What Is Enchantment? Starting Something New
Flammarion Engraving, PD
For many years now I’ve circled around the subject of enchantment as it relates to Christianity. My former blog, Letters from the Edge of Elfland, often had posts dedicated to this project of enchantment or re-enchantment. Well, now that the school year is winding down and my time as both a full-time teacher and full-time headmaster is coming to an end (next year, I’ll just be the Headmaster with a couple of classes), I thought this might be a good opportunity to return to a kind of weekly column. In truth, I’ve missed writing regularly, and as much as I love the publications where I get paid to write, I like the idea of having a place where I can just simply write what I want.
The title of this weekly column is taken from J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”. The essay is Tolkien’s attempt to write an apologia for fairy tales and what would become the fantasy genre. In describing Faërie––the realm where, or more often on the border of which, all fairy tales take place––Tolkien writes:
Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons; it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.
For Tolkien, Faërie is the place where transformation happens, where a tree is more than just a tree, where, in a sense, bread and wine can become flesh and blood. This, therefore, seemed a fitting title for my new attempt at writing regularly. But of course, all of this raises the question: what is enchantment?
The word itself is an interesting one. It entered English via French by the mid-fourteenth century and it meant to cast a magical spell upon or to bewitch. And yet, its roots go beyond the French to Latin, incantare, or to sing into. To enchant then, could be used to mean to sing something into being or into obedience, just as to invoke is to call upon something.
Over the past few years there have been many Christian attempts at what has been called “re-enchantment”. I wrote some of them myself. The idea seems to have meant primarily to return to a view of reality that is more “supernatural,” more “magical,” less “modern”. I understand the impetus here, but not unlike the phrase, Catholic Imagination, it seems to make this view of reality one option among many as opposed to an attempt to see reality as it is. Or, perhaps a little better, some seemed to use this phrase to mean to take the world which has been disenchanted and make it into something more magical or supernatural. But this too becomes problematic, because it appears to suggest that “modernity” (whatever that word means exactly) has somehow actually changed the nature of reality, rather than simply our perception of it.
Now, what do I mean by enchantment? In a sense, I mean a return to reality. When Tolkien writes about our enchantment in the context of the entire cosmos right down to bread and wine and ourselves, I believe he means that our enchantment is more of a revelation, an unveiling of what hides behind our sense perception, what the “film of familiarity” has hidden from us behind its cataracts. The world is already enchanted, it does not need us to re-enchant it. Instead, we need to have our lenses cleaned so we can see it more fully. And that is what I hope to do with this new column, to write about the books, films, poems, songs, prayers, and more that can help us see reality more clearly, and see more clearly how it is that Christ is at the center of it all and the ways we can encounter him in the sacraments, yes, but in all of the cosmos.
So, I hope you’ll join me in this new venture. Come back here every Friday to read something that seeks to help us see the world a little more clearly, to see it more closely to how it is.
David Russell Mosley is a poet and theologian living in Washington State. His second book of poetry, Liturgical Entanglements, is out now. If you like this blog, please consider donating to it through the button below.
