by Joshua Shaw
In the previous post we looked at the way in which Eusebius (and to varying degrees most of the early Christian apologists) considered the fractured humanity of paganism healed by the teaching of the true monarchy of God through Christ, which was reflected in the change of political order under Augustus and continually found greater purchase on reality as “the teaching of our saviour reached its full bloom.” Not unintelligbly he called for the burning of the ancient pagan texts–texts that seemed to be the intellectual foundation of much of the evil in the world.
While wrestling with this harsh view of paganism and its classic texts, we will consider in this post how one might appropriate the good in a work like Till We Have Faces, a work which does not content itself–as Christians have often done–with dressing up the “nobler doctrines of the philosophers” but goes even to the “dark recesses of the house of Ungit” to discover what good might be found (or gained) in the profoundest human errors. Eusebius had suggested Homer be burned (and he was not alone–Augustine too that thought the poets should be thrown out of the city–cf. City of God II.14-16 here ; cf. Confessions I.15.24.). All the while Lewis is, in a sense, re-creating Homer–how do these pieces fit together?
Before turning to Till We Have Faces, it is worthwhile to cite a piece from the passage we cited at length in the prior post (here):
This [burning the mythological books of the poets] it would be necessary for those who knew the truth to do instead of dragging and casting down the most reverent appellation ‘God’ into the shameful and lecherous language of mystery, nor again should they lock themselves up in in small chambers and recesses of darkness and the edifices of men, as if they would find God within, nor again in statues made of lifeless (ἀψύχους) matter would they suppose it necessary to honor divine powers (δυνάμεις); nor again would they think that doing so amid mud rank with blood and filth and the blood of dead corpses would please God…
Is this to us a mere trope? A dead metaphor like “cutting it out” or “kicking the bucket”? To understand our ancient counterparts–for there are no more temples along the street where animals are sacrificed with “enough blood to sail a ship on” nor are these the sites of prostitution and human cruelty–the ideas require incarnation in more than words. Consider now the lines from Eusebius about “small chambers and recesses of darkness” and “mud rank with blood and filth and the blood of dead corpses” and gods in “lifeless matter” in light of the following passages in Till We Have Faces, when the Queen of Glome, Orual, describes for us her impression of holiness and the house of Ungit.
About as far beyond the ford of the Shennit as our city is on this side of it you come to the holy house of Ungit…. [The god of the Grey Mountain] does not, however, live in the house of Ungit, but Ungit sits there alone. In the furthest recess of her house where she sits it is so dark that you cannot see her well… She is a black stone without head or hands or face, and a very strong goddess.
That was how I came to tell him all about Ungit, about the girls who are kept in her house, and the presents that brides have to make to her, and how we sometimes, in a bad year, have to cut someone’s throat and pour the blood over her.
I had a fear of that Priest which was quite different from my fear of my father. I think that what frightened me (in those early days) was the holiness of the smell that hung about him–a temple-smell of blood (mostly pigeons’ blood, but he had sacrificed men, too) and burnt fat and singed hair and wine and stale incense. It is the Ungit smell.
(Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis, 1956. Harpers Books ed. 1984, 4; 7; 11)
In these selections–and throughout the book–the dark recesses of Ungit’s temple becomes for us a dank, dark, vivid picture, almost as real as our experience. By exercising our imagination on such literature, the urgency in the writings of the Church Fathers presses us again. We can feel (and not just cerebrally–and sterilely–understand) the threat of Paganism. And by this sympathy–or, if you like, empathy–do we not also understand more deeply? If C.S. Lewis can do this for us in a great feat of imaginative effort, how much more might Vergil, Homer, Horace or Herodotus do for our understanding of Scripture, of the Apostolic Age, and the pluralistic culture of Late Antiquity?
All of this is of course not to say that we should become pagan again so that we can really fear the gods. For a living fear is as crippling to vigorous thinking as a cold and unsympathetic imagination. To this idea, Bishop B. F. Westcott (in an essay on Dionysius the Areopagite) says:
…Any form of speculation which has at any time powerfully influenced human thought will repay the study which is spent in understanding it, and sooner or later claim fresh regard. The variations of human nature are too limited to place any of its developments wholly beyond the pale of our interest…At the same time that which has ceased to be formidable becomes capable of a calm analysis.
(Essays in the History of Religion in the West, 1901 repr., p. 143; online here).
Words and an Historical Imagination
Another thing worth noting in this connection is Lewis’s use of the word “holy.” It should serve as a simple but startling reminder that Christianity was no overthrow of language itself and every man and woman coming to Christianity in the early centuries came with meanings, or, rather, things, already attached to the other end of their words. As Arthur Machen says under a different heading (regarding liberal theologians and pastors using traditional terminology):
To say, “Jesus is God,” is meaningless unless the word “God” has an antecedent meaning attached to it… The disciples to whom Jesus was speaking had already a very definite conception of God…
(A. G. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 56 here)
To understand primitive Christianity we thus all require–semantic drift affects us all–a certain kind of re-education. For studying the New Testament the most important thing to do is read the Old; for studying the Fathers (Eusebius, Augustine, etc.) nearly as important are the pagan authors in whose company and under whose tutelage they were raised.
In Till We Have Faces Lewis exemplified his ideal of the vigorous Christian imagination in action; in An Experiment in Criticism he justified it through argument. To that work we will turn in the last post.