Many Americans head to Europe for the same reason: to restore a sense of enchantment. Americans, with their emphasis on efficiency and pragmatism, seek out places that produce wonder, where the mind can roam freely. Despite its postwar concessions to American influence, Europe is still a place where wonder is bountiful and awe has not yet been swallowed by utilitarianism. At the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, in the year of our Lord, 2004, I found that the visual and metaphysical are indissolubly bound. Some ideas can only take flight in the right setting: amid medieval castles and cathedral ruins, cobblestone streets, and low-arched door frames from long ago, when people were malnourished and stooped over from looking up to God in prayer.
Most people can probably count on one hand the number of lectures they remember—their vividness, the insights they awaken, and the insoluble problems they propose. For me, one such memory was when I was a “first year,” as the British called freshmen.
It was then that I abandoned my unthinking agnosticism, when I heard Professor Davis’s introductory lecture on Paradise Lost (1667). In fact, he was kind enough to send me his lecture notes, which he assured me were so “commonplace” as to not be worth citing. As far as I know, he still uses them, and they are reproduced below. For how many others did the lecture have such an impact that it still resonates with them to this day? It was as if my professor knew my unthinking agnosticism, and then rolled up his lecture like a newspaper to hit me on the nose with it. “The problem that Milton is trying to tackle is one of what is called theodicy,” Professor Davis explained.
Paradise Lost is all about theodicy: defending the attributes of God against the various objections that have been made against them. Imagine two qualities we are asked to believe of God, and one verifiable statement about the world around us, and put them into the form of three statements:
1. God is all-powerful.
2. God is good.
3. There is evil in the world.
The problem is to be able to agree to all three propositions. On the face of things, if you agree to two, the third makes no sense. If God is all powerful and good, how can there be evil in the world? Does he lack the power to remove it, or does he lack the inclination? If he lacks the power, he’s not omnipotent; if he lacks the inclination, that would seem to call his goodness into question. As an account of the fall of man, Paradise Lost purports to tell us where the evil comes from, and to absolve God of any responsibility for it. Milton’s solution to the problem—again time-honoured, but very controversial in the seventeenth century—is free will. God, he says, created creatures with freedom, capable of sinning. Evil is their responsibility. However, there is a further problem. God is not just all-powerful and infinitely good, he is omniscient; his knowledge is as unlimited as his power and his virtue. So he sees, not just everything that is going on in the universe at a given moment, but everything that ever has happened and ever will happen: Book II, 78, ‘past, present, future he beholds’. He can foresee that Adam and Eve are going to sin. This is problematic because it seems to call their free will into question. If he can foresee it, then it’s going to happen, so where is Adam and Eve’s free will?
These “commonplace” observations, spoken in a lecture hall, still pierce the heart. The problem of Theodicy haunted me then, amongst the gravestones and cobblestone streets and cathedral ruins. It haunted me as I cupped my hand against the wind and lit my cigarette outside the lecture hall, as if dragging the smoke into my lungs was somehow an ersatz form of deeper thinking, exhaling into the air not second-hand smoke but insight. It haunts me now because I have a brain tumor that was diagnosed purely by accident—an “incidental finding” in medical parlance. The question of theodicy pertains here. If God is all good and all powerful, why would he “give” me a brain tumor? If the brain tumor was the result of “evil in the world” was I simply being punished for merely existing? As Calderόn puts it in his famous play “Life is a dream… The worst crime is being born.” I knew countless people who’d led much less healthy lives than I did. They didn’t have brain tumors. They coasted through their 30s as most of us have the good fortune of doing.
Theodicy pertains here because I am a Catholic who believes all three of the above points made by Professor Davis; and theodicy pertains here because in a secular culture that prides itself on its “critical thinking” and probing, a common misconception abounds: that for Christians, suffering is somehow made more bearable because it is redemptive. But when misfortune befalls us, something closer to the opposite might be true; that because we believe in an omnipotent and benevolent God, our suffering is particularly hard to bear. A more curious secular culture would not ask why Christians believe, but rather why Christians still believe when bad things happen. Why bother with belief at all if the thorny issue of Theodicy—of God and God’s justice—is not satisfactorily resolved? Upon careful cost-benefit analysis, something doesn’t add up. There is no guaranteed return on the investment; one’s suffering might never be satisfactorily explained. For those who believe in nothing, there is nothing to explain: fate, chance, and luck will all suffice as answers.
This is the conclusion that most people around my age (38) have drawn, quietly retreating into the “spiritual but not religious” or “Nones” category. If religion cannot provide answers to life’s hardships, if God is at the end of the day the god of Deists—aloof, distant, and not actively intervening in the world—then one is no better off for studying Him than for studying astrology. Scripture becomes nothing more than cultural curiosity, an entertaining diversion—a hobby, at best.
This deadening of the spiritual imagination is not accidental, but rather the design of the West’s postwar cultural architects, as Rusty Reno observes in his book Return of the Strong Gods (2019). It was believed that WWII was caused by fanatical and ultimately unprovable ideas—so-called “metaphysical truths”—which needed to be demystified in turn by more “rational” thought. In Reno’s paraphrase of Max Weber, society must be (re)built along the lines of disenchantment: “We must navigate through life by the cold light of scientific reason and govern societies in accord with empirical analysis of observable phenomena.”
Weber, at the time, was writing about the causes of WWI, but these would ultimately be conflated with the causes of WWII. Nationalism, and somehow even Christianity, were to blame for the violence of the 20th Century. Christianity had automatically discredited itself by not speaking with one voice in opposition to WWI, instead splintering into national churches that were all, at one point or another and to varying degrees, supportive of Europe’s ‘Great War.’
Reno identifies an interesting turn in the history of ideas:
But after 1945 the tone and tenor of disenchantment evolved in a way quite different from Weber’s sense of it in 1917. Instead of it being seen as a hard, even bitter, fate, disenchantment came to be seen as redemptive. The postwar consensus embraced ‘critical thinking’ as an indispensable cultural therapy [emphasis mine], necessary to prevent the development of the authoritarian personality and forestall the return of totalitarianism.
The difference between disenchantment as a pained last resort and disenchantment as a good in its own right is a subtle but substantive one. Indeed, it mirrors modern liberalism’s shift from “diversity” as a necessary component of a pluralistic society to an unequivocal good of which one can never have enough.
I see the distinction playing itself out everyday in how my illness is discussed with the words “luck” and “lucky” used to describe how my brain tumor was discovered “incidentally” while undergoing a series of emergency room MRIs for partial paralysis to my right side. Theoretically, it could have been years before the tumor had manifested itself symptomatically; and by then it could have metastasized into something much worse. In my milieu of highly educated upper-middle class Catholics, this was regularly referred to as luck or good fortune. Even amongst coreligionists, the word “miracle” or “miraculous” was not uttered. That language would have smacked of fundamentalism—of a kind of “born-again” evangelical Christianity unbecoming of an upper crust Christian. But what if God had chosen to save me? And if indeed he had, what was expected of me? What was I to do with the knowledge that God had given me a second chance that others suffering from brain tumors had not been given? Knowledge of God, as Paul explains in Corinthians, carries its own duties: “If I preach the Gospel, this is no reason for me to boast, for an obligation has been imposed on me, and woe to me if I do not preach it!” (1 Cor. 9:16-17).
Therein lies the rub for the postwar cultural politics of disenchantment: what if God had chosen me as his messenger to preach the Gospel of salvation to the unbelieving? I’d known people who’d died of brain tumors; In fact, I’d written about them. Such preaching would be in violation of the secular code of silence surrounding the metaphysical. I’d be deemed a deranged nutter—a madman howling from the heaths.
St. Andrews Cathedral was completed in 1318. It was ransacked by Protestant zealots (iconoclasts) in 1559. What looks and seems rather innocuous (the “ruins”) were actually the product of internecine Christian warfare. In hindsight, those ruins of a Catholic Cathedral compelled me to wonder about the one, true God. I didn’t know it at the time, but the famed conservative Russell Kirk had studied there, and it seems that the Scottish village had a similarly hypnotic effect on him. According to Kirk biographer Bradley J. Birzer, St. Andrews inaugurated a particularly prolific period of his writing, along with three conclusions that were fundamental to his work: [T]hat place matters; that the Reformation probably damaged more than it salvaged of the West; and that the line between the living and the dead is a thin one at best.
In a book he wrote about St. Andrews, quoting a man named Sir D’Arcy Thompson approvingly, Kirk summed up a sentiment that rings true to me: “The stones cry out to us as we pass, and tell us the story of our land, the chronicle of peoples and kings, the history of the Old Church and the New.” Would the Theodicy lecture have had such a profound impact on me in a less dramatic setting, say a landscape of strip malls and mass-produced cookie-cutter suburbia? To even ask the question would be to negate the role that providence played in placing me there, under such auspicious conditions for conversion.
Under the aegis of disenchantment as a ‘necessary’ cultural therapy, conversion is a difficult concept for the modern mind to grasp. We think of conversion as a kind of warm, fuzzy feeling that suddenly comes over us, like the puppy love of a first crush. The Bible tells us otherwise. Conversion is a jarring, violent process, unsettling to the subject of conversion. We should think of Saul/Paul blinded on the road to Damascus; or of Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Therefore we are buried with him by baptism, into death; that like Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we should walk in the newness of life” (Rom. 6:4-5).
We tend to think of “burial” as a metaphor, of death as a metaphor, and—even for the most liberal of Deists—of the resurrection as a metaphor. Yet these are radical words—to be taken literally, not metaphorically—as Paul reminds us in Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). The “no longer I” indicates an extinction of modernity’s treasured self, the all-important “I” of the ego-drama. Christ lives in me: this implies a hostile takeover of the body and soul, the mind and spirit.
One of the sharpest arrows in the atheist’s quiver is the following: “If God is God, then why can’t he communicate effectively? Why isn’t the whole earth one religion?” Almost twenty years later, I am no closer to resolving this than I was to resolving the Theodicy question. I emailed Professor Davis a second time—now out of desperation as much as inquisitiveness—and asked him whether Milton, in Paradise Lost, resolves the theodicy question to any degree of satisfaction, or if any other work does a better job of it. His answer was terse without being rude: “I’m afraid that I don’t regard the problem as resolvable (or pursuing a resolution as interesting in itself) … Really though these are questions for your own writing to address.”
Eventually, I became a Catholic, not through any workings of the will but by the surrender of self—No longer I—to which the Gospels refer as the prerequisite of any authentic conversion. The conclusion I’ve drawn is a simple one: at some point Theodicy must surrender to enchantment. It is by enchantment that my tumor was detected early. It is by enchantment that I am still here. It is by enchantment that my last MRI came back clean. To recognize enchantment, in the 21st century, is to apprehend and acknowledge the workings of grace in the movements of history. It’s what Walker Percy’s protagonist, Binx, in The Moviegoer (1961), calls simply “the search”:
What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Many or even most of us moderns are in despair. The worst part of all is that we don’t know it. Like second-rate doctors, we treat the symptoms, not the disease. Disenchantment cannot be cured by more of the same medicine. I died and was buried in an MRI machine and an operating room at UCLA medical center; and yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me.
