“As through the hard rocks go the branching silver veins; as into the solid land run the creeks and gulfs from the unresting sea; as the lights and influences of the upper worlds sink silently through the earth’s atmosphere; so doth Faerie invade the world of men, and sometimes startle the common eye with an association as of cause and effect, when between the two no connecting links can be traced.”
— George MacDonald, Phantastes
Despite the digital sphere of mathematical bits and bytes being perhaps the last place many would be inclined to look for the elusive, nostalgic lost world of magic, enchantment has been an ironically hot topic in the realm of cyberspace in recent months. The framing of this discussion, so often characterized by the notion of “re-enchantment,” assumes a priori that enchantment is an extinct or endangered element of existence. More astute observers, I will contend, have noted that this framing incorrectly locates the historic change in question in the external world rather than within our perception. That is, just because we have forgotten the magic doesn’t mean it went away. Further, an appreciation of the real persistence of magic in the world ought to inoculate against the sourly-saccharine sentimentality that would proffer as a solution the papering over of modernity with the rusticity of a preferred premodernity (usually medieval) without recognizing the genuine treasures of an antique sensitivity to the mystical.
From this point, George MacDonald’s preferred term of “faerie” will be likewise preferred herein as shorthand for this concept of the ontologic layer of the mystical, the supernatural, the spiritual, enchantment, magic, etc.
Illustrative of possible approaches, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien represent two rather different positions along the axis of enchantment. Tolkien’s fantasy depicted the aforementioned long lost world of magic, an archaeological layer buried beneath the industrial silt of modernity, mere stories the only artifacts remaining of a world that the immortal, ethereal elves abandoned long ago. On the other hand, Lewis might be misunderstood as holding an almost-gnostically intense Platonism in which the faerie world, while still alive and brimming with magic in the present, is nonetheless an essentially unreachable world apart, barring exceptional and inexplicable interventions. This misunderstanding would keep Narnia practically in the world of the fictitious, a cosmos beyond meaningful contact with reality. But Narnia, insofar as it is a higher realm, is also a world which overlaps and invades the modern world inhabited by the Pevensie’s. The magic wardrobe is not meant as an exception to nature. It is representative in Lewis’ metaphysics of an unveiling of the true nature of reality.
This dichotomy maps terribly conveniently on my favorite hobby horse of the Protestant-contra-Catholic divide along Platonic-contra-Aristotelian metaphysics, and not without a delightful dose of apparent paradox. One might as well imagine Raphael’s painting of the two Athenian luminaries with the face of Tolkien imposed upon Rome’s golden-child-Philosopher, gesturing to the immanence of the faerie world as inhabiting the same sphere of existence as the visible, so close to the material as to almost nullify the distinction (perhaps an unfavorable reading, granted), and who must ironically therefore explain the present conundrum, i.e. disenchantment, by noting a change in the external state of affairs, a shift in the arena. Middle-Earth is, in a sense, literally buried under the modern world. Faerie land is a relic of antiquity, so very like the Aztec relief of the dismembered Coyolxauhqui only accidentally unearthed by excavation in service of Mexico City’s electrical grid. If faerie land’s immanence is so profound as to verge on identity with the visible world, then its invisibility can be explained by its interment under concrete and conduit. In sum, Tolkien’s faerie land is deeply confluent with the visible world yet only relevantly extant in its distant past.
(As an aside, I realize that this is an interpretation that must be defended in light of Tolkien’s deeply developed lore and cosmology, but that being beyond the scope of this discussion and my expertise, I will only mention that Tolkien’s framing of his stories as a translation into English of discovered documents lends credence to this view as a psychological representation of Tolkien’s metaphysical sensibility. Another view would have Tolkien’s representation of Arda as another planet placing faerie land as spatially rather than temporally inaccessible, yet still confined to the same reality. At any rate, it is important that Tolkien does not do anything like bringing modern Londoners into Middle-Earth.)
Enter Lewis, then, who should have his face painted over Plato’s. But, with the inverse of the same irony, though Lewis’ faerie land is indeed a world quite apart from “ours,” it is more present than Tolkien’s to the modern person. Lewis and Tolkien took famously different approaches to the use of symbol. What is made plain in their disagreement is that Lewis did not view Narnia as any sort of “alternate universe” or escapist non-reality, rather it was a didactic and explicative arena of images which augment “our world” with clarity. It is not just a higher world, but a heightened world. Hence, Lewis can write even outside the confines of his fictional “world,” as he did write to a young boy concerned that he might love Aslan more than Jesus, that such a thing was impossible in view of the symbolic affinity of the latter for the former. The whole narrative telos of Narnia is a world in which facts extraneous to values have been already sifted out by necessary authorial wisdom, that is, the point is a clearer picture of the realest things. So Narnia’s immanence is a paradoxical product of its loftiness, whereas Middle-Earth’s distance is a paradoxical product of its proximity. In the spirit of illustratively modifying Raphael’s painting, perhaps our philosophers should each confusingly be making the gesture of the other with the opposite hand.
To understand this metaphysical supposition in Lewis more clearly, it is critical to acknowledge the genealogy of his faerie land concept as it descends to him from his chief inspiration in fantasy: George MacDonald. Much of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is prefigured in Phantastes, in which a young man is suddenly whisked away by an antique piece of furniture to a realm where the invisible natures of things are made visible. But in MacDonald, the affinity between faerie and visible reality is much more obvious, as the protagonist, Anodos, is not really transported to another world so much as that other world floods his waking life and supplants it. Faerie land is, while elevated, not at all a distant world for MacDonald. It might be said that MacDonald’s faerie land is beyond mortal man, but mortal man is not beyond it. It is the true world of Form which is only represented in shadow in the world which the senses behold, yet nonetheless presented in actual fact. Indeed, this conception of faerie has imagination as the sense which apprehends the things too real and lofty for mere sensory experience — so unlike the modernist assumption that imagination is an escape from reality rather than into it.
There is certainly something to be said, then, about the real power of imagination as a faculty of the imago dei. It is the very imagination of God, after all, upon which rests the very fact of existence. Imagination is an indispensable component of the rational soul, empowering mankind to make judgement on the basis of higher-order realities than animals are capable of grasping. For example, it is imagination that allows a person to discern possible consequences of a decision, to factor in various future outcomes into present action. Forward-thinking is a product of forward-seeing. Imagination affords the same power spatially as well, as in a situation in which, say, someone has been warned verbally about a danger to which his senses did not alert him. Imagination allows the individual to act in view of what he cannot see, which is often just as or more important to the action than what can be seen, seeing as the relevant realities of space and time beyond immediate perception are far vaster than the sliver of the physically and temporally present.
This fact is germaine to the practical reality of enchantment. While Lucy’s siblings initially dismiss her discovery of Narnia through the wardrobe as a frivolous product of over-active imagination, they later find that Narnia’s existence is objective. It invades their world of perception in spite of their lack of imagination. Lucy’s imagination, or “child-like faith,” is not what generates the faerie world, only what allows her to accept it once she’s seen it. Susan represents the rationalist who ultimately denies what she has seen because of its non-conformity to her unimaginative, disenchanted world view. But Narnia does not cease to exist because Susan ceases to believe in it. She simply loses access to it.
In a similar manner, the faerie world of antiquity — the world of spirits, angels, demons, and such — is not gone. The Enlightenment simply trained humanity not to look for it. And now that an industrial world has been built under the auspices of that faerie-less view, enchantment has become even more difficult to see. But truly, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Existence is ever as it has been. Narnia is still around, we just decided that poking around old wardrobes was infantile and foolish.
The sacramental worldview is key to unlocking this perception once again. As Brett Salkeld argues, this view depends upon the synthesis of Christianity with Platonic language — a synthesis that Spencer Klavan has recently argued begins with Paul the Apostle’s speech in the Areopagus. If all existence is a participation in the goodness of God, as Genesis 1 suggests, then truly “He is not far from each one of us, for ‘In Him we live and move and have our being.’” The supernatural world has not ceased its interplay with the natural. On the contrary, a cessation of this intimate relationship would be the cessation of reality, as the visible is predicated on the invisible. God is first, and reality flows from Him. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
An important implication in all this is that the requisite move for re-enchantment is not necessarily building half-timbered cottages instead of high-rises, strewing moss around overpasses or dressing like its still the eleventh century. The new way of seeing came first, then the new way of building and living followed. So the old way of seeing must re-emerge if anything like the old world is to present itself to the senses again. If we think that there is no spiritual valence to the modern world, if we cannot find faerie land because cities are too ugly or modernity is too non-medieval, then the problem lies with you and me, because the spirits have not gone away.
As Richard Beck demonstrates in Hunting Magic Eels, our ancestors did not believe in spirits and faeries and the like because they were less intelligent or less enlightened than us. One need not be superstitious in order to be supernaturalist. As Jordan Peterson’s work in Maps of Meaning finds at its bleeding edge, the possibility must be wrestled with that mythological thinking has a now-neglected power to explain reality where the promises of scientism have fallen through. The fact Peterson himself seems to continually struggle with as an evolutionary psychologist is that certain supernaturalist propositions, regardless of whether or not they can be empirically verified as true, simply seem to work. At bare minimum, they have utility. That is, it doesn’t matter if they’re scientifically true because they are true in some other concrete sense that matters more. Peterson has sought to identify that sense in the psychic, apparently beholden still to the language of the scientist in which the word “spiritual” is strictly forbidden.
My home state of New Mexico has for perhaps nearly a century been referred to as “The Land of Enchantment,” though I have often joked that it is not the inhabitants who earn the name. But the enchantment is, so like the invasive Faerie Land of MacDonald’s imagination, so powerful that it often finds those who aren’t looking for it. I grew up thinking of New Mexico, at least the part I knew, as only dusty, hot, barren, derelict. These descriptors are not inappropriate. But in the dust is mystery. In the heat is intensity. Beneath the barrenness thrives a clandestine and cutthroat world of hardy desert scrappers — among men and beasts alike. And in the obscurity and dereliction, there is a windborn silence, the unspoken familiar concord between the elder land and the perpetual-infant sunset.
New Mexicans are a deeply superstitious people. They tell legends about the Loretto Chapel, gather magic dirt from Chimayo, watch for extraterrestrials, and guard their children against Ojo. It is easy to sneer at these things when one has grown up around them. But the excesses of superstition should not be allowed to form a callousness to the immanent supernatural. That people can be wrong about spiritual matters is no proof that such matters are null. The opposite may, in fact, be true. The human sense of the supernatural is as basic as imagination itself. Even the evolutionary psychologist must wonder why, if there is no such thing as faerie land, people of all times, cultures, and places keep finding ways to describe it.
I do not know if the Chimayo mud has any real power. But I know I cannot trust pragmatic cynicism to tell me so if it were true. The committed materialist can never see enchantment even if it hits him in the face, just as Richard Dawkins once admitted that if a shining light or a booming voice from heaven disclosed the Almighty to him, he would imagine there must be a perfectly rational neurological explanation. Heaven forbid that we all be so blind! The world of spirits persists all around us. It is active even in the prosaic regularities we file away as superfluous. Though we are inclined to see the world as regularly ticking like a great Newtonian clock, only occasionally interrupted by miracles, perhaps, miracles are not interruptions of the rule but revelations of it. They are signs, signals of the higher realities frolicking around us always.
If we have any hope of being attentive to that higher world, we must stop seeing so pragmatically. Things must not be considered merely for their utility but for their reality, their Telos. We must think less about what the objects we encounter day-by-day can do for us and more about what they do to us. Perhaps if we think of, say, the internet as magical, we can understand it as spiritual, and be more alert to its powers for good and ill. Lucy does not need a rational explanation (nor does the reader) of how the lamp-post in the woods receives gas or how it came to be there in order to benefit from its light and guidance. She knows what it is for.
Finally, we must overcome the delusion that the world is in need of us to impose goodness, beauty, and truth upon it without drawing those same things from the world. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution have done a great deal to change human culture, but as far as the world is concerned, let us not be so arrogant to think that we have eviscerated the words of God: “It is good.” All the treasures man ever made were of materials mined first from earth’s bounty. If man has any hope of adding beauty to the world, he must first learn to see the wonder that is already there. The direction one looks is the direction one goes.
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. — Hebrews 13:2 (NRSV)
Being Kindled 
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