Sacraments and the Secular Age

Charles Taylor’s account of our Secular Age has many virtues. (The following relies on Jamie Smith’s summary of Taylor in How (Not) To Be Secular; page numbers are from Taylor.) Taylor rejects “subtraction” theories of secularization, the notion that secular life was lurking beneath the sacred surface of ritual, myth, and belief, waiting to be unveiled when we all grew up. He recognizes that systematic theories of secularization aren’t enough, and that we need a story of the formation of the secular age. His story is partly a story of ideas, but isn’t only a story of ideas. His account isn’t deterministic; he recognizes that things could have gone differently at various moments. Finally, he recognizes that the secular age has grown out of religious motivations and the religious life of the medieval West.

His attention is not directly on changes in belief. He wants instead to investigate the conditions of belief, what he calls the “social imaginary,” the construal of the world that is taken for granted in a society in a particular time. The social imaginary is often so basic to a society’s outlook that it isn’t recognized as a construal, but is taken simply as “the way things are.” His book examines a transformation from one social imaginary to another.

Like other theories of modernization and secularization, Taylor begins with an account of the pre-secular world, the social imaginary of the medieval world. He describes it in terms of a triple embedding. Individuals are embedded in society; society is embedded in a meaningful, crowded cosmos; and the cosmos is embedded in relation to God. This world is enchanted, charged with powers and persons and forces.

The individual within this world is “porous”; he is open to and invaded by powers beyond the human, and is open to social realities. As he puts it, it was a world “in which spiritual forces impinged on porous agents, in which the social was grounded in the sacred and secular time in higher times, a society moreover in which the play of structure and anti-structure [structure and Carnival] was held in equilibrium; and this human drama unfolded within a cosmos” (61). The possibility of closing himself off from the world, from others, of having a purely private experience or reality, is virtually unthinkable. Heresy and refusal to participate in rites isn’t tolerated because in the nature of the case the common good depends on this participation. A refusal isn’t an individual act but treason against the common good.

Taylor points out that this has profound existential significance: A porous human can’t distance himself from the world around him, can’t stand apart from, for example, his body and consider the chemistry that makes him depressed. He can’t relieve himself by saying that it’s something outside his mind, because he is a porous being subject to invading forces of all sorts. In such a world “disbelief is hard,” not because everyone believes in spirits and God is a spirit. Rather, “God figures in this world as the dominant spirit, and moreover, as the only thing that guarantees that in this awe-inspiring and frightening field of forces, good will triumph.” Disbelief in God means giving up His protecting and “chancing ourselves in the field of forces without him.” Disbelief isn’t thought of, though a search for another protector might be (41).

Magic of a sacramental kind pervades this social imaginary. The cosmos is a meaningful place, not a neutral place waiting for meaning to be imposed by the human mind. It’s a significant world, a sacramental world, in which everything points to something higher and greater. Forces can be defused and battled by ritual, relics, and talismans. The actual sacraments can have an effect on the person himself because the person is porous: Baptism isn’t something that just happens to his body.

In place of this social imaginary – an enchanted, embedded world, porous human beings, sacramental and other forms of “magic” – we live in a social imaginary where we know that the world is very different. Nature operates by immanent laws, not by personal forces. The world doesn’t have meaning in itself. We are not porous, but “buffered,” not open to the powers and to social realities and to God but capable of closing ourselves into a private space. The world gets disenchanted, and sacramental magic no longer is obvious.

Our social imaginary is the product of a “great disembedding” – the undoing of the triple embeddedness of medieval life. Individuals were disembedded from social life, potentially; society was disembedded from cosmic powers; and the cosmos as a whole was detached from God.

The driving force leading from one social imaginary to the other is Reform. The Reformation is one outbreak of Reform, but not the only one. Reform movements are dissatisfied with the state of the world, with the gap between the ideal and the real, and Reformers aim to close that gap. During the Middle Ages, and in the Reformation, the Reformers were particularly dissatisfied with the division of labor that had developed in the medieval church, between the “sacred” folks like monks and priests, and the seculars who did everything else. This made sense in the social imaginary of the medieval world: Because society was an organic whole, one set of people – monks – could devote themselves to prayer on behalf the rest of the society. Not everyone was expected to be a monk, because the monks could monk for everyone. Reform movements disliked the lowered expectations, and tried in various ways to monasticize the entirety of Christendom. Taylor points out cleverly that there are two ways to overcome the gap between ideal and real: One is to raise the real to the level of the ideal; the other is to eliminate the ideal and take immanent flourishing as the only sort of flourishing needed. Taylor thinks that the pressures of Reform movements (Calvin’s Geneva for instance) soured people on Reform; they couldn’t live up to the standard, and rather than continue in failure they gave up the ideal standards.

Sacramental magic was often a target of Reform movements. Wycliffe took aim at the hierarchy’s claims about its sacramental power. The Lollards saw this as an effort to control God. But this wasn’t easy to achieve, since the Eucharist especially was “charged with a power that could be dangerous.” People were afraid to participate in the Mass, but they were also fearful of neglecting it. They preferred adoring the Blessed Sacrament from a great distance, during Corpus Christi processions and the like. To take on sacramental magic within a triply-embedded social imaginary faced a “barrier of fear” (73). Before Reform can take hold, it has to break with the entire social imaginary that stands in its way.

The Reformation is one of the great turning points in this regard, and Taylor again, among other things, highlights the importance of sacramental questions. He claims that the Reformers contributed to the disenchantment of the world, one that eventually changed “the centre of gravity of the religious life”: “The power of God doesn’t operate through various ‘sacramentals,’ or locations of sacred power we can draw on. These are seen to be something we can control, and hence blasphemous.” He admits that “Calvin stresses that God really acts, he communicates grace and sanctification to us. We are fed by God through Christ; and in a sense by his body and blood, because it is his bodily existence which gave satisfaction, culminating in the shedding of his blood. So the Eucharist is a sign of something real, something which has exactly that form, our being fed by God.” Yet Calvin cannot admit that “God could have released something of his saving efficacy out there into the world, at the mercy of human action” because that sort of magic would be a threat to the sovereignty of God: “The whole efficacy of the sacrament is contingent on the connection between God and my faith, a speech act made and uptaken” (79). Thus “we disenchant the world; we reject the sacramentals; all the elements of ‘magic’ in the old religion. They are not only useless, but blasphemous, because they are arrogating power to us, and hence ‘plucking’ it away from ‘the glory of God’s righteousness’” (79).

Here Taylor miscontrues the aims of the Reformation, and to that extent misrepresents the direction of modernity, especially in relation to sacraments. The story is more complicated in a couple of ways, first because of the persistence of the enchanted imagination within modernity and, second, by the persistence of concern for the specifics of sacramental theology. Shifts in sacramental practice and theology are foundational to modernity, but perhaps not quite in the way that Taylor suggests.