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Recent Reading: Transposition, by C.S. Lewis (from The Weight of Glory)

Dawn Treader

I am still relatively new to C.S. Lewis. I only started reading him about four years ago. For this reason, I often hesitate to post about his writings. Like Chesterton working so hard to craft a worldview only to come to the realization that his newly constructed worldview was only that already held for centuries by the Christian church, I am always afraid of re-inventing the wheel. And, I probably am doing just that once again. Anyhow, it’s new to me. Writing helps to solidify thoughts.

I read Lewis’ address/essay entitled Transposition for the first time recently and found it to be very stimulating. The first element of intrigue, for me, is that anyone who has read Lewis’ fiction will realize that this idea of Transposition was important enough to him that it crept into his stories. It’s there in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, as the painting on the wall comes to life. It’s also there in The Silver Chair, as the ‘queen’ of the underworld tries to convince the children and the marsh wiggle that the ‘overworld’ doesn’t really exist. It is also there in The Last Battle, in the unveiling of the new Narnia. Finally, it is there in The Great Divorce, in the form of a ‘world’ that gets more solid as you get closer to heaven. Is it, perhaps, some form of Platonism? My very amateur experience says probably. But I am not philosophically astute enough to know for certain. You tell me.

Lewis’ starting point toward his doctrine of Transposition is, of all things, the phenomenon of ‘speaking in tongues.’ He uses this phenomenon, essentially, to make the point that the ‘higher’ experience of the emotions draws up the ‘lower’ experience of bodily sensation and affect into itself in such a way that the two, though distinguishable (I think), cannot be separated. (I am not going anywhere near any argument relating to ‘tongues,’ and I don’t think that was really Lewis’ focus either – only his starting point, seeing that the talk was originally given during the feast of Pentecost (see pp. 18-19)). In other words, our experience as embodied creatures is such that, while we recognize soulish love as superior to bodily appetite, we cannot completely separate the two. From there, Lewis goes on to make all sorts of interesting illustrations and applications of the point.

His first major application relates to the idea that Christianity uses natural (earthly) images to convey supernatural (heavenly) realities. Why does heaven just look like a fancy version of earth? His answer to that question is this:

If you are to translate from a language which has a large vocabulary into a language that has a small vocabulary, then you must be allowed to use several words in more than one sense (Transposition, from The Weight of Glory (Harper), p. 99).

In other words, if God is to reveal himself to us, and communicate himself to us, in a way that we can understand, then we must allow for some similarities and some difference between the pictures he draws and the reality to which they point.

Which leads to his next illustration of the point: that of drawing (this is the analogy that relates fairly well to The Silver Chair). If a person has only seen sketches of a road on white paper with pencil, he might not be able to differentiate a road from a rectangle. But this is not the reality of what a road is. Lewis says,

Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun (p. 111).

He continues,

If flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom, that is not because they are too solid, too gross, too distinct, too ‘illustrious with being.’ They are too flimsy, too transitory, too phantasmal (p. 111).

That’s the heaven of The Great Divorce in a sentence.

How then does this more glorious, more solid world relate to ours in the present?:

In a word, I think that real landscapes enter into pictures, not that pictures will one day sprout out into real trees and grass (p. 112).

That’s the painting in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The painting didn’t magically become Narnia; an image of Narnia was in the painting all along, only lacking its true solidity and glory. There was a certain glory to the painting itself, it looked quite ‘Narnian,’ but once the lines were taken away a new glory was revealed. This is reminiscent of the words of Hebrews 8:5 concerning Moses’ writings about the construction of the tabernacle:

They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, “See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.”

Now comes the point where Lewis gets really clever. He says that modern man has essentially made himself into an animal by not realizing the reality of Transposition. The materialist (I would say Scientist, but I mean that only in regards to those who hold some form of Scientism) looks at the world and sees only facts – this is the way it is. The result of this is that

He is therefore, as regards the matter at hand, in the position of an animal. You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. his world is all fact and no meaning (p. 114).

As someone who has trained a couple of Labrador Retrievers to follow hand signals, I relate to this one. This then results in things like evolutionary psychology:

A man who has experienced love from within will deliberately go about to inspect it analytically from outside and regard the results of this analysis as truer than his experience (p. 114).

And in the end

The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry (pp. 114-115).

Hence he has progressed from speaking in tongues to the Scientistic (not scientific) deconstruction of all that is true, good, and beautiful. And it all boils down to not being able to make proper application of the signs, the pointers, that we have been given. We’ve looked at the painting and only seen it as chemicals on solidified tree pulp when we should have stood in awe and prayed for the hastening of the day when the frame would be removed and the real color would appear.

More to come.

You will not understand a word
Of all the words, including mine;
Never you trouble; you can see,
And all directness is divine—
Stand up and keep your childishness:
Read all the pedants’ screeds and strictures;
But don’t believe in anything
That can’t be told in coloured pictures.

-G.K. Chesterton

Critiquing from the Inside

Our culture’s most impressive achievements usually have to do with technology: the space shuttle, advances in digital communications, instant availability of information via the internet. Albert Borgmann speculates that one ‘reason for embracing technology might be the understandable desire to embrace what’s distinctive about our culture. It’s difficult to accept the notion that the things that are most characteristic of our lives should not be most central.’ In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novels, such as The First Circle, it is striking how many Soviet citizens were unable to critique the downsides of Stalinism – and not only because of the threat of punishment. Even people imprisoned on false and trumped-up political charges were likely to defend their own country’s political system. When Christian churches dominated medieval culture and their cathedrals commanded city skylines, it was hard to challenge abuses of faith. If technology is at the center of our lives, how frightening it must be to suggest that perhaps there is something wrong at the core of what our civilization regards as most worthwhile.

-Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus, pp. 182-183

Marshall McLuhan, in The Medium is the Massage, wrote,

The poet, the artist, the sleuth – whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely ‘well-adjusted,’ he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ ‘Well-adjusted’ courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The ‘antisocial’ brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor ‘ain’t got nothin’ on.’

Old Testament prophets were Israelites who had been summoned to the courts of Heaven (on earth, as the veil was drawn back before them) before the presence of innumerable angels in festal gathering, before the very presence of God. Isaiah saw the LORD, high and lifted up, with his train filling the heavenly temple. He saw the cherubim. He realized he, and his people, were unclean. He needed an outside-in perspective. He needed to see his own culture through the eyes that were not of his culture.

G.K. Chesterton writes this about prophets:

…If we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.

Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope – the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt…

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself…It is a strange thing that men…have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed (from the Introduction to The Defendant).

If anyone is going to speak with a prophetic voice in our time and place we are going to have to get a perspective on our culture that doesn’t come from our culture. We are going to have to, as insiders, look at ourselves from the outside. How are we going to do this? My own focus is on two things: First, counter-cultural church. If the church tightly resembles our culture, we will never be able to critique it, or ourselves. Second, old books, especially the Scriptures.

In Alister McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis, he writes,

For Lewis, the reading of literature – above all, the reading of older literature – is an important challenge to some premature judgments based on ‘chronological snobbery.’ Owen Barfield had taught Lewis to be suspicious of those who declaimed the inevitable superiority of the present over the past.

…Lewis argues that a familiarity with the literature of the past provides readers with a standpoint which gives them critical distance from their own era. Thus, it allows them to see ‘the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.’ The reading of old books enable us to avoid becoming passive captives of the Spirit of the Age by keeping ‘the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds’ (p. 187).

It’s not secret why Lewis and Chesterton were able to point ‘that longest and strangest telescope’ on the world in which they lived. It was because they very often had their feet in another world altogether. Most of that was due to old books. If the sky isn’t rolled back as a scroll for us, if we do not see the heavenly vision of the prophet in the flesh, the closest we will ever get is in old books. The Bible provides 66 of them. And the church, though imperfect, has provided many, many more.

Cruising Into Oblivion at 70mph

Motorized transportation, he argued, eats up miles and makes surrounding scenery small and insignificant. ‘You’ve seen it all; yet, you’ve seen nothing.’

-Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus, p. 26

We spend so much time in vehicles.

I have had profound experiences while driving: like the first time I realized that as I was driving home from work, I was also driving toward Venus; or when, while driving during sunrise, my then six-year-old daughter explained to me that the only reason we can’t see stars during the day is that the sun outshines them (thus shedding new light on Rev. 21:21: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp”). I told her she should start writing a commentary on Revelation. I ‘read’ G.K. Chesterton for the first time while driving (I actually listened to an audiobook of Orthodoxy). I’ve traveled with Aslan and Mr. Tumnus and Bilbo Baggins and Ratty and Mr. Toad and Napolean the pig and Major the horse. I’ve rolled down the windows to smell the saline-ocean-air during much needed vacations.

Yet, with all those great experiences, I often find myself in a stupor. I read somewhere that we essentially turn on mental autopilot within a couple of minutes of beginning a drive that we are accustomed to. I’ve experienced it.

C.S. Lewis has been described as “a mind awake.” I resonate with that description, because that is one of the things I learned from Lewis: to open my eyes and be awake at all times. I have learned the same lesson from G.K. Chesterton. Don’t be content to see without seeing, or hear without hearing. Give yourself over to quiddity whenever morally possible, even when driving.

A couple of months ago I was coming out of a grocery store, about to head home after a long day of work. I was tired. A few minutes earlier rain had begun to pour down hard. As I crossed the threshold of the door and stood underneath the overhang of the roof, a young man ran by screaming curse words at the rain. In that moment I realized that in my heart I was about to do the same thing. I didn’t want to get soaked before a long drive.

But that young man’s cursing at the rain was a bucket of ice water on my soul. My mind went to Chesterton’s essay about a man running after his hat on a windy day. Chesterton’s words rolled around in my head. I then proceeding to walk, and twirl, through the rain while loudly quoting,

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

I stood outside my car for an extra minute to make sure I had absorbed the full quiddity by getting fully soaked. My drive home turned out to be one of the most enjoyable I had had in a while. And my kids loved hearing the story, and fully wished that they could have been with me. Soak it all in, my friends. Live.

Resurrection More Profound Than Immortality

Lewis believed that ‘any moment may sink an artesian well right down into one’s past self, and old joy, even old power, may come rushing up. That is why I think resurrection is so much profounder an idea than mere immortality.

-Terry Lindvall, Surprised by Laughter, p. 81

What an idea! This is why Revival is so glorious (even personal revival). This quote got me to thinking of the various ways in which resurrection is more glorious than immortality. I’ll share one:

Immortality is like a long day without any sleep. Resurrection is like waking up after a good sleep. It is like waking up after having wonderful dreams all night and then finding that your day is better than your dreams.

“Like a drunk man who knows he has a house but can’t find his way home”

Lewis quoted the same simile in Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale,’ in which the knight addresses the human journey: ‘All men know that the true good is Happiness, and all men seek it, but for the most part by wrong routes – like a drunk man who knows he has a house but can’t find his way home.’

-Terry Lindvall, Surprised by Laughter, p. 59

Rhetorical Guffawing

George Bailey compared the Lewis of the university to a ‘school book description of Friar Tuck,’ with a pronouncedly hearty manner and a booming voice ‘given over to what someone once called “rhetorical guffawing” (“Ho, ho, ho, so you think Milton was an ascetic, do you? ho, ho! You are quite wrong there.”).’

-Terry Lindvall, Surprised by Laughter, p. 44

This really has nothing to do with anything. I just love the phrase ‘rhetorical guffawing’ and find myself wishing I was a rhetorical guffawer…or not. It would probably get obnoxious after a while.