Rod Dreher has a preternatural ability to identify the topic around which all conversation among conservatives is going to orbit for the coming years, and then write the primer on it, thereby both framing and shaping that conversation for at least the ensuing decade. It is frankly astonishing. I don’t know how he does it, but he does it repeatedly. Back-to-the-land, weightlifting, organic-farmsteading, home-schooling conservatives are widely referred to as ‘crunchy cons’ to this day. ‘Benedict Option’ has entered the conservative lexicon and now you only need to throw the phrase into a discussion about society for everyone immediately to know both the diagnosis and solutions to which you’re referring. Since the publication of Dreher’s book Live Not By Lies, it has become a staple of conservative discourse to identify our current progressivist politics as Marxist in form, content, and operation, and it’s common to claim that Christians need to learn from those who survived Soviet regimes. At each stage of the development of the conservative discussion, Dreher writes the must-have book.
Well, he’s done it again. Living in Wonder is a book about ‘re-enchantment,’ a word that one currently hears on almost every conservative podcast and reads in almost every conservative Substack post. The materialist, progressivist, efficiency-based paradigm in which we’ve been entrenched for decades—even centuries—is spiralling into oblivion as we have realised that we can neither live without meaning nor author meaning out of our own personal post-modern journeys of self-discovery.
If the choice is between living in a meaning-vacuum and death, we will choose death. Meaninglessness is why suicide is the number one cause of death in the West among teenagers and young adults. At a macro level, this choice for death is seen in the decision of entire nations to stop inducting the few remaining children they have into their cultural and civilisational inheritance, while preventing further children by recourse to contraception- and abortion-technologies. In short, we cannot stand a life without meaning, and since we don’t know how to recover meaning, we’ve decided to annihilate ourselves.
Enter Dreher. Dreher thinks that we can recover meaning and purpose in our lives. Living in Wonder is his guide to this great recovery and an invitation to be part of it. The key, he tells us, is that of re-enchanting our world … but what exactly does he mean by this? Dreher seems to mean that we must rediscover the ancient Neoplatonic participation-emanation ontology of the pre-modern mind, though he does not put it quite like that. (Such a view was encouraging for me personally, as it was a philosophical defence of precisely such a conception of the world that I advanced in my 2020 book The World as God’s Icon.) In Dreher’s words:
In the medieval model, everything in the visible and invisible world was connected through God. All things had ultimate meaning because they participated in the life of the Creator. The specifics of that participatory relationship were matters of dispute among theologians, but few if any doubted that this was how the cosmos worked.
Later in the book, Dreher is more explicit about the primacy of this participation-emanation metaphysics for the recovery of an enchanted worldview. Indeed, he emphasises what Thomists—philosophers whom Dreher regrettably attacks throughout his volume, grouping them together with Calvinists—call the ‘exemplarism of the divine mind’:
Humans participate in the life of God through the logoi—the essential reasons for being—embedded within ourselves and all created things. The logoi within creation are in a real sense the incarnation of God’s ideas. Our divinely ordained task as humans is to elevate all things to deeper participation in the Logos. … Contemplating created things—stars, mountains, paintings, violin quartets, or the intricate form of a child’s ear—is in a real sense to contemplate God through the visible or audible signs of his handiwork.
In other words, the world is God’s Icon. For Dreher, then, the fundamental prerequisite for re-enchanting our world is that of relinquishing the ‘dead matter’ cosmology which modernity has handed us. Then we can return to a theocentric conception of the universe and how it is always held in being by God, Whom it in turn reflects. Once the world is seen as participating in God insofar as it exists and emanating from His divine mind insofar as it is intelligible, Dreher thinks we’re only a short step away from seeing the world’s history—including our own personal histories—under the aspect of providentialism.
Moreover, this enchanted vision of our world and ourselves Dreher says entails the normativity of miracles, angelic agency, and ultimately a meaning-filled life, to all of which we’ve grown blind on account of the modern mechanistic paradigm. Ultimately, then, ‘enchanted’ is simply the term Dreher uses to refer to “the widespread belief that, in the words of an Orthodox prayer, God is everywhere present and fills all things.”
“For many Christians in this present time,” Dreher writes, “the vivid sense of spiritual reality that our enchanted ancestors had has been drained of its life force.” He is not so naïve, however, as to think that the acceptance of Christian propositions or vague respect for Christianity as a possible ‘ethical code’ will suffice to address the so-called ‘meaning crisis.’ Many—perhaps most—Christians are just as under the spell of modernity as everyone else, having allowed modernity’s prejudices and assumptions to colonise their minds, willingly or not. For this reason, Dreher doesn’t only masterfully weave into his case an array of highly illustrative and informative (and entertaining!) anecdotes—from demon-possessed housewives to Chestertonian Italians—but he engages in a very interesting application of Iain McGilchrist’s neuroscientific work on the hemispheric relations of the human brain, suggesting that re-enchantment will require a better formation of right-brain thinking.
Having accepted the overly rationalistic, reductionist mentality of modernity, we tend to think that Christianity is solely about a contractual agreement with a ‘Lord and Saviour’ in exchange for which we are handed eternal life, or that it’s a mere intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions, or that it’s a helpful moral framework. Basically, the mystery and the wonder are gone. Worship and miracles—that is, I-You encounter with God through the transformative mystery of His love—has become little more than Christianity’s window dressing. Dreher thinks we’ve got it the wrong way round, and that’s perhaps unsurprising, given that he’s now a practising Orthodox Christian, and mystery and wonder are two things the Orthodox do very well. “I am convinced that the only way to revive the Christian faith,” Dreher asserts, “which is fading fast from the modern world, is not through moral exhortation, legalistic browbeating, or more effective apologetics but through mystery and the encounter with wonder.”
Dreher’s analysis is far from narrow, nor is it solely esoteric. For example, he takes seriously the spiritually crushing consequences of modernist aesthetics and what this has meant with regard to architecture and the built environment:
It is sometimes said that you can tell what is most important to a society by which buildings are its tallest. In the medieval era, the spires of cathedrals towered over the cities of the West. Today, skyscrapers of banks and corporations stand like giants watching over our metropolises. Our buildings tell the true tale of who and what we worship.
Now, in the cities of our world—which are no longer consoling settlements of human assembly and culture, but polluted, bustling hives—populations are dominated by temples to mammon. Our built environment teaches us that material wealth, and hence the escalation of production and consumption, are all the world is for.
The base materialism of the West in particular—though this is a moral corruption that we have successfully exported to the rest of the world—is a direct consequence, Dreher notes, of the disappearance of meaning (or, as certain Christian phenomenologists would have it, ‘value’) from our world. “If nothing has intrinsic sacramental value,” writes Dreher, “then the best way to measure the value of things is by putting a price tag on them.” And it was only a matter of time, he says, before we applied this view of the world—and how the only meaning the world can possess is that which it derives from the market—to our very own bodies. The sexual revolution and all the unhappiness that has come with it, then, is inseparable from the desecrating process of bleeding the world dry of intrinsic meaning and purpose.
Many people have long intuited that we are in a ‘meaning crisis’ and one of the seductive ways that we have attempted to escape it is through the internet and the growing social media platforms now available to us. But “the internet can be thought of as a vast disenchantment machine,” Dreher says, and cannot deliver that for which we look to it. There is a simple reason why the internet is so dangerous according to Dreher: it “destroys our ability to focus attention.” Poor attention among modern people is a catastrophe, Dreher thinks, because the theocentric, participation-emanation view of the cosmos is only recovered by way of the ability to attend to it and thus really see reality.
Dreher is in good company. The 18th century Jesuit priest Jean Pierre de Caussade insisted that deep spiritual insight came through practising attention to the “sacrament of the present moment.” The renowned French philosopher Simone Weil wrote a great deal about union with truth requiring a deep and habituated practice of attention. Valentin Tomberg—a celebrated authority among certain Catholics who are interested in re-enchantment, me among them—taught that “attention without effort” was the vital practice needed to overcome the ‘hex’ that modernity has placed on our minds, and thereby see the world as meaningful and infused with the divine presence.
Dreher tells us that “attention—what we pay attention to, and how we attend—is the most important part of the mindset needed for re-enchantment.” Having broken our ability to attend to reality in all its splendour, in favour of virtual reality, the internet has locked us up within ourselves—selves which we then try to re-create in numerous phantoms through online avatars. The ‘virtual self’ of the internet age is modernity’s realisation of its anthropology.
The internet has allowed us fully to adopt an anthropological dualism that separates self and body as if this conception of human nature were not a controversial hypothesis requiring demonstration but a truth to be assumed. Now, through technology, we are seeking to make the fiction of Descartes’ ‘self’—that is, the ghostly res cogitans encaged in the fleshly prison of the res extensa—an existential reality:
What the modern gnostics have done—most shockingly in the rise of gender ideology, which denies that the body has anything to do with one’s sex—is to separate humanity radically from the material world. To these true believers, the self is defined entirely by the mind; the body is irrelevant. The next step beyond transgenderism is transhumanism, which means the assimilation of the human into the wholly controllable realm of technology.
For Dreher the trouble is this: the isolated, atomised, autonomous ‘self’ that modern man considers himself to be simply cannot discover the enchanted world, however much he might desire to do so. Dreher offers the example of the English writer Katherine May, who has written a book entitled Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. In that book, May bemoans the fact that she has no rituals in her life, and no one to tell her how to get any and perform them. She says that she would like to join a congregation of worshippers—not necessarily Christian—who will tolerate her turning up unreliably and never fully getting involved. Basically, she wants a community that will allow her to privilege her ‘individuality’ and ‘autonomy’ above everything, even amid shared, collective religiosity. But that is precisely the problem. Either you see yourself as reality’s author at the centre of everything and thereby land yourself in a meaningless world, or you surrender yourself to something bigger than you in an act of self-renunciation—of kenosis, to use the theological term of art—by virtue of which your life can be flooded with meaning and purpose.
For Dreher, if we are going to rediscover the world as enchanted—that is, as participating in the life of God, Who is in turn intimately bound up with it everywhere and at all times—we must begin to see the world as it really is. This means turning away from the hall of mirrors that is the modern, insulated self. According to Dreher, freedom from the prison of the self, to enter enchanted reality, not only requires attentive observation of the world in all its marvellous particularity and majesty, but participatory experience of the world. As he puts it:
Re-enchantment is not about imposing fanciful nostalgia onto 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 enchanted 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.
Hence, Dreher not only highlights the work of McGilchrist in the area of participatory perception but also turns to an analysis first posited by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It was argued by Csikszentmihalyi that entering what he called the “flow state” allows people to suspend the abstractionist tendencies of the mind—especially the modern mind—and attend to the real in union with it. People experience such states while rock climbing, practising martial arts, dancing, and so forth (I have written elsewhere about how I have enjoyed intense switches into ‘flow’ whilst hunting).
‘Flow’ has gained renewed interest in recent years due to the creative and original work on this subject by academic and podcaster John Vervaeke. The lack of flow in modern life is associated among psychologists with a rise in depression and other emotional disorders. There is also a growing industry of counterfeit flow, found in social media and computer games that offer the opportunities for all the acute attention without any of the embodiment needed for genuine flow and its positive effects. And until we learn to flow again, Dreher insists, we will not learn to wonder at reality.
For Dreher, more than propositional religion, the soul needs existential nourishment. We are nourished by attending to reality, both by being interiorly present to it and by developing ways by which to enter the flow state. Such a change from sightlessness to the enchanted vision, however, requires liberation from what McGilchrist and others have called the ‘monkey brain’—the constantly chattering, obsessive, distracting mentality that torments us and ever prevents us from enjoying interior peace. Dreher explains that in this regard he was greatly helped by an ancient practice, traceable back to the first Christian monastics of the Egyptian desert, called the ‘Jesus Prayer.’ Using a knotted ‘prayer rope,’ on the advice of his Orthodox pastor Dreher spent an hour everyday meditating on a short supplicatory prayer uttered on each knot as the rope passed through his hand. Eventually, he says, his mind was quieted and his soul was ordered towards adoration.
Once we see the world as it really is, that doesn’t mean that behind the veil of modernity’s ‘dead matter’ conception of reality there is a cosy, fluffy Disneyland. In fact, in the enchanted world—the world as it really is—we have to contend with all sorts of evil forces, including innumerable demons who want to destroy us. And as Dreher wanders into an analysis of the darker side of the enchanted world, things get very strange in the book.
When, in chapter 6, Dreher began to discuss UFOs as evil ‘gods’ who have been visiting our planet, with which globalists and technocrats have long been communicating, I was poised to dismiss it as too much crackpottery. But if you think the world really is full of meaning, and that you can learn a lot more about how things really are from the great religious wisdom traditions than our modern reductionism, then why wouldn’t you consider the unfolding events of recent history in the light of such traditions? And as it happens, every great religious wisdom tradition in the world, including Christianity, holds that the cosmos is full of evil spirits who like to interfere with our lives.
The erudite writer Paul Kingsnorth, who has considerably influenced Dreher, has claimed that modern technologies are opening the world up to enslavement by occult powers of a demonic nature. In Kingsnorth’s view, we are all insufficiently aware of what is happening to us. He doesn’t claim to understand it all completely, but he’s quite sure that modern technologies, especially fast-developing AI technologies, are channels for the evil spirits which man has otherwise been attempting to withstand or appease since time immemorial.
Religiosity the world over has sought to keep the evil spirits away or at least curtail their wrath, but perhaps we’re now letting them into our homes and even into our trouser pockets through ‘smart technology’ (whose talismanic logo, many have noted, is the symbol of man’s fall to Satan’s temptation). And by way of such technology, those evil spirits may be taking possession of our minds. That, at least, is where Dreher speculates all this is going. For him, digital culture is the earthly realisation of the sphere in which malignant spirits reside, and hence by this culture the ancient “gods—Baal, Ishtar, and Moloch—have returned and are asserting their dark power over the post-Christian world.”
In Dreher’s view, the grave imperative facing modern man, especially if we’re to subdue the demonic and technologically-driven takeover of our world, is that of embracing the mystical life and entering intimate union with God. Only by a theocentric—and therefore true—mysticism will man be able to contend with the dark mysticism, the ‘occult power,’ that Dreher thinks is rapidly gaining ground. And it is to the theme of recentring modern man’s struggle on the rediscovery of mysticism that Dreher devotes the final chapter of his book.
Those familiar with my own writings will imagine the depth of my sympathy with Dreher’s case in Living in Wonder. The book is a significant achievement and a gripping read. It is filled with fascinating studies of important thinkers and creative applications of their research; with marvellous anecdotes, some of which are deeply personal; and it achieves an impressive breadth without falling into shallowness over the complex topics with which it engages. Nonetheless, I was left with qualms, which I will explore below.
I have insisted elsewhere that the question of the nature-grace relation (or the nature-supernature distinction, if you like) that has traditionally preoccupied theologians is absolutely essential to a Christian account of re-enchantment. Indeed, in my forthcoming book on Christian re-enchantment entitled Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries (to be published by Os Justi Press later this year), the nature-grace question is at the heart of the case I develop. If we don’t get our account of this topic right, in our quest to re-enchant our world, we will oscillate between a view of nature that underestimates its fallenness and a mysticism that has little to do with our embodied existence in the world—two errors to be avoided.
As it happens, all Christian denominations are stuck in a rut over this issue. Catholics have tended to posit three categories: 1) uncreated supernature (God), 2) created nature (everything God has made), and 3) created supernature (grace, by which God shares His divine life with what He has made). Inaccurate presentations of this tripartite account have repeatedly led Catholics to view creation as a two-tier system, with grace plopped by God on top of nature. The practical upshot of such a misunderstanding has recurrently been unendurable spiritual and moral schizophrenia among Catholics, with weird ‘vertical metaphors’ applied to the interrelation between the so-called natural and supernatural virtues. Moreover, it has led to an insufferable quasi-Gnostic clericalism which sees nature—baptised or otherwise—as ‘secular’ in the modern sense, with the priestly hierarchy implicitly deemed a kind of ‘perfecti’ on account of its offices being purely of supernatural origin. In turn, ‘Church’ has gradually come to be erroneously identified with ‘priesthood’ rather than ‘all the Faithful.’
Seeking to escape this theological pathology, rather than offering a truer account of the nature-grace relation, Catholic modernists simply collapsed supernature into nature. This strategic error allowed for the destruction of Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxis in the mid-20th century, from which the Catholic Church has never recovered. (Protestant reformers identified this problem in Catholic theology centuries ago and thought they could evade it by altogether rejecting one of the categories as a source of God’s revelation, namely created nature, and they thus paved the way to the ‘dead matter’ cosmology that undergirds those aspects of modernity which Dreher criticises.)
The Eastern Orthodox have come to posit two categories: 1) uncreated supernature (God) and 2) created nature (everything God has made). Prominent theologians like the 14th century Gregory Palamas unsystematically argued that God’s ‘divine energies’ are extended to nature from His essence, and that that’s really all we mean by ‘grace.’ Since, though, His energies and His essence are not really—but only conceptually—distinct (otherwise God’s simplicity and indivisibility would be undermined), Catholic theologians have wondered how such a view does not lead to a kind of hidden pantheism of the Spinozan kind. Ultimately, the Catholic concern is that the Orthodox account entails reducing Christianity to a species of paganism. With regard to practice, some claim that the Orthodox view may not be unrelated to the unfortunate tendency among its adherents to divinise temporal powers and stray into excessive nationalism, which down the ages has been called the error of ‘caesaropapism.’
As such, what Dreher says, namely that “after the triumph of Christianity and the vanquishing of Greco-Roman paganism, Christians did not make a sharp distinction between the natural and the supernatural,” and that only much later “the Latin Church began to separate ‘nature’ and ‘supernature,’” is simply untrue. The nature-supernature relation has always been at the heart of Christian theology, even if theologians of different traditions have disagreed over what is the correct understanding of the relation. And as Prof. Marcus Plested has irrefutably demonstrated in his extensive scholarship on the topic, prior to the fall of Constantinople to Muslim invaders, Thomas Aquinas’s account of the nature-supernature relation was the one accepted by many—perhaps the majority—of the Orthodox theologians in the Greek world and beyond.
Due to, in my view, Dreher’s insufficient engagement with the nature-supernature relation, he makes certain claims that seem to me irreconcilable with a Christian case for re-enchantment. That case, it seems to me, must fully acknowledge the fallenness of this sinful world (and hence its need for a Saviour) and avoid flirting with the nature-worship of paganism. For example, early in the book, Dreher claims that Christian sacerdotal blessing offers nothing new to the world which it doesn’t already have: “when a priest blesses water, turning it into holy water, he is not adding something to it to change it; he is rather making the water more fully what it already is: a carrier of God’s grace.” In contrast to such a view, Tomberg—who was, as noted, another Christian deeply concerned with the need for re-enchantment—wrote the following:
The world is not what it should be. There is a contradiction between the totality and the details. For whilst the starry heavens represent a harmony of equilibrium and perfect cooperation, animals and insects devour one another and innumerable legions of infectious microbes bear sickness and death to men, animals and plants. It is this contradiction which the term ‘the Fall’ alludes to. In the first place, it designates a state of affairs in the world which gives the impression that the world is composed of two independent, if not opposed, worlds, as if in the organism of the great world of the ‘harmony of the spheres’ there is interpolated another world with its own laws and evolution—as if a cancerous outgrowth has taken place in the otherwise healthy organism of the great world. … The ancients always knew that there is an anomaly in the state of the world. Whether they attributed it to the principle of ignorance (‘avidya’) as in ancient India, or to the principle of darkness (Ahriman) as in ancient Persia, or again to the principle of evil (Satan) as the ancient Semites did, is not important; it is always a matter of distinction between the natural world and the unnatural world, between the natural and the perverse, between health and sickness.
As Tomberg notes, the world is sick and inescapably trapped in a cycle of rebellion and violence. In its totality the world conveys something of the majesty and beauty of its Author, and yet on inspection we find that it’s ridden with defacements and corruptions of every kind. This is why the world is no longer in and of itself a bearer of grace, and is described rather as ‘fallen.’ Moreover, that is why grace must enter the world from without in order to redeem it from within, the effect of which is twofold: healing and elevation.
Dreher insists that Christian re-enchantment requires a rejection of “the world of neo-paganism and the occult,” which he says has now been “opened wide.” But due to his lack of engagement with the nature-supernature relation, there are curious passages in the book in which he seems to present Christianity as little more than a species of natural religion, and thus a kind of paganism—even if a paganism of which he would approve.
“All Christians of the first 1,300 years of the faith,” he tells us, “shared with the pagans this sacramental vision: a material world saturated with spiritual meaning and power.” But they didn’t share it. Christians understood the world as saturated with spiritual meaning because they saw it to unfold out of the Godhead in its awe-inspiring intelligibility and to be filled with angels and saints who interact with us. The pagan ‘sacramental vision’ saw the world as a realm of mischievous gods who torment us and who must be appeased at all times with violent sacrifices and the prizes of war. What the pagans worshipped as gods the Christians derided as demons. Moreover, when Dreher comes to tell us why Christianity won out over the pagan religions, we discover that it was because the former was superior to the latter by degree, not different in kind: “the ‘magic’ of the Christians was more powerful than the magic of the pagan priests and sorcerers.”
Intermittently, albeit inadvertently, conflating Christianity and paganism amid a sustained attack on the latter was confusing as I read the book, especially as Dreher urgently tells us that “people today aren’t wrong to seek enchantment—but if they do it outside a clearly and uniquely Christian path, they will inevitably be drawn into the demonic.” So … which is it? Are Christians mere supercharged pagans, sharing with all pagans the same ‘sacramental vision,’ only a better version of it, or do they entirely reject the world of paganism as demonic? I was left guessing.
With that said, Dreher is very clear about one thing: “Enchantment—the restoration of flow among God, the natural world, and us—begins with desiring God, and all his manifestations, or theophanies, in our lives.” That, most certainly, is the central message of the book, and one that our world desperately needs to hear if we’re to escape the paradigm of modernity that has painted the whole world grey and severed us from any apprehension of God, who in reality is, as St. Augustine said, closer to us than we are to ourselves. Yet again, Dreher has written the book our current epoch so gravely needs.
