Books on a Reenchanted Worldview

[WillofGod]

I was scrolling some threads on here earlier and stumbled upon the topic of Radical Orthodoxy. The brief overview I got had me intrigued with their emphasis on pushing back against modernity and recovering a more enchanted view of the world, but a few chatgpt queries then showed me their conclusions were often less-than-stellar. Anyways, as the title says, I’m looking for some good books on having this more wondrous/fantastical (maybe medieval insofar as that’s good?) view of the world as indeed God’s creation, especially some that actually deal with modernity.

 

[WillofGod]

Also, I would love some input on if any of the radical orthodoxy books stick out as truly worth reading regardless of their issues

 

[Jerusalem Blade]

Hello Will @WillofGod ,

I have interacted with the EO folks on Substack for a while, (Dreher, Kingsnorth, etc) – though Rodd Dreher is the one mostly pushing Reenchantment (sort of a modern incarnation of a medieval worldview), and I argue that the only "enchantment" worth having is the presence of the Holy One of Israel in our lives and hearts, and not the quasi-occult & UFO and other stuff of Dreher. Though I do like Dreher, and think he may indeed be regenerated.

I'm certainly not any sort of EO person, but my own book – in the genre of visionary adventure nonfiction –
A Great and Terrible Love: A Visionary Journey from Woodstock's Sorceries to God's Paradise (hyperlinked version for easier access), or the regular AGATL pdf at the same site may also be of interest.

In paperback my books can be gotten here, on Amazon. I get no royalties to keep the prices low,

It's a story of a poet / seeker called out of the darkness of the counter-culture 1960s and into the heart and Spirit of the Lord Jesus – though with much failure and grief afterwards, till He got full hold of me and set me on His path.

It's my answer (or I should say, His) to the sorcerous activities of the unregenerate of our time, caught up in the depths of satan, before the end. I came to hold to the Amil view eventually.

 

[Jerusalem Blade]

To answer your question, Will, Dreher's books, Living in Wonder, Live Not by Lies, and The Benedict Option, all are of interest (the first one I haven't read, though have seen blurbs on, and heard Rodd talk about it).

I am not a fan of "enchantment" talk!

 

[philomath]

I have not read up much on Radical Orthodoxy, but it seems that a bit of it is promulgated by Anglicans of the anglo-catholic variety.

As for books on "re-enchantment":

First, I think taking Scripture for what it says is the best place to start. A Biblical worldview holds an incredibly wondrous/fantastical view of the world as God’s creation. This can be easy to forget among all the noise of aliens and fairies (and I say this as someone with a deep fondness for / fascination with folklore and certain aspects of medieval cosmology).

You might find some works by C.S. Lewis helpful. Also reading old authors in general is helpful. You will by no means find a disenchanted worldview in the likes of Luther and Calvin.

I'll list one book I remember reading years ago that you could look into, but I don't know that I can fully endorse it since there are issues with it's authors. Also, I don't think I finished it . It is Haunted Cosmos: Doing Your Duty in a World That’s Not Just Stuff by Brian Sauve and Ben Garrett. A month or two back there was a big problem at one of their conferences with a book stand of a neo-nazi publishing company being present. Also, from what I can tell, they've been connected with DW and Webbon in the past. I listened to their podcast a bit before I knew anything about the issues surrounding DW, Webbon, et al. As for the book, I don't remember a ton about it, but I did find some points to be solid. Overall, there are likely better works by less questionable people.

Last note: In talks of re-enchantment, we also must be careful of going back to old idols. Many people have gone to their golden calves in the name of "re-enchantment".

 

[jwright82]

INTRODUCING RADICAL ORTHODOXY: MAPPING A POST-SECULAR THEOLOGY

This book is an attempt to expound the main themes of the Radical Orthodoxy movement. The unofficial leader of the movement, John Milbank, has written a preface where he welcomes the common cause with the Reformed way of looking at the world and that the Inter Varsity Fellowship ‘has shown...

www.thegospelcoalition.org

Here's a review by a book on this subject but some caveats and questions are in order. The book (and the whole movement) is saturated with philosophical lingo. And Smith's "Reformed" response is equally bad but interestingly idiosyncratic (does anyone really care about Dooyeweerd anymore).
What level of philosophy are you at personally? Without a deep knowledge of this stuff, anyone would get swallowed up by the whole discussion in general. I'll try to remember what I can about this whole thing and make comments, it's been a very very long time since I read about this topic (the movement is basically gone as far as I can tell, I'm no expert though and I welcome any corrections).
Ok, here we go! First off this started as a neo-Augustinian movement before it got it's name of "Radical Orthodoxy" (I remember reading about it and the player's involved in the early 2000's). But it's largely an Anglican and Roman Catholic thing, wrapped up in Postmodern vocabulary.
The "story" of Western society they tell is this, the world isn't the grand "neutral" place we think it is, it's saturated by religions and religious ideas. Modernity (an incredibly complex and debated idea in philosophy I might add) is not some secular "neutral" paradise where we can all just get along.
Modernity itself is a theological ideology and it's anti-christianity in substance. This seems like a no brainier, the World will hate us because of him and all that, but the rub is in the "rubber meeting the road" of the ideology.
So the church must have an alternative view of things to counteract this heretical theology of Modernity. They place the blame on Scotus and Nominalism for leading us here. Essences don't actually exist, a demystified world comes out of this and being that it's a largely a Catholic movement they also place the blame on Luther and the Reformation.
This is "true" in ethics, politics, epistemology, and metaphysics. We'll start in reverse, the Augustinian metaphysics (leaning very close to neo-Platonic metaphysics) they employ (and give a very strange interpretation of Aquinas) lead's to a view of reality that's more of being "suspended" from God then anything else.
There's nothing "structurally sound" about creation on its own because it requires every moment of it's existence to God but in a "Radical" way. But it's not really pantheistic (everything is God) at all. But one wonder's how they could have a good Creator/creature distinction with such a Platonic suspension metaphysics. Although Smith brings in Jonathan Edwards as a possible dialogue partner briefly.
That's that the idea of an essence based metaphysics gives too much being to the world thus making it practically self-existent. Plus Scotus already paved the way to a "godless" creation anyway. They say "no wonder Atheism is so popular".
They want a "Radical" dependence of creation on God, thus the Platonic suspension thing. If reality is dependent on God in a Radical way than by implication everything is on some level religious in nature (it "Radically" always points back to the Creator in it's very being). Your comments on "mystical" would be appropriate here.
Also we must be "Radical" in our epistemology (theory of knowledge) and reject "secular reason" and it's claim of being a neutral judge in society and thought. Why would we trust an alternative "religious" theory of knowledge when we already have an "Orthodox" one? Here Smith briefly brings in Van Til and "Reformed Epistemology" (Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorf).
All this comes down to politics and ethics. Therefore the Christian (as if Christian's don't instinctively do this already) should take their Orthodox and "Radical" convictions into the public square.
Why must they do this? Well if they buy into the myth that Secularism is a neutral and non-religious thing, then they're siding with the enemy. Modernity is just as religious as any old grandma going to church every Sunday.
So the rubber meeting the road question comes up, what sort of politics is "Christian"?
Largely, as far as I can tell, what we would call in the US liberal politics. But to be fair I don't know what the political landscape is like in Britain (this was largely a British thing) and it might not be fair to redefine their terms in our own American terms, I just don't know.
It's "Orthodox" in a weird sort of way because of the influence of Postmodern ideas and it's penchant for redefining everything, that whole "we use the same words (redefined in different ways), so we're Orthodox too". But emptying classical word's of their classical meanings amounts to destroying them.
But they take that into a "Radical" direction, opposition theoretically (not practically) towards Modernity. They reject the idea that Modernity is non-religious (it's just another religion out there) so because of that they can bring in their own religion to philosophize about things. A sort of "if you can do it then so can I" thing.
Smith brings in his own very idiosyncratic and complex view of a "Reformed" response to the movement to enter into critical dialogue with it. I'll leave that out for the sake of sanity and length. Unless anyone wants me to try.
But my own critical take on it is this, they certainly overlap with ideas in certain Reformed Philosophical school's so I guess dialogue is possible. But every one of their points are disputed debates within philosophy and spill over into theology. A whole book could be written on that and Smith certainly does that but it's dated.
I'd be very weary of studying that movement without a good background in historical and philosophical ideas, especially Postmodernism. Although I would recommend Michael Horton on this one. He's well versed in this kind of stuff and a safer place to get a Reformed response to it (he contributed to a book of essays on comparing and contrasting the movement to Reformed theology edited by Smith as well).
He's an amazing source to go to, Horton that is, for understanding Postmodernism and Radical Orthodoxy. I know he's interacted with both in his writings. Just Google "Michael Horton on Radical Orthodoxy" and I'm sure you'll get what you need.
My apologies for the length and complicated nature of my response but with a philosophically saturated movement like this then it's unavoidable. I can try to answer any questions you or anyone else has but this is like Alice's rabbit hole to be honest with you.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

I think one of the more important works to read alongside this discussion of “re-enchantment” is Michael Horton’s current Divine Self trilogy. Two volumes have now appeared:

Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” in Antiquity (2024)

Magician and Mechanic: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution (2026)

A third volume, Theosophist and Transhumanist: “Spiritual but Not Religious” from Spinoza to AI, is scheduled to complete the project.

I think Horton is important to this discussion because his historical argument calls into question whether “disenchantment” is really the fundamental problem with the modern West at all.

In Shaman and Sage, Horton goes back well before Christianity to the Axial Age, especially Orphism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Gnosticism, and related traditions. His argument is that what we now call “spiritual but not religious” is actually very old. The recurring idea is what he calls the divine self: the conviction that salvation or transcendence is found by looking inward, escaping ordinary creaturely limits, ascending from the material to the spiritual, and discovering some participation in divinity within oneself. The shaman becomes the sage, but the underlying religious impulse remains.

That matters because biblical Christianity did not enter an intellectually “disenchanted” world and teach people that spiritual realities existed. Quite the opposite. It entered a world already overflowing with gods, spirits, mysteries, divination, mystical ascent, magic, ecstatic experience, and philosophies of spiritual liberation.

Christianity's great contribution was not simply to enchant the world more effectively. It suppressed and displaced much of this older Axial religious tendency by proclaiming something radically different: creation ex nihilo, a Creator distinct from his creation, historical revelation, covenant, incarnation, bodily resurrection, and redemption accomplished by God rather than ascent accomplished by the divine self. Horton puts the contrast very nicely as the difference between salvation from the world in the Orphic pattern and salvation of the world in Christianity.

That is why I am somewhat cautious about saying that what the West needs is “re-enchantment.” Enchantment by what?

History contains no shortage of enchanted societies. Paganism was enchanted. The mystery religions were enchanted. Gnosticism was enchanted. Hermeticism was enchanted. Alchemy and astrology were enchanted. Renaissance magic was intensely enchanted. None of those things brought men nearer to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Magician and Mechanic develops this point in a particularly interesting way. Horton argues that the usual story in which the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution gradually replaced magic with sober rationality is badly misleading. The magician and the emerging scientific mechanic existed alongside one another, influenced one another, and frequently shared aspirations. The period was full of attempts to penetrate nature's secrets, manipulate its powers, transcend inherited limits, and attain a kind of mastery. Even figures associated with the rise of modern science inhabited a world in which alchemy, Hermeticism, prophecy, utopianism, and experimental science could intermingle.

Horton also traces the influence of Joachim of Fiore, where the older Axial ladder of spiritual ascent is, in effect, laid on its side and turned into a philosophy of history. Instead of the individual soul ascending through stages toward unmediated union, history itself supposedly progresses toward an “Age of the Spirit” in which external authority, institutions, ministry, sacraments, and eventually even the visible Church are transcended by immediate spiritual consciousness. Horton sees this as enormously important for later utopianism.

So the alternatives are not simply:

Christian enchanted world → modern disenchanted world → hopefully Christian re-enchanted world.

The history is much messier. Christianity held at bay a very old human religious instinct toward axial spirituality, mystical ascent, the divinization of the self, secret knowledge, immanent divinity, and attempts to transcend ordinary creaturely limits. As Christianity recedes, there is no particular reason to expect people simply to become materialists.

And, in fact, we increasingly see the opposite. We get astrology, crystals, neo-paganism, reincarnation, occultism, psychedelically mediated spirituality, “manifesting,” pantheism and panentheism, eclectic Eastern spirituality, the sacralization of nature, and every variety of “spiritual but not religious” belief. At the other end we get technological dreams of overcoming the limits of embodiment, mortality, nature, and even humanity itself. Horton’s forthcoming third volume is apparently going to carry that trajectory all the way from the Enlightenment through Theosophy and into Silicon Valley transhumanism and AI. Eerdmans describes his conclusion as the replacement of institutional Christianity not simply by science, but by “natural supernaturalism.”

That strikes me as much closer to what we are actually watching happen.

So I would distinguish very sharply between recovering a biblical doctrine of creation, providence, angels, demons, miracles, sacrament, and the supernatural, which we certainly need, and advocating “re-enchantment” as though enchantment itself were a Christian good.

The West's deepest problem is not that it ceased believing in an enchanted cosmos. It is that it ceased believing in Christianity, which had disciplined, corrected, and in many respects suppressed mankind's perennial tendency to invent enchanted alternatives to the Creator.

Take Christianity away and man does not remain a Weberian rationalist forever. Quite often, he goes looking for the shaman again.

That, at least, is why I think Horton's project deserves serious consideration in this discussion.

 

[jwright82]

I think one of the more important works to read alongside this discussion of “re-enchantment” is Michael Horton’s current Divine Self trilogy. Two volumes have now appeared:

Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” in Antiquity (2024)

Magician and Mechanic: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution (2026)

A third volume, Theosophist and Transhumanist: “Spiritual but Not Religious” from Spinoza to AI, is scheduled to complete the project.

I think Horton is important to this discussion because his historical argument calls into question whether “disenchantment” is really the fundamental problem with the modern West at all.

In Shaman and Sage, Horton goes back well before Christianity to the Axial Age, especially Orphism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Gnosticism, and related traditions. His argument is that what we now call “spiritual but not religious” is actually very old. The recurring idea is what he calls the divine self: the conviction that salvation or transcendence is found by looking inward, escaping ordinary creaturely limits, ascending from the material to the spiritual, and discovering some participation in divinity within oneself. The shaman becomes the sage, but the underlying religious impulse remains.

That matters because biblical Christianity did not enter an intellectually “disenchanted” world and teach people that spiritual realities existed. Quite the opposite. It entered a world already overflowing with gods, spirits, mysteries, divination, mystical ascent, magic, ecstatic experience, and philosophies of spiritual liberation.

Christianity's great contribution was not simply to enchant the world more effectively. It suppressed and displaced much of this older Axial religious tendency by proclaiming something radically different: creation ex nihilo, a Creator distinct from his creation, historical revelation, covenant, incarnation, bodily resurrection, and redemption accomplished by God rather than ascent accomplished by the divine self. Horton puts the contrast very nicely as the difference between salvation from the world in the Orphic pattern and salvation of the world in Christianity.

That is why I am somewhat cautious about saying that what the West needs is “re-enchantment.” Enchantment by what?

History contains no shortage of enchanted societies. Paganism was enchanted. The mystery religions were enchanted. Gnosticism was enchanted. Hermeticism was enchanted. Alchemy and astrology were enchanted. Renaissance magic was intensely enchanted. None of those things brought men nearer to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Magician and Mechanic develops this point in a particularly interesting way. Horton argues that the usual story in which the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution gradually replaced magic with sober rationality is badly misleading. The magician and the emerging scientific mechanic existed alongside one another, influenced one another, and frequently shared aspirations. The period was full of attempts to penetrate nature's secrets, manipulate its powers, transcend inherited limits, and attain a kind of mastery. Even figures associated with the rise of modern science inhabited a world in which alchemy, Hermeticism, prophecy, utopianism, and experimental science could intermingle.

Horton also traces the influence of Joachim of Fiore, where the older Axial ladder of spiritual ascent is, in effect, laid on its side and turned into a philosophy of history. Instead of the individual soul ascending through stages toward unmediated union, history itself supposedly progresses toward an “Age of the Spirit” in which external authority, institutions, ministry, sacraments, and eventually even the visible Church are transcended by immediate spiritual consciousness. Horton sees this as enormously important for later utopianism.

So the alternatives are not simply:

Christian enchanted world → modern disenchanted world → hopefully Christian re-enchanted world.

The history is much messier. Christianity held at bay a very old human religious instinct toward axial spirituality, mystical ascent, the divinization of the self, secret knowledge, immanent divinity, and attempts to transcend ordinary creaturely limits. As Christianity recedes, there is no particular reason to expect people simply to become materialists.

And, in fact, we increasingly see the opposite. We get astrology, crystals, neo-paganism, reincarnation, occultism, psychedelically mediated spirituality, “manifesting,” pantheism and panentheism, eclectic Eastern spirituality, the sacralization of nature, and every variety of “spiritual but not religious” belief. At the other end we get technological dreams of overcoming the limits of embodiment, mortality, nature, and even humanity itself. Horton’s forthcoming third volume is apparently going to carry that trajectory all the way from the Enlightenment through Theosophy and into Silicon Valley transhumanism and AI. Eerdmans describes his conclusion as the replacement of institutional Christianity not simply by science, but by “natural supernaturalism.”

That strikes me as much closer to what we are actually watching happen.

So I would distinguish very sharply between recovering a biblical doctrine of creation, providence, angels, demons, miracles, sacrament, and the supernatural, which we certainly need, and advocating “re-enchantment” as though enchantment itself were a Christian good.

The West's deepest problem is not that it ceased believing in an enchanted cosmos. It is that it ceased believing in Christianity, which had disciplined, corrected, and in many respects suppressed mankind's perennial tendency to invent enchanted alternatives to the Creator.

Take Christianity away and man does not remain a Weberian rationalist forever. Quite often, he goes looking for the shaman again.

That, at least, is why I think Horton's project deserves serious consideration in this discussion.

I was hoping you'd weigh in on this because I haven't read that book series yet but I know you have. Thanks Rich.

 

[RamistThomist]

Former expert here. I was big into Radical Orthodoxy when it first came out. Enchantment this, Scotus that. In terms of philosophical history, it's sheer nonsense. That said, it did arise from a legitimate concern. Our world isn't a collection of dead atoms. Teleology exists.

 

[WillofGod]

Thank you all for the replies. I really appreciate the careful approach to this kind of thing, it seems to me like there’s some genuine merit to RO’s original concerns, but the solution very easily gets taken in all the wrong directions. Instead of a wholesale reenchantment-type approach, is there anything out there that is more sober-minded and expounds on themes like those in Psalm 19, 145, Acts 17:25 “He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things” or 17:28 “In Him we live and move and exist?” I’m thinking maybe something akin to Book 1 of the institutes? My main goal is to see more clearly how truths like these work their way out in everyday life, given that God truly does uphold us moment by moment.

 

[RamistThomist]

Thank you all for the replies. I really appreciate the careful approach to this kind of thing, it seems to me like there’s some genuine merit to RO’s original concerns, but the solution very easily gets taken in all the wrong directions. Instead of a wholesale reenchantment-type approach, is there anything out there that is more sober-minded and expounds on themes like those in Psalm 19, 145, Acts 17:25 “He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things” or 17:28 “In Him we live and move and exist?” I’m thinking maybe something akin to Book 1 of the institutes? My main goal is to see more clearly how truths like these work their way out in everyday life, given that God truly does uphold us moment by moment.

Josh Robinson is a Reformed Baptist pastor who used to be on the Sword and Staff podcast. He's very well-spoken on the issues.

 

[RamistThomist]

Here is a more fundamental issue: many of the better writers use the metaphysical category of "Participation." Hans Boersma is the most famous. Try to get them to define participation. It's not wrong, but it is slippery.

 

[WillofGod]

Here is a more fundamental issue: many of the better writers use the metaphysical category of "Participation." Hans Boersma is the most famous. Try to get them to define participation. It's not wrong, but it is slippery.

The AI summary I got warned me about this as well, something along the lines of it blurring the creator-creature distinction and potentially leaning into mysticism. Have you heard of a book called Participation & Covenant in Puritan Theology by Simon J.G. Burton? It’s apparently a more reformed treatment of the topic

 

[RamistThomist]

The AI summary I got warned me about this as well, something along the lines of it blurring the creator-creature distinction and potentially leaning into mysticism. Have you heard of a book called Participation & Covenant in Puritan Theology by Simon J.G. Burton? It’s apparently a more reformed treatment of the topic

There is nothing wrong with participation, as long as it is properly defined. Glossing Acts 17, Richard Hooker writes: "Since all created things are for these reasons, ‘the offspringe of God,’ they are united to him or are ‘in him’ as ‘effectes’ of the highest cause, and conversely, God is ‘in them’ by virtue of his influence upon them as well as his sustaining of them (Hooker, 1977b: 237).

Moreover, participation is that mutuall inward hold which Christ hath of us and wee of him, in such sort that ech possesseth other by waie of speciall interest propertie and inherent copulation’ (Hooker, 1977b: 234).

Anything by Burton is excellent.

 

[SojourningSøren]

I don’t know if the book counts, but Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age” sort of touches on this issue as well. I didn’t finish it, and I just started school, but I do mean to go back and finish that book at some point, even though it seems he too kinda blames Protestants for this disenchantment thing..

 

[John Nyberg]

A lot of good points have been made so far. The resources Rich recommended look fantastic. Also what Jacob said here gets to the point.

You might find some works by C.S. Lewis helpful. Also reading old authors in general is helpful. You will by no means find a disenchanted worldview in the likes of Luther and Calvin.

It seems like what you are looking for can be found in literature. I would recommend the classics; read Dante, Chaucer, Milton, and Spenser, Lewis, Tolkien and Macdonald. Read, and reread, Beowulf. The fact is, us moderns cannot enter the enchanted past. Too much has changed. The stars are dimmed by city lights. There are no unexplored frontiers. Even the oceans are less and less mysterious to the eye of science. The heavenly (as in stellar) realm is a vacuum. Though we cannot leave modernity, we can escape it for a time and thereby gain perspective. Yet there is enough true “myth” in the Word of God to satisfy our longing for awe. Read and reread Genesis, the plagues of Egypt, and the Psalms. Especially Psalm 19.

“The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
2 Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
3 There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
4 Their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun,
5 which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,
and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.
6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them,
and there is nothing hidden from its heat.”