DISENCHANTMENT,

RE-ENCHANTMENT,
AND ENCHANTMENT
PATRICK SHERRY
Max Weber said, famously, that the modern world is disenchanted. Anumber
of recent writers have said, by contrast, that postmodernism and some devel-
opments like New Age religion are re-enchanting the world. My purpose in
this article is to put Weber and these writers alongside each other, but then to
undercut the discussion by suggesting a third possibility: that the world may
still be enchanted, for those who have eyes to see, and who have kept fresh
the responses of wonder, reverence, and delight. Perhaps it never was really
disenchanted! Here I shall draw on the work of the poet and artist David
Jones, as well as on that of some more recent theologians who are arguing for
a close connection between aesthetics and religion, and suggest that their
work depends on a wider sense of sacramentality, and one very different
from Webers understanding of that concept.
Max Weber on Disenchantmentmoth_1533 369..386
It needs to be noted straightaway that the English termdisenchantment is a
poor translation of the German Entzauberung: the latter (which is not origi-
nal to Weber, for Wieland had used it earlier and Schiller had used the cognate
verb entzaubern) means something like losing its magic. In English it is
primarily people who become disenchanted, somewhat like being disillu-
sioned, whereas Weber is describing the worldas having lost some of its allure
andcoming to seemlifeless in certain ways. As Francois-A. Isambert notes, the
poetic force of the term has popularized it, while concealing its original sense
and so giving the misleading impression that Weber was nostalgic for the old
Patrick Sherry
Lancaster University, Religious Studies Department, Lancaster LA1 4YG, Lancashire, UK
P.Sherry@Lancaster.ac.uk
Modern Theology 25:3 July 2009
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
2009 The Author
Journal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
world.
1
But the latter thought that the process was inevitable, andonthe whole
benecial: insofar as it is a loss, it is primarilythe loss of anillusion. The reasons
for its occurrence are varied. They include the Reformation, the understanding
of the world given by science and technology, and the organization of modern
societybrought about throughthe Industrial Revolution, all at the cost of some
impersonality, especially through the relegation of personal relations and the
aesthetic to the realm of the private. The process is to be seen as the modern
worlds rationalization, involving a loss of a sense of supernatural beings
like spirits operating in the world. It is akin to secularization, a term more
popular nowadays, though one that Weber also used. Although disenchant-
ment is not an important concept in itself for him, it is one that relates to many
of the central themes in his work.
Weber used the term disenchantment in his best-known work, The Prot-
estant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (190405), though discussing it only
briey there. He says that the process can be traced back to the Hebrew
prophets; later, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientic thought, it repudi-
ated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin;
2
and it came to its
logical conclusion in Puritanism, with its rejection of Catholicisms sacra-
mental magic as a road to salvation and its adoption of worldly asceticism,
so typical of the Calvinist businessman.
3
Thus the process is not as such
anti-religious, though it contributes to the breaking down of some forms of
traditional religion, a fact emphasized by Charles Taylor in his A Secular Age.
4
In a later essay of 1915 Weber says that the rationalization which has
brought about the disenchantment of the world includes both modern capi-
talist industry and bureaucratization, which have helped to bring about the
separation of public and private life and the consequent impersonality of
modern cities; and also the understanding of the world as a causal mecha-
nism, produced by rational, empirical knowledge.
5
But nature abhors a
vacuum; so, says Weber, with the development of intellectualism and the
rationalization of life, art takes over the function of this-worldly salvation, and
provides a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially from
the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism.
6
Hence art
claims a redemptive function, and begins to compete with salvation religion.
Webers understanding of science and art in relation to rationalization and
disenchantment was further developed in his last work on the subject, his
lecture Science as a Vocation, given to an audience of students in Munich
a few years later, towards the end of his life. This lecture gives Webers fullest
treatment of the concept of disenchantment. In it he says that the rationaliza-
tion brought about through science and technology means,
. . . the knowledge or belief that, if only one wanted to, one could nd out
any time; that there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at
work, but rather that one could in principle master everything through
calculation. But that means the disenchantment of the world. One need no
370 Patrick Sherry
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longer have recourse to magic in order to control or implore the spirits,
as did the savage for whom such powers existed. Technology and calcu-
lation achieve that, and this more than anything else means intellectual-
ization as such.
7
Such a view affects the way we regard the natural world: most scientists
today, says Weber, are not concerned with learning through science about the
meaning of the world, or with answering Tolstoys question What should
we do? How should we live?
Nowadays nobody can doubt in his heart of hearts that science is irreli-
gious, whether he wishes to admit it or not. Deliverance from the ratio-
nalism and intellectualism of science is a precondition of life in
communion with the divine.
8
Webers view of science, it would seem, ignores the idea that God works in
the world mainly through secondary causes, i.e. the ordinary course of
nature; and he brushes aside the long tradition of thought, exemplied in
Francis Bacon and Newton, and later in Einstein, that the scientists task is to
follow in the Creators footsteps and to trace out the signs of His wisdom in
the laws of nature. Hence not long after Webers lecture was published,
Heinrich Rickert, commenting on it, wrote in 1926:
But we can say that science does not need to lead to the demystication
of the world, for it is quite capable of making us fully conscious of the
magic of life, and the clarity it creates can still give happiness and joy
to a theoretically minded person.
9
Such a way of looking at things is, however, ruled out for Weber, for he has
made a sharp distinction between the realm of rational cognition and
mastery of nature, on the one hand, and that of mystic experiences, on the
other.
10
His over-simple view of things here and his tendency to compart-
mentalize the various spheres of life mean also that for him there has to be a
radical dichotomy between the rst of these realms and many other impor-
tant aspects of life, e.g. personal relations and the arts. Weber realizes this, for
he ends his lecture on a rhetorical note:
The fate of our age, with its characteristic rationalization and intellectu-
alization and above all the disenchantment of the world, is that the
ultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life, either
into the transcendental realm of mystical life or into the brotherhood of
immediate personal relationships between individuals.
11
He sees this withdrawal as including art too, for he immediately remarks that
great art now is intimate, not monumental. Finally, as a Parthian shot, he
dismisses the likelihood of any return to religion, for this would involve a
Disenchantment, Re-enchantment, and Enchantment 371
2009 The Author
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sacrice of the intellect. By now, as Taylor notes, Weber is tending to equate
disenchantment with the end of religion.
12
As I have remarked already, the connotations of the English term disen-
chantment might suggest that Weber was wistful or nostalgic; but in fact he
sees the process as inevitable and as the path to knowledge and freedom, for
it eliminates incalculable forces, and so makes us masters of our destiny.
13
Intellectual and cultural rationalization is irreversible, because magic and
religion have been dispossessed by science and technology. Hence Johannes
Weiss claims that, for Weber, there is no plausible way back from the moral-
philosophical insights and postulates of the Enlightenment; so the disen-
chantment of the world is irreversible in the near future, since this alone
corresponds to our intellectual aspirations and requirements.
14
This perhaps
explains why he did not explore the possibility, suggested by Nietzsche and
discussed recently by Gordon Graham,
15
that the decline of religion gives art
the opportunity to become the means whereby humanity can re-enchant the
world.
Of course, Weber himself did see some of the limitations of this viewpoint,
and was aware of the dangers of oversimplication. He confessed too in a
letter that he was absolutely unmusical religiously (while insisting that he
was not irreligious or antireligious).
16
Obviously Tolstoys great question will
not go away, even if it is one which science cannot answer, and people
continue to ask about the meaning of existence; indeed, secularization and
disenchantment may encourage the search for religious meaning; and scien-
tists too need inspiration and imagination.
17
Like Nietzsche, Weber saw that
an increasing technical mastery over life would not necessarily lead to an
increase in happiness for the human race, and that disenchantments creation
of a cold and impersonal human realm, an iron cage, could bring about a
restriction of human values.
18
But, as Arthur Mitzman says, Disenchant-
ment, rationalization, and mass societyalthough he became steadily more
apprehensive of their cultural effectswere inexorable destiny to Weber.
19
We have to ask, however, if historical trends are always inevitable, for at least
to some extent we are talking of a world that we have made.
In the decades since Weber wrote, critics have enlarged on the reservations
that I have just noted, added further objections to Webers main theses, and
brought out some of his implicit assumptions. Some have seen his work as a
late owering of the Enlightenment, vulnerable to some recent criticisms of
what Alasdair MacIntyre and others call the Enlightenment Project.
20
Others have more specic objections. For example, Webers view of Catholic
sacramentalism, which he assimilates to magic (here using the term magic
fairly literally, it seems), is something of a caricature. He fails to see that the
former depends on a wider sense of the sacramentality of the world (which
a religion stressing the importance of our inwardness may undervalue). I
shall leave discussion of this topic, however, until later, when I shall discuss
magic in more detail and also the wider sense of sacramentality.
372 Patrick Sherry
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More generally, Jean Sguy accuses Weber of underestimating the creative
power of religion to survive, adapt, and regroup in the modern world;
21
while Marcel Gauchet, less concerned with institutional religions, argues that
the religious will survive in a world without religion, so that, for example,
art, in the specic sense we moderns understand it, is the continuation of the
sacred by other means.
22
More radically, John Milbank accuses him of taking
the secular as the norm and so having to privatize religion, and of pro-
pounding a general thesis about religion which fails to t e.g. Islamic society
or Christian monasteries; he accuses both Weber and Troeltsch of creating a
sociology which is nothing but a spurious promotion of what they study
namely the secular culture of modernity.
23
Milbank might also have extended his critique to Webers view of art: for
just as the latter sees mysticism as a way out of the disenchanted world, from
the public to the private, so he sees art as a similar way out. There is some
truth in Webers position here, but, again, it is an oversimplication: there is
still a lot of institutional and performative art even today, and in any case
Webers conception verges on what John Dewey called the museum con-
ception of art, i.e. one which compartmentalizes the aesthetic, and treats art
as a separate realm, cut off from other areas of activity and experience.
24
Such
a conception commonly fails to do justice to peoples appreciation of natural
beautynot surprisingly, for here we have a public realm and something
appreciated widely, often by people with no interest in the arts as such. It
also contrasts with the view that both nature and art have become desacral-
ized in modernity.
25
At times, Webers world seems to be that of Dickens Mr Gradgrind, or that
of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century scientism. Certainly,
it leaves little room for wonder (a point that applies, I think, to his under-
standing of science, as Rickert noted). Some feminists have approached this
question by claiming that Webers view of the world is masculinist and
patriarchal. For him, it seems, the public world is a grey and impersonal one,
in which love, like many other important things, is relegated to the private
world of personal relations. Roslyn Bologh makes this accusation; and to the
defence that the former is the real world, she replies that economic and social
reality is no more real than our social relationships, so that:
. . . our desires and feelings, which are inseparable from our social rela-
tionships, are no more illusory than our economic and political worlds.
Psychic reality, like social reality, is no more nor less real than political
and economic reality.
26
Re-enchantment
Thus most recent writers reject Webers attitude to the putative modern
disenchantment of the world (though they may agree with some of what he
Disenchantment, Re-enchantment, and Enchantment 373
2009 The Author
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said, e.g. about the effects of industrialization or the impersonality of cities
today).
27
They regard it as an oversimplication; and many express a desire to
re-enchant the world.
Re-enchantment has become a fashionable term, and a wide variety of
means to it have been suggested. For example, David Ray Grifn commends
process thought as offering re-enchantment, without the baggage of tradi-
tional supernatural religion. (He construes disenchantment widely, as includ-
ing not only a lack of divine meaning and of inherent purpose, but also the
absence of moral principles in the constitution of the world, according to
modern thought, and instances J. L. Mackie and Gilbert Harman in the latter
regard.
28
)
Talk of re-enchantment is particularly prominent, however, among writers
who are familiar with or sympathetic to postmodernismor to NewAge ideas,
whether as theorists or as observers. Zygmunt Bauman, for example, writing
from the point of view of a social theorist, says in the introduction to his
Intimations of Postmodernity that, all in all, postmodernity can be seen as
restoring to the world what modernity, presumptuously, had taken away; as
a re-enchantment of the world that modernity had tried hard to dis-enchant.
That disenchantment was supposed to be part of modernitys war of libera-
tion from mystery and magic; but it de-spiritualized and de-animated the
world, reducing it to raw material to be shaped by human designs, by
instrumental rationality and social engineering. Left to itself the world
had no meaning.
29
Bauman nds it difcult to characterize re-enchantment in a similar way,
for postmodernity is a relatively amorphous condition. It is easier to dene it
negatively: Postmodernity . . . is modernity without illusions, e.g. the illusion
that the messiness of the human world is but a temporary and repairable
state.
30
So re-enchantment too can be seen, negatively, as a liberation from
disenchantment. But Bauman also says, more positively, that postmodernity
allows for mystery, accepts contingency, and respects ambiguity, and is there-
fore more realistic.
31
Graham Ward agrees with Bauman in hoping that such a re-enchantment
will offset much of the spiritual poverty of modernity, but is mainly con-
cerned with spelling out its benets for Christian theology. He welcomes
contemporary critical theory for helping to bring to an end the desacraliza-
tion of the Enlightenment and for revealing the limits of modern secularity,
and hopes that in restoring a richer account of human experience it may assist
the return of the suppressed voices of theology and the return of God-talk
from the other side of Nietzsche.
32
He goes on to argue that only theology
can complete the postmodern project, preventing it from surrendering to the
ux or to cosmic indifference,
33
and he expresses the hope that postmodern
theology will move away from the atheologies of Don Cupitt and Mark C.
Taylor towards a reappraisal and re-examination of traditional authors in the
light of critical theory, and that it will also, following Donald MacKinnon,
374 Patrick Sherry
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recognize its close connection with other disciplines: Overall the theology of
tomorrow, the theology working within a re-enchanted world, will be more
aware of the place it occupies in discursive borderlands.
34
Thus Ward hopes for a new ourishing of traditional theology, albeit one
which recognizes its relations with other elds. But he suggests that this new
ourishing, and the accompanying re-enchantment, have been recognized
more by lmmakers, novelists, poets, philosophers, political theorists, and
cultural analysts than by theologians.
35
Thus he draws his net widely, as when
he points to the re-appearance of angels in contemporary culture, e.g. in Wim
Wenders lm Wings of Desire. He sees the new bodies, states of desire, and
knowledges hinted at here as guring forth a new enchantment of the real
which he contrasts with Webers disenchantment of the world and conse-
quent withdrawing of mystery.
36
Others too look more widely, and bring in some less familiar religious
manifestations. Raymond Lee and Susan Ackerman, for instance, follow
many writers in wondering whether disenchantment in a secularized envi-
ronment may not fuel the search for religious meaning and thereby encour-
age new religious movements; and they suggest that Buddhisms appeal in
the West is unlikely to wane because the doubts and ambivalence of secu-
larized consciousness are gradually transforming the path of disenchantment
into that of re-enchantment.
37
They mention too the revival of Christian
Fundamentalism as providing, through its symbolic renewal of the holy
word, the antithesis to the commodied world. Above all, however, they
see New Age activities as particularly exemplifying the trend towards
re-enchantment at the beginning of the twenty-rst century:
The NewAge . . . brings together the themes of healing, self-determinism
and transcendental consciousness in a variety of movements that chal-
lenge the ethos of disenchantment and reintroduce the idea of the
magical as something that binds empirical and spiritual realities in a
continuous relationship.
38
New Age activities include, for Lee and Ackerman, the shamanism of Carlos
Castaneda, a modern form of magical practice which involves a power of
ecstasy and of healing, and new forms of spiritual consciousness such as are
commonly included in the category of what are called altered states of
consciousness.
39
Here they appeal to what Paul Heelas calls the sacraliza-
tion of the self in New Age movements, and to the way in which these
encourage the remaking of the self without institutional constraints (e.g.
those of established religions), to be contrasted with the self of bourgeois
consciousness which has surrendered to the alienating conditions of moder-
nity.
40
Most extremely, there is the possibility of a disintegration of the self in
ecstasy, and even the mass suicides of some religious cultsthe ultimate
sign of re-enchantment, we are told, somewhat implausibly.
41
Disenchantment, Re-enchantment, and Enchantment 375
2009 The Author
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Christopher Partridge goes still further aeld: he gives a fuller account, in
which he combines coverage of New Age activities with that of other such
contemporary movements, for which he has coined the term occulture, in
the two volumes of his The Re-enchantment of the West.
42
He concluded an
earlier article with the statement that although secularization and disenchant-
ment have reshaped Western societies, Re-enchantment is not a modern
reconstruction of the enchanted landscape of the past, but a new growth in a
secularized, globalized, technologically sophisticated, consumer-oriented
landscape.
43
In his recent work he eshes out this statement, not just with
reference to New Age activities, but through an investigation of other newly
emerging forms of spirituality and being religious, including cyberspiritual-
ity, contemporary demonology, and the sacralisation of the extraterrestrial.
The chapter on the last of these discusses sightings of UFOs, extraterrestrial
communication, and stories of abduction by aliens. He quotes Diane Purkiss
as saying Aliens are our fairies, and suggests that to explore such notions
is to re-enchant the world, and thereby to reverse, at least to some degree,
disenchantment, understood as at least in part, the process whereby
magic and mystery are driven from the world and nature is managed rather
than enchanted. . . .
44
The last quotation introduces a topic which will be very relevant to
my later consideration of contemporary theological aesthetics, that of our
attitude today to ecology and the environment. Partridge mentions the
erosion of the enchanted view of nature in the West, which writers like
Lynn White trace back to the emergence of Judaeo-Christian monotheism
and its rejection of paganisms sacralisation of nature. Weber recognized
that once magic and spirits were eliminated from our view of the natural
world, the latter became, according to Partridge, simply the physical arena
in which one obeyed God. The natural world was the creation of a good
and loving God, but it was not itself sacralized.
45
There was perhaps a
partial enchantment in mediaeval times, when the world was interpreted
in theological terms, but the Reformation, Renaissance, and industrializa-
tion accelerated the forces of disenchantment.
46
Nineteenth-century
Romanticism, however, recovered a sacralised understanding of nature,
as have some contemporary movementswhat Partridge describes as
eco-enchantment and ecospirituality.
47
In both Romanticism and con-
temporary ecology increasingly evident are re-sacralized, holistic interpre-
tations of nature as infused with the divine, if not, in some sense, divine in
itself.
48
Partridge supplies a vast amount of detail here, and some judicious com-
ments. But I think that we need now to get behind the sequence of thought
that I have just summarized and to expose some of its assumptions. The
proposal to re-enchant the world suggests at least two fundamental ques-
tions. First, can one set about re-enchanting the world, just like that? And
second, is the modern world disenchanted?
376 Patrick Sherry
2009 The Author
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My rst question is suggested by the memory of a prediction made by a
popular newspaper at the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, that
Britain stood at the beginning of a new, glorious Elizabethan Age. Such a
thing was possible; but I wonder whether one can intend or predict it, or
consciously bring it about?
The authors I have mentioned, however, could reply that re-enchantment is
happening anyway, especially through the contemporary rejection of scient-
ism. For if postmodernism involves, as Lyotard says, the rejection of grand
narratives,
49
then just as the modern world rejected the Christian narrative
of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, so the postmodern world has rejected that
of scientism, i.e. the view that the empirical sciences are the only route to
truth, and its accompanying idea of progress.
My second question is more radical, however, and asks whether Weber
exaggerated the importance of the trends that he discerned in the modern
world. What if the world always was enchanted and still is, if we but look and
keep our sense of wonder? Maybe talk of re-enchantment begs the question,
in that it presupposes that the world is disenchanted. This question, in turn,
is suggested by, above all, some recent work in theological aesthetics.
Enchantment
Shortly after Webers death in 1920 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Sonnets to
Orpheus, that, despite the work of machines,
But for us existence is still enchanted;
still in a hundred places the source. A play of pure powers,
touched only by those who kneel and wonder. (Pt. II, no.10)
More prosaically, a recent book by a sociologist of religion, AndrewGreeleys
The Catholic Imagination, begins with the following provocative statement:
Catholics live in an enchanted world. . . .
50
The author explains this in terms
of the Catholic sense of sacramentality, understood widely, i.e. not just in
terms of the seven dened sacraments of the Church, or even sacramentals
like holy water and rosary beads, but very generally, in terms of seeing
created reality as a revelation of the presence of God. Greeley does not
mention Weber at this point (he is cited later in the book, on another subject),
but he does consider the idea that disenchantment rules the modern world
and the possibility that the enchanted Catholic imagination is a manifestation
of postmodernity, only to brush aside both ideas as ctions: I nd no
persuasive evidence that either modern or post-modern humankind exists
outside of faculty ofce-buildings. Everyone tends to be pre-modern.
51
The
rest of the book tests the hypothesis that the sensibility displayed by Catholic
high art also reveals itself in the attitudes and behaviour of ordinary Catho-
lics in many different spheres. Thus he uses various surveys of public opinion
to show that Catholics have a greater interest in the arts than Protestants do,
Disenchantment, Re-enchantment, and Enchantment 377
2009 The Author
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that (would you believe it?) they visit bars more frequently, and that, more
surprisingly perhaps, they engage in sexual intercourse more often, with
greater enjoyment and more playfulness. Greeley is obviously interpreting
the term sacrament very generously, but this serves as a corrective to
Webers account, which assimilates the concept to magic (later on we shall
need to distinguish the two more clearly). For Greeley the world is
enchanted, not because it is full of spirits or magical powers, but because it is
sacramental in a wide sense.
I think that this wider sense of sacramentality is a crucial factor here, and
we get a fuller discussion of it in another recent book, David Browns God and
Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, which also advocates that
the world is enchantedand not just for Catholics. It is signicant that
Brown too writes of enchantment rather than re-enchantment. At the
beginning of the book he summarizes briey what Weber said about disen-
chantment and the growth of rationality, and sets out his own aim, which is
to help recover a sense of how God can be mediated through nature and
culture, and thereby to restore a kind of natural religion.
52
In some ways
Brown is recovering lines of thought found two centuries earlier in the
Romantic Movement. As both Partridge and Taylor remind us, some of the
Romantics had already reacted against a sense of the atness and emptiness
of the world left by the Enlightenment. In particular, Schiller, in his poem
The Gods of Greece, refers to a time when poetrys magic cloak still with
delight enfolded truth and Everything to the initiates eye showed the trace
of a God, and laments that now we face a God-shorn [entgtterte] nature,
slavishly obeying the law of gravity.
53
Like Greeley, Brownrelies explicitly onanextendedsense of sacramentality,
and one closely linked to the aesthetic. Much of his book is a discussion of
topics like sacred and secular art (including landscape painting), architecture,
places like homes andcities, gardens, andsport. Inall these areas Brownthinks
that there may be the symbolic mediation of the divine in and through the
material, for God can come sacramentally close to his world and vouchsafe
experiences of himself through the material.
54
The fact that God is omnipres-
ent does not mean that His presence is felt everywhere equally.
Thus Browns aim is to recover enchantment by reinvigorating our
wider sense of the sacramental, and thereby reclaiming large areas of human
experience neglected by religion. Both Catholicism and Protestantism are at
fault here, he thinks: the former for narrowing down the concept of sacra-
mentality in its ofcial teaching, and the latter for giving insufcient attention
to it, both in its narrower and wider senses.
Surprisingly, although Brown appeals to beauty on occasion, e.g. with
reference to churches, he says relatively little about this fundamental concept,
which seems an obvious one for being a source of the worlds enchantment.
Traditionally, many Christian thinkers have seen beauty as a mode of Gods
presence in the world, and the idea often asserts itself in art and literature,
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2009 The Author
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e.g. in Gerard Manley Hopkins poem Gods Grandeur, which begins The
world is charged with the grandeur of God, / It will ame out, like shining
from shook foil. Weber, as we have seen, though relegating art to the realm
of the private, acknowledges its power, including the ability to rival religion
(he instances, too, cases of evil beauty, like Baudelaires Les Fleurs du mal
55
).
Those who, like Hopkins, see beauty as a mode of divine presence are
giving it a sacramental signicance, in the wider sense just noted. I should
point out, however, that one could see it as a source of enchantment without
explicitly appealing to any religious belief. For behind our responses to
beauty there are, I believe, the wider and more fundamental reactions of
wonder and perhaps reverence (both noted by Rilke), and also delight. These
reactions may accompany religious beliefs or even be their source, but this is
not necessarily the case: Richard Dawkins, for instance, sometimes expresses
a sense of wonder at the variety and complexity of natural forms, yet is
famously hostile to religion.
Moreover, people may wonder at something without necessarily asking for
an explanation of it, whether a religious or a naturalistic one like evolution.
One can wonder simply at the existence of somethingthe young Wittgen-
stein wrote It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it
exists (Tractatus 6.44). Or, more commonly, one can wonder at the beauty or
intricacy of particular things, as suggested already, whether in nature or in
human creations. Wittgenstein, again, writes later:
One might say: art shows us the miracles [Wunder] of nature. It is based
on the concept of the miracles of nature (the blossom, just opening out.
What is marvellous about it?) We say: Just look at it opening out!
56
Such a response is not inconsistent with knowing the relevant scientic
explanations: Wittgenstein, as it happens, thinks that science tends to send
people to sleep here, in the sense of dulling the sense of wonder
57
, whereas
Rickert, as we have seen, insists that science need not lead to a demystica-
tion of the world; and indeed one can think of many scientists who pursue
their profession without losing their sense of wonder. Even ordinary people,
who know what causes, say, thunder and lightning, can still nd them
amazing or terrifying.
Weber might well agree with what I have just said about wonder, and even
perhaps regret his own seeming lack of a sense of wonder. But he would not,
I think, accept what Brown and Greeley say about sacramentality, because for
him this term suggests magic, and he would certainly insist that science
excludes magic and that such an exclusion is gain, even if it involves some
disenchantment (by denition, in German). By magic he is thinking, it seems,
of some kind of extraordinary factor, an unpredictable causal intervention, as
when the fairy godmother waves her magic wand and Cinderella suddenly
becomes beautiful and nely dressed. This is evident from his remarks in
Science as a Vocation about there being no mysterious, incalculable forces
Disenchantment, Re-enchantment, and Enchantment 379
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at work, like spirits needing to be invoked or controlled by magic, and about
technology and calculation being the sources of knowledge and control over
the world. Thus he seems to have in mind an instrumental view of magic, as
contrasted with one that stresses more its expressive and ritual aspects.
58
But why link magic with religion? Weber thinks that premodern views of
nature envisage extraordinary powers as present in empirical phenomena,
through the action of spirits and suchlike,
59
whereas science deals with
unvarying causal laws, leaving no room for notions like miracle, revelation,
and sacramental causality as understood by Catholicism; and that religion is
obsolete as an explanation of the world (of course he acknowledges that there
is religious rationalism, e.g. Christian theology, but this too looks for an
unworldly meaning in events). In his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism Weber sees later Judaisms repudiation of magical means to salva-
tion as coming to its logical conclusion in Puritanisms rejection of medieval
Catholicisms sacramental magic, in which, he says, The priest was a
magician who performed the miracle of transubstantiation, and who held the
key to eternal life in his hand.
60
The accusation that belief in transubstantiation amounts to magic is a
common one, made by some Protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century,
and more recently by, most famously, the Modernist Ernest Barnes, Angli-
can bishop of Birmingham 192453. It is said that when Barnes encountered
the chaplain of a nearby convent, and, wondering if he should know him,
asked who he was, he received the reply The magician at your gate, my
Lord.
61
It is often difcult to distinguish clearly magic and religion, and indeed
there is some likeness between the ritual speech and action of magic and that
of sacraments. In his later work Weber does distinguish cult and religion,
which include prayer, sacrice, and worship, from sorcery, which is magical
coercion; and priesthood frompractice of magic. The priest functions within
an organized cult, in contrast with the individual and occasional efforts of
magicians. He denies, however, that we can differentiate them absolutely,
for religious cults, he says, nearly always include magical components
(though he thinks that the latter decline in proportion to the centrality of
preaching).
62
Keith Thomas, in his Religion and the Decline of Magic, follows
Webers remark about coercion, and suggests that magic is supposed to work
automatically, whereas prayer, for instance, is non-coercive in that it will only
be answered if God chooses to concede it.
63
The case of sacraments, however, is more complex. In Catholic theology
they are, it is true, said to be valid ex opere operato, for the moral worthiness of
the priest does not affect their validity. Nevertheless, the extent of their
effectiveness may depend on the disposition of the recipient: for example,
someone who goes to confession without due repentance cannot presume on
forgiveness. And although transubstantiation is supernatural, it is not
regarded as miraculous quite in the way that, say, a sudden healing might be,
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for here again the fruitfulness of the sacrament may depend on the reverence
with which it is received.
Webers understanding of sacramentality is fairly crude, as is his grasp of
divine agency more generally. Since he does not really take into account the
ways in which God is believed to work through the ordinary chains of cause
and effect in nature, he tends to construe Gods agency in terms of special
interventions (whereas Keith Thomas, by contrast, argues, following A. N.
Whitehead and others, that it was the religious belief in divine order that
contributed to the growth of modern science,
64
so that it was the spread of
Christianity more than the rise of science that led to the decline in belief in
magic).
Weber also fails to reckon with the fact that belief in magic, especially
witchcraft, continued to some extent after the Reformation, e.g. in Calvinist
New England. Keith Thomas shows how witchcraft survived in England,
especially around 15581670, and suggests that this was because of the elimi-
nation of the protective ecclesiastical magic which had kept the threat of
sorcery under control.
65
Weber forgets, too, that Calvinism kept two sacra-
ments, albeit giving one of them a lesser role than in Catholic worship and
with a different theology. Even though Calvin attacked the Council of Trents
teaching, because it seemed to him to promise a righteousness apart from
faith, and he insisted that sacraments effectiveness depends on the Holy
Spirit who penetrates hearts and affections, he nevertheless kept the under-
standing of them as signs and as having certain effects, like sustaining faith
(Inst. IV.xiv.1,9,14). Thus, with some caveats, he kept the old scholastic de-
nition of sacraments as effective signs (it is worth noting here, however,
that among the sacraments he rejected is marriagesee Inst. IV.xix.347,
something that may reveal a lack of a sense of the sacramentality of the body
and sexuality, which Brown wishes to recover, somewhat as parts of the
modern ecological movement wish to recover a sense of reverence for the
earth).
Clearly, Weber failed to see how much of traditional Catholic teaching
survived in Calvinism. Clearly, too, he is much more interested in the causal
aspects of sacraments, which he construes narrowly, than with their sign-
bearing qualities. But it is the latter which preoccupy writers like Greeley and
Brown as much as the former, and it is these qualities that are relevant to their
claim that the world is enchanted. Our discussion of magic and sacraments,
though necessary because Weber links them, is in danger of taking us away
from the wider sense of sacramentality, which is more our concern now and
which is not particularly connected with magic. In terms of Catholicism we
should look now perhaps not so much to sacramental theology in the nar-
rower sense as to certain forms of spirituality, e.g. that of St Ignatius Loyola.
One of his followers, Fr Walter Burghardt, reminds us of Ignatius ideal of
nding God in all things, from which the former draws the conclusion that
nothing is merely human or secular: We live in a universe of grace.
66
It
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should not be forgotten here that Hopkins was a Jesuit, and that his keen
sense of the presence of Gods glory in the world, expressed in his poem
Gods Grandeur, can be seen as an exemplication of Ignatian spirituality.
It is to be noted again that both Greeley and Brown nd the closest parallel
to reading the world sacramentally in aesthetic appreciation. An even more
telling example of this parallelism is to be found in the classic essay Art and
Sacrament by the poet and artist David Jones (18951974). This essay main-
tains that any understanding of the Churchs sacraments depends on a wider
sense of sacramentality, which he thought has been lost to a great extent in
the modern world. As he puts it, People speak of sacraments with a capital
S without seeming to notice that sign and sacrament with a small s are
everywhere eroded and in some contexts non-existent, for, because of the
growth of technology, we tend to take things at their face-value today. He
remarks, however, that one cannot remain at this level all the time, for man
is a sign-maker by nature, and the creative artists task is to, as he puts it,
make radiant particular facts, so that they become intimations of immor-
tality, or . . . of some otherness of some sort.
67
Jones is not concerned here in the rst instance with what preoccupies
Weber, the causal effectiveness of sacraments, nor particularly with their
ritual role. Towards the end of his essay he quotes a French theologian,
Maurice de la Taille, as saying that on Maundy Thursday Christ placed
himself in the order of signs.
68
Jones point is that this condescension pre-
supposes an already existent world of signsor in his parlance again, sacra-
ments with a big S presuppose a world of sacraments with a small s. Like
Brown, Jones is giving us a kind of natural religion, in that he is starting from
the world, which is for him already a world of signs, especially art and other
forms of making.
This sense of the sacramentality of the world and of art, exhibited by Jones,
Brown, and Greeley, is of vast importance, raising as it does many issues,
concerning the nature of Gods presence or agency in the world, and our
awareness of them; the nature and variety of signs; and the role of wonder
here, not just for theologians or aesthetes, but also for scientists like Einstein,
philosophers, and indeed people in general.
It often tends to be assumed today that the wider sense of sacrament is
parasitic on the narrower one, referring to the ofcial sacraments of the
Church. Brown, however, in advocating a wider use, reminds us that the
term was not narrowed down until the Middle Ages, and Jones argues that
the narrower use presupposes the wider one, in so far as the former assumes
that we can understand the language of signs. But what is the relation
between the two uses now?
Now if sacraments are conventionally dened as effective signs which
convey grace (following Aquinas in e.g. On Truth 27:4), then the wider sense
of the term follows the narrower, for it too regards parts or aspects of the
world as signs, especially when people like Hopkins see them as signs-by-
382 Patrick Sherry
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likeness of Gods beauty. It also regards them, in their way, as effective: a
beautiful landscape may arouse wonder, reverence, and delight, or even
more specic moral and religious feelings (See the lilies of the eld. . . .).
Likewise with works of art. There is, however, a third aspect of ecclesial
sacraments that it is hard to extend to sacraments widely understood, namely
their use of words. Certain formulae are central to the former, e.g. I baptize
you. . . ., With this ring I thee wed. . . ., or I absolve you. . . . Many of
these uses of words are what J. L. Austin called performative utterances,
i.e. uses of language that do things as well as saying things, like promising or
congratulating. Moreover, such formulae are accompanied by other uses of
words that comment on or explain the signs and actions of the sacraments. As
both Aquinas and Calvin saw, if I were merely to pour water over people, this
action would only puzzle them. I think that such uses of words, both formu-
lae and comments or explanations, serve to differentiate the two kinds of
sacrament, whilst not invalidating the wider one.
69
Peoples perception of the wider sacramentality seems to be akin to what
Walter Stace called extrovertive mysticism, by which he meant the kind of
mysticism which consists of a seeming apprehension of God or of Ultimate
Reality, not through some inner experience but through distinctive experi-
ences of the natural world, found according to him in e.g. Jakob Boehme
70
,
and also, I think, in the Cornish poet Jack Clemo, who wrote
I was a spirit and sense mystic, and the artist in me demanded realism
landscapes, people, events. I had an inner vision that gave transcendent
meaning to the external world, not an inner vision that was independent
of the external world.
71
In a similar vein, Charles Taylor writes of art
. . . there are certain works of artby Dante, Bach, the makers of Chartres
Cathedral: the list is endlesswhose power seems inseparable fromtheir
epiphanic, transcendent reference. Here the challenge is to the unbe-
liever, to nd a non-theistic register in which to respond to them,
without impoverishment.
72
Conclusion
By now we have travelled a long way from both Weber and postmodernism.
But the linking themes are the responses of wonder, reverence, and delight,
and also the idea of a sense of the wider sacramentality of things. Weber,
seemingly, lacked those responses and that sense. It is not, however, clear to
me that postmodernism and talk of re-enchantment are the remedy for these
deciencies, though they may serve to show up the poverty of a lot of
modernism. In the nal section of this essay, therefore, I have looked rather
Disenchantment, Re-enchantment, and Enchantment 383
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to an enriched and wider sense of sacramentality, to be recovered rst
through aesthetic responses to the world.
NOTES
1 Francois-A. Isambert, Le Dsenchantement du monde: non sens ou renouveau du sens,
Archives de Sciences Religieuses 61/1 (1986), pp. 83103, at p. 83.
2 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 105. Avihu Zakai, following Alexander Koyr and others, traces it
back rather to fourteenth-century Nominalism, in his Jonathan Edwards Philosophy of History:
The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2003), p. 88, n.16.
3 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 105, 149.
4 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 7779,
426, 553, 614615.
5 Max Weber, Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions, in H. H. Gerth and C.
Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul,
1948), pp. 323359, at p. 350.
6 Ibid., p. 342.
7 Max Webers Science as a Vocation, ed. P. Lassman, I. Velody, and P. Martins (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 1314. (The essay can be found also in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills [eds.], op.cit.).
8 Ibid., p. 17.
9 Ibid., p. 84.
10 Max Weber, The Social Psychology of World Religions, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(eds.), op.cit., p. 282.
11 Weber, Science as a Vocation, p. 30.
12 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 553.
13 Lawrence A. Scaff, Weber on the cultural situation of the modern age, in Stephen Turner
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.
99106, at p. 105. Yves Lambert makes a similar point in Un paradigme inspir de Weber.
Pour contribuer a renouveler Le dbat sur secularization, Archives de Sciences Sociales des
Religions 61/1 (1986), pp. 153165.
14 Johannes Weiss, On the Irreversibility of Western Rationalism and Max Webers Alleged
Fatalism, in Sam Whimster and Scott Lash (eds.), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity
(London: Allen and Unwin: 1987), pp. 154163, at p. 162.
15 Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2007).
16 Marianne Weber, Max Weber: a Biography trans. H. Zohn (New York, NY: John Wiley, 1975),
p. 324.
See Basit Koshul, The Postmodern Signicance of Max Webers Legacy (New York and Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 6061, for further comments on this letter, arguing that
it did not commit Weber to an Enlightenment mindset or to metaphysical naturalism.
17 Jean Sguy, Rationalisation, modernit et avenir de la religion, in Archives de Sciences
Sociales des Religions 61/1 (1986), pp. 127138, esp. pp. 129133.
18 See R. Schroeder, Nietzsche and Weber, in Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity,
pp. 207221.
19 Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New Brunswick
and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1985), p. 267. The phrase iron cage was used by Weber
himself in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 181.
20 A minority view, however, points to Webers own reservations that I have noted and nds
two sides to his work. Thus Koshul argues that Weber sees the limitations of the Enlight-
enment Project, that he does not exclude questions of meaning and value, and that his work
contains the resources to bridge the supposed gap between science and religion. In particu-
lar, what he says about scientic methodology, including that of the social and cultural
sciences, could be used to arrest the process of scientic disenchantment of human culture,
384 Patrick Sherry
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by questioning its assumptions of rigid determinism in nature and consequent absence of
meaning (Sinn). Thus, he says, Webers methodology . . . disenchants the disenchanting
rationalism that has consistently used rationality to disenchant everything else (Koshul, p.
141).
21 Sguy, Rationalisation, modernit et avenir de la religion, p. 136.
22 Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, trans. O. Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997), p. 203. Weber himself, of course, might well agree with this example.
23 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 9798; cf. pp. 84,
8889.
24 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1958), chapter I.
25 See Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism failed? (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1984), pp.
9297.
26 Roslyn W. Bologh, Love or Greatness: Max Weber and Masculine ThinkingA Feminist Inquiry
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 19; cf. pp. 1213. See Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art
(NewYork: Thames and Hudson, 1991), chapter 11, for another appeal to feminism, empha-
sizing the importance of interconnectedness and interdependence.
27 Richard Rorty is a rare exception. In a discussion of John Rawls work he suggests that a
light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics like the nature of the self helps
along the disenchantment of the world, and helps to make people more pragmatic, tolerant,
liberal, and receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality. Communal and public
disenchantment may be the price we pay for individual and private spiritual liberation. See
The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy in Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and
Truth: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 175
196, at pp. 193194.
28 David Ray Grifn, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 23, n. 7. Charles Taylor also links disenchant-
ment with modernitys seeming lack of moral authority or coherence, in his Sources of the Self
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 148149.
29 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. xxi, xv.
30 Zygmunt Bauman,, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 32.
31 Ibid., pp. 3334.
32 Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory (second edn., London and Basing-
stoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. xx; cf. pp. 117, 160.
33 Graham Ward, (ed.), The Postmodern God :a theological reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp.
xlixlii.
34 Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, p. 171.
35 Graham Ward, (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell,
2001), p. xv.
36 Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 214. Compare Bruno Bettelheim,
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1976), who nds a deeper meaning in traditional fairy stories. Somehow, however,
I do not think that Weber would be impressed by these two examples!
37 Raymond L. M. Lee and SusanAckerman, The Challenge of Religion and Modernity (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2002), pp. 6, 12.
38 Ibid., pp. 2728.
39 Ibid., pp. 97102.
40 Ibid., pp. 4047, 114115.
41 Ibid., pp. 121122.
42 Christopher Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West Vol. 1: alternative spiritualities, sacral-
ization, popular culture, and occulture (London: T & T Clark, 2004) and The Re-enchantment of
the West Vol. 2: alternative spiritualities, sacralization, popular culture, and occulture (London: T
& T Clark, 2005).
43 Christopher Partridge, Alternative Spiritualities, New Religions, and the Re-enchantment
of the West, in James R. Lewis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3967, at p. 60.
44 Christopher Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West Vol. 2: alternative spiritualities, sacral-
ization, popular culture, and occulture (London: T & T Clark, 2005). p. 169.
45 Ibid., p. 45.
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46 Ibid., p. 46.
47 Ibid., p. 47.
48 Ibid., p. 50. See also Christopher Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West, vol. 1 (London: T.
and T. Clark, 2004), pp. 72, 8996.
49 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Benning-
ton and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 3738.
50 Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2000), p. 1.
51 Ibid., p. 2.
52 David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 2004), pp. 1618, 3436.
53 Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 302, 316; cf. p. 615.
54 Brown, God and Enchantment of Place, pp. 30, 82.
55 Weber, Science as a Vocation, p. 22.
56 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 56e.
See John Churchill, Wonder and the End of Explanation: Wittgenstein and Religious
Sensibility, Philosophical Investigations 17 (1994), pp. 388416.
57 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 5e. Churchill remarks that there can be a kind of aspect
blindness (a phrase used by Wittgenstein) here: cf. op.cit., p. 414.
58 See Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World, p. 118.
59 Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans E. Fischoff (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 24. This
book is a translation of parts of his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, published posthumously in
1922.
60 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 117.
61 John Barnes, Ahead of His Age: Bishop Barnes of Birmingham (London: Collins, 1979), p. 190.
62 Weber, The Sociology of Religion, pp. 28, 75.
63 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and
seventeenth century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 41.
64 Ibid., pp. 577, 657.
65 Ibid., p. 498.
66 Walter Burghardt, Long Have I Loved You: A Theologian Reects on His Church (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis, 2000), p. 195.
67 David Jones, Art and Sacrament, in his Epoch and Artist (London: Faber and Faber, 1973),
pp. 143179. I quote from the Preface, pp. 13, 16.
68 Ibid., p. 179.
69 See further my article The Sacramentality of Things, New Blackfriars 89 (2008), pp. 579590.
70 See W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 6079.
71 Jack Clemo, The Marriage of a Rebel (London: Gollancz, 1980), p. 107.
72 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 607. I do not think that Gordon Grahamwould sympathize with this
statement or with the wider sense of sacramentality seen in Brown, Greeley, and Jones. He
does not discuss natural beauty; and as the full title of his book (The Re-enchantment of the
World: Art versus Religion) suggests, he treats religion and art as rivals, and he concludes that
any attempt by autonomous art to re-enchant the world will fail (p. 186). But the other
authors mentioned do not wish to limit the connection between art and religion to reli-
gious art.
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