‘My Kind of Catholic.’ On Taylor’s Contribution to Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

ABSTRACT Many critics observe a methodological flaw in Taylor’s work. They claim that there is an alleged discrepancy between Taylor’s historical approach on the one hand and his defense of fullness in terms of openness to transcendence on the other. This article challenges this verdict by disambiguating the relation between the role of history in Taylor’s narrative and his personal defense of fullness in terms of religious openness to agapeic transcendence. In order to underpin this position, I first assess the originality of Taylor’s analysis of the historical origin of secularization by comparing his master reform narrative with other stories of secularization (§2), in particular that of Marcel Gauchet (§23). The outcome of this comparison leads to the question regarding the ontological presence of transcendence as a religious experience of fullness. Taylor’s answer to this question is evaluated from an epistemological stance (§4) and a more general cultural approach (§5). In order to retrieve a religious experience of fullness, Taylor highlights the important role of what he calls subtler languages (§6). Finally, the question is raised how subtle words in a ‘post-revolutionary climate’ may retrieve that personal, religious experience of fullness (§7).