Disenchantment and truth

“Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.” Those pithy words, penned by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, encapsulate the plight of the modern West. It’s this plight that writer and journalist Rod Dreher confronts in his latest book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Zondervan, 288 pp.).

Disenchantment, as Dreher defines it, is the perceptual state that results when a culture believes that all there is to the universe is what we observe through our senses, measure by our scientific instruments, and interpret through the lens of a materialist worldview. Anything else in our experience about which we may think we have immediate awareness—such as a sense of God’s presence, intrinsic beauty, the miraculous, the demonic, the providential, or the sacred—must be illusory and thus a social artifact of our imaginations. Because we live in a secular age, disenchantment is the default position in which our elites—in media, academia, science, business, and even religion—typically operate.

Think, for example, of that memorable section from The Abolition of Man in which C.S. Lewis writes about an English textbook, intended for use in British schools, that instructs its young readers to think of the sublime beauty in a waterfall as only existing in the minds of those observing it rather than in the waterfall itself. Although seemingly innocent in suggesting that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder—which for many of our compatriots has attained the status of a truism—it actually teaches schoolchildren that the transcendental qualities that we attrib­ute to natural objects, such as goodness, truth, and beauty, are really about our emotional reaction to those objects rather than about the objects themselves. The student, writes Lewis, “has no notion that ethics, theology, and ­politics are all at stake.”

As an ex-Catholic who grew up in a nominal Methodist home, but who is now Eastern Orthodox, Dreher provides his readers with both theoretical and practical guidance for re-enchantment. On the theoretical side of things, he tells the familiar story of Western disenchantment, one found in the works of writers like Charles Taylor, Richard Weaver, and Brad S. Gregory.

This tale begins with the rise of late medieval nominalism and the work of 14th-century Franciscan friar William of Occam (from which we get Occam’s Razor). Nominalism is the view that abstract ideas—like human nature, numbers, goodness, and beauty—do not really exist, but are merely names or labels that we construct from our experience. In classical Christian theology, however, these abstract ideas eternally exist in the mind of God. The inevitable effect of nominalism on people’s view of the world is to separate God from His creation. In such a framework, writes Dreher, it becomes easier for us not to “see” God working in the material world through events, sacred objects, the beauty of nature, liturgy, etc.

Over the subsequent centuries this way of thinking became so dominant that we moderns, whether we are religious believers or not, wind up over-­exercising the part of our mind that is analytic, litigious, and quantitative. We come to think that our longing for the proper solace for our restless hearts—eternal communion with God—can only be secured by either our reason alone or our subjective feelings untethered from the real world. Both of these options often lead to deep disappointment since we are neither mere reasoning machines nor mere feeling machines, but rational animals, emotional beings with intellects made to love Him who has made us in His image.

In terms of practical guidance, Dreher’s book takes a two-part approach. He introduces the reader to a variety of fascinating—and sometimes disturbing—real-life stories about extraordinary events that reveal we live in an enchanted cosmos. He then explains the differing ways Christians can use spiritual practices and disciplines to draw closer to God, all the while exercising the aspect of their minds that has atrophied under the totalizing influence of secularism.

The first part dominates the book’s first six chapters. Dreher has researched this idea of enchantment and interviewed a variety of ordinary people, religious figures, and respected scholars. In these often gripping accounts, the reader encounters tales of exorcism, dabbling in the occult, the growing interest in extraterrestrial intelligences, and the emerging use of psychedelics.

We learn three things from these stories. First, secularism cannot fully suppress our natural inclination for the transcendent. Second, if traditional Christian faith is not a live cultural option, people will try to satiate their longing for mystery by gravitating to attractive, though spiritually dangerous, substitutes. And third, these tales possess an authenticity that stubbornly resists the secular account of reality. Most importantly, however, some of these stories end in deliverance and true conversion to Christ.

The final five chapters of Living in Wonder largely focus on the second part: How does one actually become re-enchanted? Because Dreher is Orthodox, his guidance includes practices and disciplines, such as the “Jesus Prayer,” that are common among the most devout in his tradition.

Some evangelicals will feel uneasy about a few of Dreher’s devotional suggestions (e.g., the use of icons), but others will find practices that they can appropriate without compromising their theological convictions. In fact, a few evangelical leaders have done just that. The works of Biola philosopher J.P. Moreland (Finding Quiet and Kingdom Triangle) and the late USC philosopher Dallas Willard (The Spirit of the Disciplines) come to mind.

Readers may be put off by what they perceive as Dreher’s subtle pro-Orthodox, anti-Western bias that makes it seem as if Orthodoxy has all the answers and that it lost nothing of theological or cultural importance after its break with the West in the 11th century. But Dreher goes out of his way to positively and respectfully cite and engage Western Christians—both Protestant and Catholic—from which he has gleaned important insights.

Casting as wide a net as possible while maintaining fidelity to its author’s ecclesial home, Living in Wonder is a model of what the evangelical theologian Timothy George once called “the ecumenism of conviction.”

—Francis J. Beckwith is professor of philosophy and church-state studies and associate director of graduate studies in philosophy at Baylor University. Among his many books is Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2015).