Charles Williams Quote

Sunday I will be driving back home, and next week I plan to write one or two new posts and to continue some old conversations. To keep things moving here, I decided to give a rather interesting quote from Charles Williams:

There is, in especial, one law of literary criticism which is of use -- the law of emptying the words. Everyone who has studied great verse knows how necessary is the effort to clear the mind of our own second-hand attribution of meanings to words in order that the poet may fill them with his meanings. No less care is needed in reading the Bible. Some form of course, each word must retain, some shape and general direction. But its general colour is, naturally, only learnt from its use throughout. This has to be discovered. As a fact words such as 'faith', 'pardon', or 'glory' are taken with meanings borrowed from the common-place of everyday; comparatively few readers set to work to find out what the Bible means by them. The word 'love' has suffered even more heavily. The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, and not that our meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God.

--- Charles Williams. He Came Down From Heaven (Berkeley, California: The Apocryphile Press, 2005), p.15.

John Ruskin Quote

This week is a busy week for me. I have grading to do. I have caught some sort of cold or flu. I have Christmas shopping to do yet. But I still have time for the quote of the week:

Everybody in this room has been taught to pray daily. 'Thy kingdom come.' Now, if we hear a man swear in the streets, we think it very wrong, and say 'he takes God's name in vain.' But there's a twenty times worse way of taking His name in vain, than that. It is to ask God for what we don't want. He doesn't like that sort of prayer. If you don't want a thing, don't ask for it: such asking is the worst mockery of your King you can mock Him with: the soldiers striking Him on the head with the reed was nothing to that. If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must work for it. And to work for it, you must know what it is; we have all prayed for it many a day without thinking.
--- John Ruskin, The Crown of the Wild Olive, Lecture I.3.

Quddouson Allah! Quddouson ul-qawee! Quddouson ulladhee la yamout! Irhamna*

Throughout the years, there has been considerable debate and confusion about the relationship between Christianity with Islam. Because they are two distinct religions with differing conceptions about God, many are of the opinion that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God. Despite the fact that Arabic speaking Christians refer to God as Allah, many English speaking Christians even throw a continuous line of insults at Allah, even creating false etymologies for the origin of the title.

While one should not confuse the two religions as being one and the same, one should be able to recognize the two religions do indeed share one God in common, not only with one another, but also with the Jews. The God of Abraham is the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Vatican Council II states quite clearly the respect the Church has for Muslims. “The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God.” Nostra Aetate. 3.Vatican Translation.

Many people ask, “How can Muslims and Christians have the same God? Christians believe God is a Trinity, while Muslims only believe God is one person.” While it is true Christians and Muslims have vastly different understandings of God, this does not mean they do not worship and share God in common. This line of reasoning believes that an understanding of an object has to be the same between two different people in order for that one object to be one and the same for both people. This can be shown to be false in two ways. First, let us assume this is true. Since no two people, not even two Christians, have an identical understanding of God, no two people, not even two Christians, would have the same God. Secondly, and more importantly, let us take an object of understanding, for example, the Holy Bible. One person, a Christian, believes it is Holy Scripture revealed by God; the other person, an atheist, does not. Despite the different understandings these two people have about the text, it is still the same text, the same object that these two people have views about. The same applies for God: while the object of understanding is the same, the understanding of that object (God in this case) is different. By saying Christians and Muslims believe in the same God, no one is disputing this fact.

It is with this foundation that Christians and Muslims can begin to dialogue with one another in respect with one another as they should. Without it, dialogue becomes more difficult, and it quickly becomes a debate with participants from both sides talking against one another without listening to the other side. But once this is accepted, then further – and more difficult questions – can be asked and addressed.

For a Christian such as myself, who is interested in Islam, the truths contained in it, and what we share in common, many questions come to mind. Probably the first one is the status of Mohammad. Who was he? Was he a vile, warlike barbarian who corrupted the Arab nations leading them entirely astray? Again, if we believe Muslims and Christians share the same God (as Vatican Council II indicates, and as Popes have consistently reiterated in their dialogues with Muslims), then this cannot be the answer. Mohammad could not have been entirely wrong. If he were, he could not be pointing the Arabs, who were mostly polytheists, to the one God. Moreover, he could not be entirely vile if he led these same Arabs, mostly small petty tribes fighting against one another, into an order of peace and justice which had not been known by the Arabs at his time. “From its inception, Islam championed the formation of a new kind of human community, an umma, bound together by a common faith rather than kinship relations. This was a fundamental shift in the social paradigm of traditional Arabia, which had before centered on tribal and clan-based affinity systems.” Frederick M. Denny, “Islam and Peacebuilding” in Religion and Peacebuilding. Ed. Harold Coward and Gordon S. Smith (New York: SUNY, 2004), 131. While we might question the extent of this program, it is clear that not only did Mohammad work to overcome the blood feuds had by Arabs against each other in his time, and he even taught forgiveness was the of creating societal harmony (Surah 42:37- 40).

Can a Christian deny that Mohammad was right when he said Jesus was the Messiah, miraculously born of the Virgin Mary? Do not the Muslims believe that Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead? Can the Catholic not even point to the Koran for its teaching of the perpetual virginity of Mary as a way of indicating how ancient and widespread this Marian teaching actually is?

That there is much in common between Islam and Christianity cannot be denied; if all that Mohammad taught was wrong, then what is in common with Christianity would be false as well. Someone might respond, “But Mohammad did not teach anything new.” To the Arabs he most certainly did, if not to the Christians.

Does this mean Christians should consider Mohammad to be what he claimed to be – a prophet of God – and that the Koran is also a revelation of God? These two claims are actually two separate ones. One could in theory believe Mohammad was a prophet of God and still not believe in the Koran. The Koran was compiled after Mohammad’s death, and there is much one can question as to the method and reason for its compilation. Probably it contains elements of Mohammad’s teaching, but is it all from Mohammad? If some and not all of it is from Mohammad, how do we identify the authentic with the inauthentic texts? Do we have quotes which are taken out of context and reinterpreted by the compiler? These questions are very difficult, if impossible, to answer. If the evidence one has that Mohammad is not a prophet rests upon the Koran, then the evidence is silent and one cannot make a conclusion. Even if one did take the whole of the Koran to be Mohammad’s words, one would still have to question the meaning and intent of the words – which admittedly are not as clear cut as many would have us believe. When we look at Surah 4:157, what does it actually mean?

That they said (in boast),
‘We have killed Christ Jesus
The Son of Mary
The Messenger of Allah’
But they killed him not.

Surah 4:157. Trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali (Brentwood, Maryland: Amana Corporation, 1989).

One way to read this is to say Jesus was not killed. Muslim tradition would eventually make this the normative reading. But it was not the only one. Who is it that is saying ‘We have killed Christ Jesus?” Many Muslims scholars throughout history have said, “The Jews.” Yet did the Jews kill Jesus? No, it was the Romans. So even if he was crucified, this passage could be correct.

Interestingly enough, many Christians throughout history have taken Mohammad to be a prophet of God. They have either seen his message was later perverted by his followers (which would then not disqualify him as being a prophet; if it did, then Jesus is not a prophet because many Christians have perverted his message), or that his message was only a temporary, local message preparing the Arabs for the fullness of the Christian Gospel (such was the opinion of the Paul of Antioch.) Or, if one still thought it possible he was a prophet, one could see him a prophet like unto Balaam – one who spoke for God at times and at other times spoke out of his own human greed.

This is not to say a Christian should view him as a prophet, but they should be at least open to that possibility and not discount it based upon what happened in Arab society after Mohammad's death, even as they would not discount the Bible based upon the history of its interpretations. It is an open question and a question which Christians can respectfully engage in dialogue with Muslims.

Other questions also emerge when Christians seek good relations with Muslims. Certainly some of them are very vital, and not all of them are for Christians to consider. If Christians are indeed a People of the Book, why do Christians suffer much persecution and find life difficult in many Islamic nations? What can and should Muslims do to correct this terrible situation? How much of the way of life in an Islamic nation actually Muslim and how much of it is cultural? What aspects of the culture can be and should be changed to help Arab nations merge into the modern world? Certainly many Muslims have asked this question, and some of them have been among the greatest leaders in the work of peace and justice in modern times, such as Badshah Khan, Gandhi’s friend and ally in India.

Dialogue is two ways. Christians should realize that it is their duty, as followers of Jesus, to engage others in a loving and respectful way, even if they are shown scorn in return. We should not seek to ridicule and mock the faiths of others. The response is not an eye for an eye, but to find a way to make an enemy into a brother. If we lose sight of this, we lose sight of Jesus’ message. Why call him Lord if we do not do the things he says?


*The title of this entry comes from the Arabic recitation of the Trisagion Hymn, which in English goes, "Holy God, Holy and Might, Holy and Immortal, have mercy on us."

Father Thomas Hopko On Liturgy

Quote of the week:

To explain the liturgy is like trying to explain a poem: if the meaning the poem is carrying could be completely explained, the poem wouldn't have been written in the first place. The written liturgy, like a genuine poem, is a term of reference; the real experience is beyond words. So I would say that the words and the rituals aren't necessarily our teachers. They are the means of access to the teacher. The teacher is the lived experience. In that sense, the liturgy is ultimately silent.

--- Thomas Hopko in Speaking Of Silence: Christians and Buddhists in Dialogue. Ed. Susan Szpakowski (Halifax: Vajradhatu Publications, 2005), 127.

Till We Have Faces

Despite being his most neglected novel, C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces could be seen as his greatest theological work. It gathers together the diversity of his theological contributions into one highly enjoyable story. Unlike The Chronicles of Narnia, one does not feel as if C.S. Lewis were telling the Christian message in a thinly-veiled allegory. This is not to say that Lewis in this work does not provide for us a Christian message; he most certainly does. By the time he wrote Till We Have Faces, he came to understand that the best way to reach modern humanity was not to bludgeon them with Christian symbolism, but to reach them from the common moral and religious heritage that Christians inherited from the pagans. Thus, Lewis gives us in Till We Have Faces his theological ideals reworked so as to be placed under a completely pagan veil.

Indeed, while this methodological point is one which many do not realize that Lewis held, it is central to Lewis’ own re-conversion to Christianity and the common belief Lewis shared with his friend and co-mythopoet, Tolkien. Lewis realized that what lay behind pagan mythology was one grand story being told and proclaimed by them all, and that story had been realized as historical fact in the life and work of Jesus Christ. “Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens -- at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences.” C.S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact” in Undeceptions. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 42.

The pagan traditions, being pre-Christian, contained the mystery and wonder and excitement that preceded the Incarnation. In our modern age, post-Christian humanity has lost this sense of wonder; the world has become a dark, bleak place. In a letter to Blessed Don Giovanni Calabria, written in Latin, Lewis shows us this view with the following observation:

What you say about the present state of mankind is true: indeed, it is even worse than you say.

For they neglect not only the law of Christ but even the Law of Nature as known by the Pagans. For now they do not blush at adultery, treachery, perjury, theft and the other crimes which I will not say Christian Doctors, but the Pagans and the Barbarians have themselves denounced.

They err who say ‘the world is turning pagan again.’ Would that it were! The truth is that we are falling into a much worse state.

'Post-Christian man’ is not the same as ‘pre-Christian man.’ He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse; but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come and a spouse lost.

---C.S. Lewis, The Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis. Trans. Martin Moynihan. (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 83-85.

Lewis significantly considered the possibility that the only way the world can be Christianized again is that we would first have to reconvert humanity back to the pagan traditions. “If they were Stoics, Orphics, Mithraists, or (better still) peasants worshipping the Earth, our task might be easier. This is why I do not regard contemporary Paganisms (Theosophy, Anthroposophy, etc.) as a wholly bad symptom.” C.S. Lewis, “Modern Man and his Categories of Thought” in Present Concerns . Ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers: 1986), 66.

Till We Have Faces is a re-telling of the Psyche myth under the hand of Psyche’s sister, Orual. In the myth, Psyche weds Cupid, the God of Love, and her sisters are jealous and try to end Psyche’s happiness by any means necessary. However, we find in Till We Have Faces Orual, the Queen of Glome, a woman who so loves her sister that she is incapable of believing her sister can be well without her. Her jealousy holds no evil intentions for Psyche, they are all good intentions; yet, as with all jealousy, they lead to an ill outcome ever the same.

The book is written in two parts, the first as a complaint to the gods, the second as her response and answer. In the first part we learn of Orual’s bitterness. Her beloved sister had been taken from her – she was led to believe Psyche had been sacrificed to the gods, only to find her alive and seemingly insane. Psyche claimed to be the wife of a god, living in a great mansion; when Psyche took her sister to her home, Orual could not see it; it looked to Orual as if her sister were living out in the open, and Psyche was seeing things which were not there. She struggled with her sister, tried to get her sister to see she was just living in the open wilderness, but nothing she did could convince Psyche, just as Psyche could not convince Orual about the nature of her new home.

Orual would learn, however bitterly, that her sister was correct, but only after she had caused such pain and sorrow to Psyche, effectively turning Psyche not only completely away from her, but from the God who really was her husband: Psyche became a wandering vagabond. In response to her bitterness, she blamed the gods for not letting her see what Psyche had seen – if she only had been given that same vision, saw things for what they really were, things would be different. However, she was to learn, her complaint not only was unjust, but was selfish; in her jealous love for her sister, she would have wished anything – even her sister’s death – to have been true more than what had really happened. Only by coming face to face to who she was in reality could she ever understand and experience the Gods, and when that happens, all answers come:

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean […] When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak openly, nor let us answer. Till that need can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

----C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 294.

C.S. Lewis had a profound insight to the nature of our relationship with what we call the “supernatural.” It is all around us and pervades our very life, but we are not open to it because we are not open to being truly who we are meant to be. We have not discovered who we are in ourselves.

We are like a block of marble, unformed, and our life becomes the means by which the marble takes form, slowly, chip after painful chip. God works in us and through us by his love, wanting to turn us into those people we are meant to be: to grow up, to love and be loved. Until we are, our experience of the world is imperfect and we go stumbling about life as if we were blind. We cannot truly see until we have faces – until our eyes are fully formed, capable of seeing things beyond the cataracts of our daily existence.

This belief, found throughout many of Lewis’ writings, finds itself in its best form here. We are shown through Orual’s story both sides of the equation. We first learn to experience and appreciate her sorrow and bitterness, to appreciate her complaint by experiencing her life through her eyes. We become Orual, and her complaint is the complaint of humanity against God: how detestable God must be; if only he would reveal himself to us, everything would be better. In showing us the inner psychology behind Orual’s complaints, and the consequences of her actions, we are shown the reasoning behind humanity’s complaint against God is at its core a shallow selfishness that closes us not only from God, but ultimately, from ourselves as well. At heart, it shows us the meaning behind Jesus’ words when he said, “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25 RSV).

G.K. Chesterton Quote

Because my fellow bloggers and I have been occupied of late, the blog has been rather silent. This might happen throughout the life of the blog.

While I might prefer other means to keep the place active, nonetheless I thought something I could do, or at least try out to see if it works well, is to post an interesting quote on the blog once a week, and see what kinds of dialogue and discussion it could produce. This time, I am writing a bit of commentary to the quote; in the future, such will not always be the case.

This week, we will have for our first quote a text from G.K. Chesterton's Utopia of the Usurers, and one I find highly appropriate as a response to the sad news out of Australia this week, where therapeutic cloning has now been legalized.

In prophetic discernment, G.K. Chesterton stated:

"The key fact in the new development of plutocracy is that it will use its own blunder as an excuse for further crimes. Everywhere the very completeness of the impoverishment will be made a reason for the enslavement; though the men who impoverished were the same who enslaved. It is as if a highwayman not only took away a gentleman's horse and all his money, but then handed him over to the police for tramping without visible means of subsistence. And the most monstrous feature in this enormous meanness may be noted in the plutocratic appeal to science, or, rather, to the pseudo-science that they call Eugenics."

Alas, for the love of money we will create life; for the love of money we will destroy life. For the love of money we will say that destroying a large amount of life helps life; because after all, the dead do not speak. Only the most perverted of minds can feel it is moral to have an "improvement of life" for a few who speak at the expense of-- and the skulls of-- the many.

While the eugenics of the past was based upon treating humans as breeding stock and allowing only some groups to breed (those who were judged to have the best genes), the new eugenics seeks to create such breeding programs on a massive scale, only to kill those whom they create. They need those with bad genes to live, while the good to die; so that those who hold the good can and will sustain the life of a depraved, parasitical diseased lot.