Everything Enchanted: Humanity is desperate for transcendence, but where can it be found?

Since Charles Taylor published his monumental work A Secular Age (seriously, try picking up a copy, it’s huge) in 2007, Christian thinkers of a certain cast have been talking about “disenchantment.” This discourse persists through the present day, when, just as one example, O. Alan Noble has engaged with books on the subject of enchantment from David Bentley Hart and Rod Dreher.

The basic story, as I understand it, is that the advent of modernity has, through a complex series of developments that you can read all about in Taylor’s book if you have a spare couple of months, resulted in a general experience of reality in which the “heavens are closed.” Where people once experienced the world as filled with spiritual encounters, we now experience the world as fundamentally mechanical, dead, and indifferent. Whereas, in the past, humanity was at least as likely to explain a given phenomenon by referencing spiritual forces and powers, not least God himself, in the present we normally reference natural forces and laws of nature and causality. We live within an “immanent frame,” according to Taylor, each of us a “buffered self,” trapped within our own minds and subjectivity, cutoff from the people and world around us, and trapped within a “natural” world system, cutoff from anything divine or transcendent that may or may not exist “beyond” the natural.¹

To bring this back out of the lofty heights of academic philosophy, people live not really expecting to encounter anything we might call “supernatural” in their day-to-day life. You might think these things exist (God, devils, spirits, ghosts, the demiurge, whatever), but most of us do not expect to run into the transcendent at work or on our daily walk. Some of us think that it is essentially impossible for this to happen; if we were to run into something that felt spiritual and miraculous, we would explain it away and give ourselves a good talking to for letting our imagination run wild.²

The problem, though, is that we long for transcendence. We long for an encounter with something beyond us, to know that our lives have meaning beyond what we ourselves assign, to be assured that something or someone out there sees us and is watching over us.

More practically, I’ve lost track of the number of students I’ve had who have expressed something similar. They want to believe in God, they really do. If only He could reach out, just once, and make himself obvious. If God is out there, why doesn’t He speak a bit more often and a bit more clearly? If God really loves me, why can’t I point to one single thing in my life that He (and only He) has done?

And so, the story goes, we must reenchant the world. We must recover our eyes to see the transcendent, spiritual world all around us. The path forward for the Church is to recover the place of the altar in connecting us with the divine, the miraculous, the transcendent. People long for an encounter with the transcendent; Christianity must find a way to give it to them.

Christ Enthroned by artist Kelly Latimore

So far, so good, I think, though, if Alan Jacobs is correct, perhaps enchantment isn’t actually necessary for the Christian life. The difficulty comes in how to accomplish this reenchantment of the world. If people, deep down, desire an encounter with God, and if the modern world only escalates that desire by making it seem impossible, where should we point people for just such an encounter?

I think there are basically two directions one might take. The first is to lean in the direction of the miraculous and obviously supernatural as opposed to the natural. Where can one encounter transcendence? This option answers, “I’ve encountered the supernatural: I’ve seen people be healed, I had a friend once who saw someone who was demon possessed, I heard God speak to me one time.”

This option, in my view, is a mistake. It maintains the dichotomy between natural and supernatural handed to us by modernity. The only difference is the attempt to open up the individual to the workings of the supernatural anyway. The problem, I think, is that the obviously supernatural or miraculous is, by definition, rare. The students I speak with, the ones who want to believe in the divine but can’t because they’ve never experienced it, have generally been seeking exactly the sort of supernatural experience just described for years, they just haven’t had one. They’ve prayed for healing and nothing happened. They’ve asked God to speak and heard only silence. They’ve wondered about a spectacular manifestation of God’s presence, speaking in tongues or being overcome by the Spirit, but the closest they’ve gotten is a particularly well-timed key change.

While I think it’s true that humans desire transcendence, I think we are setting people up for failure by pointing them only to the spectacular to find it. The other option is to deny the dichotomy between natural and supernatural. To reenchant the world is to see how the supernatural is present all around us, in and through the natural. Hans Boersma calls this Sacramental Ontology, Friedrich Schleiermacher talks about the supernatural becoming natural, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes that the “world is charged with the grandeur of God.”³ The point is this: the supernatural, the transcendent, is all around us if we have eyes to see. God’s beauty meets us in the beauty of the natural world or a moving piece of art, His truth shines forth through the theories of science and axioms of math, His goodness finds us through the loving care of our neighbor.

If people want transcendence, and I think they do, we should point them not to the spectacular but to the mundane. We should be equipping people to discern God’s still, small voice encountered through the Scriptures or the Body, not teaching them to ask God to say it again, this time to them personally and audibly if possible.

The truth is, our “frame” may be immanent, but reality itself inherently participates in the transcendent. If it is enchantment that we seek, it is not hard to find. Everything is enchanted, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

1. “The buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular. All of this makes up what I want to call ‘the immanent frame’. There remains to add just one background idea: that this frame constitutes a ‘natural’ order, to be contrasted to a ‘supernatural’ one, an ‘immanent’ world, over against a possible ‘transcendent’ one.” Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 542
2. See, e.g., Sylvia Plath’s poem Black Rook in Rainy Weather, discussed (but paywalled) by O. Alan Noble here.
3. You can read Hopkins’s full poem here.