Only Ever Haunted

We don’t live in a world where one lives in fear of being cursed by their neighbor, or graveyards are to be avoided for fear of disturbing the spirits within. We live in a post-Enlightenment time dominated by powers both more and less sinister, but this bears little resemblance to the faith of ancient times. Ours is a disenchanted era, but is it all for the better? Or has something been lost that is worth retrieving?

The recent exchange between Alan Jacobs and Brad East on enchantment and disenchantment (which David Zahl linked to recently) brought to the fore important points on what exactly these words and this concept mean and most importantly, what they have to do with Jesus Christ.

Given how I wrote about disenchantment a year ago, I thought this presented an opportunity to clarify what I really mean and really am about. I think I overstated some things due to my irritation with how much work this word “disenchanted” is often made to do without adequate analysis or awareness of the idea’s history.

What is disenchantment, precisely? That’s a little complicated. There’s a widespread use of the word that describes how the world feels evacuated of meaning and magic since the Industrial Revolution and the shifts in worldview that made it possible. There are various renditions of this idea, some better and some worse, but generally there is an agreement that the world now is understood and experienced as less resonant and more sterile.[1]

L. M. Sacasas, in a recent newsletter, wrote about how disenchantment and inattentiveness are mutually reinforcing. Receptivity is key, he argued, and suggested most acutely that “enchantment is just the measure of the quality of your attention.” He noted that the word in many uses is often almost interchangeable with “wonder,” and insofar as that is so, I see no problem theologically with speaking of the world’s enchantment. Moreover, to Sacasas’ point, and not unlike what I argued last year, all things are strange and wondrous, but if we aren’t attentive to that strangeness and wondrousness, it might as well not exist at all as far as we’re concerned.

Wonder absolutely has a place in the Christian life and its end should be reverence, responsibility, and praise to God. Wonder acknowledges a dimension of otherness to the natural world, which, though we are a part of it and belong to it, there is nevertheless a surplus to it and even a gap between us and it. It is a recognition that we are surrounded by something we did not make that is the better for having a different source and interest.

The trouble — because it isn’t discussed enough — is one that Sacasas is aware of, that “enchantment” signifies more than this in the discourse bearing that name. There is Weber’s sense of instrumental reason stripping away magic and meaning, to be sure, but in most usages that I hear, “disenchantment” is freighted with metaphysics that are funded much more by Neoplatonism than they are by the incarnation and the Creator/creature distinction. This was also one of Jacobs’ points in his posts, that perceptions of vibrant unity and dazzling depth to the cosmos aren’t worth much if they do not terminate on the reign of Jesus Christ.

East is more favorable towards the language of enchantment than Jacobs is, seeing in it a revolt against an increasingly therapeutic and functionally atheistic contemporary ideology. He acknowledges Jacobs’ point that disenchantment of a sort was at work in the ancient world the moment Israel’s Scripture demoted the stars of the heavens from gods to creatures of YHWH. The nascent Christian faith later went on to confront the gods funding the empire that sought its annihilation and in time decisively swung the door shut on them.

East, however, prefers to speak of this sort of disenchantment as “dethronement”, and this is perfectly apt, as the gospel exposes the gods of our age as nothing, unworthy of our worship. Jacobs is nevertheless right, however, to identify this as disenchantment, as this exposure and demotion undoes the spell that entrances us and makes the objects of our worship seem godlike. “Enchantment” isn’t exclusively a good thing, as stories of the fae have illustrated for centuries: enchantment can also blind, inhibit, and ensnare us[2], and when it does we are in need of disenchantment.

And this is precisely what the first critics of disenchantment were targeting. Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment challenges popular accounts of disenchantment by bringing to light the inconvenient fact that many of its villains were actually highly interested in all the weirdness that the official story claims they were staunchly against. It documents the many intellectuals who, in the very heart of the supposed era of disenchantment, investigated ghosts, telepathy and telekinesis, magic, and all manner of other weird things.

More importantly though, Josephson-Storm unearths the history that these first critics were not Christians lamenting the era’s unbelief. They were figures such as Aleister Crowley and James Frazer and they mourned the decline of magic, of animism, and the old gods. They wanted something profound and powerful to believe in and practice but they did not want it to be Christianity.

The world is never lacking for gods. But while it is true that our greatest loves are our gods, it is also and no less true that there are powers behind and within these idols that are more than our inordinate love and the thing we love inordinately. There are agents, even intelligences, that trade in our alienation from God, from one another, and from ourselves, and they are rightly called demonic.

This is a sticking point for me and what prompts much of my criticism of calls for re-enchantment. I want to caution people the way Jesus does John and James when they say they want to be seated at his right and his left: “You do not know what you are asking” (Mk 10:35-38). “An ‘enchanted cosmos’ without Jesus at the absolute center of it is a terrible place to be,” Jacobs rightly concludes. It’s strange to him “how small a part Jesus plays in the current discourse about enchantment, even among people who claim to be Christians.” You who think enchantment just automatically contains or verges on Jesus, think again.

What is real about the real world is a vital component of what disenchantment and re-enchantment are ostensibly all about. A year ago I said it was good that Christians today not fear wood spirits and witches to the same extent they fear God. Not because those things are not real but because that fear is the instrument by which worship channeled its way in the medieval period. Life then wasn’t Snow White with pretty birds singing in formation everywhere peasants walked: it was a gauntlet of powers and intelligences of which they lived in fear. Though Christian faith was present, Jesus Christ was too often understood as remote from the problem, leading to a kind of magical racketeering to keep these powers at bay.

But if these things are real and Jesus Christ is subjecting every power under his feet, is there a route that is committed to none of the aforementioned errors? Certainly! “If the world as a matter of a fact is porous,” says East, “we should (a) say so, (b) live like it, and (c) adopt Christian strategies for faithful living accordingly.” I could not agree more!

I only wish that this response to the world’s porousness was not grouped with other, non-Christian attempts. “Re-enchantment, by Christians but even by others,” East writes, “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.” When this is so, I wholeheartedly endorse it. But it’s only a possibility because re-enchantment can also be a form of denial, a choice to live as though Odin is supreme or as though human beings did not require deliverance from the powers of Sin and Death. Not all re-enchantments are created equal.

Dissatisfaction with the sterility of the modern world is good, but the desire for something better is not inherently to be united with Christ, the Lord of reality as it is. I know that East knows this, but I emphasize it because I want a more explicit distinction between types of re-enchantment. The pagan Norse mystic is not moving towards reality with his re-enchantment, though he is swerving away from modernity’s (dis)enchantment.

This holds true for many proponents of a specifically Christian re-enchantment as well whenever they desire a natural theology that moves straightforwardly from below to above. What is often sought under this rubric is a relative transparency between the things of the world and the God who made them, and more than that, a stable transparency guaranteed on the creaturely side of things.

But such transparency isn’t a native feature of creatures. Such a thing is possible only in Jesus Christ through his Spirit, and it is the same kind of disclosure that makes such apparently unpromising material — the flesh of a Palestinian peasant — transparent to the being of God. That God can veil himself in created media so as to unveil himself is the prerogative of God and takes place at his initiative, not the creature’s.

Order makes all the difference. You can tell this by comparing the phrases “God is love” with “Love is God.” Love is what it is because of God, but only one of these statements is true. I want to be clearer than I have been before: God can be sensed and enjoyed and communed with through the natural world. But when this happens, it is God that makes a surface a door. Analogy flows from God to that which he has made, not vice versa. The order, the direction of fit disciplines our speech, our thought, and our affections to preserve the specificity of the God of the gospel — all of which means that a theology of the natural is needed, not a natural theology.

So which position, Jacobs’ or East’s should be adopted? Both. And not out of a lame “Let’s all be right” compromise, but because the truth is dialectical. Dialectic is necessary in a world that is more complex than pure analytical reasoning would allow, where we must, as the case requires, affirm unity in difference.

Two apt examples of this are the songs “This Is My Father’s World” and “This World Is Not My Home.” Most likely you haven’t sung both back-to-back in church before, but if you did, the effect would no doubt be jarring. While this pair may seem to be contradictory or irreconcilable, they mutually interpret each other. Both are true. We belong here even at the very same time that “here” is alien to us. The way we are does not belong here and it rubs against the grain of the universe. The truth of the world is such that only one or the other statement on their own as all-encompassing declarations would be false. Each tells a partial truth, one that is wholly false if it is not paired with the other.

Living in reality means affirming this dialectical interplay whereby the world is full of wonder, open to the Spirit, and also in the thrall of anti-God powers: the world is lovely and dark and frightening all at once. This demands we do the hard work of identifying the gods that rule our lifeworld, and more than that, that we smash the idols that enchant us and keep us preoccupied from the real world.

There are competing calls within the matter of our world, and unfortunately only one receptivity is natural to us: the one that shuts out God and instead enthrones something, anything else. Receptivity to God on the human side is the achievement of the God-Man. We should be attentive to God reaching out to us within the world, but we must be on guard against making what we like most about the world into God. What’s more, we must not pretend that a magical world without Christ at the center is anything other than a nightmare.

Do I think disenchantment is good? I should have said it depends on what disenchantment you mean. As I’ve become fond of saying, our world is only ever haunted: by ghoulies and ghosties but also by the Christ who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is more to our cosmos than secular gatekeepers would admit, but all of it isn’t good. Jesus Christ is, and that is enchantment enough.