The Way of Enchantment

Epicurus and Lucretius were not the only ones in the ancient world seeking peace of mind. Other ancients had a different strategy for attaining the goal of tranquility, one based on love and loyalty rather than disenchantment. Plato made love the engine of knowledge. Truth reveals herself most fully to those who, like Socrates, desire nothing else. It is the Old Testament, however, that most clearly makes love the linchpin of human flourishing: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

Wisdom, argues Proverbs in its rich poetic way, requires matrimony. If we bind ourselves to wisdom, she will guard us. “Love her,” we are told, “and she will keep you; she will honor you if you embrace her.” Moreover, wisdom invites our embrace. She builds herself a beautiful house, adorns herself, and prepares a festive meal. We do not defeat foolishness and falsehood by way of critical reason; instead, it is the power of true love that overcomes the prostitution of our hearts and minds. “Come,” she calls to us, “eat of my bread and drink the wine I have mixed.”

The early Christian tradition adopted the primacy of love without reservation, and often as an explicit alternative to the ancient philosophies of their day. St. Augustine’s Confessions provides a good example. It opens with a famous line: “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Our tendency is to read this metaphorically, but St. Augustine meant it literally. Like Epicurus and Lucretius, he knew how painful it is to be buffeted by conflicting desires, especially ones that seem insatiable. He wanted to rest in the unchanging eternity of God, but he also wanted to be rich and famous and to enjoy the sensual pleasures of the body.

The result was the opposite of tranquility. Augustine describes himself as “burning” and “turning endlessly,” worried about his reputation and fearful that he could not endure giving up sexual pleasure, and all the while both deceiving himself about his love of truth and accusing himself of fabricating these deceptions.

In short, the life he was living was exactly like those of the foolish men whom Lucretius describes as engaged in vain and futile worldly pursuits. However, Augustine came to recognize the truth of Christ, and he saw the futility of his worldly aspirations. Yet seeing the truth was still not enough. Of the days prior to his conversion he writes, “My desire was not to be more certain of you but to be more stable in you.” To be more stable in Christ”or, to use the language of the Gospel of John, to abide in him”this desire parallels the Epicurean goal of tranquility, or peace of mind.

Here is the critical difference. Augustine and the Christian tradition as a whole seek stability, tranquility, and peace of mind by way of what might be called a therapy of enchantment. “Let my bones,” Augustine prays with an ardor that evokes the profound desire that suffuses the Song of Songs, “be penetrated by your love.” His prayer is answered. After his conversion he writes, “You pierced my heart with the arrow of your love.”

This divine arrow”which is a direct reference to Cupid and Venus that fuses the entire ancient pagan fascination with the enslaving power of love to the Old Testament’s nuptial vision”cures Augustine’s restless, troubled soul. “Suddenly,” he writes, “it had become sweet to me to be without the sweets of folly. What I had once feared to lose was now a delight to dismiss.” Like a fire that clears the field of weeds, the fierce heat of love burns away his distracting, dissipating worldly desires, bringing him to rest in an arresting desire to abide in Christ. It is a paradox, but not an unfamiliar one. The burning passion of love makes us stable, which is to say, tranquil. Under love’s enchanting spell we rest in that which we love.

By contrast, Lucretius satisfies our desire for rest with a therapy of disenchantment, as do contemporary materialists, relativists, and the various high priests of critical theory who set the tone in contemporary intellectual culture. In a crucial passage, Lucretius describes his goal: “This is the greatest joy of all: to stand aloof in a quiet citadel stoutly fortified by the teachings of the wise, and to gaze down from that elevation on others wandering aimlessly.” Not for Lucretius are the lures of wealth or status, the patriotic fervor of citizenship, or the ardor of romantic love. Raised up by knowledge of the cold truths of reality, he stands on the heights, beyond the reach of the arrows of love. Therein lies tranquil happiness, or so he promises.

Our age of disenchantment is rarely as clear-minded, but the effort to put life beyond the reach of love remains the same. The many and various postmodern therapies of disenchantment promise a serene tranquility. Let us rise above the parochialism of national identity! If nothing is worth fighting for, then nobody will fight. Let us step back and see the culturally conditioned nature of moral judgments! If nothing is ultimately true, then everybody can just get along. Let us ascend to the heights and recognize that our loves and loyalties are of no moment to the great cosmic system and its iron laws of physics! If nothing ultimately matters, then we can just relax and get on with life.

Love and her enchantments can be dangerous. Our gods may be idols, our patriotism misguided, and our ardent convictions false. The twentieth century tells a sad tale of the brutality of ideologies passionately believed. For this reason, love is never self-authenticating. It must be purified: sometimes by reason, sometimes by conscience, sometimes by authority.

But this purification does not alter the fact that love does not take us to a high citadel. Quite the opposite, in fact. A wedding feast celebrates the destruction of the fortifying walls that insulate one person from another, and the covenant of marriage creates a very different kind of citadel, one in rather than above the world. My wife, my children, my friends, my community, my nation”I cannot gaze down from above on those whom I love. Love draws us down into what, viewed objectively, is a reckless intimacy: for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.

The same holds for a supernatural love of God. St. Augustine did not stand aloof, nor did St. Francis, nor St. Ignatius. Their Christian tranquility was in a sense far more arrogant than that which Lucretius sought. “O death,” St. Paul asks with haughty disdain, “where is thy victory?” Yet, in their steadfast and immovable love of Christ they served the world rather than observing it from above. They had a worldly otherworldliness, not an Epicurean (and postmodern) otherworldly worldliness.

I have no difficulty imagining that Stephen Greenblatt and countless others might judge St. Augustine’s love of Christ to be misguided. Faith is a divine gift, not the conclusion to a syllogism. But I worry that our pedagogues of disenchantment fail to grasp the full nature of the spiritual impoverishment they perhaps unknowingly seek. To look down on life from above: It may free us from the pains of desire, but it’s a dry, cold, loveless enterprise, one that, if followed to its end, leaves the world as it is. Christianity may be false, but at least its vision for enduring happiness is more humane, allowing us to hope that the sinews of life”our very bones”can be penetrated by an enduring, unconquerable, eternalizing love.