Enchantment

Conversation 8, Socrates Worldview 5/22

SOCRATES. Good morning, Adeimantus, is it yourself?

ADEIMANTUS. I believe it is, Socrates.

S. Spoken like a true philosopher. Shall we begin?

A. Certainly! What is the topic for today?

S. We must return to my worldview after the diversion occasioned by your dog poo problem.¹ However, before we resume our main line of argument, I want to talk about enchantment. Enchantment is the magic ingredient in what I have previously called ‘the mystery of life’.² It’s so important because it’s the backdrop, often unrecognised, against which personal preference enters into philosophical discussions. You will recall, Adeimantus, that I have asserted that the choice of a moral framework comes down to a matter of preference, since ultimately, we cannot prove the existence of a firmer foundation.

A. Yes, I recall that.

S. Whether your philosopher is sensitive to, or some might say susceptible to, enchantment will determine their preference for a humanistic or a religious moral foundation.

A. I see. Then you had better tell me what this enchantment is.

S. Let me begin with a true story, Adeimantus. Some years ago when I was a young man studying at the university ….

A. So, you were once young, Socrates?

S. Yes, Adeimantus, I know it is hard to believe, even I was once young. Let me continue. One evening I was walking towards the Physics building to check on an experiment I was running. Now, I was crossing the grassy quadrangle and passing by carefully-placed clumps of trees, populated with exotic species. I had always thought these little groves were quite delightful and, in some way, mysterious. Enchanting, in fact. In this view I was not alone, because I heard the clear voice of a young girl of about five years of age say, ‘Look at those trees! There might be fairies in there!’ I looked back to the source of the voice and saw the girl in the company of her parents and a younger child in a pram. This seemed to me a charming scene – a family taking a twilight stroll together. Imagine my surprise when the man scolded the girl, saying, ‘Stop talking like that! How many times have I told you there is no such thing as fairies?’

A. Yes, Socrates. What a spoilsport!

S. Exactly! The fellow was a weedy type - thinning hair, scrappy beard, and glasses – clearly a humanist philosopher.³ But my point in telling you this story is this: in that moment I learnt something about myself. I learnt that I am susceptible to enchantment, by which I mean the feeling that there is a connection between a special place and some deeper, or hidden, reality, and that reality is, in some sense, spiritual.

A. You don’t mean to say, Socrates, that you thought the garden grove was inhabited by spirits?

S. Not at all! At the time, I was an ardent materialist intent on pushing the scientific understanding of the world to its limits. I would certainly not have said there had to be spirits there to explain the feeling experienced by myself and the girl. I would have produced an hypothesis about this feeling being some sort of primal instinct triggered by certain types of surroundings. Even today, I would say much the same thing, although I would attach much more importance to the feeling than I would have back then.

A. Do you think that everyone experiences enchantment?

S. Clearly the girl and I have both experienced it. The girl’s father did not at that time, or if he did, he suppressed the feeling, probably because he disapproved of such feelings as being irrational. Perhaps not everyone experiences enchantment. Perhaps the experience was more prevalent in the past, especially in our culture. This would explain the preference some people have for a spiritual view of life, while others flatly oppose such a view. This is why I say the feeling of enchantment is important.

A. You will have to explain more fully to me what you mean by ‘spiritual’, Socrates.

S. Certainly, I intend to do so⁴, Adeimantus, but firstly let me give you some other examples of enchantment.

A. Very well.

S. I will give you two examples. Firstly, consider the Aboriginal people of this fair land. We frequently hear about places that are sacred to them. My understanding is that they believe the creator spirits reside in those places, along with the spirits of their ancestors. These spirits are strongly connected to the place, as they are themselves. The place, their ‘country’ is integral to their sense of being.

A. So I understand (Berndt and Tonkinson 2018).

S. And these creator spirits, evoked and memorialised in stories, ritual, and rock art, impose certain demands on the Aboriginal people to act in certain ways and not to act in other ways. We might say that they impose laws.

A. Quite so. We could say that awe leads to lore which leads to law.

S. Very clever, Adeimantus! I must remember that.

A. It is interesting, do you not think Socrates, how Aboriginal spirituality is much respected by westerners. Meanwhile, belief in the god of Islam is regarded as patently false by westerners, but their practices are respected or at least tolerated. On the other hand, a great number of westerners neither believe in the Christian god, nor tolerate Christian views. Why is this, do you think?

S. That is easy to answer, Adeimantus. Westerners never expect to have to obey the moral codes of Aboriginals or Muslims, but they do fear having to obey the moral code of Christianity. They fear that having shaken off Christianity, it might come back to haunt them. Now, concerning Christianity and its roots, my second example is Moses and the burning bush.

A. I was expecting it.

S. So you know the story, Adeimantus! Moses was looking after the flock of his father-in-law Jethro when he saw a burning bush that was not being consumed by the flames (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Exodus 3:1-6). Moses went to investigate, and a voice called out to him from the bush saying, ‘Come no nearer. Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.’ Do you know what ‘holy’ means, Adeimantus?

A. I am sure you will tell me.

S. ‘Holy’ means much the same as ‘sacred’, that is, pure and incorruptible, and true in the sense of uncontaminated by falsehood. The voice then reveals that it is God himself in the bush and Moses covers his face in awe.

A. Why did God say to Moses, ‘This is holy ground?’

S. I think it was God’s way of saying to Moses, ‘You are approaching me, and I am holy.’ To the ancient mind, something had to be present for it to be experienced. Now we can appreciate that this encounter did not take place in the physical domain. It was a meeting of minds. It took place in the world of ideas. The physical place was just a trigger for the mental experience of holiness.

A. How can a material person be holy?

S. As usual, Adeimantus, you are anticipating where we are going. I would say the ‘person’ is not a material thing. The person can be holy because it is not material. Of course, we humans have our material bodies, and our bodies influence our state of holiness. The needs of the body can detract from our holiness, or by disciplining the body, we can promote our holiness. This is the fundamental dilemma of human existence, but more on that another time. A material thing, like a place in the world, cannot be holy, because material things always contain some impurity or tendency to decay. Think of the second law of thermodynamics. So, holiness belongs in the spiritual domain, by which I mean the world of ideas.

A. Holiness is in the mind then?

S. I would say so. The holy cannot tolerate contamination by the profane. God does not allow Moses to physically approach him. It is sufficient that they can communicate. Even so, we must be pure in mind and heart to approach the holy, which leads to laws of individual and collective purity. Enchantment is the source of morality because the sense of being in the presence of the holy instils the desire to be holy also. God is good and this leads us to be good. Focussing on gratification of the senses dispels the enchanted vision. The fool says in his heart (before he does wrong), ‘There is no god.’ Or the wrongdoer actually comes to worship evil, personified as Satan, who promises power, luxury, and gratification.

A. Steady Socrates, you are going too fast for me! You are saying that enchantment, that is, spirituality, leads to morality. Is this necessarily so? Can some spirituality be amoral, or immoral? Must enchantment be accompanied by awe of God? Must it include a God figure? Conversely, does all morality necessarily derive from spirituality? If so, what is the non-spiritual person’s equivalent of spirituality as the source of their morality? Do they consciously choose or recognise it?

S. Good questions, Adeimantus. We must delve into all those things.⁵ But to give you a short answer, I would say that the kind of enchantment I am talking about invariably is connected with our sense of goodness.

A. I look forward to those discussions.

S. You will notice, Adeimantus, that the two examples I gave both refer to ancient people. While there are Aboriginal people around today who follow their traditions, their culture is ancient, as I think they would agree. And Moses was around a long time ago. Perhaps primitive people are more likely to experience enchantment than we sophisticated modern types.

A. More likely than humanist professors, you mean?

S. You said it, Adeimantus. Yes, illiterate herdsmen may be better equipped to see the sacred than humanist professors. The latter are too grown up, and at the same time not grown up enough. Jesus said you must become like a little child to enter the Kingdom of God (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 18:3), and I think he meant not just in terms of trust, but also in being open to enchantment. That humanist professor, A.C. Grayling (Grayling 2013), thinks he is safe in belittling religious people for swallowing the musings of illiterate herdsmen. This is, of course, insulting to herdsmen, illiterate or otherwise. If we are to believe the author of Exodus, or the oral tradition passed down to him, Moses was a literate shepherd. He was herding sheep when he saw the burning bush, and he spent his youth in the court of the pharaoh where he must have been instructed in the learning of the time. While that learning may have included reading, writing, and arithmetic, it would also have concerned spiritual lore. Moses was a wise and educated man, but still capable of experiencing enchantment.

A. Apparently so.

S. In Moses’ day, to be a shepherd was no mean thing. Abraham was a shepherd or herder. By the time of Jesus, shepherding had become a lowly trade and the shepherds who were first to experience the wonder of his birth were probably illiterate. The evangelists were at pains to mention this and contrast the lowly shepherds with the wealthy and erudite magi. Enchantment is open to all, regardless of learning, if they are willing to be open to it. Jesus himself, surely a man not lacking in a sense of his own worth, was happy to call himself a shepherd, although he certainly was not illiterate, given that he read from the Tora in the synagogue. One should not denigrate the unlearned, for they are just as capable of experiencing enchantment as the learned, perhaps more so.

A. Are you implying, Socrates, that a sense of morality is not a rational thing?

S. Indeed I am, Adeimantus. Surely, the experience of enchantment is not a rational thing and, since I say that morality derives at least in part from enchantment with the holy, then it follows that the moral sense is to some extent ‘pre-rational’. I am not suggesting that we should dispense entirely with our rational faculties when considering moral questions, but I do suggest that the moral sense, at its source, is not rational. That is why I have said previously that it is fundamentally a matter of preference.

A. Tell me more about the sense of awe that you ascribe to enchantment?

S. The sense of awe is hard to capture in words. Artists do it most successfully, especially in music, which is not constrained by physical dimensions.

A. I am particularly awestruck by Sibelius’ evocation of the frozen wilderness of the far north and also with Rodriguez’s imagining of the Spanish plains. I feel a sense of the spirit moving over the land in those pieces of music.

S. I’m with you there, Adeimantus. You understand completely. Anthropologists tell us that music, painting, sculpture, and dance originated in sacred ritual, long before they became art for art’s sake. Of course, these days we know so much about the physical world that the sense of mystery evaporates in the face of our prosaic description. Humanists are fond of saying that they feel awe contemplating the grandeur of the universe, but one suspects that they are impressed rather than awestruck. And if you are impressed by human achievement, it is hard not to experience hubris, and we know that nothing raises the ire of the gods like hubris.

A. So the ancient Greeks playwrights tell us.

S. Petal would like me to have given an example from ancient Celtic spirituality. You know, the land of fairy, Tir na Nog, entering the other world through a mist, and all that. Enchantment played a big part in it, and it had a strong connection to sacred landscape, but I am too ignorant of it to connect it to morality. Faint echoes survive in the Celtic poets. For me, enchantment was conjured up by Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion,’ especially the line, ‘they shall be one with the man in the wind and the west moon.’

A. As you have said before, Socrates, you are an incurable romantic.

S. When you get as old as I am, Adeimantus, you might find that you are becoming tired of the doings of mankind in this world. Then you will feel the need to search earnestly for the source of enchantment. That source is connected with the spirit and with eternal life. That is why my illustrious ancestor observed that people tend to become more religious the older they are (Xenophon 2013, Memorabilia I 4 [16]). If they fail to become more religious, then they tend to despair and long for their life to end, even to the point of wanting to be ‘put down’.

A. I suspect that what you say is true, Socrates.

S. Mark my words, Adeimantus, the time will come when, just as enchantment seems more hidden than ever, you long for it the most.

A. What can you do then?

S. That is when you look to faith and hope. But to discuss faith right now would be too big a leap. Firstly, we need to talk about what we mean by ‘person’ and before that we must be clear about science and what it tells us about the materialist view of the ‘person’.

A. Until tomorrow, then.

References

Berndt, Ronald M, and Robert Tonkinson. 2018. Aboriginal peoples in Australian society. April 19. Accessed August 22, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal/Aboriginal-peoples-in-Australian-society.

Grayling, A. C. 2013. The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism. Bloomsbury.

1985. The New Jerusalem Bible. London: Darton, Longman, & Todd.

Xenophon. 2013. The Complete Works of Xenophon. Delphi Classics Version 1. Hastings, East Sussex: Delphi Publishing Ltd.

1. See the conversation on Davis's Law.

2. See the conversation on Socrates' Worldview.

3. Socrates was being flippant. Of course he knows that not all humanist philosophers wear glasses!

4. See the conversation on The Person.

5. See the conversation on Society.