I grew up believing a simple origin story about modernity. The medieval world was a historical backwater mired in the darkness of religious orthodoxy until the light of reason dawned upon humanity. Through some accident of social, cultural, and religious evolution, the West was allowed to wake up from its dogmatic slumber and start living in the real world—a cosmos that could be harnessed by science now that it was no longer haunted by spirits.
This story, according to Max Weber, is one of disenchantment. Or, to more literally translate Weber’s entzauberung, it is the narrative of a world that has been “de-magicked.” No longer do we appeal to supernatural forces for causal explanation. Rather, we look to the testimony of our senses and the operation of logic.
Within the immanent frame modernity casts for us, as Charles Taylor styles it in “A Secular Age,” the human being’s sense of self is no longer subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous spiritual fortune. Rather, it is now up to us to make sense of a reality that is aesthetically inert unless and until acted upon.
But can human beings inhabit a world with no magic? As James K. A. Smith points out in his short companion to Taylor, “How (Not) To Be Secular,” reality is too thick to abide such a constraint. The buffered self groans inwardly as it waits eagerly to be released from the closed world of the modern imagination.
Hence, we see a host of postmodern dalliances with “re-enchantment.” Hollywood stars consult mediums. Tech moguls commune with the beyond by way of artificial intelligence. Even Sam Harris commends the pursuit of spiritual experiences, which he believes can meet our natural needs without appealing to the supernatural. As the ever-rising number of “religious nones” would have it, it is good to be “spiritual but not religious.”
The world was running so well down the road to secularity. Who cut in and hindered us? What religious sandman lulled us back into that dogmatic slumber from which the Enlightenment was supposed to awaken all of humanity?
If you ask Michael Horton, to answer such questions we need to take another look at the enchantment paradigm itself. What we have in the dawn of modernity, says Horton, is not a transition from a “religious” world to a purely natural seculum. Rather, it is the trading of one spirited worldview for another.
In the “enchanted” Middle Ages, we had a creation made and superintended by an independent Creator. At the dawn of the new and supposedly “disenchanted” world of modernity, we have an elision of creature and Creator. The natural becomes supernatural and vice versa. Salvation is no longer the reconciliation of all things through the cross but their exploration and transformation through cunning and craft.
Such is the thrust of Horton’s “Magician and Mechanic” (Eerdmans, 2026). This 370-page tour de force represents the second in a three-volume series titled “The Divine Self.”
In the first volume, Horton explored the emergence of “axiliaty” in the sixth century B.C. and its development in the centuries leading up to the Middle Ages. The particulars of axiliaty are contested, but Horton aptly uses the term to describe a shift in religious belief and practice from the local to the universal.
Worship was no longer offered solely to the god(s) of a particular people, tethered to a local temple, and governed by the esoteric rites of that particular people. Rather, worship became portable. God, however conceived, was understood to be radically in all the world. This immanentizing impulse reverberated through the worship of the Persian empire and eventually influenced the Orphic myths of Greece. Mediated through the not-so-secular philosophy of the Greeks, the Orphic tradition came to be the natural religion of Western Civilization.
This second volume narrates the next phase in that history, starting with Renaissance Florence and its retrieval of ancient mystical, neoplatonic, and kabbalistic ideas. Axiliaty began to reassert itself as individuals turned from the Catholic establishment to a spirituality that could not be circumscribed by corrupt institutions. Here, the “Corpus Hermeticum” entered the discourse as thinkers attempted to wed its hodgepodge of mystical and philosophical beliefs with a biblical understanding of the cosmos.
With this return to ancient spirituality came an evolving conception of heaven, earth, and the human in between who, through the arts of alchemy and theurgy, could connect with the divine and participate in the healing of all things. Such was the path to personal fulfillment and the consummation of history. When the supposed thrice-greatness of Hermes was combined with the tri-partite eschatology of Joachim of Fiore (especially on the prophetic lips of a preacher like Savonarola), Christendom saw the dawn of a millenarianism that would dominate the historical and political imagination of the dawning modern age.
Horton aptly traces these developments to show how ancient Hermetic ideas undergirded a host of spiritual, political, and technological developments in the early modern era: the revolutionary excesses of the Radical Reformation, the divorce of Word and Spirit by enthusiasts, the alchemical “medicine” of Paracelsus, the utopian fever dreams of explorers like Columbus, the theosophy of Böhme, the political idolatry of Hobbes, and more.
Each in their own sphere, these figures helped to craft a popular imagination in which God was understood to be someone (or something) we find in the natural world and its historical development rather than outside and above it. To know the world is to know God. To steer history is to usher in the eschaton.
Perhaps the most illuminating phase of this narrative came in the formation and early work of the Royal Society. While it’s often supposed that modern science came about through the victory of naturalism over supernaturalism, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White’s tired narrative pitting faith against science has been thoroughly debunked.
Horton rightly sets aside that narrative to show that the real struggle was not between theism and atheism. It was between an orthodox theology of creation and providence held by the likes of Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle over against the naturalized supernaturalism of a surprisingly mystical and pantheistic Isaac Newton.
A few paragraphs can scarcely do justice to the breadth of intellectual history Horton has included in this volume. It will be no surprise to readers of his previous works that the author possesses an impressive command of both the primary and secondary sources.
But therein lies the challenge for what I assume is the average reader. While Horton writes with great clarity, the sheer breadth of the material covered will make this a demanding read for all but the keenest students of history. There is gold to be mined in these pages that will pay dividends in pastoral ministry, even if Horton could have done more to bring it up closer to the surface. To be fair, he may well plan to do so in the third volume, and I am eager to read it and find out.
As a pastor, I believe that Horton has done a service to the church by providing the receipts with which we can disrupt the common-yet-false origin stories that are used to grant secularity more influence than it deserves. The blessings of our scientific day owe more to the magical thinking of our “enlightened” forebears than most realize. The best and greatest minds of the modern era—the ones that were lauded in my public school textbooks—were not always the most rational by today’s standards. And, at least in some respects, they were better for it.
“Re-enchantment” is no devolution in human progress. Nor is it necessarily some new-age hack for dealing with secularity. It is the natural response of human beings who know that there’s got to be more to reality than molecules in motion. The “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon is not new; it reflects something constitutive about the human person.
Our God is a spirit, and we are made in his image to enjoy real communion with him. What Horton so brilliantly and helpfully shows in this book (and its predecessor) is how the pursuit of that communion throughout history has gone awry when divorced from a robustly biblical metaphysic that preserves the fundamental distinction between Creator and creation (cf. Romans 1:25).
There is only One who is divine by nature—the triune God who made all things of nothing by the word of his mouth. By grace, we are made partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), but in no sense will we ever become divine. Neither will the cosmos.
Early modernity lost the Creator by looking for him in the creation and trying to control him with magic, even under the guise of “modern” Newtonian mechanics. May we better discern the spirit of our purportedly secular age so that we can help others discover a magic that comes from before the dawn of time — one that is deeper and more wonderful than anything our sin-stricken imaginations could ever devise.
Kenny Silva serves as the Senior Pastor of Hickory Grove Presbyterian Church in Mt Juliet, Tennessee, and as a guest lecturer in systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary’s Nashville extension.