Introduction: Tolstoy laments the censored volume of this same work published in Russia under his name. He requests readers use this version instead.
Chapter I: Tolstoy discusses the way of the arts in Russia. Artists spend their entire lives pursing one skill, and then become “one-sided, self-complacent specialists, dull to all the serious phenomena of life, and skilful only at rapidly twisting their legs, their tongues, or their fingers.”
The poor are taxed to fund art cruelly wrought. The end result is a performance that does not represent reality and that few enjoy. “The man of culture is heartily sick of them, while to a real working-man they are utterly incomprehensible. If any one can be pleased by these things (which is doubtful), it can only be some young footman or depraved artisan, who has contracted the spirit of the upper classes but is not yet satiated with their amusements, and wishes to show his breeding.” (loc 168)
Chapter II: Tolstoy argues that it is important for a society to know if what it claims to be art truly is. Yet he believes it is even more important, “for every conscientious artist to know this, that he may be sure that all he does has a valid meaning; that it is not merely an infatuation of the small circle of people among whom he lives which excites in him the false assurance that he is doing a good work.” (loc 201)
Discussion on the art of the various senses (taste, touch, smell, etc.)
Discussion on “What is beauty?”
In Russian (at the time T was writing), “beauty” meant only what is pleasurable to the sight. There was no association between goodness and beauty. This idea was only beginning to seep in from other languages.
“But beautiful can be used only concerning that which pleases the sight. So that the word and conception ‘good’ includes the conception of ‘beautiful,’ but the reverse is not the case the conception ‘beauty’ does not include the conception ‘good.’ If we say ‘good’ of an article which we value for its appearance, we thereby say that the article is beautiful; but if we say that it is ‘beautiful,’ it does not at all mean that the article is a good one.
German aesthetician Schasler. Three breeds of aesthetics. (1) “elegant phraseology without any substance, characterized in great part by most one-sided superficiality.” (2) “undeniable profundity of investigation and richness of subject-matter, we get a revolting awkwardness of philosophic terminology, infolding (sic) the simplest thoughts in an apparel of abstract science. (3) A style of exposition that falls into none of these three defects but it is truly concrete, and, having important matter, expresses it in clear and popular language...” (loc 316)
**NOTE. Perhaps Schasler’s three types fall into these categories: law, license, grace?
Tolstoy warns against quoting the ancients, for our words misrepresent their cultural context. (loc 327)
Chapter III:
History of Aesthetics
(1) Baumgarten (1714-1762) Founder of the field.
The object of logical knowledge is Truth
The object of aesthetic knowledge is Beauty
Beauty is the Perfect, perceived through the senses
Truth is the Perfect, reached through reason
Goodness is the Perfect, reached by moral will (no.)
“Beauty is defined by Baumgarten as a correspondence, i.e. An order of the parts in their mutual relations to eachother and in their relation to the whole. The aim of beauty is to please and excite a desire,”
Nature is the highest beauty, “therefore the highest ain of art is to copy nature”
(2) followers of Baumgarten (Maier, Eschenburg, Eberhard) - divide the pleasant from the beautiful
(3) Sulzer, Mendelssohn, Moritz
Recognize that the aim of art is not beauty, but goodness
Sultzer says, only something that contains goodness can be considered beautiful. “According to his theory, the aim of the whole life of humanity is welfare in social life. This is attained by the education of the moral feelings, to which end art should be subservient. Beauty is that which evokes and educates this feeling.” (loc 350)
Mendelssohn - “to him, art is the carrying forward of the beautiful, obscurely recognized by feeling, till it becomes the true and good. The aim of art is moral perfection.” (T quoting Schasler). The ideal is a beautiful soul inside of a beautiful body.
Aestheticians of this school negate Baumgarten’s separation of Truth, Goodness, Beauty and consolidate Beauty with Good and True.
(4) Winckelmann (1717-1767)
He removes the aim of art from goodness and makes is beauty alone and separate. He argues for three types of beauty:
1- beauty of form, 2- beauty of idea (expressed in plastic art), 3- beauty of expression (only present when 1&2 are also present)
(Similar views upheld by Herder, Goethe, and most German aestheticians until Kant.)
(5) England.
Shaftesbury (1670-1713) “’That which is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable, what is harmonious ad proportionable is true, and what is at once both beautiful and true is of consequence agreeable and good.”
Hutcheson (1694-1747) believed that beauty doesn’t always correspond with goodness, and sometimes contradicts it.
Home, Lord Karnes (1696-1782) “Beauty is that which is pleasant. Therefore beauty is defined by taste alone.”
Burke (1729-1797) beauty has its origin in self-preservation, benefit the survival of the race.
(6) France.
Andre (1741) – Three kinds of beauty: divine, natural, and artificial
Batteaux (1713-1780) - art is imitating nature, and the goal is enjoyment. (Also Diderot’s view.)
Taste determines beauty, and this is impossible to settle.
(7) Italy
Pagano – art is “uniting the beauties dispersed in nature. The capacity to perceive these beauties is taste, the capacity to bring them into one whole is artistic genius. Beauty comingles with goodness, so that beauty is goodness made visible, and goodness is inner beauty.”
Muratori (1672-1750) - “art amounts to an egotistical sensation” (self-preservation)
(8) Dutch
Hemsterhuis (1720-1790) - (influenced Goethe) - “beauty is that which gives most pleasure, and that gives most pleasure which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time. Enjoyment of the beautiful, because it gives the greatest quantity of perceptions in the shortest time, is the highest notion to which man can attain.”
(9) KANT (1724-1804)
Man understands nature outside him, and himself in nature
In nature, outside himself, he seeks truth – affair of pure reason
Inside himself, he seeks goodness – affair of practical reason (free will)
Yet there is also judging capacity (Urteilskraft), forms judgments without reasonings and pleasure without desire. This capacity is the basis of aesthetic feeling.
“Beauty, according to Kant, in its subjective meaning is that which, in general and necessarily, without reasonings and without practical advantage, pleases. In its objective meaning it is the form of a suitable object, in so far as that object is perceived without any conception of its utility.”
(10) Schiller (follower of Kant) (1759-1805) - the source of beauty is pleasure without practical advantage. “So that art may be called a game, not in the sense of an unimprtant occupation, but in the sense of a manifestation of the beauties of life itself without other aim than that of beauty.”
(Stopped at Loc 420. To be continued)
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
The Three Enemies (C.S. Lewis)
According to C.S. Lewis, a scholar faces three enemies during a time of war. As I was reading through those tonight, I realized they are also the three enemies most of us face in the "war" of our day-to-day lives. I've selected a few quotes for your perusal. If you want to read the rest, check out his essay "Learning in War-Time" collected in _The Weight of Glory._
"The first enemy is excitement -- the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work. The best defence is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come."
...
"The second enemy is frustration -- the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of leaning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in the middle of life, we have to say 'No time for that,' 'Too late now,' and 'Not for me.' But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God's hands."
...
"The third enemy is fear. War threatens us with death and pain. No man-- and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane -- need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that -- of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war to do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased."
"The first enemy is excitement -- the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work. The best defence is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come."
...
"The second enemy is frustration -- the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of leaning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in the middle of life, we have to say 'No time for that,' 'Too late now,' and 'Not for me.' But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God's hands."
...
"The third enemy is fear. War threatens us with death and pain. No man-- and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane -- need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that -- of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war to do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased."
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Notes on C.S. Lewis's "Transposition" from _Weight of Glory_
I. The chapter begins with a discussion of “glossolalia” - the speaking with tongues that descended upon the early Christians at Pentecost.
A. Lewis admits he has much to learn here.
B. He mentions the embarrassing nature of this occurrence -- to himself, and even possibly to St. Paul.
C. Lewis says speaking in tongues often seems (nowadays) to emerge from human excitement instead of an authentic manifestation of the Spirit.
D. Yet, what happened in the NT was authentic. For the men did not speak gibberish, but languages not known to themselves but to others present.
E. Also, this speaking of tongues is interwoven into the “birth story of the church”
F. So, this phenomenon which (at least sometimes) seems to be of earthy origin has at least once been of supernatual origin.
G. A critic might say that if the event is usually rooted in hysteria, then it has always been rooted in hysteria. (Cites the logical premise of Occam’s razor.)
II. Lewis seeks to ease the tension of this quandry by citing the erotic imagery and language of the mystics; for in these writings, there are emotions and images with which we are far more familiar in natural settings. The mystics, however, claim there are spiritual implications of these images that transcend our terrestrial vision.
III. Here then is the core problem: CONTINUITY. Why have we no singular language to describe the mystical? Why must we borrow terms from the mundane? “Put in its most general terms, our problem is that of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which, it is claimed, are spiritual...” ... “If we have really been visited by a revelation from beyond Nature, is it not very strange that an Apocalypse can furnish heaven with nothing more than selections from terrestrial experience...” “... That devotion can find no language but that of human lovers, and that the rite whereby Christians enact a mystical union should turn out to be only the old, familiar act of eating and drinking.”(Loc 887-894)
IV. BTW: The same problem arises when debating the differences between love and lust. The same physical act (sex) ends both. Are they not, then, essentially the same drive? And what of the difference between justice and revenge, when both may end in the same penalty? And from one perspective, the critics make a good case. The end of all these pursuits is the same. And so the critic might say it is likely that religious emotion “contains nothing that has not been borrowed from Nature.” (Loc 900)
V. Lewis cites Pepys’s Diary. Pepys describe the deep pleasure of attending The Virgin Martyr. The music was so sweet, he felt simultaneously sick and in enraptured; and he desired the repetition of the feeling. There is an obvious searching for terms here, a yearning to express what feeling has just occurred, but only insufficient metaphors can be found.
VI. Lewis says he cannot distinguish between the physiological “kick or flutter in the diaphragm” that accompanies anguish and that which accompanies pleasure. Therefore he writes, “If I were to judge simply by sensations, I should come to the absurd conclusion that joy and anguish are the same thing, that what I most dread is the same with what I most desire.” Therefore, he claims that the value of introspection, in such cases, is limited. (Loc 921ish)
VII. We like this flutter when the situation is joyful, and we hate it the situation is sorrowful. So, “It is not a mere sign of joy and anguish; it becomes what it signifies. When the joy thus flows over into the nerves, that overflow is its consummation; when the anguish thus flows over, that physical symptom is the crowning horror.”
VIII. Therefore Lewis concludes that our emotional life is “’higher’ than the life of our sensations — not, of course, morally higher, but richer, more varied, more subtle.” He proves this by saying that, if we will pay attention, the scope of our emotions is wider than the scope of our sensations. This is why our bodies sometimes use the same sensations (like the same diaphragm flutter) to respond to opposing emotions.
IX. He then explains why this is often confusing, because we expect a one-to-one correlation between realms. Yet, this is impossible when one realm is more complex than another. For example, if you are translating a book from a language with 40,000 words into a language that has only 2,000 words, some words from the 2,000-word language must be used repeatedly to absorb multiple words from the other language. Or, “If you are making a piano version of a piece originally scored for an orchestra, then the same piano notes which represent flutes in one passage must also represent violins in another.” So, when transferring the emotional to the sensational, it will sometimes be that one sensation (the narrower realm) will have to compensate for multiple emotions (the wider realm). (Loc 948ish)
** Note to self: Make comparison here to Sayers’s thought in Mind of the Maker about the limitations of language.
X. Understanding this acknowledges a certain degree of comprehension of a higher medium. It is profoundly difficult to visualize a dimension we have never experienced. We understand drawings of landscape only because we have experienced landscape. If a creature existed in a 2D world, who (by some odd manner) was able to draw a road on paper that seemed coherent with our understanding of 3D perspective, we might attempt to explain to him that he had drawn a road, and what it was. Yet, he would see only the 2D he has always known. And it would baffle him that any language we could use to connect with him would resemble the world he already knows. It would perhaps, even, seem to confirm the singularity of a 2D world that we kept using words like “triangle” or “line.” He would be suspicious that all our promises of a third dimension borrowed terms from his two. (Loc 962ish)
** Note. This is a common argument among atheists. “You have only expanded your earthly desires, projecting them to dreams of eternity.”
XI. Lewis says “symbolism” is not adequate term here. Makes a comparison to the illusion of light in a painting and the real sunlight that allows us to see it. “It is a sign, but also something more than a sign, and only a sign because it is also more than a sign, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental.”... “For there, as we have seen, the very same sensation does not merely accompany, nor merely signify, diverse and opposite emotions, but becomes part of them. The emotion descends bodily, as it were, into the sensation and digests, transforms, transubstantiates it, so that the same thrill along the nerves IS delight or IS agony.” (Loc 969 ish)
XII. Lewis transfers the idea of “transposition” to the connect of mind and body. (Loc 983)
XIII. Lewis then cycles back to the critic’s stance, that the theory of the spiritual is truly derived from the natural... a “projection or imaginary extension of the natural.” Yet, “this is the mistake that an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in every case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander can never find anything but flat shapes in a picture...” We are limited by our experience. “It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him, his conclusion is the only one possible.” (Loc 990ish) This is why only the spiritual man can discern certain things, for he has experienced them from above instead of below.
XIV. “Perhaps we have never really attained at all to what St. Paul would describe as spiritual life. But at the very least we know, in some dim and confused way, that we were trying to use natural acts and images and language with a new value, have at least desired a repentance which was not merely prudential and a love which was not self-centered. At the worst, we know enough of the spiritual to know that we have fallen short of it, as if the picture knew enough of the three-dimensional world to be aware that it was flat.” (1002)
XV. Lewis posits that it is impossible to use introspective analysis to determine our spiritual condition because we are actually only seeing “not God’s spirit and ours, but their transpositions in intellect, emotion, and imagination,” and that this will either lead to error or despair. (Loc 1009)
XVI. Lewis offers that Transposition is deeply connected to Hope because, “We can hope only what we desire.” And many theories of heaven are based on the removal of comforts that we know and love. Children and savages easily believe that heaven is full of gold, harps, and such — while the adult knows to expect something more spiritual. Yet, the child is expecting abundance, and there is something true in that: “it apprehends Heaven as joy and plentitude and love.” (Loc 1016ish)
Most adults think of heaven in terms of negatives, “no food, no drink, no sex, no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art” and we try to build up our excitement about it saying that we will have instead the sight and pleasure of God. However, “can our present notion of it outweigh our present notion of them? That is quite a different question. And for most of us at most times the answer is no.” We try to piece together understandings of the glorious unseen and comfort ourselves with those, yet the losses we are anticipating are felt deeply because they are known well.
In all of this, we expect too little. “We must believe — and therefore in some degree imagine — that every negation will be only the reverse side of a fulfilling. And we must mean by that the fulfilling, precisely, of our humanity, not our transformation into angels nor our absorption into Deity.” ... “How far the life of the risen man will be sensory, we do not know. But I surmise that it will differ from the sensory life we know here, not as emptiness differs from water or water from wine but as a flower differs from a bulb or a cathedral from an architect’s drawing. “ (Loc 1030ish)
XVII. Lewis offers an analogy of a woman who raises an infant son in a dungeon. She uses paper and pencil to sketch the outside world and cast a vision of it for him. Yet he thinks the pencil marks are in the true landscape. When the mother says, no, there are no pencil marks in the real world, “Instantly, his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied it.”
XVIII. Lewis transfers this analogy to our humanity. He says, “So with us. ‘We know not what we shall be’; but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled 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.”
And then again: “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 phanstasmal.” (Loc 1057ish)
XIX. Lewis makes four ending notes.
A.) Distinguishes Transposition from the ideas of the Developmentalist
B.) Connects Transposition to the Incarnation. “Transposition is not always symbolism. In varying degrees the lower reality can actually be drawn into the higher and becomes part of it.” (Loc 1064)
C.) The perpetual limitations of determining to see from below.
D.) Connects Transposition to the resurrection of the body, and the flooding of the senses with meaning.
A. Lewis admits he has much to learn here.
B. He mentions the embarrassing nature of this occurrence -- to himself, and even possibly to St. Paul.
C. Lewis says speaking in tongues often seems (nowadays) to emerge from human excitement instead of an authentic manifestation of the Spirit.
D. Yet, what happened in the NT was authentic. For the men did not speak gibberish, but languages not known to themselves but to others present.
E. Also, this speaking of tongues is interwoven into the “birth story of the church”
F. So, this phenomenon which (at least sometimes) seems to be of earthy origin has at least once been of supernatual origin.
G. A critic might say that if the event is usually rooted in hysteria, then it has always been rooted in hysteria. (Cites the logical premise of Occam’s razor.)
II. Lewis seeks to ease the tension of this quandry by citing the erotic imagery and language of the mystics; for in these writings, there are emotions and images with which we are far more familiar in natural settings. The mystics, however, claim there are spiritual implications of these images that transcend our terrestrial vision.
III. Here then is the core problem: CONTINUITY. Why have we no singular language to describe the mystical? Why must we borrow terms from the mundane? “Put in its most general terms, our problem is that of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which, it is claimed, are spiritual...” ... “If we have really been visited by a revelation from beyond Nature, is it not very strange that an Apocalypse can furnish heaven with nothing more than selections from terrestrial experience...” “... That devotion can find no language but that of human lovers, and that the rite whereby Christians enact a mystical union should turn out to be only the old, familiar act of eating and drinking.”(Loc 887-894)
IV. BTW: The same problem arises when debating the differences between love and lust. The same physical act (sex) ends both. Are they not, then, essentially the same drive? And what of the difference between justice and revenge, when both may end in the same penalty? And from one perspective, the critics make a good case. The end of all these pursuits is the same. And so the critic might say it is likely that religious emotion “contains nothing that has not been borrowed from Nature.” (Loc 900)
V. Lewis cites Pepys’s Diary. Pepys describe the deep pleasure of attending The Virgin Martyr. The music was so sweet, he felt simultaneously sick and in enraptured; and he desired the repetition of the feeling. There is an obvious searching for terms here, a yearning to express what feeling has just occurred, but only insufficient metaphors can be found.
VI. Lewis says he cannot distinguish between the physiological “kick or flutter in the diaphragm” that accompanies anguish and that which accompanies pleasure. Therefore he writes, “If I were to judge simply by sensations, I should come to the absurd conclusion that joy and anguish are the same thing, that what I most dread is the same with what I most desire.” Therefore, he claims that the value of introspection, in such cases, is limited. (Loc 921ish)
VII. We like this flutter when the situation is joyful, and we hate it the situation is sorrowful. So, “It is not a mere sign of joy and anguish; it becomes what it signifies. When the joy thus flows over into the nerves, that overflow is its consummation; when the anguish thus flows over, that physical symptom is the crowning horror.”
VIII. Therefore Lewis concludes that our emotional life is “’higher’ than the life of our sensations — not, of course, morally higher, but richer, more varied, more subtle.” He proves this by saying that, if we will pay attention, the scope of our emotions is wider than the scope of our sensations. This is why our bodies sometimes use the same sensations (like the same diaphragm flutter) to respond to opposing emotions.
IX. He then explains why this is often confusing, because we expect a one-to-one correlation between realms. Yet, this is impossible when one realm is more complex than another. For example, if you are translating a book from a language with 40,000 words into a language that has only 2,000 words, some words from the 2,000-word language must be used repeatedly to absorb multiple words from the other language. Or, “If you are making a piano version of a piece originally scored for an orchestra, then the same piano notes which represent flutes in one passage must also represent violins in another.” So, when transferring the emotional to the sensational, it will sometimes be that one sensation (the narrower realm) will have to compensate for multiple emotions (the wider realm). (Loc 948ish)
** Note to self: Make comparison here to Sayers’s thought in Mind of the Maker about the limitations of language.
X. Understanding this acknowledges a certain degree of comprehension of a higher medium. It is profoundly difficult to visualize a dimension we have never experienced. We understand drawings of landscape only because we have experienced landscape. If a creature existed in a 2D world, who (by some odd manner) was able to draw a road on paper that seemed coherent with our understanding of 3D perspective, we might attempt to explain to him that he had drawn a road, and what it was. Yet, he would see only the 2D he has always known. And it would baffle him that any language we could use to connect with him would resemble the world he already knows. It would perhaps, even, seem to confirm the singularity of a 2D world that we kept using words like “triangle” or “line.” He would be suspicious that all our promises of a third dimension borrowed terms from his two. (Loc 962ish)
** Note. This is a common argument among atheists. “You have only expanded your earthly desires, projecting them to dreams of eternity.”
XI. Lewis says “symbolism” is not adequate term here. Makes a comparison to the illusion of light in a painting and the real sunlight that allows us to see it. “It is a sign, but also something more than a sign, and only a sign because it is also more than a sign, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental.”... “For there, as we have seen, the very same sensation does not merely accompany, nor merely signify, diverse and opposite emotions, but becomes part of them. The emotion descends bodily, as it were, into the sensation and digests, transforms, transubstantiates it, so that the same thrill along the nerves IS delight or IS agony.” (Loc 969 ish)
XII. Lewis transfers the idea of “transposition” to the connect of mind and body. (Loc 983)
XIII. Lewis then cycles back to the critic’s stance, that the theory of the spiritual is truly derived from the natural... a “projection or imaginary extension of the natural.” Yet, “this is the mistake that an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in every case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander can never find anything but flat shapes in a picture...” We are limited by our experience. “It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him, his conclusion is the only one possible.” (Loc 990ish) This is why only the spiritual man can discern certain things, for he has experienced them from above instead of below.
XIV. “Perhaps we have never really attained at all to what St. Paul would describe as spiritual life. But at the very least we know, in some dim and confused way, that we were trying to use natural acts and images and language with a new value, have at least desired a repentance which was not merely prudential and a love which was not self-centered. At the worst, we know enough of the spiritual to know that we have fallen short of it, as if the picture knew enough of the three-dimensional world to be aware that it was flat.” (1002)
XV. Lewis posits that it is impossible to use introspective analysis to determine our spiritual condition because we are actually only seeing “not God’s spirit and ours, but their transpositions in intellect, emotion, and imagination,” and that this will either lead to error or despair. (Loc 1009)
XVI. Lewis offers that Transposition is deeply connected to Hope because, “We can hope only what we desire.” And many theories of heaven are based on the removal of comforts that we know and love. Children and savages easily believe that heaven is full of gold, harps, and such — while the adult knows to expect something more spiritual. Yet, the child is expecting abundance, and there is something true in that: “it apprehends Heaven as joy and plentitude and love.” (Loc 1016ish)
Most adults think of heaven in terms of negatives, “no food, no drink, no sex, no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art” and we try to build up our excitement about it saying that we will have instead the sight and pleasure of God. However, “can our present notion of it outweigh our present notion of them? That is quite a different question. And for most of us at most times the answer is no.” We try to piece together understandings of the glorious unseen and comfort ourselves with those, yet the losses we are anticipating are felt deeply because they are known well.
In all of this, we expect too little. “We must believe — and therefore in some degree imagine — that every negation will be only the reverse side of a fulfilling. And we must mean by that the fulfilling, precisely, of our humanity, not our transformation into angels nor our absorption into Deity.” ... “How far the life of the risen man will be sensory, we do not know. But I surmise that it will differ from the sensory life we know here, not as emptiness differs from water or water from wine but as a flower differs from a bulb or a cathedral from an architect’s drawing. “ (Loc 1030ish)
XVII. Lewis offers an analogy of a woman who raises an infant son in a dungeon. She uses paper and pencil to sketch the outside world and cast a vision of it for him. Yet he thinks the pencil marks are in the true landscape. When the mother says, no, there are no pencil marks in the real world, “Instantly, his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied it.”
XVIII. Lewis transfers this analogy to our humanity. He says, “So with us. ‘We know not what we shall be’; but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled 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.”
And then again: “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 phanstasmal.” (Loc 1057ish)
XIX. Lewis makes four ending notes.
A.) Distinguishes Transposition from the ideas of the Developmentalist
B.) Connects Transposition to the Incarnation. “Transposition is not always symbolism. In varying degrees the lower reality can actually be drawn into the higher and becomes part of it.” (Loc 1064)
C.) The perpetual limitations of determining to see from below.
D.) Connects Transposition to the resurrection of the body, and the flooding of the senses with meaning.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
A Story for Mosie
Dear Mosie,
If I could write out your story using any words I wanted, it wouldn’t start like this. That is because mothers never want their little boys to go on grand adventures without them.
Mothers want close things. They want to bake chocolate cookies for their little boys and stir up steaming mugs full of sweet things to drink. They want to put warm grey socks on their feet and soak them in lavender bubble baths until they smell sleepy and clean. Mothers want to dress their little boys in red, fuzzy footie pajamas and read them stories while they cuddle in the big chair. They want to take them outside to lie on a blanket and search for dinosaurs in the clouds.
Mothers want to call out, “Where are you?” And they want to hear their little boys answer, “I’m right here, Momma!” Because there is no sound in the wide, blue world that is sweeter to a Mother than the sound of her children safe and near. This how Mothers are made in their deepest, downest places.
So, if I could make this story go however I wanted, on the very first day you were born, I would have held you closer than Eskimo kisses. I would have tickled your toes. I would have watched you make two little fists and stretch one to the moon, and one to the stars in the biggest, hugest yawn a baby ever made.
I would have snuggled you and let you drink warm milk. When your pretty eyes fluttered and flitted from baby dreams, I would have sung sleepy songs about frogs, and fishes, and a funny old man who lives alone on the silver moon.
But this is not the story that we were given. Instead, you began your life on a grand adventure.
Most of the good books start with a grand adventure; and most heroes begin out of luck, caught in some impossible situation. So, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that the story of your life starts this way, too, because you are a hero. I can tell.
There is a lot I don’t know, but I will tell you what I do.
You were little and alone. Yet, you weren’t so very little, because you have an imagination as wide as the universe, and a laugh as big as the sea. You have courage as strong as a mountain, and love as full and warm as a belly full of soup on a snowy day.
And you weren’t so very alone, because hovering all over and around you was the One who put breath in your lungs. He made your fingers wiggle, and He knit together your little baby tummy, and your little baby nose, and He heard the first wail you made into a dark summer night. He looked down at the little perfect bundle of you, and He whispered your name, and He adored you. For yours was the voice of His son, and there is nothing sweeter to a Father than the voice of his children close. This is how Fathers are made in their deepest, downest places. He loved you so much, He watched every, single breath you took.
So you were little, but not so little. And you were alone, but not so alone. And somehow the sound of you traveled halfway around the world, past the cold black ocean, and it landed inside me, and it tugged on me. I asked, “Are you OK?” and I heard you say, “I’m right here, Momma.” But you sounded so far away, I was frightened.
Oh, I would have fought wild tigers to get you! I would have stuck swords in dragons, and I would have walked through fire, and I would have wrestled a crocodile. But instead of wild beasts, there were mountains -- mountains and mountains of paperwork to climb. So I sharpened my best pencil, and I put on my most serious reading glasses, and I climbed paperwork instead.
The farther I climbed to reach you, the stronger your little feet were kicking inside my heart. Your little hands were pressing out the sides of it. You were turning flips, and growing, and your dad and I would put our hands on the shape of all our love for you, and we would smile at each other and say, “That’s our boy!”
Your Daddy would say, “He’s just like his Daddy!” And I would say, “He’s just like his Momma!” We finally agreed that both were true.
Finally, after many, many months, something wonderful happened. I called out, “Mosie, are you OK?” and there you were. Right there close!
Daddy lifted you into his arms, and I held Daddy holding you. The top of your head smelled like sunshine, and your arms smelled like honey. When I felt the weight of you, it was a perfect fit, like you had been right up close to me every day of your life. Because in some mysterious way, you had.
I held you closer than Eskimo kisses. I tickled your toes. I watched you make two little fists and stretch one to the moon, and one to the stars in the biggest, hugest yawn a little boy ever made.
I snuggled you in a soft chair and let you drink you warm milk. When your pretty eyes fluttered and flitted from little boy dreams, I sang sleepy songs about frogs, and fishes, and a funny old man who lives alone on the silver moon.
As you slept, I held my face next to yours and watched the breath move in and out of your nose, and I whispered, “You are my little hero, and this your grand adventure.” For already, yours is a strong, brave story, fit for a strong, brave boy. I can’t wait to see how the rest of it goes.
If I could write out your story using any words I wanted, it wouldn’t start like this. That is because mothers never want their little boys to go on grand adventures without them.
Mothers want close things. They want to bake chocolate cookies for their little boys and stir up steaming mugs full of sweet things to drink. They want to put warm grey socks on their feet and soak them in lavender bubble baths until they smell sleepy and clean. Mothers want to dress their little boys in red, fuzzy footie pajamas and read them stories while they cuddle in the big chair. They want to take them outside to lie on a blanket and search for dinosaurs in the clouds.
Mothers want to call out, “Where are you?” And they want to hear their little boys answer, “I’m right here, Momma!” Because there is no sound in the wide, blue world that is sweeter to a Mother than the sound of her children safe and near. This how Mothers are made in their deepest, downest places.
So, if I could make this story go however I wanted, on the very first day you were born, I would have held you closer than Eskimo kisses. I would have tickled your toes. I would have watched you make two little fists and stretch one to the moon, and one to the stars in the biggest, hugest yawn a baby ever made.
I would have snuggled you and let you drink warm milk. When your pretty eyes fluttered and flitted from baby dreams, I would have sung sleepy songs about frogs, and fishes, and a funny old man who lives alone on the silver moon.
But this is not the story that we were given. Instead, you began your life on a grand adventure.
Most of the good books start with a grand adventure; and most heroes begin out of luck, caught in some impossible situation. So, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that the story of your life starts this way, too, because you are a hero. I can tell.
There is a lot I don’t know, but I will tell you what I do.
You were little and alone. Yet, you weren’t so very little, because you have an imagination as wide as the universe, and a laugh as big as the sea. You have courage as strong as a mountain, and love as full and warm as a belly full of soup on a snowy day.
And you weren’t so very alone, because hovering all over and around you was the One who put breath in your lungs. He made your fingers wiggle, and He knit together your little baby tummy, and your little baby nose, and He heard the first wail you made into a dark summer night. He looked down at the little perfect bundle of you, and He whispered your name, and He adored you. For yours was the voice of His son, and there is nothing sweeter to a Father than the voice of his children close. This is how Fathers are made in their deepest, downest places. He loved you so much, He watched every, single breath you took.
So you were little, but not so little. And you were alone, but not so alone. And somehow the sound of you traveled halfway around the world, past the cold black ocean, and it landed inside me, and it tugged on me. I asked, “Are you OK?” and I heard you say, “I’m right here, Momma.” But you sounded so far away, I was frightened.
Oh, I would have fought wild tigers to get you! I would have stuck swords in dragons, and I would have walked through fire, and I would have wrestled a crocodile. But instead of wild beasts, there were mountains -- mountains and mountains of paperwork to climb. So I sharpened my best pencil, and I put on my most serious reading glasses, and I climbed paperwork instead.
The farther I climbed to reach you, the stronger your little feet were kicking inside my heart. Your little hands were pressing out the sides of it. You were turning flips, and growing, and your dad and I would put our hands on the shape of all our love for you, and we would smile at each other and say, “That’s our boy!”
Your Daddy would say, “He’s just like his Daddy!” And I would say, “He’s just like his Momma!” We finally agreed that both were true.
Finally, after many, many months, something wonderful happened. I called out, “Mosie, are you OK?” and there you were. Right there close!
Daddy lifted you into his arms, and I held Daddy holding you. The top of your head smelled like sunshine, and your arms smelled like honey. When I felt the weight of you, it was a perfect fit, like you had been right up close to me every day of your life. Because in some mysterious way, you had.
I held you closer than Eskimo kisses. I tickled your toes. I watched you make two little fists and stretch one to the moon, and one to the stars in the biggest, hugest yawn a little boy ever made.
I snuggled you in a soft chair and let you drink you warm milk. When your pretty eyes fluttered and flitted from little boy dreams, I sang sleepy songs about frogs, and fishes, and a funny old man who lives alone on the silver moon.
As you slept, I held my face next to yours and watched the breath move in and out of your nose, and I whispered, “You are my little hero, and this your grand adventure.” For already, yours is a strong, brave story, fit for a strong, brave boy. I can’t wait to see how the rest of it goes.
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