Gods or Angels? A guest post by Yvonne Aburrow

Posted on March 27, 2019 by

The Inklings and Paganism

Before he became a Christian, C.S. Lewis was deeply inspired by ancient Pagan mythology, and he continued to value it as mythopoeia after his conversion, and seems to have sought to reconcile the Christian worldview with the ancient Pagan one (for example in That Hideous Strength). Lewis was also fascinated by the symbolism of astrology: a practice and worldview which started in Pagan antiquity and continued well into the Christian era. Lewis’ book, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, deals in part with astrological symbolism as part of the medieval worldview. Michael Ward has also suggested that Lewis intended the seven Narnia books to be an extended allegory of planetary symbolism. Whether or not he set out to make each book correspond to the themes of a particular planet is not settled; it is however possible to interpret them in that way.

His friend JRR Tolkien also valued ancient Pagan mythology, especially Norse mythology. The earliest inspiration for Tolkien’s invented language and world was the Kalevala, the epic of Finnish mythology; and the Valar, the gods or angels (depending on your perspective) who dwelt in Valinor, were inspired by the gods of Asgard in Norse mythology. The culture and language of the Rohirrim is pure Anglo-Saxon antiquity, with their great mead-hall and burial mounds and love of horses. And the Elder Futhark of the Runes is included in the endpapers of The Hobbit, whence I decoded it at the age of 11 or 12.

The “third Inkling”, Charles Williams, whilst profoundly committed to Christianity, was also steeped in the occult; he was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and came up with two linked occult principles of his own devising, coinherence and substitution, which formed the basis of his own occult order, the Companions of the Coinherence. There was a flourishing subculture of esoteric Christianity from the early 1900s to the mid-1930s, so it is not terribly surprising that at least one of the Inklings was involved in it.

The ‘first and last Inkling’, Owen Barfield, was an Anthroposophist and a friend of Lewis for over 40 years; his ideas influenced both Tolkien and Lewis.

The Inklings frequently discussed the concept of mythopoeia. Lewis initially believed that mythology had no value, referring to mythology as ‘lies breathed through silver’; Tolkien disagreed, pointing out that mythology contains spiritual truths. To Tolkien, myth-making was the art of the sub-creator; just as humans were made in the image of God, so we inherit our sub-creative power from God.

Ideas of Paganism in Lewis’s writing

Any reader of the Chronicles of Narnia can see that it has a number of esoteric and Pagan-inspired ideas woven through it, together with a well-worked-out philosophy and ethics of magic. As a child, when I read the Narnia books, the Christian themes were obvious because I was immersed in Christianity at the time, so it was the Pagan themes that were new and exciting and different: the fauns dancing in the woods; the talking trees; the naiads, dryads, and hamadryads; the river god who asks Aslan to free him from the Bridge at Beruna; the Maenads; ettins (an Anglo-Saxon term for Jötunn, the giants of Norse mythology) and wooses (probably derived from woodwose); even the god Silvanus puts in an appearance. These are not merely decorative flourishes in the margins of the main narrative; what Lewis seems to be saying is that the Pagan world has not been banished by Christianity; rather it is part of the Christian order.

However, this seems to me (and to other Pagan writers) a bit of a fudge, an excuse to carry on writing about the Pagan themes that he loved, despite his conversion to Christianity. The loving and lavish detail with which the Pagan-inspired characters are described, and the evocation of Nature – woods and streams and wilderness – seems deeply Pagan to me. Like many Pagans, one of my earliest encounters with Paganism was with the Pagan aspects of Narnia and of Tolkien’s legendarium, followed not long after by Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (though it was Kipling’s book that made me realize that my worldview and religion is Paganism).

As a teenager, Lewis saw an illustration by Arthur Rackham for Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and experienced a feeling that he described in his autobiography as ‘pure “Northernness”’. Perhaps this feeling was the inspiration for some of the grittier parts of Narnia, such as the dwarves, the Eastern Marshes, and the Ettinmoors. There are two types of dwarves, the red and the black, which may be a reference to the svartálfar, dökkálfar and ljósálfar (“black elves”, “dark elves”, and “light elves” of Norse mythology, which Tolkien also explicitly referenced).

In the third volume of his ‘space trilogy’, That Hideous Strength (which seems to have been heavily influenced by Charles Williams), and to a lesser extent in the first two volumes, Lewis attempts to reconcile the Pagan and astrological worldview with that of Christianity, using a modified form of Dispensation theology, in which Paganism belongs to the old dispensation, and Christianity to the new. He does this in part through the waking of Merlin and the revelation of the current incarnation of the Pendragon, and in part through the appearance of the tutelary beings of the planets (gods or angels, depending on your perspective). The planetary beings are described as majestic, powerful, and larger-than-life; their descent to Earth causes magical changes in the world.

Lewis on magic

There are two types of magic in Lewis’ scheme of things. The first is natural magic, which Aslan wields, and which can only be asked for by other beings, and occurs in accordance with Aslan’s will. The other kind is unlawful magic, such as that wielded by Uncle Andrew and Jadis (in The Magician’s Nephew), which tends to represent an abuse of power.

The difference is illustrated in several key incidents in the books. The first incident is Uncle Andrew’s abuse of the power of the magic rings, where he sends Polly to the Wood Between the Worlds without her consent, and with no idea of what he is sending her to. The next to be described is the terrible utterance of the Deplorable Word by Jadis, which caused the destruction of the world of Charn. Later in the same book, the beneficial power of Aslan’s magic is illustrated by the gift of the apple from Aslan’s garden. If Digory had stolen an extra apple (as Jadis tried to tempt him to do), the apple would have poisoned him, but because he restricted himself to plucking only the one apple that Aslan had gifted him for his mother, that apple had a beneficial effect, curing her of her illness.

Similarly, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the deep magic from the dawn of time is what gives Jadis the power to sacrifice Aslan; but it is the even deeper magic from before the dawn of time that causes his resurrection.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lucy finds a book of spells and is tempted to use them, but no good comes of the spell she tries; she only hears a girl whom she thought was a friend being bitchy about her.

At the beginning of The Silver Chair, Jill and Eustace are trying to get into Narnia to escape from the bullies at their school. Jill asks if they have to do some sort of magic to get there; Eustace replies that he feels that Aslan wouldn’t approve of such things, so they ask to be let in to Narnia. In contrast to this, the Lady of the Green Kirtle uses base enchantment to ensnare Prince Rilian, and tries to use similar means to enchant Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum into believing that Narnia doesn’t exist. It is such a relief when they burst out from the mine workings into the middle of the Narnian woods.

The ancient Pagan worldview contained a similarly dual view of magic (except for the Egyptians): magic that was aligned with the will of the gods, and magic that went against the will of the gods. Christianity largely inherited this dual worldview, though it has always had an uneasy relationship with magic workers – even miracle-working saints were tested for orthodoxy before being accepted.

The Pagan revival

At the time that the Inklings began writing, the Pagan revival was gathering pace. Around the turn of the century, Rupert Brooke, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and Edward Carpenter had written favourably of Nature-worship and Greek culture; GK Chesterton had inveighed against Dickinson in a collection of essays (Heretics, 1905). The Great God Pan was very much awakening, and had made an appearance in both The Wind in the Willows (1908) and BB’s Little Grey Men (1942). During the 1940s, Ross Nichols reintroduced Celtic mythology into Druidry, and Gerald Gardner began developing Wicca into the religion we know today. There was widespread interest in folklore, folk dancing, Celtic and Norse mythology, and several other factors which fed into the Pagan revival. It is hardly surprising, then, that Lewis and Tolkien were interested in ancient Paganism and mythology; it was part of the zeitgeist. A couple of Pagan writers have suggested that they might have become Pagans if they had been born fifty years later; but if they had been born fifty years later, both they and their books would have been very different. They and their books are a product of their era and the things they experienced, particularly the shattering experience of the First World War.

The Pagan revival has a lot to thank Lewis and Tolkien for; many Pagans received our first introduction to Pagan themes and ideas through their work, including river gods, retired stars, fauns, naiads, dryads, hamadryads, talking beasts, dwarves, elves, gnomes, salamanders, barrow-wights, wizards, and a deep appreciation of trees, flowers, and landscape.

Bibliography & Further Reading

  • Patrick Benham (2015), The Avalonians. Glastonbury; Gothic Image Publications.
  • Stratford Caldecott (2003), Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R.Tolkien. London: Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd.
  • John Garth (2011), Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. HarperCollins.
  • Sørina Higgins (2013), Introduction. The Oddest Inkling.
    https://theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/intro/
  • Ronald Hutton (2001), The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Ronald Hutton (2003), Witches, Druids and King Arthur. London: Hambledon & London.
  • Gareth Knight (1990), The Magical World of the Inklings. Shaftesbury: Element Books.
  • CS Lewis (1964), The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Grevel Lindop (2015), Charles Williams: The Third Inkling. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Michael Ward (2010). Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Jonathan Woolley (2015), Reclaiming Narnia: Walking Trees, Talking Beasts, Divine Waters. Gods & Radicals. https://godsandradicals.org/2015/05/28/reclaiming-narnia-walking-trees-talking-beasts-divine-waters/

Yvonne Aburrow has been a Pagan since 1985  and a Wiccan since 1991. She has written several books on inclusive Wicca and co-edited an anthology on Pagan Consent Culture. She has an MA in Contemporary Religions and Spiritualities from Bath Spa University, UK. She recently moved from Oxford, UK, to Cambridge, Ontario, Canada to escape Brexit and the “hostile environment for migrants” in the UK. She blogs at https://dowsingfordivinity.com and her books can be obtained via www.yvonneaburrow.com.

 

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C.S. Lewis’ Science Fiction with Adam Mattern, David C. Downing, and Brenton Dickieson

Posted on March 22, 2019 by

Last week we had an amazing Thesis Theater event, a great discussion about C.S. Lewis’ WWII-era science fiction trilogy. Recent Signum University MA graduate Adam Mattern was the central figure, presenting his thesis titled “An Image of the Discarded: C. S. Lewis’s Use of the Medieval Model in His Planetary Fiction.” I facilitated the conversation Adam, and we were pleased to have Lewis scholar, Dr. David Downing, join us by audio. David is director of the Wade Center at Wheaton College and has written one of the more important books on the Ransom Cycle, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy  (1992). David has also written an Inklings novel, Looking for the King (which I reviewed here), and an annotated version of C.S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress–books mentioned in the discussion. The conversation went so well I decided to share it below.

Sometime in late 1936 or early 1937, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien agreed to write science fiction stories, since what was being published at the time included too little of what they enjoyed. Within Lewis’s science fiction series, he incorporated the Medieval Model (as described in his The Discarded Image) to construct the cosmos of his trilogy and populate his extraterrestrial worlds of Malacandra and Perelandra. With an eye on Lewis’s history with the genre and his approach to writing fiction, this paper explores why Lewis patterned his cosmos after the Medieval Model and how he used medieval literature to inspire a feeling of Sehnsucht or Joy, a critical component of his fiction. His personal experiences with Sehnsucht informed Lewis’s approach to creating a sense of Other by drawing on spiritual elements, which he believed to be an analog of the type of alien worlds that science fiction readers longed to visit. It was through the Medieval Model and the experience of other worlds that Lewis’s series critiqued and subverted what he saw as the growing misapplication of specific scientific principles to ethics, which had become popular in other science fiction stories of the time.

Adam Mattern works for Cisco Talos as a team lead for a group that conducts web traffic analysis for a web filtering product. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his wife as she completes her Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology. He started with Signum University with the Tolkien and the Epic class and discovered Medieval Literature through reading about Tolkien and Lewis’s friendship and their fiction. Now finished with his M.A., he plans to get back into woodworking, writing, and attempting to surmount a reading list that has only been bolstered by his time at Signum.

If you would like a copy of the thesis, send me an email at junkola [at] gmail [dot] com.

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What does Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices have to say about the Inklings? Guest Post by Wesley Schantz

Posted on March 19, 2019 by

For a long time, Philip Pullman’s been my favorite living writer. And for practically as long as I’ve loved his stories, particularly The Golden Compass, I’ve been aware of his harsh criticisms of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. (That’s actually how I found this site, as I was researching recent discussions on the topic and came across this post from last January. I hope that in some respects what follows will be a continuation of the discussion Brenton and his readers were having there in the comments.)

Whatever your feelings about him might be, Pullman’s been back in the news lately with the release of a trailer for the new BBC adaptation of The Golden Compass (not to be confused with the regrettable 2007 feature film) and the announcement of an October release of his next book.

It’s a little awkward. Tolkien and Lewis are authors whose works are beloved, and without whom I probably would never have been led to discover Pullman–not only since they formed my taste for the sort of genre his books most nearly fit into, but since The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia paved the way for publishers to seek out and promote books like His Dark Materials in the first place. Thus, along with the awkwardness of liking all of them together–something that would have been latent in the case of Lewis and Tolkien anyway, even without all of Pullman’s provocations–there’s an added discomfort, a sense that Pullman is being ungrateful for all they have done for him.

To pass over the well-documented wardrobe allusion embedded in his story, these words of the Librarian of Jordan College at the close of Chapter 2 of The Golden Compass might suggest Pullman is not unaware of his debt to his forebears:

“That’s the duty of the old,” said the Librarian, “to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old” (32).

For years, Pullman has aired his critiques much more overtly in interviews and talks, providing plenty of fodder for us, fans and scholars alike, to think about and respond to. He has rather cannily gotten his name linked inextricably with Lewis’, in particular, and I have to suspect that at least to some degree his attacks spring from emulation in the older sense of ambitious rivalry, as well as the newer, of imitation; that he, as much as any poet, suffers from a certain anxiety of influence and misprizes those he must contend with.

Then in the fall of 2017, along with his long-awaited new novel, The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, Pullman released Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling. Inevitably, many responses were again determined by the Lewis-shaped hole Pullman has carved out for himself in the popular sphere. In a review of the novel, titled “Is Philip Pullman the anti-C.S. Lewis?” Elizabeth Desimone writes:

“In a roundabout way, Pullman does Christians a service by writing his anti-Christian books. He reminds us, vividly and trenchantly, of what we do not want to be, what Christ would not want us to be. His earlier books charged the church with sowing sexual guilt, a criticism that struck me as both warranted and wrong—warranted because you do not have to look far to find bad theology on sex but wrong because any Catholic who disapproves of the body or of sensory pleasure has a basic misunderstanding of sacramentality.”

If his fiction prompts a “roundabout” reaffirmation of faith through introspection, his non-fiction, gathered for the first time in Daemon Voices, poses the same challenge directly. Laura Miller’s review in the New York Times cautions:

“Taken in long swigs, Daemon Voices can be overwhelming, a torrent of enthusiasm for science, art, music and literature. But moderate doses act much like the story Lucy Pevensie reads in a magical book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a novel by Pullman’s bête noire and occasional inspiration, C. S. Lewis. Like that story, and like Pullman’s own fiction, these essays cast a spell ‘for the refreshment of the spirit.’ To read them is to be invigorated by the company of a joyfully wide-ranging, endlessly curious and imaginative mind.”

Indeed, in several passages Pullman cites Lewis admiringly. In his introduction to Paradise Lost, he writes:

“C.S. Lewis remarks that for many readers, it’s not just the events of the story that matter: it’s the world the story conjures up. In his own case, he loved the Leatherstocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper not just for ‘the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged–the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, war-paths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names’” (58).

The same reference appears in “Reading in the Borderland,” a discussion of the connection between illustrations and stories (278). Temperamentally, though, however much Pullman is drawn to world-building, he resists it:

“meanwhile the book is lying there forgotten. Because you left the path. Because you became more interested in the wood, in elaborating all the richness and invention of the world you’re making up. Never leave the path” (90).

Tracing G.K. Chesterton’s “‘evil shapes’ in the pattern of a Turkish carpet,” he remarks that this

“odd idea turns up in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia too, where the Witch kills Aslan with a knife of ‘a strange and evil shape’–what is an evil shape? Nonsense, that’s what it is” (443).

Of course, nonsense is not necessarily pejorative. The use of “Arcturian Back-rays” in “that great, mysterious, powerful, odd and inimitable novel, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus” Pullman calls

“Absolute nonsense, of course, and it doesn’t matter a bit. The real point is not how they get there, but what the do when they arrive: not the wood, but the path” (91-92).

In “Let’s Pretend,” he considers the case for adaptation of children’s books:

“A sort of worthiness argument sometimes comes into play here: it’s good that children should know classic stories like Treasure Island and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Secret Garden, and so it’s OK to adapt them for the stage…” (295).

This criticism, if it is one, is purely in the service of an argument about the narrow-mindedness of certain trends in education reform and the value of live theater as such.

In “Children’s Literature without Borders,” Pullman’s reference is decidedly mixed:

“The model of growth that seems to lie behind that attitude–the idea that such critics have of what it’s like to grow up–must be a linear one; they must think that we grow up by moving along a story of timeline, like a monkey climbing a stick. It makes more sense to me to think of the movement from childhood to adulthood not as a movement along but as a movement outwards, to include more things. C.S. Lewis, who when he wasn’t writing novels had some very sensible things to say about books and reading, made the same point when he said in his essay On Three Ways of Writing for Children: ‘I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two.’” (126)

Again, he cites the very same passage in “The Republic of Heaven,” only this time he goes on:

“There’s nothing there which a republican would have any quarrel with; but the sensible Lewis who wrote that was thrust aside in Narnia by the paranoid bigot who proclaimed that an interest in lipstick and nylons was not an addition to the pleasures of life but an absolute disqualification for the joys of heaven” (450).

Alongside the so-called problem of Susan, however, he amplifies the point with reference to Aslan’s revelation, ‘The term is over: the holidays have begun,’ with which he vehemently disagrees:

“This world is where the things are that matter. If the Narnia stories had been composed in that spirit, the children who have passed through all these adventures and presumably learned great truths from them would be free to live and grow up in the world, even at the price of engaging with the lipstick and the nylons, and use what they’d learned for the benefit of others…That would be the republican thing to do. That’s why Lewis doesn’t let his characters do it, and why the Narnia books are such an invaluable guide to what’s wrong and cruel and selfish.”

That is the very claim Desimone made about Pullman’s books, of course, seen from the other side. Her comment about “[disapproval] of the body or of sensuality” being “a basic misunderstanding of sacramentality” is also apposite here. Pullman’s harping on lipstick and nylons, and his assertion of the importance of life in “this world,” strains the whole metaphorical richness of Lewis’ Chronicles through an impossibly literal-minded sieve. “The children who have passed through all these adventures and presumably learned great truths from them”– ideally, that’s us! The same goes for when we read His Dark Materials–unless, like Pullman when he reads The Last Battle, we bring an uncharitable grouchiness to the endeavor, we do return “free to live and grow up in the world.”

That mind Miller found “endlessly curious, wide-ranging and imaginative” but also “Far from Narnia” has its limitations, as we all must. Pullman sticks to a path which, for all that they have their parallels, diverges from and even runs counter to Lewis’. And he has no patience at all with Tolkien’s luxuriant woods:

“The Lord of the Rings is not a republican story, because there is no point at which it connects with our life. Middle Earth [sic] is a place that never existed in a past that never was, and there’s no way we could ever get there. Nor do the people there behave like people, unlike those concerned with another Ring; the world depicted in Wagner’s Ring cycle never existed either, but the Ring is a republican work because Wagner’s gods and heroes are exactly like human beings, on a grand scale: every human virtue and every human temptation is there. Tolkien leaves a good half of them out. No one in Middle Earth has any sexual relations at all. I think their children must be delivered by post” (451-2).

I guess he’s never wandered very far into The Silmarillion. But then, not many people do! Whereas I, for my part, have never made it very far into Wagner; but suddenly I have an unaccountable desire to “Kill the Wabbit.”

In “Writing Fantasy Realistically,” Pullman confesses, “Now I was embarrassed to discover that I felt so much at home writing fantasy, because I’d previously thought that fantasy was a low kind of thing…I had thought (and I do still think) that the most powerful, the most profound, the greatest novels I’d read were examples of realism, not of fantasy” (351).

“I can’t remember anything in The Lord of the Rings, in all that vast epic of heroic battles and ancient magic, that titanic struggle between good and evil, that even begins to approach the ethical power and the sheer moral shock of the scene in Jane Austen’s Emma when Mr Knightley reproaches the heroine for her thoughtless treatment of poor Miss Bates.” (352)

When he cringes from imagining his work being labeled fantasy and compared to “a thousand other big fat books crowding the fantasy shelves, all with titles like The Doomsword Chronicles…” it becomes clear, if it wasn’t before, that what Pullman is revolted by is not so much Tolkien as the legions of Tolkien’s imitators; what he is revolting against is not Tolkien, but his own prejudiced view (353). This is all too easy, and understandable, to fall into when writing polemically, but certainly something to be on our guard against if we would read charitably.

As tends to happen, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams don’t figure in Pullman’s allusions–even Dorothy Sayers gets just one passing mention (127). Yet I think Barfield (quoting William Blake) says it best in his dedication in Poetic Diction to C.S. Lewis: “Opposition is true Friendship.”

In this print of Plate 20, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, you can just faintly see at the bottom of the page the aphorism “Opposition is true Friendship.” Text editions make it much easier to read.

Wesley Schantz coordinates Signum Academy, writes about books and video games, and works as a substitute teacher in Spokane, WA.

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Adam Mattern on C.S. Lewis’ Science Fiction (Announcement)

Posted on March 13, 2019 by

Join us tomorrow, Thursday, March 14, at 6pm ET for a Thesis Theater with recent Signum University MA graduate Adam Mattern, who will present his thesis titled “An Image of the Discarded: C. S. Lewis’s Use of the Medieval Model in His Planetary Fiction.” The conversation will be facilitated by Brenton Dickieson (that’s me), and special guest Lewis scholar, Dr. David Downing, director of the Wade Center at Wheaton College, will join to interview Adam.

Sometime in late 1936 or early 1937, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien agreed to write science fiction stories, since what was being published at the time included too little of what they enjoyed. Within Lewis’s science fiction series, he incorporated the Medieval Model (as described in his The Discarded Image) to construct the cosmos of his trilogy and populate his extraterrestrial worlds of Malacandra and Perelandra. With an eye on Lewis’s history with the genre and his approach to writing fiction, this paper explores why Lewis patterned his cosmos after the Medieval Model and how he used medieval literature to inspire a feeling of Sehnsucht or Joy, a critical component of his fiction. His personal experiences with Sehnsucht informed Lewis’s approach to creating a sense of Other by drawing on spiritual elements, which he believed to be an analog of the type of alien worlds that science fiction readers longed to visit. It was through the Medieval Model and the experience of other worlds that Lewis’s series critiqued and subverted what he saw as the growing misapplication of specific scientific principles to ethics, which had become popular in other science fiction stories of the time.

Adam Mattern works for Cisco Talos as a team lead for a group that conducts web traffic analysis for a web filtering product. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his wife as she completes her Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology. He started with Signum University with the Tolkien and the Epic class and discovered Medieval Literature through reading about Tolkien and Lewis’s friendship and their fiction. Now finished with his M.A., he plans to get back into woodworking, writing, and attempting to surmount a reading list that has only been bolstered by his time at Signum.

To register, click here: https://signumuniversity.org/event/thesis-theater-adam-mattern/.

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David Bentley Hart’s Prophetic New Testament Translation and America’s Heresies

Posted on March 11, 2019 by

The New Testament: A TranslationThe New Testament: A Translation by David Bentley Hart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is a little awkward to provide a star-rating for a Bible, but I am thinking here of the translation by David Bentley Hart. I read this translation quickly, on an almost daily basis in short readings over the last 3 months. I did not do any extra digging, except for a few moments where I ran to the Greek text to see if what Hart was doing with the text was fair. I don’t share Hart’s religious perspective, and I certainly don’t share his social class–both of these are essential to his translation–but this is largely how I would do a literal Greek translation if I had to.

Indeed, when I started reading the translation I got an eerie feeling that Hart was looking over my shoulder. His translations sound like my teaching notes, the ad hoc and planned translations I do for students when teaching Greek or upper levels of New Testament classes. In that way, this is an exciting and useful translation to read.

Now that Hart has done it, I know that it would have been folly for me to spend five years producing a translation like this. Not that I am not grateful, but my skills and desires really lie elsewhere. I would like to do a translation like what Robert Alter has done of the Old Testament, though that comes with a life of letters, and I am still a young thing.

But there is this other thing that holds me back from doing what Hart has done.

Truthfully, a translation like this can only ever be two things connected as one: 1) an exegetical aid to smart readers, leaders, teachers, and pastors, with 2) a prophetic edge. So translating doulos as “slave” rather than slave or servant depending on context, or transliterating logos or cosmos are moves that make us stop short in our reading. They challenge our assumptions, help us recontextualize the passage, and help us think more deeply about the integrative nature of the text. Too often we forget or are ignorant of the social moments in the New Testament, embedded in a particular worldview that is translated in our English versions but invisible to us as untrained readers.

Hart’s translation, with his helpful footnotes and supporting essays, is a brilliant text for providing that prophetic edge. But we cannot pretend that “slave” is more accurate than “servant” in translating doulos, or that cosmos is actually more accurate in English than “world.” These are choices we make. And this is where Hart’s value really shines forth. Every translation is an exegetical school, and so his version next to your favourite go-to translation (combined, I hope, with the King James for literary merit and the original text if you can) makes for a conversation that hopefully helps us rethink our walking assumptions in Bible reading.

In particular, although Hart and I have different beliefs and have really different social spaces, we are both concerned about one of America’s real Christian heresy, which is a subliminal commitment to Mammon–though I suppose we call it “security” or “blessing”–rather than the radical transformation of the Christ-life.

Jesus said very specifically that we are not to save money for the future. James goes further. I have never heard a sermon that took this passage seriously in an English, Canadian, Japanese, or American pulpit (and I can’t even recall reading a chapter about it in a Christian book, though I’m sure it’s there somewhere). The Prosperity Gospel is an American heresy, but that is partly important because it is the cartoonish, exaggerated version of what North American Christians have brought into their own souls. Even in the realm of politics, North American Christians have traded economics for integrity, and believe their leaders to be economic managers rather than formers of culture.

By contrast, in American church life there is a fascination with sex and sexuality–topics Christ hardly ever addressed, though he lived them as humans do. To use another cartoonish heresy as an example, North American evangelicalism has had an intensive, generation-long fascination with “purity” conversations about sex. This despite the fact that Christ’s biggest criticism of his fellow Jews was of their fascination with purity. More than that, there is not a single unambiguous passage in the New Testament that says “don’t have sex before you are married.” And yet millions of young people have had this message dominate youth conferences, Sunday School classes, youth groups, devotional literature, and other ways we do pulpits and pamphlets today.

This is what we Christians have traded for God’s grace and the cosmic transformation of the cross: an attention to young people’s bodies, especially to girls, in a way that is pedophilic at worst and perverse and imbalanced at best. Anyone who claims that evangelicals follow a literal reading of Scripture betrays great ignorance. It is no wonder that young people leave the church in staggering numbers. They are right to reject idolatry and they prefer civility to barbarism. And we North American church leaders will be held accountable for what they have lost.

Meanwhile, as the richest culture in all history remains terrified that it will lose a tiny bit of its financial stature, the world inside and outside the church and all through the world looks on, longing for rice in their bowls, spiritual bread in their hearts, and eucharistic transformation of their communities. Frankly, I think we deserve these ridiculous leaders, Trump and Trudeau. They are the messages writ large on the canvas of world history that which are the secrets of our own heresies.

But this is a book review, and that’s precisely the point. I don’t know how to translate as I do in the classroom without providing what is lacking in our culture. The problem with that is that I too am lacking. In the words that close Hart’s translation:

If anyone should add to them [this book’s prophecies], God will add to him the calamities that have been written about in this book. And if anyone takes away this prophecy’s book, God will take away his share from the tree of life and from the holy city that are written about in this book.

Frankly, I am simply not good enough to provide this prophetic self-critique embedded in words of Scripture. As a writer or a preacher I can discern these lines, but given my own heart and the selective and perverse literalism of many committed Anglo-American Christians, this would be a grave error.

So I leave this job to David Bentley Hart.

But as readers, we must recognize what this translation does. It is a tool for us, as are all English translations, and we read it as part of the study that forms our lives and (hopefully, God willing) transforms our church into the likeness of Christ, who gives up all worldly power and submits to the cross in order to lay down his life. As so we do the same.

If you are interested in this book, you should look at reviews that are more careful and detailed. This is merely a teaser. For example, you can read N.T. Wright’s extensive criticism at The Christian Century and David Bentley Hart’s response on Fr. Aiden Kimel’s blog. While I have profound respect for Wright, a fellow that has shaped me radically, I think he may miss the overall sense of what this translation is meant to do. As a prophetic literalized translation it works really well, and should be read with nothing more in mind.

Of course, I would quibble in 200 places in the text translation. I think that is expected in a translation like this. I wish the text was a bit more readable, but I think that reminds us of the role of this translation as a prophetic text not a primary one. I actually wish I had a critical edition of this text with twice as many footnotes, like a study Bible. Perhaps that will come. But overall, this is a pleasing result from a book that is meant to make us feel uncomfortable—both in its original Greek form and in this American English edition.

View all my reviews

Note: I have chosen not to note the importance of this translation for Anglo-American Orthodox believers, or Hart’s desire to bend translation back from Augustinian traditions (like Roman Catholicism and Protestantism). If people want my masters thesis, where I translate in a similar way (using “Judaist” instead of choosing Jew or Judean as translators including Hart do), send me an email: junkola [at] gmail [dot] com. It also has benzodiazepinic properties for those struggling with insomnia.

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TOLKIEN Official Trailer: Tentative Hope

Posted on March 7, 2019 by

I’m actually starting to get excited about this. Coming from a place of deep skepticism, I am a bit of a late adopter to the idea of this film. Or most any biopic, actually, if I know the main characters. If I know nothing about the historical figure, I tend to love beautifully made biopics. I feel good about living in blissful ignorance of the great story in front of me. It’s quite a strong decade for these films, particularly those set in WWII.

But I do know something about J.R.R. Tolkien. I am not an expert in his biography, but I feel a pretty solid sense of the man, an image in my mind of his character, his habits, his dreams, and some of the hurts and tensions in his life. So over the last few years, I have winced at each step of this Tolkien biopic journey, worrying that it would be terrible.

I began to turn with some hope toward the film with the teaser trailer a few weeks ago. It looked professional and tight with some nice imagery. Strong production does not make for a well-researched biography, but I do like a well-made film. What the teaser suggested and what this new trailer confirms for me, is that the film is largely about Tolkien’s imaginative formation in the context of friendship (the TCBS), war, and love. I’m starting to think this might work.

The cast looks compelling–we must now admit that Edith and John Ronald Tolkien are the best-looking of all the Inklings families–and the filmmakers clearly have a good sense of set direction, costume, and character interaction. The close-up scenes are great, and the war scenes look competent. We will see. Perhaps the least elegant bits of what we’ve seen thus far are the quick shots of Tolkien’s imaginative world.

And then there is this:

They had to know that Tolkien nerds were going to screenshot this bit. Hardly subtle, the shot suggests a link between war and Tolkien’s work. The link is important, and a great way to prepare for this film is to read John Garth‘s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. I am intrigued to see how they interpret the link between story, war, language, and Tolkien’s building vocation as a mythmaker. But I am a bit worried about whether they really understand fantasy and can interpret it for us on film.

At the end of the day, I will be pleased if this is a strong story about friendship. I will find my way to the theatre, I’m sure. And as the original Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films are both important to me and a little disturbing in some ways, I may never be satisfied. Still, this is my note of tentative hope!

TOLKIEN explores the formative years of the orphaned author as he finds friendship, love and artistic inspiration among a group of fellow outcasts at school. This takes him into the outbreak of World War I, which threatens to tear the “fellowship” apart. All of these experiences would inspire Tolkien to write his famous Middle-Earth novels.

Only In Theaters May 10, 2019

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Literary Diversity and the Bottomless C.S. Lewis: A Unique Journey in Books

Posted on March 5, 2019 by

In George Sayer‘s compelling biography of C.S. Lewis, Sayer recalls the first time he met his future tutor and friend. Before and after his first meeting, Sayer found himself chatting with an unknown professor, later to be revealed as J.R.R. Tolkien. When Sayer described how his  first meeting went, Tolkien remarked:

“You’ll never get to the bottom of him” (Jack, xx).

This bottomless Lewis creates some interesting puzzles for biographers, but it is also a neat phenomenon for readers. I don’t know how you tumbled into Lewis. For me, I had read Narnian fairy tales as a child, and had used sections from Lewis’ most popular apologetics, Mere Christianity, as a young teacher, but hadn’t seriously wrestled with it. When my wife and I immigrated to Japan, we found ourselves inheriting an advanced English class that had The Great Divorce as the main text for the year.

Reading that book, a Dante-like dream vision, and reading it with people from another culture as we looked at it word-by-word, line-by-line, is probably an unusual way for an adult encounter with Lewis. Yet the experience invited me deeper into his world of books over the next few years. I turned seriously to the apologetics books, especially Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, as a professor of religious studies in the hot, heady new atheist days of the last decade. The Ransom Trilogy was a great delight, rousting a long-lost love of classic sci-fi. I found myself reading Letters to An American Lady and Of Other Worlds at the beach, and was soon tumbling through his essays. And, just before I decided to do a Ph.D. on C.S. Lewis, I found myself peculiarly attracted to A Grief Observed, mostly for its intensely personal logic.

Like Stephen Fry‘s “linguistic elasticity,” my journey into C.S. Lewis’ literary career is such that I can be certain that nobody has ever done it that way before in the history of communication. Or even in Dorset. My reading experience is a unique child born of a unique mother.

Where does this unique pathmaking in Lewis’ literary life come from?

No doubt it comes partly from our own wandering along the pathways of literature. But we must admit that it also comes from this bottomless C.S. Lewis himself. Lewis’ corpus is diverse, developmental, and, on the surface, apparently disparate, with extent work that includes literary history, literary criticism, theory, philology, lecture, debate, letter, diary, memoir, anthology, festschrift editing, literary commentary, epistolary fiction, dream vision, philosophical novella, Christian teaching, sermon, biblical commentary, Wellsian sf, neo-Miltonian space fantasy, proto-Orwellian dystopia, myth retelling, fairy-tale, narrative and lyric poetry, apologetics, popular philosophical theology, and cultural criticism—and this list itself is a narrow description of Lewis’ play in form, idea, and story.

CS Lewis 1st Editions Books Photo by Lancia Smith

Photo by Lancia Smith

Kath Filmer once suggested that “every novel in his oeuvre was a ‘radical departure’ for Lewis” (The Fiction of C.S. Lewis, 112). If we change “novel” to “book” and allow Narnia to sit as a single experiment, she is on to something. Even in Narnia, which is a tightly written septet of children’s fantasy patterned after fairy tales, each one has a distinctive atmosphere and a unique adventure. The plotline of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy follows fairly typical adventure stories and will be emulated many times over in the half-century to follow. I’m not certain that something like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Last Battle has ever existed before, and may never be approximated again.

What is the reason for this greatly varied writing career?

There are many answers, I suppose, but I kind of want to resist an answer that might pin Lewis down. Lewis loved diversity, and the bookshelf he has donated to future readers is a dramatic example of someone who took joy in playing with his pen. He was compelled to write because of requests from people, because he saw a problem or possiblity in culture around him, because of images that popped into his head, and because of storylines that worked through him over years and decades. I think any of us who are writers know why he wrote so much (hint: it isn’t because of missing a joint in his thumb). But why did he write so many different kinds of things?

In the end, I think that Lewis wrote with such vigorous and beautiful diversity because he thought it was fun.

Not a terribly academic answer from a Lewis scholar, I know, but I think we need look no further. And I think that sense of fun and enjoyment of many different kinds of stories and books started early for Lewis. George Sayer looked through the Lewis Papers and discovered that:

“Jack [Lewis] had begun to make up stories before he could write, with his father acting as amanuensis…. By the age of ten, he had acquired the habit of writing. He spent some time every day and most of his time on rainy days in the attic writing and illustrating books. He produced a bibliography, a “list of my books,” seven items, including a novel, “Man Against Man,” a history called “The Relief of Murry,” and “My Life” (a journal)” (Jack, 49, 51-2).

There we see it: stories, illustrations, a novel, a history, a journal that looks like a prepubescent attempt at a memoir. The collection called Boxen is Lewis’ childhood collaboration with his brother and includes a play (a comedy), vignettes, sketches, copious histories, “scenes from Boxonian city life,” and Encylopedia Boxonia with lists and timelines–all mapped and diagrammed and beautifully illustrated. The only thing missing from that collection is fantasy and poetry, the two genres Lewis would play with as a teenager (in The Quest of Bleheris and Loki Bound) when he wasn’t writing lyric poetry that would become his first book, Spirits in Bondage.

Following his poem collection, he published a narrative dystopic poem (Dymer), started a realistic novel, began writing reviews and literary essays, started his first literary history (The Allegory of Love), and penned the best of his poems that appeared in The Pilgrim’s Regress. All of this, and perhaps two or three narrative poems, were before his conversion to Christianity in 1931–a conversion that seems to have deepened Lewis’ worldview and broadened his literary vision.

This is C.S. Lewis’ literary playground. This habit for genre diversity and story play began in childhood and continued throughout his life. My journey into his books is no doubt different than yours, but that is the fun of it, I think. In this case, I think Tolkien is right: you’ll never reach the bottom of C.S. Lewis.

Posted in On Writing, Thoughtful Essays | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments