The following post is an edited part of an article originally published on the ABC Religion site.
In a Nietzschean world without God or gods, is enchantment still an option? In a world bereft of the Platonic forms of beauty and goodness, in a world where we “know” that love and wonder boil down to brain chemistry and synaptic firings, is it pure superstition to hold on to a sense of transcendence? In other words, can a secular world be re-enchanted?
The disenchantment of the world has long been a theme of thinkers who have seen the advance of science on the one hand and, on the other hand, the retirement of religion from public life; that “melancholy long withdrawing roar of the sea of faith” as Matthew Arnold describes it in Dover Beach.
Almost 100 years ago sociologist Max Weber wrote, “The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life.”
In his review of The Joy of Secularism, edited by George Levine, literary critic James Wood recounts the tale of an atheist philosopher friend who tosses in bed at night fretting over the ultimate questions of meaning and purpose, and of the cosmic irrelevance of life and of love.
But despite a widespread view that awe, mystery and transcendence can only find their rightful place in a religious outlook, some avowedly non-religious people refuse to relinquish their rights on wonder.
Richard Dawkins, the New Atheist luminary, and perhaps the most extreme anti-religionist in the public eye, is adamant about his right to wonder and, yes, even to give thanks.
For Dawkins secularisation and atheism are no bar to living in an enchanted world, a world where it is appropriate, even obligatory, to wonder, to give thanks and to look with awe upon the works of nature.
As Dawkins says, “The world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There’s real poetry in the world. Science is the poetry of reality.” And at last year’s Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Dawkins encouraged his followers to give thanks for the ‘gift’ of life, while recognising that some find incongruity in “giving thanks in a vacuum.” Dawkins opened his talk at the convention this way:
The fact of your own existence is the most astonishing fact that you will ever have to confront. Don’t you dare ever get used to it. Don’t you dare ever say that life is boring, monotonous or joyless.
Dawkins’s dual quest – against religion and in favour of a scientific enchantment – sets up the traditional face-off with religion and science in opposite corners of the ring.
But others see another polarity at work. David Tacey from La Trobe University locates the line of fracture within secular culture rather than along religious/non-religious lines. In his book Re-Enchantment: The New Australian Spirituality, he claims there is a deep-seated tension in Australian life between artists and intellectuals:
The artists are advocating (re)enchantment from the depths of a prophetic imagination, while the intellectuals are promoting disenchantment and an ironic vision of the world.
The possibility of re-enchantment through the arts is explored by philosopher and Anglican priest Gordon Graham in The Re-enchantment of the World. Graham surveys the possibilities of writing or music or painting or architecture to remedy the secular problem of disenchantment. But he concludes:
The abandonment of religion, it seems, must mean the permanent disenchantment of the world, and any ambition on the part of art to remedy this is doomed to failure.
In his magisterial A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor offers what is perhaps the most profound recent commentary on secularism and transcendence. Taylor talks of the “buffered self” which is desensitised to transcendent realities. In doing so he makes it clear that transcendence for him is not about merely subjective feelings but is a fact of experience that can break in upon us: “the sense that fullness is to be found in something beyond us.”
Finally, let me point you to a piece referred to us through the Sense of Awe Facebook page. Theodore Dalrymple a self-described non-theist writes in City Journal:
Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves … to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.
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