Secularity and Its Aftermath

An excerpt from my dissertation on the work of Owen Barfield and Rudolf Steiner

At long last, ProQuest has published my dissertation! I chose to have it published open access so that it wouldn’t be stuck behind a paywall. You can read it in your browser or download it here:

https://www.proquest.com/docview/3207579985

As I plan to revise and attempt to publish it, I welcome any feedback you might have. And if you have any suggestions as regards who to appeal to for publication, I welcome that as well! I may end up self-publishing it—we shall see.

Please feel free to share it with anyone who you think might find it interesting.

Below is an excerpt from the introduction of the dissertation.

xoxo,

Ashton

Secularity and Its Aftermath

A modified version of “Epiphany 🗝️” by GLACEY (@5lacier)

At the end of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor speculates about two possible futures for North Atlantic societies: one that tracks with the mainline secularization thesis (i.e., religions and their superstitions—their illusions of transcendence—will gradually disappear) and one that features a revival of Christianity through “new and unprecedented itineraries to God,” itineraries that must be construed, I argue, in a decisively sacramental register.^[1]This decisively sacramental register reflects that which is most characteristic about what Taylor refers to as our modern “social imaginary”—a term I unpack here at the outset, as I use a modified version of it throughout the dissertation. For Taylor, a social imaginary is that which provides the pre-reflective background picture informing our self-understanding, the norms and standards of our moral lives, and the assumptions laden in our perception of the more-than-human world. He is careful to emphasize the “social” aspect of the phrase as an effort to counteract the contemporary tendency to assume that individual theorizing begins as soon as Homo sapiens emerge. For Taylor and Barfield, the latter is a fictitious idea native to modernity. Indeed, as I explore with Robert Bellah later, the capacity to theorize is an achievement contingent on more communal cognitive capacities that both reflect and reproduce our participation in the Life of the world. Before we ever begin theorizing, we are first leavened, as Taylor writes, by “that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.” And, importantly, the full scope of a given imaginary always “extends beyond the immediate background understanding which makes sense of our particular practices” (172). “This wider grasp has no clear limits,” he continues,

It is in fact that largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation. … It can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines. … That is another reason for speaking here of an “imaginary,” and not a theory. (173)

Taylor doesn’t explicitly state this, but his characterization suggests that human sociality is caught up in a spiritual ecology of cosmic proportions. It is implied, for example, when he says that the “sense-giving” of a social imaginary “draws on our whole world, that is, our sense of our whole predicament in time and space, among others and in history” (174). It thus seems fair to assume that the spiritual ecology I referred to is implied in his use of the term “social imaginary” given that it includes “our whole predicament.” That said, Taylor does go on to speak of “cosmic imaginaries” as distinct from the social sort, implying that the latter is an especially human creation out of which the former arises. “Just as the social imaginary consists of the understandings which make sense of our social practices,” writes Taylor, “so the ‘cosmic imaginary’ makes sense of the ways in which the surrounding world figures in our lives.”^[2] I find this distinction unhelpful, for just as theorizing requires our first being inculcated into a community of interpretation, so does the latter depend upon a more encompassing network of life which, in turn, may depend on an even more fundamental network of spirit. To remain consistent as an integral thinker, I instead opt for the abbreviated imaginary, inviting the reader to assume the social and cosmic implied therein.

So, in what sense would a renewal of Christianity in a decisively sacramental register reflect that which is most characteristic about our modern imaginary? Whether one is a devout believer or a staunch atheist, Taylor insists that what everyone living under the conditions of this imaginary shares is a structure he refers to as the “immanent frame.” A key feature of this structure is the historical achievement of the “buffered self” “for whom,” says Taylor, “it comes to seem axiomatic that all thought, feeling and purpose, all the features we normally can ascribe to agents, must be in minds, which are distinct from the ‘outer’ world.”^[3] The buffered self is the counterpoint to a disenchanted world—a world shorn of the plurivocal agency and autonomous meanings that characterize the premodern imaginary. In contrast, the world of what Taylor calls the “porous self” had no want of meaning. But there are drawbacks to enchantment, for in a world wherein “the line between personal agency and impersonal force was not at all clearly drawn,” the porous self was exceedingly vulnerable.^[4] As Taylor writes,

Once meanings are not exclusively in the mind, once we can fall under the spell, enter the zone of power of exogenous meanings, then we think of this meaning as including us, or perhaps penetrating us. We are in as it were a kind of space defined by this influence … a kind of interspace which straddles what for us [today] is a clear boundary. (35)

The “interspace” Taylor describes here is precisely the medium that, in Barfield’s terms, participation is used to refer to; enchantment is thus intimately bound up with an awareness of the latter. Thus, for Taylor, the reality reported by the porous self was not just a childish view of the world eventually to be corrected by reason and science, but the truth of premodern experience and the matrix from which the buffered self was born. Whereas many in the present-day Global North flounder about seeking for purpose, our porous ancestors had little freedom over their lot. Buffering brings the boon of increased agency, but also a corresponding loss of orientation as the cosmic order that might have guided our freedom evaporates—or at least seems to.

To describe the subjectivity of the buffered self as an achievement is to recognize that it was not given from the outset. Nor was it merely the outcome of social construction. Taylor doesn’t argue this explicitly, but the development he traces throughout A Secular Age could leave one with the impression that it was the inspiration of Christ himself that facilitated the emergence of the buffered self. In his view, monotheism in general can be read as having provided the porous self with a form of spiritual protection unparalleled in the world of enchantment; through loyalty to the one true God, the porous self underwent a kind of psychic and moral fortification that would eventually yield a new sense of personal identity. “God figures in this world as the dominant spirit,” writes Taylor, “and moreover as the only thing that guarantees that in this awe-inspiring and frightening field of forces good will triumph.”^[5] This protective power and the boundary formation it stimulated was taken to a new level as emphasis on one’s individual relationship with the person of Christ came about. As Taylor writes,

One of the potentialities of Christian faith was a reversal of the field of fear. … To draw on this power, you have to leap out of the field of magic altogether, and throw yourself on the power of God alone. This “disenchanting” move is implicit in the tradition of Judaism, and later Christianity. Fundamental to both is a break with a world in which what they judge to be bad magic, the worship of pagan Gods and forces, is rampant. (73)

The disenchantment of the plurivocal world, what Barfield refers to as the “withdrawal from participation,” can thus be retroactively read as an appropriation of agency through the centrating power of monotheism.^[6] An inversion of that movement into a centrifugal one comes with the Incarnation such that, through uniting with a physical body, Christ brings the potential for the fallen world of images to be reaffirmed—resurrected—by individual human beings who freely recognize the world’s contingency on agapeic giving and choose to participate in that loving light.

The immanent frame of modernity is, in Taylor’s view, intimately bound up with this religious development. Grossly summarizing his complex narrative, one can point to two major developments in the spiritual life of Latin Christendom during the late medieval era: a new orientation towards death and the urge to reform all of society to comport with a higher vocation that was once the exclusive province of the spiritually elect. Taylor describes the former as both a “Christianization and an individuation.” According to this eschatological vision, “We are called to live a quite transformed life,” says Taylor, “one in which death has been overcome. This transformation involves our living for something beyond the human flourishing.”^[7] Taylor repeatedly draws attention to the “excarnating” character of this aspiration, especially its ascetic disciplining of the body and emotional life in favor of rational self-possession. Hitherto, such aspirations were striven for only by spiritual elites, but at this point in western history it has become a potential aimed at by the mass of society, thereby closing the ancient gap between the priestly and lay classes.^[8] A “rage for order” emerges, the urge to reform, but with a capital R. In the wake of this movement, “less dedicated forms” (e.g., collectivist festivities like Carnival) of religiosity would be delegitimized in favor of an uncompromising transformation of the entire social body into a collection of disciplined, self-responsible individuals.^[9] Paradoxically accompanying this excarnating movement and its disciplining of society was a new affirmation of ordinary life that had the earthliness of Christ as its model. And, in the wake of theological articulations “to mark clearly the autonomy of the supernatural … [, to] establish the sovereign power of God, … [and to] disentangle the order of grace from that of nature,” the universe itself eventually becomes amenable to scientific description as a free-standing order. The prior sociological and theological transformations can thus be seen to partially give rise to, as Taylor continues, “the major theoretical transformation of Western modernity … [which] yielded our familiar picture of the natural, ‘physical’ universe as governed by exceptionless laws, which may reflect the wisdom and benevolence of the creator, but don’t require in order to be understood.”^[10] I’ve given emphasis to Taylor’s mention of the possibility that a theologically inflected account of the physical universe persists into the modern era (even though Galilean cosmology seems to militate against it) because it is important for his overall argument to insist that the immanent frame does not foreclose, but rather “permits closure [to divine transcendence], without demanding it” (544). Indeed, a key thesis of A Secular Age is that the rise of secularity consisted foremost, not in the inevitable decline of religion, but in the emergence of a public space wherein naïve acknowledgements of transcendence (and spiritual beliefs of any kind) are now challenged by the co-presence of unbelief. The immanent frame—that structure of our global imaginary which, as Taylor writes, “allows you to feel pulled [in] two ways … cross-pressured between the open and closed perspectives”^[11]—is thus “the sensed context in which we develop our beliefs” today.^[12]

Another feature of the immanent frame that contributes to the obfuscation of divine transcendence is what Taylor refers to as its epistemological picture.^[13] More specific than the branch of philosophy broadly concerned with the nature of knowledge, Taylor’s epistemological picture backgrounds those characteristically modern mediational theories that hypostasize the buffered self and its capacity to theorize. Bypassing the natural and cultural-historical enabling conditions that have allowed such second-order thinking to emerge, mediational theories posit a “series of priority relations” that eventually enshrine the unconscious belief that “knowledge of the self and its states comes before knowledge of external reality and of others. The knowledge of reality as neutral fact comes before our attributing to it various ‘values’ and relevances” (559). Combining with the impressive technological deliverances of modern science, the epistemological picture typically operates as, in Taylor’s terms, a “closed world structure” (CWS)—closing the immanent frame to transcendence. Giving voice to this view, Taylor writes: “I must grasp the world as fact before I can posit values. I must accede to the transcendent, if at all, by inference from the natural,” and—in keeping with the seemingly autonomous order of nature forged through the science of modern humanism—this attitude toward transcendence “can operate as a CWS, because it is obvious that the inference to the transcendent is at the extreme and most fragile end of a chain of inferences; it is the most epistemically questionable.”^[14] Rather than a soberly reasoned conclusion based on an objective consideration of the facts, Taylor argues that it is more accurately understood as a moral outlook, one that is mainly persuasive because it occludes the inconclusiveness of its basic premises. “There is an ethic here … ,” insists Taylor,

of a disengagement which brings control; a stance which requires courage, the refusal of the easy comforts of conformity to authority, of the consolations of an enchanted world, of the surrender to the promptings of the senses. The entire picture, shot through with “values”, which is meant to emerge out of the careful, objective, presuppositionless scrutiny, is now presented as having been there from the beginning, driving the whole process of “discovery.” (559–60)

Taylor goes on to characterize this construal as a form of “spin” for its naturalization of a viewpoint that isn’t rationally conclusive in the way it presumes. Whereas modern humanism remains open to the possibility of divine transcendence, proponents of spin close off to it and thus constitute a new permutation—what Taylor calls “exclusive humanism” (19). That the deliverances of science have gradually come to prove the tenets of unbelieving materialism seems self-evident to many exclusive humanists today. But just as the reality of divine transcendence can’t be proven through an inference from natural facts, nor can that existence be disproven—nor, moreover, can the legitimacy of faith in it. And because the epistemological picture enshrines the primacy of external facts as the measure of legitimacy under the immanent frame—registered, mind you, by the hypostasized individual—the actual context of belief formation has transformed. Says Taylor,

The crucial change is in the status accorded to the inclination to believe; this is the object of a radical shift in interpretation. It is no longer the impetus in us towards truth, but has become rather the most dangerous temptation to sin against the austere [externally oriented] principles of belief-formation.^[15]

And though the immanent frame “permits closure without demanding it,” Taylor acknowledges that “to live in this frame is to be nudged in one direction”—that is, toward closure (555). Rather than proffer a more neutral stance, as the influential epistemological picture would incline us to believe, living in the immanent frame biases us toward an impersonal, scientistic orientation in matters of moral and existential evaluation. For those satisfied with this scientistic construal of truth, unbelief is the courageous and responsible position to hold. Exclusive humanists of this stripe are thus motivated by what they believe to be the conclusions of sober maturity against the childish temptations of belief.

Another motivation for adhering to the moral outlook of exclusive humanism that Taylor notes is in continuity with the this-worldly yea-saying of Friedrich Nietzsche.^[16] If, as the supposedly conclusive theory of Darwinian descent reveals, transcendence is a mere fiction, then the excarnating pretensions of religious disciplinary formation appear in actuality as the ressentiment of the weak inflicted on the strong and noble. The unbeliever knows that all value, rather than providentially ordered, is created by human beings. “But this doesn’t cause him just to cave in. On the contrary,” writes Taylor, “he determines to affirm human worth, and the human good, and to work for it, without false illusion or consolation. And that means that in his moral beliefs he is also counter-mortification.”^[17] To yea-say is to reverse the tide of excarnation, to recuperate the body as a locus of value and striving; though the body and the natural world know no divine light, they begin to shine like sacraments.^[18] To echo Nietzsche more directly—”God is dead!”^[19]—and most are still unaware of the maddening implications. Though Barfield’s evolutionary picture is in some agreement with Nietzsche’s declaration, his vision goes further by reaffirming the traditional Christian belief that God did indeed die, but resurrected—a miracle that was then recapitulated on Whitsun in the hearts of his disciples, for St. Paul later on, and for partakers of the Holy Spirit ever after. As with Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the individual human being can genuinely participate in the metamorphosis of cultural values, but only when irradiated with the Light that lives both within and beyond the created world. In contrast, exclusive humanism ultimately issues in opaque materialism and its metaphysical correlate—nihilism. Pivotal contemporary values like universal justice and benevolence are ultimately relativized by such an outlook; as with twentieth-century existentialists, the only justification for continuing to honor such values in this absurd situation is to celebrate arbitrary choice as a courageous act of self-creation. As Taylor illustrates,

That I am left with only human concerns doesn’t tell me to take universal human welfare as my goal; nor does it tell me that freedom is important, or fulfillment, or equality. … The in fact very exigent demands of universal justice and benevolence which characterize modern humanism can’t be explained just by the subtraction of earlier goals and allegiances.^[20]

Instead of reactively dismissing modern humanism and the immanent frame as an epoch of apostasy, Taylor sees something genuinely good in its novel valuation of immanence. Somewhat ironically, the disciplinary formation and excarnating aspirations of the Reform movement have led to a situation where ordinary human flourishing has become possible at mass scale. One of the truly admirable features of modern humanism for Taylor is the liberal demand that everyone should enjoy such privileges: the demand for universal justice and benevolence. A cursory look at contemporary social justice movements reveals that something more is going on than mere slave-morality. Rather, as Taylor writes, “modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms, and others that remain within the immanent frame, are therefore responding to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it” (768). What else could affectively and rationally inspire the seemingly unnatural demands for universal justice and benevolence? To foster a fully coherent humanism one would have to begin, as Taylor suggests, by recognizing that what is most essential about the immanent frame has been constituted in connection with divine transcendence. Such a recognition might inaugurate a new relationship to the latter—thus renewing Christianity in a decisively sacramental register. Amen, for Christianity, “as the faith of the Incarnate God,” insists Taylor, “is denying something essential to itself as long as it remains wedded to forms which excarnate” (771). Anyone aspiring to articulate a new itinerary to God must thus reimagine the goods of the immanent frame according to an incarnational perspective. Divine transcendence is not hostile to, but rather the very condition that permits us to imagine ordinary human flourishing, universal justice and benevolence, “the felt need to rehabilitate the body” (including sexuality), and the Romantic re-enchantment of the world through a renewal of participation (771). Taylor also emphasizes the need to overcome the homogenization wrought by Reform: to allow for a re-embedding in distinct traditions of formation and promote “respect [for] the integrity of different ways of life.”^[21] Following Ewert Cousins,^[22] Sean Kelly also speaks of the need for such a development and designates it as the promise of a “Second Axial Age.” Whereas the first Axial Age (ca. 800–300 BCE) was thematized by the breakthrough to a transcendent point of reference, “by contrast,” writes Kelly, “[the second] involves the articulation of new forms of universality which could mediate between the particular culture spheres and help them confront their shared predicament: the threat of planet-wide ecological and civilization collapse.”^[23] What Kelly conveys here are the two fundamental challenges humanity faces in the Anthropocene: the planetary, or the challenge to recognize ourselves as indissociable from a biosphere that happens to be in crisis, and the postcolonial, or the challenge to actually honor divine transcendence by overcoming immanentist dominator-hierarchies and the univocal ideologies that correspond to them. In short, any vision that purports to be a worthy candidate for this Second Axial Age must be adequate to the postcolonial and planetary challenges. The aim of chapter 1 is to show that Barfield’s integral vision, considered as a new itinerary to God, qualifies as such an axial candidate. Though I am in agreement with Cousins and Kelly that such developments are necessary, rather than speak of a Second Axial Age, I prefer to interpret them, following Barfield and Rudolf Steiner, as a further working out of the “Christ impulse” when read as the heavenly inspiration of axial breakthroughs up until it decisively took root with the Mystery of Golgotha, or, as the latter two alternatively referred to it, the “turning-point of time.”^[24]

Speculating up until 2007 (when A Secular Age was published), Taylor envisions that the first possible future—which tracks with the mainline secularization thesis—”will become less plausible over time … in part because it will be clear that other societies are not following suit, and thus that this master narrative isn’t about universal humanity; and also because many of the ills for which ‘religion’ was supposedly responsible aren’t going away.”^[25] Although it may have once seemed incontestable to many, the first decades of the twenty-first century bear witness against the secularization thesis. For want of direction, meaning, and security, many young people today are falling into anachronistic and reactionary religious movements (e.g., the “trad” phenomenon). Many others, as if designing their social media profiles, pick and choose from the online marketplace of decontextualized spiritual beliefs and practices. In the absence of a participatory understanding of transcendence that might give dynamic measure to an evolving world, the rational options (put extremely) are to reactively reject the seeming vacuity of liberalism for “tradition” or indulge the arbitrary will for a depressingly trivial existence. “If liberalism is in crisis,” writes Matthew Rose in his A World After Liberalism, “it is because this picture of human life has been proven to be impoverished” (154). And though I think Taylor is right about the passage of time providing a critique of the mainline secularization thesis, in 2025 it looks as though these two futures are not mutually exclusive. Proponents of the mainline thesis still abound, especially if one includes those who humor religious systems along functionalist lines as “social technologies”; it also ironically persists in the deeply religious fantasies of technocrats who aspire to escape a dying Earth for promised lands in outer space. The growing popularity of a neo-feudal future in connection with such technocrats (e.g., Elon Musk) suggests that the nihilism implied in the CWS of exclusive humanism is being openly embraced today as “might is right” among those who worship billionaires like heroes. I’d thus like to propose that Taylor’s two futures, considered ideally—and hyperbolically—converge in Nietzsche’s vision of the Übermensch,^[26] that mascot of the Anthropocene. All depends on the metaphysical assumptions that inform one’s interpretation (and potential critique) of Nietzsche’s god-like ideal, for though it may be imbalanced, the Übermensch nonetheless epitomizes the status of our species now that we’ve become a geophysical force. Will his ideal be realized in its distorted image as a technologically enhanced humanoid on a never-ending quest to terraform the external universe? Or, perhaps, in a transmutation of its muscularity in the actualization of our potential—transhuman indeed—as microcosm, the anthropos (ἄνθρωπος), image of the macrocosm and of divinity itself? The word “transhuman” does go back to Dante Alighieri’s “trasumanar” after all—a verb he coined in The Divine Comedy to express the asymptotic lure of divinization.^[27] My rendering is certainly a mythologization of Taylor’s two futures, but in Barfield’s novel vision, myth and history coincide. In terms of the latter’s esoteric Christianity, we face a fork in the road: We can either fall further or turn round in metanoia to participate in, and thereby advance, the resurrection of the entire cosmos. Can you remember who and what you are, microcosm?

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^[1] Taylor, Secular Age, 755.

^[2] Taylor, 323.

^[3] Taylor, 539, my emphasis.

^[4] Taylor, 32.

^[5] Taylor, 41.

^[6] Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 57.

^[7] Taylor, 66.

^[8] Though “Western” is typically capitalized, I refrain from doing so in this dissertation so as to work against the tendency to present the west as a monolith, occluding the heterogeneity and cross-cultural reality of its cultures and their historical concourse with north, east, and south.

^[9] Taylor, 62.

^[10] Taylor, 542, my emphasis.

^[11] Taylor, 555.

^[12] Taylor, 549.

^[13] Taylor, 558.

^[14] Taylor, 558.

^[15] Taylor, 563.

^[16] See Nietzsche’s The Gay Science.

^[17] Taylor, Secular Age, 555.

^[18] Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly explore this theme in their aptly titled All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. Among their many interesting musings, the most salient for me is their emphasis on the recuperation of a poietic craftsmanship of perception against the flattened, mechanomorphic vision of late modernity. But unlike Barfield and Taylor, they describe monotheism as merely a temptation to be replaced by a polytheistic appreciation of competing and so ultimately irreconcilable goods. If there were no Good beyond the more immanent ecstasies of the Homeric gods, why should we care about being swept up in violent and morally disfiguring frenzies? By contrast, Barfield—following Steiner in some respects—makes room for polytheism (and much more), but binds the diversity of spiritual beings to a trinitarian Godhead shining in all manner of ineffable transcendence (Saving the Appearances). Towards the end of A Secular Age, Taylor gestures towards the potential of something similar.

^[19] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 5.

^[20] Taylor, Secular Age, 572.

^[21] Taylor, 772.

^[22] See Cousins’ Christ of the 21st Century.

^[23] Kelly, Becoming Gaia, 21.

^[24] Steiner, “Lecture IX. World History in the Light of Anthroposophy and as a Foundation for Knowledge of the Human Spirit,” par. 120.

^[25] Taylor, Secular Age, 770.

^[26] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 5.

^[27] “Transhumanizing could not be expressed / by words; let this case, therefore, him suffice, / for whom Grace holds experience in reserve” (Dante, Divine Comedy, Canto I, line 70). I was first alerted to the origin of the term when listening to a lecture by my external reader, Mark Vernon, wherein he contrasts Dante’s trasumanar with today’s technological transhumanism.