Cosmic Connections with Dr. Charles Taylor (Part 1 of Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age)

This episode is the first of a series of presentations from an International Symposium on “Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age” held at McGill University in Montreal in November 2024.

In this first episode, Dr. Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University, shares the motivations and long history behind his new book Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.

Prof. Taylor is internationally recognized for his pioneering work in political philosophy, social theory, and intellectual history. Over the years, he has received numerous prestigious honors, such as the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize. In 2007, together with Gérard Bouchard, he co-led the Bouchard–Taylor Commission, which examined how to accommodate cultural differences in Quebec. Taylor has authored or edited more than thirty books, including Sources of the Self and A Secular Age.

In this episode, Prof. Taylor talks about:

1. The origins of humanity’s deeper spiritual search
2. Why poetry re-enchanting a disenchanted world
3. How the study of comparative religion shaped his own spiritual life
4. Cosmic longing explored across diverse cultures
5. Beauty unites communities in transformative experiences
6. How a secular age can spark religious rediscoveries

To learn more about Dr. Charles Taylor’s work, you can visit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_(philosopher)

Cosmic Connections: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674296084

Follow us on social media for more updates:
X: https://x.com/brvnathan
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brvnathan/

This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/)
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/BeautyatWorkPodcast

#beauty #beautyatwork #podcast #symposium #science #connection #spiritual #CharlesTaylor

Transcript

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work — the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Beauty at Work. The next series of episodes are going to be presentations from an interdisciplinary symposium that we organized at McGill University in Montreal on spiritual yearning in a disenchanted age. We had the great honor of working with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who's considered among the world's most important living philosophers, to discuss key themes from his new book Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In this first episode, you will hear an introduction to the symposium from me and a word about the broader project on spiritual yearning that is funded by the John Templeton Foundation from Dr. Sarah Lane Ritchie, who oversees this initiative. Following that, we'll hear from Charles Taylor who is Professor Emeritus at McGill University. Taylor is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history, notably through books such as Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. He has received numerous honors, including the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, and the Berggruen Prize for philosophy. We also have a poetry reading from Marie Trotter, a doctoral candidate in English at McGill University, who will share a couple of original poems. Let's get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Let me just say, hello and welcome to everyone. My name is Brandon Vaidyanathan. I'm a sociologist at the Catholic University of America. It's a great honor and privilege to be here, to try to put this event together, which I couldn't have done without Dan Siri. I want to thank you, Dan, for helping make this possible and to Garth for hosting us here, for hosting us in religious studies. Sincere thanks to the John Templeton Foundation for founding this and to Charles for suggesting this idea to bring some people together to think through some of the themes that emerge out of Cosmic Connections and, as you'll see, have a lot of resonance with an initiative that we're working on through this project at JTF on spiritual yearning among the non-religious.

Let me say a word about what this event is about. Charles's new book Cosmic Connections, as he describes it, is about the human need for cosmic connection, which means not just any mode of awareness of the surrounding world but one shot through with joy, significance, and inspiration. Taylor's hypothesis is that the desire for this connection, maybe a human constant, but one that takes on different forms and different times and different places. Cosmic Connections explores poetry, particularly in romantic poetry, is one pathway to this cosmic connection. But what might be some other pathways that people are pursuing now? And that kind of pursuit is very much related to this initiative at the John Templeton Foundation on spiritual yearning among the non-religious. I'm going to bother Sarah Lane Ritchie perhaps to say a word about the initiative, and I can say a little bit about the resonance between that project and Cosmic Connections.

Sarah: My name is Sarah Lane Ritchie. I'm the Program Officer for Philosophy and Theology at the John Templeton Foundation. Just a quick word about me. Templeton has me on board basically to do all the weird stuff, like the non-traditional philosophy and theology stuff. My own background is in science and religion. I did my doctoral work and my postdoctoral work in Edinburgh in science and religion, looking at versions of expansive naturalism that would make room and space for all the things that we desire from religion and spiritual pathways.

So when I came to Templeton, I immediately began developing this new initiative that would take seriously the spiritual needs, pursuits, yearnings of the spiritual but not religious crowd, the religious nones, the dones, basically people who were serious about spiritual pursuits. Meaning, making transcendence but didn't find a home for themselves in traditional religions. Out of that, well, basically out of my own 3 AM existential crisis, the Spiritual Yearning Research Initiative was born. It's been going on for a couple of years now. Brandon is one of our grantees in this initiative. We call it SYRI, not Siri. SYRI. The Spiritual Yearning Research Initiative is just a big theme for us right now. We are aiming to do both descriptive, empirical, and normative work. So we're trying to bring the best of philosophy and theology, really just study as an ethics in a conversation with psychology, sociology, and anthropology and, again, take seriously the needs of people who have authentic spiritual desires and pursuits but don't really know what to do, don't really know what their resources are. So there's a lot of history involved. Increasingly, we're trying to help people reclaim what is out there already and to not feel like they have to rely on Saturday morning yoga. We're also trying to challenge sort of the dominant cultural narratives that the spiritual but not religious crowd is on serious — that they are overly relativistic or into if it feels good, do it. So that's what we're doing.

My own work at the moment is really just continuing this initiative, developing it in new directions. I have to say Charles Taylor's work has been infused in almost all of the projects that we see coming through our door. And so when Brandon told me that this event was happening, I basically invited myself. I was like, "Please, can I come to your party?" Because it would be lovely to be in a room full of people who are devoted to discussing this topic and around a figure that has been so influential in my own work but also the initiative as a whole. And it's the most frequently cited person in all of the grants that we're running in this program. So thanks very much for having me. I'm also, I'm around all day. If you would like to talk about your own work on projects, grant ideas, that's my whole job. So feel feel free to catch me.

Brandon: Yeah, I'm really delighted you could join us, Sarah. So there's really just so much resonance, I think, between this initiative and the new book. And the other pretext for our getting together was another event we're planning, another grant we're applying for, on beauty in trying to think about the role of beauty and drawing on particularly the kind of aesthetic realism that you develop in Cosmic Connections. This is Tara Isabella Burton and I are working on this new initiative to do some large-scale surveys, as well as field work in different sites like the Venice Carnival and Burning Man-like places and sacred music choirs and a variety of sites to understand what happens with collective aesthetic experience. How are we moved by experiences of beauty together? Again, I think there are a lot of themes from Cosmic Connections that are very germane to that project, which we'd love to discuss later on in the day.

Maybe very briefly we'll go around and say who everyone is just so we know who each other is over here, and then we'll jump right into a couple of poems by Marie Trotter, who's a doctoral candidate here in the English department and a poet. Then, Charles, we'll invite you to share a little bit about the motivations for Cosmic Connections and then some of the themes that resonate with you as we're thinking about the conversation today. Then we'll have Naomi Fisher, who is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Chicago, Robert Gilbert, Professor of Biophysics at Oxford, and then myself in the first session. We'll take a break around 10:45. There's a minute of silence for Remembrance Day at 11. Maybe some loud cannonballs around that time as well. Then the second session, we'll have Marie open us again with another one or two, and Tara Isabella Burton. She's a novelist and theologian, but also now we're honored to have her as a research fellow and lecturer at Catholic University. David McPherson can't be here in person. Unfortunately, his flight was canceled. So if there's a way to Zoom him in, we could talk about it and see if he could join us that way. Will Barbieri, Professor of Ethics at Catholic U, and Galen Watts, who has a really compelling set of considerations for us to close out this session with this afternoon. And then we'll break for lunch. After lunch, we'll come back to discuss some of the key themes that have emerged during our conversation, as well as this future project on beauty and what we might do, you know, in ways we might collaborate together as we move that initiative forward. Any questions before we get started? Great. Well, welcome everyone. I'm delighted to have you here, and I think this will be a fantastic interdisciplinary conversation. So without further ado, then we'll have Marie come on up, and we can get started.

Marie: So I'll first say that when I read poetry in other contexts, it's customary to snap to show appreciation, but I will not ask for that here. I think it might change the mood. So silence is totally acceptable. This first poem is called Things Are Good. Things are good. She and I don't talk anymore. But yesterday, the baby lay on my lap and pretended to swim, waving wildly one little limb, and left behind a bubble on my knee. The trains are still running. They work more often than not. And though my wallet had run dry, the driver let me on. My body began its monthly song. There upon a thankful ringing of the sheets, things are good. If I ask him, he sings or whispers unexpectedly the only words I want to hear. I finished once again the mystery I read for the first time last year in fall. I'd forgotten about the flood that ended it all. Bodies washed up on the fen from the raging river that broke the bridges and dams and filled the streets. An act of God that nature functioned as it should. So again, I say, things are good.

This poem is called Creators. The silver coin moon is blurring at the edges as if God, after drawing, took the side of his fist and smudged it across the sky. His hands are stained. All colors: dark blue, and metal flecks, and thin orange bands of sunset, crossing veins of rose and mauve and gold. He has traced a line along the streets and alleyways. Their pavements exhale dust in the summer heat, traces of creation's footsteps rising skyward. He has filled the backyard fences with lilacs. He has lined every alley with pale purple blooms bursting forth to be seen, their sweet scent to be noted. Summer sighs and unfolds in the uncurling of his fingers, how easily he begets beauty. My hands, less eager to make the sights I wish to devour with my eyes, beat out a halting rhythm upon a screen. Words, words and more words. Imperfect Thanksgiving for everything that is warmth and light. Thank you.

Dr. Charles: I was sort of working on this kind of problem all my life. Because to start in the middle, yeah, more or less in the middle, one of the books I wrote was A Secular Age. And the thesis was that not the secular rising thesis that religion is disappearing but very much that religious life is mutating. And what I tried to point to as a new phenomenon was a phenomenon of religious secrets. There's people who had very strong intuition somewhere that there was more to it all than standard, naturalistic or whatever you want to describe it view of the world allowed to exist, but that this is filled with people who were seeking. This is really remarkable thing. So this is a kind of banality now in this room. This is something that everybody takes for granted. This is a certain way, their starting position. And to be a little bit more autobiographical, this really started, this intuition started — not writing the book called A Secular Age. But this intuition started really when I was finishing my first degree here and heading off for Oxford. It started because I myself was pitched into a path of searching. I was brought up here in Quebec in a Catholic Church. On my mother's side, I'm a member of a very large, this pretty typical family. We went to church every Sunday. And so I had kind of a firsthand experience but not really firsthand, because the family was very relaxed. My father was Protestant, and there were also some people married into the family who were other than the Quebecois Catholics and so on. So the rule, nobody said this to me but not looking back, the rule was we just accepted each other and work with each other. Sometimes loved each other and sometimes fought with each other, as big families do, right? But nevertheless, I got a sense of what was going on by listening to the sermons at Saint-Pierre-Apôtre which were far from the worst sermons I've preached in. I tell you; I've preached in Quebecois churches. But then I also looked on at the politics of the time, Duplessis, who was really using people's fear of foreign religions in order to stir up the vote for the Union Nationale, you know, everything terrible he was doing.

So one of the things that I started in adolescence, my political life, I actually joined the provincial liberal party (speaks in foreign language). Our version of that was defeating Duplessis. But then, luckily enough, I existed in the culture, one of the cultures, that was creating the (speaks in foreign language) that would be the basis of Vatican II. Or I was listening, we were overhearing that culture. That theology, (speaks in foreign language), this was created by Dominicans and Jesuits, mostly, of course, living in France. But the thing about these particular orders, the Dominicans and Jesuits of Quebec had very close relations. You didn't get anywhere unless you did graduate work in the Dominican, the Socialist, or in Paris, and so on. So we began to read these texts before the world at large. I heard about them. So I was an undergraduate here. When was it? It was in '49 to a few years after that. They completely gave me another kind of inspiration.

The second inspiration that I got was also at McGill at that time and actually in this building. The great Islamic scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith was here. Actually, he ended up founding here the Islamic Institute in a couple of streets over. His course was on comparative religion, I guess, is the word. What I was taking on was history, but I thought this is an elective course. This sounds interesting. And it was, to me, absolutely riveting. He was not one for tremendous rhetorical flourishes or for tremendous poetic invocations, but he actually wore a gown, which nobody else did at McGill. He walked up and down like that. But he gave you a sense of what it was to be a Muslim, a Buddhist. He went through a whole lot of very famous, well-known spiritual paths. And it was riveting because without that high-flown — I don't know how he did it exactly. Without any sort of high-flown rhetoric, he gave you a sense of what it was to be a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, and so on. I was absolutely, as I said, riveted by that. It was something that I really needed to know. I didn't know why I needed to know it. I don't quite know. I can't necessarily say even today why I needed to know it. But I guess the trace in my life of that course and of all the other considerations that I had to go through, I had to switch the whole basis of my Christian faith. Right? Well, I didn't really have a very powerful Christian faith before, but I got one thanks to (unfamiliar). The working out of this was a big agenda. But I've discovered that I needed both the (speaks in foreign language) on one hand and Wilfred Smith on the other because I discovered that one of the most deepening experiences in my life has been close contact and close discussion with people from these other spiritual paths. And so in a certain sense, there is going on in me kind of encounter with, in some situations, Buddhism, in other situations, certain kind of Sufi Islam. In other situations, certain kind of Bhakti, love of God, and so on, that the sense of being accompanied by these other voices is always there. Maybe people will consider this very weird. But my own Christian faith comes even more alive when these voices are with me as well, these other points of reference.

Just to give a sense of that, the other day I had this television program in which Desmond Tutu met with the Dalai Lama. Something extraordinary emerged from that because they were both joking about the differences of their religious paths, and they were both immensely enjoying this joke, joking. It sounded very, in a way, frivolous maybe, making the whole issue of frivolity. But the backdrop of this, as the undertone of this whole thing, was their calling and passionate commitment to certain way of we, Christians, would reach for the notion of agape. But the thing that you felt was, there's something that brought us together. Now, I'm talking that brought them together. But I'm talking the resonances in me, something which brought us together in what we would call agape but, for instance, a Buddhist might call "karuna," which are not very far apart, except that the spiritual sources that put people into this are diverse. Somehow, when all these voices are singing together in a certain sense, singing together in this song of love and affirmation of the human, our desire to create a just condition for people who are suffering very badly from some kind of persecution, and then you have people who are not at all in any particular religious tradition, who are part of the same sense where we feel encouraged by, are hearing all these voices. So I don't expect this to be the description of what's going on in me and how to come about to be necessarily comprehensible to other people. Well, I just sense very much in this room, it probably is very comprehensible. So it's a peculiar position in which there's one dimension of the faith, my faith, which is sacramental and that's the path. But the fact that it can be and is accompanied by knowing other people, exchanging with other people who are on another kind of almost parallel path, and that the sense of mutual enrichment is created from this, is a very important part of my spiritual life.

Then, of course, there are doubts. There is a sense of possible loss. And I think the way for me, various forms of people call it mysticism. In Christianity, I'm thinking of John of the Cross, that that is also another voice playing from the past, from a quite different culture but very much the same basic symbols. And so I want to throw one more thing into the mix. There is this struggle with doubt, the struggle with potential loss of this very powerful. You know, Saint John called the Nautis Oscura, the dark night. The experience contains a number of dark nights in a way. I have to admit. There's a darkness that I'm always struggling with. So very, very complicated. It was incomprehensible to the percuré of my childhood that one could have such a religious life. But that's why I feel immense distance from the Bon Curé. Some of them were really good, you know. Their hearts were overflowing with real love for their parishioners. I mean, there's the picture of the paradigm Bon Curé telling his flock that they had to have fewer children or whatever it was, all the misogynistic elements of that. All of that is not simple. My point is just, I can't give you two pithy sentences with this secular biography starting off as a kid. But all of that is working at the same time. Because it's another dimension of, since I have the spiritual, which is in relation to the cosmos, right? Somehow, it has emerged, you might almost say, from the cosmos as well as from various religious revelations over time, has emerged certain very powerful insights which have transformed us in history.

Of course, the thing in the 20th century, we came to be, as a reference point of this, was ethical development looking from and to the Axial period. Jaspers call it the Axial period. Where you have something which, I think, very much steps forward, which are very similar to each other. We might have the usual model in our minds of civilizational history. People start off primitive, and then they develop further. And the fact that these appeared in four centers, maybe five if you want to include Persia, is obviously to be explained. People think by diffusion is somebody got the idea so that we have our great figures. We have Christ, and we have Confucius, and we have Buddha and so on. And people ran with the message. Well, yeah, they did actually run with the message. But the thing that Jaspers picked up on, it couldn't have spread just by people running with the message. There's too much simultaneity, contemporaneity, between these breakthroughs. And so something else is working in human history. And I don't know if you can identify it. There are two different theories from a Christian point of view: Irenaeus is the idea of giving a certain pedagogy to human beings. But the idea that people would normally have of this is, well, yes, Christian message and then it spread out; or from a Chinese point of view, someone might say, "Well, Confucian." We just had all these ideas and then they spread out, and they did. And then Buddha, the idea spread. And it did. But that doesn't account. As what Jaspers said, that doesn't account for the way in which the simultaneity of the step forward. We could go into what's special about the axial age, I think we all in a sense of it. The way in which it's working is not simply that. For some reason, in some center, some genius or whatever got these visions, these ideas, and then other people ran with the wall as it were and carried it elsewhere. Yeah, that certainly happened. But something bigger and different happened. Somehow, these basic inspirations and steps forward, they happen beyond that. I mean, it happened in several places at once.

There's actually a chapter in the last book I call the history of ethical growth in which I followed this out. The very strange way in which certain insights begin to work and they remain for a long time carried out by minorities, by precisely big rules or very dedicated, saint-like figures or by followers of Buddha and so on, and they certainly do spread that way. But there's also a deeper push forward which takes the form of suddenly conceiving the demands of these spiritualities together as becoming suddenly very much more demanding so that, out of the axial period, you get in many cases a certain distaste for certain class differences in slavery. But it becomes tolerated by ordinary people or non-violence, yes, for certain people. In Christendom, it meant that monks and clergy shouldn't take up arms and so on, though they were famous cases of mace-wielding bishops and so on. But it was considered to be strange. But on the other hand, people said, "Well, you can't ask everybody to give up. I mean, how will the economy run? You know, you got to be practical." Then suddenly, in the 18th century, we get this flip in which it becomes very quickly in a way, certainly in Western civilization in this particular case, it becomes very quickly something that unconscionable. Never practiced this. The same thing goes — not the same thing exactly but kind of similar shifts when it comes to violence. Once again, in Christendom and in many civilizations, really dedicated spiritual figures weren't supposed to engage in war paraphernalia. But on the other hand, how do you run the world without it? And then along comes a figure called Gandhi. This extraordinary spread, Gandhi to Martin Luther King, to many other figures, so that it's a remarkable thing is how in the 20th century we've had a series of overturning of very terrible regimes, very much overturning without any violence. It's a remarkable fact that all those Bolshevik regimes in Eastern Europe, which were very, very violent and held their population under, that with the exception of the Romanian dictator, they all were overturned without spitting blood. That's quite a lot, not very far. We have a long way to go. And perhaps you could even argue that this kind of steps forward produce even worse denials, which are even more — because the 20th century, I can't say we're all better. I mean, the 20th century is just really horrifying, spilling of blood. But there are these moves forward. And we're now in an epoch. Now our democracies are all threatened by reaction against the attempt to produce more just and universally concerned societies. And you get everywhere. We just had one of these reactions very close by. So we heard the blast from here. But nevertheless, a marker is put down. New demands are being made and so on.

I think that there are these relations to our whole planet, to the spiritual lives that are alive in our planet. And what I wanted to show in the book was that, in the particular department of our sense of connection to our larger cosmos, to our larger home, actually, one of these new moves, this new move, the move of the cosmic connection of the authors I tried to cite in the 19th and 20th century, these moves are attempts to redo or to compensate for a loss of other kinds of connection that existed before, like the visions of the great chain of being of the cosmic order so that there is this very strange kind of universal, which you can perhaps show in this domain of our relation to the cosmos. But I'm running this in some ways parallel to the ethical development, from the actual period, and in some ways show, and I wanted to put on the whole thing. First of all, because there's a lot of very beautiful poetry and also other works of art, you know, that I want to put that on agenda. But you also have this kind of question. What is it about our relation to the cosmos? Is it just how we feel now, and they have another feeling then and so on? Or is it something more substantial that draws together indigenous spiritualities at one end of history way back and these various forms that I'm trying to uncover in the 19th and 20th century? This is a huge question mark, all these huge question marks. What is it? But my very strong intuition is that there is something constant here, constant but changing along with the cultural surroundings in which these intuitions occur. There are many more questions here than there are answers. So we're making a parallel here between the kind of ethical development across the ages and the implicit issue of what is the draw on us of a sense of cosmic connection, again, across the ages and across different cultures in very different forms. And we're a little bit stumped. I don't know where to go to explain this or to give it. But it's an important question that we should think of, that we should know.

(outro)

Brandon: Alright, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.