The League of Bearded Catholics

Taming Aslan

I like the Lord of the Rings movies. Sure, there is plenty at which devoted Tolkien fans may legitimately chafe and grumble, but overall, a very respectable piece of work, and - for a major motion pictute based on a book - very faithful to the source material. Thumbs up, and all that.

The Narnia movies, though, I have found personally underwhelming. I was just not whelmed, at all. The first movie started strongly enough, but I lost interest by the middle. The White Witch is defeated and Narnia is set free in the end, but somehow... Meh. What bothered me seemed to be more than just the watery Disney-fication of the story, but involved something off key.

I could not at the time put my finger on any one reason for my ambivalence, but have just found a dandy article by Steven D. Boyer at Touchstone that I think sums it up, or begins to. In short, the modern world (and so the movie) rejects the very idea of hierarchy;

 

We can see Lewis’s strategy at work if we just think for a moment about what his original stories are like. Narnia is a great repository of hierarchical images and relations—of good kings and noble knights, of laborers who are not disgruntled and servants who are not demeaned, of Aslan the great Lion who rules over all, who is never safe, but always good.

One can hardly turn a page of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or of Prince Caspian without encountering compelling images of royal authority and knightly virtue—and we see now that both of these themes are intimately connected with Lewis’s positive construal of hierarchy, which in turn is foundational to his distinctively Christian vision of reality.

A Strange Sign of Maturity

...the movie as a whole consists in Peter learning to think and act independently... By (the end of the movie), he has grown enough to realize that receiving orders and following them is a sign of immaturity and weakness, whereas independent action, especially when it involves not doing as you’re told, is the sign of strength, maturity, and success.

Note well: disobedience is the sign of real maturity. This quiet, unobtrusive devaluation of humble submission to rightful authority is a significant omen of things to come in the later film.

...One could look at Caspian himself, who is transformed from a noble and honorable young king in Lewis’s telling, into a tortured warrior whose unchecked desire for personal revenge against his father’s murderer leads to the deaths of scores of his Narnian subjects. Or again, one could look at the virtuous Red Dwarf Trumpkin, whose cheerful, good-humored embrace of obedience in Lewis’s story is quietly dropped from the film, replaced by the more modern virtues of sarcasm, irony, and cynicism.

(emphasis and italics mine)

In addition to the problem with hierarchy, there is a general chipping away, or erosion, of the story at a myriad of points. For one, the Narnia in which the children find themselves is just... smaller than the one in the books. Not geographically, but less grand, less noble. Lewis' Narnia was suffused with spiritual and moral energy and significance. Something in the Narnian air made the importance of every action (or inaction) somehow closer to the surface. Courage grew more courageous, friendship more dear, sacrifice more costly, there. The Narnia of the films is... an admirably worked-up fantasy world, but where the most important thing is the children - that they have a Big Adventure and come out safe by the end of the movie. Whew! Now, wasn't that fun?

In the books, rather than being the Center of Everything, the Pevensie children play an important part in what they know is a story much bigger and more magnificent than themselves.

In the movies, Aslan's voice is not, as one might expect, the rumbling basso of a Giant Lion, but the velvety, soporific baritone of a kindly uncle. He seems not so much to have supernatural significance, but simply to have Super Powers. And he is very importantly, not known or referred to as the Son of the Great Emperor over the Sea - who as far as the films are concerned, apparently doesn't exist. The importance of that ommission is really difficult to overstate. Without God, there is no Son of God. Jesus becomes not the Maker of All Things and Savior of Mankind, but a great teacher... a kindly uncle. Without the Great Emperor Over Sea, Aslan becomes a kindly talking lion with super powers. He is shrunk.

In other words, the makers of the first two Narnia films, at least, just do not GET Lewis' story. They have never fallen in love with Narnia, though they may have read it fifty times. Like the wicked Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew, they have only a surface understanding of Narnian events, and so they feel the need to juice the story up with invented rivalries, contrived teen romance, tone deaf melodrama and sturm und drang that not only gets in the way, but at times positively cuts against the grain of Lewis's story.

As Boyer observes;

 

In Lewis’s telling of all of the Narnia tales, the children’s experiences as kings and queens in Narnia consistently transform them into nobler, more virtuous people in their own world. They are not spoiled children wanting to be kings again; they are noble kings who carry that very nobility back into their non-royal roles as schoolchildren.

In the Narnia films, the children do not carry the spirit of Narnia with them into our world, but instead carry their childish pettiness into Narnia.

But, I mean, after all... you can't expect modern audiences to believe all that Pollyanna rubbish that Lewis put in there. So, we can dream of a place where the very land, the animals, the sky and the sea are better-than-real, but we must not do the same for people. People must always be portrayed with dull and cynical realism.

C.S. Lewis - Nov. 29, 1898 - Nov. 22, 1963

 
Clive Staples ("Jack") Lewis died on this day in 1963.

I have had my beard to the grindstone the last few weeks and the date snuck up on me. I will smoke a bowl on the porch later in his honor, though I have a headcold. It's one of those Taliban headcolds... I've fought much worse bugs, but it just won't go away.

I Have Issues

 
Cover of the new issue of Gilbert Magazine, by Anthony VanArsdale).

In what can only be seen as a regrettable and hopefully temporary lapse in editorial judgment, Sean Daily and his (ordinarily brilliant) staff at Gilbert Magazine decided to pad their latest issue on The Arts with some of my own rudderless musings, accompanied by a few reproductions of my paintings. The damage to their reputation is somewhat ameliorated by making the article in which I am featured a kind of tandem interview with an actual illustrator, the inestimable Jef Murray.

Make sure to order a bunch of copies. It really is a fine magazine.

I look forward to receiving my issue in the mail, partly because this will enable me to see whether they were able to pull of some kind of editorial miracle, but mostly so that I might be reminded of what it was I actually said. Something about art and the meaning of art. Something about modern art is in there somewhere, I'm almost sure.

Stop Using Art as a Weapon!

On a related note, those of you who have read C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy may remember that at one point in the story, some examples of modern art are used against the main character as a kind of spiritual anesthetic or moral poison, as part of a general brainwashing program.

You may be interested to note, then, that it has recently been revealed that some of what is now the most well known modern art of the twentieth century may owe a great deal of that notariety to having been actively promoted and used as propaganda during the Cold War years by the C.I.A.! Using shadow "foundations", they funneled money to artists, collectors and museums, and funded traveling exhibits in the U.S. and overseas (they had to cancel the one in the U.S. after just a few weeks because, well, everyone hated it). They also controlled a number of influential publications which they used to praise the new art as an indicator of the creative freedom enjoyed in the U.S. (as contrasted with the Soviet Union).

You can't make this stuff up! I always suspected it was some kind of plot... of course the article from London's The Independent points out that we are not allowed to say that sort of thing, that abstract expressionism would have been just as popular, anyway... "probably".

The thing is, I remember how the official art of the Soviet Union was denigrated as being mere "propaganda", while ours was a high and pure art. It's true that the heroic realism of the U.S.S.R. was stiff and not very good in a lot of cases, and it's also true that it was transparent propaganda. Every Soviet citizen knew it, too. But Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were also propaganda, only of a somewhat more subtle kind... and we did not know it.

The Soviets would have been much better off letting their brilliant impressionist painters represent them around the world, that's for sure.

Inklings Cage Match!

A while back there was a string of posts on the Christian Pipe Smokers forum, each pitting one sort of thing against another in an online poll. Kind of a Que Es Mas Macho? sort of thing. For those of you who don't remember, Que Es Mas Macho? was a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Bill Murray as the host of a Mexican TV game show by that name. He would ask contestants "Que es mas macho?" ("What is more macho?") and then they had to choose between two seemingly completely random and unrelated things, like "knife, or pineapple?". The answer was always seemingly random, too, except that where famous people were concerned, Ricardo Montalban was always more macho than anyone.

That's the way I feel about a lot of such contests, which is why a show like Spike's Deadliest Warriors fails to hold my interest. It's all fantasy. It sounds for all the world like the concept was hatched by two potheads in their dorm room, "Okay... okay, like... Samurai vs. Viking... who would win?... No! No!... Ninja vs. Spartan. Ninja? No way. Yer so wrong. A Spartan would totally OWN a ninja...". Of course, it's on Spike, so that's about what one would expect.

So when "J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis?" came up as a poll topic, I kind of rolled my eyes, but weighed in anyhow;

Unfair! This is like asking me which Siamese twin I will allow to live.

That being said, I voted for Tolkien (though I love Lewis).

I certainly owe my reversion to Christianity more to Lewis, since his books were a big influence and were more openly apologetic works. I actually discovered him and Tolkien at about the same time, and had no idea they were friends or that they influenced one another so greatly.

I just had to take into account that Tolkien wrote one of the pivotal works of fiction of the twentieth century, a model for what Christian culture should be like, as opposed to the hamfisted, lowbrow kitsch that is so often foisted upon us (and on a watching world) in the name of JAY-zussss.

Tolkien's tales soak into an unsuspecting heathen's bones and begin to convert his subconscious mind before he ever begins thinking in concrete terms about religion or philosophy. Lewis articulates a meaningful universe, but Tolkien makes you long to live there.

Not everyone makes these connections, of course, or follows through on them, but I think Tolkien's work prepares the soil for those who may later cultivate and harvest.

That's an over-simple analysis, of course. Lewis wrote some marvelous passages that made heaven seem almost palpable. What thinkest thou?

(incidentally, I'm beginning to figure out that part of what has cut into my blogging of late has been a growing Facebook habit, as well as the CPS forum. I react more readily than I invent. I will endeavor from now on to save more ascii and precious brain power for TLBC)

Is Jon Stewart Reading Chesterton?

If not... is he ready to?

Here he is talking about Glenn Beck (from a recent NPR interview);

The beautiful thing about what he does is, it's very difficult to argue with his facts. It's the conclusions [that are problematic]. ... It's that slippery slope. ... So what you do is, you just grab together facts and put them together and then do a grab bag of conclusions. Everything is discovered as evidence of secret plots, of secret things that could be occurring.

This reminds me of a classic passage from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy;

Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable;

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

Disclaimer; I am not saying Glenn Beck is a lunatic. However, he does have what seem to be some pretty looney ideas, which a disturbing number of people seem to accept as real explanations of the world and the state of our Republic at present. Why is it that, far from tempering the excesses of the other,  the Right and Left so often end up mirroring one another's most ghastly mental traits?

Oh, wait. C.S Lewis nailed that one;

Opposite evils, so far from balancing, aggravate each other.

Or, as he noted regarding his semi-biographical allegory The Pilgrim's Regress;

The attack on the soul from north and south represent, in Lewis's words, "equal and opposite evils, each continually strengthened and made plausible by its critique of the other."

So... evil is a two party system, where we are allowed the tormentor of our choice. And that passes for freedom.

Incidentally, The Pilgrim's Regress was my first exposure ever to C.S. Lewis and the first chapter had me howling with laughter, in recognition of my own confused religious upbringing. Not that this was anyone's fault, but so much of my boyhood grasp of the Gospel boiled down to this (from the aforementioned chapter 1);

...it all ended with pointing out that the Landlord was quite extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would certainly torture most of them to death the moment he had the slightest pretext.

That Hideous Strength

Hideously cheesy cover art, dontcha think? I picked it up for $.75 at a used book shop.

Just finished reading That Hideous Strength, the last of C.S. Lewis' space trilogy, and while a fuller discussion will have to wait, I have a few observations.

For one thing, each of the three books of the trilogy - Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength - is a very different kind of work from the others. Whereas, for instance, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (and even including The Hobbit) there is a continuity of structure, style and rhythm, in Lewis' space trilogy, each novel is a completely different literary approach to the common material of the story.

Out of the Silent Planet is an outer space adventure romp, Perelandra is a gripping spiritual thriller and a deep meditation all in one (as I expanded on here), and finally That Hideous Strength bends the story arc into a complex and layered tale of intrigue and suspense, expanding at points into full blown satire, rolling the elements of the first two books into an apocalyptic ending.

Anyone who read one book of the trilogy and picked up another expecting more of the same might be confused for a few chapters, at any rate.

Each is worthwhile reading on its own, yet even with these very disparate approaches, the trilogy does hang together.

I have, myself, referred to Lewis now and then as Chesterton Lite, but his insights into human nature, sin and the walk of faith are at times astonishingly vivid and repeatedly call for deeper reflection.

More later. What are your impressions of the trilogy? ...What should I read next?

The C.S. Lewis Song

I confess, for something called "The C.S. Lewis Song", I was expecting this to be a little more, I don't know... jaunty? Something one could sing at the pub. But I do likes it. Quite a voice, this girl has.

Back when I was still a fairly new Christian Evangelical revert (after being raised Baptist, and then college educated into a mushy kind of Christian Agnosticism) I was for a while a great fan of Christian Rock/Pop. We have had a popular evangelical Christian radio station in the area for decades (out of John Brown University) and my radio dial was permanently welded there in the late 80s and early 90s.

I'm pretty finicky, musically, but I overlooked what I considered to be a lot of Christian Drek because I found it worthwhile to get to the Good Stuff. I was a big fan of Out of the Grey, I remember. and Brent Bourgeois. The link is to one of my favorites of his. Though I think this was before he declared as a Christian, the lyrics show he was thinking deeply about things.

It's the question of the hour,

How can I be sure of what I don't know?

She comes to me with poison in her flower,

And steals the miracle of life right out of my hand

After I became a Catholic, though (or perhaps I was just growing up), slowly, imperceptibly, Christian Pop - or Pop of almost any kind - failed to satisfy. I began to notice the extent to which Christian Pop Radio was increasingly a reflection of ordinary pop radio, and that mainly for the worse (though not totally). I also came to resent the extent to which Pop Culture had insinuated itself into the liturgy. Even the Sacrament of the Altar is not immune from the din of drum kits and electric guitars, and I say this as a great fan  - a sucker - for great guitar work. I loves me some Stevie Ray Vaughan... only not in church, please.

In the words of Hank Hill, "Can't you see? You're not making Christianity better... you're making rock and roll worse!".

I'm all for honesty and sincerity, but it seemed more and more of Christian Pop songwriting was becoming a festival of breast-beating, cathartic, sentimental introspection to the point of narcissism. Okay, we all struggle, but if I want to be depressed I'd rather listen to Pink Floyd... or Tool.

There seemed also to be an element of Christian Guilt bubbling up, not unlike the White Guilt so prevalent among hip progressives. Yes, Christians are often hypocritical. So is everyone. It's a remnant of The Fall that is part of the human condition. Yes, Christendom has had it's share of moral missteps throughout history. We should be aware of our hypocrisy, aware of our past mistakes and constant shortcomings... but can we leave off apologizing at some point and please get on with things?

I've always admired celebrities who have had the good sense not to believe their own press clippings. We ought to do likewise. We don't measure our success - or failure - by worldy standards. We are, in fact warned about conformity to the world. Why, then, do we now seem so all-fired concerned that the world "like us... really like us"?

This is part of the problem I have with what is called the Emergent Church. This movement seems to me very much in danger of being the Tragically Hip church, the Church as Fashion Victim. Clothes? Check (Hot Topic). Music? Check. Hi-Def Multimedia Worship? Check. Pop-culture references? Check. Hair gel? Check.

I understand the impulse. Shoot, I'm as embarrassed as anyone to be lumped in with Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts and the old polyester suit crowd. But to bastardize C.S. Lewis, "Because our grandparents erred in one direction, does it follow that there is no error in the opposite direction?"

It's not good to try and freeze any moment in history (say, the 1950s) and set that up as The Good Old Days... to become stodgy and grumpy and interact with our unbelieving neighbors mainly by wagging our fingers and complaining of their godless music and their dungarees. But the opposite error isn't pretty, either. To court the approval of half-interested cultural agnostics (called "seekers") or to ape the fashions and attitudes (Watch me! I'm being ironic!) of a perenially bored and fickle generation is just as bad.

As irksome as it may seem, I think I might rather stand with Brother Falwell.

So, okay, let's admit our shortcomings and mistakes, our struggles, fears and doubts, but after that... well, do we have any Good News for these people, or don't we?

All that said, the song/video linked above - by New Zealander Brooke Fraser - does flirt a bit with depressing introspection, but she pulls it together into something very lovely and even powerful. She begins with what feels like an achingly agnostic perspective, but shows that there is hope for us all to "know as we are known" in the end. Behind everything, there really is Someone there.

Steamed Rice

Anne Rice is angry;

"In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control... In the name of ... Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen." - Anne Rice, via Twitter

Sounds a lot like "Non Serviam!!", from here. I don't know anything about Anne Rice, haven't read her books. I know there was a stir a while back when she deigned to re-enter the Church and grace us all with her presence. I'm always very cautious abour celebrity conversions and Mizz Rice illustrates one reason why.

People are flighty. They'll say and do things for all kinds of reasons at the drop of a hat... make vows, join the army, redecorate the living room. Celebrities seem even more than ususally restless and ungrounded, always - very publically - embracing this movement or that guru or endorsing some new miracle health lifestyle.

Oh, Anne, Anne... whence the righteous indignation? You sound for all the world like the naive and disillusioned victim of a bait-and-switch con. Had you no idea at all what Christianity was before you signed on? Were the Ten Commandments something you had just never come across, the way some people - by a kind of miracle of chance - have never had a hamburger?

Being a Christian means turning from your own will and embracing the will of God, especially in the teaching of Christ, which has been around for, well... a while now. It strikes me as more than a little disingenuous for you to walk out of the front door of the Church and cry, "I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that the Pope refuses to endorse gay marriage!"

That would be like me storming out of a PETA rally, protesting, "Why, I had no idea this was such a narrow-minded organization! They refused to hear my presentation on the benefits of eating hamburgers!".

At least she has the decency to leave, which is more than can be said for dissidents like Call to Action, who insist that, of course, they are the real Catholics... because they have the courage to reject everything even remotely associated with Catholicism. Anne Rice is sane enough, still, to see the contradiction.

Perhaps she will go and have herself de-baptized.

Anne Rice's real problem may be simply that she holds - has held her entire life - a narrow and naive picture of God as, well, a Tame Lion;

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness ... by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all". - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Addendum: The Curt Jester apparently has a similar take. Read Committed to My Own Personal Version of Christ.

While The Internet Monk and his readers find in the occasion cause for much introspective hand-wringing. Meh.

P.S. - I've edited the above, slightly. The original was too snarky.

Not Necessarily a Book Review - Perelandra

Let me offer a big disclaimer here at the beginning of this post; I am not a literary critic... or a literary anything, for that matter. I'm not qualified even to do real criticism in my own field (fine art). I do offer social criticism pretty often, but I feel more comfortable in that role, as I have a fair amount of experience with society, having lived in it nearly every day.

What follows, then, is no more a real book review than my posts on movies could be considered movie reviews. I don't know enough about either books or movies to put things in proper perspective. If I want real movie reviews, I try to find out what pros like Steven Greydanus or Barb Nicolosi are saying.

So consider this a kind of loose recollection of how one average schlub felt about reading C.S. Lewis' space trilogy.

I knew almost nothing of the story before I began (I have yet to read That Hideous Strength, so shaddap, already, and no spoilers please). My ignorance may be confirmed in recalling that not long ago, I spoke of the entire trilogy as being "about Mars", which is only partly true of the first book, Out of the Silent Planet.

Out of the Silent Planet was a fun read, imaginative, and profound at points. Certainly as serviceable a "let's pretend we're on another planet" tale as one could reasonably ask for. It was a pleasure to read a space story written before (but not too long before) we actually did begin to go into space, when the Unknowns were so much bigger (this begs to be made into a cool Steampunk graphic novel).

That said, I wasn't bowled over. I was surely engaged enough to pick up book two, but I did not have extremely high expectations. Then Perelandra (the aforementioned "book two"), over the course of a couple of chapters, became one of my favorite books ever (not that I'm widely read).

More after the break. AHOY!! SPOILERS AHEAD!

Local Library

I haven't taken as full advantage of our local library as I might have, over the years. It has grown a lot, but strangely this growth has been mainly a matter of bricks and glass, industrial strength air conditioning and "community rooms", etc... the actual collection (of, you know... books) has been surprisingly stagnant.

I went a few days ago in high hopes and was a little let down to find only a few titles by the Four Patrons of The League, and those the most obvious. Nothing at all by Hilaire Belloc. However, I'm still happy that I managed to find a few that I had not read before.

Don't entertain the illusion that I'm any kind of expert on the Four Patrons, or even a well qualified amateur. I just love them, that's all.

For instance, I have only read a couple of Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries, and so I'm grateful to have checked out the Father Brown Omnibus.

I also snagged their only copy of C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet, the first in his well-regarded space trilogy. Okay, it was only available in LARGE PRINT, but we have learned to be content with much or with little.

I have read just about all of Lewis' apologetic works, as well as Surprised by Joy, The Four Loves and Meditations on the Psalms. I have read the Narnia books and Til We Have Faces (which I love) but never the space trilogy, so I'm enjoying filling in that particular gap in my homespun education - which consists mostly of gaps.

Ooh! Also, I was delighted to pick up a few CDs... The Very Best of Stan Freberg, and The Bob Newhart Anthology, as well as some classic jazz and blues.