Review: Charles Taylor on how poetry expresses our deepest yearnings
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To my mind, the career of the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor embodies the very spirit of “Gaudium et Spes,” the Second Vatican Council’s revolutionary vision for the church’s engagement with the modern world. Its famous opening paragraph reads like the backstory of Taylor’s body of work over 60 years:
The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.
In massive—and massively influential—books like Sources of the Self, A Secular Age, The Language Animal and now Cosmic Connections, Taylor sympathetically enters into the grief and anguish, the joys and hopes of modern humanity. He is a philosopher of remarkable erudition, but his philosophical brilliance is, fundamentally, an act of service to fellow humans. Taylor is a thinker with heart. His rigorous philosophical analysis is, in the end, existential: He wants to help us understand ourselves. He wants to help us articulate our longings and losses. He wants to hear, even in our grief and anguish, a still small whisper that calls us to something more. He wants us to find fulfillment.
If there is one theme that shapes all of his work, it is human yearning. Human longing for meaning seems remarkably durable despite all the revolutions we’ve experienced in modernity—political, scientific, industrial. Taylor carefully tracks all the ways we have “disenchanted” the world, even reaching a point where we imagine this world is all there is (what Taylor calls “exclusive humanism” or “naturalism”—a worldview that excludes souls and Spirit). Even if he personally disagrees with this, his curiosity is genuine and open-hearted.
How do people make sense of themselves if we live in this claustrophobic “immanent frame” of our own making? Taylor is intrigued by the enduring human need to make life meaningful even if people give up on God or eternity. We don’t seem to be the sorts of creatures who can remain satisfied with the flattened world of instrumental reason, technological mastery or mindless consumption. So many of us keep looking for an elusive “more,” what Taylor likes to call “fullness.”
In this latest book, Taylor (again) ambitiously covers hundreds of years of modern “disenchantment.” But this time he focuses on how art, and poetry in particular, both expresses and responds to the unique human experience of “being modern.” We live in a world that the gods have fled and, often enough, the reality of God is far from obvious or axiomatic. This is what it is to be modern. For Taylor, Rilke’s poetry faces the reality of “ontological insecurity” (we don’t know what’s real anymore) and names the “existential insecurity” that flows from this: We feel vulnerable, exposed to meaninglessness. We can’t shake the sense that, as humans, we are called to something, that our lives should have meaning. But in the malaise of modernity, it’s hard to hear the call, to know how to respond.
This diagnosis of the modern condition is deepened in the poetry of Baudelaire, who regularly addresses the “spleen” of modernity, by which he meant the distinct pain of soul we experience as melancholy or ennui. For Baudelaire, this was heightened by urban and industrial environments (he couldn’t yet imagine full immersion of our consciousness in technology, which only amplifies this alienation). Taylor’s point is that it is poets who help us understand (how) we are modern. The poets find the words to name a new experience of being human. The poets name our modern anguish.
But it is also poetry that uniquely responds to this new reality. By naming our experience, poetry already begins to transform it. “It articulates spleen,” Taylor says, “and this is a first step toward reversing it.” It’s why we listen to sad songs: the plaintive voice of Phoebe Bridgers or Adrianne Lenker isn’t just an occasion for me to wallow in despair. Their expression of that despair makes me feel less alone in the world. In that solidarity, it is as if the cosmos begins to resonate with a sense of belonging. Poetry effects communion. This resonant chamber of shared experience produced by poetry, putting us in touch with a reverberating cosmos, is what Taylor calls the “interspace.”
And in poetry, another possibility arises. Poetic language practices its own resurrection of meaning, enchantment. Thus Rilke’s elegies can also invoke a mystery:
Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise
in us invisibly? Isn’t it your dream
to be invisible someday?
If the scientists and tech titans teach us to dominate and instrumentalize the earth, the poets teach us the song of the cosmos that reminds us of our connection to something bigger than us. Poets provide glimpses and epiphanies, what Taylor calls “break-in experiences.” Poets “transfigure” the everyday for us, turning the mundane inside out to expose us to a fullness buried in the banal. Again, consider an exhortation from Rilke:
Show, my heart, that you aren’t without them.
That when figs ripen, they have you in mind.
That when their winds grow almost visible
Amid the flowering branches, it’s you they embrace.
Humans exhibit a perennial desire to (re)connect with the cosmos, with something bigger than consumption, production and the monotony of modern existence. Taylor is interested in “the evolution of human longing for reconnection.”
“But what could convince us of this?” he asks. Here the usual tools of philosophy—arguments, syllogisms, apologetics—seem ill-suited and ineffective. Which is why we must turn to the poets. “It can only be that, when we break through all the barriers, and draw on the lived meanings that the things on earth have for us, we transpose them in the transparent medium of poetry; then the realities of earth and sky show up in all their glory, and in response we experience a heightening, a fullness of existence,” he writes. Taylor doesn’t offer proofs. The best he can do is share with you his experience of the poetry of Hopkins or Mallarmé and ask whether they transfigure what you see in front of you. Then, with Rilke, you might be able to say, Hiersein ist herrlich: “To be here is glorious.”
There are moments in Cosmic Connections where Taylor’s philosophical confidence wavers with an all-too-human admission—a kind of rhetorical stutter where the philosopher becomes vulnerable. At one point, expounding on the power of Romantic poets like Hölderlin and Novalis who speak “so directly and powerfully to us,” Taylor inserts a parenthetical aside: “or is it just me?” The question is an admission, a confession, almost. Here at the end of a stellar career, in the twilight of a life (Taylor is 93), the lauded philosopher of international repute pauses to wonder: Is it just me?
Cosmic Connections is Taylor’s most personal book to date—if you read between the lines. I read it as what some have come to call a “bibliomemoir,” a personal narrative of one’s encounter with books (like Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch or Rick Gekoski’s Outside of a Dog). Of course, Taylor is articulating an argument about our experience of being modern; but in these moments of admitted doubt—Or is it just me?—we hear not Taylor the philosopher but Taylor the fellow human, wayfaring in modernity, yearning but often uncertain, hoping but not without questions.
What becomes clear is that Charles Taylor, the philosopher-pilgrim, has been sustained in his quest by poetry. When he expounds on Wordsworth and Keats, Hölderlin and Hopkins, Baudelaire and Milosz, you sense that he is also sharing with you the art that has kept him afloat in the wreckage of modern life. There is an urgency to his endeavor because he wants to invite us all into the life raft he has found in poetry. Commenting on Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” for example, Taylor admits the struggle of conveying what matters. “I still feel that I haven’t really brought out what is remarkable in these passages,” he says. “There is a magic here which I can’t fully fathom.”
In Milosz’s poem “Bells in Winter,” the poet, with eyes wide open, faces the slaughterhouse of history and the church’s complicity with atrocity, yet still finds an open possibility: “Perhaps only my reverence will save me.” In commenting on this, there is a curious slip where Taylor owns this movement in the first person: “But this reverence at least allows me to say, along with the prophets,” then quoting Milosz again:
For God himself enters Death’s door always with those that enter
And lies down in the grave with them, in Visions of Eternity
Till they awake and see Jesus and the Linen Clothes lying
That the Females had woven for them and the Gates of their Father’s House.
One senses that it is the poetry of Milosz (and Hopkins and others) that has enabled Taylor, the modern philosopher, to still find a way to believe.
It feels that way to me, too. If a yearning for something more—something eternal and transcendent—continues to reverberate in modern human hearts, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find that poets are those most attuned to this resonance. (In his “Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation,” Pope Francis explores the affinity of the poet and the priest.) The poets continue to find words for our anguish and hopes. If Taylor is trying to convince us of anything, it is to recognize the limits of reason and entertain the possibility of something more—to hear, still, the question posed by Milosz:
Wasn’t it always our
greatest wish
to live and dwell for ages in brightness?
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