Enchantment redux
Sigh—Alan has bested me. Let me try that again.
It’s true that I was conflating enchantment in general with Christian enchantment, in order to clarify and sympathetically illumine the general trend toward spiritual re-enchantment on the part of Christians (among others). Enchantment per se is not equivalent to or coterminous with a Christian doctrine of creation: stipulated.
At the same time, I don’t find it useful to say that Christianity is disenchanting, though I agree that the claim has a long and venerable pedigree, for the same reason I don’t find it useful to say that Christianity is demythologizing, though I understand why it is an attractive proposition. Christianity from the beginning is interested—discursively and performatively—not so much in disenchanting the various purported beings and rituals that populate the all too porous reality of daily human life as it is in dethroning it. Early Christian apologetics and polemics are indeed at pains to unveil the object of pagan sacrifices—as demons, though, not as fictions. The bedrock assumption of exorcism, inasmuch as exorcism encapsulates the entire problematic of enchantment, is that the pagans are absolutely right: the world is a dark and terrifying place in which humans are constantly harassed, assaulted, and tormented by numberless, nameless hostile intelligences that cannot be stopped or silenced apart from the name and the power of Jesus Christ.
I grant entirely that part of this triumphal march of dethroning ostensibly rival powers opposed to the God of the gospel is the constant exposure and ridicule of falsehoods concerning the gods, and that the accumulating effect of this rolling process could well be described as disenchantment—culminating, perhaps, in the elimination of pagan sacrifice altogether. Yet can the Middle Ages (not to mention the early modern period!) be matched in its thoroughgoing spookiness? Put differently, and more technically, I reject the view that Weber’s Entzauberung is (a) the logical cultural endpoint of Christ’s triumph over paganism, (b) necessarily materially related to the “disenchanting” effects of the church’s discursive, liturgical, and political dethronement of rival (but all too real) gods, (c) to be welcomed theologically by contemporary Christians, or (d) any combination of the above.
To be clear, I don’t see Alan as affirming any of these. Rather, it is their confluence and imposition via secularized Western culture as unimpeachable public social norms that recent movements toward a rediscovered “enchanted cosmos” are opposing and seeking to move beyond. In a word: If the world as a matter of a fact is porous, we should (a) say so, (b) live like it, and (c) adopt Christian strategies for faithful living accordingly. Whereas if the official story is true and the world is not porous—to spirits or angels or demons or heaven or fairies or magic or aliens or whatever—then likewise we should say so and (keep) living like it, etc.
Re-enchantment, by Christians but even by others, is then an attempt to move toward reality as it is, not toward reality as modernity construes it. It may well be a scarier world to inhabit, but better to know it and do something about it than to live in denial. (This is a word for the church, by the way, not just for the individual, insofar as preaching and teaching and pastoral care today tend toward the therapeutic or functionally atheistic, thus presupposing and reinforcing the tacit perspective that parishioners are already being bombarded with each and every day.)
That, at least, is my attempt at writing what I should have written the first time, namely, my sense of what the overarching re-enchantment trend is and why I think so many Christians are, reasonably enough, latching onto it.
