The Dream of Magic
Thoughts and quotes on magic, science, and technology
“The dream of magic, which eluded generations of alchemists to their great perplexity and frustration, has come true for us.”
Months ago now I read the following post on
that blew me away. I’ve been chewing on it since then. I would like to offer some thoughts and related quotes, but before you read any farther, you’ll need to read the article itself, as the whole thing is more worth your time than what I have to say about it. All quotes without a citation are taken from this article.
“You might almost say that we now use alchemy for the approaches to the natural world that didn’t work out—while science is the name we give, in retrospect, to the approaches that did work out.”
i. If science and technology are today’s magic, what does that say about their spiritual impact?
“Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord; because of these same detestable practices the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you.” -Deuteronomy 18:10-12
“We should fear and love God, so that we do not curse, swear, use satanic arts, lie or deceive by His name, but call upon Him in every trouble, pray, praise and give thanks.” -Luther’s explanation of the 2nd commandment
“We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.”
ii. In C. S. Lewis’ book, That Hideous Strength, the N.I.C.E. is made up of materialists who believe they are moving the human race forward to new and better ends through technology. They are unaware, however, that the voice that speaks to them through The Head is not the result of their own scientific efforts, but a demon.
“The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already... begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result… The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.” -C. S. Lewis
"“Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire… There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate.” -C. S. Lewis
iii. In Kristin Lavransdatter, Erlend’s aunt Fru Aashild has been shut out of the community for worldly living, suspected murder, and witchcraft. This does not stop some of the characters from going to her when in great need of medical assistance, and she is able to cure them. Later in life, Kristin, who has admired and looked up to Fru Aashild, is also able to cure a boy from a dangerous illness using means of witchcraft and superstition. In both cases, the book refuses to tell us whether it was luck, skill, or dark magic that worked the cure. It is always possible as a reader to take a purely materialistic view of the situation.
“The overwhelming impression that reading the Sydney transcript gives is of some being struggling to be born—some inhuman or beyond-human intelligence emerging from the technological superstructure we are clumsily building for it. This is, of course, an ancient primal fear: it has shadowed us at least since the publication of Frankenstein and perhaps forever, and it is primal because it seems to be the direction that the Machine has been leading us in since its emergence. But we cannot prove this, not exactly. How could it be proved? So, when we see this kind of thing, rational people that we are, we reach for rational explanations.” -Paul Kingsnorth on the Sydney AI chatbot
iv. In many ways, desiring to have magic is the desire to be like God, and be able to speak or will things into existence and be freed from the constraints of our physical bodies. It is tiring to work hard, and it is exhausting to be subject to the limitations of a weak, sinful, mortal body. Escaping our bodies completely seems like the final step towards freedom.
“Think of magic, for the moment, as the quest for instant, effortless power—the ability to get things done without taking time and without requiring labor or toil. In the absence of magic (or technology), getting anything done requires some amount of time, sometimes a great deal of time. But what if you could get results without waiting?
Likewise, in the absence of magic (or technology), getting anything done requires effort, sometimes substantial effort. But what if you could get results with just the wave of a wand, or swipe of a finger, essentially effort-free?
Until the dawn of the technological age, when we invented reliable machines and the engines to power them, work was invariably constrained by both time and effort. All work, you might say, proceeded at the speed of digestion. Human beings and domesticated animals cooperated to turn organic processes into energy that powered nearly all our work in the world (though for a few purposes we learned to draw on wind or water power).”
“We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.” -Wendell Berry
“At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.”
“Do you mean,” put in a man called Gould, “that we are to have no vegetation at all?”
“Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.” …
“What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould. “After all we are organisms ourselves.”
“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mold—all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how.” -C. S. Lewis
v. It is the angels and the demons who do not have bodies. In striving to rid ourselves of the constraints of our bodies, who are we trying to imitate?
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” -Philippians 2:5-8
“And to which of the angels has he ever said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet”? Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” -Hebrews 1: 13-14
“He (Satan), who was sustained in angelic majesty, he who was accepted and beloved of God, when he beheld man made in the image of God, broke forth into jealousy with malevolent envy” -Cyprian of Carthage
vi. Perhaps, the work we are given to do and the time and effort it takes to do it, are both valuable and central to who we are as human beings. Work itself, though effected by the curse of sin, is a good thing, not something to get rid of.
“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Genesis 2:15
“There isn’t much in a man’s head, he told me, that can’t be cured by working and taking care of something else.” -Robin Hobb
“The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” Luke 4:3-4.
“But far more of what we do at home is only drudgery if, deluded by dreams of magic, we let it become so. The preparation of food, which can be outsourced to a chain of magic from supermarket to freezer to microwave, is far better seen as an opportunity to participate in a meaningful, creative, bonding endeavor. And at formative stages, even low-skill tasks teach important personal qualities: patience, endurance, and learning to whistle while you work. So wise parents, teachers, and religious leaders will in fact sustain contexts where we build character through otherwise tedious tasks (never forgetting that finding the fun in a job, as Mary Poppins knew, comes far more naturally to children than to adults). This will be far easier when what children observe adults doing is not pressing one magical button after another, but modeling and creating deeply involved, demanding and rewarding non-magical experiences in which both children and adults take responsibility for timeful, effortful, relational work.”
vii. Hard things get easier the more you do them. And almost everything worth doing involves difficulty and hardship.
“Of course, the reason small children are given screens is rarely because they ask for them—what small children ask for, to an overwhelming and exhausting extent, is our personal attention. We give children screens—at home and school, and maybe at church as well—mostly not to solve their problem, but to solve adults’ problems.
“If we give children screens to solve adults’ problems, the core problem adults—and increasingly children—have is that we are simply drained by the escalating demands of life in a world we were told was going to get easier. But we are not just exhausted because life and work have gotten busier and more complex—we are also exhausted because we ourselves have dwindled in our resourcefulness, our resilience, and our restedness. And we have dwindled because, in the end, we are unformed.”
“You mean, the safe things are not always the best things?” -William Faulkner
“Today, in a world with instant access to Google, we rely on the electronic web to supply everything we need, from historical facts to word definitions and spellings as well as extended quotations. All of us who use a computer are aware of the shock of inner poverty that we suddenly feel when deprived (by a virus or other disaster) of our mental crutches even just for a day or a week. Plato is right: memory has been stripped from us, and all we possess is an external reminder of what we have lost, enabling us to pretend to a wisdom and an inner life we no longer possess in ourselves.” -Stratford Caldecott
“The person rises to understand, master, and enjoy whatever he is surrounded with in language, ideas, literature, and in appreciation of beauty. If you share with children the very best, carefully chosen to meet their needs, they will amaze everyone.” -Susan Schaeffer Macaulay
“No one can be sad while they’re using wrist and hand and eye and every muscle of their body.” -C. S. Lewis
“The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, “I will pass through this, everyone I ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it.” We should think of our humanity as a privilege.” -Marilynne Robinson
viii. How, then, do we live in the modern world?
“Social media companies don’t want you to go out and have fun with your friends- they want you to look at pictures of your friends having fun without you. Tech companies don’t want you to put down your phone and read a book, and they definitely don’t want you to turn off the light and go to sleep. Sleep is bad for the economy.” -Sara Eckel
"It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule." J. R. R. Tolkien
“The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, ...but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.” -Wendell Berry
“He was choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from “all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view!” -C. S. Lewis
“Why should not a mother say to herself if I raise this child aright, if I love and care for her, she shall live a life that brings joy to those about her, and thus I have changed the world? Why should not the farmer that plants a seed say to his neighbor this seed I plant today will feed someone, and that is how I change the world today?” -Robin Hobb
“Frodo was now safe in the Last Homely House east of the Sea. That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, ‘a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.’ Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness… For a while the hobbits continued to talk and think of the past journey and of the perils that lay ahead; but such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and anxiety was lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song.” -J. R. R. Tolkien
ix. Is there a deeper and better magic that can re-enchant us and reinvigorate us, as the magic of the elves revives the hobbits on their journey? A magic that does not destroy and tear down, as the magic of the Two Towers does, but one that awakens awe, wonder, rest, and love?
“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.” -C. S. Lewis
“But there is another magic, best captured by the idea of the enchanting—the sense, often unbidden and seen only out of the corner of our eye, that something wonderful, awesome, majestic, and mysterious is afoot in this world, something for which control is simply not the right word, indeed something which we would not want to control for fear of diminishing its beauty and its goodness. If the quest for the first kind of magic drives a prideful quest for power, the second kind of magic produces in us something much closer to humility.”
“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” -G. K. Chesterton
“Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” -Roald Dahl
“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt is awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” -Albert Einstein
“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.” -John Milton
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” -C. S. Lewis
“You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” -St. Augustine
“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!” -C. S. Lewis
