comforts of religion?

5. Scholarship—Biblical criticism ‘calling into question the sources of the Bible’. By sources I suppose Taylor means whether the Bible is divinely inspired or not. But yes, this was a thing. George Eliot translating Strauss's Das Leben Jesu and so on. Though Eliot, who certainly moved away from the religious beliefs of her childhood, never became an absolute materialist in the modern, Richard Dawkins sense.

People do lose their faith. There are people who are raised in a faith, and who believe as a child, but who turn against it as an adult: who reconsider the tenets of their religion and decide they’re not true. And some people never had faith in the first place to lose. But Taylor is working with a sense of what he calls ‘conversion to unbelief’, ‘conversions away from religion’, the anti-Damascene moment. Why turn from a vision of the universe as divine to one in which it is merely material, indifferent, uncaring, forbidding? It doesn’t seem like a very reassuring thing to be doing. Taylor seems to suggest that such a vision is more ‘mature’, more grown-up. Religious faith is ‘childish’ and people want to be grown up, and science is more ‘mature’.

To put the point in another way, the story that a convert to unbelief may tell, about being convinced to abandon religion by science, is in a sense really true. This person does see himself as abandoning one world view (“religion”) because another incompatible one (“science”) seemed more believable. But what made it in fact more believable was not “scientific” proofs; it is rather that one whole package: science, plus a picture of our epistemic-moral predicament in which science represents a mature facing of hard reality, beats out another package: religion, plus a rival picture of our epistemic-moral predicament in which religion, say, represents true humility, and many of the claims of science unwarranted arrogance. But the decisive consideration here was the reading of the moral predicament proposed by “science”, which struck home as true to the convert’s experience (of a faith which was still childish—and whose faith is not, to one or another degree?), rather than the actual findings of science. This is the sense in which what I’ve been calling moral considerations played a crucial role; not that the convert necessarily found the morality of “science” of itself more attractive—one can assume that in a sense the opposite was the case, where he bemoaned loss of faith—but that it offered a more convincing story about his moral/spiritual life.

Unbelief becomes ‘manliness’ as opposed to ‘childish fears and sentimentality’ [365]: science is just the vehicle by which the unbeliever manifests his grown-up-ness.

Is religion and the religious cosmic vision, childish, though? It’s true that there is Christ’s injunction that we become again as little children, Matthew 18:3–4. But I don’t think there’s anything like this in Islam. And, even in Christianity, there’s also Paul’s call to spiritual maturity, of adult understanding: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ This is a call to grow up: to leave the now, when we see through a glass, darkly, and to move to the then, when we see God face to face.

Still that's Taylor's argument. ‘In the nineteenth-century unbelief comes of age’ [374] Not that he thinks this a good thing, of course. On the contrary it strikes him as a victory for darkness. He uses that very phrase:

But it is different from this again, because it is the sense of an absence; it is the sense that all order, all meaning comes from us. We encounter no echo outside. In the world read this way, as so many of our contemporaries live it, the natural/supernatural distinction is no mere intellectual abstraction. A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent. In some respects, we may judge this achievement as a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless.

That's where the chapter ends.

One thing Taylor does not do, in this chapter or, really, throughout the whole of A Secular Age, is work with specific examples. This, I think, is a shame. How do the actual experience of nineteenth-century atheists map onto Taylor’s 5-point, or 5-point-in-one (‘it’s about buffering as maturity’), schema? Take Charles Bradlaugh, one of Victorian Britain’s most famous atheists: elected to parliament, the man who established that new MPs, and witnesses in criminal trials, did not have to swear on the Bible but could atheistically ‘affirm’ their oath. Bradlaugh was raised an Anglican, and even worked as a Sunday School teacher. In his Autobiography he talks of finding contradictions and problems in the 39 Articles—when he went to his Vicar with his concerns, the Vicar rebuked him for atheism, and his parents threw him out of the family home. He also credits giving up alcohol (‘having become a teetotaler, which in my view brought out my infidel tendencies still more vigorously’ he says) and reading Robert Taylor’s Diegesis (1829). Bradlaugh's memoir traces his movement from Anglicanism to ‘something Deistical’ to becoming a ‘Freethinker’. But Bradlaugh at no point denies the existence of God, as a modern Richard Dawkins of Christopher Hitchens does. ‘I am an Atheist but I do not say there is no God,’ was Bradlaugh’s position. ‘I am not mad enough to say anything of the kind … I object to the God of Christianity, and absolutely deny it. In all ages men have fashioned their Gods according to heir want of knowledge—the more ignorant the people the more numerous their deities, because the Gods represented their personifications of force.’ [Bradlaugh Autobiography, 337]. His caution here is that he cannot disaffirm the existence of God as such, since he does not know what ‘God as such’ is or means.

 

Another celebrated, or denigrated, 19th-century atheist, Percy Bysshe Shelley, went further: his Necessity of Atheism pamphlet was an attack on the God of the contemporary church, against priesthood and oppression. But though called an atheist (‘Shelley the atheist is dead,’ crowed the Quarterly, on his demise: ‘now he knows whether there is a hell or not!’) Shelley was in no way a Richard Dawkins absolute materialist. On the contrary he believed in a cosmic force or divine force, which he called ‘Necessity’, or ‘Power’, which flowed through the universe. He wasn’t a Deist in the Enlightenment sense of the word (which Taylor often discusses), but he was a spiritualist. Victor Hugo was also tagged as an atheist—during the 1872 census, asked if he was a Catholic, he replied: ‘no, a freethinker’—but he believed in spiritualism, in life after death and prayed every morning and every night, saying ‘Thanksgiving has wings and flies to its right destination. Your prayer knows its way better than you do’.

In all three cases the loss of faith was (a) in large part political, and (b) not a switch from belief to unbelief, but a shift from a social orthodoxy of religion to a less communitarian, but still spiritual, understanding of the universe. Carl Sagan says somewhere that what moved him from faith was a sense that not all gods and spiritual affirmations can be true, since they are not all compatible with one another. Your priest tells you his god is the true god, and mocks that other priest who claims a different god is the true god. He, says your priest, is lying. But, Sagan says: if one priest is a liar then why not another? This, we could argue, is not ‘science’ so much as trust, and consistency. Dawkins, picking up from this, has repeatedly said that everyone is an atheist—that every Christian is atheist with respect to Odin, Quetzalcóatl, Jupiter and so on—and that he just goes one God further.

None of this is part of Taylor’s complicated model for the ‘maturation’ of unbelief across this period, I'd say. Arthur Hugh Clough could believe in a God, a divine purpose for the universe, but he couldn't affirm all the improbably specifics asserted in the 39 Articles, even though affirming all of them was a condition of his tutorship at Oriel College (he resigned his tutorship on principle in 1848, even though he thereby gave up his income). His friend Matthew Arnold struggled with doubt, but was able to continue the social praxis of religion. Taylor is fond of quoting Wordsworth's quasi-pantheistical verse, but has nothing to say about Robert Browning's ‘Bishop Bloughram's Apology’ (1855): though as a (long, detailed, complexly engaged) statement about the thinning of faith it's hard to better: and Bloughram—or in his rather different way, Browning himself—were neither believers nor atheists in the ways Taylor is describing them in this book.