A Great Review Of 'Living In Wonder'

The European Conservative: 'Yet again, Dreher has written the book our current epoch so gravely needs'

I am going to disturb your weekend with what is, for me, some excellent news. Sebastian Morello at The European Conservative published yesterday his review of Living In Wonder — and I could scarcely have asked for anything better. Excerpts:

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.

More:

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.”

One more clip (it’s a long review essay):

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). 

Now, Sebastian is a trained Christian philosopher, so he has some serious qualms about parts of my book. I’m going to have to think about how to respond to them. I can say now, though, that I did not realize I had appeared to equate Thomists and Calvinists, which Sebastian says I do. I need to re-read the manuscript to check, but if I’ve been sloppy with this, I regret it. There are obviously serious differences between Scholastic Catholics and Reformed theologians! One cannot possibly call Thomists non-sacramental. Their similarities, for purposes of my argument, is that both tend to be highly rationalist in their approach to the faith. That is a great strength of the Thomists — though it is not a strength that serves them well in our time and place. This is not the fault of the Thomists, of course; my claim is simply that though Christianity is ultimately rational, a rationalist approach to Christianity is not nearly as powerful now as it once was. I think about the great little book that Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis wrote defending exclusive male+female marriage, first published in 2012, I think. I remember where I was sitting when I finished it. I thought, “This is a model of clear reasoning, a real achievement — and it’s not going to matter, because few people in this debate give a rip about reason. It all turns on affection these days.”

Anyway, I invite you to read this exceptional review, for which I am profoundly grateful, and learn more about the book — and the reviewer’s philosophical quarrel with parts of it. Sebastian ends the review like this:

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.

Pre-order, y’all! Here’s the Zondervan book page, which has links to lots of places you can pre-order. If you want a signed copy, pre-order exclusively from Eighth Day Books (which will be at the October 21st launch event in Birmingham selling copies one day before they go on sale nationwide). Living In Wonder publishes in the UK on October 24 — pre-order from Amazon.co.uk here.

I also saw over the weekend a wonderful clip highlighting Tom Holland’s call to Keep Christianity Weird. Click here to watch the video:

Here is a link to that entire episode of Justin Brierley’s podcast.

We really are entering into an age of revelation — no, not like Mama says (“We in Revelations!”), though who can really say about that? — but rather one that is going to get more supernatural, such that it will be hard to deny that, as the Catholic lawyer who saw a UFO and was for years tormented by “alien” visitors, until an exorcist fixed the problem, “The world is not what we think it is.”

Living In Wonder is not only a book of woo-woo stories — both angelic and demonic — but also a book that talks about the anthropology and psychology of enchantment, and offers practical advice for how to open yourself to the experience of enchantment strictly within a Christian context (for not all enchantment is of God). Re-enchantment is coming back, whether you want it to or not. It arguably never really left, but we are fast arriving at a state in which it will require more effort to deny the reality of the numinous and the supernatural than it will to affirm it. Besides which, as Sebastian Morello notes in his review, I have a chapter talking about the false enchantment of technology, which is going to ensnare many millions. Though I don’t mention it in my book, Paul Kingsnorth’s postapocalyptic novel Alexandria is about this.

I was at dinner the other night in Madrid, eating at the home of some friends who were eager to hear about Living In Wonder. At one point I mentioned this passage from the book:

At a 2022 conference in Oxford, I met Daniel Kim, then twenty-seven, an Anglican seminarian who left a lucrative career working as a creative in the London advertising world to study for the priesthood. Daniel told me that in his job at a high-powered firm, there were no atheists—but that, as far as he could tell, he was the only Christian in the office. The rest were all into the occult to some degree or another.

“When I was there, there was a big focus on astrology and occult-slash-Wiccan stuff, but not in the way we would think of it—you know, dark and bloody,” he said. “It was more like”—he shifted into a naive tone of voice—“‘Oh yeah, satanism is just a connection with nature, and about the fullest expression of our humanity.’ There was a high level of anthropocentric enchantment. Belief in the human spirit, belief that the human horizon can be overcome.”

The idea that the greatest challenge to Christianity is from atheism is an idea whose time has long passed, Kim said. Now the world of neo-paganism and the occult has opened wide. Young people today, some of them influenced by radical feminism, think of both atheism and Christianity as left-brained, patriarchal ways of thinking. Turning to nature religion and darker forms of the occult is, for them, an approach to connecting with a more intuitive and organic way of relating to the world.

I told Daniel Kim that these people are not entirely wrong to seek re-enchantment; it’s just that they are looking in the wrong places—in spiritually dangerous places. He agreed and said that the new openness in his generation to spiritual experience poses challenges but also offers opportunities. I asked him what the most important thing is to know about re-enchanting his generation.

“People can see through inauthenticity in a millisecond,” Kim said, snapping his fingers. “People are tired of the cool and the relevant. Because we get that everywhere.”

The evangelical ordinand learned from market research as an advertising professional a lesson that he planned to take into his church ministry: the idea that churches should downplay the numinous and the mystical for the sake of making Christianity relevant and accessible to seekers is a mistake.

“It’s not what people want anymore. It doesn’t work,” Kim said. “Actually, in some ways, young people right now want to be confronted by something, want to be provoked, want to be compelled by something different.”

A believing Catholic college student sitting at the table said yeah, it’s like that with people my age. She talked about how classmates of hers are into crystals, and “manifesting,” a form of magical thinking that she says is very popular with her generation. Listening to her, I thought of Daniel Kim’s telling me that he knows that for the rest of his life as a minister of the Gospel, he knows he’s going to have to be dealing with this. There I was at the time, 55 years old, thinking that I have a pretty good handle on the religion scene, and learning in that moment with Daniel that there was a lot I didn’t know. Later, I read Tara Isabella Burton’s book Strange Rites, and saw the social science that backs up what Daniel was telling me at Oxford.

Please share this ungated post on social media and with any friends you think might be interested in Living In Wonder.

(Also, I can tell that some of you are still having problems getting my daily dispatches. If you aren’t seeing something new from me in your inbox every weekday, then something has gone wrong. I can’t fix it on my end, but if you consult the Substack help function, it will give you some advice about some doohickey you can toggle on your account, which will straighten things out. Even subscribers who haven’t been getting their daily newsletter get these that are sent to everyone, so that’s why I’m mentioning it here. Some kind of glitch in the Substack software. I’ve told the Substack people about it, but it persists for some reason.)

I’ll be writing more in the morning, with some interesting things to talk about from my weekend in Madrid. Don’t forget to read all of Sebastian Morello’s EuroCon review! Any of you subscribers who are philosophically educated (as I am not), I would love to read your response, positive or negative, to the criticisms Sebastian levies.

UPDATE: I have heard from a couple of very smart Christians on the question I raised about Sebastian’s criticism. Father Pat Reardon, a venerable Orthodox priest (and former Catholic monk) says:

Rod, in his criticism of your book, your reviewer touches an important theological point.

Your thesis is Orthodox in its theology of Creation.

With respect to Creation, I believe that Aquinas and Calvin are closer to one another than either is to Orthodoxy. Both view Creation through the framework of cause and effect; that is how God and His Creation are related in Scholastic Theology. The relationship is kinetic.

An Orthodox theology of Creation is very different. In Orthodox thought, the action (energeia) of God in Creation is not simply a cause producing an effect. It suffuses, permeates Creation with its own activity. The res of Creation participates in that creating energeia. This divine action is always present, active, and revelatory.

For the Orthodox, the human mind does not simply reason its way from an effect (Creation) to a cause (God). Rather, "Natural Revelation" is directly revelatory of God's Presence. The light that shines in the human mind is not simply the gift of reason.  It is the unmediated recognition of a Presence. Heaven and earth are FULL of His kavod. [I added the hyperlink — RD]

In Orthodox theology, Creation is not simply kinesis, as it is for Aquinas and Calvin. Notwithstanding the obvious differences between them, both of them read Genesis through the eyes of Aristotle.

I suspect that this is where you and your reviewer part company.

You are writing as an Orthodox Christian; you will certainly get some attention and raise some concerns in a wider audience. Indeed, some readers are going to suspect you are a pantheist.

The Anglican theologian Hans Boersma writes:

Thomists and Calvinists, to my mind, both run the danger of separating nature and the supernatural. As a Thomist who highlights participation, Morello (whose interesting book *The World as Icon* [or so] I’ve read) reads Thomas as sympathetically as possible. But I think that the Neo-Thomist interpretation of Aquinas has something going for it, and that Aquinas is really quite far from Dionysius’s enchanted, participatory understanding of reality—Morello’s “icon” language notwithstanding.

My new book is getting close to being done. I critique Aquinas for not holding to a genuinely participatory metaphysic. For him, participation is always only in *esse commune*, not in God’s own being. Unlike Eastern theologians, he never speaks of partlcipation in God. Thomists (esp. Neo-Thomists) and Calvinists are very similar in the way they separate nature and the supernatural, and also in their divine monergism when it comes to regeneration.

The east uses the essence-energies distinction [Hyperlink mine — RD]. That allows the east to speak freely of creaturely participation in God being, which applies to his energies. Because Thomas does not have such a distinction, any language of participation in God becomes suspect because it immediately would imply the notion that we comprehend the divine essence itself.