Rod Dreher on how we disenchanted the world

A few weeks ago Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age came out. Somewhat like Spencer Klavan’s book, this is a book about how we have forgotten that the universe is enchanted.

What does it mean for the universe to be enchanted? Well it could mean that the spiritual and material get mixed up in each other, and we are mentally aware that this mixing is happening. Or it could mean that we can see the power of God, or the gods, at work everywhere (a deity for every tree in an extreme and pagan case, perhaps).

Modern Christians still have hints of this, particularly in the sacraments. If you bring an atheist friend to a baptism service, he will see water poured, words said… but that’s all he can see. You (depending on your Christian tradition a bit), believe, we might say, that more is happening than meets the eye, God is actually active in a special way here. We could say the same for communion and, depending on your tradition, maybe for other things too (e.g. holy water).

But, although we are not deists, I do think most Western Christians, most of the time, look out and see a world that is basically running itself, dare we say, like a machine. Could God directly intervene in his creation? Of course. But we don’t expect to see it, most of the time. We’ve built a world where it is easy to ignore that God exists, and the interesting thing here is, over the centuries, bit by bit… it is largely Christians who built that world. None of the great Christian minds (and they were great minds) along the way set out with that intention, but that has been the result. How did we get here?

So, a couple posts ago, I reviewed Spencer Klavan’s book. I enjoyed his scientific history, but did not so much buy his argument, if I understood it, that quantum mechanics requires interaction with minds to actually give birth to concrete reality. The world may truly be enchanted, but I am skeptical of your ability to derive that enchantment from quantum mechanics (be happy to be wrong about that). This isn’t a full review of his book, mainly just one chapter actually, but Dreher leans more on how the history of philosophy and theology in the West took us to this point.

Leaving the enchanted garden

Dreher suggests the Reformation, the rise of Science, the rise of Capitalism, and the Internet, as major factors, with a medley of minor factors along the way. The story, in very brief form, goes as follows. (I somewhat elaborate on his thoughts with my thoughts, but I think that’s OK.)

Once upon a time, men believed the world was enchanted. Pagans and Christians both believed this. A god might show up on your doorstep. Claims of miraculous healings were relatively routine. We moderns tend to have a strict separation in our own minds between what we consider a natural event, and a supernatural event, but the ancients did not. In fact Dreher suggests [and here I am not sure he is right, but in any case, he suggests] that early conversions of pagans to Christianity had rather less to do with the specifics of the message being preached, and more to do with the miraculous signs that accompanied that preaching - apparently your god is more powerful than mine, people said. [And there are at least some clear examples in the Bible of exactly that.]

But over time the enchantment went away - and [Klavan makes this point more strongly, actually] to some extent Christians wanted it to go away. No, we don’t want a spirit in every tree and fluttering leaf. We have one big God. One God. [And indeed, intellectual atheists sometimes credit Christianity for reducing the number of gods to one. Only one more to go, they think, but we helped.]

But over time, here is what happened.

Pre-Reformation: Dreher being a good Orthodox man, he must say, the real problem began in 1054. I smile. As we know, institutionally, in 1054 the Western Church separates from the Eastern Church. In Rod’s thinking, this actually protects the East, the Eastern Church (to this day) perseveres in older ways of thought and behavior (in which we seek to know God not as much by contemplation and examination and our terrible Western systematic theologies, but through participation in prayer, liturgy, the sacraments, and so on), while the West began to change. Aristotle, famously, is rediscovered and grows in popularity in the West. Charged by that interaction, scholastic theologians (13th century Thomas Aquinas chief among them) systematize theology and begin to take a more intellectual approach toward God. God and the natural world are things we can step back and examine. A distinction appears in thought between nature and supernature. Without anyone intending to kick God out, this begins a process in which the world (and God) becomes seen more as an object “over there” to be considered.

Then, in the early 14th century, Franciscan friar William Ockham, actually desiring to defend God from the limits he felt the scholastics were placing upon him (they were “putting God in a rationalist box”), invents nominalism. God was not “entangled” with creation, but metaphysically separated from it. Material phenomena do not have inherent meaning (and therefore do not necessarily point toward God in the ways many had once thought), they have meaning only because God assigns it to them. The mindset, now, is one of God standing outside of his creation, imposing his will upon it. The natural v. supernatural distinction grows stronger in the minds of men.

Reformation: Some Protestant readers may disagree with this, but Dreher argues that Protestantism, in part from rejecting what it saw as a growth of superstition in the Church, drew the line between religion and magic differently. Much of Roman Catholic liturgy and piety was now labelled as basically magic [the criticism of the Eucharistic liturgy as “hocus pocus” would seem to be an obvious example here… of course Protestants have differing views on this today]. Protestants were more likely to chalk apparently miraculous events up to demonic activity¹ [I do think that sense is still with us today, but probably weakening], and they were also more likely to deny that self-denial and virtuous behavior could give a human supernatural powers [think of some of the historical stories of the saints here, which Protestants are certainly more skeptical toward]. The result was an even stronger separation between the natural and supernatural (and a greater skepticism toward historical claims of the latter).

Also the invention of the printing press, and a Protestant emphasis on the importance of reading the Bible for yourself, caused the rise of mass literacy. That’s a good thing, right? I would say certainly so!, but over time, this promoted and rewarded more analytical modes of thinking. [Dreher spends a lot of time, and I appreciate this, with an emphasis on, it wasn’t so much WHAT we were thinking, but HOW we were thinking. It’s somewhat parallel to the modern cliché that the medium is the message. Science arose largely in the West because we were thinking in an analytical way that was conducive to doing science. People in much of the rest of the world weren’t any dumber, but they weren’t thinking in that way. And, also with many other parallels today, even if the rise of literacy contributed to the disenchantment problem, I doubt any of us want to solve it by removing the books!]

Science: After the Reformation, and uncoincidentally, modern science is birthed in the West. Descartes (early 17th century), though a Roman Catholic, trying to put all of thought on a rational foundation, promotes a mind-body dualism in which consciousness is separate from the body, and in which the material world exists separately from us and can be an object of experiment. Then the great Isaac Newton, also a Christian [who wrote extensively on theology], births modern physics, producing a predictable universe in which the active intervention of God just didn’t seem necessary [the planets move along because of gravity and inertia, no agent of the deity need push them, for example].

Capitalism: But the most powerful agent of disenchantment may have actually been capitalism. Money and material stuff is now what we worship. Banks, not cathedrals, are our tallest buildings, and everything has a price (including, in our day, a womb rented by a gay couple - nothing is sacred, everything is an object which may be purchased). Quoting Eugene McCarraher,

Its beatific vision… is the global imperium of capital, a heavenly city of business with incessantly expanding production, trade, and consumption.

When you have markets in everything, when the contract is what matters, why not use even your body as you’d like, for payment or not? A world in which everything you could want or want to do is an item on a shopping list is a world in which the old Christian view of creation feels implausible.

Internet: And finally, he suggests, just as mass literacy did before, the internet is rewiring our brains. [“Fluid modernity'“, it might be said, is a mindset only possible because of our technology.] We are overloaded with information, we cannot concentrate, we react impulsively instead of taking the time to properly evaluate what we experience. We can’t focus and so, because of how the brain works, we also cannot remember. [If you’re active on political social media at all, you’re regularly shocked by how much people behave as if the universe came into existence two weeks ago. We live in the constant present.] The internet is constantly changing and it trains us to think that is the natural behavior of everything, including ourselves. Everything on the web, which is the actual world many live in as much as anything, is human constructed, and I also have the right to construct whatever identity I want, without limit. Everything in the world is just material waiting to be fashioned per our desires. The choosing individual is sovereign over all, and only the future matters.

Having rejected the classical metaphysics that undergird Christianity, modern man is preparing himself to become a machine.

Of course I had to end with that.

So I found that quite an interesting history - it’s only a survey, but surveys have their purpose. I dislike leaving you at this point where “how we got here” is described but “how do we get out of this?” is not… but I am still working through the book myself. Pick it up yourself if you’d like!

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1. PS, Dreher does cite Michael Heiser as one scholar (now deceased) trying to re-enchant the world for Protestants. We read the Old Testament, Heiser has said, and read all this stuff about other “gods” and think… but they weren’t real, anyway. No, they were, Heiser says, and the Israelites believed that they were. They weren’t the true God of course, but they were other spiritual entities, with real power, doing real stuff on Earth.