Incantational and Invocational Religion
Essay Posted September 18, 2007 by James E. Nelson
I have generally grown weary of the whole is-it-okay-for-Christians-to-read-Harry-Potter discussion that continues ad nauseum and escalates after every book or movie comes out. Mark Shea describes it nicely in his Sept. 13 First Things blog post.
A curious teapot tempest of the sort one only finds in the hothouse of Extremely Earnest Conservative Christianity has been going on for several years, ever since the release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and the subsequent popularity of the Potter phenomenon. Various concerns litter the landscape of Christian conversation on these books, charges which seem to me to have virtually no substance at all.
I am of the opinion that the Harry Potter books are great literature with themes that fit quite comfortably into a Christian world view. It is possibly one of the most important works of fiction of this era. But I’m no literary expert. It is probably much better to turn to real trained experts in that field, such as John Granger (an unabashed fan of the series—and don't let the silly blog title fool you; he's a real professor, and Eastern Orthodox to boot) and other academics who understand this sort of thing in depth.
Rather, I want to consider a rather simple observation that Mark Shea makes: (And, in case his references to Gandalf and Middle Earth catch you off guard, he’s comparing Rowling's Harry Potter series to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, a must-read for many of the same Evangelicals and Fundamentalists who condemn Harry Potter.)
The simple fact is this: The [Potter] books are not occultic. Magic is not real, as Rowling repeatedly has had to state to interviewers who ask her if she “believes” in it. The magic of Harry is, as John Granger points out, “incantational,” not “invocational,” exactly like the magic of Gandalf. Born with the talent for magic, Gandalf says the magic words and fire leaps forth from his staff, just as from Harry’s wand. No principalities or powers are invoked in HP. Indeed, if any words are “invocational” they are the prayer to Elbereth and Gilthoniel uttered in Middle Earth. Yet nobody accuses Tolkien of promoting the worship of false gods. That’s because we understand Tolkien’s fictional subcreation and its rootedness in Christian thought. I suggest Christian critics try to extend Rowling the same charity.
While these two terms—incantational and invocational—are wonderfully suggestive, they deserve a bit of unpacking. Religion—both true and false—is invocational in nature. Religions recognize gods, or at the very least, higher powers. Some religions invoke the gods in order to coerce them into action: Occultic religions fall into this category. The rain dance and throwing the virgin into the volcano are both part of our popular imagination and also fit into this broad category. Some religions invoke the gods as part of the balance of nature. Eskimoes thanking the caribou or seal for allowing their own lives to be sacrificed the Eskimo could live is an example of such a thing, as is Voodoo. Christianity and Judaism invoke God primarily to enter into relationship with God.
But incantation is a rather different sort of thing. It’s impersonal. It’s an effort to manipulate matter rather than being. Incantational parlor tricks can ultimately become evil and demonic, but at its most basic form, an incantational sensibility is a childish thing. It’s precisely why Rowling, Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles are all considered children’s literature: they all hold a very childish and incantational view of the world.
This distinction between “incantational” and “invocational” magic struck a deeply troubling chord with me that I could not initially put my finger on. It was Brenda who provided connection I had initially missed. “It sounds like Big Sky,” she said. She was referring to the Bible College we both attended after high school.
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Before I plunge ahead, let me make it very clear that incantational spirituality is not Christian. The Christian tradition, no matter what denomination or group, rejects the idea of incantations. Formulas have no power; only the Holy Trinity, who Christians invoke in prayer, has any power to change the way things are. Formulas help explain the way things are, but they have no power in and of themselves to alter reality, just our perceptions of it. In turn, just as Christianity invokes the Holy Trinity, any religion or philosophy that invokes other gods or powers is viewed as a false religion by Christianity. Of course, this doesn’t mean that an incantational sensibility hasn’t creeped in here and there.
Protestants have long accused the Roman Catholics of an incantational sort of Christianity. Their favorite whipping boy is, inevitably, the Catholic Mass, where the priest recites his little hocus-pocus and the deacon rings the bells, and Jesus, like Pavlov’s dog, upon hearing the incantation and the bells obediently enters the bread and wine turning it magically into the Body and Blood of Christ.
And let me quickly add that such an image, as popular as it is among Protestants, is not only completely alien to the truth, but deeply offensive to anyone who has actually bothered to study Eucharistic theology.
Let me just as quickly add that among the folks in the pew, such an incantational view is probably relatively common, largely because the doctrine of transubstantiation (that is, the Roman version of what happens at the Lord’s Table) is inextricably linked to Platonic philosophy—something hardly anyone actually understands, much less believes, anymore. Rather than make the effort to think the hard thoughts necessary, it is easier to simply resort to an incantational interpretation of events.
But an incantational view of Christianity is not the private domain of Roman Catholics. It was what I was unwittingly taught at Bible College. Every Christian tradition throughout all time has been cursed with the temptation to reduce Christianity to a series of formulas and incantations that get the job of salvation done. Along side the Roman Catholic priest’s “hocus pocus” one can easily line up the Evangelical emphasis on inviting Jesus into your heart: One little prayer said correctly and with sincerity, folded hands, and bowed head, and poof!! . . . you’re magically transported into the new life in Christ.
There was one instructor at Big Sky that I have been particularly vocal about over the years (even in my essays). To me and many of my classmates he seemed not only inept but positively evil. He openly scoffed at those (including Doc Habermans and Mr. Parkhurst—the two really smart instructors—who thought that Paul’s epistle to the Romans was hard to understand. He had reduced the whole epistle to a series of lists—about sixteen in all—and if you memorized the lists . . . poof!! . . . you understood Romans.
Over the years I have come to realize that he wasn’t so much evil as incompetent. I suspect he just wasn’t that bright; rather he was a good memorizer. He knew all the formulas that make up Christian doctrine by heart, but he was unable to recognize the sublime reality that all those formulas pointed to. He embodied one of the principle problems with the whole concept of a Bible College education. Bible College was a hot house environment that was largely disconnected from real life. Practical matters of how worship truly related to every day life (because we always remained visitors in the local churches; we were college students from somewhere else), how our Christianity related to our secular lives (we didn’t have secular lives; we lived on campus with each other), and what it meant to be living in the world but not of the world were necessarily set aside. In its place our faith was intellecualized through an academic education.
One of my many run-ins with “my favorite instructor” occurred in preaching class. His formula for a great sermon was three main points and a poem to sum it all up. One time I had four points in my sermon. I did it, not to be ornery, but because Paul the Apostle had four points in his paragraph. I was foolish enough to think that an Apostle was a better authority than my class notes. I got a “C” on that sermon because it didn’t follow the formula. Four points were simply too hard to understand. I didn’t finish it with a poem either. Maybe if I would have tacked on a nice little summary in the words of e.e. cummings or Kahlil Gibran I could have managed a “B.”
Everything was reduced to a formula with this instructor, whether it was the christological teaching of Chalcedon or the seven dispensations of salvation. He taught Evangelism class and there we learned the little book “The Four Spiritual Laws” by heart and learned the importance of having potential converts say the prayer as it is written in the back of the booklet. No extemporaneous prayers allowed. As Hermoine Granger observed when Ronald Weazley couldn’t get his assignment to turn out right. “Say it a little slower, and with more authority, and don’t put so much flourish in your wrist movement.” Or, as we learned in Evangelism class, say the prayer as printed in the book. If you got it just right . . . poof!! . . . you were a Christian.
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Like Harry Potter at Hogwarts, I was too young and inexperienced to view the world with a critically nuanced eye. Since a few of my professors and many of my classmates seemed quite satisfied with incantational Christianity, I figured that all Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism was like that. I knew for certain that it had little to do with the living God, so I set out in search for some form of Christianity that was in tune with the living God and not just a series of formulas about a deity we read about in a book.
Over the decades I’ve discovered that the theologians weren’t kidding when they said God is ineffable. A relationship with God is a mysterious thing and one must always be satisfied with a bit of uncertainty as to just how far one can push the relationship when invoking the God of scripture who reveals himself as both bright light and dark cloud, nourishing manna and consuming fire. God is as complicated as his invitation is simple. Relationship with God is as disconcerting as it is comforting. Fellowship with God is a terribly complex matter, even though it is as basic and unadorned as “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” It’s no wonder that Christians everywhere, whether Catholic or Protestant, Orthodox or Evangelical, conservative or liberal, are tempted to reduce it all down to a series of manageable incantations that will get you far enough through the day that you can get home and sprawl in front of the t.v. for prime time.
With that in mind, neither is it surprising that when some Christians read about the incantational magic of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, they recognize something that is remarkably similar to how they relate to God, and then, in turn, reject it as occultism or idolatry, because the young Mr. Potter is essentially doing the same they are doing in their everyday Christian life. Mark Shea (quoting John Granger) is absolutely correct when he observes that Harry Potter’s magic is incantational and not invocational; it’s a parlor trick performed by those with the knack for doing it. What he doesn’t say is that much popular religion (Christianity included) is of the same species.
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It is a problem that faces every discipline of learning (if we may reduce Christianity down to a discipline of learning for a moment). Most people take mathematics in school and all they see is formulas. They may even grasp the value of certain “parlor tricks,” such as using trigonometric formulas to accurately determine the height of a building without all the hassle of climbing to the top and dropping a really big tape measure down the side.
But other people don’t just see the formulas, they see through them, and recognize that this is a way of expressing reality itself.
People who have moved beyond just seeing formulas into that rarified air of seeing through the formulas can look at complex (and simple!) mathematical formulas and recognize the profound beauty of the universe which they represent. To most of us, E=mc2 is merely something Prof. Einstein wrote in an academic paper one day. To a few people who actually care about that sort of thing, it is a picture of the stars far more beautiful and suggestive than van Gogh’s famous painting, “The Starry Night.” (I, by the way, as much as I love physics, fail to see through the formula, so I have a print of “The Starry Night” on my office wall instead of a copy of Einstein’s formula, because it’s far more beautiful and meaningful to me.)
Likewise, complex Christian formulas, such as the Chalcedonian definition, which involves a single essence and three persons, and the person of the Son of God, which embraces two distinct natures—human and divine—in that single person, are about as clear as a differential equation to many if not most Christians.
My favorite Bible College instructor faithfully made us memorize the formula, but he himself never got to the point of being able to see through all those terms—essence, person, nature, being, etc—into the very being of God that it revealed. This isn’t to say that he didn’t know God and love the God he knew. It’s rather to say that all those formulas were simply something he could repeat by memory, and had to be able to repeat by memory to prove his orthodoxy so that he could teach at that school. But back then we put so much emphasis on the formulas—the Chalcedonian definition, the seven dispensations, the four spiritual laws—that they became incantations of the faith rather divorced from the invocations we made to the God we had actually experienced and loved in our own limited ways
And sometimes (and to this day, for some people), the incantations of the faith were more important than invocations to the living God. And when that happens, whenever a Harry Potter comes along, he seems very, very evil indeed.
Copyright © 2007 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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