A Secular Age

Charles Taylore sounds really heterodoxically Catholic here, but I'm not so sure he's wrong:

"[W]e can also see it in another light. 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. Instead of reaching immediately for the weapons of polemic, we might better listen for a voice which we could never have assumed ourselves, whose tone might have been forever unknown to us if we hadn't strained to understand it. We will find that we have to extend this courtesy even to people who would never have extended it to us ... --in that respect, perhaps we have made some modest headway towards truth in the last couple of centuries, although we can certainly find precedents in the whole history of Christianity. Our faith is not the acme of Christianity, but nor is it a degenerate version; it should rather be open to a conversation that ranges over the whole of the last 20 centuries (and even in some ways before). This, of course, leaves us with an immense set of messy, hermeneutical issues: how the different approaches relate to each other; how they relate together to questions of over-arching truth. We will never be without these issues; the believe that they can be finally set aside by some secure instance of authority, whether the Bible, or the Pope, is a dangerous and damaging illusion."

[Percy, the quotation ends here.]

He goes on to show that this is an argument for the Communion of Saints.

THEN he moves to Hopkins and the constitutive power of language, which I love (I think he uses the word, "Adamic" at one point):

"A new poetic language can serve to find a way back to the God of Abraham. ... In this kind of case, the poetry has a double source ... On the one hand, the poetic images strive to articulate experience, almost one might say, to gain relief from the 'acute discomfort' of powerful but confused feeling, as Eliot put it; on the other, they strive to make sense of, to make once more experimentally real, the action of God which has already been captured in theological language honed by tradition. The ultimate insight captured in a poem is a fusion of the two, which transforms both; that is, the expreience is given a deeper meaning, and the work of God acquires a new kind of experiential reality."

...

"So there are three issues, or perhaps three ways to put the same issue, which are inherent in this understanding of language and poetry: (1) that our language has lost, and needs to have restored to it, its constitutive powers; (2) that the loss of this power means that we can indeed, deal instrumentally with the realities which surround us, but that their deeper meaning, the background in which they exist, the higher reality which finds expression in them, remain ignored and invisible; put in different terms, (3) it means that our language has lost the power to Name things in their embedding in this deeper/higher reality. And of course, (4) this incapacity of language is a crucial facet of an incapacity of being, that our lives are reduced, flattened. 'All is seared with trade; bleared, seared with toil.'"

[end of quote, P]

Goodness gracious, I wish that I'd written that! Gosh, to be old and taken seriously when talking about such things.