Devils, Demons, Angels, Spirits, Enchantment, Disenchantment and Scooby Doo!
“At the center of the new philosophy of nature that emerged victorious in the 17th century was a mechanistic doctrine of nature. This position was, in fact, often referred to as the “new mechanical philosophy.” This view of nature had two fundamental dimensions, both of which exemplified the demand that all “occult” qualities and powers be banished from nature.” –David Ray Griffin
Richard Beck has been writing a series on his blog called “Edging Toward Enchantment” that I’ve been following. I really appreciate Beck’s blog and writing, especially his book Unclean. His new book, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted, contains a lot of the material that this recent blog series is based on, I believe. So far I’ve really been enjoying the series.
In the blog series, Beck is using Charles Taylor — who I’m not very familiar with — and his sociological terms “enchantment” and “disenchantment” to describe two worldviews held by various groups of people. Beck and Taylor would describe the enchanted world as “pre-modern,” or before the technological and scientific revolutions of the Enlightenment. This worldview might roughly translate to the Purple stage of cultural development in spiral dynamics, where the cosmos is felt to be animated with spirits, and sacred rituals reflect a direct participation in the cycles and rhythms of nature.
The disenchanted worldview is akin to a Modern, rationalist worldview, where the world is stripped of spirits and ghosts in favor of a more mechanistic explanation of the cosmos. This sounds to me like the Orange level in spiral dynamics, where a metaphysical materialism, that dismisses myths, creation stories and legends, is preferred over an enchanted/mystical sort of conception of the world.
In Beck’s last post, he uses Scooby Doo — one of my all-time favorite cartoons — as an analogy for how rich, white Euro-American Christianity has become disenchanted. At first, Christians are enamored with, and frightened by, spiritual/mystical things: devils, demons, angels etc, just like Scooby and the gang are at the beginning of each episode. But as time goes on suspicions are raised and, again, as exemplified in Scooby Doo, the ghost’s mask is pulled off revealing nothing but a person who was up to no good. This, for Beck, is exactly what happens when Christianity moves into disenchantment mode, or an Orange level of development. He writes:
“The frame shifts away from the supernatural toward the moral. Christianity is about being a good person. Conservative Christians have a vision of what this moral personal looks like. Progressive Christians have a different vision of what this moral personal looks like. Regardless, the focus is the same: Christianity is about morality.”
Progressive Christians who are disenchanted move toward the social justice dimensions of Christianity and no longer care so much for all the spiritualized devil and demon mumbo jumbo talk. Beck thinks this is fine, but also thinks this shift poses some tough challenges for liberal/progressive disenchanted Christians:
“But a thoroughly moralized and disenchanted Christianity raises all sorts of questions. For example: Why do you have to do religious things, like go to church on Sundays, to be a moral person? And if you don’t have to believe in God, the Devil, miracles or life after death to practice the Golden Rule then what’s the point of believing in any of these things?
Lots of Christians who are struggling with disenchantment don’t have any good answers to these questions, and I think that’s one of the big reasons so many Christians are drifting toward agnosticism and atheism.
Which makes me think that a thoroughly disenchanted Christianity just isn’t sustainable.
At some point, for Christianity to remain vital and energized it has to reconnect with enchantment.”
I really think Dr. Beck is hitting on some very important stuff here, and I would say that it has to do mainly with the shadow side of the disenchanted, Modern, mechanistic, techno-scientific Euro-American worldview. I’m not sure where Dr. Beck is going to go as far as a proposed solution to the problem he’s laying out, but for me I can’t help but think about how a scientific/scientistic, narrowly-empirical, disenchanted, reductionistic/eliminative, materialist worldview bifurcates nature, as Whitehead would say. In other words, western techno-science diminishes or reduces nature (material, human, cosmological or otherwise) and splits mind from matter. Integral thinkers like Whitehead have helped me understand how science, following enlightenment thinkers like Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Hume et. al, tends to be concerned with the study of the mechanical “how?” of things, a study that is primarily worried about the mathematical measurement of primary qualities like length, width, height, mass, and motion. This unfortunately leaves all the other stuff, questions of beauty, morality, the “why?” questions associated with the interior aspect of life or the subjective, to be thought of as merely secondary, illusory sorts of qualities that science must overcome in order to reach objective reality. This is one reason, one big reason in my opinion, why powerful, educated Euro-Westerners have become disenchanted.
At the end of his post, Beck indicates that Christianity should try to reconnect with enchantment. Like I said above, I am curious to see how he recommends doing this, but I can speak personally and say that I agree with him and that I have — following non-dual thinkers, mystics, religious naturalists et al. — attempted to do this in my own life by refusing to collapse the subjective into the objective and remove the psychic life from the content of nature. Resisting this Modern, reductionistic/eliminative impulse, and insisting that we “maintain the reality of the red glow of the sunset, revealed to us in our psychic life, alongside the reality of the molecules and electric waves revealed by the sciences,” is one way I personally have reclaimed a sort of enchantment. Coming to see all of creation again as a child might see it — as wondrous, magical, alive, and ensouled — has been a fantastically beautiful, life-giving, and transformative thing.
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