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.