https://blog.ayjay.org/one-more-enchanted-evening/
Alan Jacobs has had a back
and forth with Brad East in the last week or so about enchantment vs.
disenchantment. I am hardly in a place
to insist but I do think that for as much Jacques Ellul as Alan Jacobs has read
I hope he read Matthew T Prior’s book Confronting
Technology: The Theology of Jacques Ellul. For anyone who isn’t already
committed to eventually getting through eighty books on exorcism, diabology,
exousiology, spiritual warfare, the reception history of the Enoch literature
and Genesis 6 references to The Watchers, Prior’s book distinguishes
exousiology (a theology of powers and principalities a la Walter Wink) from
demonology (I better not have to explain that topic here at Wenatchee The
Hatchet of all places!) whether of the Merrill Unger variety or some other) in
Christian thought.
Alan Jacobs is interested in
playing with an upgraded demonology a la Jacques Ellul’s The New Demons? Alright. A new variation on powers and
principalities? Okay! Robert Ewusie Moses’ Practices
of Power: Revisiting the Principalities and Powers in the Pauline Letters
should be on Jacobs’ reading list (if he can carve out time for it). I would suggest that the book builds upon
what strikes me now as a skeletal idea in James Cone’s Black Theology and
Black Power about Christ overcoming powers and principalities with a
specific eye toward white supremacism as one of those powers. Given the history of white Euro-American
Christians regarding BIPOC folks as either having demons, being demons or being
subjected to demons I trust Alan Jacobs has at least some inkling of the
delicacy involved in rehabilitating demonology as an element of Christian
discourse. I don’t for a second reject
the proposal since I’m a professing Christian and digging into the reception
history of demonologies and how they developed in the Second Temple period as
nascent Judaism grappled with serial imperial occupation was something I was
hoping to do grad work in. But I didn’t
manage to do that. Instead I just tried
to keep up with a smattering of books written on those topics. I haven’t pulled that off but there’s a big
old reading list you can peruse if you like.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/01/updated-version-of-reading-list-from.html
So if Alan Jacobs really
wants to explore the way Christians and Jews have written about demonology in
the last two and a half centuries … I got a recommended reading list. I am openly sympathetic to the idea that
Christians in the United States can and should regard racial supremacist dogmas
as demonic but that’s not really what I intended to get at in this post. No, I’m thinking more broadly about the years
I’ve spent reading Alan Jacobs and Brad East and how, lately, I tend to lean
more Jacobs than East. Why?
I recall a rambling piece
that was published at one point in Mere Orthodoxy
which is currently available at East’s blog.
The title is so routine among theological metacultural punditry I don’t
even need to quote it since it’s right there in the html but …
https://www.bradeast.org/blog/2019/07/against-pop-culture.html
Against pop culture
Jul 3, 2019
Christians love pop culture these days. But the subset of Christians
who love pop culture the most is pastors, writers, and academics. Pop culture
as a mode of "engagement"; pop culture as a means of
"reaching" this or that group; pop culture as a way of
"relating" to students: all these and more are celebrated and
commended and practiced in churches, classrooms, and websites every day.
"Finding the gospel in [pop culture artifact X]" is a ubiquitous and
representative genre. Christians love pop culture, and Christians with an
audience want fellow Christians to love pop culture.
Why is that? Why should Christians like, love, or "engage with" pop
culture?
I don't think there are very many, or perhaps any, good answers to that
question.
…
So … then there’s this year’s
peroration from the same Brad East on how the Jedi in Star Wars are like
Catholics and the wizards in Harry Potter are Protestants.
https://www.bradeast.org/blog/catholic-jedi-protestant-wizards
Catholic Jedi, Protestant Wizards
Aug 12, 2024
A recent visit to Orlando brought home to me how different the
respective aesthetic visions of Star Wars and Harry Potter are. A thesis came
to me: Jedi are Catholic and Wizards are Protestant.
What was that about there
not being many or any good answers to the question about why Christians should
like, love, or “engage” with pop culture? I wouldn’t say Alan Jacobs is exactly
a poptimist but he’s not anti-poptimist in rhetoric or method. East has soap-boxed against Christians being
poptimists while then, a few years later, turning around and doing pretty much
the kind of thing you’d think he wouldn’t think is a great idea. Now I’ve made no secret here at Wenatchee The
Hatchet I love animation and comics and anime and manga. I’ve written tens of thousands of words about
Batman:
the animated series. I’ve had
over the years comparing thoughts with Ethan Hein about songs by Stevie Wonder
and David Bowie and John Lee Hooker among other things. I even recently wrote a piece called “Cross
Over Instead” suggesting that if, in the last few centuries, mainstream
classical music has never taken the guitar seriously maybe classical guitarists
should take that as a hint that we will never be welcome in mainstream
classical music and reach out to every kind of guitarist playing every kind of
music so that, should classical music as “civilization” die the miserable death
its would-be defenders claim it’s constantly in danger of, we guitarists will
not suffer much loss for that.
If I wanted to I could
probably write 20,000 words about manga by Rumiko Takahashi. I’m not sure if I will but I sure could. So I’m probably firmly in the poptimist
category of criticism even if I have written extensively
on how Beethoven shifted his developmental episodes into the transitions of the
first movement of his final piano sonata; and on the first half of Nikita
Koshkin’s formidable and rewarding 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo
guitar; and more recently I’ve begun a slow-going and I hope thorough
analysis of the solo
guitar sonatas of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka. I haven’t touched that project
since February 2024 and Grand Sonata II is a very big piece with a lot
going on it, both in terms of how much Matiegka appropriates and transforms
themes by Haydn and what he does across his three-movement work. Which is to say that I can toggle back and
forth between classical guitar and cartoons and manga fairly comfortably. If Brad East is worried that kids these days
are too glued to their screens I am just not sure I share that worry because in
my experience, to be blunt, old people glued to their screens and imbibing
paranoid conspiracy theories are not coming off as much better off than people
scrolling through TikTok videos watching the antics of their favorite influencers.
When Jacobs writes:
… Can you bind the strong man? I can’t. Which makes it
strange to me how small a part Jesus plays in the current discourse about
enchantment, even among people who claim to be Christians. …
I’d say that Emil Brunner’s
quip about liberal Protestantism eliminating the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as
mediator was the whole point of The Mediator. Germanophile highbrow art asceticism or
lowbrow trance-seeking mysticism, the old Pythagorean and Orphic impulses, may
have been cultivated and assimilated in Christian patristics but we live in the
days of Ted Gioia where this dualism has to be held up as irreconcilable and
insoluble as if faith traditions haven’t spent millennia demonstrating and
arguing otherwise. When I read Philip
Ewell and John McWhorter (both black atheists) differing on questions about
classical music, I enjoyed reading both of them for the insights they have and
grumbling at the insights they most assuredly do not have, which they might
have picked up if they were willing to dust off some books by James Cone.
Christians can contribute to
aesthetic debates within contemporary culture as good-faith contributors
whether or not Christendom exists.
Jacobs has read his Jacques Ellul so he knows there have been Christians
in the last century who have taken this approach. My soap box in the last ten years at
Wenatchee The Hatchet has included a concern that if Christians want to be
taken seriously it would behoove us to explore potential theoretical and practical
solutions to issues and problems that people who are not the least bit
Christian would actually want solved. In
my case, as a classical guitarist and hobbyist composer who loves Thelonious
Monk and Haydn in comparable measures, the various highbrow/lowbrow and
white/black dualisms entrenched in musicology and history are things that I
believe need to be overcome. I agree
with Philip Ewell on that basic issue even if he would not agree with me about
maybe much of anything else, least of all Christian dogmatics.
I hope I can say I’ve staked
out a consistent and coherent position about taking “high” and “low” equally
seriously. I don’t want to say that insipid
music is made by insipid people and it isn’t worth taking seriously because,
well, too many Christian cultural pundits forget that Romans 12:16 is still in
the New Testament no matter how much they inveigh against pop culture. Do you know people who like Taylor Swift
songs? Be willing to hang out with
them. I find Katy Perry annoying myself
but I don’t have to make an issue of that if I’m hanging out with someone who
likes to listen to her. I’m sure there
are plenty of people who would be baffled as to why Oshii’s Urusei Yatsura
2: Beautiful Dream is one of my favorite movies, and who’d want to read my
case for why, if there’s a Maison Ikkoku anime remake it should be 1)
more faithful to the source material and 2) Saori Hayami would rock as Kyoko Otonashi.
And I could still turn around and write
more about cross-referencing Aquinas’ discussion of intra-Trinitarian forms of
relationship with John of Damascus’ discourse on perichoresis as a way to
recalibrate conceptions of musical time as they’ve been presented by Adorno, Zuckerkandl,
Rochberg, Scruton, Yust and others.
I get that for polemicists
who want to polemic there need to be dualisms but all too often the dualisms
seem too convenient and sometimes I even suspect they get wielded in bad
faith.
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