Fire and Knowledge

“One can never see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity.” [Ransom to Lewis]

—C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1944), p. 22

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger…. The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it.

—G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905), in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume I (1986), p. 61

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian uses the Narnia film to spew her hatred of Christianity and God:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?…. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan.

In general, the article is worth a read to see how someone who hates Christianity can view the Narnia series. Unfortunately, much of the article is based on misunderstandings and ignorance (those who have read Tolkien and C.S. Lewis will find her lack of understanding mildly funny but rather sad). Her words are loaded with disgust (“bully-pulpit,” “emotional sadism,” etc) and the mouth drops at her straw man at “American Republican Christianity”:

Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America – that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.

She seems to think people (or at least C.S. Lewis) should not express their religious views to the public, yet she is doing exactly that. But her attack is empty. There is no reasoning, just blank assertions and bitter opinions. Is there no editor at Guardian Unlimited? How could something with so little substance and so much bitterness and misunderstanding get published?

You call a tree a tree, [Tolkien said to C.S. Lewis], and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a ‘tree’ until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil….

You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.

—Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977), p. 151

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

—G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905), in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume I (1986), p. 54

Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal…. For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress.

—G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905), in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume I (1986), p. 53

Black woman may be appointed to Senate

Why is this headline color-centric? Could you imagine an article saying “White woman may be appointed to Senate” or “Chinese woman hired as CEO”? — why is race made the central point? I’m not saying we should completely ignore ethnicity. But to bring “color” to the forefront of something that should be based completely on ability seems insulting and misguided to me.

Some have puzzled over the relation between Tolkien’s stories and his Christianity, and have found it difficult to understand how a devout Roman Catholic could write with such conviction about a world where God is not worshipped. But there is no mystery. The Silmarillion is the work of a profoundly religious man. It does not contradict Christianity but complements it. There is in the legends no worship of God, yet God is indeed there, more explicitly in The Silmarillion than in the work that grew out of it, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s universe is ruled over by God, ‘The One’. Beneath Him in the hierarchy are ‘The Valar’, the guardians of the world, who are not gods by angelic powers, themselves holy and subject to God; and at one terrible moment in the story they surrender their power into His hands.

Tolkien cast his mythology in this form because he wanted it to be remote and strange, and yet at the same time not to be a lie. He wanted the mythological and legendary stories to express his own moral view of the universe; and as a Christian he could not place this view in a cosmos without the God he worshipped. At the same time, to set his stories ‘realistically’ in the known world, where religious beliefs where explicitly Christian, would deprive them of imaginative colour. So while God is present in Tolkien’s universe, He remains unseen.

—Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977), p. 99