https://www.bradeast.org/blog/my-latest-a-review-of-rod-dreher-in-ct
…
There are three major
elements to Living in Wonder: a metanarrative of decline; an
overarching diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription; and a set of practices for
the individual reader. I began above with the third, so now I will focus on the
first two.
Dreher argues that the
contemporary West is disenchanted. This term can mean
many things, but Dreher defines it as “the evaporation of a sense of the
supernatural within the world, and its replacement with a belief, sometimes
unacknowledged, that this world is all there is.” A disenchanted society is
materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic, and hedonistic. It is unspooky.
It is not open to the transcendent, the divine, the mysterious, the
inexplicable. It is closed off by design.
How did we get here? By
a lengthy series of social, cultural, economic, scientific, and intellectual
transitions, beginning in the late Middle Ages. We lost a sense of “the
givenness of things,” to use Marilynne
Robinson’s phrase. We began to think things are what we make of them
rather than gifts from God to be cherished and stewarded. We strapped nature to
a chair and tortured her for secrets. Alluding
to Yuval Noah Harari, Dreher writes that “the story of modernity is of
humankind exchanging meaning for power.”
We got power, all
right. But was the exchange worth it? Dreher suggests not. In fact, he says,
the tradeoffs are so drastic that, while we can’t go back, we can’t stay where
we are, either.
…
The rise of technocratic utilitarian reason wielded to
develop comprehensive mastery over nature and society, by chance? Where, oh where, have I heard that thesis
before? Maybe Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer had some book about kinda sorta suggested that since the age of
Enlightenment instrumental reason and technological application outstripped
other aspects of civilization in some book called Dialectic
of Enlightenment?
So far, Brad East’s review of Rod Dreher’s newest book has
me wondering what could be even remotely new about this new Dreher book. Never mind the endless bids at recovery of
enchantment, when socially conservative contemporary Christian writers who grew
up in America or the United Kingdom want to re-enchant the cosmos it’s as
though every time they inveigh against utilitarian reason they’re pulling the
hat trick Jacques Ellul said conservatives usually do, which is to redefine and
rebrand some idea formulated by revolutionary leftists from earlier generations
and then present it as a bid to go back to the good old days. Now I’m a bit fuzzy on exactly where in The New Demons
Ellul made that point but I think it was in said book.
I am openly skeptical about bids at re-enchantment from
socially conservative Christian authors here in 2024? Why?
Because it so often comes across as though they are either witlessly recycling
Romanticism from the long 19th century or they know they are
throwbacks who want to go back to some enchanted Romantic past and willfully
forget that that quest for enchantment was, if they took their own
etiological narratives seriously, precisely how we got here to begin
with. It gets me thinking of Freddie
deBoer’s snipe that the self-identified trad Caths can’t possibly be that
because real trad Caths just say they’re Catholics.
Now let’s see what Brad East wrote that Rod Dreher
prescribes for re-enchanting the world:
…
This can be acted upon
in one of two ways. The first is to deploy it as a lens to observe everyday
life. God is no longer distant but can be found anywhere and everywhere,
whether at Walmart or the auto shop, the voting booth or a neighbor’s backyard.
Re-enchantment becomes a devotional or epistemic program for the individual
believer, a matter of curating one’s routines to be mindful of the omnipresent
Lord. Beck’s approach leans this way.
The second is to bite
the bullet and proclaim, fingers uncrossed, that God works signs and wonders in
the world today, just as he did in the times and stories of Holy Scripture. In
this view, angels intervene in mortal affairs; demons assault and possess
unsuspecting sinners; terminal illnesses are healed by divine miracle; young
men see visions; and old men dream dreams (Acts 2:17). None of these things
ever ceased. Christians in the West merely lost the desire or ability to see
them.
Dreher wants to marry both approaches to a
sacramental view of the world. Signs and wonders are occasional but not
exceptional, he believes. They distill the essence of reality so that, having
once beheld or believed in the extraordinary, our eyes might be open to it in
the daily grind—we will, as the book’s title promises, live in wonder.
…
So, Romanticism, that mystical movement that reacted to the
perceived soulless aspects of Enlightenment instrumental reason. Poets and literary critics waxed eloquent
about how Newton split the rainbow and drained it of mystery or, no, wait,
maybe poetry can express human feeling about the rainbow and combine that with
Newton’s discoveries? Maybe the arts
could retain the enchantment that modern science threatened to drain away? That hope got outlined at extravagant length
by M. H. Abrams in The
Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism.
The idea, then, was to retain all the perceived
benefits of Christendom without actually committing to any of its dogmas. The liberal Protestant tradition had a hugely
formative influence on Romanticism. It’s
hard to imagine German Romanticism without Johann Gottfried Herder or Friedrich
Schleiermacher just as it is hard to imagine without Kant or Hegel and
responses to their ideas. Over at The
Imaginative Conservative there is hardly any pretense that what they want
to recover is a Romantic conception of human flourishing in the arts. When someone goes to the trouble of saying
nice things about a 20th century composer it’s a break from their
norm.
I have gone my whole not-so-very-long life reading cultural
conservatives lament that the timeless truths of the Great Art of Civilization
are being lost but this idea that the arts were expected to speak for all times
and places and to have “universal” appeal was more or less an invention of the
long 19th century. What the
cultural conservative preserver of The Great Tradition seems to skip past too
often is that the possibility of engaging those “timeless truths” has depended
on scholarly acts of translation and interpretation. No ordinary person is going to just go back
and read Homer in the Greek. No ordinary
person is just going to stroll up to some booth and read the Masoretic Text or
the Septuagint. Debates about what the
Apostle Paul meant about any number of things entail discussions of manuscript
variants. Whole libraries can be filled
with discussions of the relationship between Hebrew and Greek terminologies
that catalyzed the development of nascent Jewish and Christian demonologies in
the Hasmonean period. Even to discover
what those ideas meant at the time the ideas were being developed involves a
long disciplined path of study and to make those insights practical to anyone interpretation
and translation are needed.
The thing about that first lens is that there’s a
subjectivist element to it since the 19th century that Dreher
probably doesn’t want and that Roger Scruton declared charlatanry in special
cases. The idea that if you choose to
view the cosmos as enchanted it is through an act of active imagination means
that what you choose to perceive can make the thing what it is. Very well, why not concede that John Cage’s 4’33”
actually is music to people who decided that it is? Leonard Meyer’s suggestion
that Cage embodied “late late Romanticism” seemed on point. Cage was simply extending a Romantic
rejection of conventionalism and medieval Christendom to the point where he
invited audiences to hear whatever transpired sonically during 4’33” to be
the music. Scruton thought that was the stunt of a charlatan but from another
perspective Cage was simply summoning audiences to a form of enchantment. In other words, from a Rod Dreher the “First
lens” could still be taken as offered in a kind of bad faith if Dreher at some
point say s”No, I don’t mean it applies to the works of John Cage types”.
As for the second lens, even among Christians there’s no
shortage of cessationists, people who contend that the signs and wonders and
miracles were to validate the authenticity and authority of the once-for-all
revelation of the work of Jesus Christ so that we should not need or expect to
see such marvels in our time if we have understood truly what those marvels
were for. Now this is not necessarily a
majority stance among Christians the world over but it’s got staunch
representation among Anglicans and Dutch Christians in the last few centuries.
Dreher may hope that
his version is Orthodox and therefore not the kind of cafeteria synthesis that
is more likely to happen but the presence of a cessationist perspective in
Christian thought should be a warning that plenty of Christians and theologians
have taken a view that disenchantment is more liberating than enchantment. Bultmann could contend that by saying Christ
conquered the powers and principalities and elements of the cosmos the
Christian message had a function of liberating people from belief that those
powers controlled their lives. If Dreher
wants to believe that enchantment leads to freedom it doesn’t sound like he has
really made a case that a re-enchantment project liberates anyone. A particularly cynical take could propose
that writers and professors have a class interest in insisting that if we
only read their books that the world would be enchanted again. But to go by Esther
Acolatse’s work on pastoral practices in Ghana it doesn’t sound like most
Christians in Africa, or most Africans in general, need the world to be
re-enchanted.
Dostoevsky famously had one of his characters say that he
believed the world would be saved by beauty.
There’s not much room to confuse the overly Christological element of
that claim in Dostoevsky’s work but if people “do” subtract Christ from the
prince’s concept then the next questions that come up would be “whose beauty
will save the world?” and “by what standard do we define beauty?” The guys in Moscow, Idaho can keep invoking
that question as if it only ever goes their way but it is precisely that point
at which they run into bear traps of their own making engaging with anything
resembling critical theory or critical race theory. If a bunch of white supremacists decided what
beauty is then they have decided, not just along the way, that it is their
beauty that will save the world and nobody else’s standard of beauty. Dostoevsky’s prince could at least be
construed as pointing to a Christology that spans the globe. Partisans of Western Romantic art mysticism
have generally not been so generous.
But my enchantment is better and more legitimate
than your enchantment has been the core of the turf wars about whose
beauty will save the world (if beauty will do that) for centuries.
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