The Age of Faith

In 1651, in the aftermath of a century of religious war, Thomas Hobbes set out to end the age of faith. Leviathan proposed to replace the quarrelsome authority of priests and prophets with a single secular sovereign, and it did so by recasting the human being as a piece of machinery: man as matter in motion, the commonwealth as an artificial man, sovereignty itself as an artificial soul giving life to the whole. Hobbes stands at the dawn of the disenchanted West, the world we have inhabited for roughly two and a half centuries. The wheel he set turning has nearly closed its arc. The order he inaugurated, the Age of Reason, the industrial age, and what the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin called the Sensate age, is exhausting itself across every domain at once, and the signature of that exhaustion is the return of faith. By faith I mean something broad, the return of the transcendent, the search for meaning beyond material progress, the slow re-enchantment of a world that three centuries of…