ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates on the central issue in Part I, whether reenchantment is best expressed in theistic or in secular terms. In that perspective, it challenges the idea, common to many contemporary debates, that the transition from a premodern order to the modern world can be seen as part of a univocal and progressive disenchantment of Western culture, whereby religion simply falls away, to be replaced by science and rationality. Instead, it focuses on six different shades of meaning, related to as divergent domains as those of cosmology, ethics, epistemology, and religion in the field of genealogical research as to the concepts of enchantment/disenchantment. Next, the complex debate between historians, sociologists, and philosophers on the genesis of a disenchanted world and on the status of the Weberian position is presented. Against the background of this debate, the genealogical link between the religious search for transcendence and the process of disenchantment is assessed. Building on the discussion between Taylor and Bilgrami, it is concluded not only that the Christian notion of agapeic transcendence has been too quickly abandoned in the process of disenchantment, but that the retrieval of this notion is essential to understanding the very meaning of reenchantment in a secular world.
