Healthy Spiritual Paranoia

He's out to get us.

Religion is capable of generating all kinds of weirdness. (And all kinds of weirdos.) At the fringes, in various Christian traditions, superstition can overtake sound theology and sane spirituality, resulting in sundry forms of flakiness. This range can be as innocuous as Aunt Mildred’s strange obsession with following the Old Testament diet to dangerous--even murderous--fantasies of cult leaders like Jim Jones.

Moving in more supernatural directions, manifestations of the outlandish run the gamut from strange manifestations of Pentecostalism (anyone remember the fad from a few years ago when gold teeth appeared?) to Catholic statues of Mary bleeding from the eyes.

Exorcism is practiced by many different Christians who share nothing in their practices (again, one can compare Pentecostals with Roman Catholics, though there are practices in between these two). I bet most suburban Christians in America haven’t given two thoughts about real exorcism in as many years.

Visions, manifestations, dreams, demons, levitations, healings, angels, prophecies, blood, secret teachings, special revelations--the spectrum of non-normative Christianity is wide and wild. And most “normal” Christians rightly tend to stay away from the spookier edges where it is easy to get lost in the darkness of cults and wayward personalities.

And yet--take a look at the following passages:

Ephesians 1:20-21: "He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come."

Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Colossians 1:16: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.”

1 Peter 5:8: “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”

Whatever one might think about the more outre practices of the Christian fringe, one must admit that the New Testament is no stranger to the supernatural, and that Paul and other writers indicate that the realm of the divine might impinge upon this material world in less than friendly ways. In other words, biblically we have a right to have a healthy spiritual paranoia. Obviously anything religious can zoom off into dangerous or bizarre areas, and the New Testament urges restraint and scrutiny. But . . . it also gives us uncomfortable pause.

Interestingly, the high points of Christian engagement with culture accept this biblical directive. 

Dante, for instance, used all manner of literary resources to exemplify the reality of the Dark Side, while aware that his poem was “just” art. Demons don’t use hooks to rip apart the damned, and Satan is not miserably encased in ice at the center of the earth. But spiritually speaking, these metaphors enunciate genuine turmoil of the soul and speak to the hunger for immortal love. Some modern readers will reduce these images to mere Jungian metaphors of mental growth and stability, but Dante would have none of that Oprah-fied diminution of genuine truths.

Milton also plays around at a high level of seriousness in Paradise Lost. It is play in the sense that Satan’s persona is made-up, but it is deadly serious in the sense that the negentropic forces of evil genuinely exist and that humans are in big trouble.

William Blake in a more heretical, offbeat way explores similar territory with his fantastic mythologies derived from Christian and esoteric sources (like the Kabbalah), but his art still has the capacity to help us recognize that evil can be palpable and is not just the result of a nascent industrialism’s bad effects on society.

In a more recent vein, Charles Williams draws on his experiences with the occult to craft weird novels of supernatural realities that are both enmeshed in human lives and that exist beyond the material world. His Christian novels of the supernatural are not meant to be literal, and yet they are meant to be real. People really do give themselves over to the occult and hope to damage the goodness in God’s creation. 

On the one hand--the outskirts and beyond of Christian supernaturalism, where hairbrained fanatics dwell. On the other hand--a biblically normed acknowledgement of multiple levels of the created order, some parts of which do not look upon us favorably. In the middle--serious artists who want to get beyond ooga-booga scariness of television or film and use the resources of language to remind us of something important.

Toldja So

I just came across this a few minutes ago on Amazon while looking for something else. It is an in-depth study (apparently) of what the previous blog entry was about. Echoes of Eden resound in a variety of ways through "high" literature to various forms of pop culture. This helps explain why someone can be so enchanted with, say, the Harry Potter series as well as with the Narnia books. Homer's Iliad still has the power to move us, but so does The Avengers. Part of the reason, maybe, is that sometimes our hunger for lost paradise still punches through our imaginations.

Echoes of Eden: Reflections on Christianity, Literature, and the Arts by Jerram Barrs.

Impossible Art

A mighty narrative problem: how do you tell the story of unfallen humanity?

By the nature of our sin distorted vision, we cannot imagine aright what it is like to be unfallen. We can try, of course, and some utopian literature, such as More’s Utopia or Voltaire’s El Dorado or Lewis’ Perelandra, get at it with varying degrees of success. The unavoidable problem, though, is that, according to the various mainstream Christian theologies, human beings now live with distorted imaginations, bent wills, errant loves, and muddied intellects. We cannot literally imagine Eden since our imaginations can see only through a glass darkly. But we urgently feel the need to imagine the unimaginable.

An example: it is nearly impossible for an adult to imagine the naked body of a member of the opposite sex in a purely unfallen way. Too many immediate distortions of our being get in the way from perfect control of the will. No matter how hard we might try artistically, we cannot imagine a naked man or woman with total purity. It is out of our control, due to sin (Sin, not sins). Yet we feel the pull toward purity, so various artistic attempts throughout time try to render this dignity of unfallen human nature in its primal beauty, but we never quite get it. Greek Classical statuary, for instance, idealizes human form beyond mere prurience. William Blake’s strange, beautiful forms also re-conceptualize the human body as sublimely beautiful.

Blake's Perfection of Form

And John Milton tried. Boy, did he try.

He tried to imagine the unfallen condition, a part of which would be lack of shame since nothing shameful has yet occurred, and not just with nekkid bods. He tried hard to configure a sense of unfallen sublimity through language, image, metaphor, syntax, allusion, and plot. And with some success, at least as near as one can in our fragmented, alienated condition. In Book 4 of Paradise Lost, we see Adam and Eve resting and eating--without gluttony, without waste, in perfect harmony of appetite and love (and vegan!):

Under a tuft of shade that on a green

Stood whispering soft, by a fresh Fountain side

They sat them down, and after no more toil

Of thir sweet Gardning labour then suffic'd

To recommend coole ZEPHYR, and made ease

More easie, wholsom thirst and appetite

More grateful, to thir Supper Fruits they fell,

Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes

Yeilded them, side-long as they sat recline

On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours:

The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde

Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream;

Compliant nature feeds them. The couple harvest their meal from willing plants. The creek water is just right. Milton probably did not think they actually talked in Miltonic  verse, but the use of elaborate, ballet-like syntax points to perfect equipoise.

(Eve to Adam:)

“O thou for whom

And from whom I was formd flesh of thy flesh,

And without whom am to no end, my Guide

And Head, what thou hast said is just and right. “

She could have just said, “Yes, dear.” But the copiousness of rhetoric is both elegant and playful, a suitable literary ploy for showing (lost) human perfection.

The issue here is to use the resources of language and theology and history (the Classical tradition) to exemplify something noble, something beautiful, something beyond our ken--our pre-fall love and concordance between male and female.

But not just this.  Milton tries to capture how the circumambient realm of nature is oriented toward the king and queen of creation. Animals goof off for husband and wife in an Edenic, prelapsarian icanhazcheeseburger way. How does one imagine original innocence? Milton has the animals playing with one another instead of fleeing, competing with, or killing each other. Now, this might not literally have been the case, but my point is that we,  on the other side of the break, alienated from nature as well as from God and each other, create metaphors of harmony, unity, peace, joy, and love through such means as extrapolating from how our cats and dogs and parrots play with us. This unity among animals for the service of joy is one way to imagine the now unimaginable.

Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles

Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems

Fair couple, linkt in happie nuptial League,

Alone as they. About them frisking playd

All Beasts of th' Earth, since wilde, and of all chase

In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den;

Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw

Dandl'd the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards

Gambold before them, th' unwieldy Elephant

To make them mirth us'd all his might, & wreathd

His Lithe Proboscis . . .

Of course Milton fails, because we can no  longer see what we no longer are. All art must fail. But we can reach for it. We are driven to use art to regain something of what was lost. We earnestly imagine men and women loving each other with perfect equity and without lust. We imagine a fructifying nature where we belong, with no mosquitoes or indigestion. We can imagine playing with cats and dogs and elephants in an equilibrium of rightly measured honor (e.g., Narnia), whereas now we are often merely pathetic in our attempts to put clothing on our animals and in talking to them like children, treating real live humans around us with lesser dignity.

All art fails. All art must fail. This is part of the sadness of great beauty made by humans. And yet the failure of beautiful art can serve as a sign of redemption. We can imagine elephants being silly to entertain their beloved human companions in paradise and this imagined friendship, sometimes intermittently embodied in life today, gives us a picture of what we were, at play in the fields of the Lord.

Adam and Eve laugh at his lithe proboscis. He laughs with them.

(I have been waiting forever to use the word “circumambient.”)

Wasting Time with Books

On the one hand, Charles Spurgeon said this about reading:

Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.

On the other hand, Spurgeon had a thing against reading fiction--idle hands, devil’s workshop sort of thing:

How many young people there are whose hearts are just a road along which thoughts of levity and desires for amusement are continually going! How many precious hours are wasted over the novels of the day! I think that one of the worst enemies of the Gospel of Christ, at the present time, is to be found in the fiction of the day. People get these worthless books and sit, and sit—forgetful of the duties of this world and of all that relates to the world to come—just losing themselves in the story of the hero or heroine. I have seen them shedding tears over things that never happened, as if there were not enough real sorrows in the world for us to grieve over! So these feet of fictitious personages, these feet of foolish frivolities, these feet of mere nonsense, or worse, keep traversing the hearts of men and making them hard so that the Gospel cannot enter.

There is an acceptable way of reading this. Spurgeon the Baptist preacher was not entirely wrong in that much of the popular fiction of his Victorian day was trash and probably did fill the minds of readers with nonsense, just like most fiction today. A cinematic American example based that era: remember the writer in the excellent Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven? He wrote penny-dreadful novels of gunslingers and derring-do, silly novels meant to stoke simplistic daydreams of fallen masculine power. Clergy in 19th century America and  England were opposed to such salacious trash of the day, just as we today are rightly worried about our kids watching trash like the Saw movies or the Fast and Furious franchise nonsense. We cannot fault Spurgeon (and other clergy) for advising his flock to keep from wasting time or money on infantile fantasies that lie about the way life really is.

Jesse James, Superhero

But there is something more here, something not quite right in Spurgeon’s distaste for fiction. Spurgeon and his American counterparts sometimes forbade reading any fiction of any kind, including such classics as Don Quixote. The great American novelist Stephen Crane, for instance (1871--1900), had a Methodist clergyman father who dissed reading novels as an un-Christian waste of time. No wonder a talented child would forsake his faith the way Crane did if it was for him the only way to live out his vocation. By identifying one form of creative art in all its dimensions, whether trash or excellent, with ungodliness, Crane’s father constructed a terrible gap between talent and calling, leaving his son no alternative but to walk away from a constrictive evangelicalism. The Christian tradition at its best has found that the vocation of fiction writer finds a rightful place among all the ways of tending the Garden, which is the primary covenant God made with earth-man (Adam, related to adamah, Hebrew for earth).

I am not sure how widespread this attitude is today, but it still survives, more often now it seems in a utilitarian form. Reading fiction takes up too much time, this attitude says. One should be reading the Bible, or cleaning out the garage, or watching sports, or doing something.  Reading fiction (for some, reading anything) is a monumental bore and/or waste of time. There is no justification for it. Even Christians fall into this-- reading the sports page is infinitely preferable to reading a short story because you gain useful information from the first, since sports is much more important, whereas the second . . . wastes time. And it’s harder to read, anyway. Any reading, including fiction if one must have it, ought to be edifying, upbuilding, educational, improving, and so on. Or at least the reading ought to be simple, entertaining-- vacation, summer-by-the-pool, easily digestible and disposable books. One complaint against serious literature--it’s too hard. Or it’s too downbeat. Or it’s too long.  How many Christians today are aliterate?

But the shape of the lives of human beings is narrative. All the world’s a stage, Jacques says in As You Like It, and we all come on the stage, say our lines, and then exit. Individually we yearn for meaningful lives, we anxiously read our own lives to see if there is a pattern, a plot,  that we are not randomly living random accidental lives that simply stop randomly. Even the most pugnacious atheist wants to believe that his life is not literally a chaotic play of energy in the meaningless space of the cosmos (“I get a job, I do well, I am recognized, my friends like my insights, I go on to accomplish things for the Cause, and then I die-- having completed a worthwhile life that means something, doggone it”).

On a larger stage, the narrative of Scripture is the ultimate template of all plot--beginning, complications, resolution, end. The Bible tells us by its very nature that there is a narrative quality to existence. There is the cosmic sized story of creation, redemption, fall, and restoration, and within that meta-plot, there are subplots. The Bible is full of narrative (not fiction, understand). Compare that to the Koran, which is mostly compiled of legalistic statements and highly truncated and edited stories from the Hebrew scriptures, scattered higglety-pigglety throughout the book.

Give yourself unto reading, indeed. Read some good theology, like Spurgeon says, but also read some good fiction like Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” It isn’t a sin. Besides, reading good novels is good for your brain. The science is in.

Not Western, But So What?

The roll call of Christian poets is mighty impressive. Most of us are familiar with some of the Big Names of the English language tradition, such as John Milton, George Herbert, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, and so forth, but the tradition is much wider than this, with lesser known writers who deserve reading. This list would include the likes of Thomas Traherne, Christopher Smart, Elizabeth Jennings, and Jack Clemo.

Blind Cornish and Christian poet Jack Clemo

Beyond the English language, you can find Christian poets who have been influential in their own national and theological spheres, such as the Dutchman Jacobus Revius, the French Huguenot Salluste du Bartas, the Danish Lutheran N. F. S. Grundtvig, or the Polish Czeslaw Milosz.

One of the first biggies of Christian poetry was the early church poet Ephrem of Syria. Ephrem lived in the 4th century and was highly prolific (as so many church authors were back then), churning out hundreds of texts of poems, hymns, sermons, and biblical commentary. His writing was popular and translated into surrounding languages, such as Coptic (Egyptian), Armenian, and Georgian (as in near Russia, not near Alabama).  One of the themes of the early church was Christ as victor, as warrior, and Ephrem exemplifies this in some of his work. Notice in this  prose translation of some opening lines how Christ fights Death like a mighty hero:

"Death trampled our Lord underfoot but he in his turn treated death as highroad for his own feet.  He submitted to it, enduring it willingly, because by this means he would be able to destroy death in spite of itself.  Death had its own way when our Lord went out from Jerusalem carrying his cross; but when by a loud cry from that cross he summoned the dead from the underworld, death was powerless to prevent it.

“Death slew him by means of the body which he had assumed; but the same body proved to be the weapon with which he conquered death.  Concealed beneath the cloak of his manhood, his godhead engaged death in combat; but in slaying our Lord, death itself was slain.  It was able to kill natural human life, but was itself killed by the life that is above the nature of man.

“Death could not devour our Lord unless he possessed a body, neither could hell swallow him up unless he bore our flesh; and so he came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld.  This chariot was the body which he received from the virgin; in it he invaded death’s fortress, broke open its strong room and scattered all its treasure.”

The emphasis here is on hardcore doctrine (the incarnation, the atonement, our salvation) in highly charged, exciting poetic imagery. When we think of the tradition of Christian poetry, it is good to have some knowledge of the English tradition, as referenced above, but it’s also good to expand beyond that, forming an historical awareness of Christian poetry. This is good for us for several reasons. One, it helps smash the chronological snobbery that we are more and more enveloped by; two, it expands our access to profound spiritual resources that can enhance our own devotional lives.

Christ the Conqueror

I’ve been trying to track down a quotation given on numerous web pages regarding Ephrem, including Wikipedia, but haven’t found it. The quotation is this: Ephrem is, according to one writer, “The greatest poet of the patristic age and, perhaps, the only theologian-poet to rank beside Dante.” — Robert Murray. I have no way of judging the truth of this, but I’m sure one could mount such a defense of Ephrem’s importance.

Wait. There was a huge Christian church in Syria as big as anything in the West?

Well, there was. Syria was once a hotbed of vital Christian culture, with poets and theologians of great learning influencing the early church all over Europe and the Mediterranean. For instance, the now relatively famous Irish monastics were in direct contact with this Syrian Christianity, and a lot of the Celtic interlace on texts like the famous Book of Kells derived some of their inspiration from Syriac (and Egyptian Christian) versions and were not totally indigenous to the Irish.

So what happened to Ephrem and his ilk? What happened to this thriving, influential branch of Christianity, and why didn’t it hang around like the church in the West?

Well, there was this thing in the seventh century called Islam . . . .

To find out what happened to the ancient Syrian church, read this.

Just Listen to Your Heart

It is a temptation to take an important work by C. S. Lewis and call it a tour de force because you will end up calling nearly everything he wrote a tour de force. But in all honesty not everything C. S. Lewis wrote works equally well. And sometimes even Jack nodded. For instance, no one would argue that Lewis was a great poet, even though that’s what he wanted to be when first starting out. And it would be pretty hard to argue that The Pilgrim’s Regress is one of the best things Lewis wrote. Though The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has some fun stuff in it, it can never rank at the top of the Narnia books. And some of the occasional essays are too tied up with contemporary issues and arguments to speak with the same irenic urgency that Lewis’ most important works do (like The Abolition of Man--if anything, this work is even more desperately true regarding 21st century American education than mid- 20th century British education).

But The Screwtape Letters? Well, that is a TOUR DE FORCE. There are many good things one can say about this book, with its incisive examination of the way we poor mortals constantly fool ourselves into thinking we are pretty decent people. One particular aspect of this great bit of epistolary genius is the way Lewis examines the rightful place of clear thinking in the cosmic scheme of redemption. I mean, we are talking about demons, and salvation, and eternal souls, and God’s love, and sex. And right in the middle of these really really big issues, Lewis keeps returning to the importance of clear thinking--or rather the absence of it in the modern age when it comes to “spirituality.”

Uncle Screwtape tells Wormwood in the very first letter to keep the patient away from argumentation because logic, definition, well stated propositions and so forth no will not in fact clinch a solid atheism:

“But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as a result of a chain of reasoning.”

Lewis indicates that most people in 1942 had already become trained by mass media and modern education to think in terms of impressions and passing subjective states of moods as the defining condition of real life. Don’t believe your lying brain; believe in yourself, your heart, your Oprah-shaped hopes and dreams. Clear thinking (not the “critical thinking” pabulum currently so au courant in academia) helps kill this kind of ego centered stance.

Screwtape also offers this bit of advice: “Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church.”

Don’t define things. Don’t categorize. Don’t seek out cause and effect. Don’t box me in with your reductive petty ideas and logic chopping. Systematic theology is for losers. Didn’t you read the latest book on church growth? That book you have in your hands--yeah, The Imitation of Christ--man, that’s OLD. It can’t have anything to say to me. Here, read this book on prayers from twitter. And stop using those old fashioned theological words. They are such a turnoff.

This continues throughout the letters. The advice tends to center around a few key strategies: keep the patient in the stream of things (especially through mass media), keep him constantly monitoring his state of mind, keep him focused on the momentary as The Real. Above all, avoid things that might lead him to think about ultimate ends, final purposes. At one point about halfway through the letters, Screwtape’s facade of care for his nephew slips when he learns that Wormwood inadvertently let the patient have two real pleasures--a good book and a nice country walk. This practically led the patient to a second, deeper conversion because the patient was taken outside of himself to think about the ultimate end of things--which is the love of God.

The depth Lewis takes us to in this book comes, partly, from showing the linkage of logic and love. Clear thinking-- clarifying  definitions, accurate comparisons, historically shaped perspectives, and so forth--do not sever us from God, from beauty, from deepest, richest emotions. Clear thinking moves out of the way the tiresome ego and its enervating fears about life so that we can finally see Reality in all of its sublime, heartbreaking beauty.

Logic does not cancel out love for the Christian. It brings us to an attentiveness that silences the constant but ephemeral propaganda that each one of us is the center of the cosmos. For me, this is one of the things that makes The Screwtape Letters such a powerful and convicting piece of writing.

Reaching for the Stars

Take a look at the YouTube clip regarding the new movie by Christopher Nolen. Forget about the movie itself for a minute. Pay attention instead to the exalted rhetoric of sublime human exploration and achievement as the ultimate identity marker of what it means to be a fully realized human being.

“We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments, these moments when we dared to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known, to count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we’ve lost all that, and perhaps  we’ve just forgotten that we’re still pioneers, that we’ve barely begun, and that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, that our destiny lies above us.”

This is nonsense, but it is surprising nonsense.

It is nonsense because the “we have defined ourselves” sounds like human beings have defined themselves as technological overachievers from the beginning. But overcoming the impossible in the sense given in this clip is an ideology born in the Enlightenment, or thereabouts. People like Francis Bacon* and his heirs thought that with the right materialist manipulation of nature (and of human beings, eventually), we overcomers would overcome nature and rule like gods. (The answer to this blasphemic hubris is Gulliver’s Travels and Frankenstein.)

Swiftian scientist extracting sunlight from cucumbers

It is surprising nonsense, because we are well into the second decade of the 21st century, and we are nowhere near the Gernsbackian utopia envisaged by atheists who idolize scientism and its promise of endless progress. The world might have some pretty sophisticated technology, but human beings are as a whole still in pretty bad shape. Our greatest accomplishments don’t seem to fix the problems with crime, with civil wars, with collapsing infrastructures, with poor education, with shattered families and the attendant pathologies of crime and drug addiction. It is surprising that anyone could still say with a straight face that our destiny, our ultimate satisfying identity, is in space exploration.

When it comes to technology, we are in a sense superior to previous generations, and our best inventions (maybe) are still ahead of us, though superior ways of delivering pornography doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. Breaking barriers in terms of curing cancer is impressive and humane. Breaking barriers in terms of bigger and bigger houses (on the moon, maybe) with bigger and bigger closets is less so.

"I say, old chum! Does this thingy show the topless girls from Mardi Gras?"

Here is an odd fact--odd from the perspective of a secularist ideologue who believes in inevitable progress: human nature doesn’t change. What Plato, what Shakespeare, what Edwin Arlington Robinson has to say about being human is still as relevant as it has ever been.

According to the New Testament, the proudest human achievement is to repent. In an unintended way, the Interstellar voice-over gets it right--our destiny lies above us, just as Aeschylus, Milton, Faulkner, and , oh, I don’t know--Isaiah?--have been telling us.

Maybe this movie will be good. Nolen has made some entertaining movies. But it will only be a pleasantly diverting fiction, if the movie is nothing other than a celebration of Promethean Man, who is in fact the little child who says, “I can do it by myself!”

* I am probably being a bit unfair to Francis Bacon, but history is uncanny in its twists and reversals. Bacon wanted empiricism to serve humans, helping them to become noble and religious. Instead, it brought about the horror of things like hyper-efficient Nazi death camps and transhumanism