Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, Hope:
R.J. Snell (Angelico Press, $28 pb, 182 pages)
R.J. Snell, editor-in-chief of The Public Discourse and director of academic programs at the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, has written an important short brief against modern malaise, the false idylls that promise but fail to address that malaise, and the recovery of hope to escape the malaise. Each of those three sections are about equal in length but for the average readers Snell’s most engaging chapters are those diagnosing what is wrong in society. Snell says that modernity teaches that there is “no supernatural happiness to worry about, only immanent, temporal well-being.” Paradoxically, this has made modern man miserable. The secular culture – which affects even religious believers who stew in this empty broth – has made a “disenchanted world” and borrowing from Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, Snell finds this world to be “flat and empty” and “lacking purpose.” Not only has “something been lost” but “something is known to have been lost.” Secular culture is incapable of filling the vacuum, the void left by a denuded religion. The philosophical turn away from enchantment, the idea that God plays a role in human affairs, has paradoxically paralyzed modern man through the idea that everything “is within our control.” Every problem is a resolvable in principle if only man could be reasonable enough to ascertain the solution. Every failure is a human failure (for example, extreme weather being the result of man-made climate change rather than forces of nature). But facing intractable problems daunts mankind especially when efforts to address them do not work out. It is not only God but nature and human nature that is denied or sidelined by modernity’s biases.
Snell rightly criticizes the false idylls that mankind has entrusted his happiness to: totalizing politics, therapeutic culture, performative religion. All these are powerless when the “West has rejected God, transcendence, and philosophy” (philosophy meaning love of wisdom) and therefore have “lost the word as well” because God, transcendence, and philosophy are “the resources allowing words to have substance.” Without the power of the cosmos – an infinite God, not a finite universe — words are empty vessels. Lastly, Snell argues that understanding reality through the prism of a transcendent God is the only way out of the malaise. The argument becomes philosophically technical and is unlikely to convince those who have fallen away from church, but it might help those who attend but do not deeply appreciate the truth of the cosmos to find re-enchantment and therefore happiness.
