World Views and Meaning in a Civil Society

This is a post I intended for the George MacDonald Facebook page, I thought maybe it would be better hosted here.

George MacDonald lived at one of the turning points in our culture. Victorian England was still ostensibly a Christian culture, you can see in his novels that church attendance was the norm but he also documents how this was increasingly a social show and he often depicts sincere atheists in a better light than insincere Christians. 

By the time of the Inklings (A literary discussion group comprising CS Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield, et al), they were exceptions by being Christian intellectuals in a largely secular culture, particularly in the intellectual culture. Lewis wrote a very good book “The Discarded Image” which dealt with the way throughout the middle ages Christian philosophers, scientists and poets viewed their conception of the ptolemaic world view. Lewis didn’t see this world view as fundamentally Christian but it was used in a Christian context. In this view there was a participation with the world the world macrocosm was reflected in the microcosm of man. Within this view we have the Christian idea that in the beginning was the Word, so we have meaning at the centre of existence.

We now live in a secular society where the ruling paradigm is  materialism that looks for truth with a microscope or telescope “out there” in the world and I don’t see that much difference to the fundamentalist Christians who see the truth as “out there” in a book. MacDonald had a very strong imaginative sense of participation with God, where Truth is seen and experienced as fundamental.

The US election has just passed and one of the things that really strikes me about it, is how much cynicism there is about our societies basic building blocks. There is a sense that our politicians are bought and corrupt, no one is trustworthy, other building blocks like the nuclear family are both far less robust than they had been and generally not even considered as important. There are plenty of people who think 911 was an inside job, that global warming is liberal hoax, that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays and that jesus Christ did not exist. It is now pretty mainstream to think Western culture in all it’s varieties including Government and Business is simply an oppressive patriarchy. CS Lewis spoke about how this inclination to see through everything means that you end up seeing nothing. All of these impulses are deconstructing, I don’t think we’ll find a beautiful world if all we do is take things apart. When rationality that starts off with the presupposition of meaning ends with the conclusion that all meaning is subjective, then it should be no surprise that our discourse becomes increasingly frivolous. Instead of arguing the nature of meaning and the world, university students seem more concerned with where they sit on an entirely fluid gender spectrum.

Are we going to be able to build a new intellectual spiritual paradigm to replace that ‘discarded image”? Personally I think Owen Barfield may represent a possible direction.  I don’t think religion is simply a matter of individual salvation, it is used as a basic building block for civil society. Sorry if these are rather gloomy reflections.

 I thought this was going to end in a question for people to discuss, maybe the question is what do people think of the idea that a world view that sees meaning as fundamental (as religious views generally do) is necessary for healthy functioning society? Is their such a world view and how does it get taken up by society at large?

Owen Barfield - Saving the Appearances

The Inklings were a small group of Oxford writers and friends who would meet weekly to read aloud and discuss their works in progress. The two most famous members were JRR Tolkien who wrote the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings (these were the first novels I read with pleasure) and C S Lewis who wrote the Narnia books and was influential with his books of Christian apologetics. Tolkien and Lewis' output extend beyond the popular works in very interesting ways.  But there were also two other significant Inklings, Charles Williams who wrote fascinating contemporary novels where the spiritual world would break through into this world and strange books of theology. Lastly there was Owen Barfield.

Barfield isn't as well known as Tolkien and Lewis and this is partly because he can be hard to read, but he influenced them both. He is hard to read largely because his ideas are contrary to so much modern thought and assumptions. Barfield engaged with Lewis in what they termed the Great war. This was a dialogue between them that would lead to Lewis moving from Atheism to Theism and  curing him of his "chronological snobbery", more on that later. Barfield's early fairytale the Silver Trumpet was a success in Tolkien's house and his writing on Language in A History of English Words and Poetic Diction were influential, within the Inklings. Amongst the Inklings he is probably the most significant thinker.

I did find "Saving the Appearances" difficult and I can't describe it as Barfield would, but this could be a very significant book. It is a major reassessment of the way we see ourselves and history, it questions the very nature of the way modern people think. We are used to thinking of the evolution of the external world but we are not used to thinking of the evolution of consciousness, this is an oversight that could have profound repercussions. History is generally written with a contemporary mind or consciousness reinterpreting the past through our sensibility, but if we read works from an earlier time period and we allow ourselves to listen for the meanings and impressions of that time we then start to see a different world view to our own. We see that the issues and significance of ideas and events were different and they had different suppositions.  If we turn from literature and it's relatively small time scales to the sciences that talk confidently about millions of years of geological time, then the possibility of a disconnect and re-interpretation from modern consciousness becomes massive. Barfield makes the observation that when Scientists talk about the distant past, they are inferring how it would appear to a contemporary human being had they been there. But obviously, no contemporary human consciousness was there.

Barfield posits three types of thought. Figuration, Alpha and Beta thinking. The external world only makes sense to us through our original figuration, figuration as I think is mostly our language and underlying thought forms. The basic blocks of our thinking that we participate in when we experience the world. Alpha and beta thinking is abstract thinking not different in kind but in subject. Alpha thinking is thinking about the contents of figuration.  Alpha thinking is about concepts relating to the external world, scientific concepts like gravity, laws of motion are all alpha thinking.  Beta thinking is thinking about thinking i.e. philosophy.

We sort of know that all inquiry begins with consciousness, but then we forget this as we analyse our world, we abstract ourselves and our consciousness from our thoughts of the world. If we look back at the middle ages and before, we see thinking where the nature of the macrocosm cycles through the microcosm. It seems that this abstraction came about not through logical exposition but through the successes of alpha thinking in shaping our world and as the books title says "saving the appearances" that is having concepts that can accommodate that which we see e.g. theories of motion, gravity etc.

That in short are the bare bones of this book, but Barfield thinks about thinking with an intensity that is startling, maybe you won't agree with where he goes with this, but I think he is well worth engaging with.

Reflections upon reading CS Lewis' Allegory of Love

I first came to Lewis through reading his Narnia novels, not in my childhood but in my twenties. While I enjoyed these books I wasn't that excited by them. I was very aware that he was a Christian apologist which at that time I did not regard as a point in his favour. But I have slowly come to see that Lewis has a sensibility well worth exploring and I have also come to appreciate the Christian cultural/spiritual tradition.

Lewis has a number of different facets to his work. The Mythic/Fantasy Imaginative works, Christian Apoligetics, Philosophy/Theology, Social Commentator and Literary Criticism and analysis. This last category of his writing I think is often overlooked now, partly because of the fame of his Narnia books and the rise in appreciation in the US particularly of his overtly Christian writing.

In recent times I have read two works of his literary analysis by CS Lewis "The Discarded Image" which explores the cosmological conception of the Middle Ages and how it appears in literature. And Now the "Allegory of Love" which is an exploration of Allegorical tradition of Courtly Love. Both books are impressive works of scholarship but also very engaging reads.

Lewis has said that when reading every second book should be an old one and one of the reasons for that is that by reading old books we discover a sensibility different from our own. If we could read books from the future they would serve the same purpose, unfortunately we haven't figured out how to do so. Sci Fi is possibly an imaginative attempt to satisfy that desire. Old books can let us see our own time with other eyes.

Lewis dedicated this book to fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield and a central strand of thought that he may have picked up from Barfield is that through literature we can explore the way consciousness develops. "Allegory of Love" explores literature from the Middle Ages and some things that we may regard as fundamental had not emerged, for instance the romantic love story that leads to marriage which now seems such a cliche. In Courtly love adultery was the norm and it is interesting to see the way a new mode of love hammers itself out in the imaginations of the poets. Whether they were leading or following the social trend I don't know, but in those works we can see the transformation.

Another interesting development that Lewis seems to be tracing is that of the expression of the inner life through literature, which first found expression in Allegory and Lewis focus primarily on the Romance of the Rose for this, where the different parts of the personality are depicted as separate personifications. Later he claims that it was possible to do the same thing more realistically. The Romance of the Rose Lewis claims is the most consistent and structural Allegory, the later works he explores use Allegory only in part, mixed with other modes of expression.

I'm not going to give a survey of the whole book which is rich in ideas, and I admit I was not able to digest it all,  partly because I didn't have sufficient familiarity of the texts he discusses. But even so I was captivated by Lewis easy engagement with these works from the Middle Ages leading up to Spenser's Fairy Queen. That engagement drew me with him through all 450 pages. This book could well serve to generate enthusiasm to read these early texts.

It was also interesting how Lewis' familiarity with the Middle Ages is reflected in his Narnia books. The odd mix of mythologies, images, ideas lumped together that makes the Narnia books is stylistically typical of works from the Middle Ages.

Hopefully this will spur me to read Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida and the entire Fairy Queen other books discussed. It would be great to return to this book again when I am more familiar with the imaginative country it explores.

The Works of George MacDonald: A long journey to the beginning

Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of The Rings were the first novels I read with pleasure (aged 14) and they made an immediate and lasting impact upon me. It was very different with George MacDonald, although it must be about 30 years since I read the first book by him, which would have been either Lilith or Princess and the Goblins, I'm not sure which. I certainly thought Lilith was very good but it didn't lead to further reading. I think WH Auden and CS Lewis both gave me the impression that MacDonald's realistic Victorian novels were not very good and not worth reading, so I had the impression that MacDonald effectively had a small oeuvre.

Lilith I re read every so often, each time I read it it took me on a journey and amazed me, but the events of the book were not imprinted on my mind, I had certain lasting impressions, the ancestral house, the Library, Mr Raven, the movement between this world and another, the room of the dead. But it was such a unique book that takes you on an inner journey and you come out of it as you come out of a dream. I am starting to read this again this time taking extensive notes and it would be good to write a blog on this book alone.

The Princess and the Goblin's I enjoyed but probably didn't give it sufficient credit due to it being a children's book. I re-read it to my daughter and very much enjoyed it, Princess Irene's grandmother struck me as something of a prototype for the Lady Galadriel. Having recently read GK Chesterton's comments on the book, I realise I have taken this wonderful book too much for granted:

But in a certain rather special sense I for one can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has substantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I ever read ... it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life. It is called The Princess and the Goblin, and is by George MacDonald....

I read Phantastes and the Golden Key and also enjoyed them very well, but I think because I read his visionary fantasies I had a mistaken impression of him as a rather vague romantic whom I could enjoy but shouldn't contemplate too deeply. However slowly I came to realise that I had lived with MacDonald's work for a long time and their influence although subtle was lasting, there is a sense of the numinous, a slaking of a thirst of the soul, that finally pushed me out of my sleepiness and I realised that I wanted to know more about George MacDonald. I joined the George MacDonald Society Facebook group, which I found a source for a lot of good information and stirred my enthusiasm. It was through this group that I came upon an article called "George MacDonald: Merging Myth and Method" by Robert Trexler, which you can find here:

http://www.george-macdonald.com/assets/downloads/gmarticle.pdf

Trexter in his opening remarks made the following statement:

"But if the revival of interest in MacDonald can be partly credited to Lewis, so also can some of the misconceptions about MacDonald, especially as regards MacDonald the novelist."

Trexter goes on to argue that MacDonald's realistic Victorian novels have been significantly undervalued by Lewis and are worth serious attention, he focuses on one of the Wingfold novels "There and Back" and marks mythic motifs within the novel.

I am very thankful for this article as it changed my thinking and led me to read the Wingfold books: Thomas Wingfold Curate; There and Back and Paul Faber, Surgeon. I realised that I had only touched upon the riches that MacDonald's work had to offer. I like novels that contain ideas and deal with the interior life of their subjects and these novels did that in a unique way. They had likeable and varied characters, the main themes seemed to be a slow unfolding of faith which is depicted in a very real and sincere manner. The books are also many layered, with mythic and visionary elements that come from Polwarth's writings and his brother's manuscript although are not limited to these. MacDonald concentrates on personal transformations and the inner journeys we make to become better people and our movement towards the divine. He does this with gentleness and seriousness unparalleled by any author.

So almost 30 years after first reading MacDonald's work I have come to see that he has created a great body of work and I am at the start of a voyage of discovery, sailing into the east. I feel as though I have a lot to get from MacDonald, through his realistic Victorian novels, his sermons and criticism and the fantasy novels that I already know, but not well enough. I have come to the beginning.

Christianity: an appreciation from the outside

I grew up in a society that was already largely post-Christian. I don't recall my friends going to Church and I certainly didn't. I do remember having a pastor come to talk to us in standard 2 or 3 (aged 8-9). Increasingly the public discourse around Christianity has become vitriolic, giving the impression that the Christian religion is regressive and intolerant and responsible for slaughter. This blog is not going to be a defence organist these allegations, although I don't think they are fair and I would highly recommend David Bentley Hart's "Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and it's Fashionable Enemies" to answer those issues. I intend to write instead an appreciation of the Christian religion, at a later stage I would also like to do a blog that considers what religion is.

Over the years i have come across many Christian thinkers and artists and I have come to realise that Christianity is central to Western culture, I think we should celebrate our culture and steep ourselves in it and having an open attitude to Christianity is an essential part of that.

JRR Tolkien was the first author that I really read with joy and a sense of compulsion, his mythology which forms the fabric of his work is intrinsic to his Christian faith. CS Lewis' Narnia books had a wonderful sense of invention, Lewis wears his Christianity much more overtly than Tolkien.

Both of these writers owe a significant debt to the Scottish writer George MacDonald who wrote wonderful fantasies for both adults and children that speak directly to the heart in a way that no modern writer I am aware of can. Lilith, Phantastes and the Golden Key are gorgeous examples of the fantasy genre still unrivalled.  MacDonald also wrote much Victorian fiction which though very popular in his own time is now not so highly regarded, I think largely due to his central themes of faith that critics are now allergic to.

Lewis Tolkien and MacDonald are significant modern writers to me whose Christianity provides a rich imaginative backdrop to their works. The large sensibility of G K Chesterton unfortunately has no modern correspondence although it has a mirror within the Vedantic tradition with the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo, writers like Chesterton that are also overlooked by contemporary critics.

I have recently started reading George MacDonald's Victorian novels and was interested in the way he depicted the Christian faith of the time. He painted a faith that was extensively practiced but mostly by habit and his central characters seek to find a faith that was the living water of Christ's teachings. That we now have a society where secular materialism is our orthodoxy is hardly surprising. The modern rise of fundamentalism and literal readings of the Bible play into the hands of the critics of Christianity. Insisting upon the earth being 6000 years old and focussing on old harsh dogmas, like the sin of homosexuality give the faith a facade of superstition. I can't see these trends as the living waters of Christ's legacy of compassion, they also have little to do with the work of the great theologians.

Looking further back than MacDonald we have amazing artistic achievements from Christian artists, William Blake's startling mix of visual poetic and prophetic vision still sears the mind's eye. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Handel's Messiah, Bach's work almost entirely fits within the Christian context, Dante's works of sublimity cannot be separated from the Christian faith. The cultural impact of people like Saint Francis, Martin Luther, Jacob Boehme, John Bunyan and John Milton to name a few is enormous. Trying to understand them without their Christian context is impossible.

Today amazing feats of engineering and massive public resources are invested in building roadways and their impressive over passes. In the Middle Ages they put that kind of effort and resources into building Cathedrals, filled with artwork telling the story of Christ, with incredible acoustics so that divine music celebrating Christ could be sung, Stained glass windows where the light would shine through Christ. Incredible arches, beautiful proportions all designed to raise our minds to the divine, they are still there to be marvelled at. I find these much more impressive than motorways.

Early Christian writers like Saint Augustine, Origen, Geoffrey of Nyassa drew out of the teachings of Christ rich theological traditions. We lack even the awareness of what it is that we are missing.

Do we want to appreciate our own culture? Surely some awareness of our cultural past would be valuable? A willingness to share those things that moved our ancestors with a great sense of awe and beauty, if we want to commune with them then we need get over this rude sense of distaste that we now have for the Christian religion.

Strangely our modern technological society grew within a Christian framework, was fostered by Christian Universities by Christian scientists. It is odd that we have come to believe the Christian religion was antithetical to scientific investigation.

Rupert Sheldrake (to paraphrase) said that he came to Christianity because he no longer believed in materialism and that Christianity was the spiritual tradition that fitted with his cultural background. Sheldrake has done a number of scientific experiments that have been repeatable which show materialism to be highly improbable. Pretty much the same can be said of CS Lewis his memoir "Surprised by Joy" shows the slow process by which he came to Theism, little is devoted to how he came to Christianity, but again it best fitted him and the joy of sharing a tradition with others could not really be had by him from the Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic faiths.

David Bentley Hart wrote a very good book "The Experience of God: Being Consciousness Bliss" which showed how the fundamental concept of God in Christianity, Islam and Hinduism is the same. The advantages that religions give is that on a most fundamental level these Theistic faiths allows that meaning, love and connectedness are fundamental qualities of the world. It also for me makes more sense that this relative world could spring into existence from the absolute reality of God, whereas a relative world popping into existence from nothing just makes no sense.

This is an external view of Christianity as i don't practice it, I practice Kriya Yoga which is a Vedantic or Hindu tradition, a lot of the advantages that Lewis found I don't. There are sufficient sincere practitioners of Kriya Yoga to have sense of shared observance. Having a living Master is a a huge boon, also the Churches where I am are no longer thriving and I can't with a clear conscience advocate the uniqueness of Christ which seems to be such a focus, I can accept his divinity.

Fundamentalists may have done more harm to Christianity than Atheists although it seems to me that the public debate only focuses on these two extremes rather than on the more sophisticated practitioners of Christianity.