Beyond Doubt

An Interview with Charles Taylor

Charles Margrave Taylor is professor emeritus at McGill University and the author of many notable works. Wayfare Editor Zachary Davis invites Taylor to reflect on the development of Taylor’s own faith and the impact faith can have on all of us as we act in the world.

What are your earliest memories of your spiritual and religious life?

Well, a lot of the early experience was negative. I was brought up in Quebec, in the French-speaking Catholic Church in Quebec, and at that point it was extremely clerical, extremely authoritarian. So when I was very young, I don’t remember being impressed one way or another. Although I was impressed by the rhetorical culture that came with the Dominican sermons. It’s a kind of rhetoric that I can still conjure up in my mind. It wasn’t until I was well into adolescence that I felt called upon to take some kind of stand towards religion, and it seemed to me to be very negative.

A lot of Quebecers had this experience, which eventually came out roughly in the 1960s, what we call the Quiet Revolution, where so many people left the church and there was a de-clericalization. So that could have been my story, but what happened is that a lot of the theological work that underlay what later became Vatican II was being written by French-speaking Jesuits and Dominicans, people like Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar. And because the French and Quebec communities of these orders were so closely linked, some of these texts, some not yet published, some even under ban, got into my hands. And I was really deeply moved and carried away by this completely different picture of the faith in history. It was not focused on worrying about one’s own personal salvation, whether you obeyed the rules and so on, but that Christ came to save the world. It was something that was for all of history and for all humanity. I saw a certain vision of a kind of love and self-giving that could really transform not just oneself, but the world. And it had a tremendously powerful effect on me. This was the crucial, decisive turning point in my life. 

If you had a grandchild come to you and say, “Grandpa, I just think Jesus and Christianity is a myth. I’m just going to follow science.” How might you respond? 

I think I’d say, “Find your own spiritual path, but ‘just science’ can’t be the source of that spiritual path.”

And if that same grandchild says, “Well, Grandpa, spirituality isn’t real. Science is real.”

I think I would try to point out that all the things that deeply move us in ethics, in music, in art—science in no way explains that, or even comes to terms with that. That there is another level, another dimension to human experience.

What relationship should Christians have with doubt? 

My whole life’s been accompanied by doubts and uncertainty. I believe faith can be a sister of doubt. You have a sense of the direction you want to move in, and then moments when you don’t really move that easily in the direction you want. Faith is a challenge. You can think that it’s an intellectual challenge and try to find reasons. But by prayer and by thought—I practice a certain kind of Christian meditation—you can get beyond this, and there’s some kind of purification of the faith that happens. That you’re reaching out beyond these doubts to a deeper, richer, fuller connection. Faith means that you sense that there’s something—and here the vocabulary fails in a certain sense—I was going to say something out there, or I could say something is up there, or I could say something is down there because it’s deeper. Or deeper in there. The whole field of ethics and the ends of human life are only available through metaphor. 

Here’s another very powerful experience I had when I was an undergraduate at McGill. There was a remarkable teacher called Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who did a lot of work in India. He became one of the foremost people in the Christian world who studied Islam. I signed up for his course in comparative religion and it was an absolutely extraordinary experience. He didn’t have great rhetorical skill—he kind of walked up and down holding his toga gown while almost mumbling, but he evoked what it was to be a Buddhist or to be a Muslim in an extraordinarily rich way.

And I immediately liked him. There was an ecumenical spirit which only came to fruition and broad acceptance later on in my life. A desire not only to want to understand, but to exchange with other faiths. From Buddhism, for instance, the intuition of sunyata—emptiness. That a lot of the things that you’re attached to are getting in your way, and if you can kind of fall into an abyss when you detach from them, that is what opens up the gates to something bigger. And so that very Buddhist idea makes sense for me in a Christian perspective. That these kinds of doubts hold you back, and somehow, if you can get beyond them, if you fall into the pit they’re threatening, it can allow the greater power of the force and agape that I feel is somewhere there in the universe because of the life and death of Christ. So that’s the kind of relationship faith can have with doubt, and why I think it’s the good sister, not the bad sister, of faith. 

The way you described this world religions course models a way we can hold on to our own faith commitments without being threatened by those that are different.

Our faith is even enriched by that difference. It’s very paradoxical. And to certain people it’s totally incomprehensible to think positively of something that is different, or in terms of propositions, contradictory. That to think positively of other faiths must mean you are in the process of moving out of your own faith. But it doesn’t have to work that way. It's a great mystery. It’s something that I don’t claim fully to understand. 

Do you think it has something to do with an intuition that though there are very divergent expressions of the divine or the sacred they point to some common source?

Yes, yes. Point to is maybe too strong, but obviously they must have some kind of common source. And then when you factor in other things, such as the ethical growth in human history, starting off with what Karl Jaspers identified as the Axial Age, these changes in Greece, Israel, the Ganges Plain and China that occurred. They’re very different in many ways, but there are certainly very powerful common features. Then you look at the continuing development of ethics over time so that now, for instance, we have an ethic of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which is way beyond the demands that existed earlier. 

And this has obviously been the work of people from all these different traditions. You get the great breakthrough of nonviolence against unjust regimes with Gandhi, a Hindu. And then that is picked up by Martin Luther King and John Lewis, Christians who recognized the resonance of what Gandhi was doing for Christians.

A compelling reason to me for why we are in fact spiritual (and not merely material) beings is that we do respond to the call to love. And the way that you describe this ethic of love moving across cultures and traditions, being particularized, but nonetheless finding resonance and response in each seems important for understanding the spark of the divinity which is within us. 

Yes, absolutely! We often translate the Greek word agape as something to do with the love of parents for children or caring love. It’s not quite the same as erotic love nor even the love for parents. I think of this love in terms of Paul’s kenotic love, a self-emptying love, a reaching down love. That is the force and that has the power to move people very deeply. So you are right, if you think of pictures of the human psyche which stress the search for power, wealth, and control, etc.—which undoubtedly also exist!—but if you think that is the whole story, the Marxist, materialistic accounts just seem to leave out terribly important facts about human beings.

We’re in an age of anxiety, a pessimistic age, a challenging spiritual age. But at the end of your book A Secular Age, you encourage readers to be unafraid of the future, to trust that the Christian witness can be renewed for each generation. How can we live forward in faith and not be overcome by worry or nostalgia?

You have to look back on history and take off the blinkers. Some traditionalists in the Catholic Church, for example, believe that the church starts at Pentecost in Israel in the 30s AD and it’s continually saying the same thing. Which is obviously absurd when you really know the history. That’s what Vatican II really recognized. What we’re called upon to do is to continue this history in a way that connects with and makes sense of what we have become. Great saints, such as Saint Paul writing in the New Testament or Teresa of Ávila or Saint John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart still speak to us, so there is a certain kind of continuity, but each age is tremendously different, and the spiritual realities are very different. 

So instead of seeking to recover the original Christian experience or message, we should think of our own lives as part of an unfolding message? 

That’s right. 

What does it look like as a Christian to be responsive to our own time?

Whether you like it or not, you are the time. So when something really holds you or pulls you, you may not understand why, but if there’s some genuine contact, God is speaking to our time in you. The original experience is not figuring out, but being pulled. Only later may you develop reasons you can explain to someone else.

Charles Taylor is a professor emeritus of political science and philosophy at McGill University and the author of the acclaimed book A Secular Age.

Art by Augustus Vincent Tack.