Catholic Tradition, Charles Taylor and Evelyn Waugh

2023 Update: What we have here is the first of a series of musings on Charles Taylor, begun many years ago, when this site started in 2009. For navigation purposes, we list and link the five parts here:

• A Secular Age – Charles Taylor’s Acceptable Loss?
• Catholic Tradition, Charles Taylor and Evelyn Waugh
• Catholic Tradition, Charles Taylor and Supernatural Mystery
• Catholic Tradition, Charles Taylor and Charles Krauthammer
• Catholic Tradition, Charles Taylor and Phillip Larkin

And now back to 2009 — Roger Buck

In 1930, Evelyn Waugh, the British Catholic novelist (most famously of Brideshead Revisited), wrote:

It seems to me that in the present state of European history, the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and chaos.

Civilization — and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe — has not in itself the power of survival.

It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. It is no longer possible to deny the supernatural basis on which it rests.

This is quoted in Charles Taylor’s breathtaking masterpiece A Secular Age. Taylor then goes on to consider Waugh’s view of the flatness of modern civilisation, which threatens “the final triumph of the Hollow Men, who knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, had lost the ability to feel or think deeply about anything.”

Seventy years later, can we not see all-too-ample evidence for the extension – nay escalation – of Waugh’s forebodings? In 2010 is it not easy to behold: the loss of thinking, “dumbing-down” everywhere and the loss of feeling, substituted by the gratuitous and pornographic …?

Now A Secular Age is a book I hope to review at length at some point. In fact, my thoughts here are preparation for that upcoming review. For Taylor’s book is very important for the themes of this site.

It is the story of how we transited from Christendom—Western Catholic Civilisation—to Modern Pluralism and Fragmentation. And it contains an immensely sophisticated 800 page argument as to how we in the West lost faith as we buffered ourselves.

That is to say, how we lost reality as we created a defended, individualistic and materialistic identity – which protected us from the vicissitudes of earlier eras, while also leaving us enclosed in restricted selves, less open to any transcendent reality.

Or again: buffered. This adjective is so good I feel as to permit repetition. Through such related but diverse means as a peculiarly objectified thinking and technological mastery, we buffered ourselves from both harm – and God.

Taylor’s analysis is truly staggering and of inestimable import I feel – yet it is hardly in agreement with Evelyn Waugh. Nor is Taylor particularly sympathetic to the kind of traditional Catholicism, this website aspires to support.

This author’s thought is complex, and I risk oversimplifying him. But it seems to me he means something to the effect that ours is “the least bad civilisation so far.” His view would seem to be that although the loss of the transcendent is regrettable, it has been perhaps necessary and compensated by enormous gains.

Reading Charles Taylor I have to admit: he knows far, far more than I do about the immensity of deprivation, poverty, squalor, disease, cruelties, torture, xenophobia, racism and wars of the pre-modern era.

Far more than most of us moderns, he understands how Hobbes could famously write-off human existence as “nasty, brutish and short”.

He knows also poignantly why medieval Catholics prayed, IMPLORING Our Lady: “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.”

Taylor goes on to suggest that Waugh’s call to return to Supernatural Christianity is “very seductive” – though in the end, short-sighted. It would seem that he regards such thinking as too simplistic. For him, it apparently lacks sufficient complexity, nuance, depth.

But as much as I salute the penetration of Taylor’s sociological analysis – what depths, what depths I feel are missing with him!

Is our society headed towards the Final Triumph of the Hollow Men? Or is it simply “the least bad so far” …? And perhaps evolving onwards and upwards to one still less bad?

These are questions of (literally) burning import. To wrestle with such questions, it is indeed necessary to struggle for depth. As invaluable as Taylor’s work is, I think he is in many respects, very wrong. Why I think that and why I think he is lacking depth is something I will try to tackle next time.

To be continued …

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