“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” – Marcus Aurelius
While Marcus Aurelius is probably best known as the kindly old emperor offed by Commodus in Gladiator, the real man behind the fictional character was the last of Rome’s “Five Good Emperors” and was also an insightful philosopher.
I came across this quote of his the other day, and I was struck by the note of truth it sounded. It reminded me of a passage from one of my favorite books, Mere Christianity.
“Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And, taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature — either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.” – C.S. Lewis
How true – and what a potent reminder that every day we are presented with choices, and the choices we make shape who we are in eternity.
To steal from Gladiator, since I mentioned it: “What we do in life… echoes in eternity.”
On the drive to Cincinnati yesterday, I listened to a radio dramatization of “The Screwtape Letters,” C.S. Lewis’ famous look into the mentoring relationship between two devils – a junior tempter (Wormwood), and his uncle, a senior tempter (Screwtape). In the story, Wormwood is tempting his first human, and his uncle gives him tips and hints about how to adequately keep humans away from the “great enemy:” God.
I made it through about half of the set yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the dramatization. I was totally engrossed. The voice acting helped, too – Andy Serkis (Gollum) was fantastic as Screwtape, and the other actors, though lesser known, performed their parts equally well.
I was struck yesterday by the dramatization of the eighth letter from Screwtape to Wormwood, dealing with the “law of undulation.” I’d quote the whole chapter if I could, but that wouldn’t be exactly legal – so, just a snippet. (Someone has posted the whole chapter, and most of the book, here).
Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.
To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily good; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth.
Lewis goes on to discuss the role of free will in the “war” for human souls, but that’s a slightly different topic (and, of course, a very debatable one). The “Law of Undulation” is, in itself, a broad topic that we can apply to our lives and walks of faith in a variety of different ways. With this blog post, I mostly just wanted to point out how much I believe in the point that Lewis is making – that our lives naturally have highs and lows, because of the way we have been created and because of the sinful and broken nature of our world. Often, when we’re in a valley, we look only for the path that will take us to the next peak – but we should recognize that God is in the valleys as much as or more than he is in the peaks. When we find ourselves in a downward trough of undulation, we should ask ourselves what God wants to make of it.
This pattern of undulation won’t end until we’re at home in heaven. There’s a verse in Isaiah that speaks to this:
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”- Isaiah 40:4-5
I’m continuing my Lord of the Rings reread, and I have to say that this time through (this is probably the sixth or seventh time I’ve read them) I’m focusing on taking deeper lessons from the story instead of just reading for entertainment. Of course, participating in a LOTR book club on Monday nights with some brilliant friends only helps the cause.
One of the themes we’ve talked about a bit at the book club is nature. Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis use nature as a thematic element in their fantasy stories, and both seem to have similar methods of introducing and using it.
And as it so happens, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of nature in my life lately. I just returned from a wonderful vacation where I got to see both the piney splendor of the Pacific Northwest and the rocky lakeshores of the Catskill Mountains. While traveling, I began to read C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, which includes a great section about nature. So, let me start this off with a section of The Fellowship of the Ring. The Fellowship has just emerged from the Mines of Moria and, under the leadership of Aragorn, decides to seek refuge in Lothlórien. Boromir shows some reluctance to enter the forest.
He stepped forward; but Boromir stood irresolute and did not follow. ‘Is there no other way?’ he said.
‘What other fairer way would you desire?’ said Aragorn.
‘A plain road, though it led through a hedge of swords,’ said Boromir. ‘By strange paths has this company been led, and so far to evil fortune. Against my will we passed under the shades of Moria, to our loss. And now we must enter the Golden Wood, you say. But of that perilous land we have heard in Gondor, and it is said that few come out who once go in; and of that few none have escaped unscathed.’
‘Say not unscathed, but if you say unchanged, then maybe you will speak the truth,’ said Aragorn. ‘But lore wanes in Gondor, Boromir, if in the city of those who once were wise they now speak evil of Lothlórien. Believe what you will, there is no other way for us – unless you would go back to Moria-gate, or scale the pathless mountains, or swim the Great River all alone.’
‘Then lead on!’ said Boromir. ‘But it is perilous.’
‘Perilous indeed,’ said Aragorn, ‘fair and perilous; but only evil need fear it, or those who bring some evil with them. Follow me!’
Boromir isn’t afraid to speak his mind, and speak it plainly – even if he is wrong (one of the reasons I like him, but that’s another story). Boromir, subject to what must have been the Gondorian equivalent of an urban legend, believes the woods to be wicked and evil. Aragorn corrects him, noting that the woods is dangerous, but that the real danger lies within one’s own heart (think Star Wars: Luke’s strange cave training with Yoda).
C.S. Lewis echoes this sentiment in The Four Loves.
“If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn; this is only another way of saying that nature does not teach.”
Lewis suggests that Nature is a myriad of different things all at once: it’s life and death. It’s beautiful and terrible. It’s forgiving and unforgiving. As Lewis puts it, it at once includes, “overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur and sombre desolation.”
But Lewis certainly doesn’t suggest that Nature is without its merits. He continues:
“Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.”
For Lewis, the lesson that Nature taught was one of God’s glory. Lewis believes he never would have fully understood God’s glory – or learned to fear God – without “certain ominous ravines” and “unapproachable crags.” But to others, Nature appeals to the “dark gods in the blood.” Though Nature can suggest glory, it presents other things, too – sex, hunger and power operate in Nature without shame.
We can certainly see this idea of nature as a “mirror” in Tolkien’s Lothlórien, among other places. Boromir is right to fear the woods, because the woods will expose the fears that he carries in his heart. Tolkien’s Nature, in and of itself, is not good or evil. It may reflect the good or evil present in it (as I’ll note presently) or, in its natural course cause actions that seem to be good or evil, though they are neither (the foiling of the Fellowship on Caradhras).
We can see the effect of good or evil in nature if we read on to the end of the Lothlórien chapter. The Fellowship has reached Cerin Amroth, a hill with a vantage point of the surrounding lands. Frodo pauses to look out over the golden wood:
Frodo looked and saw, still at some distance, a hill of many mighty trees, or a city of green towers: which it was he could not tell. Out of it, it seemed to him that the power and light came that held all the land in sway. He longed suddenly to fly like a bird to rest in the green city. Then he looked eastward and saw all the land of Lorien running down to the pale gleam of Anduin, the Great River. He lifted his eyes across the river and all the light went out, and he was back again in the world he knew. Beyond the river the land appeared flat and empty, formless and vague, until far away it rose again like a wall, dark and drear. The sun that lay on Lothlorien had no power to enlighten the shadow of that distant height.
‘There lies the fastness of Southern Mirkwood,’ said Haldir. ‘It is clad in a forest of dark fir, where the trees strive one against another and their branches rot and wither. In the midst upon a stony height stands Dol Guldur, where long the hidden Enemy had his dewlling. We fear now that it is inhabited again, and with power sevenfold. A black cloud lies often over it of late. In this high place you ay see the two powers that are opposed to one another; and ever they strive now in thought, but whereas the light perceives the very heart of the darkness, its own secret has not been discovered. Not yet’ He turned and climbed swiftly down, and they followed him.
Nature can appear to be good or evil depending on both what is inhabiting it, and, again, depending on the perspective of the beholder. As Lewis would say, it teaches us no lessons than those we already wish to learn.
Instead, Lewis suggests we should “learn our theology and philosophy elsewhere.” That we must “leave the hills and woods and go back to our studies, to church, to our Bibles, to our knees.” And, in a specific note to nature lovers, Lewis continues, “Otherwise the love of nature is beginning to turn into nature religion. And then, even if it does not lead us to the Dark Gods, it will lead us to a great deal of nonsense.”
I don’t know about you, but to me this all makes perfect sense. I believe wholeheartedly – especially since I tend to be a “nature lover” – that the love of nature must be anchored in truth. Additionally, Tolkien’s storytelling seems to back up the theological stylings of his good friend Lewis. Lothlórien is just one example.
As a parting thought: At book club on Monday we discussed Radagast, Gandalf’s wizarding peer with a deep affection for nature (and possible St. Francis parallel). If Lewis suggests that a pure love of nature will, at best, lead to a “great deal of nonsense,” then perhaps that’s one reason why Radagast is considered a simpleton and a fool in the books.
In thinking about and discussing Easter lately with some friends, I was reminded of a C.S. Lewis quote that I’d seen once before but had never considered deeply.
“There is a stage in a child’s life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas or Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began ‘Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen.’ This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer seem sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They will have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life.”
Ah, more wisdom from Clive. The type of sentimentality and expectancy Lewis describes is probably more often associated with Christmas in this modern day and age, though the lesson is just as potent for Easter.
Children don’t think in abstract terms, so to the boy, the thing (chocolate) and the sign (Easter) appear to be one and the same. But the thing is ephemeral, and is consumed – while the sign survives the thing in which it was once incarnate. The boy, then, remembers Easter even when the egg is gone, and is thus faced with the choice that Lewis presents.
How then, does the boy “get back” to the time when the chocolate was both delicious and significant? Does he focus on eating more chocolate, in the hopes that the feeling will somehow return? Or does he look elsewhere for the spiritual nature that made the egg significant in the first place?
What we often mistake as a desire to “consume more eggs” is really a desire to find the divine that makes the eggs significant in the first place. One commentary on this passage uses Communion – eating the bread and drinking the wine – as a metaphor.
“If [a] person puts the spiritual first and desires to have the benefits of the death of Christ sealed to his life, he can still use the sacrament to experience this. If [he] puts the sacrament, the physical ritual of eating and drinking, first in his life, he may become a very religious person, but he will have missed the higher reality to which the sacrament is pointing.” - Will Vaus, Mere Theology
I’m fully aware that this post is a bit “out there” and highly theoretical – but the main point is that we seek an understanding of the spiritual that makes our rituals significant, as opposed to engaging in rituals because we recognize that they once held some sacred meaning. Chasing the “thing,” as Lewis describes, will make the eggs no longer feel sacramental.
So this Easter, I hope you have many chocolate eggs to enjoy – and I hope that they are full of the meaning and significance of Christ’s death and resurrection.
