Speaking A New World into Existence

Re-Enchanting the World with Language: A Follow-Up to The Dark Enchantment of Modernity

Beginning At the Beginning

Last week, I wrote an essay called The Dark Enchantment of Modernity that focused on the importance of language in the mind of C.S. Lewis. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were lots of folks who read and enjoyed the essay; much more than I was expecting, in fact, which I’m really happy about. Joe Holland who is a friend of mine who serves as the Academic Dean at Grimke Seminary suggested writing more on the use of language as combat against evil. I thought this was a good idea and would make for a nice follow up to my original essay and would give me an opportunity to speak on enchantment from an angle that I’ve never explored before.

But, before we get going, let’s start back at the beginning. Before we can understand how language can be used to combat evil, we must first understand language, how it comes about, and derives its meaning. Then, we must also understand how language has been co-opted by the powers of darkness. In last week’s essay, I explained it this way:

Languages and ethics are born from a culture’s cosmic imagery or world picture. To use an analogy to give some earthiness to Baxter’s point, you ought to think of the relationship between these things in this way, to use an analogy — These things share something similar to a womb and child relationship. In the same way that a mother’s womb gives life, nourishment, and body to its child, cosmic imagery does the same thing with language and ethics. Language takes meaning from cosmic imagery and gives body to it like a local habitation. A cultures cosmic imagery is embodied within its languages and then these languages are used to enact ethics within the world.

This is how language works. Regardless of what culture you look at — be it ancient or modern. For example, when you look at many ancient languages like Hebrew or Latin, you will never see gender-neutral language like “birthing persons” or “pregnant people.” This is because their language was guided by a particular cosmic imagery where the Divine had created only one gender to give birth — women. The reason why modern language now has gender-neutral language like this is because the culture in which it finds its embodiment now has a different cosmic imagery.

Words have power. Words can speak worlds into existence and set worlds on fire (James 3:6). And this is why there is a war for words. This should be no surprise to us as Christians, for it has been this way since the first age. Remember, God spoke words to Adam and Eve that was meant to structure their world and guide their ethics.

The enemy from the beginning sought to twist those words into a dark spell that would curse humanity.

 “And he said unto the woman, ‘Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’ And the woman said unto the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.’ And the serpent said unto the woman, ‘Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’” - Genesis 3:1-5

The war of our age is the original war playing out again and again on the fractal canvas of time. As the wheel of time turns, more icons of God are born into the old war for the cosmos, just like their kin before them. There’s nothing new under the sun. Men may sub-create and arrange their world differently than those who came before them, but it’s the same old forms and matter. At the end of the day, the battle of each age is decided upon how they answer this question:

Will we fall under the enchantment of the Dark Magic and bend creation to our will, or will we yield to the True Magic of the One who created us and live in harmony with creation?

Re-Enchanting Our Vocabulary

For faithful Christians united to the Second Adam, the choice is simple. No amount of word games will persuade us to take the fruit and eat. No matter what TGC and Christianity Today writers tell us, we know that what hides behind the veil is nothing more than the enemy of old. He may be dressed in drag instead of having the appearance of the garden serpent, but make no mistake, it’s still him.

So, for those of us who have chosen to not become our own gods and to drink the Kool-Aid from the forbidden tree, where do we begin? We must begin with re-enchanting our vocabulary which starts with remembering the old world and its cosmic imagery. Remember, language is born from cosmic imagery, so we must start there.

This is why I said in the last essay that we must take up and read. We must immerse ourselves in the Great Tradition. We must let Plato’s Republic inform us then we must read Saint Augustine’s City of God next to it. We must let Aristotle inform us on the distinction between form and matter and then we must immerse ourselves in Saint Thomas’ Summa Theologiae. We must read Virgil’s Aeneid and Dionysus the Areopagite On the Celestial Hierarchy and see how Dante brings it all together in a beautiful symphony in Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Then, when your done with that, come back to C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image and Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia.

By doing this, we will immerse ourselves in the comic imagery of the old world. But here’s what I didn’t say last time and what I will say now.

After you take up and read, take up and take off. Go and live. Go sit on a mountain and contemplate the seven heavens and write about how they reflect the Celestial Hierarchy. Go stand by the vastness of the see and be reminded of the infinity of God and memorialize it with paint on a canvas. Call boys’ and girls’ boys and girls. Go and teach your children to do the same in hopeful expectation that they’ll go and teach their children.

It’s only after we spend time living in a re-enchanted world picture that we can begin to craft what Doug Wilson in Angels in the Architecture calls the poetic imagination. And then, and only then, can we begin casting our own counter-spells against modernity’s dark enchantment.

Baxter points out in his Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis this very thing. He writes:

“Dante could teach modern writers how to cast those ‘spells’ . . . used for breaking enchantments as he put it in his ‘Weight of Glory’ sermon. Dante taught him how an artist could cast a ‘counter spell’ in which the good feels weighty and attractive, a spell to overcome the ‘evil enchantment’ cast by modernity.”

By cultivating a poetic imagination, we can lift up our vocabulary and re-enchant it. We can learn to use our words to make the good, true, and beautiful weighty, attractive, and sacral. This may seem abstract at first, but it shouldn’t. We do this all the time with common things to sacralize them. It’s actually engrained into human nature.

For example, Christians have traditionally done this with funerals. The beasts of the field don’t bury their dead. But we lift up the life of the dead and ritualize it by lighting candles, putting pictures up to be viewed, saying a requiem or eulogizing, and processing the body through our towns. This sets apart the dead’s life as sacred. It communicates to the world that this person was created in the image of God and that they made our lives better in various ways. It makes living this kind of life weighty and attractive.

We even do this with sex. The thing that sets human sex apart from the sex of the beasts of the field is that we don’t do it in the streets for the world to see. Rather, we ritualize it and lift it up. We light candles, put on music, we have a designated place where this union of flesh occurs in private. This sets it apart as sacred and gives weightiness and attractiveness to the experience.

This is what we should do with our language and ethics.

We should lift them up so that they’re made beautiful and weighty acting as counter spells to the ugliness and rootlessness of modernity. There is no such thing as a High English, but that’s what we should strive for. A high language that embodies a high cosmic imagery that is clothed in poetic imagination. This may seem pedantic, but I promise enduring and beautiful to describe your wife’s beauty like this:

Her beauty is like that of the heavenly host;

Enduring and unfathomable in worth.

Like a star burning in the darkness of the sky outermost;

Then it is to just say “damn boo, you’re hot as hell.” Was it it Adam who first uttered poetry over his woman in the Garden? This is what human language was created for.

There is a reason why America has been dumbed down. We have been dumbed down so that we’d no longer look up, and our language reflects that (Contrast beauty like the heavenly host and being hot as hell).

Conclusion

Now, I am in no way guaranteeing that once we do this that the world will start listening. In fact, I don’t expect that at all. To shoot straight with you, I think we’re way past the tipping point now. Now, that’s not to say that we won’t win a few battles here and there. But we must remember that we’re fighting battles in an empire that will inevitably crumble. Our government is doing everything within its to make sure that its comic image is the image that is worshipped by restoring infant extermination laws and by making sure that Nephilim can share the restroom with your daughters.

But, when the empire finally crumbles, as it will, we will be here to rebuild in the ruins. Our work should be to build small pockets of resistance (and in states that are friendly to allowing us to do so). We do this by turning our homes and neighborhoods into miniature Shires where we live in community with like-minded neighbors, and by turning our churches into miniature Rivendell’s where people can come to rest and recover the lost lore of an old world by participating in our liturgies, catechesis, and Christian schools. We should band together with like-minded churches that share our cosmic imagery and create strong networks to support one another. As western culture eats itself, we will be here with a counterculture and counter spells ready to re-enchant a world.