We conclude Lewis's discussion of the problem of the similarity but incongruity of the story of Jesus with the Pagan stories of dying and rising gods. Again, from chapter 14, "The Grand Miracle," from Miracles; a Preliminary Study.
Now if there is such a God and if He descends to rise again, then we can understand why Christ is at once so like the Corn-king and so silent about him. He is like the Corn-king because the Corn-king is a portrait of Him. The similarity is not in the least unreal or accidental. For the Corn-king is derived (through human imagination) from the facts of Nature, and the facts of Nature from her Creator; the Death and Rebirth pattern is in her because it was first in Him. On the other hand, elements of Nature-religion are strikingly absent from the teaching of Jesus and from the Judaic preparation which led up to it precisely because in them Nature's Original is manifesting itself. In them you have from the very outset got in behind Nature-religion and behind Nature herself. Where the real God is present the shadows of that God do not appear; that which the shadows resembled does. The Hebrews throughout their history were being constantly headed off from the worship of Nature-gods; not because the Nature-gods were in all respect unlike the God of Nature but because, at least, they were merely like, and it was the destiny of that nation to be turned away from the likenesses to the thing itself.
Lewis had much more to say about "the Grand Miracle," both before the passages I quoted and after. And much more to say about miracles, in general. I recommend his book highly.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Oops!
I thought I had saved a link to an article on Messianism that I wanted to read later, but apparently I published it by mistake. Now that was stupid.
Let me add to the anonymous commenter who gave me some advice on the Messianism post: Since I reverted it to a draft, your comment won't show up. Sorry.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
C.S. Lewis on Mythicism, Part 3, Distinguishing between Nature-gods and the God of Nature.
In Part 1 Lewis showed how the Incarnation was a pattern that was repeated throughout Nature. In Part 2 he showed the similarity of the Christian story to other Pagan stories of dying and rising gods, yet noticed how out of place the story of Jesus is among the pagan stories. In Part 3 Lewis will begin to offer an explanation for the incongruity. From chapter 14, "The Grand Miracle," from Miracles; a Preliminary Study:
There is, however, one hypothesis which if accepted, makes everything easy and coherent. The Christians are not claiming that simply 'God' was incarnate in Jesus. They are claiming that the one true God is He whom the Jews worshipped as Jahweh, and that it is He who has descended. Now the double character of Jahweh is this. On the one hand He is the God of Nature, her glad Creator. It is He who sends rain into the furrows till the valleys stand so thick with corn that they laugh and sing. The trees of the wood rejoice before Him and His voice causes the wild deer to bring forth their young. He is the God of wheat and wine and oil. In that respect He is constantly doing all the things that Nature Gods do: He is Bacchus, Venus, Ceres all rolled into one. There is no trace in Judaism of the idea found in some pessimistic and Pantheistic religions that Nature is some kind of illusion or disaster, that finite existence is in itself an evil and that the cure lies in the relapse of all things into God. Compared with such anti-natural conceptions Jahweh might almost be mistaken for a Nature God.
On the other hand, Jahweh is clearly not a Nature-God. He does not die and come to life each year as a true Corn-king should. He may give wine and fertility, but must not be worshipped with Bacchanalian or aphrodisiac rites. He is not the soul of Nature nor of any high and holy place: heaven is His throne, not His vehicle, earth is His footstool, not His vesture. One day He will dismantle both and make a new heaven and earth. He is not to be identified even with the 'divine spark' in man. He is 'God and not man': His thoughts are not our thoughts: all our righteousness is filthy rags....
Jahweh is neither the soul of Nature nor her enemy. She is neither His body nor a declension and falling away from Him. She is His creature. He is not a nature-God, but the God of Nature -- her inventor, maker, owner, and controller. To everyone who reads this book the conception has been familiar from childhood, we therefore easily think it is the most ordinary conception in the world. 'If people are going to believe in a God at all,' we ask, 'what other kind would they believe in?' But the answer of history is, 'Almost any other kind.' We mistake our priveleges for our instincts: just as one meets ladies who believe their own refined manners to be natural to them. They don't remember being taught.
There is, however, one hypothesis which if accepted, makes everything easy and coherent. The Christians are not claiming that simply 'God' was incarnate in Jesus. They are claiming that the one true God is He whom the Jews worshipped as Jahweh, and that it is He who has descended. Now the double character of Jahweh is this. On the one hand He is the God of Nature, her glad Creator. It is He who sends rain into the furrows till the valleys stand so thick with corn that they laugh and sing. The trees of the wood rejoice before Him and His voice causes the wild deer to bring forth their young. He is the God of wheat and wine and oil. In that respect He is constantly doing all the things that Nature Gods do: He is Bacchus, Venus, Ceres all rolled into one. There is no trace in Judaism of the idea found in some pessimistic and Pantheistic religions that Nature is some kind of illusion or disaster, that finite existence is in itself an evil and that the cure lies in the relapse of all things into God. Compared with such anti-natural conceptions Jahweh might almost be mistaken for a Nature God.
On the other hand, Jahweh is clearly not a Nature-God. He does not die and come to life each year as a true Corn-king should. He may give wine and fertility, but must not be worshipped with Bacchanalian or aphrodisiac rites. He is not the soul of Nature nor of any high and holy place: heaven is His throne, not His vehicle, earth is His footstool, not His vesture. One day He will dismantle both and make a new heaven and earth. He is not to be identified even with the 'divine spark' in man. He is 'God and not man': His thoughts are not our thoughts: all our righteousness is filthy rags....
Jahweh is neither the soul of Nature nor her enemy. She is neither His body nor a declension and falling away from Him. She is His creature. He is not a nature-God, but the God of Nature -- her inventor, maker, owner, and controller. To everyone who reads this book the conception has been familiar from childhood, we therefore easily think it is the most ordinary conception in the world. 'If people are going to believe in a God at all,' we ask, 'what other kind would they believe in?' But the answer of history is, 'Almost any other kind.' We mistake our priveleges for our instincts: just as one meets ladies who believe their own refined manners to be natural to them. They don't remember being taught.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
C.S. Lewis on Mythicism, Part 2, Of Disbelieving Sea-serpents
Back when he was an atheist, C.S. Lewis wrote to a friend,
"All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention – Christ as much as Loki."
So after he became a theist, when he began to consider Christianity, Lewis had to deal with the question of how much of it was myth and how much was fact. We pick up (from Part 1) his discussion from chapter 14, "The Grand Miracle," from his book, Miracles; a Preliminary Study:
From this point of view the Christian doctrine makes itself so quickly at home amid the deepest appehensions of reality which we have from other sources, that doubt may spring up in a new direction. Is it not fitting in too well? So well that it must have come into men's minds from seeing this pattern elsewhere, particularly in the annual death and resurrection of the corn? For there have, of course, been many religions in which that annual drama (so important for the life of the tribe) was almost admittedly the central theme, and the deity - Adonis, Osiris, or another - almost undisguisedly a personification of the corn, a "corn-king" who died and rose again each year. Is not Christ simply another corn-king?
Now this brings us to the oddest thing about Christianity. In a sense the view which I have just described is actually true. From a certain point of view Christ is 'the same sort of thing' as Adonis or Osiris (always, of course, waiving the fact that they lived nobody knows where or when, while He was executed by a Roman magistrate we know in a year which can be roughly dated). And that is just the puzzle. If Christianity is a religion of that kind why is the analogy of the seed falling into the ground so seldom mentioned (twice only if I mistake not) in the New Testament? Corn-religions are popular and respectable: if that is what the first Christian teachers were putting across, what motive could they have for concealing the fact? The impression they make is that of men who simply don't know how close they are to the corn-religions: men who simply overlook the rich sources of relevant imagery and association which they must have been on the verge of tapping at every moment. If you say they suppressed it because they were Jews, that only raises the puzzle in a new form. Why should the only religion of a 'dying God' which has actually survived and risen to unexampled spiritual heights occur precisely among those people to whom, and to whom almost alone, the whole circle of ides that belong to the 'dying God' was foreign? I myself, who first seriously read the New Testament when I was, imaginatively and poetically, all agog for the Death and Rebirth pattern and anxious to meet a corn-king, was chilled and puzzled by the almost total absence of such ideas in the Christian documents. One moment particularly stood out. A 'dying God' - the only dying God who might possibly be historical - holds bread, that is, corn, in His hand and says, 'This is my body.' Surely here, even if nowhere else - or surely if not here, at least in the earliest comments on this passage and through all later devotional usage in ever swelling volume - the truth must come out; the connection between this and the annual drama of the crops must be made. But it is not. It is there for me. There is no sign that it ws there for the disciples or (humanly speaking) for Christ Himself. It is almost as if He didn't realise what He had said.
The records, in fact, show us a Person who enacts the part of the Dying God, but whose thoughts and words remain outside the circle of religious ideas to which the Dying God belongs. The very thing which the Nature-religions are all about seems to have really happened once, but it happened in a circle where no trace of Nature-religion was present. It is as if you met the sea-serpent and found that it disbelieved in sea-serpents: as if history recorded a man who had done all the things attributed to Sir Launcelot but who had himself never apparently heard of chivalry.
From this point of view the Christian doctrine makes itself so quickly at home amid the deepest appehensions of reality which we have from other sources, that doubt may spring up in a new direction. Is it not fitting in too well? So well that it must have come into men's minds from seeing this pattern elsewhere, particularly in the annual death and resurrection of the corn? For there have, of course, been many religions in which that annual drama (so important for the life of the tribe) was almost admittedly the central theme, and the deity - Adonis, Osiris, or another - almost undisguisedly a personification of the corn, a "corn-king" who died and rose again each year. Is not Christ simply another corn-king?
Now this brings us to the oddest thing about Christianity. In a sense the view which I have just described is actually true. From a certain point of view Christ is 'the same sort of thing' as Adonis or Osiris (always, of course, waiving the fact that they lived nobody knows where or when, while He was executed by a Roman magistrate we know in a year which can be roughly dated). And that is just the puzzle. If Christianity is a religion of that kind why is the analogy of the seed falling into the ground so seldom mentioned (twice only if I mistake not) in the New Testament? Corn-religions are popular and respectable: if that is what the first Christian teachers were putting across, what motive could they have for concealing the fact? The impression they make is that of men who simply don't know how close they are to the corn-religions: men who simply overlook the rich sources of relevant imagery and association which they must have been on the verge of tapping at every moment. If you say they suppressed it because they were Jews, that only raises the puzzle in a new form. Why should the only religion of a 'dying God' which has actually survived and risen to unexampled spiritual heights occur precisely among those people to whom, and to whom almost alone, the whole circle of ides that belong to the 'dying God' was foreign? I myself, who first seriously read the New Testament when I was, imaginatively and poetically, all agog for the Death and Rebirth pattern and anxious to meet a corn-king, was chilled and puzzled by the almost total absence of such ideas in the Christian documents. One moment particularly stood out. A 'dying God' - the only dying God who might possibly be historical - holds bread, that is, corn, in His hand and says, 'This is my body.' Surely here, even if nowhere else - or surely if not here, at least in the earliest comments on this passage and through all later devotional usage in ever swelling volume - the truth must come out; the connection between this and the annual drama of the crops must be made. But it is not. It is there for me. There is no sign that it ws there for the disciples or (humanly speaking) for Christ Himself. It is almost as if He didn't realise what He had said.
The records, in fact, show us a Person who enacts the part of the Dying God, but whose thoughts and words remain outside the circle of religious ideas to which the Dying God belongs. The very thing which the Nature-religions are all about seems to have really happened once, but it happened in a circle where no trace of Nature-religion was present. It is as if you met the sea-serpent and found that it disbelieved in sea-serpents: as if history recorded a man who had done all the things attributed to Sir Launcelot but who had himself never apparently heard of chivalry.
Monday, June 25, 2012
C.S. Lewis on Mythicism, Part 1, The Incarnation as Pattern
One of the arguments that Mythicists - people who do not believe that Jesus existed - use to support their case is that the story of Jesus incarnation, death, and resurrection, is just another dying and rising god story that one finds throughout Paganism, and therefore no more likely true than the other stories. C.S. Lewis had a lot to say about this. I thought I would quote him at length, which will probably take a few posts, all from chapter 14, "The Grand Miracle," from his book, Miracles; a Preliminary Study We'll begin with his description of the doctrine of the Incarnation.
In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, to colour and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both coloured now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colourless in the dark, he lost his colour too.
In this descent and reascent everyone will recognize a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the world. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life reascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced: then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult. So it is also in our moral and emotional life. The first innocent spontaneous desires to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial: but from that there is a reascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way - Death and Rebirth - go down to go up - it is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies.
The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of it which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key. I am not now referring to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The total pattern, of which they are only the turning point, is the real Death and Rebirth: for certainly no seed fell from so fair a tree into so dark and cold a soil as would furnish more than a faint analogy to this huge descent and reascension in which God dredged the salt and oozy bottom of Creation.
In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, to colour and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both coloured now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colourless in the dark, he lost his colour too.
In this descent and reascent everyone will recognize a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the world. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life reascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced: then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult. So it is also in our moral and emotional life. The first innocent spontaneous desires to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial: but from that there is a reascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way - Death and Rebirth - go down to go up - it is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies.
The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of it which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key. I am not now referring to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The total pattern, of which they are only the turning point, is the real Death and Rebirth: for certainly no seed fell from so fair a tree into so dark and cold a soil as would furnish more than a faint analogy to this huge descent and reascension in which God dredged the salt and oozy bottom of Creation.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Please Consider Signing Petition for 9/11 Families
There's a petition sponsored by four 9/11 family members asking President Obama to watch a special DVD on 9/11. I've signed the petition, and I've been asked to ask my readers to consider signing it as well:
9/11 Families ask Obama to watch "9/11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out".
9/11 Families ask Obama to watch "9/11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak Out".
Saturday, June 23, 2012
WTC 7 and Jesus
Up until Youtube came into existence in 2005, very few people had heard of the collapse of WTC7. Unless you were one of the lucky ones to see it collapse live on TV the very first day, you probably never saw it. And if something like Youtube hadn't come along, you may never have even heard of it. It would have been known to only a few crank conspiracy theorists. In a few decades, those people would have died out, most of the video copies of #7 would have been lost. The only reference to it would be in a book here or there by some specialist in the early history of the 21st century.
Why is that? Well, we 9/11 Truthers would say that WTC7 was an embarrassment to the power establishment of America. It pointed to a darker truth that they preferred not be seen by the general public. All pressure was brought to bear on the media to make sure that no further film of Building 7's collapse would be seen or talked about. Now maybe we Truthers are wrong about the motives of the media. But the point remains that except for the internet and something called "Youtube," Building #7 would have meant little to most people. (I'm curious how many people have heard of it, even with youtube. I would guess it's still a minority).
So what does this have to do with Jesus? Mythicists -- people who believe that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist -- like to point to the dearth of testimony regarding Jesus's life. For example, Philo, an Alexandrian Jewish leader and intellectual, and contemporary of Jesus, writesmuch about Jewish life in first century Palestine*, but never mentions Jesus or his followers. And this is used by mythicists as evidence that Jesus never existed, or that if he existed, he never did anything to attract much attention.
But could there be another reason why Philo never mentioned Jesus? Could it be that Philo had heard all the rumors about Jesus, and his supposed miracles, and his supposed resurrection, and the nascent movement growing around him, and decided not to take any of it seriously? Could it be that Philo decided that it was just another one of those weird religious cults that occassionally pops up, gains some momentary popularity, and then dies off? Why would it be worth mentioning along with the really important things, such as politics and philosophy? Perhaps Jesus was to Philo what Building 7 is to most people today: An odd curiosity, not to be taken seriously.
*To be honest, I haven't read anything by Philo, so I'm not sure how much he did write about Jewish life in first century Palestine. The impression I get is that Philo was more of a philosopher and less of an historian, unlike Josephus, who tried to give many historical details about first century Palestine. But I'm willing to bet that Philo wrote something about it.
Why is that? Well, we 9/11 Truthers would say that WTC7 was an embarrassment to the power establishment of America. It pointed to a darker truth that they preferred not be seen by the general public. All pressure was brought to bear on the media to make sure that no further film of Building 7's collapse would be seen or talked about. Now maybe we Truthers are wrong about the motives of the media. But the point remains that except for the internet and something called "Youtube," Building #7 would have meant little to most people. (I'm curious how many people have heard of it, even with youtube. I would guess it's still a minority).
So what does this have to do with Jesus? Mythicists -- people who believe that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist -- like to point to the dearth of testimony regarding Jesus's life. For example, Philo, an Alexandrian Jewish leader and intellectual, and contemporary of Jesus, writes
But could there be another reason why Philo never mentioned Jesus? Could it be that Philo had heard all the rumors about Jesus, and his supposed miracles, and his supposed resurrection, and the nascent movement growing around him, and decided not to take any of it seriously? Could it be that Philo decided that it was just another one of those weird religious cults that occassionally pops up, gains some momentary popularity, and then dies off? Why would it be worth mentioning along with the really important things, such as politics and philosophy? Perhaps Jesus was to Philo what Building 7 is to most people today: An odd curiosity, not to be taken seriously.
*To be honest, I haven't read anything by Philo, so I'm not sure how much he did write about Jewish life in first century Palestine. The impression I get is that Philo was more of a philosopher and less of an historian, unlike Josephus, who tried to give many historical details about first century Palestine. But I'm willing to bet that Philo wrote something about it.
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