A Theological Response to Secularism as Public Policy

Abstract

Secular public policy comes in two basic versions, namely the Anglo-Saxon and the Francophone versions, roughly reflecting the two versions of the Christian religion—the Protestant and the Catholic respectively—which the public body seeks to put to one side. To the extent that these correlations do hold, a theological interrogation is called for. Such interrogation can focus on what is a constitutive element of democracy, and overlooked in both cases of secularity, namely the value of solidarity. But the enactment of solidarity is a secular religious expression, beyond any ‘closed immanence’ that might be thought to characterize the public space. In recognizing this, the Christian churches are ethically bound to move to a major reformulation of their basic doctrines and secular society to rethink its displacement of religion.

Secular public policy comes in two basic versions, broadly speaking the Anglo-Saxon and the Francophone, reflecting two versions of the Christian religion which the public body seeks to put to one side. To the extent that these correlations do hold, and it must be stressed here that one is dealing here in ‘ideal types,’ it behoves theology to interrogate these different reasons. Such interrogation can usefully focus on what is a constitutive element of democracy, and overlooked in both cases of secularity, namely the value of solidarity. And if, as I will argue below, the experience of solidarity is a central mark of human transcendence, then there are major implications for how religion is ‘placed’ in secular society. ¹

We begin with a brief sketch of the argument. The version of religion out of which Anglo-Saxon secularity emerged, sees God intervening to lift persons out of the state of sin, on the condition each individual responds with a ‘yes’ to this gratuitous offer; the hierarchy of the organized church centred in Rome fudges this challenge. Once you subtract the religious dimension, individuals in secular culture are seen as blocked from reaching objective truth and society must allow each to form their own way forward, and protect the rights of religion too.

The other version posits a transcendent God securing a cosmic and moral order; natural human potential flourishes by divine grace, symbolized in hierarchies of power tracking God’s determining role. Once you subtract the religious dimension there remains in this Francophone version of secularity the natural human capacity to determine one’s own life. Religion, because of its heteronomous point of view, is excluded as obstructing this free self-determination, and the state operates under the legal framework of a strict separation from religious bodies. This policy is known as laïcité. ²

The challenge to the first version is to recognize the problem of motivation: why should any citizen recognize the others’ points of view? The focus is to a large extent on each individual or group being allowed to form their own opinion. The challenge to the Protestant church is to shift away from an unnecessarily supernaturalistic solution to the problem of motivation, namely an intervening God assuring the just reward to deserving parties.

In the case of the latter version of secularity, the weakness has to do with the question of free self-determination as the central value or norm. The state has the duty to facilitate the free formation of conscience. But in prescribing what is normative for human nature, does this not contradict the whole thrust of secular policy? Is not the project of secular modernity thus in some way incoherent? The challenge for the Catholic church is not to insist that its premodern picture of normative human nature is decisive, nor to see this as necessarily linked to a cosmic hierarchy (symbolized in the ecclesiastical structure).

Finally, the vision of a secular society governed not through force but by democratic consensus presupposes the commitment to solidarity on the part of the citizens. This would imply a widespread attitude that puts the community of dialogue above simply getting one’s own way. This, as will be argued, reveals a specific religious dimension in ‘ordinary’ secular culture, not apart from it. This can be best be approached by highlighting a major shift in our understanding of the world of human persons, now seen essentially in terms of the symbolic transformation of people’s lives, in terms of the frame of ‘interiority.’ Before theology can interrogate secularity, and secular public policy, we need to draw attention to this shift.

Shift in Philosophical Framework

The broad background to the emergence of secularity is the shift from a cosmological frame of thinking to the frame of subjectivity. This shift is associated with the rise of science, in particular Galileo’s turn from a geocentric to a heliocentric model, bringing to the fore our critical awareness of our perspective, our subjectivity. This critical awareness arguably has its remote origins in the emergence of a more humanist understanding of religion in the Axial Age of the major world religions, 800–200 BCE and taken further after that. For Charles Taylor, ³ this move of the Axial Age is complemented by a transcendent understanding of the divine, by the development of second-order thinking, and by a globality of vision. ⁴ Among the examples are the post-exilic Hebrew prophets, Gautama’s simplification of the Hindu tradition, and the breakthrough in the classic Greek philosophical culture. ⁵ This can lead to seeing secular society precisely as emerging from Christianity, as for example Gauchet does, describing Christianity as, in his phrase, ‘la religion de la sortie de la religion,’ the religion that exits from religion. ⁶ For this reason it is plausible that along with what appears as ‘disenchantment’ there will also be, in contemporary culture, much ‘re-enchantment’—one commentator points to Heidegger, Rilke, Musil, as examples of writers giving expression to this. ⁷

The shift in philosophical framework has a crucial impact on theological reflection. What we are talking about is a new horizon for such reflection, which we can provisionally refer to as that of ‘interiority.’ We are no longer spectators of a world already there, but internally co-creative of the world; we are also self-consciously historical. The new horizon takes shape as an awakening to this interior world of meaning in terms of which our freedom of self-determination is given expression and put into effect. In the 18th and 19th century Romantic Movement this frame of reference is ‘discovered,’ as Coleridge formulates it:

In looking at objects of nature . . . as at yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking a symbolic language for something within me that forever and already exists, than observing anything new, a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. ⁸

The divide between observer on the one hand and observed object on the other, is challenged by the phenomenology of intersubjectivity associated with Hegel. In this view, consciousness is never simply closed in its subjective self but is always reaching out to the world. Langer affirms this whole shift in mental approach, seeing reality not simply as ‘there’ but in terms of symbolic transformation. ⁹ This ‘new key’ to philosophy, as she puts it, describes her research into ‘the symbolism of reason, rite, and art.’ The ‘view from above,’ the cosmic view of ‘man’ as below the angels, above the beasts, is here superseded. A new slant on the normativity of human lives is called for, one that has still to be properly thematized in secular culture.

Religion in a New Key

This creates a problem for religions. The defining doctrines and the rules constitutive of how religion takes institutional form are now seen as relative to the personal journeying that is our new horizon of reflection. Of the religious symbol it is noted by Eugene Webb: ‘To call it by a name and speak of it as though it had a specific entative status is not to know it as an entity, but to give metaphysical expression to an aspiration; it is to aim toward and seek to evoke fidelity to the goal of the dynamic process.’ ¹⁰ What can be lost in the process of institutionalizing religion is clarity about the analogical character of the symbols and their limitations. Voegelin phrases the problem in terms of ‘the general deformation of experiential symbols into doctrines.’ ¹¹

Similarly, Karl Jaspers agues that what is being sought is a way to structure our lives, or Existenzerhellung. Jaspers explains the religious symbol:

Not everyone will recognize himself in it, but each one does so more or less, both in adoption and rejection, by translating it into his own reality as this very individual. Its communication has many meanings and may be misunderstood. Its appeal to the man to whom it appeals at all will be to involve his self. ¹²

If one goes along with this, a big shift is in order for the way the religions present themselves today. Of any religious person we are now more self-consciously aware of the dimension of their psychological reality, something unpicked by countless novelists. The case of the Baptist missionary in Barbara Kingsolver’s (1998) The Poisonwood Bible, or, earlier, that of the pastor in Gide’s (1919) La Symphonie Pastorale, are well-known examples. Our transcendence is always coloured by ‘the terror of death,’ to use Becker’s phrase, by struggling with finitude, and by the resultant coping mechanisms. ¹³ The call is to a norm of responsibility, namely working through one’s self-deceptions rather than facilitating them. Religious communities—the focus here is on Roman Catholicism—may be found to harbour instances of psychological abuse. ¹⁴ One might link the sexual abuse crisis in the Church with deficient structures of ecclesial authority, as does Thomas O’Loughlin. ¹⁵

Two Versions of Secular Public Policy

Secular policy is in general consistent with a democratic governmental system, which is based on consensus, and puts religious bodies to one side. As already indicated, we can distinguish two different approaches to here, corresponding to two different interpretations of the Christian religious tradition.

The version of secularity best known in our own context is typical of Anglophone cultures and is based on a scepticism of absolute truth. I call this ‘Version B.’ In this version it is claimed that each person has the right to put forward their understanding of truth, and so do the religions. The key principle here is that of the equality of all such claims. Ethics is a matter of the principles of fairness. There is an imperative to act in a way that you can will it of any person, the principle of your action should be universalizable. For Kant, it is in this attitude that lies the dignity of the human person. The approach of the Enlightenment, central to Kant’s thinking, is summed up by the idea that each person should stand on their own feet: sapere aude, or dare to be wise, as Kant put it. For this reason, there can be no determining religious authority in society. But at the same time the state has no jurisdiction over what the religion holds to be true and of value. The slogan for this version of secular policy could be said to be: ‘Leave them alone.’

The flaw in this ethical approach concerns the problem of motivation. Without sanctions or framing of the kind that religion offers, there might not be the necessary motivation to follow those principles of fairness if one can flout them with impunity. In the secular-adjusted version of the religion, God may be seen as securing, in his perfectly just overview, an ultimate foundation for such motivation. But this in turn throws up the problem of natural disasters such as plagues or earthquakes, by the nature of things causing much undeserved, unjust, suffering. This is termed ‘the problem of evil.’ In other words, how do we reconcile unjust suffering with the idea of a God who is fair. The failure of theodicy would throw religion into doubt.

The second version, what I call ‘Version A,’ is more typical of Francophone countries and policy of laïcité. It focuses on the human potential for self-determination and on the free formation of conscience in order to actualize this potential. This is seen to be the duty of the secular state, taking care to distinguish this from the citizen’s free choice of religion and the of religious symbols in the public square. (The near-complete covering of the face, as in the burka, is forbidden for reasons of public security, as explained by Miaille. ¹⁶ ). Democracy is seen as resistance to heteronomy, and heteronomy is associated with religion. Which symbols will prevail, in the minds and hearts of the citizens, remains open, those of liberty and equality (symbolized in the recent pantheonization of Josephine Baker), or those of religion (symbolized for example in the canonization of John-Paul II). In this sense, laïcité can be thought of in terms of the slogan, ‘Leave us alone.’

The weakness of this ethical is not concerned with motivation as such, but with the quality of such motivation. Without the proper symbolization of the capacity for self-determination and for transcendence, culture will become shallow. But there is a problem, because the normativity of the freedom or self-transcendence would seem bound up with the framing of a cosmic hierarchy—which is precisely what is being resisted in democracy. For this reason, one can expect a drift into the extremes of a transhumanism and, in reaction, a shift of citizens to the political right. ¹⁷ It leads also to philosophical and theological critiques of modernity and the secular state, as discussed below. ¹⁸

The Religious Antecedents

The two versions of secularity can be seen as derivative of the two distinct understandings of the religion that is now put aside. In Version A, that giving rise to the policy of laïcité, the classic religious perspective was founded on an understanding of God as fully transcendent, answering to the anxiety of the Ancient World, felt to be at the hands of powers beyond their control, the anxiety of ‘fate.’ In the framing normative order now newly established, the natural human potential to flourish is given and brought into actualization by divine grace, working through normal human capacities, and takes institutional form in hierarchies of power that reflect and symbolize God’s founding position.

In Version B, the religious perspective—now in the context of the rise of the new middle class and greater individualism—answered to the anxiety not of the cosmic order as such, but of any person’s particular place in the order of salvation. Are they matching up to what is demanded of them as an individual? The old hierarchical order is seen as a block to this kind of critical self-awareness. It is an anxiety of guilt and condemnation and is founded on an understanding of human ‘fault,’ but God is the power that brings about a reversal of this, through—the central emphasis here—the believer’s reorientation, made possible by God’s gratuitous and intervening gift of Christ. The key point is that of ‘justification’ (by faith alone); the religion is in a sense defined by its opposition to the Catholic hierarchical picture.

In both cases, as we will see, there are elements of re-enchantment—in a secular frame of thinking. The secular upshot of the changes is not devoid of transcendence. But this is not the case with a third version of religion, Deism. Deism proposes that human beings function autonomously in a more or less closed system of physical and moral transactions; the distant God is there as a guarantee, a security blanket, as it were, for counter-examples to or failures of the system. ¹⁹ This is religion justified through theodicy, and it is a justification found inauthentic, and indeed to be resisted, by the central character in Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, and likewise in Pamuk’s Snow. ²⁰

If you subtract the religious dimension from this third version, you get to a secular culture of ‘closed immanence.’ Various forms of reductionism are seen as plausible: there is an absence of the validity of personal knowledge, an Absence of Mind, in the title of Robinson’s short book. ²¹ If knowledge properly speaking is of objects (something that would leave out the scientist as agent), then, as Hume argued, there is no ‘self’ to be known as such. That means there is no subject of a possible re-enchantment. This impersonal and closed world is the dismal vision of Dennett. ²² It lurks in the background of the secular culture.

Shortcomings of the Two Notions of Secular Public Policy

We turn now to the two more helpful versions of secularity. I start with the religion Version B. Eliding the religious dimension here, you arrive at the ‘Anglophone’ version of secularity, described above. Human beings are essentially blocked in the exercise of their intellect and of their power of willing, hampered in what they can know and in the scope of their willingness. There is a default scepticism about ‘grand narratives.’ Religions have of course themselves an equal right to be respected in their beliefs, not judged.

Tillich argues that neither of the two versions of the Christian religion has purchase in contemporary culture. ‘The contents of the tradition,’ he writes, ‘however excellent, however praised, however loved once, lose their power to give content today.’ ²³ But he points in particular to the Version B religion as problematic in putting to one side a philosophical anthropology that could ground a new expression of the tradition. The upshot of this (he is speaking of some Protestant theologians) is that ‘the doctrinal concepts of the biblical message were preached as objective truth without any attempt to mediate the message to man in his psychosomatic and psycho-social existence.’ ²⁴ The choice of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to God is too abstracted from the actual intersubjective conditions of human growth.

The oversight is shared by the culture and the version of the religion associated with it. The take-away point here is then to see how, within these frames of thinking, one could integrate the ‘yay’ or ‘nay,’ the basic orientation, in a philosophical anthropology. For example, Lonergan has argued that there is an ineluctable existential dialectic thrown up by the human condition, as one moves into the world of meaning and of value, issuing in moments of ‘conversion’ on an intellectual and also psychic level. ²⁵ Staying with our frame of interiority, the centrality of our symbolic world, we may point to the cross as symbol of persons facing down rejection, and by a difficult inversion of one’s immediate trajectory, giving hope.

Turning to Version A, if you elide the religious dimension, you arrive at the ‘Francophone’ version of secularity: human beings have a natural capacity to determine their own lives and the society has the duty of forming the conscience of each citizen. ²⁶ Religion is set aside as obstructing this through its heteronomous point of view, and its hierarchical forms of social arrangements. Growth in human self-understanding and a more whole-hearted orientation towards true flourishing seem to be blocked by the hierarchical expressions of God’s role and of the cosmology. But, as mentioned, without the proper symbolization this orientation (to truth and charity) tends to evaporate; culture becomes shallow, the most marketable products tend to swallow up all the rest. Shrove Tuesday morphs into the Rio carnival.

The key point here, to be discussed in detail in the following section, is not to see normativity as inevitably linked to a pre-modern cosmology and theology, but to embrace its re-articulation within the new frame of thinking.

Religion and the Blind Spot of a Secular Culture

We have identified a blind spot in secular culture, of either kind: the difficulty of articulating, in a culture that has gone beyond the cosmocentric, ‘theological,’ framework, the human powers of self-determination and transcendence, the foundation of any commitment to solidarity. Lonergan compares the situation to that of the Trobriand islanders as described by Malinowski. While in matters of practical living the islanders exercise their rational faculties, Malinowski observes, beyond that realm intelligence yields to magic and myth. Our own scientific culture has similarly been content, Lonergan writes:

merely to make more cultivated and more civilized the intelligent and rational part of Trobriand living, while maintaining a surrounding no man’s land which used to be inhabited by myth and magic but which is now empty—we do not admit, Here be strange beasts; we simply do not bother about it. ²⁷

The Version A religion can be said to offer a positive contribution to this neglected dimension of the modern secular project, as envisioning for persons the growth of holiness. This contribution is, however, blocked by the inappropriate ‘fit’ of the symbolization of such holiness, namely in a hierarchical and authoritative idea of the actual genesis of such holiness. On the other hand, in Version B religion we have a recognition of the centrality of personal choice as key element in the religion, but this contribution is hampered by a supernaturalistic framing of such authentic choice, bypassing the psychology of personal growth, as pointed out by Tillich.

‘Human Nature’ as Normative?

We can now focus on this fundamental problematic of secular culture. The cosmocentric theological frame of thinking prescribing what the telos is of human ‘nature’ has been dethroned in favour of the idea of the human person’s self-creation through the world of symbols. Humans are pour-soi (for-itself) rather than en-soi (in-itself). There is no fixed mould into which we must fit, as argued at the very start of the modern period in Pic della Mirandola’s Oration on the dignity of man. God is here addressing Adam:

Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other things is limited and constrained with the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, unconstrained by no limits, in accordance with thy own free will, in whose hands we have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. ²⁸

To this, because of the neglect of the reenchanted, and transcendent, dimension to secularity, there has been a reaction, thinkers who would turn back to the pre-modern articulation of ‘human nature’ given from above. As showing where Mirandola’s picture tends towards, Brague quotes Marlowe’s Dr Faustus:

O what a world of profit and delight

Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,

Is promised to the studious artizans!. . .

A sound magician is a mighty god.

Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity. ²⁹

The unconstrained freedom described by Mirandola is going to lead to the fantasy of a god-like power. Brague comments on the loss of all cosmological or theological context for understanding human nature:

Instead of the claim that it is man who ought to receive his norm from an external authority, it is he who determines what can claim authority over him. The relationship between man and the divine takes on the form of ‘it’s either him or me.’ Humanism must thus tend to become an atheism. ³⁰

MacIntyre makes a similar point to that of Brague about the loss of normative human nature, exemplified in the 18th century in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, representative of modernity’s hubris. Rameau’s nephew cannot be persuaded to follow his uncle’s set of norms: he simply appeals to a different set of desires. ‘What divides them,’ MacIntyre suggests, is the question ‘of precisely which of our desires are to be acknowledged as legitimate guides to action, and which on the other hand are to be inhibited, frustrated or re-educated; and clearly this question cannot be answered by trying to use our desires themselves as some sort of criterion.’ ³¹ Later, MacIntyre again refers to this text of Diderot as ‘the classic statement’ of the problem. ³² He says that the unity of the self demands that one assent to some or other more or less arbitrary hierarchy of preferences, even if this requires the repression of inner conflict.

But we have been introducing a frame of thinking that sees what it is that one has to become as discerned gradually through engagement with the world of symbolic meaning. The content of the normativity is not prescribed from the start by our reason, as the ‘correct desires.’ One discovers not a ‘what’ but a ‘who.’ ‘Who is a man?’ asks Lonergan. ‘Who is to be a man? The answer is ‘I,’ ‘We.’ . . . What has to be a man is not just any instance of rational animal. . ..’ ³³ It is the journey that creates one’s identity, and given the right intersubjective conditions, creates an ethos of solidarity. It can lead towards what constitutes a flourishing life. Such an ethos cannot be said to be imposed from ‘above,’ for in this religious tradition the ‘above’ is seen as fully transcendent, and the idea of an ‘external’ as contrasted with an ‘internal’ determination is not pertinent here, a point also made by Bp Hippolyte Simon. ³⁴ God’s ‘ought’ cannot rival man’s free choice.

The Norm of a Commitment to a Community of Dialogue

If the weakness of post-secular religion B is a tendency to non-foundationalism and to a supernaturalism (seeing the ‘above’ as able to countermand a determination from ‘below’), then the weakness of post-secular religion A is the tendency to see any normative human flourishing rejected because it is necessarily bound up precisely with that pre-modern cosmology. It is important, therefore, to suggest how ethics may indeed have a foundation, a ‘natural’ one but not linked to an ontology that commits one to a premodern approach. Only if this is so, will there be solid grounds for eschewing the non-foundationalism and the supernaturalism of post-secular religion B.

What is ‘natural’ to human persons in our secular framework is the demand on oneself to make something of oneself, and the world of interiority and self-discovery described earlier by Coleridge. But how does one judge the quality of any such self-making? The very question presupposes a commitment to developing a community of meaning. Walking down a crowded street I feel a sharp pain in my side and see a stranger had tripped and tried to correct his fall; or I see hurrying away the colleague with whom I had harsh words at this morning’s departmental meeting. From the point of view of ‘what happened’ (my pain) the intention makes no difference. From the point of view of what it means, that is to say ethics, the intention makes all the difference, qualifying the act as mean or vindictive—or else simply clumsy. No external account of ethics is strictly speaking possible—for example, conforming to ‘human nature’ thought of in terms of biology or as value-neutral. The ethical terms picking out the ‘quality’ of the act, only make sense in a community of meaning.

The result is that the condition of possibility of ethics is that I must be able to ‘get’ the other’s intention and vice-versa. This means that implicit in my ethical intentionality is a commitment to this community of dialogue. It is this commitment that is the foundation for ethics rather than anything ‘objective,’ ‘human nature’ as thought of in the cosmological frame of reference. The foundational act is affirming myself as a participant in co-creating our common world of value. It is a question of identity but not in the sense of a conflictual ‘identity politics.’ It is also and foremost a natural response to the other person’s commitment to a community of dialogue.

Solidarity as the Religious Phenomenon

Secular culture, tainted by the post-religion oversights of A and of B, neglects this basic need for such commitment to solidarity. ³⁵ This is the dimension that Taylor refers to as the need for recognition and its neglect spawns the unhelpful ‘politics of identity.’ ³⁶ That need for solidarity and for recognition was met in a pre-secular culture by the given social roles in a hierarchical society. ³⁷ The need would now have to be met through the fostering of every person’s journey, informed by the conditions for such journeying uncovered by the social and psychological sciences. In this regard, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been identified as a welcome anomaly to the normal channels catered for by secular public policy. ³⁸

But this is not just a question of an institutional or ecclesial dimension: this approach can be delineated, finally, as highlighting a specifically religious need. This is because the recognition of the other, and the attitude of forgiveness that can ‘restart’ the solidarity, points to a predicament: each person, needing recognition, cannot by virtue of that all-consuming need, give it. Yet recognition does occur, as evidenced in persons’ growth in integrity of will and in overcoming self-deception. That gives us good grounds for a reasonable trust in a power transcendent of all finite powers, all powers blocked by the impasse referred to above. Religion, appropriately symbolized in its person-directed and aspirational aspect, would seem central to a more consequential secular culture. The symbol of sacral hierarchy needs to be replaced by embodied symbols of participative journeying. And this would seem to fit in with the transformation, in the life of Jesus and the subsequent narratives of his life, of the messiah-symbol, the Christ.

The Self-understanding of the Christian faith

Finally, is it possible that these religious traditions could be authentically reframed in a secular context? For former Methodist minister Leatt, as he tells us in his recent theological memoir, the answer is ‘no,’ and he moves to an eastern spirituality. ³⁹ Leatt’s point of view represents a large swathe of thinking in the developed world. But from the perspective of religion in a new key one might answer differently. We have described above the secular frame of a world of symbols by which we live our lives, a world of interiority and a community of meaning sourced through human transcendence. An integral element here is an implicit affirmation of a non-finite power presupposed to the drama of personal growth and community. But how, if at all, would this fit with the dogmatic formulations of the faith?

We have introduced the idea that human self-transcendence is an overlooked but central dimension of a culture understood as secular. That transcendence enables citizens to go beyond themselves in an open recognition of and consent to a pluralism in the culture. In the absence of some such philosophical psychology, furthermore, we could have no idea of what it is for God, in the traditional way of formulating the faith, to take up and perfect human form. Williams, for example, wants to put strict limits on any project to give an interpretation of the Christian faith in the terms of a philosophical psychology. ⁴⁰ For Williams, ‘we do not have available the criteria that would help us settle what is and is not a plausible or persuasive narrative account of the basic claim’ of God taking human form. ⁴¹

But Williams is influenced by Wittgenstein’s scepticism regarding our ability to unpack human transcendence. For Wittgenstein, there is nothing to be identified in any action or behaviour as ‘willing.’ ‘What is left over,’ Wittgenstein asks, ‘if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?’ ⁴² The trying, the willing, he points out, is nothing else but the action itself. ⁴³ This view is, however, firmly refuted by the narratives in the global traditions of literature where the central character’s ‘willing’ is convincingly problematized by, for example, uncovering elements of self-delusion. Such problematization might equally be seen in the gospel narratives. So the normative dimension of the human person, the human form taken up by Jesus, is not something religious faith must suppose introduced from outside the human psychological drama whose elements we can and do make sense of, although never with complete lucidity.

Delport notes that although Christ’s human nature may well be unpacked in terms of ‘a recognizable human psyche’ (quoting Williams), this cannot be the case with his divine nature. ⁴⁴ I need therefore to say something about this traditional formulation of the ‘two natures’ of Christ, so taken for granted. For this formulation reflects a very different cultural frame of reference to the one we have been evoking above.

It is useful to distinguish here, as Lonergan does, three different realms or frameworks of meaning. ⁴⁵ First, we can pick out the ‘common sense’ frame of thinking of the biblical story-telling, and contrast it with the ‘theoretical’ frame of thinking that was introduced so memorably in the classical Greek philosophical period. Even as the evangelical narratives were being composed in their language of story and metaphor, a more theoretical interest was at hand, concerned with formulating the nature or essence of Jesus as the Christ. The influence of the Greek philosophers is palpable.

But the ‘common sense’ cultural framework makes a similar point. The traditional wisdom traditions of Kenya have been canvassed by Odera Oruka. To the question, ‘Why is there death?,’ the wise answer is given, ‘To make room for the young.’ This however is susceptible of the critical question, What about sparsely populated areas such as deserts? ⁴⁶ With theory there is a new realm of conversation. This awareness, so far as it constitutes a third approach, signals the arrival of the realm of interiority. This can be clarified by noting how the meaning of science has shifted. In the earlier, classical, version scientific theory was supposed to be descriptive of the world as it really is. But we can note how such description is distanced from how the world is actually experienced: science talks about mass rather than heaviness, temperature rather than how hot or cold it feels (metal feels colder than wood at the same temperature). So one has to ask which is the real table, the hard surface I touch, or the atoms and molecules, and forces governing their interaction? One lives in two worlds, and my mind now becomes the site of a differentiated rather than compact consciousness. Interiority refers to my relation to my own cognitional operations. In the final analysis, I have to judge with my powers of reason how far to take the theory, how to apply it in different situations, and so on.

An example of how these two realms of meaning can exist side by side without resolution is given by O’Loughlin in describing how in the Catholic Church the eucharist may be described alternately in doctrinal language or else in everyday talk. Whereas everyday ‘empirical language’ is always provisional and to some extent poetic, doctrinal language ‘is comprehensive of reality and its elements can be assembled to form in the minds of its users a replica of the actual universe under discussion.’ ⁴⁷ So when describing what is going on at the eucharist in ‘empirical language,’ the liturgy may be said to be uplifting, say, or else formulaic and soporific: but in either case the faithful (with one mind on the given doctrinal ‘information’) feel something is left out, namely, what is ‘really’ the case—the true formulation of what is going on!

Here, the resources of interiority are not referred to, and the faithful are left doubting their lived experience, an experience that draws on a familiarity, from the narratives of countless novels, with how persons grow in resolving clashing or contradictory beliefs, and possible self-delusions. The doctrinal formulations, it is presumed, must be accepted on authority, in other words bypassing our normal powers of intelligence. But within the frame of interiority, which takes many cultural changes to come to consciousness, theory is relativized. The final normative precept is: ‘Be responsible.’ A man or woman, for example, is now seen not simply as an instance of ‘rational animal’ (the theory), but rather has to take responsibility for their own personal growth, the burden of existentialist philosophy.

The achievements envisaged in any normative appropriation of human willing—the new frame of thinking—amount to growth in the quality of one’s actual self-transcendence. This is the quality of life that can be seen, analogically, as sharing in God’s non-finite transcendence. It is a quality that is described in the biblical texts in terms of the ‘wisdom’ and ‘word’ of God. The ‘Logos’ idea employed in particular in John’s gospel narrative can be seen as holding that such self-transcendence is sourced in God’s self-communication; the idea of ‘Spirit’ as a co-eternal reality can be seen as affirming that such self-communication is in fact effective in the recipient.

We can, in contrast, take one example of how the theoretical frame of thinking has determined the form in which the Christian faith has come down to us. Christ must be divine, argues Irenaeus, because otherwise it would not be the actual presence of God that we encounter in Jesus. And he must be human to sum up our human flesh and blood life. ⁴⁸ These descriptions are in terms of ‘nature,’ both human and divine. Haight argues that this way of putting it is not central to the faith: ‘The language of a hypostasized Logos constituted the milieu of the discussion. But that very framework has become part of the problem; it has lost its plausibility and power in a postmodern intellectual culture.’ ⁴⁹ For Haight, the meaning of Nicaea is, simply, ‘that no less than God was and is present and at work in Jesus.’ ⁵⁰ Unpacked in this way, he argues, we have a language of faith that is not a mythological way of speaking, but nor is the Logos hypostasized.

Conclusion

The debate on religion in a secular culture is about our understanding of autonomy. Does autonomy exclude anything ‘higher’? Or is autonomy, on the contrary, very much what a religion in a secular culture is all about, is religion at the heart of the growth of freedom in human history? This is what we have been suggesting. The suggestion is supported by the Axial Age theory, the push to transform the religions towards a focus on humanity and its fulfilment. In understanding what that fulfilment could mean we have the witness of the grand tradition of storytelling, which, if we follow Booker, contrasts the ‘below the line’ challenge of personal growth with the ostensive plot (‘above the line’). ⁵¹ This challenge, and the internal world of the characters, is a matter of the symbols one lives by, the ideas and values charged with significance that give meaning and motivate action. We create the world we live in, by symbolizing it and then living through these symbols, whether the cross or the swastika. The discovery of the absolute transcendence of the creator goes along with the discovery of the human psyche. Faith will henceforth always include this journeying dimension towards responsibility for our world. Voegelin, doyen of the Axial Age researchers, puts in this way: ‘Not only does one discover one’s own psyche as instrument of the transcendent, but at the same time divinity in its radical supra-human transcendence.’ ⁵²

All this fits very well with the approach of Haight. ‘Jesus is the historical mediation of God for the Christian imagination,’ he writes. ‘This is why the ideal presentation of Jesus as the medium of God will assume a narrative form.’ ⁵³ In the narrative the listener undergoes a shift of their hierarchy of values.

What is presented here is not a matter of giving a watered-down or relativist interpretation of the Christian faith. The affirmation of human transcendence as the exact ‘place’ of God’s action in the world has in principle no further possible development. If this affirmation is identified with the person Jesus, then that solidarity with Jesus is unsurpassable. At the same time this leads to a depopulating of the ‘other world above,’ a diminishment of its effective energy or reality in people’s lives. In cultures influenced by this religion it is going to provoke a secularization process (as Gauchet and others have argued). That solidarity with Jesus is an open centrifugal, rather than a closed centripetal, attitude. Along with this affirmation is an affirmation of all religious expressions as participating in something positive and to be respected, as manifesting that very human transcendence in a plurality of ways outside of the Christian churches as well as within them. It is an interpretation that can speak to a secular culture and contribute towards modifying the standard public policy of secularism or laïcité.

Special Note on Reforming Liberal Secular Public Policy

In a number of publications Cécile Laborde has discussed the reasonableness of liberal secular policy. It has been pointed out to this author that given her knowledge of the French policy of laïcité, her work ought to be incorporated more in this article. While I am grateful for this suggestion, it is beyond my competence to offer anything more than a brief note on one of her suggestions that would seem of relevance to our topic. As I understand her, Laborde takes issue with how the central element in liberal social policy, viz. the value of individual autonomy, plays out in the treatment of religion. The liberal state, she argues, must affirm and express its sovereignty and cannot share final decision-making with non-state institutions. It must oppose any challenge to this (an idea that seems to come close to the slogan suggested earlier to characterize the Francophone approach to secularity, Leave us alone). Commenting on this approach of Laborde, Aurelia Bardon and Jeffrey Howard sum up her idea in this way: ‘Those who insist that God has sovereignty over a particular domain, and that the liberal state must be constricted accordingly, must be opposed—a difficult position for egalitarians who mistakenly believe they can remain neutral on such questions.’ ⁵⁴ Liberalism, Laborde argues, ‘for all its claims to neutrality, cannot dispense with an ethical evaluation of the saliency of different conceptions, beliefs, and commitments.’ ⁵⁵ Some objective normativity, in other words, must be assumed. ⁵⁶ And because of this it would be mistaken, argues Laborde, to castigate ‘as equally unreasonable,’ the very different kind of religiosity found in conservative religious believers compared to religious fanatics and fundamentalists. ⁵⁷

It is clear that an obstacle to such reform of liberal secular public policy is the claim of the Roman Catholic Church to offer itself as an alternative sovereignty to that of the state, having until recently thought of itself as ‘a perfect society,’ ordered hierarchically under God and alongside the normal society. This self-conception was dropped in the 1960s at the influential Second Vatican Council in favour of the idea of the Church as ‘the people of God,’ key phrase in the document, Lumen Gentium, especially Chapter 2. All the baptized are seen to share equally in the Christian vocation. At the same time, however, as pointed out by O’Loughlin, the document states that ‘the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood’ differs ‘essentially and not only in degree’ from the common priesthood of the faithful (Lumen Gentium, para.10). ⁵⁸ All are equal but some more equal than others. ⁵⁹

What we have pointed out in the paper is how the standard for normativity in a vision of human flourishing has in the modern period become problematic, issuing in a backlash of uncritical religious conservatism. But in the transposition of religion into a new key, with a cultural consciousness framed in the mode of ‘interiority,’ we have a tune that can be sung in a ‘secular’ way, and at the same time equally in a way that makes explicit a reference to the religious tradition and to God, but with these now seen as facilitating that ‘ordinary’ secular life. The church can be seen, as expressed in Lumen Gentium, para.1, as the ‘sacrament’ or sign of the unity of humankind, and union with God. Secularization may best be seen as the opportunity for religion to discover its true meaning.