When I was fourteen, I asked a girl I knew ‘do you really believe all that stuff?’ about, in essence, the whole of Christianity. I’m just one person, and not a particularly important one, but perhaps this incident contains something of interest when trying to understand secularisation in our era.
I too concur with most of what has been said but also find the need to refine some of the terms proposed in the text, especially in order to keep the question open: How does a 14 year old of today or tomorrow recognise and indeed take interest in a saint?
What constitutes human flourishing? I agree that a saint is the remarkable, rare example of a blossomed human being. But not because he/she is “good”. I find such viewpoint still tied to the moral canons that most churches frame the mystery of becoming.
To say that saints are able to “Place God before humanity” is perhaps not sufficiently inclusive. Yes in the sense of daring to transcend the societal norms of the day; the common sense and above all the fear that has many humans in fetters. But “ God before humanity” might continue to propagate a false disjunction between “human” and “divine” (often reinforced by religious doctrines).
In my understanding humanity is not a static reality nor is is antithetical with the divine. A saint is one who is less in a quest for being good, but in a quest for Being, including overcoming limits, unraveling potentials, cross over chasms and give herself/himself to insane amounts of love. Including one for humanity. That radical.
If I was told, when I was 14, about such people, that they were as good and able as myself and everyone else I knew, only perhaps forerunners exceptionally curious and eager, i would be interested. If, furthermore, I was given the tools to perceive the energetic beauty that certain people exude on account of being who they are (no tricks of rhetoric) then I would have been inwardly moved.
I agree, saints will come, even “in the desert” of the dispossessed.
If Christianity doesn`t offer a clear path to radically transformation oneself--even knowing that only a few will ever walk it--then it is already slowly dying. I grew up without a faith or even seeing the need for it. It just wasn't something I considered. The times I did attend, mainly with friends, it always seemed like an odd thing to do.
But a life of exclusive humanism and trying to fake authenticity was largely a disaster. The shiny promises of all the ever proliferating secular therapies and diversions failed.
I type this in a monastery seeking that more radical path. I think there is a turn happening in our civilization. Small and slow, but a turn. If so, how does Taylor explain that?
I like this a lot. I find myself more and more thinking along the same lines. The idea that 'the churches have failed to give clear examples of people placing God before humanity' seems obviously true to me, and was a reason also, I think now, that I had the same attitude to Christianity for most of my life. If it is just wordliness, then why bother?
I have also found that the lives of the saints make sense of it all. I am struck by the possibility - the likelihood even - that the catastrophe of the reformation, in ripping away from England the saints, the monastics and the Virgin Mary (the feminine aspect of Christianity, badly absent from the Protestant world), ripped out the heart of the nation too. I'm especially taken by the destruction of the chantries. Each monastery would have monks chanting for the health of the nation, its rulers and its people. Destroy all those and you literally dis-en-chant the country.
Still, the good news is that saints are still being made on Mount Athos and elsewhere. Personally I pray to St Bede and St Edmund daily. I think they're still watching us.
I like this piece very much. The area of rural north Portugal where I currently live still maintains, just, a living tradition. This includes reverence to a hierarchy of saints from the local to the universal. For me it is clear that there is an impulse in humanity in all places and throughout all eras that pulls us to transcend our ordinary humanness. So, an exploration of that impulse is the necessary response. I venture that the human being has two roles: the materialisation of spirit, and the spiritualisation of matter. Neither seems easy, but I guess that's by the by. Best wishes
Your essay has stayed in my mind and I write a blog yesterday where I put it in the bigger context of things I am thinking about. Sort of expanding in my earlier comment. Leaving the breadcrumb trail here if it is of interest!
Very thought provoking. Thinking about my youth, I sort of had the opposite experience. (I have only recently started thinking about it this way, so I could be missing a lot.) My family never went to any church (there’s a whole other story there, everything is complicated!) but I grew up reading (and enjoying) Bible stories and I read about saints, mostly coincidentally. Nobody told me to, but there were always tons of books in the house and one of them happened to be stories from British history and talked about several medieval saints. I read them as stories (maybe with some added awe as they were “true” but no more). But they certainly made an impression, especially the story of the poet Caedmon. And years later, in university, I encountered the story of Caedmon again, reading it (awkwardly) in Old English. And it was an encounter that cracked me open and tuned out to be central to who I am becoming….(that’s another story, and I don’t know how it ends…)
Now looking back (more than twenty years later!) I think….I encountered saints and had NO IDEA what to do about it. Ha. I mean, I didn’t do nothing: I turned my fascination with Caedmon and Hild into a big project and I enjoyed it and learned a lot, but I felt I had to make my interest “respectable” to my professors and peers by presenting it as purely academic. It was that, but it was never only that, but I didn’t have the language to express the things I felt, not even to myself. Also one of the weird things about university is you can study a story from a religious context without any personal faith and perhaps even without any respect for the worldview it came from. I just accepted this back then but now I find it very weird and unmoored from reality. How could I have expected to learn from the story of a saint without the understanding or accepting something of what that story meant to the people who told it?
Anyway, thanks for letting me think out loud! Enjoy your writing.
I haven't read A Secular Age in several years so I don't recall if Taylor discusses this there, but in his Sources of the Self, he describes a certain crisis of meaning that afflicts us living within the naturalistic attitude of our culture.
This isn't quite the ethics of authenticity (though they do pair well), nor is it to do quite with exclusive humanism. It is, rather than being any explicit ethical or moral outlook, a crisis brought about by the failure of such things to grab hold of us.
Given Taylor's elaboration of selfhood as a distinctly and irreducibly moral concept, it would make sense here to speak of a certain ennui or malaise (which, unsurprisingly, was part of the original title of his Ethics of Authenticity) in the absence of higher goods, rather than any express outlook that replaces them.
I too concur with most of what has been said but also find the need to refine some of the terms proposed in the text, especially in order to keep the question open: How does a 14 year old of today or tomorrow recognise and indeed take interest in a saint?
What constitutes human flourishing? I agree that a saint is the remarkable, rare example of a blossomed human being. But not because he/she is “good”. I find such viewpoint still tied to the moral canons that most churches frame the mystery of becoming.
To say that saints are able to “Place God before humanity” is perhaps not sufficiently inclusive. Yes in the sense of daring to transcend the societal norms of the day; the common sense and above all the fear that has many humans in fetters. But “ God before humanity” might continue to propagate a false disjunction between “human” and “divine” (often reinforced by religious doctrines).
In my understanding humanity is not a static reality nor is is antithetical with the divine. A saint is one who is less in a quest for being good, but in a quest for Being, including overcoming limits, unraveling potentials, cross over chasms and give herself/himself to insane amounts of love. Including one for humanity. That radical.
If I was told, when I was 14, about such people, that they were as good and able as myself and everyone else I knew, only perhaps forerunners exceptionally curious and eager, i would be interested. If, furthermore, I was given the tools to perceive the energetic beauty that certain people exude on account of being who they are (no tricks of rhetoric) then I would have been inwardly moved.
I agree, saints will come, even “in the desert” of the dispossessed.
If Christianity doesn`t offer a clear path to radically transformation oneself--even knowing that only a few will ever walk it--then it is already slowly dying. I grew up without a faith or even seeing the need for it. It just wasn't something I considered. The times I did attend, mainly with friends, it always seemed like an odd thing to do.
But a life of exclusive humanism and trying to fake authenticity was largely a disaster. The shiny promises of all the ever proliferating secular therapies and diversions failed.
I type this in a monastery seeking that more radical path. I think there is a turn happening in our civilization. Small and slow, but a turn. If so, how does Taylor explain that?
I like this a lot. I find myself more and more thinking along the same lines. The idea that 'the churches have failed to give clear examples of people placing God before humanity' seems obviously true to me, and was a reason also, I think now, that I had the same attitude to Christianity for most of my life. If it is just wordliness, then why bother?
I have also found that the lives of the saints make sense of it all. I am struck by the possibility - the likelihood even - that the catastrophe of the reformation, in ripping away from England the saints, the monastics and the Virgin Mary (the feminine aspect of Christianity, badly absent from the Protestant world), ripped out the heart of the nation too. I'm especially taken by the destruction of the chantries. Each monastery would have monks chanting for the health of the nation, its rulers and its people. Destroy all those and you literally dis-en-chant the country.
Still, the good news is that saints are still being made on Mount Athos and elsewhere. Personally I pray to St Bede and St Edmund daily. I think they're still watching us.
I like this piece very much. The area of rural north Portugal where I currently live still maintains, just, a living tradition. This includes reverence to a hierarchy of saints from the local to the universal. For me it is clear that there is an impulse in humanity in all places and throughout all eras that pulls us to transcend our ordinary humanness. So, an exploration of that impulse is the necessary response. I venture that the human being has two roles: the materialisation of spirit, and the spiritualisation of matter. Neither seems easy, but I guess that's by the by. Best wishes
Your essay has stayed in my mind and I write a blog yesterday where I put it in the bigger context of things I am thinking about. Sort of expanding in my earlier comment. Leaving the breadcrumb trail here if it is of interest!
https://torthuilexplores.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-saints.html?m=1
Very thought provoking. Thinking about my youth, I sort of had the opposite experience. (I have only recently started thinking about it this way, so I could be missing a lot.) My family never went to any church (there’s a whole other story there, everything is complicated!) but I grew up reading (and enjoying) Bible stories and I read about saints, mostly coincidentally. Nobody told me to, but there were always tons of books in the house and one of them happened to be stories from British history and talked about several medieval saints. I read them as stories (maybe with some added awe as they were “true” but no more). But they certainly made an impression, especially the story of the poet Caedmon. And years later, in university, I encountered the story of Caedmon again, reading it (awkwardly) in Old English. And it was an encounter that cracked me open and tuned out to be central to who I am becoming….(that’s another story, and I don’t know how it ends…)
Now looking back (more than twenty years later!) I think….I encountered saints and had NO IDEA what to do about it. Ha. I mean, I didn’t do nothing: I turned my fascination with Caedmon and Hild into a big project and I enjoyed it and learned a lot, but I felt I had to make my interest “respectable” to my professors and peers by presenting it as purely academic. It was that, but it was never only that, but I didn’t have the language to express the things I felt, not even to myself. Also one of the weird things about university is you can study a story from a religious context without any personal faith and perhaps even without any respect for the worldview it came from. I just accepted this back then but now I find it very weird and unmoored from reality. How could I have expected to learn from the story of a saint without the understanding or accepting something of what that story meant to the people who told it?
Anyway, thanks for letting me think out loud! Enjoy your writing.
I haven't read A Secular Age in several years so I don't recall if Taylor discusses this there, but in his Sources of the Self, he describes a certain crisis of meaning that afflicts us living within the naturalistic attitude of our culture.
This isn't quite the ethics of authenticity (though they do pair well), nor is it to do quite with exclusive humanism. It is, rather than being any explicit ethical or moral outlook, a crisis brought about by the failure of such things to grab hold of us.
Given Taylor's elaboration of selfhood as a distinctly and irreducibly moral concept, it would make sense here to speak of a certain ennui or malaise (which, unsurprisingly, was part of the original title of his Ethics of Authenticity) in the absence of higher goods, rather than any express outlook that replaces them.