Nice timing from Alan Jacobs on “the specificity of your enchantment” for a couple reasons:
- I just got Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels in the mail not three weeks ago.
- I read a fitting line in William T. Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed just tonight: “Postmodernism also trumpets the vacuity of signs, such that the signifier refers only to other signifiers, not to the signified.”
I have to admit, though, that I have mixed feelings here. I don’t want a vague enchantment; I want to get to the signified and not be stuck only with signifiers. And I want this authentic taste of reality for others as well. But Jacobs’ post felt a bit like Brad East’s recent post on finding the real, “valid” Eucharist. (I did not like it.) Maybe it’s just that the older I get the more sensitive I am to the sound of things, but I can’t help hearing some explicitly Christian — but no less “American” — version of “give me liberty or give me death.” There is something preemptive and haughty about these calls for the real deal and nothing but the real deal.
I love what Christian Wiman says about Jesus: He’s not just mystical and meaningful, he’s “a shard of glass in your gut.” But Wiman does not use this to say “give me the real thing” but to say that “Christ is God crying I am here… here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God.”
There are a few things from Price’s introduction that are worth pointing out. While I have not yet read Price’s book through, I’m not convinced that he would share Jacobs’ sentiment.
Price has just said, in the opening paragraph before the one quoted by Jacobs, that the stories of the Bible held an intense magnetism for him since before he could even read. When Price says, in Jacobs’ quote, “By then,” he means “by the age of eight.” For anyone who knows anything about the gospel of small origins and worldwide implications (of whom — do not misunderstand me — Jacobs is a preeminent example), this kind of early specificity, a deep childhood absorption of the singular claim of Jesus at the burning heart of the Bible and of all life — it’s absolutely wonderful, but it is not a norm that can be taken for granted.
Nor can we overlook the fact that this is the beginning of Price’s faith. Naturally Price has had to take those early apprehensions into the rest of his (enchanted) life. So what does he say about where it has “led him”? To the (tellingly phrased) question “Do I participate in that state of mind which John’s Jesus calls ‘trusting’ in him?” Price answers: “complicated forms of Yes.”
“I have come to that trust through years of reading and watching the probing efforts of other times and people at the comprehension of mystery in their own cultures, through the unimplored early arrival of an uncanny sense of the rightness of one man’s claim, but above all from the overwhelming impression of both an emblematic truth and an honest effort at accuracy conveyed to me in the hit-or-miss words and domestic wonders explicit in both Mark’s and John’s stories.”
Price says of Jesus that he was “a man who knew himself to be, by birth and choice, one of the central aspects of pure reality (whatever that reality is, wherever it resides, whatever hopes it holds for my fellow creatures and for me, who am after all a creature as much like Jesus and his pupils as are the great balance of humankind).” He also says that his writing demands not only intelligence but above all “a reader with an acknowledged personal share of humankind’s old fears and hungers.”
None of this is wishy-washy, nor does it contradict the desire and the need “to get to the signified.” Price says, “I clearly believe that the gospels deliver what they claim to contain.” And he clearly extols the “uncanny sense of the rightness of one man’s claim.” But has this sounded like an author with even an ounce of impatience toward those who are learning, or relearning, or encouraging others to experience the world as “enchanted”?
I hardly think so.
I know that the obligatory disclaimer was made by Jacobs — “you may be aided enormously by such reflections [on enchantment]” — but he is obviously, in this post at least, not granting much genuineness to that possibility. “Every knee will bow to Jesus don’t you know? So your experience of an enchanted world has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging this.” I simply want to say: It might. And we have good reason to believe and to hope that it will lead to that very culminating moment “at the end of history” to which Jacobs points.
In his wonderful little book on the Beatitudes, George Hunsinger expounds on exactly the passage in Philippians 2 that Jacobs references. Yes, one day, the veil will be lifted, and every knee will bow and every tongue confess, with specificity, that Jesus Christ is Lord.
The knees of all—especially the knees of those who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, of those who strove for peace, and of those who were persecuted for righteousness’ sake—will bow. It will be revealed to them at last that in the midst of their earthly aspirations, struggles, and persecutions, they were not alone. They will see and acknowledge the Crucified Lord who was with them all along. They will know that by his resurrection he has prevailed. And he will give them what he has always given. He will give them simply himself, and with himself the kingdom of heaven.