Is the World Mute or Enchanted?

How Hartmut Rosa can help us with the Enchantment discourse

Photo by Edoardo Bortoli on Unsplash

Two recent books, neither of which I have had the time to read, have helped revive the discourse on enchantment, David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life and Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. In a series of insightful blog posts, Alan Jacobs wrote a piece voicing his skepticism about the need for enchantment for the faithful Christian life. Brad East wrote a response with very helpful definitions of both enchantment and disenchantment (which I will quote later). Jacobs responded back, noting that “enchantment” technically doesn’t refer only to angels and demons and Christian spiritual forces, but to any supernatural forces. And in that sense Christianity has always been a force of disenchantment, dispelling the myths of magic and superstition.

Bonnie Kristian

poses the question that maybe enchantment too often translates into an emotional experience, in which case, is it that important to our faith? Oh, and then there’s numerous pieces by

L. M. Sacasas

on the subject of enchantment, like this recent one. That’s a lot of hyperlinks.

My point is a lot of smart people are talking about enchantment, and we haven’t even named the elephant in the room, Charles Taylor and his monumental work, A Secular Age, which as Bonnie points out in her Substack, everyone seems to be citing these days (including me since the days of Disruptive Witness). What are we to make of all this attention to enchantment and disenchantment? My theory is that it is intimately tied to two related trends: the crisis of meaning and the muteness of the world in modernity as explained by Hartmut Rosa. The former I have already written about, so I won’t elaborate on here. To summarize, I think that for many modern people life seems to be drained of meaning, and it just so happens that sources of meaning tend always to come from out there, from some transcendent level, higher order, or enchanted realm. Thus, it makes perfect sense for the same people who feel a lack of meaning to also feel a desire for some kind of enchantment to imbue life with meaning. But what I’d like to explore in this article is how Rosa’s concept of resonance in his book The Uncontrollability of the World can be helpful in these conversations.