From the writings of Jurgen Habermas on the role of religion in public life to a host of more theoretical reflections on religion in contemporary society, the idea of the post-secular has acquired increasing currency in contemporary academic discussions.

The outpouring of books and journal articles on the topic signals an important shift in scholarly thinking religion and secularism. Yet it should also give us pause; the term has at times been used uncritically, and we should be wary of it's deployment simply to signal a contested claime about the resurgence of religion. That said, there is no doubt that the notion raises a number of important issues concerning both the place of religion in 21^th century society and it's status as an object of study in the academy.

The goal of the research is to defined how human consciousness is transformed after the transition from secular to post-secular age, and reveal constitutive characteristics and features of these transformations.

The main material

A number of things make Taylor's research remarkable. First, it addresses what is perhaps the major problematic of philosophy, ethics, and religion of the past century and a half. This is the problem of the content and foundations of moral value and all that such value involves, the problem that can be taken to be one of the issues addressed by Nietzsche's famous claim that God is dead. In the wake of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard, what is the most compelling account of what makes life valuable and what is the normative status of this way of life? What is it that grounds our sense of obligation, that inspires us to affirm and commit our lives to certain values, and that empowers or motivates us to realize such commitments? As Taylor suggests, after the Enlightenment and the 18^th century, the most attractive solutions to this question lie in nature, as a form of natural sympathy or set of natural desires or interests, or in our sense of human dignity grounded in our rational agency, or in some kind of transcendence. The problem of Taylor's present work is this set of challenges and the way it has implications for our sense of what is worthwhile or valuable in human life, what matters to us, and why.

Second, Taylor's work is informed and nuanced, pluralist, deep, open, and yet critical. He frames questions in such a way that they are highly abstract and yet richly concrete, and his discussion of positions and issues is broad and yet filled with detail. What marks Taylor's style, as a philosopher, is that he sets out novel and wide conceptual frameworks and yet illustrates them with encounters that are detailed and subtle. This is why we say that Taylor is indebted to predecessors like Hegel and Foucault, both of whose work is narrative, exploratory, and yet conceptual, all at once.

We can best understand the idea of “A Secular Age" as having two parts, a diachronic or narrative one and a dialectical or synchronic one. In the first four parts, Taylor charts the historical development that led to the main option that makes our secular age possible, what he calls “exclusive humanism”, and then describes its diverse legacy in the 19^th century to our own day. In the last part and final six chapters, he uses these results in order to explore several current options of belief and unbelief in their interrelations and especially in terms of how they deal with suffering and evil, the bodily and the sexual, violence and destruction, the mundane and the variety of ordinary life.

Taylor's historical narrative is marked by several features. First, it is not a history of doctrines or theories. Rather it is a history of the background conditions that made various doctrinal and practical ways of life possible and hence is framed as a history of lived experience, what Taylor calls the “social imaginaries" of lived experience, or what might be called a history of sensibilities or worldviews, of the self-understandings of our social existence [6, p.146, 171-174]. Second, Taylor's account avoids “homogenizing" these social imaginaries of experience and tries to appreciate their complexity. Third, Taylor emphasizes that one of the most important shifts in these background frameworks as lived, these social imaginaries, is when they cease to be oriented around elites and become explicitly open to all human beings. They become the frameworks of belief and life for whole societies.

Fourth, time and again Taylor eschews what he calls “subtraction stories”, which narrate the development of secularity as the formulation of a view that emerges by subtracting one or more features of transcendence from the view and thereby freeing us from illusions or limitations that confine and distort who we are. His own approach seeks to show how various forms of belief and unbelief interact with their social and religious context and with one another in ways that are constantly giving rise to new forms of belief and unbelief. Taylor's story does not treat the history of Christianity in the West as a story from darkness to light, from infantile piety to an adult form of secular humanism, one in which a conception of a morally ordered society under divine governance realizes a more perfect state when its references to transcendence are subtracted from it [6, p.22, 91, 255, 573].

Finally, Taylor explicitly confines his account to a history of secularism as it arises within the life of Christendom in the West. Although he does, on a few occasions, refer to Islam and Judaism, the book is an account of the current age in the life of Christianity in the world of North Atlantic civilizations. By and large, the theologians, texts, authors, philosophers, political figures, poets, and others whom he discusses are Christian or are figures whose lives and work can be understood within the context of Christian culture in the West. Taylor does say that analogous accounts could be given for secularity within other religious worlds; he does not indicate or suggest how these other accounts might be similar to or different from his own.

In “A Secular Age" one senses the same kind of struggle going on, especially when Taylor tries to clarify what he means by secularization, what he takes to be the object of his narrative and his account, and the kind of life and the kind of experience he takes to be the most revealing setting in which the crucial features of a person's lived experience are disclosed. The latter he calls “fullness”, but this term is obscured as much as clarified by its commonness.

Taylor talks often about experiencing fullness and how it is in such an experience that the character of an age's ideals and their capacity to inspire and empower a person are revealed. “Fullness" characterizes a momentary experience when what counts most about a way of life and a conception of what matters in life is conveyed to the agent in a particularly complete and perfect way [6, p.600-601]. Hence, for a believer, Taylor says, fullness is experienced as received, while for non-believers, especially after the 18^th century, fullness is experienced as grounded or empowered by something that lies within us, say reason or certain forms of desire [6, p.9].

Moreover, although there comes a time when such ideals of life are conceived of as available to every Christian, still they may be best articulated by members of an elite - by statesmen or philosophers or saints or poets - because they are most capable of expressing the experience of such fullness in a way that reveals its dimensions and its character and because they are most likely to have done so. For this reason, Taylor's story not only refers to social and political practices and events, and to psychological responses and habits, but also to its main illustrative expositors, so to speak, who are philosophers, novelists, poets, the authors of confessional literature, and such, for they are the people who have left us literary evidence of what they experienced at moments when they lived in a moment of fullness and then sought to articulate its meaning and character.

We mention all of this not to try to clarify what Taylor means by “fullness" or to register qualms about the term or its use. He develops and employs a terminology, and he has to, at least as a kind of shorthand, but it may be that the meaning of his vocabulary only becomes clearer and more accessible as the book goes on and that the terms may themselves have a good deal of ambiguity or nuance. The terms he uses are by and large an embedded vocabulary that is hard to disengage from the particular contexts in which it is used.

A secular world. Exclusive humanism. According to Taylor, the modern, secular world emerges when an internal and self-sufficient humanism becomes available as a real opportunity, a humanism with no goal other than some form of human flourishing. Resources for such a selfsufficient or, (as Taylor calls it) an exclusive humanism, become available at least in the 16^th and 17^th centuries - with the rise of the new science and all it implies with a new sense of the self, its depths and its status as disengaged with the world as an observer, analyst, and critic, and with a new appreciation for ordinary life and the mundane. These changes were all guided by a reform spirit in Christianity, of which the Reformation was a high point insofar as it focused on dissolving the gap between elite and popular piety. But such a humanism itself only begins to emerge in the Enlightenment and to come of age in the 19^th century. When it does, this exclusive humanism is marked by agency that is active and constructive and by a conception of social order that is grounded in science, art, and morality [6, p.114, 125].

Taylor gives priority of place to the natural law tradition, the rise of neo-Stoicism, and the way in which the Cartesian revolution provided the notion of disengaged agency that could seek to transform society according to an ideal of order that is grounded in divine providence. Lipsius, the creator of neo-Stoicism, was committed to the human capacity to unify society through active intervention in public, political, and military affairs [6, p.117-118]. He had advice for absolute sovereigns whose goal was political peace and security in the face of conflict and war. Exclusive humanism developed out of this combination of neo-Stoicism, the natural law tradition, and the contract tradition of Grotius and Locke [5, p.130]. In the wake of the Cartesian revolution, society came to be viewed as a malleable substance that could be shaped by the human imposition of ideal form. That ideal was an ideal of moral order, first conceived as a harmony of interests and then as security for individual rights and the creation of freedom, and finally as a network of mutual benefit whereby individuals are organized in society in order to help one another [6, p.171].

According to exclusive humanism it, we are motivated either by enlightenment or by a sense of natural sympathy, and our aim is benevolence. It is one of the special achievements of such humanism that it discloses these new, anthropocentric moral sources by which we are motivated and empowered to accomplish mutual benefit. It is the province of the buffered self, disengaged and the locus of dignity, freedom, discipline, and a sense of human capability [6, p.257, 262]. Hence, by the early 19^th century, exclusive humanism developed as an alternative to Christian faith in a personal God and an order of miracles and mystery. It had positive and negative features, giving rise to a sense of pride and self-worth but also to a feeling of being limited by this world and of being alienated from something valuable and decisive [6, p.299].

A new age of religious searching. The 19^th and 20™ centuries, then, are scenes of instability and uncertainty, for poets and philosophers, and eventually for whole peoples and societies, who experience ennui and a pervasive meaninglessness. Taylor surveys the many dimensions of such changes and the proliferation of modes of unbelief and responses to them in the 19^th century; he features, among others, literary figures, artists, and poets whose work expresses the melancholy and despair that grip the age. It is a time of unbelief for some and of novel ontic commitments, albeit not religious ones, for others, a time of wonder, play, mystery, and even horror [6, p.374-376].

Of special importance for understanding the current situation are the changes associated with the 1960s, the growth of widespread “expressive" individualism as a social movement, and changes in the conception of agency and the good. With the return of a vital youth culture and the development of a consumer society, together with a host of other social and economic changes, this new culture recovers in its own way trends that Taylor associates with Romanticism but now as a mass movement with its focus on fashion, style, external display, the protection of rights, and much more. Of all of this, Taylor asks: where in the culture of expressive individualism is the sacred? [6, p.486].

To answer this very difficult question Taylor explores a whole variety of modalities of contemporary culture, their roots in the previous two centuries, their relationship to traditional religious practices and commitments. He concludes that in some ways post-1960s generations are deeply alienated from traditional forms of Christian faith in the West, often opposing such forms and often recovering them but only in rigid, exaggerated ways. But one should not see the past fifty years, pure and simply, as a time of the breakdown of a sense of the sacred. Rather new forms of spirituality have developed, new senses of the sacred set in new languages [6, p.507]. There have emerged new struggles for wholeness and spiritual health, new paths to what Taylor has called all along “fullness”.

We are in a new age of religious searching. At a time when morality seems to be a matter of utility, rationality, and freedom, it may be hard to see why anyone feels the need to ground morality in something higher, in divine transcendence, but, Taylor argues, religious answers to the question of life's meaning are still available, and, to some, such answers are desirable [6, p.591-592].

“Immanent frame”. Part V gives an account of the “spiritual shape of the present age”. Here Taylor draws upon the terminology, conceptual apparatus, and results of the earlier chapters in order to conduct a kind of structural-dialectical analysis of the complexity of our current age, a time in which a host of spiritual and anti-spiritual options for Christians interact and vie with one another and with the historical context of the age. The dramatis person who have been introduced earlier - disenchantment, the porous and buffered selves, the modern moral order, exclusive humanism, higher time and secular time, the paleo-, neo-, and post-Durkheimian dispensations - and a number of new players (for example, the “immanent frame”, “the ancient regime” and “the closed world structures”, and an array of cross pressures) now come on stage in a series of dramatic engagements, like a repertoire company performing a variety show.

One of the central themes that recurs in these last chapters, having been introduced earlier, concerns the ways in which belief and unbelief cope with a cluster of realities - ordinary life, the body, sexuality, violence, suffering, pain, evil, and such. If these realities are intended to be grouped together, it is nonetheless difficult to grasp how the category they constitute should be defined. What is the polarity of which these realities are intended to occupy one pole? Is it the opposition between the abstract and the concrete? Or that between the mental and the physical? Or between the sacred and the profane? Or the transcendent and the immanent? Or eternity and time? Between spiritual transformation and a wholly worldly human flourishing? In a sense, the polarity is none of these in any narrow way; it is all of them in a broad sense.

Belief and unbelief. Taylor argues that the salient feature of Western societies is not a decline in religious belief and practice; it is rather the plurality of forms of belief and unbelief and their fragile or transitory status. We live in a world of what he calls “cross pressures" where the old beliefs and views are destabilized and new ones have formed and especially where middle positions take shape or are transformed [6, p.595]. Novel forms of spiritual life take shape between orthodox religiosity and atheistic materialism and as a result of these cross pressures. Often Christianity has gone through stages or taken up views that involve what Taylor calls “excarnation”, a shift from taking seriously the bodily, the sexual, the physical, and such to giving priority of place to what lies in the head, e. g., reason or psychological well-being or spiritual transformation. But at critical moments there emerged forms of belief and unbelief that sought to recover the sense of the bodily and its importance; Taylor frequently cites the case of Schiller and his notion of “play" as well as more extreme figures from the Romantics and Nietzsche to Bataille [6, p.609-617]. There are a host of more traditional forms of belief and unbelief, moreover, that also seek to cope with these realities.

The aspiration to fullness or wholeness includes the aspiration to rescue or rehabilitate the bodily and the domain of natural, ordinary desires [6, p.618]. A full human life must somehow deal with our incarnate status, whether by affirming it, denying its significance, or in some middle way. As Taylor shows, the domain of the physical and ordinary makes a variety of demands upon moral positions and upon Christianity, and both ethics and religion have sought to cope with these challenges and to incorporate the bodily, the sexual, and the ordinary in a variety of ways. Taylor's account amounts to his particular way of articulating what is well-known and occasionally to his framing a widely-appreciated set of issues in a novel way or to calling attention to what is not all that frequently discussed. The classical model for this discussion is Platonic, for the category to which Taylor is here calling attention can be initially understood as a set of variations on Plato's portrayal of life in the world of everyday experience, the world of “becoming”, of change and instability. Hence, the challenges that are posed for religion and ethics, insofar as they seek fullness and perfection, are the challenges of time and history, of the physical and mundane, of desire and pain and erotic love, of injury, pain, violence, and suffering, and much else along these lines, including their natural fulfillments as well as fragile character.

In Chapter 17 Taylor uses this set of realities and the problems it poses for belief and unbelief in order to map some positions that are available today. They are used, for example, by nonbelievers in critiques of Christianity. One critique is Romantic; it charges Christianity with trying to escape the limitations of our finite human condition. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum, Taylor points out that this effort smacks of “changing the subject”, insofar as it chooses to fulfill human life by aiming to transcend it altogether. “Are we not forsaking human excellence and striving after some alien life-form? ” [6, p.626]. But there is another charge against the aspiration to transcend, not just that it is futile and self-defeating, but that it actually damages us, unfits us for the pursuit of human fulfillment. By inducing in us hate and disgust at our ordinary human desires and neediness, a repulsion at our limitations which poisons the joy we might otherwise feel in the satisfactions of human life as it is.

Taylor notes that this charge is especially made against Christianity, not only by Nussbaum but before her by thinkers such as Voltaire and Nietzsche. But Taylor calls our attention to this argument. First, it fails to appreciate how often and how importantly Christianity itself demanded a return to the ordinary and the “rediscovery and affirmation of important human goods" [6, p.628]. What he is calling attention to is the way that in religious and literary, as well as social, contexts there has been in modernity a renewed appreciation of everyday (even flawed) relationships, conduct, and experiences, from love to estrangement, from animosity to mutual concern. In short, no form of transformation is acceptable that eschews what is human in our lives, and not all forms of transcendence are completely valuable; it is not all that clear what forms of transcendence are desirable and what forms are not, nor can we be certain at all times about what in human life ought to be transcended and what should not [6, p.630]. There is too much complexity in sexual love, violence, and even suffering for categorical, completely confident judgments. In the end, Taylor encourages us to worry about crediting too seriously the distinction between the immanent and the transcendent as they occur in this kind of critique of Christianity.

However, there is another way to make this kind of case against critics like Nietzsche, not because no clear line divides the immanent from the transcendent, but because even when there is such a line, it may not be possible to cross it. One might be inclined to believe that there is a kind of violence, suffering, or evil that is so extreme, so radical, that it is always worth transcending although in some sense it is never possible to do so. Such a radical evil, to be taken seriously, must be acknowledged for what it is - wholly evil, such that transcending it would risk treating it as an opportunity or motivation for bettering oneself through escape. The only alternative, then, would be to oppose it, to resist it, leaving open how that might be done in a way that does not risk turning the evil itself into a good or succumbing to it.

If one form of Christianity sought to transcend the body, suffering, violence, and evil, another form, more humanistic, failed to appreciate the depth and seriousness of the latter. It was criticized too, but this time not by a humanistic responsibility to the everyday but rather, on the one hand, by those who celebrated violence, aggression, and desire to inflict suffering - once again, it is Nietzsche who comes to Taylor's mind - and, on the other, by those who believe that “this humanism tends to hide from itself how great the conflict is between the different things we value" and “artificially removes the tragedy, the wrenching choices between incompatibles, the dilemmas, which are inseparable from human life” [6, p.635]; here it is Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams whom Taylor mentions. For both such positions, an “untroubled harmony" is “unattainable" and “even a kind of culpable weakness” [6, p.635]. Here too, however, Taylor finds the critique at times unjustified and yet also, in other cases, wholly appropriate. But oddly enough it is the very same humanism that charges Christianity with an unacceptable disregard of the human that is itself now charged with too compromised a harmony with it.

Taylor's analysis does not end here, but it is sufficient for us to see the point of his dialectical, ramified exploration of positions: it is to demonstrate that the map of possibilities for belief and unbelief in our age is not a simple one, not even one of basic oppositions. Instead what is needed, as he himself says, is a “new, more nuanced map of the ideological terrain" [6, p.626]. It is a project organized around what he calls the “maximal demand”, to examine “how to define our highest spiritual or moral aspirations for human beings, while showing a path to the transformation involved which doesn't crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity” [6, p.639-640]. And the ultimate ground of this demand, he claims, is our aspiration to wholeness. To be sure, Taylor admits that not all see this aspiration in the same terms or in the same way; Plato and Aristotle may both adhere to it and yet with very different interpretations. But he does claim that it is central to a Christianity whose central affirmation is the Incarnation of the divine in the human. This is a very Hegelian commitment on Taylor's part, and there is little surprise in his making it.

Moreover, embedded in the belief in the incarnation is a commitment to the union of the sacred and the profane, the infinite and the finite, that does show how profoundly Christian Taylor's analysis is. One need only note that Judaism, for all its own commitment to some kind of unity in nature and society, is not grounded in the affirmation of a similar unity of the divine and the human. For Judaism, when the infinite encounters the finite in moments of revelation, it is crucial that both retain their utter independence and that the covenant between them is dialectically rich but also respects their fundamental difference. Can the same be said of the ideals of eternity and the realities of history, of redemption and human fulfillment? Or is the distinction between transcendence and immanence, fundamentally, so different for Judaism that the maximal demand need be met but only in a very different way than it must in Christianity?

Conclusion. In his work “A Secular Age" Taylor identifies his own proclivities and commitments, his own receptivity to transcendence and engagement with the historical, cultural, and political challenges we all face. We are introduced to a variety of ideal types of religious and non-religious ways of life, but this is no disinterested scholarly inquiry, no disengaged charting of territory or classification. It is rather an elaborate and committed mapping of territory for inhabitants by a co-inhabitant and a restrained eulogy to a particular domicile by one who occupies it. “A Secular Age" is a philosophical paean to one form of Christian moral and political life.

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