Disenchantment and the Devil

The modern world is only as profane as we make it

Sometimes, when I’m walking in the countryside, I like to imagine away all traces of the modern world. Roads, pylons, buildings. Other people in fluorescent Gore-Tex and their insufficiently feral dogs. I like to imagine I am wandering through the same woods and fells and dales, but centuries ago. That I am ‘in history’. And not as a time traveller, but as someone fully immersed in the moment, oblivious to the 21^st century and its profane concerns.

Perhaps I’m in the 8^th century, when much of my fiction* is set. A world of remote farmsteads and bustling monasteries, a world where pitched battles are fought and heroic songs are sung of them. And, yes, perhaps a world that owes as much to fantasy as actual history. There could be dragons, so it’s a good thing I have an invisible sword hanging from my belt.

A still from Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert (1965)

I’m sure I’m not the only one who does this. Perhaps you do it too. If not, rest assured, there’s a good chance that random middle-aged man who looks like a geography teacher has other things on his mind.

Would my reverie be disturbed by the appearance of a Roman road, with a company of legionaries marching along, and perhaps a ragtag of camp followers and noisy livestock? No, not at all. In fact, humans and animals from just about any period of the ancient world or Middle Ages would fit right in. And I’m fine with wagons on those ancient roads; perhaps a medieval wagon on the ghostly remains of a Roman road is even better than actual Romans. That wagon could be heading to a market town or even a small city. At some point of historical development, though, the spell would be broken.

Disenchantment in history

Which point? In terms of dates, certainly the 19^th century and maybe even the 17^th? But dates don’t really capture it. What does? The conventional way to think about this is in terms of disenchantment. The modern world – the world of pylons and Gore-Tex – is disenchanted because such technology has given humans mastery over nature. Or because capitalism has instrumentalised the world. Or because a materialist worldview has no room for the sacred. These accounts overlap and complement one another, but the last is perhaps the most important.

Humans have always used technology of one kind or another. In fact, if we went back far enough, to before the advent of agriculture and primitive cities, I fear the spell would be broken at the other end. Just millennium after millennium of hunting and gathering in loincloths. Where’s the magic in that? And humans as we know ourselves have always been acquisitive, have always traded and always exploited our natural environment, even if we once felt obliged to placate the appropriate spirits first. Or, in the case of the Christian West, if we saw that exploitation as mandated by God. (See Prometheus and providence.)

With spirits and God alike out of the picture, the world does indeed seem disenchanted. But what if disenchantment is the wrong way to think about this? What if a sense of the sacred is less about what we believe or don’t believe about things unseen than our attitude to what we find in the world, natural or otherwise?

I have written before – see Christianity and existential freedom – about how the Christian emphasis on divine grace, while liberating believers from the pagan urge to placate the universe, paradoxically made thinkable the previously unthinkable. Why not move on from religion, and the idea of a morally freighted universe, altogether? This is less about belief than disposition, however. It is a kind of existential corollary of the epistemological move made by the Enlightenment polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace, who is supposed to have said of God, ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’.

Indeed, when people are not blaming the Enlightenment for disenchanting the world, they often take aim at the Reformation. The Protestant Reformers reaffirmed the gospel emphasis on grace and, among other things, rejected more ritualistic aspects of religious practice that suggested Christians have to earn their salvation. Some argue this robbed religion of its magic, and paved the way for secularism, scientific materialism and modern capitalism. But this is a bad case of reading history backwards.

In its own terms, the Reformation was a religious revival, bringing mystery and awe back into a church that had become all too worldly. Ritual was not abolished but put in its place. It’s true that science and commerce both flourished in the wake of the Reformation. So too, eventually, did religious toleration. But those scientists and entrepreneurs were Christians, not atheists. Many were more devout in their Protestant faith than their medieval Catholic forebears had been in theirs.

Making our own meaning?

It was only very slowly that the ‘God hypothesis’ began to seem superfluous not only for science but for human wellbeing. And – in both cases – it was Deism rather than Protestantism that marked a decisive break from historic Christianity. That is, it was the idea that God exists, that he created the universe even, but that he plays no active role in the workings of the universe or in the lives of human beings. While Deists rejected the idea that Jesus died for our sins, they generally held onto the convenient Christian idea that we don’t have to worry about judgement.

Slowly, what was made thinkable in theory by Christianity’s putting the burden of salvation on God began to seem like common sense: leave him to it. There was no need explicitly to renounce God, but just as little need to bother him. When people today speak dismissively about ‘God botherers’, they are using rhetorical Deism to express a cheerful irreverence for the whole idea of religion. In most cases, they don’t believe in God at all, but they take some kind of comfort from anthropomorphising the very idea of God: ‘I’m sure if there is a God, he (or she!) has more important things to worry about than who we sleep with’ etc.

Why did no one think of that before? Or rather, why did no one think like that? The answer is as much anthropological as theological. If we humans live in a morally freighted universe, what we do in life matters in a profoundly objective sense. This, surely, is the human intuition that gives rise to belief in God or gods in every culture we know. After generations of getting increasingly comfortable with leaving God out of things, the post-Christian view is that morality is a human invention, and ultimately subjective. The universe is only morally freighted if, and to the extent that, we decide it is.

This seems especially plausible in a world that is increasingly man-made. As walkers cannot help noticing, not only cities but much of the countryside is now man-made. Not to speak of human institutions, from government and the law to schools and the media. Even the church is man-made. Or at least that’s how it seems to the post-Christian disposition. When we look at the world this way, we see no meaning we didn’t put there. And we call it disenchantment.

Enchantment strikes back?

Sometimes, though, we look differently. In a much-shared scene from Sam Mendes’ film American Beauty, a sensitive young man shows a girl the film he’s made of a plastic bag dancing in the wind, and explains: ‘that’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.’

Sweet, right? I mean, is it possible to be too sensitive to intimations of the sacred? Probably, and I’d be especially of wary of drawing religious conclusions from such experiences, but still: it’s possible to look even at something entirely man-made and intuit something truly meaningful breaking through from beyond the man-made.

Philosophers have argued over these things for millennia, and it is only relatively recently that scepticism about the objectivity of truth, goodness and beauty has enjoyed the prestige it does now. We still have a stubborn sense that certain things are true, and not because convention says so; that they really are. That certain things are right or wrong regardless of how anyone feels about them. And that beauty is really there in the world, not in the eye of the beholder.

Sometimes these things come together. If we see a plastic bag caught in a tree while walking in the country, we are much more likely to see it as ugly than beautiful, in part because we feel it was wrong of someone to discard it so carelessly. A plastic bag strikes a false note, because it does not belong in the tree. It is an offence against the beautiful, the good and the true.

Luis Buñuel’s film Simon of the Desert, ostensibly set in 5^th century Syria, ends with the jarring image of a plane flying over the would-be hermit before he is transported to a nightclub in contemporary (1960s) New York. But this is just the culmination of long and annoying campaign by the Devil, mostly in the guise of a temptress in a ‘sexy schoolgirl’ outfit, to distract Simon from his vocation. While people pester him with requests for miracles, the Devil poses a more existential challenge by making a mockery of Simon’s pious asceticism. A horned accuser would be one thing, but this?

The Devil, no matter the outfit he wears, is obviously no atheist. But neither does he respect what is sacred. The Devil does not exactly disenchant; he diminishes, deflates and defiles the sacred. His schtick is the relentless bathos of the knob gag. He embodies the tedious, adolescent idea that life itself is no more than a dirty joke. But, of course, dirty jokes only work as long as at least some people take sex seriously enough to be offended. You cannot defile what no one holds sacred.

Tell the truth and shame the Devil

I always thought Game of Thrones would have been better without the semi-pornographic brothel scenes, but that’s more because they were regrettable in their own terms than because they spoiled the show. There was enough pathos in the various prostitutes’ stories to give the lie to the affected nonchalance of these scenes. There was tragedy behind the titillation. (There always is, even if you pretend not to see it.)

The universality of sex and indeed prostitution is a boon to film and TV producers. Even the crudest vulgarity will not break the spell of historical fantasy like a plastic bag or a digital watch would, or like an ill-judged sassy line often does. Because, pace Philip Larkin, sex did not begin in 1963. And it has always been both sacred and profane; the confusion of the two has always been part of its mystery. There is nothing historical about that, or about the dance between the two more generally.

As for real historical change, I still like an ‘unspoiled’ view of the countryside. And I will continue to imagine away the unavoidable trappings of modernity on my walks. But nothing began in 1863, 1663 or even 1517 to do permanent violence to the landscape in a spiritual as opposed to aesthetic sense. The world is as enchanted and as enchanting as it ever was.

When I yearn to be oblivious to the profane concerns of the 21^st century, perhaps what I really want is to be free of the vain conceit that humanity itself disenchants the world. There was a time when people knew better.

*The Pictish Princess ..and other stories from before there was a Scotland