disenchantment, re-enchantment, and enchantment

8/12/2019 Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment, And Enchantment

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DISENCHANTMENT,RE-ENCHANTMENT,

AND ENCHANTMENT

PATRICK SHERRY

Max Weber said, famously, that the modern world is disenchanted. A numberof recent writers have said, by contrast, that postmodernism and some devel-opments like New Age religion are re-enchanting the world. My purpose in

this article is to put Weber and these writers alongside each other, but then toundercut the discussion by suggesting a third possibility: that the world maystill be enchanted, for those who have eyes to see, and who have kept freshthe responses of wonder, reverence, and delight. Perhaps it never was reallydisenchanted! Here I shall draw on the work of the poet and artist David

Jones, as well as on that of some more recent theologians who are arguing fora close connection between aesthetics and religion, and suggest that their

work depends on a wider sense of sacramentality, and one very differentfrom Webers understanding of that concept.

Max Weber on Disenchantmentmoth_1533 369..386

It needs to be noted straightaway that the English term disenchantment is apoor translation of the German Entzauberung: the latter (which is not origi-

nal to Weber, for Wieland had used it earlier and Schiller had used the cognateverb entzaubern) means something like losing its magic. In English it isprimarily people who become disenchanted, somewhat like being disillu-sioned, whereas Weber is describing the world as having lost some of its allureand coming to seem lifeless in certain ways. As Francois-A. Isambert notes, thepoetic force of the term has popularized it, while concealing its original senseand so giving the misleading impression that Weber was nostalgic for the old

Patrick SherryLancaster University, Religious Studies Department, Lancaster LA1 4YG, Lancashire, [email protected]

Modern Theology 25:3 July 2009ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

2009 The AuthorJournal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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world.1 But the latter thought that the process was inevitable, and on the wholebeneficial:insofarasitisaloss,itisprimarilythelossofanillusion.Thereasonsfor its occurrence are varied. They include the Reformation, the understandingof the world given by science and technology, and the organization of modern

society brought about through the Industrial Revolution, all at the cost of someimpersonality, especially through the relegation of personal relations and theaesthetic to the realm of the private. The process is to be seen as the modernworlds rationalization, involving a loss of a sense of supernatural beingslike spirits operating in the world. It is akin to secularization, a term morepopular nowadays, though one that Weber also used. Although disenchant-ment is not an important concept in itself for him, it is one that relates to manyof the central themes in his work.

Weber used the term disenchantment in his best-known work, The Prot-estant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (190405), though discussing it onlybriefly there. He says that the process can be traced back to the Hebrewprophets; later, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, it repudi-ated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin;2 and it came to itslogical conclusion in Puritanism, with its rejection of Catholicisms sacra-mental magic as a road to salvation and its adoption of worldly asceticism,so typical of the Calvinist businessman.3 Thus the process is not as suchanti-religious, though it contributes to the breaking down of some forms oftraditional religion, a fact emphasized by Charles Taylor in hisA Secular Age.4

In a later essay of 1915 Weber says that the rationalization which hasbrought about the disenchantment of the world includes both modern capi-talist industry and bureaucratization, which have helped to bring about theseparation of public and private life and the consequent impersonality ofmodern cities; and also the understanding of the world as a causal mecha-nism, produced by rational, empirical knowledge.5 But nature abhors avacuum; so, says Weber, with the development of intellectualism and therationalization of life, art takes over the function of this-worldly salvation, andprovides asalvationfrom the routines of everyday life, and especially fromthe increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism.6 Hence artclaims a redemptive function, and begins to compete with salvation religion.

Webers understanding of science and art in relation to rationalization anddisenchantment was further developed in his last work on the subject, hislecture Science as a Vocation, given to an audience of students in Municha few years later, towards the end of his life. This lecture gives Webers fullesttreatment of the concept of disenchantment. In it he says that the rationaliza-tion brought about through science and technology means,

. . . the knowledge or belief that, if only one wanted to, onecouldfind outany time; that there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers atwork, but rather that one could in principle master everything throughcalculation. But that means the disenchantment of the world. One need no

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longer have recourse to magic in order to control or implore the spirits,as did the savage for whom such powers existed. Technology and calcu-lation achieve that, and this more than anything else means intellectual-ization as such.7

Such a view affects the way we regard the natural world: most scientiststoday, says Weber, are not concerned with learning through science about themeaning of the world, or with answering Tolstoys question What shouldwe do? How should we live?

Nowadays nobody can doubt in his heart of hearts that science is irreli-gious, whether he wishes to admit it or not. Deliverance from the ratio-

nalism and intellectualism of science is a precondition of life incommunion with the divine.8

Webers view of science, it would seem, ignores the idea that God works inthe world mainly through secondary causes, i.e. the ordinary course ofnature; and he brushes aside the long tradition of thought, exemplified inFrancis Bacon and Newton, and later in Einstein, that the scientists task is to

follow in the Creators footsteps and to trace out the signs of His wisdom inthe laws of nature. Hence not long after Webers lecture was published,Heinrich Rickert, commenting on it, wrote in 1926:

But we can say that science does not need to lead to the demystificationof the world, for it is quite capable of making us fully conscious of themagic of life, and the clarity it creates can still give happiness and joyto a theoretically minded person.9

Such a way of looking at things is, however, ruled out for Weber, for he hasmade a sharp distinction between the realm of rational cognition andmastery of nature, on the one hand, and that of mystic experiences, on theother.10 His over-simple view of things here and his tendency to compart-mentalize the various spheres of life mean also that for him there has to be aradical dichotomy between the first of these realms and many other impor-

tant aspects of life, e.g. personal relations and the arts. Weber realizes this, forhe ends his lecture on a rhetorical note:

The fate of our age, with its characteristic rationalization and intellectu-alization and above all the disenchantment of the world, is that theultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life, eitherinto the transcendental realm of mystical life or into the brotherhood ofimmediate personal relationships between individuals.11

He sees this withdrawal as including art too, for he immediately remarks thatgreat art now is intimate, not monumental. Finally, as a Parthian shot, hedismisses the likelihood of any return to religion, for this would involve a

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sacrifice of the intellect. By now, as Taylor notes, Weber is tending to equatedisenchantment with the end of religion.12

As I have remarked already, the connotations of the English term disen-chantment might suggest that Weber was wistful or nostalgic; but in fact he

sees the process as inevitable and as the path to knowledge and freedom, forit eliminates incalculable forces, and so makes us masters of our destiny.13

Intellectual and cultural rationalization is irreversible, because magic andreligion have been dispossessed by science and technology. Hence JohannesWeiss claims that, for Weber, there is no plausible way back from the moral-philosophical insights and postulates of the Enlightenment; so the disen-chantment of the world is irreversible in the near future, since this alonecorresponds to our intellectual aspirations and requirements.14 This perhapsexplains why he did not explore the possibility, suggested by Nietzsche anddiscussed recently by Gordon Graham,15 that the decline of religion gives artthe opportunity to become the means whereby humanity can re-enchant theworld.

Of course, Weber himself did see some of the limitations of this viewpoint,and was aware of the dangers of oversimplification. He confessed too in aletter that he was absolutely unmusical religiously (while insisting that hewas not irreligious or antireligious).16 Obviously Tolstoys great question willnot go away, even if it is one which science cannot answer, and peoplecontinue to ask about the meaning of existence; indeed, secularization anddisenchantment may encourage the search for religious meaning; and scien-tists too need inspiration and imagination.17 Like Nietzsche, Weber saw thatan increasing technical mastery over life would not necessarily lead to anincrease in happiness for the human race, and that disenchantments creationof a cold and impersonal human realm, an iron cage, could bring about arestriction of human values.18 But, as Arthur Mitzman says, Disenchant-ment, rationalization, and mass societyalthough he became steadily moreapprehensive of their cultural effectswere inexorable destiny to Weber.19

We have to ask, however, if historical trends are always inevitable, for at leastto some extent we are talking of a world that we have made.

In the decades since Weber wrote, critics have enlarged on the reservations

that I have just noted, added further objections to Webers main theses, andbrought out some of his implicit assumptions. Some have seen his work as alate flowering of the Enlightenment, vulnerable to some recent criticisms ofwhat Alasdair MacIntyre and others call the Enlightenment Project.20

Others have more specific objections. For example, Webers view of Catholicsacramentalism, which he assimilates to magic (here using the term magicfairly literally, it seems), is something of a caricature. He fails to see that the

former depends on a wider sense of the sacramentality of the world (whicha religion stressing the importance of our inwardness may undervalue). Ishall leave discussion of this topic, however, until later, when I shall discussmagic in more detail and also the wider sense of sacramentality.

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More generally, Jean Sguy accuses Weber of underestimating the creativepower of religion to survive, adapt, and regroup in the modern world;21

while Marcel Gauchet, less concerned with institutional religions, argues thatthe religious will survive in a world without religion, so that, for example,

art, in the specific sense we moderns understand it, is the continuation of thesacred by other means.22 More radically, John Milbank accuses him of takingthe secular as the norm and so having to privatize religion, and of pro-pounding a general thesis about religion which fails to fit e.g. Islamic societyor Christian monasteries; he accuses both Weber and Troeltsch of creating asociology which is nothing but a spurious promotion of what they studynamely the secular culture of modernity.23

Milbank might also have extended his critique to Webers view of art: forjust as the latter sees mysticism as a way out of the disenchanted world, fromthe public to the private, so he sees art as a similar way out. There is sometruth in Webers position here, but, again, it is an oversimplification: there isstill a lot of institutional and performative art even today, and in any caseWebers conception verges on what John Dewey called the museum con-ception of art, i.e. one which compartmentalizes the aesthetic, and treats artas a separate realm, cut off from other areas of activity and experience.24 Sucha conception commonly fails to do justice to peoples appreciation of natural

beautynot surprisingly, for here we have a public realm and somethingappreciated widely, often by people with no interest in the arts as such. Italso contrasts with the view that bothnature and art have become desacral-ized in modernity.25

At times, Webers world seems to be that of Dickens Mr Gradgrind, or thatof late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century scientism. Certainly,it leaves little room for wonder (a point that applies, I think, to his under-standing of science, as Rickert noted). Some feminists have approached thisquestion by claiming that Webers view of the world is masculinist andpatriarchal. For him, it seems, the public world is a grey and impersonal one,in which love, like many other important things, is relegated to the privateworld of personal relations. Roslyn Bologh makes this accusation; and to thedefence that the former is the real world, she replies that economic and social

reality is no more real than our social relationships, so that:

. . . our desires and feelings, which are inseparable from our social rela-tionships, are no more illusory than our economic and political worlds.Psychic reality, like social reality, is no more nor less real than politicaland economic reality.26

Re-enchantment

Thus most recent writers reject Webers attitude to the putative moderndisenchantment of the world (though they may agree with some of what he




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said, e.g. about the effects of industrialization or the impersonality of citiestoday).27 They regard it as an oversimplification; and many express a desire tore-enchant the world.

Re-enchantment has become a fashionable term, and a wide variety of

means to it have been suggested. For example, David Ray Griffin commendsprocess thought as offering re-enchantment, without the baggage of tradi-tional supernatural religion. (He construes disenchantment widely, as includ-ing not only a lack of divine meaning and of inherent purpose, but also theabsence of moral principles in the constitution of the world, according tomodern thought, and instances J. L. Mackie and Gilbert Harman in the latterregard.28)

Talk of re-enchantment is particularly prominent, however, among writerswho are familiar with or sympathetic to postmodernism or to New Age ideas,whether as theorists or as observers. Zygmunt Bauman, for example, writingfrom the point of view of a social theorist, says in the introduction to hisIntimations of Postmodernity that, all in all, postmodernity can be seen asrestoring to the world what modernity, presumptuously, had taken away; asare-enchantmentof the world that modernity had tried hard to dis-enchant.That disenchantment was supposed to be part of modernitys war of libera-tion from mystery and magic; but it de-spiritualized and de-animated theworld, reducing it to raw material to be shaped by human designs, byinstrumental rationality and social engineering. Left to itself the worldhad no meaning.29

Bauman finds it difficult to characterize re-enchantment in a similar way,for postmodernity is a relatively amorphous condition. It is easier to define itnegatively: Postmodernity . . . ismodernity without illusions, e.g. the illusionthat the messiness of the human world is but a temporary and repairablestate.30 So re-enchantment too can be seen, negatively, as a liberation fromdisenchantment. But Bauman also says, more positively, that postmodernityallows for mystery, accepts contingency, and respects ambiguity, and is there-fore more realistic.31

Graham Ward agrees with Bauman in hoping that such a re-enchantmentwill offset much of the spiritual poverty of modernity, but is mainly con-

cerned with spelling out its benefits for Christian theology. He welcomescontemporary critical theory for helping to bring to an end the desacraliza-tion of the Enlightenment and for revealing the limits of modern secularity,and hopes that in restoring a richer account of human experience it may assistthe return of the suppressed voices of theology and the return of God-talkfrom the other side of Nietzsche.32 He goes on to argue that only theologycan complete the postmodern project, preventing it from surrendering to the

flux or to cosmic indifference,33 and he expresses the hope that postmoderntheology will move away from the atheologies of Don Cupitt and Mark C.Taylor towards a reappraisal and re-examination of traditional authors in thelight of critical theory, and that it will also, following Donald MacKinnon,

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recognize its close connection with other disciplines: Overall the theology oftomorrow, the theology working within a re-enchanted world, will be moreaware of the place it occupies in discursive borderlands.34

Thus Ward hopes for a new flourishing of traditional theology, albeit one

which recognizes its relations with other fields. But he suggests that this newflourishing, and the accompanying re-enchantment, have been recognizedmore by filmmakers, novelists, poets, philosophers, political theorists, andcultural analysts than by theologians.35 Thus he draws his net widely, as whenhe points to the re-appearance of angels in contemporary culture, e.g. in WimWenders filmWings of Desire. He sees the new bodies, states of desire, andknowledges hinted at here as figuring forth a new enchantment of the realwhich he contrasts with Webers disenchantment of the world and conse-quent withdrawing of mystery.36

Others too look more widely, and bring in some less familiar religiousmanifestations. Raymond Lee and Susan Ackerman, for instance, followmany writers in wondering whether disenchantment in a secularized envi-ronment may not fuel the search for religious meaning and thereby encour-age new religious movements; and they suggest that Buddhisms appeal inthe West is unlikely to wane because the doubts and ambivalence of secu-larized consciousness are gradually transforming the path of disenchantmentinto that of re-enchantment.37 They mention too the revival of ChristianFundamentalism as providing, through its symbolic renewal of the holyword, the antithesis to the commodified world. Above all, however, theysee New Age activities as particularly exemplifying the trend towardsre-enchantment at the beginning of the twenty-first century:

The New Age . . . brings together the themes of healing, self-determinismand transcendental consciousness in a variety of movements that chal-lenge the ethos of disenchantment and reintroduce the idea of themagical as something that binds empirical and spiritual realities in acontinuous relationship.38

New Age activities include, for Lee and Ackerman, the shamanism of Carlos

Castaneda, a modern form of magical practice which involves a power ofecstasy and of healing, and new forms of spiritual consciousness such as arecommonly included in the category of what are called altered states ofconsciousness.39 Here they appeal to what Paul Heelas calls the sacraliza-tion of the self in New Age movements, and to the way in which theseencourage the remaking of the self without institutional constraints (e.g.those of established religions), to be contrasted with the self of bourgeois

consciousness which has surrendered to the alienating conditions of moder-nity.40 Most extremely, there is the possibility of a disintegration of the self inecstasy, and even the mass suicides of some religious cultsthe ultimatesign of re-enchantment, we are told, somewhat implausibly.41




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Christopher Partridge goes still further afield: he gives a fuller account, inwhich he combines coverage of New Age activities with that of other suchcontemporary movements, for which he has coined the term occulture, inthe two volumes of his The Re-enchantment of the West.42 He concluded an

earlier article with the statement that although secularization and disenchant-ment have reshaped Western societies, Re-enchantment is not a modernreconstruction of the enchanted landscape of the past, but a new growth in asecularized, globalized, technologically sophisticated, consumer-orientedlandscape.43 In his recent work he fleshes out this statement, not just withreference to New Age activities, but through an investigation of other newlyemerging forms of spirituality and being religious, including cyberspiritual-ity, contemporary demonology, and the sacralisation of the extraterrestrial.The chapter on the last of these discusses sightings of UFOs, extraterrestrialcommunication, and stories of abduction by aliens. He quotes Diane Purkissas saying Aliens are our fairies, and suggests that to explore such notionsis to re-enchant the world, and thereby to reverse, at least to some degree,disenchantment, understood as at least in part, the process wherebymagic and mystery are driven from the world and nature is managed ratherthan enchanted. . . .44

The last quotation introduces a topic which will be very relevant tomy later consideration of contemporary theological aesthetics, that of ourattitude today to ecology and the environment. Partridge mentions theerosion of the enchanted view of nature in the West, which writers likeLynn White trace back to the emergence of Judaeo-Christian monotheismand its rejection of paganisms sacralisation of nature. Weber recognizedthat once magic and spirits were eliminated from our view of the naturalworld, the latter became, according to Partridge, simply the physical arenain which one obeyed God. The natural world was the creation of a goodand loving God, but it was not itself sacralized.45 There was perhaps apartial enchantment in mediaeval times, when the world was interpretedin theological terms, but the Reformation, Renaissance, and industrializa-tion accelerated the forces of disenchantment.46 Nineteenth-centuryRomanticism, however, recovered a sacralised understanding of nature,

as have some contemporary movementswhat Partridge describes aseco-enchantment and ecospirituality.47 In both Romanticism and con-temporary ecology increasingly evident are re-sacralized, holistic interpre-tations of nature as infused with the divine, if not, in some sense, divine initself.48

Partridge supplies a vast amount of detail here, and some judicious com-ments. But I think that we need now to get behind the sequence of thought

that I have just summarized and to expose some of its assumptions. Theproposal to re-enchant the world suggests at least two fundamental ques-tions. First, can one set about re-enchanting the world, just like that? Andsecond,isthe modern world disenchanted?

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My first question is suggested by the memory of a prediction made by apopular newspaper at the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, thatBritain stood at the beginning of a new, glorious Elizabethan Age. Such athing was possible; but I wonder whether one can intend or predict it, or

consciously bring it about?The authors I have mentioned, however, could reply that re-enchantment ishappening anyway, especially through the contemporary rejection of scient-ism. For if postmodernism involves, as Lyotard says, the rejection of grandnarratives,49 then just as the modern world rejected the Christian narrativeof Creation, Fall, and Redemption, so the postmodern world has rejected thatof scientism, i.e. the view that the empirical sciences are the only route totruth, and its accompanying idea of progress.

My second question is more radical, however, and asks whether Weberexaggerated the importance of the trends that he discerned in the modernworld. What if the world always was enchanted and still is, if we but look andkeep our sense of wonder? Maybe talk of re-enchantment begs the question,in that it presupposes that the world is disenchanted. This question, in turn,is suggested by, above all, some recent work in theological aesthetics.

Enchantment

Shortly after Webers death in 1920 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Sonnets toOrpheus, that, despite the work of machines,

But for us existence is still enchanted;still in a hundred places the source. A play of pure powers,

touched only by those who kneel and wonder. (Pt. II, no.10)More prosaically, a recent book by a sociologist of religion, Andrew GreeleysThe Catholic Imagination, begins with the following provocative statement:Catholics live in an enchanted world. . . .50 The author explains this in termsof the Catholic sense of sacramentality, understood widely, i.e. not just interms of the seven defined sacraments of the Church, or even sacramentalslike holy water and rosary beads, but very generally, in terms of seeing

created reality as a revelation of the presence of God. Greeley does notmention Weber at this point (he is cited later in the book, on another subject),

but he does consider the idea that disenchantment rules the modern worldand the possibility that the enchanted Catholic imagination is a manifestationof postmodernity, only to brush aside both ideas as fictions: I find nopersuasive evidence that either modern or post-modern humankind existsoutside of faculty office-buildings. Everyone tends to be pre-modern.51 The

rest of the book tests the hypothesis that the sensibility displayed by Catholichigh art also reveals itself in the attitudes and behaviour of ordinary Catho-lics in many different spheres. Thus he uses various surveys of public opinionto show that Catholics have a greater interest in the arts than Protestants do,




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that (would you believe it?) they visit bars more frequently, and that, moresurprisingly perhaps, they engage in sexual intercourse more often, withgreater enjoyment and more playfulness. Greeley is obviously interpretingthe term sacrament very generously, but this serves as a corrective to

Webers account, which assimilates the concept to magic (later on we shallneed to distinguish the two more clearly). For Greeley the world isenchanted, not because it is full of spirits or magical powers, but because it issacramental in a wide sense.

I think that this wider sense of sacramentality is a crucial factor here, andwe get a fuller discussion of it in another recent book, David BrownsGod andEnchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, which also advocates thatthe world is enchantedand not just for Catholics. It is significant thatBrown too writes of enchantment rather than re-enchantment. At thebeginning of the book he summarizes briefly what Weber said about disen-chantment and the growth of rationality, and sets out his own aim, which isto help recover a sense of how God can be mediated through nature andculture, and thereby to restore a kind of natural religion.52 In some waysBrown is recovering lines of thought found two centuries earlier in theRomantic Movement. As both Partridge and Taylor remind us, some of theRomantics had already reacted against a sense of the flatness and emptinessof the world left by the Enlightenment. In particular, Schiller, in his poemThe Gods of Greece, refers to a time when poetrys magic cloak still withdelight enfolded truth and Everything to the initiates eye showed the traceof a God, and laments that now we face a God-shorn [entgtterte] nature,slavishly obeying the law of gravity.53

Like Greeley, Brown relies explicitly on an extended sense of sacramentality,and one closely linked to the aesthetic. Much of his book is a discussion oftopics like sacred and secular art (including landscape painting), architecture,placeslikehomesandcities,gardens,andsport.InalltheseareasBrownthinksthat there may be the symbolic mediation of the divine in and through thematerial, for God can come sacramentally close to his world and vouchsafeexperiences of himself through the material.54 The fact that God is omnipres-ent does not mean that His presence is felt everywhere equally.

Thus Browns aim is to recover enchantment by reinvigorating ourwider sense of the sacramental, and thereby reclaiming large areas of humanexperience neglected by religion. Both Catholicism and Protestantism are atfault here, he thinks: the former for narrowing down the concept of sacra-mentality in its official teaching, and the latter for giving insufficient attentionto it, both in its narrower and wider senses.

Surprisingly, although Brown appeals to beauty on occasion, e.g. with

reference to churches, he says relatively little about this fundamental concept,which seems an obvious one for being a source of the worlds enchantment.Traditionally, many Christian thinkers have seen beauty as a mode of Godspresence in the world, and the idea often asserts itself in art and literature,

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e.g. in Gerard Manley Hopkins poem Gods Grandeur, which begins Theworld is charged with the grandeur of God, / It will flame out, like shiningfrom shook foil. Weber, as we have seen, though relegating art to the realmof the private, acknowledges its power, including the ability to rival religion

(he instances, too, cases of evil beauty, like Baudelaires Les Fleurs du mal

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).Those who, like Hopkins, see beauty as a mode of divine presence aregiving it a sacramental significance, in the wider sense just noted. I shouldpoint out, however, that one could see it as a source of enchantment withoutexplicitly appealing to any religious belief. For behind our responses to

beauty there are, I believe, the wider and more fundamental reactions ofwonder and perhaps reverence (both noted by Rilke), and also delight. Thesereactions may accompany religious beliefs or even be their source, but this isnot necessarily the case: Richard Dawkins, for instance, sometimes expressesa sense of wonder at the variety and complexity of natural forms, yet isfamously hostile to religion.

Moreover, people may wonder at something without necessarily asking foran explanation of it, whether a religious or a naturalistic one like evolution.One can wonder simply at the existence of somethingthe young Wittgen-stein wrote It is not howthings are in the world that is mystical, but thatitexists (Tractatus6.44). Or, more commonly, one can wonder at the beauty orintricacy of particular things, as suggested already, whether in nature or inhuman creations. Wittgenstein, again, writes later:

One might say: art shows us the miracles [Wunder] of nature. It is basedon the concept of the miracles of nature (the blossom, just opening out.What ismarvellousabout it?) We say: Just look at it opening out!56

Such a response is not inconsistent with knowing the relevant scientificexplanations: Wittgenstein, as it happens, thinks that science tends to sendpeople to sleep here, in the sense of dulling the sense of wonder57, whereasRickert, as we have seen, insists that science need not lead to a demystifica-tion of the world; and indeed one can think of many scientists who pursuetheir profession without losing their sense of wonder. Even ordinary people,who know what causes, say, thunder and lightning, can still find them

amazing or terrifying.Weber might well agree with what I have just said about wonder, and even

perhaps regret his own seeming lack of a sense of wonder. But he would not,I think, accept what Brown and Greeley say about sacramentality, because forhim this term suggests magic, and he would certainly insist that scienceexcludes magic and that such an exclusion is gain, even if it involves somedisenchantment (by definition, in German). By magic he is thinking, it seems,

of some kind of extraordinary factor, an unpredictable causal intervention, aswhen the fairy godmother waves her magic wand and Cinderella suddenly

becomes beautiful and finely dressed. This is evident from his remarks inScience as a Vocation about there being no mysterious, incalculable forces




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at work, like spirits needing to be invoked or controlled by magic, and abouttechnology and calculation being the sources of knowledge and control overthe world. Thus he seems to have in mind an instrumental view of magic, ascontrasted with one that stresses more its expressive and ritual aspects.58

But why link magic with religion? Weber thinks that premodern views ofnature envisage extraordinary powers as present in empirical phenomena,through the action of spirits and suchlike,59 whereas science deals withunvarying causal laws, leaving no room for notions like miracle, revelation,and sacramental causality as understood by Catholicism; and that religion isobsolete as an explanation of the world (of course he acknowledges that thereis religious rationalism, e.g. Christian theology, but this too looks for anunworldly meaning in events). In his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalismWeber sees later Judaisms repudiation of magical means to salva-tion as coming to its logical conclusion in Puritanisms rejection of medievalCatholicisms sacramental magic, in which, he says, The priest was amagician who performed the miracle of transubstantiation, and who held thekey to eternal life in his hand.60

The accusation that belief in transubstantiation amounts to magic is acommon one, made by some Protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century,and more recently by, most famously, the Modernist Ernest Barnes, Angli-can bishop of Birmingham 192453. It is said that when Barnes encounteredthe chaplain of a nearby convent, and, wondering if he should know him,asked who he was, he received the reply The magician at your gate, myLord.61

It is often difficult to distinguish clearly magic and religion, and indeedthere is some likeness between the ritual speech and action of magic and thatof sacraments. In his later work Weber does distinguish cult and religion,which include prayer, sacrifice, and worship, from sorcery, which is magicalcoercion; and priesthood from practice of magic. The priest functions withinan organized cult, in contrast with the individual and occasional efforts ofmagicians. He denies, however, that we can differentiate them absolutely,for religious cults, he says, nearly always include magical components(though he thinks that the latter decline in proportion to the centrality of

preaching).62 Keith Thomas, in his Religion and the Decline of Magic, followsWebers remark about coercion, and suggests that magic is supposed to workautomatically, whereas prayer, for instance, is non-coercive in that it will onlybe answered if God chooses to concede it.63

The case of sacraments, however, is more complex. In Catholic theologythey are, it is true, said to be validex opere operato, for the moral worthiness ofthe priest does not affect their validity. Nevertheless, the extent of their

effectiveness may depend on the disposition of the recipient: for example,someone who goes to confession without due repentance cannot presume onforgiveness. And although transubstantiation is supernatural, it is notregarded as miraculous quite in the way that, say, a sudden healing might be,

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should not be forgotten here that Hopkins was a Jesuit, and that his keensense of the presence of Gods glory in the world, expressed in his poemGods Grandeur, can be seen as an exemplification of Ignatian spirituality.

It is to be noted again that both Greeley and Brown find the closest parallel

to reading the world sacramentally in aesthetic appreciation. An even moretelling example of this parallelism is to be found in the classic essay Art andSacrament by the poet and artist David Jones (18951974). This essay main-tains that any understanding of the Churchs sacraments depends on a widersense of sacramentality, which he thought has been lost to a great extent inthe modern world. As he puts it, People speak of sacraments with a capitalS without seeming to notice that sign and sacrament with a small s areeverywhere eroded and in some contexts non-existent, for, because of thegrowth of technology, we tend to take things at their face-value today. Heremarks, however, that one cannot remain at this level all the time, for manis a sign-maker by nature, and the creative artists task is to, as he puts it,make radiant particular facts, so that they become intimations of immor-tality, or . . . of some otherness of some sort.67

Jones is not concerned here in the first instance with what preoccupiesWeber, the causal effectiveness of sacraments, nor particularly with theirritual role. Towards the end of his essay he quotes a French theologian,Maurice de la Taille, as saying that on Maundy Thursday Christ placedhimself in the order of signs.68 Jones point is that this condescension pre-supposes an already existent world of signsor in his parlance again, sacra-ments with a big S presuppose a world of sacraments with a small s. LikeBrown, Jones is giving us a kind of natural religion, in that he is starting fromthe world, which is for him already a world of signs, especially art and otherforms of making.

This sense of the sacramentality of the world and of art, exhibited by Jones,Brown, and Greeley, is of vast importance, raising as it does many issues,concerning the nature of Gods presence or agency in the world, and ourawareness of them; the nature and variety of signs; and the role of wonderhere, not just for theologians or aesthetes, but also for scientists like Einstein,philosophers, and indeed people in general.

It often tends to be assumed today that the wider sense of sacrament isparasitic on the narrower one, referring to the official sacraments of theChurch. Brown, however, in advocating a wider use, reminds us that theterm was not narrowed down until the Middle Ages, and Jones argues thatthe narrower use presupposes the wider one, in so far as the former assumesthat we can understand the language of signs. But what is the relationbetween the two uses now?

Now if sacraments are conventionally defined as effective signs whichconvey grace (following Aquinas in e.g.On Truth27:4), then the wider senseof the term follows the narrower, for it too regards parts or aspects of theworld as signs, especially when people like Hopkins see them as signs-by-

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likeness of Gods beauty. It also regards them, in their way, as effective: abeautiful landscape may arouse wonder, reverence, and delight, or evenmore specific moral and religious feelings (See the lilies of the field. . . .).Likewise with works of art. There is, however, a third aspect of ecclesial

sacraments that it is hard to extend to sacraments widely understood, namelytheir use of words. Certain formulae are central to the former, e.g. I baptizeyou. . . ., With this ring I thee wed. . . ., or I absolve you. . . . Many ofthese uses of words are what J. L. Austin called performative utterances,i.e. uses of language thatdothings as well as saying things, like promising orcongratulating. Moreover, such formulae are accompanied by other uses ofwords that comment on or explain the signs and actions of the sacraments. As

both Aquinas and Calvin saw, if I were merely to pour water over people, thisaction would only puzzle them. I think that such uses of words, both formu-lae and comments or explanations, serve to differentiate the two kinds ofsacrament, whilst not invalidating the wider one.69

Peoples perception of the wider sacramentality seems to be akin to whatWalter Stace called extrovertive mysticism, by which he meant the kind ofmysticism which consists of a seeming apprehension of God or of UltimateReality, not through some inner experience but through distinctive experi-ences of the natural world, found according to him in e.g. Jakob Boehme70,and also, I think, in the Cornish poet Jack Clemo, who wrote

I was a spirit and sense mystic, and the artist in me demanded realismlandscapes, people, events. I had an inner vision that gave transcendentmeaning to the external world, not an inner vision that was independentof the external world.71

In a similar vein, Charles Taylor writes of art

. . . there are certain works of artby Dante, Bach, the makers of ChartresCathedral: the list is endlesswhose power seems inseparable from theirepiphanic, transcendent reference. Here the challenge is to the unbe-liever, to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to them,without impoverishment.72

Conclusion

By now we have travelled a long way from both Weber and postmodernism.But the linking themes are the responses of wonder, reverence, and delight,and also the idea of a sense of the wider sacramentality of things. Weber,

seemingly, lacked those responses and that sense. It is not, however, clear tome that postmodernism and talk of re-enchantment are the remedy for thesedeficiencies, though they may serve to show up the poverty of a lot ofmodernism. In the final section of this essay, therefore, I have looked rather




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by questioning its assumptions of rigid determinism in nature and consequent absence ofmeaning (Sinn). Thus, he says, Webers methodology . . . disenchants the disenchantingrationalism that has consistently used rationality to disenchant everything else (Koshul, p.141).

21 Sguy, Rationalisation, modernit et avenir de la religion, p. 136.22 Marcel Gauchet,The Disenchantment of the World, trans. O. Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1997), p. 203. Weber himself, of course, might well agree with this example.23 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 9798; cf. pp. 84,

8889.24 John Dewey,Art as Experience (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1958), chapter I.25 See Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism failed? (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1984), pp.

9297.26 Roslyn W. Bologh,Love or Greatness: Max Weber and Masculine ThinkingA Feminist Inquiry

(London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 19; cf. pp. 1213. See Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), chapter 11, for another appeal to feminism, empha-

sizing the importance of interconnectedness and interdependence.27 Richard Rorty is a rare exception. In a discussion of John Rawls work he suggests that alight-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics like the nature of the self helpsalong the disenchantment of the world, and helps to make people more pragmatic, tolerant,liberal, and receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality. Communal and publicdisenchantment may be the price we pay for individual and private spiritual liberation. SeeThe Priority of Democracy to Philosophy in Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, andTruth: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 175196, at pp. 193194.

28 David Ray Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 23, n. 7. Charles Taylor also links disenchant-ment with modernitys seeming lack of moral authority or coherence, in his Sources of the Self(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 148149.

29 Zygmunt Bauman,Intimations of Postmodernity(London: Routledge, 1992), pp. xxi, xv.30 Zygmunt Bauman,,Postmodern Ethics(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 32.31 Ibid., pp. 3334.32 Graham Ward,Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory(second edn., London and Basing-

stoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. xx; cf. pp. 117, 160.33 Graham Ward, (ed.),The Postmodern God :a theological reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp.

xlixlii.34 Graham Ward,Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, p. 171.35 Graham Ward, (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell,

2001), p. xv.36 Graham Ward,Cities of God(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 214. Compare Bruno Bettelheim,

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Thames andHudson, 1976), who finds a deeper meaning in traditional fairy stories. Somehow, however,I do not think that Weber would be impressed by these two examples!

37 Raymond L. M. Lee and Susan Ackerman, The Challenge of Religion and Modernity (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2002), pp. 6, 12.

38 Ibid., pp. 2728.39 Ibid., pp. 97102.40 Ibid., pp. 4047, 114115.41 Ibid., pp. 121122.42 Christopher Partridge,The Re-enchantment of the West Vol. 1: alternative spiritualities, sacral-

ization, popular culture, and occulture(London: T & T Clark, 2004) andThe Re-enchantment ofthe West Vol. 2: alternative spiritualities, sacralization, popular culture, and occulture(London: T& T Clark, 2005).

43 Christopher Partridge, Alternative Spiritualities, New Religions, and the Re-enchantment

of the West, in James R. Lewis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements(Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3967, at p. 60.44 Christopher Partridge,The Re-enchantment of the West Vol. 2: alternative spiritualities, sacral-

ization, popular culture, and occulture(London: T & T Clark, 2005). p. 169.45 Ibid., p. 45.




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disenchantment, re-enchantment, and enchantment

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