The Lion of Judah, Jesus and Jihad
CS Lewis, The Allegory of Love, p 365
7.
I said earlier that CS Lewis’ writing seemed to me to have notably more grace than John Belt’s — and I think that grace has to do with the theological virtue of the same name too, that beauty is an indicator of Grace if you like.
Here’s another author, also writing for children, whose prose is a marvel of purity — describing the music of the stars of which Lewis also spoke — Ursula Le Guin:
It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.
Ursula Le Guin, Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula would, I think, describe herself as a Taoist: the traditions may differs, grace is still grace.
8.
Well, you might not think it would be easy to get from Narnia and CS Lewis to jihad in a single bound, but it has been done, and Jarret Brachman posted the proof a while back…
The jihadist propaganda lion:
was in fact swiped from the Narnia lion:
— as Brachman elegantly demonstrated:
all three images credit: Jarret Brachman, Cronus Global
9
Well, that’s funny — but not uplifting.
So I’ll leave you with another flight — that of the king of the birds this time — in the words of Isaiah:
But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
Isaiah 40:31
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zen:
September 27th, 2011 at 3:12 am
"…“riding the Lion” idea a great deal more powerfully, and it’s imaginative fiction."
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Some might suggest the same of the other passage 🙂
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On a serious note, Charles you studied Jung at one point, did you not? Animals, or at least certain ones, have strong cross-cultural significance. I’ve read that a visceral reaction to snakes is virtually hard-wired in all people, for example. Lions once had a great geographic range, into middle Europe and Asia in the warmer times, which would have embedded them into all of the neolithic and early bronze age cultures south of, say, modern Belgium
Charles Cameron:
September 27th, 2011 at 7:03 am
Hi, Zen:
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In response to your first point, if I may back up a little…
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The poet Kathleen Raine, whom I knew many years ago and greatly admire, writes approvingly of Scottish "road-menders and foresters who can recite long passages from Paradise Lost" and of those whose thought is formed "to the cadence of waves, / Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail" – while Gary Snyder speaks of laying rip-rap – "a cobble of stones laid on steep slick rock to make a trail for horses in mountains" and finds in the rhythm of that work the rhythm of his poems.
What I am suggesting here is that beauty of language is hard-won, whether by intense reading, intense writing, or other intense work. Two things to note here:
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— the intensity of the work guarantees that it involves inner work on oneself as well as craft practice, and
— such intensity is as easily the property of road-menders as it is of literary figures
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More particularly, CS Lewis and Ursula Le Guin can write as beautifully as they do because they have soaked themselves in deep traditions (the Christian gospels, Taoism) to the point where those riches have been transformed within them "where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt" into imaginative forms, received by them as gifts and passed along to the rest of us through the craft and art of their writing.
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To my mind, that’s how both the Narnia books and the Earthsea trilogy got written — and it also explains how the beauty of language naturally accrues to the beauty of deeply pondered images.
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I’d call that "imaginative" in the full sense of the term.
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The other passage seems to me to be the work of someone who has read CS Lewis, does not appear to have bathed in and transformed the material Lewis gave him as Lewis transformed the gospel stories into Narnia, but has simply burped half-digested Lewis up in a form that suggests he has a special relationship ("intimacy") with Christ.
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He may have dreamed as he says, or he may have fabricated the story – but to my ear it lacks, precisely, the hard-won beauty that both Lewis and Le Guin exhibit.
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*
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I had not wished to be so blunt as this in my post, and am not in any case the judge of any man – but authentic beauty and imagination seem worth defending.
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The conductor John Eliot Gardiner quotes Bach to the effect that "Wherever there is devotional music, God with his grace is present" — and if you listen to Sara Mingardo singing the recitative "O selger Tag" (YouTube, starting at 1.07) immediately before Gardiner makes that comment, I believe you will find the same hard-won beauty, the same abundant grace.
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As Benedict XVI said recently, "The work of art is the fruit of human creativity, which questions the visible reality, trying to discover its deep meaning and to communicate it through the language of shapes, colors, sounds. (It) is an open door on the infinite (which) opens the eyes of the mind, of the heart."
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A recitative is the least flashy, the most prosaic you might say, of all the forms Bach uses in his music – yet Mingardo infuses it with an ineffable beauty.
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*
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I cannot recommend too highly – and I am writing this with Scott particularly in mind, knowing his love of Bach – the DVD of In Rehearsal with John Eliot Gardiner, from which that video clip was taken.
Charles Cameron:
September 27th, 2011 at 7:25 am
As to lions — at one time I was the literary editor of the journal Carnivore…
… and my editor, the shaman-scientist Randy Eaton, would be the guy to ask…
J.ScottShipman:
September 27th, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Hi Charles,
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Many thanks for the post and the Bach references. The video clip you attached is divine. As I may have mentioned in an email, I attended my son’s church in Lynchburg recently and the youth pastor was speaking in the morning service and chose as his text Revelation 5 [wading into Revelation as a young preacher is usually not advised:))]—the theme was "worthiness." It had been too long since I’d read Revelation, and when he came to verses 5 and 6 I notices the dichotomy between the Lion and the Lamb—the totality and vastness that separates these two images. Having just read Chadwick the day before, with the Clement quote mentioned in your last post, I saw these verses with new eyes and insight.
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"And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.
"And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth."
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The juxtaposition of the Lion and Lamb metaphors seem to exemplify the worthiness and virtue each bring. Of course, you realize I’ll chew on these ideas in the days to come—-so many thanks for such a beautiful post—-and not at all insignificant.:))
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