REVIEW-ESSAY

Becoming Children of Modernity

Thaddens J, Kozinski

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 increase its abstractness and distance; the ac-
curacy, nuance, and precision of our char-
C hristian modernists and anti-modernists,
and those falling somewhere in between,
have offered countless definitions, character-
acterizations increase its narrowness and
obscurity. Moreover, the more one studies
izations, and genealogies of secular modernity. secular modernity, the more it presents it-
Although trying to write its definitive bi- self as a phenomenon not easily separable
ography is an important, even necessary, from reality itself, as immune to exhaustive
taskand of course, this has been precisely intellectual comprehension and description,
the task of Modrai Age ah initioultimately, as impossible to escape or transcend.
it is impossible. There is something asymp- This is the leitmotif of Charles Taylor's
totically elusive about modernity: the depth recent magnum opus, A Secular Age, and I
and comprehensiveness of our definitions think it is a defensible one. Modernity is,
in a very real sense, inescapable. As Taylor
THADDEUS J, KOZINSKI is a professor of Hu- puts itwe are in it. In other words, there
manities and Trivium at Wyoming Catholic Col- is something virtually ontological about
lege. His book The Political Problem of Religious
secular modernity. Even though what we
Pluralism: John Rawts, Jacques Maritain, and Alas-
dair Maclntyre is in process for publication from are talking about is, of course, an artifact of
Lexington Books. man, not God, that is, a cultural and historical

161
 M O D E R N AGE
phenomenon, not a natural or supernatu-
ral one equivalent to a change in being itself
(I am no Hegelian)nevertheless, cultural
and historical being is, at least for the cul-
ture-dependent rational animals that we
are, the ineluctable mediator of any "pure"
being that we may experience. As Alasdair
Maclntyre has argued persuasively, pace the
Enlightenment's "view from nowhere," we
never encounter reality unmediated by tra-
ditioti, cultural artifacts of human language,
conceptual schemes, social practices, rituals,
narratives, moral norms, etc., and though
we can ultimately transcend tradition, his-
tory, 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 hu-
manist thinker to be against itwhatever
its ontological status. Should we not create
adequately anti-modern domestic, social,
cultural, political, educational, and liturgi-
cal environments if the ones secular moder-
nity has occasioned threaten our salvation?
However, if secular modernity is rightly in-
terpreted as an ubiquitous and existentially
inescapable consciousnessthat is, not a
particular ideology or structure-of-sin, but
something underlying these, then "anti-
modernness" 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 fmite times and
places when they become idols preventing
the attainment of union with the timeless
and placeless Godnot because modernity
is intrinsically evil.
The End of Navet
What should we say secular modernity is
then? Taylor attempts to defme it, and it
162
takes him almost eight hundred pages of
historical, sociological, psychological, an-
thropological, economic, political, scien-
tific, and theological analysis to do it. It is
by far the most sophisticated and erudite
attempt 1 have ever read to defme what
might be, along with God, being, and the
individual human person, a most indefm-
able 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 "naively" 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 op-
tion 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 con-
sists, among other things, of a move
from a society where belief in God is
unchallenged and indeed unproblem-
atic, to one in which it is understood
to be one option among others.... lA]
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.'
Note that his characterization of secular
modernity is eminently nonideological and
noncondemnatory; it is neither the rigid
denunciation of the traditionalist, nor the
 SPRING 2009
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 identified with exclusive humanism,
managerial liberalism, and fascist funda-
mentalism, on the one hand, or the resur-
gence 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 interpreta-
tions and embodiments, the structures of
thought and practice that have built upon
and with secular modernity's peculiar con-
sciousness 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 dif-
ferences 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: sci-
entific, social, technological, and so
on, constitute such a frame in that
they are part ofa "natural," or "this
worldly" order which can be un-
derstood in its own terms, without
reference to the "supernatural" or
"transcendent.""
An age or society would then be
secular or not, in virtue of the con-
ditions of experience of and search
for the spiritual.^
According to Taylor, secular modernity
is the ineluctable mode, background, and
context for all thought and practice in the
contemporary West, rather than any par-
ticular ideological or cultural expression
of it. It is, thus, a deeper reality than the
merely ideologicalit is existential. We en-
counter it deep within our lived experi-
ence of reality, before we have the chance
to reflect on it. It is not so much the reflec-
tive, philosophical description or account
we give ourselves ofa more fundamental,
pre-philosophical, and pre-reflective expe-
rience, but is itself this fundamental expe-
rience, 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 rheto-
ric 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 tran-
scend 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 reli-
gious believer in the modern West experi-
ence his religion in a naive 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 immuue
to and exclusive of any and all alternative
interpretations? Can one completely avoid
being disengaged from one's naive experi-
ence of what is and must he, losing all aware-
ness oiwhat is not and might not be? Is it even
possible for a religious child to retain this
sort of navet nowadays? I am not sug-
gesting by this interrogation that modern
163
 MODERN AGE
consciousness precludes the perennial and
epoch-indifferent capacity of human rea-
son 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 ar-
gues, is an entirely new incapacity to ex-
perience the reality of a particular world-
view in a naive way; that is, without the
consciousness of there being other viable
options.
For the Christian, then, the end of na-
ive religious consciousness would entail an
ineluctable experience of reality as per-
petually open to the possibility, or at least
the awareness, of a non-Christian inter-
pretation 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.
Thrse of Lisieux, who, as we know from
their personal writings, experienced this
sense of the absence of God with an in-
tensity we cannot imagineeven in the
possession of a robust supernatural Faith?
Perhaps what Bl. Teresa experienced was a
supernaturally heightened and intensified
version ot the ordinary consciousness of
the typical modern man. Some of the most
influential Christian saints in our daySt.
Thrse of Lisieux, St. Edith Stein, Bl.
Mother Teresa, and St. Padre Pioare all
representative of what seems to be a pecu-
liarly modern form of spiritually, what Fr.
Aidan Nichols has called existential prayer,
"accepting in a generous spirit our depriva-
tion of many of the conventional props and
assurances of a culturally transmitted reli-
gion...may be ushered with peculiar imme-
lf.4
diacy into the presence of the living God."^
Obviously, these saints did escape secular
uiodernity; however, it occurred precisely
through a peculiarly intense experience
of the existential absence of God, written
into the very fabric of modern secular con-
sciousness. It would seem that these saints
escaped it by going ttmmj^h it.
Assuming that this characterization of
secular modernity is more or less accu-
rate, what would happen if one were to
deny secular inudernity 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, on-
tological, then this conviction and its ensu-
ing 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 is-
sue open whether, for purposes of
ultimate explanation, or spiritual
transformation, or final sense-mak-
ing, we might have to invoke some-
thing transcendent. It is only when
the order is "spun" in a certain way
that it seems to dictate a "closed" in-
terpretation.''
This closed spin Taylor calls "exclusive
humanism." We can see it today in both
 SPRING
its "right" and "left" versions: its twofold
Janus-like embodiment in "conservative,"
nation-worshipping, secular-messianic mil-
itarism, on the one hand, and relativistic,
Protagorean, managerial totalitarianism, on
the otherrelativism and fundamentalism
being equally narcissistic, practically atheis-
tic, and nihilistic.
If we take these "closed spins" to be
secular modernity itself, we would rightly
respond either by attacking them or by at-
tempting to escape them, or both. If Tay-
lor is correct, however, although we must
renounce and avoid all errors and evils, we
should not renounce and avoid the larger
background condition or consciousness-
formthe immanent framethat 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 mo-
dernity, we do not thereby escape the back-
ground itselfnor should we wish to. The
lack of awareness of the twice-removed nature
o secular modernity is, perhaps, a main
reason for the disordered interpretations
and embodiments of it, for fundamentalism
(both Islamic and Americanist) and relativ-
ism {both liberal and conservative) are mo-
tivated by a mistaken aversion to what they
consider evilthis or that particular aspect
of secular modernity itself.
Both Cause and Cure
What, then, would be the effect of embrac-
ing modernity? As Taylor explains, attend-
ing the peculiar consciousness shift ot mo-
dernity is a heightened capacity intimately
to feel the pull of other worldviewses-
pecially 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 experi-
ence of living here is that of being cross-
2009
pressured between the open and closed
perspectives."'* Modern secular pluralism,
then, before it is "spun" by some celebra-
tory or condemnatory ideology, provides
an unprecedented opportunity for indi-
viduals to experience the other/rom the in-
side; 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. Alas-
dair Maclntyre describes this inmiersion in
other traditions as learning a second lan-
guage, 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 ac-
cess to the whole triith. yet it can still be
perceived and grasped by us in a partial,
tendentious, and distorted way. Encoun-
tering 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 objec-
tive sense, the whole truth, or the closest
to it, but as fmite, 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 resigna-
tion to skepticism towards or denial of the
truth itself, but an affirmation of the inex-
haustibility of truth in itself, a denial of its
165
 M O D E R N AGE
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, becom-
ing deadly to our soul. Instead of a part of
truth, it functions now as a full-fledged er-
ror, 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 holisti-
cally, becomes error, indeed, a lie. If the
diseased mind could learn to see the part as
part, and not simply a hateful error to con-
demn 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 in-
tellects 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 intel-
lects, this dawning can only occur through
a persistent and often excruciating dialec-
tical comparison of whole and part, a dy-
namic 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 of-
ten 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
166
we need to embrace for the completion and
correction of our thinking. Thus, occasional
immersions in the deeply pluralistic milieu
of our secular modern culturethough
not, of course, its cesspools of immorality
and idolatryalways preceded and fol-
lowed by intensive periods of nursing at the
bosom of one's particular religious and/or
philosophical tradition, are, I think, obliga-
tory. Only these encounters with the spin-
free 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? Chris-
tians, for example, believe themselves to
have "the whole truth" through the revela-
tion ofjesus Christ, so why would they risk
damnation by plunging themselves into plu-
ralism, 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 moder-
nity 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 he the
whole. This is the spiritual disease of which
modernity is both the cause and cure. Frag-
mentary, partial knowledge, unrecognized
as fragmentary and partial and substituting
for comprehensive, holistic knowledge, is
the intellectual condition of our fallen na-
ture, and the besetting bane of modernity;
but with the intrinsic help of grace, the
 SPRING
extrinsic help of Scripture and Tradition,
and cooperation through courageous phil-
osophical 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-mak-
ing individual. As Maclntyre has pointed out,
the "individual" is not a natural type of hu-
man being, but a kind of scripted role creat-
ed by modernity itself according to its own
peculiar dramatic exigencies. Whatever we
eventually become, whether postmodern,
isolated, fragmented, secularist, therapeu-
tic, urban connoisseurs of private self cre-
ation; or anti-modern, communitarian,
traditionalist, paleoconservative, "back to
the land" aspirants of a neomedieval Chris-
tendomwe 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 es-
cape 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, de-
pending 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 respon-
sibility and high dignity that attends it for
radical autonomy and spiritual independence.^
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
2009
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, how-
ever, human beings speak uninhibit-
edly to one another. How illuminat-
ing this contrast is! For in the face
of it, we suddenly become aware of
the degree of human closeness, mu-
tual 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.^
"Unless you become as little chil-
dren...." Knowing in the center of his be-
ing, before the onset of any rational reflec-
tion or self-consciousness, that he is utterly
incapable of independent existence, the
child naively, immediately, and joyfully
opens himself up to the existence, influ-
ence, and guidance of the other. Child-
like, trustful openness is the indispensable
requirement for divine faith, and faith re-
quires 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
isfor each particular personthe 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-
167
 MODERN AGE

ing culture we live in, in both its tradi- a humble plea of ignorance nor a simple
tionalist and modernist varieties. and pious submission to God's wordbut
According to Alasdair Maclntyre, our a type of idolatry.
"enlightened, free-thinking age" is, ironi-
cally, a culture of suffocating dogmatism.'' Conclusion: A New Axial Age
If so, it is vitally important for us to use the
great gift we have been given in these times, Modernity involves the coming to
a heightened capacity for god-like freedom, be of new kinds of public space,
for others. But to give to others the gift of which cannot be accounted for in
ourselves, we must first have an intimate terms of changes in explicit views,
experience of what is not ourselves, for, as either of factual belief or normative
Edith Stein has claimed, we can only know principle. Rather the transition in-
ourselves adequately through the eyes of volves to some extent the definition
others. All of this requires a willingness to of new possible spaces hitherto out-
expose ourselves to the other in the most side the repertory of our forebears,
vulnerable way, to ask, to seek, to venture and beyond the limits of their social
out existentially in humble questioning of imaginary."
ourselves and all that is around useven
when we think already to know the an- The essential message of Charles Taylors
swers given to us by the gift of Faith. groundbreaking A Secular Age is, I think,
this: notwithstanding the serious spiritual
What really is important in life is dangers that secular modernity uniquely
not so much to provide answers, as occasions, such as the illusion of the self-suf-
to discern true questions. When true ficient, mentally invulnerable "individual,"
questions are found, they themselves what Taylor calls the "buffered self," the
open the heart to the mystery. Ori- virtually irresistible inclination to spin the
gen used to say: "Every true ques- world according to one's existential pref-
tion is like the lance which pierces erences, or the suffocating epistemological
the side of Christ causing blood and dichotomy of answers without questions
water to flow forth."'" and questions without answers; the present
age in which Providence has blessed us to
Do we truly experience our spiritual an- live is, nevertheless, spiritually rich, robust,
swers as answers to questions, to questions and exhilarating. Our secular age affords a
we, ourselves, have truly asked? Those who uniquely intense existential awareness of the
do not experience answers this way, who primacy of questioning and an unsurpassed
believe themselves to have obtained the urgency to discover the right questions. In
answers without having first endured the short, what Taylor is telling us is that we
existential agony of searching in the dark- are in the midst ofa secondand perhaps
ness, whether because one has judged that final?Axial Age, one in which we are
there are no answers, or because they are all called to play the role of Socrates, even
believed to be already securely possessed, whenand perhaps precisely whenour
should recognize in such an attitude neither questions have already been answered.

1 Charles Taylor, A Seeular Age (Cambridge, MA: 3. 4 Aidan Nichols, Christendom Awake {Great Britain:
Belknap Press, 207), 12, 19-20. 2 Ibid., 594. 3 Ibid., T&T Clark Ltd., 1999), 213. 5 Taylor, A Secular Age,

168
 SPRING 2009

594. 6 Ibid., 555. 7 Charles Taylor, A Catholic Moder-
nity? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 8Josef
Pieper, Faith, Hope, and Love (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press. 1997), 4. 9 Alasdair Maclntyre. "Philosophy
Recalled to its Tasks," in The Tasks of Philosophy: Se-
lected Essays, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press. 2006), 182. 10 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. 11 Charles Tay-
lor, "Two Theories of Modernity," The Hastings Center
Rfpori 24.2 (March 1995).

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