“This Can’t Be All There Is”: Spirituality under the Immanent Frame

The essay discusses whether it makes sense to understand “the malaises of secularness” as historically unprecedented expressions of human spirituality. To this end, it starts from the broader context – our western secular age – to outline an (updated) account of secularization, both as cultural innovation (break-through) and as soft pressure (break-down) to foster the mundane realm of flourishing (fullness as saturation or satiety). The second part of the essay investigates the modern challenges to this new common sense, which, on closer inspection, appears both resilient and malleable. In particular, it focuses on the persistence of the idea of Higher Flourishing and how, within the Immanent Frame, this thrust towards “moreness” gives rise to practices and imaginaries of downward transcendence or, to use the terminology employed in the essay, of "hyper-resonance" with ordinary enchantments.