Tag: Eugene McCarraher

William T. Cavanaugh: Recovering The Body of Christ from the Modern Nation State

Ivan Illich and William Cavanaugh both describe the development of the modern nation state as a displacement of the church by the state. Illich traces the first step in this transformation as occurring within the Catholic Church, as it transformed itself into “an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.”[1] The institutionalization of Christian charity, fellowship, and love, had the effect of assigning a divine-like status to bureaucracy, church-law, priest and pope, such that the Christian suspension of the weight of the law becomes instead, a divinizing of the law, which through history is shifted to the powers of state.

Cavanaugh provides a case study of this development with the Church in Chile, where the responsibility and reality once assigned to the church become the domain of State in shaping peoples’ lives. The divisions between soul and body, State and society, politics and religion, effectively assigned predominance to the State. Inasmuch as the Eucharist joins Christians to the body of Christ shaping the life and mind of communicants, the State, through coercive measures such as torture, took over this Eucharistic power.

Cavanaugh shows “how torture works to discipline an entire society into an aggregate of fearful and mutually distrustful individuals” functioning as the State liturgy in Chile, in disciplining the population. [2]  “Torture is liturgy – or, perhaps better said, ‘anti-liturgy’ – because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship of that mysterious power.”[3] Just as the body of Christ transforms human imagination, so too the state (in co-opting the church), can shape and discipline human imagination in a drama of its own making. Rather than divinization and salvation, the state both produces and controls the “enemy” through torture. The drama is a demonstration of the omnipotence of the state to discipline, control, and destroy the revolutionary, the subversive, or the “filth” that would oppose it.[4]

Torture atomizes the individual, destroying the connections of family, society, and church, producing the isolated individual with a singular focus (the pain of torture). In turn, the torturer functions on behalf of the state, sacrificing moral integrity in the service of the larger cause. “By focusing on their own pain and sacrifice, no matter how disproportionate to the pain of torture, torturers deny the reality of the other and confer reality on the concerns of the regime alone.”[5] The only reality that concerns torturers and their victims is that of the state, and in the process of torture this reality takes on flesh. While there is no concrete reality to the idea of state, the process of torture inscribes these ideas in the flesh. “With the demolition of the victim’s affective ties and loyalties, past and future, the purpose of torture is to destroy the person as a political actor, and to leave her isolated and compliant with the regime’s goals.”[6] In Cavanaugh’s telling, the Church in Chile is complicit in these goals, inasmuch as she relinquished the realm of the political and the body to the State.

Chile is simply a type however, of what has happened throughout the West with the rise of the modern state and what might be called modern religion, inclusive of nationalism and capitalism. He argues in Modern Theology and Political Theology, “the kinds of public devotion formerly associated with Christianity in the West never did go away, but largely migrated to a new realm defined by the nation state.”[7]  It is not that in the modern secular age we do without religion, rather the enchantments of religion have been invested in the nation state. The transcendent has been traded for an idolatrous immanence. As Eugene McCarraher in, The Enchantments of Mammon similarly describes (as in the subtitle of his work) “How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.”[8] “Far from being an agent of ‘disenchantment,’ capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity.”[9] McCarraher and Cavanaugh suggest that, rather than disenchantment, modernity is simply “misenchantment,” with state and capital becoming the immanent frame of worship. The state and its economy become the unifying center, with the accompanying demand that its citizens be willing to sacrifice their lives for the nation as they might have once sacrificed for Christ.

In Cavanaugh’s narration of how sacrifice for the nation displaced Christian sacrifice, the “revulsion to killing in the name of religion is used to legitimize the transfer of ultimate loyalty to the modern state.”[10] The so-called “Wars of Religion” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe evoked the founding moment of modern liberalism by theorists such as John Rawls, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout. According to the liberal telling of the story,

liberalism … was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen … [11]

In this telling, the modern state arose to keep peace among warring religious factions. The state must step in to mediate between competing religious beliefs, and the secularization of public discourse and the privatization of religion were necessary to keep religionists from slaughtering one another.

Cavanaugh maintains this telling of the story is backwards: “The ‘Wars of Religion’ were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birth pangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between ‘Protestantism” and “Catholicism,’ but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order.”[12] Cavanaugh argues that “Wars of Religion” is an anachronistic misreading, as “religion” as it will come to be known – an apolitical and private sphere, and State as the proper realm of the political (and with it the embodied and public) did not exist apart from the creation of these categories through justification provided by the Wars of Religion. “The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects.”[13] Gaining this sovereign control explains why the religious wars pitted co-religionists against one another (sometimes Catholics versus Catholics or Protestants versus Protestants), as it was not religion but state power that was being contested, and religion was simply a justifying backdrop in this effort.

As religion was privatized and separated from the political, the State shifted from reference to the condition of the ruler or condition of the realm (in the medieval period) to an abstract and independent political entity: “a form of public power separate from both ruler and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a certain defined territory.”[14] The result of the conflicts was an inversion of the previous ecclesial dominance over civil authorities, with the modern State dictating to the Church.

Martin Luther, Henry VIII, and Philip II, backed and insured this new arrangement. According to Luther, every Christian is subject to two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal. “Coercive power is ordained by God but is given only to the secular powers in order that civil peace be maintained among sinners. Since coercive power is defined as secular, the Church is left with a purely suasive authority, that of preaching the Word of God.”[15] Luther assigned coercive power (the power of the sword) to the state (picturing the state as the peacemaker), attempting to disinvest the Church from such powers. In so doing , he left no clear jurisdiction to the Church. As he writes To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation: “I say therefore that since the temporal power is ordained of God to punish the wicked and protect the good, it should be left free to perform its office in the whole body of Christendom without restriction and without respect to persons, whether it affects pope, bishops, priests, monks, nuns or anyone else.”[16]

This sensibility among both Protestants and Catholics, explains not only the case of Pinochet in Chile, but the general relegating of the religious to the private and non-political. “Because the Christian is saved by faith alone, the Church will in time become, strictly speaking, unnecessary for salvation, taking on the status of a congreganofidelium, a collection of the faithful for the purpose of nourishing the faith. What is left to the Church is increasingly the purely interior government of the souls of its members; their bodies are handed over to the secular authorities.”[17] Cavanaugh goes to great lengths in showing the Wars of Religion were actually the wars of this emerging State dominance. “The new State required unchallenged authority within its borders, and so the domestication of the Church. Church leaders became acolytes of the State as the religion of the State replaced that of the Church, or more accurately, the very concept of religion as separable from the Church was invented.”[18]

This aggravated form of Constantinianism goes beyond the early Roman Church, in that the State as guarantor of freedom and peace with final authority over the body, becomes an end in itself. Freedom in Christ and that freedom and safety secured by the State are fused, and the State is the ultimate public good, while religion is relegated to soulish goods. “Wars are now fought on behalf of this particular way of life by the State, for the defense or expansion of its borders, its economic or political interests.”[19] In the words of Immanuel Kant, thus the State can “maintain itself perpetually.”[20] For Kant, the peace and stability provided by the State is integral to his theory of right, and it would be as wrong to attempt to overthrow the State as it would be to overthrow reason.[21] So the Church in Chile serves as a type of the Church in general, in imagining it could liberate itself from political alignments with the State, it became one of many privatized groups, subject to State domination and torture.[22]

Cavanaugh’s more positive conclusion is that part of the Church in Chile gradually found a way to escape the confinement to the private and the “soul” put upon it by the State, and it was able to “body forth the life of Christ” in resistance to the liturgies of State. He describes a small segment of the Church “performing the body of Christ” as it began to reconceive itself and its relation to the State, especially in conjunction with being the body of Christ in an imagination shaped by the Eucharist.[23] “If torture is the imagination of the state, the Eucharist is the imagination of the church.”[24] It is the means of resisting the state and being conformed to Christ so as to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1-2). The body of Christ cannot be de-politicized, privatized or hidden (in the realm of the soul), but one must perform or do the Eucharist. The point is not simply a silent remembering, hearing, or attending, but to “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19) is a “literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of many in His sacrifice.”[25] “The word anamnesis had the effect not so much of a memorial, as one would say kind words about the dead, but rather of a performance.”[26] The church resists state oppression by being the body of Christ and resisting the isolating, fragmenting, discipline imposed by the state.

 In the words of Justin Martyr, the Eucharist is not a common bread or drink, but just as the Word becomes incarnate so Christians are to incarnate Christ. The “food over which thanks has been given by the prayer of his word, and which nourishes our flesh and blood by assimilation, is both the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.”[27] Those who participate in communion without love, with no thought for the widow and orphan, according to Ignatius, “will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in His goodness afterwards raised up again.”[28] Ignatius is reflecting on Matthew 25:35-36, “For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” Christians are to body forth and live out His life. Those who assimilate and discern the body of Christ partake of His suffering with the weak. As Augustine reports, he heard a voice say, “I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.”[29] By the power of His life, and the power of His body (tortured and killed and raised), His followers have a body which the powers of state, the principalities and powers, the powers of death, cannot erase or disappear.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Though Illich wrote extensively, the ideas expressed here come toward the end of his life and were only captured in an interview recorded by David Cayley, and presented as a series of podcasts https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich, for which Cayley has provided transcripts https://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts. Paul Kennedy moderates the overall podcast, with David Cayley, commenting in both the direct conversation and explanatory asides. 

[2] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 15.

[3] Torture, 30.

[4] Torture, 31.

[5] Torture, 36.

[6] Torture, 38.

[7] William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011) 1.

[8] Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. (Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition).

[9] McCarraher, 4.

[10] William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” (Modem Theology 11:4 October 1995 ISSN 0266-7177) 397.

[11] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1984), ρ 5. Cited in Cavanaugh, Wars of Religion, 397.

[12] Wars of Religion, 398.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol II, ρ 353. Cited in Wars of Religion, 398.

[15] Wars of Religion, 399.

[16] Martin Luther, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” trans Charles M Jacobs in Three Treatises (Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1966), ρ 15. Cited in Wars of Religion, 399.

[17] Wars of Religion, 399.

[18] Wars of Religion, 408.

[19] Wars of Religion, 409.

[20] Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 136 [326]. Cited in Wars of Religion, 409.

[21] Ralph Walker notes that Kant “clearly regards the stability of the state as an end which the Theory of Right requires us to pursue (though he does not put this in so many words, so that the contradiction with his other remarks about ends does not become obvious)” Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 161. Wars of Religion, 409.

[22] Torture, 202.

[23] Torture, 253.

[24] Torture, 229.

[25] Torture, 229.

[26] Torture, 230.

[27] Justin Martyr, First Apology, 66, in The Eucharist, Message of the Fathers of the Church, no. 7, ed. Daniel J. Sheerin (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1986) 34. Cited in Torture, 231.

[28] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 6-7, Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 121. Cited in Torture, 231.

[29] St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 124 [VII. X (16)]. Cited in Torture, 232.

The Myth of Modern Disenchantment

The disenchantment of the world with modernity may be on the order of Jesus’ depiction of the emptying out of one unclean spirit, leaving a vacuum then occupied by a multiple of seven. Like the idol maker in the book of Isaiah, the (dis)enchantments of modernity are a force so potent as to blind its adherents to their enchanting role, in animating and calling into existence what has no existence of its own. The secular or modern, are propped up by blindness to the animating force of human perception. It is easy enough to demonstrate the factual error (that modernity has dispelled the occult), what is more difficult is to reveal this trick of reifying from out of nothing an entity with God-like powers of determination. But the myth of modernity might be approached from these two directions: the factual error equating secularity with the occlusion of the spiritual, and the oxymoronic manner in which animating spirits are traded for an animate culture.

This latter is hard to see as it is hidden in plain sight, as the language of “secular” and “modern” fall into cultural reification picturing something like a sui generis animate force. This cultural reification tends to empty the world of human agency, historical causality, and ideological genealogy, to suggest the modern “arose” as a unique epoch unlike any other.[1] The story can be told in any number of ways: Descartes discovered the foundation of reason; Newton dispelled the occult with a mechanical understanding; the laws of nature explain, determine and create everything; and modern science has eliminated the need for God. As a result, we moderns now know there are no ghosts in the machine and we can trust in reason, science, and progress. In this modern age people no longer believe in magic and spirits as the myths have been dispelled, the gods have died, nature is subjugated, and instrumental reason, mechanistic materialism, modern science and medicine now rule. While there are still backward people in certain parts of the world and society, gripped by myth, animism and superstition, for moderns the world has been de-animated, myth has ended, and superstition is no more. A new form of human individual has arisen, as the old foundations have been erased, and a new form of thought and reason have been set in place. The world is forever changed and we moderns can march boldly forward, knowing that progress is an inevitable force unleashed by modern reason and science. There is a clean break with the past as a new age, unlike any that preceded it, has arisen.

What may not occur to the adherent of the modern myth, is that the work of religious myth is now performed by the secular myth. The world may have been emptied of one form of animate power, but now law, culture, and progress are the “new” animating forces (not so new but the force of law that has always been at work). To imagine a rupture has occurred, and a new age has dawned, is to be blind to history and how culture takes flight from its social moorings, in the projections of human agents. This blindness is illustrated in both Orientalism and capitalism.

The myth of the modern animates notions of the progressive West and the backward East. Orientals are stuck in the past, subject to nature, having not yet thrown off superstition, while the Occident is progressive, enlightened, and driven by reason rather than passion. The Easterner and African are still in early developmental stages (the premodern), while the West is modern, mature, a light set on a hill. Progress moves from East to West, so that Westward movement is advancement, while a visit to the East is a return to the past. The Easterner is driven by religion, and superstition undergirds Eastern political structures, while in Western secularism, the state is driven by humanitarian, democratic, principles and not religion.  

Eugene McCarraher in, The Enchantments of Mammon describes as his subtitle describes it, “How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.” McCarraher suggests that, rather than disenchantment, modernity is simply one more “misenchantment” (as I have explored here). “Far from being an agent of ‘disenchantment,’ capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity.”[2] McCarraher is refuting the story of Max Weber, in his supposition that capitalism is a disenchanting force, and he appeals to a series of counter descriptions.[3] According to David Brooks, acquisitiveness stems from a “sacramental longing,” a desire to enter “a magical realm in which all is harmony, happiness, and contentment.” Or as historian Steve Fraser puts it, in the stampede for consumer goods slumbers “a sacramental quest for transcendence, reveries of what might be.” Thomas Carlyle, speaking of 1840’s industrial England, perceived “invisible Enchantments” which left owners and workers alike, “spell-bound” by “the Gospel of Mammonism” in which money possessed and bestowed its “miraculous facilities.” Marx and Engels wrote of the capitalist, in The Communist Manifesto, as “like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world he has called up by his spells.” In the first volume of Capital, Marx writes of “the fetishism of commodities,” and of the attribution of human or supernatural qualities to manufactured goods. Even Weber, after tracing the supposed disenchantment which arises with the Protestant Reformation, writes that “many old gods ascend from their graves” avatars of the “laws” of the market animated by the spirits of “the gospel of Mammonism.” Capitalism, Walter Benjamin informs us, is a “cult” with its own ontology, morals, and ritual practices whose “spirit . . . speaks from the ornamentation of banknotes.”[4]

McCarraher maintains this is not hyperbole or metaphor but that capital bears similar enchantments to a world animated by spirits and deities. As he explains, capitalism is its own sort of cult with its own liturgical codes and high priests, or those who have mastered the arcane art of the deal.

 Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies— the material culture of production and consumption. Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia of economists, executives, managers, and business writers, a stratum akin to Aztec priests, medieval scholastics, and Chinese mandarins. Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing, and product design.” Capital is “the mana or pneuma or soul or elan vital of the world, replacing the older enlivening spirits with one that is more real, energetic, and productive.[5]

The evidence suggests there has not been disenchantment, or an occlusion of the occult, but its reinforcement. As pointed out by Jason A. Josephson-Storm, not only the enchantments of mammon, but the new age has also ushered in crystal healing, energy balancing, chakra yoga, tarot readings, wicca covens, witches and warlocks, ghosts, near death experiences, psychics, extraterrestrials, miracles, etc. A 2005 Gallup poll found that a third of Americans believe in ghosts, while a YouGov survey in 2015 found that 48 percent of Americans believe people can possess one or more types of psychic ability (e.g., precognition, telepathy, etc.) while 43 percent agreed with the statement “Ghosts exist.” As Josephson-Storm concludes, “taken together it appears the majority of Americans are at least open to the idea of ghosts and psychic powers, while a not-insignificant number believe in necromancy.”[6] This then supports his larger point “that the human sciences have internalized the modern project” in “the notion of ‘modernity’ itself as the sign of a pure rupture or difference. In this way modernity has functioned as a master paradigm or episteme—what I have been calling a myth.”[7]

I presume that all that falls short of Paul’s exposure of the animating, enchantments of the law, will displace God with subordinate mythical powers. The reification of idols, the letter of the law, Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free, are all of one piece with the enslaving elementary principles, thrones and political powers. The human tendency is to construct a counter reality, in which the human artisans are blind to their role of manufacture – whether a piece of metal, a principle, an ideology, culture, or the ego. Like Aaron’s explanation to Moses, the golden calf was not shaped by human hands, it miraculously emerged from the fire and all were forced to worship with its “natural” appearing. Modernity as a final explanation is made of the same stuff as Aaron’s idol, and the deconstruction and exposure of this means of manufacture is an apocalyptic reordering of human understanding of reality.

[1] See Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

[2] Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (p. 4). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] McCarraher, 3.

[4]McCarraher, 3-5.

[5] McCarraher, 5-6.

[6] Josephson-Storm, 24.

[7] Josephson-Storm, 309.

Apocalypse as Overcoming the Deception of Misenchantment

It has been suggested (here), from a variety of sources, that the problems and solutions posed within an apocalyptic theology (hereafter “AT”) are either contradictory or ambiguous. The unified difference of AT with contractual theology or a salvation historical approach, focused as it is on cosmic bondage and liberation rather than personal guilt and payment, is clear but what, exactly, constitutes the cosmic element of this bondage and liberation? Is it literally demonic or does the demonic serve as a metaphor for the systemic nature of a humanly generated enslavement and, in either case, does the demonic serve in place of articulation and understanding? What role is there for faith or human agency in a system that puts the emphasis on superhuman agencies (demons and God). AT has been accused of being so cosmically minded that it is of no individual good? So, what role for faith and individual agency and precisely what power is it that Christ defeats and how?

I have suggested that the ambiguities and questions raised by AT might be addressed in development of the notion of self-deception, which, in the abstract, may seem either unlikely, or if duly considered, may seem inescapable. That is, to claim that we are fostered in deception and darkness might seem to be a religious abstraction of such magnitude that it is a sort of meaningless metaphor, but then descriptions of how we are captive to culture or to capitalism, nationalism, sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, might paint a picture of inescapable determinism. This parallels the proposal of the demonic in apocalyptic theology: it may seem unlikely that satanic forces (literal or metaphorical) control the world and if they do, best leave that mysterious predicament to an equally mysterious in-breaking of God. The recognition that this enslaving force consists of the elementary principles of the world, thrones and political powers, spiritual and human forces, the very way we think and are constituted in our thinking, might result in the counter-inclination to claim this matrix constituting the Subject is impenetrable and irredeemable. In describing the problem, however, isn’t there already the sense that we may have become enmeshed in a lie which does not have us completely in its grip, as we have named it and, by extension, through our own agency we may be part of its generation.

To illustrate how self-deception might help negotiate the problems posed in AT, let me propose the work of Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, as an example of the machinations of a cosmic-like deception and active human agency. McCarraher’s starting proposal is that the world is the “sacrament” through which the power and presence of God were meant to be mediated. This opening recognition simultaneously approaches how it is that a failed religion or a failed imagination might “misenchant” the world, as the power of God is assigned to subordinate or created powers (as in Paul’s description in Romans 1), and how it is that this failure is overcome only through rightly recognizing God.

McCarraher is following and refuting the story of Max Weber, in his supposition that capitalism and secularism have disenchanted the world, so that in ridding the world of spirits and deities, reason and science now rule. Haven’t we broken the shackles of dutiful worship, the subordination to the past, the slavish subjection to this vale of tears in hope of a future reward, so that now we are set free to fulfill the self? In the words of Michael Lewis, capitalists are “practitioners of liberty” who “do not suffer the constraints of their private ambition” and who “work hard, if unintentionally, to free others from constraint.”[1] Has capitalism evacuated sacredness from material objects so that the enchanted forces which were once revered no longer structure our devotion and desires?

McCarraher musters a long line of witnesses to suggest there is no difference between the enchantments of mammon and religion.  Journalist Naomi Klein writes of the “the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets” and claims, “corporate business has always had a deep New Age streak,” with branding as the most advanced form of “corporate transcendence.” These neoliberal totems of enchantment (the Nike swoosh, the Starbucks siren) indicate, in the estimate of Barbara Ehrenreich, that despite its reputation for focus on the bottom line, corporate business is “shot through with magical thinking,” inspired and mesmerized by New Age quackery and bunkum. Jesus Christ, Lao-tzu, Buddha, or Carl Jung, provide the keys to the “seven habits” or “four competencies” or “sixty-seven principles of success,” as arcane as end-times prophecy. According to David Brooks, acquisitiveness stems from a “sacramental longing,” a desire to enter “a magical realm in which all is harmony, happiness, and contentment.” Or as historian Steve Fraser puts it, in the stampede for consumer goods slumbers “a sacramental quest for transcendence, reveries of what might be.” Thomas Carlyle, speaking of 1840’s industrial England, perceived “invisible Enchantments” which left owners and workers alike, “spell-bound” by “the Gospel of Mammonism” in which money possessed and bestowed its “miraculous facilities.” Marx and Engels wrote of the capitalist, in The Communist Manifesto, as “like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world he has called up by his spells.” In the first volume of Capital, Marx writes of “the fetishism of commodities,” and of the attribution of human or supernatural qualities to manufactured goods. Even Weber, after tracing the supposed disenchantment which arises with the Protestant Reformation, writes that “many old gods ascend from their graves” avatars of the “laws” of the market animated by the spirits of “the gospel of Mammonism.” Capitalism, Walter Benjamin informs us, is a “cult” with its own ontology, morals, and ritual practices whose “spirit . . . speaks from the ornamentation of banknotes.”[2]

McCarraher maintains this is not hyperbole or metaphor but that capital bears similar enchantments to a world animated by spirits and deities. He proposes that that capitalism, with its perversion and parody of enchantment is not a disenchantment but a misenchantment. As he explains, capitalism is its own sort of cult with its own liturgical codes and high priests, or those who have mastered the arcane art of the deal.

 Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies— the material culture of production and consumption. Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia of economists, executives, managers, and business writers, a stratum akin to Aztec priests, medieval scholastics, and Chinese mandarins. Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing, and product design.” Capital is “the mana or pneuma or soul or elan vital of the world, replacing the older enlivening spirits with one that is more real, energetic, and productive.[3]

Though “secularists” imagine they are free of the enchantments of ideology, in Slavoj Žižek’s estimate, which accords with McCarraher, there is a very particular reason that the world, sacred or secular, glows with the same ideological enchantment. He maintains that in capitalism and not religion, resides the “archideological” fantasy, in that one might imagine he can simultaneously play this game and withhold commitment. Where the religionist may bow down in fear before his gods, the modern ideologue imagines that his is a voluntary consent to enchantment.[4] Žižek argues that the most successful ideology makes room for this “distancing” (even the religious sort). We all know money has no intrinsic value, but this supposed distancing allowing for an “inward conscious freedom,” is itself part of being fully interpolated into the ideology. In religious ideology there is an obscuring of the origins of the idol which closes off the supposed freedom of choice. Like Aaron’s explanation to Moses, the golden calf was not shaped by human hands, it miraculously emerged from the fire and all were forced to worship. Where religion played the role of obscuring the reification of the symbolic, capitalism proves the lie still works even when exposed.  Everyone may know that money has no intrinsic value but, according to Marx, “they know it, but they are doing it anyway.”

The fetishist knows full well that the shoe is only a shoe, but this does not dissolve the need or pleasure of the fetish. In the Matrix, Cypher knows that the Matrix is a computer-generated virtual reality but this does not subtract from the pleasure of his virtual steak or for his desire to “be someone” virtually important in the virtual world: “someone like an actor.” The Matrix is the big Other, and in the end, there may be nothing more satisfying than to be reinserted into a warm vat of embryonic fluid and to once again become part of its ordering of reality. To be “somebody” in the Matrix will mean being literally reinserted (interpolated) into its energy of enchantment.

In the Lacanian version of misenchantment, misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the self is engineered through the register of the symbolic order (the law, the father). One “sees” himself, the ego or “I” as an object through the matrix of the Other or the symbolic order. Whether this Other is God, the Party (as in Stalinism), the People (as in communist China), or the State, the Subject is only constituted in the struggle to be recognized by this agency. (The struggle before the law described by the Apostle Paul in Romans 7.) To be interpolated into the law or to find satisfaction through whatever “master signifier” one may serve, is the peculiar form of human enslavement. This master signifier works by holding out the glow of enchantment (its being, its significance) to its Subjects, but this god must be obscure, unknown, or mute as the master signifier works by simultaneously withholding and promising meaning.

To be a Subject in this order is to “make one’s mark,” to leave a legacy, to accumulate significance, whether that of zeros and ones or just the accumulation of numbers (Anselm’s doctrine of divine satisfaction makes direct appeal to both money and a heavenly calculus in which there is a limited space creating a quantifiable amount). Though they “do not know what they do” in a first order of belief or understanding, the significance of enchantment is that the Other (God, the heavenly calculus, the symbolic order) knows and sees. The worshipper presumes the priest understands the Latin of the mass/matrix, and if neither priest nor laity comprehend, the magic/enchantment still registers with God/the big Other. Every society depends upon this structuring symbolic order, whether it is presumed to be ordained by God or “secular” powers is not determinative of the degree of misenchantment.

If knowledge, whether self-knowledge or knowledge of God, is to be freed from ideology or misenchantment, it must be freed from the dualism between self and Other or between the ego and law/superego by knowing the unified Subject of God.  Where alienation is the structuring principle of the failed Subject and her world, knowing God as the living, personal Word, cannot accommodate this mute deity. Knowing God overturns this impenetrable Other and its alienated subjectivity. The true Subject, the self-communicating God, in the act of communication frees from the bondage of dualism – the servitude of striving to be interpolated into the law – as there is no distance between the subject and object of knowledge. God as the object of knowledge is also the Subject who knows, first in Christ but in all who are “in Christ.”

Do we learn this truth, Kierkegaard asks, as if we are constituted a learning Subject prior to the founding of this subjectivity? This knowing does not reason to the truth but from the truth. The truth determines the form of reason. The truth, Kierkegaard concludes is in the relation to God, who constituted the whole relation, and falsehood or the sickness unto death is to imagine that this one who relates would found the relation within himself. In Lacanian terms he would create a subject-object relation within himself through the Other of the law. Kierkegaard comes closer than any other thinker prior to Lacan, in The Sickness Unto Death, in laying out the empty death dealing nature of this relationship to an empty Other. At the same time, he points to the apocalyptic nature of knowing God. His so-called “fideism” is simply the refusal to subject God’s self-revelation to a method incapable of receiving knowledge of God. God has acted in his Self-revelation to make us (complete?) Subjects, so that this revelation is the act of reconciliation and this soteriology is an epistemology.

As Thomas Torrance describes a Barthian approach to AT, both “how God gives Himself to be known” and “how one receives and knows what is given” are revealed in Christ.

“In short Jesus Christ is Himself both the Word of God as spoken by God to man and that same Word as heard and received by man, Himself both the Truth of God given to man and that very Truth understood and actualized in man. He is that divine and human Truth in His one Person.”[5]

If, as Samuel Adams puts it, “we prioritize the theological sense of ‘apocalyptic’, then we (methodologically?) subject all worldviews and contexts to the freedom of God’s sovereignty over his own self-revelation. This event of self-revelation is the apocalypse, in subjectivity and objectivity, of Jesus Christ.”[6]

The alienated subject/object relation is a misenchanting lie, empty in both poles of the relation, and only overturned and filled out by Christ. This seems to clarify the hue of the supernatural (the seemingly demonic) in every form of human enslavement while tracking human agency in the generation and overcoming of the lie through the truth.

[1] Eugene, McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon (p. 3). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] McCarraher, 3-5.

[3] McCarraher, 5-6.

[4] But even this description is not entirely accurate or always the case. It is very doubtful that an upper-class Roman of the first century directly believed in the Roman gods, anymore than a modern-day Japanese directly believes in his religion. He does not believe it, but he does it anyway as it seems to work.

[5] T. F. Torrance, Theological Science, 50. Quoted from Samuel Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method: An Examination of Theological Historiography in Critical Dialogue with N. T. Wright.

[6] Adams, 124.