Heresies

I am finishing the last of the pile of used books I bought Ben for his birthday - one figures that out of six, at least a couple will suit - which I may discuss in some depth when I finish. Until then, two things caught my attention, It examines the early heresies of the church, with some discussion of how those have played out in later centuries. Yet it doesn't have a bad word to say about the heretics themselves nor the doctrines they put forward. Heresy is not used as a near-equivalent to blasphemy, sacrilege, or denial of belief, but as a precise term for doctrines that look at first as if they could be true. Heresies are theories about Christ that had a following at one point, and had to be examined closely for their implications and faithfulness to all scripture, not just one section.

The second interesting bit was an unpursued analogy to color in describing the nature of Christ. I pushed it a little further for my own amusement. Consider God to be blue, and humanity yellow. The dual nature of Christ, recognised quite early though a full doctrine of Trinity took longer, was difficult to get one's mind around. Still is. Was Jesus, then, essentially blue, but painted over to look yellow? Or essentially yellow, somehow covered in blue? After much wrestling, it was decided that neither was a true picture: Jesus was fully blue, and fully yellow. That led to a next set of questions: can we say that Jesus was green, then? Much debate, and as these things go, the debates were not often gracious. No, not green. Jesus is not a hybrid, new thing, but very blue, and very yellow. Hmm. Striped, then, whether in bold flag-stripes, concentric circles, or a million imperceptible, interpenetrated stripes? No, not that either.

Well then, what? Something can't be both blue and yellow. It has to fit one of the descriptions above. But it doesn't, and by AD 450 or so, there was eventual agreement that this is as close as we can get with our limited understanding. Analogies for mysteries are worrisome, but they are all we have. We like to come up with analogies for the Trinity. A Sunday school favorite is the apple, with skin, flesh, and seeds. It's a terrible analogy - we don't eat the seeds, the skin has no contact with the seeds, what exactly is the tree in this whole process... but we seem to feel we should try something to make it clearer. God as coach, putting down his clipboard and whistle and playing goal as a demonstration for we humans...well, it captures something, but it obscures just as much. The problem is with the arrogance of believing that we've got this mystery under control with our analogy - and yes, I have heard stupid persons, when discussing the Trinity, bring up some favorite analogy as if it settled everything, and the rest of us need discuss no more.

There is a tradition of mystic understanding of mystery call the apophatic, the understanding by negation. God is not this, God is not that. But its practitioners are quite clear that one cannot start from there, but must first build up a structure, from which pieces are discarded: not thus...not thus...not thus... The practice is more common in the Eastern churches, but CS Lewis fans will recognise that he uses apophatic techniques in his descriptions of God often*. We see something of this in the creed from the Council of Chalcedon in 451 - after several positive statements about the nature of God and Christ, a whole section turns to statements in the negative.

...inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten...

(An intro to the Creed of Chalcedon here.) *Start with Narnia, Screwtape, and Great Divorce, and very especially Till We have Faces for this.

Three About Lewis

The Cambridge Companion To CS Lewis ny Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward
The Hidden Story Of Narnia and
The Professor Of Narnia, both by Will Vaus

I might have like the latter two better had I not read them A) expecting an adult book, and/or B) immediately after the first.

The Cambridge Companion is an academic book, with essays about Lewis' influence on Medieval scholarship, his acceptance or rebellions against the debates in philosophy of his day, attempts to rate him as a literary historian - that sort of thing. Big concepts, sometimes referring to obscure or forgotten authors, harsh criticism even from his supporters and surprising acknowledgments even from his critics - and, most important - a not-very-compelling writing style, for the most part.

Vaus's volumes here are for young adults. (I really need to research these volumes better before putting them on my wish list.) Vaus is one of the more persuasive writers against Michael Ward's Planet Narnia hypothesis (which I wrote about in several post in October 2010). He is convincing enough on that score that I have softened, though not changed, my stance on the idea.

"Cambridge" has a bibliography with 200 titles. "Hidden Story" has questions at the end of each chapter. Very different aims. If you are looking for youth's biography of Lewis, or wish to steer a bright Narnia-entranced youngster into an understanding of such things as how Aslan's breath is meant to suggest the Holy Spirit, or Lewis thoughts on kingship relate to the contemporary Christian idea of servant leadership, the Vaus paperbacks may suit nicely. But I hesitate to recommend them, because I didn't like them. They seemed over-obvious.

If you want to fight through some academic writing for concepts that will reward and one can hold onto, the Cambridge was mostly worth it to me. I found I am not nearly as interested in the academic side as I thought - or perhaps I am just stupider or lazier than I once was. It is the sort of book I kept putting down thinking I'm not enjoying this, then finding that something I had just read was the basis of my musings for the next twenty-four hours, and so clearly worth the effort. It's not a fun read, but it's a fun think.

As examples, Mark Edward's essay on Lewis as a classicist had me in well over my head. As I was little interested in Greek and Roman writings, I cared only moderately what Lewis had to say about them. Thus I was unable to have any sense whatsoever of the importance and timing of his his contributions in early 20th C philosophical debates about the use and meaning of the classics - debates which still greatly influence the textbooks and college teaching of ancient history now.

In contrast, Kevin J. Vanhoozer's discussion of Lewis's view of scripture was based on information at least 75% known to me, and the essay filled out rather than challenged my understanding. Paul S. Fiddes' monograph on Lewis's theology starts with the perceptive but uncontroversial point that "the making of persons" is central to the theology - then takes that to some controversial places.

I made it about halfway through the volume before conceding it had won by TKO. I failed to answer the bell for Round Nine. I'm not passing it on, however, as I intend to have another go at it. Or perhaps not. Being smart about things matters to me less than it used to.

The Core

At the fireworks last night - rather disappointing, BTW (spoiled, I guess) - we briefly discussed Evangelical Covenant principles of agreement on the important points of the faith and freedom in the less-crucial. This stemmed from my son's recounting a question he had received at the information booth that morning - were we more Wesleyan or Calvinist in our theology?

The difficulty, of course, is that we don't all even agree on what are non-negotiable points of Christianity and which are less important. The Evangelical Covenant has some families who baptise infants, and some who hold to the importance of believer's baptism. (We have disagreement about that even in the family. Tracy and I consider infant baptism to be scriptural, Jonathan and Heidi had Emily dedicated instead of baptised. We're correct, of course, but what can you do?) A full-immersion Baptist would be unlikely to consider that a peripheral point. We take the Lord's Table only once a month in our congregation, and real presence is believed by some (us, again) and not by others. There are those who would find that looseness and lack of focus on the Sacrament to be a point too crucial to overlook in choosing a church.

CS Lewis had a paragraph or so on just this problem, with better examples. I am going to guess it is Mere Christianity, but it is evidence of my loss of grip on the Lewis corpus that I can no longer instantly tell you where it's from.

I may write a bit on what I see as the core.

Boy's Book and Girl's Book

Devin Brown, - an Asbury professor, though I don't think either of my sons or my daughter-in-law had him - writes in his Inside Prince Caspian.

Lewis's Essay "On Three Ways of Writing For Children" ... describes the Boy's Book or Girl's Book with its immensely successful schoolboy or schoolgirl who is able to perform incredible tasks with little or no preparation beforehand. Harry Potter and his magical abilities fit into this implausible category, and for the most part, so do his Quidditch skills. As has been noted, beginning with Price Caspian but also to some extent in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Lewis avoids creating this type of protagonist.

What's wrong with the Boy's Book or the Girl's Book? (Think of the Hardy Boys or the Nancy Drew series, where the protagonists are barely old enough to drive a car but somehow are able to fly planes and sail submarines, and the adolescent heroes spend their time catching international spies* rather than scooping ice cream, babysitting, or mowing lawns.) In discussing this type of book, Lewis points out "We run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery to the ego." The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration."

When we get back to our own lifes in the real world, they seem less satisfying than ever. While we may dream of scorring the winning goal in the final moment of the championship game, this kind of dream may cause us to despise our real lives and the world we actually live in.

Two quibbles. The Harry Potter-type books also rely on feeding the idea you are secretly very special, even though ignorant others don't notice it. Someday. Someday... I would also like to point out that as naturally gifted as some of these protagonists are, they are nonetheless portrayed as having also worked to become as skilled as they are. And Chip Hilton did scoop ice cream. Yet even so, very few are remotely capable of being such a multisport star, however hard they work.

*The international spies in these books have never been taught that special pugilistic trick of disabling your opponent by hitting them in the solar plexus. This turns out to be an important omission in their training every time, because the Hardy Boys, who presumably learned it from self-defense books you can order from the last pages of a comic book, defeat them with it repeatedly.

The Real You

We tend to regard the self that one shows under provocation, or with a few drinks under the belt, as the "real you" coming out. Yet at the extreme we reject that entirely - what a person does under torture or drugged senseless we don't consider to be their real personality.

If some 80-year-old deacon who always knew he was attracted to children and might become disinhibited with alcohol makes it to his dying day with never the slightest inappropriateness to a child, do we say that his "real" self was a child molester, but it just never came out? I don't think anyone would say so.

Or what if he always knew he had an attraction to other males? I think there are folks who would say he was "really" a gay man.

Decent people wonder if they would be decent in harsh times, or whether they would easily slip into violence and thievery during societal breakdown. We pray we never have to find out. We might pray also that we never have dementia, which would reveal much of what has been on our minds all these years. (I call that "not enough fence to keep the sheep in") Is that, though, the real self?

CS Lewis admonished that we might be giving ourselves credit for cheerful disposition that is largely a result of good digestion, or focused discipline that is due more to our parents' efforts than our own.

We draw a line somewhere, and I don't know how consistent we are. Interesting to contemplate which is the real self among our friends and relatives.

In The Past, This Issue Was Unimportant

CS Lewis advocated scholarly study of the past

...not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times, and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pouts from the press and the microphone of his own age. "Learning In War-Time" 1939

American attitudes toward the past were always a bit different than English attitudes, and I think there have been some cultural changes since he wrote this. We are now, if anything, even more prisoners of our own time in popular culture. History seems to have begun on November 22, 1963, and the teenage memories of baby boomers (subject to retroactive manipulation by their current ideas) are as far back as we go for any contrasting understanding to our own day. Before that, it’s WW’s, Great Depression, robber barons, McCarthyism, and black-and-white photography in general, all rolled in together as the Bad Old Days. Before that, knights in armor, Robin Hood, and people in togas inhabited the world at roughly the same time, much as Lewis noted was believed in his era.

Much is made about how those goofy American conservatives get it wrong in their historical beliefs. And they do. They get much of colonial or revolutionary history wrong. They get biblical history wrong. But they at least seem to have held on to the general idea that “people didn’t always see things the way we do now.” They have something of the past to set against the present. I think they are increasingly fighting that battle alone in this culture. (Also, their inaccuracy is overstated. They go wrong in ways a modern scholar never would, in the direction of hagiography rather than cynicism, of sweeping uncomfortable facts under the rug rather than examining them. But cynicism, or focusing on refuse, can be merely a reverse bias. There is wishful thinking on the scholarly side as well.)

In contrast, how much historical perspective does Tom Friedman give when analysing the great sweeps of our culture in the world? Most of the newspaper and magazine columnists make no mention of events before their time, and worse, only the symbolic events of even their own time: MLK, Vietnam. (Okay, except George Will, Thomas Sowell, and other conservative dinosaurs. But that’s my point.) Time and Newsweek long since gave up any longer perspective, and even the sources we might expect to be bearers of the flame, such as New Yorker or Harper’s confine their references outside the last decades to writers and artists. One can still find a bit better fare at New Republic or Atlantic (but Atlantic has allowed conservative in, so perhaps they no longer count). But highbrow slips to middle, middlebrow to low, and that precious perspective, that startling moment in reading when you realise that this author cares for your favorite soapbox not at all, yet is deeply concerned with an issue you had never considered of the least importance. And, full stop, you are painfully aware that he's smarter than you, and our age may have it wrong.

These categories of writers aren’t what Lewis was talking about as scholars in contrast to the common man, of course. They are very much the popular culture he refers to as the problem in his own day. Yet even among those, there doesn’t seem to be the ready familiarity and frequent reference to earlier eras that I remember even from the national discussions of my youth (I fully grant this memory could be suspect. I could be remembering conveniently. And I did go to William & Mary, after all, which would likely rank high in the “historical perspective” category.)

The scholars have come down a few notches since then as well, elevating popular culture to the rank of worthy studies, and imposing more modern categories back on other times and places. These are not worthless – indeed, this array of social histories are sometimes better at answering the questions of how people viewed things in other times, to set against our own to get some perspective. But they have in general weakened in this regard. We learn how medieval woman might have answered our questions, not what questions she might have asked herself. The study of law requires peering into the past and attempting to understand ideas and their development, and Volokh at least seems to do this. Whether legal academics do this more or less often than they did seventy years ago I can’t say. But literature, art, history, political science – these seem to have become increasingly present-focused, even when discussing the past.

Is it mostly the yahoo conservatives who are fighting the long twilight struggle against the dark, then, butchering their revolutionary history, their civil war history, their biblical history, but at least remembering when others would rather forget “We didn’t always think this way.”

Posr 2900 - That Hideous Strength - Last Time

Well knock me over with a feather. Commenter David likes this book best of the three by a long margin. He suggests it would work well as a movie.

On reflection, I think he is quite right on that. Many of the book's difficulties disappear in film's medium. There are conventions from the horror and SF movie genres that would make the spiritual and demonic nature of the N.I.C.E much more plausible and efficiently captured. Some scenes that are a bit tedious to read because of the necessity of describing a great deal - such as Jane Studdock's visions or the confusion of tongues scene at the end, might be remarkably easy to show. Feverstone's character, or the Fairy's enjoyment of torturing a certain type, can be shown more easily than described. The bloody attack by the animals, the floor running with blood - okay, that might be tougher to do without good special-effects people. Jane's ambivalence about marriage/career/personality/obedience, and Mark's dawning recognition of what being a husband actually means would have to be put quite differently. The accidents of mid-20th C cultural choices are both too near and too far from our own to resonate well. But as these same questions remain a popular topic now, I'm sure there's a way to accomplish it.

As a movie, I think it works. A rather intense and frightening movie as well. I certainly wouldn't bring children to see it.

That Hideous Strength II

For a book with so many flaws, it certainly sets me thinking. Elements of this post will be used in a later essay on enforcing culture on others.

The description of Belbury, the Inner Ring, and Mark Studdock's temptations to it may be the only strong point of the book, but it is handled artfully enough that one feels sure Lewis understood this temptation from the inside.

Why did this grip me so as a young man, and again now, when the danger is (hopefully) past? I saw myself clearly in these temptations, and took the warning quite seriously. I think I took it as an admonition of what could happen to you "in business," or perhaps politics, or some other large organization. I wouldn't have said I had already experienced much of this.

The N.I.C.E - National Institute for Creative Experiment (ironically and unfortunately the acronym for the QA wing of the National Health Service in the UK) at Belbury is not that different from a college theater department - mine anyway. Mark Studdock's insecurities were familiar because I had been living them not long before. The delicate calculation of who Belongs and who is a mere visitor dominated my social life for a few years. I was not fully conscious of this, yet if I needed evidence for the truth of it, my ability to retrieve that social data instantly, though I had not thought of it for 35-40 years, should be enough.

The network was never static - each round of Directors Workshop productions brought in new talents on the rise; each musical brought in singers and dancers staking out territory, some even commanding places of acceptance even though they were not theater majors, and elevating the status of those in the department who could sing or dance well. Then on to the long slog of the status of those who liked their theater grim versus those for fun, the modernists versus the classicists, the technical and production cliques versus the onstage. Move too far in one direction and you could excite enmity. Many who wanted in could not crack the core, and could never know why.

This is too negative a portrait, of course. There was genuine affection, real camaraderie, and willing humility of acknowledging superior talent. I was not a skilled player at the status game for good reasons and bad. These questions were originally not part of my entry into a career. When they did emerge later, as power started to redistribute in the 1990's, I played and played badly, quite vulnerable to those who assured me of their protection and influence. I was spared most of all, quite in accordance with what Lewis predicted, by genuinely liking some people who were of no advantage to me, and genuinely disapproving of others whose goodwill was necessary. My knack for offending those in authority protected me from ever going too far down that Belbury road.

I do worry how much this attitude was part of me unawares at our last church. I was a central player there - I was inner ring. Such folk seldom have the slightest awareness who they are subtly undermining and excluding. Thus my lack of awareness of exclusion proves nothing. Even contrary evidence - of my encouraging and including others - may only obscure the truth.

Purgatory

"Shall we, perhaps, in Purgatory, see our own faces and hear our own voices as they really were?"
CS Lewis Reflections on the Psalms

In my case, that would be brutal.

That Hideous Strength

I last read the book over 30 years ago, I think. There may have been another reading early on in there, and I have read excerpts and references to the book.

I find it is a very different book at 57 than at 25. When I first read it I saw much of myself in Mark Studdock (and my new wife in Jane Studdock). What I had remembered of the book included a great deal of the temptations he faced, and his weakness of character he showed in facing them. What I took away from this was "Don't be that guy. And you could, you know." On this reading, I more often think how much I want to warn the young man. I don't see myself at all, nor my wife in Jane. Perhaps the lessons took.

Or some of the lessons, anyway. I see parts of myself in some of the other characters now, including some of the most unattractive. Not so very much - I seem to have found other faults instead - but some things that were not visible in me as a young man, not even in my secret heart, have evidence now.


A word of warning on the reading. I see flaws in the construction of the story that I did not see at first. Most probably, I was so taken with identification with Mark and Jane, and anxious to read any new twist on Merlin, that I was able to disregard weaknesses. The descriptions of the temptations and development of Mark and Jane are believably timed, subtle, and ring true. To be like the conflicts and ambiguities of real life they should unfold slowly, and they do. The other characters, especially the fellows of Bracton and the staff of the N.I.C.E, are likewise plausible and recognisable. I now know some people like them, as I did not when I was in my twenties. But the events surrounding them do not read so believably. It is not that the events could not happen - though of course it is a modern fairy tale and the events are supposed to be sharply drawn, with good and evil unmasked - but that they seem to happen without sufficient set up and cause. Catastrophes have little buildup, and feel inserted for the sake of the plot rather than flowing naturally from previous events.

Lewis seems to have sensed this himself, as he uses literary devices to extend the impression of time at several points. And it is certainly true that events in real life do often seem to descend without cause upon us, showing their origins only in retrospect. We plod along daily with life changing little, then one Tuesday it all upends overnight. However, authors are not allowed to tell stories that way, even if that is more like real life. It jars.

It's an odd contrast, with the internal events of the main characters handled so deftly and precisely, while the exterior events seem at times to fall off a passing vegetable wagon. They add up in the end, and hang together in retrospect, but while they are occurring they take one out of the book a bit.

Course On Lewis

I have borrowed one of those college courses on CD about CS Lewis. I did not like the first lecture at all, nor the second one all that much. The professor is entirely too breathless, as if every sentence has an exclamation point after it. I find his praise of Lewis over-the-top. And if I, whose thought is formed by Lewis and am one of his great admirers, find you over the top, then the matter is quite settled.

I am liking the third lecture better, and will continue, hoping to pick up a few things here or there that I did not know, or a new angle I had not considered. It is an introduction to Lewis, so perhaps I should not have expected to learn a great deal. Additionally, there are few points where he gets minor facts wrong. Not a big deal, but a bit irritating.

I found myself thinking, quite early on "I could do better than this. Actually, I have done better than this, teaching Sunday School." Then "I could do much better than this." And soon "A lot of people could do better than this." Which led, of course to my thinking exactly how I would do this if I have another chance at it.

Here's the odd thing. I found that the overall organization that this professor works from, and the examples he chooses, are better than what I did, and better than any of the ideas I was coming up with. To oversimplify, his presentation is irritating, both his intonation and his phrasing, but his content is excellent. One can tell he is used to addressing evangelical audiences, and includes some assumptions not shared universally among Christians. He falls back on some cliches in criticising modern thinkers. But basically, he gets it right, and he gets the important parts up front and in a good order.

I might not have noticed his strengths had I not pursued exactly what I thought his weaknesses were. Which is a very Lewisian conclusion to draw.