"Magi"
We seek between sand and stars.
Betwixt this shifting, chameleon landscape
and the vault of fixed invariance.
Squeezed in the vice of time and eternity
we are aching
dreaming dust.
But here we find in a mother's arms
the reconciliation of heaven and earth.
Behold the divinization of flesh and bone
where we the riven
are made whole.
There are two aspects related to the colonialism of disenchantment.
The first aspect is the observation that disenchantment is largely a Western problem. The Christianity of the global East and South is very much enchanted. In Africa, South America, and the East Christians don't need convincing that the devil exists and that malevolent spiritual forces are at work in the world. Educated white people in America and Europe doubt this, but the rest of the world doesn't.
A different way to make this point is to observe that disenchantment is WEIRD. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Over the last few decades in psychology a conversation has started about how the vast majority of participants in psychological research has come from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic nations. These studies produce psychological findings we too quickly assume hold for the rest of the world. But do they? How weird are WEIRD participants? The answer, it turns out, is pretty damn weird. Numerous studies have shown that WEIRD participants behave very differently from the rest of the world. Here, then, is another way to describe the colonialism of disenchantment. Most of the world is enchanted. Disenchantment, by contrast, is both WEIRD and weird.
A second aspect concerning the colonialism of disenchantment is harder to admit about ourselves but it has had a historical impact upon colonialism.
Specifically, the disenchanted Christianity of progressive Christians in the West is considered to be more "educated," "complex," and "scientifically literate" than more enchanted forms of Christian belief. This is largely due to the fact that many progressive Christians, especially ex-evangelicals, have been on a journey away from the enchanted Christianity of their childhood. This journey is typically narrated as a developmental process, moving from childhood naivete into something more ambiguous, yes, but something more adult and mature, more willing and courageous to "face doubts" and "live with the questions." Sometimes this developmental process is described as an "evolution," from a simpler to a more complex faith.
The unspoken assumption here is that enchanted forms of faith are childish, naive, and simplistic. We grow out of certainty to embrace doubt. A Christianity that doubts and questions the enchanted aspects of faith is felt to be mature, sophisticated, and complex. Combine these things and you have the the colonialism of disenchantment. The skeptical, questioning, doubting, faith of progressive Christianity in the West is the more evolved faith. By contrast, the enchanted faith of the global East and South is more primitive, naive, and superstitious. The West, by rejecting enchantment, became "enlightened." Disenchantment is adult and grown-up, whereas enchantment is childish, trafficking in make-believe and fairy tales.
This, I have argued, is one of the great paradoxes of progressive, ex-evangelical Christianity, how it claims to be a champion of a post-colonial Christianity in the world, yet enacts and embodies a WEIRD and colonial attitude when it comes to enchantment.
This isn't idle speculation. Disenchantment had a significant role in the colonial project. As Graham Jones has argued in his book Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy disenchantment aided colonialism in two different ways.
First, the rise of entertainment magic in the West was linked to Enlightenment values. The modern stage magician was no longer viewed as an agent of the occult but was, rather, a skilled illusionist. Magic became "scientific" and "technical." The audience knew what they were witnessing was a "trick." What happened on the stage looked like "magic," but the audience knew better, and that was a part of the delight and fascination. This E/enlightened approach to magic facilitated disenchantment among the masses.
As Jones writes, "modern magical showmen were expected to present tricks as tricks to audiences eager to be deceived, but not so credulous as to mistake illusions for reality. These performers agentively carved out associations with science." Thus, "Western illusionism converged with modern materialist cosmology and empiricist epistemology...[B]y the beginning of the nineteenth century, the illusionist had emerged as 'a powerful symbol of progress' in the West, as a scientific popularizer and debunker of superstitions...The close association of entertainment magic with Enlightenment values of rationality, skepticism, and materialism made it a powerful resource for signifying secular modernity..."
Jones' second observation is that, once the stage magician became an agent of disenchantment, he could be used to expose and create a contrast with "primitive" peoples who still "believed in magic." In contrast to the Western stage magician, the sorcerers, witches, and shamans of ingenious peoples were viewed as cons taking advantage of uneducated savages. The modern stage magician demonstrated how indigenous magic was just "tricks," and that anyone who "believed in" these tricks was primitive, childish, and backward. Thus, in "exposing" indigenous magic for what it was, while noting the incredulous nature of the "savages," modern magic fueled the narrative of "progress" that gave birth to the colonial project. Indigenous people who believed in "magic" were "childish" and "primitive" and in need of parenting, education, and supervision.
As Jones writes,
The era of colonialism invigorated Enlightenment discourses of progress by dramatizing the dominion of Western European powers over less technologically advanced peoples of the global south. It also provided magicians with a new foil: "primitive"--or, in Weber's parlance, "savage"--magicians reputed to hold sway among colonial populations. More than Europe's fairground quacks and village soothsayers, ritual experts in non-Western traditions came to figure in the literature and lore of entertainment magic as conceptual embodiments of premodern, non-modern, or antimodern approaches to magic. Magic authors drew on a variety of ethnographic representations and erudite commentaries in constructing these discourses, equating the benighted outlook of present-day colonial subjects with the superstitious beliefs of Europe's historical past.
In short, a disenchanted approach to "magic" supported the colonial project.
Jones goes on in Magic's Reason to show how modern magicians were used by colonial powers to discredit indigenous shamans and sorcerers. Jones recounts the case of Robert-Houdin, the Father of Modern of Magic, who was used by the French colonialists to "debunk" and "expose" the "trickery" of the marabouts, popular religious figures in colonial Algeria.
Here in the case of Robert-Houdin we see disenchantment--a refusal to believe in magic--used as an agent of colonial oppression. A disenchanted approach toward "magic" was associated with progress, advancement, and reason, the attitude that justified the paternalistic posture behind the colonial project to educate backward, childish, savage, and primitive colonial populations. If you believed in magic that, quite literally, justified your oppression.
All this, then, is what I call "the colonialism of disenchantment."
"Nativity"
To find you here,
slick with blood
and warmed by straw,
is not what we imagined.
We prayed for magic
and escape,
a cessation to our aching.
But here is answered
a question we were not asking,
reversing expectations
of grace and deliverance.
This strange exodus.
I am the Lord your God,
who brought you up from the land of Egypt.
Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.
The entire Israelite community left the Wilderness of Sin, moving from one place to the next according to the Lord’s command. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. So the people complained to Moses, “Give us water to drink.”
“Why are you complaining to me?” Moses replied to them. “Why are you testing the Lord?”
But the people thirsted there for water and grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you ever bring us up from Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”
Then Moses cried out to the Lord, “What should I do with these people? In a little while they will stone me!”
The Lord answered Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you. Take the staff you struck the Nile with in your hand and go. I am going to stand there in front of you on the rock at Horeb; when you hit the rock, water will come out of it and the people will drink.” Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel. He named the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites complained, and because they tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
Moses replied to them. “Why are you testing the Lord?”He named the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites complained, and because they tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
“But my people did not listen to my voice;
Israel did not obey me.
So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts
to follow their own plans.
If only my people would listen to me
and Israel would follow my ways,
I would quickly subdue their enemies
and turn my hand against their foes.”
And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one.
And do not bring us to the time of testing,
but rescue us from the evil one.
One of the things that struck me in reading The Silmarillion was Tolkien's depiction of the cosmic, angelic fall that brings evil to Middle Earth. Again, this is well-trod territory, and I had known about the fall of Melkor. So, it wasn't discovering this part of Tolkien's world that caught my attention but was, rather, the evocative way he describes the impact of Melkor's fall on the world at the end of the Quenta Silmarillion. That evocation is what interrupted me.
But before we get to those haunting lines, let me catch everyone up. Not everyone is a Tolkien nerd.
At the beginning of time Eru, who is also called Ilúvatar, the One, creates the world by singing it into existence. Among his creation are divine beings calls the Ainur. The Ainur are invited by Eru Ilúvatar to participate in creation by joining his harmony. The Ainur do so, but one of their number, Melkor, begins to insert dissonant notes of his own devising:
But now Ilúvatar sat and hearkened, and for a great while it seemed good to him, for in the music there were no flaws. But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself. To Melkor among the Ainur had been given the greatest gifts of power and knowledge, and he had a share in all the gifts of his brethren. He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame; for desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his own, and it seemed to him that Ilúvatar took no thought for the Void, and he was impatient of its emptiness.
Some of these thoughts he now wove into his music, and straightway discord arose about him, and many that sang nigh him grew despondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had at first. Then the discord of Melkor spread ever wider, and the melodies which had been heard before foundered in a sea of turbulent sound. But Ilúvatar sat and hearkened until it seemed that about his throne there was a raging storm, as of dark waters that made war one upon another in an endless wrath that would not be assuaged.
But Morgoth himself the Valar thrust through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void; and a guard is set for ever on those walls, and Eärendil keeps watch upon the ramparts of the sky. Yet the lies of that Melkor, the mighty and accursed, Morgoth Bauglir, the Power of Terror and of Hate, sowed in the hearts of Elves and Men are a seed that does not die and cannot be destroyed; and ever and anon it sprouts anew, and will bear dark fruit even unto the latest days.
Breath of Fire is also, in many ways, the story of how the entire wellness industry, especially when it fuses with New Age spirituality, traffics in the prosperity gospel. As a related example of this, last year I wrote about how witchcraft is the pagan version of the prosperity gospel. And if not witchcraft proper, then the adjacent New Age practice of "manifesting" abundance. The New Age prosperity gospel belief in the "law of attraction"-- think/manifest it, and it will happen--is a spiritual thread that runs through the entire wellness industry.
The point here is that the prosperity gospel haunts every spiritual tradition. Pagan, Western, and Eastern. Christians have their version of the prosperity gospel. Pagans have their version of the prosperity gospel. And as Breath of Fire recounts, yoga has its version. The prosperity gospel tempts the religious and spiritual-but-not-religious alike.
Self-esteem was first described in 1890 by William James in his influential book Principles of Psychology, one of the very first psychology textbooks. In Principles James, for the first time in history, describes and defines "self-esteem," and he does so by offering a psychological equation. Specifically:
Self-esteem = Successes / Pretensions
According to James, self-esteem is an emotional feedback system that reflects the degree to which we have successfully accomplished our goals and dreams, our "pretensions." Even more simply, self-esteem measures the gap between the life you have versus the life you want, the distance between your actual life and your ideal life.
This equation makes sense. Whenever we accomplish our goals, whenever our dreams are realized, we feel a flush of pride and satisfaction. By contrast, whenever we fail or experience setback and dissatisfaction we feel sad and insecure. In short, self-esteem is that feedback system in your head that keeps track of how well your life is going.
As a feedback system, the variable nature of self-esteem makes it a poor choice for a foundation of mental health. Self-esteem isn't constant and steady. Self-esteem goes up and down, reflecting how my life is unfolding, for good or ill. What that means is that mental health has become for us the constant monitoring, managing, and rehabilitation of our self-regard. And that effort is difficult, exhausting, and interminable. Worse, it's counterproductive as we keep throwing people back inside themselves to secure an elusive happiness and joy. Our lives are spent chasing thoughts in our own minds. And this self-referentiality is only making us sicker and sicker.
During our Roundtable, I focused my short remarks on much of the content of this series, speaking about the apophatic tradition, the causal joint, and providence. But before getting to those reflections, I listed out some mysteries faced by reductive materialism. We might call these "mysteries of science."
Again, as I asked in this series, "What is a mystery?" One way to define a mystery is any question that, in principle, reductive materialism cannot answer. That is to say, a question that falls outside the boundaries of science. In such cases we are denied a mechanistic account, and without knowing "How it works" we're left with mystery.
So, what are some of the mysteries science faces? Where does a reductive materialism hit a wall of explanation?
First, being itself, the question of existence, is a mystery. Why is there something rather than nothing is a persistent mystery that science cannot answer.
Second, science itself is a mystery. By that I mean that science can never, in principle, get behind its own equations. Even if science were able to reduce down to a single "God Equation," a grand "theory of everything," it would still face the question: Why this particular equation? And why these particular variables? To even write down such an equation demands some givens, givens which themselves cannot be accounted for. In short, science itself is mysterious.
Third, mathematics is a mystery. Many mathematicians are what are called "mathematical Platonists." According to mathematical Platonism, mathematical truths are objective aspects of the universe. That is to say, mathematical truths are like material "facts" in how they exist independently of human minds. For example, the Pythagorean Theorem existed and was true prior to its discovery. And yet, no scientific account can be given to explain the existence and truth of the Pythagorean Theorem.
Fourth, consciousness is a mystery. No third person, mechanistic account can explain first-person, subjective experience. At best, we can establish a correlation between a neurological event and a subjective experience (like the taste of apple pie), but a correlation is not a causal explanation. No brain scan will tell you what apple pie tastes like. For an exhaustive tour of this debate, read David Bentley Hart's All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life.
Fifth, free will is a mystery. By definition. Of course, some deny the existence of free will. But the point to observe here is how, if you adopt a stance of scientific materialism, free will is ruled out before you even begin your investigation. Simply because if you assume materialism you're committed to offering a mechanistic view of neuroanatomy which, by definition, nullifies free will. In short, the issue of free will concerns metaphysical axioms which cannot be adjudicated by science. To say that "science disproves free will" is nonsensical for science, in assuming materialistic reductionism, denies free will axiomatically. Even more broadly, this is also why any "account" of free will, an attempt to explain how it "works," is also doomed to failure.
Sixth, the transcendentals--the true, the beautiful, and the good--are mysteries. Hume's Dictum is one example, that you cannot get an ought from an is. No amount of scientific analysis can determine moral duties or imperatives. You cannot extract an ethical claim from a descriptive claim. Another issue concerns the axiomatic nature of moral judgments, what might be called their "universality." Moral judgments, to be moral judgments, cannot be subjective, mere personal preferences. Also, attributions of value, like human dignity, cannot be extracted from materialistic descriptions. Of course, like free will, one can deny the existence of the transcendentals. But insofar as we operate, implicitly or explicitly, in the light of the transcendentals--making moral judgments or acting in light of human dignity--this falls beyond the scope of scientific materialism.
In summary, while this series focused primarily upon what might be called "theological mysteries," there are also "scientific mysteries," locations where reductive materialism cannot give an account or, in the giving an account, rules out the reality in question.
"Shepherds"
Unlikely we were
to be given this task.
To seek, to stand, to see.
To become a witness to amazement.
To behold what we could not comprehend.
And to return
to silence, stars, and sky.
To know yourself
as one interrupted
and made ill-fit with the world.
O come, O come, Immanuel,
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.
Restore us, O Lord God of hosts;
let your face shine, that we may be saved.
This series has focused on two sorts of mysteries, the mystery of God's own being and the mystery of God's relation to the world. Both of these concern the contrast between Uncreated Being and created being.
But another location where mystery shows up concerns God's will. Most of these questions concern why God does or does not act in the world. God's will is inscrutable. This is particularly dismaying in relation to pain and suffering, questions of theodicy. Why does God allow horrific things to happen? Why is God not answering our prayers?
At these moments, Christians often appeal to mystery. Texts like Isaiah 55 are regularly invoked:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
The boundary that was vigilantly policed by Jewish monotheism was between Uncreated Being and created being. To worship created being was idolatrous. Only Uncreated Being, the One who created the universe ex nihilo ("from nothing"), was worthy of devotion and worship. During Second Temple Judaism this contrast between Uncreated and created being encountered Greek philosophical thought which eventually led to the Christian apophatic tradition. While created being is accessible to human observation and exploration, Uncreated Being is an impenetrable mystery. What Uncreated Being "is" in itself is beyond human comprehension.
What, then, happens when Uncreated Being and created being make contact? What is the "casual joint" between God and the world? What does this point of connection and influence look like? How does the Infinite and the finite interact?
As I mentioned at the end of the last post, because one side of the relation is shrouded in apophatic mystery the "casual joint" between God and the world cannot be specified, described, or imagined. At the causal joint we must make an appeal to mystery. This is not done to avoid hard questions or stop the conversation. It concerns, rather, the grammar of God. Due to the asymmetry of being we find at the causal joint no "explanation" can be given for God's relation to and influence upon the world. And the casual joint shows up in a lot of conversations, from miracles, to providence, to prayer. We ask a lot of "how" questions, and "how" questions concern the causal joint.
Basically, mystery evaporates whenever we have a reductive or mechanistic account, if we can specify a causal chain. So we ask questions like "How does prayer work?" or "How do miracles work?" with the expectation that there's some mechanism behind the scenes that we can investigate and uncover. But since things like prayer and miracles show up at the causal joint--the interface between created being and Uncreated being--a mechanism cannot be specified due to the apophatic mystery on one side of the equation. This renders all of God's actions in and on the world inherently mysterious.
At the causal joint, mystery is simply unavoidable.
To start, theologians make a contrast between cataphatic and apophatic theology. Cataphatic theology, also called "positive theology," concerns what can be properly said, claimed, or asserted about God. Basically, cataphatic theology concerns our "God talk," verbal statements that express our ideas and beliefs about God. Cataphatic theology contains creeds, beliefs, doctrines, dogmas, and Biblical teachings. A lot of cataphatic theology involves policing all these words and ideas, drawing boundaries between the licit and illicit, between orthodoxy and heresy. Most of our spiritual lives are spent swimming in cataphatic waters--from books to podcasts to sermons to blogs/newsletters--we share, talk, and debate about ideas and beliefs about God and the life of faith. Some of us gravitate toward abstract, theological cataphatic expressions, others like to keep things literal and Biblical. Either way, we're expressing beliefs about God.
The apophatic tradition, by contrast, is called "negative theology." Apophatic theology is the Via Negativa, the "way of negation."
There are a couple of different ways to think about this. First, in contrast to positive theology, what we can properly say about God, negative theology concerns what cannot be said about God. Apophatic theology marks the point where words and mental representations about God falter and fail. A different way of thinking about negative theology is approaching God through a series of negations. Through negations--God is not this, God is not that--we chip away at the mystery of God. Thomas Aquinas deploys this strategy in the Summa Theologica. Critically, for Thomas, this "chipping away" doesn't reveal God at the end of the process in any clear, positive way. As Thomas said, we can know God's existence but not God's essence. That is to say, from a cataphatic perspective, we can assert that God exists. We know this by observing God's effects upon the world. These are Thomas' famous five "proofs" for the existence of God. That said, while we can assert, positively, that God exists (if you find Thomas' proofs convincing), we do not know what God "is." God's essence is beyond human conception. To peer into God's very being is to look into an impenetrable darkness. Following Thomas, we can use negations to narrow in on God, sort of like approaching the event horizon of a black hole. Our knowledge is a boundary encircling a mystery rather than the grasping of something definite.
The critical point here is how apophatic theology chastens our verbal claims and mental representations of God. There is a literalness in speaking about God that must be mortified. True, our words can help us climb toward God, our thoughts can seek him, but at some point we reach the top of the cataphatic ladder. Words and ideas can only take us so far. At the top cataphatic ladder is a step into the mystical and contemplative. Silence is emphasized over verbalization. Thomas Aquinas reached the top of his cataphatic ladder in a mystical experience, late in his life, during the celebration of the Eucharist. He stopped writing the Summa because after his vision all his words seemed to him as straw.
While all the church fathers and early theologians recognized the apophatic aspect of the theological task, along with the mystical approach toward God, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. late 5th to early 6th century) and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 662) are considered seminal figures in the apophatic tradition. After Aquinas, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1328) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464) are also a major figures, along with the author of the mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing (14th century). But again, pretty much every significant Christian theologian, early and late, has recognized the apophatic aspect of theological reflection. The role apophaticism plays in emphasis and centrality varies considerably across theologians and through the tradition as a whole, but it's always there.
The point of this post, beyond introducing readers to apophatic theology so I can freely use the word "apophatic" going forward, is simply to state that, due to God being God, mystery is baked deeply into the pie. Any speech or reflection about God is inherently haunted by mystery. All God talk is mysterious, has an apophatic aspect. To be sure, apophaticism isn't what I was describing in my last post, the way "mystery" can get used to short-circuit a theological conversation or wave away a hard question. But as I'll argue in the posts to come, mystery must be regularly invoked at the God/creation point of contact. Necessarily so, because, as we've seen in this post, there is a persisting apophatic aspect to one side of this relationship.
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).