Searching for Reenchantment in all the wrong places
JB on November 20, 2009 in Practices & Experiences, Uncategorized, the evaluative - Culture, the interpretive - Religion No Comments »The New Age seems to be a dysfunctional response to postmodernity.
I use the word response to indicate an over against or counter-movement. For example, it seems to me that the emerging church conversation is a response to Protestant fundamentalism (and, I’m hoping, Catholic fundamentalism). For its part, the New Atheism, is a form of Enlightenment fundamentalism. Another example, in the Catholic church our new priests are tending toward a reactionary traditionalism, what sociologist, Fr. Andy Greeley, has called “young fogeys.” Radical Orthodoxy seems to be another response to both modernism and postmodernism; I’m sympathetic to and interested in RO’s response.
If I had to choose one word to describe what many, many people seem to be searching for it would be reenchantment and I would reckon it is motivated by a nostalgia for an experience of the world prior to it being demythologized. (If only they understood our true myth.)
If the transformative journey is marked by movement from a naive understanding through reflection to a novel hermeneutic of the second naivete’, then some movements, as responses, seem to entail an en masse regression back to an original, first naivete’. I’m no sociologist of religion but this dynamic does seem to capture at least part of what is going on.
I would like to add that, in my view, the New Age movement has done violence to the wisdom of the Eastern traditions. It has engaged them at a very superficial level, especially where ontological monism is concerned. The East, for the most part, is not engaging in classical Western metaphysics. It’s practices are geared toward leading people into phenomenal experiences and not, rather, to metaphysical conclusions. The New Age movement, in my view, is a superficial engagement of the East that results in a perversion of those traditions, which I treat here, for any interested: No-Self & Nirvana elucidated by Dumoulin.
The New Age, then, is a facile syncretism and seems a kindred spirit to the Prosperity Gospel movement in that it tries to do an end around the Cross. What has often been called transrational, in the New Age movement, is actually an arational gnosticism, which tells us spiritual pedestrians of the metaphysical bourgeoisie: “You don’t see this truth because you are not at this stage, on our level.” And they are blind to and caught up in this silly tautology, which is like saying you don’t see any elephants around here because I carry an elephant gun and they wouldn’t dare come ’round here.
The New Atheism is a superficial conflation of descriptive science, normative philosophy and interpretive metaphysics, which amounts to an Enlightenment fundamentalism or scientism. It is the obverse side of the epistemic coin of the same philosophically bankrupt realm as religious fundamentalism or fideism, which similarly conflates these approaches to reality.
As for any suggestion by David Bentley Hart that an authentic Christianity nurtures its own nihilism insofar as it’s our supposed view that what we’re given by nature and tradition is nothing if not transformed or unredeemed, that is poppycock! At least there are those of us with a radically incarnational outlook, who do not view at-one-ment as a response to some ontological rupture located in the past but instead as a teleological striving oriented toward the future, who, with Scotus and the Franciscans, hold that the incarnation was not occasioned by some felix culpa but was otherwise in the cosmic cards from the get-go. Even among those who take a more classical approach to atonement, not all buy into a notion of total depravity, anyway. And this leads into my next point, which is that we do not believe that special revelation is or was necessary in order for humankind to discern right from wrong, to distinguish good from evil. At the same time, we would not deny that the Good News helps us to journey more swiftly and with less hindrance through all of Lonergan’s ongoing conversions (intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious, as expanded by Don Gelpi).
As a radically social animal and story-teller, humankind is inescapably liturgical, although the liturgy will be either doxologic or nihilistic. Among the doxologic approaches, in addition to such as the Eucharistic stance (of thanksgiving), there is the existentialistic, which even if not explicitly theistic need not be necessarily considered nihilistic, whereby people of large intelligence and profound goodwill realize such values as truth, beauty, goodness and unity, as they care deeply, are concerned with ultimates and celebrate whole-heartedly. How such people were formed and how many are where are historical and sociologic data, which are beyond me. That we should expect to encounter them, however, is our own theological anthropology grounded in a pneumatological (or even Christocentric) inclusivity? (And I do not ground mine in any Kantian-inspired, transcendental Thomism, which is a tad too optimistic.)
