Ancient-Modern Philosophy: George Berkeley and the Reenchantment of the World

Abstract

Christians from a number of fields have identified Modern philosophy as the cause of serious problems in the contemporary world, especially for the Christian doctrine of God. Modernity in various ways disenchanted the world, but they propose to reenchant it by retrieving early Christian Platonism. In this paper, it is argued that George Berkeley offers an alternative for reenchanting the world, not through the rejection of Modernity but through a Christian Modernity which seizes on the best insights of both ancient and modern philosophy, under the guidance of God’s self-revelation, to present a world infused with the governing activity of the Transcendent God.