(I'm posting a little early becasue we have Vigil to sing tomorrow. I've used a lot of uncited quotes here. They all come from the notes in Walter Hooper's CS Lewis: A Companin and Guide.)
I had one of those moments today where what I always heard when right out the window with a new perception coming in. It was like doing a word scramble and suddenly, all the letters re-arranged. We were changint the Psalm verses during communion. We were on Psalm 18 LXX (Ps 19 if you use that new-fangled counting system).
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Day upon day uttereth speech, and night upon night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.
Ps 19:1-3 (TMB)
What I saw in our chapters this week was a crucial journey, one might even say the climax of the entire book. Which begins with Augray pointing out The Silent Planet (the bleakest moments in all his travels) in the night sky and ends with Ransom seeing the maps of the solar system... every planet has its Oyarsa except Earth. Without our Oyarsa...every one of them (ie, us) wants to be a little Oyarsa himself. But, (t)here must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themeselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maleldil. These creatures have no eldila. They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair - or one trying to see over a whole country when he is level with it - like a female trying to beget young on herself.
Without the Eldila, from which we are to learn God's praises, we don't even speak the language of the rst of the solar system. Yes, I know it is because God divided the tongues at Babel, but that is a punishment. We each try to be our own little deity. And today females even beget young on themselves.
This weeks reading showed me something important - it's not that we're fallen - but to an unfallen being, we must really be a mess; a bent race. And we can't tell at all, because each of us is fallen. Every system we have here, on Earth, is a mess, which is why we must submit to the System stared by God - His Church. The only Government that has hope is the one that takes the Church as a guide - hence Byzantium. But even that is doomed: my Kingdom is not of this world, as Christ said, and how can it be? By the end of Chapter 17 we're discussing what we know to be true - our economi systme is built on slavery, even if not real slavery (as in the early US) it is a virtual slavery (as in Communism) or else it is just wage slavery: people have to work or they will not eat. This is the system in which we live.
This cuts over into an earlier post I think, where I spoke about "doers of the word", or, in Greek, Ginesthe de poietai Logou and I rambled it into "Be a poet of the Logos - that is Jesus." Now, it must be said that Lewis, himself, was of our Fallen Race, but I think there is an element of Grace in these stories that is missing in the current SciFi Gospel being preached. In the Matrix we see a whole bunch of humans fending forthemselves against machines who are also fedning for themselves. Our machines are as fallen as our people are. The programs (like Agent Smith) are also fending for themselves. The Wachowski brothers can't imagine a world that isn't fallen. It can be very different from the one in which we live, yes, but it is still fallen. CSL, by Grace, can, because he is a Poet of the Logos. He says, "Most of the earlier stories start from the ... assumption that we, the human race, are in the right, and everything else is ogres. I may have done a little towards altering that." He engages in a meta-creation, just like Tolkien does.
CSL gives us poetry that allows us to ehar the Eldila, to hear the praises of God being sun, even if we don't know we're listening. He knew our fallen world wouldn't listen to "normal preaching" in a lot of cases. He took, I think, the whole idea of interplanetary travel as evidence of our problems. Here is one of his letters...
What set me about writing the book was the discovery that a pupil of mine took all that dream of interplanetary colonization quite seriously, and the realization that thousands of people, in one form or another, depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human species for the whole meaning of the universe - that a 'scientific' hope of defeating death is the real rival to Christianity...
You will be both grieved and amused to learn that out of about sixty reviews, only two showed any knowledge that my idea of the fall of the Bent One was anything but a private invention of my own! But if only there were someone with a richer talent and more leisure, I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelization of England: any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.
And one of the reviewers (and Anglican Clergyman) said in 1939, "This is an altogether satisfactory story in which fiction and theology are so skillfully blended that the non-Christian will not realize that he is being instructed until it is too late. It is excellent propaganda..."
It is odd and sad that the world CSL left in 1963 would have fallen so far in 40 years that, today, many who claim the name Christian would also miss the point.
Sorry, "aurality" should have been "orality."
Here's a question... Is Middle Earth a fallen world? or one not yet fallen? or one fallen and restored? I know JRRT was very un willing to have his world viewed as parallel to ours and certainly NOT allegory. But he was devoutly Catholic. And his religion is there...
We are a visual people. Even our textual WWW shows that - I like to see the text, thank you. But, yes, I rather like the idea of an oral culture, where story telling, etc, works more. I like radio shows much more than TV shows, for example.
Orthodoxy is on the edge, I think, between the cultures. Our icons - certainly visual - invite oral story telling. Our liturgy too, is much the same way. But I own a copy of the "Prologue from Ochrid" and saints lives come without Icons there, and are silent until one prays them alive again.
I think Middle Earth is fallen; especially having read the Silmarillion. But not fallen in the same way as is "real" Earth.
I'm as visual as the next guy. But when it comes to reading/literature and so forth, I'm also tactile and orally inclined. I like the feel of the book and the sound of the words.
I'm one of those freeks who'd rather pay several more hundred dollars for the complete set of Church fathers in book form than a couple hundred on the CD version.
I also think that paper and ink and typography is important for the reading-experience. After having read a book called Scrolling forward - making sense of documents in the digital age I was strengthened in my view that a book is like a human. The Word or maybe the spirit is there, but it is incarnated in the mysterious blend of solidity and ephemerality. Spirituality disconnected from a body is not that good an idea and I sometimes seem to think that texts disconnected from the body of a book is not that good an idea too.
Just look at how texts are incarnating everyday in our offices through our printers. Is it just a question of us having bad screens or is there a need in this?
On the other hand I am right now engaged in writing a commentary here and I do not find it a problem that it exists only on my screen and soon on your screens... :-)
(This probably didn't have much to do with OOTSP, but I have such a love for this associative thinking :-)
Huw:
Once again, very good.
Yes, gone are the Dostoyevsky's, the O'Connors, the Eliots of the 19th and 20th centuries. I've not yet found any replacements for them, but am very open to ideas.
Unfortunately, their "replacements" are much more explicitly visible--we are after all, a visual culture--and thus it is no surprise to me that some of the big movies are taken right out of the comic book genre, or emulate it.
Even though I'm a huge fan of the LOTR movies, they lose something when translated to the visual medium. I want words that sing, the fill the soul. I want a story that comes in through your ears and explodes in your mind.
Lewis does that, and Tolkien much more. We need to get back to aurality--or progress once more to it.