Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I feel like a traitor to the cause for expressing this: the Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the most disappointing movie I recall. The movie does less with more. I understood that Prince Caspian was not the best story for a movie, but I enjoyed the movie in the theater nonetheless and was excited when I could buy the DVD and watch it again. Moreover, I agreed with the writer who said that the most important thing about the PC movie was that it made it possible for VDT-the-movie. VDT is a story that cries out for a visual representation, an overloading of the senses with the mysteries of the sea quest and the heroes' movement toward the supernatural.

Unfortunately the VDT movie had none of this. Its makers exchanged the classic plot for cute movie story lines: a lost mother, a child stowaway and the martial mouse's tutelage and befriending of an unpleasant boy. What I expected was a visual feast of ingenious special effects imagining the sacramental; what I experienced was a sea with white flowers rather than a sea of white flowers, and a boundary to Aslan's country that would have excited me when I was a surfer -- a six-foot face that never closed -- but in no way represented the wonder expressed in C.S. Lewis's description.

Honestly, other than the fact that the movie is about C.S. Lewis's wonderful story, in many ways the most appealing of the Chronicles, there is nothing to commend this movie.

I love Silver Chair, but except for the characterization of Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, I have no anticipation of another Narnia movie. Unless, of course, Peter Jackson is enlisted.

The Gospels and the Church

In his Everlasting Man (1925), GK Chesterton gave expression to something that I have observed in my students, but have not until now had the words to express: the Church makes Jesus palatable (part II, chapter 2).

Often students take my Jesus and the Gospels course because they adore Jesus spiritually, but then find that the Gospels are a problem -- and the problem is canonized in the New Testament!

I have been troubled by this, thinking perhaps this is my fault, that I have veiled the allure of the man who saved the world. Since I am obligated to expose students to the Quest for the Historical Jesus, perhaps this ruins things for the student.

But I am not convinced. The naked Jesus of the Gospels is "a trouble" -- a far cry from the Jesus-is-just-alright world of my '70s youth. The Church clothes him with mercy, compassion and decency -- for better or worse.

Something Odd in the Truth

In Mere Christianity CS Lewis likens Theology and Physics: both are difficult because they are about reality. And reality is odd -- as is Christianity: both have those "queer twists" that one could not have anticipated. Lewis himself was anticipated here by GK Chesterton's chapter, "The Paradoxes of Christianity":

"It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything. It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe. An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all. The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some simple astronomer into calling it a globe. A blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point; but it doesn't. Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment. From the grand curve of our earth it could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved. It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides, he should have a heart on both sides....

If our mathematician from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain. But if he guessed that the man's heart was in the right place, then I should call him something more than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth. It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit...the obvious deduction that he has two hearts. It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth." (Orthodoxy)

Neo-Logisms

My friend protests my creation of new words: peoplehood and reshalomification are two of the offenders.

Although I cannot cite them to justify my own onslaught on the English language, Lewis used poethood, while Chesterton used topsyturvydom many times. In his "The Dragon's Grandmother" Chesterton pulled out pumpkinity -- the whole phrase is infinitely protracted pumpkinity. Oh my.

Truth, Not Fact

The following words are by the Voice speaking from behind the protagonist in CS Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress (1933):

“Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then it is My mythology....[T]his is My inventing, this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live.... [W]as there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God?”

The “veil” is the myth of the dying and rising “corn-king,” -- a term Lewis used in his “Grand Miracle,” Miracles (1947). But the biblical story is also the form in which the Voice has “chosen to appear.”

(to be completed)

The Value of CS Lewis

I have just finished reading student essays on Lewis's The Great Divorce. What strikes me is how much people can learn from Lewis about the meaning of life, from a Christian perspective.

To enable them to interpret GD, students read Mere Christianity -- book four, Beyond Personality is the key -- and selections from The Problem of Pain, Miracles, Letters to Malcolm, The Four Loves, "Transposition," and The Chronicles of Narnia:

• "Heaven"
• "Hell"
• "Christianity and Religion"
  
• "The Grand Miracle"
• the story in The Silver Chair about the confrontation between a witch preaching projectionism and believers in Aslan
• the story of Emeth in The Last Battle

What students learn is that the purpose of human life is to be "taken into the life of God" -- theosis! All of one's pursuits are to be oriented to this one end (telos). The person experiences a longing (Sehnsucht) for this end, but is prone to choose other ends (power, sex, intoxication) to fill the emptiness within -- "How easily the longing accepts false objects, and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us," Lewis wrote in 1943.

These freely chosen ends become one's hell, when viewed from the perspective of eternity. On the other hand, if one chooses to identify one's hobbies, friends, and aesthetic desires as pointers to one's telos, the human person can begin to experience the bliss -- heaven -- for which God has designed the human person.

The key for the person is to submit, to release oneself, to the "treatment" of the Creator. This is a death to Self, but a Yes to one's Design. The No dis-orders the person, but the Yes aims one at the God-designed home port.

The Significance of Daily Choices

“[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.” (CS Lewis, MC 3.4)

Lewis shows the impact of choices in The Great Divorce: in the afterlife, ghosts who choose Self as God progressively de-create themselves, from the inside out. The ghosts are shells -- transparent insubstantial Un-man -- doomed to the hell they create for themselves.