Who's Afraid of Disenchantment?

The Reformers knew exactly what they were doing, actually

© Obsidian Entertainment, 2022 (Source: IGN)

I think the definitive moment where video games clearly began crossing over equally into the realm of art came in 2013 with the release of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. Mainstream audiences mostly know it today as an acclaimed HBO series, but for my chronically-online generation, we first experienced the story of Joel and Ellie either huddled over our Playstation 3s or, in my case, vicariously through YouTubers. The point was made, though: The nerds had come for great storytelling once and for all.

After high school, my own relationship with gaming was pretty casual. Yet it was always titles with the strongest stories that drew me back in, such as God of War (2018) and Jedi: Fallen Order (2019). But playing Obsidian Entertainment’s Pentiment (2022) was simply something else. My wife would attest under oath to how much the progress of the mysteries of Kiersau Abbey and its surrounding town of Tassing based in sixteenth-century Germany sucked me into its labyrinthine relationships at the expense of household chores. Beyond that though, it was just how much it faithfully captured the late medieval and early modern European world that enthralled me (I mean, they even included a bibliography in the credits.)

The question at the heart of Pentiment’s story is the ultimate worth of truth. The plot culminates in a confrontation with the village priest Thomas who has been behind the murders that have consumed Andreas Maler, a scribe-turned-sleuth, as well as Magdalene, the daughter of Tassing’s printer Claus who has also gotten involved. As Thomas discloses, he was killing anyone who came too close to the actual history of the local saints of Tassing: They were not “Saint Moritz” and “Saint Satia” from the start but rather Mars and Diana, products of Christianization rather than the miraculous. Players are then left to decide whether to disclose these secrets to the townspeople or bury them to maintain the legend. As John Ehrett concluded regarding his own decision in his playthrough to keep things from coming to light, “The truth will out—as it must. But the fear of chaos, of total social breakdown if cherished illusions are shattered, is a very powerful fear. And it can become overwhelming.” In the spirit of Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, perhaps it’s better to “make the lie true” after all.

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As the project of theological retrieval has gotten into full swing amongst Reformed evangelicals, there’s been a growing tendency to sneer at the notion that the Reformation was the chief cause behind the West’s widespread disenchantment. To admit such would be to concede that the near-universal victory of modernity in its promotion of hyper-individualism began with a plea to return Christianity to its biblical and apostolic roots. Initially conceived by the sociologist Max Weber and furthered in recent record by historians such as Brad Gregory, it’s become somewhat of a bugbear to Protestants who want to undermine the self-proclaimed monopoly of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy on all things sacramental.

Lately however, scholars such as Carlos Eire complicated this picture. In his latest book They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023), Eire, long-time professor at Yale and one of the foremost historians of the Reformation alive today, focuses on widely-attested reports of supernatural phenomena in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries centered around religious figures, including the “Flying Friar” St. Joseph of Cupertino and the Carmelite mystic St. Teresa of Avila. The main thrust of his argument is that “both Protestants and Catholics professed belief in human flight and tried to sort out the airborne among them…at the very same time that calculus, empirical science, and atheism emerged in Western culture.”¹ Eire is quite simply taking no historiographical prisoners here: The Enlightenment, supposedly the inevitable wakeup call to Europe from its “dogmatic slumber,” came on the coattails of a time when a lot of its inhabitants still believed someone could levitate or be in two places at once. So much for completely secularizing the age, then.

But this trend is only part of the portrait. While it’s true that plenty of the Reformers remained quite enchanted with the world, they were certainly not inclined to unduly sacramentalize it.² Euan Cameron, another eminent Reformation historian, contends that “The core theology of the Reformed faith was in its very essence a process of demystification. How that message was received or adapted at popular level was of course another matter.”³ In other words, the thrust of mainstream Reformation thought was concerned with recovering an evangelical grasp of the Christian faith no longer held captive to the obscurantism of Catholic dogma; if others sought to seize upon that for other ends, that was on them.

Taking a brief glance at the magisterial Reformers on the Eucharist gets at this fact well enough. It’s perhaps the best known secret of the history of the Reformation that its dividing line between its Lutheran and Reformed strains came down to the nature of the Lord’s Supper. The Marburg Colloquy of 1529, instigated by Philip of Hesse’s invitation to Zwingli to come to Germany in the hopes of securing a united Protestant front against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, resulted in almost total agreement on all major points of doctrine save for on the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Some today might find the obstinance of Luther in particular to be pedantic, yet it’s clear that in his own mind, nothing less than the very essence of the Christian faith was at stake. As he declared,

We must turn our eyes and hearts simply to the institution of christ and this alone, and set nothing before us but the very word of Christ by which he instituted the sacrament, made perfect, and committed it to us. For in that word, and in that word alone, reside the power, the nature, and the substance of the mass.⁴

It should not be missed what Luther is getting at here. Far from trying to insist on the serpentine sacramentalism of Catholic dogma, he is instead bullish on the mystical wondrousness of the Eucharist. He goes on to conclude that

According to its substance, therefore, the mass is nothing but the aforesaid words of Christ…[N]othing else is needed for a worthy holding of mass than a faith that relies confidently on this promise, believes Christ to be true in these words of his, and does not doubt that these infinite blessings have been bestowed upon it. Hard on this faith there follows, of itself, a most sweet stirring of the heart, whereby the spirit of man is enlarged and enriched…so that he draws to Christ, that gracious and bounteous testator, and made a thoroughly new and different man. Who would not shed tears of gladness, indeed, almost faint for joy in Christ, if he believed with unshaken faith that this inestimable promise of Christ belonged to him?⁵

The emphasis here is not at all on trying to fully understand the mystery of Christ’s real presence in the sacrament but wholly on what it means for the believer’s communion with God by receiving it in faith. Their strident metaphysical departures aside from each other, Zwingli shares the same sentiment, writing that

To eat the body of Christ sacramentally, if we wish to speak accurately, is to eat the body of Christ in heart and spirit with the accompaniment of the sacrament…When you comfort yourself thus, I say, you eat his body spiritually, that is, you stand unterrified in God against all attacks of despair, through confidence in the humanity he took upon himself for you.⁶

Notice once more that the main concern is the comfort of grace the Eucharist provides to the true believer. These examples indicate a need then to revise how we discuss the long-term metaphysical consequences of the Reformation: Far from being concerned with disenchantment as a whole, the Reformers sought to demystify one’s apprehension of the gospel. Even Calvin, who bears the brunt of the burden for disenchantment’s rise within Weber’s thesis, was insistent on the pervasiveness of the spiritual realm’s impact upon the Christian life.⁷ The God of the Reformers was deeply involved with the universe he created, all the while remaining mysterious unto himself apart from his revelation. Jeffrey R. Watt has noted that “Calvin and other Reformed Protestants embraced a form of piety in which God was far more transcendent than Catholics had envisioned,” which he posits conduced towards “a certain desacralization of mentality.”⁸ However, that is not because the Reformers thought God was nowhere to be found in the world; he was simply already everywhere by merit of his omnipresence. As Calvin noted in his commentary on Genesis 26:25, The “inward invocation of God neither requires an altar, nor has any special choice of place,” since “the saints, wherever the lived, worshiped” by merit of their status alone.⁹ Man can’t disenchant the world anymore than he can modify the air he breathes, for that too testifies to the care of his Creator.

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Both Tom Holland’s Dominion (2019) and Carl R. Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) forced Christians to do some soul-searching as it pertained to their potential role in aiding and abetting expressive individualism’s ascendance. Part of that has led those of a Catholic and Orthodox persuasion to declare that a good deal of the blame lay with Protestantism’s skeptical underbelly. In his latest book, Rod Dreher remarks that “The world has never been truly disenchanted. We modern people have simply lost the ability to perceive the world with the eyes of wonder. We can no longer see what is really real.”¹⁰ The cure is in leaving behind “the dark wood of late modernity” in favor of the mystery of “a thoroughly Christian context” that is “far from the dry or shallow kind of Christianity” of the West desperately need of “an infusion of authentic, time-tested mysticism” found in the Orthodox faith that Dreher calls home.¹¹ His point isn’t lost on Protestants: Dogged rationalism has robbed us of the splendor humanity deserves, leaving the Leviathan of sola Scriptura to claim yet another hapless generation in its long, withdrawing, materialism-inducing roar.

The mistake lies in thinking that Protestants haven’t been sufficiently savoring the mystery of Christianity without a sufficiently sacramental aesthetic. Yes, it is absolutely the case that Protestantism was central in getting Western Europe on board with more critically analyzing the world around them apart from conceiving of it in purely supernatural terms. Yet given how much good that’s done for us as far as, I don’t know, physical longevity is concerned, it seems odd to think that just because the Reformation played a role in pushing people to think about things for themselves it’s somehow the dastardly domino simultaneously responsible for the full onslaught of woke progressivism and post-modern nihilism.

It’s not just odd, though; it’s intellectually and spiritually lazy. We can blame-shift as much as we want for how we got here, but the way forward is in realizing how far we’ve come, not in surly navel-gazing or confessional cloistering. The Reformation bequeathed afresh in the sixteenth century a radical encounter with the biblical gospel more comprehensively than had otherwise been possible to many people for centuries past. Reactionary platitudes would have us think that the silver bullet can only be fashioned out of not just premodernity but an entirely post-rational mindset. Within that set of nostalgic lenses, we’re not just in need of apprehending more God-gazing wonder as Dreher calls for; the ulterior goal is to actualize a performative ideological victory through an appeal to the senses at the almost total exclusion of the heart and mind. Christendom redevivus does not a national (re?)conversion make.

The Reformation continues to remind us that sometimes you have to risk telling people like it is so that they’ll come to know what’s really there. Then again, I suppose video games are still just for kids.

1. Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale University Press, 2023), 23.

2. Luther once remarked regarding the popular belief in “Wichtelin” or household spirits that “People are more afraid to give offense to those demons than to God and the whole world.” His issue however was with the extent to which it was blasphemous in distracting one from caring first and foremost about love for God and neighbor, not with affirming the reality of such creatures themselves. Martin Luther, Decem Praecepta wittenbergensi predicata populo (Wittenberg: Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, 1518), sigs. Bii^v –Biii^r. Quoted in Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford University Press, 2010), 42.

3. Cameron, Enchanted Europe, 158.

4. Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” in Three Treatises, trans. by A. T. W. Steinhäuser; rev. by Frederick C. Ahrens and Abdel Ross Wentz (Fortress, Press, 1970), 113–260.

5. Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” in Three Treatises, 158.

6. Huldrych Zwingli, “Fidei Expositio (1531),” in Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, Volume 1: 1523-1552, ed. by James T. Dennison, Jr. (Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), 176–225.

7. As just one example, my friend Tom Holsteen first pointed out to me a few years ago during one of his seminars with Shawn Wright at Southern Seminary that Calvin’s commentary on 1 Peter is rife with references to Satan and demonic activities, despite how it’s not explicitly brought up within the text of the epistle itself.

8. Jeffrey R. Watt, The Consistory and Social Discipline in Calvin's Geneva (University of Rochester Press, 2020), 160–61.

9. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. by John King, 2 vols. (The Calvin Translation Society, 1850), 2: 71.

10. Rod Dreher, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Zondervan, 2024), 13.

11. Dreher, Living in Wonder, 13, 15–16.