Finally, the ideal of unity with nature also seemed unattainable. The ancients would identify themselves with nature, because they saw it as a living whole of which they were a part. But the whole realm of nature had become disenchanted through the growth of modern science and technology. Rather than seeing nature as an object of contemplation, as a realm of beauty, mystery and magic, the technologist gave it only an instrumental value. He was engaged in a struggle against nature, which he wanted to dominate and control by a machine. Since nature is only a machine, it can be controlled to serve us.—Frederick Beiser, Hegel (2005)
Monday, July 11, 2011
Mystery and Magic
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A proper theological response:
ReplyDelete"The Hidden Commonwealth rewards frequent readings, even by persons so fanatical in their prejudices as to refuse to believe its reports (such tragically deluded souls can treat the book as only a compendium of folklore, if they must, and still profit from it). Kirk’s real concern, as it happens, is not simply the fairy realm, but also those rare mortals privileged with the ability to see its inhabitants with their own eyes. It is, to a great extent, a treatise on the “second sight,” a gift Kirk believed to be the special possession of a very few—a great many of whom were, like Kirk himself, seventh sons—and to be demonstrable not only from anecdote, but also from scripture. Not to everyone do the “peaceable folk” appear, it seems, but a wealth of anecdotes—principally anecdotes concerning remarkable instances of foreknowledge on the part of recognized seers, or concerning their encounters with the specters of persons who had died far away—prove that there are those who, from birth, are able to pierce the veil within which the fairy realm is hidden. And these persons, says, Kirk, are of the same family as the prophets of ancient Israel, and of all prophets in all lands and among all peoples.
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"Moreover, even if one suspects this is not a matter so much of illusion as of delusion, again that is of no consequence. A delusion this amiable is endlessly preferable to boredom, for boredom is the one force that can utterly defeat the will to be, and so the will to care at all what is or is not true. It is only some degree of prior enchantment that allows the eye to see, and to seek to see yet more. And so, deluded or not, a belief in fairies will always be in some sense far more rational than the absolute conviction that such things are sheer nonsense, and that the cosmos consists in nothing but brute material events in haphazard combinations. Or, I suppose, another way of saying this would be that the ability of any of us to view the world with some sort of contemplative rationality rests upon the capacity we possessed as children to see in everything a kind of articulate mystery, and to believe in far more than what ordinary vision discloses to us: a capacity that endows us with that spiritual eros that allows us to know and love the world, and that we are wise to continue to cultivate in ourselves even after age and disillusion have weakened our sight."
—David Bentley Hart, "The Secret Commonwealth" (2009)