Jesuit Higher Education in a Secular Age

A Response to Charles Taylor and the Crisis of Fullness

Daniel S. Hendrickson

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781647122348
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In Jesuit Higher Education in a Secular Age, Creighton University President Daniel S. Hendrickson, SJ, explores three pedagogies of fullness–study, solidarity, and grace–to show how Jesuit education can foster greater self-awareness, a stronger sense of global solidarity, and an aptitude for inspiration, awe, and gratitude among their students.

CHAPTER ONE

THE SEARCH FOR FULLNESS IN A SECULAR AGE

The philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age was the motivating force of this book.¹ It not only inspired me, but it also launched scholarly discussions from many camps in the academy. In an age of academic disciplines, and with corresponding concerns about a lack of dialogue between departments on university campuses, it is remarkable to see literary critics, historians, philosophers, political theorists, scientists, sociologists, and theologians conversing so eagerly about a single publication. In New York, Chicago, and New Haven, conferences immediately convened after the 2007 publication of the book. More recently—in journals like Faith and Philosophy, Inquiry, and New Blackfriars; and in books such as Rethinking Secularism (2011), The Joy of Secularism (2011), and, in particular, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (2010)—scholars with many interests have devoted serious attention to A Secular Age. In all its nine hundred magisterial and prize winning pages, Taylor explains that the northern Atlantic societies of the global community—those nations framing the upper quadrant of the Atlantic Ocean, such as Western European, Scandinavian, and North American states—are less religious than ever. In the course of world history, this is “sudden,” the result of a five-hundred-year process of secularization that he and now I address.

Taylor is not traditionally categorized as a philosopher, given that he accepts support and entertains challenges from thinkers both within and beyond his own particular discipline. I am willing to do likewise, for three reasons. The first is that the disciplinary silos within the academy could and should be more conversant with one another. Special interests and pointed inquiries within disciplines lead to historic insights in their respective fields of study, but remarkable achievements are also discovered in collaboration. Recent discussions about the state of higher education understand a current crisis of university culture through, in part, fragmented academic communities. The situation is not uncomplicated, but some regret how inquiries lead to ends of their own through means of their own. Moreover, some perspectives—for example, scientific ones—gain influence and prestige in proportions that stifle and silence others. As a result, not only are interests and inquiries dealt with in isolation from others, but some are disregarded. Taylor, a philosopher with communitarian sensibilities, allows for a more open dialogue, whereby historians, scientists, sociologists, and theologians, for example, participate meaningfully in a conversation he frames.

He prefigured key backgrounds for A Secular Age in a 1996 lecture, “A Catholic Modernity.” It was given at a Catholic institution, the University of Dayton, when he received a prestigious award, and it was later published by Oxford University Press.² “The remarkable fact that academic culture in the Western world breathes an atmosphere of unbelief,” he describes, “has cultivated . . . a habit of masking religious interest.”³ He concedes, “Yes, [some of us] do a lot of that, obviously too much. The reasons are many, including ones to do with the advantages . . . of conformity.”⁴ Some such advantages, according to him, regard reputation, tenure, and promotion.

In his speech Taylor publicly identifies himself as a Roman Catholic, and, subsequently, the talk grounds him in important ways. First, his gesture toward unbelief, in the decisively rational context of the university, is simply a good entrée into A Secular Age and his explanation of the five-hundred-year process leading us to the less-religious place the academy finds itself today.

Even though in many ways Taylor is a philosopher, he is also a historian of ideas. He thinks across millennia. If there was any doubt about his faith perspective after his “Catholic Modernity” address, or if it is unfamiliar to readers who know him exclusively through his more scholarly, but religiously muted, publications—such as Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) and The Ethics of Authenticity (1991)—Taylor’s recent A Secular Age is a full and wider manifestation of a profound religious identity in his life and work.

To expand on this first point, I believe Taylor wants us to recognize the geocultural and sociocultural spread of Western secularism that began to unfold in the sixteenth century, around the time of the Protestant Reformation. We must recognize it, he insists, in comparison with the once-enduring Christian reality dominating the history of these places before 1500, and also in comparison with the rest of the global community today: Hindu India, the Muslim Middle East, Catholic Latin America, Buddhist Asia, and so on. Perhaps the suddenness of secularism is more evident. Whether it is or is not, Taylor’s main point is that the current stronghold dynamic of Western secularism by no means attests to a simple subtraction theory; that is, the West grew up and got smart. Becoming secular is not a matter of what is being let go or sloughed off. An understanding of secularism is incomplete if it only accounts for Enlightenment-era rationality and scientific achievement that mitigate and invalidate alternative perspectives of knowing. If Western secularism comes about quickly, it is also complicated, and many forces, Christianity included, are seriously complicit. The introductory remarks to Taylor’s “Catholic Modernity” essay, then, establish for us Taylor’s religious interest and the existential version of secularism he focuses upon.

This leads to my second reason for following Taylor’s lead, and for referencing these opening remarks. Taylor’s talk is an indictment that the academy generally masks religious belief or, simply, breathes unbelief. Though he has quietly noted his own religious commitment throughout his career, in this particular address he directly embraces the reality. Recognizing nuance is ironic because it is such an important dynamic of A Secular Age. Nuance happens in Taylor’s parsing of “secularism” as a term. The overarching nuance regards the version of secularity he wishes to discuss, “Secularity 3”: the conditions of belief.⁵ It narrows the discussion of secularism away from an analytical concern about religious creeds and their contents, and also away from questions about the nature of faith and belief, and simultaneously expands the discussion and frames an existential preoccupation. He wants to discuss secularism in the ways it affects our daily lives and how we understand our own selves and our emotional, intellectual, political, and social capacities and relations. Knowing his existential focus, and also its correspondent Secularity 3, is crucial for understanding better the lengthy narrative of Western culture he chronicles.

This existential focus engages my third reason for referencing Taylor’s uncharacteristic religious transparency in his 1996 lecture. Readers of Taylor’s work cannot now not appreciate the roles and meanings of specifically religious terms and motives in his writing. For instance, his deployment of the Greek term “agape” in A Secular Age is significant. It is a Christian word and should be interpreted as such. Agape, moreover, is expressly important to my book as a whole in its connection to Taylor’s term “fullness,” a fundamental construct in A Secular Age. In my understanding, fullness represents the thrust of Taylor’s book and drives it. The term is a philosophical-anthropological construct that functions in tandem with the existential perspective of Taylor’s Secularity 3. The cultural conditions of belief and the human experience of fullness together manifest important insights about a secular age. Taylor deploys agape to further expand our interpretation of fullness, and if he is right about the academy, dwelling in an overt religious construct creates something of a challenge for us.

TAYLOR’S FULLNESS AS THE CONTEXT OF THIS BOOK

Taylor affirms that many people have a certain kind of experience when life seems purpose-filled, connected, driven, and genuine.⁶ This phenomenal moment facilitates a profound sense of interior peace and a sense of wholeness. A personal instance as such “unsettles and breaks through our ordinary sense of being in the world, with its familiar objects, activities and points of reference, . . . when ‘ordinary reality is abolished and something terrifyingly other shines through.’ ”⁷ He discusses this on page 5; but 607 pages later, he keeps looking back over his shoulder to this epiphanic description of “fullness” and to Bede Griffiths, the person through whom it occurred. Griffiths was an Englishman who remembered a certain moment of fullness for the rest of his life. His experience of fullness recalls a dimming springtime evening in his school-age youth, one filled with birdsong and new blossoms, and around the boy, the friendly flight of a chirping lark. The combined elements of the external world, a calmed and confirmed disposition within Griffiths himself, and a poignant sense of meaning and purpose were sudden. It seized Griffiths, and in some way, it encompassed and enchanted him. He felt attentive to the world and his life in a way that was notable for its intensity and impression, but he also felt pulled beyond himself, or at least influenced by something he himself did not originate. For years Griffiths seems to have been wonderfully haunted by this moment.⁸

Never forgetting an experience that seemed existentially transformative, Griffiths later became a Benedictine monk, and he soon left the locale of his English monastery to spend his life in India, and eventually in an Indian ashram. From the subcontinent he, a Western-trained monastic, established a career comparing and articulating the affinities and symbolic contrasts among Christian, Hindu, and Muslim experiences of fullness.⁹

“What I want to do” in A Secular Age, Taylor insists, “is focus attention on the different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding your life in one way or the other.”¹⁰ His way of doing this stems from Griffiths’s revelation and Taylor’s prognosis that the experience of fullness—in particular, an expression of being enchanted by realities or a singular reality beyond us—will cease occurring for those of us who dwell in a secular age. His discussion about the kinds of experiences that we rarely or no longer enjoy exposes a concern. He worries that our Western and modern-era perspective will either misinterpret fullness as self-generated, or that our twenty-first-century sensibilities will prevent fullness from happening altogether. In a subsequent publication, moreover, Taylor speaks about fullness as a categorical term that attempts to capture and highlight an aspect of the human condition whereby each of us experiences life either as meaningful, genuine, and authentic or as capable of being such.¹¹

Taylor wants to rescue fullness, resuscitating a part of our lives. In A Secular Age, he speaks and writes about being disenchanted, and indicates that he is interested in something that might be called reenchantment. The lament of modernity and its particular malaises—discussed in both Sources of the Self and The Ethics of Authenticity—are related. In accord with Taylor’s diagnosis, I interpret the waning or simply unoccurring experience of fullness on our individual campuses as steadily grieved in A Secular Age. This eclipse of fullness is the fundamental malady of the kind of disenchantment that disturbs Taylor so profoundly.

When Taylor arrives at his final chapter, he returns to fullness and Griffiths’s epiphany. The sensibility it represents was familiar to the late Czech poet, activist, and political leader Václav Havel, who experienced profound fullness during imprisonment at the Heřmanice Correctional Institute in Ostrava, former Czechoslovakia, sometime between 1979 and 1984. He recorded this in his Letters to Olga (1984).^1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Jesuit Higher Education and the Restoration of Enchantment
• 1 The Search for Fullness in a Secular Age
• 2 Developing Taylor’s Conception of Fullness
• 3 Charles Taylor in Educational Discourse
• 4 Renaissance Humanistic Backgrounds of Jesuit Educational Thought
• 5 The Tradition of Jesuit Education
• 6 Higher Education in a Secular Age
• Conclusion: Forming a Learned Imagination
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author