Ming
“…in your light do we see light.”
PSALM 36:9
Of Toolsheds and Marsh-Wiggles
A few minutes before the dawn of the New Year, I found myself on a steep and crowded street that overlooked most of the Auckland skyline. Most people (I included) aimed phones at the skyline in anticipation. A vague countdown began, and then the vast horizon blossomed with fireworks. I was struck by the sheer number of people fixated on recording, swaying their phones to and fro like wands by which memory and atmosphere could be captured.
The aim of this article is an indictment of modernity. As Michael Ward states: “The incessant spiritual orchestration that accompanies [the universe], that actually constitutes it, and that is normally inaudible, is now also considered incredible. The cosmos therefore comes to be regarded as nothing more than a very elaborate machine when in reality it is tingling with life…’”1 Ward claims that the medieval conception of the universe as a “festival not a machine” is now beyond belief.2 Our world has become disenchanted. In the words of Saturn by Sleeping at Last, we have lost the reality of, “How rare and beautiful it is to even exist”.
The anecdote in the first paragraph serves as a parable. We moderns (or post-moderns) have snuffed enchantment, that allegedly irrational and primeval wick, shunning wonder in a perpetual pilgrimage for elusive pleasure. We have ignored the fireworks display of the cosmos, so to speak, seeking to encapsulate its glory in our metallic rectangles. Is your first reaction upon seeing alabaster stars studding the sky to recognise along with the ancients that the “heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1) and gaze with awestruck wonder at this teleological world, or to point our phones at the thing to try to capture it? One cannot capture the world. The world explodes out of our cameras. A higher-resolution photo cannot help you.
Perhaps you are not convinced. You have heard this a thousand times. Maybe you, along with Schleiermacher, reckon religion to be a mere projection of the fears and inadequacies of fragile fundamentalists. You think that Christians require an intellectual coming of age where we need to recognise, with Camus’ Meursault and other existentialists, the oxymoronic “gentle indifference of the world”.3 In response, I will present the argument from Lewis’ toolshed and the argument from marsh-wiggle. C. S. Lewis, who understood enchantment, will be our discussion partner in both cases.
In his “Meditation in a Toolshed”, C. S. Lewis differentiates between “looking at” a “beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it” and “looking along” it, such that leaves, the sun, and other objects are visible by its light.4 Using this distinction, we may acknowledge a brief argument. When one looks along Christianity, so to speak, he sees a world suffused with light. With simultaneous unity and diversity, the world is a vivid carnival directed by the Triune God. Abortion is anathema because humans are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27) and painstakingly woven by God (Psalm 139:13-16). The Gospel proclaims that the “light of men” entered into our darkness (John 1:4-5), paying for our sins and justifying us by His blood (Romans 3:23-26) and that we are to come to Him through faith (Ephesians 2:8-9).
Let us look along atheism consistently. Do not hide behind Hitchens-esque platitudes. Do you hear the cry of Nietzsche’s madman? Listen to his lantern clanking. Watch it glow in the daylight. He asks, “Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?”. He proclaims the death of God and the resultant darkness.5 Understand his logic. If there is no God, then where does our meaning come from? The existentialists and our university students declare that we make our own meaning, but how is that meaning transcendent? And if meaning is only subjective, may I make my own meaning in murdering innocents? Where do objective, immutable, and universal moral values come from when we look along atheism? You may hold to them, but how can you consistently account for them? Why should we not concur with the madman, our spokesperson for secularism, that there is darkness and disenchantment? Those questions are not rhetorical.
Let us briefly consult the argument from marsh-wiggle. Lewis’ witch, in The Silver Chair, a quintessential liberal theologian, who attempts to enchant the protagonists by saying that Aslan and his country above are mere illusions. Puddleglum, the pessimistic yet steadfast marsh-wiggle, responds to the witch: “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself… Then all I can say is that… the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones… We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.”6
Puddleglum appeals to the imagination. How is it that Aslan’s land, that resplendent world teeming with polyphonic life, “licks [the witch’s] real world hollow”? I think, along with Lewis, that Puddleglum’s “desire [or memory] for [his] own far-off country” indicates the reality of this country, that it is the “scent of a flower we have not found”.7 There is something deeply existential about Puddleglum’s statement. Could our profound recognition of modernity’s barrenness and disenchantment and our yearning for something beyond the material indicate a distant land? Think about it. Search the recesses of your being. Hearken to the toolshed, the marsh-wiggle, and the Shepherd who bids you to come to Him (Matthew 11:28-30).
Footnotes
- Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 242.
- Clive Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 4.
- Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 122.
- First published as Clive Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” The Coventry Evening Telegraph, July 17, 1945.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 181-182.
- From Project Gutenberg Canada’s version of The Silver Chair by Clive Lewis.
- Clive Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), 4-5.
