The insight that a world without God may be the world where God as God is most readily found has struck many of the most farsighted sufferers of the unfolding contemporary immanence. When nothing points to God, then God can approach us through himself. The very bereftness of our experience opens us to the touch of the One who mysteriously speaks to us.
Elements of this perspective had already begun to emerge, not coincidentally, in the first wave of revolt against God as it broke in the nineteenth century. Kierkegaard was certainly familiar with the dynamic of irony along which it unfolded. But it was Nietzsche, whose proclamation of the death of God marked a watershed, who named the troubling intimation in pronouncing his demise. He identified the nihilism that followed as “uncanny” (unheimlich): “Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?” His arresting perception, widely echoed, might be taken as the hallmark of a secular age that senses its own shortfall without being able to express it and, therefore, without being able to know itself as secular.
My reflections will pursue the logic of that intuition, although their purpose is to yield far more than the inconclusive musings in which the more sociological observations of our contemporaries terminate. They are well-intentioned efforts to understand a phenomenon whose roots are spiritually deeper than either the observers or the subjects are willing to acknowledge. We live in a world where human beings have increasingly secured their own finite fulfillment. A sociological approach that measures human beings in the immanent terminology of that world is especially unsuited to grasping the heart of the issue. Rising or falling numbers have nothing to do with truth, as both Socrates and Kierkegaard remind us. Only a dwelling within can explore the interior of a reality that cannot be accessed from outside of it. This was why Nietzsche was not content to rest with mere observation or prediction and came achingly close to the Zarathustra who was recognized by Benedict XVI as “the most pious of those who do not believe in God.”
That intuition would lead, even if only unconsciously, toward the deepest realization of the meaning of God’s absence in the harrowing century that followed. A long line of patient bearers of loss dwelled with such steadfastness that they reached the God who had also shared it by their side. They were the ones who grasped that extreme loss is also the path of extreme gain. All is returned a hundredfold and running over. Even the deprivations of torture and death could not dislodge the certainty they reached on the other side of abandonment. The vanishing trail of these astronauts of the spirit can scarcely be traced in the biographies and testaments they left behind. We do not comprehend how they could soar so far above the catastrophe that fell upon them, crushing so many of their companions yet providing them with an incomparable opening toward transcendence.
How could they look back and say, as Solzhenitsyn did, “Thank you, prison, for being in my life,” or confess with Victor Frankl, “Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs”? Nor is this a line of spiritual witnesses that has by any means reached an end or left a complete list. Liu Xiaobo’s ringing declaration, “No enemies, no hatred,” as well as the aptly named film about Franz Jägerstätter, A Hidden Life, are among the more recent reminders. When I wrote After Ideology I tried to unpack the extraordinary significance of those who lived the truth that demolished the lie. I now think that we should add to that characterization the illumination of a secular age as more than it appears to be. Beyond the overthrow of ideology, there is liberation from the framework of immanence that was its precondition. All of those who responded to the call of transcendence saw that they had begun to reverse the drift of history in which they found themselves. They had overturned the secular paradigm as the measure of relevance.
Among the most visionary explorers of that transformation was the great Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was perhaps the one who grasped the theological implications in their starkest form. The encounter with God in the moment of the complete absence of God was not only a supreme consolation, but a model of the deepest truth carried by an age that no longer knows or cares about him. It is when God is absent that he is most present, not only in the divine condescension that stretches toward the heart of every person, but as a revelation of the way he can most surely be approached. Perhaps the bereftness of a secular age, its unshakable sense of the uncanny, intimates a new paradigm of the spirit that includes the divine indwelling in loss.
Enough has happened for us to suggest that the time for talk about a new paradigm has passed and that the time to enter upon the perspective of those who have lived it has arrived. Political theory is among the disciplines uniquely suited to the task since without a professional allegiance to the stance of observation, it can step into the historical struggle to share at least in part the practical responsibility of its participants. That is the linchpin on which my meditation turns.
Nothing is viewed from the outside, as if we were observers from another planet. The historical reality with which we are engaged remains the one in which we find ourselves. It is our destiny that is at stake as we struggle to make sense of its ramifications. The advantage of the approach is that the narrative has not been fixed in advance by a reigning construction, for it is one we too must take a hand in shaping. As a consequence, what a secular age means is susceptible to enlargement within the dynamic of our own responsive unfolding within it. This was something I came to appreciate in the contentiousness of liberal political societies that are a constant invitation to go beyond the often-unpromising prospects with which they began.
They are polities that seem to pull themselves together only in the struggles that confront them. It is only then that their character is disclosed through what I named “the growth of the liberal soul,” a dynamic that comes as much of a surprise to the bitterly divided partisans as to those who would despair of any commonality between them. Human existence is never a fait accompli but a process whose forward movement enacts and reveals what it is about, without ever reaching a resting place that can declare its consummation. Our horizon in the end is not confined to history at all but to the perspective of eternity from which history becomes visible to us. That component of the paradigm shift was explored in the growing awareness of the impossibility of thinking of ourselves in objective terms.
What we know most deeply we know through the luminosity that unfolds from within reality where thinking and being are one. This was reprised in The Modern Philosophical Revolution and distilled into the notion of the person who stands within the light that emanates from beyond being in The Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being. Of course, it goes without saying that these animadversions on the author’s odyssey, liberally sprinkled with missteps and misjudgments, are only offered by way of an indication of the scope of the paradigm shift The Invisible Source of Authority intimates within a secular age. They are adduced only to forestall the understandable objection that our historical moment is more properly viewed as one in which God and man have parted company more than ever.
It is to strain against the impression of the issue as somehow settled that the present text is offered. Instead we are invited to contemplate it as an open question, even an invitation to an opening that might yield a far different account from the one that has hitherto dominated our world. If we are to enlarge our horizons we cannot simply talk about them in the conventions of scholarship, but enter into them in the only way that can move them forward, that is, with the whole of our existence. We are guided in this by those who staked their all on the answer to the question of God or of Being. They knew it, not as a topic of casual conversation, but as the indispensable opening from which all else springs. Philosophy can thus return from a subject matter to a way of life, as its best practitioners have always known.
What this means is that there is no Archimedean point from which an inquiry might be launched, for our narrative has already begun even before we have stepped into the scene. We are immersed in the meditation and must begin to find our way as Pascal did when in the Pensées (S94/L60) he asked about the foundation of justice. It was a question that would scarcely have arisen except for his premonition of a shaking of the foundations so familiar to us but only dimly glimpsed by the early moderns who first grappled with it. Historic changes in science, religion, and politics were already dissolving an older sense of who we are and our place in the universe. Are we alone in the vastness of it all? The question, Pascal knew, could not be answered for it was premised on a capacity to stand outside it. Whatever we know, we must know from within.
This was what set him on the course of the pensées distilled into the aphorisms that allowed him a glimpse of what cannot be fully contemplated. It was a style of reflection adopted by many of his successors who also came to see that the principles by which they lived could not be accessed without presupposing them. Once the question of the foundation of order is asked, the questioner is already bound by its authoritative force. We too stand under the judgment that is synonymous with the term crisis. If we wish to interrogate justice we can do so only under the imperative of justice itself. Morality cannot be scrutinized from the outside, as if we possessed a mastery that allowed us to fix the scope of its validity. It is rather that we discover the reach of its hold as we submit ever more patiently to the authority of its requirements.
Obligation is prior to our arrival at the event, for we could scarcely be obligated if its source derived from a discretionary acceptance or rejection. To perceive the depth of pre-obligation we must resist the illusion of mastery that the paradigm of objectivity, so characteristic of the modern worldview, has given us. It takes considerable effort to recognize that objectivity too is rooted in an orientation within being that, without being subjective, is nevertheless authoritative for us. Truth too is an order to which we submit for we cannot invent truth without the claim that we have been truthful. What matters most is, therefore, not immediately visible as we embark on a course of action by which the inexorable contours of what is right begin to imprint our own existence. At the beginning, they are only dimly intuited, and that sideways glance is, Pascal understood, best conveyed in the form of an aphorism.
The virtue of the medium is that it carries the source of truth within it. Without appealing to external evidence, it reveals its authority within the formulation itself. The title of the present reflection is drawn from one of Pascal’s (1623–62) most piercing observations of the way in which his meditation unwinds into the disclosure of what is present invisibly from the beginning. Quoting his equally penetrating contemporary, Montaigne, Pascal remarks on the futility of the quest to find a foundation of justice beyond it. There is no going behind it for “whoever tries to reduce it to first principles destroys it.” He saw that Montaigne’s elevation of custom to unquestionable primacy was, far from an appeal to the merely given, a deeper acknowledgment of metaphysical primacy that could not be superseded. Custom is, in the formulation of Montaigne, the fondemment mystique de l’autorité, the mystical source of authority. It derives, not from its mere existence, but from its inscrutability.
To examine anything, we must do so in light of what remains beyond examination, the unscathed. At the time when Descartes was planting the seeds of doubt ever deeper and, simultaneously, discovering that there was a limit beyond which his exhortations could not go, Montaigne and Pascal had glimpsed a faith that lies on the far side of doubt. A secret or invisible source of authority remained as the boundary of life itself. It was what could not be surpassed. They were not quite at the insight of Kant that doubt presupposes itself, and certainly had not arrived at the other side of nihilism that Nietzsche broached. But the pattern had become clear. Even in the age of mastery, the horizon of mastery could not be transcended. The framing moral obligations remained impenetrable and irreducible, for mastery too would have to submit to the eternal verities that enshrouded it. Truth and goodness could not be abrogated without losing all that made thinking and acting possible.
To say that this was custom, as Montaigne had suggested, was clearly not sufficient, for it did not explain what made the hold of custom possible. Instead custom functioned as a place holder, as it did for David Hume and others, for an authoritative source no longer transparent. The divine had retreated into invisibility and reigned all the more impregnably in that mysterious transcendence. It is a transition that may be taken as emblematic of the presence of God in a secular age whose reality may be all the more palpable for all his invisibility. Montaigne and Pascal speak of it as a source of certainty beyond the vagaries that afflict all mundane pronouncements of truth. Uncertainty is itself glimpsed in light of a certainty that is barely known. It is in that scarcely accessible intimation that the source of its hold lies. Invisibility is itself the way that God has become visible.
This reading of course departs from the more conventional account of Montaigne and Pascal as skeptics who are tinged with fideism. But that is to treat the searching intensity of their thought as a probing without direction, when the reality is that it is driven by an awareness of that for which they search. Skeptics do not doubt; they see ahead. They keep their eyes on the fullness of what has surpassed all earthly defeat. Bearing witness to the indefeasibility of what is true and good, they open a window on another world that may no longer have an evocative presence in this one.
As martyr-witnesses of a secular age they have overturned it before it has even begun. In this task they are preceded by one whose prescience has often been taken as marking the opening salvo in the determination to do without God or to pronounce his demise. Hugo Grotius penned his meditation in the context of a preface to that great flowering of natural law that appeared to provide a sufficient foundation to On the Law of War and Peace (1625). International law was, as it is still today, the one instance in which in the absence of law, human and divine, modern men are thrown back on their own resources to work out the rules of order by which they may accommodate one another and minimize the conflicts between them.
Grotius was sufficiently steeped in the great medieval architecture of law to know that natural law, resting on eternal law and confirmed in divine law, could not remain fully accessible through reason alone. This was why he could suggest that even between belligerents who lacked a common theological framework, natural law could become the basis for peace. The rise of natural law thus converged with the expansion of a world from which God was becoming increasingly absent. Even before there was a secular age its emergence in practice was clearly on the horizon. It was this prospect that prompted Grotius, a humanist of great theological attunement, to contemplate the abyss that opened when men could manage their affairs without God.
Through the daring glance he cast ahead, Grotius became unwittingly the prophet of an age from which he instinctively shrank back. He allowed himself to venture what he immediately retracted, that is, the appalling thought that there is no God. I will have much more to say about this notorious passage in a thinker who did all that he could to resist the implications embedded in his own project. Here I mention it only to call attention to the way he confronted the enormity he himself had admitted. This is all the more necessary since the few lines of his passing remark have acquired a notoriety that has overtaken the larger impact of his labors that move in a contrary direction. Contemplating the invisibility of God, Grotius was really the first to point out the invisible source of his authority. He had glimpsed the God of a secular age as its defining paradigm.
This is why what I have to say, without being an extended examination of Grotius, continually circles around the ellipsis he appends to the magisterial opening of his guide for order in the modern world. De Juri Belli ac Pacis ushered in four centuries of reflection on natural law, or its equivalents, as the self-sufficient basis for the fabric of law within and between nations. In many ways the secret to the success of that project, transacted over the tumultuous centuries that followed, may be found in the moral daring of Grotius’s remark at the dawn of the age. Would natural law hold if we suppose what should never be supposed—that there is no God? Much has been made of the self-reversal that seemed to indicate a doubt deeper than the author intended. On closer examination, however, Grotius glimpses a dynamic of hiddenness and disclosure that is inseparable from the revelation of a God beyond all visibility. Unlike the fool who said in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14), this was no embrace of a liberty without constraints. It was a profession of faith in natural law that, even in the absence of God, would become a path that leads us back to God.
Rather than an undermining of natural law, the remark can equally be read as an affirmation that restores it to its source. Instead of seeing God as the guarantor of natural law, he may more properly be viewed as its consummation. If there is law, then there is God. Even if the immediacy of God’s presence is no longer available, we already intuit the way toward him. To the extent that law is already a mode of transcendence, by which we set ourselves aside for the sake of obligations held as greater, we are on a way that culminates in the divine presence. It is only from the end point that the invitation, the gift of possibility, can be seen as invisibly present from the very beginning.
The fascinating implications of a passing remark turn out to contain the spiritual dynamic from which a secular world unfolds. “Even if there is no God” is the path by which an age without God comes to know itself as such and, in that instant, revolves again toward the God it finds it never left. The pattern may be compared to the Platonic myth of the ages in which the god shepherds souls until, once released from his care, they discover their participation in the guiding divine Nous within them. In the context of the Statesman that mythic history was, however, only a visual narrative. The dialogue itself pointed to a path it did not undertake but that, for that reason, lies at the very heart of the inner change it exhorts. What is intimated cannot be talked about, as in our own laments about the decline of faith in a secular age, for they are conditioned on the countermovement by which the flight of the gods heralds a return.
The key moment is the realization that return is different from the prior dispensation. Now God must be found within and after absence. In many respects that was Plato’s project, just as it was that of Grotius whose daring matched the search in the Republic for justice in the soul, apart from all calculation of consequences in this life or the next. Only those who entrusted themselves to the order of right, dimly intuited, would reach the point at which the Good or God discloses itself as the foundation of the whole. Grotius’s seemingly casual remark turns out to hold within it the possibility of justice within a world evacuated of all higher authority. It is the very absence of God that is the invitation to find him beyond all temporal mediations and, therefore, to know him as he is in himself—that is, in his transcendence.
The growth of the soul, previously invoked in my study of liberal democracy, contains a parallel application to the question of God in a secular age. “Anatheism” and the “post-secular” are ad hoc conjectures about the impossibility of excluding God even when he has been excluded. Such formulas include or reverse what they seem to assert. They carry within them a dynamic of self-overturning that may be sensed without being explained. It is to dispel the ensuing confusion in the self-understanding of a secular age that the present reflections are offered.
It is one thing to suggest that a secular world cannot be atheistic and quite another to say why that is so. In order to reach a fuller insight, it is necessary to focus not only on the logic of reversal from which the secular mind lives, but on the far deeper understanding of what sustains it. That was what Grotius invited as he contemplated the growth of the soul by which, even without God, the imperative of natural law restores us to God. By forgoing God, he sensed the disclosure of God even more fully. Sacrifice of all assurance is the path of God himself, from the crucified One to the mystics of the dark night of the soul. But where then is the faith that sustains this movement?
The answer is nowhere in the tangible aspects of existence but in the unfolding by which the soul eventually touches on that which is beyond all being. The adventure of transcendence, which historically began in the “axial age,” has reached an apogee in the secular outlook that knows itself optimally within the exodus from itself. “My soul was visited in that hour,” Alyosha Karamazov declares, for about transcendence nothing more can be said. Now we begin to see why so much emphasis must be placed on the movement that underpins a secular world. What is beyond the boundary cannot be known; it can only be glimpsed as marking its limit. But that is sufficient, for the encounter itself opens the transfiguration of all earthly perspectives. In that glimpse the secular worldview not only reaches its limit, but exceeds it, as the innermost secret of its being. A secular world is not only impossible in principle, but is already a transcendence of its own expectations.
It is because our thinking has failed to keep pace with the promise of transcendence that we have failed to grasp the deepest intimation of our secular age. The paradigm shift may have been a long time building, but, as with any series of anticipations, it is punctuated by the prophetic glimpses that foresee it. Retrospectively, we can identify the farsighted observers. In the process of differentiation that constitutes the drama of history all is present from the beginning, even if compactly discerned. The only advantage possessed by those who come later is the availability of more aptly fashioned modes of understanding. They can behold what is more fitting even though the fitting might also have been glimpsed by those who came before. In this respect the emergence of a secular age may be regarded, not as a falling away from God, but as a fuller disclosure of what had previously not been manifest.
How otherwise can the transcendence of God be displayed than in a renunciation of all mundane entanglements? Perhaps this withdrawal is the very means he employs, perhaps the only ones, by which he can disclose who he is. But in that realization we see that absence has become a fullness glimpsed at the boundary of a world whose every aspect is a hymn of praise for One who would not crush the broken reed or quench the flickering wick. The divine condescension could not be more perfectly expressed than in the complete abnegation of presence. Everything worldly becomes a sacramental means for the disclosure of the One who cannot disclose himself. The finite ceases to be finite when it is the vehicle by which the infinite is poured out. Such an overhaul may challenge the capacity even of the believers, solidly planted in their respective communities within history, to embrace. But it is not beyond the capacity of a world that has already set out to show that natural law holds, even if there is no God. That world already knows the invisible source of authority that is present nowhere but within the faith that sustains its moral and political practice.
Now the question is whether it is possible to articulate that openness to the transcendent that is at the heart of the secular paradigm. Can invisibility be understood as the distinctive mark of God’s revelation in a secular age? It was the early modern thinkers who first voiced unease with the notion of living in a world from which God has disappeared. By the nineteenth century the ebbing of faith, epitomized by Matthew Arnold’s “On Dover Beach,” came to be viewed as a full-blown catastrophe looming over modernity as a whole. All of the world religions would have to grapple with it sooner or later in varying ways as they shrank from, or struggled with, a world now shorn of transcendent reference. The inclination from the start of this outburst of hand-wringing was to assume the crisis could be approached from the outside and therefore could be measured and remedied by instruments of worldly success. Loss of faith was viewed as a historical phenomenon, and depicted in the language of social science reports about the rise of the “nones” who disclaim any confessional allegiance.
Application of a sociological perspective reached a high point in the most famous study of the past twenty years, Charles Taylor’s Secular Age (2007). His well-intentioned project, of understanding the character of a secular world from within its own parameters, slipped into an increasingly external mode that could never find its way back to the deeper affirmation of faith to which it aspired. Having taken the event of faith as a phenomenon, it could never become an event within the mind of Taylor himself. This is what accounts for the strangely inconclusive character of the treatment of which even his most admiring readers complain. It is, however, a demonstration of the challenge facing any attempt to think through the meaning of the secular without conforming to the methodological limits of that worldview.
Somewhat greater success is enjoyed by the more philosophically attuned approach of Robert Bellah, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and, most recently, Hans Joas. Theirs is informed by an awareness of desacralization as not simply a moment of secular modernity, but a correlate to the differentiation of divine transcendence that marks the axial age. Joas, in particular, makes considerable headway in The Power of the Sacred: An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment. In many respects he goes further than Taylor in recognizing that secular society is constituted by its own heightening of a sense of the sacred, as the rights and dignity of the person are elevated into a center of reverence. But as the subtitle of his book indicates, sensitivity to an increase of sacrality is still couched within the sociological framework of Max Weber. Enchantment / disenchantment is not how people living in a secular order experience their lives but instead reflects an external vantage point assumed by observers of the phenomenon. Detachment cannot quite access the interiority from which luminosity prevails, despite the opaqueness of an uncomprehending world surrounding them. The observers are not included within the growth or loss of meaning of the events they examine.
A secular science detailing the character of the secular regime is scarcely even in touch with the condition of its own possibility, that is, that the breakthrough to the transcendent has made possible the differentiation of a world that is secular and open to the rise of secular sciences about itself. Thus, thinking about a world without God turns out to be more elusive than anticipated. It cannot be clarified by simply emphasizing the transcendence of God as Karl Barth and his many successors among the radical neo-orthodox theologians have sought to do. The result may yield a useful corrective to the overconfidence of secular disciplines that discourse about the God who, by definition, lies beyond their horizon. While the neo-orthodox judgment may be correct, it does not account for its own condition of possibility as one rendered by scholars who also reside within the same secular horizon.
A similar limitation applies to the more long-standing efforts to think about the natural as if it could be separated from the supernatural. Henri de Lubac built his great reflection on le surnaturel from his dissatisfaction with the scholastic treatment of the issue, as have such notable successors as David Bentley Hart. Without in any way diminishing the value of those estimable reflections, we are inclined to feel that there is yet a failure to push the meditation far enough. Not only do the natural and the supernatural mutually imply one another, but our ability to perceive the difference is itself the axis within which we live and move and have our being.
The Platonic notion of the Between, as introduced by Voegelin, and extensively mined by William Desmond and others, is a useful alternative way of grasping the polarity within which existence unfolds, without itself including the poles. It is, however, doubtful that the structure of the Between can become transparent without a more concrete unfolding of the path that arrives at that conception. It is thus to show rather than to talk about the arrival at such a practical unfolding that the present meditation is undertaken. This is why it follows the path of political reflection.
What distinguishes The Invisible Source of Authority: God in a Secular Age from the exemplary efforts listed above is that it begins, not with a general formulation of the problem, but with the concrete challenges of order within which we live. In that respect. it is similar to the more concretely political focus of two French thinkers, Jean-Luc Marion and Pierre Manent, who in their respective ways have sought to think through the meaning of secularization. France was the first modern state to attempt to codify the concept under the rubric “laicity,” a source of confusion that both Marion and Manent skillfully expose. While it is evident that the notion of a lay separation presupposes a sacred realm from which it is distinguished, it is not clear that these thinkers follow out the implications of their analysis for the secular world as a whole.
Certainly, they are aware of the instability of the notion of a secular realm and make good use of that insight in exposing the groundlessness of authority that is its public face. A confrontation with resurgent Islam that denies the separation of social reality from divine authority offers a formidable challenge to secular self-understanding. Manent fully recognizes this, but his own strictly political alternative hardly constitutes a sufficient response to it. Even the building up of community through joint action does not yet arrive at a conclusion adequately transparent. In contrast, Marion’s preference for a Catholic witness to a transcendence beyond power, a sacrificial openness that furnishes the possibility of meeting, remains too remote from the event that constitutes community. Dwelling too much on the shortcomings of the secular paradigm, they each fail, in different ways, to find their way through to its positive affirmation. A secular order is not simply reducible to the incoherence it displays, but already carries the seeds of a deeper spiritual truth within it. We ought to look for the opening toward the transcendent that remains implicit within the self-limitation of a secular age.
Even if lament at the absence of God is a first word, it cannot be the final one. The prophets who developed the mode of lamentation did so, not for the sake of condemnation, but in order to recall their listeners to the God they had forgotten. Critique must stir up the consciousness of truth from which it derives. Diagnosis cannot be separated from therapy. It is the obverse of what a secular age seems to be that is the principal goal of this meditation. Without discounting the critical emphasis of the historical narrative adduced above, it seeks to press the direction further than its exponents have generally been prepared to go. Why would the secular age be a topic of concern if not for the sense of a need to transcend it? The age in which the absence of God is heightened is also the age that draws ever closer toward what it is missing. What it most needs is a way of comprehending the sense of the uncanny that afflicts and pervades it. It needs a way of understanding how the absent God is even more intensely present by virtue of that absence. A speculative grasp of necessity, even in the hands of a thinker as fearless as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, does not necessarily carry the meditation all the way.
For that conclusion to be reached, there must be a deeper receptivity to a revelation of what has already been revealed. To the extent that life is in advance of reflection on it, the attunement to the right order of existence takes precedence over all formulations theological and philosophical. That is why the present inquiry takes its bearings, not from any general statements of principle, but from the imperatives that become clarified in the experience of living them. Rather than dismiss the remark of a practical statesman like Grotius as incoherent or deficient, we take it as abounding with riches not yet visible on the surface of its formulation. What do men live by when there is no God? The question can only be answered by living it out, and in that unfolding the horizon of transcendence is immeasurably enlarged. In the always unanticipated opening beyond the mundane we are given a glimpse of the God whose absence makes the world without him both possible and impossible.
My argument in The Invisible Source of Authority: God in a Secular Age eschews extended analysis of texts and the attendant scholarly debates. It takes its cue from the early modern figures who saw that the meditative glimpse could grasp more in passing than even the most extended discourses could hope to comprehend. Without adopting an aphoristic style, it nevertheless begins to approach it in the form of meditations that concede what scholarly convention tends to overlook. The question of the meaning of the secular age cannot exclude the thinker who raises it or the scholar who grapples with it. Canons of scholarly objectivity retain all of their validity, but they do not exhaust the imperative from which they are derived. Only those who have pledged a personal allegiance to truth can invoke the authoritativeness toward which scholarship aspires. But that implies a more than scholarly commitment.
Perhaps without realizing, we have begun to pledge our very selves in the task. Scholarship about the individuals and texts touched on remains indispensable, but the existential disposition from which it is derived holds a priority. That cannot be examined or verified but only glimpsed in passing. A meditative unfolding of what is already present, as it is in an aphorism, holds the best hope of disclosing how a secular age should think about itself. Without ceasing to be secular, it must heighten its awareness of the presuppositions from which its scholarship lives. Only by way of a meditation can it discern clearly that the intellectual disciplines available are insufficient for its self-understanding. That is the turning point in which the present essay reaches the transparence at which it aims. To think about God is to stand within the truth that is synonymous with the viewpoint of God.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from The Invisible Source of Authority: God in a Secular Age (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
