Enchantment Revisited
[“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”).]
O Lover,
One of the ways we modern westerners think and speak about the medieval natural world centers on the theme of “enchantment.” According to this paradigm, sometimes identified with the “great chain of being,” the first dozen centuries or so of the common era were characterized by a sense of wonder with terms such as “magical,” “meaning,” and “supernatural” employed. While the sensate and trans-sensate worlds, the terrestrial and the celestial, were separate, the membrane twixt them was porous.
In the aftermath of the transitional Renaissance the notion of the world as “enchanted” was increasingly challenged by the Enlightenment(17th-18th C) and the broader changes referred to as “modernity.” The empirical with its dependence on the observable or experience was on the ascendency as were the roles of science and reason, the impulse toward individualism, and the atrophying of tradition. The German Max Weber (1864-1920), for example, characterized modernity as increasingly “disenchanted” resulting in a diminishing role for religion and spirituality, a change sometimes referred to as “secularization.” Efforts to fill the resulting void with consumerism, hedonism, and/or varieties of materialism would increasingly be found wanting. While amid such conflict much western religiosity would in time revert to modern versions of the medieval paradigm, the natural world would remain a casualty.
In contrast to the above, something amazing has been going on, particularly during my own lifespan. Convergence of cosmology and spirituality, resurgence of both the scholarship and practice of Christian mystics, growth of interspirituality, and the vacuity of much of modernism have all contributed to this freshet. Central has been an emerging critique of the dualism pervasive in both the medieval and modern periods, albeit in very different ways. Fresh and promising ways to intuit, practice, and come upon language for Your relationship with the cosmos have flowered. In all of this the contributions of mystics of all traditions and periods have been both timely and timeless.
One aspect of this development might be dubbed “enchantment redux,” a tapestry consisting of many strands: e.g., You, O Lover, as both Source and Télos of all having being; You as both Self-diffuser and Encompassing One; You as Ground/Depth/Abyss of Being rather than mere item within the subject/object structure. For bearers of the name of the Christ in both the East and the West, all of this, and infinitely more, have long been implicit in “the Lógos become flesh” (Jn 1:14), “heaven . . . wedded to earth” (Exsúltet [Easter Vigil]), theósis/deification/divinization (“engoddedness”). While in our own time we are being shown that Your relationship with us creatures is beyond enumeration (e.g., oneness or twoness), naming, or description, our senses, intellects, experience, and intuitions come upon evocations of convergence and unítas everywhere.
So then, given the present freshet, what of the cósmos? Stated panentheistically: whoever else You may be, O Lover, all that we have glimpsed of You is inextricably entangled with the creation You have gifted with being. Veiled in finitude throughout, this cósmos is nevertheless a luminous lantern of the “unapproachable Light” in which You dwell (I Tim 6:16). It is irrevocably infused of You, harbinger of the full flowering of the vision of the Apocalypse: “At last Your habitation is among us creatures” (21:3). Having never been otherwise, but now in present time unprecedentedly perceived, Your handiwork is being shown to be a menagerie of “thin places,” a “palace of the bride” in the poetry of Juan de la Cruz.
In a word, the cósmos is indeed enchanted, but in the words of Eliot, now as “for the first time.”
