Living in a disenchanted age is the most significant challenge we face in seeking a relationship with God
I have continued to ponder the challenge of understanding life in a disenchanted age and communicating those understandings in a way that will help clarify my conclusion.
The domination of disenchantment in our age is prerequisite to my conclusion.
Charles Taylor asserts the disenchanted age evolved in a slow but methodical process over the previous 500 years. This explains, at least in part, why there is not a general awareness or concern about our contemporary age being disenchanted. Like the fabled frog, we unaware we have been slowly boiled (disenchanted).
A second factor which I believe impedes awareness of a disenchanted age is the obvious existence of, and attraction to, enchantment in our age. Coincidentally, it also argues for the domination of disenchantment.
When we feel the pinch of disenchantment we can conveniently escape to a enchanted refuge (vacation, fantasy, sabbatical, meditation, yoga, religion, contemplation, prayer, daydreams, sci-fi , mystery (ad infinitum ). Such escapes are only temporary. If not temporary, people become, at best, weird anomalies or at worse, outcasts.
I think that it can be helpful to image enchantment/disenchantment as default modes. Humans like computers have an operating system. Before the disenchanted age, humanity’s operating system was enchanted. As characterized earlier, in the enchanted age the world had a vertical, spiritual dimension. Human events intermingled with spirits, God, and magic. It was the default mode for human interaction and source of meaning and purpose. Progressively, humanity searched outside their enchanted realm for answers to the mysteries of their existence. The example of Galileo, tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, and forced to recant, spending the rest of his life under house arrest, illustrates the dominance of enchantment and the impulse to default.
The default mode for the disenchanted age is reliance on human ability/reason and scientific laws as an ultimate source for answers to the problems of modernity. Utility, efficiency and production are our preimemmant tools to achieve full potential as human beings. Inherently, disenchantment rejects the transcendent. Mystery, fantasy, spirituality, faith, divinity, magic, art, namely, enchantment, is rendered irrelevant. our existence in a disenchanted age is reduced to one dimension, removing depth and meaning and distorting the purpose of our lives. Aas Beck describes, “When creation is stripped of its holy, sacred and enchanted character …it becomes–material. Raw, disenchanted material. Inert stuff. Piles of particles.”
In this disenchanted age we live in a paradox. On the one hand there is the reality of human progress and the optimism of an unbounded future, all attributable to human ingenuity and science. On the other hand, there is a transcendent reality. An awareness that we exist and recognize our need for meaning and purpose which is unfulfilled in a disenchanted reality.
The challenge is how do we live in this paradox. A default to disenchantment demands “either/or” and rejects “both/and”. Defaulting to “either/or” is the defining issue that leads me to my conclusion that living in a disenchanted age is the most significant challenge we face in seeking a relationship with God.
More to come.
The goal of the disenchanter (the father of all lies) is to deny that we humans, from conception to eternity, are made in the image of God, and loved beyond measure by our Enchanting Creator God.
One of the best statements of the weakness of the disenchanter is made by C. S. Lewis in his book, The Silver Chair, by marsh-wiggle called Puddelglum s he addresses the disenchanter who appears as a beautiful queen of the underworld (or as a giant green snake). Puddelglum breaks her spell of disenchantment with these words: “One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should
think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”
C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (Chronicles of Narnia, #4)
In our day Mr. Rogers was always telling children that they were loved for being just who they were because they mattered. He was proclaiming that everyone is made in the image of God (The Enchanter)
With Love, Bob Ahern