Maps Of The Soul

When I wasn’t even in school yet, my parents hung a poster on the wall  of my bedroom.  The name of the poster of was “The Land Of Make Believe”, and it was like a road atlas to the Country of Dreams.  Literally, because the whole poster was illustrated with scenes from familiar fairy-stories and nursery rhymes, connected by a road that wound through that unreal but ever so familiar geography.

It wound past the wood where Little Red Riding Hood encountered the Wolf, leaped over  a rushing stream on a bridge where the Three Billy Goats Gruff deceived the hungry Troll, and passed by the hill where Jack and Jill went to fetch their fateful pail of water.   There were, in the background, fabulous castles wherein dwelt such notables as Jack the Giant Killer, and Grandfather-Know-It-All, as well as the Emerald City of Oz.

That map did not survive my parents’ divorce.  I never saw it again until the Internet had matured enough to become the garage sale of Western Civilization, where if you are patient enough, and have good enough search engine skills, you can find almost anything. For some reason, it had never dawned on me that if I had one of these posters hanging in my childhood bedroom, others of my generation may have had the same poster and had been just as mesmerized by it as I was.  On the Internet, I learned that it was drawn by the Czech artist Jaro Hess in 1930, and the figure of the Wandering Jew in the lower right hand corner had been changed to conform to post-Holocaust sensibilities to “The Wanderer”.  It is still available, although it is not cheap.

The poster had been published in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which explains why it ended up in my bedroom.  My family has deep roots in Western Michigan and it probably had belonged to someone in my father’s family, which explains why it disappeared after my parents’ divorce.

This dimly-remembered early childhood wall decoration may have begotten in me a love of maps of imaginary places.  All I know is that, some eight years after the nursery rhyme map disappeared from the wall of my bedroom, I encountered a fold-out map of Wilderland in the front pieces of  JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.  Immediately hooked by the depiction of rivers, mountains, and forests to which I would never be able to travel, I finished the book in a single reading.  It would not be true to say that the maps added nothing to my enjoyment of the tale.   In fact, they gave the whole story a concreteness it would otherwise have lacked.

Since the appearance of The Lord Of The Rings in the 1950s, the Fantasy Map has become something of a cliché.  I wasn’t surprised to find a map of Earthsea in Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard Of Earthsea, and truth be told, I’m glad the map was included.  I would have been profoundly lost if I hadn’t been able to follow Ged around the numerous islands where the narrative took place.  I don’t know if The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant would have been improved had they included a map.  I doubt it.  Jack Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy also lacked maps, although they are available on the Internet, but I had little trouble keeping track of the action as it unfolded.   Robert E Howard’s Hyborean Age was nothing more than a set of political boundaries, but that didn’t keep my youthful imagination from filling in the dark forests and choking deserts from his muscular prose.

One of the newer fantasy worlds to be painstakingly mapped is George R R Martin’s brutal Westeros.  Of course, Westeros is only one large continent in a much larger world, and a lot of the action takes place in geographies that are only hinted at in the maps in the earlier books.  Martin has an eye for detail, and the maps come in very handy.  Also, the maps appear to have evolved from the narrative, which I appreciate, since  writers who create a map beforehand have a tendency to want to take you to every place mentioned on the map whether or not they have an adventure worthy of it.  Even George R R Martin, in my opinion, spent too much time in Slaver’s Bay in A Dance With Dragons and maybe this wouldn’t have occurred had a detailed map of the area not accompanied A Feast For Crows.

A very beautiful, and very whimsical, fan map of Westeros has been produced.

Indeed, now that role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons have become so popular, it is customary for intricate campaigns in these games to come accompanied by maps.  In order to allow the dungeonmaster to guide his flock through increasingly complex scenarios, ProFantasy, a UK software developer, has produced an array of software tools that allow the cartographers of Paradise to quickly render their visions into actual maps.  

Finally, the whole idea of the map of an imaginary realm takes a metaphysical bent when you consider what CS Lewis said about fantasy stories, that they take place in the only alternative world known to us, that of the human soul.   There have been innumerable geographers of the soul, including depth-psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, Joseph Campbell,  and my personal favorite, Carl Gustav Jung, who proposed that the intricate mandalas produced by Tibetan artists revealed the  unconscious geological strata of the human soul.  Yet I believe that the Bible, with its wealth of stories and poetry, serves admirably in that regard, especially in that difficult-to-trace frontier between the human soul and the Divine.

The greatest danger with maps, especially with a map as accurate as is the Bible,  is to mistake the map for the terrain itself.  The best maps help you achieve your destination with the least amount of surprise and the greatest comfort.   But only the most slothful and intransigent of armchair travelogues will mistake their knowledge of maps obtained in the comfort of the library for the actual arduous journey undertaken by the intrepid explorers of the psyche.

Repentance, Simplicity, Gratitude

Lent is beginning to creep up upon us again.  In the Orthodox Church we are in the middle of what is called the Triodion, a period of preparation for Lent which is, in itself, a preparation for Pascha.  There are, aptly, three Sundays in the Triodion, all of which bring repentance front and center; last week was Zacchaeus Sunday,  tomorrow is the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee followed by a week free of fasting.  Next Sunday is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, and the Triodion will be complete.  After that is Meatfare Sunday and Cheesefare week, where dairy is allowed but meat prescribed. This  completes the gradual descent into the full rigors of an Orthodox Lent.

Last year, I asked for suggestions about movies that might be appropriate viewing for the Lenten season.  I got a lot of recommendations.  Some were  classics;  Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Gospel According to St. Matthew.    Some were wonderful surprises; The Island, Godspell, In Bruges, Italian For Beginners, Tokyo Godfathers

There were some which were recommended for which I couldn’t discern any connection to the season; Au Hasard Baltasar, Ordet, Seventh Seal.    There were some that even interfered with my celebration of the season, although they are excellent films otherwise;  Gran Torino, Facing The Giants, The Blind Side.    I found Fireproof unwatchable.

Of all the films I watched during Lent last year, there are three in particular I want to take with me into Lent this year as being particularly reflective of three major virtues I am going to try to cultivate; Repentance, Simplicity, Gratitude.

Repentance:   Flywheel (2003).

Before culture-war Christianity there was just plain Christianity.  This comes out clearly in this first film by Sherwood Productions, a production company which has since gone on to release lucrative releases for the Evangelical market such as Fireproof and Courageous.  Flywheel was their first attempt, and it shgows, especially in the acting and in the production values.  The spiritual value of the film, however, is head and shoulders above its successors.

The protagonist is the church-going owner of a used car lot.  He takes pride in being able to milk more profit out of each transactions than any of his other salespeople.  His marriage is falling apart, but that doesn’t particularly concern him.  I don’t remember offhand what the crisis was that led to his repentance, but at one point he came face to face with the teachings of Christ.   He had to make a decision to cease his dishonest dealings and make costly restitution.  The struggles he faces while attempting to reorder his business in a way that would not be unfaithful to his faith are believable   This modern-day Zacchaeus re-emerges as a business leader in a way that is neither hokey or predictable.

Simplicity  Amal (2007) 

Truth be told, we Orthodox are proudly semi-Pelagian.   Inasmuch the whole nature vs grace distinction that so preoccupied the Blessed Augustine  makes any sense in our context at all, we are not so uncomfortable with nature as are many other Christian traditions  (Forgive me if appear as though I am speaking for the whole Orthodox Church here.    I am a layman, and not a very good one at that).  Natural human goodness was God’s original plan.  There is more of it than we have a right to expect, and wherever it is encountered, it should be encouraged.

This film is the story of Dostoyevsky’s Prince Mishkin on the crowded streets of New Delhi.  Amal is a rickshaw driver, who never complains when others abuse him, never charges more than his due, and who is honest to a fault.    Indeed, like Mishkin, he is thought to be a little  bit simple.  However, one day he gives a rich man a ride who is in the throes of an existential crisis.  Amal so impresses the rich man that the rich man determines to leave his entire fortune to the rickshaw driver to the despite of his dissolute and violent children.  Amal’s character illuminates the flaws of the other, more self-centered characters in the film, and many of them come to, if not repentance, at least a greater self-knowledge a lessening of their egoism.

Gratitude  Babette’s Feast (1987)

Two sisters, spinster daughters of the founder of an austere Protestant sect, take in as a cook/servant a worldly Parisian woman who is in some political trouble.   Despite the hard-scrabble lifestyle of the sisters and the  barrenness of their physical surroundings, the Frenchwoman does not complain and earns the respect and even the love of the two sisters over the years.

The Frenchwoman wins a sum of money in a lottery, and everyone expects her to return to Paris and resume her life.  Instead, she spends the bulk of her winnings on a single night’s dinner for the sisters and  surviving members of their sect.  Indeed, the major part of the film is food porn at its most lascivious – the Frenchwoman is a master chef and she lavishes all her considerable skill on this single meal.

When the food and drink finally arrives at the table, it works an almost Eucharistic spell; old wrongs are forgiven, lapsed friendships are renewed, paths not taken are reopened and cherished for what might have ensued.   Briefly, earthly food and drink becomes the transmitter of grace, and the barrier between the sensuous and the spiritual dissolves.

Avoiding “Jesusism”

I responded to the late Michael Spencer, of Internet Monk fame, when he posted a couple of years ago about the lack of sacramentality in Evangelical worship:

But evangelicals are in sacramental chaos, and the results are quite obvious. Evangelicals are “re-sacramentalizing” in an uncritical and unbiblical way. The Planetshakers article was good evidence, but you can see and hear it everywhere. What are our evangelical sacraments? Where will evangelicals defend the idea that “God is dependably at work?”

We have sacramentalized technology.
We have sacramentalized the pastor and other leaders.
We have sacramentalized music. (i.e. the songs themselves and the experience of singing.)
We have sacramentalized leaders of musical worship.
We have sacramentalized events. (God is here!)
We have sacramentalized the various forms of the altar call.
We have sacramentalized the creation of an emotional reaction.
We’ve done all of this, amazingly, while de-emphasizing and theologically gutting baptism. We’ve done this while reducing the Lord’s Supper to a relatively meaningless, optional recollection. We’ve done this while removing any aspects of sacramentalism from our worship and even our architecture. (Public reading of scripture, hymns, tables/altars, baptisteries, pulpits.) And we’ve given over to whomever wants to speak up the power to say what God is saying, what God is doing, what God is using, what God thinks of whatever we’re doing, what the Spirit is up to and so on.

 

My response:

I hadn’t been Orthodox a year when all of a sudden it hit me why Evangelicals, my former self included, believed that Catholics and Orthodox **worshipped saints**, statues, icons and Mary. We treat them the way Evangelicals treat God. That is to say, we do religious acts in their presence, directed to them. No wonder. Since there is no [official] sacrifice in Evangelical worship, there is just “dylia” offered to God, religious acts done in His presence, directed to Him.

Any Cathodox would be aghast, and rightly so, at offering the Eucharist to anyone except the most Holy Trinity. Without the Eucharist properly understood… You have kind of a Jesusism, an ideology extracted from a text, subject to all of the vicissitudes and mutations of any ideology.

Ortanne Laivino! Anwa ortanne Laivino!

Apparently, that is the Paschal Greeting in Tolkien’s constructed Elvish language Quenya. It was fun tracking down the exact translation of this phrase. Apparently, it comes from Tolkien himself, who also translated several Christian prayers into Quenya, such as The Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary.

Naturally, this leads to some speculation as to what significance the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Eru Ilúvatar has for the Elves. There is precious little to go by either in The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillon. Human piety or apostasy is measured in these works by the human group’s faithfulness to the alliance with the Eldar, and by extension, to the Valar.  Yet there is a line drawn between the Elves, who are bound to this world and cannot transpass it, and Men, whose fate lies “beyond the circle of the world, and what it is, even Mandos cannot tell.”

Nevertheless, Tolkien constructed his mythology to be, at the least, compatible with the worship of the Blessed Trinity.  I view the Valar as Elementals, roughly corresponding to the των στοιχειων του κοσμου ["the elements of this world"], mentioned so coyly in St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (2:20).  Alas, the Elves never finish their apprenticeship.  The virtual immortality in this world which is so coveted by the fallen Numenoreans, turns out to be a perpetual submission to the Valar.    Men would eventually come, because of their participation in the Divine nature, to overshadow their titular overlords.  So, the First would be Last, and the Last, First.

The number and depth of human-Elvish relationships show that the Elves have at least a capacity to enter into the communio sanctorum, except that they would be participating from the streets of Tirion and Alqualondë, rejoicing in the good fortune of their younger brethren and awaiting their own eventual redemption.  I am certain that the learned among them, on this bright Feast of Feasts, would greet each other with the Paschal greeting:

Ortanne Laivino! Anwa ortanne Laivino! 

laivë noun “ointment” , hence Laivino, “the Anointed, the Christ”

orta- vb. “rise”, also transitive “raise, lift up”, pa.t. ortanë (Nam, RGEO:67, ORO; misreading “ortani” in Letters:426). According to PE17:63-64, this pa.t. form ortanë is only transitive (*”raised”), whereas the intransitive pa.t. (*”rose”) is orontë. 

anwa adj. “real, actual, true” 

From an online Quenya dictionary

Ten Overlooked Fantastic Films You Should See – Number Six

Brendan And The Secret Of Kells –

I don’t believe this little jewel got much exposure here in the United States.  Even after it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2009, it still only made it to about 100 screens.  It’s a shame, because it is breathtaking.

What I liked about the film, apart from the brilliant animation, was the seamless interweaving of Brendan’s Christianity and the pagan natural world that surrounds him.  Brendan is the orphaned nephew of an abbot, who continually warns him about the danger of the Wild Woods.  Naturally, Brendan escapes the first chance he gets, and he befriends Aisling, a nature spirit.

He is not afraid of her.

Brendan needs Aisling’s help to subdue a dragon spirit and obtain an eyepiece that will allow him to finish the magnificent Book of Kells.  Despite all the respect paid to pre-Patrician paganism in this film, I noticed that Aisling was terrified of the dragon spirit, and it fell to Brendan, the Christian, to subdue it.

Oh yes, Pangur Ban, the first among all the cats of Eire, plays an important supporting role as well.

An Inklings Course

A small group of friends, Reformed Christians, in the unlikely location of Central Florida, have initiated a small course for high schools and college students.  They teach cultural criticism, classical languages, philosophy, and logic to young people. I would love to participate in their Film Nights, since as a rule they show better films than those playing at the local cineplex.

The Reformed are well-suited to this sort of cultural analysis, since the argument could be made that they created North Atlantic/Anglo-American culture and have  only just had the controls wrested from their grasp in the last few decades by their successors and supplanters the social democrats.

Reviewing their list of offerings I was surprised to see that, although JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis figure prominently in their iconography, and in the lists of favorite books of the faculty, they don’t appear to have a literature course dedicated specifically to the Inklings and their works.   Ruminating on this, I decided to see if I could construct a course outline for their students:

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INKLINGS

Premodernism and Romanticism in Literature and Theology

I. The Inklings As Romantics and Counter-Revolutionaries It is important to  place Tolkien, Lewis, Williams and Barfield in their milieu.  In these days of blockbuster films based upon their imaginary works, it is hard to imagine how out-of-step the Inklings were in the literary world of wartime and post-war Britain.  Realism and Modernism dominated both the best-seller charts and the academic  departments.  When JRR Tolkien submitted The Lord Of The Rings to Allen & Unwin for publications, they feared they wouldn’t be able to sell 1500 copies.

This portion of the course would focus on predecessors to the Inklings; the great Romantic poets Wordsworth and Byron, George Macdonald, Lord Dunsany, and E.R. Eddison.  readings would include, but not be limited to, CS Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Discarded Image, Owen Barfield’s Romanticism Come Of Age, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s  essay “Dante and Charles Williams”.

II. The Inklings As World-Builders This module would serve as an introduction to mythopoeia and mythopoetic literature.  Now that Narnia and Middle-Earth are household words, it can be productive to study the metaphysics of the invented worlds of Lewis and Tolkien and contrast them with non-Christian or anti-Christian underpinnings of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea, Stephen King’s Mid-World, or China Mieville’s New Crobuzon.

Although these secondary worlds are as richly woven and as thoroughly imagined as Lewis’  or Tolkien’s , they don’t rings as true as either Narnia or Middle Earth, which were constructed as worlds congruent with the worship of the Holy Trinity, explicitly in Narnia’s case and implicitly in the case of Middle-Earth.   Why would some metaphysics, the metaphysics of creation by a Tri-personal God, be superior for the construction of secondary worlds than metaphysics based on Taoism (which explains the obsession with “balance” in modern imaginative works as varied as Star Wars or Avatar: The Last Airbender), or on chance and necessity, or on dialectic?

III. The Inklings as Romantic Theologians It should be obvious that Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams were not systematic theologians.  Their relation of the body of their works to elaborated Christian dogma were informal and even tenuous.  The jury is still out as to whether Owen Barfield is even an orthodox Christian despite his public baptism in his sixties, and Charles Williams’ Christian thought  is impenetrable to most interpreters.

Nevertheless, the Inklings were instrumental in rehabilitating that most human of faculties, the much-maligned imagination, and especially Barfield and Williams made the observation that the failure of the Church in their day was not a failure of faith but a failure of imagination.

Ten Overlooked Fantastic Films You Should See – Number Eight

8. The Iron Giant – I didn’t see this on the big screen because I allowed my children to talk me into going to Inspector Gadget instead.  For the next three years, the reputation of this movie percolated in the back of my mind until I finally saw it on VHS.

 

Hogarth and the Giant

 

This movie astounded me.  It is still  my favorite animated feature film of all time, and was my first introduction to the humor of Brad Bird, who was one of the writers for the Simpsons.

I loved The Iron Giant‘s take on the 50s.  I think it helps to remember that the stifling conformity of that era was far from universal.  There were single mothers [like my own] struggling in a world far less supportive of them, and anti-establishment types whose questioning of authority eventually led to the upheaval of the 60s and beyond.   The Iron Giant is widely praised for being slyly anti-authoritarian and anti-military, but I found it to be a deeply patriotic movie.

What most people won’t tell you is how much Christian symbolism there is in this movie.  There is a clearer presentation of the Gospel in The Iron Giant than there is in anything coming out of the ‘family-friendly, faith-and-popcorn’ circuit.  I guess if you want to hide something, the best place is in plain sight.

Paganism and Christianity

The beast ran in the wood
that had lost the man’s mind;
on a path harder than death
spectral shapes stood

Charles Williams “Taliessin Through Logres”

At one time, I wondered whether there had been any unbroken tradition of cult or practice between the pre-Christian peoples of Europe and the burgeoning pagan/earth-based religion community that we see emerging today.   European paganism persisted longer in the regions bordering the southeastern Baltic than in any other region of Europe, that is Pomerania, Prussia, Lithuania, and Latvia.  Strangely,the languages spoken in these areas are very conservative linguistically as well, and are studied by linguists because of the archaic features they preserve that other related languages have long since dropped.  In addition to this, I had heard that Lithuanians were never as fervent in their Catholicism as, say, the Poles.

For all these reasons, I thought perhaps, just perhaps, in Lithuania there may have existed a living community of pagans who had maintained their ancestral faith down to the present day.  Checking through the Internet, though, I found a very familiar pattern; whatever pagan material had survived in Lithuania survived mostly as a constellation of folk practices or “superstitions” the content of which had been forgotten by the people practicing them.  Even in Lithuania, which had maintained its traditional paganism into the time of John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer, Christianity had completely displaced traditional paganism.

However, in the 19th century, at the height of the Romantic movement, a literary and cultural movement called Romulva was initiated to restore traditional Lithuanian paganism.  It has had a modicum of success, but the majority of Lithuanians remain Catholic.  This movement coincided with a resurgence of interest in traditional paganism (Wagner, Swineburne, etc) in other Christian European countries.

How did Christianity displace paganism so completely?  A lot of historians point to the pressure of belonging to the wider Mediterranean/Roman world.  That makes sense for the early Germanic incursors into the western parts of the Roman world, but it makes very little sense for the pagan Saxons and Slavs, most of whom were evangelized by Irish and Anglo-Saxon monastics unaffiliated with any “Roman” power, even the Merovingians who often actively opposed them.

St Boniface chops down Thor's Oak

As an Orthodox  Christian I want to say that paganism was displaced because it was replaced by a superior spiritual force.  Paganism has a very pragmatic and empirical side.   It worked for the pagans.  Pre-schism Christianity had an equally pragmatic and empirical side.  The hagiography of that era is full of what we could call “power encounters” between the old ways and the rising power of Christ, such as the battle between Saint Patrick and the pagan king Laoghaire on the hill of Slane.  Bede is full of this sort of story, and I am more disposed to believe Bede as a journalist than as a propagandist.

If paganism was the veneration of the “elemental spirits” of the world, then the Church was right in replacing the cultus of the pagan gods with the veneration of Christian saints.   Mankind was “coming into its own” under the tutelage of the Church, and the elemental spirits were being put out of a job.   The saints were taking it over.  In a way, secular scientism could be seen as an outgrowth of this development.

That leaves the explanation of the emergence of modern neo-paganism, even amidst the triumph of its successor secular materialism, as a rebuke to a denatured, splintered Christianity that has lost its spiritual mojo.

A Tale Of Three Parishes – A Prolegomenon

Since my family’s Baptism and Chrismation into Holy Orthodoxy in 2006, we have been involved in a number of parishes; OCA, Greek and Antiochian.  Since we are converts ourselves,  we feel most comfortable where there are a lot of other converts, especially those coming from an Evangelical Christian background.

However, this can sometimes lead to a niggling suspicious feeling that I as a  convert am just “playing Orthodox”  I have a bad   self-congratulatory attitude about being in the “true Church” which feeds my ego at both ends; first, for having been an Evangelical Protestant and so understanding the concept of regeneration and enjoying a facility with the Bible, and second, for being Orthodox and knowing about the Saints and the disciplines and all the panoply of historic Christianity.

The Ochlophobist has a friend, Samn!,  that left the following comment on his blog amidst all the flotsam and jetsam concerning the current malcriadez in the Antiochian Archdiocese:

+Philip and his clerical friends are quite anomalous even in their generation of Arab Orthodox because they for whatever reason missed out on the revival that came from the Orthodox Youth Movement and were already in America by the time the Lebanese monasteries like Dayr el-Harf really started bearing fruit. And so, like Jewish actors acquiring waspy surnames, they went out of their way to trade in Orthodox ways for the ways of the perceived American elites of the early sixties, Episcopalians. (I’m glad I’m not the only one who has seen this)

And so, when converts came, they were unable to transmit the heritage of the Church of Antioch to them, but rather allowed a trial-and-error approach to figuring out what a lived Orthodoxy is. The anti-monasticism and the America-firstism that have been signature traits of much of the Archdiocese’s leadership… have served to hinder spiritual bonds and bonds of affection and communication with the mother church. In the aftermath of this current crisis, those are the things that need to be cultivated, regardless of the Archdiocese’s ultimate autonomy, both for the sake of having a healthy and fruitful relationship with Damascus and for the authentic transmission of Antioch’s ancient heritage of lived Orthodoxy to all those who come to her thirsting for it.

And, just in case you are thirsting to know more about Antioch’s ancient heritage of lived Orthodoxy,  Samn! offers his own Arab Orthodoxy blog, and it is first-rate.

Please visit and encourage.

God, the Spider

Watching the recent movie War, Inc. I saw another example of a cinematic cliché  which, as far as I can tell by extensive Googling,  I am the only film fan who has ever noticed.   Now, if I am the only film fan who is aware of a cinematic cliché, can it possibly be a cliché?    Since  it appears I have few, but loyal readers, I will let you all be the judges of this.

I call the cliché “the paralyzed totalitarian”.  I have seen him now in four movies.  In Terry Gillam’s Brazil, Sam’s father’s colleague (and Sam’s mother’s lover?) Helpmann has enormous power, orders Sam to be tortured, but is confined to a wheelchair.

Also wheelchair-bound is José Lewgoy as the warden of the prison in which are being detained William Hurt and Raul Julia in Kiss of the Spider Woman.  Together with the secret policeman, he cunningly positions  the homosexual Molina to weave his way into the confidences of the suspicious political prisoner Arregui, yet he is incapable of any independent motion and is dependent on an attendant for everything.

In the recent War, Inc.,  Walken, the “viceroy” of sad Turaqistan, which has been the object of yet another American preemptive invasion, wields enormous power from his wheelchair, and the very earliest movie I in which have ever seen this “paralyzed totalitarian” figure is Abel Gance’s silent masterpiece Napoleon, in which Marat, Robespierre, and Louis St. Just plot together to eliminate enough Frenchmen to usher in the new day of la Republique juste et belle.   The actor portraying the arch-Jacobin  St. Just fidgets about in his little wooden wheelchair nervously planning the death of thousands and misery for uncounted others.

The image sticks with me, I believe, because it portrays those of a totalitarian cast of mind  as victims of their own machinations.   In gathering more and more power to themselves, they lose that which make them human, becoming in their turn as powerless as their victims.

One of the emotional objections I had to Calvinism as a system was that I always had a niggling in the back of my mind that the system would eventually  eliminate the freedom of God.   If man were not free, then I couldn’t see how God could possibly be free.  Some great awful necessity, some dreadful immutable ἀνάγκη, whether internal to God or external to Him, would demand the damnation of men.

I know there are a thousand qualifications I would have to make, and I take a great risk in mentioning this.   After all, the Christian blogosphere is about 94% Calvinists of  disputatious temperament.  I hope my obscurity saves me.

Borges says it better than I:

Lejos de la ciudad, lejos del foro
clamoroso y del tiempo, que es mudanza,
Edwards, eterno ya, sueña y avanza
a la sombra de árboles de oro.

Hoy es mañana y es ayer. No hay una
cosa de Dios en el sereno ambiente
que no le exalte misteriosamente,
el oro de la tarde o de la luna.

Piensa feliz que el mundo es un eterno
instrumento de ira y que el ansiado
cielo para unos pocos fue creado

y casi para todos el infierno.
En el centro puntual de la maraña
hay otro prisionero, Dios, la Araña

“Far from the city, from the clamorous forum and outside of Time, which is Change, Edwards, now eternal, dreams and walks forward under the golden trees.

Today is tomorrow and is yesterday, and in the serenity there is nothing of God which does not mysteriously exalt Him, the gold of the afternoon, or of the moon.

He meditates happily upon the world as an eternal instrument of wrath, and that the anticipated heavens were created for a very few,

and Hell for nearly everybody, and that at the absolute center of the maze waits another prisoner, the Spider, God.”

By the way, the movies are all  good.  War, Inc. is the weakest of them, maybe a C+.  Brazil is a B+.  Kiss of the Spider Woman is a solid A, and Napoleon is one of the best movies ever produced.