The Logos Scripture · The Stoa · Dialectic
David Bai · 2026-08-16 · hangs on The Rule 9.14
I
If the man were not worth refuting, I would not spend the words on him.
But he is. Charles Taylor, born in Montreal in 1931; a philosopher of the first rank, professor at McGill, with substantial work behind him in political philosophy and the philosophy of the social sciences. He has taken the Kyoto Prize, the Kluge Prize and the Templeton Prize. In 2007, when Quebec was in an uproar over immigration and religious practice, the provincial government appointed a commission of inquiry and made him its co-chair; the resulting report went on to shape policy in more countries than one.
The Kyoto Prize was founded by Kazuo Inamori, a man I hold in high regard, and it is often spoken of as Japan's Nobel. I take it, then, that Taylor's achievements are real ones.
The Kyoto citation says that Dr Taylor, working from a standpoint of holistic individualism, has advocated communitarianism and multiculturalism, and that through a lifetime of enquiry he has pointed out a way forward for humanity — a future in which plural and heterogeneous cultures live together in peace on a footing of mutual recognition.
What is holistic individualism? It holds that individualism matters, but that how a person realises it depends on how he stands with what surrounds him; and from this comes the idea of the community network. It is through a network woven out of dialogue that human beings build an identity and establish a frame, and it is within that frame that a person becomes able to tell good from evil, to weigh what is worth having, and to decide what to do.
All of which may seem self-evident. But self-evident things must still be said, and said again, before they sink in. A scholar's task is to lay bare the logic underneath what is self-evident; a man of influence must also put it into practice. He appears to have done both.
And then I happened to read one of his best-selling books, and found the trouble in it serious enough that I cannot let it pass.
The book is A Secular Age, published in 2007, and it is very thick. Its purpose is to explain how the West went from a world in which scarcely anyone failed to believe in Jesus to a world in which belief is one option among others — and to explain the crisis of faith in the modern world.
In modern society, the book argues, a person has become a closed and atomised individual who takes himself to be inwardly safe and self-contained, holding the threatening cosmos at a distance, with a clear psychological boundary drawn between the self and everything outside it. This is the buffered self. The medieval person, by contrast, was a porous self: he lived in a world charged with magic, open to invasion by spirits, demons and cosmic forces, with no settled border between inside and out. The price of the buffered self, Taylor holds, is loneliness, a conversation with no one but ourselves, and a longing for transcendence that cannot be met.
In other words: although we live in a world where our material and rational needs are satisfied, many moderns are haunted by a feeling that will not go away — that everything we do is missing some larger cosmic story. This is not ordinary emptiness but a standing disquiet, the sense that a purely material universe is flat, as though a dimension had gone out of it.
And this, he says, has a history behind it. Modern secular society is the child that medieval Christian society gave birth to, its next generation, and not — as people commonly suppose — a matter of simply subtracting God and putting scientific reason in his place. Several hundred thousand words, and the conclusion comes to this: the modern is immanent and closed, the medieval was transcendent and open.
I know him to be a devout Catholic, and I know his study of secular society to be deep, and widely praised in the academy and in government both. Yet his argument runs along the same lines as those of many others I have refuted before, which makes me sigh: a good number of contemporary thinkers still commit grave errors of logic, and spare no effort in misleading the public. So I too must spare no effort in showing where the error lies.
II
The first thing first. In the book he refutes a popular account which he names the subtraction story: people once all believed in God, then science rose, God was subtracted, and what is left is today.
Not so, he says. The secular is not a subtraction. It has a history of its own, a moral order of its own, and its own positive claims about how a person ought to live.
That much is true; a secular society did not fall out of the sky. But the subtraction story is a target he has set up himself. Whether anyone much holds it, nobody knows, and it does not greatly matter.
III
Now look at what he means by the historical process. The secular, he says, grew out of the inside of Christianity. The Reformation required every man to live devoutly in his daily life, which erased the line between the sacred and the profane, and set off the disenchantment of the world. Only then is there the immanent frame — immanent meaning that one no longer converses with gods and spirits — and inside that frame the closed self is produced, where formerly the self was porous and stood open to a universe filled with meaning.
Put plainly: the church gave birth to the secular, and cast off the gods and spirits in the delivery. What he seems to want to say is that the secular gestated within religion of itself, and that the only effort which counted was the church’s own.
This is not correct. It mistakes an institutional failure for an inheritance. On that reasoning a tyrant may be called the father of democracy, since he made his tyranny too exhausting to bear and the people rose against him.
IV
The birth story fails in two fundamental places.
First: secular society existed before the Middle Ages. Explaining the world without recourse to gods was not invented in the sixteenth century. Democritus argued for atoms; Epicurus taught that a man need fear neither the gods nor death; Lucretius cast the whole doctrine into a long poem — and that was the first century before our era. The poem was lost for a thousand years and more, and came to light again in 1417, on a shelf in a monastery. Came to light again. That is not a birth. That is a recovery.
Second: secular society was not delivered. It was fought for. In 1553 Servetus was burned at Geneva, and the hand that lit it was Protestant. In 1600 Bruno was burned in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome, and the hand was Catholic. In 1633 Galileo confessed before the Inquisition and lived under house arrest for the rest of his life. Descartes — whom Taylor actually cites as evidence that faith nurtured science — placed the human mind at the centre of certainty, and the church answered by putting his works on the Index of Forbidden Books, a list established in 1559 and not abolished until 1966: four hundred years of a register of what a person may not read. Voltaire's books were burned in public, the man was shut in the Bastille, and then expelled.
These were not children the church brought forth. These were infants the church meant to strangle. Where in the world is there a mother who completes her delivery by killing her offspring? To write four centuries of bloody suppression as a parturition is not a historical insight; it is powder and paint on the church's face.
V
More important still: the old world did not collapse because somebody idly removed God from it. It collapsed because it could not do the work. Famine came and it could not feed the people; plague came and prayer availed nothing, and a third of Europe died. Inside, it had rotted through — offices for sale, pardons for sale. In the end it tore itself apart, fighting a hundred years of religious war in which Christians killed Christians over doctrine, until the survivors could bear no more.
The men of the Enlightenment came gradually to see that science, reason, and human happiness and rights were what mattered. They thought, they wrote, they fought, and they accumulated a great treasury of ideas. Then came the moment that stands for all of it: American independence. Jefferson drafted the Declaration and set the pursuit of happiness among the rights held to be self-evident, dependent on no saviour's verdict. Washington put it more plainly still:
The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period; the researches of the human mind after social happiness have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government.
The secular order was not the instant in which God was removed. It was what was won by long struggle against that dark age.
VI
I have said before that I have refuted a good many men in history who wished us to take the myths back up, and looking at Taylor now, how alike they are.
When the literal reading of scripture grew hard to sustain, Coleridge saw it. He wrote: he who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all. Logically he knew perfectly well that truth comes first. Yet to protect Christianity he brought in a distinction between Understanding and Reason, casting religion as something Reason cannot reach while Understanding knows it to be true — so that holding to the truth became holding to the church, and the fork in the road between them would never arrive.
Dostoevsky did not play that game. He built no wall and he offered no sophistry; he simply would not pay. If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, he wrote, and it really were so that the truth was outside Christ, I would rather remain with Christ. That at least is honest. He tells you the order he has set in his own heart.
Taylor knows that neither method will serve. Coleridge's rampart no longer holds, and Dostoevsky's sentence is too naked for a modern academic. So he takes a third road: he does not defend his own side at all, he diagnoses you. In his pages the unbeliever is not mistaken. He is ill — flat, closed, lacking something.
VII
Their common method is to attach the fine words to their own side and the foul ones to yours.
Of the secular side: a malaise of immanence; a life closed entirely inside the immanent order and therefore lacking in itself.
Of the believing side: fullness, transcendence, openness.
That is not argument. That is browbeating with adjectives.
VIII
At any time whatever, a person is unsatisfied; that is what human beings are. If some find that God consoles them, that is their own affair. But a scholar, a philosopher, must reason with grounds and reason correctly, because the public often lacks the means to do it themselves. They depend on you, and you must not cheat them. If logic is to be dispensed with, people may as well read the Bible directly.
In the Middle Ages people were unsatisfied too. Were there not a great many then who hungered after knowledge of the natural world?
If Christianity were truly indispensable, why did the Middle Ages give way to the secular world at all — why bring forth such a child? And if the secular world is Christianity's next generation, why should we turn back? On what grounds? Atavism?
One thing must be said first. His transcendence is fastened to the supernatural by definition. Given that, the immanent frame’s want of transcendence is not something he found by looking; it is something he settled by naming. He has proved nothing. He has only called it so.
Why should the secular world be unable to meet the need for transcendence? The origin and the bounds of the universe as science has uncovered them; the bending of space and time; the laws of the quantum; the longing a person feels looking out at the depth of the stars — is that not transcendence?
A man must die, and the fact seems absurd. Yet he does not wish to die as light as a goose feather; he wants his death to weigh more than Mount Tai, and he will go on even if it means rolling Sisyphus's stone up the hill. Is that not transcendence?
Asia has no Christianity, and Asia has entered the modern secular world all the same, with constitutions and with elections; and where transcendence is wanted, people make offerings to their own gods, and the society goes forward regardless.
IX
Last, that hole. He says secular life has a hole in it. I say it has a scar.
In the Middle Ages a sentence could get a man burned; a book could get him imprisoned; and to say I do not know, or I do not believe, could get him punished and killed. That was a malignancy.
When the surgeon has cut the tumour out, the patient does not stand before the mirror mourning the place it used to fill, and does not feel a hole there. He does not miss the pain. He walks out in health.
X
So I must point out that all these defenders of the faith share one disease: when the logic fails them, they cast about for some other means of holding their ground.
Coleridge tampered with definitions, so that the fork between truth and God should never appear.
Dostoevsky appealed to feeling: even if the truth and God should part company, I would rather stay on God's side.
Taylor substitutes the question. He changes is this true into are you satisfied living this way, and adds that living otherwise would leave a person very empty. The room will generally nod, and find the remark the more humane one.
It changes nothing about how the matter actually stands.
The Stoa →The Stoa is not scripture. Everything here is signed, may be wrong, may be refuted, and may never be edited into the scripture. (cf. The Rule 7.3)