Blaming Luther for Modernity

“Disenchantment” is a word and an idea that’s gotten a lot of mileage since the publication of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in 2007. And understandably so. There are lots of people who don’t feel at home in the present. Of course, in many ways they do: fast food, flush toilets, vaccines, Netflix, and other luxuries are so ubiquitous as to become necessities that we demand. And yet within our dependence upon such commodified satisfactions there is also a discontent, a latent protest in our inmost being that we are divorced from the how life should be.

The disenchantment discourse began with a famous Max Weber lecture in which the sociologist asserted that instrumental reason — rationality of a purely engineering sort, preoccupied only with profitable outcomes and the most efficient means for procuring them — had contributed to the “disenchantment of the world,” “disenchantment” being an English rendering of the German Entzauberung, which more literally describes the stripping away of magic.

Disenchantment enabled the exploitation of the natural world and of human beings, as instrumental reason recognized nothing particularly special about places or creatures. Such de-magic’ed reason viewed everything that didn’t add to the efficiency of capitalism’s profit-making and scientific development as unimportant and better left in the supposedly primitive and embarrassing past.

People who have come to recognize how much of the late modern lifeworld is alienating and devalues them sometimes propose “re-enchanting” the world as a solution. This is especially prevalent in some wings of Christianity, particularly those downstream of Roman Catholicism, those (like Charles Taylor) for whom the Reformation is the villain that sent mystery and magic and wonder packing in 1517. Suffice to say that many since A Secular Age have fallen under Taylor’s spell, laying at the feet of Martin Luther all that they find unsatisfying in modernity.

More recently, Richard Beck has launched a complaint of this sort, claiming that Luther’s doctrine of sola fide — “faith alone” — has disenchanted Christianity, and particularly the eucharist. He says, “As you know, Catholicism has a very enchanted view of the Eucharist.” “Enchanted” is made to do a lot of unspecified work here, and I can’t help but feel like Inigo Montoya. Because I don’t think that most Catholic theologians, if asked, would answer that they have an enchanted view of the Eucharist. They would assert their understanding of the Eucharist is true to what the Eucharist is. To call it “enchantment” is to magically turn Reformation slurs into commendations.

I have to call foul when a Catholic account of the Eucharist gets the appellation, “enchanted,” the same way I do when Charles Taylor baldly asserts, “Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not.” Our ancestors in 1500 didn’t understand their universe as “enchanted.” They saw it as strange, frightening, and dangerous, albeit for reasons some of us in modernity may not share.

And this is a good thing! Because it is better that Christians not fear wood-spirits and witches to the same extent they fear God. Not, to be sure, because such things don’t exist — that’s the mistake many supercilious moderns make. The reason is that faith needs to assure believers that the lordless powers afoot in our world need not be appeased in order to be safe. It is good when Christians know that there is only one Lord whom “we have to hear and obey” and whom “we have to trust and obey in life and in death” (Barmen Declaration, I).

It seems to me that many Protestant appeals to re-enchantment are often rooted in a feeling of missing out on the Great Tradition and a subsequent lumping together of ideas that are not aspects of the tradition to which they belong. That is, there is a sense of envy that leads to an uncritical and unsystematic searching for connections and implications of doctrines and practices, lumping all of it under the heading, “enchantment.”

But I don’t think this pooled assortment names anything real. Or, better, it is made up of real things that carry a meaning and import that the anxious Protestant imports to it. It is an example of what Jacques Lacan calls objet petit a, a “little-o other” that symbolizes the allure of otherness insofar as the subject represents her lack in an object. But her desire is never actually, truly that object. The anxious Protestant wants a feeling of weirdness and its attendant wonder, like a visitor to a Renaissance faire who marvels at how blacksmiths forged swords. Disenchantment, I think, is just such a phenomena.

Beck goes on to claim that “the shift toward faith in the Eucharist, and away from transubstantiation, involved what we could call an ontological-to-subjective shift in the Protestant sacramental imagination.” The little word, “faith,” here performs a sleight of hand in which the disposition of the one taking the meal becomes the only thing the meal is about. But this is most assuredly not what the Reformers proposed as an alternative, and more importantly, isn’t a necessary consequence of their revised liturgies.

Beck is right that one valence of the word “faith” is the posture of the individual in and after the encounter with God, and I am persuaded that this sense should be more determinative when discussing the life of faith. Because it is far more common to speak of faith as a measure of activity, even if that activity is mental or affective in nature. Faith in this sense is often quantified in some arbitrary manner, whereby the amount or quality of my faith is thought of as determinative for me and what I can expect of God. This is a problem, but it’s a problem non-Protestants can have just as much as Protestants and has nothing really to do with “disenchantment.”

Later, Beck expands his argument against Luther, contending, “This is how sola fide disenchanted the world. Faith was no longer a mystical and sacramental encounter with sacred realities in the world, but was reduced, instead, to psychology.”

The truer story, though, is just more complicated than the disenchantment camp presents it. And it has to be because disenchantment isn’t something new or something the Reformers invented. Plutarch, after all, wrote a dialogue in the first century AD inquiring why the oracles had fallen silent. Most famously, in this essay, one of the characters recounts of hearing someone at sea shouting, “The great god Pan is dead!” This declaration, passing along the Mediterranean, signals an immense sea change overtaking the ancient world.

I have elsewhere critiqued the disenchantment paradigm; it suffices to say here, along with Jason Josephson Storm in his monumental work, The Myth of Disenchantment, “We have never been disenchanted.”

The Taylorian disenchantment critique presumes a power to subjectivity that it otherwise laments. That is, the greatest threat to the enchanted universe is people who can reject that enchanted content and functionally replace it with another universe. There is something lacking in an account of a powerfully magical universe whose one weakness is the people who inhabit it. The same goes for a meal that, under the right conditions, transforms from one type of substance to that of the Savior’s embodiment. The question raises itself: Is the faith of the communicant really the problem when the critic concedes that that faith can unravel the “objectively enchanted” content of the thing in question?

It is not reflected upon enough in contemporary theology that, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, the crack in being is subjectivity. And this is both for ill — though this part is probably all you’ve already heard from loyally Tridentine Catholics as much as you have from Classic-Princeton-Forever True Reformed thought leaders — as well as for good. The gift of subjectivity can, indeed, fashion worlds out of the matter of the one universe we all share, such that I enter a completely different world depending on where I call home. But that is far from a matter of retreating into solipsism (which I see as largely synonymous with “reduction to psychology”); rather, it’s one of the genuineness of different worlds rooted in intersubjectivity and the malleability of the stuff of the universe. We can obstruct the real, certainly, and yet the Eucharist cannot be without us. A dog can eat bread but it cannot feed on Christ by faith.

It seems to me, therefore, that the problem some people have isn’t with faith or by extension, “faith alone,” so much as it is that the “perfect” thing they idolize — that never was real — is susceptible to change and to, well, imperfection.

This must be qualified dialectically, of course. Are there Christians for whom the Eucharist is little more than an odd departure from the usual Sunday morning fare? For whom the Lord’s Table is only something to be done because that’s what Christians are supposed to do? For whom what is ingested is only molecules of wheat and grape? Without question, yes.

And yet … does the rote obedience without tradition-derived insight make the meal any less weird? Is it not strange that even those who do not believe anything significant happens in the eating and drinking of these elements do it because they believe it is commanded by their Lord? Does this not itself testify to something deeply odd?

I say that it does. Because Beck is right: it is a matter of ontology. And precisely because it is a matter of ontology the Eucharist does what it does because it is what it is, not because of the quality or quantity of the faith with which the communicant consumes the elements. But it is at the same time true that the subject will receive more of what is there if she eats in faith, digests with her heart and soul and faith clinging to the mundane act of eating, longing for the Jesus who promised to be there to sew her up, even for a moment, in the consumption of these contemptible elements that otherwise offer nothing more than calories.

Faith must look for Christ in the Eucharist because bread and wine have no intrinsic power to convey Jesus Christ, nor do priests or elders. Christ is present when and where he chooses, and it is sheer grace that he binds himself to this pitiful meal. Faith receives the Savior in the most mundane of culinary items to whatever extent it does because faith’s lord is there. Disenchantment aids faith whenever it makes clear that it is Jesus Christ that upholds sinners, not magic. Can the faith become reduced to psychology? Certainly. But sola fide isn’t to blame. That’s just hocus pocus.