Читать книгу A Well of Wonder - Clyde S. Kilby - Страница 13

One of the important ideas in Reflections on the Psalms is that the Bible itself has a creative rather than an abstractive quality. The Psalms are poems rather than doctrinal treatises or even sermons. The Bible is literature. Of course one must not read it merely as literature, thus missing the very thing it is about. On the other hand, unless such parts as the Psalms are read as poetry “we shall miss what is in them and think we see what is not.” The Psalms, Lewis continues, are great poetry—some, such as Psalm 18 and 19, perfect poetry. At the same time the Bible is made up of a great variety of elements, some of which may seem inconsequential, crabbed, practical, or rhapsodic.

Lewis starts with those elements in the Psalms that trouble him. Most troubling for a modern reader, says Lewis, are the vindictive or cursing Psalms. Occasionally indeed we come upon a verse that is nothing short of devilish, as where the psalmist asks the Lord to slay his enemies or that extreme instance in which a blessing is offered to anyone who will crush a Babylonian baby against the pavement. Such maledictions, declares Lewis, are sinful, and when seen as such rather than minimized in any way, will suggest to the Christian reader similar sins in his or her own life, even if such sins are more cleverly disguised. Nor can Old Testament believers be excused, since they had plenty of Scripture against vengeance and grudges, in fact plenty of teaching very similar to that of Christ’s. The truth is that Christ’s teaching was anticipated by all teachers of truth, some even outside of Judaism. This, Lewis insists, is exactly what should be expected as a result of that Light which has lighted everyone from the beginning. All truth is from God.

Nevertheless, the Hebrews seem to have been even more vitriolic than their Pagan neighbors. Lewis thinks this might be based on the principle of “the higher the more in danger,” that is, a person with greatness of soul and an abiding conception of right and wrong is more likely to show an ugly fanaticism than a smaller person who is not so much above temptation as below it. Under some circumstances the absence of indignation may be a worse sign than indignation itself. The very elevation of religion is bound to make a religious bad person the worst sort of bad person. Satan himself was once an angel in heaven. Shocking as the cursing Psalms may be, then, it is clear that their composers were people neither morally indifferent nor willing, like some today, to reduce wickedness to a neurosis.

With these difficulties out of the way, Lewis turns to the great positives of the Psalms. First is the robust, virile, spontaneous, and mirthful delight in God, displayed by the Hebrews. They often felt a genuine longing for the mere presence of God that shames Christians. They had an “appetite” for God that did not let a false sense of good manners preclude their enjoyment of him. They were ravished by their love of God’s law, which they believed to be firmly rooted in his nature and as real as trees and clouds.

Lewis reminds us that the ancient Hebrews were not merchants and financiers at all but farmers and shepherds. Though their poetry says little about landscape, it does give us weather “enjoyed almost as a vegetable might be supposed to enjoy it”: “Thou art good to the earth . . . thou waterest her furrows . . . thou makest it soft with the drops of rain . . . the little hills shall rejoice on every side . . . the valleys shall stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing” (see Ps. 65:9ff.). The Jews understood better than their neighbors, and perhaps we also, a pristine doctrine of God as creator of nature, one that at once empties nature of anything like a pantheistic divinity and at the same time makes her a symbol or manifestation of the Divine.

Lewis confesses that when he first became a Christian he was disturbed by the continuous command in the Psalms to praise God. It sounded as if God were saying, “What I most want is to be told that I am good and great.” Even the very quantity of the praise seemed important to the psalmists. Then he discovered the principle that praise is simply the sign of healthy understanding. To ascribe praise to whatever is truly praiseworthy reflects the character of both the thing praised and the one who praises. Praise likewise completes enjoyment, whether of God or a sunset or one’s friend.

Lewis completes his reflections by three chapters devoted to what he calls “second meanings,” that is, prophetic or allegorical meanings, and the doctrine of scriptural inspiration. Since both these topics are in Lewis’s view related to myth, I should like to give special attention to them.

As to prophecy or allegory, he cites the famous passage from Virgil that describes a virgin, a golden age beginning, and a child sent down from heaven, also Plato’s discussion of the fate of a perfect man in a wicked world, and says that a Christian reading either of these two non-Christian accounts will be struck by their similarity to the biblical accounts. Now Lewis holds that the similarity in Virgil was doubtless accidental but in Plato only partially so. Plato perhaps had in mind the recent death of his teacher Socrates, a great man who died at the hands of people who feared and despised justice. It was not mere luck but rather great wisdom that enabled Plato to extrapolate from the experience of Socrates the vision of the perfect man who dies as a sacrifice to evil, even though Plato probably had no intuition that such an instance would ever become history.

Mythology is replete with the dying god, with death and rebirth, and the idea that one must undergo death if he would truly live. The resemblance between such myths and Christian truth has the same relation as the sun and its reflection in a pond. It is not the same thing but neither is it a wholly different thing. The kernel of wheat is indeed, as Christ said, “reborn” after “death.” Because God made wheat thus, it should occasion no total surprise if a Pagan sees there a symbol and puts it into the form of a myth. Because, like all men, the Pagans suffered longing for Joy, even when they were unable to identify its source, they incorporated their unsteady conceptions into myths and, because no myth was ever quite equivalent to the longing, created more and more myths. Myth arises from “gleams of celestial strength and beauty failing on a jungle of filth and imbecility,” as he put it in Perelandra. A “pressure from God” lay upon the Pagan mythmakers. Yet they would have been as surprised as anyone else if they had learned that they were talking a better thing than they ever dreamed.

If Pagan sources did so well, what of sacred ones? We have two excellent reasons, says Lewis, for accepting the truth of the biblical second meanings. One is that they are holy and inspired, the other that our Lord himself taught it and indeed claimed to be the second meaning of many Old Testament passages such as Isaiah 53, the Sufferer in Psalm 22, the King in Psalms 2 and 72, and the Incarnation in Psalm 45. Lewis confesses that though he once believed the interpretation of the Bridegroom as Christ in the Song of Songs was “frigid and far-fetched,” he later began to discover that even in this instance there might be second meanings that are not arbitrary and meanings indeed that spring from depths one would not suspect.

As to the inspiration of the Bible, he does not consider the Old Testament as “the Word of God” if by that we mean that each passage, in itself, gives us impeccable science or history. Rather, the Old Testament “carries” the Word of God, and we should use it not as “an encyclopedia or an encyclical” but “by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.” He cites St. Jerome’s remark that Moses described the creation “after the manner of a popular poet” and Calvin’s doubt whether Job were actual history as his own views also. The fact that miracles are recorded in the Old Testament has nothing to do with his view on inspiration. Belief in God includes belief in his supernatural powers.

Lewis is even willing to accept the Genesis account of creation as derived from, though a great improvement upon, earlier Semitic stories, which were Pagan and mythical—provided “derived from” is interpreted to mean that the retellers were themselves guided by God. And so with the whole of the Old Testament. It consists of the same kind of material, says Lewis, as any other literature, yet “taken into the service of God’s word.” God of course does not condone the sin revealed in the cursing Psalms but causes his word to go forth even through the written account of sin and the sinner who wrote it. We must even suppose that the canonizing and the work of redactors and editors are under some kind of “Divine pressure.”

One might be at first inclined, says Lewis, to think that God made a mistake in giving us such a Bible rather than a rigorously systematic statement of his truth in a form as unrefracted as that of the multiplication table. But even the teaching of Christ, “in which there is no imperfection,” does not come to us in that manner and is not a thing for the intellect alone but rather something for the whole person. Understanding the true meaning of Christ is not learning a “subject” but rather “steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself.”

The seeming imperfection in the way the Bible is composed may be an illusion. “It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way—to find the Word in it, not without repeated and leisurely reading nor without discriminations made by our conscience and our critical faculties, to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God’s gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works. . . . Certainly it seems to me that from having had to reach what is really the Voice of God in the cursing Psalms through all the horrible distortions of the human medium, I have gained something I might not have gained from a flawless, ethical exposition.” Even the “nihilism” of Ecclesiastes with its “clear, cold picture of life without God” is a part of God’s Word.

In view of the importance of scriptural inspiration to many Christians, I take the liberty of submitting here an additional comment that Professor Lewis was kind enough to send me.

I enclose what, at such short notice, I feel able to say on this question. If it is at all likely to upset anyone, throw it in the waste paper basket. Remember too that it is pretty tentative, much less an attempt to establish a view than a statement of the issue on which, whether rightly or wrongly, I have come to work. To me the curious thing is that neither in my own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question in fact ever assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone—both first class as literature—is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question ‘Is Ruth historical?’ (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It can still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g., the Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened, but the value of others (e.g., the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain.

To Lewis the story of creation in Genesis is mythical, but that does not mean it is untrue. It means rather that it is truer than history itself. The account of Adam and Eve, God and an apple, symbolizes clearly a time long ago when catastrophe fell upon mankind. “For all I can see,” says Lewis, “it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no consequence.” Indeed, one might ask whether humanity and history are not actually as mysterious as myth. The great historians are quite agreed that to state the facts of history may be to leave out its essence, since history is made up both of objective, overt actions and also of the joys, agonies, and deep motives of the human soul. Christianity is the Christian creed, but it is also the glorious experience of God in the heart of a believer. We must not think we have a greater thing when we accept the “hypostasized abstract nouns” of a creed as more real than the myth which incorporates them and Reality itself. Melville once remarked that the true places are never down on any map. A myth is indeed to be defined by its very power to convey essence rather than outward fact, reality rather than semblance, the genuine rather than the accidental. It is the difference between the factual announcement of a wedding and the ineluctable joys actually incorporated in the event. Corbin S. Carnell says that for Lewis “the great myths of the Bible as well as of pagan literature refer not to the non-historical but rather to the non-describable. The historical correlative for something like the Genesis account of the creation and fall may be disputed. But the theological validity of the myth rests on its uniqueness as an account of real creation (out of nothing), on its psychological insight into the rebellious will, and on its clear statement that people have a special dignity by virtue of their being made in God’s ‘image.’”⁶ The historical correlative is less significant than the thing it signifies. All facts are misleading in proportion to their divergence from Eternal Fact.

Perhaps Marjorie E. Wright stated it correctly when she says that for Lewis and certain other writers Christianity itself is the great central historical embodiment of myth. “It is the archetypal myth of which all others are more or less distorted images.”⁷ Christ is the great Reality that makes every other reality a jarring note and cracked vessel. The trouble, says Lewis, is that we are so inveterately given to factualizing Christian truth it is practically impossible for us to hear God when he says that one day he will give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun.

Only once did myth ever become fact, and that was when the Word became flesh, when God became man. “This is not ‘a religion,’ nor ‘a philosophy.’ It is the summing up and actuality of them all.”

It would be a bad mistake to infer from what has been said in the last few paragraphs that Lewis regarded the Bible as simply another good book. He repeatedly calls it “Holy Scripture,” assures us that it bears the authority of God, sharply distinguishes even between the canon and the apocrypha, presses the historical reliability of the New Testament in particular, and often assures us that we must “go back to our Bibles,” even to the very words. The biblical account, says he, often turns out to be more accurate than our lengthy theological interpretations of it. It is all right to leave the words of the Bible for a moment to make some point clear. “But you must always go back. Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him.”⁸

Doctrinally, Lewis accepted the Nicene, Athanasian, and Apostles’ Creeds. He was never failing in his opposition to theological “modernism.” Some of his most acerbic satire is employed against it in both his fiction and his expository works. It is as ridiculous, he declares, to believe that the earth is flat as to believe in the watered-down popular theology of modern England. In The Screwtape Letters a major employment of hell itself is in encouraging theologians to create a new “historical Jesus” in each generation. He repeatedly insists that, contrary to the opinion of many modern theologians, it was less St. Paul than Christ who taught the terrors of hell and other “fierce” doctrines rather than sweetness and vapid love.⁹

Though Lewis denied the doctrine of total depravity on the grounds that if we were totally depraved we should not know it and because we have the idea of good, the denial is more nearly theoretical than actual in his works. Everywhere we find him representing humanity as a horror to God and a “miserable offender.” In “Religion and Rocketry”¹⁰ he says that non-Christians often suppose that the Incarnation implies some special merit in humanity but that it implies “just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity” because “no creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. . . . Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for.”

The most vivid picture of what it means to be saved—and Lewis does not hesitate to use this word—is the transformation of Eustace from a dragon back into a person in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace tells how he remembered that a dragon might be able to cast its skin like a snake and began to work on himself. At first the scales alone came off but as he went deeper he found his whole skin starting to peel off and finally was able to step right out of it altogether. This is the point at which a less orthodox writer might stop, but not Lewis. Eustace started to wash himself, but when he put his foot into the water he saw that it was as hard and rough and scaly as it had been before. So he began again to scratch and finally peeled off another entire dragon skin. But once again he found under it another. At this point Aslan said, “You will have to let me undress you.” Though Eustace was deathly afraid of Aslan's claws, he lay down before him. His fears were justified, for the very first tear made by Aslan was so deep he felt it had gone clear down to his heart. When the skin was at last off, Eustace discovered it “ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been.” Afterward Aslan bathed him and dressed him in new clothes, the symbolism of which is clear enough.

In respect to the church, Lewis teaches that it has no beauty except that given it by Christ and that its primary purpose is to draw men to him, “the true Cure.” The Christian’s vocation, however, is not mainly to spread Christianity but rather to love Christ. The Christian is not so much to follow rules as to possess a Person and to wait upon the Holy Spirit for guidance. The Christian is not called to religion or even good works but to holiness before God. Christianity is not a “safe” vocation, for Christ is to be followed at all hazards.

Lewis believed that prayer must include confession and penitence, adoration, and fellowship with God as well as petition. “Prayer,” he says, “is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.” He believed that where Christianity and other religions differ, Christianity is correct. He held that conversion is necessary and that heaven and hell are final.

If in some of his beliefs Lewis stands somewhat to the left of orthodoxy, there are others in which he moves toward the right, at least as orthodoxy is normally practiced by most Christians. For instance, the speaking in tongues at Pentecost is not only accepted by Lewis but also explained in an ingenious manner that is worth describing. The holy phenomenon of talking in tongues bears the same relationship to the gibberish sometimes taken for it as a miraculous event to a natural one. Looking from below, one will always suppose a thing to be “nothing but” or “merely” this or that. The natural to which one is accustomed will so fill the eye that the supernatural does not appear. One sees clearly the facts but not their meaning. But from above one can see both the fact and the meaning, the supernatural and the natural. The supernatural must be transposed if sinners are to have any notion of it, yet the transposition is bound to be like that of a person required to translate from a language of twenty-two vowels into one of only five vowels—one must give each character more than one value. Hence St. Paul’s admonition that spiritual things must be discerned not naturally but spiritually.

Again, Lewis believes firmly in prayer for the sick. I think he is talking about Mrs. Lewis when he tells of a woman suffering from incurable cancer who was apparently healed by the laying on of hands and prayer. Lewis defends the proposition that the devil is alive and active, and he goes further than most of us in his belief concerning the reality and work of angels. He believes one enters heaven immediately at death. He thinks the Bible teaches clearly the second coming of Christ, and he thinks this may be the next great event in history. Generally Lewis stands with St. Paul in upholding the man as head of the wife, though he does not forget the rest of St. Paul’s analogy. Despite his conception that the early part of Genesis is mythical (in the sense I have described), Lewis’s frequent discussions of the Garden of Eden make it apparent that it means a hundred times more to him as myth than it does to most Christians as history. And we can say also that Lewis’s God is alive, not static and not in the least hazy and far away. Lewis is set apart from most Christians, says Chad Walsh, by the “vividness of the gold in his religious imagination.”¹¹