Towards a Language of Beauty: I. Beauty and the Incarnation

"Then we went to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men... for we cannot forget that beauty."
- The Primary Chronicle, account of the conversion of the Kievan Rus

I. THE WAY OF WONDER

It is the classical Christian conviction that all of history, time, creation, and meaning begin and end--and "live, and move, and have their being" in the Logos of God, who is the second person of the Holy Trinity, and for our sake was "incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man." It is for this reason that, for most of church history, one of the primary objects of Christian art--one might say the favorite meditation on beauty--is that of the Christ child seated on the lap of the Virgin.

Madonna and Child, Catacombs, c. AD 150

The Adoration of the Magi, detail from sarcophagus, c. AD 200

Theotokos Hodegetria "She who shows the way", Hagia Sophia, c. 9th Century

In the typical image, the Christ child--who appears in Eastern iconography not as a normal baby, but with an enlarged forehead to show him as the Word and Wisdom of the Father--sits enthroned upon the lap of the Virgin Mary, she (the source of his humanity) framing him, directing our eye toward him, "showing us the way" to worship him.

It must be stressed first and foremost that such images are icons of the Incarnation. Christians do not believe that God became every man, or just any man, but a particular man who like all particular men had a particular mother. And it was only in that particularity that the real universality of the Gospel was achieved. The fact that attempts have been made--and indeed are still being made--to erase the mother from the image entirely perhaps says something about our inability to come to terms with this particularity, and with our confused and damaged sense of individualism in which we seek to know each piece of the mosaic apart from all the others. But we do not know Christ apart from his full humanity, and that humanity is not an abstract idea. It is a person.

The hymnography of the Church has never tired of meditating on this image, poetically understanding Christ as the same God whom Ezekiel saw enthroned in glory upon the cherubim:

I behold a strange and wonderful mystery:
The cave a heaven, the Virgin a cherubic throne,
And the manger a noble place in which hath lain Christ
The uncontained God.
Let us therefore praise and magnify him.
- Katabasiae of the Nativity

This paradox--what Tolkien described as the "singer entering into the tale"--is the whole basis of the classical Christian understanding of beauty and wonder. It is the source of the absolute Christian confidence that finite creation can be the means of knowing an infinite God. Thus, by extension, bread and wine, water and oil are not merely things, nor are they some kind of an audio-visual aid to our teaching, but rather the real means of real participation and communion with one who is unknowable, and yet makes Himself known.

II. "WHY PROTESTANTS CAN'T WRITE"

I have begun with the Incarnation and the Sacraments due in part to a set of articles by Peter Leithart, published in First Things back in 2016. The provocative title of the article series was, “Why Protestants Can’t Write.” You could sum up Letihart’s argument in his very first sentence: “Blame it on Marburg.” For those who don’t know, the 1529 Marburg Colloquy was the first major “church split” of the Magisterial Reformation, between the German Martin Luther—and his followers—and the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli and his followers. The dispute was over the Eucharist: Luther held with a fifteen centuries-old reading of the New Testament and argued that that Eucharist was really the body and blood of Christ, although rejecting explanation of Transubstantiation.

To Zwingli, on the other hand, “myth or ritual… was no longer literally and symbolically real and true.” The traditional understanding of the Eucharist was, in other words, superstitious nonsense. And the vast majority of Protestantism followed Zwingli’s view that “literal truth is over here, while symbols drift off in another direction. At best, they live in adjoining rooms; at worst, in widely separated neighborhoods.”

That brings us to Leithart’s thesis, which he offers “in a fit of gleeful reductionism”:

“Modern Protestants can’t write because we have no sacramental theology. Protestants will learn to write when we have reckoned with the tragic results of Marburg, and have exorcised the ghost of Zwingli from our poetics. Protestants need not give up our Protestantism to do this, as there are abundant sacramental resources within our own tradition. But contemporary Protestants do need to give up the instinctive anti-sacramentalism that infects so much of Protestantism, especially American Protestantism.”

And, if my own story is anything to judge by, any Protestant writer who can survive the immediate spike in his blood-pressure long enough to read Leithart’s argument to the end will see that he has a point. But the problem goes back much farther than Marburg. Anti-sacramentalism is really part of a distinctively Gnostic way of viewing our relationship with the God who is Truth.

This is probably easiest to illustrate when we consider the differences in corporate worship between the average evangelical service and the churches of catholic tradition: The focus of evangelical protestant worship is the sermon, because God can only be apprehended mentally. Terry Johnson, a contemporary Reformed theologian, puts it this way:

“the worship of Reformed Protestantism is simple. We merely read, preach, pray, sing and see the Word of God… True faith comes through the word (Rom. 10:17). True worship then must be primarily (though not absolutely) non-material, non-sensual, and non-symbolic.” (Johnson, Reformed Worship, pp. 38 & 47.)

At more than one point in Protestant history, this tendency has extended towards docetist beliefs about the Incarnation itself; Puritan catechist, iconoclast, and Bishop of the Church of England Gervase Babington made it very clear that the Incarnation was at best a temporary occurrence:

Where the scripture spoke of Christ having parts such as feet, hands and face, these were merely temporary forms in which he appeared to men and in which ‘he lay hid even when he was seen’…

By contrast, the focus of Christian worship everywhere before the Reformation (and still in the
churches of more orthodox Christology) was and is the sacrament: meeting God and communing with him with our whole being, our bodies as well as our minds. In this sense Christ is truly the mediator--he "mediates" the experience of the Holy Trinity and the experience of humanity, enabling real participation, right now and in the flesh, with the Life which is the source of all life.

III. THE SACRAMENTAL IMAGINATION

So how does this affect our understanding of beauty? For the Puritan, the Incarnation was a hat-trick that God pulled off at one point in time—Christ folding himself down into physical space for a little while, or only "seemed" to be human, so that he could pay for the wrath of the Father on our behalf. Beyond this, it does not have any kind of ongoing implications. We therefore meet with truth by learning about and then agreeing to true things.

At its worst, this line of thinking leads to some of the ugliest examples of iconoclasm as illustrated by Cromwell and his Roundheads. At best, art produced by this mindset will tend towards moralism and sermonizing. Its most successful contemporary expression is probably the half-dozen or so films by the Kendrick brothers. It has been said that the Kendrick brothers themselves do not consider what they are doing to be art: they are preaching through the medium of film.

For the classical Christian, the Incarnation makes possible the heavenly liturgy and the perfect sacrifice offered once and for all “at the end of the ages.” Because it is eternal, it is ongoing, and therefore it continues to have ongoing implications. It is the catching up of the physical into the spiritual, the earthly into the heavenly, so that there is a real man with a real body offering a real sacrifice really seated at the right hand of the Father. All of physical creation, therefore, but especially human activity, is potentially salvific if it participates in the work of Christ. That is why theologians such as Alexander Schmemman have characterized the Church not as an institution with sacraments, but as the sacrament itself, one with the institutions and rites necessary for taking everything human and earthly and bringing it up into the life of the Holy Trinity.

This understanding of the Incarnation was used by St. John of Damascus in a series of three treatises he wrote defending the use of sacred art (which included not only icons, but vestments, crosses, and beautiful church buildings) in Christian worship. Writing against the iconoclast heresy of the 8th Century, St. John eerily anticipated Evangelical worship in America today:

If you say that God ought only to be apprehended spiritually, then take away everything bodily, the lights, the fragrant incense, even vocal prayer, the divine mysteries themselves that are celebrated with matter, the bread, the wine, the oil of chrismation, the form of the cross.

The Incarnation, St. John argues, has confirmed the use of holy things in worship—something prefigured by the tabernacle, cherubic images, the ark, the rod of Aaron, the tablets of stone, the manna and the shewbread of the Old Covenant, but brought to its fullness in Christ. Perhaps the words of Holy Scripture itself are most revealing: in the Bible, the Word of God is a person, not a book; the New Covenant is bread and wine, body and blood, not a contract or an agreement. We apprehend the Truth with our whole being, not just our intellect.

To put it another way, in her article on the sacramental imagination in the writings of George
MacDonald, Heather Ward argues that “we can regard Christian fantasy-writing as the outcome of an imagination that works in sacramental terms, seeing the material world as participant in, and mediator of, the divine.”

This view of the Incarnation has, to one degree or another, underpinned the greatest monuments of Christian art, both in literature and in the fine arts. It produced Mozart and Bach, Rubilev and Da Vinci, Notre-Dame de Paris and St. Basil’s Cathedral. It gave us Dostoyevsky and Dante. And, I would argue, it gave us Tolkien and Lewis, though they articulated and implemented it to different degrees and in different ways. In the next post in this series, I will begin an examination of the sacramental imagination in Tolkien's legendarium.


Currently reading: For the Life of the World, Fr Alexander Schmemann
Current audio book: The Brothers Karamazov
Currently translating: The Aeneid, Virgil

Towards a Language of Beauty: An autobiographical prologue

In the posts which follow, I am going to try to work out, largely for my own benefit, my own growing sense of something, of beauty as an objective reality--substantial, like holiness, and like holiness possessing a myriad of expressions which are quite individual while nevertheless variations on the same great theme. Indeed, I do not think this similarity between holiness and beauty is coincidental.

The study of the relationships of those expressions might be called a "science" or even a "theology" of beauty. But because both of those terms seem rather cold, and because I am philologist, I have settled on the metaphor (though it may be more than metaphor) of language.

This impression began at a very early age, as I suspect it does for most people, but has been influenced for me by my lifelong interaction with Christianity and the art, literature, and languages of the Middle Ages. In this prologue, it is simply my desire to record some of the early impressions which first brought about the awakening of my consciousness to beauty in the world and in the word.

I. PARADISE LOST

One of my earliest memories is of reading Paradise Lost. I had discovered this book due to the happy accident that, because I was from a large family and because I was the only boy, all of the books were stored in my bedroom. It was part of one of those "Great Books" sets which I believe had belonged to my mother, and which had come (like most of the fiction in the house) with her into the marriage.

10 or so might be a somewhat precocious age to come to Milton, but I had been taught to read largely on King James's English, so the language was less of a barrier than it might otherwise have been. There were numerous classical mythology references which I did not understand and which went largely over my head, but the Biblical references I did understand. And the parts I did understand proved to be rich enough that I was able to let the others pass for the moment.

Because I've always been the kind of person who shares his enthusiasm with other people, I was very keen to make sure everyone in my family was as interested in Milton as I was. We got the book on audio and began to listen to it on a road-trip. After about ten minutes, my father switched it off, saying that he found it boring. That is the first moment I can remember feeling really alone, and it is the first moment when I realized that there are some things which some people enjoy which other people find dull and boring.

I'm more generous now, as an adult. I understand that a lot of people don't care for poetry, and that an audio book on a road trip may not be the best medium for encountering Milton for the first time. But I've never been able to shake the impression of that moment.

II. TO AN UNSEEN SHORE

Beowulf came to me around the same time, not as lightning out of a clear sky, but as the treasure-laden funeral ship of Scyld: grey prow and mast and ropes looming up out of the mist, the guilt edges of the golden sail billowing just beyond sight.

When I first read the poem, as a young lad, I could only see the faintest outline of its dragon-headed prow. It was a story full of monsters, one which happened "in days of yore" in a land and culture so far from my own that it may as well have been on another planet. But there was something familiar about it even then, though I did not know what, and discovering the poem was like remembering something that I had forgotten.

As I grew older and read the poem again and again the outline of the ship became clearer, and I even began to mark the significance of the strange carvings on its ring-whorled prow. Or rather, I began to attempt to infuse them with significance of my own, for I knew that they must mean something, so I tried to give them meanings which they could not hold. The ship was fixed, like an island in the sea; it would endure, it was I who was falling away into the mist.

Then I first began to see where other men and women had also struggled to draw the ship into their own harbor, catching it with great hooks of iron and trying to drag it out of the mist and re-purpose it for their own use. "This is a fine ship," they said, "and it is a great shame that it should hold only the bones of a dead man. We will draw it into our harbor and make it useful again, to carry more practical cargo or make raids upon our enemies.." But it could not be done. For when those men had drawn their catch to shore they found they had not captured a living vessel at all, but only dead flotsam and jetsam - unsound vessels which could not keep out the sea.

Abandoning this plan, I began to chase the ship itself, determined that if I could not bring it into my own harbor, I would instead cling to some rope or spar, and let the ship carry me where it would. It was only when I learned to read Anglo-Saxon that the whole outline of the ship became clear to me for the very first time: tall, icy, ring-whorled, the beds of ancient kings and heroes laid out upon biers of gold under ancient standards, gray ropes trailing through the mists. I can see only the faintest glitter of that treasure now, and yet I no longer wish to fill my pockets with rings and gems to take home and strew among my pet causes and soapboxes. I cling to the side, damp with mist and the spray of the sea-foam, and hope that Scyld's ship will take me back, by the straight road, to Those who sent him.

III. FAIRY STORIES

I discovered Tolkien's Legendarium not long after I discovered Beowulf, and I cannot remember a time when Lewis's Narnia books did not permeate my imagination. They, along with the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse of St John, are the first things I can remember reading. Of Narnia and Tolkien's Legendarium--and of the Apocalypse too--I want to say much more elsewhere, since they are so essential to the question of this language of beauty. But for now, it is enough to say two things: the imaginative debt I owe to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair is incalculable. I have never written a story which did not somehow contain those two stories within it.

Regarding Tolkien, my love for his works is deep and prolonged, and has only intensified as I got older. Yet, the first time I read The Lord of the Rings, it was the Appendices which most sparked my imagination. I can still vividly remember sitting on my bed in my room, reading Appendix F "On Translation" in which Tolkien discusses the etymology of the name of the Brandywine river. The realization struck me like a thunderclap: you could name a river.

I'd always loved stories, but from that moment forward I have primarily thought of myself as a writer of stories, a teller of tales. Adulthood, necessity, and the grace of God have required me to become many other things, but this was my first sense of calling, of vocation. That was the moment I knew it would not be enough to consume, enjoy, or appreciate beautiful things. I would have to learn to make them myself.

IV. EXCEPT A SEED FALLS TO THE EARTH

Somewhere along the way, that sense of vocation and those early stirrings towards beauty were buried, lying dormant for a time. It may be important to briefly recount the reasons: the exigencies of adult life, which involved finishing school, finishing college, starting a family, starting a career. My wife, Sophia, was always the living spark of beauty and joy throughout all of this, and she never stopped loving my stories even when I, for a time, stopped telling them. There was also a strongly pietistic, moralizing attitude towards art and storytelling that was part of the particular brand of Christianity in which I was actively involved starting at around the age of 16 which purged many things of beauty, transcendence, and solidity from my bookshelf and from my life. Narnia survived the purge, so did Beowulf. Tolkien did not.

It is hard to speak about this time, because I do not want to be uncharitable to people I still love and admire, but at the same time it is hard not to use very strong language to describe this marring of the Gospel--for that is what it is, and nothing less. It was a brand of Evangelical Fundamentalism which was and is a kind of prosperity gospel which says: let us teach people how to manage their finances well, how to raise happy families, how--in other words--to live out the "American dream" under the auspices of being well-off materially and financially so that we can "accomplish more for the Kingdom." People will then see how well we are doing as Christians--even, how much better off we are than they are--and be persuaded to convert as well. One slogan we heard a lot was "showing the world a better way of life." But that better way of life was not the way of the Cross.

It need hardly be said that this was not the approach Christ took in the Gospels, nor was material success a great distinguishing feature of the Church of the first four centuries, the Church of the martyrs, the Church which turned the world upside-down. But this approach possessed a certain allure. It promised Sunday's triumphalism without Friday's cross.

But if this particular theology had no room for suffering, it also had no room for beauty. Even when it did not reject beauty in a self-aware way--as indeed it sometimes did--there was simply no room for something which did not contribute to the categories of "success" it recognized. It is the kind of theology which leads to nice houses and driveways full of cars, but shabby churches which at best resemble conference centers or concert halls, and at worst are dingy and poorly maintained relics to American consumerism. All of this was, in turn, layered over a fairly typical Evangelical Fundamentalist approach to history and culture, which saw everything between the Apostles and Martin Luther as little more than a deep abyss of error.

Beneath all of this, and beneath the daily cares of life as a young husband, father, professional, and pastor, my early movement toward beauty lay dormant. And in a strange way, I think this was necessary. "Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

V. THE MEDIEVAL MODEL

The reawakening began, not coincidentally, around the time of (I think, shortly before) the birth of my first child. Those early seeds of beauty which had been planted in my childhood--primarily by great literature, but also by the Baroque and Classical composers my parents had taught me to love--began to sprout and bear fruit. There has to be something more, I often said to myself in those days, and I have found that every time I have said that to myself, it has been true.

I did not yet know what was missing. But I knew that something was missing. And I knew that I wanted that something for my children. So I returned to the sources of beauty in my childhood, who I now intuited had a far better grasp of the other transcendentals--truth and goodness--than my own context. I went back to Lewis. I returned to Tolkien. Two works, absolutely crucial to this period and to my whole life after, were On Fairy Stories and The Discarded Image. Both are, I think, critical texts for a rediscovery of the Language of Beauty in the West, and so I will devote more detailed essays to each in due time.

On Fairy Stories showed me the place, the crucial role, of imagination in the Kingdom of God. And The Discarded Image introduced me to what Lewis called "the medieval model." I can only describe the difference between the modern and medieval ways of viewing everything--man, God, the whole of the cosmos--via a series of similes: it is like being raised in a hut and then being taken into a cathedral for the first time. It is like seeing the entire world through a small, grainy, black-and-white screen, and then being taken out into the vivid colors and smells of the open air. It is like believing your whole life that you are the only person in the world, only to wake up in the midst of a vast and impossibly ancient city.

And the modern man does not know what he is missing, because a fish does not know when he is wet.

VI. PANTOCRATOR

That vision of the world which I found, first in The Discarded Image, and then later again in The Divine Comedy, drew me into a prolonged and detailed study of the language, literature, and theology of the Middle Ages. At the distance of so many centuries, these things could be encountered safely, at a time I would not have been able to meet them as living reality. But beauty is "not a tame lion," and by degrees and by many strange "chance, if chance you call it" encounters, I found myself standing in the nave of an Orthodox cathedral on the feast day of St Seraphim of Sarov. And I fell on my face, quite literally, before Beauty Himself.

Here, the Medieval Model was still alive. Here, the Incarnation--so central, as I had come to believe, to any understanding of beauty in the created world--was a physical, immanent reality, made present to our senses by sacramental art, and by the "tremendous Reality on the altar." And I was no longer safe.

Within this ancient Church, I found--among many, many things--the unifying principle which I had sought. There is an interplay between the Church's iconography--very different from Western religious art, both in its style but also in its conventions--and its hymnography, sacred Scripture, and liturgical calendar which show Truth, Goodness, and Beauty not to be the three rigid legs of a stool on which we may sit in judgment over the modern world, but rather as three partners in the intricate and beautiful dance of the soul towards God.

The posts which follow will be a series of reflections, or essays, aimed not at offering an apologetic for beauty--for beauty is its own apologetic--but rather at studying the steps of the dance. I confess that one of my motives in all of this is to try to put into words a sense of how someone who is not an iconographer, or a hymnographer, or clergy but is, as I am, a storyteller, might nevertheless understand their vocation in these terms.


Currently reading: For the Life of the World, Fr Alexander Schmemann
Current audio book: The Brothers Karamazov
Currently translating: The Aeneid, Virgil

An Inklings Toast

In October of 2018, I was invited to speak and offer a series of toasts at an Inklings festival hosted by The Eighth Day Institute. For the toasts, I focused on things which the Inklings, despite their many differences, shared: an oddball sense of humor, a love of language and what could be done with language, and a confidence (at least on the part of Lewis, Tolkien, and Dyson) in the idea of "True Myth." Here's the final toast.

*~*

On an early Sunday morning in September of 1931, three 30-something Oxford dons took a stroll together on Addison’s Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College. They were a 32-year-old C.S. Lewis, a 39-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien, and a 35-year-old Hugo Dyson. Their conversation had begun the evening before during dinner and had gone late into the night. Tolkien had left around 3 AM, and Lewis and Dyson continued to talk until 4 AM before retiring in their rooms there at the college. The next day, Lewis wrote to his dear friend and long-time correspondent Arthur Greeves:

We began on metaphor and myth—interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would. 

We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot: then discussed the difference between love and friendship—then finally drifted back to poetry and books.

Later in the letter, discussing the writings of William Morris and George MacDonald, Lewis said:

These hauntingly beautiful lands [of Morris's fiction] which somehow never satisfy,—this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality—these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied. 

The MacDonald conception of death—or, to speak more correctly, St Paul’s—is really the answer to Morris: but I don’t think I should have understood it without going through Morris. He is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you . . . to go further.

Lewis's letters to Greeves provide a valuable "inside look" at his conversion. What they reveal is something deeper than either intellectual assent or an emotional surge; it is a complete paradigm-shift, a new way of looking at the world through "mythic" eyes. When Lewis wrote to Greeves again the next month, he put it this way:

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’. 

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.

Many years later, Lewis would write a poem called "What the Bird Said Early in the Year." It is, not coincidentally, set on Addison's Walk, and it compares this paradigm-shift to a spell being broken--perhaps a spell of perpetual winter, broken forever by the coming of the King of the Wood?

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.

Each of these toasts has been to celebrate something of significance to the Inklings, a love which they shared--humor, language, myth. But this final toast is to the one great Thing which binds all other things together. Glory to Jesus Christ, who breaks every spell, and makes every story come true!



Currently reading: For the Life of the World, Fr Alexander Schmemman
Current audio book: Out of the Silent Planet, CS Lewis
Currently translating: Beowulf

The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 10

As usual, here's the answer to the previous riddle:

"Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar. Þar fara svanbrúðir til hreiðrs síns ok verpa eggjum; skurm á eggi er eigi höndum gert né hamri klappat, en svanr er fyrir eyjar utan örðigr, sá er þær gátu eggin við."

"Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi, but I have guessed it. Swan-maids* go to their nests and lay eggs; the shell of the egg is not by hand or hammer forged, and the swan by whom they previously got the eggs sits upright outside the islands."

Riddle 10

Þá mælti Gestumblindi:

"Hverjar eru þær rýgjar
á reginfjalli,
elr við kván kona,
þar til er mög of getr,
ok eigu-t þær varðir vera?
Heiðrekr konungr,
hyggðu at gátu."

Then said Gestumblindi:

"What are those ladies
On the mighty mountain,
Woman begets by wife,
So that she bears a son,
And those women have no husbands?**
Heiðrekr king,
Ponder this riddle."

*Female swans.
**This is an idiomatic rendering of (in literal word-order): and having-not [i.e. marriage] those women be.


Currently reading: Reclaiming the Atonement, Patrick Henry Reardon
Current audio book: Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis
Currently translating: Hervarar Saga, "The Riddles of Gestumblindi"

The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 9

First, here's the answer to riddle 8:

Heiðrekr mælti: "Smækkast nú gáturnar, Gestumblindi, hvat þarf lengr yfir þessu at sitja? Þat er hrafntinna, ok skein á hana sólargeisli."

Your riddles grow small, Gestumblindi, what need is there to sit any longer at this? That is obsidian*, when shone on her a sunbeam.

Riddle 9

Þá mælti Gestumblindi:

"Báru brúðir
bleikhaddaðar
ambáttir tvær
öl til skemmu;
var-at þat höndum horfit
né hamri at klappat,
þó var fyrir eyjar utan
örðigr sá, er gerði.
Heiðrekr konungr,
hyggðu at gátu."

Then said Gestumblindi:

"Maidens bore,
Fair-headed,
Serving-maids twain
Ale to the store-house;
Not turned by hands
Nor beaten by hammers,
Though far outside the island
The maker sat upright.**
Heiðrekr king,
Ponder this riddle."

*Literally "raven-flint."
**The thing which was not turned by hands or beaten by hammers must refer to the cask in which the ale was carried, not the ale itself.


Currently reading: For the Life of the World
Current audio book: The Man Who Was Thursday
Currently translating: Hervara saga, "The Riddles of Gestumblindi"

That Tremendous Reality

 "...much too frightened of that tremendous Reality on the altar."

With these words, G.K Chesterton explained why he put off his conversion to Roman Catholicism until the last 14 years of his life. It wasn't until recently, reading a sort of biography of Chesterton (Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God) that I realized what a late convert he was. It surprised me that the man who could write so intimately of confession in the Father Brown Mysteries had not actually "crossed the Tiber" when most of them were written. He delayed, in his own words (not that we can trust authors when they speak of themselves, but that's often all we have to go on), because he was "much too frightened" of the Sacrament of Sacraments, the Holy Eucharist.

I've been mulling over this thought the last couple of days because of something that happened in my own experience, being in the process of converting from a Southern/Independent Baptist upbringing to the Orthodox Church. There were many "tipping points" along the way--it might be better to describe them as a slow progress up the mountain. But for a long time I had been content with the idea of reading "sacramental authors"--Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton, but also Ratzinger and Vigen Gourian and Alexander Schmemann--and importing their ideas as much as possible into my own Baptist experience.

One day during a Sunday morning service in which we were to take "The Lord's Supper" (which at the church where I have been on staff the last 10+ years is done 2-3 times a year), one of the pastors stood up before communion and gave a little talk, reminding everyone that what was about to happen was just, and I quote, "just crackers and grape juice, and nothing more." My oldest daughter (6 at the time) wanted to know why the pastor "did not believe in communion." And that is when I knew we had to make a change.

But what is interesting to me, and what the Deacon who teaches the catechumen class at our new church pointed out to me, is the fact that people have to be reminded, not that something significant is happening in communion (though probably there are people who need to be reminded of that), but rather that nothing whatsoever is happening. There is a fear in these churches, quite justified, that the act of ritual itself will impart the sense that something significant is taking place. And that brings me back to Chesterton's fear, his intuition, about the reality made imminent on the altar.

Admitting that different Christians can mean very different things when they speak of "sacraments," it seems to me that the sacramental view of the world is the native language of creation. It is what even merely human rituals and even merely pagan religions hint at, so that if for a moment we let our guard down we find that our nominalism does not really hold up.

This is not to say that everyone understands fully what is happening. I am not sure that I ever will. But I see it as significant that it is precisely in these moments--communion, baptism, marriage--that even Baptists will revert back to traditional liturgical formulas. Without knowing why, after he spent several minutes telling us all that this was only juice and only crackers, the pastor proceeded to say "this is my body, which was broken for you" and break the bread, and "this cup is the new testament in my blood" and distribute the juice. There is an intuition, deep down in the quiet places of the heart, that something awful is happening, or ought to be happening, and that these words and no others will do.

What I have called nominalism, this insistence on seeing things for nothing more than they appear to be--we might say even less than they appear to be--is a defense. It is a defense against the terrible alternative of the world breaking in upon us, of showing itself to be the world, and the shift in gravity this might cause.

Let us stand aright. Let us stand with fear.

My interview at the Tolkien Experience Project

Fellow Signumite and now PhD candidate at Cardiff Metropolitan University Luke Shelton graciously interviewed me a couple of months back for his Tolkien Experience Project. My responses to his questions went live today. There's a certain rightness in that, since today is the feast day of St John of Damascus.

Though he's less well-known or appreciated in the West, St John of Damascus was (depending on who you ask) either the first of the Scholastics or the last of the Greek Fathers. In his Three Treatises, he also put forward what would prove to be the basis for the classical Christian theology of art, a legacy which Tolkien ultimately inherited and developed in On Fairy Stories. I cannot stress enough how important On Fairy Stories has been to the development of my faith and understanding of the world and my role in it.

I may write more about this theology of art and incarnation in a future post if it isn't too far off the beaten path for this blog. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out the interview and Luke's whole project here.