The Alternate Enchantment of the Reformation

Since the 2007 release of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, the Christian intellectual sphere has reverberated with talk of disenchantment, a historical process that helped create the modern world. According to Taylor, the old enchanted realm was “the world of spirits, demons, moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged,” whereas in our present disenchanted world “the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spiritual élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are those of humans…and minds are bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, etc., are situated ‘within them’.”

Like Max Weber before him, Taylor places much of the blame for this disenchantment on the Protestant Reformation and credits it with helping create the secular world in which we now live. As Exhibit A for the theory of Protestant disenchantment, scholars including Taylor have pointed to the work of Eamon Duffy, the Catholic historian of the Reformation whose classic work The Stripping of the Altars documented the abandonment of traditional religious practices in England from the late medieval period through the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Duffy does not use the language of disenchantment in that text, but the phrase “stripping the altars” is heavily symbolic, leading us to imagine iconoclasm, whitewashed walls, and Christmas getting cancelled. It points to the eventual abandonment of the altar, which many regard as the logical result of the Reformation.

These thinkers present us with grand narratives of disenchantment. Such sweeping judgments, which string the events of multiple centuries back to one primary node of causation, help us make sense of history and ignite our imaginations. But these works of macrohistory are forever vulnerable to the work of microhistorians who examine the diverse experiences of humans in each era.

Consider the example of Andrew Marvell, who lived at the tail end of England’s age of Reformation. In the years just following the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I, Marvell took a job working for Lord Thomas Fairfax, victorious general of the New Model Army and leader of the Parliamentarian cause. He lived with the Fairfaxes on an estate that was formerly home to the Cistercian Nun Appleton Priory. It had come into the possession of the Fairfax family after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

As a little treat for his boss, Marvell wrote a poem about the house’s history. It centered on the possibly legendary rescue of a female ward under the care of the nuns, who subsequently became the bride of a Fairfax ancestor. Marvell portrayed the nunnery as if it were a magical castle in which sorceresses kept their inferiors under a spell. The brave hero taunts the nuns,

“Is this that Sanctity so great,
An Art by which you finly'r cheat
Hypocrite Witches, hence avant,
Who though in prison yet inchant!”

When the young man succeeds in rescuing the woman who will be his bride, the poet exults,

“But the glad Youth away her bears,
And to the Nuns bequeaths her Tears:
Who guiltily their Prize bemoan,
Like Gipsies that a Child hath stoln.
Thenceforth (as when th' Inchantment ends
The Castle vanishes or rends)
The wasting Cloister with the rest
Was in one instant dispossest.”

Marvell speaks of the enchantment of the cloister, which becomes disenchantment upon the house’s dispossession. Many analysts of the English Reformation have argued over the years that the process of disenchantment dates to this overthrow of the medieval church. The ruined monasteries that dot the British countryside are the chief symbols of King Henry VIII’s religious revolution—symbols perhaps of the disbelief that would eventually conquer the land. At first glance, Marvell seems to agree that enchantment ended with monasticism, but the truth is more complicated.

Max Weber is the most cited promoter of the concept of disenchantment, though he was hardly the first person to reference it. Disenchantment for Weber occurred when the sacraments ceased to be regarded as true means of grace, “for though the sacraments had been ordained by God for the increase of His glory, and must hence be scrupulously observed, they are not a means to the attainment of grace, but only the subjective externa subsidia of faith.” Alternatively, in his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Weber described disenchantment as the process of intellectualization by which all things can, at least theoretically, be understood by means of reason without resorting to magical explanations.

Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.

But for many of those who lived through the English Reformation, particularly the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the second half of the 1530s, disenchantment meant something different. The Roman Church was seen to have held the people under a kind of magic spell by means of things not prescribed in Scripture: the cult of the saints, relics, pilgrimages, monasticism, and the like. The enchantment here was not any spiritual or supernatural reality, but specifically a false spirituality.

The historian Ronald Hutton, an expert on witchcraft in England and beyond, notes that the Reformation did not bring a decrease in witch hunting due to some sudden disbelief in magic, but rather a substantial increase. While Christianity had always been marked out by “its unusual focus on an all-powerful, all-good and universally present God” who could not be thwarted by human beings (magically inclined or not), in the century before the Reformation “a new idea appeared, that God had allowed Satan to enable bad humans to work destructive magic on good people, using the powers of his demons.” In other words, if supernatural things were occurring that were not instigated by God, they were aligned with the devil. Magic could not simply be neutral. Hutton argues,

The reason why the great majority of trials were concentrated in the period 1560 to 1640 was that this was the time in which the initial attempts to heal the division [of the Reformation] proved to have failed. Instead, Protestant and Catholic now set out to destroy each other, in Europe’s full-blown wars of religion. The result was a huge rise in the religious temperature, in which a belief in a satanic crusade to wreck Christianity seemed especially credible.

In other words, if religious things were happening that were not in line with God’s word and his will—such as the Catholic practices Protestants found objectionable—this was proof that Satan was attempting to combat the proclamation of the true gospel message. The devil was responding to the work of God’s Spirit with spiritual deeds of his own, fooling humans into worshipping false idols and imprisoning them in superstitions of the mind. This makes sense when one considers Martin Luther’s heavy emphasis on the devil in his theology. The abuses of medieval Catholic practice were, in Luther’s words, a Babylonian Captivity from which Christians needed to be released: an evil enchantment that would be broken by the true work of the Spirit.

Thus, in 1538, the reform minded Lancelot Ridley (cousin of the more famous Reformer Nicholas Ridley) wrote to his co-religionists that “your dream is gone, your eyes be open, you be no more in such dreams, you be fully awaked thanks be God.” One of the earliest histories of the dissolution of England’s monasteries, the chronicle of Edward Hall published in 1548, describes those who protested the religious changes in the Pilgrimage of Grace as still living under the spell of Rome. “The inhabitants of the North parts being at that time very ignorant and rude, knowing not what true religion meant, but altogether noseled in superstition and popery…”

If we take Taylor’s definition of enchantment as “the world of spirits, demons, moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged,” then the Protestant Reformers certainly believed in an enchanted world. But they saw two forms of enchantment at war with one another: angels and demons, the Lord of Lords and the lord of this world. They sought the defeat of the forces of darkness and the triumph of the light, which is to say the true practice of religion as God intended it, without the additional elements that might draw people into idolatry.

This explains the obsession of many English Protestants with witches and witchcraft. In 1584, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Reginald Scot wrote in his book The Discovery of Witchcraft that Roman doctrine remained a clear and present danger because of its capacity to enchant the Christian, writing that “our cold prophets and enchanters make us fools still, to the shame of us all, but specially of papists, who conjure every thing, and thereby bring to pass nothing. They say to their candles, ‘I conjure you to endure forever,’ and yet they last not a paternoster while the longer.” King James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England), who was raised under the tutelage of Presbyterian reformers, was positively obsessed with dark spiritual forces, penning his own work Daemonologie in 1597.

But Protestants were not only seeking to break the enchantment of false religion. They had an alternate enchantment of their own. For Lutherans, it was rooted in Luther’s emphases on embracing God’s good gifts in the physical world, restoring a proper appreciation for the body and sexual activity, treasuring the union between God’s word and physical signs in the sacraments, and marveling at the incarnation of the Son of God in human flesh. For John Calvin, enchantment began by seeing creation as God’s theater, for “wherever you turn your eyes, there is no portion of the world, however minute, that does not exhibit at least some sparks of beauty; while it is impossible to contemplate the vast and beautiful fabric as it extends around, without being overwhelmed by the immense weight of glory.”

However, in A Secular Age, Taylor places heavy emphasis on charged objects: physical items which carry spiritual power. This allows him and others to take aim at the Protestant understanding of the Lord’s Supper, which contrasts with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin had explained his doctrine of the Supper as follows.

Therefore, what our mind does not comprehend let faith conceive—viz. that the Spirit truly unites things separated by space. That sacred communion of flesh and blood by which Christ transfuses his life into us, just as if it penetrated our bones and marrow, he testifies and seals in the Supper, and that not by presenting a vain or empty sign, but by there exerting an efficacy of the Spirit by which he fulfils what he promises. And truly the thing there signified he exhibits and offers to all who sit down at that spiritual feast, although it is beneficially received by believers only who receive this great benefit with true faith and heartfelt gratitude.

Taylor takes issue with Calvin’s caveat that Christ’s body and blood are received by faith. He complains that “what [Calvin] can’t admit is that God could have released something of his saving efficacy out there into the world, at the mercy of human action, because that is the cost of really sanctifying creatures like us which are bodily, social, historical.” But this is to mistake Calvin’s concern. Unlike many of the Radical Reformers and Anabaptists, the Magisterial Reformers (Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, et al) were not crypto-Gnostics. They did not object to the physicalism of the Lord’s Supper, but to precisely what Taylor seems to value: the efficacy of salvation being “at the mercy of human action.” This seemed to the Reformers a clear violation of God’s sovereignty in salvation, his right to choose a people for himself, and the necessity of grace alone.

The man so responsible for driving the theology of the English Reformation, Thomas Cranmer, declared that the Lord’s Supper was “no vain ceremony, no bare sign, no untrue figure of a thing absent” but “the communion of the body and blood of the Lord in a marvellous incorporation, which by the operation of the Holy Ghost, the very bond of our conjunction with Christ, is through faith wrought in the souls of the faithful, whereby not only their souls live to eternal life, but they surely trust to win to their bodies a resurrection to immortality.” Thus, the Reformers spoke of the sacraments as means of grace, not in the sense that they were works of merit by which we may obtain grace, but that they were the ordinary means by which God communicates grace freely to his people, without regard to any merit but Christ’s.

This understanding of the sacraments was at the heart of the alternate enchantment offered by Protestants. They did not seek an end of all enchantment but the triumph of true enchantment over false enchantment. For the view that the sacraments do not communicate Christ and the world does not exist under his perfect providence, we must look to the Radical Reformation, which was as much opposed to the Magisterial Reformation as it was to any doctrine of Rome. There we find the transformation of the sacraments into bare signs that testify to human decision, along with a suspicion of the body and physicality. The disenchanted world in which we live is more the child of the Anabaptists than it is of Luther, Calvin, or Cranmer.

But the world never ceases in enchantment. Spiritual forces remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. For water is still poured in the name of the Triune God, and bread and wine still communicate the true body and blood of our Lord, not through some false enchantment, but the true enchantment that is the work of the Spirit of God. Creation goes on proclaiming the goodness of its Creator, who lives and reigns over all things and continues to set sinners free.