Abstract
This short volume makes a modest, but nonetheless distinctive, contribution to recognizing the theological import of the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor. Its contribution does not primarily consist in finer articulations of T.’s long-standing concern with issues of philosophical anthropology; instead, it evidences in strikingly concrete terms the acutely perceptive and profoundly Catholic character of the framework giving intellectual shape to his philosophical inquiry. Its capacity to provide such a perspective on T.’s work is due, in significant degree, to its origin as a set of exchanges in which T. explores his own growth as a believer in dialogue with Jonathan Guilbault, an editor at Novalis, the Toronto publisher of the French original (2015). This exploration is set in a framework highlighting five books T. has himself identified as significant in shaping the dynamics of his belief. These books and their authors, which respectively serve as points of reference for each of the book’s five chapters, are The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the poetic oeuvre of Friedrich Hölderlin, The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Faithful to the Future: Listening to Yves Congar by Brother Émile of Taizé.
T. has long acknowledged the importance of The Phenomenology of Perception in enabling him to undertake the articulation of an account of human activity that would be more adequate than those on offer from the reductive naturalism that had become the default position of much English-language philosophy during the twentieth century. What he intriguingly notes here, however, is that the shift of philosophical attention to “lived experience” that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology makes possible can also be seen in a theological register, specifically the one expressed in Vatican II’s call that the church be attentive to the “signs of the times.” T. uses pointed terms to describe this ecclesial shift: “The church was compelled to come back to reality and must never cease to do so” (18).
It is not insignificant that the next three works that are subjects of T.’s conversation—Hölderlin’s poetry, Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—are not treatises articulating philosophical analyses and arguments but rather are works of poetry and imaginative fiction. These works—including their genres—are significant not just for the light they shed on the content of T.’s religious faith but also—and at least as importantly—on the manner of its expression in T.’s own writing. A remark he makes about his experience of reading Hölderlin is indicative of the interdependent dynamic of content and expression that, as I read T.’s major works, is embedded into the structure and execution of his philosophical project: “Not only does Hölderlin’s poetry show us and convince us that everything is held together in the world, it also gives us the very strong impression of touching this mystery, of being fully incorporated in it. His art does more than reveal: it also creates a relationship that makes us partake of something” (22, emphasis mine). Over against the dynamic of “holding together”—a dynamic more longed for than attained in the strain of Romanticism represented by Hölderlin—T. encounters a related but differently inflected tension in Baudelaire. He is a poet who “mingled rupture and continuity” (42), whose dissatisfaction with the elusive character of the sought-for unity “worsened into anguish and spleen” (43). Yet in such spleen, T. still discerns possibilities for hope; the loss of meaning against which spleen protests almost paradoxically provides solidarity with all those “insane with agony,” a kinship with “the forgotten ones,” that T. perceives as a form of compassion providing an avenue for hope (57). It is then hardly surprising that community is also an important touchstone in the appreciation T. expresses for Dostoevsky: “For Dostoevsky as for the Romantics, we become free insofar as we make ourselves available to a communion with the great real force that circulates throughout the created world” (63).
Fittingly, the conversation in the final chapter, on the significance T. finds in the thought of Yves Congar, circles back to the importance of reading “the signs of the times” (82–85)—a task essential to the mission of “making him [Christ] present to men and women of all times” (82) that T. sees entrusted to the church. T. finds value in the way Brother Émile’s book concisely situates Congar, together with de Lubac and Chenu, as three “titans” of French theology, whose work helped to make “the small revolution of Vatican II possible; they enabled the church to open up to what’s right and precious in modern intuitions” (80). T. has again provided his audience with a discerning enactment—albeit on a scale smaller than that of Sources of The Self or A Secular Age—of how to read “the signs of the times.”