Rediscovering the Enchanted Universe: A review of Living in Wonder

O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee, . . .
—Francis Thompson, “The Kingdom of God”

This review presents an unusual challenge. As a regular reader of the author’s excellent Rod Dreher’s Diary, I followed the work’s development from its inception, read excerpts online, and even offered an opinion on which cover image was best. So the issue here is how well the execution fulfills the design.

As demonstrated by his previous books, The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, Dreher is exquisitely sensitive to nascent cultural, religious, and intellectual trends that will affect society. Living in Wonder examines the mega-trend underlying these lesser ones: the disenchantment of our world. It traces the causes, effects, and potential remedies for the tragic estrangement of humans from Nature and from their own embodied selves.

Wonder and the deeper reality

Dreher insists that enchantment is not some special technique that will fabricate bespoke epiphanies. Our universe is already imbued with wonder; we need only open our hearts to encounter this. Perceiving deeper reality will inspire us to fight for it against the chaos and evil that threaten it, for the world is both brighter—and darker—than we think.

Living in Wonder begins with provocative testimony Dreher heard from a young American lawyer about bizarre encounters first attributed to extraterrestrial aliens that were later exposed as demonic. Then he offers an English drug addict’s account of his miraculous healing in the River Jordan and a Hungarian Evangelical’s plea for direct perception of God. Dreher’s book seeks to demonstrate “the profound human need to believe that we live and move and have our being in the presence of God—not just the idea of God but the God who is as near to us as the air we breathe, the light we see, and the solid ground on which we walk.”

Here and throughout Living in Wonder, Dreher’s prose shimmers like sunrise on the sea when narrating numinous anecdotes directly from the lips of those who experienced them. His loveliest example describes walking with a joyful (though recently widowed) friend across a flower-strewn plain in Italy. The miracle is simply the “dearest freshness” of wild Nature drawing men into resonance with herself. He is his own principal witness because this book is partly his own spiritual memoir, recording his own faith journey from irreligion to Catholicism to Orthodoxy.

Having gotten our attention, Dreher digs for the roots of contemporary despair. But not all of his excavations are equally deep. Although detailed rebuttals are beyond the scope of this review, be aware that Dreher’s grasp of history, especially Church history, is weaker than his other areas of knowledge. Despite acknowledging the existence of a Catholic mystical tradition, he says no more about it. Furthermore, he seems unacquainted with Catholic “popular religion” of any era. Intellectuals set religious agendas, but that does not automatically determine how ordinary people live their faith.

Although Dreher cites Catholic sources and informants, as well as a few Evangelical ones, his text slants gently East. Some rude Catholics mock Dreher because of his commitment to Orthodoxy, which he sees as preserving the ancient symbols, rituals, hierarchies, and practices that give “a profound description of how reality works. He faults Catholic dependence on propositional theology that treats “the world as an object to be contemplated, not a subject to be integrated through spiritual penetration of the divine energies.” We need to remember that Eastern and Western Christendom did not suddenly start going their own ways because of the Great Schism in 1054; they split because they’d already been going their own ways for centuries. Christ’s Church needs to breathe with both lungs, as St. John Paul II famously declared.

The roots of disenchantment

Dreher’s search for roots uncovers the usual disenchanters—the Scholastics, Ockham, and Descartes—and historical movements that drained the world of wonder—the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Capitalism, the Industrial Revolution. Once philosophers had divorced the natural from the supernatural and removed matters of faith from philosophy, they gradually erased the supernatural from Western consciousness. Influenced by these ideas, the Reformation was “an engine of disenchantment” that exiled “the numinous from the collective consciousness of Western Christianity.” Successive eras banished mystery. They made science the only source of truth, money the only source of worth, and utility the only measure of value.

The Myth of Modern Progress has raised the West high on the twin pillars of Science and Technology, but unprecedented wealth and untrammeled freedom have not brought happiness. Too many contemporary people are monads adrift in a meaningless universe devoid of hope, organisms reduced to mere algorithms. They are at risk of enslavement by what English writer Paul Kingsnorth calls “The Machine,” the social forces breaking boundaries, destroying limits, homogenizing identities, like a swarm of self-replicating robots churning a planet to gray goo. The Machine is “anti-nature and thus anti-human.”

As Christianity melts out of the West, more and more people—especially young ones—prefer to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” At most, these “nonverts” may practice a vague Morally Therapeutic Deism. Their disillusionment could leave an opening for Islam, as in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, or for some pseudo-religion of their own design or even the occult.

The turn to occultism has been accelerating since the New Age enthusiasms of the 1970s and ‘80s. (This reviewer’s first sale to the Catholic press was an article on Neo-Paganism in 1983.) But the phenomenon has moved far beyond Gerald Gardner’s Wicca and Anton La Vey’s Church of Satan, thanks to its “normalization” in popular art and media: the general public can now recognize a pentagram or Baphomet or a Tarot card. Occultism conveniently tracks with Progressivism: sex-positive, feminist, LGBT-friendly, and environmentally sensitive.

Today’s occultists are often wildly eclectic, combining elements from whatever cultures they can plunder and increasingly transgressive. (Aleister Crowley, the “Great Beast” would be so proud.) Whether devotees of the Triple Goddess, Santa Muerte, the orishas, or Satan himself, they practice their rituals because these seem to “work.” Christian prayers did not yield the same satisfying results on command. Supposed effectiveness and the promise of control are reportedly making magic chic in Silicon Valley.

Dreher is concerned that most Christian churches are unprepared for dealing with the occult, much less the demonic. Among others, he interviews, exorcists, a diabolically possessed woman, and a young scholar once deeply immersed in the blasphemous perversions of Crowleyite sex “magick”. The peril is real, but Dreher urges us to concentrate on God’s genuine wonders rather than obsess over counterfeit demonic ones.

Technology against authentic transformation

Advanced technology, especially informational technology, is a tool of “liquid modernity” dissolving the human past. It is reshaping users’ brains, damaging the ability to concentrate. The internet has become society’s external nervous system, replacing real experiences with virtual ones, providing a limitless supply of custom-made distractions, and offering universal knowledge without wisdom. Yoked with Artificial Intelligence, it can dissociate parts of the psyche to fabricate other selves, generate any desired words or images, and provide better companionship than other human beings. It even promises electronic immortality, fulfilling the ancient Gnostic dream of freedom from physical embodiment. The metaphysics of godless modernity is digital.

The section of Living in Wonder most likely to cause controversy is Dreher’s speculations about UFOs: they are diabolical delusions, not extraterrestrial visitors. (How many UFOs are really “unexplained”?) Evangelicals were already saying that in the late twentieth century but Dreher extrapolates from ideas published in 1989 by French astronomer and information specialist Jacques Vallée. Spirits pretending to be aliens or discorporate evolved beings from some other dimension could use information technology to spread a new religion of Anti-Christ—especially if arrogant “techbros” foolishly summon them in search of greater knowledge.

Instead, Dreher bids us open ourselves to God’s real Cosmos, bursting with wonders visible and invisible. “The Christian tradition draws us across the border of ourselves to resonate and reconcile with creation and to draw into ourselves the meaning the Creator built into his handiwork.” True enchantment is not added; it is discovered where it already is.

This transformation comes through prayer, which is steadily fixing our attention on God.

As St. Augustine said, “What we attend to, we love; what we love, we will become.” Through grace, we can become like God (theosis) and join the Great Dance of his Creation (perichoresis). A life of prayer requires sustained effort, personal sacrifice, and submission to the will of God—in short, true conversion of the heart. (Dreher describes his own physical and psychological healing through the Jesus Prayer.) Although we cannot compel spiritual manifestations, we can prepare ourselves to receive them through prayer and openness to wonder.

Another door to wonder is beauty, which “harrows the soul” to make it fruitful. It reminds us to accept life and the natural world as a gift, thereby honoring the Giver. Dreher lovingly describes the hierophanies he encountered through beauty: at Chartres Cathedral, at the Orthodox monastery of Sucevita in Romania, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and in Russian director Andre Tarkovsky’s films Andre Rublev and Nostalgia.

Testimonies and triumph

Dreher continues this theme with profiles of three makers of beauty—all converts to Orthodoxy—who exemplify lives lived in wonder. English writer Martin Shaw bids us recover the mythic dimension of life and accept suffering (“the Way of Ashes”) to achieve wisdom. Paul Kingsnorth, an English writer living in Ireland, is entranced by Nature, which he calls awesome because God, not us, made it. He admonishes us to “Keep Christianity simple, and wild, and ascetic, and beautiful, and loving.” Jonathan Pageau, a French-Canadian carver of icons, is also a writer and speaker who uses social media to proclaim that everything in the visible world is a symbol of the unseen world.

Living in Wonder closes with more personal testimonies from Dreher: what he learned from an evocative image of St. Galgano by Italian artist Luca Daum and a visit to the shrine where that medieval saint’s sword remains embedded in stone; his restorative experience with the Holy Fire in Jerusalem at the lowest point in his life; and hints of an apocalyptic dream that he fears is coming true.

Dreher agrees with Karl Rahner’s warning: “In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic. . . or nothing at all.” Theological treasures of Christendom are useless unless they lead to a personal relationship with Christ. Disenchanted moderns “don’t want to know about God; they want to know God.” Christ is the medium through which God communicates the message of himself.

Seek the living God while you may, says Dreher, but “take courage because the Lion of Judah has triumphed.”

In conclusion, Living in Wonder does fulfill its promise as a wonder-filled invitation to enchantment. Dreher strides across today’s vast spiritual deserts, searching for springs of living water. But his book is no typical critique of Western decadence. Its power lies in the stories it tells of real people’s spiritual struggles, not in “some fairytale past” but in our disenchanted modern times. We see wounded men and women—including the author—seeking, finding, and loving God, the God who loved them before he laid the foundations of this marvelous earth.

Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age
By Rod Dreher
Zondervan, 2024
Hardcover, 288 pages