Relocating To Elfland

“Scazons”
by C. S. Lewis

Walking to-day by a cottage I shed tears
When I remembered how once I had walked there
With my friends who are mortal and dead. Years
Little had healed the wound that was laid bare.

Out little spear that stabs! I, fool, believed
I had outgrown the local, unique sting,
I had transmuted wholly (I was deceived)
Into Love universal the lov’d thing.

But Thou, Lord, surely knewest thine own plan
When the angelic indifferencies with no bar
Universally loved, but Thou gav’st man
The tether and pang of the particular,

Which, like a chemic drop, infinitesimal,
Plashed into pure water, changing the whole,
Embodies and embitters and turns all
Spirit’s sweet water into astringent soul,

That we, though small, might quiver with Fire’s same
Substantial form as Thou – not reflect merely
Like lunar angels back to Thee cold flame.
Gods are we, Thou hast said; and we pay dearly.

One of the conversations going on in the church that is very old but currently as lively as ever is the one about the relationship between science and theology. Of particular interest to me here is the question from that conversation: To what extent should Christians let the theology they have learned from “special revelation” (scripture) influence their interpretation of “general revelation” (nature) in the course of doing science? I’ve written about this elsewhere before, but it continues to fascinate me, not least because of how many Christians give what is basically the secularist’s answer – “not at all!” It should be beyond dispute (we hear) that any compromise of objectivity is a compromise of science itself; a scientist must come to the data with an open mind and simply see where his investigations lead him.

I’ve thought a lot about this because, as a former attorney, I’m deeply sensitive to the problem of prejudging evidence. Make up your mind about a case before it is presented, and you will be deaf to anything that doesn’t fit your view. Such an approach inevitably yields miscarriages of justice. So it is with science, we understand: let people start believing in demon possession because they read about it in the Bible, and they may start burning people with “demonic” symptoms without ever bothering to consider what medical causes might be in play.

All right, but here’s a difficulty. Suppose we say theology is one domain of study with its own rules (faith working from scripture), and science is another domain of study with its own rules (reason working from nature), and the former mustn’t disturb the latter. Doesn’t this mean we have already placed the “supernatural” firmly outside the bounds of science? Doesn’t this define science in such a way that the evidence can lead nowhere but to purely “natural” conclusions? Isn’t this, then, a prejudging of the evidence? And doesn’t it completely secularize science?

Consider, for example, the Gadarene demoniac. If we met this man today, we would want to have him examined by a physician, and we would not want the interference of crazy religious ideas about demon possession. But suppose some physician, committed to what we now know as the “scientific method,” had run up to Jesus as He encountered the Gadarene, and told Him He was about to corrupt a brilliant opportunity for science with His wild ideas about exorcism. And suppose Jesus had said to this physician, “Your objectivity has blinded you to what’s actually going on here.” Would that have been a corrupting imposition of theology on science? Would that have been a theological prejudging of the scientific evidence on Jesus’ part? Or would it have been an exposure of the prejudging of the evidence on the physician’s part? Hmmm . . . .

I ask this because I recently read something in Jim Jordan’s Through New Eyes that is kind of obvious, but it’s also kind of radical. He says this (p. 29):

“According to the Greeks – and actually all pagans – the world was not made by God. Rather, the world, or the raw material of the world, has always existed. This always-existing stuff just is, and so it is called ‘Being.’ This ‘Being’ stuff is like a blank slate. It is silent and meaningless ‘raw material.’ It does not bear the impress of any Creator, and it does not joyfully shout His name (Psalm 98:4–9).”

If you let this sink in, it means that to look at anything in the world without seeing how it shows off the glory of God is to look at it wrongly; it is, in short, to misunderstand the thing before you. There isn’t anything that is “just there,” naked under the microscope, open to all interpretations. Whatever is already has meaning, because it is created; and this must govern our interpretation of whatever is. How do we know this? Because the Bible tells us so. We can’t very readily throw out our Bible, or we cease to be Christians; and we can’t very readily shelve our Bible when we walk into the laboratory, because it tells us how we must look at everything we find there. This isn’t to say the Bible is a scientific handbook, which scientists must consult for answers to all sorts of scientific questions. It is to say the scientist never deals with anything for which the Bible hasn’t already provided a supernaturalistic interpretive grid – and this surely rules out the possibility of “Christianized” naturalistic science.

Now here’s a kicker: If the biblical understanding that nothing is “just there” precludes scientific interpreting of the world in just any way we please (notably without reference to the Creator), does it also preclude artistic representing of the world in just any way we please? In other words, if the Bible forbids a certain kind of objectivity in science, does it simultaneously impose a certain kind of objectivity in art?

Daniel Boorstin, in The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination, describes the classical distinction between comedy and tragedy:

“By mid-fifth century B.C., Tragedy and Comedy each had staked out different realms. Tragedy recaptured the ancient and the remote, gods and heroes. The spectator could see an enlarged version of himself struggling with grand issues of time and destiny. . . . Tragedy was a vision of events at a great distance in time (usually too in space) from the spectator.

“Comedy held up a mirror to the present. If Tragedy conjured up the unseen, Comedy rescued the familiar from the cliché. Comedy intensified daily experience, dramatizing the garrulous old man, the boastful soldier, the vain courtesan, the rude conceited youth, who all were so commonplace that they had ceased to be interesting. But Comedy made them laughable.” (Boorstin, Creators, p. 214)

Perhaps tragedy and comedy are reverse images of each other. When we look at man through the microscope, blowing him up so he is larger than life, we want to laugh at him. Enlarged beyond his ordinary size, he cannot be taken seriously. But when we look at man through the telescope, placing him on the epic stage of all things, we want to weep, for what is he on such a scale? And we ache for ourselves in him. It is when we see man for what he is, in his created proportions and relations, that we are humbled with hope and not despair, and laugh with joy instead of ridicule. “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.”

I would enjoy an evening with lots of pipe smoke and Scotch to discuss a Christian response to this development in the arts:

“First in painting and later in theater and poetry, Expressionismus would be used after 1911 to describe the German avant garde much as Futurismo described the Italian. It would be used retroactively to describe Strindberg’s drama. For painters, it represented the replacement of Seurat by Van Gogh as a model; and the assertion of a new goal: to paint not the observed moment in the life of nature, but nature’s inner life, and the inner life of the artist as well.” (William Everdell, The First Moderns, p. 305)

“All our talk of invisible things is metaphorical, figurative, poetic. . . . But this does not mean that what we say is untrue and incorrect. On the contrary, real poetry is truth, for it is based on the resemblance, similarity, and kinship that exist between different groups of phenomena. All language, all metaphors and similes, all symbolism are based on and presuppose this penetration of the visible by the invisible world. If speaking figuratively were untrue, all our thought and knowledge would be an illusion and speech itself impossible.” (Bavinck, p. 2.106)

This piece by Roger Scruton at The American presents an extraordinarily brilliant analysis of “popular” music, as well as insightful reflections on the nature of music in general. Do take a couple hours to read and listen through it.

Thanks to my dear friend and ministerial colleague, Dr. David Innes (who blogs here), for bringing this article in Harper’s Magazine to my attention.

A teaser:

“Why is every Crisis in American Education cast as an economic threat and never a civic one? In part, because we don’t have the language for it. Our focus is on the usual economic indicators. There are no corresponding ‘civic indicators,’ no generally agreed-upon warning signs of political vulnerability, even though the inability of more than two thirds of our college graduates to read a text and draw rational inferences could be seen as the political equivalent of runaway inflation or soaring unemployment.

“If we lack the language, and therefore the awareness, to right the imbalance between the vocational and the civic, if education in America—despite the heroic efforts of individual teachers—is no longer in the business of producing the kinds of citizens necessary to the survival of a democratic society, it’s in large part because the time-honored civic function of our educational system has been ground up by the ideological mills of both the right and the left into a radioactive paste called values education and declared off-limits. Consider the irony. Worried about indoctrination, we’ve short-circuited argument. Fearful of propaganda, we’ve taken away the only tools that could detect and counter it.”

“In Praise of Solid People”
by C. S. Lewis

Thank God that there are solid folk
Who water flowers and roll the lawn,
And sit and sew and talk and smoke,
And snore all through the summer dawn.

Who pass untroubled nights and days
Full-fed and sleepily content,
Rejoicing in each other’s praise,
Respectable and innocent.

Who feel the things that all men feel,
And think in well-worn grooves of thought,
Whose honest spirits never reel
Before man’s mystery, overwrought.

Yet not unfaithful nor unkind,
With work-day virtues surely staid,
Theirs is the sane and humble mind,
And dull affections undismayed.

O happy people! I have seen
No verse yet written in your praise,
And, truth to tell, the time has been
I would have scorned your easy ways.

But now thro’ weariness and strife
I learn your worthiness indeed,
The world is better for such life
As stout, suburban people lead.

Too often have I sat alone
When the wet night falls heavily,
And fretting winds around me moan,
And homeless longing vexes me

For lore that I shall never know,
And visions none can hope to see,
Till brooding works upon me so
A childish fear steals over me.

I look around the empty room,
The clock still ticking in its place,
And all else silent as the tomb,
Till suddenly, I think, a face

Grows from the darkness just beside.
I turn, and lo! it fades away,
And soon another phantom tide
Of shifting dreams begins to play,

And dusky galleys past me sail,
Full freighted on a faerie sea;
I hear the silken merchants hail
Across the ringing waves to me

—Then suddenly, again, the room,
Familiar books about me piled,
And I alone amid the gloom,
By one more mocking dream beguiled.

And still no nearer to the Light,
And still no further from myself,
Alone and lost in clinging night
—(The clock’s still ticking on the shelf).

Then do I envy solid folk
Who sit of evenings by the fire,
After their work and doze and smoke,
And are not fretted by desire.

(from Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics)

This was recently posted over at First Things, from one of my favorite contemporary poets:

Give thanks for all things
On the plucked lute, and likewise
The harp of ten strings.

Have the lifted horn
Greatly blare, and pronounce it
Good to have been born.

Lend the breath of life
To the stops of the sweet flute
Or capering fife,

And tell the deep drum
To make, at the right juncture,
Pandemonium.

Then, in grave relief,
Praise too our sorrows on the
Cello of shared grief.

I have noted with interest the spate of recent films dealing with vigilante justice (two of the more memorable being Boondock Saints and The Brave One). Last year another contribution arrived in Gary Gray’s Law Abiding Citizen. It is a hard film to watch, from the opening scene, and there is a lot of rough language; but it is a movie with a message (underscored by the sheer implausibility of its storyline), and thanks to compelling performances from Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler (no surprise!), the question at the heart of the film simply will not be denied. 

What I find powerful in these vigilante films, despite their deplorable glamorization at times of personal vengeance, is their rejection in the strongest possible terms of “legal positivism.” Legal positivism is the view that, roughly speaking, law is as law does. Law exists or it does not exist, but the existence of law has nothing to do with its merits or demerits (judged by some standard external to itself). Lon Fuller says that, in positivism, “law is defined as ‘the existence of public order’ without asking what kind of order is meant or how it is brought about. Again, the distinguishing mark of law is said to lie in a means, namely ‘force,’ that is typically employed to effectuate its aims” (The Morality of Law, rev. ed., p. 118). 

By contrast, a basic tenet of vigilante justice is that the “justice” offered by an existing legal system just isn’t good enough – in fact, doesn’t qualify as justice at all. Whether the vigilante impulse is a righteous alternative is not my point here; what interests me is the argument for holding legal systems accountable to something outside themselves. Put simply, there must be a moral standard to which human systems of justice are held accountable; or put yet another way, there must be a genuinely transcendent moral norm, so that might in itself does not make right. 

This transcendent moral norm is frequently identified by invocations of divine justice (e.g., the tagline in Boondock Saints, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done”). In Law Abiding Citizen, Clyde Shelton says to prosecutor Nick Rice, “I’m gonna pull the whole thing down. I’m gonna bring the whole *&^%$# diseased, corrupt temple down on your head. It’s gonna be Biblical.” Later in the film, he disguises himself as a janitor under the telling name “Nomos.” Higher law, higher nomos – even divine nomos – is the central issue of the film. 

But of course this accountability to a transcendent standard, demanded by the vigilante, must in the end return on his own pate. In Shelton’s arraignment, he demands of the judge, “Whatever happened to right and wrong?” Good question. Later he says to Rice, “Justice should be harsh, Nick, but especially for those who denied it to others.” Fine, but is there such a thing as an unjust response to injustice? Later, he utters these telling words: “Everyone must be held accountable for their actions.” And this is the reason his methods cannot, in the end, prevail. At the end of the film, in the final scene in Shelton’s cell, everything comes full circle as Rice says to him, “We’re all held accountable, Clyde. That includes you.” 

The anger in vigilante films is refreshing. It shows the refusal of the human spirit to surrender to positivistic views of justice and morality. It shows that our hearts cry out for a standard beyond and above us all. That standard (though most of the films barely hint at it, at best) is the law of God in whose hand is the life-breath of every living thing and whose are all our ways. 

Law Abiding Citizen ends with Grand Funk Railroad’s “Sin’s a Good Man’s Brother”: 

     Some folks need an education
     Don’t give up or we’ll lose the nation
     You say we need a revolution?
     It seems to be the only solution 

Indeed we do need a revolution. But let us make it one grounded in the law of God, administered according to methods He prescribes. Let us leave off taking the law into our own hands, whether in organized legal systems or in personal vendettas, and let us kiss the scepter of God in order that we may learn at His feet the ways of righteousness, justice, equity, and peace.