Enchantments and Disenchantments

Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, a now-hard-to-find 1989 book by Thomas M. King, S.J., offers rare insight into how it is that fundamentalist and liberal Christians differ so radically in their spiritualities.

King is a Jesuit priest who teaches theology at Georgetown University (or did at the time this book came out; I don't know if he still does). He is considered an expert on the thought of the French Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but this book has little to say about Teilhard. It focuses instead on how texts of all kinds — scripture, literature, drama — can raise us up out of this messy phenomenal world into "a vivid world that enchants us with its own compelling truth" (p. vii).

Such a world is the one written of as the Bible's Kingdom of God. Fr. King likens it to, among higher worlds spoken of in other stories and texts, Don Quixote's ineffable "Golden Age" (an "impossible dream," according to the musical Man of La Mancha) and Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms. In such ethereal heavens, people live exclusively by "the word," or, as capitalized in the Gospel of John, "the Word."

That is, words can be used as incantations to extract a single, set order of affairs from the chaotic whirligig of possibilities that could otherwise arise in the world of material phenomena. Those who live by such enchanting words of law and order are, in biblical terms, said to be righteous souls. Those who decline to succumb to the enchantment of such righteous verbal formulas are said to be lost to evil.

Thus, the first baptism spoken of in the gospels: the baptism "with water for repentance" for which John the Baptist was famous.

But there is also a second baptism mentioned in the gospels: a baptism of fire, which is also a baptism of Spirit.

In the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus undergoes three temptations by Satan in the desert after being baptized by water by John and hearing the voice of his Father emanate from heaven: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." As the Son of God referred to in traditional Hebrew scripture, Jesus knew he was henceforth to identify with and live by a text — specifically, by the Law and the Prophets of his Jewish people, which we Christians now call the Old Testament.

But the Evil One's voice came to Jesus, as he fasted for forty days in the desert, and offered him three temptations which collectively amounted to his, Jesus's, baptism of fire.

The first blandishment which Jesus confronted during his desert ordeal was the temptation to turn stones into loaves of bread — which, had Jesus acquiesced, would right then and there have put paid to the heavenly ideal Jesus now upheld as the supposed Son of God.

The second temptation was yet more problematic, since Satan turned Jesus's ideal itself into a form of temptation. Jesus was asked to renounce his material body by stepping out from the pinnacle of the Temple and walking successfully across the sky (pp. 118-119).

By rejecting that second temptation (see p. 120), Jesus rejected the purely verbal — just as by rejecting the first temptation, he had rejected the purely experiential. The combination of the two rejections left him prey, then, to the third temptation: to seize pure power. The Tempter offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world as his personal dominion, as if to say, "Since you reject both the purely verbal and the demands of the flesh as limitations on your actions, that seemingly leaves you wholly unconstrained. Why not, then, simply rule the whole world, as my viceroy?"

But Jesus did not fall into this trap of seeming bifurcation, instead finding a happy medium: per King, "[H]e would give first place to the word of God; he would [also] understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything); and, finally, he would never worship the powers of this world" (p. 120).

The part about understanding the weakness of human flesh is the key one. Those who undergo the first baptism alone, the baptism of righteousness and repentance, often lack "an ongoing experience of the world and their own sensibilities" (p. 120). This is no wonder: such believers are prone, after all, to using only "set phrases with no surprises" (p. 121) to convey the truth, "for surprises are found in experience — not in the inevitablity of a text."

These, then, are today's fundamentalists — as well as the Pharisees and religious authorities of Jesus's time. Both today's Biblical literalists and the contemporaries of Jesus who upheld the Law by condemning Jesus for healing on the sabbath are in righteous thrall to a text which purports to be God's word. Neither outlook is wrong — it just lacks the second baptism, the baptism of fire which (the Gospel of John tells us) also is a baptism of Spirit.

"Something fundamental about Spirit" is, King tells us (p. 140), that "it cannot be captured in words." This is because "it blows where it will and it lacks both measure and form." Spirit is "what God says in events" — that is, in phenomenal occurrences taking place here in the material world.

"But what if what God says in events does not coincide, or readily coincide, with what God says in his Word? Then, like Job, one must struggle with the apparent — or more than apparent — difference" (p. 140). This amounts to the Dark Night of the Soul. This is what the mystics tell us accompanies the temptation — as in "Lead us not into temptation" — that necessarily precedes our baptism of fire and Spirit.

After the second baptism, the baptism of fire and Spirit, we cease to be funadamentalists/Pharisees. No longer in thrall to the Word of God as distinct from the Spirit, we are apt to become theological "liberals." No longer blinded to the weaknesses of human flesh, we develop true compassion.

Yet we are in danger of swinging too far to the opposite extreme: some Christians, so very "liberal," "have felt so deeply their Baptism of Fire, their baptism back into humanity, that all they can recognize is the extent of human ambiguity. They find all talk of Kingdoms and heavenly identities to be a puzzling rhetoric without meaning. These too [like the fundamentalists] would reduce Christianity to a single baptism, [in this case] that of fire, and see Jesus only as a human ideal" (p. 123).