In 2007, Charles Taylor wrote a book entitled, A Secular Age which gave us a clear and comprehensive analysis of the secular age we live in and the implications of that for our faith. More than a thousand years before that an unknown author in the fourteenth century wrote a book, The Cloud of Unknowing, that (in way that doesn’t initially leap out at you) answers the fundamental question Taylor left us with.
I had read both Taylor’s book and The Cloud of Unknowing without making a connection between the two. That connection was pointed out to me by a doctoral student whose thesis I am directing. Her thesis? She is interfacing Taylor’s analysis of secularity with the fundamental insight of the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Here’s her thesis in capsule:
One of the ways Taylor defines our secular age is this: “The shift to secularity consists of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic to one in which it is understood to be one option among others – and frequently not the one that is easiest to embrace.” Taylor suggests that two things are conspiring to produce this.
First, we now are what he calls “buffered persons”, that is, we have moved from “a self who is vulnerable to many religious fears and superstitions to a self that is buffered from all the ‘spirits’ within the enchanted world.” I’m old enough to have been brought up in that enchanted world where spirits, demons, and supernatural powers lived under every rock, where you sprinkled holy water around the house during a lightning storm.
Second, for Taylor, we now live inside what he calls an “immanent worldview”, where our secularized world gives us the idea that there is no other world than this one and we don’t need anything beyond this world to achieve full flourishing, meaning, and happiness.
Taylor, a devout Christian, concludes by saying that this new situation doesn’t constitute a crisis of faith, but rather a crisis of imagination. The old imaginaries within which we imagined our faith don’t serve us anymore. We need a new imagination within which to picture our faith.
And from where can we draw this new imagination?
According to my doctoral student, the new imagination we need within which to re-picture our faith can be drawn from the fundamental counsel given us in The Cloud of Unknowing. But this isn’t immediately evident.
On the surface, what this unknown fourteenth century writer advocates is a simple prayer practice, not unlike what many today call “centering prayer”, where you go to prayer without any agenda, request, or words. You just sit in silence, without expectation, simply trusting that God will give you what you really need.
However, for the author of The Cloudthis is not just a simple prayer practice, it’s a basic stance before life itself. It’s a stance of radical honesty, of radical sincerity, where you stand naked in soul before yourself, life, and God. What’s being said here?
In short, because of our buffered persons and our immanent consciousness, we are almost never fully naked in soul, almost never fully sincere (sine cere – without wax), never fully ourselves. It is rare for us to get beneath all the distractions, ideologies, cultural obsessions, traumas, daydreams, and groupthink that seemingly forever color our consciousness.
What The Cloud advocates is that we, as our habitual stance before reality, try to strip away everything that’s not true in us in an attempt to stand outside of all of our distractions and defenses, naked in soul, helpless to think or imagine, just asking life and God to give us what we cannot even imagine is best for us.
Taylor suggests that we need a new imagination within which again to picture our faith. The Cloud suggests that the new imagination we need will not be the result of intellectually thinking ourselves into a new way of imaging our faith. Rather, that new imagination will be given us when we stand before God, naked in spirit, devoid of our own imagination, and helpless to help ourselves. Then, paradoxically, when we can no longer help ourselves, we can be helped from what is beyond our buffered selves and the virtual immanent prison within which we live. Life and God can now flow into us, and flow into us in an untainted way, precisely because we are standing naked, helpless and unknowing, before the mystery of ourselves, life, and God.
John of the Cross words this invitation this way: Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.
What this means is that, paradoxically, faith starts at precisely that place where we are tempted to think it stops, namely, at that place where we find ourselves naked and helpless to imagine faith and God.
What’s our real struggle for faith today? Charles Taylor gives us a diagnosis. What are we to do inside this struggle? The Cloud of Unknowing gives us a prescription.