I won’t get in the habit of publishing too much of my students’ work on this blog, but I can’t help it in this case. The bellwork assignment (which students begin immediately upon taking their seat in my classroom) was to personify Love and Hatred. These snippets, both from the same student, are worth serious reflection:
Love jumps from person to person, making new life and destroying teenagers.
One of Hate[’s] favorite line[s] to say is, “I love you.”
Only tonight did I finally finish Till We Have Faces, a novel by C. S. Lewis that draws upon the myth of Eros and Psyche. Rather than write a book review, I will simply give my recommendation, and share some tangential thoughts of my own gained from the reading. I think this is a book for anyone, regardless of any other like or dislike for Lewis and his other works. And anyone, in this case, means just about anyone, but I’ll add this caveat: as I find often with Lewis, the prose is simple enough for young readers, but the content is (how to put it?) adult, mature, full, extreme, intense, not for most young readers.
I noted some clear similarities in TWHF to The Four Loves and The Great Divorce, especially in dealing with the perversion of “mother love” and the conflation between love and devouring. Very compelling. I have more thinking to do on the matters of love, or (to follow Lewis a little closer) on the matter of loves. I think some of the stuff from TWHF will enrich my reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which is next on my list.
What has my head spinning is the tension and conglomeration, as delivered by Lewis, of “paganism,” historical “Christianity,” myth, and the nature of the gods. The power of this work rests somewhere between, on the one hand, the failure of the philosophic account of the gods and, on the other, the inanity of obscure, sterile, merely allegorical myth—or more to the point, the inanity of merely allegorical interpretation of myth. Here, between philosophy and allegory, is the place where men and gods meet each other face to face. And what about this meeting? The gritty ugliness of pagan worship has, for Lewis (and for me), a kind of tangibility and truth above the sophisticated contemplation of the “Divine Nature” that is at once obviously Greek and also recognizably part of the history of the Christian religion. A god untouched by human art has a power of speech, a connection to what is visceral in us, that a beautiful marble statue cannot have. This latter god, crystallized by poetry, by sculpture, by theology and explanation, by moralizing, by merely allegorical myth—humans have so veiled and covered this god with their art that he does not meet with them, for this refinement of the image of the god is also a self-veiling, a hiding away, a denial of what is visceral and therefore the height of all dishonesty. They fashion a face for the god and lose their own faces, so that even when they come to the new god they have themselves no eyes to see and no ears to hear. And I think Lewis would be on track to point at modern and historical Christianity and say that we, or some of us, in our sophistication and high art, have exchanged the truth about God for a lie, the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things….
Let’s see what Kierkegaard might say to this.
They looked at this man, this not-man, this murderer, with disgust and horror.—“Is he a psychopath, or just utterly unsympathetic, apathetic, a not-man?”—They cannot understand him. He must appear masked to them—“What are his motives?”—Why do they care about his motives?—“He is evil, and does he not see it or care? Without care!”—He is unintelligible without his mask. He does not play by the rules but, as it is, has enough strength to endure a little while before an enforcer of someone’s rules crushes him with a penalty. He has risen from a deeper ruin and is rearing his ugly head here. Is this his convalescence or his last writhing motion before death?—“What is this monster?”— If there is an end for the sake of which humankind exists, then he more than any has failed to meet it. If there is no such end, he is a god among men. As a monster or a god, either way he is a not-man. Behold the free spirit. If he is not a god, he will die more wretchedly than any man. If he is a god at present, and does not die, then his is a living death without love, and eventually lacking feeling, lacking pleasure, and lacking consciousness as much as he lacks conscience. If he is becoming a god, this is worst of all:—not merely having nothing, but being nothing.
Criticisms often come without council; a person breathes out accusations to knock down another’s “house of cards,” but almost never teaches his tongue to edify.
On a related note, Ephesians 4.25-32, English Standard Version, italics added:
Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
Friendship is very mature when silent moments can be enjoyed just as much as conversations. Until then, there may be moments when one friend feels compelled to talk, to entertain the other with words. After the compulsion to entertain is thoroughly conquered, there is only sincerity and quietude of spirit. The one friend no longer frantically attempts to make his presence worthwhile; he knows that he delights his friend, for his friend would have already communicated this to him in a multitude of ways. He delights, and feels delighted in: they may talk or not, walk or not, come or go, drifting in the freedom of mature friendship.
—What, friend, shall we do today?
—Whatever is necessary, and whatever is delightful, too.
An apologist who was in Annapolis recently was asked some questions about justice and how a Christ-follower would relate to such a concept. Through some story-telling and illustration, she said that we should never seek justice on our own behalf, but always do so for our neighbor. If a man is being beaten, he should not retaliate. If he sees someone else being beaten, he should rise up to go protect him. When I heard this, I didn’t bother going through the consequences and hairy nuances involved in the scenarios, but I immediately thought about my many friends in the military. This apologist did not have anything about the military in mind when she said it, but I thought her argument would work well to support a follower of Christ in his decision to join the military.
It has been a question for me for some time, whether believers belong in military service. When I first came to the College, I would probably have said, unqualifiedly, “No. Christianity and war should not mix,” and I had my verses to show for it. But since living with a U.S. Marine, living near the Naval Academy and meeting many believers there, and seeing a dear friend in the military come into a relationship with Jesus Christ, this “issue” is very much muddled for me. What did Jesus say to the Roman soldiers who came to him asking what they needed to do? “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages,” Luke 3.14.* He does not say, “Throw down your swords and repent of your murderous ways.” The soldier, as a type, has varied significations in the New Testament:
May the Lord, the God of peace and the Architect of all the nations, help me and teach me in all this, and show me above all how to fulfill the commandment to love my enemies and overcome evil with good, and how to teach others to do the same.
*Bible citations so marked come from the English Standard Version.
In Book XII of the Confessions, Augustine acknowledges the large variety of interpretations that arise from the first few sentences of Genesis. In the midst of discussing these, he takes a whole chapter, xxv, to propose a fundamental rule for Bible teachers: in no way should they compromise love in discussions about the meaning of the written word.
Behold now, how foolish a conceit it is, in such plenty of most true opinions, as may be fetched out of those same words, rashly to affirm which of them Moses principally meant: and thereby, with pernicious contentions to offend charity itself; for whose sake he spake everything, whose words we go about to expound.
When I first read this I found it a little surprising. Augustine himself had some very strong opinions about Genesis, for the most part supporting an allegorical hermeneutic for the whole creation story. This kind of interpretation he thought was instrumental in combating some, like the Manichæans, who used peculiar literal readings of passages in Genesis as a means to discredit the Old Testament, to maintain that its putative contradictions render it useless for any instruction. So it is conceivable that, because of his success in combating the Manichæans, he would have highly valued his own opinions. Augustine, however, appears very sensitive to the verse, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble,”* from James 4.6, 1 Peter 5.5, Proverbs 3.34 Septuagint. This he cites in the second sentence of Book I, and then he repeats it many times throughout the whole. He acknowledges his own great intelligence and skill as a writer, but he fears the fruit of these excellences if his pride should get hold of them. So he would rather be contradicted than stand firm in his conceit. To this point he writes about the proud who love their own opinions and assert them too strongly:
Whereas they are so earnest, that Moses did not mean what I say, but what they say; this I neither like nor love: for even if it is so, yet is this rashness of theirs no sign of knowledge, but of over boldness; nor hath seeing further, but swelling bigger, begotten it. And therefore, O Lord, are thy judgments to be trembled at; seeing that thy truth is neither mine, nor his, nor a third’s; but belonging to us all, whom thou callest publicly to partake of it: warning us terribly not to account it private to ourselves, for fear we be deprived of it. For whosoever challenges that as proper to himself, which thou propoundest for all to enjoy, and would make that his own, which belongs to all; that man shall be driven from what is common to all, to what is properly his own; that is, from truth, to a lie. For he that speaketh a lie, speaketh it of his own.
That last sentence, qui enim loquitur mendacium de suo loquitur, is a fairly literal translation of the Greek, ὅταν λαλῇ τὸ ψεῦδος ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ, of Joh. 8.44, which is in reference to the devil, who is often associated with pride and prideful men, as at III.vi and X.xliii. Augustine believes that human conceit runs together inextricably with the devil’s deceit. On this premise alone we could consider the healthy fear of our own pride justified. But Augustine’s main point, getting back to that rule for Bible teachers mentioned above, is that pride leads to discord and upsets love. If we believe what Jesus Christ said about the two greatest commandments at Matthew 22.37-40—especially this last verse, “on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets”*—then we believe that our treatment of Genesis is also swallowed up by the commandment to love our neighbor, and therefore we should conduct ourselves in love and never let our reading cause discord, undue argument, or strife. To this point Augustine rightly cites Paul at 1 Corinthians 4.6: “Let us not therefore be puffed up in favor of one, against another, above that which is written.”
*Bible citations so marked come from the English Standard Version.
