The Greatest? No.

Not that anyone associated with Commonweal should be trusted as having right judgment.

The legendary Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor is our era's greatest theorist of community and solidarity.

For Commonweal, he discusses Pope Francis' exhortation to emerge from our cramped, fear-driven lives: https://t.co/QJaKzy6WsA

— Commonweal Magazine (@commonwealmag) November 24, 2020

Who Needed Ressourcement to a Greater Degree than the Other Jurisdictions?

The patriarchate of Rome.

CWR : The Next Pope is an evangelical call to ressourcement by Eduardo Echeverria
George Weigel’s new book provides a balanced perspective on what the next pope should embrace in order to promote the radically Christocentric and evangelical imperative of the Church.

Yves Congar and the Future of the Church in its Past
by Charles Taylorhttps://t.co/AT5pehdjBY

— Church Life Journal (@ChurchLifeND) August 26, 2020

Church Life Journal

I'm not going to critique Taylor here, though what he says is worthy of critique, as his understanding of the problem of political life is flawed, and affects his understanding of the Church's mission as well.

I won't disagree that the patriarchate of Rome needed Ressourcement, not only to become familiar with the Fathers as models, but also as voices of the Tradition, and to be able to distinguish between what is directly pertaining to the Kerygma, theological propositions that have been found to have value in explaining the Kerygma and accepted by the Church Universal, theological opinion that is not yet accepted by all of the Church Universal, and so on. Was a Latin synod posturing as an ecumenical council the best or most effective means of bringing Ressourcement to Latin bishops? Or could this aspect of ecclesial reform have been done in a better and more cost-effective way? If the synod had just been an opportunity for bishops to gather, pray, study and have discussions, without feeling it necessary to issue documents to justify the calling of the synod, would the results have been better?

Charles Taylor's Liberalism, Again

Happening now: Sociologist José Casanova, a Berkley Center senior fellow, and philosopher Charles Taylor discuss Taylor’s seminal work #ASecularAge (2007) and the divergent religious dynamics that can coexist within our global secular age.

Watch live: https://t.co/KxCnU77kNI

— Berkley Center (@GUberkleycenter) June 11, 2020

Charles Taylor on Solidarity and Fairness

Church Life Journal

This is how the source of the deep cracks in modern capitalist societies presents itself. There are two contexts that justify our deeds; we can define them as the “democratic” and the “capitalist.” To be honest, we cannot reject either one. We cannot reject the democratic context, because it has become a central, inseparable element of our vision of legitimacy. We also cannot reject the capitalist context, because we have long ago passed the stage where we would be satisfied with a stagnant economy. Thus, we have to come to terms with them both. The first context is a great source of solidarity. When we manage to awaken and activate the feeling of our common citizenship we are capable of acting in often surprising ways by authentically devoting ourselves to others or in the name of the common good. This is especially apparent during times of war or during movements of national liberation—in a certain sense the Polish Solidarity movement was an important instance of such a movement. The second context demands that we put solidarity to the side and agree to bend or even break the rules of reciprocity in the name of effectiveness, which, it is apparent, we cannot renounce.

These are the two contradictory principles -both are illusionary and the illusions of "democracy" and "greater wealth" are used by the oligarchy to provide a cover of legitimacy. Does Taylor realize this, or has he drunk the Kool-aid as well? Being subject to the same state is insufficient to create "solidarity" and Taylor fails to recognize "civic nationalism" cannot overcome substantial differences in group identity or culture. Comparing Canada (or the U.S.) to a rather homogeneous ethnic state like Poland is comparing apples and oranges.

Solidarity is a solution but Taylor has no adequate means to promoting it because he doesn't acknowledge real divisions. Moreover, the state itself is opposed to solidarity and will not permit any true solidarity (as opposed to companionship in subjugation) to exist because solidarity is a threat to its power and existence.

2019 Claude Ryan Lecture on Catholic Social Thought

2017 Beatty Memorial Lecture - Charles Taylor

"The Challenge of Regressive Democracy"

More with Charles Taylor

A True Believer?

Following upon this post; some videos which reveal Charles Taylor's attitudes towards multiculturalism, diversity, and immigration.

Reconstructing Democracy

First Things: Two Cheers for Charles Taylor and Friends by Carl R. Trueman

Reconstructing Democracy: How Citizens Are Building from the Ground Up by Charles Taylor, Patrizia Nanz, and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor

Taylor holds on to leftists delusions about the conditions/requirements of communal life. Academics need to get out into the real world.

2019 Ratzinger Prize

Related:


Church Life Journal

The Ethics of Authenticity

Inescapable Horizons by Mark C. Henrie

Means to End, End to Means

Time to reconsider God as end in respect of the relationship of the common good to the ultimate end?

From The End of Modernity by Thaddeus Kozinski:

According to St. Thomas, men cannot adequately understand in theory, let alone fulfill in practice, the detailed precepts of the natural law without the help of its author, God, and its divinely appointed interpreter, the Roman Catholic Church. With regard to a non-sacral foundation for political order, the Thomist Joseph May in the 1950s stated: “The only true doctrine is that civil society cannot prescind from the ultimate end [emphasis mine] both because the temporal welfare implies an ordering to the spiritual and supernatural, and because the individual citizens are directly and positively bound to tend to it.”[8] And even Dignitatis Humanae insists that it “leaves untouched the traditional Catholic doctrine about the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ” (Sec. 1). As Pope John Paul II often reiterated, the face of Jesus Christ is the only true mirror in which man can fully and accurately contemplate and comprehend his own nature and destiny; thus, only therein can he discern the moral values and goods most perfective of himself and the political order.

Well, He is Canadian, Isn't He?

Or a liberal of some sort...

Mirror of Justice: Matthew Rose on "Tayloring Christianity" - FT

Charles Taylor on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

Two from Ethika Politica

On Monastic Papacies by C.C. Pecknold
Francis, Benedict, and MacIntyre? By John Haldane

The Theological Origin and, Hopefully, End of Modernity by Thaddeus J. Kozinski

Voluntarism, an indifferent will as primary moral agent; nominalism, the rejection of any real reference for universal concepts; disenchantment, the default existential mode of a buffered, self-sufficient “individual”; and desacralization, the “immanent frame” surrounding and conditioning modern social and intellectual life—these were the background assumptions of the Enlightenment, but they seem now foregrounded social, cultural, and political dogmas. The “Regensburg Address” of the Pope, with his account of the three waves of dehellenization, is, I think, a key text for grasping this development. Dehellenized reason closed to intelligible being, a voluntarist God beyond good and evil, a non-participatory cosmos mechanically construed, and a univocal, flattened concept of being supplanting Aquinas’ precarious but precious metaphysics of analogy—these are the metaphysical, epistemological, and theological roots of modernity, and they are deeply planted. As the Pope suggests, these roots have nourished a misshapen cultural tree, nay, a forest; and it cannot be simply cut down and replanted—for it is our home, whether we like our home or not, for, at least for the time being, there is no other domestic domicile into which to move, it would seem.


Now, great fruits came via their heroic attempts: the progress of medicine and human rights; what Taylor calls the “affirmation of ordinary life”; the dignity of persons seen as ends and never means (Casanova); the autonomy of politics, science, and economics from ecclesial control. This represents, as in the words of Maritain, a maturation of the political order and the Gospel seed coming to fruition. This is the true message of Gaudium et spes, when interpreted correctly–that is, not as a replacement of the Syllabus of Errors, but its complement. After Vatican II, no Catholic can interpret the prior social teaching and theology as simply a rejection of modernity, but neither can they reject or dismiss the prior teaching as outdated or simply mistaken.

The question of modernity, again. Kozinski offers a couple of scenarios as to how this all plays out, but I think maybe the analysis starts off on the wrong foot. Was there a rebellion against the authority of the Church? Undoubtedly. Did that rebellion provide the intellectual roots for liberalism? Or merely the occasion for it to develop as a reaction against the wars of religion?

Maybe it is not "modernity" that is the problem, but the power of earthly rulers vying against God; they are the ones who have made of liberalism and a host of other idealogies in order to take power for themselves in the name of liberating the masses.

MoJ: Review of Taylor & Maclure, "Secularism and Freedom of Conscience"

Sentimentality or Honesty? On Charles Taylor by Mark Oppenheimer
(via Mirror of Justice)

But Taylor is no Nietzschean, and he does not want to romanticize what we might call Extreme Catholicism. Not only is that premodern Catholicism unrecoverable, Taylor says; it had to expire in order for us to become a more charitable, humane species. Taylor argues that with the Protestant Reformation came an “affirmation of ordinary life” (the term is discussed at length in Sources of the Self) that refocused religious devotion on the daily acts and works of ordinary people while elevating the sufferings of those ordinary people to a matter of divine concern.

Where exactly is his evidence for this? Sounds like self-loathing Catholicism, if anything. Taylor has not been a priority, and I haven't acquired Sources of the Self yet... Another Canadian to bug me?

Proposition four: “That is the task at hand: how to live a life that is personally authentic—a goal the medieval church would not have understood, much less approved of—while giving that life meaning, spirituality, fullness.” In other words, how can we keep our modern humanity without losing what is best from the more enchanted past?

It is on this question that the personal Taylor and the political Taylor converge, in ways that can be quite satisfying. It might seem that the Taylor who writes about the modern personality (Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity) and the Taylor who writes about the modern state (parts of A Secular Age and Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”) are working on two different projects. I don’t think that is so. Although I could not find a place where Taylor connects the two urges, it seems to me that “authenticity,” a word he uses only for the personal project, is actually the word he wants for the political project too.

Philosophers like Rousseau tend to see political community as the natural enemy of personal authenticity; the state is what represses our true selves. (I have to thank my friend Matthew Simpson, the philosopher and Rousseau scholar, for clarifying this point.) But as I read Taylor, he seems to say that just as any given woman in Quebec wants to be true to herself, the Québécois want to be true to their culture. It is the same problem on two different levels. It is the Romantic urge personally and politically, and in both cases it seems to appear, historically speaking, just on either side of the year 1800. The political urge makes no sense without the personal one. Taylor recognizes this equivalence implicitly, and his work argues for it, but he never quite formulates the extent to which, for him, the personal is political.

True to their culture? Or true to their roots? What is Romantic about the desire to maintain one's identity in the face of those who would take it away? Such an urge pre-exists modernity.

Word on Fire: Culture: Charles Taylor & the Secular Age

The History of American Secularism - Charles Taylor

Does he get it right?