A Little Magic Now and Then is Relished By the Wisest Men

My brother-and-sister-in-law recently got me into on N.D. Wilson’s podcast. If you’ve ever read his non-fiction, you know that he’s something of a Christian Platonist. He sees (rightly) that the grass in your backyard or the crumbling brick buildings downtown are imbued with meaning and drenched with magic. One need not go to the English countryside to find faeries. They might just be living in a Kansas cornfield. Or they might be under your bed.

And this got me thinking about Paul Tyson’s little book, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic. His definition of magic is anything that cannot be accounted by science. Science studies that which is “measurable, material, and mathematically modellable.” Anything that cannot be studied by science (like value and purpose) is magic. Tyson then outlines four theories of magic. The first two are ancient and the last two are fairly modern.

Animist theory: Nature is understood to be divine and living.

Platonist theory: Nature is saturated in transcendent meaning from beyond itself.

Supernatural theory: Nature is not magical, but a separated supernatural reality is magical.

Anti-magical theory: Magic is understood to be unreal.

I won’t regurgitate his entire book (it’s less than seventy pages long), but Tyson summarizes his lessons early on. All quotations below are taken directly from Tyson. I only want to chat about one or two, but here are the seven in brief:

1. We now live in a high age of magic. One the one hand, knowledge is reduced to facts, but, on the other hand, our culture is addicted to magical fantasies. This dissonance and tension are failing our modern world.
2. The second lesson introduces the four theories of magic mentioned above.
3. The third lesson explores the idea of disenchantment and how it happened to our world. Disenchantment is “the way we modern people reflexively experience the world as un”
4. The fourth lesson looks at how disenchantment didn’t happen fully to our world. Both the third and fourth lessons explain how the two modern theories of magic (supernatural and anti-magical) succeeded and failed in shaping our modern world.
5. What is the magic of quality and purpose? You cannot measure a quality like beauty. You cannot touch a purpose like love. And so, on the anti-magical view, quality and purpose do not exist objectively. Moral and aesthetic qualities and purposes end up as constructs of our consciousness. Lesson five helps us understand how quality and purpose should be understood as very real.
6. The sixth lesson is concerned with questions of magic and essence, the cosmic mystery of intelligibility. The foundation of modern science is the idea that our ideas and knowledge of the world are true. But modern science cannot establish its own foundation. How can we know that modern science is true if we’re only using the tool of modern science to find that out? Our modern theories of magic are a problem.
7. The final and seventh lesson is Tyson’s attempt to show that a reworked Platonist view is the best theory of magic to take up.

Lesson, the Second

The second lesson is, perhaps, the most helpful for understanding how we got to where we are. While animism and Platonism are ancient, the other two theories of magic are fairly recent. By the 14th century, most thinkers believed that early medieval Christian Platonism couldn’t quite account for the concrete “whatness” (quiddity) of ships and shoes and ceiling wax, of cabbages and kings. Whereas once, order, meaning, essence, purpose, and value that was within a cabbage because the value of the cabbage was derived from beyond the cabbage, now all of it’s meaning and purpose was understood to be fundamental to the cabbage. Meaning wasn’t a gift given to nature. Meaning became something fundamental to nature. And so, Nature was no longer dependent on the Divine.

From the 1300s to the 1500s, thinkers tried to understand Nature as a self-standing reality. To do that, the Church developed a two-room cosmos. In one compartment, there is a self-standing, unsupported natural world. In the other room, there is a secret and supernatural type of reality, completely outside of the natural world.

This 16th century idea of a free-standing Nature (natura pura) was a big deal in the development of magical theory. Now, Nature doesn’t require the divine Being to interact with it. The divine Being is external and super-natural. God made Nature, but he doesn’t continue to interact with Nature (aside from a few miracles, perhaps).

Compared with the Christian Platonist theory of magic, this supernatural theory is very dualist. By dualist, Tyson means that there is an earthly Nature that is decisively cut away from the heavenly “supernature”. There are now two realms. Things in Nature no longer have any magical mystery. “They have become concrete knowable objects in the material space-time world.” With this new starting point, the late medieval and early modern Church continued to de-mystify and de-magic Nature. And so, the soil was prepared for the growth of modern science.

Nature Isn’t Home Alone. Nature IS the House.

If nature no longer needs “supernature in order to be nature AND if nature can be understood in a completely natural way, then the supernatural realm becomes “functionally superfluous” to our knowledge of the world. Now, it’s possible to toss the supernatural, metaphysical, and the magical outside of the house entirely because the house now only has one room: tangible reality. “It is now possible to think that religion, magic, and transcendence-concerned philosophy are mere fictions.” This leads to the anti-magical theory of magic. How so?

• If nature is fully separate from divinity, nature can be fully understood by fully natural means (i.e., experimentation and mathematics).
• If man is divinely mandated to rule the earth (Gen.1:28), scientific mastery of nature is a religious responsibility.
• If nature is clockwork, man obviously stands outside of the machine (because he knows about it, he cannot be just another cog). Man reasons within his soul (this is the only supernatural furniture smuggled into the natura pura house) and is detached from nature enough to master nature.

Natura pura had the whole house to itself. Aristotle’s metaphysics were also in the trash can. Isaac Newton’s physics was ascendant. Now, it was easy to see the whole universe as clockwork. “The old ways of approaching the darkly glowing mysteries, the Creator-embedded wonders, and the quasi-divine animate powers of nature could now be set aside.” The value and meaning of natura pura was calculated by weighing quantifiable pleasures and pains against each other.

By the 1840s and under the banner of naturalism, the anti-magic theory really came into its own. If only the natural is scientifically real and if only science can give us real knowledge, then the supernatural and the magical are redundant and unnecessary. Religion begins to drift away from what you can really know, along with magic. Magic is dismissed along with the supernatural. “After such a dismissal, any serious belief in magic, or anything supernatural, can now be reasonably thought of as a childish delusion that has no place in the scientific age. Uneducated magical folk beliefs and scientifically impossible religious doctrines were now thought of as belonging to the same genus. Magic and religion could now both be tossed into the bin of superstition.” (I think of Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes in those recent movies. Everything spooky can be explained. See also, Scooby Doo.)

And so, we also become naturalized. The imago Dei has been wiped away. The eternal soul is now only a nursery rhyme. We don’t stand out from nature. We’re just another cog in the machine. This brave new world is fairly terrifying for us when we stop to think about it. On this view, what appears to be magical is merely and necessarily a biological and physical mechanism. “And yet,” maintains Tyson. “Qualities and meanings, and religious and transcendent longings, have not disappeared.”

We Can’t Outrun the Magic

The fourth lesson is, I think, Tyson’s best. He’s a great diagnostician. His prescription is Christian Platonism and he didn’t need to persuade me much there. When it comes to diagnosing Western culture and its relationship to the spiritual, he leans heavily on the work of Jason Ananda Josephson Storm. Has the world been completely flattened and disenchanted, castrated of all its magical qualities? Not quite.

During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when the supernatural was supposedly being banished from the house of Nature, Marie Curie, Jean Baptiste Perrin, and Charles Richet were all very much interested in the paranormal. The occult was a craze in 19th century Europe. And we still have an interest in the spooky, intangible things in life.

John Locke was an empiricist. For him, physical things had primary qualities (extension, figure, motion, solidity, and number) and only those primary qualities had a definite, objective existence. Whether the human mind can observe them or not, those primary qualities are real. They are more real than our observation and interpretation of them. And so, for all scientific and practical purposes, value and purpose and meaning are not real features of objective existence. But in our day to day, in our experience, value, meaning, and purpose are fundamental to our lives.

So, are these “secondary” qualities unreal, as Locke said, or are they real because we experience them? There’s a cultural dissonance “between our scientific knowledge of reality and our subjective experience of meaning and value.”

Disenchantment is an important myth because it governs our lives these days. And it’s a false myth because enchantment has not disappeared from our daily experiences. “What has really happened is that our understanding of where enchantment is has moved – under the conditions of scientific modernity – entirely out of the categories of knowledge and factual reality, and completely into the categories of imagination and subjectivity.”

The Great Dane to the Rescue

The Great Dane, Kierkegaard, said that an objective understanding of material facts has never been a pathway to any ultimate truth. Science just raises further questions. The questions answered by physics lead to answers only found in metaphysics. Modern science is only equipped to answer only the questions it can ask.

Kierkegaard tried to find the right terms for the thing he was looking for. He coined the term “existential.” He maintained that when we try to make sense of the value and meaning of the world (the things that science cannot give us), we should start with the personal experiences of our own existence rather than the abstractions about universal and objective truth. “To Kierkegaard, the love, rivalry, wonder, anxiety, and all those mundane yet richly meaning-laden experiences of our own particular life, constitute the true texture of our actual existence.” And so, for him, it seemed obvious to start the search for meaning where we exist.

Kierkegaard turned Locke on his head and said that we should treat those “secondary” concerns (value, meaning, purpose, etc.) as primary. Objective truth (while still important) is to be secondary. This is hard to do because we love objective reality. Science can measure it and so we can understand it. We’ve gotten so much further than our backwards ancestors. But all that gets in the way for Kierkegaard. For him, “such objectivity is seriously problematic if it displaces our deeply interested and personal concern with truth.”

Facts are basically irrelevant to existentially important truth. They’re not unimportant, but truth is what makes them important. The meaning of a life is what makes the healing medicine important. The purpose of the trip is what makes the flight good. Out of those contexts, they’re just pills and machines. If we pursue power and social status (measurable things measured with material and objective facts) without asking the big questions of meaning and value, we live as subhuman and tragic figures.

If you treat the scientifically knowable as the main arena of truth, Kierkegaard said, then objectivity becomes false. In contrast to this, our actual experience of the world, our subjectivity – that is truth. What Kierkegaard meant is that “an objective attitude towards detached facts and instrumental effectiveness – the so called realism of a natura pura metaphysics – cannot be a true vision of human and cosmic reality if we carefully consider the nature of our actual existence.”

Our actual experience of existence simply doesn’t match up with a natura pura objectivist way of looking at things. We instinctively know that there’s a room missing. Or perhaps we’re even aware that the wall isn’t even supposed to be there. But even apart from what we experience within ourselves, there’s also imagination.

Imagination had much clout in the two older theories of magic. When magic is a given, it’s expected that there will be layers to our understanding of the natural world. Yes, we still experimented with and mathematically modelled upon nature, but in an open and imaginative that evoked more poetry, dance, art, and music than modernity allows. If you have a natura pura view or a supernaturalist view, that’s all out the window. We can thank Rene Descartes for that.

For Descartes, the mind is a supernatural thing somehow connected to the cog of the human being in the machine of the cosmos. This is the interpretive lens of the world and how mostly of us experience life today. Freedom, purpose, will, value, beauty – these are all things that exist only in our supernatural minds. “Ironically, by science we have become magicians standing over nature and bending it to our own will.” However, this makes imagination and subjectivity false “when they are thought of as projecting human meanings and values onto the natural world.” But, Tyson teases, what if nature really is full of meaning and what if our imagination is also part of nature and the most appropriate part of nature for touching those magical mysteries?

What if?