Why we live in a disenchanted world

In C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the character Mark has a profound moral experience through which he becomes awakened to transcendence. In the wake of this, he looks at his entire life with fresh perspective: “[Mark] looked back on his life not with shame, but with a kind of disgust at its dreariness … He was aware, without even having to think of it, that it was he himself — nothing else in the whole universe — that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.”

In Lewis’s book, Mark and his wife personify modernity. His beliefs and attitudes represent many modern, secular people — in Lewis’s context as well as our own, a few generations later.

Mark’s experience of life as the “dry and choking places” provides us with an insightful window into modern people. Even if they aren’t consciously aware, people all around us are starving for transcendence and meaning. They live in the dry and choking places. Thus, many of our non-Christian friends and family members and coworkers experience spiritual need in terms of dreariness more than guilt (as Mark did). What does this mean for how we do evangelism and apologetics?

Disenchantment

Throughout the modern era, traditional sources of transcendence (such as God, eternal judgment, and everlasting glory) were gradually displaced. The result is that many modern people feel a vague but poignant sense of loss. One category for describing this modern predicament is the word disenchantment. This term can be understood in different ways, but it often involves a sense of flatness and diminishment resulting from the loss of transcendence. Charles Taylor, in his magisterial A Secular Age, describes this dynamic in terms of malaise and uneasiness: “There is a generalized sense in our culture that with the eclipse of the transcendent, something may have been lost.”

Taylor argues that modern life tends to limit itself to the “immanent frame,” closed off from contact with transcendent reality. For most of human history, life had a kind of fullness and awe because it had larger spiritual implications. For all the occasional brutality and ignorance of the premodern world, life still had a richness that made it worth living.

In a Christian imagination, for example, life in this world isn’t final, and this physical world itself participates in spiritual reality. It’s a theater of God’s glory. Yet modern people tend to look at the physical universe as more mechanical and self-contained. This change has decisive emotional implications. It’s like moving from a forest into a desert. Taylor explains, “As a result of the denial of transcendence, of heroism, of deep feeling, we are left with a view of human life which is empty, cannot inspire commitment, offers nothing really worthwhile, cannot answer the craving for goals we can dedicate ourselves to.” Thus, in the modern world, “our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance.”

To understand the existential ramifications of disenchantment, imagine what it feels like going on a date with someone you’ve loved your entire life. It’s exciting, adventurous, adrenal. Everything is on the line! Now imagine when you get there, a different person has shown up — a person you have no interest in. How does the date feel different? You can go through the motions but with a sense of anticlimax. The magic is gone. Or imagine the first time you really got lost in a good novel. You were captivated by the heroes and villains and the drama of the plot. It felt important. Now imagine instead reading a mediocre old magazine for the hundredth time. Turning the pages takes willpower. The magic is gone. We could stack up more metaphors, but hopefully the feeling of disenchantment is clear. The dreadful point is this: For modernity, life itself is disenchanted. It’s not just the girl, not just the book; it’s everything.

It’s important to understand that most modern people aren’t fully consciously aware of these dynamics. We can live and move among “the dry and choking places” while only dimly sensing that something is missing. Often it takes significant slowing down and self-reflection to come to terms with this deep sense of emptiness that pervades our lives. In Making Sense of God, Tim Keller argues that modern people tend to live in denial of our situation: “On the whole, we are in denial about the depth and magnitude of our discontent … It usually takes years to break through and dispel the denial in order to see the magnitude and dimension of our dissatisfaction in life.” This means we will often need to help those around us reflect on and come to terms with the personal implications of modern disenchantment.

Meaninglessness

Modern life is also characterized by the tragic reality of meaninglessness, which is related to but distinct from disenchantment. Whereas disenchantment means the loss of magic, meaninglessness means the loss of order and purpose. Unmoored from God, human life has become characterized by a sense of chaos and disintegration. Lacking a transcendent anchor, we become free to determine who and what we are, how and why to live. But this subjective, self-constructed meaning is flimsy (for example, it often fails to sustain us during deep or traumatic suffering).

This sense of cosmic meaninglessness is at the root of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous analysis of the “death of God.” Nietzsche used this phrase to refer to modernity’s loss of belief in God. The famous lament of the “madman” (a figure usually interpreted as representing Nietzsche himself) illustrates the emotional implications of this loss:

“Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?”

The particular emotions of modern meaninglessness are powerfully conveyed by this speech and its metaphors (wiping away the horizon, unchaining the earth, plunging into empty space, and so on). Again, this is how many modern people feel — even though they don’t always realize it.

In existential philosophy, meaninglessness is often reflected upon in relation to morality. The “new atheism,” for example, is characterized by moral confidence and superiority, apparently believing it is obvious that we can retain moral meaning apart from God. But this is an eccentric pattern within the tradition of atheism. Older existentialist philosophers tended to see atheism as entailing the loss of moral meaning. Jean-Paul Sartre famously rejected the efforts of earlier atheists to retain traditional morality apart from God, arguing that “the existentialist finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible Heaven.” Sartre approved of Dostoevsky’s famous slogan “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted” and identified it as the “starting point” for existentialist thought.

Similarly, for Albert Camus, atheism entailed that transcendent meaning (about morality and everything else) is ultimately unknowable and thus irrelevant to human existence: “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me?” Camus argued that our inherent desire for meaning in a world that has revealed itself to be ultimately meaningless results in a sense of absurdity. The only logical question is whether suicide is the appropriate response.

Again, the point isn’t that modern people are constantly thinking about meaninglessness at a conscious level. I’m talking about the atmosphere in which we function (from which we are frequently distracted). Often it will only become fully evident to us if we slow down to consider larger questions of purpose and meaning. Yet the huge spike in anxiety and depression in recent years suggests that the concerns of these existentialist philosophers have not lost their relevance. And soberingly, to Camus’s point, suicide rates continue to rise.

Originally published at The Worldview Bulletin Newsletter.