- My name is Jose Casanova and I am
a professor of sociology
and a senior fellow
at the Berkeley Center,
and I have the pleasure and the privilege
of introducing Charles Taylor today,
well this introduction,
he already had an introduction
by President DaJoya yesterday,
you know that he is one of the
greatest living philosophers,
but I just want to say on a personal note,
Charles Taylor is not only
the philosopher's philosopher,
he is a citizen's philosopher,
a public intellectual,
of course in Quebec particularly,
he is the leading Quebecois
public intellectual,
has been active in many
many public debates,
even run for political office,
lately in the last years,
an organ of the base of multiculturalism,
and the integration of immigrants,
has served with Brouchard
on the Quebecois Commission,
on Multiculturalism and Immigrants,
and besides that,
I would like to add
those of us who have had
the personal privilege of
knowing him personally,
we've been touched by his
intellectual generosity,
with colleagues and with the students,
and by his extraordinary humanity,
and we are all very, very proud of having
you here Charles with us,
so please,
the lecture tonight is
Disenchantment and Secularity.
(audience applauds)
- I think I said yesterday that titles
don't quite necessarily matter,
there are two parts,
one is tearing down certain ideas
that have been going around,
and the second is trying
to build up an alternative.
And I'm very close to ending
the first phase of that,
that is criticizing the
existing sociological
theories of secularization,
and as soon as I get my notes clear,
I'll be able to continue with that,
and I want to after a short time attempt
to swing into and build
up a more positive theory.
So remember I was saying
all the way back yesterday,
that this sociological
secularization thesis takes
various developments which
we can call part of modernization,
like industrialization,
mobility and so on and so on,
and see them as the cause of movements
of secularization
understood in two senses,
remember secularization is
understood to consist in
the retreat of religion
from the public sphere,
it's no longer being dominant in
the public sphere on one hand,
and on the other hand
it's thought to consist
in a decline of faith,
a decline of belief and practice,
these two things which
are complexly related.
And I'd like to tackle head on this notion
that we can establish this kind uni-linear
relationship between the developments
we call modernization and the developments
we call secularization,
and the first thing I'd
like to do is examine one of
the important developments people think
of as essential to modernity,
and its relation to secularization,
and that is the notion of differentiation,
and you'll find this as a central element
in almost all the statements of
the sociological theory of secularization,
what is meant by differentiation here?
This is of course a very important
idea from Max Weber,
it's the notion that,
we start from today to see what we mean,
we find it very easy
to talk about politics,
economics, theater,
the world of politics,
the world of business,
the world of theater, the worlds of art,
by which we mean that these are spheres
of existence where there has
developed certain specialties,
special ways of life
which are dedicated to
business or politics or art,
certain institutions have grown up,
great bureaucratic structures,
political parties,
economic firms and so on,
associations of artists,
a market for art, et cetera, et cetera,
occupations institutions
and a whole set of rules,
a whole set of not only
ontology which govern how
you behave in the business world
and the political world and so on,
but also if you like have how-to books
and how to notions develop,
so we get the sense that
there's a whole world,
you can live in a whole world where you're
in the political world,
and you're reading a quite
different kind of space,
and if you're in the business world or in
the art world or in the
University world and so on,
that is the notion of differentiation,
is the notion of people
living in those spheres,
but differentiation is development because
the sense of the history behind this,
it's got a narrative behind
this theoretical term,
is that in earlier times
this wasn't the case,
if you go back far enough,
for instance this is the Theorist
I was quoting yesterday Steve Bruce,
the Scottish sociologist makes this point,
that if you go back far
enough for instance,
households,
which were a little bit different
from what we call families,
households because they
included live-in servants
and relations and apprentices,
they were units of private living,
but they were also products of production,
think of the family farm,
think of the early Artisans,
they were also units of production,
in that case the world of
private life and the family,
and the world of economic activity,
were absolutely interwoven,
and you can go back,
if you want to think now
of religion as a sphere,
which of course is part of the point
of invoking differentiation in
the context of a theory of secularization,
you can again go back,
in the early theorists
of early societies say
(speaks in foreign language)
Religion was everywhere,
in the sense that religious
ritual accompanied
every kind of activity,
hunting activity,
every kind of human activity,
there wasn't a religious
sphere separated out,
if you try to think of
the Roman Republic with
a religious sphere and
the political sphere,
you find Caesar is Pontius Maximus,
everybody has some kind of
religious function as well,
various rituals accompanied
auguries et cetera,
whether you're going to
go to battle and so on,
there was an interweaving of religion
and all the other aspects of life,
And indeed you don't have to
go back to the Roman Republic,
you can go back to the middle ages of
the early modern period where for instance
artisans were organizing guilds,
and the guilds had a religious life,
they were under the patronage of a saint,
they celebrated the
saint's days and so on,
this interweaving was there.
Differentiation is where
this kind of interweaving
falls away and these spheres develop if
you like their own consistency and their
own rules and so on and so on,
so there has been
differentiation in this sense,
and it is thought that what we mean by
the first aspect of secularization,
namely the retreat of
religion from public life,
is just a consequence of,
it's just a facet of differentiation,
that the religious sphere is separated
from the political sphere,
and this is something that
Weber seems to have launched,
in a very interesting paper,
which I'll give you the
title of later if you want,
but it's translated and published in
this great volume from Max Weber,
(speaks in foreign language)
spoken roughly in German,
as it were the provisional
report as it were,
there he makes a fascinating
discussion of how religion
is separated from the
different spheres of life,
and he points out there
even is a conflict between
for instance the demands of
the gospel on the one hand,
and the demands on you as an
entrepreneur or someone who
was running a corporation
for your shareholders,
the demands on you in that case
are that you make the maximum profit,
but these may run and thwart
the demands of the gospel,
and then he goes on to
discuss the political sphere,
and how the demands on
you as a political leader,
maybe you have to cut certain corners
and do certain things
for the public wheel,
which go against the demands of the gospel
and so on and so on.
Now it seems to me that this
is a very confused notion,
because if the idea is that
secularization is something new,
and it's meant to be according
to the theory and history,
the conflict between the
gospel and the demands
of certain other spheres of
life doesn't start yesterday,
I mean just think of tremendous battles of
the medieval bishops against
a warrior aristocracy
was always going to war all the time
and always attacking their neighbors,
and trying to get higher and rebel
against the king and so on,
it's great effort to have a truce of God,
don't fight on Sundays,
don't fight on Fridays,
don't fight on holy week,
that was thought to be
a tremendous concession
that they won from them,
the struggle between these
different if you like
the elements of life
has always been there,
so this theory of,
I could go into this further and Jose
has publicly criticized other aspects of
the theory of differentiation,
when you look at it more closely it more
or less crumbles before you.
Now there are other however features that
are mentioned in this theory,
like the development
of industrial society,
the development of an urban
industrial mode of life,
which means the concentration
of people coming
in from the countryside
filling up the cities,
becoming workers in large
factories and so on,
and that's also thought
to be one of the factors
that has pushed forward secularization.
Here is where I'd like to
say there is some truth,
some important kernel of truth to
the sociological secularization theory,
and the kernel of truth is really this,
that certain forms of religious life,
like the religious life organized
around rural parishes for instance,
which is a very thick dense religious life
in which various kinds of
movements of solidarity
and mutual health were woven together,
with the life of the parish,
the life of the sodalities,
around throughout the year different
liturgical festivities
and so on and so on,
that kind of life in many many
cases just couldn't survive,
the departure of people out
of the country into the city,
and they are living a
completely different kind
of existence related in a very different
way to their neighbors,
or not related to their
neighbors and so on,
and very famous French
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
said this famous thing
about when the peasant comes
to the (speaks in foreign language)
He's thinking of the
particular regions of Loire
that end up in the (speaks
in foreign language),
where it disappears from
the horizon of the church,
and he is lost to the church.
Lost to his practice.
So there is here in this particular case,
the French case you can
really see a connection
between economic and social
development on one hand,
and in this case the decline
of faith and practice.
But where this theory,
where this doesn't add up to a successful
statement of the sociological theory,
is that what it doesn't take
account of is that along
with the destabilization
of some religious forms,
you get very often,
I'm gonna use this word
that I borrowed from
Daniele Hervieu-Leger the
French sociologist of religion,
it's a recomposition if you like,
a reforming of other religious forms,
think of something like
the spiritual movement
of Methodism as it
starts in the Anglo-Saxon
world England and America and so on,
and you find that this
movement among other places
takes off very often among
newly urbanized workers,
it's one of the important features,
as Edward Thompson has shown,
gets in a way interwoven
with their other attempts
to self organize and
find a way of surviving
and prospering in this
new very, very unfavorable
environment that was
the industrial suburbs
of Britain at the time,
so here you get something quite different
from the French case and Paris and so on,
but it's similar in this respect,
that there was a real destabilization of
the earlier rural mode of parish life,
but what came in its place was a,
as it were a recomposition,
a reformulation,
or you think of if you like
the Catholic Church in this country,
where it's formed from
people who definitely
move out of there,
originally European homelands,
come here without sometimes
from Catholic parishes
in Poland or Belgium or
various parts of Europe,
form what are first ethnic parishes here,
so they're like the same thing,
but these of course parishes have
a quite different way of operating,
they begin to develop quickly away from
the earlier forms,
in the end ethnic parishes
tend to lose people to
as it were American parishes which
are not ethnically defined any more.
And you can see that this
very important experience,
the immigration experience
produces a new form,
and interestingly enough,
this is the work of Jose
Casanova I'm drawing on here,
it's very interesting that the fact
that this is what happens,
recomposition happens,
is something to do with
the receiving country,
because following the
immigrants who left Italy
for instance to go to Argentina or
the United States or elsewhere,
it's an interesting thing that,
the level of practice is
higher when they come to
the United States and
they get more organized
into Catholic parishes here than
it is in other countries like Argentina,
something to do with the
circumstances that they fall into.
So what we have to do is
recognize the validity,
the underlying intuitions of
this secularization thesis,
and that certain of the
things that they point out,
not everything,
not things like differentiation
which turns out to be
I think a confused concept in this regard,
but certain of the changes they point
to actually do stabilize older forms,
and sometimes this destabilization
isn't compensated by,
or rather there are always
recomposition's of some kind,
but some of them are of
a totally secular kind,
they are maybe various movements
social democratic movements in Europe,
communist movements and so on and so on,
in other words people always have to find
a way of putting their lives
and the meaning of their
life together again,
but in some cases these lives are
put together without a faith horizon,
and in other cases they are.
So what we have here is not,
and I think this is the two key things
that have to be kept in mind here,
the secularization theory
cannot be interpreted
in a linear or uniform fashion,
it's not that something
like industrialization
has a linear effect,
the more industrialization the less
religion right the way through,
it's the chaotic dialectical,
it's a challenge and
response type movement,
destabilizes some and then
others grow and so on,
and it's also not uniform across the whole
of the Western world,
we saw this case of the difference between
the French case and the
Anglo-Saxon case a minute ago,
as David Martin has brilliantly shown,
there are national and regional
and even confessional trajectories
that are very, very different,
so we have to have a much more
complicated secularization,
if you like in which we take account
of this challenge response,
of this coming and going and so on.
And what we need to explain though,
and here I'm going to
change gears now move into,
I'm finished as it were
trying to tear down,
let me try to build
something in its place,
what we need to understand,
and which the secularization thesis
never really tried to understand,
is what underlies these plural
possibilities of recomposition,
what underlies the fact that
in some cases people having
had their earlier forms of collective
religious life disturbed and undermined,
take on new forms of religious life,
in other cases they take on new forms
of life which don't
have this faith horizon,
what makes for this
gamut of possibilities?
Now here I think we
need historical analysis
of a kind that recognizes,
here I'm going to come back
to my hobbyhorse yesterday,
which recognizes the falsity of what
I'm calling subtraction theories,
if you believe in a subtraction theory in
the sense that I talked about yesterday,
you believe that what eventuates from
a destabilization of
earlier religion forms,
this kind of a certain
pattern of human behavior
and activity which was already there
and ready to come out
and just needs to get
the obstacles to it
cleared out of the way,
but if you see history in terms of
what I'm calling construction,
I'm still worried about that word,
that is that people,
human beings over history
develop partly by design,
partly by just coming above it,
modes of understanding of
themselves and their horizon,
and what it is to live in a society,
and what it is to live in
history which are very different,
which define a very
different idea of the human,
then we need to understand how
a mode of self understanding,
a mode of identity arose,
in which this possibility of non-belief,
a possibility of a solution to
life without a faith horizon,
became something really present,
because I want to claim that,
and this is a central
part of the book actually,
I've written on this,
I started with this,
back in 1500,
they were the rare person,
particularly someone who had an education
and had studied the classics
and had read Lucretius,
in every age there's more and more people
who have done that and
to have disconnected,
or even in a kind of
secret way become atheists,
but for the vast majority of people
this wasn't really an option,
and why,
if you like for almost
everybody some kind of theism,
Christian-related generally
theism was interwoven
with cults and practices that
existed since time immemorial,
were the only possible options
for finding one's way in life,
one's orientation in life,
so there were various heretical movements,
proto-Protestant movements like
the Waldensians and the
Hussites, et cetera,
there were even movements that
it is said were Manichaean,
the Albigenses in southern France,
some people have cast some doubt
on how heretical they really were,
as against it being very
handy for the French from
the North to have a good reason to come
in there and take over,
maybe this is a lot of paranoia from
my friends on the French side,
but there are certain questions,
because we don't have these people
around telling us what they believe,
we just have the stories
of the Inquisition
about what terrible
Manichaees they were anyway,
but Manichaeism still
had some kind of relation
in their view to yet
another interpretation
of Christ and his death and so on.
And so the options were relatively narrow,
now what had to change,
the interesting issue is what to change
for the options to widen?
Because I think this is really the case,
you see what I am saying here,
as something when you come back,
I invite you to come back and we'll fight
about this later if you don't agree,
but you see that I'm making a move which
is really predicated on a rejection
of something like subtraction story,
the idea of subtraction story is that
all these options were
on the table even then,
but something was stopping some of them
from getting to the fore,
you just remove that something
and then they come to the fore,
I'm saying that for these
things to be a live option,
you have to have another kind of,
this is a word I want to use a lot,
social imaginary,
another way of collectively
imagining what it is
to live and one's world
in a society in history,
in time,
I have this terrible problem with this,
I'm gonna move it slightly like that
and I hope you'll still
be able to hear me.
And it's how this change in the social
imaginary developed that we have to trace,
now there are two big things,
there are many things
to be said about this,
there are two big things
I like to concentrate on.
For the first,
and this will justify the title,
the enchanted world how to recede,
the enchanted world is the opposite
of this term disenchantment,
and by that I mean a world in which people
lived surrounded by what
they saw as spirits,
and what I want to call
significance defined forces,
I mean that's a long expression
for something of the following kind,
if you went to Canterbury and you got
a vial with water in it,
supposedly with some percentage of
the blood of Thomas A
Becket the martyr in it,
and you brought it home
to your sick mother,
this connected to a relic,
this was meant to cure,
but you see this is
totally unlike bringing
back penicillin to your mother
or something of that kind,
or Advil or something,
because we understand
now what it is to have
a chemical substance that
is certain definite defects
on whatever chemical
changes occur in my body
which has an important effect on ending
the pain or ending the disease,
here you have something which is simply
an all-purpose goodness,
it's meant to cure any kind of disease,
the power of this physical power,
the power in this physical object
is one that is defined by significance,
that is its beneficial,
not defined by primarily it's making
this or that chemical change,
so I want to talk about forces,
I mean forces of this kind,
morally defined forces if you like.
So you live in a world,
a world of relics and
the world of spirits,
and that is what we very often think of
as the enchanted world,
as the world disenchantment has ended.
Now if you do live in that kind of world,
and a great many of the forces abroad
our potentially some
of them are beneficial,
some of them are
potentially very dangerous,
it's almost inconceivable for many people
that you would want to do
without the power of God,
the good magic that comes
from the power of God,
a good example of this
are various rituals,
like the ritual in
England and also in France
in peasant villages of
beating the bounds of
the parish on what are
called rogation days
if you look up this and so on,
these are various seasons
where you walk around
the limits of the parish carrying
the sacraments carrying candles carrying
various objects which
have sacramental force
and prayers of intercession and so on,
and in that way you protect the parish
from the wood spirits,
that otherwise could invade it
and cause all sorts of terrible things,
disease of the cattle and so on and so on,
or in my society,
I know people still remember,
(speaks in foreign language)
When there is a tremendous electric storm
people are very frightened about that,
you ring the bell in the church steeple,
(speaks in foreign language)
In order to fight against the danger
of being struck by lightning,
that kind of ritual,
was a tremendously important
part of their lives,
and you can see that if you want to think
of it in terms of magic,
and I want to question the
concept in a minute of magic,
but there's a good magic in which
we need to fight the bad magic,
and God is in some ways indispensable.
Now what happened back in
Christendom from 1500 on,
where exactly we date
it is very very complex,
is something like a,
a religiously inspired, faith
inspired disenchantment,
that is polemical attack at a great number
of these collective practices,
which were seen as idolatrous,
not really fully Christian.
So I want to put this in the context,
I want to sketch out very quickly,
the context of,
and this is a very big context,
the context of what you can think of as
the great axial turns,
Jasper's expression,
which occurred in different
ways in different civilizations,
in maybe something like
the first millennium,
the last millennium before our era,
I mean the first millennium BCE,
in which you have developed
new religious forms,
which put forward the
idea of the highest good,
be it that of salvation
or that of nirvana,
I mean it's very, very different,
and what results from
these are large-scale
civilizational religions
which are in a certain sense
a hybrid of these new goals on one hand,
and the widespread practice of the kind
I've just been describing,
so-called magical practice on the other,
in the sense that these belong together
in the same civilization,
can even be somehow related in
some kind of complementarity.
The main think of Thailand today has
a Buddhist society where you have
the laypeople feed the monks,
the monks are the people
who are dedicated totally
to what seems to be the
highest good in this religion,
but the laypeople feed them
and thereby they require merit,
so there's a kind of way that
these can exist in balance.
What happened in Latin Christendom,
what in general in the religions that come
from Abraham and the Jewish
Christian and Muslim,
there's been a tremendous
uneasy relationship from
the beginning between the highest notions
of salvation on the one hand,
and these various practices on the other,
I mean even the medieval
church could cross
the line to a point where
it was out of the question,
like using the host as a love potion,
you can understand even more,
you say a requiem mass for somebody
already living in the hopes of,
okay, so you can understand,
I'm on the side of the bishops
here I can see the point,
but there are some I
think very important move
that you could see happening
in the Latin church,
starting way back with Hildebrand,
and moving further and
further with each wave,
and the Protestant Reformation
was one such important stage,
but then the Catholics
also carried on various
sorts of reform in the Catholic Church,
in which the toleration
for this other kind
of practice gets close to zero,
so in the end,
in extreme Calvinist cases for instance
it's thought that all
these kinds of activities
by their definition show
a lack of faith in God,
because they're dealing
with forces that don't seem
to depend immediately with the
relation of the soul to God,
their power is in things,
and these can never be
thought to be benign,
in other words there is not what
a lot of peasant cultures
still have a notion of,
which is there's white
magic and bad magic,
white magic and black magic,
good logic and bad magic,
so-called cunning women that you go
to if you had some disease and so on,
in extreme Protestant culture these people
were driven to the wall,
because there isn't such
a thing as good magic,
anybody engaging in this kind
of stuff must be against God,
I think it's not an accident,
at least part a reflection of this,
that the entire attempt to disenchant,
at the beginning inspired
by the official church
and the clergy to disenchant,
had what from a modern point of view had
a paradoxical early effect of ratcheting
up a witchcraft craze,
it's very interesting if you read Aquinas
and you read 18th-century Enlightenment,
and they say where does it come from,
they both agree,
but in the middle you have
this horrifying period
were perfectly intelligent people
and really quite cultivated
people were wildly
into the idea that we are
threatened by witches,
I think this is the
consequence of driving magic
to the boundaries and
making anyone who practices
it be seen as a
practitioner of black magic
and therefore is someone to be targeted.
So we have this very powerful
movement to disenchantment,
and I think you could say that,
the notion of magic that we developed
is really not a clearly
pre-existing category,
but one that was created by this,
what was expelled from
legitimate Christian practice on
the grounds that it was incompatible with
it and needed to be stopped,
got defined in the modern sense,
the modern European sense
of the word as magic,
and that of course is
the word Weber coined,
de-magnification
that's what disenchantment means,
the purging of magic.
So we have this category which
then becomes an academic category,
you have Frazier talking
about magic against religion,
and then you have anthropologists like
Evan Spitzer going out there,
and of course there it breaks down,
I mean their people realize
you have to reconstruct
the whole category in order to understand
what's going on in these
quite different societies,
because our category is so much the result
of our religious history,
so that's one important change,
and what it's driven by,
and here I leave hanging
in terms of historical
causation you could say I'm proposing
a bigger question than I'm answering,
let's accept that for the moment,
because what I'm saying is,
there is in ways that is
not easy to understand,
this continually renewed
drive towards reform,
reform being an attempt
to bring all members of
the church up to the highest standards of
the demand of the gospel,
in other words,
an attempt to overturn the
uneasy coexistence between
a minority to use Weber's language,
a minority of religious virtuosi of monks
or Beku's or especially
dedicated people on one hand,
and the mass of the Buddhist Christian
and so on faithful on the other,
to wipe out this
distinction in the terms of
the Protestant reformers whose very clear
the idea that there are certain vocations
which are following
counsels of perfection,
they were thinking of
the monastic vocations,
absolutely out of the question,
this is prideful attempt to fabricate
oneself powers that one doesn't have,
on the contrary,
there are only two categories,
the saved and the damned,
all saved Christians must be 100 percent,
again the language of European union
about different Europe at
different speeds and so on,
(speaks in foreign language)
No that can't be allowed
in the Christian church,
this is I think one of the drives
that you see in the movement for reform,
and it exists also of
course on the Catholic side,
particularly the French case is obviously
what I'm more familiar with,
but it if you have the Jansenist tendency,
and unfortunately you guys
are on the right side,
if you look at the Jansenist's tendency,
you see this real attempt to clean up
the act of their parishioners,
to stop various,
stopping of course Carnival,
and this is (speaks in foreign language)
My patron saint and Charles
Barneux whose portrait
is over there in the other hall,
it's terrible what he said about dancing,
about carnival and so on,
he really wanted to clean up the act,
so we get this extremely powerful drive,
and the paradox I want to put to you,
is this is a little bit parallel
to Weber as you can see,
the unintended consequence of this in
a certain sense as a secular world.
But let me push a bit further in order
to make this more comprehensible,
and let me look at another
facet of this drive to reform,
other than simply wiping
out these particular
unacceptable practices which
have been called bad magic,
and that was that a proper Christian
life involves inculcating disciplines,
the discipline of civility,
the disciplines of self-control,
creating economic agents
who had inculcated
the work ethic, controlling sexual desire,
but also especially at the
beginning where it was important,
was controlling anger and aggressivity,
you can see the transformation
of the upper classes
in West European societies
starting about 1500
and moving on to the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries,
where at the beginning you
have people easily given
to anger and feuding and are
always ready to get drunk
and have a fight or go
out and battle others
in order to better their position,
and they become,
well the word civilized of course is
a word based on the notion of civility,
in the notion of moving towards that way,
and you get upper classes,
leading classes of
a quite different kind
emerging from this change,
a discipline therefore not simply in
the aid of regularity and
efficacy in the economic life,
but also in armies,
the development of William
of Orange by Cromwell,
by Gustaf Adolphus,
the Protestants were ahead on this,
of really well disciplined
armies capable through
drill of being tremendously
effective on the battlefield,
and in state administration,
Philip Gorski wrote a
very interesting book
on Calvinism and Pietism,
he's looked at the two cases
of Holland and Prussia,
and shown how they have
developed with this ethos
of dedication and discipline
tremendously effective administration,
I mean this is quite frightening in a way,
but this very small in terms of population
and in terms of inherent wealth,
Prussian state becomes
able to punch way above
its weight in the
European balance of power,
it becomes a great power long
before it deserves to be,
and part of that comes
from the discipline,
this is again a long feat,
but the discipline of its officer corps,
of its civil servants,
and what you get is
profoundly mixed motives,
piety,
the definition of piety,
and the search for power and efficacy
are just interwoven together,
absolutely inexorably interwoven together
in the lives of some of these people,
let's stick with Prussia,
and what was his name,
I think he was Frederick
William something or other,
he was the second king of Prussia after
the Prussians forwarded
themselves to a kingdom,
and of course famously the father
of Frederick the great, absolute monster,
but a very interesting
mixture of extreme piety
and incredible efficacious
dedication to building an army,
he was known as the (speaks
in foreign language),
he was this soldier king,
and of course he prepared
this wonderful army
and this double heritage
for his son Frederick,
of great piety on one
hand and ruthless use
of the army on the other,
and Frederick took one and not the other,
and he carried it to as we
all know tremendous success.
Now this kind of figure,
the mixed motives in Frederick,
William the first is that right,
they're all called Frederick or whatever,
anyway he's the father
of Frederick the great,
this emblematic figure in a certain way,
of the manner in which piety and efficacy
or if you like piety and
power become interwoven,
the latter being seen as
the fruit of the former.
Now what that does is,
in a certain sense is a remake
of a very very old idea,
and the old idea all believing societies,
in Muslim societies,
Christian societies and so on,
was that God gives power,
God gives victory to those
who are really pious,
so in other words in the byzantine empire
when they begin to lose
badly to the Muslims,
that is when the iconoclastic
reform gets real traction,
because people are saying what why is God
not giving us victory over these infidels,
but it must be because we
have in some way offended him,
and the supposedly misuse of icons
was identified as what was really wrong,
but you see this is a
very different modality,
in its analogies,
but this relating of piety and power
is a quite different kind,
because it's not saying any more God's
as it were quasi miraculous interventions,
which give us victory in the past,
are now being withheld
from us or even directly
aiding the other side,
because we are not pious enough,
here you have the notion that piety
and power are the same entity,
they're the same causal entity,
piety is still understood as
this disciplined mode of existence,
is the most efficacious mode of existence,
and so we get another kind
of notion that God set up
the world so that the pious
disciplined organized are
the ones who inherit the earth not
by his miraculous intervention,
but by the way things work,
I mean he set up so it works that way,
it's a quite different kind of idea.
And hence we get this conception
of a world so organized,
and I want to spell out
one version of that in
a variant ideal-type that
I call providential deism,
and it goes something of this kind,
that God set up human life so that
if people abide by certain rules,
and in one variant these
rules are called natural law,
they will succeed in establishing
peace and prosperity,
the key to natural law
on this understanding is
that it creates a society in which human
beings each having their own goals,
which very often but then
in conflict with each other,
if they abide by the
right way of operating,
these goals will mesh,
and it will be a society
of mutual benefit,
of course one of the
most famous formulations
of this is the one we
know from Adam Smith,
if we all try to fulfill our quite
egoistic purposes in life,
but through the method
of peaceful production,
we will do something which
rebounds to the benefit of everyone else,
and if everyone is doing this we have
a happy spiral going upward,
we can now see the
background to this stadial
theory that I mentioned yesterday,
the idea that a commercial
society is a peaceful society,
but we aren't into fighting each
other and mutual degradation,
And trying to grab what we need from
our neighbor as they were back then,
we are into our society of
production and exchange,
and this is a win-win society,
as against that being a zero-sum society,
I mean this is not the language
of the eighteenth century,
but you've got to understand
this is a win-win society,
this is a positive sum game and
that is how God designed it.
So we get the early template of,
of what a proper religion is,
in which we have society can offer us if
we follow the rules a good life,
but this good life is not defined in terms
of Christian notions of
perfection and sainthood,
nor even necessarily
or very often in terms
of Plato and Aristotle
derived notions of virtue,
it's defined as,
the peace and prosperity for everyone,
in a way you see it's almost a return to
the pre-axial understanding
of human flourishing
as being the center point
at that stage of ritual,
only now of course it's very
definitely a post axial idea,
because we only achieve
this kind of mutual benefit
and this kind of prosperity peace
and flourishing through a very
exigent mode of discipline,
it's something we have to as
it were transform ourselves
in order to achieve this.
And so the Deist template
that I'm thinking of is
the notion that God made the world,
he doesn't intervene,
he made the world with certain rules,
and if you get the rules right,
then you can really flourish,
I mean Locke's version of natural law is
a perfect example of this,
that we have this right to life,
and how can we develop a society in which
my right to life and
my right to prosperity,
my right to property,
doesn't override or interfere with yours,
well you read chapter five and you get
the whole story there,
the negative context of
all this is it writing
for the people who were
setting up the Carolinas,
and how to get rid of all
these Indians and so on,
there is that unfortunate side to it,
but it has its own internal consistency,
and you could even say
that a certain piety,
piety with this kind of God
is necessary to good order,
so the proper religion has a very sparse
structure of beliefs,
a creator God,
a benevolent creator God
setting up these rules,
and in some of the more robust variants,
God gives an extra help
by promising rewards
and punishment after death,
this is Locke's view,
that God is in a sense,
shoring up the power of his set of rules
by adding these other
rewards and punishments,
but there is also an intrinsic reward,
an intrinsic punishment
involved in following
the rules or not following the rules.
Now the point that I
want to get here to is,
that this template of what
I call providential deism
is something that not very many people
believed as there a whole sum,
I mean quite a few of the
upper classes did believe,
but not by any means everybody,
as defining their religious position,
but it is there as part of
the inescapable background,
because of the greater
and greater interweaving
and the alliance of piety and power,
people thought was that not
all our Christian religion,
Heaven forfend,
that's not all that it consists in,
we also owe to God worship and
praise and so on and so on,
and we also need God's grace in order
to live up to this and so on,
but lots of people who are
perfectly orthodox are in
a world in which churches allied
with states are building empires,
and just look at the whole 19th-century
are congratulating themselves,
they're taking the white
man's burden and spreading
this wonderful gospel and way
of life to the whole world,
and with this in a sense
the notion of progress,
in the perfectly secular sense
we very often don't think about it,
and Christianization run
neatly together interwoven,
so that we have a certain
kind of self understanding,
which I'm gonna try to characterize,
with this concept of an imminent frame,
and this again is not the whole
of anybody's religious life,
it's just a very important chunk
of one's religious existence because it's
the way that churches and
states together produced
the disciplines that gave that both
defined piety and gave power,
and in this what turns
out to be central are
a number of impersonal orders,
I mean first of all of course
the impersonal order that
we see In the universe scientifically
understood and post
Galilean Newtonian terms,
secondly the order,
the proper order of society as defined
by Locke in Natural Law,
thirdly and I can't expatiate
on this at the moment,
but what came to be seen as moral order,
understood either in utilitarian
or Kantian terms again,
highly impersonal order,
and of course theologically
speaking you could say that,
one of the great shifts brought about
by the early Christian church,
the fullness of the church in relation to
the Greek thought that they took on,
was in a certain sense
precisely a centering on
the personal, on the historical,
on the bodily, et cetera,
which quite radically altered this world,
and in a certain sense a
lot of that is undone when
we get back to the idea
that we get personal
orders making demands on
us in the modern West.
Now I've said that,
the central place this
notion of impersonal order
can allow roughly speaking
three possibilities
dividing the field,
that can be your whole religious life,
you can become a deist,
that becomes your whole religious life,
or no it can't possibly be you,
have a very strong reflex
of orthodoxy in yourself,
and say we have to speak about God's
worship and greatness, grace and so on,
or you can go the other direction,
it's very easy to go the other direction
and say yes this is the whole point,
but bringing God in is
actually getting in the way,
let's say nature did this,
let's say this is how
things are in nature,
why is God getting in the way?
Well these churches are
always getting in the way,
they're squabbling with
each other about who should
be established and fighting each other
and getting unnecessary
division between people,
they are demanding sometimes
unreasonable modes of athleticism,
read Hume's wonderful passage of Hume
on that monkish virtues and so on,
you get a whole list of the
real virtues which are all to
do with sociability and getting
on with people and so on,
and the monkish virtues,
and then there's a wonderful passage,
I wish I had it with me here,
where he says,
I think he's thinking of St Francis,
one of my favorite saints,
but he said this harebrained aesthetic
may find his place in the calendar,
after he dies,
but no one would invite
him into polite company,
St Francis sitting there with,
and so we get this idea
that was Hume and so on,
that Christianity, that
faith is actually a danger,
so we get these three reactions,
if you like this,
the social imaginary of
this impersonal order
under laws that bring
about mutual benefit,
becomes a kind of central
room in the house if
you like from which people can
migrate incorporating that,
build the house that incorporates that
was something else beside,
and that something else beside can be more
or less orthodox faith house,
or it can be a house which is not really
in sight of faith, that
even is combating faith,
and of course if you see
how Christians behave even
at their best,
but certainly most of the
time not at their best,
there's lots that we do to
aggravate people outside
the church to an extreme degree,
so you can see that many
people are motivated
to take that other move,
this I think,
these two crucial developments
I've been talking about,
namely disenchantment,
and the building of this
concept of understanding,
not concept of imaginary
of impersonal order,
created a world in which
it's quite conceivable
and even very many people unfrightening
to just move out of a
whole faith tradition,
and then you start a tremendous
battle of course going
on between these different positions,
you get a deeply divided civilization.
Now this is more or less accomplished
well before there is much
falling off of faith,
we're looking at something which prepared
the ground but it wasn't
necessarily these options
weren't necessarily massively occupied,
massively accepted,
you obviously get to
the French Revolution,
completely atheistic forms,
(speaks in foreign language)
atheistic forms of
Jacobin-ism which remain
a minority which were very powerful,
but it's opened out a new kind of space,
what I'm trying to argue here is if
we think no longer subtraction
story but we think,
let me use this word one last time,
(speaks in foreign language)
If we think of the kind of world
our ancestors constructed
in those centuries,
the seventeenth and eighteenth
century social world,
we can see how it creates
a quite different context
in which the faith option
is by no means the only one,
and in which you can not
only easily hold your world
meaning together by moving about into
a position of non-belief,
but even argue that that
is the more coherent
option granted misunderstanding of order,
this is one of the great
unintended consequences of history,
in a certain sense I
know I'm echoing Weber,
I mean Weber says,
this tremendous mode of capitalism
which then mutates into an iron cage,
it's no longer something,
and what I'm saying here is that,
the greatest attempt to
make everybody over into
a full hundred percent Christian,
and to make that something
very real in the world,
made that a mode of
piety so linked to power,
that in a certain sense the church
didn't transform the world,
the world captured the church,
I mean you could put it that way,
the world also captured the church,
and a church captured by the world is
no longer capable of
speaking to many people,
so anyway that's as far
as I want to get today,
because the magic hour has
come and I must have questions,
and I'll go over this tomorrow,
there's more to be said,
but let me stop here.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you very much, we have
half an hour for discussion,
questions comments,
so please come,
there is a microphone here,
identify yourself first.
- [Man] Very much
appreciate those glimpses
into your personal piety Professor Taylor,
question,
is there another tradition
that you can comment on
a kind of underground
Christianity represented
perhaps like figures by Thomas
Merton and Thomas Keating,
and how do they fit into your narrative?
- No I mean there
definitely is more than one,
there are many, many of these traditions,
first of all I want to
mention something that
I meant to mention
earlier that I'm talking
about Latin Christendom and
of course the whole Greek
and Russian is it's a
quite different world,
they had their own problems
but it's quite different,
but secondly there are
right the way through
this in this civilization,
there are tremendous
traditions of spirituality,
including the Jesuit one,
but the one that naturally I most drawn to
and close to is the French
seventeenth century,
as described by Henri Blemond and so on,
some of the figures there clearly stand
totally outside this
picture I'm giving you,
in other words there is
this continued resistance,
but what set the general understanding
that everybody has of
the world we live in,
that was something I've
been trying to describe,
so by no means captured everybody.
- [Man] Thank you Professor Taylor,
I really enjoyed that the way
you develop this narrative,
and in particular your use of reform,
and in a way reform brought
about its own trouble,
and as I looked through your book,
it's interesting you could
almost read Vatican two,
because as you're talking of reform
you put Protestant over against catholic,
and the criticisms back and forth,
Corpus Christi enchantment on one side
and so on and so forth,
but in a way it was a very quick catch
up for the Catholic
Church of this process,
but was there not something
else going on there too,
and as I looked in your index you
don't refer to John Courtney Murray,
and when you talk about--
- I'm just a poor
Canadian, sorry about that.
- [Man] Because you're taking natural law
and Locke and Grotius,
but was there something
else going on here too?
- Yes definitely,
there's also (speaks in foreign language)
that Murray drew on,
I think that that is
another part of the story
which I try to give in
later chapters which is how
the church responded to
the French Revolution,
how they try to backup the restoration,
and you get an accentuation
of the monarchic
power structure in the church,
and I think the immediate
as it were situation
which helped to propel Vatican II,
was the tremendous dissatisfaction in
the Catholic Church with
particularly the way
this developed through Pius IX
and Pius X and the anti-modernist
struggle and so on,
and attempt to create a
structure which Stalin
wouldn't have blushed at in some ways,
and the thing finally
blew in that famous day
in whatever it was,
1962 in Rome when the
bishops sent back all of
the official statements
that were to be redone,
so I think you have there
a very important moment,
but it's not entirely along the lines
of what I'm calling reform,
and I think even some
elements of Vatican II which
I am very delighted with as
you can probably imagine,
but some elements of Vatican II stay in
that line which I think is highly dubious,
the line of being sure you know what
the meanings of certain pieties are,
that the laity cherish,
and that you clergy,
electorals, theologians,
adates have a right to clean that up
and a duty to clean that up,
I think this has been one
of the most consistent
long-term exercises of how should I say,
of lack of humility on the part
of church leaders in Western history,
and a certain amount of that
hung over Vatican II as well,
so Vatican II is very
good because it helped
I think cure a certain deviation,
cure a certain position
of total opposition
to the modern liberal world,
which the post-revolutionary restoration
church got us into Pius IX and Pius X,
very, very good,
but these deeper issues in Western history
didn't really get I think fully addressed,
but they were by the theologians inspired,
Vatican II, people like
Dulubach and Conger
but they couldn't get on the agenda,
it's too much to expect that they
would all get on the agenda.
- [Man] I find it very
interesting as you discuss
going from a very constrained
possibility om belief,
and now you've discussed
how the social imagine
there was able to develop
such that we've got
these three new and very different
possibilities concerning belief,
I want to ask you two questions,
one is about the relationship between
the existence of a possible way of life,
or a possible world
that you could inhabit,
and then the actual appropriation
of those possibilities,
are they always linked,
once you have a broadening of
the spectrum of possibilities,
are they always going to
be taken up in society,
and also is it a case that we have
a proliferation of possibilities here,
is that the spectrum of human
possibility that is expanding,
or is it merely the
spectrum between belief
and non-belief that is expanding?
- Okay, what's the difference,
I think it's probably the former--
- [Man] I guess to be more specific,
perhaps--
- I see, the spectrum of human
possibility, yeah absolutely.
- [Man] So you could fulfill
numerous possibilities
of human life within a
believing constraint,
so is it in fact that the total number
of human possibilities is
expanding at this point,
or is it merely sort
of the spectrum between
new possibilities of non-belief
that are cropping up?
- Oh no they are new
possibilities of belief,
and I think that's a very important point,
and it's not that we could
think of them beforehand,
I may think of eruptions into,
or go right back to St Francis,
I said he is to me a
very important figure,
nobody invented that possibility before,
I mean it does have
antecedents in one sense,
but in another sense
that something quite new,
and so do various things
in the twentieth century,
kinds of movements,
(speaks in foreign language)
and so on, you can go on and on and on,
there are constantly these new
possibilities being realized,
most of us don't understand them
as possibilities until it's there,
and you see a kind of
spirituality springing up,
absolutely these are very much among
faith people as well as
among non-faith people.
- [Woman] Thank you for your
talk I very much enjoyed it,
I'm interested in the non-linear model of
the history of secularization,
and also if such a thing
can be known or guessed at,
the sort of experience of secularism
or secularization in early days,
and I'm wondering if you
can say at the history
of secularization as the decline of faith
and belief can be understood as a kind
of history of an idea,
history of secularism is a concept
or as an experience or as an idea,
and how that developed,
the re-composition notion
as a reaction as well
as an element of people's ideas of what is
a secular world as a world
condition might offer
in the way of deprivation
or fright or possibility,
or open season for piety now equals power,
which any number of equations can
be made once you've taken God out,
and is that what secularism means,
that removal?
- So it isn't a position,
or even a brace of positions in a sense,
perhaps Christianity might be thought to
be a brace of different positions,
but secular positions
are positions that react
to this common structure I talked
about earlier by moving out,
once they've done that there is
a tremendous number of possibilities,
because what I want to argue and I'll
talk about this tomorrow more,
is that you get what I
call the Nova effect,
the multiplication of possibilities,
because there are various
things that people find
not really satisfactory about
this neat deist ordered world,
and some people express
their dissatisfaction
by going back to orthodox belief,
others like Rousseau start
a completely new hair going,
others have a nostalgia for precisely
what existed before the
disciplinary revolution,
for great warriors and their ability to,
I mean Nietzsche is a
great example of this,
it inhabits Totfeld too,
Totfeld is torn by on one hand
he agrees yes the world
is becoming more equal,
and obviously that's providential,
and God wants it that way,
but what have we lost,
we've lost these great
figures in the past,
the heroism of these great figures,
of the regime,
so there is a nostalgia
for that which produces
a whole lot of new positions,
then there are reactions to that,
I could go on and on and on all night
when you think about it,
so on both sides,
there is this multiplication of positions
which is propelled by a
sense of dissatisfaction,
various kinds of dissatisfaction,
with this what was later
called the bourgeois world,
in other words the neat
theist order is is succeeded
by what people think of
as the bourgeois world
and you have all these
reactions against that,
and this may be called
a lot of things today,
by your parents, or whatever,
yes?
- [Woman] This is just a
question of clarification
really about your own version
of the master narrative,
so it's quite clear
that you don't just want
to give a more complex account,
but you want to deny the
kind of determinism that
we see in the other versions
of the subtraction stories,
and emphasize that at
every point of the course
of human history these
decisions were individual
decisions were made and this construction
or cultivation which might be a better way
of capturing it took place,
and sometimes this
resulted in good choices
and sometimes this
resulted in bad choices,
and so while you want to deny
progress with a capital P,
that we just woke up one day
and realized that tolerance
and equality and autonomy
were just the truth.
It seems to me that hearing you
speak and reading your work,
there isn't progress there but there is
the promise of a happy ending in a way,
or there is this providence
that that's the right term,
that is behind this,
not in the sense that
everything is determined,
but in the sense that everything,
even the bad choices that we make can
be possibilities for conversion.
- Oh yes felix culpa.
- [Woman] So I suppose the first question
is how you view your own position,
and secondly how do you
reconcile the two then,
how do we reconcile this
construction that is going on,
which at the same time is
not just anything goes,
but is in some way,
in some way measured
against an objective truth?
- I mean you're absolutely right,
so I canceled some of my,
little bit too snarky and superior tone
of voice when I talked
about the deist order,
the deist order, that notion of order,
had the tremendous
advantage that it promises
the possibility of real peaceful existence
between large numbers of human beings,
it also promises implicit in
it is the notion of equality,
which in certain circumstances but only
in certain circumstances
can nevertheless flourish,
that is wonderful stuff that has happened,
there's no doubt about that,
and of course in my own political life,
but I think that what's wrong
with the progress story,
let me go back to
yesterday's talk where I said
that one idea is that you
relegate this other stuff to
the past and it's well lost,
we gained but there's no losses,
and I think we're always
incurring losses with the gains,
so we have to struggle
very hard in order to hang
on to the gains and not incur the losses,
because the losses can even
actually even cancel the gains.
Let me give you an example,
we live in societies which are
in some respects
tremendously peaceful inside,
I know there's a lot of violence,
but if you read seventeenth,
eighteenth century brigands,
you wouldn't want to live there,
tremendously peaceful inside,
but they reaped tremendous
violence inside,
as we know,
this country is at war,
my country is also at
a slightly smaller war,
and we do that much too easily,
and part of the reason
why we sometimes do that,
is we're so proud of where we got to,
we're going to push it down everyone
else's throat whether they like it or not,
and get out of our way,
so wow, what's happening here,
the very sense of total
satisfaction and purpose
is luring us into practicing
another kind of violence,
which is different incidents
and different victims,
but horrifying scale,
so realizing this,
we've got to have this sense all the time
of what we are losing,
and try to compensate for it,
that's how I see it,
so it's a very, very,
in other words the people you
can most trust to operate,
I know I'm intervening in one
of your important decisions,
the people who can most
trust to lead us forward in
the best realizations of
modernity are the ones
that are least crowing
about how great we are.
I haven't intervened in your.
- [Man] Hi, I feel like a minor interloper
in this discussion,
but if you could put into
a modern context some
of your arguments that would make it
a lot easier for me to understand,
I don't know about the rest of the crowd,
but in approaching the idea of
the as you put it
disenchanted world or society,
I think there is an
argument for the existence
of that enchantment still occurring today,
I see commercials about diet
pills that will make me happy,
soaps that will make me
powerful and fast cars
that will make me appealing to women,
now this is humorous,
but things of this nature
attack us in a very human level,
and something that I
think it was still present
at the times that you
spoke the 1500s where
you could get a vial of
water for your grandmother,
why are we any different than we are now,
and what has happened to
essentially validate the argument?
- Well because,
and this too will have to
be qualified immediately
after I say it,
but most of us don't really believe in
that kind of efficacy,
and it so deeply in us,
and this is a very interesting issue,
the issue of what we lost,
because we became
different kinds of people,
okay I want to qualify that,
because there are lots of people in
our society that still go to okay,
absolutely,
so you can't get it totally out,
but for the vast majority
of people they would
say that's just superstition
that doesn't work,
on the other hand this hope
for quasi magical effects,
if I have this kind of soap all the women
are going to love me and so on,
that is so so powerful
that people go for it,
but if you call them on it,
then say of course I'm not
doing that I'm just getting,
of course I don't believe that junk,
and they rush out and buy it anyway,
that's quite different from the ones who
are going to get the vial
of water from Canterbury,
they are not feeling taken in,
this is what's really
gonna heal my grandmother,
it's a very different kind of world,
and there are different kinds of people,
and they can see things we can't see,
I would like to say but
this is very complex.
- [Man] Thank you.
- [Woman] You talked about the fact that
the three major monotheistic religions
have contributed to the
disenchantment of the world,
and as we were concentrating
mainly on the Western case,
I was wondering what was
your opinion on a theory such
as Marcel Gousher's about the fact
that Christianity in itself is responsible
for the disenchantment of the world
and not religion as an entity.
- Except that I would
go further than Goucher,
but I think he might agree
with this friendly amendment,
it was Latin Christendom,
so it's not,
all these possibilities are there
in if you like Christianity,
also there are parallel
possibilities in Islam and Judaism,
I mean I just want to make
a quick footnote here,
there are certain movements in Islam which
have been trying to clean
it up in parallel ways,
some of them like the
Wahabi go back quite far,
they leave these beautiful
tombs to molder in Mecca,
because the tombs of various saints
and that's something
absolutely unconscionable
that you should have that,
so they can't quite wipe them out
but they let them molder away,
and as a result of the
example of Latin Christendom
various other things
happened in other areas,
but for some reason,
the society that exploited
this possibility to the utmost,
was Latin Christendom,
now why is that,
that's why I said earlier
I'm not solving anything,
there is another question that
I don't really know how to answer.
- [Woman] Hi my question has a few parts,
so you hear a lot these
days about the rise
in religious fundamentalism today,
and my first question is
do you think that is true,
or in a historical
context do you think there
actually is a rise in
fundamentalism right now,
and if you do think that
is true the it seems to me
that you were describing sort
of a narrowing of the tent,
and do you think that sort of led
to this extreme black
and white kind of thing,
and the last part is is
there a way out of that?
- Well I think the trouble is what people
call fundamentalism is
such a heterogeneous class
but it's hard to see exactly
what unites it together,
now certainly part of what unites
these different phenomena you might think,
the things that people
want to call fundamental is
that they express a profound sense
of certain elements of the
world around attacking us,
however we are defined
our religion and need
to be fought back and they
are trying to destroy us,
so you get this very high
sense of hostility and danger,
that's something that they can have.
And then the second
thing that you often get
as well I call primordialism,
that they claim to be reaching
back to the original form,
and there's a kind of
pathos attending that,
because they usually innovate
in the most strikingly
in order to realize their
claim to be going back.
These are very modern phenomena,
because they bespeak the decomposition
or destabilization of the earlier forms,
and people are reaching for
some kind of re-composition,
but there kind of re-composition that also
are meeting other kinds
of gold that people
have in the modern world,
how to organize against what seem to
be major agencies of the
destabilization of our society,
and this is something relatively new,
very modern mobilization
resembling nationalism
very closely in the sense
that we are being targeted
by those people and we have to rise up,
but around religious markers
and a modification of
the religious life not always fully
conscious as a modification,
modification of the religious life
to mobilize in order to fight that,
so this is I think,
for instance the original fundamentalism,
biblical inerrancy if
you tried to explain that
to Augustine he wouldn't have
understood what you meant,
but in a world where you think
that certain scientifically
minded elites are targeting you,
it makes sense to speak
up in an extreme sense
on creation science,
to speak of the Bible is an
absolutely inerrant document,
you can see it's reactive to the situation
and the situational threat,
but I think that's gonna be on the scenery
as long as there are these
tremendous destabilizations,
it's not the only reaction to but it's
one that you can understand.
- [Jose] We have only a few moments left,
so please the three questions be brief.
- I'll be brief.
- [Man] And then if you can answer
the three questions please.
- [Woman] Sorry my brief
question is about Tocqueville
and in democracy in America
and then the unseen machine
he seems to content that the
reason for secularization
is a close collusion between
politics and religion,
particularly in France between
the state and the church,
and that when one fell both fail,
I just wanted your comment
on that contention.
- No I mean he was
definitely on to something.
- Next question.
- Next question yes.
- [Man] He's not allowed to
respond to the questions?
- [Jose] He'll answer all three together.
- [Man] Okay you have separation of church
and state triumph of secularism,
where does Spinoza fit in,
you wrote about the political
theological treatise when,
when 16 something?
- [Man] This is going back
towards a differing perception
between the medieval world
and our world in regards
to drinking the martyr's blood
to cure your grandmother,
what if some of those
traditional medicinal
remedies actually had
real-world efficacy such
as using Wolf's Bane as an abortive active
or something along those lines,
how is it different than
believing in medicine that
only has a percentage
chance of working today?
- Okay these are three small questions,
I could go on and on,
but the last question first
because it's right in my mind,
that's a different kind of point,
because there's lots of
herds that people use
in traditional societies that
are pooh-poohed by modern medicine,
and it turns out they
have very good properties,
and that's rather different from the vial
of water with the blood of St Thomas,
but Spinoza,
so we have a two hour
lecture on each of them,
settle down,
I mean Spinoza is not really in the line
of ascent reading up to the separation
of church and state here,
it's a quite different line,
one in which he is the father
of a certain kind of I think,
a certain kind of mysticism
of the whole which
we see at the time of Goethe
and the German Romantic period,
he is the father of a certain conception
of religious freedom based on the fact,
and in that there is some analogy to
the argument for toleration,
but it's not really what is the parent to
the separation of the
church and state here,
which is, I can go on at great length,
that's what I want to say about Spinoza.
About Totfeld I thought he had very
very good insight into
the French situation,
in a certain sense Totfeld is always
talking about France,
even when he is talking about America,
and he sees that,
the tremendous battle
between the liberal left
in the revolution and
the church didn't need
to happen in a certain sense,
and he of course mainly targets in the
(speaks in foreign language)
he targets the (speaks in
foreign language) and so on,
but of course one also has
to target the church itself,
and it's something that is not written in
the very stars of Europe,
but it could have been different.
- [Man] Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
