The Dark Enchantment of Modernity

Re-enchanting Cosmic Imagery, Language, and Ethics

Introduction

I’ve recently been thumbing through Jason Baxter’s The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis. At some point last year, I had heard an interview that Baxter did with The Theology Pugcast and was intrigued, so I decided to pick up a copy of his book. Let me say: I have not been disappointed. It is the first book that I’ve had a chance to read this year, and I suspect that it will be one of the best. It is worthy of being on your bookshelves.

Many readers know C.S. Lewis as a mythmaker with the Chronicles of Narnia and the Ransom Trilogy. Others know him as a theologian and apologist with Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. This is what Baxter’s book is about — showing us how the great books of that age shaped the great mind of C.S. Lewis.

I think for those who read this book rightly, they’ll receive not just an understanding of Lewis as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, but a kind of counter-spell to the dark enchantment of modernity. A dark enchantment that is weaving a world that is hostile towards Christian cosmology and ill-suited to Christian spirituality. It will also re-affirm what many have said for a while now: We are currently in a war for the dictionary. And the reason why we’re in a war for the dictionary is that the powers-that-be understand that words create worlds. Whoever controls language and stories can shape the world however they desire, including the way people view of God, themselves, and their ethics.

Cosmic Imagery, Language, and Ethics

Now, I’m not the only person to see that there is a connection between language and ethics. In the chapter Evil Enchantment, Baxter picks up a discussion on Lewis’ love for languages and how language can affect ethics. He writes:

“Both language and ethics are connected to our cosmic imagery. Our speech makes up a linguistic microcosm, the medium through which we describe our hopes, fears, dreams, and ambitions, and as such it absorbs and reflects the atmosphere of the world in which it is shaped. . .

The difference between linguistic styles from age to age are of interest precisely because we carry our ‘world’ about within our language. Languages are subworlds, sharing similar deep structures to the universe in which they are native. Different languages vary in ton and rhythm and the very feel of every sentence, possessing their own personalities, made up of unique syntaxes, vocabularies, and rhetorical styles: ‘A language has its own personality; implies an outlook, reveals a mental activity, and has a resonance, not quite the same as any other. . . The uniqueness of language is due, in part to the ‘world picture’ that serves as the habitat in which the language is born, develops, and adapts. The cosmos gets into the language, like rainwater seeps into subterranean aquafers and regulates the height of the water table.

Because of this connection between language and world picture (what I have been calling, ‘cosmic imaginary’), not only should we expect language to change from age to age, but we should also expect that on the side of the Great Divide — the fundamental rupture in history that rendered modern society radically different from any other epoch in human history — the linguistic world we live in is peculiarly ill-suited to spiritual desire.”

At first glance, Baxter’s point may come off a little abstract to some readers, but it can be summed up like this: Languages and ethics are born from a culture’s cosmic imagery or world picture. To use an analogy to give some earthiness to his 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.

Just think about the cosmic imagery of Christianity for a moment. This world picture teaches us that the transcendent and imminent Most-High God created the heavens and earth, and then He created man male and female with the capability of being fruitful and multiplying (Gen. 1:27-28). In the story, God gives Adam ethics born from this cosmic imagery to be embodied in the world (Eat from these trees, and not that tree). Adam then repeats this pattern by being giving Eve seed, and then Eve gives body to the seed by producing offspring. The seed goes out into the world, takes dominion, repeats the pattern, and is to enact God-glorifying ethics in the world based off this world picture.

For centuries the ethics of many countries were shaped by this cosmic imagery. In Medieval Europe and even into the Reformation era, there were sumptuary, blasphemy, and heresy laws. For hundreds of years, America’s ethics even reflected this cosmic imagery in that only those who were male and female could be united together in marriage and only male and female could have children. It wasn’t until 2015 that same-sex couples were able to be joined together in marriage and it wasn’t until 1997 that same-sex couples were legally able to adopt children. It wasn’t until the rise of modernity that this cosmic imagery was cast off, which has now affected our language and ethics.

The Dark Enchantment

Now, the question we must ask is what happens when we begin to inhabit a world that has a different cosmic imagery? What does that world look like?

Baxter notes in his book that it is entirely possible for a culture to become blind to moral responsibility and to lose its sense of courage as a result of change in cosmic imagery. The culture, as a result, becomes trapped within its own way of speaking.

Wendell Berry was onto this reality back in 1979 in his analysis of an official report on the Three Mile Island Crisis. He noted that the report was disturbing because the language within the document was marked with an “inability to admit what it is talking about. Because these specialists have routinely eliminated themselves, as such and as representative human beings, from consideration . . . they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge to each, much less to the public, that their problem involved an extreme danger to a lot of people.”

This is what happens when there is a change in cosmic imagery. Language and ethics are naturally affected in the same way that the child in the womb of an unwell mother is affected.

To present one more example of this, this is why we now have new language and ethics in regard to “birthing persons” and “pregnant people.” The modern project is nothing less than a casting off of the old cosmos. It’s the destruction of the old cathedral. In the new cosmic imagery of modernity, there’s an androgynous god somewhere up there, and all he wants is for people to be happy. He doesn’t tell them how to be happy. He lets them define that for themselves.

And this is the world that is going to be assumed by our children’s children.

Countering The Dark Enchantment

So then, how are we to break this dark enchantment? Can it be broken at this point?

Indeed, I believe it can. And C.S. Lewis thought so too. In the Weight of Glory he talked about the need of a powerful counter spell to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness saying:

“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I need the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us from nearly a hundred years.”

God promises to honor those who honor Him and to disdain those who distain Him (1 Sam. 2:30). I believe that the counter spell we need is remaining faithful to and retrieving the cosmic imagery of Christianity and the language and ethics of Christendom.

What does this look like at a practical level?

First, it’s going to require that recognize the signs of the times and fashion for ourselves new loyalties. I agree with Arron Renn that we are living in a Negative World. However, I would diagnose the problem as much worse than that. We’re living in a Darkly Enchanted World.

At this point, it’s not even that the thinktanks, pastors, and seminaries that were faithful a decade or two ago are trying to be winsome as much as they have been baptized into the waters of dark enchantment. Recently, I saw a tweet from Patrick Miller who writes for TGC making the case for preferred pronouns. Suffice it to say that it was ludacris. But I bring this up to make a point: Things are much darker than they seem, and this is a man and organization who has fallen under the spell, and we must not give our loyalty to those who have fallen under the dark enchantment. I mentioned above that there’s a war for the dictionary. Language and the words matter, and that’s why there’s a war for it.

So, don’t be on the wrong side of that war.

Second, it’s going to require a retrieval of the classical world picture. We must live within our own particular world picture. We must be loyal to that story, and it’s also a good idea to apprentice ourselves to those throughout history who did the same.

To use another analogy, we must like Gandalf in the Fellowship of the Ring ride the old paths into the great library of Minas Tirith. We must retrieve and sit in front of those old parchments that contain the story of the old world. We must immerse ourselves in their ancient-glory. Take up Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri. Take up the classics, and don’t just look at the beam, but see along the beam and let their world picture become your world picture.

Also, take your family with you so they can learn to see along the beam too.

Baxter himself takes up this point talking about that Lewis viewed Dante, especially his Paradiso as a counter spell to modernity. He writes:

“Dante could teach modern writers how to cast on 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.”

This isn’t all that dissimilar from what Rod Dreher recommends in his critically acclaimed book The Benedict Option. However, as a Postmillennial Protestant, I’m a bit more optimistic than Dreher is. So, I would call this approach something like The Inklings Option. We are drawing lines in the sand and immersing ourselves in the Great Tradition, but we’re not doing it to build Christian ghettos. Rather, we’re doing it as a counter spell to break the dark enchantment of modernity, to re-enchant the cosmos once more so that it would be on earth as it is in heaven.