R: Let This House Be Haunted

For thousands of years, people accepted the active working of the supernatural as part of a mythic narrative that shaped the borders of experience. The numina for the Romans, the faeries for the Celts, the ātman for Indo-Aryans were all supernatural forces that had real and immediate impact on the visible world. In the Christian period, Paul and his successors described ordinary life as a battlefield where an ancient spiritual war was being fought. Angels, demons, saints, and miracles all played a part in the everyday lives of Christians during the Medieval period.

But the Reformation, and later the Enlightenment, critiqued the over-enchantment of everyday life. Martin Luther denounced fear-mongering about purgatory as greedy indulgence-marketing and stories about saintly miracles as superstitions. The enchanted world and the disenchanted world overlapped in early modern Europe: in Catholic France, peasants continued to dress up as corpses on All Hallow’s Eve, the night the restless dead were believed to haunt the earth in a danse macabre, while in Protestant England, people merely lit candles in remembrance of departed relatives. Enhanced by the Enlightenment, Luther’s ethic has won out in the West. A failed harvest is due to a lack of nitrogen in the soil, not the work of demons. An “A” on that test was because you studied, not because you prayed to St. Joseph of Cupertino. This debate asks: should we return to an enchanted and mythologized world? Would enchantment - belief in the active work of supernatural forces beyond our ken - result in a less anxious, more unified society? Would a mythic narrative add meaning and structure to our lives?

The affirmative may argue that our culture has lost not superstition but imagination. The cold rationality and faceless bureaucratic spirit of modern life stifle creativity and force us into dull, predictable routines. We have no sense of anything greater than our atomized existence, no ultimate narrative that inspires us to self-sacrifice and love. A de-mythologized world is deprived of the wonder and mystery we all long for. As Shakespeare said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet I.5). For instance, it is only by belief in evil spiritual powers that we can make sense of evil - otherwise, after all, we would have to regard our fellow man, indeed ourselves, as the source of all the world’s evil. Further, the prospect of the saints and angels giving us aid and cheering us on is of great comfort. The Christian should regard herself as a warrior on the front lines of a cosmic struggle, not a cog in the capitalist machine.

The negative may point to numerous historical examples of the great destruction so often wrought by the “enchanted world.” The injustices of the Salem Witch Trials, the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic, and the Spanish Inquisition show what happens when we see witches, demons, and phantoms behind every corner. Even today, many are still duped into giving their money to charlatan preachers and cult leaders who stupefy and satisfy with holy hocus-pocus. Blaming the world’s evil on unseen forces allows us to divert blame from ourselves - “the devil made me do it” is a poor excuse for bad behavior. Putting superstitions about the natural world behind us has enabled immense scientific advancements, from Galileo to the Human Genome Project. God reveals himself through Scripture, the person of Christ, and the working of the Spirit in his Church, not through opaque spiritual mysteries and unseen esoteric beings. Our faith should be reasonable, not laughable.