An honest religious response to modern disenchantment is not as simple as we like to believe

Stop me if you’ve heard this before:

The modern world is a shell of itself. We are living through a Meaning Crisis™, a Loneliness Crisis™, an Attention Crisis™, and everything is spiraling away faster than we can keep track. Our work is less fulfilling and more precarious than it was for our great-grandparents. Our few hours of leisure are channeled through flashy, prefab dopamine sinks that leave us feeling emptier than before. But our problem is deeper than this. It’s a spiritual problem. There was once a unifying moral vision which grounded us, a grand narrative into which everything—we might once have said “all of Creation”—might fit. Now the old magic is gone—though you can catch it in snatches, like the trace mists of an already-evaporated morning dew.

It wasn’t (says the story) always this way. We used to understand, long ago, that the world, and our movements through it, and its natural cycles, and the very stuff of reality, were saturated with meaning. The much-maligned medieval mind was, compared with our scientific modernism, rich with a lost enchantment. In fact, the “superstitious” medieval mind might offer us the escape hatch we so badly need for our modern malaise.

In fact (says the story), our chronology is flipped. We’ve been told there was a steady upwards march from the nadir of the Dark Ages through the Renaissance to the Enlightenment’s peaks. This has it backwards: we’ve actually fallen from a culture of universal enchantment (the High Middle Ages, Catholicism, Chartes) into a morass of alienation and atomization (secular post-liberalism). The culprit? It depends how far back you want to look. The Frankfurt School? The Industrial Revolution? Robespierre? The philosophes? Bacon? Hobbes? Descartes? Maybe farther than that: maybe agriculture. The Younger Dryas. Maybe the slaughter of Abel. Maybe the Fall.

How a person answers this question of origins is a pretty good predictor of their politics. The past worth recovering is the blueprint for tomorrow’s utopic vision. Everybody, in other words, will use the same framing to tell you a different, but equally urgent, story.

But the trajectory of this story as a whole – divine beginning, calamitous fall, hope of restoration – is true. In some fundamental ways, the world really is hollower than it once was. However exaggerated and cliched, however frustratingly trite its retelling, however reliant on poor apings of Charles Taylor—the story of disenchantment remains true.

Disenchantment (Materialism’s displacement of metaphysics) changed human consciousness. It worsened it. “Re-enchantment” promises a richer future through a recovery of what was lost. And if disenchantment is at the root of so much that is broken in our arts, culture, and relationship to nature, then surely re-enchantment is the most significant project of our time.

That’s the coda to the story I began with. This is the call-to-arms for religiously-inclined artists and thinkers we hear most often, after we hear the long litany of modern ills. 

Our job, the coda says, is to recover the old metaphysical vision charted in antiquity and brought to perfection in the lost Middle Ages. Culture must be rebaptised in the Thirteenth Century (or some other benchmark) if it has a chance of surviving our modern decadence. This means not only the mass recovery of Aquinas (and through Aquinas, Augustine’s Christian Platonism), but of the vast stock of folk traditions and local color which were suppressed during the iconoclasms of “Progress”: the Reformation, the Puritan revolts, the juggernauts of capital-s Science and capital-t Technology. Whatever was once dismissed as “superstition,” as old wives’ tales and big fish stories — whatever was mocked as backward, primitive, idolatrous, embarrassing, kitsch — now stands a chance at revival.

For young Christians in the Traditionalist circles of the internet, this takes on a particular shade. This means a recovery, not so much of the “early church,” but of the late antique church and its roseate medieval flourishes. It means the cult of the saints; medals and novenas; candles for the dead; reclaiming old fasts; bringing back “Rorate Caeli” and Lammas and Gregorian Chant and the Churching of Women.

It also means an openness – if not an outright, premeditated credulity – toward those dimensions of spiritual life which modernity had apparently “erased.” It means a wariness of demons and an invocation of angels. It means a renewed attention to hyper-local workings of divine grace (holy wells and holy grottoes and bleeding statues and oil-oozing icons). It means that miraculous accounts (floating men, divine healings) once dismissed as improbable by Enlightenment rationality demand new reckonings.

What could be wrong with this?

Nothing wholeheartedly wrong-headed (provided you already accept the supernatural). But there is a tenor to the drive toward re-enchantment which I think contains the seeds of future hollowness and future disillusionment. I want to try to stave off those consequences.

I have, then, three concerns or semi-objections to the re-enchantment project as popularized in the trad-sphere.

The Dialectic of Re-enchantment

I don’t think that history follows any kind of script. I don’t believe dialectical materialism (whether Hegel’s or Marx’s or anyone else’s) works. But there is undoubtedly a temporary, historically determined character to the re-enchantment movement which grinds against its appeal to timeless, eternal truth.

Firstly, re-enchantment looks backward to an already narrow historical band of liturgical and mystical traditions (almost always medieval and never, for instance, including the spirituality of the Second Temple era). But more than this, it also generates most of its energy (and following) from its loud opposition to an incredibly narrow, incredibly modern range of ailments. (How often does “Great Books” and “Western Civilization” content on Substack and YouTube, for instance, pivot into outright venting sessions?) 

The rhetoric of re-enchantment is often better characterized by what it fights against than by what it reclaims. And what it fights – falling under the bogeyman term of “Modernity” (or something crasser like “wokeness”) – are usually part of a hyper-local, post-industrial smorgasbord of Western European and American complaints: the spiritual pressures of deracination, decadence, and other “-isms” (secularism, globalism, etc) specific to a particular time and place. Look outside this narrow sliver of the world, or wait another hundred years for these specific problems to evolve or disappear, and the re-enchantment movement begins to look like just one more local subculture among many.

There is nothing wrong with subcultures. But souls can’t be wagered on subcultures. And religion is the arena of the soul, not merely one more lane of cultural pride. In soul matters, the stakes must be as clear as possible—it would be disastrous to learn, years later, that one’s religious life was merely a gamble on a time-bound social media trend whose relevance fizzled out in a matter of years.

The “Modernity” of the 21^st century is not the final boss of history. It’s very possible that whatever dystopian future follows from here – whether it looks more like accelerationist transhumanism or a new theocratic barbarism – will make our Modernity look full of promise by comparison. The “modern” traits so often maligned by hardcore younger Traditionalists – tolerance, pluralism, skeptical inquiry, separation of church and state – did not arrive by accident or by some nefarious scheme to undermine the Old Good Order. They were the necessary historical outworkings of a crueler (albeit more “enchanted”) world which did not yet know their protection. And if re-enchanters are successful in overthrowing Modernity, it’s possible that these traits will be badly, badly missed in very short order. The old Soviet cliché of “thinking dialectically” would save us from such an overcorrection.

The Problem of Truth(s)

With re-enchantment, truth becomes muddled. The species of truth that most of us grew up to understand — call it “verificationist” or “positivist” or even just “common sense”— becomes frustratingly harder to articulate and apply in an enchanted, premodern worldview.

Enchantment does not only invite a new general perception of the world (following St. John of Damascus’s claim that “the whole earth is a living icon of the face of God”). It also invites questions that are very, very specific and which might sound embarrassingly hostile if put plainly. Is it true that Joseph of Arimathea really planted this tree in Glastonbury? Is it true that Thomas Becket’s blood cured blindness? Is it true that the Holy Houses of Loreto and Walsingham were built by angels and translated from Christ’s home in Nazareth? Is it true that this reliquary contains the wood of the cross, or St. Peter’s finger bone, or Mary Magdalene’s tooth? More: was King Arthur real? Was St. Christopher? Are fairies?

In Modernity, there is nothing wrong with asking such questions. Most of us were raised with the (“modern,” “reductionist”) idea that true is true, false is false, and there’s no two ways about it. Either it happened, or it didn’t. Either it’s real, or it’s fake. Most of us cannot imagine a world, and would not want to live in a world, where these questions were discouraged or obscured. But this “reductionist” way of thinking, to a re-enchanter, is merely a holdover from the Cartesian split between mind and matter which has removed us from Creation and limited our attention to a narrow sliver of reality. Here’s where even well-meaning, affable modern re-enchanters like Jonathan Pageau or Malcolm Guite might elide one definition of truth into another as a means of preserving the source of enchantment and its richness. A re-enchanter might be tempted, in response to one of the above questions, to say something along the lines of: “well, there’s a symbolic, archetypal weight to the story you’re investigating, a deeper truth which is, in fact, ‘truer than true.’” Which is not really helpful to an honest seeker. To truly investigate, to question, to criticize, to literalize, to be skeptical, to (heaven forbid) “debunk,” is to break with the spirit of re-enchantment altogether. There are entire attitudes and dispositions — perfectly normal to most of us — which are, in practice if not in theory, verboten in an enchanted world.

And what if the answer to any, if not all, of the questions above is “no”? What if it could be demonstrated, or at least plausibly argued, that many (or most, or all) of the artifacts and sites of sacred meaning that animated our medieval forebears were the result of misunderstandings or superstitions or placebo effects or outright frauds? The totalizing fear of disenchantment prevents us from being entirely honest with our own histories. At best, re-enchantment makes us more “open-minded” toward realms of experience outside of what Ross Douthat calls “official knowledge” – at worst, it provokes cognitive dissonance and sets the stage for a colossal relapse into disillusionment down the road.

And how, then, does something like rigorous scientific inquiry take place in such a world?

Re-enchantment and the Scientific Method

Re-enchantment sits uneasily with modern science. This is an extension of a larger problem with Traditionalist spaces. I don’t mean the old canard that science and religion are in conflict; the Aquinian-Aristotelian system is almost certainly a better and more comprehensive map of observable reality than the mere materialist systems we use today.

I mean that while scholastic metaphysics claims to leave a space for modern scientific inquiry of a kind, it holds Modernity’s mostly secular “philosophy of science” in deep suspicion, if not contempt. And I mean that this acts as a barrier to absorbing a great range of important truth which should otherwise inform our approach to Creation.

This line of suspicion runs obliquely through both Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine and Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option (both recent reads). In both, Francis Bacon’s commission to “subdue” nature through dispassionate inquiry, and Rene Descartes’s division between mind and matter are described as symptoms of a psychic break that never should have happened. Scientia ought never to have been divorced from noesis. But the break has happened, and we cannot exactly reverse it or forget what we have learned about the material world because of it. And that means that, while there may be no fundamental conflict between the findings of the sciences and those of the “queen of science” (theology), much of what’s been learned in the 800 years since the Summa was published has gone unattended by the faithful in any serious way.

Evolution by natural selection is an obvious example (less controversial in Christian circles than it used to be). But even basic facts about natural and geological history, about astronomy and oceanography and mycology and biology and particle physics—these are treated as the tiniest of footnotes, barely worthy of mention, in most religious accounts of reality. That they are true – and that they therefore are manifestations of the divine Logos – is treated as a minor concern. More sympathy and time and attention are addressed to small, dubious sources of medieval “enchantment” than to the grandest of new scientific discoveries. Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of science and faith as “non-overlapping magisteria” is unintentionally reinforced – and the magisterium of science gets punted to the side.

Here, I think, is my biggest personal hang-up with the movement toward re-enchantment. I am a skeptical person at heart, but I can accept, in principle, the miraculous. I can accept the existence of unfathomable numinous depths to reality, both material and immaterial — I can accept, in principle, the existence of registers of spiritual reality which dwarf our own knowable plane of existence. (This, I think, is a necessary prerequisite of orthodox Christian faith.) Paul believed in, and taught, not only the literal existence of angels but of a fundamentally grander and weirder model of our kosmos, full of archons and a divine council (as in Psalm 82) whose ultimate realignment under Christ is a major part of his Christian gospel. Pseudo-Dionysius ranked up to nine orders of angels. A twofold miracle stands at the center of the Nicene Creed: a man is born of a Virgin and raised from the dead, two things that otherwise “cannot happen.” Creation itself is a foundational miracle demanded of every orthodox monotheist. So it’s very possible that medieval peasants, in their easy accession to the realms of angels and spirits, really did have an understanding of reality which exceeded our own. The enchanted vision of the world itself, with its extravagant miracles, is not really at issue.

The real hang-up is that I cannot abide any system which asks me to ignore or discount the almost infinite splendor of material reality qua material reality. I can accept as a matter of faith that material reality is the lowest tier or plane or experience of total reality, compared with what we analogically call “the heavens” and with the final dwelling place of God. But I cannot easily accept the intrusion of “enchantment” where the full extent of material wonder has not even been acknowledged, and where that acknowledgement is often treated as a regrettable distraction.

If something is true, it declares the glory of God. It matters to the whole rest of reality. And the modern scientific method has entirely reshaped the scale and the number of “true things” which need to be accounted for. The physical universe is larger and older and weirder by several million orders of magnitude than what the most brilliant medieval minds could have imagined. And all of it matters. What happened on Planet Earth in the late Mesozoic matters. The terrifying marine monsters of the now-lost Western Interior Seaway matter. The Zanclean Flood matters. The 5.1 million species of fungi alive on Planet Earth at this moment matter. The 99.9% of species ever to live, before the dawn of homo sapiens, matter. The existence of each lunar crater, each exoplanet, each newly discovered star, each supernova, each Black Hole, each lightyear inside the space of the Boötes Void, matters.

Dashed-off paeans to the “beauty of Creation” – usually involving vague tropes like “the heavens,” “the mountains,” “the sea” – are wholly inadequate to capturing the magisterial scale of material reality. A mature and comprehensive 21^st century religious account of the universe would involve a more sincere and ambitious encounter with these avenues of knowledge and wonder which our ancestors never had the opportunity to experience. Our ancestors believed human history was only a few thousand years old. We know now that the species has existed for above 200,000. They believed in a static cosmos of spheres; we know that the heavens are infinitely wider and more dynamic. They knew only their local ecosystems and legends of far-off places. We know of biomes far stranger than they could have imagined, and of awful alien fauna who roamed the Earth for millions of years longer than our own civilizations existed. Just as it is true that our ancestors knew things about reality which we’ve forgotten, it’s undeniably true that we have plumbed depths that would have paralyzed them with awe.

Re-enchanters want to skip over this station of reality and go right to the angelic. Without regular infusions of the supernatural, the lowly earth is not enough to sustain their interest. Our world, they say, has lost its connection to the divine. Perhaps, sitting in a cubicle in the heart of a lonely metropolis, surrounded by screens for ten hours a day, it can feel that way. But perspective is everything. If we’re in the business of recovering lost knowledge and lost affections – as well we should be – then we need to go farther and recover a proper narrative that accounts for the full scale of modern knowledge. I have never heard an artist or poet or novelist or clergyman or theologian or philosopher give proper weight both to mature religious faith and to a mature rendering of the scale of the material universe. One is always sacrificed for the other, and these limitations are probably inevitable. But so long as we’re striving for re-enchantment, we ought to take our enchantment all the way, into the farthest corners of human knowledge, including the untouched magisteria of the last two centuries of scientific discovery. At even this lowliest junction of the Great Chain of Being, there is glory to be found. And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!