The modern West often tells a story about itself: that it has outgrown enchantment. The world, once experienced as alive with meaning, has been reduced to matter in motion; what earlier ages perceived as sacramental presence is now explained in terms of mechanism. Religion is privatised, myth is relegated to fiction, and meaning becomes something we construct rather than discover. It is a powerful narrative – but increasingly, it is difficult to sustain.
The assumption underlying this narrative is what Charles Taylor famously described as a ‘subtraction story’: modernity emerges by shedding illusions, leaving us in a disenchanted but more truthful world. As James K A Smith summarises this account, we come to believe that we are alone in a silent universe, and that if there is to be meaning, it must be something we create. The result is a peculiar mixture of exhilaration and unease: we stand, as it were, before a ‘normative abyss’, free to legislate meaning, yet haunted by the suspicion that such meaning lacks any real foundation.
