Le Monde des religions, July-August 2005.
Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, The Lord of the Rings, The Alchemist: the greatest literary and cinematic successes of the last decade have one thing in common: they fulfill our need for wonder. Strewn with sacred enigmas, magic formulas, strange phenomena, and terrible secrets, they satisfy our taste for mystery, our fascination with the unexplained. For this is precisely the paradox of our ultramodern age: the more science progresses, the more we need dreams and myths. The more the world seems decipherable and rationalizable, the more we seek to restore its magical aura. We are currently witnessing an attempt to re-enchant the world… precisely because the world has been disenchanted. Carl Gustav Jung offered an explanation half a century ago: human beings need reason as much as emotion, science as much as myth, arguments as much as symbols. Why? Quite simply because we are not beings of reason alone. He also connects to the world through his desires, his feelings, his heart, his imagination. He is nourished by dreams as much as by logical explanations, by poetry and legends as much as by objective knowledge. The error of European scientism, inherited from the 19th century (more so than from the Enlightenment), was to deny this. It was believed that the irrational part of humanity could be eradicated and that everything could be explained according to Cartesian logic. Imagination and intuition were scorned. Myth was relegated to the status of a children's fable. The Christian churches partly followed suit with this rationalist critique. They privileged a dogmatic and normative discourse—appealing to reason—at the expense of transmitting an inner experience—linked to the heart—or symbolic knowledge that speaks to the imagination.
We are therefore witnessing a return of the repressed. Dan Brown's readers are primarily Christians who seek in his esoteric thrillers the mystery, myth, and symbolism they no longer find in their churches. Fans of The Lord of the Rings, like avid readers of Bernard Werber, are often young adults with a strong scientific and technical background, but who are also searching for fantastical worlds inspired by mythologies other than those of our religions, from which they have distanced themselves considerably.
Should we be worried about this resurgence of myth and wonder? Certainly not, as long as it doesn't, in turn, constitute a rejection of reason and science. Religions, for example, should place greater emphasis on this need for emotion, mystery, and symbolism, without abandoning the depth of their moral and theological teachings. Readers of The Da Vinci Code can be moved by the magic of fiction and the great myths of esotericism (the secret of the Templars, etc.) without taking the author's theses at face value and rejecting historical knowledge in the name of a completely fictional conspiracy theory. In other words, it's all a question of finding the right balance between desire and reality, emotion and reason. Human beings need wonder to be fully human, but they mustn't mistake their dreams for reality.
Le Monde des religions, July-August 2005.