Christianity and the charge of disenchantment

A Christian shrine perches on a former pagan sacred rock in Lithuania, © LietuvosGamta.lt

In February 1387 the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Jogaila, returned to his capital city of Vilnius bearing a new name, Władysław, and sporting the white robe of the newly baptised. The last pagan ruler in Europe, who had accepted the crown of Poland at the price of becoming a Christian, was intent on bringing Europe’s last pagan state, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, into the fold of Christendom. According to the chroniclers, King Władysław brought with him Polish priests and soldiers, who carried axes and set about publicly cutting down the sacred oaks that the Lithuanians worshipped. The pagan Lithuanians looked on, dumbfounded, as the Poles laid the axe to their sacred groves with apparent impunity. After the mass baptisms, when the priests sprinkled water over Lithuanians in groups of hundreds, those who wanted to show their loyalty to the new faith – and to the Grand Duke – took up the axe themselves to attack the trees. The creature was no longer to be worshipped, but the Creator; and the gods had been shown powerless against the servants of the new God of the Christians. Within a few decades, the formerly sacred forests set aside for the gods were re-purposed for timber, for charcoal-burning and for the extraction of bark, and the process of mass deforestation commenced. By the end of the 17th century many species that had once enjoyed protection as sacred animals in the Lithuanian forests, such as the aurochs and European bison, had either gone extinct or were on the verge of annihilation.

There are many other stories that could be told about how the introduction of Christianity brought a new, desacralised and disenchanted view of nature; Lithuania’s experience was just one among many. And while Christians are more familiar with defending their faith against the charge of superstition or irrationality, the charge of disenchantment – which is, arguably, the opposite charge from the old Enlightenment critique of Christianity as a superstitious religion of old wives – is increasingly levelled against the Christian faith. It was Christianity that emptied the natural world of its inherent sacredness, and therefore Christianity that laid the foundations for a mindset that enabled ecological destruction. Christianity alienates human beings from nature, and places an artificial gulf between humans and all other living things. That is the charge, and it is a serious one for those who believe deeply in the value of supernatural faith. If Christianity actually turns out to be the root and cause of the disenchantment that many Christians themselves deplore, then clearly Christianity is the problem and not the solution.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile at this point to draw a distinction between supernaturalism and re-enchantment. Both are advocated, to varying degrees, by people who see a revival of faith as part of the future of humanity, and who see value in faith as something good in and of itself. The late-20th-century fad for the de-supernaturalisation of faith has faded, perhaps for the obvious reason that faith doesn’t have much appeal if it surrenders its own USP (the idea that something exists beyond the material world). But supernaturalism – the affirmation and celebration of the value of the supernatural claims of faith – is not necessarily the same thing as re-enchantment, which suggests an experience of the supernatural and transcendent that is not only found in extraordinary works of God or the Biblical reports of them – the miracles of Jesus, for example – but in everything. Enchantment is the idea that the supernatural permeates the natural, that there is a permeable boundary between flesh and spirit, between the human and the divine, and that the entire natural world has the capacity to become a window to supernatural realities. At its most extreme, this kind of thinking (we could call it ‘hard enchantment’, perhaps) clearly has the potential to become pantheism – a view that, traditionally, transgresses the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. But a weaker, ‘soft enchantment’ is something that has historically existed alongside or as part of a Christian worldview for much of Christianity’s history.

On the face of it, Christianity might seem to be a religion that disenchants, on the grounds that it posits a clear distinction between the Creator and the creature: ‘There is a God, and He isn’t you’. Traditional Christianity is not a solipsistic or pantheistic religion. But on the other hand, Christianity’s entire raison d’être is its distinctive belief in the co-existence of divine and human natures in a man who is both fully God and fully man; so Christianity can hardly be a religion hostile, in and of itself, to the permeability of the boundary between the unchanging divine and the finite and contingent material. Nothing in the Christian faith obliges us to accept a materialistic outlook on the natural world, or indeed to accept contemporary prejudices about the sharp definition of the conceptual boundaries of the spiritual and material.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Christianity emerged from 1st-century Judaism – which did not have a desacralised or disenchanted view of nature. We need only read the Psalms to realise that ancient Jews regarded the natural world with awe and wonder, albeit that awe and wonder drew them to worship the Creator, and not the creature itself. Jesus himself expressed wonder at the beauty of nature (cf. Matt. 6:28-29), and St Paul in the Letter to the Romans (8:19-22) looked ahead to the redemption of the entire creation, not just human souls. But it is undeniable that Christianity’s rejection of nature-worship has provided, for some, a pretext to intensify the exploitation of natural resources and to treat all living creatures as means to human ends – a kind of radical anthropocentrism. To associate such radical anthropocentrism solely with Christianity, however, is to suppose that pre-Christian societies always treated nature with reverence and awe. They did not. The Romans, for example, had their taboos and their sacred trees and groves, but the unsentimental Romans were very far from being tree-huggers.

The charge of radical anthropocentrism against Christianity derives from Christianity’s emphasis on the redemption of human nature through a human being, the God-man Jesus Christ. There is, so critics allege, no place in this cosmology or economy of salvation for other creatures – hence the oft-repeated canards that the theory of evolution and the likelihood of extraterrestrial life are ideas inherently distressing to Christians. But it is obviously untrue that human beings are the only creatures who matter in the Christian outlook; the angels matter, for one thing, and Isaiah 11:6-9 (unless interpreted in a wholly allegorical fashion) points to a future renewal of creation for animals as well as for human beings. It is not difficult to find Christians who expect their pets to join them at the general resurrection, and there is no obvious reason to consider such speculation unorthodox.

St Francis of Assisi is perhaps the most influential example of a Christian who emphasised the holiness of God permeating the entire created order, but it is often forgotten that St Francis inspired an entire Franciscan spiritual and theological tradition of according great significance to naturalia (natural phenomena) as manifestations of the mystery of God, from St Bonaventure’s ‘Book of Nature’ to the Franciscan missionaries’ fascination with the wonders of distant lands. St Francis was not just an inspirational spiritual teacher, but the initiator of a serious philosophical tradition. The Franciscans eloquently showed that there was no contradiction between worshipping the Creator, and Him alone, and finding boundless wonder in created things. For if our world is the creation of an infinite God, it goes without saying (to my mind, at least) that the creation will be a source of awe and wonder, and that the creation will reveal (in some partial way, at least) the majesty and holiness of an ineffable, unknowable God. So it is bitterly ironic that sciences like cosmology and particle physics have stretched the boundaries of the universe we live in to the point where its complexity, scale and age now lie at or beyond the limits of human comprehension, while many Christians perceive science as a threat to faith. What is a greater support to faith than sciences that reveal a world of unfathomable mysteries, and inform us that the prosaic material world we seem to perceive is not the true reality?

The possibility of the co-existence of Christianity and enchantment is one of those things that has sometimes been better understood by ordinary Christians than by theologians, perhaps because theologians are so often concerned with the enforcement of orthodoxy and the teaching of the central truths of the Christian faith. To be clear, it is not a central truth of the Christian faith that we live in an enchanted world – and it would be wrong to claim that it is; I will not cast aspersions on the sincerity of the faith of those for whom enchantment does not matter. But the wisdom of ordinary Christians who found God over the centuries in the landscapes and natural world they inhabited, without confusing the creature for the Creator and remaining faithful Christians, deserves our attention and respect.

So how did we get to the point where Christianity became a pretext for the disenchantment and exploitation of the natural world, for a radical anthropocentrism in which all creatures exist only to serve and gratify the human? I would argue that this development has more to do with the Enlightenment than it does with Christianity, although it is undeniable that the Church was complicit in the Enlightenment project of disenchantment – even to the point where the clergy, those whose job was literally to affirm the reality of the supernatural, became the Enlightenment’s ‘useful idiots’ and advanced the agenda of disenchantment. If the blame can be pinned on one man, it is Balthasar Bekker (1634-98), who was determined the restrict the field of the Christian understanding of the supernatural. Bekker is a crucial figure because he provides a bridge between an older, Reformation-rooted Calvinist tradition of suspicion about supernatural claims (sometimes called ‘cessationism’) and the newer, burgeoning rationalism of the Scientific Revolution. These two streams met in Bekker and caused him to become a kind of ‘neo-Sadducee’, stripping the supernatural claims of Christianity to their bare essentials and denying the existence of spirits, or magic, or miracles in the modern world. Of course, it was only a short step from Bekker to question all the supernatural claims of Christianity, and to abandon theism for deism and, eventually, for atheism.

There seems little disagreement now among Christians that the Bekkerian trajectory of de-supernaturalisation has now run its course; only a small remnant of ageing anti-supernaturalist Christians cling on to their dog-eared copies of Don Cupitt’s Sea of Faith. The question is, what comes next? One option is the arid territory of Biblical fundamentalism, a narrow view of faith and human nature that restricts the field of human wonder to the pages of the Bible and a facile interpretation of it. But I find it difficult to accept that we must choose between Enlightenment materialism and Biblical fundamentalism; after all, both are novel creations of the last two centuries. For most of Christian history – and throughout the Middle Ages, in particular – Christians managed to co-exist with orthodoxy and awe of nature; and I would argue that this is something we should (indeed must) recover. The creature is not the Creator, there is a God and He’s not you – but the world He created is a boundless and unlimited source of wonder and new knowledge of Him. Truly, we live in an enchanted world.