NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 75, Issue 3/4, 2021

The idea of a Catholic modernity, first introduced by Charles Taylor in 1996, offers a third “grand strategy” of relating modernity and religion (transcendence) in our time. In this introduction, the project is presented: six leading authors from different religious traditions (David and Bernice Martin, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Cummings Neville, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jonathan Boyarin) examine the idea of a Catholic modernity and Taylor responds to their reflections and looks back 25 years on.

After a critical examination of western master narratives of modernization and secularization, David Martin focuses, first, on one of the variants of Christian modernity, Anglican modernity. The Anglican Church provides a simulacrum of the universal church as it ranges from the Catholic to the Evangelical and Pentecostal and is, hence, rigged also by many of the problems confronting the church in the contemporary world. Next, Martin considers some examples of unanchored spirituality and free-floating faith that have, in his opinion, no serious future as major expressions of Christianity—he discusses, in particular, Schumann’s paradigm of Romantic music. Though inevitably fallible, churches are to be regarded as pointers to transcendence, opening, in the words of William Blake, “the doors of perception.” Without the institutional church to protect and perpetuate the Christian language of transcendence and provide ritual re-enactment of the Christian story of ruin and restoration, the Anglican/Christian vision would be as vulnerable and ephemeral as most contemporary forms of non-institutional, un-anchored “spirituality” [the editors].

There are somewhere between 200 million and 600 million Pentecostal/ Charismatic Christians in the world today. Most of them live in the “majority world,” and two thirds are women. Pentecostals are proud of being modern and frequently boast of it. Yet “Pentecostal modernity” is not a straightforward clone of the intellectual and political history of Europe and the North Atlantic. It contains paradoxical elements that can be plausibly interpreted as evidence of purposefully moral selectiveness by Pentecostals among the items in the “modern” cultural program. They in effect help to “heal the wounds of modernity.” This account of Pentecostal modernity also seeks to show that in two particular respects Pentecostal modernity might be considered a “correction” of Charles Taylor’s western model of modernity: in regarding human flourishing as spiritually sanctioned; and in retaining a porous model of the self, vertically open to possession by the Spirit or by forces of evil, and horizontally open by retaining some “dividual” characteristics of embeddedness with others.

This essay first outlines the distinctive and significant features of Taylor’s interpretation of modernity and secularization, especially, his emphasis on the immanent frame within a naturalism closed to transcendence. The essay then offers some different perspectives, not intended as a critique of Taylor, but rather to underscore elements in need of greater emphasis. My perspective acknowledges more lines of continuity between modernity and previous times. Traditional theological affirmations of infinity, omnipresence, and creativity have in the past spurred negative and apophatic theologies. They have also sought an interpretation of transcendence as embedded in the world of nature and human life in ways that point to the sacral and sacramental character of the world and human behavior. These interpretations can be retrieved to think the modern world as suffused with transcendence. Transcendence is not closed to modern buffered selves. Many exemplify a transcendence that goes beyond their own interests. They are aware of their finitude and realize that transcendence is a mystery.

I want to engage Taylor with a comparative Confucian vision of modernity. In order to do this, I need to present a metaphysics which can serve as a framework for comparisons necessary for a global philosophical historical perspective on modernity and transcendence and in which, in particular, I can represent both Christian and Confucian categories as alternative specifications of ultimate reality. Using non-personalistic metaphors of spontaneous emergence and stressing (dis)harmonies, Confucian philosophy gives its own specification of the ultimate conditions of human life. This will allow me to sketch how Confucian modernists might engage with modernity. I will thus defend in Confucian terms Taylor’s claim that genuine religious transcendence is possible within the conditions of modernity.

Taylor characterizes Western modernity as being very inhospitable to the transcendent, yet also as opening an opportunity for a renewed engagement with the transcendent from within modernity. This debate is also vivid in Islam and I will reconstruct it by focusing on the concept of time (dahr). Some strains in Islam condemned the posture of maximizing the “flourishing of life” within the limits of (a life)time as dahriya because it would, in their eyes, constitute a rejection altogether of the transcendent. This position was seen as the quintessence of “the philosophers” (al Ghazali) and of Western modernity (al Afghani). Opposing this view, I will then explain how and why I can make a rapprochement between Charles Taylor’s proposal of a “Catholic modernity” and Islamic modernity through the lenses of Muhammad Iqbal’s philosophy of time. Through his analysis of the hadith “Do not vilify time, because time is God,” Iqbal shows that time (dahr) should not be considered as the antithesis of transcendence, but that in time, from within dahr, transcendence is present: in “creative evolution” (Bergson), life is not enclosed in immanence, but on the contrary God is manifesting himself under his name dahr.

For two main reasons, I am not much tempted to articulate a “Jewish modernity” analogous to “a Catholic modernity” as presented by Charles Taylor. First, modernity is “lost”. In the last decades, dreams of a bright secular future of modernity (“later is better”) have collapsed. This affects also the possible role one envisages for non-scientific allegiances and worldviews. It renders this engagement with Taylor seem almost nostalgic or retrospective. Second, I have reservations about many of the concepts Taylor is using. Some of them, like theology and transcendence, are specific to a tradition in ways that must be specified. Others, like religion, the secular and modernity, likewise demand more definite settings. Taylor’s generous Catholicism, extending to the (pre-Christian) past, is a post-Catholicism as it attempts, like various post-Judaisms, to find a new place for Catholicism in a modernity characterized by skepticism and naturalism. Finally, Taylor’s critique of “rights talk” is contrasted to a Jewish notion of mutual obligation.

In this essay, I comment on the contributions of the six authors who have critically reflected on my notion of a ‘Catholic Modernity’ from their own perspectives. Selecting particular issues from these authors to comment on was challenging due to the richness of each contribution. I comment, among others, on the crucial question of religious violence and intolerance in our world and the related issue of how to deal with pluralism among and within religions: we can no longer identify a particular religion with “its” civilization or nation, be it in the form of Christendom, Islamicate, or religious nationalism.

This essay develops central themes which I have originally set out in my lecture “A Catholic Modernity?” of 1996. I extend those initial reflections by offering further considerations which I have elucidated over the last 25 years. These include the significance of understanding disenchantment and unbundling in coming to terms with the changes involved in modernity. I also sketch a multi-layered hermeneutical approach for “reading the signs of the times” from a Christian perspective.

In a time when the two major strategies followed by Christian religious traditions in modernity have lost traction—Christendom and subcultural isolation on the one hand and liberal and socialist assimilation with modernity on the other hand—Charles Taylor’s Catholic modernity idea opens up a “third grand strategy,” a new perspective on the relationship between religion and modernity. Moreover, the perspective can be put to use in other religious traditions as well. We will, hence, argue for the extension from a Catholic modernity to a religious modernities perspective. With the help of the arguments and suggestions as well as the critiques put forward by Taylor and the other authors in this volume Modernity and Transcendence, we will chart some of the main axes of this vast research field: (1) the clarification of Catholic/religious modernity; (2) the generalization of the Catholic modernity idea into a religious modernities perspective; (3) the invention of an inspiring, post-Christendom Christianity/post-fusional religion and theology; (4) the issue of religious engagement in our time—what Taylor calls “the Ricci project”; (5 and 6) the need for encompassing theories of modernity and religion (transcendence).