How to Re-Enchant the World
27th October 2024
The meaning of the leaf is the leaf, as I once heard Roger Scruton say. Perhaps it was an original coinage from the Sage of Sundey Hill Farm, but it has the slight feel of a Zen koan: a seemingly inscrutable saying that can nonetheless help the listener achieve enlightenment. Scruton meant it as a reminder of the importance of focusing on the particular object or experience that you’re faced with at any given moment.
I had this aphorism in the back of my mind all through Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder, an argument for a more spiritually aware mode of living, and against the successful but ultimately incomplete materialism that dominates the modern world. “Enchantment” is the key word Dreher uses here. By this, he means preparing your mind to see beyond the everyday things presented to our eyes and ears, and to sense what Christians would regard as the underlying reality of existence: the grace and goodness of God, and the unity of creation.
Dreher is a devout and observant Orthodox Christian. This naturally gives him a certain appreciation of why modern life can feel so disenchanted. In his telling, the dovetailing of the everyday and the transcendent, so common in the high medieval imagination, was dealt successive blows. The first came from nominalism: the philosophical position which denied the existence of an underlying metaphysical unity behind the physical world. Then came the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution of the last few centuries.