Saturday 12 December 2015

Compensation

Compensation is the universal rule of life - as Ralph Waldo Emerson intuited.

When worldly fellowship is lacking, God will ensure that we do not lack for other-worldly fellowship.

(On condition of our choices and effort, of our repentance and self-correction.)

The rise of fantasy literature, and indeed the whole positive side of the arts, sciences, mass media and modern communications is a part of this: almost all technology, despite its being overall and in intention destructive, but makes it possible to find compensatory good. 

The modern situation that creates the problem will (or some adjacent aspect will) create new possibilities of solution that are sufficient to the problem. 

So - as the social nature of society is subverted and suppressed, and collapses around us; we have a multitude of new communications with fellows emerging - to some extent even in this mortal world, but also in the other and invisible world - the imagination.

(Which is, of course, a real place with real and valid content!)


RW Emerson's essay Compensation 

2 comments:

Geraint Apted said...

Do something bad and the law of compensation will visit something bad on you. But if you throw yourself on the mercy of God through Christ and believe that He is the son of God, he will bear all your sins for you. In this way, the law of compensation is repealed for a beleiver.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God."

Gospel according to John

"It means," said Asian, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know: Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

Bruce Charlton said...

@Geraint - Compensation is a law *within* the Christian dispensation - it is something which has its context after salvation has been won for us by Christ. In a nutshell, compensation is not about salvation - it is an operative factor in theosis - and stretching into the after-life.