What Have We Been Talking About Here?

A digest of some recent post for free subscribers

‘Despair of nothing’ — a doorway over an apartment building in Rome

Hello all. This is a compendium of some of the best posts lately, for free subscribers. Ye who are paid subscribers can safely skip this. I am going to send a new post later today

The Internet And The Nous

It is probably true too that the part of the book I’m working on this weekend has to do with attention and disenchantment, so I was especially primed to keep beavering away. This weekend, I re-read Nicholas Carr’s great book from just over a decade ago, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brain, which emerged from his realization that he could not focus as he once could (this is a common phenomenon; it’s certainly happened to me). I needed to re-acquaint myself with all the research compiled by Carr on neuroplasticity, and the ways in which using the Internet changes the circuitry of our brains. I remembered from my earlier reading that Carr showed that just as literacy reshaped our brains (something that Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich cites as a reason why the Western brain and mind are so different from the rest of the world’s), so too is the Internet. In short, the Internet fragments our attention, and therefore fragments our conception of reality, and of ourselves.

In this sense, the Internet is a great disenchantment machine. If enchantment — defined as a palpable and sustained awareness of God’s presence in the material world, and a sense of connection between ourselves and the world beyond our heads — requires paying a particular kind of attention, then Internet use makes that kind of attention much harder to achieve. Because it is rewiring our minds, it is turning us into a different kind of person.

From an Orthodox Christian point of view, we can say that the Internet is stitching shut our nous, which is the primary means of communicating with God. The nous (pronounced “noose”) is the perceptive faculty of each human person. The Bible locates it in the heart, but when I read Iain McGilchrist, it seems that physiologically it’s in the brain’s right hemisphere.

Now, whenever anyone interested in Orthodoxy asks me which books they should read to get started, one that’s always on my short list is Welcome To The Orthodox Church, by my dear friend Frederica Mathewes-Green, who is pretty much an Orthodox Apostle to North Americans. Here, posted with her permission, is a lengthy passage explaining what the nous is in Orthodox thought, and how it works:

One more:

Isn’t that great? Can’t recommend Welcome To The Orthodox Church highly enough. If you want to check out the YouTube video series Frederica did on the book, here is a link. They’re great for the curious.

Stefano Meets An Angel

A few years ago, in my European travels, I met an Italian man, radiant with faith, who told me about his miraculous conversion. When I began writing the re-enchantment book, I asked him if he would write it down so I could use it. He told me he would try, but that it was difficult — and I don’t think he meant because of the English.

The man, Stefano, does not want me to use his last name, because he wants this story to be entirely for, as he put is, “the greater glory of God.” Here is what he wrote:

I was born in Rome and come from a family of working parents. I have one older brother. A very good family, with parents who were very attentive and loving to me.

However, faith was not an important issue in my home. My father had been a member of the Communist Party for many years. He had always been very skeptical about religion. My mother had been born in the countryside, in the middle of the Apennines to a very religious mother (my grandmother Maria), but she had left home very early because she had lost her father in her youth, and was sent to Rome to a boarding school for nuns to finish her studies. Her faith had withered in urban life, far from the traditions of the countryside. However, my parents baptized me because it was commonplace.

In my family the only person who had faith was my grandmother Maria, who used to come in the winter months. Her faith was very simple, rooted in the sensum fidei of the humble, a simple faith, without studies, a life of daily Mass, sacrifice and prayer.

For as long as I can remember, something particular was happening in my life. A very strong voice, inside me, spoke to me and guided me in making drawings. It told me "draw a cloud", "draw a person", "draw the sun". It seemed to me something normal, a thing that I lived with total naturalness.

I remember one day, when I was about four years old, I went to my mother with a drawing with three crosses next to each other, and this voice told me to draw "my Son", "the sun is covered". I was drawing Calvary without knowing it! I went to show my mother the drawing and she immediately asked me, "Who told you about this?” I answered evasively; no one had told me about this, but the inner voice had guided me.

When I was seven years old, I was with my grandmother watching television. It was the days before Easter, and on television there was a report of a person who suffered a kind of mystical experience. Some marks appeared on his body, amid great pain and writhing, as if someone was hitting him with a whip. I was very impressed by what I saw.

From that night until I was thirteen years old, two phenomena occurred. Every night I would dream the same dream: a dark and evil lady would come to my bed and start hitting me with a crucifix. I would wake up terrified and take refuge in my parents' or my brother's bed. The second phenomenon occurred during the day: I would see a lady dressed in long robes, adorned with jewels, who would appear in some situations such as when we were eating at the dining room table. I was the only one who had the angle of vision facing the living room, or when I was waiting for the elevator and she would appear in the entrance hall of the building where I lived. I saw this lady as if she were real. She never spoke to me, never a grimace.

I was watching myself and it scared me to death; I somehow connected the lady of the night with the lady I saw during the day. At the same time, the voice inside me stopped. In the midst of these experiences, I discussed the matter with a school friend who confirmed that he did not see this lady, and that he had never had an inner voice guiding him. When I discussed it with the religion teacher at the elementary school, a nun, she told me to pray but could not give me much more explanation.

From the beginning of these phenomena, my relationship with Jesus, Mary and the Church was contradictory. On the one hand, I felt a deep attraction to sacred places, but at the same time I was very afraid of religious images, prayers, miracles, stories about the devil, etc.

I never discussed these phenomena with my family. I grew up apparently without big problems. I was a somewhat introverted boy, eager to play soccer and be with my school friends. When I was eleven years old, it was time for my First Communion. I suffered through the catechesis because of its content, but at the same time I really wanted to receive communion. A battle was raging inside me.

The Saturday before the day of the First Communion there was a rehearsal in the parish. The priest was distributing the bread to the children arranged in a semicircle around the altar. I was the last in line, and when it was my turn, he told me "The body of Christ" (it wasn't really, it was a rehearsal).I told him "I don't eat this shit". The priest gave me a loud slap in the face and left me standing there.

However, this did not prevent me from receiving communion for the first time the following week. At that moment I felt again that voice I used to hear when I was little, and it was very comforting. But adolescence was lurking,and things got worse quickly. The dreams and visions were very conditioning. I resolved not to pay any more attention to the lady who appeared to me until I ended up not seeing her anymore, and the dreams stopped too. It was like putting that life experience in a drawer and going back to build a new life.

I joined the fans of the soccer team of my city. I started to abuse alcohol and drugs. I began to frequent people and places that were not very creditable. I continued my studies and imitating my father, I quickly moved toward Communist ideology. Being a good student, I began to learn atheist and anti-religious doctrines.

When I was around seventeen or eighteen years old, just about to enter the university stage, I had a reputation. People around me appreciated me for my ideological radicalism, the violence of my words and my actions, and the continuous blasphemies that I inserted in every sentence I pronounced. I spat on crucifixes, ridiculed saints and priests, uttered tremendous words against the Virgin Mary and her Son. It seemed to me that in this way I could push away the memories of my childhood and finally separate myself from them. It seemed to work by no longer having those strange experiences and by being respected and appreciated by my surroundings. As I moved further into the vortex of pleasure, pride and violence, I felt internally a deep emptiness that I filled with more doses of cynicism.

I became an ultra [fanatical supporter] of a soccer team, I had irreverent behavior: I was blasphemous, and full of rage and violence — until I met three people: an Argentine friend, a girl and a priest.

The Argentine friend I met thanks to a cousin, because they worked together. He was a very charismatic person who spoke to me a lot about Jesus and his miracles. He prayed naturally, and spoke to me about the Eucharist and the Resurrection.

The girl was a college classmate I liked; I saw her as very different from the others. I teased her about her devotions, but she didn't get angry. One day she left for me in a college book a piece of paper; I thought she was going to tell me something about the two of us, but it was the prayer to the Guardian Angel. I would accompany her to Mass so I could be with her. She took me to St. Paul's Basilica in Rome, where I would stare at her praying the rosary amidst the beauty of the Basilica.

And finally the priest, who came to my grandmother Maria's town and talked with me about life and reality. He seemed to me a very special person. One day he told me to be attentive to the signs God wanted to send me.

The meeting with these three people, which occurred during the same period, made me look back at my past and my experiences. I was struggling not to experience the terror of the vision again. I felt a deep fear of stepping in sacred places, or going deeper into the message of Christ — until God came strongly into my life. When I recalled those experiences again, I felt a deep uneasiness, and fear that it could happen again. Added to all this was the security I had when I saw a certain person repeatedly: I passed him in the supermarket, at the university, in the subway. He was a stern, middle-aged man who stared at me intensely.

As my past came back to me, I thought that it could all be a figment of my imagination. The only person who could help me was my childhood friend, who still lived near my house, but with whom I no longer had much of a relationship. I decided to call him and asked him to meet me.

When I saw him, I asked him if he remembered if when we were children, I had ever told him about the vision and the dreams. He remembered perfectly well, and confirmed everything I already knew. One day, he told me, he was very surprised when I told him, "Really, you don't see a lady?".

The good news was that I was not crazy, but I had a problem that I did not know how to solve or manage, until God made himself present with force.

One day in November, I was walking to the subway station. I was always passing by a church that has a crucifix on the side wall with a prayer. I looked at the crucifix and read the prayer: "Christ was so strong for you that he faced death." I wanted to enter the church. Almost trembling, I made a tour of the statues and paintings until I noticed a nun with a wound on her forehead: "Saint Rita" it said under the statue. I asked her to help me because I didn't know what to do anymore. Only some time later I found out that she was the saint of impossible cases.

When I arrived at the university, an old friend asked me how I was doing, and told me that he had been seeing me looking strange for some time. Knowing that this person had a Christian background, I asked him to pray for me. He agreed, looking at me with surprise.

That evening, I had a meeting with a cousin with whom, thanks to a mutual friend, we had begun to talk about God. We used to go to the house of another cousin in common, so we decided to go that night. I didn’t really want to, because in that house there was always a party and I did not feel like being present. Driving to pick up my cousin I passed in front of the old friend's house, and I clearly felt that he was praying for me. Then my cousin and I we drove to a neighborhood in Rome to go to the house. Once we parked, I told my cousin that I didn't feel like going upstairs, and that we should stay and talk.

When I go out of the car, I realized that on the other side of the street there was a homeless man sitting and staring at me. His stare was intense, and made me uncomfortable. After a few seconds I told my cousin to go upstairs. When I began to leave, the homeless man got up, crossed the street, came straight to me and said: "Hi Stefano, I finally found you".

I was paralyzed and incredulous. The homeless man said, "The Lord Jesus told me to tell you that from now on, you will have nothing to fear.”

I began to cry. My cousin, standing next to me, also heard the man say to me, "From today you will live for Him".

He continued to talk to me. The homeless man told me that the dreams I had as a child, and the visions, were not of God, and that God had allowed me to be tempted for a greater good.

The homeless man was also excited, and cried with happiness for having found me. He knew everything about my life. I have a certain difficulty in remembering all the words he said to me, but I do recall that he was very moved.

When he finished his speech, he knelt down and began to pray an Our Father. After each sentence, he added praise to God for His mercy, and for having been able to fulfill his mission. We could not follow his prayer, it was so powerful.

When he was leaving and saying goodbye, I asked him if he was an angel. He smiled at me and did not answer. I asked him for his name, and he said, "My name is Felice di Natale." It is a possible name in Italian, but it sounds like the phrase, "happiness of Christmas" He blessed me in the name of the Trinity, hugged me and left.

From that day on my life changed. The next morning, when I woke up, I went to the kitchen and greeted my mother, who was making coffee, with a kiss. My mother separated abruptly and said, "You look different, what did you do last night?"I felt I had a new heart.

That same morning I got a call from that friend who had prayed for me. He wanted to show me his new car fresh from the dealership. When I went down to see him, he said, "I'll be right back, I'm going to the bank for a moment.” I stayed in the car waiting and thinking.

Since the car was new, I started to open the glove compartment and look around. When I opened the ashtray I found a medal with a familiar face: "Saint Rita, pray for us". It was the same woman I had prayed to the day before! Just in time, I looked up, and in front of the car stood a person arguing with another person behind the car. On his t-shirt was written the word, "Angel.” I looked at Santa Rita and then at the t-shirt of the person in front of me. Since that day my life changed, and after almost twenty years I can say that my conversion was a miracle, and that my life is Christ. I radically changed my life. I left the life of sin and opened my heart to Jesus.

Through his witness, Stefano’s entire family subsequently converted to Christianity — even his lifelong Communist father, who accepted Christ on his deathbed. See, there are no impossible causes!

The Archdruid And Me

One of you forwarded me this essay by John Michael Greer, a practicing “white magic” occultist — he is a Druid — who is very smart, very insightful, and a good writer. I enjoy reading him, and learn from him, though I am, of course, adamantly opposed to his religious practices, thinking them extremely dangerous. Still, I respect him, and as I said, I learn from him. His essay is about the meaning of enchantment, and has helped me refine the definition of my own project.

JMG writes that Max Weber’s famous verdict that the modern world has become disenchanted isn’t actually true:

In his 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that the disenchantment of the world—that is, a change in attitudes toward the world that stripped it of its spiritual and magical dimensions—was central to the rise of modern capitalist society, and was prefigured by certain important trends in Protestant Christianity. The idea of disenchantment as a basic theme of modernity became very popular in Weber’s time and remains popular today, because it reflects one of the common prejudices of our time:  people in the past ignorantly believed in magic and religion, the claim goes, but we’re enlightened nowadays and know better.

What Josephson-Storm pointed out is that Weber’s claim only works out literally if you ignore the fact that a very large percentage of people in today’s industrial nations still believe in gods, practice magic, consult horoscopes, and engage in all those other supposedly outworn practices of the allegedly superstitious past.  For a disenchanted world, there sure is a lot of enchantment going on! What’s more, as Josephson-Storm also pointed out, Weber himself knew better; while he was writing his vivid discussion of the disenchantment of the world in 1904, quite a few of his friends and associates were practicing magic, consulting horoscopes, and so on.  When he claimed that the modern world was disenchanted, in other words, Weber was in a very real sense talking about how he thought things ought to be, not discussing how things actually are.

JMG’s point is that almost nobody lives as if the world were truly disenchanted. People pay attention to astrology, for example. They go to church, still, and if they don’t go to church, they still believe in some kind of god, and in angels, and demons. They do all kinds of things that would freak a strict materialist out. In Cambridge over the holiday, I visited a dear old friend and his wife. He’s a Cambridge don who works in a STEM field. We got to talking about my work on this new book. He told me that I’m bonkers. Literally, he said that! Then, being English, he apologized.

I told him there was no need to apologize. We’ve been friends for long enough that he can say something like that to me, and I am not in the least offended. It’s true; I love the guy. He’s a dear, dear man, full of life and joy. But I realized as we continued to talk that he is as close-minded about the prospect that strict materialism isn’t true as any Arkansas fundamentalist Christian would be about his own belief. I kept coming up with scenarios, including things I had experienced, and my pal insisted, dogmatically, that there has to be a materialist explanation for it, because materialism is true.

I realized later, thinking about this, how very few people I know like him. Many of my friends and acquaintances do think I’m somewhat bonkers about this stuff, but almost none of them would go to the mat for materialism like my Cambridge don friend did. Being with such a hardcore materialist for an afternoon illuminated the truth of what JMG is saying.

More JMG:

What, then, is an enchanted world?  If you want a glimpse into that, pick up a good collection of fairy tales, medieval legends, or ancient myths. Read them, and imagine yourself living in a world where these stories seem as obviously true as the comparable stories of scientific materialism seems to us. Imagine watching the sun rise in the morning, knowing—in the same casual way that you now know the sun is a ball of incandescent hydrogen millions of miles away in the hard vacuum of deep space—that the sun is a person who gazes down on the world as he or she travels from east to west through the sky. Imagine looking out at the forest and knowing that the trees have a guardian spirit who must be placated if you want to harvest some wood. Imagine standing on a riverbank and knowing—again, casually, without putting any particular stress on the fact—that the flowing water in front of you is quite literally the physical body of a goddess or a god.

Enchantment goes further than that. Imagine knowing, in the same well-of-course fashion just discussed, that how well you can complete some task—plowing a field, nursing a child, forging iron into a tool, healing an illness, building a structure, and the list goes on—doesn’t depend on the kind of objective measures of efficiency we’re used to using. Imagine that your success depends instead on whether you can, in the process of doing that task, identify yourself with the god or spirit or culture hero that first did the same task back in the beginning of time, and make your act one with that original deed.

How do you do that?  Maybe you sing a magic song while you do the task, the way folk healers do in so many cultures, so that the herbs you use are still in some enchanted sense resting in the hands of the legendary being who first used them. Maybe you take part in a magic dance before you start, the way people in the north of England used to celebrate the beginning of plowing with sword dances in which a central figure suffers a mock-beheading and is then brought back to life—it requires no particular background in comparative religion to recognize in these proceedings an enchanted vision of the life cycle of grain, which is decapitated at harvest and rises again with the green shoots of spring.

He’s right about that, but there is an immense and absolutely crucial between pagan enchantment and Christian enchantment. From a Christian point of view, it’s not that JMG is necessarily wrong in general about the metaphysics, but that his view is ultimately incompatible with Christianity. To speak bluntly, the sun is not a person, and there are no guardian spirits in the woods. There may well be spirits in the woods, but they are not benign or beneficial. One of the things I’ve learned from interviewing exorcists, and people formerly involved with the occult, is that what people consider to be “white magic” — what JMG does, as well as various aspects of what we call broadly “New Age” — is not possible to separate fundamentally from black magic, which is actively beseeching demons to do harm to others, and to gain control over the world.

JMG writes (emphasis his):

In an age of enchantment, what we call the “symbolic” is as real as a rock.  That’s a lesson that most people in today’s disenchanted societies have a very hard time grasping. More generally, it seems to be very hard these days for most of us to grasp that people in different ages and cultures really did experience the world in a radically different way. They weren’t simply playing make-believe. They really did look east toward the rising sun and see a vast, golden, radiant person gazing back at them.  They really did feel the hands of a saint, a spirit, or a god guiding their own hands as they recited a charm over the herbs they were brewing into a healing potion.

The reason I can say this so confidently, of course, is that that same state of mind and that same kind of experience are essential elements of the practice of the kind of old-fashioned occultism that I do. To practice classic occult disciplines is to enter into an enchanted world, even if that world is only as large as the space traced out by a ritual circle and its entire existence unfolds in however much time elapses from the beginning of a ceremony to its end. Within those limits of space and time, stars and planets become persons, times and places far distant from the ritual and from one another fuse into a single moment, angels and spirits take on a body made of incense smoke and speak to the mage. Disenchantment dissolves like mist and the old enchantments surge back to fill their accustomed place. That’s the point of magic.

This is what contemporary Christian thinkers and storytellers like Jonathan Pageau and Paul Kingsnorth keep saying, and what I think Martin Shaw, who is on his way into Orthodoxy, will soon learn (or, to be precise, what he knows already, but which is being Christianized within him). It is no coincidence that all three of these men, as well as myself, are Orthodox Christian converts. It is within Orthodoxy that the enchanted world is most vivid and accessible, within Christian belief.