...“Re-enchantment” begins with the idea that, as Jordan Peterson put it, the world isn’t “made out of matter… it’s made out of what matters.”
...Peterson remains agnostic.
Jonathan Pageau, an Eastern Orthodox icon carver and friend of Peterson, picks up where Peterson leaves off, initiating viewers into “the symbolic world,” in which patterns from myth, legend, and Scripture manifest themselves in everyday life. God, after all, is not a watchmaker, but a storyteller.
...Thinkers like Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, and Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary biologist, also contend against shallow, materialistic views of reality, arguing that our desacralized, demythologized, supposedly objective view of the world is actually a neuropsychological aberration of Western modernity....
...Contrary to the claims of the Steven Pinkers and Christopher Hitchenses of the world, however, disenchantment is no guarantee of peace and human flourishing....
...Darren Aaronofsky’s Mother! begins in exactly the closed-off, predictable world that’s collapsing around us. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence play a married couple living in a secluded country house. He’s a poet struggling to find inspiration while she works to restore the house after a fire nearly destroyed it.
She loves her husband, and she loves the house. “I want to make a paradise,” she says. Mother (none of the characters have names) would prefer no intrusions and no surprises. She doesn’t get her wish.
...After that, though, things get a whole lot weirder.
...Then all hell breaks loose.
...Chesterton’s 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday is similar to Mother!, except Chesterton doesn’t hate God....
...The Man Who Was Thursday is subtitled “A Nightmare,” but it is Aaronofsky’s vision that is truly nightmarish. For Chesterton, the early stages of re-enchantment may indeed feel like a bad dream, but all fears are dispelled when we realize we are not dreaming....
Re-enchantment may shock us...
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