The second edition of Margaret Urban Walker's fantastic book Moral Understandings arrived in the mail today. Just in time: I was able to brandish it while critiquing the somewhat pathetic conclusion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, which I think I've told you I've been reading with some students. No, we haven't read the whole work - we portioned it out - but I think we've read enough. Worries about his argument and his biases have accumulated, and the final chapter - although it's Taylor's most eloquent - confirms them. In short, A Secular Age is wishful thinking: he's a Catholic Christian of some description, but is embarrassed by the Bible, faults the church for authoritarianism, reads no theology (there's certainly nothing about the Trinity or Christology)... Instead, he speaks of the need for transcendence, a flourishing which goes beyond the human, the importance of creative attunement to tradition, and poetic language which doesn't foreclose the possibility of meaning beyond the immanent. Yeah, yeah, I thought, as if: that's not Christianity but an emaciated 19th century idea of theism.But then, in his final chapter, he praises the communion of the saints, one of my own faves:
Neither of us grasps the whole picture. None of us could ever grasp alone everything that is involved in our alienation from God and his action to bring us back. But there are a great many of us, scattered through history, who have had some powerful sense of some facet of this drama. Together we can live it more fully than any one of us could alone. … What this fragmentary and difficult conversation points toward is the Communion of Saints. I’m understanding this not just as a communion of perfected persons, who have left their imperfections behind; but rather as a communion of whole lives, of whole itineraries towards God. (754)
Sounds nice until you think about it more. And when you think about it more you notice a few serious problems (well, we did). First, this has nothing to do with the actual Roman Catholic cult of the saints, the "whole itineraries" of whose lives are not the point. The point is that they are available here and now to help us, whatever they got up to in their lives. (Less important that they led good lives than that they left good relics!) Indeed, someone the itinerary of whose life was complete wouldn't be a saint, just a dead exemplar - posthumous miracles are required for canonization because only those count as saints who aren't dead, though they've passed on from this life. Second, dead exemplars are what the Romans and other pagans learned from, and one of the inspirations of the secular humanities in our own time. The project is intelligible and in its own way inspiring - it's what I do - but it has nothing to do with Christianity. Third, the communion Taylor celebrates is a communion with the dead, rather than the living, something continuous with a troubling inability or willingness to take human relationships seriously we'd noticed already in the book's opening chapters.
Finally, and this takes us to Margaret Walker, it's not even really a communion with them, since each of us (if we count) is crafting an individualized itinerary. It's like what I understood at the labyrinth at Little Portion Friary - each person is on his own journey, encounters are sweet but evanescent - though without the labyrinth! (To be fair, Taylor presumably senses a shared telos in his reading of the saints of the past, and - in other settings than this book - might allow that there is some divine guidance at work. Or not.) The Walker connection is that the exemplary lives Taylor celebrates are not just lonely, subordinating relationships to other people if not avoiding them entirely, but an ideal specific to the moment in which we find ourselves. She derides the ethical systems of Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre and John Rawls, all of which stress the coherence and integrity of a whole life, for promoting an ideal of a "career self":
[W]hole-life narrative is not a necessary expression of human personhood. Instead, it is a recipe for the sort of selves that fit a specific economic and institutional environment. While this model of relentless self-definition and self-control strongly emphasizes individual responsibility for oneself, it eclipses our dependence on and vulnerability to each other, and it overshadows our life-defining connections to and responsibilities for each other. ("Getting out of line: Alternatives to life as a career," in Moral Contexts [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003], 195-96)
The ideal of the "career self" is in fact inaccessible to most people, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing, as a life open to multiple connections and responsibilities is arguably fuller than one which adds up to a clear Taylorian "itinerary." The appeal of the idea of the communion of saints isn't just that there are lots of them, complementing each other's idiosyncracies, but that they form a vast community of care, uniting the living and the dead, and showing that no life is more whole than the one open to the connections and responsibilities of relation. Say, maybe that's why Taylor doesn't get the Trinity, either!
(The lovely image of the community of apostles, evangelists, prophets and saints sharing a meal, above and below this post, is from the altar of the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico. It's a place I've twice spent time, and where my dear friend B - someone, incidentally, with whom I have often discussed saintliness - just spent Easter. Click on the pics to see who all's at this remarkable history-transcending gathering.)
