There’s a fantastic post on the differences between pre- and post- enlightenment experiences over at the Immanent Frame by Charles Taylor, which is well worth a read if you have the time. It’s a veritable essay, so prepare to be confronted with some fairly dense writing.

Once you venture in, however, there’s an interesting discussion on the change of sensibilities between us and our ancestors – or, more precisely, between those of us for whom magic is a fact, and those of us for whom science explains the smallest thing.

…we tend to think of our differences from our remote forbears in terms of different beliefs, whereas there is something much more puzzling involved here.

It is clear that for our forbears, and many people in the world today who live in a similar religious world, the presence of spirits, and of different forms of possession, is no more a matter of (optional, voluntarily embraced) belief than is for me the presence of this computer and its keyboard at the tips of my fingers.

This concept is key when interpreting our forbears, be they the church fathers, medieval or reformation scholarship, the Desert fathers, the gospels and epistles themselves or the Hebrew scriptures and Genesis narrative. That is – the differences are more than simply those of belief, but rather one of experience. Saying to a man in the first century that magic is not real, would have been like saying to me that the computer I’m typing on right now is not real.

We have great trouble getting our minds around this, and we rapidly reach for intra-psychic explanations, in terms of delusions, projections, and the like. But one thing that seems clear is that the whole situation of the self in experience is subtly but importantly different in these worlds and in ours. We make a sharp distinction between inner and outer, what is in the “mind” and what is out there in the world.

This is a distinction that was not made in the ancient world, and in many places today, still is not made. The inner and the outer are both intrinsic to reality; the mind and the world both contribute to our experience. The world can have an effect on out minds; our minds can effect the world. We, however, draw heavy distinctions. Morality, thought, faith, can never reside on the outside, but are firmly placed inside the mind. Emotion, evil, are all internalised, mental constructs, but not things that come at us from the outside – not demons, not ontological evil, not ontological emotion, not ontological morality. We are buffered, bounded selves, separated from the outside. They were – and are – porous, mentally and emotionally vulnerable to the outside world.

As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me,” to use the contemporary expression…the porous self is vulnerable: to spirits, demons, cosmic forces. And along with this go certain fears that can grip it in certain circumstances. The buffered self has been taken out of the world of this kind of fear.

I think this is key – that we separate ourselves. The audience that the bible was originally read by were porous. They were vulnerable to outside moral, emotional, mental influences. But, because we live in a different reality than they, we are not vulnerable to these same influences. How, then, do we act whenwe are taken out of the world of this kind of fear?

How is a Christian supposed to interpret scripture in the light of this drastic change in worldview? Should we ‘regress’, and seek to return to pre-enlightenment experience? Or should we drive on, trying to understand the teachings of Christ in a disenchanted world?

I’m not entirely sure, to be honest, what the answer to this question is. I feel that enchantment, in a way, is a key aspect of Christianity. The wonder that there is so much mystery, that Christ is indeed an outside moral, emotional, mental influence on us, that he saves us from other influences, is certainly an enchantment in exactly the way pre-enlightenment experienced it. But, on the other hand, it seems that the knowledge gained since the enlightenment is truth, and one cannot turn their back on truth – else we are turning our back on Christ.

I’d suggest that the best path to take is some kind of middle way, one that accepts mystery and enchantment in our world, that doesn’t seek to debunk or disprove the magic that surrounds us, that experiences wonder at the magic in both the known and the unknown…but this way seems rhetorical to me, as I do not know myself how to find this middle way.

Any ideas?