Alan Jacobs Misses the Mark with Jesus, Enchantment, and (even) David Bentley Hart

Photo of Alan Jacobs, Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University

Alan Jacobs is high on my list of living heroes, and his book Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind was one of my favorite reads in the past five years. Notwithstanding, a recent short post of his on his blog was a profound disappointment for two reasons. First, Jacobs gave a flippant and inaccurate categorization of a book that I am reading and enjoying tremendously. Secondly, and far more importantly, he makes a complete hash of his claim that “experiencing the world as enchanted has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Taking my second heartbreak first, I’ll first note that, after this bold claim about there being a realm that is entirely unrelated to the lordship of Jesus Christ, he does back away and soft-peddle his language substantially for those who want to think that the cosmos is enchanted:

For me — YMMV, and it really and truly may vary, you may be aided enormously by such reflections — it’s just another way to avoid thinking about Jesus. I already have a thousand of those, I don’t need a thousand-and-one.

Now, that is not much of a concession. It is more like a backhanded warning (or even a spiritual put-down). However, he does directly say that there are other people who might “be aided enormously by such reflections” on the enchantment of Christ’s creation.

Jacobs goes on to link to several of his fabulously wonderful essays related to Charles Taylor from past years and to close with an agonizingly beautiful passage from Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels. However, Jacobs—in his freedom from any need for enchantment given his single-minded pursuit of Jesus Christ—gives an ever-so-slightly distorted twist to everything that he mentions. Here is the passage cited from Price:

By then, in the countryside near my parents’ home, I had also undergone solitary apprehensions of a vibrant unity among all visible things and the thing I guessed was hid beneath the visible world — the reachable world of trees, rocks, water, clouds, snakes, foxes, myself, and (beneath them) all I loved and feared. Even that early I sensed the world’s unity as a vast kinship far past the bond of any root I shared with other creatures in evolutionary time, and the Bible stories had begun to engage me steadily in silence and to draw me toward the singular claim at their burning heart — Your life is willed and watched with care by a god who once lived here.

Theologically, there is plenty that can be legitimately questioned within this enchanting passage, but Jacobs brilliantly (not a compliment in all cases) reads the passage as a clarion call for the challenge that Christ represents to enchantment. Citing the “singular claim” that Price arrives at, Jacobs expounds this as Jesus Christ being “something more surprising, challenging, and specific” than Price’s “vibrant unity among all visible things,” and Jacobs rewrites the closing line as: “my life is willed and watched with care by a God — the only God there is — who once lived here.” This, however, twists the point that Price is making in a couple of subtle ways. Price has a wordplay on “singular” as he approaches “the singular claim at their burning heart” (much like Moses approaching the burning bush or Elena Shvarts there gazing into “the heart-wood, the smouldering trunk” with her poem “The Book on the Windowsill”). In addition to the meaning of “specific” that Jacobs mentions, singular can also mean “unusual” or “peculiar, odd.” Price is calling Jesus Christ several things at the same time with his closing lines: a god among gods, a uniquely central figure, a historical person, one who watches each of us and wills good things for us, and one who is thereby the ultimate meaning of (or within or behind) the “vibrant unity among all visible things and the thing I guessed was hid beneath the visible world.” These claims for Price are clearly not to dismiss or to push aside all of the strangeness hidden within creation. Instead, Price is saying that all of the wildness points to Jesus Christ as a god who lived among us. Price might very well agree with the vital claim by Jacobs that Jesus is also “the only God there is.” However, the point that Price is making in this passage is that the incarnation means that Jesus is “a god who once lived here.”

And this is a call to recognize the whole world as being on fire with divine life. On one of the several occasions when he was accused of being a blasphemer, Jesus Christ responded that all of his listeners were “gods” according to the sacred scriptures. The Apostle Paul describes Christ as giving a proper place to every principality and power under heaven as Christ reorders the new creation by his death and resurrection and subdues all of the spirits in the entire cosmos to His Father’s love.

This is Jesus we are talking about, so I appreciate the warning that Jacobs is issuing when he quotes himself on Charles Taylor and how the “porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike.” It is a terrible thing, indeed, to be open to demonic manipulations. I’m just not so sure that pretending that we can avoid such openness is any kind of a solution. Mary had to watch her son—God’s son—die before her eyes on a Roman cross at the hands of people like all of us who were worked up into a demonic frenzy. Before my own rhetoric carries me away, however, I also agree with Jacobs that the antidote to manipulation by demons is a singular focus on Jesus Christ. Mary at the foot of the cross was both singularly focused on Jesus Christ and entirely vulnerable as a “porous self” to the horrors of our fallen cosmos. Mary is the highest example of discipleship that we are called to emulate, and her posture alone can restore to us the creation of her Son—a world that “will flame out” with divine life because it is “charged with the grandeur of God.”

I hope that I’ve suggested something above about the absurdity of the claim that “experiencing the world as enchanted has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord,” and I suspect that this is a bit of rhetorical hyperbole from Jacobs to capture his audience early in his short post. To be as clear as possible, however, I would say that “the buffered self” is only a false and hopeless refuge and that to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord is to enable yourself to experience the world as enchanted. To put my position as bluntly and boldly as possible: with Jesus Christ comes all of His divinely enchanted creation, and if you are not seeing this in some sense, you should question the integrity of your sacramental and liturgical means of focusing on Jesus Christ.

Christianity has never considered paganism to be simply evil or dangerous. As C. S. Lewis wrote in 1952 with “Is Theism Important? A Reply” from the Socratic Digest:

When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, “Would that she were.” For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. ...The Christian and the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with the writers of the New Statesman; and those writers would of course agree with me.

Or as Chesterton is recorded to have said in 1911 within The Future of Religion: Mr. G. K. Chesterton's Reply to Mr. Bernard Shaw (Reprinted for The Heretics): “If anyone supposed that because [England] had become Pagan it would remain Pagan, he would advise those people to read a little history.” We could go to many other examples including John Calvin who wrote that “all creatures are animated by angelic motion ...because God exerts and diffuses his energy in a secret manner, so that no creature is content with his own peculiar vigor, but is animated by angels themselves.” Or we might consider my own favorite passage which comes from Origen of Alexandria (Contra Celsum 8.31) as he says that all of the many nature spirits worshiped by the pagans were servants of God and not demons:

We indeed also maintain with regard not only to the fruits of the earth, but to every flowing stream and every breath of air that the ground brings forth those things which are said to grow up naturally — that the water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams — that the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians; but we deny that those invisible agents are demons. And if we might speak boldly, we would say that if demons have any share at all in these things, to them belong famine, blasting of the vine and fruit trees, pestilence among men and beasts: all these are the proper occupations of demons.

I should return to my topic, however, and note that I agree with Charles Taylor (and Jacobs in his more articulate moments) that we cannot simply “go back” to a time of the “porous self” and that to attempt such a simple return would be foolish. However, even Taylor is not dogmatic on these questions and leaves the future open:

I talked about not being able to go back. But surely lots of our contemporaries are already “back” in this world. They believe in and practice certain rituals to restore health or give them success. The mentality survives, even if underground. That is true; much survives of the earlier epoch. But the big change, which would be hard to undo, is that which has replaced the porous selves of yore with what I would describe as “buffered” selves. [From “Disenchantment—Reenchantment” by Charles Taylor quoted in The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now edited by George Levine.]

No one of us has any control over such shared and collective realities, and I agree, again, with Jacobs, that our only calling is to keep our eyes, with Mary, upon Christ. However, seeing Christ does not have “absolutely nothing to do with” whatever capacity we might still have for “experiencing the world as enchanted,” and the “buffered self” is certainly not a refuge in which to hide.

Having spent a little time nursing my second and most serious injury from the short post by Jacobs, let me briefly conclude with my first devastation. It was actually a kind of physical pain to me when Jacobs gave a flippant and inaccurate categorization of a book that I am currently reading and enjoying tremendously. His opening sentence threw out some very clever shade:

It seems that “enchantment” is having a moment right now — e.g. — and, well, okay, but I’d like to make two points...

The link goes to All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life by David Bentley Hart recently published by Yale (after a long wait that started for many in 2016). Now, certainly, Hart has written a great deal about enchantment, insisting as he has in print that: “Of course mermaids exist” (“Selkies and Nixies” in The Lamp Magazine on May 26, 2021) and agreeing (in the words of his dog Roland) with Charles Taylor about the extent to which we are cut off from this world:

In an age of unbelief, everyone is an unbeliever to some degree. Belief now requires a decision, and a tacit application of will that never for a moment relents. That’s why the fiercest forms of faith in the modern world are actually just inverted forms of faithlessness—forms of desperation masquerading as faith. Arch-traditionalism, I mean, and of course fundamentalism, which are in fact manifestations of a morbidly impoverished power of belief, a faith wasted away by inanition and hardened by desiccation, and of a frantic attempt to hold onto relics or remains that one mistakes for living possibilities. …Well, the regress is infinite. It’s simply the case now that almost everyone of your race today—in the modern world, I mean—even the most devout and convinced of them, is more profoundly an infidel. Real, guileless faith in the divinity that shows itself in the evident forms of creation has become catastrophically attenuated, like the fading scent of a chipmunk on the porch after two days of rain. And that’s a tragic condition to be in, because the divine dimension is real, and is moreover the deepest truth of your own natures. To be estranged from it is to be shattered within yourselves… to become something less than machines… fragments of machines… a heap of springs and sprockets. [Roland in Moonlight page 328.]

However, the book (apparently) dismissed by Jacobs as another example of “enchantment” having “a moment right now,” is not just another treatise on enchantment but is a sustained engagement with contemporary philosophy and science in relation to mind, life, language, and consciousness. It is a sustained and systematic examination of our shared mindset of mechanistic materialism as the metaphysical vision that none of us have the capacity to step outside of to any significant degree. This book by Hart is serious work, and I found the witty and hand-waving treatment by Jacobs, in the case of this short blog post, to be in poor taste.