Tag: Christianity

Across the Chasm–Underwater

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Photo by Alex Rose on Unsplash

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?”

Photo by geoff trodd on Unsplash

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.

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

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.


	


	



			
				


			

			
In the House of Wisdom
		
	
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Continuing with C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress.  John has grown up and left to pursue the vision of his Island, which filled him with immense longing.  The path westward toward the Island is interrupted by something like the Grand Canyon (most likely representing sin), which no one can cross.  John and his companion, Vertue, travel north and south along the canyon’s rim seeking help from many people representing different world views and ways of life, but no one understands or believes his goal is real.  (Mother Kirk is the exception, but they reject her offer of guidance.)  Vertue has become very sick and weak from these interactions and needs healing.  And then they arrive at the house of Mr. Wisdom.  Here, in allegorical form, is a defense of Longing, the desire for something this world can never satisfy.





Old Mr. Wisdom sits them down on his porch, looking west, and begins to speak. 





From The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book 7, Chapter IX





“The words between you and and Reason were true.  What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.  If water will not set a man at ease, then be sure it not thirst, or not thirst only, that tormented him: he wanted drunkenness to cure his dullness, or talk to cure his solitude, or the like.  How, indeed, do we know our desires save by their satisfaction?  When do we know them until we say, “Ah, this was what I wanted”?  And if there were any desire which it was natural for man to feel but impossible for man to satisfy, would not the nature of this desire remain to him always ambiguous?





“If old tales were true, if a man without putting off humanity could indeed pass the frontiers of our country, if he could be, and yet be a man, in that fabled East and fabled West, then indeed at the moment of fruition, the raising of the cup, the assumption of the crown, the kiss of the spouse–then first, to his backward glance, the long roads of desire that he had trodden would become plain in all their winding, and when he found, he would know what it was that he had sought. 





A lady named Contemplation takes John by moonlight to see the island.
Illustration by Michael Hague (c) 1981





“I am old and full of tears, and I see that you also begin to feel the sorrow that is born with us.  Abandon hope: do not abandon desire.  Feel no wonder that these glimpses of your Island so easily confuse themselves with viler things, and are so easily blasphemed. Above all, never try to keep them, never try to revisit the same place or time wherein the vision was accorded to you.  You will pay the penalty of all who could bind down to one place or time within our country that which our country cannot contain.  Have you not heard from the Steward of the sin of idolatry, and how, in their old chronicles, the manna turned to worms if any tried to hoard it?  Be not greedy, be not passionate; you will but crush dead on your own breast with hot, rough hands the thing loved. But if ever you incline to doubt that the thing you long for is something real, remember what your own experience has taught you.





“Think that it is a feeling, and at once the feeling has no value.  Stand sentinel at your own mind, watching for that feeling, and you will find–what shall I say?–a flutter in the heart, an image in the head, a sob in the throat: and was that your desire?  You know that it was not, and that not feeling whatever will appease you, that feeling, refine it a you will, is but one more spurious claimant–spurious as the gross lusts of which the giant* speaks.





“Let us conclude then that what you desire is no state of yourself at all, but something, for that very reason, Other and Outer. And knowing this you will find tolerable the truth that you cannot attain it. That the thing should be, is so great a good that when you remember “it is” you will forget to be sorry that you can never have it….”





***





*The Spirit of the Age, Freudianism, which says spiritual longing is merely disguised sexual desire. 





Afterword





Wisdom is not the lady Wisdom of the Bible; he is the spokesman for Philosophical Idealism.  In the next chapter John discovers that Wisdom’s children do not adhere to his strict diet.  The children of philosophical idealism include Marx, Herbert Spencer, Spinoza, Rudolf Steiner, Kant, and Bernard Bosanquet (a 19th century English philosophical idealist and neo-Hegelian). They enjoy rich foods from other world-views and their own views are all over the map.





In his next session with John, which I will skip, Wisdom explains philosophical idealism without, of course, calling it that.  The explanation is allegorical, like the rest of the novel, and terse.  But those qualities may make it easier to follow if you’re unacquainted with the topic.  If you are familiar with Hindu philosophy, theosophy, or typical New Age thinking, the similarities will leap out at you:  





The “esoteric” wisdom is that John and this Other he longs for are actually of one and the same substance.  “Atman is Brahman” is the relevant Hindu saying, that is, the essence of the soul is the same as the essence of God. The Island John envisions is a glimpse of the great Universal Mind of which each of our minds is a small part or microcosm, not knowing its true nature. 





Following these talks, Vertue is completely healed.  Physically, anyway.  He says he must go onward, down into the canyon bottom and then up the other side.  He and John argue, for has not Wisdom told them that the other side cannot be reached, except by contemplation?  To Vertue it matters not; he must go on even if he dies.  Vertue is willing to abandon every scrap of creature comfort, including friendship.  John decides he must follow him. 





And we will find out if Mr. Wisdom was right about this: that our spiritual longings are real and good and must be kept alive, but their attainment is hopeless. 





Grand Canyon photo by Lionello DelPiccolo on Unsplash

	


	



			
				


			

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

		
George HerbertGeorge 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; 


pics-of-jesus-hd-images-backgrounds-christs-mobile


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.

	


	



			
				


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Christ Appears to the Pilgrim
		
	
	

		
This selection from John Amos Komensky follows on the previous installment, where you can read about his interesting life. 


The Labyrinth of the World, Chapter XXXVIII


The Pilgrim receives Christ as his guest


(Our Illumination comes from on High.)


Behold, a clear light appeared on high, and raising my eyes towards it, I see the window above me full of brightness, and from out of that brightness there appeared One, in aspect, indeed, similar to a man, but in His splendor truly God. His countenance shone exceedingly, yet could human eyes gaze at it, for it didn’t cause terror; rather it had a loveliness such as I had never seen in the world. He then—kindness itself, friendliness itself—addressed me in these most sweet words:


(Wherein the Source of all Light and all Joy lies)


2. “Welcome, welcome, my son and dear brother.” And having said these words, He embraced me, and kissed me kindly. There came from him the most delightful scent, and I was seized by such unspeakable delight that tears flowed from my eyes, and I didn’t know how to respond to so unexpected a greeting. I could only sigh deeply and gaze at Him, feeling meek.


(to be continued)


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–Piero della Francesca, The Resurrection, c. 1463-5, fresco, 225 x 200 cm (Museo Civico, Sansepolcro, Italy)


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…”
		
	
	

		
Frank LaubachContinuing 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-unsplashthe 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. 


Photo by Alex Blăjan on Unsplash