Modern Intellectual History, 8, 3 (2011), pp.

621646
doi:10.1017/S1479244311000370


C Cambridge University Press 2011

charles taylors a secular age

and secularization in early
modern germany
ian hunter
Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland
E-mail: i.hunter@uq.edu.au

from philosophical history to the history

of historiography
In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylors 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.1 Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylors 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.2 Taylor delivers this history in his
reform master narrative: that certain fundamental religious and cultural

Research for this article was made possible by the award of an Australian Professorial
Fellowship. I am grateful to Wayne Hudson for sharing his insights into the issues raised,
and to the journals two anonymous readers for their comments on the first version.
Historiographic discussions of Taylors book have been somewhat thin on the ground.
But see J. Butler, Disquieted History in A Secular Age, in M. Warner, J. VanAntwerpen
and C. Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2010),
193216; and J. Sheehan, When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age, in
ibid., 21742.
P. E. Gordon, The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylors A Secular
Age, Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008), 64773, 64950. Cf. also R. C. Miner, Suarez

621

622 ian hunter

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 mans autonomous rationality through
timefrom Lockes uncovering of a Socinian reasonable Christianity, through
Warburtons Whiggish history of the emergence of a non-political church, to
Priestleys treatment of the Reformation as the birth of a free reason that might
even disprove Christianity itselfthe 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,
Kants version feeds into the twentieth-century post-Protestant philosophical
rationalism that forms neo-Thomisms main historical rival.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 theologiesCatholic
neo-Thomist versus Protestant rationalistthen it is possible that their success in
sublimating theology into philosophy has been overestimated, and that they are

as Founder of Modernity? Reflections on a Topos in Recent Historiography, History of

Philosophy Quarterly 18 (2001), 1736.
See, in particular, W. Sparn, Kants Doctrine of Atonement as a Theory of Subjectivity,
in P. J. Rossi and M. Wreen, eds., Kants Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered (Indianapolis,
1991), 10312. See also I. Hunter, Kants Religion and Prussian Religious Policy, Modern
Intellectual History 2 (2005), 127; and, more generally, J. Milbank, The Invocation of
Clio, in his The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, OR, 2009), 175220,
18797.

charles taylors a secular age

in fact ways of continuing to wage theological war by other means.4 Second, if the
rival philosophicalhistorical constructions of secularization are not themselves
foundationalin the sense of arising either from the historical disembedding of
reason from mans embodied nature, or from the progressive refinement of his
rational beingthen 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 secularizationwhich seems to me the
one most finely tuned to the contextual nexus linking academic constructions to
concrete religious and political programmesI have drawn principally from two
fundamental studies by Martin Heckel.5 Surprisingly absent from anglophone
discussions, and perhaps more cited than exemplified in germanophone work,
Heckels 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 GermanLutheran cultural tradition, making
Heckels approach significantly different from both neo-Thomist and neoKantian philosophical historiographies. As the pre-eminent historian of German
Staatskirchenrechtconstitutional law of the church and religionHeckel
provides an insiders 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, Heckels intimate history brings with it the limits that come with
belonging to the tradition that one is investigating.
At the risk of oversimplifying Heckels 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 Lowith 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

4
5

See Milbank, The Invocation of Clio, 17581.

M. Heckel, Das Sakularisierungsproblem in der Entwicklung des deutschen
Staatskirchenrechts, in G. Dilcher and I. Staff, eds., Christentum und modernes Recht.
Beitrage zum Problem der Sakularisation (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 3595; and M.
Heckel, Sakularisierung: Staatskirchenrechtliche Aspekte einer umstrittenen Kategorie,
in Martin Heckel Gesammelte Schriften: Staat, Kirche, Recht, Geschichte, ed. K. Schlaich
(Tubingen, 1989), 773911.

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624 ian hunter

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.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.7 Specifically it was the German
public-law discipline of Staatskirchenrecht, embracing both the imperial public
church law flowing from two fundamental religious peace treatiesof Augsburg
(1555) and Osnabruck (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.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.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

6
7
8

Heckel, Das Sakularisierungsproblem, 3549; Heckel, Sakularisierung, 7736.

Heckel, Das Sakularisierungsproblem, 5055; Heckel, Sakularisierung, 78993.
For an overview see M. Stolleis, Geschichte des offentlichen Rechts in Deutschland. Erster
Band: Reichspublizistik und Policeywissenschaft 16001800 (Munich, 1988), 126267.
M. Heckel, Religionsbann und landesherrliches Kirchenregiment, in H.-C. Rublack, ed.,
Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland (Gutersloh, 1992), 13062.

charles taylors a secular age

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 philosophicalhistorical reconstructions. The most important of
these were Kants construction of secularization as the progressive realization
of rational being; Hegels 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
states moral foundations.10 In attempting to deal with the chasm between these
philosophical histories of secularization and the empires 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.11 Others attempted to incorporate their philosophical histories as
Weltanschauungen into the ideological platforms of rival religious and secularist
political partiessuch as those championed (respectively) by the right and left
Hegelianswith a view to overturning the constitutional religious order by
installing either a Christian or a secularist party state.12
Heckels 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, Taylors 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
10
11
12

Heckel, Das Sakularisierungsproblem, 5972; Heckel, Sakularisierung, 79389.

Heckel, Sakularisierung, 80022.
Ibid., 82262.

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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 Taylors A Secular
Age, I will begin by outlining the main features of his philosophical history
of secularizationfocusing in particular on his account of the crucial early
modern periodthen 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 Taylors philosophical hermeneutics.

taylors 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.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
unbeliefin fact the conditions of the worldlification of religionare also
foundational for political and sociological constructions of secularity.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 navely within a
theistic construal, to one in which we all shunt between two stances, in which
everyones construal shows up as such; and in which moreover, unbelief has
become for many the major default option? (14). Taylors 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 nineteenthand twentieth-century philosophical history.
Taylors all-consuming question thus issues in an account in which a
philosophically and theologically driven movement of Christian Reform
invertsor is sublimatedinto an epochal secularization of consciousness that
13
14

C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 13. All further references given in text.
Jon Butler makes a similar point. See Butler, Disquieted History, 1956.

charles taylors a secular age

carries with it the totality of culture, society and state. This account contrasts
strongly not just with Heckels 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.15 In treating modernity as an epochal totality arising from the
secularization or worldlification of its supposed theological or metaphysical
foundations, Taylors 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.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, Taylors
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 conditiona spiritual
predicamentin 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 domainand vice versathe crisis moment for which is
provided by the Protestant Reformation. In this regard, like Alasdair MacIntyres
similar construction, Taylors Thomistic lapsarian history is the inverted image

15

16

For a helpful overview see D. Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory
(Aldershot, 2005), 4790.
On the theme of multiple modernities see J. G. A. Pocock, Perceptions of Modernity
in Early Modern Historical Thinking, Intellectual History Review 17 (2007), 7992; D.
Martin, Secularisation and the Future of Christianity, Journal of Contemporary Religion
20 (2005), 14560; and, more generally, S. N. Eisenstadt, Mulitple Modernities, Daedalus
129 (2000), 129.

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of progressivist Kantian philosophical history;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.18
Taylors pre-lapsarian era is characterized by the embeddedness of temporal
phenomena in transcendent principles or realitiesGod, the Platonic forms, the
spiritual community of gods and menand vice versa (257). He asserts that
there was a timepossibly from late antiquity until the late Middle Ageswhen
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 (257):
I have been drawing a portrait of the world we have lost, one in which spiritual forces
impinged on porous agents, in which the social was grounded in the sacred and secular
time in higher times,a society moreover in which the play of structure and anti-structure
was held in equilibrium; and this human drama unfolded within a cosmos. All of this has
been dismantled and replaced by something quite different in the transformation that we
often roughly call disenchantment. (61)

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,
Taylors 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 (2875). Taylor characterizes the modern moral order as

17

18

For MacIntyres version see A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre
Dame, 1981); and, for germane comment, K. Reames, Metaphysics, History, and Moral
Philosophy: The Centrality of the 1990 Aquinas Lecture to MacIntyres Argument for
Thomism, The Thomist 62 (1998), 41943.
See Hunter, Kants Religion.

charles taylors a secular age

secular in the sense of being grounded in a exclusive humanism, focused

solely on autonomous mans temporal flourishing, from which all transcendent
realities have been banished. He also insists that this development cannot be
understood as a subtraction storywith secularity treated as the residuum
left after the stripping away of religionas secularity is itself the sublimated
form of a particular (Protestant) kind of religion (22). Here we again encounter
Taylors version of the nineteenth-century philosophical history of secularity as
the outcome of the worldlification of religion. Taylors 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 philosophicalhistorical
hermeneutic.
The first of Taylors 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 (14658). 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 modernitywhere Reform crystallizes
into the Protestant ReformationReform Christianity is understood in quasiWeberian 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 (7588).
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).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.20 This lays the philosophicalhistorical groundwork
19
20

See Miner, Suarez as Founder of Modernity?.

There is a strong similarity between this account of the origins of a secularized disciplinary
society and that offered by the representatives of Anglo-Catholic radical orthodoxy. See

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630 ian hunter

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 discussesNewtonian science,
neo-Stoic discipline and Eliass taming of the warrior nobility, the pedagogical
programmes of Reformation churches and statesare thus epiphenomenal.
Their disenchanting and disciplining powers are only the instruments and
effects of the Christianascetic reform of daily life and the nominalistvoluntarist
theology that is supposed to have driven the Reform process.
Taylors second historical stage in the unfolding of secularity and modern
unbelief is a transitional one that he associates with the seventeenth-century
English Deist movementBlount, Toland, Collins, Tindal, and Herbert of
Cherburyalbeit under a very general construal (22169). For Taylor, the role
of Deism is to function as the tipping pointthe moment of worldlifying
inversion or sublimationat 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 (22134). 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 Deisms 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 GalileanNewtonian physics and cosmology whose objectifying
C. Pickstock, After Writing (Oxford, 1998), 12166; and J. Milbank, A Closer Walk on the
Wild Side, in Warner, VanAntwerpen and Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism, 5482, 719.

charles taylors a secular age

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 (27095). This, Taylor
argues, is what allowed the Deists to deny Gods 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 (27275). 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 Taylors own combative method that he ascribes
this anti-metaphysical historiographic sensibility not just to Gibbon and the
Deists, but also to Gibbons twentieth-century editor, the historian Hugh TrevorRoper (2723).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 metaphysicsin which
the world arises when a philosophical god imbues prime matter with the forms of
his divine intellectionand 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 historicalcultural 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.22 In
a striking symptomatic demonstration of the fact that this culturalreligious
21

22

Taylor does not discuss the pre-eminent modern reception of Gibbon: J. G. A. Pococks
Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 19992005).
See the fundamental studies by R. Hafner, Jacob Thomasius und die Geschichte der
Haresien, in F. Vollhardt, ed., Christian Thomasius (16551728): Neue Forschungen im
Kontext der Fruhaufklarung (Tubingen, 1997), 14164; S. Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit in der
Weltgeschichte: Philosophiegeschichte zwischen Barok und Aufklarung (Tubingen, 2004); M.
Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Fruhaufklarung in Deutschland 16801720
(Hamburg, 2002); and volume 2 of Pococks Barbarism and Religion, Narratives of Civil

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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 pairsthe transcendent and the immanent,
the timeless and the temporal, the intellect and the body or emotionsare
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 (27580).
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 philosophicalhistorical
method. This is because Taylors narrative itself treats historical eventssuch
as those associated with political secularization, Newtonian science, Deist
anthropomorphizingas 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.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 Taylors 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 Gods 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) (32140).

23

Government (Cambridge, 1999). See also I. Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional
State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge, 2007), 6173.
See, in this regard, Taylors critique of Quentin Skinner for refusing to conceive historical
development in accordance with the temporal unfolding of transcendental truth: C. Taylor,
The Hermeneutics of Conflict, in J. Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner
and His Critics (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 21828.

charles taylors a secular age

According to Taylor, it is this new cosmic imaginary that opens the gate to a
whole array of new positions in the field of unbeliefwhat he calls the nova
effectin 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 (35276). From this supposedly latent presence of a lost
higher metaphysical order, Taylor extrapolates what he calls the modern malaise
or modern predicamenta 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 (377401). 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 (40712). At this point, we have entered
Taylors 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 Westare 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 secularizationaccording to which secular
reason and a scientific world emerge from the negative stripping away of
unjustified or superstitious religious and metaphysical beliefsTaylor 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 experiencedthe
buffered self, the disenchanted or objectified worldwhile 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

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orienting his philosophical history to the real metaphysical world we have

misplaced. Somewhat ironically, then, Taylors 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, ifaccording to the subtraction story about which Taylor rightly
complainsthe secular is what is left when religion is stripped away from a
self-grounding rationality, then, in Taylors inverted version, the sacred is what
is left when secular culture is stripped away from a self-grounding ontotheology.
Taylors 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 Taylors 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 Taylors 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 broadchurch AnglicanProtestant confession to be enshrined in common law and
embedded in the two old universities, thereby constituting the culturalpolitical
centre from which various forms of religious heterodoxy and political dissent
measured their distance.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
24

J. C. D. Clark, English Society 16601832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien
Regime, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2000), 43123; idem, Protestantism, Nationalism, and
National Identity, 16601832, Historical Journal 43 (2000), 24976.

charles taylors a secular age

a multiform one in which different territories and cities were able to develop
their own religious settlements and cultures.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.26 Early modern Germany thus provides the richer
array of theological and political culturesin particular the clashes between
realist metaphysics and theological voluntarism, transcendent and immanent
conceptions of political societythat is presumed by Taylors 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 secularizationits focus on interactions of religion,
politics, law and philosophy in a series of open-ended religious and political
strugglesmakes it highly corrosive of Taylors philosophical history of a secular
epoch.
Let us go straight to Taylors 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.27 From the middle of the sixteenth century,
central Western Europe was subject to a series of overlapping rival waves of

25

26

27

For a revealing overview see R. von Friedeburg and M. J. Seidler, The Holy Roman Empire
of the German Nation, in H. A. Lloyd, G. Burgess and S. Hodson, eds., European Political
Thought 14501700: Religion, Law and Philosophy (New Haven and London, 2008), 10272.
Illuminating insights into this variety are provided in H. Dreitzel, Politische Philosophie,
in H. Holzhey and W. Schmidt-Biggemann, eds., Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, Band
4: Das heilige Romische Reich deutscher Nation, Nord- und Ostmitteleuropa (Basel, 2001),
607726; and W. Sparn, Die Schulphilosophie in den lutherischen Territorien, in ibid.,
47597.
For helpful overviews of the main forms of confessionalization see H. Schilling,
Confessional Europe, in T. A. J. Brady, H. A. Oberman and J. D. Tracy, eds., Handbook
of European History 14001600: Latin Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 2,
Visions, Programs and Outcomes (Leiden, 1995), 641682; E. W. Zeeden, Konfessionsbildung:

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reformationLutheran, Catholic, and Calvinistin 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.28 A number of the key
features of these confessionalizing programmes are at radical variance to some
of Taylors central claims.29
In the first place, while a voluntarist and anti-intellectualist theology did
indeed play an important role for some confessionalizing groupsespecially for
the fideist and pietist wings of the major confessionsthis 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
theologiestheologies teaching that the temporal world is shaped by Gods
transcendent intellection of its formsplayed a no less important role in many
of the confessionalizing programmes, including Protestant ones, which were
supported by a Protestant scholasticism.30 This is particularly clear in the case of
seventeenth-century Lutheran Saxony, where a highly realist and intellectualist
official confessionthe Formula of Concordwas centred on an authoritative
metaphysical explication of how divine being is united with human being in

28

29

30

Studien zur Reformation, Gegenreformation und katholischen Reform (Stuttgart, 1985); and
Rublack, Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland.
W. Reinhard, Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des
konfessionellen Zeitalters, Zeitschrift fur Historische Forschung 10 (1983), 25777; H.
Schilling, Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich: Religioser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in
Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620, Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988), 145. Reinhards
and Schillings approach has been criticized by scholars questioning their emphasis
on the state and top-down confessionalization, and arguing instead for the selfconfessionalizing capacity of local religious communities. See, for example, R. C. Head,
Catholics and Protestants in Graubunden: Confessional Discipline and Confessional
Identities without an Early Modern State?, German History 17 (1999), 32145; and
H. R. Schmidt, Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Playdoyer fur das Ende des Etatismus in
der Konfessionalisierungforschung, Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1997), 63982. While
significant, these modifications of the confessionalization paradigm have no direct bearing
on the present argument.
The following remarks also largely apply to the similar claims of the radical orthodoxy
writers mentioned in note 20 above.
For important analysis and evidence regarding the confessionalizing deployment of
intellectualist metaphysical theologies in Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran programs,
consult Holzhey and Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, Band 4,
specifically the sections by P. R. Blum and V. Mudroch, Die Schulphilosophie in den
katholischen Territorien (30291); W. Schmidt-Biggemann, Die Schulphilosophie in
den reformierten Territorien (392474); and W. Sparn, Die Schulphilosophie in den
lutherischen Territorien (475587).

charles taylors a secular age

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.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 Taylors 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.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,33
so too could the realist metaphysics of a clergy rendered holy by privileged

31

32

33

For the circumstances in which early Lutheran voluntarism and fideism were academically
contested though the confessionally driven return of a fully fledged ontological
metaphysics see the classic study by W. Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: Die ontologische
Frage in der lutherischen Theologie des fruhen 17. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1976). On the use
of the Formula of Concord in confessionalizing programmes see I. Mager, Aufnahme und
Ablehnung des Konkordienbuches in Nord- Mittel- und Ostdeutschland, in M. Brecht,
R. Schwarz and H. W. Krumwiede, eds., Bekenntnis und Einheit der Kirche (Stuttgart,
1980), 271302. For the manner in which the Formula of Concord was embedded in Saxon
consistorial and criminal lawincluding the law of heresy and witchcraftsee P. Landau,
Carpzov, das Protestantische Kirchenrecht und die fruhneuzeitliche Gesellschaft, in G.
Jerouschek, W. Schild and W. Gropp, eds., Benedict Carpzov: Neue Perspektiven zu einem
umstrittenen sachsischen Juristen (Tubingen, 2000), 22756.
For more on the depreciation of doctrinal theology and the appreciation of the historical
importance of practices of piety, see the essays in H-J. Nieden and M. Nieden, eds., Praxis
Pietatis: Bietrage zu Theologie und Frommigkeit in der Fruhen Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1999).
See the fascinating study of the exercise of Calvinist ecclesial and civil discipline in Emden
by a presbyterial town council, in H. Schilling, Sundenzucht und fruhneuzeitliche
Sozialdisziplinierung: Die calvinistische, presbyteriale Kirchenzucht in Emden vom
16. bis 19. Jahrhundert, in G. Schmidt, ed., Stande und Gesellschaft im Alten Reich
(Stuttgart, 1989), 265302. For a parallel exercise of ecclesial and civil authority by the

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access to the transcendentals.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 authoritycontemplative,
quietistic, monasticwith 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. Taylors neo-Thomist
before-and-after storyin which transcendental intellectualist theologies have
both normative and chronological priority over the voluntarist theologies that
have supposedly excluded them from the immanent framecan 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.35 Taylors 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.

34

35

anti-metaphysical Prussian Pietists see C. Hinrichs, Preuentum und Pietismus: Der

Pietismus in Brandenberg-Preuen als religios-soziale Reformbewegung (Gottingen, 1971).
See the discussion of the role of the Jesuit political theologian Adam Contzen as spiritual
confessor and political adviser to Maximillian of Bavaria during the Thirty Years War, in R.
Bireley, Hofbeichtvater und Politik im 17. Jahrhundert, in M. Sievernich and G. Switek,
eds., Ignatianisch: Eigenart und Methode der Gesellschaft Jesu (Freiburg, 1989), 386403.
See also the account of the political deployment of Lutheran scholastic metaphysics in
Saxony in Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State, 3445, 5483.
Cf. Pocock, Perceptions of Modernity; and Martin, Secularisation and the Future of
Christianity.

charles taylors a secular age

From these all-too-brief remarks on the first stage of Taylors 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
Taylors 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 civilpedagogical 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 Taylors sacralized or sacramental
societyin 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.36 If specifically
political programs of secularization began to emerge in this contextthat is,
programmes characterized by various attempts to disarticulate the forms of
spiritual and civil authority, the ecclesial and political communitiesthen 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.37
Several of these points can be further developed by returning to the second
main stage of Taylors 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
36

37

H. Schilling, Confessionalisation and the Rise of Religious and Cultural Frontiers in Early
eds., Frontiers of Faith: Religious Exchange
Modern Europe, in E. Andor and I. G. Toth,
and the Constitution of Religious Identities 14001750 (Budapest, 2001), 2135.
Cf. M. Stolleis, Religion und Politik im Zeitalter des Barock. Konfessionalisierung oder
Sakularisierung bei der Entstehung des fruhmodernen Staates?, in D. Breuer, B. BeckerCantarino, H. Schilling and W. Sparn, eds., Religion und Religiositat im Zeitalter des
Barock (Wiesbaden, 1995), 2342; H. Dreitzel, Christliche Aufklarung durch furstlichen
Absolutismus. Thomasius und die Destruktion des fruhneuzeitlichen Konfessionsstaates,
in Vollhardt, ed., Christian Thomasius, 1750; and Heckel, Das Sakularisierungproblem.

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anti-sacramental anthropomorphic ethicsin which God enunciates rational

moral rules already implicit in mans self-governing reasonand 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, Taylors 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 Deismthe 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 historiographyprove 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 Taylora movement unified by a shared ethico-religious sensibility
and rationalistic outlookand 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.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) politicaltheological possibilities
of anti-Trinitarian thought.39 On the other hand, if we look at the public faces of
political secularization in late seventeenth-century Protestant Germanyfigures
such as Johann Becmann, Samuel Pufendorf, and Christian Thomasiusthen
their theological outlook bears little resemblance to Taylors 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 mans corrupted understanding, and in which salvation is to be sought in
gratuitous grace.40

38

39
40

See the illuminating studies by W. Hudson, The English Deists: Studies in Early
Enlightenment (London, 2008).
M. Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund, 85114.
On Pufendorfs theological outlook see D. Doring, Pufendorf-Studien. Beitrage zur
Biographie Samuel von Pufendorfs und zu seiner Entwicklung als Historiker und theologischer
Schriftsteller (Berlin, 1992). For Thomasiuss see T. Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the

charles taylors a secular age

This anti-rationalist pietistic Lutheranism was in part associated with

Pufendorfs and Thomasiuss 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 publiclaw 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.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 GalileanNewtonian scientific revolution, with its supposed
objectifying disenchantment of the cosmos. Thomasius, for example, remained
attached to a version of Renaissance PlatonicHermetic 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 worldeven if he

41

German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian
Thomasius (Rochester, 2006).
On the contextually specific reciprocity between Pufendorfs and Thomasiuss antimetaphysical pietistic theology and their Hobbesian politics and public law, see D.
Doring, Sakularisierung und Moraltheologie bei Samuel von Pufendorf, Zeitschrift fur
Theologie und Kirche 90 (1993), 15674; Dreitzel, Christliche Aufklarung durch furstlichen
Absolutismus; and Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State, 11341.

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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.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.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.44
Similar remarks apply to the second of Taylors 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 antimetaphysical historiographyamong whose leading exponents were Jacob
Thomasius, Johann Mosheim, Gottfried Arnold and Isaac de Beausobrewas
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

42
43

44

Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State, 6971.

See H. Dreitzel, Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart der Eklektischen Philosophie, Zeitschrift
fur Historische Forschung 18 (1991), 281343; and U. J. Schneider, Eclecticism Rediscovered,
Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998), 173182.
See the illuminating studies in S. Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science
and the Shaping of Modernity 12101685 (Oxford, 2006); and K. Park and L. Daston, eds.,
The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2006).

charles taylors a secular age

and places, often with devastating consequences for their prior holy status.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 mans. On the other hand, in Protestant
Germany this anti-metaphysical philology converged with the anti-metaphysical
theology of Protestant pietism. This meant that philologicalscientific insistence
on the historicity of all texts found strong culturalreligious support in pietistic
doctrines of mans incapacity to comprehend Gods supposedly transcendental
intellection of the cosmos.46 Far from being anthropomorphic, in defending its
theology of faith and grace, German pietism insisted that Gods intellect and will
were separated from mans by an unbridgeable gulf, and it attacked scholastic
metaphysics as anthropomorphic for positing a continuity here.47 In a typical
outcome of this coalescence, Jacob Thomasius thus took over Lorenzo Vallas
philological demonstration that Dionysius the Areopagite was a fifth-century
(CE) neo-Platonisthence that he could not have been converted by the apostle
Paul, as claimed in Catholic traditionand then used this to repudiate the
(anthropomorphic) Platonist theology of the pseudo-Dionysius as a post facto
philosophical corruption of Christian faith.48
It was a result of this convergence between philology and pietism that
university metaphysicsthe scholastic teaching that the cosmos is shaped
through Gods intelligizing of its transcendent formswas 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 (Gods ex nihilo creation of the cosmos), and
was tied contextually to the historical existence of the Greek philosophical
schools and the scholastic universities.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
45
46

47

48

49

Hafner, Jacob Thomasius and die Geschichte der Haresien.

R. Hafner, Das Erknenntnisproblem in der Philologie um 1700. Zum Verhaltnis von
Polymathie und Aporetik bei Jacob Friedrich Reimman, Christian Thomasius und Johann
Albert Fabricius, in his Philologie und Erkenntnis: Beitrage zu Begriff und Problem
fruhneuzeitlicher Philologie (Tubingen, 2001), 95128.
W. Sparn, Philosophie, in H. Lehmann, ed., Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten (Gottingen,
2004), 22763.
J. Thomasius, Schediasma historicum (Leipzig, 1665), 52. Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit in
der Weltgeschichte, 7782.
Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit in der Weltgeschichte, 721; Mulsow, Moderne aus dem
Untergrund, 261307.

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terms of its own self-understandingas the claimed participation in divine

intellectionbut 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 churchwhich in certain regards parallels the durability of
the natural sciencesearly 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, Taylors bid to reinstate the harmonization of Greek metaphysics and
Christian doctrineand to do so as a means of showing how the transcendent
can still be understood as manifesting itself in empirical historyshould 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
Taylors narrativethe transition to a modernity characterized by the oscillation
between unbelief and longing for a concealed transcendencemay 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, Schillers 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
humanismthe immanent framenonetheless 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 selfthen
a different picture comes into focus.50 In the case of Schillers programme for
harmonizing sensuousness or emotion with abstract reason, for example, there
50

On this approach to the history of philosophy and aesthetics see P. Hadot, Philosophy
as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. M. Chase (Oxford,

charles taylors a secular age

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 (31217).
In fact Schillers aesthetic programme only makes sense as a local improvisation
on and critique of Kants ethical programme: one that substitutes the inner
task of balancing reason and emotions for Kants inner task of subjecting the
sensuous inclinations to the commands of mans noumenal or rational being.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.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 Taylors 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 transcendentalssuch things
as the Aristotelian conception of virtue or the Platonic conception of the cosmos
as the Forms in realizationare 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 Taylors
transcendentalsthe Aristotelian embedded forms, the Platonically emanated
forms of the divine intellecthave 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

51

52

1995); and M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France
19811982, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell (New York, 2006).
For more, see I. Hunter, The Morals of Metaphysics: Kants Groundwork as Intellectual
Paideia, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002), 90829; and idem, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies,
in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York, 1992),
34767.
This issue is also discussed, from a different perspective, in S. During, Completing
Secularism: The Mundane in the Neo-Liberal Era, in Warner, VanAntwerpen and
Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism, 10525.

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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 Taylors 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. Taylors
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 Taylors 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 Taylors 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.53

53

For some relevant discussion, see J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner: The History of
Politics and the Politics of History, Common Knowledge 10 (2004), 53250, 54750; C.
Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago, 2004); I. Hunter, The State of History and the
Empire of Metaphysics, History and Theory 44 (2005), 289303.