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.

I’m in FT on Andrew Root and “the church in the immanent frame”

Today First Things published my review of Andrew Root’s new book, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age. Here’s how the review opens:

If there is one thing everyone agrees about in America, it is that churches are in decline. Agnosticism and apostasy have, as ideas and as habits, been trickling down from Western elites for three centuries. First they came for the mainline; then they came for Catholics; now they have come for evangelicals. The “nones” are rising and long-time parishes are shuttering. One hears of consultants being brought in to help local churches “die well.” Even in the Bible Belt, for every thriving congregation there are five on hospice care.

Andrew Root’s new book is therefore a timely one. Titled Churches and the Crisis of Decline, it speaks directly to churches and pastors looking to survive, if not thrive, in a time of disorienting collapse. The book offers a theological vision for faithful pastoral ministry and church life that draws upon the writings of a young Swiss pastor who lived in similarly trying times a century ago: Karl Barth. Root wants us to see Barth’s theology—especially his commentary on Romans—as pastoral above all: that is, written by a minister for ministers tasked with the proclamation of the gospel and the care of a congregation. Just as St. Thomas wrote the Summa Theologiae for the practical tasks of his fellow Dominicans, so Barth wrote the bullet-stopping volumes of the Kirchliche Dogmatik for fellow preachers of God’s word. Rather than leave Barth to the systematicians, Root wants to reclaim him for the pastors.

Click here to read the rest.

On pastors embarrassed to say the great word “God”

Inside the immanent frame, there is a sneaky temptation for the pastor. She is often tempted, and somehow invisibly formed, to take God less seriously than her people do. The pastor can feel embarrassed to say the great word “God” or to even see the word “God” as a great word. Inside the invisible immanent frame, the word “God” feels meaningless, even immature. The pastor feels the temptation to run the congregation as a small business, even a little self-conscious of all the enchantment and dogma. But her people, who more directly bear the contradictions of modernity, and at times spit out the dry sawdust of the immanent frame, yearn to know that God has a purpose for their lives. They yearn to know that God can still speak. Secretly, and maybe with a little shame, the pastor finds herself doubting this, wanting at least one foot to rest squarely inside modernity, fearing she’ll be overtaken by superstition. The moral vision of immanence becomes more tempting for her than for her people.

—Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (2022), 31. Preach, brother.

Turning back the clock

In the last six weeks I’ve read three different books that all makes disparaging reference to “turning back the clock.” By disparaging I mean that they repudiate the usual use to which the cliché is put. Noticing the shared rhetorical move between these works, spread across about four decades in the first half of the twentieth century, made me wonder how common a trope this is for Christian and especially conservative writers in the last hundred or so years. Do share if you know some other ones.

Here’s the first. From G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World (1910):

There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

Next comes C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1941–44; rev. 1952):

You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say; but if it turns out to be only religion, well, the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back. If anyone is feeling that way I should like to say three things to him.

First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. We have all seen this when we do arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

Finally, Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948):

Whoever argues for a restoration of values is sooner or later met with the objection that one cannot return, or as the phrase is likely to be, “you can't turn the clock back.” By thus assuming that we are prisoners of the moment, the objection well reveals the philosophic position of modernism. The believer in truth, on the other hand, is bound to maintain that the things of highest value are not affected by the passage of time; otherwise the very concept of truth becomes impossible. In declaring that we wish to recover lost ideals and values, we are looking toward an ontological realm which is timeless. Only the sheerest relativism insists that passing time renders unattainable one ideal while forcing upon us another. Therefore those that say we can have the integration we wish, and those who say we cannot, differ in their ideas of ultimate reality, for the latter are positing the primacy of time and of matter. And this is the kind of division which prevents us from having one world.

Now the return which the idealists propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically. They are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth. They are making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight from this toward periphery. It is expressible, also, as a movement from unity to individualism. In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them. A recovery of certain viewpoints associated with the past would be a recovery of understanding as such, and this, unless we admit ourselves to be helpless in the movement of a deterministic march, is possible at any time. In brief, one does not require a particular standpoint to comprehend the timeless. Let us remember all the while that the very notion of eternal verities is repugnant to the modern temper.

I imagine there are many, many more where these come from. Anti-modern, conservative, and reactionary writers adore Chesterton, Lewis, and Weaver. Perhaps someone else has already collected the further quotes and riffs they spawned. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more.

Louis Dupré on symbolism and ontology in religious language

Religious language must, by its very nature, be symbolic: its referent surpasses the objective universe. Objectivist language is fit only to signify things in a one-dimensional universe. It is incapable of referring to another level of reality, as art, poetry, and religion do. Rather than properly symbolizing, it establishes external analogies between objectively conceived realities. Their relation is allegorical rather than symbolic. A truly symbolic relation must be grounded in Being itself. Nothing exposes our religious impoverishment more directly than the loss of the ontological dimension of language. To overcome this, poets and mystics have removed their language as far as possible from everyday speech.

In premodern traditions, language remained closer to the ontological core which all things share and which intrinsically links them to one another. Symbols thereby participated in the very Being of what they symbolized, as they still do in great poetry. Religious symbols re-presented the divine reality: they actually made the divine present in images and metaphors. The ontological richness of the participatory presence of a truly symbolic system of signification appeared in the original conception of sacraments, rituals, icons, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

The nominalism of the late Middle Ages resulted in a very different representation of the creature's relation with God. The world no longer appears as a divine expression except in the restricted sense of expressing the divine will. Finite reality becomes separated from its Creator. As a result, creatures have lost not only their intrinsic participation in God's Being but also their ontological communion with one another. Their relation becomes defined by divine decree. Nominalism not only has survived the secularization of modern thought, but has became radicalized in our own cybernetic culture, where symbols are reduced to arbitrary signs in an intramundane web of references, of which each point can be linked to any other point. The advantages of such a system need no proof: the entire scientific and technical functioning of contemporary society depends on it. At the same time, the modern mind's capacity for creating and understanding religious symbols has been severely weakened. Symbols have become man-made, objective signs, serviceable for making any reality part of a system without having to be part of that reality.

Recent theologians have attempted to stem the secular tide. Two of them did so by basically rethinking the relation between nature and grace, the main causes of today's secularism. Henri de Lubac undertook a historical critique of the modern separation of nature and supernatural. Not coincidentally, he also wrote a masterly literary study on religious symbolism before the nominalist revolution. In a number of works Hans Urs von Balthasar developed a theology in which grace, rather than being added to nature as a supernatural accident, constitutes the very depth of the mystery of Being. Being is both immanent and transcendent. Grace consists in its transcendent dimension. Whenever a poet, artist, or philosopher penetrates into the mystery of existence, he or she reveals an aspect of divine grace. Not only theology but also art and poetry, even philosophy, thereby regain a mystical quality, and religion resumes its place at the heart of human reality.

No program of theological renewal can by itself achieve a religious restoration. To be effective a theological vision requires a recognition of the sacred. Is the modern mind still capable of such a recognition? Its fundamental attitude directly conflicts with the conditions necessary for it. First, some kind of moral conversion has become indispensable. The immediate question is not whether we confess a religious faith, or whether we live in conformity with certain religious norms, but whether we are of a disposition to accept any kind of theoretical or practical direction coming from a source other than the mind itself. Such a disposition demands that we be prepared to abandon the conquering, self-sufficient state of mind characteristic of late modernity. I still believe in the necessity of what I wrote at an earlier occasion: "What is needed is a conversion to an attitude in which existing is more than taking, acting more than making, meaning more than function—an attitude in which there is enough leisure for wonder and enough detachment for transcendence. What is needed most of all is an attitude in which transcendence can be recognized again."

—Louis Dupré, Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture (2008), 115-117

Scruton, Eagleton, Scialabba, et al—why don't they convert?

The question is a sincere one, and in no way facetious. Roger Scruton, Terry Eagleton, and George Scialabba represent an older generation of thinkers and writers who take religion, Christianity, and theology seriously, and moreover ridicule or at least roll their eyes at its cultured despisers (like the so-called New Atheists). And there are others like them.

Yet it is never entirely clear to me why they themselves are not Christians, or at least theists of one sort or another. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton refers vaguely to "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." In his review of Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things, Scialabba remarks that, for neuroscientists, "the metaphysical sense" of the soul is a "blank," and asks further, "wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?" (Surely an affirmative answer to this spare hypothetical depends wholly on a shared premise that already presumes against the claims of revelation?) My sense is that Eagleton is something of a principled agnostic perhaps, though I've by no means read either his work or the others' exhaustively. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Scruton, as a philosopher, has addressed this question head-on. And Scialabba belongs explicitly to a tradition of thought that believes "metaphysics" to have been descredited once and for all.

But why? I mean: What are the concrete reasons why these specific individuals reject the claims of either historic Christianity or classical theism or some other particular religious tradition? Is it theodicy? Is it "science" (but that seems unlikely)? Is it something about the Bible, the exposures of historical criticism perhaps? Is it something about belief in the spiritual or transcendent as such?

I'm genuinely interested. Nothing would be more conducive to mutual learning between believers and nonbelievers, or to theological reflection on the part of Christians, than understanding the actual reasons why such learned and influential thinkers reject the claims of faith, or at least hold them at arm's length.

I suppose the hunch I harbor—which I don't intend pejoratively, but which animates why I ask—is that there do not exist articulable robust moral or philosophical reasons "why not," but only something like Scruton's phrase above: they, and others like them, are "those for whom the passing of God from the world is felt as a reality." But is that enough? If so, why? Given the world's continued recourse to and reliance on faith, and a sufficient number of thoughtful, educated, and scholarly believers (not to mention theologians!) in the secularized West, it seems to me that an account of the "why not" is called for and would be richly productive.

But then, maybe all of them have done just this, and I speak from ignorance of their answers. If so, I readily welcome being put in my place.

Update: A kind reader on Twitter pointed me to this essay by Scialabba: "An Honest Believer," Agni (No. 26, 1988). It's lovely, and gives you a good deal of Scialabba's intellectual and existential wrestling with his loss of Catholic faith in his 20s. I confess I remain, and perhaps forever will be, perplexed by the ubiquitous, apparently self-evident reference to "modern/ity" as a coherent and self-evidently true and good thing to be/embrace; but that is neither here nor there at the moment.

John Webster on the perennial nature of the intellect's depravity

"[W]e would be unwise to think of the depravity of the intellect as a peculiarly modern occurrence, a collateral effect of the naturalization of our view of ourselves. It assumes peculiar modern forms, such as the association of the intellect with pure human spontaneity and resistance to the idea that the movement of the mind is moved by God. But these are instances of perennial treachery; if our intellects are depraved, it is not because we are children of Scotus or Descartes or Kant, but because we are children of Adam."

—John Webster, God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology—Volume II, Virtue and Intellect (T&T Clark, 2016), 147