On the Fairy-Faith

Part 2, The Secret Commonwealth

In my researches about the Celtic fairy-faith, preparing for my class this summer in Ireland, I came across David Bentley Hart's 2009 essay "The Secret Commonwealth," which Hart has reposted on his Substack newsletter.

In "The Secret Commonwealth" Hart sets out a defense of the fairy-faith. If you know Hart's work, this will not be surprising. For example, Hart's most recent book is entitled All Things Are Full of Gods, which takes its title from a quote from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus. You can draw a straight line from the ancient belief that "all things are full of gods," that nature is alive with spiritual powers and potencies, to the fairy-faith of the Celtic peoples of the British Isles. The Greeks believed that life was due to psyche, the life force or "soul." As Aristotle set forth, psyche animates vegetable, animal, and human life. All living things possessed a soul. And while this view of a spiritual potency, a soul, infusing living creatures might strike modern minds as outdated, primitive science, Hart argues in All Things Are Full of Gods that life remains a fundamental mystery that reductionistic materialism cannot solve. So perhaps the Greeks were closer to the truth than modern biological science. And if that's so, then so is the fairy-faith.

Hart begins his 2009 essay by introducing the work of Robert Kirk, a Christian clergyman, who published his treatise The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies in 1691. As Hart describes, Kirk wasn't just interested in documenting the lore of the fairy-faith, he was particularly interested in the Celtic seers and visionaries, those among the Celts blessed with "the second sight." As Hart observes:

Kirk’s real concern, as it happens, was not simply the fairy realm, but also that rare breed of mortals who enjoy the ability to see its inhabitants with their own eyes. In large part, it is a treatise on the “second sight,” a special gift that Kirk believed to be possessed by only certain specially privileged souls—a great many of whom were, like Kirk himself, seventh sons—and one whose reality is attested not only in folklore, but also in scripture. Not to everyone do the “peaceable folk” appear, it seems, but a wealth of credible anecdotes—concerning persons who have experienced remarkable flashes of foreknowledge or encounters with the specters of friends who have died far away or other uncanny revelations—prove that there are those who have from birth been granted the ability to see the unseen, and even in many cases to pierce the veil within which the fairy realm is hidden. And such individuals, says Kirk, are of the same family as the prophets of ancient Israel, and of all the truly inspired prophets of every land and every race.

In commenting upon Kirk's work, Hart makes a few observations about what he calls "the essential sanity" of the fairy-faith, the "deep conviction that those traditions touch upon a real dimension of vital intelligence or intelligences residing in the world all about us, occasionally visible and audible to us, but for the most part outside the reach of our dull, earthbound senses."

In defending the sanity of the fairy-faith, Hart makes two points.

First, the fairy-faith is much closer to the Scriptural imagination than our disenchanted modern imaginations. Simply put, the fairy-faith is biblical. As Hart observes, "such warrant [for the fairy-faith] really can be found in the Bible if one chooses to look for it, and Kirk was simply a more careful reader than most other Christians on this matter." Hart points to the letters of Paul who described "elemental powers" ruling the cosmos. These cosmic and spiritual powers had once been in a state of rebellion but have now come under the dominion of Christ (see Col. 1:20). This is the same vision that C.S. Lewis uses in The Chronicles of Narnia where we see pagan nature spirits and gods come under the rule of Aslan/Christ. In Lewis's imagination, paganism is baptized. Or, as Michael Martin says, the fairies are Christian.

Hart's second and bigger point in defending the fairy-faith is how its vision of the world pushes back upon a mechanical vision of the cosmos. The fairy-faith is saner than mechanistic visions of nature as it helps us recover a deep intuition that the world is, well, alive, suffused with mind, intelligence, agency, and personhood. Hart goes even further to say that there is a moral imperative in coming to see the world in this enchanted, vital way. Here's Hart making these points:

....there was an essential sanity in Kirk’s approach to reality that we would all do well to emulate whenever we find ourselves gravitating toward the obscene fantasy of a purely mechanical natural order. One need not yet believe in fairies to grasp that there is no good reason why one ought not to do so, and that there may even be some moral imperative that one should. To see the world as inhabited by these vital intelligences, or to believe that behind the outward forms of nature there might be an unperceived realm of intelligent order, is simply to respond rationally to one of the ways in which the world seems to address us when we intuit simultaneously its rational frame and the depth of mystery it seems to hide from us.

In short, the issue isn't can we believe in fairies, but that we must believe. And the reason for this, Hart continues, concerns how the way we see reality impacts our emotional and moral experience of the world. Materialism evacuates the world of meaning and significance. And as I describe in The Shape of Joy, this evacuation has both mental health and moral consequences. Thus, while believing in fairies might seem to be, from a scientific perspective, delusional, from the perspective of human flourishing and moral engagement the fairy-faith is a saner and truer view of the world. Here's Hart making these points in concluding his essay:

Even if one is so misled about the frame of reality as to think that the world Kirk describes is sheer delusion, again that is of no consequence. A vision of reality this amiable is endlessly preferable to the sheer metaphysical boredom of the materialist view of things and, for that very reason, makes a moral demand on any responsible soul; boredom is, after all, the one force that can utterly defeat the will to care what is or is not true to begin with. It is only some degree of prior enchantment that allows the eye to see, and to seek to see yet more. And so, deluded or not, a belief in fairies will always be in some sense far more rational than the absolute conviction that such things are sheer nonsense, and that the cosmos consists in nothing but brute material events in haphazard combinations.

Another way of saying this, I suppose, would be that the ability of any of us to view the world with some sort of contemplative rationality rests upon the capacity we possessed as children to see in everything a kind of eloquently articulate mystery, and to believe in far more than what ordinary vision discloses to us: a capacity that endows us with that spiritual eros that allows us to know and love the world, and that we are wise to continue to cultivate in ourselves even after age and disillusion have weakened our sight.