> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://mereorthodoxy.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Truth, Breathed Through Silver - URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/truth-breathed-through-silver/ - Published: 2026-10-26T11:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-26T10:59:59.000Z - Description: Where, in our perma-casual age who “sees through” all as nothing, will we get to breathe a more solemn air? - Author: Mere Orthodoxy - Tags: Marc Sims, Books, Poetry, Culture Ever the precocious child, a young C.S. Lewis was reading a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem (*Tegner’s Drapa*), when he came across these lines: > *I heard a voice that cried,* > *Balder the beautiful* > *Is dead, is dead——* Lewis recounts how these words affected him: > I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it. Immediately after recounting this story, only a few pages into his autobiography, Lewis warns the reader: > The reader who finds \[this episode\] of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. What was it that so thoroughly arrested a young Lewis? This brief snatch of a myth, expansive beyond his own comprehension, was like the opening of a door from some Higher Country Beyond. And, for a moment, a chink of golden light fell down upon his face, before promptly disappearing. This longing for the transcendent is what the poet and disciple of Lewis, Malcolm Guite, is seeking to do for our own generation with his new four volume epic of the story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail*.* \~ In 2022, when Queen Elizabeth died, this same golden light struck me. I peered in on it from a suburb in the Pacific Northwest of the United States–a place that has all the enchantment and tradition of an Applebee's or an apartment complex. Watching soldiers festooned in regalia like living chess pieces arrayed behind the Queen’s casket, marching through marble-pillared halls, awash in angelic choirs: it was like watching some fairytale come to life. 70 years prior, Lewis watched the coronation of the 25-year-old Elizabeth and commented that the poor young queen was overwhelmed by the tragic splendor of it all. > The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be his vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if he said, “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.” There is, Lewis assumes, in all of us a longing for the high, regality of kings and queens, because from the beginning God made us as those with dominion over this earth (Gen 1:28). And so the pageantry of the service tugs at some deep longing in us all for what we are made for. Yet all of us in a post-monarchical world feel the world of scepters and crowns to be rather anachronistic. My daily experience has no analog for this. Our political leaders do not evoke majesty nor do our sacred spaces seem numinous. All the churches in my hometown look like Costco warehouses or strip mall storefronts–they are, if anything, practical and unpretentious. Over here, we put a high premium on not putting on airs, on being “down to earth.” The Queen’s funeral service, on the other hand, was quite literally attempting to exalt us *from* the earth. It was, in the most literal definition of the word, *pompous–*as in, full of pomp and circumstance. “The very fact that the word pompous is now used only in a bad sense,” writes Lewis in his *Preface to Paradise Lost,* “measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of ‘solemnity’. What is that? Lewis explains: “\[Solemnity\] is the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary.” This “does not suggest gloom, oppression or austerity…Feasts, in this sense, are more solemn than fasts….\[Solemnity\] is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for *pomp.*” Solemnity is the quality of “a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them.” It is the reason figures of church and state don unusual clothes, march in choreographed synchronization, and bear symbols like scepters and orbs: “a celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade…all these wear unusual clothes, and move with calculated dignity.” If you are reading this from a suburb similar to my own–a world of Chick-fil-A, athleisure, and self-deprecating humor–then maybe this all seems rather silly. Modern people tend to deconstruct ceremony to *nothing but* the sum of its parts–that crown isn’t magical, it is just a bunch of diamonds embedded in a circle. It is tempting to see the value of an act, object, or tradition exclusively in its utility or function. While showing the service to my son, upon seeing a close up shot of the Queen’s crown he wondered aloud (in true American fashion), “Wow, I wonder how much money that’s worth.” Lewis is suggesting, however, that this eye which “sees through” all ceremony and reduces it to the sum of its parts, is no virtue. In fact, it is a curse: “To see through all things is the same as not to see.” Modest, pragmatic American though I am, I was surprised as I watched the Queen’s funeral to feel a stab of longing for this mysterious solemnity, as if some lost world I had, in truth, never known, cracked open its door to let its regal warmth stream out. I did not feel this because of my deep love of the Queen or England, nor for my secret pining for Anglicanism. Something else reached an invisible hand out and offered me an experience I had so rarely encountered in my deeply American fear of pretension. Where, in our perma-casual age who “sees through” all as *nothing but,* will we get to breathe this solemn air? One place, Lewis believes, is the realm of poetry: *Balder the beautiful is dead.* *\~* Malcolm Guite also watched the Queen’s service and said it was as if, for a moment, Britain had “woken up” and reclaimed some of her former solemnity. He goes on: > People who’d been told they only had an attention span of five minutes queued for days to walk out of a noisy world and, in awestruck silence, stand and genuflect in the ancient chamber where Her Majesty lay with a guard of honor, with bright swords, with the fabled beauty of the crown resting on her coffin, laid aside for the greater glories of Heaven. Guite wondered if now was the time to act upon an old desire he had to “take up the tale” of Britain’s most ancient myth: King Arthur and the quest for the Holy Grail. Guite’s project is to take this myth and translate it into the high, heraldic solemnity of a ballad; not a modern deconstruction of Arthur or a familiar ready-for-television crossover, but an epic, long, rhymed ballad. Why? “What is the point of having a poet, inspired by the Muse,” Lewis suggests, “if he tells the stories just as you or I would have told them?” It is precisely because the form is unusual that it pulls us in. What will deliver us from what author and neuroscientist, Erik Hoel, [calls](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/exit-the-supersensorium?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), “disappearing up our own brainstems,” from hyper-addictive, low-brow, short-form media? We need to breathe that bracing, unfamiliar mountain air of what is above us from time to time. And it is this Arthurian myth in particular, Guite believes, that possesses a kind of “incantatory power” to aid in breaking the bindings of unbelief for our generation today and root us into Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. \~ As Lewis grew into manhood, there were two sides of him growing in tandem: the Romantic, whose imagination was baptized into the world of myth and fairy tales, forever chasing that light he first experienced as a child; and the Rationalist, the rigorous mind which sniffed out fallacies and cynically demanded proof, who “saw through” charades and charlatans alike. His Romanticism led to a fertile imagination. His Rationalism led to a bleak atheism. Both led to a painful schizophrenia: “Nearly all I loved,” he wrote, “I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless.” Lewis’ conversion to Christianity is more winding and protracted than one turn, but the famous conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in 1931 proved to be pivotal. It also sheds light on the essential breakthrough Lewis needed to not only see the truth of Christianity, but how the Christian faith reconciled these two warring halves of his brain. Lewis loved the beauty of myths, but they were “lies,” he told Tolkien and Dyson “even though…breathed through silver.” *No,* Tolkien replied, *they are not.* Myths, according to Tolkien, are “splintered fragments of the true light” of Ultimate Truth: beams of gold cast like sparks into the dark, glimmers of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty embedded in the stories we tell. The reason that chivalry, sacrifice, and love conquering death resonate with us so deeply isn’t because they are false, but because they echo the True Myth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Much later, Lewis [referred](https://www.nytimes.com/1956/11/18/archives/sometimes-fairy-stories-may-say-best-whats-to-be-said.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to the power of myths and fairy tales to captivate the emotions and imaginations of a reader with the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the gospel, even if the readers’ prejudices were against Christianity. Lewis referred to this as “stealing past watchful dragons” so that the heart could soar with Christ and, in time, tug the mind along with it. Guite notes how both Lewis and Tolkien did this in their own myth-making: > I saw how beautifully writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had reawakened our desire for the marvellous and mysterious, and how their stories, often drawing subtly on Arthurian motifs, had reached out with truth and beauty to so many who had scarcely known, until they turned the pages of *Narnia* and *The Lord of the Rings,* how much they longed for these tales of imagination and how these tales reawakened what Lewis, in *The Weight of Glory*, called that “inconsolable secret,” our yearning for the “far-off country,” which we glimpse when, for a while, the veil is lifted and we see how God moves in and through His creation and draws us back to Him. So, he has taken up his recent project to "continue the vital mission to ‘slip past the watchful dragons’ of secularism and awaken again in the modern world that openness to beauty and mystery which prepares the heart for the coming of Christ.” A ballad of King Arthur may seem like a strange resource for evangelism and discipleship. There will be many who will likely never give it a chance because they dislike poetry out of hand. But I want to persuade you to try. I believe that Guite’s work, in profound ways, will be a kind of hammer to break up the hard hearts of the secular West and make us receptive to Jesus Christ, in three primary ways: the True, the Good, the Beautiful. Let’s examine them in reverse order. ## **The Beautiful** Guite’s attention to beauty and the wonder of creation–what he calls “the world’s bright edge”-– is one of the most refreshing aspects of *Galahad.* His poetry demonstrates that Guite himself is a true lover of the created world–not one who looks upon it as mere matter to be utilized, but as something that possesses a *nature*, a proper giveness that should be respected as well as admired. In Susanna Clarke’s foreword, she explains that Guite’s ballad “sweeps you onward into adventure, solemn magic, and beauty” with its “jewel-like colours.” “The whole poem,” she goes on, “has the mesmerizing brilliance of the little paintings in the margins of illuminated manuscripts.” And, of course, the very form of the tale as a rhymed ballad makes Beauty the air the entire story breathes. The printed edition of the book is meticulously crafted with lovely wood-cut illustrations from Stephen Crotts. But the audiobook is perhaps the most enchanting version of the book, since Guite himself reads the ballad with all the care and gravitas one would expect (plus, there is the charm of hearing Cambridge, pipe tobacco, and tweed trousers come through his voice). The poetic nature may be what wards many new readers off, but the rollicking rhythm is simple and begins to bear you along as you read, as if it is weaving a spell. This story is Beautiful, in both content and form, and fills one with a sense that there is, in the words of Tolkien, “light and high beauty” forever beyond the reach of this world’s Shadow. Dostoevsky once remarked “Beauty will save the world.” Why? Because Beauty is self-evident and like a candle in the dark, always outshines what is foul. Beauty is not all, but it is an indispensable element of the human experience. And Christians must be able to not only explain *where* that longing comes from (God), but also must contribute works of art that feed our craving for Beauty. If we do not, then we run the risk of ceding one of God’s attributes to the world, and mislead the next generation into thinking that God may be Good and True, but aesthetically chilling or (even worse) boring. ## **The Good** What was the last piece of pop-culture you interacted with regarding Arthurian romance or the Holy Grail? If you are like me, it was probably Monty Python. Or, perhaps if you are more sophisticated, Miguel de Cervantes’ *Don Quixote.* Both of these are so fun (and popular) because they do what all good satire does: skewer pretensions and expose what is ridiculous for what it really is. But man cannot live on satire alone. Guite’s tale provides an earnest, ambitious, and sincere attempt to make chivalry, romance, and virtue both attractive and believable. Many times, people are duplicitous and ulterior, but not always. And if all the art we consume portrays nothing but that? If we only ever hear Handel’s *Hallelujah* chorus in the context of Clark Griswold finally getting his Christmas lights to work? Are we not impoverished? Is there not some slot within our hearts that remains unfulfilled, some essential nutrient of the soul we become deficient in? Throughout Galahad’s tale, knights act with the kind of chivalry that is pantomimed in Monty Python or Cervantes, but instead of being the set up for a punchline, they deliver in earnest. Knights defend maiden’s honor, die courageously for brothers, and maintain their vows in the fiercest of temptations. And all of this is done while honestly admitting human sin and flaws–Guite doesn’t flatten characters into tropes. Lancelot’s secret love for Guinevere and abiding shame (despite his reputation for honor) is a worm that gnaws his conscience throughout the tale, and proves to be a surprising and compelling arc of redemption. But, a weakness of modern storytelling is to so emphasize the flaws of mankind that we subtly begin to believe that anyone daring to be heroic is really only doing so with dark, or at the very least, compromised motives. Not so in *Galahad.* One sees healthy ambition to “dare to do the deed” of whatever virtue, faith, and chivalry demand in the moment, no matter how dire the cost. And, through it all, the knights are seeking the Holy Grail–a symbol of the presence of Christ Himself. Though Guite is using mythical imagery and symbolism throughout, the book is suffused with Christianity, and is able to cast the familiar into the frame of myth that makes it both fresh and attractive. ## **The True** How can a ballad about a mythical figure on a mythical quest seeking a mythical object have anything to do with truth? The story is full of magic, elfs, naiads and dryads, and much, much more fantastic material. At one point, a block of marble (with sword plunged halfway in) floats upon the water to Arthur’s castle in Camelot. The book is fanciful, without a doubt. Yet, as Christians, we are reminded that reality is stranger than it seems. Elisha makes axe heads float (2 Kings 6:1-7), Balaam’s donkey speaks (Num 22:21-39), and Moses makes water gush from a rock (Ex 17). When Christ resurrected from the dead, it was with such concussive force, that the tombs of the dead in Jerusalem cracked open and resurrected saints wandered the streets (Matt 27:51-53). And, of course, the mundane and ordinary is littered with magic, if we have eyes to see: through some mystical alchemy, a tree can transform a flower into an apple, using nothing but sunshine, water, and air. A kind of secular enchantment can fall over our eyes and we can come to believe in a mechanistic materialism that explains how things “really work” and “see through” all: *that crown is nothing but metal and stone, shaped in a certain way.* Reading *Galahad* is an imaginative exercise to pop that illusion, to expel the reductive eye that “sees through” all, and pay attention to deeper truths. In Lewis’ *Voyage of the Dawn Treader,* Eustace gets a chance to meet Ramandu–a living star–and speak with him: > “In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” > “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” But more true than anything is the story’s expectation that a long awaited hero, a knight (literally) in shining armor, will come to heal the wastelands and set right what has been wrong. The ache we all feel for a Savior, a Deliverer, a Righteous One who uses His power and might to save–all of which is cast into mythical story in *Galahad*–points to the truest thing this world is waiting for: the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, who shall come in might and wrath, in love and truth, in mercy and healing, to banish darkness and establish a Kingdom of Light, forever and ever, amen. \~ We possess a deep longing for that golden light, the murmur in our souls of some expectation that beyond, in another realm, there is majesty and awe and splendor that we are on the outside of, but ache to be welcomed into–to bathe in so that we become like the Beauty we are beholding. All the faint, far off echoes of it that we catch in snippets through books and art and nature, all of it is making a promise to us: *one day.* “That is why,” Lewis writes, “the poets,” like the wonderful Mr. Guite, “tell us such lovely falsehoods.” They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. Guite’s second installment in his Arthuriad, [*The Coming of Arthur*](https://store.rabbitroom.com/products/the-coming-of-arthur-merlins-isle-an-arthuriad-2?gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=23070571427&gbraid=0AAAAAoiz8wZDN01S9iA21BDEJ82rgoGd0&gclid=Cj0KCQjwuJLWBhD%5FARIsAIBcRUxp5XWkI%5FosYkYqAAcktP6ZZqPUpsoCVh48fAQf-064rfj3RAAeFlMaAnS1EALw%5FwcB&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* releases on November 9th, and the first installment, [*Galahad and the Grail*](https://store.rabbitroom.com/products/merlins-isle?pr%5Fprod%5Fstrat=pinned&pr%5Frec%5Fid=1c483b9cd&pr%5Frec%5Fpid=7427972661335&pr%5Fref%5Fpid=7617855455319&pr%5Fseq=uniform&ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*,* can be purchased now. I hope you will take up the tale and break the dark enchantment the secular West has languished under for too long.