Poesy v. Theology

My guess is that C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, might be among his least read works, viewed perhaps as a mere mole hill next to such vast mountains like The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. But reading that book recently, what with prayer on our minds around here, I was quite amazed by its content. Here, for instance, is a brief quote which quite startled me by its truth and originality. It concerns biblical interpretation:

I suggest two rules for exegetics: 1) Never take the images literally. 2) When the purport of the images—what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections—seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture—the light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they now call “demythologizing” Christianity can easily be “re-mythologising” it—and substituting a poorer mythology for a richer.

  [From Chapter X, p. 52, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., edition, 1964]

Ah! the hierarchies of experience, where the poetic rises above the intellectual. But at those heights the general fades and becomes personal—which is where real understanding germinates.

Mosaic of Madness

Some mornings I have to make active efforts to assert a view of the world in stark contrast with the one I see presented in the newspaper of record. The paper’s view is a mosaic made of hundreds of stories, some illustrated. Both are “selected,” each selection itself chosen to highlight a particular editorial impulse. The composite is what I called the ravings of a schizophrenic a while back. The vast contrarian mosaic possible from events across the globe would not by any means suggest that total madness has us in its grip. It would show, rather, humanity at its usual…

The view I must assert is not visible at all. It holds the overwhelming presence in reality of an altogether invisible order. I don’t hold that view to compensate for the “horrors” in the news—although my view does have compensatory effects. It’s not about “feel good” or “ain’t it awful”; those are the filters the paper uses in picking stories to cover and images to show. My view attempts to capture the truth. The compensation arises because the news-mosaic is extremely distorted and, alas, the only image that’s tangibly available. It tends, therefore, to persuade us that that’s the way things are. And that impression must be countered.

To be sure, virtually all of our information reaches us by the senses; not all but virtually all; to hold that reality is divinely ordered therefore relies on a minuscule input from our innermost selves. Not surprisingly, therefore, in secular ages, when faith is not reinforced by masses of other believers, it’s lonely out there.