The Oxford in Narnia

A few things that C.S. Lewis is responsible for:

1. Developing the "argument from desire." In a time when the classic theological proofs seemed to have lost their currency, this line of reasoning was a refreshing twist. Basically it suggests that just as our thirst signals the need for and thus probable existence of water, so our deepest longings for joy signal that their fulfillment, most completely in God, very well may exist.

2. Showing us that the parallels to Christianity in Greek mythology need not lead one towards Campbellite conclusions, but could actually support one's Christian faith. The predecessors don't relativize the claims of Christianity as much as they point toward their Christian fulfillment, where the "myth becomes fact."

3. Exposing the fact that the materialist smuggles a priori assumptions into debates just as much as the Christians does. In other words, to say with Freud that love is merely euphamized lust requires at least as many unprovable presuppositions about the nature of the universe as when Christians insist that lust is a lesser form of love. In this Lewis did not attempt to "prove God" as much as he leveled the playing field with those who thought they could disprove God.

4. Making us aware of what he famously termed our "chronological snobbery" by exposing unexamined biases such as "everyone thought the world was flat before the Christopher Columbus" to be exactly what they were - Enlightenment propaganda (that, amazingly, is still taught today). Lewis, who advised we read three old books for every new one, spent enough time with Aristotle, Ptolemy and Aquinas to have gotten around to discovering that they too knew the world was round.

5. Showing us that the problem of evil contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, that is - the idea of justice itself. But at the same time giving us in A Grief Observed a personal account of human suffering that was anything but simplistic.

Of course Lewis also gave us his fiction where he enfleshed the above ideas. But my point in presenting the above "arguments" is to highlight the fact that the author of the Chronicles of Narnia was also the first president of the Oxford Socratic Club. Somehow I think that the two are not unrelated. Legend has it that after one particularly troublesome tangle with G.E.M. Anscombe over his essay on miracles, that Lewis decided naked reason was very limited in what it could accomplish - and so, to the taunt of many a colleague, he began to write fantasies and children's books (genres that had then been long since relegated to the nursery). But it worked - and so that 1948 debate may therefore be as good a time as any to mark the "postmodern" shift in theological method.

And for a brief refresher of what Lewis' fiction is responsible for:

1. Questioning the "humanitarian" argument against hell in The Great Divorce by showing us how consistent hell is with divine love: The consequence of, as it was for Dante, absolute freedom - God's "thy will be done" to his creatures.

2. Showing through his space trilogy that the Christian imagination is not limited to Medieval cosmology, and can quickly and ably follow behind anything our telescopes can discover.

3. Simply making many cobwebbed Christian docrtrines eminently believable again: The Genesis account of creation and fall in The Magician's Nephew and (more convincingly I think) Perelandra, repentance and baptism in Eustace the boy-dragon of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and of course demons in The Screwtape Letters and atonement in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.

4. Giving us a revealing portrait of the materialist attempt to deconstruct Christian belief in The Silver Chair where the a witch tries to convince the children with captivating music that Aslan is a mythic copy of mundane cat. (They're still doing it to Lewis today.)

5. Both exposing the shallowness of religious relativism in The Last Battle's "Tashlan" (a mix of Tash and Aslan which was neither) and providing a very generous assessment of religions other than Christianity through the playing out of the final judgment scene in that same book: Where those who did good in the name of the false god Tash are shown to have actually done so to Aslan, and evil done in the name of Aslan was actually done to Tash.

I don't mean here to "decode" the fiction. Lewis wrote so that his work could stand alone without such interpretations, and even advised parents not to say things like "Aslan is Jesus," but to let children figure it out, when the time was right, on their own. What I hope to show instead is that for Lewis, imagination is not limited by "doctrine", but liberated by it. Rather than being a wet blanket on creativity, robust doctrine is food for it - as Tolkien, a devout Catholic, makes plain. Or consider another serious Catholic, who I am told in a letter to a friend insisted,

"I wrote The Divine Comedy not as an allegory, but as a practical guide that men and women might find salvation."

Our zeitgeist gets less excited about argument than it does about imagination - which is fine - Lewis saw that sixty-some years ago and made the strategic shift. He did this to get past the "sleeping dragons" of reason, but by doing so he never left reason behind.

Super cable

I'm currently betwixt Seminary and University housing plans, and in the meantime am house-sitting. One of the advantages is having almost triple digits worth of channels to choose from, leading me to the following reflection triad:

Travel Channel
Here I go again. All it took was one generation that didn't believe in anything supernatural, to produce a generation that believes in everything supernatural.

Now we have a host of very foolish people who are approaching the recently rediscoverd "spirit realm" like Steve approaches the animal kingdom. And what do you know? Someone got bit.

On this show a team of contemporary ghostbusters went to the most haunted house in England where a happy medium proceeded to taunt the resident spirits. Ouija was busted out, a little channelling was thrown in, and everyone felt a "dark and oppressive" atmosphere. "Show yourself" yelled the psychic, only to demand after one crew member was thrown to the floor, "Get off him." Get off him in the name of... entertainment? The dude was freaked... and he wouldn't be the first. Overnight thrillseekers in that house have kept local exorcists in business for quite some time.

Apparently this particular home was unsuccessfully exorcised twenty years ago by the local bishop. All it would take is one look from the master exorcist to clean out that place for good, but his servants are often not very adept at fascilitating his presence. Count exorcism as one of the things I (but not all) didn't learn how to do in Seminary (we'd probably have to believe in the devil first).

Allow me to refer you once again to Susan Howatch's novels for a psychiatrically sophisticated (that is, beyond Frank Peretti) treatment of these issues. But meanwhile on the Travel Channel, the sons of Sciva live.

EWTN and CSPAN
When world Jewry gets mad at something, you usually hear about it. But what about when they really like something, like for example Benedict's recent address to the synagogue in Cologne broadcast on EWTN? Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Jews are listening to their own rabbis, like David Dalin who while exposing the myth of Pius XII's connection with Hitler to be just that - myth - is making the connections between Hitler and another faith uncomfortably factual.

CSPAN covered his packed house speaking engagements, and the Rabbi did quite well on his feet.

Movie Channels:
I loved the first installment and was excited to see if this pair would have grown up a bit. They didn't.

In Before Sunset the female character waxed eloquent about the spiritual rest she received when staying in Communist Warsaw (thanks to the lack of advertising). Forget the 140,000,000 dead people - Communism gives you more mental space to journal! And Ethan Hawke's character, after making the transition from Kierkegaard's aesthetic to the ethical life was painfully eager to slip back into the first (nevermind the wife and kids).

Is the third stage (which blends the best of the first two) still so unfashionable?

Eurotrip-assessment

The Light Side

"Walk about Zion. Go round about her, number her towers, consider will her ramparts, go through her citadels; that you may tell the next generation that this is God, our God for ever and ever."

That psalm seems to sum up my trip. "The hour is coming," said Jesus to the Samaritan woman, "where neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father" (John 4), meaning (I presume) that no longer would genuine worship to the God of Israel come only from Jerusalem - and Europe's countless cathedrals are some of the most fulfilling fulfillments of that prophecy that continues to be fulfilled. To "consider well such ramparts" has a delightfully confirming effect on one's faith in the God for whom they were constructed.

Germany, by the way, should be especially congratulated for insuring that such an experience is still possible. Fashionable Euro-architects like Le Corbusier had declared that

"The core of our old cities, with their domes and cathedrals, must be broken up and skyscrapers put in their place,"

and saw in the WWII bombing a possibility for a "fresh start." Fortunately the opposing voices won out, and the reconstruction job of innumerable churches has succeeded (in some cases exceeding the originals in quality).

Continue...

The Dark Side
And good thing too, because it is arguable whether Europe in its contemporary state of civilization could produce anything as inspiring. Writes David Hart,

"The eye of faith presumes to see something miraculous within the ordinariness of the moment, mysterious hints of an intelligible order calling out for translation into artifacts, but boredom's disenchantment renders the imagination inert and desire torpid."

In other words, Christian France gave us Notre Dame, Secular France gave us La Defense.

Picking up on that very analogy comes George Weigel's recent book on the state of [European] Union, which helped me make sense of the real, non-tourist, Europe that didn't make it into my highlight clips below. Consider the facts that...

1. "Demographic suicide" is no exaggeration for a Europe that is refusing to produce the next generation. According to the NYT Magazine, it is the greatest "sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death of the 14th century." Muslims, I and anyone else who has been to Europe lately can personally attest, are quickly filling the void.
2. The deadening hand of bureaucracy from Brussels (the E.U. capital) continues to stifle entrepreneurship and consequently the economy. Because of the fiscally lethal red-tape, small business owners regularly choose to overwork than to hire.
3. The double digit unemployment that every German I spoke with laments is a situation critical. Germany, the economic "powerhouse" of the E.U. has a per capita gross domestic product equivalent to Arkansas and only slightly higher than West Virginia and Mississippi.
4. It is common for Americans with a dewy eyed view of free health care to point to Europe as "the answer." But, I beg you, take another look. Or consider the many world doctors attending the Goethe Institute who explained to me (to my surprise) that America is where they all look for advances in medicine. Or consider the advice routinely given visitors to Italy, "If you're sick, get out."

I hope it goes without saying that neither I, nor Weigel, put forth America as the shining counter-example. There is plenty to be worried about here too. But we are still, I am happy to declare, not Europe - who in hailing Ancient Rome and the Enlightenment but excising any reference to Christianity in their (now failed) Constitution forgot that

"The democratic project did not emerge, a kind of political virgin birth, in either the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen." and that "the Enlightenment commitment to the claims of reason 'owe[s] even more to Thomas Aquinas than to Voltaire; its spiritual flavor is discernible in Augustine. Even the ideas that exploded in the Paris of 1789 were present in the Paris of 1277'" (pp. 103 and 106).

For understanding (as oppose to merely enjoying) modern Europe, given the choice between spending eight weeks there and reading this brief but well informed book that is a compendium of the best of European analysis in the last decade... I'd actually choose the book.

Spoiled brats like me got to do both.

Art and the (Emergent) Church

I can't believe I just titled a post that way, but I've been asked to summarize the discussion at the Emergent Church panel that I was invited to participate on last night in NYC. The group was quite fun and engaging - and of course, in good Emergent style there were couches-a-plenty. Brian McLaren will be there next week should anyone be interested (I'd get there early).

By the way, if the following views are not deemed Emergent someone please let me know. Maybe I'll be privileged to be the first disciplinary case in Emergent. Perhaps, in their eagerness to recover ancient spiritual practices, they'll use the Rosary of Shame.

My argument was focused on visual art which is, ehem, "my field," and therefore what I can, like, say smart stuff about. My point was (I hope) pretty straighforward: That epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and art are on a parellel trajectories in Western culture, and therefore those who may find the philosophical discussions wearisome may find the parallels in art history more immediately graspable... and consequently discover some ways the church can respond.

Here are the twin trajectories as I see them:
Continue...

KNOWLEDGE:
Shipwreck: Very roughly, knowledge was about what was known, then became about the knower (DesCartes, Kant). And finally knowledge, in seeking to find itself, as the Gospel saying goes, lost itself altogether. This, I suggest, is the postmodern epistemological condition. (That inexcusably short summary is expanded upon here, here and here)

Mutiny: If knowledge then is on the rocks thanks to the doomed trajectory of Modernity, the church need not chain itself to that sinking ship. Perhaps Alister McGrath, speaking at least for evangelicals, said it best:

"The time has come for evangelicalism to purge itself of the remaining foundational influences of the Enlightenment, not simply because the Enlightenment is over, but because of the danger of allowing ideas whose origins and legitimation lie outside the Christian gospel to exercise a decisive influence on that gospel... We have been liberated from the rationalist demand to set out 'logical' and 'rational' grounds for our beliefs. Belief systems possess their own integrites, which may not be evaluated by others as if there were some privileged position from which all may be judged."

The Emergent Church, it seems to me, is one of many parties seeking to divest themselves of Enlightenment stock. And though some are eager to transfer funds into the shaky futures of radical postmodernism, most realize that the investing in the great tradition is a more lucrative prospect.

Recovery: For example of mining the great tradition, Origen of the 3rd century may have said it better than Alister McGrath. In arguing with some formidable pagan opponents of Christianity, Origen had the gaul to insist that the truth of the Gospel is to be evaluated only by a

"proof peculiar to itself, and this is more divine than Greek argument"

The Emergent Church can is therefore just one example of many Christian traditions that are recovering a basis for knowledge independent of Enlightenment criteria. In so doing, thank goodness there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Emergent can rediscover (not invent) the fact that Christian truth is not abstract, but personal... in fact truth is one particular person.

VISUAL ART:
Shipwreck: Very roughly, art was about what was painted, then became about the painter (Modernity's cult of the artist). And finally art, in seeking to find itself (remember "Art for Art's sake"?), as the Gospel saying goes, lost itself altogether. This, I suggest, is the postmodern condition of art. Any walk through a major museum will probably confirm this impression. Or simply consider this. Or pick up the recent art issue of (always to be taken with a large grain of salt) Adbusters which after suggesting the corruption of the MoMa asserts that "Modern art is a disaster area - never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little." Or visit the Pompidou center for cotemporary art in Paris where one can enjoy rooms dedicated to "Disfigurement Art," "Violent Procedures Art" and, my favorite, the "Pathos/Death" room... all for a steep admission fee.

Mutiny: If art then is on the rocks thanks to the doomed trajectory of the Modernity, the church need not chain itself to a sinking ship. Even while our culture may have lost its basis for the creation of art (as chronicled so well by Tom Wolfe or Hans Rookmaker), the church has had a compelling basis all along that it is hight time it recovered.

Recovery: This basis is the icon. Other artforms are of course important as well, but their legitimacy derives from securing the big kahuna: A picture of the ineffible - God himself - something which in Christianity at least is a possibility. True at one point images were forbidden. But the history of salvation took us from Point A to Point B, and the 7th ecumenical council (the property of all Christians) secured the interpretation of Scripture in a way that made the use of icons not only permissible, but a necessary consequence of God having revealed himself in human form.

MY POINT:
Emergent churches can therefore, by rediscovering thinkers like Origen, enjoy the recovery of a uniquely Christian basis for knowledge, independent of the Enlightenment - and by rediscovering John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion (the two best defenders of icons) enjoy the recovery of a uniquely Christian basis for Art, independent of Modernity.

Critiques: Among the important points that came up in the discussion time was this: Shouldn't there still be room for art that makes us uncomfortable in the church? As Nick put it, what if the radical art today is just the Elvis/Metallica of yesteryear, unacceptable now but soon to be accepted.

That is a good and fair question. Certainly we don't want to encourage a new wave of Kinkades - an Edenic art with no hint of the Fall. But what puts art in a state of crisis today (in my estimation) is that too often raging against the machine is all it knows how to do. It stops with the raging, which is why all but a minority of the elite seem to have given up on the majority contemporary art. Whereas the Christian vision, while certainly having room for Good Friday... provides an Easter Sunday as well. The answer I think is both of these elements, the darkness and the light, in their totality - both of which are contained within the inexhaustible Christ - whose icon is home base for Christian art.

It should not go without notice that not every religion enjoys this warrant for art at the center of both its piety and doctrine.

MOVING ON:
And a final point: Far from advocating a static return to an older form of Christian art a la the Pre-Raphs or Neo-Gothic craze of the nineteenth century, Christians can employ all kinds of new art... with the basis of the icon as fuel for the journey. Using the 7th ecumenical council as perennial legitimation, the liberating moves of Modern Art (and not all of them are) can be embraced by the church. One of the most moving "art experiences" I've had was at Plateau d'Assy in France, where the orphaned Modern Art of Rouault, Chagall, Matisse et. al. found a home in the church. Or the in the Wilhem Memorial Church in Berlin where Modern technique stands side by side the bombed but still standing classic foundations of an more ancient church. Old and new, side by side. What better architectural illustration of a way for Emergent (or any church) to move forward: Without leaving the past - most especially the icon - behind.

Europics

Back in the land of pancakes and free public toilets, where I can finally email my very unprofessional picture phone shots. Here they are on flickr, which means you can comment on them (and the profound captions) individually.

Incidentally, if you're in the NYC area come on out to this on Monday. The panelists sound fascinating.

Wavroom

"Warum?" I asked the German car rental agent when he said I could upgrade to a new Mercedes for the same price of the station wagon that I had reserved.

"Warum nicht?" was his nonchalant reply.

What better way to start a week on the German roads? The Mercedes had a "Kompressor" - which I think is a good thing. It also had six gears. I didn't know cars had six gears - let alone that one would need it (which on the Autobahn, one very much does).

Continue...

Reunited with Denise after two months (fidelity is sexy), we set out along with my Schwegermutter and Schwegerin who just happened to be on the continent as well, for a whirlwind tour of the significant part of Germany that is easier (and much cheaper) by car than by rail.

Here was our itinerary:

Wurzburg
The Wurzburg residence provides all the thrills of Versailles (Versailles' unsurpassable Gardens excepted) without the feeling that you're being slowly pressed through a meatgrinder to make tourist-burgers. The fact that the Tiepolo frescoe was being renovated was more than made up for by the tourguide we had, who was far and away the best guide I had the privilege to see in action. In delightfully snooty English with only a slight Franconian accent he announced

"The architecture of this structure was so well designed by Balthasar Neumann that the Tiepolo frescoe survived a direct hit from a WWII bomb as well as pilings burning directly above it for several hours. My favorite point of comparison is a recent building in France that was so poorly constructed that it fell down all on its own. We've gone from Baroque, to Bawreck."

The town of Wurzburg is packed with religious sculptures, paintings and bookstores on every corner. This meant, as you might imagine, I really like it. Kilian's cathedral, with its menorah that overwhelms you as soon as you step in, was a great reminder to Christians that Israel has always been God's first move... and the Stations of the Cross to end all Stations of the Cross can be found leading up to the hilltop of the Wurzburg Kapelle

Rothenburg
Just as we finished dinner and were halfway through the famous nightwatchman tour through the city streets, a storm of such force came in that we all had to scramble under the town hall as shingles crashed down from the rooftops right next to us. In my fear, I swore to Saint Anne that if she'd save me I'd become a monk. And that hilarious chuch history joke leads us to...

Wittenburg
Not the most inspiring or beautiful town after gorgeous Rothenburg, but then again, to build a Protestant Rome where I could venerate the relics of Luther and Melanchthon (which do in fact reside in Wittenburg) would kind of miss the point.

However the Cranach triptych at the St. Mary's Church was a brilliant example of every positive thing the Reformation stood for... including art.

Berlin
The same fable came to mind in touring the Reichstag in Berlin as when visiting the Swiss capital: The tortoise and the hare. By which I mean that we Americans should beware that in proclaiming ourselves as the world's greatest democracy we don't get surpassed by other countries who are doing it pretty well too. The clear Reichstag building means that every citizen (and in this case tourist) can look down into the Parliament and see the decisions that are made and how they make them.

Despite what I said about Protestant Rome in Wittenburg, this was actually attempted in Berlin, where resides the "Protestant Saint Peter's" - the Berliner Dom. I don't think it's quite caught on yet (and it's had 100 years).

Due to an amazing modern Church I visited there, I'll talk a little more about Berlin when I get around to posting about Plateau d'Assy.

The Rhine
We stayed in a castle on the Rhine for our last night (no more pricy than a Berlin hotel), and on the following day visited Berg Eltz (this time I got to go inside). Then to Trier's oldest church in Germany which not unlike Aachen has a little bit of everything. Finally we made a brief stop under a great sunset and a rainbow in Hildegard's Bingen.

"Aww, thank you, Hil. As if she had anything to do with it. But you know, I bet, in a way, she did."

(That, I'm sure you realize, was a reference to Martin Short's SCTV line where on the occasion of a white Christmas he remarked "Aww, thank you, Bing. As if he had anything to do with it. But you know, I bet, in a way, he did.")

While waiting for planes I got to see a bit more of Frankfurt, including the hall and Church where most of the Holy Roman Emperors were elected, as well as a fitting end to my crash course in Europe and a nice transition into what I'll be studying for the next five or so years... The Icon Museum.

Back in the States I reached for the clutch and the six gear shifter in my dinky automatic 2000 (the year before they fixed all the glitches) Ford Focus.

But they were no where to be found.