one more enchanted evening

The story so far:

My post on the recent vogue for “enchantment”

Brad East’s reply

Me again

Brad again

I think we’re converging on a shared position — mostly. Brad is less persuaded than I am by the argument that Judaism and Christianity are disenchanting forces in relation to their pagan/animist neighbors, but that’s okay, because I like this very much:

Christianity from the beginning is interested — discursively and performatively — not so much in disenchanting the various purported beings and rituals that populate the all too porous reality of daily human life as it is in dethroning it. Early Christian apologetics and polemics are indeed at pains to unveil the object of pagan sacrifices — as demons, though, not as fictions. The bedrock assumption of exorcism, inasmuch as exorcism encapsulates the entire problematic of enchantment, is that the pagans are absolutely right: the world is a dark and terrifying place in which humans are constantly harassed, assaulted, and tormented by numberless, nameless hostile intelligences that cannot be stopped or silenced apart from the name and the power of Jesus Christ.

Amen! This leads me to one of my favorite themes, which is Jesus as the conqueror of the Powers. See for instance this post, some of which makes its way into this massive essay on Thomas Pynchon. Closely related is my attempt to sketch out a demonology. Basically, I find the language of “enchantment” less appealing, and less descriptively sound, than the Pauline language of Jesus overmastering the kosmokratoras (the Cosmic Rulers), the archai and exhousai, and bringing them to bow before Him – He who has conquered not through strength but through weakness, not through self-exaltation but through self-emptying.

An “enchanted cosmos” without Jesus at the absolute center of it is a terrible place to be: you find yourself in the situation of almost all pagans, struggling to navigate a landscape populated by forces that you mainly just hope to evade. As Brad says, “the world is a dark and terrifying place in which humans are constantly harassed, assaulted, and tormented by numberless, nameless hostile intelligences that cannot be stopped or silenced apart from the name and the power of Jesus Christ.” Escaping their notice is often the best scenario. “How can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man?” Can you bind the strong man? I can’t. Which makes it strange to me how small a part Jesus plays in the current discourse about enchantment, even among people who claim to be Christians.