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| Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word |
One reason is that the book talks of a duality within the breast of each of us that can turn our religious commitment to God's word into a spiritus vertiginis — a spirit of confusion. This comes out most clearly in King's discussion of Faust, Goethe's poetic masterpiece of the early 19th century.
The main character of this 12,111-line dramatic poem has elsewhere been called Dr. Faustus. He was a scholar and professor enchanted by words and books. One day he suddenly realized his books were unable to slake his thirst for pure experience in the world. He abruptly turned for once to the Erdgeist, the Earth Spirit, for guidance.
This was exactly what Mephisto — Mephistopheles — wanted. Mephisto was the adversary to God sometimes known as Satan. But, as in the Book of Job, Satan began the story of Faust in attendance at the heavenly court, of a mind to arrange with the Lord to put Faust to a test. Though the Lord promised Mephistopheles he, God, would ultimately lead Faust "to the light" (p. 88), Mephistopheles would be given, in the meantime, a free hand to corrupt Faust's erstwhile devotion to godly things.
Faust would accordingly succumb to Mephisto's urging for him to sign a contract: if Mephisto could arrange for Faust to experience such bliss on earth that he "was satisfied with the present moment and asked it to linger" (p. 91), Mephisto would gain Faust's soul for all eternity.
But Faust had an ace in the hole: he was aware that his own inner life was based on a duality. He told his book-besotted assistant, Wagner,"You know only a single impulse ... Two souls dwell in my bosom" (p. 90). One of Faust's "souls" was that of the literary lover of texts. Such a lover is subject to the enchantments of worlds made entirely of words.
Faust's other "soul" resonated with the Erdgeist. It wanted nothing more than the perfection of Faust's experience in this world.
King makes clear that books — words, texts, verbal enchantments — are, for us all, psychological stand-ins for the Divine Word by which God created the world, according to the Old and New Testaments. In the way in which books are capable of enchanting us and transporting us out of this too often unintelligible world here below, they are associated in our psyches with God, heaven, eternity, justice, harmony, and order. As such, they embody the perfect forms which Socrates spoke of in the Dialogues of Plato.
But as Christians like St. Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Merton have found, pure contemplation of what we imbibe from words and books, the Bible included, is bound to run aground on the shoals of our second "soul," the one which, like Faust's, is oriented toward earthly experience, not heavenly delight. Hence after declaring that the deed, not the word, was everything, Faust willingly underwent the "phantasmagoria" that Mephisto arranged for him: a chaos of experience that led to tragic consequences for those Faust most loved: his virginal lady love Marguerite and others.
Marguerite's mother and brother died due to Faust's diabolical machinations. Marguerite herself drowned the illegitimate child Faust fathered in her and died on the gallows for her crime. But, just as had been promised by the Lord, Faust himself would be saved from eternal damnation!
How can this be, this inversion of what we would normally expect divine justice to mete out? Thomas King's explanation of the conundrum is that God knew Faust would never fully succumb to Mephisto's World-over-the-Word philosophy. Why wouldn't he? Simply because Faust's first "soul" — his enchantment with stories of higher things — would ensure that he would remain restlessly unsatisfied by the chaos of earthly experience, with no guiding ethic or purpose in sight.
We all have two souls, no? We all undergo an inner dialogue, a tension between the desire to know a perfect, static order, God-given and eternal, and the desire to allow a chaotic unpredictability to make our experience of this world ever fresh, ever new. God, make me your perfect servant every day, in every way — but not yet, dear God, not yet!
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