The Chastening Rod
An Abstract Review of Rod Dreher's Living in Wonder
Back in 2019, when I was still a milkdrinker, I remember watching an episode of the Netflix historical drama The Crown. My family had taken a great liking to it and we became one of millions of Americans to develop a circumstantial interest in the British royalty. This episode, “Moondust,” the seventh of the third season, focused on the 1969 Apollo 13 moon landing mission, and the cultural and personal ramifications of that landmark event on the royal family. The storyline interwoven into this larger backdrop is the personal life of Prince Philip, and in particular a sort of midlife crisis he experiences as he contemplates the life he’s spent as consort to the Queen (resurrecting troubles of masculine identity that were primary in the first season of the show). In any case, the significant part of this episode I wish to focus on is that, as Prince Philip tries to find ways to process his turmoil he meets the new Dean of Windsor, Robin Woods, a priest who has a particular interest in using one of the neglected buildings on the estate of Windsor Castle to host “an academy or conservatoire” for the “personal and spiritual growth” of burned-out or dissatisfied clergymen, men of the cloth who basically are in a similar rut to Prince Philip. While Prince Philip, in his usual manner, responds blithely and cynically toward this cleric, even referring to the Dean’s conservatoire as a “concentration camp for spiritual defectives,” when the Dean extends an offer for Prince Philip to attend a meeting of this group, despite some characteristic grumbling, he accepts.
This is where we get to the meat of it. Dean Woods arrives with the Duke of Edinburgh and things are amicable, and Prince Philip even jokes with the men about the clutter that’s arisen now that this building is being used again. The conversation opens with one priest, Reverend Michael, a young and clearly capable man who, however, has found himself in a quaint rural parish with a dwindling congregation. This quite quickly enters the age-old topic among Christian leaders and zealots, of religious decline and cultural secularization. Michael makes a poignant remark (kudos to the screenwriters) that ties together all the themes developing in the episode hitherto:
More and more people are finding their spiritual needs being met elsewhere… [in] the Moon [for example]... Five hundred million people watched the lunar landing…getting from televisions what they used to get from the church: a sense of coming together, a sense of community, of awe, of wonder.
Indeed, by the time depicted in this episode, as a number of charts could show us, religious adherence in the West had already begun precipitously declining. The Moon landing as an intrinsically world-historic event, being accomplished through the power of industrial technique, is apropos as indicative of this transformation in Western society, for, yes, the elements of religious zeal once directed to the table of the Lord’s feast were now directed through the icon of mass media toward the quasi-Messianic triumph of industrialism. Responding to Michael’s comment, Dean Woods quotes from Keats,
“What is there in thee, Moon, that thou shouldst move my heart so potently?” Now we know what the Moon is. Nothing. Just dust. Silence. Monochromatic void. We see no God behind those rocks and space dust, simply an unknowable vastness.
As these remarks hang in the air Prince Philip is invited to contribute his reflections. What follows is yet another cleverly crafted scene. To the shock of the assembled religious, Prince Philip, well, snaps.
I'll tell you what I think. I've never heard such a load of pretentious, self-piteous nonsense. What you lot need to do is to get off your backsides, get out into the world, and bloody well do something. This is why you are all so…so lost. I believe that there is an imperative within man, all men, to make a mark. Action is what defines us. Action, not suffering. All this sitting around, thinking and talking… Let me ask you this: do you think those astronauts up there are catatonic like you lot? Of course not. They are too busy achieving something spectacular. And as a result they are at one with the world, at one with their God. And happy. That’s my advice. Model yourselves on men of action, like Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins. … [They’re] not a bunch of navel-gazing underachievers infecting one another with gaseous doom. If you do opt for action, you can start by cleaning up this bloody floor.
We can tell why Prince Philip is upset. He’s a man who, by virtue of station, family, and era, is reasonably Christian, however culturally, and his choleric disposition aside there was certainly some faith in him. Thus, finding himself in a midlife crisis and coming in the presence of religious men who ought to “have the answers,” however crude an understanding of the ordained life, he finds that they’re just as self-piteous as him. It’s a bit of projection, sure, but the irritation is understandable, and all the more so what Prince Philip remarks is quite poignant.
The civilizational deformation identified in this scene, lamented over by its ensemble, is what’s referred to in increasingly popular circles as “disenchantment.” That is, the world that the ancients could see filled with nymphs, fair folk, spells, prophecy, wonders, runes, and other mysteries is now devoid of those and what remains itself is seen as “just dust.” Most of this is attributed to the cultural and academic ascendancy of scientific materialism, wherein by the process of man tearing open the atom or landing on the Moon we’ve realized all that the ancients were doing was attributing stories and wonders to phenomena they just couldn’t explain. This is the so-called “God of the gaps argument,” that thunder is not divine wrath, but just a discharge of built-up electricity within clouds caused by the meteorology of stormfronts, and villagefolk who didn’t know any better spun tall tales out of this.
As a self-admitted milkdrinker at this time I knew the power of disenchantment, even if I couldn’t name it or explain it. This is probably why this episode stuck with me, because at the time I was being asked to believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God, my Redeemer from my sins, Who was heralded by angels to be born of a Virgin, and was to be Lord of my life. Yet, what did literally any of that mean? More so, who could believe it? Granted, I had turned to apologetics rather early, a rather famous moment in my spiritual journey being when I missed a whole Sunday service hunched over a copy of Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and so I thought I knew how to believe it. My upbringing had also included watching The Big Bang Theory, when that was coming out, and the noxious reductionist atheism in that show couldn’t be any more explicit, so while conflicting with my religious worldview I accepted the presumed answer that since an atheist worldview was based on reasoning and evidence it would be reasoning and evidence that could undo it. So, whether Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, William Lane Craig, or any number of other apologists, I for some time took it in stride that “facts” were what the world needed.
In hindsight, it’s all so futile. After all, “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.” Still, the awakening had to be rude for me when I finally realized that “Jesus Christ has more independent accounts of his life than Julius Caesar” and “but the Gospels had to be written before 70 AD” wouldn’t get me nor the atheist to heaven, nor were the reason why Christ was nailed to the Cross. These things don’t help the soul, they only beset it. How much would I have prospered if Ecclesiates had been put in my hands first (woe to the “formation” of Evangelical spirituality) and I got to see its concluding wisdom:
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. (12:12-13).
Or, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding” (Prov. 9:10). The faculties of the human mind gets the man absolutely nowhere if he isn’t awestruck by the reality of the living God Who is present and active everywhere, and personally calls to every man’s heart. First, Moses fell down before the Burning Bush, then he received the Law. First, John fell at Christ’s feet as dead, then he received the Apocalypse. First, Paul is struck blind by God’s glory, then he receives the Gospel.
Still, as I was in the process of figuring these things out, the power of the trance modernity had enthralled me in was powerful. “But how can I believe in these things?” Was I supposed to ignore science? Was I supposed to pretend? What world would I be in, however, if all it came from, comes down to, and will come to is “monochromatic void”?
All this is what
addresses in what I resolutely believe to be one of the most important books of our time: Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (read the first chapter here). This thoughtfully designed book, clocking in at just under 300 pages, is the perfect encapsulation of “quality over quantity.” Oftentimes reading some books I find myself despairing that the author, in their promise to not make the book too bulky and dense, still could’ve added at least 50 or 100 pages without compromising that intent and avoided leaving many thoughts superficial or incomplete. With Dreher’s, that’s not the case, he makes perfect use of his space, and the only reason I’d want him to add more to it is not because of any deficiency in what is present but simply because I could listen to him go on and on about this subject. Dreher’s writing career has, for all intents and purposes, been leading up to this book.1 In 2015, he published the book How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem, wherein he recounts the therapeutic effect reading through Dante’s famous poem had on him in a turbulent time of his life, with many reflections concerning God’s presence and love, the sickness of the soul, the distractions of life, and other themes that serve as excellent foundations for discussion of worldweariness and the modern crisis of meaning. He followed this two years later with his more provocative yet insightful The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, where he cogently employs the witness of St. Benedict of Nursia and the Benedictine tradition of Western monasticism, which forged enclaves of wisdom and piety in an otherwise chaotic late Roman era, as an example for how Christians should respond to our chaotic era of decline. Then came, in 2020, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, written at the height of the COVID pandemic, wherein Dreher reflects on the sudden inflammation of (as Sam Francis would put it) hard managerialism in the “liberal-democratic” West, and formulates how Christians should live through such tribulation whether it results in the worsening or collapse of the regimes. Put another way, The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies are brothers from another mother, worthily read together, the former discussing what to do when Babylon has expended itself and is experiencing its death rattles, giving way to a new order, whereas the latter gives advice for how to endure when Babylon is still prowling about as a roaring lion. All of these books outline a civilizational pathology, one that many people, Dreher vicariously, need to be led and defended through, and it’s Living in Wonder that brings this altogether by identifying the pathogen as disenchantment and the cure as Jesus Christ.And I say Jesus Christ to immediately sidestep some dismissals of “re-enchantment rhetoric” I’ve seen, that it’s idolized in and of itself.
is a case in point:In other words, the Enchantment paradigm can’t answer the three most important questions: Where did this “Enchantedness” come from, why did it go away, and how do we get it back? These are metaphysical questions, not sociological ones.
While I’m sure what Davis talks about here, and in his larger article “Beyond Enchantment,” has merit, I think he should’ve learned something to the contrary from all the authors he mentions (Malcolm Guite, Jonathan Pageau, Tolkien, and Dreher). Dreher makes it clear in his take on enchantment, “you will meet in these pages” of his book those “who came to Christ through experiences of awe” (p. 10). Not came to experiences of awe, not came to a sense of mystery, but to Christ. Dreher’s account is Christocentric, but his focus is on how Christ is made central by experiences of awe, and he wants to defend, contra culturally dominant reductionist materialism, that such experiences are valid, and in particular eudaimonic.2
Dreher also makes it clear that he sees a clear distinction between what he terms “Dark Enchantment” and “[Good] Enchantment,” the former being what Davis labels “occultism, neopaganism, and Satanism” (see ch. 5). There is a wisdom that “descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish” (Jas. 3:15), and Dreher is concerned about it, so much so that he makes one of the most poignant observations contemporary Christians need to take to heart, that atheism is not the greatest threat to Christianity (today, in the future, or at any point in time), but rather the rising specter of occultism is (p. 86). Dreher is purposefully and expressly pursuing “the wisdom that is from above,” which “is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy” (Jas. 3:17). I could probably go deeper into defending the “Enchantment paradigm,” contra Davis, but at the end of the day I think if you got Davis, Dreher, Guite, and Pageau in a room together and controlled for all the variables they’d end up in agreement. They’re all talking about the same thing, hoping for the same thing, and striving for the same thing. Let’s continue with focusing more substantively on what Dreher outlines, then.
Dreher’s book is broken into three unofficial parts: the first, chs. 1-4, focuses on the enchantment-disenchantment dynamic proper, explaining what, to go back to Keats, “is there in thee, Moon, that thou shouldst move my heart so potently” contra the existential exsanguination of reductionist materialism. He immediately moves, from this, in chs. 5-6, to discussing “Dark Enchantment,” how the rediscovery of “otherworldliness” has unfortunately led to a degree of “underworldliness” proliferating as well, and ranging from occultism to UFOlogy to psychedelics Dreher boldly discusses these subjects with all seriousness and also diligently exposes their spiritual, moral, and logical fraudulence. Then, the third and final part, chs. 7-11, all focus on how exactly to re-enchant oneself, readjusting to the mystical rhythms and patterns of reality, and what to expect of the growing re-enchantment phenomenon (esp. ch. 10). All this makes for a truly captivating read.
What really adds to the wonder of this wondrous book about wonder is that it contains so many common-sense answers to the materialism I’d been struggling with for years. I can tell why cessationism is quite popular among certain Protestants, especially Presbyterianism, due to its Protestant neo-Scholasticism seeking to stand on the level of the Papists as a mature religion without guilty association with the Pentecostals. The “weird cousin” of charismatic churches, the desire to save face in the wake of the Enlightenment, the hyperfixation on intellectualism, all of these have incentivized various branches of the Church to deemphasize her supernatural heritage. Dreher reveals that it’s not “continuationism” nor “cessationism” the Church should concern herself with, but rather mysticism. That’s the word the Church has always spoken of, never any of this newfangled academic nomenclature. Dreher’s book is, therefore, to some extent a vindication of a principle I’ve touted on this blog: going forward to the past. If what was was enchanted, and that was good, what will be needs to learn from the past, if it is to be good. To put it simply, much of what Dreher exposes about the spellbinding of materialism comes down to a rather blithe question: “Says who?”
Understand how cathartic yet aggravating this realization was. I’d been struggling with the “emptiness” of the world for years, just for the answer to have been staring me in the face all this time!? But, of course! Who exactly “proved” that thunder doesn’t mean divine wrath, the sky isn’t the heavens, and that angels don’t hide your car keys? Yes, that last one is a joke, but still, says who? In the wider reading I’ve been doing after being energized by Dreher’s work I came across an excellent passage from C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, wherein the protagonists (Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace) meet Ramandu, a mysterious old man who recounts to them how he used to be a star. “Golly,” the young boy Edmund mutters in response, “He’s a retired star.” It’s a truly fascinating and wondrous notion. The following discourse is the apex of the episode:
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”3
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handywork” (Ps. 19:1). Do stars have a voice? No, of course not! Says. Who? Look it up, stars do speak, they are saying something. What, it doesn’t sound like French or Latin or Russian? Well, who died and made you God?4 Would it have been reasonable for an English man of letters in the 1700s, upon receiving the scholarship of William Jones from Calcutta in the Indic languages to have remarked, “Well, this isn’t language, it doesn’t sound like any language I’ve heard of”?
Look at man. He’s made up of trillions of organisms called “cells.” Yet, what are cells? Nothing. They didn’t produce Mona Lisa, Starry Night, “The Blue Danube,” or Hamlet. You can thoroughly measure, categorize, and analyze all of their functions, in clean clinical language. Yet, these “cells” when strewn together in some arbitrary way produce man. And man has produced all those things. Likewise, how different do we think stars are? Sure, billions and billions of tons of hydrogen plasma hasn’t produced Mona Lisa or “The Blue Danube,” but do you know what stars have produced? Us. Everything around you. As Carl Sagan once put it, “We are made of star-stuff.” Well, couldn’t we just as easily say that stars are made of people-stuff? In conclusion, you realize that no one has said anything to the contrary, we merely changed some words in our definition of star: “a light in the heavens” became “a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity.” Even then, a rose by any other name…5
Delving into the enchantment discourse quickly makes you realize that the Middle Ages really contain the brunt of what you need to (re)learn to be (re)enchanted, and two of my most favoritest awesomest people here on Substack,
and , have published a lot in terms of medieval enchantment. Oh, I can’t forget to mention , either, a leading and underappreciated exegete of the Inklings (and their medieval roots). Keim in particular published a series of essays late last year on medieval symbology (start here), which was just fantastic. This series ends just as strong as it begins, maybe stronger, with the essay “Why the Sky Is Blue,” which complements much of what we’ve been saying.“Why is the sky blue?” It’s a question that children ask. Let’s pose it to Google and see what the AI bot gives us: “The sky is blue because of a process called Rayleigh scattering, which occurs when sunlight passes through Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered by air molecules.” Well done, Google—that’s a correct answer.
Well, not quite. The statement is correct, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s an answer to a different question. When Google says this, and when all the humans whose knowledge Google has consumed say this, they are explaining how the sky is blue. They’re describing a physical process by which the white light from the sun is converted into blue light that reaches our eyes when we look up toward the heavens.
This is the coup de grâce against materialism (disenchantment). Granted, we can certainly go deeper and more philosophical, perhaps none of this would necessarily convince/convert Richard Dawkins, but of course that’s not what we’re trying to accomplish. Before being noetically waylaid by his posh English or by a decade in a school system that affirms his worldview, or if after any of that we’ve experienced a crisis of disillusionment, we can build up an immune system through what we’ve been exploring. But consider this: the reason why you love anyone is not how you love them. Perhaps how you love them is because psychosocial stimuli cause your body to produce oxytocin in their presence, but that’s not why you love them. Why you love them is because “love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God” (1 Jn. 4:7).
Thus, what Dreher exposes in his book is simply that the discarded image of the Middle Ages was never discarded due to obsolescence or impropriety, but rather was discarded just as the Virgin Mary was discarded from the Notre-Dame by the Jacobin heathens. Not out of reason, nor of consideration, but out of revolutionary necessity. We were never given the chance to ask if any of it was wrong, we were only ever told it was wrong. One of the books I started reading in the time since I read Dreher’s is Sam Francis’ Leviathan and Its Enemies. An excellent book, maybe I’ll get around to posting something about it too but in a more timely fashion. What Francis describes in this tome, despite his secular portrayal, is the civilizational deformation that led to disenchantment, in the guise of “the revolution of mass and scale.”6 Mass and scale first revolutionized population, which begat the demand for revolutionary mass and scale in statecraft, economy, and culture. Mass population needed mass production to sustain itself, but the industry of mass production needed a complementary industry of mass humanity, which would have a requisite banality and homogeneity of character so as not to stress out or undermine mass production (the “local” and “particularist” values of the pre-revolutionary world Francis describes would never buy from a factory instead of a farm, nor would it build a factory in its backyard, despite not reducing their mass and scale in turn).7 The revolution of mass and scale in culture, then, takes the form of convincing men that all of reality is nothing more than fractal patterns of the Machine, with the intent of acclimating them to their new roles; the cell is a tiny machine, a cow is a milky machine, humans are egotistical machines. Since there’s nothing special about machines, they’re just lifeless hunks of metal, then clearly there’s nothing special about the rest of Creation. Ultimately, stars are just giant hot machines. Paul Kingsnorth, drawing on Augusto Del Noce, puts it this way:
The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw the modern era as a thorough and permanent revolution - a radical break with the human past. He defined a modern person as ‘someone who thinks that “today it is no longer possible…”’ We do not tend to see our time as continuous with what has gone before. Instead, we believe we live after what Del Noce called a ‘violent break with history’: a move from the ‘kingdom of necessity’ to the ‘kingdom of freedom.’ In the story of Progress which informs our view of history and society, the revolutions of the modern age - industrial, political and intellectual - are assumed to have radically changed the world. By sweeping away old ways of thinking, seeing and living, modernity has produced ‘a type of violence capable of breaking the continuum of history.’
What Progress wants is the end of history.8
Hear me loud and clear: you were never convinced that the supernatural is fake, you were only ever indoctrinated to think so.9
Given just how flimsy the foundations of reductionist materialism are, it’s amazing that the house of cards hasn’t collapsed sooner. That’s explicable for two reasons, of course. First, you were never supposed to notice the man behind the curtain (that was the purpose of the indoctrination). Second, you weren’t paying attention. And therein lies another major element in Dreher’s thinking: attention. As a matter of fact, attention constitutes an entire chapter in the book (ch. 7). It’s something that seems so simple, yet it carries major implications. Being attentive, being present and grounded in the moment, is to enchantment what possession is to law. This can be demonstrated in two ways.
First, many of you may remember at some point seeing the “Did you spot the gorilla?” selective attention test, an experiment in which you watch a minute-long video of people tossing around a basketball, and then are asked at the end, “Did you spot the gorilla?” Then you gawk in disbelief as the video rewinds and shows that a gorilla walked through about halfway into the video, and you can rewind the video yourself to prove that, yes, they’re not tricking you, that gorilla was there all along. While it may be said this only applies to selective attention, relatively speaking it’s also about inattention, because you’re not paying attention to the gorilla, you’re distracted by the basketball. Another demonstration is something you can do right now. Find any detailed item, whether a book cover or a photo you may look up, and then look at it for intervals of five, 15, and 60 seconds. Your brain will only process a blur in five seconds, whereas for 60 seconds you’ll be able to savor a lot more of this item’s features and comprehend what it is. We are able to appreciate the world far more deeply when we give it the attention it’s due, allowing it to meaningfully absorb into our minds and shape us. As the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset remarked, “Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
Attention is given due credit by fellow Substack writer
in his very popular, and excellent, article “If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention,” which Dreher himself has taken note of. In his words, reflecting on philosopher Jane Bennett,Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate. And this experience in turn reinforces the disinclination to attend to the world with appropriate patience and care. Looking and failing to see, we mistakenly conclude there was nothing to see.
Modernity has us moving at a hundred miles per hour. There’s another useful analogy, for what’s the chance you’ll be able to see, or truly appreciate, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog if you whizzed by it for a split-second? There’s a ton of books that’ve been coming out on this, such as Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus and Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call, which focus on how modern technology has greatly compromised our psychic faculties. Yet, since being “plugged in” is an integral part of being a subject of the mass society, which I’m sure Sam Francis if he was still with us would agree with and likely have written on already, and the mass society demands hegemony and subjugation, not only must we give into this but by doing so we must as well fall into the trap of managerial disenchantment. Likewise, Jonathan Pageau has explained that technology is making time speed up, which, given the analogy provided above, means yet again that our attention is being compromised. Then, you have the insightfulness of
, who laments how he “committed an act of violence” by taking out a smartphone to capture a moment of wonder. His words:This January and February, the northern hemisphere has been treated to a ‘parade of planets’, as Mars, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn have draped themselves across the night sky, with our moon frequently joining the ceremony. The front of my house faces south-west, and when I peeked through my curtain one evening I was confronted with Venus and Saturn escorting the rising crescent moon. No matter how many times I see Venus, its brightness shocks me—a jolt of silver fire in the firmament. I gasped, and for a few moments felt the river of wonder flow through me. I called to my daughter, and together we rushed out of the front door to get a better look. …
Moments are fragile things. Shy, delicate, flighty. Like a doe in the wood, they’ll bolt at the slightest disruption.
My thought when I reached into my pocket for the device was, ‘This will look great on Instagram.’ I could post some poetic words to go with it and get a bunch of likes and affirming comments. I raised up the phone, took the photos, and then was hit by a sinking feeling.
…
I had instantly removed myself from the flow of what I had been experiencing. My presence vanished into the rectangle of glass and craving that I was holding. Instead of allowing myself to feel the wonder and share it with my little girl, I’d sought to commodify it.
The way humans are created, we are supposed to exist in the moment. Grounded, conscientious, embodied. So many people can go throughout their day without feeling so much as the wind against their skin. Once in a while we are faced by something that stirs us from our slumber, and Heugh starts off his article with precisely that phenomenon: “We are part of the fabric of things, and when something beautiful or terrible ripples through that fabric we cannot help but quiver.”
These “quivers” (or “gasps”) are momentary calls to re-embodiment, to regain one’s bearing on their tangible and bodily existence in the world. What Heugh experienced was such a call, beckoning him to observe the wonders of the heavens, but he murdered it, by spurning the call to conjure forth a magical artifact, the smartphone, the wand of the technosorcerer. He forcibly removed himself from the wonder, not letting it fully penetrate his being and be enraptured by it. He’ll never get that back, you don’t just slip in and out of wonder like a slipper, you must ride it all the way through. Certainly, that’s the source of his regret.
Heugh’s story is very particular, because there was objectively something there, something wonderful. Yet, given just how often the rest of us on this sorry globe are pulling out our phones, how much more susceptible are we to not ever notice something wonderful? Heugh’s story is tragic because he didn’t have a phone at first, but then he summoned it. How much more tragic are we, who always have one? Pulling out our phones hundreds of times per day as we do, how exhausting to imagine, equates to hundreds of disruptions of wonder, embodiment, attention every day. A relatively new YouTube channel, Wobbbleverse, has framed this in another way via “ghost time,” another symptom of our disenchanted managerial society wherein the repetitive, soul-sucking, self-fragmenting use of technology creates hour-long blocks of our lives that we don’t retain memory or attention for, a truly terrifying prospect.
If we aren’t paying attention, it goes without saying that we’re going to miss out. Although, it bears asking, “What is it that we should be paying attention to?” Well, in all honesty, it’s as simple as “stop and smell the roses.”10 An atheist is fundamentally a person who doesn’t pay attention. As we learned from the selective attention test, relatively speaking what he is distracted from is that which matters. While he might process the olfactory stimuli of rose oxide and his psychology considers that “nice,” he’s not paying attention to the rose. He can’t because his worldview doesn’t permit it, but also because he’s not looking beyond the chemistry. Keim explains it sarcastically:
Those poor medievals looked at rose plants and had no idea that their red flowers were red because they reflected long-wavelength light, or that their white flowers were white because they reflected all wavelengths of light, or that their stems had thorns because thorns are an evolutionary adaptation. Instead, medieval people—pitifully ignorant but good pious folk they were—medieval people looked at rose plants and said that they have red flowers for the Blood of Christ, and white flowers for the purity of the Virgin Mary, and thorns for the Crown of Thorns.
There’s a poignant remark in the work of the prominent Jewish rabbi Abraham Heschel, Man is Not Alone, where he reflects on how the first question asked in the Bible is “Where art thou Adam?”, indicating that its man, in his fallenness, who recedes from the world, but not God. “God,” says Heschel, “is less rare than we think.” Huegh concurs, “The inconspicuousness of the sacred is an illusion brought about by a failure of attention. Without attention there is no connection, no communality, no intimacy. What we do not know we cannot love; God is love, and so we are estranged.” Enchantment, then, is to attain the mentality that Jacob had after his dream of the Heavenly Ladder: “And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not!’” (Gen. 28:16). Just like the aforementioned gorilla, God has been here all along. We are asked to do nothing more than love, and give attention to, what’s right in front of us: the verdure and luster of a meadow, the innocence and magnanimity of a baby’s smile, or the sun-kissed glimmer of an early morning graced by birdsong.
This is why I’ve taken up such a zeal for Holy Communion, because we have forgotten the everyday miracle that is the Eucharist. Seriously, what is more profound of a reality than that in the simple creatures of bread and wine God makes Himself present, and we have “communion of the blood of Christ” and “communion of the body of Christ” (1 Cor. 10:16)? God the Father sends His Spirit to consecrate these gifts with the Presence of His Son, and thus the fullness of the Godhead enters our own selves. As
says (Substack has so many wonderful people on it), “When you eat something, you are making it your body. There is no longer any distinction between you and the food, since your body has broken down its constituent parts and distributed them throughout itself. You become one with the food.” If our food is divine food, then shan’t we become divine?11 If we paid attention, we’d understand this, and we’d marvel. There’s no such thing as divine hiddenness, there is no such thing as theothanatology, “for He hath said, ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee’” (Heb. 13:5). The Eucharist is an enchantment that’s been staring us in the face this whole time, and we’ve neglected it.But that brings us back to the problem at hand: disenchantment. We’ve had this powerful mystery in front of us the whole time, yet clearly we’ve forgotten it, for so many philosophies and vain deceits have arisen distracting us from it.
describes “the bewitching of the modern world” as “old Morgul magic,” a hex “so powerful that it has the power to blind you to things right in front of you…”I believe something like this is what’s happened to us. The story of secular materialism that we were baptized into in school has blinded us to an enchanted, sacral world right in front of us. This story has changed the way we perceive reality.
It’s a terrifyingly powerful spell. If anyone has been following the Catholics (doesn’t hurt to check in on them once in a while) you’d know that the USCCB has been organizing a “National Eucharistic Revival” since 2022, sparked by the revelation of a 2019 Pew study that only one-third of American Catholics believed in the Carnal Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. What I primarily took away from this was more so how shocking it was that the Catholics, of all churches, had forgotten one of their most integral teachings. If that happened to them, what will come of us?12 After all, the Church of England will likely be extinct well before the end of the century. While the circumstances seem bleak, we should remember the words of King David, who, despite once being Israel’s most esteemed warrior, was cast down to a fugitive by King Saul, who brought all of Israel down upon him, but sung these words in the midst of these circumstances to the Lord:
My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword. Be Thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; let Thy glory be above all the earth. (Ps. 57:4-5)
When David is faced with such calamity, his response is simple: “Be Thou exalted, O God.” Which makes complete sense. After all, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Ps. 46:1). Whereas there is no saving health in us, there is in God. “The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; He will save, He will rejoice over thee with joy; He will rest in His love, He will joy over thee with singing” (Zeph. 3:17). “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39). Nothing. This famous passage nullifies any source of disenchantment. Life, with all its tumults and distractions. Men, with all their schemes and delusions. Powers and principalities, with all their malice and deceptions. Things to come (the future), with all its worries and uncertainties. Nothing. There is far more power contained in the Chalice of the Eucharist than contained in any atomic bomb on the planet. God is bigger than the bomb, the Moon landing, the microscope, the Universe being 10 thousand or 10 billion years old, dark matter, and any other creature. Disenchantment is not something to fear, but to mock.
Still, we should admit that the times we live in make it hard to be enchanted. After all, Christians understood everything I just said, perhaps even better than I understand it, but they still were being tossed to the lions, not making it easy for the Church to do its thing. So, what does Dreher say we need to do? It’s simple, and it ties into how The Benedict Option, Live Not By Lies, and this present book are all part of a spiritual trilogy, about how to understand, survive, and remake the present world. I personally understand how hard it is. Despite all I’ve seen and said, it still strikes me that to be enchanted, and to live like someone that is enchanted, is quite difficult. What enchantment is there in the bureaucracy and proceduralism that dominates managerial society? Nothing. As the Proverb (which has been reworked into a Twainish apocrypha) says, “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him” (26:4). We cannot act as part of disenchanted society if we wish to transcend it, rather we must “be not conformed to this world” and instead be “transformed by the renewing of [our] mind” (Rom. 12:2).
This is where The Benedict Option comes into play. St. Benedict helped build communities that were fortresses against the decline of the Western Roman Empire, greenhouses where saplings of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance were cultivated. It’s true that the spaces we’re in can operate to raise or lower our spirits; we are uplifted and gladdened by being in our homes, because they’re ours and because for years we’ve meticulously articulated our personality through every arrangement of furniture and ornamentation. Contrariwise, a drug house is debilitating to one’s spirit, for its strange, ugly, and literally threatening. Taken to the extreme, a place like a death camp is deadly not just to our bodies but even to our souls; as an infamous Holocaust anecdote relates, one camp prisoner etched onto the walls of a cell, “If there is a God, he must beg my forgiveness.” Given this, the architecture (spiritual, cultural, physical, economic, etc.) the modern mass man operates in is manifestly debilitating.
In fact, this has been well-established since the 1993 book by James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere, which documents the degeneration of the spirit of America’s architects, how soul-crushing managerialism came to dominate the profession, twisting it into the industry (rather than art) of “urban planning.” Whereas at one point in America’s history the City Beautiful movement sought to recapture the glory of Rome in Cincinnati or Manhattan, when such names as Daniel Burnham and Ralph Adams Cram were esteemed, now the managers produced cities on the basis of efficiency, not communality, killing the Main Street, the walkable city, the public park, and other nostalgic hallmarks of American society.13 How possible is enchantment when the very cities we live in, the design of which is beyond our means to affect, serve the agenda of disenchantment? Well, that’s the point, did St. Benedict try to implement urban reform in Rome after its ravaging at the hands of Alaric? No, rather he trekked many miles from Rome, and towards the outskirts of Latium he found a hill and ascended it, establishing his famous abbey at Monte Cassino. Monte Cassino could be controlled, it would bend to Benedict’s will, obey his rule, and pursue the redemption of man, whereas Rome couldn’t (or wouldn’t). It doesn’t just come down to the architecture, of course, but to the ways of life, although these are symbiotic. “Parish or perish,” an article written by
, captures this well. We are structurally atomized from each other, because if we do live next to someone it’s usually in a cookie-cutter suburbia, which contains nothing but snaking threads of road lined with neatly spaced houses, but their organization is completely anarchic. There is no unity, no centrality, no space, one’s life is not focused on any sort of communal center, but each individual dwelling is clearly meant to exist autonomously, even if right next to other houses. Therefore, oneself is made even more so uncentered and isolated. Compare this with traditional town planning, such as the Quebec parish system that Madeleine highlights, wherein your dwelling is clearly part of a larger ecosystem, concentrated on a central element, a thoroughfare and/or a parish church. You, therefore, are likewise part of a larger ecosystem, a citizen, not an automaton.
A village conducts you to a main street, which takes you by the storefronts of your neighbors, where you can purchase homemade breads or get a clipping from the barber, who doubles as the vestry junior warden at the parish church, the stout red-brick building at the end of the thoroughfare soaring high with its regal white steeple. A suburb, on the other hand, cattle prods you down circuitous roads, like the transporting of machine parts down the assembly line, toward the highway, a massive stretch of scorched-earth, which conducts you to some brutalist blight on the earth in an industrial park 50 miles or so away from home, disconnected from all human and natural patterns of existence. One uplifts the soul, the other siphons it. There is no easy answer to this mass cruelty. For those fortunate enough to live in flyover states, where managerial urban planning hasn’t taken hold outside of the cities, it might be easier, but for those trapped in the worst of it, the hyperurban megaregions, it’s much harder. Multidwelling units, the most popular form of residence in America, are impossible to fix. Despite what gentrified complexes might be attempting, with apartments on top and businesses below, parks nearby, and more amenities, packing humans together like sardines will never glorify man. Perhaps it’s somewhere to start, with like-minded dissidents opting to purchase a contiguous block of apartments, but that’ll be complicated by a feature that also explains why low-density suburban residency is also ill-advised. While having freestanding homes might be nice, and people could try to band together and be more conscientiously neighborly, putting a cul-de-sac to good use, the problem that exists is the tyranny of the HOA. HOAs make your life miserable just for building a fence an inch too high, what makes you think the busybodies and schoolmarms who get their only rush of purpose in life from being part of these managerialist tumors will permit the formation of dissident neighborhoods?
Live Not By Lies will need to come first for many, more than two-thirds of Americans, figuring out how to live in the morass of caustic managerialist mass society. The Benedict Option is feasible for those dismissed by the managerial elite as “rednecks” and “hillbillies,” easily overlooked “poor White trash,” and thus by virtue of birth already marginalized from the System. That’s a blessing in disguise, and it makes it culturally and structurally easier to associate with intentional communities or enclaves that seek to build their own Monte Cassinos, such as the
movement, the Free State Project, or the Institute of Christ the King’s St. Aubin village project.In all times and places, however, it’s important to live in wonder. You don’t want to be like the “navel-gazing underachievers infecting one another with gaseous doom” that Prince Philip scorned. Action is what defines us, and we must act both toward the end of survival, but also of piety. There is no “remedy” for disenchantment in the terms of something ready-made or simple. In fact, Dreher’s probing deconstruction of psychedelics is precisely built upon that. Rather than pursuing wonder through living well, through making oneself into a better person, the psychonaut continues to accept the mores of mass society by taking the easy road, a mechanized version of enchantment that requires no continence, no temperance, no prudence, but just a soft bed, a long weekend, and perhaps a trip sitter nearby with an antidote. You must, rather, persevere through great spiritual labor to heal your nous, developing what Orthodox theology calls phronema, and dwell in the Cross of Christ. An excellent point that Dreher makes is that enchantment is not conjured, which is magic, nor purchased, which is psychedelics, but surrendered to.
In his review of Dreher’s book Dwight Longenecker reflects on Dreher’s employment of a famous quote of Karl Rahner’s:
He predicts that the Christian who is not a mystic will “cease to be anything at all.” Does he mean the non-mystic will cease to be a Christian, or that he really will “cease to be anything at all”? If the latter, the cost of being a non-visionary would seem to be rather severe: Being devoid of mysticism would mean annihilation—being nothing at all. To extend the thought from the individual to the corporate, for us to fail as a race of mystics means the abolition of man.
The answer is this isn’t what Dreher, and likely Rahner, means by “re-enchantment.” Rather, Dreher emphasizes that to be “enchanted” means to be open to experiencing the numinous. “[T]rue enchantment is simply living within the confident belief that there is deep meaning to life, meaning that exists in the world independent of ourselves. It is living with faith to know that meaning and commune with it. It is not abstract meaning, but meaning that lives in and through God, and in his Son, the Logos made flesh” (p. 12). Take Heugh’s story. Is the night sky always as wondrous as he saw it that night? Is the night sky even that visible all the time, in all places? No, Heugh’s from England after all, there was probably a massive rainstorm just a mile away blotting it all out. However, what “being enchanted” means is that whenever the night sky is like that Heugh would be willing and able to see it for what it is, give glory to God, and not murder it. If stories of holy men of the faith are to be indicative of anything, they weren’t enthralled in visions 24/7. After all, the stories of their visions are often framed in the sense of being shocking, unexpected, and dazzling. To be enchanted means that you will heed to Christ’s words: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me” (Rev. 3:20). When Christ comes knocking, will you answer Him?
Paul teaches us by employing Greco-Roman athleticism as an analogy that there are worldly labors that parallel the Christian life well. I believe addiction is a worldly travail that parallels the unregenerate life just as well. However, addiction can be cured. Oftentimes, literal addiction has been cured by come-to-Jesus moments. More generally, it comes through rigorous training of mind, body, and soul to break free of its conditioning. This applies to personal habits of re-enchantment, which Dreher mentions, and this can include thoughtful, embodied prayer (ch. 7) that attaches you to the immortal voice and bountiful treasury of the Church (which I discuss at the end of my article “The Noetic Effects of a Wicked and Adulterous Generation”), the enjoyment of illuminating music like Vivaldi or Mozart while possessing the mentality that Bach had when uttered his last words, “Don't cry for me, for I go to where music is born,” the thrill of an epic story (especially an enchanted tale, such as Phantastes or The Hobbit), or the rearing of a child and the savoring of every laugh, every smile, and every single moment. Any of these, while also endeavoring to do your best to be attentive, grounding and embodying yourself in the moment. This isn’t a matter of having a kitsch trinket or a cute attitude, but about transforming your life and forming habits that ground you as a living, breathing human being. To quote from Dreher, “Christian re-enchantment is not about imposing a fanciful nostalgia on the world, like coating a plain yellow cake with pastel fondant frosting. Instead, it is about learning how to perceive what already exists and reestablishing participatory contact with the really real. God has already enriched the world; it is up to us to clear away the scales from our eyes, recognize what is there, and establish a relationship with it” (p. 43).
And, fortunately, just as for an addict there is a recovery group for the disenchanted. It’s called the Church, the hospital for sinners, the pillar and ground of the truth. Yeah, we can grant that Christianity itself isn’t doing too hot, its hirelings have willingly stripped their faith of its wonder to accommodate the world, but, again, give not into navel-gazing or gaseous doom. Give into action, be the watchman on the wall, who looks out for the enemy, and defends his city, keeping its light alive. The Church is built on the Rock of Christ, the Church will overwhelm the gates of Hades, the Church cannot be stopped. We can return to that, we can rediscover the numinal power of the Church’s prayer, the formative powers of her ancient rites, the authority of her ministers, and the grace of her precious sacramental life. This is not about us, this is not our fight, this is not our world, it’s God’s, God’s, God’s. Remember that “your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:5).
If you haven’t noticed, this article is very long. I actually didn’t expect to have this much to say, but enchantment really is an all-encompassing subject, because at its core it simply means “rediscovering and taking seriously the Christian worldview in full.” Because, remember, Christianity contains a religion, but it isn’t reducible to a religion, it’s also a morality, an aesthetic, a history, a people, a God. So, a lot ended up being part of this post, and there’s probably two or three spin-offs I can make from the material that made it (or didn’t) into this. That being said, what I’m going to do is eventually make a Hub for Enchantment, like I did for Liturgical Theology, and then append it to this post as basically a further reading section. There’s so much more that can be said, but, most importantly, all of it needs to be lived. Focus on that, above all else, do something, in response to anything in this article that might’ve resonated with you. Kneel and pray, stand and sing, go and love, do whatever you feel necessary, but above all: “Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.” To God be the glory.
Though I lament that I haven’t entirely read through these books yet.
That is, they bring men toward states of virtue, rather than away from it or not having any effect whatsoever.
C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 552. Emphasis mine.
Certainly not God!
I ran some of this thoughts past Elon Musk’s “Grok” AI, and while it didn’t come to say that stars are living beings, which I suppose it doesn’t need to, it still admitted something of similar profundity:
So, are they alive? If “alive” means breathing, thinking, or feeling—no. Stars don’t care, don’t strive, don’t love. But if “alive” means dynamic, transformative, part of a grand unfolding—then maybe they skirt the edge. They’re not banal gas balls; they’re cosmic engines with a presence that shapes reality. Like man’s cells add up to a questioning soul, a star’s fusion adds up to something awe-inspiring—not conscious, but alive in its own vast, indifferent way. I’d say stars aren’t alive as we are, but they’re not lifeless either. They’re a different kind of wonder—cousins, not kin, in the universe’s strange family.
Accordingly, we needn’t conclude that stars are “alive,” in the sense of conscious hypostatized beings (or whatever philosophical jargon you’d employ to get across the idea of “ontologically equivalent to a human being”). More importantly they just don’t have to be “mere matter.” At the end of the day we’re simply striving to not to be materialists, whatever the finer details of that implies is an in-house discussion for those who are aware that there’s much more to Creation than what meets the eye.
S. Francis, Leviathan and Its Enemies, 9.
This is a summary of what Francis discusses in ibid., 32-36.
Cf. C. Trueman, Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 93-96, 100-101, 336-37; Francis, Leviathan and Its Enemies, 73-76, 84-85.
See Francis, Leviathan and Its Enemies, 71-94.
Fascinating how so much old-timey wisdom perfectly encapsulates exactly what needs to be done today? It’s like that old quote from the author Donald Kingsbury that’s been making the rounds recently:
Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was. (Courtship Rite, 179)
Here’s another way to think of this: The ancients didn’t have a modern science of gastroenterology, when something was ingested it was presumed to permeate the entire being of the consumer and impart its attributes to the person. So, when an ancient consumed wine, which is associated with giddiness and bubbling, the wine would permeate the consumer and make him giddy and bubbly (drunk). So, as a scriptural example, when Christ says He is going to spit out the Laodiceans (Rev. 3:16) it signifies that rather than incorporating them (literally) He is going to expel them and separate them from His life-giving being. It’s an image of damnation. Given this, once you chew and swallow something for the ancients that which was ingested became part of you and gave its benefits (nutrients) to your body. On this basis, once the Host is chewed and the Chalice sipped and both ingested the Spirit communicates by faith the grace of God to your soul, as the nutrients would’ve been communicated at the same instance to regular bread and wine, in the eyes of an ancient.
Protestants, sure, but any other Christian, too.
To this narrative may be added the work of E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities.