Life is beautiful, wonderful, even seemingly magical at times. At least, it can be. But for a lot of people these days, life appears to have lost its magic, if it ever had any for them. For many people, life, and the world itself, have become disenchanted. Their lives no longer seem as meaningful as they once did (if they ever did). Life seems empty, devoid of any real purpose and bereft of any genuine and lasting hope—a brief interlude consisting primarily of pain and suffering and ending in inevitable death.
Disenchantment with the world is not an entirely new phenomenon. Max Weber, the German sociologist, is often credited as the first person to notice and comment upon the disenchantment of modern life. In a speech he gave a little over a hundred years ago, on the heels of the horrors of World War I, Weber claimed, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life.”
But actually, Friedrich Schiller wrote about disenchantment (in German, Entzauberung) more than a hundred years before Weber. In his poem “The Gods of Greece,” first published in 1788, Schiller lamented the cultural loss of a sense of the transcendent:
Whilst the smiling Earth ye govern’d still,
And with Rapture’s soft and guiding hand
Let the happy Nations at your will,
Beauteous Beings from the Fable-land!
Whilst your blissful worship smil’d around,
Ah! How diff’rent was it in that day!
. . .
Beauteous World, where art thou gone? Oh, thou,
Nature’s blooming youth, return once more!
Ah, but in Song’s fairy region now
Lives thy fabled trace so dear of yore!
Cold and perish’d, sorrow now the plains,
Not one Godhead greets my longing sight;
Ah, the Shadow only now remains
Of yon living Image bright!
Aye! they homeward go,– and they have flown,
All that’s bright and fair they’ve taken too,
Ev’ry colour, ev’ry living tone,–
And a soulless world is all we view.
Lord Byron surveyed Schiller’s “soulless world” and gave a more personal, and much darker, take on the nature and impact of disenchantment in his poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” published between 1812 and 1818, as is captured by this compilation of verses drawn from that poem:
Years steal fire from the mind as vigor from the limb; and life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim. I have no hope for myself or for others. Our life is a false nature; it is not in the harmony of things; it is an all-blasting upas whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their poison dews upon mankind. We wither from our youth; we gasp with unslaked thirst for unattainable good; lured from the first to the last by phantoms – love, fame, ambition, avarice – all idle, and all ill – one meteor of many names, that vanishes in the smoke of death.
But sadly, tragically, many people today know only too well the hopelessness expressed by Byron: hopelessness regarding their own lives, the world, and the future.
Pretty dark. But sadly, tragically, many people today know only too well the hopelessness expressed by Byron: hopelessness regarding their own lives, the world, and the future. Marriages break up. Family relationships, friendships, and business partnerships fall apart. Loved ones die. Careers disappoint. To some people, life seems like a pointless pursuit of one thing after another—money, possessions, status, power, pleasure, etc.—none of which satisfies them in any deep or lasting way. The cup of life may seem enchanted, but only very briefly, and only “near the brim,” when one is at the height of youth, strength, health, and (maybe) hope. “Life’s enchanted cup” is, according to Byron, a heartbreaking illusion. Life is a “meteor” that flashes only briefly, dramatically but deceptively, leading nowhere but death, which claims us all in the end.
In response to a life that seems meaningless and hopeless, some people get depressed. Some people get anxious. Some get both anxious and depressed. Some turn to alcohol and/or drugs to try to blot out the pain and emptiness they feel. Some claim to wish they had never been born at all (as in the anti-natalism movement), or even claim that we human beings ought to pursue voluntary human extinction by choosing not to bear any more children. And some people, having reached the depths of despair, lash out in violence against others, or turn to suicide, or both.
How did we, as a culture, get to such a point? How did we, as human beings, get to such a point?
Well, the truth is, life and the world are still enchanted. Life is still beautiful, mysterious (in an intriguing and appealing sense), and wonder-full. But we’ve done our best to deny this truth. We’ve done our best to disenchant the world, so we have no one to blame but ourselves for our current situation. We’ve done our best to convince ourselves that we, and the cosmos as a whole, are nothing but a random swirl of matter and energy.
We’ve forgotten (or deliberately denied) where we came from (God), and we’ve forgotten (or deliberately denied) where we’re supposed to be heading (also God). Is it any surprise that the world has come to appear as “soulless” to us when we’ve sought to deny our very souls?
We are finite creatures whose desires are infinite. The finite world cannot satisfy our desires, precisely because those desires are infinite. And those desires are infinite because they are, at their deepest level, a desire for the infinite good, who is God. Nothing less than God will satisfy us. Or as Roger Scruton put it, God is the only possible solution to our “metaphysical predicament.”
Without God, “life’s enchanted cup” only “sparkles near the brim,” at best. But with God, that cup sparkles from top to bottom and is filled to overflowing.