ABSTRACT
Charles Taylor approaches secularism in his wide-ranging account of A Secular Age not just as the waning of religious institutions and the “withdrawal” of God from public spaces and everyday life but also as what Wendy Brown calls “a condition of being, knowing, and inhabiting the world in a particular way.”1 Against Max Weber’s secularisation thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Taylor emphasises new possibilities for the experience of “fullness” and belief in a secular age. At the same time, Taylor shares with Weber a view that secularism emerges from within early modern Christianity itself. He locates the origins of what he calls an “enriched materialism” (398) imbued with divinity in the “High Renaissance” before Galileo, a time when meaning was located not just in minds but also in certain “charged” objects of nature (35). Such a world invited a broadened hermeneutics: “Once meanings are not exclusively in the mind, once we can fall under the spell, enter the zone of power of exogenous meaning, then we think of this meaning as including us, or perhaps penetrating us” (35). This version of early modern materialism approaches the human-whose reason and isolation underwrites a proleptic modernity-in dialectical relation to the non-human. It also filters historical narratives of secularisation through a materialist discourse of nature. The examples below, from early modern authors as well as some contemporary philosophers, highlight the overlapping philosophical, theological, and political debates that shape the larger discourse of what I am calling “enchanted materialism.”
