Please Let There Be an Arras!

Before Shakespeare, there was Christopher Marlowe. The always-correct Wikipedia says (at least it said it last week) that Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy were the first popular plays (ca. 1582) on the London public stage, both showing the power and suitability of blank verse for drama.

I can see why Tamburlaine had such an immediate and fateful effect. Marlowe’s pair of plays, about the fourteenth-century founder of the Asian Timurid Empire, flows in straightforward meter with a strong simplicity of vocabulary that I found very easy to understand even today. You don’t get any of Shakespeare’s neologisms or extended metaphors, but you do get powerful drama. Part I (i.e. the first play) tells of Tamburlaine’s rise as he conquers kingdom after kingdom, sometimes through military superiority, sometimes through stratagem, and sometimes merely by presenting himself to his opponents, who apparently all agreed on his almost superhuman beauty and dignity. Part II, a better drama with a dash of poetic flare along with all the clear expository dialog, tells of the mighty emperor’s downfall. Why does success seem like such an imcomplete story? Whatever the explanation, Part I’s meteoric rise would offer little satisfaction without the tragic descent of Part II.

I also just read Marlowe’s Edward II. This weak English king seems despicable at first and then pathetic. But my sympathies turned toward him about the same time as his brother Edmund’s did in the play. Edward’s horrible death isn’t explained in the dialog; I think the audience was assumed to know it. (Edward was burned from the inside out with a red-hot poker.) Apparently, if I correctly understood the stage directions, or lack thereof, this death takes place on stage with screaming from the dying king. Gruesome. I would hope that the action was hidden behind an arras as thick as the one that hides Polonius.

Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is next. Time to quit writing and start reading!

Book Awards – 2022

The votes have been tabulated (not difficult since I’m the only voting member). A protective barrier has been placed around the presenters’ podium to prevent any unscripted slapping. It looks like we’re ready for the presentation of this year’s Book Awards.

Author of the Most Books Named Little Dorrit: Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. My third reading of Little Dorrit magnified its great qualities in my mind and at least found some explanation for a couple of the weaknesses. One theme I thought about this year but didn’t blog about earlier is condescension. Miss Wade resents all kindnesses done to her because they seem like condescension. But Dickens shows the right thinking in other relationships. First, not all kindness is condescension, as Arthur Clennam demonstrates in his kindness to Daniel Doyce. Second, condescension isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Amy rightly “condescends” to poor, witless Maggie: as an orphan with stunted mental growth, Maggie needs someone to talk with her and deal with her at a level she can understand. And are we to be offended that our Lord emptied Himself and became flesh, “abhorring not the virgin’s womb” and humbling Himself by a birth in a stable?

Best New Read in History: Stephen R. Brown, Merchant Kings
Some volumes of the Oxford History of the United States are among the best history books I’ve ever read. But this year’s dreadful The Republic for Which It Stands is not among that august group. Often this award goes to Will and Ariel Durant, whose massive, multi-volume history of western civilization I’ve enjoyed reading for decades. But this year’s pages on the Enlightenment left me wishing for darkness. So with the usual suspects out of contention, this year the award goes to an author whose obscure name I had to look up again just now, and to a book lacking the verbal polish of anything by, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin. But from Merchant Kings I finally got a good, brutally honest exposition of the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company (as well as four other exploratory and exploitative companies from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries) and a clear idea for the first time of the strange and dangerous relationship of each with its mother country. I learned a lot from all the histories I read this year, even the ones that didn’t make me smile, but I learned the most from this slender volume.

Best New Read in Fiction: Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
I don’t remember where I got the tip to read this book. I don’t remember ever seeing this author’s name outside my own reading plan. (Have you ever heard of her?) I understand why the book has been forgotten by society: it’s a twentieth-century book about a devout believer, but it isn’t written in the style of the Christian romances that filled the bookshelves of the late twentieth-century Christian bookstores. So it’s designed to appeal to a small slice of the reading public. Well, I for one am in that slice. It turns out that a twentieth-century Christian doesn’t need to have a crisis of faith in order to have a compelling story. What to do with church bazaars and annoying neighbors can be surprisingly dramatic. And I defy you to predict the charming ending!

Most Disappointing Read: Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization
I’ve already complained about them enough this year, even in today’s post. But this dubious honor is awarded each year, so duty demands that I mention them one last time. Let’s hope I have better things to say about the Durants next year.

Comeback Player of the Year: Alexandre Dumas
In The Man in the Iron Mask, the Musketeers came back again in all their glory . . . only to die. Well, most of them, anyway. I couldn’t be happier about being so sad.

Best New Read in Poetry:
This award was not given this year because of the excessive appearance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s works of dead girls hanging their ghostly hair from heaven and brushing men’s cheeks.

Best New Read in Religion: Augustine, Homilies on I John
Augustine works through grammatical points (“I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven,” means that his readers are little children because they are forgiven), important implications of single words (“We have an advocate” shows that the Apostle also had need of Jesus’ advocacy), and apparent contradictions (Do Christians commit sin or not? I’ll let you read the homilies to find Augustine’s solution for yourself). Augustine was such a good pastor, he continues to feed sheep.

Best New Read in Biography: Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life
It was very difficult for me to decide which was the best written of the biographies I read this year. In the end I gave the award to the biography which most changed my view of the subject. I ended up admiring John Kennedy more than I had, which was no mean feat considering that Dallek also made the President’s flaws look even more despicable than I had imagined!

Best Subject of a Biography: Ron Chernow, Grant
I might actually have learned more from this book than I did from An Unfinished Life since Grant’s considerable accomplishments as President have been underplayed for at least a century. But I have to say that it didn’t so much change my view of this hero as much as it strengthened my view that Grant has been and is still the most underrated of American Presidents. Thank goodness the Dunning School and the Lost Cause are losing their grip on historiography.

Best Reread: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Maybe this is just a given.

Best Book in a Category By Itself: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Capote said that this wasn’t just a new book but a new kind of book: journalistic history written as a novel. His approach gave literary life to the victims of this senseless crime and provided insight to the aberrant minds of the killers. I couldn’t help wondering if his work at all inspired John Douglas when he started the real life BAU in the FBI.

Best Offroading: Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place
I had meant to read this book ever since it was recommended to me fifty years ago. I don’t know what I would have thought then. I’m sorry to say I’m afraid the strict doctrinal bounds of my youth would have led me to disapprove of Corrie Ten Boom’s Christianity. Now I can only see that her faithful love of Jesus led her to sacrifice to unimaginable lengths in an attempt to save Jews from the Nazis. As far as the doctrine goes, the book actually challenged me to reconsider whether I weren’t more right at 16 about some things, especially about how God might lead someone to action. But then, I’ve never been put in a situation where lying to authorities would save a life, or a situation in which I had to judge whether the officers of an invading force had any authority. No book this year made me think and rethink more than this one.

A year ago today, I wrote that I was looking forward to Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, Augustine’s homilies on I John, and even Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. None of these disappointed, and two even won awards. What am I especially eager to read in 2023? Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (about the hunchback), poetry and essays of Matthew Arnold, and a return to Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. I’m also hoping for a better experience from the Durants and from the Oxford History of the U. S. as I read David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear. (Kennedy’s book won a Pulitzer, so I think my hopes will be fulfilled.) May your New Year also be filled with anticipation for an abundance of good books!

Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol – 2022

Several months ago I read all of Chesterton’s columns for the Illustrated London News from 1926. When I posted about that reading at the time, I mentioned that I would come back to it in December, since the series ended with a wonderful piece about old Christmas carols. In this last, beautiful column, Chesterton ascribes three special virtues to old Christmas carols: (1) anachronism, which shows that the events of Christmas and its celebration are continuously present in a spiritual sense throughout history, (2) incongruity, which makes little logical sense but great poetic sense, and (3) lustiness such that people sometimes shout “Ut hoy!” in celebration of Christ’s birth.

Now, I have to think that Chesterton knew many more truly old carols than I do. I don’t know the one, for instance, that contains shouts of “Ut hoy!” But I do know a couple of carols about holly that seem to fit GKC’s description perfectly.

The first carol I’m trolling today is “The Holly Bears a Berry.”

1. Now the holly bears a berry as white as the milk,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who was wrapped up in silk:

Chorus: And Mary she bore Jesus our Saviour for to be,
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly.
Holly! Holly!
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly!

2. Now the holly bears a berry as green as the grass,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died on the cross:

Chorus

3. Now the holly bears a berry as black as the coal,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died for us all:

Chorus

4. Now the holly bears a berry, as blood is it red,
Then trust we our Saviour, who rose from the dead:

Chorus

Anachronism? Not exactly. But I think the mix of tenses in every verse accomplishes the same thing. The holly bears a berry in the present tense now, and Mary bore Jesus in the past tense in, perhaps, 4 B.C. But maybe there is some anachronism in the assignment of the colors. I had to look up the white berry: the berries on my holly bushes are never white. But according to the internet, which might actually be right in this case, a Christian legend says that the berries were white until the time of the crucifixion. I wasn’t familiar with this legend until this morning, but it sounds a lot like the legends printed on cedar signs I used to study in roadside Stuckey’s restaurants. (Talk about anachronism and incongruity!) According to this very important and informative bit of childhood reading, both the dogwood flower and the burro mystically acquired their cross-shaped markings during the original Holy Week. If we accept the legend, this carol sings of the holly as bearing, in the present tense, berries it hasn’t born in two thousand years.

I honestly don’t know that I understood why I have always loved the verses of this carol so much until Chesterton pointed out the vitality of incongruity in this literature. Some songwriter not as wise as the anonymous farmers of Cornwall who shaped this poem over generations – some silly songwriter like me, for instance – would have tried to get the bloody red in the same verse as the cross and the living green in the verse with the Resurrection. How much better the carol is the way it stands! Death in life, life in death.

Lustiness? What could be more “lusty” than stopping the lilting beat in the middle of each stanza to exclaim the word “holly” twice? Have you ever shouted that word before? The next time you find yourself walking through the woods wondering why life isn’t making any sense, I hope you come across a holly bush and get a chance to start the habit.

The other carol today is clearly related to the first. Maybe a fellow in Gloucestershire visited Cornwall, heard “The Holly Bears a Berry,” and tried to bring it home, but forgot parts or tried to improve it. Maybe the geographical journey went the other way. Maybe both carols stand as descendants of some forgotten Ur-carol that connected the holly and the birth of Jesus. However it was, here are the lyrics, as currently known, of “The Holly and the Ivy”:

1. The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.

Chorus: Oh! The rising of the sun
And the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir!

2. The holly bears a blossom,
As white as the lily flower,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ,
To be our sweet Saviour.

Chorus

3. The holly bears a berry,
As red as any blood,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to do us sinners good.

Chorus   

4. The holly bears a prickle,
As sharp as any thorn,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.

Chorus

I want to go through Chesterton’s three qualities in reverse order this time. I hate “contemporary” “worship” “songs” that forget sentence structure and just start stringing spiritual sounding phrases together without any verbs. I like verbs. But I love this verbless chorus with all my heart and have since I first sang it in the third-grade Christmas concert at Maude V. Roark Elementary School in Arlington, TX. (Arlington consisted of a couple of neighborhoods of houses, the Hollandale Circle apartments – where my family lived –, Roark school, a Walmart, and Six Flags. That’s all my eight-year-old mind took in, but I honestly don’t think there was much more. I just looked up the school: it closed last year and was demolished! May the echoes of “The Holly and the Ivy” reverberate around the area forever!)

Anyway, back to the chorus of this carol. I don’t care about verbs here. I just want to sing lustilly about four beautiful things! In fact, as I sing this song, I start to wonder if these aren’t my four favorite things in the universe! The running of the deer! Why haven’t I thought to celebrate that before! Oh, glorious!

Now what the deer and the organ have to do with each other or what either has to do with a holly’s berries or blossoms, I don’t know. But the poem works its aesthetic magic as we sing it, and it is clear to our minds that all these things, incongruous at first glance, form one perfect unity of ideas to which nothing could be added, from which nothing could be taken. I used to think there was a slight imperfection in this otherwise integral organism with the mention of the organ, which didn’t exist when Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ. But Chesterton has taught me that the anachronism is part of the point: our means of celebrating and singing dwell in mystical unity with the songs of the angels and the shepherds on the Holy Night.

You know what this world needs? People need to stop “trolling” each other on social media and start trolling ancient yuletide carols!

Really Rapid Wrap-up of Rather Recent Reading

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to write a post. The biggest part of my problem has actually been the reading. I set up my yearly schedule assuming that a history book or biography will come in at around six-hundred pages. But here in the last weeks of the year, when I don’t have much leeway, I opened up this year’s volume in the Oxford History of the United States and found out it was nine-hundred pages long and then started the biography of Grant that I had chosen only to find that it was nine-hundred sixty pages long. These surprises form part of the adventure of e-reading. If I had purchased hard copies of these books, I would have known by their thickness to set aside extra days.

Anyway, I’m packing two months of reading into one post today.

I’ll begin the quick catch-up with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. I reread books III and IV this year, and it finally sank in (perhaps because of something I read this year about Richardson’s Clarissa) that Spenser isn’t trying to prove anything about virtues but simply aims to present the reader with examples of each selected virtue and its opposite(s) through the interweaving stories of his knights, damsels, wizards, gods, and monsters. By a multitude of examples, we see in book III, for instance, that a life of charity is simply and obviously better than a life of hatred. I love the language and the stories, and I enjoyed reading the unfinished epic enough to read it again, but only now did I really understand this plan and purpose.

Next up, Trollope’s Castle Richmond. I have to give a bit away, but only as much of the early plot as you might find on the back cover of an edition of the book. Right off the bat, Herbert Fitzgerald becomes engaged to Clara Desmond. When the two kids get engaged at the beginning of the book, you know something is going to go very wrong. It turns out that Herbert's mother was married previously to a cad who abandoned her and then, based on extensive research, seemed to have died. But twenty years or so later, the first husband shows up, arranges a secret meeting with Sir Timothy Fitzgerald, Herbert’s father, and blackmails him. Now, within the accepted norms of the time, this situation makes for an interesting, tense plot. But, wow! Why was this normal at the time? Why is the honor of Herbert’s mother dependent on whether this creep really died or not? (A later twist that I won’t reveal shows how really arbitrary this view is.) Why is Sir Timothy so convinced that his wife is too frail even to hear the news? (Thankfully, Trollope is not convinced of that chauvinistic view at all.) And why can’t they just admit the truth to the public, thus taking away the blackmailer’s power?

Now for Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands. The two volumes I've read in the Oxford History of the U. S. that seem to me to be superbly written (Battle Cry of Freedom and What Hath God Wrought) both won the Pulitzer prize for history. The two that I enjoyed without going crazy over (you’ll have to ask my wife about all the strategies she developed in dealing with my daily outpourings of enthusiasm for What Hath God Wrought) were both finalists for the prize (The Glorious Cause and Empire of Liberty). Richard White’s offering, covering 1865-1896, was not a finalist for the prize and I . . . yeah, I think I just have to say that I didn’t like it. So I guess my critical eye for good nonfiction writing, honed over decades of grading papers, is in line with the Pulitzer committee. (My wife can’t figure out why I read nine-hundred pages of a book I didn’t like.) On virtually every page, I came across a sentence whose place in the argument of its paragraph I could not discern. Many times I encountered paragraphs whose occulted relation to the chapter, I could not understand. Much of the information was interesting, but it’s presentation was such a jumble! A typical example: “The United States was still the country Mark Twain took so much pained delight in, and it produced figures hard to imagine until they had actually emerged.” Mark Twain had not been mentioned for many chapters; I don’t know what singular vision of the country Twain had; I don’t know why his delight in the country was pained; I don’t know why the personage about to be introduced, Jacob Coxey, was so hard to imagine; and I can’t conceive why the existence of eccentric people is harder to imagine in a country painfully loved by its leading author. How did the greatest publisher in the world make a deal with this guy?

Jacob Abbott’s King Alfred of England, was the only biography of Alfred the Great I could find at the time. (This isn’t the long one.) I thought I was in big trouble when this nineteenth-century book began with a declaration of the superiority of Anglo-Saxons over everyone else in the world. But it eventually settled in and provided me, surprisingly, with exactly what I was looking for: a coherent telling of the life of the great king with careful notes about discrepancies in the chronicles, and arguments about what in all the tales we can believe and what truths we can infer from the parts we can’t believe. I loved seeing that Abbott conducted his most detailed inspection of variants in dealing with the story in which Alfred, hiding out from the momentarily overpowering Danes and disguised as a farm hand, is scolded by the wife of the house for burning some bread. Here’s another thing I’m never going to do (as SNL’s couple of Sammies would say): write an opera about Alfred the Great in which his time at the farm takes up all of Act II.

I end with Ron Chernow’s Grant. (This is the long one.) Both the book and the President deserve longer, more glowing reviews than I have time to give them today. About the author, I’ll just say that his biography of Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write the musical and that he went on to be a very active historical adviser during the writing and development of the show. About the President (I already knew so much about him as a general, my main hope in reading this book was to learn more about his years in the White House), I’ll only say this: Voter suppression during his eight years as Chief Executive didn’t just mean requiring a literacy test or purging registration rolls or closing polling places. Thousands of black voters in the South were simply murdered (together with a few white Republicans). And Grant sent in troops to fight against these outrages when the states did nothing.

I’m going through my schedule for 2023 now and checking the length of each potentially hefty book. So I should have fewer days next fall when I have to read in panicked overdrive.

Watching the Wheels

I begin today following up on the last post with one more comment about the Sun in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Since the character of each traditional planet is presented by Lewis as a “splintered fragment of the true light,” i.e. as one part of the character and nature of Christ, then we can easily see Christ in Lewis’s conception of the Sun since our Lord is the source of knowledge and of transformation. And since Christ is our exemplar in all things pertaining to life and godliness, where we find ourselves in positions (professional and otherwise) of teaching and transforming, we follow and learn from Christ.

Next in the Narnia series (following the original order, of course) is The Silver Chair. The mention of silver in the title provides our link to the moon. As Michael Ward points out, in medieval and Renaissance cosmology the moon divides creation into the changeable, transient things below its sphere and the perfect, eternal things above. You’ll remember (I hope) that a large portion of the story takes place underground and involves debates with the witch about the differences between the world below the ground and the world above. The moon also affects mental health, providing another division, this time between sanity and luna-cy, a division whose effects are seen in Rilian as he passes between those two states each day. Are you a health-care worker? Whether you’re providing therapy to the mentally ill or just putting a band-aid on a child’s knee, learn from the Great Physician. (I don’t know what it has to do with the moon, but I want to mention my favorite allegorical image from the whole series, which appears in this volume: Eustace and Jill are looking for a message carved in the stone, but it doesn’t occur to them that the writing might be sized appropriately for the local giants, and they fail to recognize the smooth, closed canyons they walk through as the letters they’re seeking.)

The fifth of the Chronicles is The Horse and His Boy. Mercury is present everywhere in the book as rapidly traveling children and horses and lions merge and separate like beads of quicksilver. Human followers of the god of speed include traders and carriers. In his aspect as messenger, Mercury is a type for journalists and messengers. In his work of dividing and joining, he guides people who work in mathematics and analysis. If your line of work falls within any of these areas, learn from Jesus, the Word who will return traveling as fast as lightning across the sky.

In The Magician’s Nephew, we read of the creation of Narnia. Ward links this book with Venus. Our sex-crazed culture thinks only of Venus’s association with eroticism, but Lewis concentrates more (or totally) on her beauty and fertility. Anytime you make things, especially where you produce beautiful things, whether that means children, crops, or works of art, learn how to do this from the One through whom all things were made, remembering that “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” (Anyone squeamish about the whole idea of comparing Jesus to the planets worshiped by ancient pagans will do well to remember that He refers to Himself once as the Morning Star and is in many biblical passages compared to the Sun.)

There’s one book left and one planet, and as it turns out, The Last Battle and Saturn go together very nicely. Saturn is often depicted holding a scythe, an instrument which suggests among other things, agriculture. Lewis has already assigned the notion of growing things to Venus, though. Biblical references to the true God holding a sickle remind us that the scythe is used at the end of the agricultural cycle: at the time of reaping, the time of death. Having trouble associating the Way, the Truth, and the Life with death? Remember who holds the keys to Hell and to Death! And remember that for the faithful, death is but a transition; we might even say death is a Door. Honor Christ who holds both your life and your death in his hands. And thank the good Lord for all who work in professions of dissolution, decay, and closure. Buildings need great expertise when it’s time for them to be demolished. Bodies need tender, skilled, respectful care when they lie lifeless. And the trashman? The trashman should be paid four times what he makes now! Christ is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. Learn from Him to bring everything to its fitting end at the proper time.

A few short blog posts won’t convince you of Michael Ward’s theory. But if you’re on the verge of believing, consider that Saturn is often equated with the Greek Cronos, the god of time, and then think of Father Time waking up to signal the end of all things in The Last Battle. If you need more convincing, read one of Ward’s books. If, on the other hand, you’re sure you can’t be convinced of this theory . . . well, I don’t think you would have read this far if you’re that sure.

Here Comes the Sun

When I first read The Chronicles of Narnia fifty years ago, most of my friends who were fellow fans of the series called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader their favorite of the seven books. I didn’t understand; it was my least favorite. People sailing around finding weird islands with no thematic connection? My 16-year-old self wasn’t having it. (The 2010 film’s attempt to provide an overarching plot with its green mist and seven swords didn’t work and, while it presumed to save Narnia the land, brought about the tragic downfall of Narnia the movie franchise.)

During my most recent rereading of the book, though, I kept thinking that I couldn’t see how I had missed its now very obvious meanings and messages. Even without Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia theory, couldn’t I have seen the unifying warp thread of Knowledge (with its inevitable woof of Ignorance) running through the whole web? Making maps of unknown lands is almost the cardinal symbol for learning and knowledge. But I was as blind to it as Lucy was to the Dufflepuds at first. Oh yeah! Seeing what was invisible before: that is actually the leading metaphor for learning and knowledge! Ah! Now I see!

Ward associates this third volume of the series with the Sun (one of the classical “planets,” a word which referred to the bodies that moved with respect to the stars), and surely no one can argue with that claim. The sun shines on the gold in the lake; it disappears in the sea of darkness that drives people mad by making all their dreams come true (ALL their dreams); and its rays edify, encourage, and guide Lucy when she stands in them. If you haven’t read Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed” and you’re the kind of person who would read this post (as I suppose you are!), you should read it. It’s available online. You can probably even listen to it on YouTube, unless the publishers find it and take it down.

OK, you’re back. In that essay, as you know since you just read it, Lewis talks about the difference between seeing a beam of light coming through a crack in the door and then looking along the beam of light at the world outside. He takes the analogy in various directions, but they all have to do with types of knowledge based on how we see things. And Lucy looking along the beam of the Sun is surely Jack Lewis in that toolshed.

The main symbol of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the Sun, the Sun gives light, and light is a metaphor for knowledge. So what is it that Lucy knows in a new way while standing in the beam of sunlight? Among the things she sees is an albatross that looks like a cross, so even my teenage mind could have figured out that Lucy was learning to know Jesus better. And where ultimately are they all sailing? To Aslan’s land. Every Christian reading this book should also be on a voyage to Aslan’s land where, after seeing in a mirror dimly for so long, we will finally see Him face to face. “Thou hast said, ‘Seek ye my face.’ Thy face, LORD, do I seek.” If thinking about the symbology in the book didn’t get me to understand that the voyage is one of getting to know God better and better, I could have learned it when Aslan explains it in plain English near the end: “There [i.e. in our non-Narnian world] I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

I think I probably just needed to live more of my own voyage to understand what Lewis had to say through the Dawn Treader’s voyage about getting to know Aslan better. There is a time and place for everything, a time for Narnia to be at war, and a time for Narnia’s prince to enjoy peace and seek knowledge. But the journey to know God better in this life has been traveled before. In the book the trailblazers are Lord Octesian and Lord Rhoop and . . . oh, I can’t remember them any better than Caspian can. In our world they are the saints, whether that means people whose names get on calendars or family members and mentors who inspire us. Along the way, Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, Reepicheep, and Eustace find some of their forerunners, who have been distracted from pursuing their journeys to the glorious end; but surely we can learn as much from the errors of those who go before us as we do by their successes. And, thank God!, we can also learn from our own errors. On that journey we have times of darkness. We encounter Dufflepudlian mysteries that become clear only slowly. We sometimes have to peel off layers of dragon skin. But with all the wanderings, the overall trajectory is still one of becoming closer to God by knowing Him better and better.

The subtitle of my blog is “one Christian’s journey through literature.” So really my reading plan and my blog are also voyages of the Dawn Treader. See? How did I miss it before?

Jupiter and Mars Are All Right Tonight

In the summer of 2008, I was privileged to attend a three-day seminar with Michael Ward in which he talked about his view of C. S. Lewis’s organizational scheme for the Chronicles of Narnia, a view then recently published in his book Planet Narnia. “I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist,” he said, “but I believe I have discovered the secret to these books, a secret Lewis seems not to have shared with anyone during his lifetime.” Ward was sitting in bed one evening studying Lewis’s Poem “The Planets” when he read, in the section on Jupiter: “Of wrath ended / And woes mended, of winter passed / And guilt forgiven, and good fortune / Jove is master.” He sat up suddenly and thought, “That’s the plot to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe!” He then started thinking of whether the other six classical planets corresponded to the other six Narnia books.

I highly recommend Ward’s book if you like Lewis’s children’s series. If you don’t care to read a somewhat lengthy rendition of an Oxford dissertation, you could also try Ward’s condensation of the ideas in The Narnia Code, which was, I believe, written for use in adult Sunday School classes. In any case, I have used it in adult Sunday School classes.

In his capacity of professor of Renaissance literature, Lewis had professional interest in the symbolic history of the planets. As a lay theologian, he regarded the gods associated with the planets as conveying partial truth. As his friend J. R. R. Tolkien told him, “Myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light.” (Quotation from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien.) So Jupiter’s qualities are only some of the qualities of Jesus Christ, and insofar as we can see Jupiter, the king of winter passed and guilt forgiven, as worthy of respect, we must realize that Christ is worthy of honor and praise for this and for so much more.

Prince Caspian is heavily influenced by the myths of Mars. There’s more war in that book than in any of the other six. We are meant to lionize (pun very much intended) Caspian and all the Old Narnians who win the battles in that book; in doing so, we honor the image of Mars in them. So, too, we honor Christ as the Lord of Hosts with a sword in his mouth. 

Mars’s martial qualities are well known to all of us. After all, those "martial" qualities are named after him. Much more surprising to me is Lewis’s indication in his poem of a connection between Mars and trees. However essential that aspect might or might not be to the common understanding of the myth of Mars, Lewis notes it, and sure enough, Prince Caspian is full of woods and forests.

Michael Ward has convinced most people in the world of Lewis scholarship of the validity of his theory. He has thoroughly convinced me, and he has certainly changed the way I read and think about those books. Essentially, Ward says that rather than waiting for Aslan to show up, we are to recognize Christ’s presence on every page.

In turn, my altered thinking about Lewis’s Narnia books has improved the way I think of Jesus. Seeing Him as the synthesis of seven mighty mythical gods (and more!) make me more able to see Him at a glance as grander and more awesome than I normally do. And understanding more about Lewis’s desire to have Aslan permeate the very atmosphere of each of the Narnia books helps me to see Christ permeating our world. In other words, Michael Ward has helped me, in biblical terms, to magnify the Lord.

I’ve also come to see more clearly Jesus Christ as an exemplar of all that we might do for a vocation. In what situations or jobs do you follow Jupiter? Are you a government official? A boss? A parent? Any kind of authority figure? King Jesus shows you how to be a righteous leader. In what contexts do you follow Mars? Are you in the military? A police officer? A firefighter? Jesus shows you how to be courageous. Or turning to the relationship between Mars and trees and carpentry, do you craft or build anything? Jesus shows you in the wonders of the physical world how to craft with loving attention to detail.

Enough for now. More in a few days about the other books in the series.