In a beautifully written and well argued essay for Plough,
made the argument that Christians who have been pining for re-enchantment have actually been causing further spiritual emptiness and, in some cases, leading to demonic forces:If the widespread calls for re-enchantment tell us anything, it is that people feel a sense of hollowness and spiritual hunger in the contemporary world. Re-enchantment may seem like the answer to this hunger, but on closer inspection, it turns out that re-enchantment contributes to this same hollowness. We cannot slake our thirst for spiritual things by projecting our desires onto the natural world, and offering people something that may or may not be reality will not satisfy sincere spiritual hunger. And there is real danger in seeking out enchantment for the sake of enchantment, danger that we may stumble on a magic we can’t control; in seeking to enchant we may find ourselves bewitched.
Instead, Clarkson calls us to remember that we don’t “re” enchant the world. The world as creation is always already enchanted. It’s our job just to open our eyes. We just have to have the discernment to open our eyes to the right things:
After all, the world is not disenchanted. Whatever meaning and spiritual potency was in the world remains in it. It is only the quality of our attention that has changed. In pursuit of a meaningful life in a spiritually impoverished time, we should seek not the enchantments of the magicians of Egypt, but the pillar of fire, which leads us out of darkness and into the Promised Land.
It seems to me that one basic way of thinking of enchantment in the contemporary world is as opposed to spiritual desiccation and the loss of meaning.
There are a collection of experiences that tend to journey together: a disconnection from the natural world, alienation from other humans, the sense that all the most profound human emotions are merely chemical reactions in the brain, the mediation of all experiences through screens and measurements, the feeling that spiritual forces are mute, the feeling that the Lord’s Supper is exclusively a psychological exercise, and so on. What all these experiences have in common are muteness and loss, the sense that there is nothing out there able to connect and affect us. In Charles Taylor’s language, that we are “buffered selves” living in the “immanent frame.”
Of course there are plenty of people who experience things beyond this frame, who experience some kind of connection or what Hartmut Rosa calls resonance with the world. But not all of them are healthy. For example, there is a magic shop just down the street from my house that has been in business for 30 years selling crystals and tarot cards and other occult nonsense. I suspect their customers have felt something of a connection rather than only muteness (even if demonic), but I also suspect that for many of them it’s also a lifestyle option and form of entertainment. Something they self-consciously imagine themselves acting as if it were a spiritual connection, rather than merely being a spiritual connection.
But my larger point is that if disenchantment refers primarily to this sense of muteness and loss, then we still should desire enchantment, properly understood. Because enchantment, Christian enchantment looks like the recognition of the createdness of being, the image of God in humanity, objectivity of justice in God, the foundation of love, and the sacredness of the sacred, among other things. It means there there is something out there beyond (but not excluding) our synapses.
And I think even the most religious of us is likely to forget this truth, that we live in a created reality, given our contemporary experience of the world. With concrete under our feet and screens mediating our vision of the world and supply chains distancing us from fields and pastures, we feel the loss of something real. Life feels plastic and artificial.
Gerard Manley Hopkins gets at this in his great poem, “God’s Grandeur”:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
For Hopkins, the world is always already enchanted, “charged with the grandeur of God.” However, people still do not “reck his rod,” they don’t acknowledge Christ’s Cross. Why is that? Well, in part Hopkins suggests, it’s because “all is seared with trade.” Our commercial enterprises have taken us away from the reality of God and into greed. And those enterprises have directly led to the degradation of the land. But notice the last line in the first stanza: “nor can foot feel, being shod.” Our feet can’t feel creation because of our shoes. There’s a disconnect, Hopkins suggests, between humanity and God’s creation because of the industrial creations of humans.
How much more is this true today with our technology? And yet, the second stanza brings hope: “And for all this, nature is never spent.” In other words, despite our efforts to abuse the natural world and to distance ourselves from creation and to disenchant the world and deny the grandeur of God, it’s always there!
The challenge for Christians is to pursue the right kind of enchantment, an orientation toward the world that is ordered by God and his truth. Clarkson points out, rightly, that Christianity was also a force of disenchantment, denouncing the pagan gods as nothing but mute metal and stone and wood. Still today we have a disenchanting role to play in reminding the world that their idols are mute. But we also have an obligation to see the world as created by God, as governed by God’s providence, as peopled by humans made in God’s image, as filled with real beauty. The world is not mute because it it testifies to the goodness of the Creator.
Part of this enchantment, I believe, is coming to see the order in creation which God has put there for us to live in according to our good and his will. Rather than see the universe as mute about matters of sexuality, for example, we see creation testifying to the rightness of marriage between a man and a woman.
All of this to say, I think Clarkson is right, that we need to seek the enchantment of the “the pillar of fire, which leads us out of darkness and into the Promised Land.” I do think language of “re-enchantment” is problematic because we have always lived in God’s grandeur. But I do think that language of disenchantment is helpful at describing a general feeling of muteness and loss that is common to many contemporary people, and has been for a very long time.
Few contemporary people psychologically stay aware of this muteness and loss, as I understand it. They tend to divert themselves, engage in thin spiritual practices like TikTok tarot card readings, or overstimulate themselves. But it’s there.
It’s our obligation as Christians to both disenchant the idols of the world and show God’s grandeur for what it is, the beauty of creation and the goodness of his will for our lives, the wonder of the human face which has meaning because God designed it, and the significance of justice in a world of chaos. There is something out there, there is Someone. And he loves us. And because he created us and sustains us, our lives have meaning and purpose. Creation speaks; it testifies of his goodness. That’s what we must fight to remember.
Love Gerard Manley Hopkins.