Re-Enchantment and Christian Animism

This post was not written using AI.

The current moment for “re-enchantment” strikes a deep chord for me. A few of my readers may know that in a past that now seems both distant and poignantly unrecoverable, I was ordained a priest in the Orthodox Church (I would mention the jurisdiction but I prefer to retain at least a little anonymity on this platform) and served several years in a parish. When I left the priesthood, I also, for a time, became an apostate from the faith: at first from Orthodoxy, and later from Christianity tout court. That I ever found my way back — to Orthodoxy, not to the priesthood; that’s no longer a possibility, a fact for which I’m quite grateful as I don’t believe I’m suited for it — is a miracle of grace. I am old enough now to know that life has great, irremediable sorrows, sorrows that can only have their healing in God’s Kingdom; that I once stood at the altar, and no longer may, is of course one of these sorrows for me.

Why did I leave the priesthood and why did I apostatize? In the beginning of my Orthodox life I was, as many of the “Orthobros” are today, an insufferable rigorist in terms of ecclesiology, doctrine more broadly, and praxis. I think that God sends trials and temptations especially to such people to humble them (which is why I don’t worry overmuch about the current crop of young male converts;

Paul Kingsnorth

and

The Druid Stares Back

are correct about this — they will either mature in the faith, or leave). The trial and temptation that came for me, as I inclined further and further towards a deeply ascetic Orthodoxy, was that inwardly, I rebelled. I rebelled against the spirit of works such as Tito Colliander’s Way of the Ascetics, which, although it is a modern book, is a fairly pristine representative of traditional Orthodox ascetic piety. At the heart of it, there was no place for my body, no place for my affective life; ultimately, no place for me, no place for the entire created order.

Please believe me when I say that I am deeply familiar with the stock responses about the incarnational character of Christian theology and spirituality. I am deeply familiar with them — and also, in the end, they are not a response to the most profound and fundamental question: what is the nature of created things?

Sebastian Morello

(whose controversial recent book I am now reading with great enjoyment) might say that “the world is God’s icon,” and I do not know how deeply in his book of that title he explores the nature of the icon itself. It seems to me that to valorize the created world simply because it images forth the uncreated God is precisely not to valorize the created world at all. It is to leave all value in God, and the question of what the bestowal of value on the created world by God really means is left unaddressed. What does the created world itself contribute? Anything? Nothing? If something, then what, and how?

This question is of course central to our spiritual life. What are we doing here? Are we creating, or obeying? Is virtue creative, genuinely creative, or is it a matter simply of asymptotic approach to an unreachable archetype in whom all being, all truth, all value, subsist? Is the fundamental gesture of spiritual life to become nothing? It seems to me that, incarnational tensions and protestations to the contrary, there is something Buddhist at the heart of this metaphysical spirituality. Indeed, not Buddhist: Perennialist. Schuon himself, in a moment of lucid honesty in Esoterism As Principle And As Way, says that Perennialism’s closest metaphysical expression is Advaita Vedanta. So much for the Abba of Jesus!

While I have found my way back to the communion of the Orthodox Church, I wear my metaphysics much more lightly than I did before, in part, because after the winding path that brought me home — which included great succor from personalists and existentialists, mostly Catholic, who might be anathema to both sides of the current re-enchantment debate — I see the tentative and human, all-too-human character of all metaphysics per se. Here, Berdyaev, the fiery prophet, is once again my master, as indeed he was at the very beginning of my journey into Christian faith long before I read the Ladder of Divine Ascent. “We have lost all confidence in the possibility and fruitfulness of an abstract metaphysic,” as he wrote in the first lines of Freedom and the Spirit. (And before accusations fly against Berdyaev, I ask readers to remember that he was the spiritual son of a great confessor of the faith, St Alexei Mechev.)

In the same text, Berdyaev also says:

The torment of doubt may be defeated, yet even in the new-found faith the depths of previous uncertainty are revealed. Such a faith will possess quite a different quality from that belonging to those who have not had these doubts, and who have inherited their beliefs from tradition. The man who has travelled far in the realms of the spirit, and who has passed through great trials in the course of his search for truth, will be formed spiritually along lines which must differ altogether from those pertaining to the man who has never shifted his position and to whom new spiritual territories are unknown.

All metaphysics — whether the Platonism and Neoplatonism that the Fathers took up and transfigured, or the Aristotelianism through which the Angelic Doctor shone piercing, prismatic rays of revealed truth — is provisional. In this, perhaps, I am now forever a son of the East: an apophaticist who takes apophaticism very seriously indeed. In moments of prayer, particularly at times of utter grief and desolation, I have understood the silence of St Thomas. I see all metaphysical speculation and “it looks like straw.”

All of this is to say: the desire for re-enchantment is elemental and irrepressible. But as sympathetic as I am to traditionalist revanchism (and I am indeed very sympathetic, given the world as it is), re-enchantment will not be found in adherence to some metaphysical schema, even one with tremendous traditional bona fides. It will not be found in Scholasticism; it will not be found in Neoplatonism; it will not be found either in Hermeticism, if this last is conceived and enacted primarily as another set of foundational metaphysical dogmas. What I want — and what I think is needed for the healing of our minds, hearts, souls, bodies, families, civilizations, indeed, for the healing of the earth — is something different; something more innocent, more childlike, something that does not summon forth the armories of a rigid traditionalism.

I wrote recently:

We want magic because we want Faerie, and we have wanted it since we were children: and having become disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we want to know how Faerie stands in relation to him. We want to know if the the Lord’s feet really did “walk upon England’s mountains green,” we want to know what hath Avalon to do with Jerusalem. And the Fathers will not tell us that.

Quid ergo Avalonis et Hierosolymis? This is the question that possesses my heart, that has possessed my heart for so long. The approach to an answer — as tempted as I am, in spite of all I know, to seek an answer in further metaphysical speculation! — is I think not through what is high, but through what is low.

By this I mean: to rediscover and reinhabit a genuinely re-enchanted life-world, the place to look is not the high metaphysical speculation of the spiritual masters held up by this or that orthodoxy (including esoteric orthodoxies) — it is to rediscover the more humble mind and life of the simplest pre-modern believers. And above all, that means animism: it means that we acknowledge that enchantment is with us, willy-nilly, whether we want it or not: and it is present because we inhabit a world that is not primarily a world of things (as the materialists tell us) or a world of One Thing (as the Perennialists and all their co-travellers tell us) but a world of persons. Human persons; non-human persons; persons with gross bodies; persons with subtle bodies. Persons with whom we must relate. Persons who act freely within their capacities and spheres of power. Persons who exist in relationship with one another, with us, and with the Lord. Persons who are creative, unpredictable, terrifying, benevolent, malicious, delightful. Persons on all levels of being.

This felt and experienced life-world is what I might refer to as Christian Animism, or perhaps, if I am bold, Christian Druidry. Note that I say “felt and experienced”: the way into it is to experience the living world and the living beings that surround us, whom our ancestors knew well, but in whom sophists told us that we should not believe, with whom they told us we must not engage. Many of us say freely that we have this experience in the temple, of the real presence of the angels and the saints — but I am not sure, if our alleged experience of numinous beings is thus segregated from the forests and the mountains, that we are really the believers we claim to be.

I do not pretend to understand the metaphysics of this animist world. Whether I understand it or not, whether I use this or that more-or-less-cogent schema to orient my mind in it, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that I acknowledge it, that I accept it, that indeed I love it, that I receive it. If God is the Creator, then surely He created all this also — all these persons with whom He calls me to live, just as He calls me to live with the other sons and daughters of Adam and Eve.

Of course, a radical purification is needed here. Where our ancestors worshipped these beings, we must not. The darkness that accompanies so many of the principalities and powers is terrifyingly real, and the same darkness afflicts those who turn first to sorcery, necromancy, the manipulation and appeasement of these powers to achieve their ends. There is a real meaning to “pagan darkness,” and I had experiences while I was away from the Church that confirmed this truth to me irrefutably.

But the fact that we no longer worship other men does not mean that we cease to believe that other men exist, or that we try to live our lives without relating to them at all. The fact that there are men given wholly over to evil does not mean that there are no men struggling in the path of the good. We accept this field of relationship as one of the Creator’s greatest gifts, in spite of its character as an arena that tries our faith. Why should we not extend the circle fully, and accept relationship with a living, personal world as the place of our salvation?

Spirits of the woods, the fields, the ocean, the water, the stars: how might we, Christian men and women, speak to them? Listen to them? Preach the Gospel to them? Receive the Gospel preached by them to us? Might a Christian astrologer learn to hear the Gospel preached by the circling stars? Might a Christian Druid in the High Sierra preach the Gospel to the spirits of the ancient trees who have awaited its coming since the dawn of time? Is our troublesome and painful presence in the world now a fruit above all of the fact that we have failed in this fundamental vocation?

And still more: might the stars and the mountains and the forests and the sea, might the hawks and bees and coyotes and bears, might the living stones and the breath of the air and the bright fire, have something to teach us, to reveal to us, that we could receive in no other way? Might not the earth herself, in her holy places, where our ancient ancestors built stone circles, and our more recent ancestors built churches, teach us a love and a wonder we cannot learn unless we listen to her?

I leave you with the question, but this is the path my heart leads me on as I continue to attempt to discover what it means to be a Christian in this world: not negating this world for the sake of some other, but answering the spiritual flame in the heart of every created thing, addressing it, listening to it, singing with it, as a Mystery that has not been fathomed yet by any metaphysics, and never shall be, but is open to the voice of Magic and of Love.