Across the Chasm–Underwater

I thought the previous installment from C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress would be the last from that book, but now I’ve decided to not leave the book on such a stark and ugly note. Or such ugly pics, for that matter.

In that post, John faced Death–literally. Death told him that death to self is inevitable: He can go willingly or he can struggle. He chooses to go willingly.

He finds himself on the floor of the canyon. A small crowd of people are standing around a figure sitting on a throne: Mother Kirk (the mother church). A large pool stretches between them and the opposite wall of the canyon. His old companion Vertue is there too, sitting on the ground completely naked. John’s long quest has reached its climax.

Mother Kirk tells them that the only way to the other side is to become naked like Vertue and dive into the water headfirst. Then they must swim downwards to a tunnel in the wall that leads up and onto the opposite side. John thinks to himself, “I see they have brought me here to kill me.”

As he hesitates on the brink, he is visited by wraiths of all the men representing worldviews he met heretofore, such as Old Enlightenment, Sensible, and Humanist, who all try to tempt him away from believing in the necessity or even the reality of what he is about to do (baptism and rebirth). But Vertue interrupts his ruminations: “Come on, John…the longer we look at it the less we shall like it,” and he dives into the water. John soon follows.

From The Pilgrim’s Regress by C. S. Lewis, Book 9, Chapter V: Across the Canyon

My dream grew darker so that I have a sense, but little clear memory of the things that John experienced both in the pool and in great catacombs, paved sometimes with water, sometimes with stone, and upon winding stairways in the live rocks whereby he and Vertue ascended through the inwards of the mountain to the land beyond Peccatum Adae.* He learned many mysteries in the earth and passed through many elements, dying many deaths….

Of all the people he had met in his journey only Wisdom appeared to him in the caverns, and troubled him by saying that no man could really come where he had come. All his adventures were but figurative, for no professed experience of these places could be anything other than mythology. But then another voice spoke to him from behind him, saying:

“Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then it is My mythology. The words of Wisdom** are also myth and metaphor: but since they do not know themselves for what they are, in them the hidden myth is master, where it should be servant: and it is but of man’s inventing.

“But this is My inventing, this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live.

“What would you have? Have you not heard among the Pagans the story of Semele? Or was there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God?”

Afterword

This passage is unique in the book for it is the only time God Himself speaks. The voice seeks to set John’s heart at ease and counter what Wisdom said about the relation of truth and myth.

In this, his first book that was not poetry and his first apologetic, Lewis certainly had in mind the theories of The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, an enormously influential series of books first published in 1890. It argued that myths of a god whose death and resurrection enabled the crops to grow–or were the crops growing–were nearly universal across cultures, and the story of Jesus was merely one of these.

What John is experiencing as he dives and goes underwater is of course baptism: death to the old self, the rising of the new. Wisdom has said this could only be metaphorical, not a real experience. But God counters that use of the word “only” and explains that it is both mythical and real, it is His means by which finite, sinful people will be able to live with a holy God, “that you might see My face and live.”

Lewis and Literary Theory

Lewis responds to Frazer’s anthropology by applying knowledge from his own areas of expertise: literary and linguistic theory and clarifying the relationship between myth, fact and revelation. “It is but truth, not fact” is a concept seeded into Lewis by his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, during the famous chat they had on Oxford grounds which led to Lewis’s conversion. The seed Tolkien planted bloomed also into an essay Lewis later wrote, “Myth Became Fact.” It provides a distinction between myth and legend, myth and truth, myth and factuality. It describes myth in a way that no other literary analyst, as far as I know, had done. Lewis says myths are not merely legends, much less allegories, or even untrue. He says that myths allow us to experience, to “taste,” an archetypal truth that gives rise to many truths.

Lewis and Tolkien (and G.K. Chesterton as well) believed that God prepared the way for Jesus Christ through the Jews by law and prophecy and through the pagans by imagination. Stories of a dying but living god seized the pagan sensibility. There are myths that humans invent and then there is the one that God invented: All life does come only from plants that die in winter only to rise again. All plants really do provide a seed that dies yet creates a much bigger life.

Jesus himself seems to acknowledge these pagan ideas when he answers the request from the Greeks in John 12:20-25: Predicting his own death, he continues, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

The voice of God here says that Wisdom’s words also consist of “myth and metaphor” but Wisdom is unaware that they do. This idea that literal language was not distinctly different or free from figurative language was first advanced by Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and radicalized by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). But no modern literary theorists advanced it until I.A. Richards in 1936. It became a central tenet to the deconstruction theories of Jacque Derrida and Paul deMan much later in the 20th century. That Lewis was arguing it in 1933 shows he was ahead of his time.

Whither Mysticism?

What has all this to do with mystical wonder? This passage illustrates an intellectual dimension of mystical wonder. It portrays the astounding way God reaches us through all we experience as meaning. The One revealed as The Word is the essence of meaningfulness. When we want to open a door to a transcendent dimension we use myth and metaphor. When God wants to, He uses human lives.

*Latin: the sin of Adam

The Mystical Experience of Christmas

Christmas: the idea that the creator of 200 billion galaxies was born as one of us, a helpless infant on earth, in recent historical times. Needless to say it has inspired millions of songs and works of art. Indeed, it’s fair to say there would be no western art or literature without it. Doctrinal propositions do not suffice. We will never get to the end of it. It is beyond us.

What is the mystical hold this story has upon us?

G. K. Chesterton, with his unique power of insight, meditates upon what makes the birth of this one being unique, until he arrives at its essence.

from The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton

No other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in
fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced
on us by the word “Bethlehem.” No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage
seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or
too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too
occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go
to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it
because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical, or any number of
other things in separation; but not because it was itself.

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The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend
or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our
minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which
are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero-worship.

It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously, to the wonders to be found at
the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from
the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can some times take
us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor.

It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own
house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if
he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It
is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made
of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us
and pass.

It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that is there made eternal;
all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange
fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the
lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings
fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the
shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over
something more human than humanity.

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When metaphors become real

Continuing from the previous installment from C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress.

….. As a man in a dream talks without fear to his dead friend, and only afterwards bethinks himself, “It was a ghost! I have talked with a ghost!” and wakes screaming: even so John sprang up as he saw what he had done.

“I have been praying,” he said. “It is the Landlord under a new name. It is the rules and the black hole and the slavery dressed out in a new fashion to catch me. And I am caught…”

But this was insupportable to him and he said that he had only fallen into a metaphor. Even Mr. Wisdom had confessed that Mother Kirk and the Stewards gave an account of the truth in picture writing. And one must use metaphors. The feelings and the imagination needed that support. “The great thing,” said John, “is to keep the intellect free from them: to remember that they are metaphors.”

John continues onward but the trail down into this Grand Canyon becomes so treacherous he finds he must call upon “Mr. Wisdom’s ‘Absolute’ incessantly….He knew now that he was praying, but he thought he had drawn the fangs of that knowledge.” Finally, the path becomes so dark that he fears falling and stops to rest, hungry and thirsty as he is.

From The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 8, chapter V

Then I dreamed that once more a Man came to him in the darkness and said, “You must pass the night where you are, but I have brought you a loaf and if you crawl along the ledge ten paces more you will find that a little fall of water comes down the cliff.”

“Sir,” said John. “I do not know your name and I cannot see your face, but I thank you. Will you not sit down and eat, yourself?”

“I am full and not hungry,” said the Man. “And I will pass on. But one word before I go. You cannot have it both ways.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Your life has been saved all this day by crying out to something which you call by many names, and you have said to yourself that you used metaphors.”

“Was I wrong, sir?”

“Perhaps not. But you must play fair. If its help is not a metaphor, neither are its commands. If it can answer when you call, then it can speak without your asking. If you can go to it, it can come to you.”

Afterword

John is confronted with the shortcomings of thinking of God as Universal Spirit, a great Mind of which we are each a small part. It’s easy to picture it, like a great mist or nebula of stars high above us.

But does this Mind truly have consciousness? If so, then it must have a will of its own. And so it must be able to initiate and not merely respond. (And how can we continue to refer to it with the neutral pronoun “it” when the only minds we know are either male or female?)

Avoiding such questions can keep us out of dangerous waters for a while. Universal Spirit, like the God of monism or pantheism, is a rather lame creature. As Lewis writes in another book, “The pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf.“

Jewish and Christian thought teach a concept quite different. Many would like to dispense with the Bible’s apparent metaphors for God too, but, Lewis writes, “it is with a shock that we discover [the Christian images of kingship] to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters–when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes besides you in the dark. But what If He were searching for us? Someone wholly other, such as you experience when you are fishing and there is a sudden tug at the end of the line. It’s alive!”

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A 20th century French philosopher, a 17th-century English poem, and a mystical experience

Here is proof that poetry can take us where flat statements cannot. This selection is twinned with the previous one, George Herbert’s poem. You will see why.

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The French philosopher Simone Weil was born in 1909 and lived only until 1942. Gifted with sharp intelligence and curiosity, she obtained an advanced degree in Philosophy from the Ecole Normale Superiuere and taught at a girls’ school. Her short life was marked by a restless search for truth and fighting for justice for the working class. Several times she rejected the academic life to work the soil with her bare hands. Some thought of her as “an unorthodox Marxist moving toward anarchism.” She helped the anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War and took part in the French resistance when the Germans invaded France. Yet she wrestled with belief in God and pursued truth passionately, allowing no ideologies or alliances to block her.

When the Nazis occupied France Weil eventually left for the United States. The French provisional government asked for her assistance and she moved to London. There she wanted to share in the sufferings of those in the occupied zone, but this self-imposed lack of nutrition along with her working to the point of exhaustion led to her death.

She published no books in her lifetime and few essays on religion. The record of her spiritual hunger and mystical experiences only came to light when her letters were published posthumously. She may be the most “heady” of 20th century thinkers to have a mystical experience.

From Waiting for God by Simone Weil

There was a young English Catholic there [at Solesmes Abbey] from whom I gained my first idea of the supernatural power of the sacraments because of the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to communion. Chance—for I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence—made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named “metaphysical.” In reading them later on, I discovered the poem…called “Love.”* I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.

In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them. In the Firetti the accounts of apparitions rather put me off if anything, like the miracles in the Gospel. Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.

*Titled “Love III” in most editions of Herbert’s works.

**The Abbey at Solesme, France.** By Bautsch – Own work, Public Domain

Infinite Love says: “Pull up a chair. Join me. Let’s dig in.”

George Herbert was a vicar in the Church of England as well as one of the most beloved poets of the 17th century. The monasteries on England were no more, but it is clear that neither all-out devotion to God nor mystical experience had disappeared. Herbert wrote many poems expressing a deep, affective devotion and an imagination awakened to God’s infinite love as found in Jesus.

The following poem is one of his best. It assumes knowledge of the New Testament’s simple teaching, “God is love.” With connotations of the communion rite, it describes our hesitancy to accept the grace of God. “Can I really join You, be with You, without becoming perfect first, without having earned the right?”

The poem had a momentous effect on the 20th century philosopher and social activist Simone Weil, as we will see in the next installment.

Love III

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.

“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here:”
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat:”
So I did sit and eat.

Quotation marks added to clarify who's speaking.

“Whatever struggles you have, transfer them to Me”

Sorry, fans, for the longest delay ever! Travels, new jobs, new schools, hurricanes, bees, sin.

Another from our series by John Amos Komensky. The pilgrim responds to Jesus’ welcoming words. He tells Jesus he will do whatever Jesus asks, to be nothing, so that Jesus will be everything.

Chapter 39 Their Betrothal

Jesus replies,

“I accept this from you, my son. Hold to this, become, call yourself, and remain my own. Mine, indeed, you were and are from all eternity, but you did not know it. I have long prepared for you that happiness to which I will now lead you; but you did not understand what I was doing. I have led you to yourself through strange paths and by round-about ways; you did not know this, nor what I, the ruler of all my chosen ones, intended. Neither did you perceive by what means I worked on you. But I was everywhere with you, and therefore somewhat guided you through these crooked paths, that I might at last bring you even closer to me. Neither the world, your guides, nor even Solomon could teach you. There is no way that they could enrich you, content you, satisfy the desires of your heart, because they didn’t have what you were searching for. But I will teach you everything, enrich you, and content you.

“This only I demand of you: that whatever you have seen in the world, and whatever struggles you have witnessed among people, you should transfer it to me, and lay the burden of it on me. This as long as you live, shall be your work and your task; of that which men seek there in the world, but don’t find—that is, peace and joy—I will give you in abundance.”

From Komensky’s The Labyrinth of the World. As with many of our selections this one is taken from The Protestant Mystics, selected and edited by Anne Fremantle, with an introduction by W. H. Auden. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964. I have modernized some of the syntax and vocabulary for contemporary readers.

How to Find What You Have Always Wanted

Continuing from the previous installment and the vision of the 17th-century Moravian educator and bishop John Amos Komensky. Recall that shortly before these mystical experiences Komensky lost his wife and children while fleeing war. We can be sure that, as Frank Laubach expressed it, Komensky had “the heart of his heart cut by suffering.” This passage continues his vision of Jesus Christ.

…Then He, seeing me overwhelmed with joy, spoke further to me: “Where, then, have you been, my son? Why have you tarried so long? By what path have you come? What have you sought in the world? Joy! Where could you see it but in God;

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and where could you seek God, but in His own temple, and what is the temple of the living God, but the living temple that He Himself has fashioned—your own heart? I saw, my son, that you went astray, but I want to see it no longer. I have brought you to your own self. I have led you into yourself. For here have I chosen my palace and my dwelling. If you want to dwell with me here, you will find here what you have vainly sought on earth: rest, comfort, glory, and abundance of all things. This I promise you, my son, that you will not be deceived here as you were there in the world.”

Christ’s words to Komensky confirm a concept often repeated in the New Testament letters, “Christ in you” (e.g., Col. 1:17). And it confirms many Old Testament verses too. That is because it may well be said that the entire aim of God as recounted in the Bible is to once again bring human beings into fellowship with Himself as it was—and perhaps even better than it was—before the Fall.

As with many of our selections this one is taken from The Protestant Mystics, selected and edited by Anne Fremantle, with an introduction by W. H. Auden. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964. I have modernized some of the syntax and vocabulary for contemporary readers.

The Pilgrim Desires to Flee from the World

John Amos Komensky was born in 1592 in Moravia. Well educated at several European universities, he became minister of a church at Fulneck, Moravia. War caused him to flee to Brandeis but his wife and children died along the way. In a hut in Brandeis he wrote the spiritual masterpiece from which our selections are taken, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.

The wars in Europe continued to harass Komensky all his life. He lived in Silesia, then England, where the civil war in 1642 forced him to move to Sweden. He was appointed Moravian (Unity) Bishop of Lissa in 1648. Poland and Sweden began to fight, resulting in Komensky’s home and library being destroyed by fire. He moved to Amsterdam. He died there and is buried at the church of the French Protestants. Following the scholarly custom of the day, Komensky took a Latin name, Comenius, by which he is found in most historical writings.

According to the Encyclopedia of World Biography, Komensky is considered the father of modern education. He advised Protestant governments all over Europe. He was the first to promote universal education, picture books for children written in their native tongues (instead of Latin), and other innovations. His life belies the notion that those who believe in heaven and hell do not focus on improving life on earth.

This selection is one of those that is not happy and bright. But, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the “good news” of Christ does not begin with comfort and affirmation. Hang on; our next installment continues with Komensky’s vision of Christ.

**John Amos Kemensky, from The Labyrinth of the World, Chapter 26**

(The Pilgrim beholds the Dying and Dead. The Bottomless Abyss beyond the World.)

3. Looking now about me, I behold the ways of the dying, of whom there were many; and I see a mournful thing–to wit, that all gave up the ghost with horror, lamentation, fear and trembling, knowing now what would befall them and whither they would go. Although I was afraid, yet wishing to ever acquire more knowledge, I walked through the rows of the dead to the limits of the world and of light. Here, where others, shutting their eyes, blindly cast forth their dead, I threw off the glasses of Falsehood, rubbed my eyes, and leaned forward as far as I dared. And I behold awful darkness and gloom, of which the mind of man can find neither the end nor the ground; and there was here naught but worms, frogs, serpents, scorpions, rottenness, stench, the smell of brimstone and pitch that overwhelmed body and soul, generally unspeakable horror.

(The Pilgrim falls to the Ground terrified.)

4. Then My bowels quaked, my whole body trembled, and, terrified, I fell swooning to the ground, and cried mournfully: “Oh, most miserable, wretched, unhappy mankind! This then, is your last glory! This the conclusion of your many splendid deeds! This the term of your learning and much wisdom over which you glory so greatly! This the rest and repose that you crave after countless labors and struggles! This the immortality for which you ever hope! Oh, that I had never been born, never passed through the gate of life! For after the many vanities of the world, nothing but darkness and horror are my part! O God, God, God! God, if you are a God, have mercy on wretched me!”

Accord and discord

Continuing with Frank Laubach’s amazing letters home, introduced a couple of installments ago.

March 23, 1930

….An hour of any day may be made perfect by merely choosing. It is perfect if one looks toward God that entire hour, waiting for His leadership all through the hour and trying hard to do every tiny thing exactly as God wishes it done, as perfectly as possible. No emotions are necessary.

April 18, 1930

I have tasted a thrill in fellowship with God which has made anything discordant with God disgusting. This afternoon the possession of God has caught me up with such sheer joy that I thought I never had known anything like it. God was so close and so amazingly lovely that I felt like melting all over with a strange blissful contentment. Having had this experience, which comes to me now several times a week, the thrill of filth repels me, for I know its power to drag me from God. And after an hour of close friendship with God my soul feels clean, as new fallen snow.

“…this direct first hand grasping of God Himself…”

Continuing with the letters of Frank Laubach. See previous post for information on Laubach.

March 15, 1930

This week a new, and to me marvelous experience, has come out of my loneliness. I have been so desperately lonesome that it was unbearable save by talking with God. And so every waking moment of the week I have been looking toward him, with perhaps the exception of an hour or two.

Last Thursday night I was listening to a phonograph in Lumbatan and allowing my heart to commune when something broke within me, and I longed to lift my own will up and give it completely to God.

How infinitely richer this direct first hand grasping of God Himself is, than the old method which I used and recommended for years, the reading of endless devotional books. Almost it seems to me now that the very Bible cannot be read as a substitute for meeting God soul to soul and face to face. And yet, how was this new closeness achieved? Ah, I know now that it was by cutting the very heart of my heart and by suffering. Somebody was telling me this week that nobody can make a violin speak

alex-blajan-199244-unsplash the last depths of human longing until that soul has been made tender by some great anguish. I do not say it is the only way to the heart of God, but must witness that it has opened an inner shrine for me which I never entered before.

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Across the Chasm–Underwater