If the first part was a diagnosis, this is the path home. If disenchantment thinned our faith, then beauty and transcendence are how God thickens it again. If the church drifted into quiet heresy by losing its wonder, then the way back to orthodoxy is through the restoration of awe.
We will not recover our depth through fear. We will not recover our life through better arguments. We will not recover our centre by defending the truth more loudly.
The world does not need louder Christians. It needs Christians who can see again.
The way back to orthodoxy is through beauty and transcendence. Not as decoration. Not as aesthetic sugar. But as revelation.
Because beauty does what argument alone cannot do.
Beauty wounds us with the presence of God. Beauty opens the heart where logic cannot enter. Beauty re-baptises the imagination and returns the world to its sacred density.
The early church knew this.
The mystics knew this.
The Celtic saints knew this.
The desert elders knew this.
Lewis and Tolkien knew this.
Dostoevsky reminds us that beauty will save the world.
Balthasar wrote millions of words insisting that the glory of God is the beauty of Christ.
And somewhere in our modern scramble for relevance, we forgot it.
Beauty Is Not Optional for Faith
Beauty is not a luxury. Beauty is a mode of truth. A lens. A form of perception through which the soul recognises the presence of God.
Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World argues that the world is meant to be a sacrament, a holy sign of divine life. Not a symbol, but a real participation in God.
Hans Balthasar, in his first volume of The Glory of the Lord, insists that beauty is the language in which God speaks creation into being. Beauty is not one of God’s hobbies. Beauty is what God is like.
Lewis, in The Weight of Glory, said that beauty wounds us because it awakens a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy. It whispers of another world, the real one, the one we ache toward.
Tolkien, in On Fairy Stories, said that beauty is “joy beyond the walls of the world,” the sudden rupture of grace in the mundane.
Beauty is the crack in the ceiling where transcendence shines through.
A faith without beauty becomes thin.
A church without beauty becomes functional.
A Christianity without beauty becomes a quiet heresy.
We were not meant to survive on abstract ideas.
We were meant to be pierced by splendour.
Transcendence Is Not Escape
Transcendence does not pull us out of the world. It returns us to the world with new eyes.
Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane said that transcendence gives the world depth. It does not remove us from reality but roots us more deeply in it. It breaks the illusion that matter is empty and reminds us that creation is a burning bush.
David Bentley Hart in The Experience of God says that transcendence is what gives the world its intelligibility, its weight, its mystery. Without transcendence, the world collapses into flatness, and faith collapses with it.
Transcendence is the awakening of the soul to the fact that the world is alive.
It is what the disciples felt when Christ broke the bread in Emmaus.
It is what Moses felt when the bush burned.
It is what Jacob felt when he woke and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.”
Transcendence is not the departure of God. It is the discovery that God was here the whole time.
Re-enchantment Begins With Attention
The problem is not that God left.
The problem is that we stopped paying attention.
Evelyn Underhill in Mysticism said that the spiritual life begins with “the art of seeing.” Not with exotic visions, but with simple awareness. The slow opening of the inner eye.
Attention is prayer.
Attention is reverence.
Attention is the beginning of worship.
Simone Weil called attention “the purest form of generosity.”
The Psalms call it “beholding.”
Jesus called it “eyes to see.”
To re-enchant faith is to learn to pay attention again.
To the shimmer of light on water.
To the quiet dignity of bread on a table.
To the holiness of a sigh.
To the presence that fills the room in stillness.
This is transcendence in the ordinary.
This is sacrament.
This is the recovery of the world.
Why Beauty Heals the Church
Beauty heals because beauty unifies. It takes fragmented hearts and pulls them toward a single point. It gathers our desires and raises them toward God.
Beauty also humbles us. It pulls us out of our frantic self importance. It dethrones our obsession with control. It interrupts our strategies and reminds us that we are dust and glory at once.
Beauty also awakens longing.
Longing is the doorway to God.
Lewis argued that longing is the signature of God written inside the soul. Zahnd puts it simply: “Beauty calls us home.”
And beauty heals because beauty is truthful. It reveals what is real in a way that ideas alone cannot. It shows us what goodness looks like, not just what goodness means.
A church that returns to beauty returns to God.
Sacrament Is the Framework of Re-Enchantment
If beauty is the spark, sacrament is the structure.
Schmemann argued that the world is meant to be received as communion. Boersma in Heavenly Participation expands this idea: creation is sacramental because it participates in God’s being.
This means:
Water is not just water.
Bread is not just bread.
Wine is not just wine.
The world is not just itself.
Everything is charged with God.
This was the worldview of the early Christians. They saw the world as a vast cathedral and believed that every created thing carried the trace of its Maker.
We lost this.
But we can recover it.
Re-enchantment is not the invention of something new.
It is the restoration of something ancient.
The world was enchanted long before we arrived.
We simply need to wake up to it.
Beauty Re-Baptises the Imagination
Re enchantment requires the baptism of the imagination.
Lewis said imagination is “the organ of meaning.”
Tolkien said imagination is how we perceive truth through story.
Hart says imagination is the doorway to the infinite.
The modern church mistrusted imagination.
It became suspicious of anything that felt too mysterious, too beautiful, too creative.
But imagination is not the enemy of orthodoxy. Imagination is how orthodoxy becomes visible.
Imagination lets doctrine breathe.
Imagination lets theology sing.
Imagination lets Scripture open like a world instead of a manual.
To re-enchant faith is to re baptise the imagination in wonder.
Transcendence Makes Orthodoxy Alive Again
Orthodoxy is not a set of correct answers.
Orthodoxy is the right way of seeing God.
And we cannot see God rightly without transcendence.
Without transcendence, doctrines become slogans.
Without transcendence, worship becomes noise.
Without transcendence, mission becomes marketing.
Transcendence is what keeps orthodoxy from becoming brittle.
Beauty is what keeps orthodoxy from becoming cold.
Together they return orthodoxy to its true nature:
a living vision of the living God.
What Re Enchantment Looks Like in Practice
Re enchantment is not a new program. It is a posture.
It looks like:
Lighting a candle before prayer.
Receiving the Eucharist slowly.
Walking in silence at dusk.
Reading Scripture as a world rather than a text.
Blessing your children with real hands and real words.
Singing without watching the clock.
Naming beauty as revelation.
Letting awe interrupt your certainty.
Letting mystery be mystery.
Letting God be God.
It is not complicated.
It is simply a return to attention, reverence, and wonder.
The Church Will Be Healed by Beauty
We have tried everything else.
We tried being relevant.
We tried being impressive.
We tried being loud.
We tried being clever.
We tried being strategic.
We tried being modern.
None of it saved us.
None of it brought back awe.
None of it made the world thick again.
Beauty will.
Transcendence will.
The recovery of sacrament will.
The return of mystery will.
Because the soul was made for wonder.
And a church that cannot wonder cannot be orthodox.
The way back to orthodoxy is through beauty and transcendence.
Scribbling Theology 