When Rod Dreher's book <em>The Benedict Option</em> was published it produced two reactions.
The first was from people who were immediately convinced by his analysis that the long-inhabited place of the Church in the public square could no longer be taken for granted. In fact, it was worse than that: the Christian value system was being steadily repudiated and had lost all traction because the Christian vision of society had been lost by the population. They looked at the world in a totally different way.
The second was from people who were unable or unwilling to grasp what he was asking. They misread him as encouraging a fleeing to the hills, as if we were all to become desert fathers and mothers.
In fact, he rightly foresaw a degree of public exclusion bordering on persecution and suggested Christians draw together informally in communities of physical proximity for support and renewal. As the culture wars intensify, he becomes increasingly correct in his diagnosis.
Many believe <em>The Benedict Option</em> to be one of the most important books written this century .
Since then, Dreher has written the book <em>Live Not By Lies</em> in order to wake people up to the reality and the ambitions of the soft totalitarianism of the Left. In that book, people who have experienced the real totalitarianism of communism raise their anxious voices trying to warn the West that the same goal is being worked for but by a different route, and to let off the alarm in order that we should be able to resist devolving power over what we say and think.
Now Dreher has penned a new book, essentially a sequel to <em>The Benedict Option</em> called <em>Living in Wonder</em>.
He brings two skills to the task. In particular, the first is to have an intellectual mastery of the philosophical and spiritual issues underlying how Western culture got to where it has arrived at today.
But the second is his journalistic skill of finding exactly the right anecdotes to act as corroborative evidence for what he’s trying to present his readers with.
In <em>Living by Wonder</em>, Dreher addresses what has caused what the poet Matthew Arnold so famously (or infamously) described in his poem <em>Dover Beach</em>:
"The sea of faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd; / But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
In his new book, Dreher takes the reader on a vivid journey. It is one that begins by explaining the unravelling of Christendom, but most importantly how a fresh renewal of faith can be achieved by the Church.
Plenty of people have offered a diagnosis of the present theological and spiritual crisis, but few have been able to offer a solution.
Dreher’s diagnosis is one of the most compelling, and his solution one of the most persuasive. He uses the metaphor of enchantment, writing about its loss and what might constitute its recapture.
Few writers have the skill to explain how the rot set in early during the Nominalist assault on Scholasticism, which saw the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than as merely names and labels, take on the philosophical systems based on medieval Christian thought.
But Dreher achieves this with some finesse and nerve. He charts the dissolution in our capacity to see, treasure and trust the supernatural through and beyond the Cartesian dualism – which holds body and mind to be ontologically separate – that began the process of dividing mind from body and spirit from matter.
Such is his gift for making complex ideas accessible that I found myself with a fresh glimpse of Cartesian entrapment in the disjunction between brain and body, thinking and embodiment. This also set the scene for providing a glimpse into what was set to become the perversity of transgenderism.
We can’t and don’t blame Descartes for gender dysphoria, but we can see how, unrestrained by the holistic Sacramentalism of the Catholic Church, secular society found itself bifurcated by artificial antipathies that skewed the balance of our humanity.
The book overflows with insights into our cultural, spiritual and intellectual wounds.
He quotes the excellent Cuban-American Catholic historian Carlos Eire on the re-drawing of the definition of magic by the Reformation that robbed society of its understanding of the reality of the supernatural:
“The Reformation gave rise to a desperate mentality that saw reality in binary terms but drew the line between religion and magic differently. It rejected the intense intermingling of natural and supernatural as well as the material and spiritual placing Catholic ritual into the realm of magic. Protestants stripped God’s agency from all Catholic miracles and gave credit to the devil instead.”
In case any readers should have difficulty with this analysis, we are reminded of the work of Iain McGilchrist and his thesis of the divided brain.
Dreher moves from theology and philosophy to neuroscience to offer some corroboration that disenchantment is also a function of the division of culture that is reflected in the biology of the brain.
McGilchrist has suggested that fact and meaning, myth and measurement, science and religion have been problematically dislocated from each other as a biological, neurological and philosophical facet of our culture. His account of how the brain recognises or fails to recognise meaning and resonance in the world ratifies the "beauty first" path to re-enchantment, and ultimately to <em>theosis,</em> Union with God.
Dreher comments that our incapacity to resolve the fracture has been part of creating an atmosphere hostile to Christian Revelation, masking our capacity to engage with enchantment, which he describes as “the restoration of flow among God, the natural world, and us, [and that] begins with desiring God, and all his manifestations, or theophanies, in our lives".
Or to put it in different words, a refusal or inability to recognise the supernatural.
Dreher also sees this in terms of the antithetic dualities of control and sacrificial love between an addiction to our autonomy and our need to trust. Control and autonomy have become the characteristics of our world of late modernity, and have inhibited both the personal and social sense of enchantment.
His chapter on the demonic has attracted more journalistic interest than any other chapter. And his documentation of the reality is carefully and competently presented.
But it is his chapter on beauty that is the climax of the book. His assertion, following St Augustine, is that we are made for beauty, in the same way that we are made for God himself, and forever restless with Him, and the accompaniment of beauty.
He refers to the Orthodox theologian Timothy Patitsas, who suggests that falling in love with beauty is the shortest Gateway to God. It happens by awakening our <em>Eros</em>, the Greek word for sensual desire. But this is not <em>Eros</em> restricted to sexual desire, but <em>Eros</em> the first part of the path to transformation.
Pope Benedict XVI writes of Christian <em>Eros</em> as bodily desire that has been sanctified by the spirit. In traditional Christian teaching, man is both flesh and spirit intricately and inextricably commingled as distinct from modern Cartesian mind body dualism, which holds body and mind to be ontologically separate.
Pope Benedict taught that true <em>Eros</em> tends to rise in ecstasy towards the divine to lead us beyond ourselves; for this very reason that is called the path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing.
The Christian path starts with <em>Eros</em> but is perfected by transforming <em>Eros</em> into <em>Agape</em>, the supreme form of love. This is not a strict denial of <em>Eros</em> – the unfiltered desire to be united with the other, to possess or be possessed by it – but a distillation of erotic desire into something purer than mere bodily desire.<em> </em>
In short: your house can be purified and sanctified, or it can lead us to destruction. So how can one gain re-enchantment?
“Everyone who left the faith began their defection by ceasing to pray," Dreher says.
He suggests that a sacramental vision accompanied by the practice of hesychastic prayer – in which a person blocks out all his senses and eliminates all his thoughts for the purpose of attaining a beatific vision – offers the beginning of the enablement of re-enchantment; like playing a musical instrument where scales are practiced in order to retrain the musician’s mind and body.
Above all, we need a willingness to sacrifice ego, autonomy, control, perverse will, and to surrender to a <em>metanoia</em>, a transformation of perspective in which mind is re-located to being encased in the heart.
This is a book which challenges all the presuppositions of a culture and mindset that has emptied itself of the divine, and redraws the map of theology and spirituality in order to allow ourselves, accompanied by the Holy Spirit, to find our way home.
<em>(Photo: Rod Dreher | CNS)</em>
