Fools Say In Their Hearts There Is No God

 

I think that the second source of disenchantment, “voluntarist self-creation”, is the biggest “challenge” for those who are disenchanted.  To recapitulate Dr. Lemmons’ description, disenchantment is the cultural displacement of religious belief.  Two things are important about this description.  First, the displacement is cultural, a larger movement than disaffected individuals.  Second, there is a displacement of religious belief, a loss of relationship with the Creator of the larger world outside of the self and a lack of belief that religion is important for living “freely, fully, and happily” (R. Mary Hayden Lemmons, "Modes of Re-enchantment: John Paul II and the Role of Familial Love," Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies XXIX (2017): 91-114).

 

The “voluntarist self-creation” type of disenchantment “’seeks fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one’s own identity” (Ibid.), where one says “I exist because I will myself” rather than “I think therefore I am”.  And this leaves those disenchanted without recourse to relationship “…when willfulness is identified as the key to self-identity, human interactions become a test of invented identities.  That leaves no way to transcend egocentricity and bridge interpersonal differences without sacrificing one’s own identity or that of another”.  (Ibid.)  This is reminiscent of the “holodeck”, a place of virtual reality defined by the user, in the series “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.  One can live out fictional relationships of one’s own creation as long as one isolates oneself from actual relationships.  Obviously such a path requires the rejection of objective truth.

 

Is there a way back to “enchantment”, to singing God’s praises, for those who take this path?  Dr Lemmons offers paths of re-enchantment through developing religious faith, especially through “familial” engagement and it is true that healing comes through relationship, especially through covenant community.  The motivation for re-enchantment for the “voluntarist self-creator” is constricted by the nature of the disenchantment: “The willfulness that is so essential to voluntarist self-creation draws its power from human pride, the thrill of dominating and dismissing truth, and the pleasures of self-gratification.  Re-enchantment, thus, must wait until the lifestyle of self-gratification ceases to please” (Ibid.).  While misery is motivating, the self-centeredness of “self-creation” does migrate to “anger, rage, isolation, cynicism, and incipient despair” (Ibid.) that entraps the bloated will which would rather "rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven". 

 

Given that access to the Truth is necessary for re-enchantment, this is made more difficult by the “de-Hellenization” of Western culture, in which the possibility of transcendent truth is removed from the culture, as so eloquently explained by Michael Hanby: “Philosophically speaking, de-Hellenization means the eclipse of an order of being, nature, and truth that transcends history, the triumph of time over eternity, with the corresponding reduction of nature to meaningless matter and a reduction of truth to so many social, political, or psychological “situations.” . . .Of course, as we have seen, one need not deny or refute this traditional understanding to effect a paradigm shift to a de-Hellenized Christianity. Indeed, one could even affirm or exalt it in an ideal sense. It is enough that it simply ceases to factor into our understanding of God and the world in any meaningful way. This will always involve a denial of the obvious if the Greek sense of being is true, but turning a blind eye to reality is an art at which we have become quite practiced.” (Michael Hanby, “A False Paradigm” in First Things, November 2018).