FROM PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY TO THE HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor's philosophical history of secularization, as presented in his A Secular Age. I do so by situating it in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire. Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion by entertaining the possibility that modern philosophical and historiographic conceptions of secularization might themselves be outcrops of this unfinished competition.Footnote ¹ Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylor's philosophical history of secularization is a Catholic one, and that this is bound up with a specific (neo-Thomist) view of secularization as a theological and ecclesiological “disembedding” of rational subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacral body, community (church), and cosmos.Footnote ² Taylor delivers this history in his “reform master narrative”: that certain fundamental religious and cultural reforms or changes in early modern Europe wrought the secularization responsible for a modern epoch of “unbelief”.

Standing opposed to this neo-Thomist history it is possible to identify a rival master narrative of a distinctively Protestant rationalist cast. According to this competing narrative, secularization emerges not from the moral uprooting of the rational subject from its sacral community but from a different kind of process altogether: the progressive winnowing of the chaff of historical religious belief from the kernel of the morally self-governing rational subject. In treating secular rational individualism as that which remains when extraneous religious belief and theological doctrine have been purged by and from history, this rival narrative conforms to what Taylor calls the “subtraction story” of secularization. This provokes his understandable scepticism for its refusal to entertain the possibility that secularization might itself have religious and theological conditions of historical existence. While there have been various sources of the Protestant view of history as the progressive unfolding of man's autonomous rationality through time—from Locke's uncovering of a Socinian “reasonable Christianity”, through Warburton's Whiggish history of the emergence of a non-political church, to Priestley's treatment of the Reformation as the birth of a free reason that might even disprove Christianity itself—the version that Kant offers in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (and associated writings) has most pertinence for our present concerns. This is because in treating the Reformation as a stage in the process that sees the sloughing of the historical Christ, leaving behind Christ only as symbol of our own self-governing and self-redemptive moral reason, Kant's version feeds into the twentieth-century post-Protestant philosophical rationalism that forms neo-Thomism's main historical rival.Footnote ³

Significant as they are, these observations remain curtain-raisers for entertaining two more important possibilities that promise to put the historiographic discussion of secularization on a more fundamental footing. First, if the rivalry between Taylorian and Kantian philosophical histories is in fact driven by the conflict between their underpinning theologies—Catholic neo-Thomist versus Protestant rationalist—then it is possible that their success in sublimating theology into philosophy has been overestimated, and that they are in fact ways of continuing to wage theological war by other means.Footnote ⁴ Second, if the rival philosophical–historical constructions of secularization are not themselves foundational—in the sense of arising either from the historical disembedding of reason from man's “embodied nature”, or from the progressive refinement of his “rational being”—then they will have no necessary pre-eminence over other constructions of secularization: specifically, jurisprudential and contextual–historiographic ones. Rather, they will sit alongside the latter, jostling for position as competing conceptions attached to autonomous concrete cultural and political programmes.

This way of framing discussions of secularization—which seems to me the one most finely tuned to the contextual nexus linking academic constructions to concrete religious and political programmes—I have drawn principally from two fundamental studies by Martin Heckel.Footnote ⁵ Surprisingly absent from anglophone discussions, and perhaps more cited than exemplified in germanophone work, Heckel's studies have the potential to shift the axis of the historiography of secularization. This is not least because they are written from a perspective that combines public-law jurisprudence and a non-philosophical (contextual) historiography within a broadly German–Lutheran cultural tradition, making Heckel's approach significantly different from both neo-Thomist and neo-Kantian philosophical historiographies. As the pre-eminent historian of German Staatskirchenrecht—constitutional law of the church and religion—Heckel provides an insider's history of secularization as a combined juridical and theological response to early modern confessionalism. This proves to be an invaluable corrective to the rival philosophical histories even if, as some have argued, Heckel's intimate history brings with it the limits that come with belonging to the tradition that one is investigating.

At the risk of oversimplifying Heckel's nuanced and wide-ranging discussion, we can encapsulate three of its key outcomes, orienting them to the task at hand. In the first place, Heckel shows that secularization in early modern Germany did not refer to an epochal cultural “worldlification” (Verweltlichung) or sublimation of religion, whether viewed negatively, as by the right Hegelians Löwith and Schmitt; or positively, as by Hegel, the left Hegelians, the neo-Kantians, and Blumenburg. Rather, it referred to something far more domain-specific and contextually relative, namely to the transfer of church property and church jurisdiction from ecclesial to civil authority, especially in the context of the settlement of Protestant princely claims in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War.Footnote ⁶ At stake was not a totalizing secularization or rationalization of the zeitgeist, but a limited and contextual political secularization of the judicial and civil domains that left large swathes of religious life quite untouched. Religious institutions were, of course, in the throes of their own “reformations” during this period, but this typically led to the intensification rather than the dilution of religious life, even if these religious changes interacted in complex ways with political secularization.

Second, the intellectual discipline that formulated the conceptual and ethical parameters for this political secularization was neither philosophy nor theology but public-law jurisprudence.Footnote ⁷ Specifically it was the German public-law discipline of Staatskirchenrecht, embracing both the imperial public church law flowing from two fundamental religious peace treaties—of Augsburg (1555) and Osnabrück (Westphalia) (1648)—and the array of decrees and laws through which these treaties were received, interpreted, operationalized, and also transformed in the religious constitutions of the princely territorial states.Footnote ⁸ Here secularization did not take place as an epochal shift in the culture and consciousness of humanity brought about by profound philosophical–theological transformations. It occurred rather as a historically specific alteration in the religious and political order of the German Empire and its estates. This was brought about by more than a century of protracted jurisprudential and diplomatic activity, and was manifest in a specific ensemble of developments. The most important of these were the establishment of balance and parity in the treatment of the Catholic and Protestant confessions at the level of imperial law and politics; the gradual and uneven emergence of indifference towards competing religious truths at the level of territorial law and government, which was the condition of religious toleration and “freedom”; and the capacity of this constitutional order to permit a multiconfessional system of public churches and schools grounded in public law.Footnote ⁹

Third, the epochalist philosophical conceptions of secularization characteristic of modern philosophical histories did not emerge for a further two hundred years, in the middle of the nineteenth century. At this point, the specific public-law construction of secularization as an array of constitutional enactments for ordering the relation between state and church was actively forgotten in a series of expansionist philosophical–historical reconstructions. The most important of these were Kant's construction of secularization as the progressive realization of rational being; Hegel's conception of the “worldlifying” sublimation of transcendent Christianity into philosophy and thence into the historical state; and the neo-Thomist narrative of a worldlifying loss of transcendent Christian beliefs, begun by the Reformation, but culminating in the “liberal” system of an indifferent state supervising a plurality of equally valid confessions, and now lamented as the de-Christianization of public life and the loss of the state's moral foundations.Footnote ¹⁰ In attempting to deal with the chasm between these philosophical histories of secularization and the empire's historical public-law religious constitutions, their authors oscillated between two adjacent strategies. Some followed Kant in insisting on the “theoretical” correctness of their philosophical history regardless of empirical history and the “practice” of public law, thereby contenting themselves with the role of juridically inconsequential moral prophets.Footnote ¹¹ Others attempted to incorporate their philosophical histories as Weltanschauungen into the ideological platforms of rival religious and secularist political parties—such as those championed (respectively) by the right and left Hegelians—with a view to overturning the constitutional religious order by installing either a Christian or a secularist party state.Footnote ¹²

Heckel's public-law historiography thus provides us with a framework capable of linking the philosophical history of secularization to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Protestant Germany. It does so by situating philosophical history as a nineteenth-century philosophical erasure of the public-law history of secularization. This was executed through the construction of secularization as a (positively or negatively conceived) epochal “worldlification” of religion affecting the entirety of state and society and possibly humanity, which was then anachronistically projected backwards onto sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political secularization. For its part, political secularization had a quite different focus, namely establishing public-law parity of treatment between the rival confessions, within a political order characterized not by a Christianizing or secularizing state, but by one whose indifference to rival religious truths issued in a system of state-managed multiconfessionalism.

In both its structure and its function, Taylor's account of secularization is a monolithic outcrop of the towering ranges of nineteenth-century philosophical history. Extruded from both Hegelian and neo-Thomist magma flows, it juts from the plains of twenty-first-century scholarship in a manner that reminds us that we have not yet escaped the combative ideological milieu of that form of historiography. In elaborating on this characterization of Taylor's A Secular Age, I will begin by outlining the main features of his philosophical history of secularization—focusing in particular on his account of the crucial early modern period—then move on to contrast this with the very different contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Germany, before concluding with some reflections on the cultural role of Taylor's philosophical hermeneutics.

TAYLOR'S PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY

Taylor introduces his account by distinguishing between three conceptions of secularity: political secularity or the constitutional separation of church and state; secularity conceived sociologically in terms of declining patterns of church attendance and religious observance; and the secularity that he is interested in, understood in terms of the conditions responsible for the onset of a modern epoch of “unbelief”.Footnote ¹³ Demonstrating the ease with which a philosophical taxonomy can collapse disparate histories, Taylor declares that the third conception holds the key to understanding the first two, as only it captures the underlying conditions of the “whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place” (3). Taylor thus envisages that the (philosophical) conditions supposedly responsible for the rise of modern unbelief—in fact the conditions of the “worldlification” of religion—are also foundational for political and sociological constructions of secularity.Footnote ¹⁴ In doing so, he retrospectively imposes the model of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical history onto early modern public-law political secularity. Having effected this absorption of historical jurisprudence into philosophy, Taylor can then pose what purports to be a fundamental historical question: “How did we move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naïvely within a theistic construal, to one in which we all shunt between two stances, in which everyone's construal shows up as such; and in which moreover, unbelief has become for many the major default option?” (14). Taylor's way of posing his central question is thus a way of assimilating the early modern political and public-law historiography of secularization to the preoccupations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical history.

Taylor's all-consuming question thus issues in an account in which a philosophically and theologically driven movement of “Christian Reform” inverts—or is sublimated—into an epochal secularization of consciousness that carries with it the totality of culture, society and state. This account contrasts strongly not just with Heckel's juristic studies but also with important research in the history of religion and theology, which stresses the regional and plural character of secularity and secularism. When focused on Europe, this research has tied secularization to the historical forms of religious settlement that took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following various religious civil wars. As a result, it views both the forms of secularity and the ways in which it is theorized as subject to significant differences, depending on the character of regional and national settlements, and their long intellectual aftermath.Footnote ¹⁵ In treating modernity as an epochal totality arising from the secularization or “worldlification” of its supposed theological or metaphysical foundations, Taylor's account ignores the historical existence of different forms of secularization and the “multiple modernities” to which they have given rise. Conversely, discussions that recognize a plurality of secularizations tied to diverse early modern religious settlements typically entertain a plurality of modernities, treating them as projections of particular religious and political programmes designed to configure the present in their image.Footnote ¹⁶ Our discussion of public-law secularization in early modern Protestant Germany will thus exemplify only a particular historical form of secularization and the modernity that it projects.

Rather then encompassing the possibility of multiple modernities, Taylor's history is a single linear before-and-after narrative in which the “before” has both normative and chronological priority in relation to the “after”. It thus has the form of a philosophical history in which a lost normative order with a metaphysical character supplies the hermeneutic key to a single general history of secularization. This leads to a single modern condition—a “spiritual predicament”—in which “we” are all supposedly caught: “it is a crucial fact of our spiritual predicament that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition” (28). The several epochs of this history unfold as the lapsarian retreat or “disembedding” of metaphysical forms from the temporal domain—and vice versa—the crisis moment for which is provided by the Protestant Reformation. In this regard, like Alasdair MacIntyre's similar construction, Taylor's Thomistic lapsarian history is the inverted image of progressivist Kantian philosophical history;Footnote ¹⁷ as for Kant, the Protestant Reformation begins the positive and progressive process of winnowing the husks of historical sacramental religion from a “pure religion of reason”.Footnote ¹⁸

Taylor's pre-lapsarian era is characterized by the embeddedness of temporal phenomena in transcendent principles or realities—God, the Platonic forms, the spiritual community of gods and men—and vice versa (25–7). He asserts that there was a time—possibly from late antiquity until the late Middle Ages—when these “ontic” transcendent principles were embedded in the temporal sphere in a threefold manner: in the form of a human essence or entelechy whose bodily realization connected man to the higher order of transcendent essences or goods; in the form of the enchanted cosmos where things were understood in terms of transcendent “forms realizing themselves in nature”; and in the form of a sacralized society whose hierarchical order was understood as a reflection of the spiritual hierarchy of the cosmos (25–7):

According to Taylor, some version of this order was still present in 1500, and accounts for the taken-for-granted character of medieval religious belief, which was embedded in the moral culture and ritual observances of community, cosmos, and social order.

Contrasting term-for-term with this earlier embedded metaphysical order, Taylor's post-lapsarian “modern moral order” consists of, first, a “buffered self”, or a self turned in its own mentality, dislocated from its bodily realization, and rendered impervious to transcendent forms and magical forces; second, a disenchanted world in which science has replaced the transcendent forms realizing themselves in nature with an objectified universe governed by purely mechanical Newtonian laws; and third, a disciplinary society in which social order no longer reflects transcendent hierarchy and is conceived as subject to laws imposed by instrumental human reason for the purposes of a merely human flourishing (28–75). Taylor characterizes the modern moral order as secular in the sense of being grounded in a “exclusive humanism”, focused solely on autonomous man's temporal flourishing, from which all transcendent realities have been banished. He also insists that this development cannot be understood as a “subtraction story”—with secularity treated as the residuum left after the stripping away of religion—as secularity is itself the sublimated form of a particular (Protestant) kind of religion (22). Here we again encounter Taylor's version of the nineteenth-century philosophical history of secularity as the outcome of the “worldlification” of religion. Taylor's account of the unfolding of this order of unbelief from the prior order of temporally embodied metaphysics has three main stages and is underpinned by a single philosophical–historical hermeneutic.

The first of Taylor's epochal stages is characterized by what he calls the rise of disciplinary society and the “great disembedding” of self and society from their place in a cosmos characterized by “forms realizing themselves in nature” (146–58). At first sight it appears that many empirical historical factors contribute to his epochal transformation: Newtonian science, new conceptions of civility and social discipline, and the pedagogical programmes of reforming churches and states. It turns out, though, that the multiplicity of ostensibly historical factors is itself dependent on a far simpler double-sided philosophical–historical transformation. On one side of this putative process, Taylor argues that disciplinary society and the great disembedding flowed from the rise of “Reform Christianity”. Beginning with the religious reforms of the twelfth century, but picking up speed in early modernity—where Reform crystallizes into the Protestant Reformation—Reform Christianity is understood in quasi-Weberian terms. It is thus characterized in terms of the transfer of previously elite forms of Christian asceticism into daily life, such that salvation will be pursued outside its sacramental precincts, via a “worldly asceticism” that seeks the virtuoso religious disciplining of quotidian life and ordinary selves (75–88). On the flip side of this process, Taylor claims that the religious disciplining of profane life was reciprocally dependent on a profound theological transformation taking place in Latin Christendom, namely the emergence of a nominalist and voluntarist theology of the will from the Scotist and Occamite traditions (96–9).Footnote ¹⁹ This was at variance with the embedded intellectualism of Thomism, and supposedly issued in the disciplinary ferocity of Lutheran Reform.

On this familiar neo-Thomist account, theological nominalism and voluntarism allow the self, cosmos, and society to be viewed as objects of a purely willed ordering.Footnote ²⁰ This lays the philosophical–historical groundwork for the removal of the transcendent forms from the cosmos; the treatment of the self in terms of its own self-disciplining moral laws; and the ordering of society as an object of instrumental disciplinary laws aimed at only immanent human flourishing. The other factors that Taylor discusses—Newtonian science, neo-Stoic discipline and Elias's taming of the warrior nobility, the pedagogical programmes of Reformation churches and states—are thus epiphenomenal. Their disenchanting and disciplining powers are only the instruments and effects of the Christian–ascetic reform of daily life and the nominalist–voluntarist theology that is supposed to have driven the Reform process.

Taylor's second historical stage in the unfolding of secularity and modern unbelief is a transitional one that he associates with the seventeenth-century English Deist movement—Blount, Toland, Collins, Tindal, and Herbert of Cherbury—albeit under a very general construal (221–69). For Taylor, the role of Deism is to function as the tipping point—the moment of “worldlifying” inversion or sublimation—at which Reform Christianity, having launched the self and society as objects of willed shaping, can begin to leave God out of the picture. According to Taylor, Deism plays this role by acting as the agent of epochal dissemination for two supposed consequences of Reform Christianity: first, the anthropomorphizing of religion that allowed a theology of grace to be replaced by a self-sufficient morality of rational self-control and mutual benevolence; and second, the creation of a sense of “impersonal order” in which God was relegated to the margins of a Newtonianized cosmos and precluded from manifesting himself in a now profane history (221–34). Through its powers of dissemination, Deism is ascribed the role of helping to transform these otherwise elite theories into a global Weltanschauung or zeitgeist that Taylor calls a “social imaginary”: “what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society” (172). As a result of the Deist anthropomorphizing and moralizing of religion, Taylor argues, self and society came to be generally conceived as objects of a purely human reform programme. This was aimed at self-discipline and mutual benevolence, and at the ordering of society in accordance with the immanent end of mutual benefit, hence a wholly human flourishing with no transcendent dimension. Taylor thus portrays Deism as a carrying forward of the inner dynamic of voluntarist Reform Christianity into an epochal secular conception of the self and society.

In discussing Deism's creation of an impersonal cosmic and historical order, Taylor focuses on two powerful cultural forces that he argues permitted it to execute its appointed historical task. In the first place, Deism was supposedly informed by Galilean–Newtonian physics and cosmology whose objectifying treatment of the universe removed the transcendental dimension of “forms realizing themselves in things”, and with it the conception of historical time as the temporal unfolding of a Platonic or Christian eternity (270–95). This, Taylor argues, is what allowed the Deists to deny God's immediate personal presence in the cosmos and in the events of history, and to treat him as an impersonal principle or force that had set the universe in motion but then allowed it to run on Newtonian laws. Second, though, and even more importantly for Taylor, Deism was informed by an anti-metaphysical and de-sacralizing historiography of theology and the church (272–75). According to Taylor, this historiography is characterized by its will to treat the church as a purely immanent historical institution no different from other social institutions, but also by its deployment of a method in which theologies are treated as historical events and, as such, incapable of being either true or false.

It is a significant pointer to Taylor's own combative method that he ascribes this anti-metaphysical historiographic sensibility not just to Gibbon and the Deists, but also to Gibbon's twentieth-century editor, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (272–3).Footnote ²¹ This in turn is a pointer to the fact that, unlike the case of Newtonian science, Taylor is not content simply to describe the anti-metaphysical historiography of theology and the church, and feels compelled rather to contest and displace it with an opposed historiography. In fact he does this by focusing on a crucial nexus that had first been identified by this early modern historiography itself. As we shall see below, it was during the seventeenth century that an array of humanist historians of philosophy sought to dismember scholastic metaphysics by situating it at an impossible nexus: between a Greek metaphysics—in which the world arises when a philosophical god imbues prime matter with the forms of his divine intellection—and the Christian religion, according to which the world is created ex nihilo by a God who maintains personal relations with man through the redemptive mysteries of faith. For the moment, it is important to observe that the early modern historians elaborated this historical–cultural conflict in order to undo the patristic and scholastic harmonization of philosophy and theology, thence to expel Greek metaphysics from Christian history, and ultimately to treat the events of this history as wholly temporal in both senses of the word.Footnote ²² In a striking symptomatic demonstration of the fact that this cultural–religious battle remains unresolved, Taylor advances along the opposed front, arguing for the reconciliation of Greek metaphysics and Christian doctrine as a means of reinstating the transcendent in temporal history. Roughly speaking, this is a reconciliation in which the opposed pairs—the transcendent and the immanent, the timeless and the temporal, the intellect and the body or emotions—are harmonized via a notion of the temporal world as the domain in which the transcendent is actualized through embodiment in historical events, thereby allowing the latter to harbor transcendental meaning (275–80).

At this point, in defending a transcendentally pregnant history against a Gibbonian anti-metaphysical historiography of theology and the church, Taylor in effect offers a reflexive defence of his own philosophical–historical method. This is because Taylor's narrative itself treats historical events—such as those associated with political secularization, Newtonian science, Deist anthropomorphizing—as filled with hidden transcendental significance, even if this significance is that of the emptying of the transcendental. In other words, we might say that in deploying a hermeneutic philosophical history, Taylor is engaged in a methodological defence of metaphysics against the historicization of philosophy undertaken by the early modern “contextual” historians of philosophy and their modern heirs, such as the Cambridge school.Footnote ²³ Here we are in the presence of an unresolved and deeply rooted cultural and religious conflict, one from which the present essay cannot itself find refuge in transcendental scholarly neutrality.

The third epoch of Taylor's philosophical history concerns the deepening of the secular humanism made available by Deism into outright unbelief or atheism. Taylor associates this final phase in the history of unbelief with the emergence of a new “cosmic imaginary”. In fact, this amounts to the transformation of disembodied reason and its objectified scientific world into a kind of broad ideological consciousness or Weltanschauung for the whole of Western European society. At the centre of this consciousness lie two self-disquieting notions: that the vastness of cosmic space puts the world out of God's providential reach (Burnet and phsyico-cosmology); and that man himself is not the product of a divine creative act but of a “dark abyss of time” in which humanity had somehow arisen from matter (Vico and cosmic history) (321–40).

According to Taylor, it is this new cosmic imaginary that opens the gate to a whole array of new positions in the field of unbelief—what he calls the “nova effect”—in which the world and man can be treated as products of dark material forces, ranging from geological catastrophes to the Freudian unconscious and Darwinian evolution. At the same time, because these doctrines of unbelief derive not from science as such, but from the miscegenation of the impersonal Deistic universe and a scientistic world view or ideology, the cultural imagination of the West remains in touch with the world of embedded transcendence that has been excluded from view by the new grid of unbelief, which Taylor calls the “immanent frame” (352–76). From this supposedly latent presence of a lost higher metaphysical order, Taylor extrapolates what he calls the “modern malaise” or “modern predicament”—a nagging anxiety about the lack of transcendent meaning in quotidian life. This in turn is supposed to give birth to cultural movements such as Romanticism that attempt to reinstate lost transcendence minus its ontology, in the form of art and play (377–401). From this return of repressed metaphysical belief within the new domain of unbelief arises a whole host of Romantic and post-Romantic doctrines. Here individuals wrestle with their unbelief and seek respite in forms of transcendence whose “ontic” character remains ambiguous and obscure (407–12). At this point, we have entered Taylor's version of twentieth-century secularity, and, even though much else is canvassed in his omnibus, he has in fact completed his account of how “we”—all those living in the West—are supposedly now faced with an inescapable but irresolvable choice. This takes place within the field of possibilities generated between modern unbelief and the latent belief in transcendent principles and beings whose worldlification brought this epoch of unbelief into existence.

We can conclude this summary with a methodological observation. In combating the “subtraction story” of secularization—according to which secular reason and a scientific world emerge from the negative stripping away of unjustified or superstitious religious and metaphysical beliefs—Taylor appears to insist that secularity must be treated in terms of positive disciplines and intellectual inventions: such things as the forms of civility, scientific disenchantment, religious Reform and social disciplining that he has described. At the same time, though, we have also seen that Taylor regards these matrices of ideas and practices as forming a kind of cognitive grid, the “immanent frame” of “exclusive humanism”. This allows only certain things to be experienced—the buffered self, the disenchanted or objectified world—while excluding access to the older cultural form of embedded transcendent realities: God, the cosmos as “forms in realization”, and the sacralized society or church. As a result, these transcendent realities do not have positive conditions of existence in particular intellectual disciplines, arts or “practices of the self”. Instead, Taylor ascribes them an “ontic” character pertaining to the level of (occluded) Being, thereby orienting his philosophical history to the “real” metaphysical world we have misplaced. Somewhat ironically, then, Taylor's own account assumes the form of a “subtraction story”; for were we able to strip away the merely positive historical conditions that have produced exclusive humanism and the secular age of unbelief, then we would be again confronted by timeless transcendent principles that have no positive historical conditions of existence, apparently. In short, if—according to the “subtraction story” about which Taylor rightly complains—the secular is what is left when religion is stripped away from a self-grounding rationality, then, in Taylor's inverted version, the sacred is what is left when secular culture is stripped away from a self-grounding ontotheology. Taylor's philosophico-theological commitment to these supposedly ontologically real principles, or Being, enters the content of his history through the narrative of an abiding malaise or anxiety about the loss of higher meaning, and it enters the form of his narrative by giving it the shape of a hermeneutic history of the concealment of Being in secular time and its partial disclosure through prophetic philosophical history.

SECULARIZATION IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY

Before turning to the historiography of secularization in early modern Protestant Germany, we are now in a position to clarify our reasons for treating this as a kind of test case for Taylor's account. Clearly this is not because the German case is to be regarded as typical, given that we have already pointed to the existence of a plurality of historical forms of secularization, none of which is any more typical than the others. If we compare it with the English, though, then there are certain features of the German case that make it better suited to a discussion of Taylor's arguments, regardless of the fact that Taylor himself pays no heed to different regional histories and styles of secularization. In England, the late seventeenth-century religious and political settlement was achieved at the level of a single territorial kingdom. This permitted a broad-church Anglican–Protestant confession to be enshrined in common law and embedded in the two old universities, thereby constituting the cultural–political centre from which various forms of religious heterodoxy and political dissent measured their distance.Footnote ²⁴ In Germany, though, the continuing presence of the empire as a legal and political order for a whole variety of territorial, urban, and estate entities meant that the great religious peace treaties of 1555 and 1648 could not impose a uniform religious and political constitution, producing instead a multiform one in which different territories and cities were able to develop their own religious settlements and cultures.Footnote ²⁵ As a result, the variegated German political and religious landscape supported intellectual cultures that did not survive under the “Anglican Settlement”. In particular it supported a full-blooded metaphysical Protestant scholasticism that drew on Thomist sources and that sat uncomfortably alongside both an anti-metaphysical “voluntarist” Lutheran Pietism and equally anti-metaphysical juridical and political cultures, some of which were inspired by Hobbes.Footnote ²⁶ Early modern Germany thus provides the richer array of theological and political cultures—in particular the clashes between realist metaphysics and theological voluntarism, transcendent and immanent conceptions of political society—that is presumed by Taylor's wide-ranging account, making it into a source of revealing cruces. As it turns out, the regional and contextual character of the recent historiography of early modern German confessionalization and secularization—its focus on interactions of religion, politics, law and philosophy in a series of open-ended religious and political struggles—makes it highly corrosive of Taylor's philosophical history of a secular epoch.

Let us go straight to Taylor's first and central argument: that the combination of Reform Christianity and theological voluntarism was responsible for a transfer of religious discipline into daily life, which in turn resulted in the disembedding of the transcendent forms and the emergence of the autarkic self, the disenchanted universe, and disciplinary society. To the extent that this argument does make contact with the recent historiography of religion and politics in early modern Germany then it is via the phenomenon that historians have called confessionalization. For by confessionalization historians do indeed refer to a concerted effort made by early modern churches and states to intensify the religious disciplining of daily life through an array of pedagogical, juridical, and political programmes.Footnote ²⁷ From the middle of the sixteenth century, central Western Europe was subject to a series of overlapping rival waves of “reformation”—Lutheran, Catholic, and Calvinist—in which religious activists and “godly princes” sought to intensify the spiritual governance of territorial populations in accordance with a dense mix of religious and political imperatives, resulting in the phenomenon of the confessional state.Footnote ²⁸ A number of the key features of these confessionalizing programmes are at radical variance to some of Taylor's central claims.Footnote ²⁹

In the first place, while a voluntarist and anti-intellectualist theology did indeed play an important role for some confessionalizing groups—especially for the fideist and pietist wings of the major confessions—this elevation of the will over the intellect does not provide the theological key to what Taylor presumes is a fundamentally Protestant confessional disciplining of daily life. On the contrary, a number of key studies have shown that realist and intellectualist metaphysical theologies—theologies teaching that the temporal world is shaped by God's transcendent intellection of its forms—played a no less important role in many of the confessionalizing programmes, including Protestant ones, which were supported by a Protestant scholasticism.Footnote ³⁰ This is particularly clear in the case of seventeenth-century Lutheran Saxony, where a highly realist and intellectualist official confession—the Formula of Concord—was centred on an authoritative metaphysical explication of how divine being is united with human being in Christ, and contained in the corporeal being of the Eucharistic host. Designed to combat Tridentine Catholicism and to distinguish orthodox Lutheranism from its Calvinist rival, in states like Saxony the Formula of Concord provided confessional definition for a wide array of religious pedagogies and judicial statutes, establishing the contours of a sacralized confessional state.Footnote ³¹

Second, this is a pointer to the fact that programmes for the confessional disciplining of daily life were not the material expression of the theological or metaphysical ideas advanced within them, as is assumed in Taylor's claim that the elevation of the will in Protestant voluntarism allowed society to be viewed as an object of willed disciplinary transformation, rather than as the sacral embodiment of a cosmic hierarchy. As Taylor himself sometimes observes, it is not the pure thinking of theological ideas that is decisive here, but the manner in which thinking them forms part of specific practices of piety, ways of life, and religious comportments.Footnote ³² What this means, though, is that social and political effects cannot be read off from theological doctrine. Such effects must instead be approached via the concrete historical circumstances in which particular religious practices and comportments are articulated to an array of pedagogical and juridical programmes, where their spiritual authority can be exercised in the register of ecclesial and civil authority, or not. It thus transpires that while the voluntarist theology informing the austere authority of reborn “earthly saints” could indeed be exercised as disciplinary authority,Footnote ³³ so too could the realist metaphysics of a clergy rendered holy by privileged access to the transcendentals.Footnote ³⁴ Equally, where these same spiritual practices and comportments were not articulated to powerful pedagogical and juridical institutions, they could issue in forms of spiritual authority—contemplative, quietistic, monastic—with little relation to the driving centres of ecclesial and civil power.

Third, if metaphysical theologies (viewing the cosmos in terms of the manifestation of divine intellection) and voluntarist theologies (viewing it in terms of inscrutably willed laws) were related to each other principally via the confessionalizing programmes in which they were articulated, then they must be regarded as contemporaneous in early modern Europe. Taylor's neo-Thomist before-and-after story—in which transcendental intellectualist theologies have both normative and chronological priority over the voluntarist theologies that have supposedly excluded them from the “immanent frame”—can thus only be understood as a lapsarian narrative designed to constitute modernity in terms of longing for the metaphysical world we have lost. For the same reason, post-Protestant and neo-Kantian narratives of the emergence of enlightened, rationally self-governing individuals and societies from a prior dark age of religious authoritarianism simply substitute a progressivist rationalist modernity for the Thomistic lapsarian one. In both cases, the attempt to constitute an epochal modernity as “our” defining present entails the collapsing of normative and chronological priority (or posterity), as part of an effort to project a modernity suited to a particular religious, cultural or political agenda.Footnote ³⁵ Taylor's account of modernity as a secular age of exclusive humanism and unbelief should thus be seen as an attempt to imbue the present with a liberal Catholic conception of it as the domain of lost transcendence and community, which remains locked in rivalry with the post-Protestant conception of modernity as the “unfinished enlightenment project”. From the viewpoint of a properly detached intellectual historiography, however, this spectacle of multiple or rival modernities can only point to the fact that history has no fundamental sense of direction, suggesting that the present is better approached as a domain of unfinished struggles and unintended outcomes.

From these all-too-brief remarks on the first stage of Taylor's argument, a picture of secularization in early modern Germany begins to emerge that looks quite unlike his. Programmes to intensify the religious disciplining of ordinary life between 1550 and 1700 did not betoken the secularization of religion in Taylor's sense; that is, the “worldlifying” inversion of “Reform Christianity” into the blueprint for a desacralized disciplinary society inhabited by atomistic selves. Rather, driven by both realist and voluntarist theologies, and present in Lutheran, Catholic and Calvinist territories, these programmes represented concerted religious– and civil–pedagogical attempts to superimpose the ecclesial and civil communities in the form of the confessional state, estate, or community. It seems likely, then, that the prototypes of Taylor's sacralized or sacramental society—in which civil authority is imbued with a cosmic religious significance—are to be found not in ancient magical societies or medieval Christendom, but in such early modern confessional states as Saxony and Bavaria: states that possessed the means of combining spiritual and civil authority, and aspired to superimpose universal ecclesial community and territorial political citizenship.Footnote ³⁶ If specifically political programs of secularization began to emerge in this context—that is, programmes characterized by various attempts to disarticulate the forms of spiritual and civil authority, the ecclesial and political communities—then these cannot be understood in the Taylorian manner as reflex effects of a “deeper” secularization viewed as the worldly sublimation of religion: a conception which lay far ahead in the nineteenth century. Rather, they must be understood as autonomous programmes and campaigns, targeted on the early modern confessional states whose juridical and political institutions they sought to purge of ecclesial imperatives, and grounded not in fundamental theology or philosophy but in the disciplines of public law (Staatskirchenrecht) and politics.Footnote ³⁷

Several of these points can be further developed by returning to the second main stage of Taylor's narrative; that is, his argument that early modern “Deism” was the means by which the “disembedding” effects of Reform Christianity were transformed into an epochal “social imaginary” or spirit of the age. It will be recalled that Taylor thinks Deism was responsible for the creation of this secular humanist spirit in part through its spread of an anti-sacramental anthropomorphic ethics—in which God enunciates rational moral rules already implicit in man's self-governing reason—and in part through its embodiment of a disenchanting natural science and a detranscendentalizing empirical historiography. Understood as a further step in the “worldlification” of Reform Christianity, Taylor's Deism supplies him with the cultural agency that he needs in order to gather together the disparate threads of secularization into a single Weltanschauung and disseminate this to an entire “age”. Yet the pressures that this places on Deism—the requirement that its rational religiosity provide the unifying basis for the secularizing effects of intellectual cultures as diverse as the natural sciences and a profane historiography—prove to be far greater than this somewhat fragile construct can bear.

It is beginning to look as if even in England there was no Deism of the kind posited by Taylor—a movement unified by a shared ethico-religious sensibility and rationalistic outlook—and that this cultural and religious identity was in fact retrospectively imposed on a rather diverse group of early modern thinkers by Romantic writers in search of precursors.Footnote ³⁸ Setting aside the (important) issue of whether Deism existed as a coherent movement even in England, we must focus on the question whether something like a generalized Deistic sensibility can be found in early modern Germany, as the rationalist anthropomorphic basis of an epochal secularization. There are good reasons for scepticism in this regard. On the one hand, to the extent that the ideas of Toland, Collins and Tindal did circulate in Protestant Germany, they did so not as a circumambient zeitgeist or “social imaginary”, but through narrow clandestine intellectual networks interested in exploiting the (anti-confessional) political–theological possibilities of anti-Trinitarian thought.Footnote ³⁹ On the other hand, if we look at the public faces of political secularization in late seventeenth-century Protestant Germany—figures such as Johann Becmann, Samuel Pufendorf, and Christian Thomasius—then their theological outlook bears little resemblance to Taylor's Deism. Far from accepting a rationalist ethical Christianity modelled by an anthropomorphic God, in their religious lives these figures remained committed to a fideistic and pietistic style of Lutheranism: one in which divine rationality remains inscrutable to man's corrupted understanding, and in which salvation is to be sought in gratuitous grace.Footnote ⁴⁰

This anti-rationalist pietistic Lutheranism was in part associated with Pufendorf's and Thomasius's campaign against Protestant scholastic rationalism: an array of metaphysical doctrines teaching that man can participate in divine intellection through a rational substance shared with God; for they identified this with a philosophical doctrinalization of religion that allowed it be coercively imposed as a confession (the Formula of Concord) in the confessional state. But their pietism was also symbiotically related to the political and public-law constructions through which they pursued the political secularization of the confessional state by restricting the end of politics to the maintenance of social peace alone, thereby relocating the church outside the domain of political coercion in the domain of the free collegial pursuit of grace.Footnote ⁴¹ Taylor is thus right to insist that the forms of rationality driving (certain kinds of) secularization can indeed be shaped by particular theological cultures and outlooks, making them inaccessible to a historiography that seeks to approach secularization by subtracting religion. In the case of Pufendorf and Thomasius, however, this shaping took place not through the agency of an all-encompassing rational religiosity, but through the maintenance of an anti-rationalist pietism that allowed them to reconfigure religion as a domain of faith incapable of doctrinal formalization and political enforcement. Political secularization in early modern Protestant Germany was thus not the result of an epochal Deistic rationalizing of religion but of highly contextualized cultural and political circumstances in which anti-rationalist political jurists sought to undo the articulation of ecclesial and civil authority in a particular kind of confessional state. They did so by deploying a fideistic and pietistic conception of religion alongside a “Hobbesian” public-law construction of the state, in what was in fact a distinctive regional form or style of secularization.

Given this, there is no reason to presume that the public-law champions of political secularization in early modern Germany should have had any particular relation to the Galilean–Newtonian scientific revolution, with its supposed objectifying disenchantment of the cosmos. Thomasius, for example, remained attached to a version of Renaissance Platonic–Hermetic natural philosophy—according to which the cosmos is ordered by the “spirits” of light and air understood as active and invisible parts of the corporeal world—even if he put this doctrine to an anti-metaphysical use too: as a means of denying that the world is ordered by immaterial substances or transcendental intelligibles.Footnote ⁴² To the extent that public-law political secularization was generalized, then this was not through any alliance with the new natural sciences, cemented by a shared (Deistic) rationalism. Rather this took place through its incorporation into a distinctive kind of philosophical culture, that of “eclecticism”. Here, jurisprudence itself, in combination with the pietistic critique of the limits of human reason, resulted in an empiricistic and probabilistic approach to knowledge.Footnote ⁴³ Considering that Taylor offers no concerted argument in favour of a Mertonian or Weberian link between Protestant anti-sacramentalism and the development of Galilean–Newtonian mechanics and cosmology, there is perhaps no need to pursue the notion of some such epochal link any further here. We can observe, though, that, as in the historiography of moral and political thought, so too in the recent historiography of early modern science, the emphasis increasingly falls not on epochal changes of consciousness but on regional contexts or specific milieus. Here, new techniques of calculation and observation, and the improvisation of new scientific personae and institutions, give rise to sciences whose durability is secured by favourable cultural and political circumstances rather than by an epochal change of consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁴

Similar remarks apply to the second of Taylor's “Deistic” secularizing instruments: the anti-metaphysical historiography of theology and the church that Taylor identifies with Gibbon and to which he ascribes “disembedding” effects through its historicizing of the church and its relativizing of theological truth and falsity. In early modern Protestant Germany this radically anti-metaphysical historiography—among whose leading exponents were Jacob Thomasius, Johann Mosheim, Gottfried Arnold and Isaac de Beausobre—was the not the expression of an epochal anthropomorphic religiosity. It arose instead from the unexpected coalescence of two quite different intellectual sources, taking place in “regional” (Dutch and north German) cultural and political circumstances. On the one hand, this historiography drew heavily on the new humanistic forms of textual philology and biblical criticism through which previously sacred texts were treated as the historical products of particular times and places, often with devastating consequences for their prior holy status.Footnote ⁴⁵ In treating texts in this manner the new philology was certainly anthropocentric, but it was not anthropomorphic in the theological sense of treating the divine intellect and will as similar to or continuous with man's. On the other hand, in Protestant Germany this anti-metaphysical philology converged with the anti-metaphysical theology of Protestant pietism. This meant that philological–scientific insistence on the historicity of all texts found strong cultural–religious support in pietistic doctrines of man's incapacity to comprehend God's supposedly transcendental intellection of the cosmos.Footnote ⁴⁶ Far from being anthropomorphic, in defending its theology of faith and grace, German pietism insisted that God's intellect and will were separated from man's by an unbridgeable gulf, and it attacked scholastic metaphysics as anthropomorphic for positing a continuity here.Footnote ⁴⁷ In a typical outcome of this coalescence, Jacob Thomasius thus took over Lorenzo Valla's philological demonstration that Dionysius the Areopagite was a fifth-century (CE) neo-Platonist—hence that he could not have been converted by the apostle Paul, as claimed in Catholic tradition—and then used this to repudiate the (anthropomorphic) Platonist theology of the ‘pseudo-Dionysius’ as a post facto philosophical corruption of Christian faith.Footnote ⁴⁸

It was a result of this convergence between philology and pietism that university metaphysics—the scholastic teaching that the cosmos is shaped through God's intelligizing of its transcendent forms—was itself historicized. In the new historiography this doctrine was viewed as the historical product of the patristic miscegenation of Greek metaphysics (doctrine of the divine mind) and Christian faith (God's ex nihilo creation of the cosmos), and was tied contextually to the historical existence of the Greek philosophical schools and the scholastic universities.Footnote ⁴⁹ In treating metaphysical theologies as purely historical phenomena, incapable of truth (or falsity), this profane “contextual” historiography of philosophy provided a powerful weapon against the metaphysics used in such confessional formulas as the Formula of Concord and the Tridentine decrees. It allowed such metaphysics to be viewed not in terms of its own self-understanding—as the claimed participation in divine intellection—but as a purely historical teaching with effects in civil society: the doctrinalization of religion, for example, and the facilitation of mutually persecutory confessionalization.

In other words, despite the durability and importance of this historicization of theology and the church—which in certain regards parallels the durability of the natural sciences—early modern profane contextualizing historiography was not the instrument or effect of an epochal dislocation of church or society from their transcendent ontologies or archetypes. Rather, it emerged as a regional combat discipline one of whose key objectives was to show that the very notion that church or society might have such transcendent grounds is itself a historical product of the clericalist philosophical corruption of Christian faith. Seen in this light, Taylor's bid to reinstate the harmonization of Greek metaphysics and Christian doctrine—and to do so as a means of showing how the transcendent can still be understood as manifesting itself in empirical history—should be regarded as a counterattacking defence of metaphysics against its historicization, symptomatic, then, of a protracted and unfinished cultural battle.

In light of the preceding discussion, the third main phase or epoch of Taylor's narrative—the transition to a modernity characterized by the oscillation between unbelief and longing for a concealed transcendence—may be regarded as using a hermeneutic philosophical history to project a particular religious or cultural comportment onto a common “modernity” occupied by a collective “we”. Taylor achieves this by presenting an array of intellectual cultures that are themselves organized in terms of longing for concealed transcendence: Victorian cultural criticism, Schiller's philosophical aesthetics, and Romantic “sublime” symbology. He then treats these movements as half-conscious symptoms of the real disembedding of the transcendentals that he has ascribed to the “worldlification” of Reform Christianity during the Deistic epoch. Taylor can thus treat this aesthetic array as instrument, effect and evidence of the manner in which a banished transcendence, excluded by the secularizing “grid” of exclusive humanism—the “immanent frame”—nonetheless persists in manifesting itself as a disquieting presence in the empirical present, in the form of a “modern malaise” or “modern predicament”.

If, however, we attend to the regional character of such intellectual cultures—that is, to their grounding in concrete intellectual arts or “spiritual exercises” designed to establish a particular relation to and cultivation of the self—then a different picture comes into focus.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the case of Schiller's programme for harmonizing sensuousness or emotion with abstract reason, for example, there is no need to follow Taylor in treating this as if it were an attempt to re-embed the rationalism of the “buffered self” in a sacral body or community (312–17). In fact Schiller's aesthetic programme only makes sense as a local improvisation on and critique of Kant's ethical programme: one that substitutes the inner task of “balancing” reason and emotions for Kant's inner task of subjecting the “sensuous inclinations” to the commands of man's noumenal or rational being.Footnote ⁵¹ Seen historically, neither of these regimens is any closer to the truth of humanity (or the cosmos) than the other, as each only represents a particular way of grooming an aesthetically or ethically elevated personality, initially regional to the north German academic circles and sectarian aesthetic cults. Neither of them has any relation to a lost “ontic” human essence, as each is a discipline of ethical self-formation rooted in a moral pedagogy rather than in a moral ontology.Footnote ⁵² As a result, we can suggest that far from being felt as a “malaise” by all “moderns”, the longing for a lost transcendence, or the pining for a lost embodiment in sensuous feeling, are felt only by those highly educated groupings whose members have learned to cultivate themselves through the duplex anthropology of reason and feeling in order to shape themselves in accordance with it.

Can we apply the same sort of historicizing approach to Taylor's own longing for the disembedded transcendentals, embodied self, sacral community, and metaphysically significant cosmos? Taylor would, of course, reply that, unlike Schillerian sensuousness or Kantian noumena, his transcendentals—such things as the Aristotelian conception of virtue or the Platonic conception of the cosmos as the “Forms in realization'”—are “ontic”. This would mean that his longing is no mere practice of self-cultivation but an authentic orientation to a real metaphysical “world we have lost”. Hopefully the preceding discussion will have shown the insufficiency of such a response. After all, since at least the middle of the seventeenth century there has been a historiography in which Taylor's transcendentals—the Aristotelian embedded forms, the Platonically emanated forms of the divine intellect—have themselves been treated as local historical teachings. In the light cast by this historiography, the lost transcendentals appear not as the founding lapsus in a history of secular modernity, but as the initiating precept in a spiritual exercise designed to form the prophetic hermeneut who will find them.

In situating itself as heir to that early modern anti-metaphysical historiography of philosophy, the present essay has sought to show that Taylor's philosophical history of secularization as the “worldlification” of “Reform Christianity” should be treated as an extended “spiritual exercise” in which the loss of the transcendentals is presented in the form of an imaginal narrative history. Taylor's mythopoeic narrative provides the discursive means for his readers to relate to themselves as beings whom the “great disembedding” of the transcendentals has stranded in a desacralized disciplinary society inhabited by atomistic individuals: provides them, that is, with the discursive means of shaping their ethical selves around longing for membership in a lost, hence recoverable, sacralizing community. In renarrating a key part of Taylor's history we have canvassed an extensive and multifaceted empirical historiography which indicates that rather than being symptomatic of an epochal sublimation of religion, political secularization in early modern Germany represented a regional and contested response to the phenomenon of the confessional state. If Taylor's book is heir to that contestation then so too is the present paper, but from the other side, leaving us with the question whether an empirical contextual historiography might yet have roots in a regional anti-metaphysical cultural politics.Footnote ⁵³