[This piece first appeared at the old Eternity Road blogsite on December 4, 2005 – FWP]
1. The Haunting
Via the worthy Lane Core -- welcome to the Eternity Road blogroll, Lane -- comes this inspiring take on the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christian faith:
"Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless." With these words C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, described the early years of his life. The story of his pre-conversion self, however, is much more than the autobiography of one 20th-century Englishman. It depicts the spiritual torpor of modern man, namely post-Christian man.
For the first time in the history of humanity, man does not believe in the supernatural. The supernatural was natural to the pre-Christian age. The sun and the stars, trees and rivers, everything that surrounded them was inhabited by dryads and nymphs and all sorts of mythological creatures. Everything bore the trace of the divine. Modern man may smile at the primitiveness of their beliefs. In the best case, he will admit that it would make a good fairy tale for children.
Lewis did not think so; to him it was the twentieth century that was regressive. By reducing the world to the material reality which one can experience with one’s senses, man has turned the world into a vacuum in which men spend their time, as T.S. Eliot would say, "dodging [their] emptiness." Surprisingly enough, it was pagan mythological literature, permeated as it was with the intuitive belief in the supernatural, which set Lewis searching for God. He became a theist and his conversion to Christ followed later. Pagan literature–Greek myths, the sagas and eddas of Norse mythology and the epics of classical antiquity–acted upon him as a preparatio evangelica. His imagination and his sensibility were "baptised" first, which proved to be a pre-requisite for the conversion of his heart. The material reality around him was the same but his gaze had been converted. Like the post-conversion T.S. Eliot, he ended up revisiting the ordinary experiences of his daily life and saw a transfigured reality:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
I doubt there remains a reader of this site who doesn't know of my admiration for Lewis, by far the greatest of the modern polemicists for Christianity. But it becomes deeper as I acquaint myself with the details of his journey out of the darkness.
Lewis was not merely a persuasive writer and promulgator of the teachings of others; he was also the possessor of a mighty intelligence and a fertile imagination. Among other things, he conceived the central need of the modern mind -- accurately, in my judgment -- as a fusion of the spiritual yearning naturally inborn in all of us with a revived, freshly vivid vision of what lies beyond the mundane realm through which we plod. For this reason above all others, his Ransom and Narnia books are among the most powerful of all tools for the opening of the weary, battered, spiritually malnourished human heart. He'd "been there," and had divined what it takes to get from "there" to "here."
But where is "here"? Perhaps it was put best by Father Andrew Greeley when he said that "Catholics live in a haunted world." (Substitute "Christians" for "Catholics" for, uh, best catholicity.) We are perpetually mindful of a realm beyond the one that's evident to our senses. Our choices are formed as much, if not more, by our consciousness of that realm as by their probable consequences in this one. For us as for no materialist of any stripe, the world is alive and immanent with promise.
With the help of another great genius, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (upon whom Lewis's hero Dr. Elwin Ransom was based), Lewis found his way, and then his voice. Then he bestowed it upon us.
2. Our Pride And Our Burden.
Curt at North Western Winds presents an interesting citation today from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's (Pope Benedict XVI) Introduction to Christianity:
The fact that when the perfectly just man appeared he was crucified, delivered up by justice to death, tells us pitilessly who man is: Thou art such, man, that thou canst not bear the just man - that he who simply loves becomes a fool, a scourged criminal, an outcast. Thou art such because, unjust thyself, thou dost always need the injustice of the next man in order to feel excused and thus cannot tolerate the just man who seems to rob thee of this excuse. Such art thou. St John summarized all this in the Ecce Homo ("Look, this is [the] man!" of Pilate, which means quite fundamentally: this is how it is with man; this is man. The truth of man is his complete lack of truth. The sayings in the Pslam that every man is a liar (Ps 116 [115]: 11) and lives in some way or other against the truth already reveals how it really is with man. The truth about man is that he is continually assailing the truth; the just man crucified is thus a mirror held up to man in which he sees himself unadorned. But the Cross does not reveal only man; it also reveals God. God is such that he identifies himself with man right down into the abyss and that he judges him and saves him. In the abyss of human failure is revealed the still more inexhaustible abyss of divine love. The Cross is thus truly the center of revelation, a revelation that does not reveal any previously unknown principle but reveals us to ourselves by revealing us before God and God in our midst.
Now, the Holy Father's emphasis on God's identification with Man is quite important. Still, there's more here: a fundamental insight of the sort we overlook until we've stumbled over it...after which, we call it "obvious."
Rational consciousness, the defining characteristic of Man, is the ability to form abstractions and to use them in reasoning. But every abstraction is an incomplete rendition of the reality it seeks to model. In other words, no matter how sincerely we try to make our conceptions accurate representations of the world, they will always lie, if only by omission.
But the human mind is unsatisfied by the incomplete. It yearns toward fullness; toward transcendence; toward God. So we tend to take such things and "fill in the blanks," sometimes arbitrarily, and sometimes willfully. But even the best of us is incomplete himself, particularly in his knowledge. And even the best of us is inclined to see the world not as it is, but as we would like it to be.
This is Man's glory and his cross. Being creatures made in God's image and destined to be reunited with God, we are conscious, yet partial. Conjoined, these characteristics compel us to fantasize...and some of the fantasies are wrong.
3. Certainties.
The word "if" has received quite a bit of, ah, critical attention. (Myself, I think that most of it should go to "should," but that's a subject for another screed.) In his novel An Odor Of Sanctity, Frank Yerby called it "the saddest word in any language." In Godel, Escher, Bach, his exposition on the roots of consciousness, computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter called it "the push into fantasy." Our constant need for "if," the indication of a condition upon which other propositions might be found true, is a potent expression of the uncertainty in which we live.
It's difficult, this job of living. What make it difficult are uncertainty and change.
Uncertainty keeps us tense. Change wears us out. In combination, they leave us gasping for breath and ever more desperate for surcease.
The hell of it is that there's so much uncertainty. Indeed, it seems to be everywhere. Even the propositions upon which ordinary people rely in the course of the most ordinary of their days are uncertain. Wait! Stop! How do you know that floor will bear your weight? Yes, yes, you've walked across it before, but things do change. Mightn't it have weakened fatally since the last time you tested it -- at the risk of your life, one might add?
Uncertainty rules the physical world. Uncertainty is the ruling principle of the fundamental insights of physics. If the quantum physicists can be believed, Heraclitus was essentially correct: everything is fire, and nothing is truly stable. Heisenberg said it, I believe it, and that settles it.
But we hunger for certainty and stability. So we create them in our heads.
Create them? Excuse me. Do we really? We don't create anything else! Everything we make is a blend of pre-existent stuffs with the labor of our bodies and minds. Rather, we extrapolate from the order and persistence we can see to wider, deeper degrees of order and persistence, beneath the bottom-most of which lies a Will that governs all?
Men being partial and limited, we cannot grasp the whole of Creation. Therefore we cannot be certain that there are any truly immutable truths, or any permanence even to the laws our best minds have deduced from what they can see and touch. This recognition has turned many a man to despair.
Nevertheless, certainty and stability are available, as and where they've always been:
For I know that my Redeemer liveth,
And that he shall stand,
at the latter day, upon the Earth. [Job, 19:25]
We can't be certain of what we believe, but we can be certain that we believe it. The Advent season, which opens the liturgical year, reminds us that the coming of Christ was foretold by the prophesies of Isaiah and others who came before him, and heralded at last by "the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, 'Prepare ye the way of the Lord'":
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit." [Mark, 1:4-8]
Job could not be certain of what he foresaw. Neither could Isaiah, and neither could John. They were men, like us, and certainty about factual things is not available to men. But they trusted the visions they had been given. They were firm in their belief -- and they were right.
For the next three weeks, Christians everywhere will prepare for the arrival of their Certainty, from whose Will flows the inexhaustible stability of all-healing grace.
May God bless and keep you all.
