Okay. Kafka did throw me off for a bit. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about “A Hunger Artist,” given my preoccupation with Tolstoy, whose work I truly enjoyed. I had read The Metamorphosis awhile ago, and though I enjoyed and appreciated…shall we say…its form — i.e., Kafka’s style--I couldn’t and still can’t appreciate it as literature. On the one hand, Kafka does manage to capture a particular historical moment quite well — the breakdown of middle-class life and its mores; but on the other, his manner of depicting this moment is de rigueur in its attack on the family. I think “A Hunger Artist” can be faulted for much the same reason. For not only does Kafka highlight the absurdity of the art market and the absurd existence of the artist, he also takes shots at the once-again phantom public, i.e. the middle class (for Kafka), who in his mind appreciates art only for its spectacular value. Kafka, like Socrates, and unlike Tolstoy or Ion, wants his readers to question tradition, to witness its absurd repercussions. Certainly, there is much to criticize the bourgeoisie for; like giving birth to capitalism and abetting the rise of market society. Nonetheless, one can’t help but be reminded of the rather facile slaps that contemporary artists take at capitalism today. What both these artists and Kafka have failed to appreciate is the role that capitalism played in “freeing” the individual. Moreover, what neither want to admit is that the same “philistine” that both inveigh against is the same person who reads or buys their book/art. And as one fellow artist--in this case, a musician and songwriter named Bob Geldoff--once noted, “You never bite the hand that feeds.”
Oddly enough, “Ion” sort of embodies all that I like about Socrates, as well as everything I hate. On the hand, the man was a rebel, a “gadfly,” as he once said of himself. And being one myself, I can respect that aspect of him as a person: He was compelled to rebel by virtue of the principles he adhered to. On the other hand, however, Socrates’s rebellion proved to be, in effect, suicidal. He was put to death for his transgressions, a fate he willingly accepted. For not only was Socrates bound to his principles, but he was bound to the laws of the polis. He had recognized early on that what he preached and taught went against the grain of Greek doctrine; yet he continued. And as admirable as these actions might be, they reflect at least in part not only changes occurring in Greek society at the time, but also how Socrates indeed embodied an idea whose time had not yet come. “Ion,” it seems to me, illustrates this in rather poignant fashion.
Socrates in his own way straddles the ancient world and the wellsprings of the modern era. His respect for the laws of the polis--in essence, Greek tradition (see Montesquieu on “the spirit of the laws”) — establishes one leg in the ancient world; while the assertion of his individuality clearly puts his other leg in the modern. His teachings put him at odds with the polis, yet since his identity is derived from the polis, it could be said that Socrates was merely giving his fellow citizens a glimpse of the future. But as he was to discover, they were not ready for that peek. Thus, it could be said that Socrates was a medium for the future, embodying the dialectic of history. Ion, on the contrary, was a medium of the past, with his art being the transmission of tradition. It is no wonder, then, that both men seemed to be talking past one another. Socrates, of course, expected as much, while Ion played the fool. And I suppose this last morsel says quite a bit about Plato, who, in making Ion the fool, sides with Socrates and against tradition. “The Republic” seems to echo this sentiment, although it could be argued that a man like Socrates would have no existence in a hypothetical state as such.
I think the issue of artistic genius or originality is also raised in “Ion.” Is Ion--the medium — the artist? Or is Homer? A structuralist analysis renders this question virtually impossible to answer. For even though Homer penned his plays, he, too, was in effect a medium of tradition; the ideas for his plays having not fallen from the sky. Ion is thus a medium of a medium. What distinguishes Homer, of course, is the manner in which Greek tradition is conveyed by him. He was the author of the plays; Ion was not. Thus, I would argue that while technically speaking both men could be viewed as or considered artists, Homer’s position vis-a-vis the origins of tradition makes his contribution more valuable.
Tolstoy’s interest in tackling these complicated issues appealed to me. I’ve been bothered by the “anything goes” approach to art for years; so Tolstoy’s painstaking elaboration of standards was strongly appreciated.
I also believe that the religious connotations that he attaches to art are important, for they inject content into the medium that art is. And of course that injection provides us with standards to work with thereafter. We then are equipped with criteria to judge art.
Tolstoy is a Hegelian in his philosophical approach to aesthetics. Thus, each age has its own criteria, and that criteria never leapfrogs its era. That way the aesthetics of an age remain in sync with the spirit (Geist) of that age. “Good” art reflects that spirit; “bad” or counterfeit art fails to do so.
In the end, Tolstoy’s pacifism gets the best of his aesthetic theory, however. He ignores how cultures differ--how their religious traditions may differ. One culture’s traditions, in fact, may be at odds with another’s. Hegel’s logic leads Tolstoy to embrace the notion of “the brotherhood of man” but without appreciating its implications. The unifying spirit that lurks behind the concept is also a leveling spirit, which in our day means the degradation, co-optation and commodification of culture. Naturally, concepts/developments were far beyond Tolstoy’s purview; but it is still possible to utilize Tolstoy’s methodology, as long as one accepts the fact that not all of the earth’s inhabitants are Christian, and the majority care not to be. The upshot of that suggestion, however, is that the brotherhood may need to be rethought, especially if that brotherhood is said to be the United Nations. Thanks, but no thanks. If peace means one-world government, led by multinational corporations and their toadies in each country of the world, give me war.
Along with Christopher Lasch and Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor played a big part in my journey back to living a more religious life — one that re-embraced Catholicism but without it being a stranglehold. Living a life more akin to Christ’s didn’t foreclose my understanding or even prevent my loving of others who also lived their lives seriously. They, too, find the current popular practice of “lite living” unbearable and have, by one way or another, chosen to dig deeper into what the Creator has/had in store for them. For me, it has meant picking up my Cross and following Jesus to “Calvary,” as cited here by Kozinski:
“And for our nonangelic, discursive, fallen intellects, this dawning can only occur through a persistent and often excruciating dialectical comparison of whole and part, a dynamic exemplified by Socrates and brought to near-perfection by St. Thomas in his Summa Theologiae. It is a kind of ongoing intellectual crucifixion, with modernity as Calvary.”
In my case, crucifixion has meant the pain of loss, sometimes every day, of an animal dying in my arms; or passing yet another one killed, laying dead on the roadside, and my returning to remove the body, while reciting a prayer. Suffering is an inevitable and often ineffable part of this life. Our futile attempts to extricate it from ours might only serve to cheapen its meaning and diminish its needed place as a touchstone to answering the Big Questions that Charles Taylor asks us to ask ourselves in this important book.
Becoming Children of Modernity/By Thaddeus J. Kozinski/Modern Age Journal/Spring 2009
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).
As the benefits of Revelation disappear even more from the coming world, man will truly learn what it means to be cut off from Revelation…. The rapid advance of a non-Christian ethos, however, will be crucial for the Christian sensibility. As unbelievers deny Revelation more decisively, as they put their denial into more consistent practice, it will become more evident what it really means to be a Christian.
— Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World
Only someone who has broken out of the restricted horizon of ideology can see clearly what has been left behind. And only those who have fully contemplated the abyss can be sure of having attained the spiritual truth capable of overcoming it.
— David Walsh, After Ideology
No One Gets Out of Here Alive
Christian modernists and anti-modernists, and those falling somewhere in between, have offered countless definitions, characterizations, and genealogies of secular modernity. Although trying to write its definitive biography is an important, even necessary, task — and of course, this has been precisely the task of Modern Age ab initio — ultimately, it is impossible. There is something asymptotically elusive about modernity: the depth and comprehensiveness of our definitions increase its abstractness and distance; the accuracy, nuance, and precision of our characterizations increase its narrowness and obscurity. Moreover, the more one studies secular modernity, the more it presents itself as a phenomenon not easily separable from reality itself, as immune to exhaustive intellectual comprehension and description, as impossible to escape or transcend.
This is the leitmotif of Charles Taylor’s recent magnum opus, A Secular Age, and I think it is a defensible one. Modernity is, in a very real sense, inescapable. As Taylor puts it — we are in it. In other words, there is something virtually ontological about secular modernity. Even though what we are talking about is, of course, an artifact of man, not God, that is, a cultural and historical phenomenon, not a natural or supernatural one equivalent to a change in being itself (I am no Hegelian) — nevertheless, cultural and historical being is, at least for the culture- dependent rational animals that we are, the ineluctable mediator of any “pure” being that we may experience. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued persuasively, pace the Enlightenment’s “view from nowhere,” we never encounter reality unmediated by tradition, cultural artifacts of human language, conceptual schemes, social practices, rituals, narratives, moral norms, etc., and though we can ultimately transcend tradition, history, and culture to attain timeless truth, it is only through the cultural resources and productions that we both create and are created by that we can do so.
Nevertheless, in light of the notorious, anti-human weeds that have sprouted solely in the soil of secular modernity, it feels obligatory for both the religious and humanist thinker to be against it — whatever its ontological status. Should we not create adequately anti-modern domestic, social, cultural, political, educational, and liturgical environments if the ones secular modernity has occasioned threaten our salvation? However, if secular modernity is rightly interpreted as an ubiquitous and existentially inescapable consciousness — that is, not a particular ideology or structure-of-sin, but something underlying these, then “antimodernness” is illusory, and escape futile. Christians are indeed obliged to resist and ultimately “escape” from secular modernity, but that is because Christians are obliged ultimately to transcend all finite times and places when they become idols preventing the attainment of union with the timeless and placeless God — not because modernity is intrinsically evil.
The End of Naïveté
What should we say secular modernity is then? Taylor attempts to define it, and it takes him almost eight hundred pages of historical, sociological, psychological, anthropological, economic, political, scientific, and theological analysis to do it. It is by far the most sophisticated and erudite attempt I have ever read to define what might be, along with God, being, and the individual human person, a most indefinable reality. Out of the many trenchant and profound descriptions of modernity Taylor offers us, this one is especially helpful for our purposes:
[T]here has been a titanic change in our western civilization. We have changed not just from a condition where most people lived “naïvely” in a construal (part Christian, part related to “spirits” of pagan origin) as simple reality, to one in which almost no one is capable of this, but all see their option as one among many. We all learn to navigate between two standpoints: an “engaged” one in which we live as best we can the reality our standpoint opens us to; and a “disengaged” one in which we are able to see ourselves as occupying one standpoint among a range of possible ones, with which we have in various ways to coexist…. The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others…. [A] secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of an imaginable life for masses of peoples.1
Note that his characterization of secular modernity is eminently nonideological and noncondemnatory; it is neither the rigid denunciation of the traditionalist, nor the insouciant glorification of the humanist. Rather, Taylor identifies secular modernity as something more akin to a radically new paradigm or consciousness shift, in itself neither moral nor immoral, true nor false, pro-Christian nor anti-Christian. It is not to be identifi ed with exclusive humanism, managerial liberalism, and fascist fundamentalism, on the one hand, or the resurgence of public religiosity, the priority of liberal democracy and human rights, and the intolerance of religious intolerance, on the other. For these, according to Taylor, are only its diverse ideological interpretations and embodiments, the structures of thought and practice that have built upon and with secular modernity’s peculiar consciousness and potentiality, what he calls the “immanent frame”:
We have undergone a change in our condition, involving both an alteration of the structures we live within, and our way of imaging these structures. This is something we all share, regardless of our differences in outlook. But this cannot be captured in terms of a decline and marginalization of religion. What we share is what I have been calling “the immanent frame”; the different structures we live in: scientific, social, technological, and so on, constitute such a frame in that they are part of a “natural,” or “this worldly” order which can be understood in its own terms, without reference to the “supernatural” or “transcendent.”2
An age or society would then be secular or not, in virtue of the conditions of experience of and search for the spiritual.3
According to Taylor, secular modernity is the ineluctable mode, background, and context for all thought and practice in the contemporary West, rather than any particular ideological or cultural expression of it. It is, thus, a deeper reality than the merely ideological — it is existential. We encounter it deep within our lived experience of reality, before we have the chance to reflect on it. It is not so much the reflective, philosophical description or account we give ourselves of a more fundamental, pre-philosophical, and pre-reflective experience, but is itself this fundamental experience, embodied in the warp and woof of our lives in such a way that any attempt to disengage or extricate ourselves from it is equivalent to the attempt to escape reality itself. Because secularity is so intimately bound up with our experience of reality, it serves as the ineluctable background to and structure of the very form and content of our thinking, akin to grammar and rhetoric as the background to and structure of the matter and expression of our words. Although we can think about, and thus gain some distance from, this background and structure in an abstract, philosophical manner, we cannot entirely escape and transcend it.
This is a radical claim. Nevertheless, I think there is one short and powerful demonstration of its essential accuracy. Ask oneself this question: does any religious believer in the modern West experience his religion in a naïve manner; that is, in the way a small child raised within a sheltered, integrally and robustly religious home might experience it? Is it simply the way things are, that is, a priori immune to and exclusive of any and all alternative interpretations? Can one completely avoid being disengaged from one’s naïve experience of what is and must be, losing all awareness of what is not and might not be? Is it even possible for a religious child to retain this sort of naïveté nowadays? I am not suggesting by this interrogation that modern consciousness precludes the perennial and epoch-indifferent capacity of human reason to abstract from one’s lived experience and entertain other possible philosophical and theological accounts of reality through and in one’s imagination and intellect. If that were the case, there would be nothing new in secular modernity in this respect, for even the most sheltered and parochial medieval peasant could thereby “escape” from the Christianity he imbibed with his mother’s milk. What does seem radically unique to secular modernity, as Taylor argues, is an entirely new incapacity to experience the reality of a particular worldview in a naïve way; that is, without the consciousness of there being other viable options.
For the Christian, then, the end of naïve religious consciousness would entail an ineluctable experience of reality as perpetually open to the possibility, or at least the awareness, of a non-Christian interpretation and experience of the world, of the possible absence of God. Might such a characterization of our epoch explain the experiences of Bl. Mother Teresa and St. Therese of Lisieux, who, as we know from their personal writings, experienced this sense of the absence of God with an intensity we cannot imagine — even in the possession of a robust supernatural Faith? Perhaps what Bl. Teresa experienced was a supernaturally heightened and intensified version of the ordinary consciousness of the typical modern man. Some of the most influential Christian saints in our day — St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Edith Stein, Bl. Mother Teresa, and St. Padre Pio — are all representative of what seems to be a peculiarly modern form of spiritually, what Fr. Aidan Nichols has called existential prayer, “accepting in a generous spirit our deprivation of many of the conventional props and assurances of a culturally transmitted religion… may be ushered with peculiar immediacy into the presence of the living God.”4 Obviously, these saints did escape secular modernity; however, it occurred precisely through a peculiarly intense experience of the existential absence of God, written into the very fabric of modern secular consciousness. It would seem that these saints escaped it by going through it.
Assuming that this characterization of secular modernity is more or less accurate, what would happen if one were to deny secular modernity by attempting to escape it by going against or around it? To answer this question we must first attempt to answer the more fundamental question of why one would desire to escape secular modernity in the first place. One reason, perhaps, would be the conviction that it is evil, for aversion is, as St. Thomas teaches, the passion of the soul naturally evoked by the presence of evil. However, if we are correct in our assessment of the distinctly modern condition as being something preceding or situating morality, as being, subjectively and experientially at least, ontological, then this conviction and its ensuing passion would be gravely mistaken and disordered. What is evil, of course, are the predominant ideological interpretations of secular modernity, what Taylor identifies as certain “spins” on the culture of secular modernity that are often mistakenly taken to be the reality itself:
But this order of itself leaves the issue open whether, for purposes of ultimate explanation, or spiritual transformation, or final sense-making, we might have to invoke something transcendent. It is only when the order is “spun” in a certain way that it seems to dictate a “closed” interpretation. 5
This closed spin Taylor calls “exclusive humanism.” We can see it today in both its “right” and “left” versions: its twofold Janus-like embodiment in “conservative,” nation-worshipping, secular-messianic militarism, on the one hand, and relativistic, Protagorean, managerial totalitarianism, on the other — relativism and fundamentalism being equally narcissistic, practically atheistic, and nihilistic.
If we take these “closed spins” to be secular modernity itself, we would rightly respond either by attacking them or by attempting to escape them, or both. If Taylor is correct, however, although we must renounce and avoid all errors and evils, we should not renounce and avoid the larger background condition or consciousnessform — the immanent frame — that has both enabled their existence and our capacity to choose radically different theoretical and practical alternatives to them. In short, by choosing an alternative content built upon and within the background of secular modernity, we do not thereby escape the background itself — nor should we wish to. The lack of awareness of the twice-removed nature of secular modernity is, perhaps, a main reason for the disordered interpretations and embodiments of it, for fundamentalism (both Islamic and Americanist) and relativism (both liberal and conservative) are motivated by a mistaken aversion to what they consider evil — this or that particular aspect of secular modernity itself.
Both Cause and Cure
What, then, would be the effect of embracing modernity? As Taylor explains, attending the peculiar consciousness shift of modernity is a heightened capacity intimately to feel the pull of other worldviews — especially those we might otherwise deem unworthy of attraction. “Living within the frame,” Taylor writes, “doesn’t simply tip you in one direction, but allows you to feel pulled two ways. A very common experience of living here is that of being crosspressured between the open and closed perspectives.”6 Modern secular pluralism, then, before it is “spun” by some celebratory or condemnatory ideology, provides an unprecedented opportunity for individuals to experience the other from the inside; that is, not just as an abstract possibility of thought and practice, as was possible in preceding ages, but intimately, as a living, breathing, concrete, coherent (or perhaps not so coherent), historical tradition. Alasdair MacIntyre describes this immersion in other traditions as learning a second language, and he judges it indispensable for the authentic understanding and practice of one’s own tradition. For, without such immersion, eventually we lose the capacity to recognize and correct the defects in our own tradition, rendering us ineffective as participants in its further development.
By encountering the partial truths in other traditions, we become more able to recognize partial truths as partial, both in other traditions and within our own, as well as the partialness of our appropriation and understanding of our own tradition. Our tradition may indeed be the true tradition, providing incomparable and privileged access to the whole truth, yet it can still be perceived and grasped by us in a partial, tendentious, and distorted way. Encountering the truths in other traditions can serve to expose that false dichotomy in our mind that leads us to interpret alternative positions as nothing more than full-fledged errors, and our own personal position as nothing less than the whole truth. Our position might very well be, in an objective sense, the whole truth, or the closest to it, but as fi nite, fallible, sinful creatures, our grasp of it is inevitably partial. This was Socrates’ insight: “All I know is that I do not know” was not a somber resignation to skepticism towards or denial of the truth itself, but an affirmation of the inexhaustibility of truth in itself, a denial of its complete transparency to us, and his joyful resignation to this.
Modernity, of course, can cause a loss of the capacity to feel the pull of those parts of the truth one requires to regain wholeness. When this occurs, any part of the truth that we had genuinely recognized and possessed loses its healing properties as truth, becoming deadly to our soul. Instead of a part of truth, it functions now as a full-fledged error, rendering us blind to precisely those other parts of the truth that could render us whole again. In other words, truth, when embraced partially but interpreted holistically, becomes error, indeed, a lie. If the diseased mind could learn to see the part as part, and not simply a hateful error to condemn and fear, and from which to escape at all costs, it could recognize the prison into which it has fallen. As Plato’s cave suggests, liberation from intellectual prison can only occur through the dawning upon our intellects of the light of the whole, the Good, which is both that by which all knowledge occurs and the knowable par excellence. And for our nonangelic, discursive, fallen intellects, this dawning can only occur through a persistent and often excruciating dialectical comparison of whole and part, a dynamic exemplified by Socrates and brought to near-perfection by St. Thomas in his Summa Theologiae. It is a kind of ongoing intellectual crucifixion, with modernity as Calvary.
None of this is meant to suggest that there aren’t full-fledged, pernicious errors, as distinct from merely partial truths — indeed, modernity has provided far more and worse ones than ever before. But often what we perceive to be absolute error is only distorted partial truth, perceived as error because seen out of context. Similarly, often what we perceive to be wholly truth is only an exaggeration of partial truth. The partial truths we reject as unworthy of our consideration are sometimes precisely those we need to embrace for the completion and correction of our thinking. Thus, occasional immersions in the deeply pluralistic milieu of our secular modern culture — though not, of course, its cesspools of immorality and idolatry — always preceded and followed by intensive periods of nursing at the bosom of one’s particular religious and/or philosophical tradition, are, I think, obligatory. Only these encounters with the spinfree immanent frame that is modernity iteslf can enable us to recognize the partialness of our own and others’ appropriation of the truth, effectively to help end the reign of the relativistic, exclusively humanist spin, and to transcend whatever in modernity that holds us back from union with the truth, with God.
Are encounters with what one knows to be erroneous viewpoints truly necessary for the full appropriation of the truth? Christians, for example, believe themselves to have “the whole truth” through the revelation of Jesus Christ, so why would they risk damnation by plunging themselves into pluralism, into alien traditions that are known to be fundamentally in error and dangerous to the soul? However, Christians, though believing themselves in possession of the whole truth through the gift of faith, are, nevertheless, simultaneously dispossessed of it; for they, like all of us, are always, in a subjective sense, approaching the whole truth. The peculiar evil of secular modernity is that it can blind us to the fact that what we often think to be the whole truth is only our own partial appropriation of it, and, even worse, a part pretending to be the whole. This is the spiritual disease of which modernity is both the cause and cure. Fragmentary, partial knowledge, unrecognized as fragmentary and partial and substituting for comprehensive, holistic knowledge, is the intellectual condition of our fallen nature, and the besetting bane of modernity; but with the intrinsic help of grace, the extrinsic help of Scripture and Tradition, and cooperation through courageous philosophical analysis and dialogue combined with contemplation, Christians can ascend, at least partially, to the whole that awaits them personally in the beatific vision.
Becoming Children of Modernity
Whatever modernity is, one thing we can say for certain is that it, and it alone, was the mid-wife for the birth of the choice-making individual. As MacIntyre has pointed out, the “individual” is not a natural type of human being, but a kind of scripted role created by modernity itself according to its own peculiar dramatic exigencies. Whatever we eventually become, whether postmodern, isolated, fragmented, secularist, therapeutic, urban connoisseurs of private self creation; or anti-modern, communitarian, traditionalist, paleoconservative, “back to the land” aspirants of a neomedieval Christendom — we do so by choice as individuals, before we do and are anything or anybody else. For all the alternatives that modernity offers, modernity does not permit us to escape this fundamental precondition for the shaping of our identities. If Taylor is correct, the non-chosen and communally conferred identity of the choice-making individual is, like secular modernity itself, neither good nor evil in itself, but potentially both, depending precisely on the spin we put on it. As Taylor argues in his essay “A Catholic Modernity?” the greatest mistake secular moderns have made regarding their new identity is to construe the radical responsibility and high dignity that attends it for radical autonomy and spiritual independence.7 This, and not secular modernity per se, is arguably the main cause of the culture of death. What, then, is the alternative to such a construal? Josef Pieper provides a clue:
I refer of course to the life of our fellowmen under the conditions of tyranny. As we all know, under such conditions no one dares trust anyone else. Candid communication dries up; and there arises that special kind of unhealthy wordlessness which is not silence so much as muteness. Under conditions of freedom, however, human beings speak uninhibitedly to one another. How illuminating this contrast is! For in the face of it, we suddenly become aware of the degree of human closeness, mutual affirmation, communion, that resides in the simple fact that people listen to each other and are disposed from the start to trust and “believe” each other.8
“Unless you become as little children….” Knowing in the center of his being, before the onset of any rational reflection or self-consciousness, that he is utterly incapable of independent existence, the child naïvely, immediately, and joyfully opens himself up to the existence, influence, and guidance of the other. Childlike, trustful openness is the indispensable requirement for divine faith, and faith requires the capacity and willingness to give assent to the authority of someone other than ourselves. For this assent to be given freely and with love, we must develop a certain attitude of soul, one receptive to the influence of others and willing to be continually transformed by that influence. I think what Charles Taylor is advising as the proper response to the inescapable existential milieu that secular modernity is, and the irreplaceable identity of the “choice-making individual” that it offers, is a radical, questioning openness to what is — for each particular person — the divine and human other. The existence of even one person with a genuine spirit of erotic, Socratic questioning is the most effective antidote to the suffocating, anti-question- ing culture we live in, in both its traditionalist and modernist varieties.
According to Alasdair MacIntyre, our “enlightened, free-thinking age” is, ironically, a culture of suffocating dogmatism.9 If so, it is vitally important for us to use the great gift we have been given in these times, a heightened capacity for god-like freedom, for others. But to give to others the gift of ourselves, we must first have an intimate experience of what is not ourselves, for, as Edith Stein has claimed, we can only know ourselves adequately through the eyes of others. All of this requires a willingness to expose ourselves to the other in the most vulnerable way, to ask, to seek, to venture out existentially in humble questioning of ourselves and all that is around us — even when we think already to know the answers given to us by the gift of Faith.
What really is important in life is not so much to provide answers, as to discern true questions. When true questions are found, they themselves open the heart to the mystery. Origen used to say: “Every true question is like the lance which pierces the side of Christ causing blood and water to flow forth.”10
Do we truly experience our spiritual answers as answers to questions, to questions we, ourselves, have truly asked? Those who do not experience answers this way, who believe themselves to have obtained the answers without having first endured the existential agony of searching in the darkness, whether because one has judged that there are no answers, or because they are believed to be already securely possessed, should recognize in such an attitude neither a humble plea of ignorance nor a simple and pious submission to God’s word — but a type of idolatry.
Conclusion: A New Axial Age
Modernity involves the coming to be of new kinds of public space, which cannot be accounted for in terms of changes in explicit views, either of factual belief or normative principle. Rather the transition involves to some extent the definition of new possible spaces hitherto outside the repertory of our forebears, and beyond the limits of their social imaginary.11
The essential message of Charles Taylor’s groundbreaking A Secular Age is, I think, this: notwithstanding the serious spiritual dangers that secular modernity uniquely occasions, such as the illusion of the self-sufficient, mentally invulnerable “individual,” what Taylor calls the “buffered self,” the virtually irresistible inclination to spin the world according to one’s existential preferences, or the suffocating epistemological dichotomy of answers without questions and questions without answers; the present age in which Providence has blessed us to live is, nevertheless, spiritually rich, robust, and exhilarating. Our secular age affords a uniquely intense existential awareness of the primacy of questioning and an unsurpassed urgency to discover the right questions. In short, what Taylor is telling us is that we are in the midst of a second — and perhaps final? — Axial Age, one in which we are all called to play the role of Socrates, even when — and perhaps precisely when — our questions have already been answered.
NOTES
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 12, 19–20.
Ibid., 594.
Ibid., 3.
Aidan Nichols, Christendom Awake (Great Britain: T&T Clark Ltd., 1999), 213. 5 Taylor, A Secular Age, 594.
Ibid., 555.
Charles Taylor, A Catholic Modernity? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, and Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 41.
Alasdair MacIntyre, “Philosophy Recalled to its Tasks,” in The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 182.
Archbishop Bruno Forte, “Religion and Freedom: Searching For the Infinitely Loving Father-Mother,” a lecture given at a meeting of the bishops of England and Wales, 12 November 2007, accessed on 2 May 2008, available at www.catholic. org/featured/headline.php?ID=5262.
Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” The Hastings Center Report 24.2 (March 1995).
