An essay like this comes too late, like Athena's Owl that only takes off at dusk, when a fad-phenomenon is already at its dusk.
Evangelicals spent 20 or so years, wasted, trying to restore a pre-modern vision in a modern world. The drab decay of Capitalism and the Demon of Mammon had made Man materialistic and individualistic, lost and lonely in this fragmenting and alienating world. As the claim goes, what Christianity lost (cribbing from Etienne Gilson's dubious historical reconstruction) was its sense of the mystical and divine. The "Christian-Platonic Synthesis" (popularized by Hans Boersma) persevered in Medieval Europe, creating the glory of Christendom. However bad-guys inexplicably appeared, as the snake crept into Eden. Scotus introduced seeds of univocity, which were fully exploited by the Nominalists of Occam's breed. These poured into the Reformation (or at least parts of it, maybe by mistake), which then formed the Modern West, which brought about the boogeymen (incidentally shared with the average DemSoc leftist) of Capitalism, Individualism, Consumerism, Bourgeois Ethics, and so on. The pedigree of each of these concepts is taken as a given, as if Weber's Benjamin Franklin is still a model for today's Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, let alone Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab (who inexplicably keeps a bust of Lenin). But let us leave off the genealogical criticism for a moment. Instead, the solution to this alienation is to retvrn to a pre-modern conception of the world, where magic and enchantment creep through every forest and river. Scorn is heaped upon the average Baptist Evangelical, who turns church into a commercial and consumer experience, looking simultaneously for emotive explosions and arid intellectual sermonizing. Liturgy, it turns out, is the solution to reverse the tide. If we only sat through something like Gothic ritual, whether the Latin mass or a salad-bar of DIY church experience, we may begin to recover a sense of the holy and numinous.
Before I continue, I would like to say that I was tempted with this belief. The majesty of certain aesthetics seems impressive, though one must wonder why so many seemingly abandoned these without a shred of memory of what was lost. Was the West really in the clutches of demons, that ruined it (even as the 3rd world was "doing better")? The most obvious crack came when James KA Smith, who built a career of writing a trilogy of re-liturgizing Human life, admitted that his entire project was overthrown by the baptism scene in The Godfather, where Michael Corleone is steeped in the richness of Tridentine liturgy, renouncing the devil, as he orchestrated the murder of his competitors. Why had the Latin mass failed? And more importantly, why did so many Roman Catholics toss it to the curb when Vatican II began the process of replacement. For a laity steeped in such a grand tradition, how did it get overthrown in a night? Was it really just a cabal of German liberals who orchestrated a revolutionary coup? Why didn't the liturgy prepare the laity for a fight?
I never found any of these grandiose visions persuasive. Additionally, these all severely gut any substantive Protestant theology (as well as the raison d'être for the same), which explains why many of these people find themselves swimming the Tiber, the Bosporous, or awkwardly resituate on the heavily besieged/decayed Canterbury and Wittenberg trails. Again, I am not entirely averse to the shopping mall architecture of aged Seeker Sensitive churches, or the Walmart liturgies of many non-denomination brands. I am someone who has been generally in agreement with the Federal Vision criticism of contemporary [Reformed] Protestantism, and the need to recover a proper sense of the sacraments that the Reformers themselves had. But this must dove-tail with a proper analysis of contemporary woes. Can the above re-enchantment mythicists explain why, in early America, Methodists and Baptists (not Episcopalians or Catholics) exploded among the native American population? These were camp-revivalists, grass-roots lay-led preachers, and yet it was the re-evangelization of an American population whose Christianity withered. The America that produced Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay was far less Christian than the America that produced Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland. Obviously, the piety of the average Traditionalist likely quails before a Fundy-adjacent Baptist grandma. So what went wrong?
The truth is that the Evangelical argument of the 2000s and 2010s has all been tried before ("nothing is new under the sun"). Modernists in the Early Twentieth Century felt the pressure of ecclesiastical unity around their Social Gospel vision. If doctrine was to be placed in the liberal "live and let live" box, then what exactly held churches together? Their worship! The wrong (but repeated) mantra of Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi seemed to offer a way forward to unite the various Western Protestant churches (as well as Rome). That is likely the reason why so many Mainline churches adopted Gothic architecture and the lowest level of Roman vestments (stole, chasuble, cassock), so unity would be easier. Ritualism, which put aside Reformation dogma, dovetailed with a Modernism. The result was the growing decay of any sense of wonder, especially as the horrors of the Twentieth Century imposed themselves, as well as the growing skepticism around Socialism and Communism.
Post-Liberalism attempted to recover "catholicity" through a refocus on liturgical traditions and ancient dogma. Lindbeck and Frei attempted to save Mainline Lutheranism (and other Mainliners) through their Yale school circle. Welcoming some aspects of Barth's reworking of the Reformation tradition (especially his "Catholic turn" in Church Dogmatics), these worked with an effort to curb the decay of the mid-Twentieth Century. Many Mainliners simply began to abandon the semblance of Christian orthodoxy through the Hippy Movement and the Death of God. James Pike still wore his clerical collar as he committed adultery, was an alcoholic, and sat on panels with fellow Modernist Martin Luther King Jr in reducing the Gospel to Civil Rights. Post-Liberalism wanted to reverse this secularization, without giving up the good aspects of the Main Line Church. But all this did was produce incoherence that the average pew-sitter could barely comprehend. Avoiding biblicism and secular conversion (ala the theology of someone like Paul Tillich) meant recovering the Bible as "an event", around which a community is formed as they read through it. But what did this mean? Was it real? Speech-act theory and the "linguistic turn" in post-modern theology meant you could simply not answer the question. There was never a sense why the Bible was unique or true. Why not form a liturgical community around the Koran? Or the canon of Dr. Seuss? Sensible theologians like Jaroslav Pelikan simply abandoned for the rootless and modernist Lutheran church for Eastern Orthodoxy, while men like Robert Jensen faded away senselessly. How can one write about The Church without any historic or institutional sense? Protestants like Peter Leithart find means to cope with this fatal flaw, as the more insightful students simply abandon this path for Rome or Constantinople.
On this face, these paths obviously lead to greener pastures. But are they greener pastures? If Liturgy was the means of cultural production or formation, why did the Soviets bulldoze Orthodoxy in a generation (which still afflicts Eastern Europeans as they return to Christianity)? Again, why did Rome fold? Maybe because the reasons and claims about enchantment, about liturgy, about a pre-modern world are false. Maybe what this whole argument revolves around is a desire to play make-pretend.
Such is ok in a poetic key, as Romantic poets sought to rediscover the gods in a world increasingly filled with industrial waste and the smoke of industry. But these were small circles, of relative influence, that did not claim to the prerogative of a civilizational core. They were far more individualistic than the communitarian Modernists. So why did the Evangelicals fail? Because they tried a failed experiment, but lacked even the intellectual substance and vaulted positions their forebears held. They were not sitting in Oxbridge or Ivy Leagues, pouring over centuries of texts, they were regurgitating what their betters had done. Radical Orthodoxy, which was the closest thing to an intellectual vanguard for this movement, was pockmarked with surface-level reading and historiographical incompetence. Yet as many as there are disaffected, there will be an audience willing to read persuasive nonsense.
The reason why the magic of the premodern world failed is because it lost its persuasiveness. People did not believe in reliquaries, charms, magick, and holy ground simply because of a Social Imaginary, but that they believed it *worked*. When better things (empirically) came along, they adopted them. But we're often not much better, imbuing superstitious "it works" magic in The Science. As Ivan Illich noted long ago, the White Coat priesthood of doctors and scientists have replaced the Church's black-cassocked clergy. The efficacy of The Science has had a mixed result, though I am far from playing the relativistic card between Systems of Knowledge in a Foucaultian sense. Some things break-down and fall apart because they don't work. Often times corruption and reform roar to life because someone dared to look at what the people actually believe and do. It is easy to see the hoaried past as some bastion of mystical reverence, when peasant life (and clerical life) was anything but that. The Christian-Platonic Synthesis reigned in an age of semi-barbarous superstitions among many average people. What jaded Moderns want is to reintroduce an age of ignorance, where one actively suppresses an awareness of what is real from what is fantasy ("who can know? it's just power, man"), and eagerly clinging to their placebos. But when rubber hits the road, do they drive a sick child to an emergency care or to a shrine?
The harsh truth is that, in the Bible, the Word of God wars constantly against this fantasy dream. The Prophets condemned "the High Places" because the numinous mountain had replaced the intellective commands of God. Jerusalem was Holy because God deigned it so, not because the geography had a particularly sacred intrinsic potency. The sacrament, or the various peculiarities of Prophetic counsel, were potent because God said they were, not because they had any intrinsic power. Namaan was cured of leprosy when he dipped in the Jordan several times, but such was not open to any leper who took upon this remedy. The Lord's Supper maintains potency because of Christ's echoing command. Gazing on the host and parading it around town does nothing, the Christian was commanded to take and eat. This may seem like a particularly holy thing to do (especially if you're re-enchanting the imagination), but it is empty and false. The rules of Nature (and God's special revelation) remain despite Man's unending efforts to add and elaborate. Like the god of Persia who "ate" (when Daniel exposed it was conniving priests), so many mystical rites are simply products of Human imagination. So be it, but then entertain yourself with a video game or comic book, and spare the metaphysics.
Christians do not suffer a lack of "enchantment", but the failure of obedience. The love of God grows cold because Christians do not follow the words of Christ, which include both doctrines about God, Man, and the World, but also how to orient oneself. The unspectacular world of quiet prayer in a closet does not elicit the "seeming" world-changing impact of gold, silk, and processions. Church life should include sacramental ritual (as commanded) alongside teaching, fellowship, and discipline. But a rickety wooden shack would do just as well as marble cathedrals. The power is in the promise, and the conformity to reality. We do not suffer because of a loss of enchantment, as if we only needed to fall back asleep, but a lack of sobriety. The world is full of average people groping at numinous and mystical experiences, discovered in drug-induced ecstasy, crystals, signs from the gods-Universe found in palms or stars, and so on. Europe has de-Christianized, but it has not become less superstitious (probably more). Traditional Christian denominations are suffuse with people who mix veneration of saints or angels with tantric yoga and Wicca. Just like imbeciles complaining about Individual (when the West is all too communitarian), we do not suffer a lack of an enchantment, but an overgrowth of it.
Proper liturgy is about forming the spiritual intellect (understanding), through body and soul, but it is not some pagan spell. It is about ritual in the same sense a marriage ceremony or a dinner party is about proper ritual. Certain customs elaborate and order, but they do not unleash bad juju if botched or stuttered. On the contrary, the denigration of Language and Cult/Culture is what forms the basis of Superstition and Magic, where 'Hoc Est Meum Corpus' transmogrifies into 'Hocuspocus'. What the early Christians understood in a haunted world of paganism, as much as Medieval missionaries and the later Reformers, was that the Word of God expelled babble for speech, replacing Logos for Mythos, where the full revelation of the divine economy was on offer. The Christian was now strong enough to step over the realm of the gods, trampling down the rebellious without fear of reprisal. Nature became a book, not a prison.
Test the Spirits, discern good from bad, and let the radiance of intelligence enlighten the world.
Jason Ananda Josephson Storm wrote a book, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences in which he contends that disenchantment is an intra-scholastic super-myth which misconstrued Weber's hypothesis that the Europe has been in the process of disenchantment, not that it "has" been disenchanted, and that Weber contended the Puritans disenchanted because they were so religious, not because they weren't pious. Storm hypothesizes that in a triangular relationship between religion, magic and superstition the three categories designate accepted, marginal and rejected bids at enchantment or ritual. Storm points out that if you go by what rank and file believe and do there are, as you've put it, far more people now seeking occult experience than there were in earlier ages. Storm noted in the US, for instance, there are places where more people believe in demons and ghosts than believe in Christian doctrines.
ReplyDeleteThe most contentious element of Storm's thesis may be where he points out that Carl Jung was an occultist and that a variety of formative figures in western European liberal arts/humanities were openly occultist or had it as a significant side project. Storm contends that the occultic/mystical tendencies in Western liberal arts from the 18th century on has been, as it were, shoved in the closet so the intellectual respectability of the academic fields can be retained.
I have not bothered to read Max Weber but between my reading Francis Young and Brian Levack on the history of Anglican and Catholic exorcism; and reading Crawford Gribben's research on the evolution of millennialism in the Puritans and the trans-Atlantic evangelical world more generally; my hunch, for what little it may be worth, is the Weber hypothesis of disenchantment as process might make more sense if it were tethered to the history of Calvinist polemic against the legitimacy of Catholic exorcism and to postmillennialist triumphalism casting out "superstition". It's not hard to read any non-random Puritan warning against the magical thinking of Catholic sacramentalism (I'm going through Richard Sibbes' fourteen sermon series called "The Returning Backslider" based on Hosea 14 and they're impressive) and see how Storm's hypothesis about the triangle of religion/magic/superstition could play out in intra-Christian terms, with Storm's proposal being that Weber's disenchantment hypothesis makes more sense if it's read as religious groups debating what counts as "religion" and "superstition", with disenchantment being the move of moving from the former to the latter and that "this" is how disenchantment happened, not an army of free-thinking intellectual superheroes showing the emperor has no clothes. There's that element, too, showing that the magic of the past doesn't "work" but Storm's proposal is that if you look at how many daffy ideas scientists entertained or how much of an alchemist many key natural philosophers were (and I think Ephraim Radner touched on that a little in his magnificent book A Profound Ignorance on the problems of 20th century pneumatology, ESPECIALLY the Moltmann strain), even intellectuals have believed in magic, but the history of the social sciences has been, in part, a history of suppressing this pattern in the field.
Apropos of paganism and spells, I haven't written as much as I could about the work Clinton Arnold has done on the role the cult of Ephesian Artemis likely had in the writing of Ephesians, or Graham Twelftree's helpful work on Hellenistic, Roman, Jewish and early Christian exorcists as healers. It hasn't been the best of years IRL so I'm not as prolific in blogging as I once was.
Ah, the book
ReplyDeletehttps://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo26032843.html
"Such is ok in a poetic key, as Romantic poets sought to rediscover the gods in a world increasingly filled with industrial waste and the smoke of industry. But these were small circles, of relative influence, that did not claim to the prerogative of a civilizational core. They were far more individualistic than the communitarian Modernists. So why did the Evangelicals fail? Because they tried a failed experiment, but lacked even the intellectual substance and vaulted positions their forebears held. ... "
M H Abrams has a couple of books on the Romantics I'm slowly going through. They're usual suspects reading, namely The Mirror and the Lamp (on Romantic literary theory) and Natural Supernaturalism (on how the Romantics tried to formulate a pantheistic art-mysticism that retained what people like about Christian utopian/millennialism/mysticism without having to deal with christology and the other stuff). What the music historian Leonard Meyer said about the Romantics that stuck with me is that it was/is a set of ideologies formulated by and for elite egalitarians but that by the 20th century (in music and musicology and composing, at least) the "elite" and "egalitarian" impulses had fractured past the point where the break could be healed and so we got esoteric post-tonal integral serialists like Pierre Boulez on the one hand and maybe a tonal Marxist populist like Hans Eisler on the other--Theodor Adorno claimed that hermetic art-religion cultism and overt political agitprop were the only two fields left in the wake of a discredited art-religion the Romantics thought could re-enchant the world. Jacques Ellul contended (I think correctly) that by the time Adorno made this bitter point in his dense and nearly impenetrable book Aesthetic Theory, Adorno had been one of the few to understand the problems of "technique" worked out in the arts in the West.
ReplyDeleteChristian attempts at "re-enchantment" can come across like Romanticist art-religion 2.0 with the idea that "We'll get it to work this time because we actually profess the Christian dogmas the Romantics wanted to dispense with", but that comes across to me, gut take, like theonomistic reconstructionists thinking that because this time we're in Moscow, Idaho and not in Boston that four centuries from now our descendants won't be unitarian universalist apostates because, well, because. I "have" blogged about how when I cross referenced the history of anti-exorcism polemic with the entitlement mentality of postmillennialist futurist eschatology that this double whammy seems more plausible as an explanation of "disenchantment" than the free-thinker myth of free-thinkers speaking truth to power. Brian Levack pointed out that even the likes of Newton could believe spirit possession was possible.
Being a former Pentecostal in Anglican/Presbyterian wings I think one of the failures of the re-enchantment crowd is they want a highbrow re-enchantment and have had the low-brow "trance' stuff Ted Gioia bloviates about off the table. This comes around to Baptist and Methodist and Pentecostal worship issues, and there are some musicologists who have tried to claim this lowbrow spirit-possession invocation is more "African" (as if musically induced mantic states didn't occur across the world? But I"m trying to set that aside for a bit)--the re-enchantment project seems to appeal to highbrow "high flyers" who want "respectable" magic and want a kind of sacramentology that isn't too lowbrow. Benedict XVI was adamant that now rock-based liturgical music was acceptable while local popular song traditions ought to be drawn on for a new living liturgy. To me the double bind seems obvious but it was apparently not so obvious to Ratzinger or his fans. But I digress (again). When highbrows contend that the masses don't need to know high church Latin to be blessed by the excellent music it's a reminder that the Reformation happened for a lot of good reasons! The Anglican theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie has been contending that as a counter-balance to highbrow Schleiermacher art mysticism the Church needs the Zwingli/Calvin/Bullinger antidote to liberal Lutheran art-mysticism. I admit I'm inclined to agree. :) William T Dargan's book on the history of the lining out tradition in black American churches presents a case that it was in the ultra low liturgy of the Calvinist low church Anglican and Scottish church traditions that metrical psalmody and Watts hymns migrated to the American continent where they faciliated a vernacular worship idiom African Americans cultivated over the centuries. The re-enchanters, almost across the board, seem to be Roger Scruton types who abominate metrical psalmody and in Scruton's case he wants the perfect English sixteenth century rites that have power by being old and mystical and not because the doctrines they refer to have any metaphysical meaning. For a low church guy like myself it came off like Scruton was holding a form of godliness and denying the power of it ... and if that's where he landed, c'mon, we could just read Rudolf Bultmann for that kind of demythologized Christianity but Bultmann could at least exegete the biblical texts whereas Scruton couldn't keep track of how it was the tabernacle described in Exodus not the Solomonic Temple.
Per the Methodist and American Indian observation, I can't help but point out that the first published musical work by a Native American using western notational practice was Thomas Commuck's shape-note hymn Indian Melodies, which was a Methodist hymnal.
So, yeah, that's pretty telling of how significant Baptist and Methodist inroads into Native American communities was that the first Native American musical work to get published was a Methodist shape-note hymanl (and, I may be a bit biased here but several of Commuck's melodies are lovely).
another thought, Storm pointed out that the Romantics believed the world had been disenchanted but there are two big caveats: 1) disenchantment a la "the flight of the fairies" is part of fairy lore since its beginning and it was usually thought that the advent of iron tools was why the fairies left, not urbanization (nods to this in the Hellboy comics continuity) 2) the Romantics believed that their art would be the agent of re-enchantment, which is a detail that 20th century literary theorists and scholars decided to more or less ignore because it was embarassing.
ReplyDeleteSo the re-enchantment gambit in highbrow Christendom is, if I may be so pugnacious as to say so, Romantic art-religious mysticism parading as though it's going to work because the Christian dogmatics have been retained whereas the Romantics, in Storm's take, were open about the hermetic occult neo-pagan nature of their project being for the select special people who had the magic in them to "change things".
In some of the reading I'm doing on exorcism and spirit possession there's a secular/liberal strand of scholarship that thinks that frenzied mantic states ought to come back. Then there's the Ted Gioia gushing about the "occult" origins of musicology. To the extent that Ratzinger et al loathe the idea of a resurgent pagan/spirit-possession lowbrow Dionysianism I "get" that, in a way, but the highflyers seem to not get that the lowbrow Baptist/Methodist/Pentecostal "when the Spirit moves" approach has become more the global norm in Christianity the world over. A Marxist or post-Marxist might suggest, perhaps, that the re-enchantment of high flyer Anglicans and Catholics trying to "re-enchant' the world is a class project more than a Christian project?