Meaning Outside Ourselves
Charged objects in Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age
Recently, I was contacted by a reader named Josh about a surprising experience he had on Facebook Marketplace. He was looking for something else entirely when he stumbled upon an advertisement for a St. Benedict Exorcism Medal featuring the ‘Cross of the Holy Father Benedict.’ This prompted several questions in Josh’s mind: Wasn’t God the Father and not Benedict? Didn’t Christ die on the cross and not Benedict? What was the advantage of wearing a St. Benedict cross? What was the advantage of wearing any cross? Wasn’t this all idolatrous?
Josh was able to answer some of his own questions with a bit of research, but he wanted to hear my thoughts as well. Soon, I was typing furiously about Vatican II, sacramentology, and saints’ cults. I also reached into the deep recesses of my memory and pulled out the term ‘charged objects,’ and once I began rambling about those, Josh suggested I write an entire article. As it so happened, I needed an idea for this week’s post, so charged objects it is!
I first heard about charged objects back in 2020 when I was engaged in numerous nighttime feeding sessions with my newborn son. I decided to make good use of that time and listen to the forty-hour-long audio version of Charles Taylor’s celebrated work A Secular Age, which I had been wanting to tackle for some time. In my exceedingly sleep deprived state, the choice of a philosophical text was perhaps not ideal, but I did make it through. As I listened, I used my one free hand (the other was holding my son) to keep a running list of names and terms I wanted to research further when I had the chance.
One of those terms was ‘charged object.’ Taylor’s discussion of the subject intrigued me, and I wanted to see what other people had written about them. However, when I finally got a few hours’ sleep and was able to search for additional information, I discovered that this is a kind of Taylor-ism, rather like ‘social imaginary’ and ‘buffered self.’ (More on the latter to come!) So I must stick with A Secular Age to explain the concept and how it relates to what is surely the new number one item on Josh’s Christmas wish list. (We wish him a Merry Exorcism and a Happy New Year.)
In A Secular Age, Taylor sets out to contrast the mindsets of people living in 1500 A.D. and 2000 A.D. Specifically, why was disbelief in God almost unthinkable in Europe in 1500 but by 2000 it was one of many valid options from which people felt they could choose? The book is wide-ranging and touches on many aspects of secularization. One of the key transitions Western society has undergone, according to Taylor, is the switch from an ‘enchanted’ world of “spirits, demons, moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged” to a ‘disenchanted’ world.1
The process of disenchantment is the disappearance of this world, and the substitution of what we live today: a world in which the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spiritual élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are those of humans (grosso modo, with apologies to possible Martians or extra-terrestrials); and minds are bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, etc., are situated ‘within’ them.2
This push toward meanings within the mind, the internalized self, and self-expressive existence are all hallmarks of our present age in the West. To speak of meanings ‘within the mind’ is to say that “things only have the meaning they do in that they awaken a certain response in us.”3 Meaning is not ‘out there’ waiting for us to find it. The truth is inside ourselves, and we will find meaning by plumbing those depths. “But in the enchanted world, meanings are not in the mind in this sense, certainly not in the human mind.”4 That is the process of disenchantment that Western society at large has undergone.
Our medieval ancestors looked outside themselves for meaning: to religion, tradition, authorities, and creation itself. They also had a profound sense of physicality that we lack, namely that the lines between the physical and the spiritual were more blurry for them. This is where charged objects come in, for they believed that there were forces in the world - sources of deep meaning and power - that could impact them both externally and internally. These forces were not only personalities such as the devil or wood sprites but actual objects which we might now deem ‘magical.’
“Thus precisely in this cult of the saints, we can see how the forces here were not all agents, subjectivities, who could decide to confer a favour. But power also resided in things. For the curative action of saints was often linked to centres where their relics resided; either some piece of their body (supposedly), or some object which had been connected with them in life, like (in the case of Christ), pieces of the true cross, or the sweat-cloth which Saint Veronica had used to wipe his face, and which was on display on certain occasions in Rome. And we can add to this other objects which had been endowed with sacramental power, like the Host, or candles which had been blessed at Candlemas, and the like. These objects were loci of spiritual power; which is why they had to be treated with care, and if abused could wreak terrible damage. In fact, in the enchanted world, the line between personal agency and impersonal force was not at all clearly drawn.”5
As Taylor notes, the enchanted world “shows a perplexing absence of certain boundaries which seem to us essential.”6 Whereas we think of ourselves as ‘buffered’ in the sense that forces cannot penetrate our minds and impose themselves upon us (as in demon possession and magic spells), our ancestors believed their minds were more ‘porous’ and could be penetrated by forces of good and evil. In the enchanted world, “the meaning exists already outside of us, prior to contact; it can take us over, we can fall into its field of force. It comes on us from the outside.”7 Among the things that can impact us are charged objects, including physical items associated with saints or even Christ himself.
“These ‘charged’ objects can affect not only us but other things in the world. They can effect cures, save ships from wreck, end hail and lightning, and so on. They have what we usually call ‘magic’ powers. Blessed objects, e.g., relics of saints, the Host candles, are full of God-power, and can do some of the good things which God’s power does, like heal diseases, and fight off disasters. Sources of evil power correspondingly wreak malevolent ends, make us sick, weaken our cattle, blight our crops, and the like.”8
We moderns simply do not believe that physical things can affect our minds in this way, save for substances like hallucinogens, which do impact our thinking but cannot really impose meaning on us or change who we are at a fundamental level. For us, “the physical world, outside the mind, must proceed by causal laws which in no way turn on the moral meanings things have for us.”9 But according to a medieval perspective, “charged things can impose meanings, and bring about physical outcomes proportionate to their meanings.”10
This is not to say that medieval people rejected any sense of internal meaning or independent thought. On the contrary, they simply saw themselves not as ‘minds in a vat’ that operate independently of external realities, but as minds simultaneously under internal and external influence. “The meaning can no longer be placed simply within; but nor can it be located exclusively without. Rather it is in a kind of interspace which straddles what for us is a clear boundary. Or the boundary is, in an image I want to use here, porous.”11 The shift from ‘porous’ to ‘buffered’ selves is crucial to Taylor’s argument throughout A Secular Age.
“Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded self—I want to say ‘buffered’ self—and the ‘porous’ self of the earlier enchanted world. What difference does this make? A very different existential condition…For the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined in my responses to them…As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to ‘get to me’, to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term ‘buffered’ here. This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it.”12
Charged objects help us to see this difference. Can a medal really carry a blessing from St. Benedict, whose patronage extends to those afflicted with temptation, curses, illness, and poisons? I am not simply asking if a medal can remind you to pray to St. Benedict or to God for deliverance (which would itself be an example of external influence upon the mind), but rather if the medal itself carries a spiritual power. Benedict of Nursia was said to have made the sign of the cross over a cup full of poison and thus caused it shatter. Do we believe this story? Can a saint really do that? Do such powers exist in the world as a matter of course, or do we admit only a few scattered incidents of divine intervention in human affairs, or do we indeed reject everything supernatural?
The Saint Benedict Medal is, in fact, a remnant of the medieval world still existing in our own. After the Counter-Reformation and especially the Vatican II council, Roman Catholicism has been heavily modernized. The medieval aspects of Catholic belief are often deemphasized in the modern West, but unlike many Protestant denominations, Catholics can never fully modernize without a major change of doctrine. For the Catholic understanding of salvation relies on grace being transmitted through sacraments, several of which involve physical objects. Can bread and wine truly communicate the saving body and blood of Jesus Christ? Can washing with water truly grant forgiveness? To answer ‘no’ is to depart not only from the medieval mindset, but from historic Roman Catholicism.
Charged objects are a fascinating window into an earlier time. Few of us are aware of how totally our view of the world is affected by the vast and sweeping changes of the past five hundred years. To understand our ancestors is to appreciate that for them, life was not all about self-expression, radical independence, and choice as a form of identity building. It was about communing with something bigger than one’s self: existing as part of an interconnected web of human relationships which were themselves united to a spiritual hierarchy of angels, demons, and ultimately God himself.
Our goal is not to fully return to that medieval mindset. Taylor freely admits we cannot. But we can seek to understand it and allow it to smooth out the rough edges of our individualism. Perhaps then we would find ourselves less lonely, always chasing after meaning, striving and failing to uphold our own identities. For salvation does not lie within ourselves, but in the coming of one outside, who joined himself to our humanity and calls to us all, “Come.”
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“The Battle of Frankenhausen and the Ruin of Thomas Müntzer” at 1517
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 29.
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I have heard the language of "charged" from certain friends who use crystals for all sorts of ends like you were writing about.