The day of the Last Judgement! That day no one knows –only God the Father knows — but its signs are given in the Gospel and in the Apocalypse of the holy Apostle John the Theologian. Revelation speaks of the events at the end of the world and of the Last Judgement primarily in images and in a veiled manner, but the Holy Fathers have explained these images, and there is an authentic Church tradition that speaks clearly concerning the signs of the approach of the end, and concerning the Last Judgement.
Before the end of life on earth there will be agitation, wars, civil war, hunger, earthquakes… Men will suffer from fear, will die from ex­pectation of calamity. There will be no life, no joy of life, but a tor­mented state of falling away from life. But there will be a falling away not only from life, but from faith also, and when the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?  (St. Luke 18: 8.) Men will become proud, ungrateful, rejecting Divine law. Together with the falling away from life will be also a weakening of moral life. There will be an exhaustion of good and an increase of evil.

Of these times the holy Apostle John the Theologian speaks in his God-inspired work, the Apocalypse. He himself says that he “was in the Spirit” when he wrote it: this means that the Holy Spirit Himself was in him when under the form of various images the fate of the Church and the world was opened to him; and so this is a Divine Revelation.

The Apocalypse represents the fate of the Church in the image of a woman who hides herself in those times in the wilderness: she does not show herself in public life; as today in Russia. In public life the leading role will be played by forces which prepare the possibility for the appearance of Antichrist.

Antichrist will be a man, and not the devil incarnate. “Anti” means “old,” and it also signifies “in place of” or “against.” Antichrist is a man who desires to be in place of Christ, to occupy His place and possess what Christ should possess: he desires to possess the attraction of Christ and authority over the whole world. And Antichrist will receive that authority before his destruction and the destruction of the world.

What is known of this man — Antichrist? His precise ancestry is unknown: his father is completely unknown, and his mother a foul pre­tended virgin. He will be a Jew of the tribe of Dan. He will be very intelligent and endowed with skill in handling people. He will be fas­cinating and kind. The philosopher Vladimir Soloviev worked long at presenting the advent and person of Antichrist. He made careful use of all material on this question, not only Patristic but also Moslem, and he worked out a brilliant picture.

Before the advent of Antichrist there is already being prepared in the world the possibility of his appearance: The mystery of iniquity doth already work (II Thes. 2:7). The forces preparing for his appearance fight above all against the lawful Imperial authority. The holy Apostle Paul says that Antichrist cannot be manifested until what withholdeth be taken away (II Thes. 2: 6-7). St. John Chrysostom explains that the “with­holding one” is the lawful pious authority: such an authority fights with evil. For this reason the “mystery,” already at work in the world, fights with this authority; it desires a lawless authority. When the “mystery” decisively achieves that authority, nothing will any longer hinder the appearance- of Antichrist.

Fascinating, intelligent, kind, he will be merciful — he will act with mercy and goodness; but not for the sake of mercy and goodness, but for the strengthening of his authority. And when he will have strengthened it to the point where the whole world acknowledges him, then he will reveal his face.

For his capital he will choose Jerusalem, because it was here that the Saviour revealed His Divine teaching and His person, and it was here that the entire world was called to the blessedness of goodness and sal­vation. But the world did not acknowledge Christ and crucified Him in Jerusalem; under Antichrist, however, the whole world will acknowledge his authority, and Jerusalem will become the capital of the world.

Having attained the pinnacle of authority, Antichrist will demand of men the acknowledgement that he has attained what no earthly power had ever attained and none can attain, and he will demand worship of himself as a higher being, as a god.

Soloviev well describes the character of his activity as “Supreme Ruler.” He will do what is pleasing to all — on the condition of being recognized as Supreme Authority. He will allow the Church to exist, will permit her Divine services, will promise to build magnificent churches — on the condition that all recognize him as “Supreme Being” and worship him. Antichrist will have a personal hatred for Christ; he will sec in Him a rival and look upon Him as a personal enemy. He will live by this hatred and rejoice in men’s apostasy from Christ.

Under Antichrist there will be an immense falling away from the faith. Many bishops will change in faith and in justification will point to the brilliant situation of the Church. The search for compromise will be the characteristic disposition of men. Straightforwardness of confes­sion will disappear. Men will cleverly justify their fall, and gracious evil will support such a general disposition. There will be in men the habit of apostasy from truth, and the sweetness of compromise and sin.

Antichrist will allow men everything, as long as they “fall down and worship him”; and the whole world will submit to him. And then there will appear the two righteous men, who will fearlessly preach the faith and accuse Antichrist. According to Church tradition they are the two Prophets of the Old Testament, Elijah and Enoch, who did not taste of death, but will taste it now for three days; and in three days they must rise. Their death will call forth the great rejoicing of Antichrist and his servants. Their resurrection will plunge them into great confu­sion and terror. And then will come the end of the world.

The Apostle Peter says that the first world was made out of wa­ter — an image of the primordial chaos, and perished by water — in the Flood. And now the world is reserved unto fire. The earth and the works that are therein shall he burned up (II Peter 3:5-7, 10). All the elements will ignite. This present world will perish in a single instant. In an instant all will be changed.

And the Sign of the Son of God will appear: the Sign of the Cross.

The whole world, having willingly submitted to Antichrist, will weep. Everything is finished forever: Antichrist killed; the end of his kingdom of warfare with Christ; the end, and one is held accountable; one must answer to the true God.

“The end of the world” signifies not the annihilation of the world, but its transformation. Everything will be transformed suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye. The dead will rise in new bodies: their own, but renewed, just as the Saviour rose in His own body and on it were traces of wounds from the nails and spear, yet it possessed new faculties, and in this sense it was a new body. It is not clear whether this new body will be such as that with which Adam was made, or whether it will be an entirely new body.

And the Lord will appear in glory on the clouds. Trumpets will sound, and loud, with power! They will sound in the soul and conscience! All will become clear to the human conscience. The Prophet Daniel, speaking of the Last Judgement, relates how the Ancient of days, the Judge, sits on His throne, and before Him is a fiery stream (Daniel 7: 9-10). Fire is a purifying element; it burns sin. Woe to a man if sin has become a part of his nature: then the fire will burn the man himself.

This fire will be kindled within a man: seeing the Cross, some will rejoice, but others will fall into confusion, terror, and despair. Thus will men be divided instantly. The very state of a man’s soul casts him to one side or the other, to right or to left.

The more consciously and persistently a man strives toward God in his life, the greater will be his joy when he hears: “Come unto Me, ye blessed.” And conversely: the same words will call the fire of horror and torture on those who did not desire Him, who fled and fought or blasphemed Him during their lifetime!

The Last Judgement knows of no witnesses or written protocols! Everything is inscribed in the souls of men and these records, these “books,” are opened at the Judgement. Everything becomes clear to all and to oneself.

And some will go to joy, while others — to horror.

When “the books are opened,” it will become clear that the roots of all vices lie in the human soul. Here is a drunkard or a lecher: when the body has died, some may think that sin is dead too. No! There was an inclination to sin in the soul, and that sin was sweet to the soul, and if the soul has not repented of the sin and has not freed itself from it, it will come to the Last Judgement also with the same desire for sin. It will never satisfy that desire and in that soul there will be the suffering of hatred. It will accuse everyone and everything in its tortured condition, it will hate everyone and everything. “There will be gnashing of teeth” of powerless malice and the unquenchable fire of hatred.

A “fiery gehenna” — such is the inner fire. “Here there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Such is the state of hell.

I want to keep this as brief as possible, because there are countless better places to go and hash out these kinds of issues than Internet Monk, and a lot of times there is more heat generated than light.  Touching divine matters,  John Wesley said that in order to be effective we needed cool heads and warm hearts.  Alas, I have a cold heart and a hot head, and on this Lazarus Saturday, the eve of our descent into Orthodox Holy Week, I want to keep both of these in check.

There are two propositions that I have come to believe:

The Church is visible, and it is One
Heresy is crueller than murder

Whatever you may believe about the truth value of the first proposition, there was a time when it was true.  From the time of Constantine until the Fourth Council at Chalcedon in 451, the Great Church was visibly and organizationally united.

About fifteen years ago, I had a strange dream.  I was working in a homeless shelter/soup kitchen, and Saint Patrick came in dressed as a modern homeless man.  His sanctity, though, was apparent to all of us and he preached an impassioned sermon.  Many of the homeless men accepted Christ.  Afterwards the saint asked me where the Church was so that he could  baptize the new flock.  I asked him which church.

Which Church?  the saint replied.  The  Church, of course.  Where is it?  Point me the way.   In my day, you could point me there.

Now, there were Arians in south of France in Patrick’s day, but we won’t go there for now.  when I awoke from the dream I was convinced that what I had been taught all my life about the Church of Christ, that it was basically a sort of a roll call of the redeemed, was false.

The second proposition is a little touchier.  Orthodoxy means “correct glory” , not “correct belief” or “correct administration”.  There needs to a place where everything fits in its proper place.  Ideas have consequences and they also try desperately to reproduce themselves in other minds.  I am doing this right now.

“Is it too slight a thing for you that you should feed in the good pasture, that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pastures? Or that you should drink of the clear waters, that you must foul the rest with your feet?  As for My flock, they must eat what you tread down with your feet and drink what you foul with your feet!” (Ez. 34:18-19)

When I was in South America as a Protestant missionary, I came across a small, isolated church where the pastor had sort of cobbled together the most odious portions of the doctrines of several Protestant sects and was preaching them vociferously.  His flock wasn’t large, but it was fervent, and very, very sad.  He was himself more miserable than Sylvia Plath baking her last batch of cookies, and his followers, practically all women, reflected his pathologies.   They alone were the bulwark  against which Antichrist in his pluriform manifestations raged constantly.

“Fear not, [vanishingly] little flock…”

‘Why did this guy ever leave the Catholic Church?’  I thought to myself.   ‘He’d be better off walking up a mountainside on his bleeding knees to kiss a statue of the Virgin than he is infecting other people with his neuroses from the pulpit every Sunday.  Hell, he’d be better off drinking beer and listening to a lot of 70s R&B.’

Fortunately, God is good, and most of us, the effects of heresy are pretty minimal.  Most heresiarchs are not as culpable as my South American example.   A heresiarch is like a doctor of podiatry who believes his club foot is normal, and attempts to reproduce it in all of the patients who come to him.

Since all things come from God and all things are in the process of returning to God, there always manages to be some sweet water mixed in with all the foul.  But why not seek out the fountain of living water that flows unmixedly and uninterruptedly from the Throne of God?

Maybe I am deceived, and worse yet, attempting to deceive all of you.  That is a possibility.  My South American pastor certainly operated with a degree of self-assurance I have never been able to achieve.  Maybe I have just found a heresy that is nourishing my own sinfulness.  If that is true, let each man guard himself as best he can, and for Christ’s sake, since we are all in such a perilous predicament, let us cut each other some slack.

I know this doesn’t answer the specific question “Why did you become Orthodox, rather than Catholic, or stay Pentecostal, or return to neo-Calvinism, or go emergent like your brother?”

All I can say is that since my earliest thoughts, I have only ever wanted Jesus the Christ, even though I may not have known it at the time.  You can find a lot of Him in a lot of places, but the fullness, the pleroma, of Him who fills all is the Church [Eph. 1.23], and I am convinced that that Church is the Holy Synod of Orthodoxy.

She’s Brazilian, and her blog is in Portuguese, but that shouldn’t deter you from a visit.   Google Translate is kind to her site, but the real pleasure is in her drawings.   By turns whimsical, fantastic, and sensual, Cynthia França wields a pencil like Logen Ninefingers can wield a sword, and it cuts just as deeply.  I wasn’t able to determine if Miss França has ever published any of her drawings professionally, or if anyone had ever tapped her to illustrate a book.  There were several drawings on her site that seemed to come from a fictional source; Soccertown kids, all appropriately named,  a set of drawings entitled Les Reines D’Autobus, but I was frustrated by my total ignorance of Brazilian popular culture.

Since reading L. Sprague De Camp’s planetary romances of the Viagens Interplanetárias in my earliest adolescence, Brazil has always seemed like a mythical country in its own right.  I don’t mean to disparage the tremendous challenges faced by the average Brazilian in navigating the real world, but when I visited there, I felt more like I was living inside a legend than I have anywhere else.  There has to be some compensation for living in a country where there is so much poverty and injustice, and oddly, there is.  Nature is exuberant there, beyond anything we know in North America away from the redwood groves on the West Coast.  Taking the bus from Santos on the coast to São Paulo was like dreaming with my eyes open.   Music, better music than you can pay to hear in most venues, wafts out of the windows and down to the street.

Because of this I’m surprised Brazil hasn’t produced more fantasy literature.  Some of the tales of the bandeirantes, with which Brazilian schoolchildren are as familiar as American children used to be with the stories of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, definitely had a mythopoetic flavor to them.  Miss França has a fantastic side to her as well.  In her online portfolio there are drawings of Conan, Dejah Thoris, and Desire of the Endless, as well as numerous sketches from what Miss França refers to as her “pocket mythology”.  I learned that the phrase Portuguese would use for the Endless is os Perpétuos.  From one Gaiman fan to another Gaiman fan, I salute you.

Miss França also has produced an occasional series of sketches of Biblical women.  You should really go see these, because they are not likely to see the light of day between the pages of your Zondervan Purpose Oriented Planner Bible.  Mary and Martha are here, as are Herodias and a slightly older Salomé, three of David’s wives, Jezebel and her daughter Athalia.  Even though Miss França appears to have a soft spot for the bad girls, there are plenty of good girls; Ruth and Orpah are here, as are the three daughters of Job.  My favorite, however, is the sketch of Leah and Rachel, the wives of Jacob.  Miss França takes the liberty of depicting Leah not as strictly plain, but just frank and transparent as opposed to Rachel’s smoldering and mysterious glamour.

Now, I know I have maybe thirty two nanoWarhols of artistic critical influence, but I would dearly love to see Miss França exercise her considerable talents somewhere where she could be more widely appreciated.

My life took a turn for the better when I stopped listening to too much AM radio.  My bad habit started before 9-11-2001 actually.  At first, I looked at it as a sort of a harmless hobby, entertainment.  I lived in Miami at the time and Miami was kind of a hothouse for political radio, both in English and in Spanish.  The Spanish side of the forum was obsessed with Fidel Castro, and who hated him the worst.  If you thought Fidel Castro wasn’t entirely evil, say, maybe like Idi Amin Dada- or Joseph Stalin-level evil rather than Satan-level, the Spanish media in Miami couldn’t say enough bad about you.  The English-speaking media was a little more subtle.  English-speaking Miami was always heavily Jewish, and their patron saint was Neil Rogers, an old-school agnostic, openly homosexual Jew who gleefully skewered everybody, left or right, who held themselves above the common corruption that covers all of us, as Willie Loman said it, “from the stench of the di-dee to the shroud of the grave”.

Neil Rogers passed away from cancer in 2010.   I am not alone in saying that I miss him.  Already in his heyday in the first Clinton administration, though, strident conservative voices were vying for recognition.  Rush Limbaugh was syndicated, and we in Miami had the unparalleled blessing of having G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame  to listen to five days a week.  My favorite broadcast of his was where he instructed his listeners on how to conduct themselves in a knife fight.  I have not had to use that information yet, but you never know when it will come in handy.

What was a pastime before the attacks on the Twin Towers became an obsession afterwards.  I needed an answer for the question “Why did these men do this?  Why did they hate us so much?”  Now, I had travelled abroad in Latin America and Spain, and had encountered the endemic anti-Americanism there.  I also remembered the rhetoric that issued from the Iranian Revolution after the overthrow of the Shah and during the  hostage crisis about America being the “Great Satan”.  That didn’t puzzle me as much as it did many of my compatriots, though, because I remembered the role that Britain and the US played in the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and the subsequent tyranny of the Shah and his family.  Don’t ask me how I learned about this, an event that took place when I was two, but I knew about it even in 1978 when Jimmy Carter decided to toss the Shah to the geopolitical Devil by refusing him military aid.  ”Good riddance” I thought back then, and still believe, although I am no fan of the Islamic Republic that followed him.

It may seem cruel for me to point this out, but what I remember the most about 9/11 was the great sense of relief everybody seemed to feel.  After the initial shock wore off (during which the churches were full, something that hasn’t happened since), there was something of a carnival attitude.  Like the Fourth of July, the American flag was everywhere.  People started greeting each other on the streets again.  It was like the past fifty years had been erased and we all woke up in Mayberry one morning.  All of the Medician post-Cold War moral ambiguity of the Clintons vanished overnight, replaced by the resolute and vigilant Proconsul Bush, Junior.  America could breath easily again.

We finally had another enemy to replace the late, lamented Communists.

Actually, we now had two enemies.  The exterior, but least dangerous enemy, was “Radical” Islam.  It is to the credit of whatever propaganda machine coined that phrase that the “Radical” has remained in place for over a decade, presumably to differentiate it from the tepid sort of Islam practiced by the family of the girl my son is currently dating, which is curiously like the Christianity practiced by my family where time spent in the detritus of Asian popular culture, playing video games, responding to Facebook status updates, or watching TV outweigh by a factor of ten or so attendance upon divine services [if any of my family reads this, you know me as the worst offender] .

The worse enemy was the internal one.  Almost overnight after 9/11, on AM radio, the Real Enemy became the Donkeys who, depending on who you were listening to, were traitors worse than Benedict Arnold or Vikdun Quisling. Now, this was puzzling to me. I came to consciousness in the highly politicized atmosphere of the late 60s, and there were a lot of Democrats around then. They drew a lot of criticism, then as now, but there was never any sense that they were actually traitors. That kind of rhetoric has been left for our day, although it is hard to get a bead on just who is the target of this treason.  It always seems to be “people like me”, you know, Christians if you are a Christian, small business people (“the backbone of our nation”, as both sides delight in calling them, although given the way they have been treated another body part would be more accurate) if you are a small business person.  White if you are white, although this is usually couched in high sounding phrases about “European Christian civilization” standing against the onslaught of “illegal immigration” and “multiculturalism”  .

And that, Dear Constant reader, is how your humble Mule ended up on a book cover as the symbol of evil, with a pistol pointed at the head of dear old Uncle Sam.  Uncle Sam, whoever he represents, appears to be returning the love.   I used to wear a jacket that looked exactly like that in 1971 with the peace sign, the Have A Nice Day face, the Yang-Yin symbol.  It was as if the artist had been rummaging through my attic.

I don’t wonder that there isn’t a good amount of paranoia and hate on the other side.  Half an hour spent at places like the Daily Kos (http://www.dailykos.com/) or Democratic Underground (http://www.democraticunderground.com) should convince you that there is little love showered there upon the knuckle-dragging “racist” “Dominionist”  troglodytes who vote Republican.  The same spirit is at work there; the Re”thug”licans are subhumans whose agenda is to ‘get’  ”people like me”; agnostic if you are agnostic, gay if you are gay, sexually permissive if you are…, well, you get my drift.  You are hated.  They hate you.  To be fair, this kind of Manichaean hatred may be an outgrowth of our two party system, but I don’t know whether the Canadian system that seems to require thirty five contending parties on the Left to ensure the election of Stephen Harper is any improvement.

Now we come to what I really want to say.  There is nothing that can result from this sort of polarization except violence.  Marshall McLuhan stated that all violence was an attempt to establish an identity, which dovetailed precisely with some of things Fr. Stephen Freeman discussed recently on his blog concerning the distinction between the True and the False Self  (this post would be a great place to start).  The True Self is who were are in Christ, and the Church defines this a being a person in communion with other persons and ultimately, in communion with the Persons of the Trinity in the community of the Church.  Over against this is the False Self, the Individual, who stands in opposition to other individuals who, in the jostling of everyday life, are generally experienced as being obstacles, as being In My Way.

The False Self, since it has Nothing at its core,  needs an Enemy.  Only against the Enemy can the false Self begin to coalesce and direct its energies and experience something akin to life.   This is Who I Am, says this poor ragged construct of ten thousand conflicting thoughts, impulses, lusts, and passions.  They hate me: the preps, the hipsters, those goddamned sophisticated arugula-eating atheists, the smug religious hypocrites, the bullies, the hucksters, those self-congratulatory heteronormative cisgendered privileged bastards, the multiculturalists, the academics, the favored, the envious.  Oderunt ergo sum.  ”I am hated, therefore I am”  And as the pressure drops at the core, the winds around this non-existent center pick up speed until a perfect storm of violence erupts.

Worse than that, this rootlessness this centerlessness seems to come with the territory as an American.  Someday, when the story of humanity on this continent is fully told, something accurate may be said about my country, the Country With No Real Name, with an algorithm where its heart should be.  When we arrived on the shores here from Europe, we experienced the Other as Heathen and Savage, and this predilection has never departed from us.   From this corelessness and the inevitable fury that surrounds it proceeded the genocide of the Native Americans, the dismemberment of Mexico, Sherman’s March Through Georgia, the Sacco-Vanzetti Trials, the Red Scare, the McCarthy Hearings, Vietnam and I don’t see it ending soon.  Will my son and daughter have to live in a landscape of Bed Bath and Beyonds and Applebees deteriorating into a moonscape of Title Loan shops, Pawn shops, liquor stores and Buy Here/Pay Here used car lots as our common life and wealth is siphoned off to pursue another interminable war in some other unpronounceable place?

We need Jesus.  Not the American Jeezus who saves the false Self, but the real Jesus who kills it.  I am capable of Newton, of the Boston bombing, even of 9/11.  How many times have idly daydreamed about these or worse events in which I can get rid of all those bad people who do all those evil deeds so that the good people, like me, can get on with their good lives?  Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison.  I am no longer capable of discerning between good and evil,  I want to put the fruit back on the branch.

After introducing the Inklings as a group, Father Malcolm discusses each of them in turn; first CS Lewis, whose spiritual biography Father Malcolm presents as a healing of that great divide which was just beginning to open in lewis’ day between what was true, that which could be verified by Science [always capitalized], and that which Mattered, which was all of these myths and stories that moved the soul so deeply but which were of no value for discerning the truth.  From Lewis, Father Malcolm proceeds to a discussion of one of Lewis’ earliest and closest friends, Owen Barfield.  Barfield is hard to discuss in Christian terms; he comes with a lot of Anthroposophic baggage, but Father Malcolm does a first-rate job in addressing Barfield’s idiosyncrasies in a way that can help the average Christian to begin to process them.   The Barfield lecture comes with an extra surprise; Barfield’s grandson, namesake, and literary executor Owen A. Barfield joins Father Malcolm to discuss the reprinting of his grandfather’s imaginative works, of which there were a lot more than saw publication in his lifetime.

Father Malcolm then moves on to a discussion of Charles Williams, and his exegesis of Williams’ biography and the class-related handicaps with which Williams struggled all his life were particularly illuminating to this American.  Father Malcolm treats Williams’ poetry as central to any understanding of Williams’ thinking, which is something that Williams himself would have wanted.  Charles Williams’ poetry gets overlooked because it is difficult.  I don’t think Father Malcolm addresses this issue clearly, but those who find his criticism, his theological writing, and his hermetic novels difficult because of his private vocabulary are bound to find his poetry almost inaccessible.  I know I do.  However, Father Malcolm points out that Williams, out of all the Inklings, is a better place to start than any of the others for a criticism of our common economic life, and this last five minutes of the Williams lecture are highly recommended because of this.

Ending with Tolkien, Father Malcolm saves the most famous of the Inklings for the last.  Surprisingly, he doesn’t spend a lot of time on the great  trilogy, but discusses a lot of Tolkien’s attitudes towards his own work.  He reads Tolkien’s poem Mythopoeia for a glimpse into what Tolkien understood himself as doing; subcreating in the image and after the fashion of the great Creator.  Then Father Malcolm investigates a lot of Tolkien’s source material; the Norse myths, the Anglo-Saxon literature with which Tolkien as a professor of Anglo-Saxon was intimately familiar.   The best line in Father Malcolm’s discourse comes towards the middle; ‘you have this one remarkable individual replacing an entire race  as a creator of mythological material’, which of course, is precisely what Tolkien was and did.

It would be jejune for  me to think I could fault Father Malcolm for what he failed to cover in this wonderful lectures.  If the good father is amenable to adding a second series [he has already moved on to Blake, a poet with whom I badly need to acquaint myself], he may wish to discuss Tolkien fandom, Charles Williams’ concept of co-inherence and the perichoreisis of the Holy Trinity, Owen Barfield’s links to Goethe and others of the the German Romantic Naturphilosophie, and Lewis’ literary criticism, especially The Allegory Of Love and The Discarded Image.

Links to the podcasts are hosted on this blog.  More people need to hear them.  The first lecture is here. Press on the Magic card below to download the corresponding lecture on that Inkling. There were some issues with the volume which I addressed in reposting them.

Full size Magic The Gathering cards:

C.S. Lewis
Charles Williams
Owen Barfield
J.R.R. Tolkien

From Orthodixie:

It’s the birthday of Flannery O’Connor [Savannah, Georgia (1925)] who wrote two novels and 32 short stories and who said: “I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.” When she was six, she and a chicken that she taught to walk backward appeared on the news. She later said: “I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”

She said, “When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. … Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

– Stolen from The Writer’s Almanac

Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol. Her response was, “If it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”
[Source]

Flannery O’Connor: “When I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me, it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified… The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature.”

Additional poignancy is added in that this year the Feast of the Annunciation abuts the Sunday of Orthodoxy.  I never got the appeal of Miss O’Connor’s writing for serious Protestants.  She is not at all sympathetic to them.  I hung out with a lot of neo-Calvinist, culture-engaging types who lionized her.  When I started reading her, I found her to be very dismissive of Protestantism, whether of the modernist, of the fundamentalist, or of this new-fangled presuppositionalist variety.  I think it has something to do with the radical nature of grace in Miss O’Connor’s fiction, which is indeed arresting, but which never comes about through The [classical Protestant] Word Of God Preached, but through [good ol' dirty Catholic] matter.  I am not ashamed to admit that it was Miss O’Connor’s short story Parker’s Back that turned me into an iconodule, rather than St. John of Damascus’ cooly argued Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Images.  Once I saw the image of my proud, bitter,  man-hating soul in Sarah Ruth’s fastidious iconoclasm, there was no recourse but for me to prostrate myself before the holy icon of the blessed flesh of my Lord, and ask His forgiveness for my sin and spiritual elitism.  He who did not deign to hold Himself aloof from the messiness of our incarnate lives forgave me.

Suddenly, caught by the level beam, Frodo saw the old king’s head: it was lying rolled away by the road side.  ’Look, Sam!’ he cried, startled into speech.  ’The king has got a crown again!’

The eyes were hollow and the carven head was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was a coronal of silver and gold.  A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stonecrop gleamed.

‘They cannot conquer forever!’ said Frodo.  And then suddenly the brief glimpse was gone.  The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the stuttering of a lamp, black night fell.

JRR Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings , II, Journey To The Crossroads

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“There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity.”

“You can’t trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.”CM Kornbluth

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Father Stephen Freeman, on his popular blog,  Glory To God For All Things, swings for the fence a lot.  He is the kind of blogger who isn’t content to hit singles and doubles consistently and get on base, but he expects to hit a bases-loaded home run each time he steps out of the batting box.   With his latest post,  A Crisis Of Beauty, he does precisely that.

Father Stephen lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, a community that received in the 1940s the sobriquet of being “the ugliest city in America”, and has recently been anointed as the “most Bible-minded city in America.”  Father Stephen meditates on the ugliness of modern American life and wonders why it has to be so,  especially in a community that is so ‘Bible minded’.  The comments that the good Father’s post engendered discuss a number of possible causes, from the baleful influence of popular Evangelical Protestantism, to the Malthusian argument that there are too many [of the wrong kind of] people, to the corruption of oligarchic market capitalism.

Ugliness was one of the marks of evil in Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord Of The Rings.  Orcs were ‘ruined elves’, and the cannon fodder of the Dark Lord.  It was a mark of their degradation that they hated beauty. The poor deformed creatures could create no beauty of their own, and the mere existence of it reminded them of their lost estate, so they hated beauty and defaced it whenever they encountered it.

I think something orc-like has entered into the soul of Late Imperial America.  Ugliness sets up a self-reinforcing feedback loop.  Working in an ugly building, living in an ugly, cookie-cutter house, eating tasteless, corn syrup-based foods in an ugly AppleChili’s Red Olive Barrel, worshiping in a gymnasium or a hangar to a cacophony of electronically distorted noises, makes you uglier, and this internal ugliness produces in turn more ugliness, and worse, a contentment with ugliness and eventually, a resentment of beauty.  But there us another force at work, something that will not prove easy to undo, because it has lodged in one of our most basic and most primal human passions.

What I have to say here is going to be controversial  The pornification of American culture has played a key role in uglifying it.  A frequent Orthodox poster on blogs pertaining to modern relationships between the sexes remarks that about the only personal characteristic that 21st century cares about is sex appeal.   Everything else is secondary, maybe even superfluous

The problem is that porn is boring.  There are just so many ways that you can rub body parts together, and eventually, the itch you are trying to scratch becomes larger than anything you can scratch it with.  Additionally, for some reason not immediately apparent to me, use of pornography sears a sector of the human soul that appreciates and evaluates beauty.  As the flesh and the sexual passions clamor more insistently, little by little, the other pleasures recede and lose their ability to charm, entice, or motivate.

I don’t think that even 20 years ago, it was apparent that our society would become as highly sexualized as it currently is.  The Sexual Revolution is, of course, very old news,  and the original impetus for it came from Scandinavia and France, were traditional attitudes towards sexuality dissolved before they did here in the US.  The message that you can have sex with whomever you want whenever you want with no adverse effects is one that is always going to find fertile soil, though.

The increasing sexualization of society has a side-effect.  We are primates, and whatever your view of human origins and our relationship to monkeys, apes, and lemurs, human females share an observable tendency that they share with other female primates – they are attracted to males who exhibit what is called conspicuous consumption.  These days, the most desirable females come with a very, very high price tag.  This is, I believe, the motive force, the engine behind the ruthless exploitation of resources and rapid monetarization of anything that provokes even a momentary interest.  A market will be found, and usually it will be ignited by the image of an appealing young woman.

Which is a shame.  Americans are not an ugly people, more that any other other people who dwell on the face of the earth, and we were, as recently as the early forties, exploring our own way of creating beauty.  There are English ways of being beautiful, French ways, Russian ways, Chinese ways, and if you have ever heard the Cherubic hymn sung by a Kenyan choir, African ways as well.  Indeed, a lot of what it means to be beautiful is what it means to be beautiful right here, right now.  There is an Beauty  of This Moment and This Place which is not transferable to There and Then.  It is the increasing homogenization, the franchising of America [as Father Stephen calls it] that is a key element to its uglification.   

American Beauty, which is essentially a regional beauty, even a local beauty,  was strangled in the crib by a rising advertising/promotional industry, an industry whose goal was to decouple the purchasing will from the higher brain functions and make it as reliable as breathing and circulation by attaching it to our most basic passions.   Once the link to sex was discovered and ruthlessly exploited, there was no more room for American Beauty.

By the time the fourth week in Lent rolls around, my bruised and battered self-righteousness may be ready to pray this lovely prayer, and mean it:

“I have outdone the Publican in my transgressions,
yet I do not emulate him in his repentance;
I have not gained the virtue of the Pharisee,
yet I surpass his self-conceit.
O Christ my God, in Thy supreme humility
Thou hast upon the Cross destroyed the devil’s arrogance;
make me a stranger to the past sins of the Publican
and to the great foolishness of the Pharisee;
establish in my soul the good that each of them possessed,
and save me.”

The Orthodox Church is a good place for sinners.  There are a lot of us here.  As a former Evangelical, it has been quite costly to jettison the concept of the “regenerate Church”.   The field of Protestantism is full of formerly “pure churches” where the hands currently on the rudder are steering their barques in a direction that I don’t believe the original pilots would have wanted them to take.  It is hard anyway to keep a church in pristine form longer than one or two generations, and it would take a heart of diamantine hardness and abstraction to look down at your newborn child and see only an unregenerate heathen, cordwood for the fires of Hell.   I think this may indeed be the genesis of that peculiar informal Protestant doctrine of the “age of accountability” , which if it were true, would make abortion something of a mercy rather than a misfortune.

Unfortunately, the Orthodox Church in the United States is a wonderful place to indulge a spiritual elitism that would be the envy of the most fastidious supralapsarian Neo-Calvinist or the most prophetically endowed Third Wave Pentecostal.  Our parishes are for the most part small, the regular attendees at Liturgy are mostly pious and those who attend Vespers and Orthros even more so.  Ehrmergerd!   All of this and we’re in The One True Church as well?  Talk about dropping the bacterium of Phariseeism into a Petri dish full of yummy sugar water…

Thank God as Holy Week approaches, more and more of the marginal members of the parish start showing up;  that rough looking guy with the flashy wife and the tattoos on his knuckles, the couple who own the nightclub, the Coptic girl who’s married to a Muslim and wears a hijab,  the husbands and wives of parishoners who you see so seldom that it is hard to remember who goes with whom.  Its hard to talk with them at coffee hour, but they remind you that the Church is indeed for everyone.  James Joyce made the remark about the Catholic Church – “Here comes everyone!”  With a change in geography, the same could be said of the Orthodox Church.  I wonder if I lived in a traditional Orthodox society whether I’d see these ‘marginal’ types more often.  Would I see them as brothers and sisters in Christ, or would I see them as part of the mission field?

JRR Tolkien, in one of his letters to his son, recommended that he embrace the catholicity of the Church as a spiritual discipline :

“Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children – from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn – open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand – after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.”

PS – Sorry about the super-heroes.

Then there are the anomalies.  You can remember every detail of a remote event as if you were there, but you can’t remember for the life of you where you were or what you were doing there.  It was in the spring of 1974.   I remember that because the Sun was shining and there were a lot of people outside.  Since I was living in Michigan at the time, and the event was some kind of a Christian event – rally, concert or some such – it had to be in the spring of 1974. Prior to late 1973 I wouldn’t have voluntarily attended a Christian event, except maybe to argue with Christians.   Ergo, it had to be during the spring or early summer of 1974.  Some friends of mine brought a nun to me.  I still don’t know why.  The nun was young, not much older than we were, and kind of cute, even without make-up.  She was clearly confused.  My friends pushed the nun at me.  The nun looked at me, and she said this;

“You have to demythologize what you read in the Bible, then remythologize it.”

I didn’t know how to respond.  I heard the word “demythologize” which immediately triggered an association with the German philosopher/theologian Rudolph Bultmann, and this immediately raised a red flag in my head – “caution, liberal Christianity ahead!”  The nun looked strangely grave.  Why would a slightly older celibate Catholic girl, a girl I might have been interested in dating had she not been a nun, be looking at me like this, as earnestly as any of my Evangelical friends?  She wanted me to respond.

‘I guess what you’re trying to say is that we don’t have to believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a fish to preach the gospel.’  I replied as best and a truthfully as I could at that time.  ’Yes!!  Exactly!!’  the nun responded.  ’But it’s the remythologizing that is even more important!”  I was flummoxed.  I had absolutely no idea what the good sister meant by “remythologizing”.  I don’t think I said anything.  The literal snapshot memory ends with the good sister’s response, but something marked that tiny almost 40-year-old exchange as significant, since I can remember it vividly despite remembering nothing else about that day, not even why I was there.

Now, Rudolph Bultmann, as a German existential theologian, made a great noise about the de-mythologization of the message of the New Testament.  It was his claim that ‘modern’, ‘scientifically-minded’  people couldn’t be expected to believe the miraculous, “obviously” mythological stories in the New Testament.  Of course, Bultmann was not the first to point this out.  North Atlantic, Anglo-Celtic society has been undergoing a three century-long process of demythologization, in the sense that no one believes, for example, in the story of Jonah and the Fish the way their seven-times-great-grandparents did.  Even the ones who “believe” it feel a need to defend its historicity.   Now, this is hard for me to think about, much less put into words, but when you cast a myth in terms of its “historicity” you have already lost that sense of primacy which the myth held before there was any controversy of whether it is “historical” or not.  Nobody these days believes that Baldur the Good was slain by a twig of mistletoe guided by the hand of Loki the Trickster.  It is a beautiful story, but here is the kicker; no one alive today understands what it meant for someone to believe it was true.  Was it understood as historical by the Viking who stepped out of his boat into the surf, coming ashore on a beach in Northumberland?  Did he invoke Baldur’s aid?  What did he expect when he did so?  This is what I had in mind when I posted about Neil Gaiman and the Neo-Pagans.  The point that Mr. Gaiman was trying to make was not that neo-pagans were evil people, or hypocritical in the practice of their religion [although there are hypocrites and slackers in every religion],  but that there isn’t any organic continuity between what they believe and what somebody  believed about the same gods back in the seventh century.  The stories about Baldur and Thor had been demythologized already, effectually, by the triumph of a superior mythology – that of Christianity.  With the pruning back of Christianity in competition with rationalistic Modernism, room has been made for experiments like neo-paganism and neo-paganism is a remythologization.  However, it is a re-mythologization that still lacks a myth, and apparently still in the salvage mode.  Perhaps, and this is a big, big perhaps, there is a nexus of spiritual energy out there that was once known as ‘Thor’ or ‘Odin’.  Maybe, and this is an even bigger maybe, and much more dangerous, that nexus may be relatively benign.  People invoking ‘Thor’ or ‘Odin’ will have experiences with whatever is behind these names.  Stories will circulate about these experiences, and they will be smoothed and embellished as stories inevitably are, and a new myth will arise.

Western Europe and its cultural outposts in the Americas are not the only society to have suffered demythologization.  What took three centuries in Europe evaporated in a single week in August 1945 in the skies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The Japanese world view, their mythology,  their belief in themselves as a people especially favored by heaven, and of their divine Emperor, dissipated immediately after their surrender to General Douglas MacArthur.  This ended World War Two, and inaugurated a deep spiritual malaise in the Japanese soul.  For a few decades, the spiritual malaise generated by this forcible demythologization was held at bay by a rising tide of prosperity, but this receded after the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble in the 1990s.  The Japanese are great storytellers, and during this post war period, they generated a number of cautionary tales about the effects of atomic warfare, but all in all their stories were about the omnipotence of science and the triumphant march of modernity.  Now, their comics [manga] and cartoons [anime ] are devoured in industrial quantities by sensitive and thoughtful Western young people as the Japanese struggle with questions of transcendence and identity, and attempt to rebuild their shattered mythological structure.  Needless to say, this project is being very closely tracked by their co-sufferers in the West.

My next post will be about super-powers.

Filed under: Uncategorized ]]> http://asinusspinasmasticans.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/re-mythologies-we-live-by-cute-nuns-and-rudolph-bultmann/feed/ 0 asinusspinasmasticans beautiful-nuns orthodox_novice 404005_375673395832318_888835571_n Wodan_heilt_Balders_Pferd_by_Emil_Doepler kaiba2 http://asinusspinasmasticans.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/fantasy-and-the-dushevni-diet/ http://asinusspinasmasticans.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/fantasy-and-the-dushevni-diet/#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:49:04 +0000 asinusspinasmasticans http://asinusspinasmasticans.wordpress.com/?p=865 ]]> Not too many years ago a young monastic aspirant went to Mount Athos.  In talking with the venerable abbot of the monastery where he wished to stay, he told him, “Holy Father! My heart burns for the spiritual life, for asceticism, for unceasing communion with God, for obedience to an Elder. Instruct me, please, holy Father, that I may attain to spiritual advancement.”

Going to the bookshelf, the Abbot pulled down a copy of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. “Read this, son,” he said.

“But Father!” objected the disturbed aspirant. “This is heterodox Victorian sentimentality, a product of the Western captivity! This isn’t spiritual; it’s not even Orthodox! I need writings which will teach me spirituality!” 

The Abbot smiled, saying, “Unless you first develop normal, human, Christian feelings and learn to view life as little Davey did – with simplicity, kindness, warmth, and forgiveness – then all the Orthodox ‘spirituality’ and Patristic writings will not only be of no help to you-they will turn you into a ‘spiritual’ monster and destroy your soul.”

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A while back, blogger with similar interests to mine posted that Christians ought not, and Orthodox Christians most definitely should not, read fantasy literature:

Fantasy… is a pure expression of the passions. Basically it’s whatever the mind imagines ends up on paper. So then we end up with werewolves and vampires and a celebration of evil that in the modern genre completely lacks what the original characters were intended to portray. In this way, a genre that was meant to lead someone toward Christ now pulls them in the opposite direction by tantalizing every wicked fantasy and passion imaginable, and infusing it with a lustful voyeurism so that people constantly want more and more perverse and graphic fantasies.

On the surface, I have to say that I agree with her.   “Man’s imaginations are wicked from his youth”, Genesis says.  I made an offhand comment about fifteen years ago to a friend on the ‘darkening’ of the fantasy genre; most of the material that was coming out at that time seemed to be concerned with the demonic, and with the infernal side of occultic powers.   There didn’t seem to be any celestial counterweight and a lot of fantasy material seemed to be moving from the Tolkienesque to the “gritty”, “realistic” outlook. The best of it was pagan/stoic and the worst of it was flatly demonic.  Once the pornification of Western society got underway in earnest, wrought in great part by the Internet, fantasy literature followed suit, and now you can’t turn a page without some sexual practice that would have shocked a jury forty years ago described in painstaking detail between orcs and elves.

It is not fantasy material exclusively that as fallen prey to this; romances are saucier and kinkier; simple murder no longer suffices to carry a detective novel, you need cannibalism or torture.   The problem is that there is no longer any intermediary between the head, the eyes, and the loins.  Lewis’ Men Without Chests have arrived, and they are worse than any glittering vampire or werewolf out of the latest potboiler.  There is in Tibetan Buddhism the concept of the Hungry Ghost (ཡི་དྭགས), an entity with overdeveloped mouth and stomach, but with a neck and chest too thin to allow for the passage of food.  This parcel of decayed human energy lives in constant torment as its enormous stomach demands input from its hypertrophied mouth, but there is nothing in between that can mediate the transfer.   We have starved the sentiments for so long that we may be said to exist in a state of spiritual diabetes.  We devour and devour all manner of stories; fantasies, romances, novels, but we seem incapable to extract even the minutest nutrition from any on them, We are like those who lack a vital digestive enzyme.

Forty years ago, Father Seraphim Rose also noticed this strange deficiency in young pilgrims coming to his California monastery for spiritual guidance:

 [There is a]  problem [which] lies in the poverty of our modern soul, which has not been prepared or trained to receive the depths of true Christian experience. There is a cultural as well as a psychological aspect to this poverty of ours: The education of youth today, especially in America, is notoriously deficient in developing responsiveness to the best expressions of human art, literature, and music, as a result of which young people are formed haphazardly under the influence of television, rock music, and other manifestations of today’s culture (or rather, anti-culture); and, both as a cause and as a result of this–but most of all because of the absence on the part of parents and teachers of any conscious idea of what Christian Life is and how a young person should be brought up in it–the soul of a person who has survived the years of youth is often an emotional wasteland, and at best reveals deficiencies in the basic attitudes towards life that were once considered normal and indispensable

Father Seraphim went on to say that what was needed in this situation was a “Dushevni diet”, one that would nourish the middle soul, the Chest, in Lewis’ vocabulary.  The idea of the “Dushevni diet” is to allow the soul to learn those responses to an object which those objects ought naturally to invoke, or which a well-trained soul should naturally feel.  Lewis himself, in The Abolition Of Man, uses the example of Samuel Johnson’s observation that

That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force
upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the
ruins of Iona.

with the caveat that the man whose patriotism does not swell at Marathon or whose piety is not warmed at Iona will inevitably complain that because his [lack of] patriotism and his [lack of] piety are neither strengthened nor  fortified at either Marathon or Iona, it must follow the idea of these places doing either is a subjective fantasy, and that his feelings of tedium and his desire to find an inn where he can grab a beer and watch the soccer matches are just as valid as all that sentimental nonsense about brave ancient Athenian citizen-warriors or Celtic monks standing waist deep in freezing water chanting the Psalms.  I’m sorry, but  those thoughts are the grandfathers to the complaints of overweight women that they are equally as desirable to as wide an array of men as their slender sisters.   That just is not so.   Value is as objective as anything measured by the positive sciences.  It is just that the instrument used to measure it is not a scale, or a measuring stick, or a pipette, but rather the human soul itself.  If that soul is faulty or unbalanced, it will perforce register a different value for the object than will the purer soul.

Until this point, I have said nothing that Fr. Seraphim and Dr. Lewis have not said before me, and much more eloquently. However, as far as an Orthodox Christian who enjoys and appreciates the fantasy genre as I do, I would like to make the following observations:

First of all, salvation is offered to us through What Is, not through what we would like it to be.  The very first time I saw an Orthodox icon of Christ, I was struck by the Greek legend Ὁ ὮΝ, “That Which IS”, in the nimbus of his halo.  In itself, this would appear to be reason enough to exclude anything of a fantastic nature from Fr. Seraphim’s “dushevni diet”, and with the vast majority of modern fantasy, I would be in complete agreement with myself.   There is a lot of brutality, a lot of anxiety, a lot of lasciviousness, and a complete lack of transcendence in most fantasy material these days, both Western and Eastern.  I include Eastern fantastic literature because Japanese and Korean manga (comics) and anime (cartoons) are occupy the same literary niche for young people of my son’s generation that The Lord Of The Rings and the Narnia books occupied for me when I was younger.

But there is an important point I would like to make:  For all the popularity of the ‘gritty’, ‘realistic’ fantasies of Joe Abercrombie, George R. R. Martin, and China Mieville, we would do well to remember that they are considered ‘realistic’ because of one important point; their narratives unwind in created worlds that resemble our own in one essential way; they are closed worlds where even magic is technological in nature.  It obeys ‘rules’ that cannot be broken, which can be observed and mastered, and using techniques which can be perfected through experimentation and practice.  There is no help coming from beyond the circle of the invented world.  Self-interest rules all things, and the struggle of omnes contra omnes continues apace.  In the hands of the aforementioned authors, this “realistic” approach to fantasy has produced some engaging yarns.  They are gifted writers, and, interestingly, Mr. Mieville has produced a story which points beyond itself in a way I’m not certain the author didn’t intend.

In The City And The City, Mr. Mieville has created two separate cities, Beszel and Ul Quoma.  The two cities occupy the same physical space, and may even share buildings and streets.  Each ‘city’ has its own airport and port district.  Citizens of each city can dimly glimpse, at times, residents of the other city or the outlines of buildings.  However, to admit to this is to commit Breach, risking arrest and incarceration. Citizens of both cities have been strictly trained since earliest childhood to disregard all evidence of the other city.   The narrative of Mr. Mieville’s book unwinds as a policeman in the less wealthy city, Beszel, is investigating a murder of a young woman which implicates  a well-connected functionary in the corresponding, wealthier city of Ul Quoma.  His distress increases as he realizes that the world in which he grew up believing does not correspond to the world as it actually is.

In the same way, there is something fantastic about the life we live in our sanitized, corporatized, modern world.  We fly across the landscape like Djinn in metal boxes.  We know the thoughts of others at multiplied hundreds of leagues. We hear no animals bawl out their agonies when their time comes to keep us nourished.  In addition, a constant barrage of intellectual static that attempts to convince us that This Truncated World Is The Real World, that  nothing exists outside of what can be measured, monetarized, and manipulated.  If you want to maintain little fantasy religious worlds or little counter-cultural worlds within strict boundaries of a “religious” or “intentional” community, you are by all means free to do so  (We are not tyrants, after all, is another song that is sung constantly).  If you try to smuggle anything out from behind those well-guarded frontiers, though, you will find yourself committing Breach and arousing the ire of the Gatekeepers.  In this way, something like The Lord Of The Rings, or even Spirited Away,  can serve to cast doubt on the Official Narrative.  Spiritual forces and proper human sentiment can be experienced as liberating and empowering, and in this way, the Real World, The Only One That Truly Is, that which is signalled by the Greek letters in the halo, can be made more real than this dreary official fantasy in which we find ourselves.