A distant, glorious echo: Tolkien and typology

In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien boldy declares his dislike of allegory and notes that, whatever critics and readers have suggested, the novel is most certainly not an allegory. Nonetheless, Christian readers have insisted on finding parallels to Christian theology throughout his works, to the extent that they commonly consider various characters—Gandalf in particular—to be explicitly Christ-figures.

The Tower of Orthanc, illustrated by Alan Lee

Given Tolkien’s adamant rejection of any sort of allegorical reading of his text, we surely cannot admit of an accidental allegory; such a thing would not make sense. More, when we hold The Lord of the Rings up against works that are explicitly allegorical—C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, for example—we note that there is a real and even profound difference between the two in character and tone. We should therefore grant that Tolkien is not to be argued with here and move on.¹

Still, Christian ideas keep popping up in his works: the death and resurrection of Gandalf, the unambiguously demonic evil that the heroes oppose in its various incarnations of Sauron or the Balrog, the king returning to claim his throne after a long stewardship, the long-awaited marriage of that triumphant king to a radiant bride, and so forth. While these do not have the sorts of explicit allegorical turns that characterize, for example, Lewis’ explicit identification of Aslan with Jesus, clearly there is something going on here. What is more, Tolkien himself would freely admit it.

The answer is simple enough. What many readers have mistaken for allegory is typology instead. Continue reading →

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Romance in Pride and Prejudice: Sometimes, We Settle

It is axiomatic that an artist’s work will be admired and disdained for a single set of qualities. Some admire the breadth and passion of Beethoven while others find his stamina and pathos tedious. Some admire the precision and pacing of Kubrick’s films while others find them pretentious. Jane Austen is no exception; her longevity is like that of any other significant artist. The defenders and detractors never stop having their arguments about the worth of her work.

It may be worth revisiting Pride & Prejudice, which is two hundred years old this year, to consider what distinguishes her romances from contemporary romances. After all, Elizabeth Bennett is not the kind of character we can imagine will be convincingly portrayed by a Meg Ryan or a Kate Hudson, or even a Julia Roberts. Lizzy and Jane are not heroines who lend themselves to being championed by America’s sweethearts in just about any generation of film.

Arguably, Noah Berlatsky, writing for the Atlantic, has summed up the paradoxical appeal of Austen’s work: “She has to be one of the least romantic writers ever to write romance.”

Austen’s tales of romance may endure because she put so little stock in romance as we tend to define it. In an Austen novel, career advancement, real estate values, the size of an entailment, and the social and fiscal connections that come with marriage all matter. If that seems unappealing it is because we can’t conceive of a culture in which a marriage could be arranged to benefit clans rather than as the culmination of a quest for a “soulmate.” We also live in a culture which, in some sense, denies the inevitability of death. And so Austen’s tales of matrimony and negotiation don’t make sense to us because they are often, as Berlatsky put it, as “small as life.” Americans want life to be bigger and grander in every respect than a life could be in Jane Austen’s time.

But a title like Pride & Prejudice suggests that however domestic the tale, Austen’s themes are hardly small. Just as stories about war are rarely “just” about war, Austen’s tales of romance are not “just” stories of people who marry. The title tips us off to character flaws before we’ve even opened the book. Though Elizabeth and Darcy are not imbued with a social or symbolic significance as apocalyptic as Dostoevsky’s characters, they do represent ways of living life. That Austen is quotidian where Dostoevsky is apocalyptic, that Austen is mundane where Dostoevsky is grotesque hardly means she was not writing about ideas. Austen had an eye for the mundane details with which philosophies of life must contend on a daily basis. Dostoevsky wrote about the personal and social cataclysms that philosophies create when untempered by other ideals. But it is the dry domesticity of Austen’s narrative world and the long term decisions made within it that give her characters’ decisions weight. Irreversible life-altering decisions hinge on a person’s ability or inability to make the right decision after observing mundane details. Continue reading →

Jackson and Tolkien: Hollywood’s Infatuation With Angst

Matt’s piece on The Lord of the Rings a few weeks ago nicely summed up one of the major ways in which Peter Jackson’s view of the world diverges from Tolkien’s: its profoundly different moral vision. But Jackson’s storytelling sense diverges from Tolkien’s in other, equally profound ways — not least in its approach to conflict.

There are two fundamental types of conflict in literature: external and internal. External conflicts pit the character against forces in the world around them: other men, society, or nature itself. Internal conflicts pit the character against himself. For prototypical examples, one might think of Odysseus and Hamlet. While each faces a variety of conflicts, Odysseus spends of the majority of his time confronting external enemies, and Hamlet spends a great deal of his time wrestling with himself. One of the literary strengths of Tolkien’s works is that they contain just about every sort of conflict imaginable. Continue reading →

Ruminations on Joy

A few weeks ago I read Zadie Smith’s essay, “Joy,” in the New York Review of Books. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend doing so. It’s a beautifully written, decidedly contemporary reflection on joy with a tone I suspect Millennial and Gen-X readers will particularly resonate with. I also recommend Gary Gutting’s follow-up piece in the Times, helpfully bringing Thomas Aquinas into conversation with Smith’s portrait of joy.

As I’ve reflected on Smith’s essay the last few weeks, I’ve thought about a few things. The first is that I believe Smith’s ultimate conclusions about joy as opposed to pleasure are somewhat reminiscent of those of C.S. Lewis, whose reflections on joy ring the truest of all those I’ve come across.

Smith’s essay begins with an assumption that is self-evident to anyone who exists in this world: pleasures are rather easy to come by but joy is a bit more elusive. She then describes a handful of moments in her life when she felt that she touched joy, in particular a London nightclub experience in the 90s at the beginning of the ecstasy craze. But was that really joy? The morning-after letdown makes Smith wonder. Maybe joy exists mostly in the tease, the replication, the mimesis of something far rarer or altogether out of reach?

Reflecting on her drug experience that felt awfully close to joy, Smith writes:

At the neural level, such experiences gave you a clue about what joy not-under-the-influence would feel like. Helped you learn to recognize joy, when it arrived. I suppose a neuroscientist could explain in very clear terms why the moment after giving birth can feel ecstatic, or swimming in a Welsh mountain lake with somebody dear to you. Perhaps the same synapses that ecstasy falsely twanged are twanged authentically by fresh water, certain epidurals, and oxytocin… We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romantic crushes—especially if they are fraught with danger—do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. When my wild crush came, we wandered around a museum for so long it closed without us noticing; stuck in the grounds we climbed a high wall and, finding it higher on its other side, considered our options: broken ankles or a long night sleeping on a stone lion. In the end a passerby helped us down, and things turned prosaic and, after a few months, fizzled out. What looked like love had just been teen spirit. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy, and think nothing of breaking your ankles.

To me, Smith’s notion of joy here feels like bittersweet nostalgia and longing more than anything, which brings to mind Lewis’s notion of it in Surprised by Joy. Reflecting on the common qualities of Lewis’s own list of “joy” experiences from childhood, he writes:

For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasure in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

Smith seems to agree with Lewis that joy is a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. “The thing no one ever tells you about joy,” she writes, “is that it has very little real pleasure in it.” And yet she seems more perplexed than Lewis on the question of why humans would choose to desire joy over pleasure, even when it can cause so much pain:

The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told it to my husband, who told it to me. For months afterward these words stuck with both of us, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy, as animals themselves sensibly do. The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.

Smith’s recognition of the ultimate disposability and evanescence of pleasure seems to me representative of my generation’s increasing awareness of the general ephemerality of things, and their skepticism of all the tropes (a house, a family, a career, the suburban life…) previously associated (mostly via Hollywood) with a “joyous” life.

Mine is a generation which has grown up seeing about half of all marriages end in divorce. We’ve seen the real estate market collapse a few times, as well the stock market. We’ve seen umpteen holes shot through our heroes and icons (sex scandals, doping scandals, the generally unflattering transparency of 360 degree media).

Meanwhile, the allure of physical possessions seems ever diminished. Books on bookshelves are going the way of the CD. Amassing expensive furniture, investing in home improvements, registering for fine wedding china that will rarely be used… all of it feels pointless in a world whose impermanence is palpable: a world where life is lived via moment-by-moment tweets and Insta-documents quickly forgotten; where natural disaster, terrorism and apocalyptic doom are not feared as much as expected; where market instability, escalating debt and climate change make visions the future look closer to Children of Men than “Tomorrowland.”

Because of all of this (and no doubt much more), many of us are now, on the whole, much more desirous of experiences than things. We’d rather travel, eat amazing food, see movies, have adventures, and live socially in the present-tense than build for anything long-term. Unlike our parents, we tend to rent rather than buy; we work in jobs for years but not decades; we don’t live in one place for very long. We have close friends for “seasons,” but very few for life.

To be sure, the idea of rootedness, permanence and longevity–building an idyllic homestead wherein one’s family can flourish, amidst a tightknit community where “everybody knows your name,” where we can carve out a niche and stake our place for once and all–is desirable, but mostly in a fantasy sense (in the simultaneously nostalgic and eschatological sense, perhaps, of Marilynne Robinson’s reflections on home in the essay, “When I was a Child I Read Books.”) Such a vision confronts us mostly as a stab, a pang, a longing for what we know will probably never be.

And this brings us back to the discussion of joy. For it is precisely in those pangs and longings where joy exists, argues Lewis. “All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire,” he wrote once in a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths. “Our best havings are wantings.”

Though I agree with Lewis that pleasure is surely distinct from joy, I also think they are very closely linked. That is, I believe pleasure–mostly the nostalgic remembrance of a pleasure–can often be a catalyst for joy. Zadie Smith’s experience in the London club likely felt more joyous and profound in her memory–with great distance–than it did in the actual moment. Perhaps in the moment it was closer to pleasure than joy. But without that initial pleasure to look back on and long for, would there be joy?

When I consider instances of joy in my life thus far, most of what I would list probably felt more like pleasure at the time. I think of the summer night in Cambridge when I snuck onto the roof of Clare College with friends, looking out over the moonlit gardens, punting down the Cam river well after midnight, with champagne and laughter in ample supply. I think of the long, late-night undergrad conversations at Wheaton with my roommates: about God, movies, theology, relationships and the like. Or the childhood trips with my family to the Tulsa State Fair, an autumnal tradition rife with the screams and whirring of carnival rides and the smells of all things barbecue and fried. Pleasures all.

The memories of all that, the longing for those happy experiences and the intense recognition that they will never be replicated in just the same way… that’s what stirs up joy. Sehnsucht. And it’s not just nostalgia for the past. It’s nostalgia for a future that a lifetime full of accumulated pangs and pleasures leads us to believe exists. Somewhere. Joy is the ineffable, the transcendent, the sublime stasis which a million little experiences grasp at but can never fully capture. An ultimate settledness for which our hearts now restlessly pine.

This is why Smith feels that there is something melancholy about joy, that it has such a paradoxical capacity to bring us pain. And perhaps that is why in today’s world–so untrusted and unstable, where we’re all so aware of contingency and fragility–the idea of joy makes a lot more sense when articulated as a groaning for completion rather than a smiling-face present perfection. Lewis’ characterization of joy as always pointing away or calling us elsewhere (emphasizing our “pilgrim status”) rings true for citizens of discombobulated late modernity. We know all too well the vacuity that so often accompanies lives of consumption; the limited capacity of things to bring lasting pleasure. (Of course, experiences can also be disposable and empty, though I think they have greater capacity to morph into pleasant memories which ultimately bring joy).

Still, whether we’re curating commodities or experiences, It’s up to us to make the most of the little pleasures we come across. We can either celebrate the presentness of pleasure (YOLO, right?!) and stop there; or we can go further and see in pleasure signposts, recognizing that the ecstatic feeling triggered by a dance party, or a small-batch bourbon, or a down-to-the-wire Super Bowl, is not an end unto itself but rather a means by which we can contemplate our true pilgrim status and the telos to which it all must point.

Law and Les Miserables, Revisited

Ed. note: I’m thrilled to publish this reflection by on Les Mis. by Dr. Jason Hood, a friend of mine and author of an important upcoming book on imitation that you should really preorder right now.

In its opening weeks at the box office, some reviewers have reluctantly praised Les Miserables while panning it for being too sincere and epic, laden with “unashamed, operatic-sized sentiments.” This criticism is similar to the objections raised against Babel, the recent effort from Mumford and Sons. But just as many Christians praised Mumford and co. for letting music and faith take them soaring above cynicism, the epic new production of “Les Miz” has been racking up acclaim from Christians, including bloggers Tim Dalyrmple and Owen Strachan.

CNN suggests that a marketing effort concentrated on evangelicals, including large institutions like Focus on the Family, is paying off at the box office. But the story’s themes of radical, beautiful grace are widely and justly celebrated. Even those who didn’t see the film in advance were pulsing with excitement. Mike Cosper wrote a paean for The Gospel Coalition even before seeing the film, urging readers to see it. Cosper’s pre-review rightly highlights the powerful depiction of grace in the film and garnered a great deal of attention (over 2,000 tweets and Facebook posts and likes at my last visit).

Cosper, Dalrymple and Strachan rightly highlight the beautiful depiction of the gospel in this classic tale. Dalrymple began his post: “I cannot think of any work of fiction that conveys the contrast between Law and Grace as vividly and profoundly as Les Miserables.” All three authors cite the distinction between law and grace in the titles of their posts, a distinction that has often been a common theme in analysis of Les Miz.

But what if the story also shows us a beautiful picture of law?

In a famous scene at the beginning of the story, we encounter a thief named Valjean who is newly released from prison. After being turned away for being a convict he is finally welcomed by a priest. He repays the kindness by stealing the priest’s silver and running away. When he is caught and dragged back, the priest forgives him and even gives him more than he had taken. In the musical version, the priest sings, “By the Passion and the Blood,  God has raised you out of darkness;  I have bought your soul for God!”

This encounter with grace is far more beautiful and sacrificial than I can portray in this summary, but I also haven’t spoiled it for you. Valjean is reformed and transformed. Yet the antagonist, a policeman named Javert, hunts Valjean down ruthlessly, as he is convinced of his own righteousness and Valjean’s depravity. The common approach is that the story presents a sharp contrast between the law (Javert) and the gospel (the priest and Valjean).

But there’s another way to look at the narrative. Rather than seeing Javert as a law-riddled villain and Valjean an anti- or post-law hero, perhaps we should see two different approaches to law: one fueled by grace and the pursuit of mercy and true righteousness, the other fueled by anger and self-righteousness. When the priest and Valjean depict grace, they are in fact keeping the law. The priest is obeying the commands of Jesus: loving his neighbor, turning the other cheek, doing mercy, and forgiving freely as he has been freely forgiven by God. In other words, the picture of grace and gospel in Les Miserables is also a beautiful portrait of law and commands. Hugo’s priest isn’t just a Christ-figure; he’s also a Christ-follower.

Conversely, Javert might sing “Mine is the way of the Lord” while he ruthlessly pursues Valjean, but he’s wrong. His desire for justice and order is right, but his practice doesn’t represent law in any sort of biblical sense. Javert didn’t need to ditch the pursuit of law and justice; he needed grace and redemption that led to new law, a godly law that wouldn’t imprison a man for five years for stealing bread. He needed to discover merciful justice that wouldn’t imprison the poor inhumanely or treat the at-risk with ruthless contempt. In other words, he needed a law more like the law of Moses and Jesus.

Of course, any command can be used cruelly. But a healthy approach to law–an approach infused with beauty and grace–is possible, and helps us contribute to the creation of a more merciful world. In conversation with Cosper and others on Twitter, Jamie Smith pointed out that some celebrations of the story seemed to reject law wholesale, leaving little room for the vital cultural task of lawmaking and the pursuit of justice. Yes, there is a difference between law and grace, or law and gospel. But uncritical acceptance of a radical dichotomy between them can be spiritually harmful, hermeneutically disastrous, and culturally damaging. (Let me hasten to add that Cosper, Strachan, and Dalrymple aren’t guilty of those charges.)

Given that the word nomos in the NT is used in many different ways, an adjustment in our taxonomy might be helpful. Joe Rigney, a professor at Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, asks why we aren’t using the label “legalism” (the ruthless, unbiblical application of constraints) instead of “law” to describe Javert.

In today’s climate, where law and constraint are dirty words and “freedom” and “liberty” are feted and glorified to the point of idolatry, it’s all too easy for law to become a derogatory label, which makes it helpful to have other terms in hand. Many contemporary Christians see law primarily in negative hues, wrongly taking Paul’s relegation of Old Testament Law—Torah—in Romans 6-7 as a rejection of any sort of command or law. But as OT scholar Jay Sklar puts it, biblical laws “are windows into the heart of the lawgiver.” When Moses gave Israel laws, he began by stressing God’s gracious redemption of his people (both versions of the Ten Commandments begin with a note of grace; Deut 5:6, Exod 20:1-2). When Jesus commanded his disciples to lay down their lives, he only did so on the basis of the fact that he was doing the same for them. And in Hugo’s story, obeying Jesus’ commands on the basis of grace becomes a vehicle for the extension of grace and mercy.

Consider the irony of trying to pit mercy against biblical law. As Rigney notes, Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees for their lawlessness (Matt 23:23 and context) fits Javert: by neglecting mercy and perpetuating injustice, he was showing his utter disregard for God’s law, neglecting what Jesus called “the weightier matters of the law.”

It’s the law informed by grace and mercy, not pitted against it. We find that law in the Bible; I also think we can see it in Les Miserables.

Jason B. Hood is author of Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern (IVP, 2013). Among other fun activities, he teaches graduate courses in Old Testament for Union University.

What’s Wrong with the Hobbits? Jackson’s Malformed Moral Universe

Jeffrey Weiss thinks that Peter Jackson doesn’t understand the moral universe of J.R.R. Tolkien. That’s a thesis that I wholeheartedly endorse. But not quite in the same way that Weiss does, or at least not with the same bit of evidence.

For instance, Weiss contends that Jackson turns Frodo into a hero at the end of his quest to destroy the ring:

In the movie, after Gollum bites off his finger, Frodo heroically launches himself at Gollum and hurls them both over the side. Gollum falls with the Ring into the lava but Frodo is barely saved by Sam.

I’ll grant that Jackson’s version is more exciting, in the same way that loading Ophelia with a suicide vest and having her blast herself to smithereens center-stage would liven up a production of Hamlet. But that wouldn’t be Shakespeare.

Here’s the key for Tolkein that Jackson ignores: Frodo fails in his quest but the quest succeeds. Jackson, however, has Frodo win.

To put it in Tolkien’s Christian framework, salvation in the book could not be achieved even by the most heroic efforts of men (or hobbits). To a secularist, Gollum’s fall might be read as an accident. To Tolkien, it was always providential, an act of grace.

It’s true that Jackson alters the story and that the alterations suggest he misses Tolkien’s point. But Jackson’s changes are wrong in a different and more subtle way that Weiss suggests.

In point of fact, Jackson doesn’t seem to interpret Frodo’s final charge as “heroic” at all. (You can watch the final scene here). Frodo’s face is quite clearly still set on attaining the Ring and when he accosts Smeagol he goes straight for trying to wrest it back. Nor is it at all fair to say Frodo “hurls them both over the side.” They both go over, but again that’s a side-effect of Frodo’s struggle to get back what he’d lost. Even to the very last, as the Ring sits on top of the lava, Frodo looks longingly at it and feels the temptation of it one final time. Sam even has to say, “Don’t you let go. Don’t let go” before he hoists him up.

frodo ring

Contra Weiss, then, Frodo clearly doesn’t “win” here. At all. But Jackson still misses Tolkien’s vision, albeit in a more subtle way: Frodo’s failure isn’t quite absolute, but is intermixed with resisting the Ring’s calling one final time.

Yet that difference also misrepresents Tolkien’s moral universe by obscuring the “providence” at work in Gollum’s fall. Despite the Ring’s inevitable destruction, Jackson allows a final act of resistance to its allures. Frodo feels every bit of the temptation and, with the voice of exhortation from a friend, turns away from it. (He is perhaps too literally “white knuckling” his resistance to temptation.)

Of course, Tolkien does have characters who are able to resist the Ring’s power. Most prominently, Tom Bombadil seems to be wholly uninterested in the Ring due to what we might describe as a moral immaturity.

And then there’s Faramir, who avoids the Ring’s temptations because of his own moral purity and prudence. It is Faramir, if anywhere, where Jackson’s failure to grasp Tolkien’s moral world is the clearest. In his most significant departure from the plot of the books, Faramir actually tries to take the Ring and then rather than sending them on their way with gifts takes them with him to Gondor, where they only narrowly escape.

That is a question that I suspect Jackson has no plausible answer for, especially given his inability to understand Faramir’s “purity of heart.” Which is to say, the one character that Tolkien presents as having the moral fiber to resist the Ring Jackson portrays as grasping after it. But while Tolkien destroys the Ring without giving Frodo the chance to resist it one more time, Jackson provides the false consolation that at the end Frodo had enough goodness in him to not follow Gollum to his doom. Whether Frodo would have actually had the internal resources “not let go” in a parallel-Tolkien-universe is to me something of an open question. He failed to resist it once: why should we believe that as long as the Ring exists and he can see it, he wouldn’t go after it even to his own destruction?

Tolkien’s universe has much starker moral lines than Jackson’s story—and the difference matters. In the movies, we cling to goodness with our fingernails. Only at the last second do we somehow, presumably from within ourselves, find the strength to overcome our previous bad decisions and do the right thing. But the books are a world where goodness holds us and overcomes our failures. It is a world where we stand in need of grace—but where grace also transforms us and makes possible a genuine moral purity.

Of Women and the Freedom to be Holy

There is a story told in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein about a young French man and an Arabian woman who fall in love. As Frankenstein’s monster is telling his creator about how he came to understand language, sorrow, love, and human feeling, he retells the love story of Felix and Safie, a young couple who inhabit the cottage into which he is spying. Frankenstein is a rich novel, and the autobiographical tale of the monster is especially moving, but there is a tangent within it that I found particularly interesting.

As the monster retells Christian Safie’s story of escape from her Islamic father, he notes that Safie did everything in her power to stay in Europe, where she, as a woman, would have a fair place and the opportunity to live her life as she saw fit.

“Safie related that her mother was a Christian Arab, seized and made a slave by the Turks…The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms of her mother, who, born in freedom, spurned the bondage to which she was now reduced. She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion and an independence of spirit…This lady died, but her lessons were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie, who sickened at the prospect of again returning to Asia and being immured within the walls of a harem, allowed only to occupy herself with infantile amusements, ill suited to the temper of her soul, now accustomed to grand ideas and a noble emulation for virtue…

Remaining in a country where women were allowed to take a rank in society, was enchanting to her.”

This passage shocked me, to be quite honest. I studied English literature at a very conservative school, and still I was taught that Mary Shelley saw herself as an outsider, doomed for her great talent that was viewed as incongruous with her gender; that she perhaps even wrote herself into Frankenstein’s monster: built of broken pieces, and separated from the loving embrace of human understanding.

English: Portrait of Mary Shelley (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Perhaps this is true (who am I to say), but there is, at least, here in her masterpiece work, an appreciation of what Christianity alone provided women in the 18^th and 19^th centuries: the freedom to be human. Safie is, after all, seeking only to be allowed to pursue virtue, to learn, to deepen her soul, and to marry a man she loves. She knows that it is only a Christian nation that can provide that freedom for her.

This is a part of the Christian story, a part of the Bible itself, that I think we’ve too often forgotten to tell, bowing, in our own way, to the common modern idea that Christianity is, at its core, oppressive to women. Instead of fighting back tooth and nail we most often answer only that Christian wives and mothers are very happy, or that women want the strong manly leaders our churches encourage. And that’s really not the story we need to be telling.

Perhaps instead we should talk about Mary, not only allowed, but encouraged to sit at Jesus’ feet and learn, instead of being relegated to household chores. Maybe we could talk about Mary Magdalene, one of the great redemption stories of the New Testament. Why don’t we talk about Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila, who were given excellent educations and able to devote themselves to a life of rich spirituality, producing important theological contributions to our understanding of the spiritual life. Why don’t we talk about Mary Shelley, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Elizabeth Browning, all of whom were able to express their great talent in previously unprecedented ways, not despite of, but because of the Christian society to which they owed what freedom they had, and which would continue to give their progeny ever more opportunities to be as fully human as God made them. This is the story we’re not fighting hard enough to tell—perhaps because we’re not fighting hard enough to see it be ever more true.

When Mary Shelley wrote Safie in 1816, she saw unique freedom and respect for women in Christianity, but somewhere in the following 200 years it became the religion of oppression, leaving it up to our secular counterparts to champion the cause of the marginalized and to cry out for equality, without ever understanding that God had already told us how much he valued every human life, and therefore had given us all the reason we would ever need to free the oppressed.

Christianity is, after all, the religion that teaches its followers to treat slaves as brothers, to adopt the orphans, to set the captives free. It is the religion that teaches that in the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no distinction between slave and free, between the many races of the earth, or between male and female. Hear me rightly here: This is not a declaration that gender is meaningless; in fact, I think it’s quite possible and most probable that being a holy woman looks different than being a holy man (just as holiness in me will look different than holiness in you). What must be universal, however, is freedom for each and every person, regardless of race, position, or gender, to pursue holiness; we must fight to give everyone the chance to live out of the depths of their own soul and the heights of their God-given talents. I believe that Jesus shows us how to do this by example when he looks an outcast woman of another race in the eye and frees her to sin no more, or calls a hated tax collector out of a tree and asks him to dinner and a new way of life.

Christianity is the religion that teaches that everyone has an opportunity to be a child of God, without mediation or restriction, and to live an abundant life in Christ. At its essence, this is the story of our faith, and we should consider it soberly and then champion it in every possible avenue and opportunity.

This is the story we should be shouting from our rooftops, and at this time of year in particular, we can.

Truly he taught us to love one another

His law is love, and his gospel is peace

Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother

And in His name, all oppression shall cease.

Ray Bradbury, J.R. R. Tolkien, and the Benefits of Nostalgia

In an excellent piece on Ray Bradbury’s nostalgia, Andy Rau tosses off this fascinating but undeveloped parenthetical: “Of the various Christian fantasists of the 20th century, I think only J.R.R. Tolkien matches Bradbury’s sad but determined nostalgia for what we’ve left behind or cannot attain.”

Rau’s analysis of Bradbury is full of wisdom, and I encourage you to click through and read it. But don’t do so expecting him to unpack that connection between Tolkien and Bradbury. For that, dear reader, stick with me.

Though Tolkien was a British, Catholic, Oxford professor and Bradbury was an American, vaguely Buddhist, self-educated writer, there are deep affinities between the two, affinities which should make both writers essential imaginative resources for the sort of people who read a site called Mere Orthodoxy.

The “sad but determined nostalgia” that Rau identifies in both Tolkien and Bradbury is perhaps the most important emotional resonance of their work. Tolkien and Bradbury are masters of a certain longing for the past, a desire for a history which we feel ourselves to be alienated from. This longing is one of the most powerful anxieties created by modernity, especially in those of us who are of a traditionalist or conservative stripe: a persistent sense of being cut off from a more authentic, holistic tradition.

Tolkien’s Cover Designs for the First Edition of The Lord of the Rings (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some of this emotion, of course, is simply a golden-age nostalgia experienced by people in every age, the feeling that our forebears were heroes and we a diminished people. Some of it is appropriate critique of modernity’s excesses. But the middle ground between the false idealization of the first impulse and the discursive critique of the second is made up of raw longing for a different world, an unease with the world as it is.

Tolkien articulated this discomfort with throbbing beauty in the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings; he expressed it more directly when in a letter he described his spiritual position as a soldier fighting “the long defeat.”

Bradbury’s work is concerned with an American version of this longing, one less heroic and more childlike, but beautiful nonetheless: read his de facto epigraph, published in the New Yorker not long before his death, and try not to be moved by his longing-but-joyful memorialization of his childhood. In Dandelion Wine, an autobiographical novel drawing on the same memories of boyhood in Illinois, he describes his work this way: “the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.”

Like Tolkien, Bradbury feels both the green spaces of his boyhood and their ultimate loss and destruction as present realities. Cynics and progressives may dismiss such a response as golden-age thinking, but anyone who feels affection for their past knows the emotion at some level and can find value in its literary expression.

Those of us with conservative or traditionalist leanings are uniquely poised to appreciate this sort of literary expression, for like Tolkien and Bradbury our beliefs are premised on the essential (if not thoroughgoing) goodness of the past, rather than its essential evil. From this perspective, literature that calls up our desire for that past schools us in the virtue of fidelity to that past, and love for it. Like Tolkien, for Bradbury our love what has gone before disciplines and chastens our hope for the future. He is thus an essential imaginative resource for all of us who would do the same.

Adults in the Body of Children: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Midsummer Night’s Dream

Alan Jacobs passed along this fascinating little bit on Lewis’s story:

My real criticism of this novel relates to a different matter. It is that it ends just when it is getting interesting. The Pevensie kids become the kings and queens of Narnia: King Peter the Magnificent, Queen Susan the Gentle, King Edmund the Just and Queen Lucy the Valiant. They grow to adulthood in this world, until, many years later, they chance upon the lamppost again, and tumble back into our world, no longer adults, now children. Only a few hours have passed on Earth, for all the year (decades?) they spent in Narnia. Then Lewis stops; but this is where the story starts, surely — what would it be like to have an adult consciousness inside the body of a child? To have passed through puberty, and then suddenly to have the hormone tap switched off? You could hardly go back to you former existence; but neither could you expect to live as an adult. Would you go mad, or use your beyond-your-seeming-years wisdom to some purpose? How would you cope? Would you try to explain? Would you betray yourself, and reveal the Narnia portal to the world — would governments attempt to exploit it? The psychological interest in the story begins at the end; but that’s exactly the place where Lewis drops the bar down and ends things. Grrr!

I’m tempted to say that cultivating an “adult consciousness” is simply one of the many things that imaginative literature and play provide for children. That’s a tough note to swallow, if only because for most of us what distinguishes the “adult consciousness” is simply (and perhaps exclusively) related to those “raging hormones” and everything they lead to.

But erotic attachments are not Lewis’s theme, and as a result the adulthood that he depicts in the Pevensies is one unfettered by them. He writes that the adult Queens of Narnia were objects of male affection and pursuit, but is silent on whether such attention was reciprocated. And given they are hunting together at the end, it’s safe to say it was not.

This subordination of erotic attachments become clearer when the ending of the book is put into relief against one of its potential sources: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s the High King Peter when they discover the lamppost:

“I know not how it is, but this lamp on the post worketh on me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before, as it were a dream, or in the dream of a dream.”

And here, of course, is the famous bit from Midsummer after the lovers are discovered: ”Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.”

The textual parallel is only a hint (though one strengthened by the preceding dialogue in Midsummer), but the contexts of the utterances have their own antitheses as well: the four are siblings in Lion, while Midsummer’s has its lovers. In both, though, a pair of men and women. And in Midsummer it is the lovers who are discovered by those on the hunt, while in Lion they are on the hunt themselves. But in both, it’s precisely hunting that leads to the conclusion.

What to make of all this?

The concord in Narnia is not brought about by the resolution of sexual desire, as in Midsummer, but by transcending it.

And as such, Narnia affords the Pevensies an experience of adulthood that is limited in one key respect. But while it is no less adulthood for it, it more closely approximates childhood than Roberts seems to grant. I think of a line by Lewis’s mentor George MacDonald: ”There is a childhood into which we have to grow, just as there is a childhood which we must leave behind.” Somewhat paradoxically, the imaginative experience of adulthood enables moves that transition along by deepening the experience of childhood (affected, as it is, by flights of imaginative fancy) and so enabling the possibility of adulthood. Even if that experience doesn’t encapsulate all the freedoms and privileges we afford to adults.

Postscript: I offer all of this by way of exploration. It’s a hypothesis, and by no means determinative. I’d be interested to hear critical feedback and questions in the comments, as I’m not sure I’ve put the thought out clearly enough. It is a new parallel to me (tonight!) and such things take me time to work out.

Waking in the Dark Wood

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right way was wholly lost and gone.

Canto 1:1-3, Inferno

Now, this is an interesting way to start a story. From the outset of Dante’s Inferno, the reader finds herself in what should probably be the middle. But Dante cannot remember where he started, his first step into the wood, or even when he left the path he meant to be on; so this is his new beginning. And it doesn’t look promising.

From the moment I opened Dante’s Inferno in high school, this passage became a part of my internal dialogue. In his first three lines, Dante expresses the experience of many a prodigal son or wandering daughter. You made a left when you knew you were meant to go right, a few more turns were a little less clear, the road kept slopping gently downward, and pretty soon, you’d forgotten where you’d been or how you ended where you are.

It’s sometimes easy for the dramatic sinner (those of us who, if we’re going to go wrong, really like to do the thing with flare and dedication) to identify when we’ve hit those dark woods, because everything in our lives is suddenly under shadow. But I think it is a common occurrence even in the most pious. Perhaps it is fifty extra pounds and a food addiction you seemed not to notice until you saw that picture on Facebook and now cutting back seems impossibly hard. Maybe it’s an illicit sex life that started out so innocently and grew so gradually, you can’t pinpoint where it went too far. Or maybe it’s even less obvious, like anger that’s been secretly stewing so long, forgiveness doesn’t seem possible, or bigotry and prejudice that’s become a part of you.

I am discovering, that, unlike the murky confusion and sudden awaking of the path that leads to darkness, the right ways are often fully illuminated and obvious, the better to see how difficult they really are. When Dante finds himself lost in the dark, the most obvious exit he finds is an ominous gate with a path leading slowly downward. Though any reader can tell this is a bad idea, Dante decides to take his journey farther down into a deep pit, only to find that he must eventually start climbing again, just from an even lower starting point. As he moves into Purgatory, he starts an ascent that is illumined by the light of day, but no more reassuring than the downward spiral in which he had been. In fact, the climb is about to get so steep, so difficult, that he must leave his current guide behind and carry on without him.

Dante cannot ascend towards heaven until he faces the consequences of sin and sees for himself that repentance is often hard and painful. This is as good an allegory for living repentance as I’ve read. Walking in the path of sanctification, in step with one’s own conviction can be really damn hard, especially when you’re used to the shade. Where it seems easy to slip down a path that leads to darkness, the way back out is not so fun; after all “…the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction.” You see this same theme, by the way, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which it becomes evident that the only way for Voldemort to heal his soul is through repentance, which is much too painful for him to ever consider.

I have spent a long time admiring the narrow path while blithely skipping down the broad, where the road is smooth, which such interesting, shady woods on the horizon. But those woods are not so pleasant close-up, and there are but two paths left. The arduous climb into the clear light of day, back to a high road, of sorts, or a certain gate I’ve no interest in getting nearer. It has taken a long time for me to accept that there is no easy way out of the woods. Despite it’s uncomfortable brightness, and the hot, dusty climb ahead, I’m turning towards the Sun.

Culture, politics, and religion for those who love words.

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