Poetic Knowledge as Enchantment
Edited and Reshared from the Classical Woman Substack
In George Macdonald’s richly allegorical literary fairy tale, Phantastes, Anodos, our “pathless” protagonist, is on a quest through the forest of Fairy Land where to be enchanted is to view the world through unfallen eyes. The experience is awe-inspiring and wonder-full as he encounters numerous tests and lessons to find his way. Sublimity is on every page, but the tale is darkened when he transgresses a prohibition and a Shadow attaches itself to him. This Shadow serves as a symbol of disenchanted materialism and pride that blinds Anodos from properly seeing anything that falls in its boundary, and with the Shadow knit to his back, his journey continues.
As Anodos walks through the forest he meets a girl in possession of a globe, “bright and clear as the purest crystal.”1 Macdonald shows us that the globe represents nature and the earth. The girl plays with the globe in delight, and after coaxing her for a short time Anodos persuades her to let him touch it. As he lays his hand upon it, “A tiny torrent of harmony rolled out of the little globe.”2 Here we find echoes of the “music of the spheres” that dominated the medieval mind and its inheritors. As he listens, joy fills Anodos’ heart when his soul is united with the globe in a song. Not long after this initial encounter, Anodos’ Shadow-Self covers the girl and her globe and begins to produce in him a greedy dissatisfaction. Her child-like wonder remains untainted, but Anodos' vision of her goes dark. No longer content to have held the globe and experienced it, he hungers to possess and empirically know about the globe. His thoughts change from those of love to those of mastery. Macdonald is unsubtle as he targets an analytical approach to knowledge. Eventually, the craving becomes too great, and Anodos attempts to wrest it from the girl’s hands. The globe begins producing an increasingly discordant sound until it shatters in both of their hands. With a guttural wail as she runs into the woods, the girl weeps, “You have broken my globe; my globe is broken- my globe is broken!”3
It is a sobering moment when the globe is shattered, and with it the wonder and joy of the previous moments. In many ways this scene is a cautionary tale for all of us as it teaches us about the fragile nature of poetic knowledge. This scene from Phantastes synthesizes seamlessly with what James Taylor describes in his educational treatise, Poetic Knowledge. He explains that, “Poetic knowledge is not necessarily a knowledge of poetry but rather a poetic (a sensory-emotional) experience of reality.”4 As I pondered Taylor’s work in light of this scene from Phantastes, I constructed a working definition.
Poetic knowledge is an internalized, sympathetic union with a knowable object as a whole (not divided into parts) juxtaposed to an externalized analysis of that object. This way of knowing “tunes the soul” to Reality, bringing a person into deeper harmony with the creation that is singing a song of worship through Love.
As we keep the image of our girl’s globe in mind we must begin with the recognition that wholeness is an essential ingredient to the poetic mode. As James Taylor describes, poetic knowledge is,
“A spontaneous act of the external and internal senses with the intellect, integrated and whole, rather than an act associated with the power of analytic reasoning. It is, according to a tradition from Homer, to Robert Frost, from Socrates to Maritain, a natural human act, synthetic and penetrating, that gets us inside the thing experienced. It is, we might say, knowledge from the inside out, radically different in this regard from a knowledge about things.”5
We were meant to live inside this world. The full experience of the girl’s globe was reached when the vibrations of its harmonies penetrated both her and Anodos’ souls. Modern progressive education, devoid of the Spirit and rich in the spirit of a materialistic age, aims for the antithesis of this way of knowing. From their earliest days children are being discipled to view knowledge as something to be dominated for all kinds of reasons- to be smart or to be successful - but never to be led to worship anything more than themselves. Knowledge is a means to various materialistic ends, but it is rarely an end in itself, and certainly not in the sense that produces awareness of Christ as the one, “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”6 By raising our children in the Shadow, we have become a culture of Globe-Smashers that are robbing humanity of its wonder, awe, and transcendent relationship with creation.
In addition to encountering objects holistically, child-like wonder is also essential to our understanding of poetic knowledge. Wonder is the road that goes between our intellect (mind) and affections (heart) to get “the significance of what is really there.”7 It is in wonder that our senses and emotions are integrated and collaborated to worship. Anodos did not enter the poetic mode with the globe until he had touched it with his hands, heard its song, and been filled with spontaneous awe. Take an interaction with an apple as a simple example of this idea. An apple could be sitting on the table in front of you, but it is not until you take up the apple, look at it, admire its color, take a bite, enjoy its sweetness and crunch, and then are left with a sense of “appleness” that you have come to really begin to know apples. It is the cultivator of apple orchards and bakers of apple pie that know apples best.
Many people see apples or even use apples to satisfy their hunger. Not everyone knows apples in the sense we are talking about. Most never stop to praise the God who made apples. Indeed, the pinnacle of this mode of knowing is when the soul, in its attending, begins to worship. It is a communion of the person, the object, and Love. We are not talking about a subjective feeling but a common sensory experience that can be known by anyone who attends (giving their full attention), gets a sense of an object’s weight (might we say its glory?), and is led to love (by Love Himself). This is connected to transcendent Reality as God has made it, and our getting to experience it for what it is. Anyone who knows apples in the way we mean would have a common, intuitive sense about appleness with other people who have also known apples in this poetic way. But as we consider this illustration of an apple, I find that many moderns are not really coming to know anything in this way. We have lost our common sense and certainly have lost a sense of how knowledge should lead us to worship.
Why might this be? How can numerous people move through their days and nights upon this earth without going beyond the surface of things and coming to know anything in a deep and meaningful way? This is where the image of Anodos’ Shadow is pertinent. Remember, the Shadow is representative of the disenchanting power of a materialistic worldview rooted in pride. A materialistic view of the world naturally reduces nature to its utility. We see Anodos’ downfall begin with obsessing to gain empirical knowledge about the globe, when he fixates on desiring to dominate and possess it. Macdonald was rebutting the Scientism of his own age that has come to full fruition and is beginning to rot in our own. By separating spirit from matter, reality has been disenchanted and modern man is obsessed with a facts and analysis-driven approach to knowing that would have been largely foreign to past generations. I am not trying to suggest that there is never a place for the analysis of information, but what I am saying is that it cannot come properly until after years of synthetic, integrated experiences of the world in which to give shape and context to that analysis. Taken out of order, analysis can morbidly and irreverently dissect bodies of knowledge to the point that the whole becomes unrecognizable. It can smash the globe of Reality, fragmenting our relationship with it into a million discordant pieces.
It is here that we conclude that the recovery of poetic knowledge begins with a recognition that worship in the human soul is inextricably connected to a person’s experience of a sensory-rich world that is ours for the searching out.8 Like Anodos, we may fall, even subconsciously, into a disenchanted materialistic mindset that blinds us to the wonders all around us. The Christian life necessarily includes regular repentance from the blindness of our Shadow-Selves as we seek the Light of Christ to enlighten the eyes of our souls. As parents, the atmosphere and methods we employ as we educate our children are sending a message as powerful as the content itself. Will we be a Professor Gradgrind, drilling and killing facts, facts, facts?9 Or might we join our children in discovering the one thing needful, which is learning to love God and man, things and places?10 Like Anodos, we are all sent by God on a quest through an enchanted world, and the Holy Spirit, the Teacher of Mankind, will be our guide if only we will attend to what He is communicating all around us. Seeing, we wish to see. Hearing, we wish to hear. And in doing so may we, like Anodos, find that,
“It not only satisfied my hunger, but operated in such a way upon my senses that I was brought into far more complete relationship with the things around me.”11
This is the gift granted to us through poetic knowledge. This is our divine education as we learn to live in the mind of the Maker.
Phantastes, page 53 (Free Kindle Version)
Phantastes, page 54 (Free Kindle Version)
Phantastes, page 54 (Free Kindle Version)
Poetic Knowledge, page 6
Poetic Knowledge, page 6
Colossians 2:3
Poetic Knowledge, page 6
Proverbs 25:2
Hard Times, Charles Dickens
Poetic Knowledge, page 7
Phantastes, page 29 (Free Kindle Version)
I am a CM educator of a few years and have really enjoyed perusing your stack and curriculum. I have been, along with my husband amd children, in a MacDonald year. We recently read The Golden Key and The Light Princess. I cannot wait to read Phantastes after reading your article here. I am trying to wrap my head around this concept of poetic learning and in re-reading your definition was reminded of the discussion of Analysis and Synthesis in Charles Kingsley's Madam How and Lady Why (ch 8). In it, Synthesis is portrayed rather poorly for looking at things more as he expects them to be rather than how they are and for bullying his brother Analysis for many years. Analysis, however, is limited in his ability to understand things in that he can only see some thing's factual parts and not how they work together as a whole. So, as a pair, these two help us understand the world but care must be given not to allow one the upper hand of the other. Back to poetic learning, I think the pendulum in education must swing back toward synthesis soon, toward the seeing of an idea as a whole, in relation to other ideas and truths, rather than the accumulation of facts or the more recent push toward developing "learning skills." This has been true of my experience since my eyes have been opened to CM's "science of relations."