A Work In Progress

Just experimenting….

Yusef looked down from the the bridge to the deck and to the lone figure leaning over the gunwales on the leeward side, facing the open ocean. They were now in the most dangerous leg of the long journey. After the run up the long western coasts of Lusitania they ventured into the fierce waters off the shores of Cantabria. They were now two Sabbaths out from Al-Gadir, and Yusef had put his young nephew to the task of scanning the horizon for signs of the sudden storms that were so common in the region.

“He’s quiet, and a good worker. His father has taught him well,” remarked the quick-witted Greek physician they had taken on in Massalia when they were forced to winter there. “The crew likes him, ” admitted Yusef, ” and there is no small virtue in that.” Of all the voyages a merchant could undertake, the tin run to Brittania, or as its inhabitants named it, Prydain the Mighty, was the longest, the most dangerous, but also the most profitable. However, the long tedious stretches of coastal navigation, together with the lack of civilized harbor for respite, made for frequent and sharp disputes among the crew.

“The crewmen take their disputes to him,” observed the Greek. “Ay that,” affirmed Yusef, ducking slightly to maintain his balance on the bridge as a sudden gust pushed them forward with unexpected speed. “He has a keen sense of justice, and an uncanny sense for uncovering the truth. With a gang of cutthroats like we have on this vessel, that’s invaluable. They take his word as if it were that of our Moshe Rabeynu.”

The Greek continued. “If he were lazy, or a drunkard, he wouldn’t command the respect he does, but he works like a young Trojan when we put ashore for repairs. He has a keen sense for wood, always picking just the right tree and fashioning just the right beam from it. He would make an excellent shipwright if he were to take up that trade.”

“I doubt Yashu will become a ships’ carpenter,” admitted the merchant. “He’s too good for this messy world. He’ll come to a bad end for it. What was it your philosopher said about the too-righteous man and his destiny? “

“Yes, the Thick One.” The Greek laughed aloud. “I’ve read that myself, although there are few that can abide his rigor in these degenerate days. Those who name him as their master now prefer to dazzle the masses with thaumaturgy, mix potions, and interpret omens. Hear the philosopher himself, then;

‘ the just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, the branding-iron in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he will be impaled.’

That is a grim judgement on your young nephew, my friend.”

The merchant narrowed his eyes against the salt spray. The wind had picked up considerably. “No. The judgement is on us, ” The merchant turned and shouted to the young man below.

“Yashu! Any sign of a storm coming?”

“No, father,” the young man answered. “The wind and the seas don’t agree. The winds are playful and forceful, but the ocean doesn’t sing their tune. She is as calm as she has been since we rounded the Tower. In matters like this, I would trust the sea herself before paying heed to these inconstant winds.”

Suddenly, the doors to the middledeck flew open, and one sailor, a tall ruddy Gaul with an earring ran out, hotly pursued by another. The second sailor, a swarthy Syrian, had drawn a knife and bellowed at the first.

“Son of a promiscuous jackal! Violator of she-goats! I’ll have your egg-sack pinned to my wall! Give me back my goddess, you worshipper of cow-shit and sticks!”

The Greek took a step towards the bridge stairs, but the older man put a hand on his shoulder and restrained him. “Let Yashu handle it,” he advised.

The Gaul ran forward to the prow of the ship and turned, running along the leeward side of the deck until Yashu stepped into his path. The Gaul stopped short and the Syrian collided with him. “What is the dispute, brothers?”

The Syrian let the knife fall to his side. “This Gaulish pig stole my goddess while I was sleeping, young master, and put it around ’s own swinish neck. A gift from my dear wife’s mother it is, to protect me on this long voyage.”

“Liar! False Accuser!” hissed the Gaul. “I swear, young master. This was given to me by Melita, princess of courtesans, young master, in Massalia these three months gone. I had thought it lost until I saw it around this ape’s neck, if you can call that wine-barrel a neck.”

“Let me see the goddess, ” Yashu requested. Sheepishly, the Gaul slipped the amulet on its leather strap off his neck and handed it to the young Jew.

“Can one man steal the favor of the Divine from another? Would this not turn into a curse?” he asked the Gaul . “The master of this ship is a Jew, and a devout one. Did you not fear that he would be offended by these superstitions? Would it not be better if I cast this into the depths of the sea, and thus end both the argument, and the offense? ” He swung the amulet around his head as if to toss it into the waves.

The Gaul exploded. “That’s just like a Jew! It’s true, then, isn’t it? You care nothing for the gods. You have no god in that famous Temple of yours, just empty air! Go ahead! Toss the goddess into the sea, then, and bring her wrath down upon us all!”

The Syrian, on the other hand, begged the young man not to toss the amulet overboard. “Please, young master! Let him have it. It’s mine, let him wear it for now. It will find its way back to me, by the love of my wife and her mother. I’ll win it from him at dice, or a sea bird will pluck it from his neck and drop it in my lap.”

Yashu handed the amulet to the Syrian. “He who enjoys the favor of the Divine, can he lose it by force, or by the craft of another?” He turned back to the Gaul, who by his demeanor had all but admitted his crime. “You still fear the winds and the waves? Here, take this.”

Picking up a nail and a pair of tongs, he heated the nail in the charcoal fire and bent it into a circle. After plunging it into the cold water, he wrapped a leather strap around it and handed it to the Gaul. “We are all of us alive by virtue of nails like this one. Do you think that the nails on this ship weren’t happy to continue their underground slumber? Do you think they enjoyed being wrenched from their beds by the smithies, scorched to the point of melting, then driven with force into the sides of this ship unbidden to support our enterprise? Yet here they are, and as long as they do what the Divine has called them to do, we can continue to do the same.”

The Gaul bent his head. “Forgive me, young master. Fear unmanned me, and made my stomach weak.”

Yashu laughed, and the laugh disarmed them all, even the merchant and the surgeon. “Fear will unman us all, if we let it. But fear not. This voyage will not end with us feeding the fishes. My uncle is a shrewd and generous man, and few of his enterprises turn out poorly either for himself or those who cast their lots in with him. You will return to Massalia with as much silver as you can carry. You will marry a dark-eyed maiden with hair like a raven’s wing and sire a cohort of strong sons and delectable daughters. As they said of Joseph the Comely in our holy books, you will see your children’s children’s children.”

At this, the Syrian gave the Gaul a sharp jab in the ribs. “Now, Gaul, that’s a better fortune than returning to that pockmarked whore Melita.”

May the Lord have mercy on my presumption

Ways Of Knowing

Before I converted to Orthodoxy, I did due diligence on both the Orthodox and the Catholic churches. I attended services in both churches, read the obligatory apologetic works from both sides, and even read harrowing critiques of each church from the point of view of the other.

I do not want to go into the reasons I decided for Orthodoxy. What I want to do is present a mental exercise. Long before I even felt the pull towards Ancient Christianity, I heard a musical production by a Romanian group called Enigma, which enjoyed some success in the Eurobeat-techno 90s scene.

The name of the song was “Mea Culpa”, and the artist produced what he called an “Orthodox Mix” and a “Catholic Mix”. All of the subsequent reading I did while investigating the theology and practice of both churches only clarified what I learned, on an emotional level, as being the difference between the two ancient Churches. Click on the two churches below to hear the different versions of the same song:

Clicking the link should invoke a media player that will allow you to listen to the song. I invoke the Fair Usage clause

Preparing For The Coming Global Lent: I – Church and Empire

For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.

Treebeard – from The Two Towers; presciently used as an introduction to the Extended Edition DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring

I am sorry I have been so remiss in working on this blog this year. The things I want to say I struggle to find among kindred minds the vocabulary to express. With the infosphere so full of disheartening political and economic news, the signal-to-noise ratio remains appallingly low. Nobody within earshot of me seems to be saying anything useful or encouraging except for the Orthodox, some of the better Catholics, Wendell Berry, the Scylding, and, surprisingly, some granola-crunching New Agers.

Oh yes, Tim Enloe is doing some important work digesting primary sources which can act as signposts especially to those whose interest is in the development of what can only be called the Mind of the West.

I can only hope my problem isn’t selective hearing on my part; what the Reformed refer to as “judicial hardening”.

One of the reasons I had for reading Owen Barfield was the hope that he would have:cleared a path for me through the intellectual thicket in which I currently find myself The Western world in general, and the United States of America in particular, appears to be approaching an impasse to which no easy solution presents itself. There is a dislocation on the horizon that will be certainly uncomfortable, probably grueling, and possibly violent. If the current “common sense” consensus prevails, we in the USA and aligned countries will find ourselves on an unsustainable trajectory where we are competing with the rest of the world for a dwindling amount of resources. By the current “common sense” consensus, I mean the pragmatic, objectivizing, particularizing, quantifying, and now digitizing impulse that produced both the Scientific and the Commercial revolutions, and led to us organizing ourselves into, and relating to each other primarily through the mediation of, corporations that act as vast Turing devices acting only for the quantification and increase of Capital, now expressed primarily as a series of 1s and 0s on a digital medium somewhere.
Recently , I read an interesting online essay by Jim Davis, Globalization, Romanticism, and Owen Barfield. Even though Mr. Davis’ presuppositions and concerns are not my own, I heartily recommend the essay. Summarizing Mr. Davis is a little difficult, not entirely because of the subtlety of his arguments, but also because of the surprising eclecticism of his sources. He draws not only from the Usual Suspects in Barfield studies; Eliot, Auden, Steiner, the German Naturphilosophen, but also Karl Marx and William Blake.

The connection with Karl Marx struck me as being interesting. Marx was, after all, a Romantic at heart, and the Romantic concept of the Eternal Return was deeply embedded into his narrative. However, it was the mention of William Blake that most ignited my imagination. Blake was present at the birth of a particular sort of Imperial consciousness, that of the regnant Whig classes in Great Britain. There appears to have been a kind of energy which was liberated by the disposal of the Catholic, medieval-minded James Stuart, which energy manifested itself in both the Scientific and Commercial revolutions of the 18th Century, and the establishment of the Whig Empire.

That Empire, with a very few modifications, is the very same Urizenic regime currently in power, which, in Blake’s poetic vision, was a metaphor what was occuring as a result of the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions; the dilution of risk through the use of joint stock corporations, the commoditization of labor in the “dark Satanic mills”. Artisianry, whereby a particular suit of clothes was made for a particular man, was sacrificed for the mass production of abstract “clothes” for abstract “men”.

It is not to lament the “world that once was”, but rather to show how a particular consciousness engenders a particular state of affairs in the so-called “material world”, that world which is characterized by the words “politics” and “economics”. In this sense, essence precedes existence; the Interior is anterior to the Exterior, nothing emerges in the technosphere which did not previously exist in the imagination, but a particularly focused kind of imagination.

The Church is not the interior of the Empire, the Empire is the material expression of the Church. Man was created to live and move and have his being in this Empire/Church which was intended to mediate the life [energies?] of the Blessed Trinity to the whole of Creation.

Charles Williams saw, no, felt this acutely, and called it the “Web of Exchange”, “Co-inherence”, or simply “the City”, and hinted that it was intended to encompass the entirety of Creation. Indeed, we see that one of the gravest problems that we are facing is an ecological crisis, whereby the Web of Empire, that portion of the Web of Exchange which organizes the energies of men, is returning material to the Web of Physical Nature, that portion of the Web of Exchange whose interchanges and sacrifices we describe as chemical reactions, in a condition unusable by it. What men call “the economy” has its inputs from this other, more elementary Web, and its impact upon this Web is considerable, but the terms of Exchange have not hitherto been charitable.

The changes we desperately need at this juncture will have to come from a change in Church. There are a lot of conflicting voices out there, and most of them are clamoring for a preservation of the status quo, with which voices I certainly sympathize, because it is comfortable for me.

But I don’t know whether that will be a option for us very much longer. As our Lord put it

A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.

It’ s always like that;  we’re comfortable, and we begin to feel  constriction and the pressure, until suddenly light and cold burst in on us, and we are thrust into a larger world.

Gleanings From The Inklings

One of the real charms of the imaginative literature of the Inklings is that their works come in such well-numbered series: There are three volumes in The Lord Of The Rings, but if you add The Silmarillion, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Hobbit, Smith Of Wooten Major, Farmer Giles Of Ham, and Leaf By Niggle, and if you reduce the trilogy to a single work, you get a seven-fold opera. There are three books in the Ransom series; Out Of The Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, and seven Narnia books. Charles Williams’ metaphysical thrillers number, conveniently, seven, although I wish he hadn’t written Shadows Of Ecstasy. Until We Have Faces and the Taliessin poetry of Charles Williams don’t fit this tidy Trinitarian/Zacarian scheme, but they shouldn’t be overlooked because of that oversight.I have my favorite moments from these works, and in Letterman fashion, I’d like to count them backwards.

With commentary…

10) The Progress of the Suicide, from Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell.

There is a lot to complain about in Williams’ literary style, but when it comes to depicting supernatural, sub-natural, or post-natural modes of existence, he has no peer. In Descent Into Hell, an unloved workman commits suicide to escape from the torment of life. He awakens in a silent universe illuminated by a furious moon that will not allow him to escape into himself. He conceives the idea that he needs to go to London. The purgatorial landscape he crosses, and the unexpected help he encounters on the way remain the most vivid depiction of the spiritual geography of the Afterlife I have ever encountered in literature.

9) Bilbo Surrenders The Arkenstone from JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit.

This plot device took me entirely by surprise, and prepare me for the centrality and necessity of hobbits in The Lord Of The Rings. Now, The Lord Of The Rings is a very mannish book, by hobbit standards, but any race that could prize peace between those who should by rights be friends and allies over wealth and comfort would be the only race that could ever be entrusted to carry the One Ring to its destruction. Men could be ensnared by power, Elves by beauty, and Dwarves by Craft (that wonderful old Germanic word!), but how do you corrupt a race that values above all things, “peace and quiet, and good tilled earth”?

8 ) The Descent Of The Gods Upon St. Anne’s from CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength.

Actually, That Hideous Strength is my least favorite among Lewis’ imaginative works. Lewis is a good preacher, and a great storyteller, but he doesn’t mix the two voices as well as Bunyan or Langland. In That Hideous Strength, he is covering the same ground as he does in Abolition Of Man, and there are places in the narrative where Lewis is trying so hard to be Williams, and places where is trying so hard to be Tolkien, and there are even traces of Barfield in the mix. I prefer Lewis when he is being truer to his own Muse, as in The Horse And His Boy, or Till We Have Faces. Nevertheless, I had the extreme felicity of having put a copy of Gustav Holst’s The Planets on the stereo before settling into my easy chair to the chapter where Ransom is inviting the Oyéresu, the planetary geniuses of Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn, into the body of Merlin. The music blended so powerfully with Lewis’ language that I slowed practically to a crawl for the full effect. It was, as may well be expected, a peak experience.

7) Anthony’s Vision Of The Griffin/Eagle in Charles Williams, The Place of The Lion.

I had a hard time deciding between this and the vision of the butterflies earlier in this same novel. The butterfly scene is more charming, and more accessible. But Anthony’s vision of the Eagle, the platonic Form of Perception and Discernment, is central to understanding Anthony’s character and the whole dynamic of the novel. Only by means of the Eagle is Anthony able to assimilate the other Archtypes and sew up the rupture between the world of the Ideals and their playground of the quotidian world, where all the other characters wander about in their deadly delusions.It is a scene that I needed to read several times before the grandeur of what Williams was trying to say began to emerge from his difficult language. Williams is not a visual writer as is Lewis or Tolkien. When it did, it was as breathtaking as Plato’s original parable of the Cave; I saw gods arising out of the Earth, and, like the sibyl of Endor, I cried aloud.

Mention should be made of the Eucharistic unicorn of the twelfth chapter. Nowhere else in all his writings does Williams show any sectarianism I have been able to discern, save here alone, yet the effect is graciously ecumenical and heartwarming.

6) Random’s Landing Upon The Floating Islands and His Encounter With The Lady Of Venus from CS Lewis, Perelandra.

For such a sensuous book, Perelandra has inspired surprisingly little visual art. Most of what has been produced concentrates on the image of the Green Lady, although nobody in sad Thulcandra will ever depict her unfallen eros. There is a privately commissioned icon of St. Brigid of Kildare in my church that comes close. It partakes of the same spirit of Lewis’ description of the Lady of Venus. Perelandra was a crucial book for me because it convinced me of the basic materiality of Christianity and of the basic goodness of matter. Lewis’ descriptions of the sights, sounds, and tastes of that unfallen world worked on me like a tonic. I may not have realized it in high school, when I first picked up this book, but the material world can be nothing other than sacrament if we can but cleanse our perceptions aright.Som,e years ago, when I still attended a church in the Reformed tradition, there occured a discussion about how to reach the “unchurched”. I don’t remember now what action the board of elders decided to take, but a wise friend of mine offered this advice to me privately:

They should throw a party, a harvest party. Let the maidens weave vines in their hair and serve steaming cider on the first real cold moonlit night of the year. Let the young men compete in contests of strength and fleetness. Let the good dames of the church load the tables until they groan. At the end, invite all and sundry to a Divine service giving proper thanks to God who so liberally supplies all things for our enjoyment.

God, I miss Christendom.

5) Beren Happens Upon Luthien Tinuviel Dancing In The Starlight from JRR Tolkien, The Silmarillion

I don’t think there can be any doubt that we are closest here to the heart of Tolkien’s Legendarium. If any man ever poured out love onto paper and page, Tolkien does so at just this point in his narrative. Tolkien prized three earthly things above all else; starlight, trees, and his wife Edith. All three are masterfully commingled in the Lay of Luthien, and all three – starlight, trees, and married love, are under siege today.

Light pollution keeps most of us from seeing the heavens that declare the glory of God. Having spent most of my adult life in Florida, I can say that I have never seen the stars the way Ptolemy, Johannes Kepler, or even Fred Hoyle must have seen them. As a boy, I was led out into a field on a midnight hike with the Boy Scouts. There, we were shown the principal stars with their fascinating names; Betelgeuse, Antares, Spica, Vega, and how to find them using the Pole Star, Polaris, as our center of reference. I can still find Polaris, with difficulty, but my night sky is illumined now by billboards and neon, and I am much the poorer for it.

I never learned any of the names of trees growing up. Our family was four generations off the farm, and we now paid people to know about trees for us. I do remember that in my early boyhood (even before the Boy Scout hike), the majestic elms that were the trademark of the local college were dying of a fungus infestation. By the next summer, they were dead and needed to be uprooted. Tolkien’s love of trees and his unsuccessful defense of them against various development projects is well documented.

I never knew that Edith Tolkien was three years and change older than “Ronald”, nor that she converted to Catholicism at his insistence and against the wishes of her family. That helps to explain some of the “unapproachableness” of Thingol Greycloak’s daughter in the narrative. Tolkien was intimidated by the older and more accomplished Edith, and was instructed by his clerical guardian not to pay court to her until his 21st birthday. On the midnight of that day, he proposed to her and was rebuffed. He persisted though and was finally victorious. The union was a happy one, and a fertile, producing four children.

The four words “sex”, “marriage”, “babies” and “without” create a perfectly infernal matrix in which web we are as trapped as any hapless fly. Try it: Sex without Marriage, Marriage without Sex, Sex without Babies, Babies without Sex, Marriage Without Babies, Babies without Marriage.

Anyone care to call me out on this?

4) Digory And Polly In Charn from CS Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew – The passage of Digory and Polly through the royal chamber of Charn displays for me what is Lewis’ principal charm; his ability to put into simple, everyday language the effects of sin and virtue on the human person:

Both the men and women looked kind and wise, and they seemed to come of a handsome race. But after the children had gone a few steps down the room they came to face that looked a little different. These were very solemn faces. You felt as if you would have to mind your Ps and Qs, if you ever met living people like that. When they had gone a little further, they found themselves among faces they didn’t like: this was about the middle of the room. The faces here looked very strong and proud and happy, but they looked cruel. A little further on they looked crueller. Further on again, they were still cruel, but they no longer looked happy. They were even despairing faces: as if the people they belonged to had done dreadful things and had suffered dreadful things.

And there you have all the story of our glorious and tragic Humankind -

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow -

Nothing we ever do turns out right. There is always the Law of Unintended Consequences, whose iron rigor penetrates all our endeavors, be they the democratization of the Middle East, the redefinition of marriage (homosexual marriage is the caboose on this train, not the engine), or the establishment by legislation of “family values”. The primordial image of this is the Tower of Babel. It reaches for Heaven, but ends in rubble and division. Logres devolves into Britain, the Dawn of the Proletariat into the Gulag Archipelago, Woodstock Nation into the horrors of Altamont and the Tate-Manson murders.

Still – You have to wonder whether or not Lewis didn’t have a problematic attraction to the “bad girl”. Joy Davidson definitely appealed to this part of him. This happens to a lot of good men, especially spiritual men. Lewis himself commented on the Celestial and the Infernal Venus, and Queen Jadis of Charn is easily the sexiest in the whole Inklings canon, including the lusty Redival from Till We Have Faces.

3)The Repentance Of Lester Furnival from Charles Williams, All Hallow’s Eve. All of Williams’ best characters are either mad or dead. Lester Furnival (what a splendid amalgam of “carnival” and “funeral”) is dead and only gradually does she awaken to that fact. But Williams’ Afterlife is not, thank God, Tim Burton’s snarky Afterlife. It seems not much changes, but events no longer are connected by temporality, but by another principle altogether, a principle that can be called, loosely, sympathy.

The path of Lester’s salvation looms before her in the person of a schoolchum that she had previously treated shabbily, and in the person of her husband, Richard, whose love she had taken for granted. In the realm in which she find herself now, these sins of omission loom enormous, and worse, are being used by an evil sorcerer as a breach by which he can enter the atemporal realm, affect the future, and precipitate the Apocalypse. Lester needs to ask forgiveness of her schoolmate, and just as importantly, receive it. Then she needs to assure her grieving husband that she did appreciate his love. In doing just these simple things, she thwarts cosmic evil and knits the Earthly City to the Heavenly
The first few times reading Williams’ fiction, I was surprised at the great weight he placed upon what would to anyone else appear to be very small courtesies and the exchange of social conventions. Three decades of contemplation, I believe, had led me to believe that the answer lies in Williams’ peculiar doctrine of coinherence. I want to discuss coinherence more rigorously in later posts, but right it will suffice to say that coinherence is an extension to human life of the con-substantiality of the Holy Trinity, how the Blessed Three can simultaneously exist, and be adored, as One and as Many.

2) The Dawn Treader’s Approach, and Reepicheep’s Departure, To Aslan’s Country from CS Lewis, Voyage Of The Dawn Treader

I think there are a lot of people for whom Reepicheep, the courtly Lord of the Talking Mice of Narnia, is a favorite character in the series. Certainly, he is a throughback to an earlier time, when Honor and Chevalrie mattered. Despite his obvious authority, Reepicheep is no tyrant. He understands that there is greater glory of to a king by being the free Lord of a free people than by being the master of slaves.

The approach of the Dawn Treader to Aslan’s Country, in increasing power and light, reminds me of two things; the first is the passage of Bunyan’s Pilgrims through Beulah Land on the very outskirts of the Celestial City:

Now I saw in my dream, that by this time the pilgrims were got over the Enchanted Ground, and entering into the country of Beulah, whose air was very sweet and pleasant, the way lying directly through it, they solaced themselves there for a season.
Yea, here they heard continually the singing of birds, and saw every day the flowers appear in the earth, and heard the voice of the turtle in the land. In this country the sun shineth night and day: wherefore this was beyond the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and also out of the reach of Giant Despair; neither could they from this place so much as see Doubting Castle. Here they were within sight of the city they were going to; also here met them some of the inhabitants thereof; for in
this land the shining ones commonly walked, because it was upon the borders of heaven.

The second is the Seraphic hymn sung in every Orthodox Divine Liturgy at the termination of the Liturgy of the Word and the commencement of the Liturgy of the Mysteries.

Οἱ τὰ Χερουβεὶμ μυστικῶς εἰκονίζοντες, καὶ τῇ ζωοποιῷ Τριάδι τὸν τρισάγιον ὕμνον προσᾴδοντες, πᾶσαν τὴν βιοτικὴν ἀποθώμεθα μέριμναν, ὡς τὸν Βασιλέα τῶν ὅλων ὑποδεξόμενοι, ταῖς ἀγγελικαῖς ἀοράτως δορυφορούμενον τάξεσιν. Ἀλληλούϊα.

“We, who mystically represent the Cherubim, sing the thrice holy hymn to the life giving Trinity. Let us set aside all the cares of life that we may receive the King of all, Who comes invisibly escorted by the angelic hosts.”

There are those among us who seem always to dwell in Beulah Land, in the suburbs of heaven. I seldom meet these people these days. The last was an old-school Pentecostal preacher-woman in her 90s. But the language of the Liturgy reminds us that there is passage into Aslan’s country every week. Most of us, like the other sailors on the Dawn Treader have to return to the difficulties and cares of the “biotikan merimnan”.

But, like Reepicheep, we don’t have to.

1) Frodo And Sam At The Cracks Of Doom from JRR Tolkien, The Return Of The King

Her is the recapitulation of all things Inkling; the triumph of the lowly and merciful over the arrogant pitilessness of power, the fatal inability of egotism to discern the motivations of sacrificial love, and the intervention of Providence when all the best intentioned plans of Men, Wizards, Elves, and Hobbits fail.

True good wins a substantial victory over true evil, and although the Shadow, though submerged, always takes new form and reemerges, the Days of the King may soon be upon us.

May they last while the thrones of the Powers endure.

Owen Barfield and Evolution

There tend to be two kinds of apparent heretics in the Church. You have those like Origen, Tertullian who push right up to the boundaries of orthodoxy or who even step over it, and you have those who have an insight that is so close to the reverse-singularity, white-hole-that-is-orthodoxy that it appears heretical to everybody else. I put St. Dionysius the Areopagite into this second category.

Right now, i think the Christian intellectual world is weighing and measuring what to do with Owen Barfield. Is he another peripheral, not-quite-orthodox figure who may be interesting and provocative, but who will never make any significant changes in the Church’s DNA? Or did he Get It in a way that just about no other writer in the 20th century did?

What I find most provocative about Barfield is the way he deals with evolution. Now, in case you’ve been asleep for the past 175 years, the triumph of Darwinian evolutionary materialism in the Academy has neatly divided Christendom into “modernist” and “fundamentalist” camps, and how they love to go at each other. On the other side of the Atlantic, neither branch has fared very well, and Christianity is, in the immortal words of Cool Hand Luke, “as dead as shit”. On this side, the modernist and the fundamentalist branches have each taken turns at being the canonical representative of Christianity to North American society. It took North Americans 75 years to get sick of modernist Christianity, but the fundamentalist branch seems to have outlasted its welcome in about half the time. If polls of church-raised teens and twenties tell us anything, it tells us that Britain is our future, and that weekly churchgoing will soon fall into single digits.

Now, “modernist” and “fundamentalist” Christianity split apart at the very fissure point introduced by Darwin – is man the product of impersonal forces working by chance and necessity or is he the crowning achievement of a Great Artificer who constructed Everything We See in pretty much the same way a watchmaker in a shop constructs a watch, albeit with infinitely greater resources and with much greater attention to detail?

As I have said before, I think that is the wrong question, and I don’t think there is a right answer for it. As it turns out I have never believed in Creation the way the bible story books picture it – a big hand coming out of the sky and all the animals and plants issuing forth from it in a mighty stream. And I have never quite bought entirely into the modern myth – you know, where the tiny Australopithecus mother is soothing her baby to sleep in the purple twilight of the African savanna. All of Plato, and Aristotle, and Jesus, and Dante, and Marx, and Lao-Tze are there in seminis in her guttural cooings awaiting only the right set of tumblers to fall into place by blind chance.

Now, I just finished reading the first three chapters of Barfield’s Unancestral Voice , and my brain is on fire. In this short expanse of prose, Barfield turns Darwin on his head in a reverse manner to the way that Marx supposedly turned Hegel on his head. There was no inchoate, unreasoning, unKnowing process that willy-nilly resulted in man’s rational and linguistic capacities. His single phrase -

The interior is anterior

liberated me to see what he had been saying all along. The “unfree wisdom” was what nature had all along. All of it, Plato, Aristotle, Jefferson, Einstein, was there, somewhere, encoded into the warp and woof of Creation, but it wasn’t free. It wasn’t yet self aware. And it wasn’t the result of material processes. And at the center of it was the Incarnation.

Suddenly, into my mind unbidden came the image of Adam “naming” the animals, except that they didn’t look like they did now. They came as motile undifferentiated arrangements of protoplasm, kind of like what we imagine stem cells to be, and as Adam sang the incantations over them, the tiger grew long of tooth and claw, the hare long of ear and hind leg, the hound keen of snout, and the hawk keen of eye and swift of wing. This Barfield calls “original participation”, before man was aware of any schism between himself and the exterior world. Then came the Fall, and the long painful process of individuation whereby man grew more and more of himself as a subject apart from an objective nature, reaching its apex in the modern physicist’s awareness that the ultimate object of analysis is likely to be of zero mass and infinite velocity. In other words, it doesn’t exist at all.

Here is where Barfield inserts the Incarnation. At a pivotal point in St. John’s gospel, “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God”, binds himself with a towel and washes his disciples’ feet, instituting the Eucharistic supper. In this way, Christ attaches strong elastic bands to our nature, running pell-mell towards individuation and atomization, towards non-existence, and brings it back to what Barfield calls “final participation”, yet chastened, humbled, and ready for service now rather than exploitation.

Phew – there you have it. For some reason it would not have made such an impact on me if I hadn’t just finished reading Archimandrite Sophrony’s life of St. Silhouan, especially what he said about the Saint being that towards which nature intended, all of Creation rejoicing to become a saint in the saint – the air he breathes rejoicing to be expired in prayer, the wheat rejoicing to nourish his sinews, the very birds of the air rejoicing to be observed by him.

Maybe you can see now why I don’t want to surrender Barfield to the New Agers, who have made much more commerce with his ideas than have Christians. Not only is he a good point of contact, but I don’t think he properly belongs to any group who doesn’t put Christ as defined at Nicea and Chalcedon at the center.

R.I.P. Larry Norman (1947 – 2008)

I just learned that Larry Norman passed away yesterday. Even though I haven’t thought about him in years, I know the world will be the poorer for his absence.

In 1972, his record, Only Visiting This Planet, was light-years ahead of anything else in Christian music, both lyrically and musically, and ironically, it still is. I don’t listen to CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) much these days. My wife likes it, but she is of a generation that knoweth not Larry Norman, or Randy Matthews, or Keith Green.

Hell, you can’t even get these pussified “positive hits” Christian stations to play anything by Keith Green these days. The last time I called in to request “The Grace By Which We Stand”, about a decade and a half ago, I was told that Mr. Green was considered “too controversial”.

Just like his Master, I guess.

Norman lost the public ear after releasing his best record In Another Land in 1977. He did a lot of idiosyncratic music, including Bright Light Into Darkened Places, an anthology of “spiritual” rock songs written by “unregenerate heathens” like Jagger and Richards, or Randy Newman. but Christian music’s new darlings were Phil Keaggy, a virtuoso progressive-rock guitarist who put out increasingly blander and blander albums until he rocked like a neutered cat, or a squeaky-clean-gosh-ain’t-she-cute little minx named Amy Grant. Larry, in perfect character and to his credit, soldiered on in increasing obscurity and accumulating personal problem.

Thank you for the music, Larry. I’m certain you’re hearing some great stuff now.

Theology Of Language

I found something on the Calvin College website after Googling the phrase “theology of language”. I find it curious that with all the electrons sacrificing their quantum levels, smashing against the phosphors of computer screens in the service of the wars between “free grace” and “works-religion”, no one seems to expend much curiosity about why man is allowed to speak at all.

A Calvin student, Nathan Bierma, has come up with five observations that he believes should serve as prolegomena for a theology of language:

1. God created us as linguistic beings, encoding symbolic meaning in our words and actions as “stewards of symbolic reality” (Quentin Schultze, Communicating For Life).

2. Christ’s incarnate nature is revealed to us in John 1 as logos, “the word.” Here, and in Genesis 1, the word is associated with divine nature and divine action.

3. Our sinful nature leads us to miscommunicate, both deliberately and unintentionally, perpetuating our pride, frustration, and helplessness.

4. We are transformed through Christ to speak the truth, to “echo God’s reality,” as Schultze says, rather than to use linguistic symbols as tools to serve self-serving ends.

5. Multilingual diversity is a prelude of heavenly community and its songs of praise and confession of Christ’s lordship in every tongue.

Thank you, Nathan. That is a good introduction, and it saves a lazy Mule from having to come up with something on my own. I would like to add some comments, of course.

In point number one, Bierma correctly points out that God has created us as linguistic beings. However, I would like to expand on this. A linguistic being means that you were created as someone who exists within a linguistic community. Evolutionary accounts of the emergence of language in human beings appear to me to ignore the fact that for a language-production-gene to have any possible survival value, there has to be a corresponding language-processing-gene in the receiver.

Language -> necessarily implies relationship, exchange, and tradition. A man can receive nothing, says the Forerunner, except what has been given him… All of us were born into different language communities, and we received our language from others.   Indeed, research seems to indicate that children raised apart from social contact never do learn language properly.  Any discussion of language that focuses only on the individual and his linguistic ability is not even going to be able to begin to explain language theologically.

In Mr. Bierma’s second point, Christ as the Word of the Father has a rich metaphorical tradition in the Eastern Orthodox church. Evidently, Christ is not a “word” in the sense of a His being a vibration in the air. He is not a spoken or a written Word. He is an incarnate Word. This is getting easier for me to understand the longer I am Orthodox, for the Orthodox use a lot of different means to express Christ – icons, vestments, liturgical movements, colors, smells (the incense used during Lent is more acrid than that used between Pentecost and Advent, for example).

Some Christians take issue with this. Jacques Ellul in his remarkable book, The Humiliation Of The Word, points out that God is primarily concerned with the Word qua language, and he criticizes the modern tendency to reduce everything to image. I don’t know but that the Orthodox are going to have to answer his objections eventually. Ellul’s arguments are a good deal more nuanced than the unsophisticated “You guys are breaking the Second Commandment” arguments that are usually thrown our way.

Nuestra Señora De Guadalupe Ruega Por Nosotros

Feliz fiesta guadalupeña a todos nuestros hermanos mexicanos. Que la pasen bien feliz en compania con todos sus queridos familiares y amigos. Que Dios nos bendiga a todos y que Nuestra Señora la purisima Teotocos nos envuelva a todos en las faldas de sus intercesiones.

Actually Reading Barfield

I have to apologize for subjecting the readers of this blog to two rambling and practically incoherent essays on “epistemology” and Owen Barfield without taking the time to read much of what Barfield actually had to say.

Barfield is not easy reading. It takes effort to follow his arguments and even more effort to decipher where he wants you to go with what he is giving you. Fortunately, I started with a book of his that covers very familiar territory: Owen Barfield on CS Lewis is a collection of essays and addresses, written or delivered at various times after Lewis’ death, in which Barfield remembers and comments on the thought and writings of his intimate friend, CS Lewis.

What struck me deeply about the book was the profound affection Barfield felt for his absent friend. Although the period of their deepest communion was a brief two years while they were both still undergraduates, the two of them were fortunate in being able to continue their friendship for the remainder of their lives. In addition, their friendship appears to have been one of those which Lewis himself described in The Four Loves; one in which the friendship is enriched rather than diminished by the inclusion of other friends. Charles Williams, J.R.R . Tolkien, Walter Hooper, Barfield’s fellow Steinerite A.C. Harwood, Joy Davidson, and the phelgmatic Mrs. Moore, with whom Lewis conducted a maybe-not-so-platonic affair for the majority of his adult life, all make their way into the narrative and are all remembered by Barfield with great fondness.

The book is as much about Barfield’s thought as it is about Lewis. The best essay in the collection, “Either:Or: Coleridge, Lewis, and Romantic Theology” is also the densest and most impenetrable. Only twice have I had the unsettling experience of reading something that I was certain would tie up all the loose ends I have flapping around in my mind and present me with a Unified Field Theory of God, Life, Logic, Language, Imagination, Knowledge and Everything. Both times I have been following the thread of the writer’s argument with increasing excitement, saying “amen” under my breath to everything he has to say, when suddenly the writer sprouts wings and the argument flies into the Empyrean leaving me quite behind. I plod along through pages of material I cannot begin to assimilate until I come through to the other side, where the writer descends once again to my level of understanding. However, I find the world and everything in it completely changed as a result of something that occurred in that upper storey to which I, alas, still have no access.

The first time was while reading Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The second was while reading the essay I mentioned above. Interestingly, both works dealt with something akin to what Barfield says that Coleridge called “polarity”. When two concepts are logically opposed, they cannot both be right any more than two physical objects can occupy the same space. However, when two concepts are in polar opposition, each one necessarily generates the other and is transformed into it. Barfield states that the proper faculty for the apprehension of this is not so much the logical, critical faculties of the intellect but rather the imagination. Here we run into problems. The imagination is suspect in our day and age since it is routinely relegated to the realm of the non-existent or the false.

You can see this the most clearly in the modern (not post-Modern) attitude towards the traditional Lives of the Saints among most Protestants and their fellow travelers for whom whatever could have been recorded by a time-traveler with a video camcorder is considered true and everything else is imaginary; that is to say – false, illusionary, leading to deception. Of course, these same Protestants take it very hard when you approach the Bible itself with the same attitude. You are either told that if you refuse to hear the voice of God speaking in the Bible, you are not likely to consider the truth if it comes to you from another source (presuppostional apologetics), or you are buried in a avalanche of minutae about Darius the Mede or ingenious arguments about alternative dates for the regencies of Hebrew kings (evidential apologetics).

Remember my earlier discussion of Francis Schaeffer and Malcolm Muggeridge? Schaeffer is a firm believer in Christianity as the great historical religion. I take this to mean that Schaeffer believed with all of his heart that if he had been a time-traveler with a camcorder he would have captured a woman, a snake, and an apple. To be very fair to Schaeffer, I believe this myself and unapologetically, but I am getting very close to the opinion that it is the wrong question to be asking. For example, if someone had been present with a tape recorder at the time recorded by John 12:28,29 , would he have recorded the voice of God the Father, the voice of an angel, or a simple thunderclap?

I think that what Barfield is saying is that imagination is as active a component in establishing the truth of a thing, especially the truth of a person, as is what Carlyle referred to as “imperial analysis”. To illustrate what I mean, go and see Father Stephen’s embedded video of Saint Nikolai Velimirovich, where the saint, at the end of the video, is portrayed in a series of photographs as an aging man, then finally, as an icon. Now an icon is a product of the Church’s contemplation of that saint. Barfield, I believe, would call it an exercise of the Church’s imagination, as if, when the man who can be caught on video and photograph perishes, he is meant to be translated into legend.

Breathing Outside the Ghetto

What a sheltered world I live in. One writer who is a guilty pleasure of mine; Neil Gaiman, is, unbeknownst to me, also a fan of the Inklings. Neil is best known for his graphic novels, especially Sandman, and his work on the current Beowulf film. I have been meaning to get around to Mr. Gaiman’s work for some time, along with that of Tim Powers, whose Declare was nominated for best work of Adult Fantasy by the Mythopetic Society the same year that Mr. Gaiman’s American Gods won.

This is from Mr. Gaiman’s online journal:

I was thrilled — partly I think because I was really surprised — to learn that American Gods has been nominated for a Mythopoeic Award by the Mythopoeic Society.

(The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature is given to the fantasy novel, multi-volume, or single-author story collection for adults published during the previous year that best exemplifies “the spirit of the Inklings.”)

Several years ago Charles Vess and I won the Best Novel award for the illustrated version of Stardust.. The award is a statue of a Lion — Aslan, I assume.

The candidates this year are:
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, Adult Literature
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion (Morrow/Avon)
Neil Gaiman, American Gods (William Morrow)
Sarah A. Hoyt, Ill Met by Moonlight (Ace)
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind (Harcourt Brace)
Tim Powers, Declare (William Morrow)

(My favourite for the award — of the books I’ve read so far — would be The Other Wind. At least, I think it’s the one that C.S. Lewis and Tolkien would have liked best. Although, on reflection, I like to think that Charles Williams might have preferred Declare or American Gods.)

Of course, anybody who knows anything about any of these works is invited to comment: