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.

Enchantment

I completely understand Alan’s lack of interest in and general nonchalance toward “enchantment” and “re-enchantment.” His warnings are well taken, and his ambivalence is warranted, and his charity toward those for whom the concept or phenomenon is important is appreciated.

I have a review of Rod Dreher’s new book on the same theme coming out next month in Christianity Today, so I won’t say much more here except the following.

There are many faddish, superficial, and a-Christian ways of deploying “enchantment” as a term or penumbra of loosely connected ideas, feelings, even vibes. But let me offer a modest definition of the term in the way that I use it, interpret it, and (I think) find it employed by others—from professors to pastors to laypeople.

“Disenchantment” names a false apprehension of reality. Imposed by the ambient secular culture, it proposes the world as fundamentally meaningless, chaotic, and godless, and therefore inert or plastic before the constructions and manipulations of rational man. We are alone; miracles are myths; angels and demons are fictions; dreams and visions are disclosive of nothing but our own psyches; numinous encounters are either harmless or signs of a broken or sick mind. Man is the measure of all things and the world is what we make of it. Meaning is imposed and autonomy is the first and last law of reality.

Given this stipulated definition, enchantment or re-enchantment is its inversion: a true apprehension of reality as it actually is: the fallen but good handiwork of a loving Creator; the recipient of his lasting care and unfailing providence; the medium of astonishing beauty; the impress of his grace; the theater of glory as well as of suffering; the audience of the incarnation; the vehicle for the eventual final epiphany of God become flesh. Here, in this cosmos of the Spirit, truth is discovered and disclosed, communication lies at the heart of things, and the grain of reality is compassion and mercy, not brute violence. The numinous is not psychotic, it is to be expected—if not to be sought, since this world is the haunt not only of angels but also of demons. You and I live our small and out of the way lives as bit parts in the grand drama of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, the triumph of the former secured but not yet manifest. Join which side you will.

In my experience, people talking about or yearning for enchantment feel belittled, bedeviled, and beaten down by disenchantment. They feel condescended to, coerced into pretending that life is nothing but atoms and energy, when they know in their bones the open secret that this world is charged with the grandeur of God. They don’t want to invite evil spirits into their homes. They just don’t want to be made to feel crazy for believing in what cannot be seen. And given that Christianity is by definition a faith in what cannot be seen, it seems straightforward that disenchantment is, at a minimum, non- or anti-Christian and that enchantment is apt to reality, and therefore to the gospel, in a way that disenchantment is not. Put differently, disenchantment makes believing in Christ and following him harder, because every given social norm screams that it’s irrational, insane, and masochistic. But we don’t want a social imaginary built on the lie that there is no God, that this world is all there is, that any hint or echo or sense or experience of the invisible, the mystical, the transcendent is nothing but the mind’s projection of daily life onto the screen of eternity.

Hence the turn to re-enchantment. The foregoing is by no means a full-bore apologia. But it is a sympathetic explanation and a defining of terms that, I think, makes some sense of the trend, such as it is. Where it leads, if anything, is anyone’s guess.