Sehnsucht/ Joy may be the guidance of the Holy Ghost

Jesus tells the disciples that the Holy Ghost can teach them everything they need to know - (e.g. John 14: 26  But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.)

This, indeed, is exactly the kind of arrangement that one would expect from a loving God for his children. God would not rely upon merely human arrangements for transmission of vital knowledge.

God would (surely?) ensure that each person had a direct, independent, individual knowledge of the necessities.


The Holy Ghost is equivalent to Jesus: either is Jesus himself (as I believe) or some other conceptualisation of relation; but however explained, the Holy Ghost will bring whatever is necessary to our remembrance, into our thoughts.

But not necessarily under the name of Jesus of the Holy Ghost - perhaps not identified or perhaps misidentified.

Yet the quality of the knowledge is its own evidence - the knowledge has the quality of being self-validating: from our depths we know it is true.


Of course, anyone who has tried will know that it is not easy to receive such knowledge - there are distractions, there are evil motivations, false knowledge, demonic deception... all kinds of obstacles stand in the path.

Yet we are made to know the validity of that which is valid - this 'discerning' capacity is inbuilt, like a divine instinct. We each can - if we will it - discern Good from evil - and indeed if this was not so, then salvation would not be possible for all Men; at best it would be down to the sheer chance of what specific putative knowledge we happened to be exposed-to. 

We are able to 'hear' and respond to the Holy Ghost because we are the Children of God, with potential to become gods. When that which is divine in us meets with Jesus in the Holy Ghost; then we can have direct 'access' to sufficient knowledge to live and learn.


Of course, someone who does not know the name or historical identity of Jesus will experience the personal relationship with the Holy Ghost in some other way. And Modern Man who excludes all possibility of the divine or even spiritual, will experience contact with the Holy Ghost in some reduced and 'psychological' way.

Nonetheless, the experience of contact with the Holy Ghost is universal - although individuals vary widely in the intensity and frequency of experience. 

One way the necessary knowledge may be experienced is by the Romantic feeling that the Germans dubbed Sehnsucht. This is what CS Lewis termed Joy; and it is that quality of yearning or longing which people may experience from a story, phrase, picture, landscape, poem or encounter with a person or situation.

Sehnsucht is, characteristically, a product of human Imagination; and probably the 'modern' human imagination of the past (?) 250 years especially and increasingly. We imagine some-thing which we then desire to be in, to be part-of - we seek directness: seek to be immersed-in and aware-of and active-doing - all at once.

It is not just found in adults; but in children too (Lewis reported his first experiences during young childhood) - and is sometimes the underlying reason for our deepest , most personal and idiosyncratic likes and preferences, our hobbies and vocations - Lewis's lifelong passion for Northern-ness was triggered and revealed by an apparently innocuous sentence from Longfellow's translation of Tegner's Drapa: Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead.  


An example of Sehnsucht from my experience: In reading about Lothlorien in The Lord of the Rings; I felt a (physical) sense of pulling at my heart, of wanting something about that situation in a more-than-literal way... What I wanted was imprecise, indeed was is hard to imagine the want being satisfied by any imaginable circumstance - but the feeling itself was very characteristic.

(I discuss Sehnsucht and Tolkien in more detail in this essay.)

Such Sehnsucht may be (externally) the Holy Ghost wordlessly sharing - mind to mind, person to person - a partial and distorted picture-knowledge of Heaven; and our-divine-selves responding (internally) with a feeling of yearning to participate in Heaven.

And this - if accepted and valued primarily -  may be a sufficient basis from the implicit love of  Jesus and desire for his gift of Heavenly Life Eternal. After death, we may then recognise, may know, the Good Shepherd who promises to lead us to that longed-for country.

When most of Life is superficial, routine, when we lack engagement and involvement; when nothing in actual mortal Life truly gratifies us - then Sehnsucht may be a sufficient signpost and motivation to follow Jesus through death into life everlasting.

Perfect moments in life - their relation to Heaven

It is fairly common for atheists to feel that Heaven solves no problems . One idea is that Heaven is merely a continuation, a perpetuation of life, and not qualitatively different. Hence they assume that Heaven is more-of-the-same; therefore no answer to anything...

Or else, atheists feel that if Heaven is indeed qualitatively different from this mortal life, then such a different state would not so much solve, as obliterate, the problems of this mortal life. For instance, if Heaven is a state of ego-less bliss, then 'I' am no longer my-self; so 'my' problems have been removed only by removing 'me'...

(This idea of Heaven as inhabited by qualitatively-changed "unrecognisable" people is somewhat like 'solving' unhappiness by extreme intoxication, anaesthesia or some kind of destructive brain surgery... Yes we get rid of misery, but only by getting rid of any aware state of being; by reducing each specific individual human to something other, or less.) 


But there is another way of framing this business...

When I was a young man, I did not believe in any life but this mortal one; and I gravitated towards a 'philosophy' whereby life was 'about' perfect moments - (somehow, to be decided - I hoped) expanded to occupy total significance.

I envisaged that I may be able to experience perfect moments such that one would expand to occupy my total consciousness in a timeless kind of way - or else that I might project my-self into this state; and that perhaps death would take me while in such a timeless state.

So, I would sometimes experience a perfect moment, and I would know at that time that I was experiencing perfection. (And it was important that I did recognise and acknowledge these moments.) My intention was that I would live primarily to experience such moments; and my 'real' life was such moments - the rest being just preparation, filler or for bodily sustenance.

Consequently; if I found myself in a perfect moment, I would try to hold and sustain it as long as possible; wring every drop from it. With predictable results.)  


This has been a fairly common strategy for living since the 1800s among non-Christian, and not-supernaturalist, Romantics - for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated such a philosophy, and James Joyce with his 'epiphanies' (I discovered and was much influenced by Joyce at age 19). CS Lewis describes (and analyses) such moments with great clarity in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy as being a focus of his pre-Christian life.

I would now regard this as a genuine but partial truth.

I believe that such perfect epiphanic moments are indeed possible, they are truly important, and they can happen - although they do not always happen. For example, I had many such moments as a late teen up to age about 21; but there were long periods afterwards when I did not have any such (no matter how I tried or wanted - and, of course, trying is a problem!).


So what do I now think about perfect moments?

My understanding is (stated briefly, and partially) that Heaven consists of life lived at the level of these mortal perfect moments. 

What, then, is the difference between epiphanies in mortal life and in Heaven?

The first is that perfect moments have a different purpose. In this mortal life the perfect moments are experiences from-which we are supposed to learn; for example, I have learned from them a foretaste of the many and various joys of Heaven - a vision that, when contemplated, may fill me with hope and clarify my aims.

But for one who believes that this mortal life is everything and death is extinction; the perfect moments are sad - they lead to the emotion which the German Romantics called Sehnsucht - a bittersweet yearning, which invades even the moments themselves (rapidly eroding their perfection).

Sehnsucht derives from our knowledge that the moment is inevitably transient; it will not last; our memory of the moment and our capacity to experience that memory will weaken and extinguish.

So that the perfect moment is gone, even as it is being recognised...


Yet when they are regarded as insights into the Heavenly state, the transience of perfect moments is not a problem but related to their function. Because the ultimate concern of mortal life is not 'cashed-out' in this life but the next; not mortal memory but the permanence of recollection in an immortal resurrected Man.  

(Because immortality is immunity to the entropic processes that are inevitable and intrinsic to mortal life. Immortality is perpetually-self-renewing.) 

Perfect moments, indeed, may give insight into what it is like to be a resurrected immortal living in Heaven.

We can potentially imagine what life would be like if it was lived as one perfect moment after another... Or more exactly, lived such that perfections blend-into a continuous, fluidly-changing state of being; a process of living. 


We can also see (from our experiences in mortal life) that such a Heavenly life would entail a world constituted people who all were committed to living in such a way; people for whom this was the most important way of being; and therefore people necessarily harmonised in means and ends, in methods and purposes, by their mutual love, freely consented.

I learned this need for a loving Heaven; because I recognised that so many people had no interest in perfect moments, did not recognise or value such moments; rejected the situations and attitudes that led to such moments. People who had other ideas of what life is for or about.

I presume such people would not want Heaven, and would not be found there (but some other place or places) - and therefore such people would not in Heaven (as they so often do here on earth) continually operate to prevent, sabotage and subvert perfect moments.


We can and should enjoy perfect moments, because their joyfulness is perhaps the best part of mortal life - but that is not all; that is not the end of the matter.

The joy of perfect moments is not used-up in current pleasure, nor limited by the durability of brain-based memory - because such joy signifies potential knowledge. 

It is up to each-of-us to recognise and live-by that knowledge.

What is the significance of unreasonable happiness?

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Although a somewhat Eeyore-like and gloomy individual in many ways; I (thank Heavens) have been prone to outbreaks of unreasonable happiness through my life - those times various called, Peak Experiences (Maslow), Epiphanies (James Joyce), Joy or Sehnsucht (CS Lewis) and many other things - those feelings much loved by the Romantics such as Wordsworth and the New England Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau.

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The mainstream secular modern view is that such moments have no deep significance - being caused by physiological change, or drugs, or a brainstorm... or something like that. The attitude is to enjoy them while they last, and then forget about them - because there is no special significance, nothing to be learned from them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson regarded these moments as significant - but cautioned against regarding them as evidence for optimism about future life. For Emerson they were not harbingers of anything, but to be valued in and of themselves - they were on the one hand the most important things in life, on the other hand utterly self-sufficient and free of general implications.

In practice, however, this remained little more than a bare literary assertion: meanwhile such moments came and went, the complications of life continued and then ended. Was Mankind any further forward after Emerson's explanations and Thoreau's experiments - were Emerson and Thoreau themselves any further forward? Seemingly not.  

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Yet, as the secular, this-worldly, spirituality which Emerson pioneered began to gather strength, there emerged a view that such moments of unreasonable happiness were harbingers - of a possible 'evolutionary' future for Man: a future of Men developing a higher and much happier consciousness. Such was the theme of Colin Wilson, and his books from The Outsider onwards collected and analyzed many examples of this.

Indeed, some kind of fundamental change to the human mind, society, or some combination of the two (whether or not this change was called evolution) was necessary if unreasonable happiness was to be anything more than a glorious interlude.

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Yet, even this has been subverted by Transhumanism - which purports to engineer and make permanent such moments in a scientific project dedicated to transforming human physiology using drugs, genetics and anything else necessary.

Even supposing this were possible; the implicit conviction is that unreasonable happiness is a delusional epiphenomenon - the hope is to make it a permanent delusion (and without the shadow of death to cloud perfect bliss, because death would be abolished too).

A project genetically and pharmacologically to engineer a state of permanent happy delusion in Mankind is itself perhaps the bleakest and most despairing philosophy of life which humans have yet devised.  

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What of Christian views of such moments? There are many and diverse - from the pessimistic idea that moments of happiness are most likely to be demonic deceptions; to the optimistic and positive visionary theology of Thomas Traherne.

But my particular interest is the idea from CS Lewis, and less explicitly from Tolkien, that such moments of happiness are evidence for Christianity - the 'argument from desire'.

That such moments of happiness are actually a desire-for - and foretaste-of - something not-of-this-world (since nothing imaginable in this-world could be a fulfilment of this desire); and the fact that we have such other-worldly yearnings is evidence that that desired world is real (otherwise we would not have such feelings).

In a nutshell, we are unreasonably happy because of hope for Heaven - and that hope was implanted in us by God.

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I personally find this a compelling argument (while being aware that others do not) - but as expressed in Lewis and Tolkien, it is somewhat incomplete. The reason it is incomplete is that this feeling is not only forward-looking and hopeful but (and Lewis says this very clearly) is also very powerfully nostalgic and backward-looking. Our state of unreasonable happiness is a yearning for what was, as well as what may-be.

Tolkien expresses this as a yearning for Eden - a real state of Paradise in which Man dwelt and from which he now is exiled. Tolkien seemingly regards this as a kind of inherited race-memory (indeed, the concept of hereditary memory is central for Tolkien's world view).

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But I find the complete explanation for the unreasonable happiness of Joy, Sehnsucht, Peak Experiences in the doctrine of a pre-mortal spiritual and Heavenly existence.

This was also the implicit explanation of Wordsworth in his famous phrase: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: the soul that rises with us, our life's star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.

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This I find to be a full and satisfying explanation for the phenomenology and function of these significant-seeming happy experiences: that the special quality of both backward nostalgic yearning and forward hopeful yearning, combine to locate my mortal life in-the-middle - between partial memories of a pre-mortal spirit-existence in Heaven before my birth and optimistic anticipations of a resurrected Heavenly life after my death.

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Peak experiences - the Christian difference

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Peak experience is a name for those times, perhaps moments, of highest and happiest consciousness.

Opening Christmas presents with the family, or sharing a funny experience at the dinner table; walking past the ruined chapel on a frosty morning, looking at the stars and seeing a meteor...

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I think I always regarded them as 'true' in some sense, truer than the ordinary mundane consciousness, and truer than existential despair - but the question always was: true in what sense?

True in what sense?

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Some would have it that the truth of peak experiences is about consciousness and human evolution - that peak experiences are the kind of consciousness humans ought to have always, a high energy/ high frequency consciousness; and their message is that we should try and live so that we have more and more of them (each peak experience being a clue to thin kind of thing we ought to be doing, and how to get further peak experiences), until the state becomes continuous...

Some would have it that peak experiences are premier examples of the power of the imagination, the imaginative mind - not objective in the sense of having real-world factual correlates; but, yes, objective in the sense of being really in our minds and a universal human experience - and the lesson is that we should become artists of our own lives;  so that our life becomes a self-creation...

Some would have it that peak experiences are an attunement with reality, moments when we cease to be separated from the rest of the world, and recognize our relatedness - moments when we become free of the curse of consciousness, the literalizing, factual, deadly and dead hand of 'rationality'; free of socialization, of civilization, modernity - and the lesson is that we should live naturally, instinctively, spontaneously, un-self-consciously: become again (like) animals inside action and inside the world and unaware of our situation...

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But these and other variants amount to locating peak experiences in our own minds, so the peak experience is ultimately a psychological state - and the specific content of the peak experience is just a means to this state of mind.

So the frosty beauty of the morning and the light on leaves and crumbled walls is merely a means to the end of my state of mind; in particular that yearning element of the peak experience (Sehnsucht) - that yearning for some kind of ideal, eternal and perfect frosty morning - that is a thing which (by this consciousness-focused, psychological view) never can be satisfied, which has no independent existence.

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By this consciousness-focused, consciousness-based view of peak experiences, the specific content of peak experiences are merely a trigger to the desired state of mind. So, the fact that (say) frosty mornings, the stars and planets, neolithic temples or the Cheviot Hills, or the thought of Numenor are reliable triggers - says something about me and my upbringing and the way my mind (brain) is set-up; but nothing about the ultimate nature of reality - and this consciousness-centred view of peak experiences would regard it as an error to suppose that I can ever find any of these thing in actual, factual reality.

In effect, peak experiences are like dreams - those rare paradisal dreams; and the only way that those dreams can be made 'real' is for us to dream them continuously.

By this perspective, the only possible 'place' we can find the content of our peak experiences is in the world of imagination. The only place I can find Numenor is in my own interpretation of the fictional works of JRR Tolkien and any further fictional works I may find or make on the topic; and the only way I could be in Numenor is to imagine I am in Numenor; and the only way - even in theory - I could be in Numenor 'permanently' would be to live in a dream (or a psychotic delusion).

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So, to locate peak experiences, our best moments, in imagination is to yearn that life be a dream: a chosen dream, a lucid dream, a self-fulfilment dream - but 'just a dream' nonetheless.

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By contrast, as a Christian my understand of peak experiences, and my interpretation of peak experiences as a glimpse of reality - locates them not in dreams, delusions, fictions, imaginations or the products of human creativity but in Heaven.

The feeling I get on a frosty morning becomes a glimpse of objective external reality, existing independent of myself and my mind or brain, and the reason I am made so happy about it is that this glimpse is a promise!

For a Christian, the yearning (the Sehnsucht) is like the child's yearning for Christmas - that is a yearning for something that really will happen; but it really will happen in a fully satisfying and permanent way. The only question being: whether I personally want to join this happening?

Christmas will happen, and it will be everything I hope for; the question is whether I want to 'join-in' and celebrate it?

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But what of the specifics? If I yearn for the past, or an imagined place like Numenor, do they literally exist and could I literally live there in some kind of actuality that was not merely a self-gratifying daydream or happy delusion?

The answer is that these things and places and people are literally real but incompletely understood and distortedly understood - that all the things which trigger peak experiences are glimpses of the same thing - and indeed we already know this, instinctively.

We already know that peak experiences are not atomic and autonomous and one-off and disconnected and contradicting; but instead all peak experiences are linked, are separate glimpses of the same thing which - if we could see it properly and comprehend it - is one coherent and harmonious thing. Our peak experiences are momentary understandings of permanent reality; which is an actual place where we as actual people (as ourselves) can go and will go if we consent to it.

What we cannot have, is the partial glimpse only and detached; we cannot have a permanent and satisfying inhabiting of nothing-but a frosty chapel, a family joke, Christmas morning or Numenor.

Rather, what we can have is a life of the essence of all of these (and more).

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So, in the end, peak experiences are either about a real, actual and possible place and situation that we ourselves could actually inhabit; or else they point to a world of lovely dreams and fulfilling delusions and gratifying self-deceptions.

That is the Christian difference. The peak experiences happen (thank God) either way: the frost on the fallen leaves has the same psychological effect up-front. But the Christian difference is that peak experiences are ultimately really real. It is what happens the moment after the peak experience that is different - when we ask ourselves 'what does that experience mean?

When I am a Christian, the momentary feeling of joy I get from that single frost-edged fern is a partial and distorted but true vision of some actual place that I can actually dwell-in.

And that difference makes for a big difference.

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Think of it as a child would see it. The child has a fantasy which thrills him, which he loves, which he years-for - King Arthur or Robin Hood, Power Rangers or Bionicle, whatever it may be. He wants it to be real: really-real - actually existing as a place that he could go to, with all the things he most loves about it; and not a disappointment but as good as he hopes-for, when he gets there.

Anything less is a failure.

Anything less is not really-real.

Anything less is just something else - any adult who tries to tell the child that he really doesn't want that but wants something else, it perceived as practising a bait-and-switch.  

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Christianity properly understood, properly explained, must be really-real, and must satisfy the most powerful yearnings of children - not of course immediately, here and now - but ultimately, the promise is (must be) to give us in reality what we most deeply want in our imaginations.

Not something else, but that.

Because those deepest yearnings are placed in us by God to guide us back to Him, and are (or should be) our source of hope beyond current circumstances.

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Thus Christianity truly is wish-fulfilment - not whim-fulfilment, but that which we must deeply, earnestly, really wish for - what we, as children of God, and as actual children, most wish for - excitement, happiness, fighting and rest, knowing everything that we want to know, perfect health and healing of all hurts, to love and be loved - securely and forever.

That is the Heaven that is glimpsed by peak experiences. Anything less is not enough. Anything other is not what we want.

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A straight answer to a plain question.

The child asks: is it real, can I go there?

The answer: yes, and yes.

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Tolkien's ‘The Marring of Men’

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Heaven and the Human Condition in ‘The Marring of Men’ (‘The debate of Finrod and Andreth’)

Bruce G Charlton. The Chronicle of the Oxford University C.S. Lewis Society, 2008; Vol 5, Issue 3: 20-29


The Argument from Desire

One of C.S. Lewis’s most famous arguments in support of Christianity is that the instinctive but otherworldly yearning emotion of ‘joy’ (in German, Sehnsucht) implies that there exists some means of satisfying this urge; otherwise humans would not experience it.

This is sometimes termed the ‘argument from desire’. In brief, it states that because humans profoundly and spontaneously desire something not of this world, the experience suggests the reality of the supernatural. Lewis used the argument in many of his best known Christian writings. In Mere Christianity, he argues that ‘[i]f I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world’. In ‘The Weight of Glory’, he notes that ‘we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy’. And in the autobiographical Surprised by Joy, he comments that ‘[i]n a sense, the central story of [his] life is about nothing else’.

But Lewis is not the only among his friends to formulate an argument from desire. Perhaps the idea’s most powerful and compelling exposition can be found in a little-known and recently-published (1993) story by Lewis’ great friend J.R.R. Tolkien; a tale which was written in about 1959 and appears in the middle of Volume X of The History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in twelve volumes between 1983 and 1996 [1]. Since The History of Middle-earth is read only by Tolkien scholars and enthusiasts, this wonderful dialogue is at present little known or discussed.

It is, of course, no coincidence that both Lewis and Tolkien should write of the argument from desire, since Lewis’s own conversion to Christianity was shaped by this argument: both Tolkien and Hugo Dyson used it in the famous late night conversation of September 1929 on Addison’s Walk in Magdalen College – an event which was recorded by both Lewis and Tolkien. Tolkien’s epistolary poem ‘Mythopoeia’ (addressed to Lewis) outflanks the counter-argument that this is mere wishful thinking or day-dreaming by asking the question: ‘Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream?’ And Tolkien used the argument again in a letter to his son Christopher dated 30 January 1945, in reference to the human yearning for the Garden of Eden:

…certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’ [2].

But in ‘The Marring of Men’, Tolkien makes the argument from desire the basis of a fiction – and, as so often, Tolkien’s most personal concerns are most powerfully expressed in the terms of the mythic ‘secondary world’ he created.


‘The Marring of Men’

Tolkien’s story was never formally named – but probably the most compelling of its alternative titles was ‘The Marring of Men’ which I have adopted here . In the History of Middle-earth, the story is given its Elven name, ‘Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth’, translated as ‘The Debate of Finrod and Andreth’. The text of J.R.R. Tolkien’s story is about twenty pages long, with a further forty pages of notes and supplementary material compiled from other writings by J.R.R. Tolkien and notes by Christopher Tolkien.

‘The Marring of Men’ is part of the Silmarillion body of texts, which were composed over many decades, from Tolkien’s young adulthood during World War I right up until his death in 1973. This body of texts is sometimes referred to in its totality as Tolkien’s ‘Legendarium’, to distinguish it from the single volume Silmarillion selected by J.R.R. Tolkien’s son Christopher, and published in 1978.

The situation in ‘The Marring of Men’ is that of a conversation between Andreth, a mortal human woman, and Finrod Felagund, an immortal Noldo, a ‘High’ Elf. The explicit subject of their conversation is the nature and meaning of mortality, and its implications for the human condition – a subject which is probably the most fundamental of all religious topics, and which is certainly the single main interest and underlying theme of most of Tolkien’s fiction, including The Lord of the Rings. The implicit subject of the conversation is original sin and the fallen nature of Man – which is why the title ‘The Marring of Men’ seems appropriate.

But the conversation between Andreth and Finrod is not simply an abstract philosophical debate: It is fuelled both by world events and by personal experiences. The protagonists are aware of the imminent prospect of Middle-earth being irrevocably overrun and permanently destroyed by Morgoth. (The selfishness and assertive pride of Morgoth, the corrupt Vala or ‘fallen angel’ analogous to the Christian devil, are the primary origin of evil in Tolkien’s world.)

The personal element comes from the fact that the now middle-aged woman Andreth had fallen mutually in love with Finrod’s brother Aegnor in her youth, and had wished to marry the immortal Elf; but she was ultimately rejected by the Elf, who left to follow the call of duty and fight in the (believed hopeless) wars against Morgoth. It emerges during the conversation that Aegnor’s most compelling reason for rejecting Andreth was that he did not want love to turn to pity at her advancing age, infirmity and ultimate mortality – but (in Elven fashion) wished to preserve a memory of perfect love unstained by pity.

The ‘marring’ referred to in the title is mortality. The first question is whether Men were created mortal, or whether Men were originally immortal but lapsed into mortality due to some event analogous to original sin.


Immortal Elves and Mortal Men

While mortality is a universal feature of the human condition as we know it in the primary world, the Elven presence in Tolkien’s secondary world brings to this debate a contrast unavailable in human history. Tolkien asks in which ways the issue of mortality would be sharpened and made inescapable if mortal Men found themselves living alongside immortal Elves – creatures who, while they can be killed, do not die of age or sickness, and, if killed, can be reincarnated or remain as spirits within the world.

Tolkien’s Elves are fundamentally the same species as Men – both are human in the biological sense that Men and Elves can intermarry and reproduce to have viable offspring (who are then offered the choice whether to become immortal Elves or mortal Men). Elves are also religious kin to Men in that both are ‘children’ of the one God (Elves having been created first). But Elves seem, at the time of this story, to be superior to Men, in that Elves are immortal in the sense defined above. Elves do not suffer illness; they are more intelligent (‘wise’) than men, more beautiful, more knowledgeable and more artistic; Elves also have a much more vivid, lasting and accurate memory than Men.

The question arises in the secondary world: If Elves are immortal and generally superior in abilities, what is the function of Men? Why did Eru (the ‘One’ God) create mortal Men at all, when he had already created immortal Elves? Implicitly, Tolkien is also asking the primary world question why God created mortal and imperfect Men when he could have created more perfect humans – like the immortal Elves?

Tolkien’s answer is subtle and indirect, but seems to be related to the single key area in which the greatest mortal Men are superior to Elves: courage. Most of the ‘heroes’ in Tolkien’s world, those who have changed the direction of history, are mortal Men (or indeed Hobbits, who are close kin to mortal Men); and there seems to be a kind of courage possible for mortals which is either impossible for, or at least much rarer among, Elves. Elves have (especially as they grow older) a tendency to despondency, detachment and the avoidance of confrontation. On a related note, Tolkien hints that Men are free in a way in which Elves are not, and that this freedom is integral to the ultimate purpose of Men in Tolkien’s world – and by implication also in the real world.

C.S. Lewis once stated (albeit from the pen of a fictional devil!) that courage was the fundamental human virtue, because it underpinned all other virtues: Without courage other virtues would be abandoned as soon as this became expedient:

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky." [3]

At any rate, courage seems to be one virtue in which the best of Tolkien’s mortal Men seem to excel.


The Fall of Men

The first question is whether Tolkien’s One God ‘Eru’ originally created immortal Men, who had been ‘marred’ and made mortal by the time of Andreth (and, by implication, our time). This is Andreth’s first view – the mortal woman suspects that Men were meant to be immortal but have been punished with mortality:

‘[T]he Wise among men say: “We were not made for death, nor born ever to die. Death was imposed upon us.” And behold! the fear of it is with us always, and we flee from it ever as the hart from the hunter’ [4].

‘We may have been mortal when first we met the Elves far away, or maybe we were not.... But already we had our lore, and needed none from the Elves: we knew that in our beginning we had been born never to die. And by that, my lord, we meant: born to life everlasting, without any shadow of an end’ [5].

Naturally, this prompts the Christian reader to think of parallels with the Fall of Man and original sin; and this analogy is clearly intended by Tolkien.

Andreth talks of a rumour she has heard from the wise men and women among her ancestors, that perhaps in the past Men committed a terrible but undefined act which was the cause of this marring. The implication, never made fully clear, is that Men in their freedom may have deviated from their original role as conceived by ‘the One’, and been corrupted or intimidated into worshipping Morgoth, or at least into doing his will and in some way serving his purposes. This, it is suggested, may be the cause of Men’s mortality as such, along with a progressive shortening of their lifespan and a permanent dissatisfaction and alienation from the world they inhabit and even their own bodies. In the dialogue, Finrod asks:

‘[W]hat did ye do, ye men, long ago in the dark? How did ye anger Eru?... Will you not say what you know or have heard?’

‘I will not’, said Andreth. ‘We do not speak of this to those of other race. But indeed the Wise are uncertain and speak with contrary voices; for whatever happened long ago, we have fled from it; we have tried to forget, and so long we have tried that now we cannot remember any time when we were not as we are’ [6].


Men’s Lifespan

By contrast to their uncertainty about the origin of mortality, the decline in mortal lifespan caused by Morgoth’s corruption of the world seems certain to both Andreth and Finrod. Later in Tolkien’s history, those Men who help defeat Morgoth are rewarded with a lifespan of about three times Men’s usual maximum, i.e. about 300 years; greater strength, intelligence and height; and a safe island off the coast of Middle-earth on which to dwell (Numenor, Tolkien’s Atlantis).

It seems possible that the enhancements of ‘Numenorean’ Men are simply a restoration of the original condition of Men. Or it may be that these enhancements are compensations of Elvenness, rendering Men more Elven (though still mortal), perhaps with the ultimate aim of a unification of Elves and Men. At any rate, the majority of Numenoreans eventually succumb to corruption and evil, and are destroyed by Eru in a massive reshaping of the world, which drowns the island and the vast Numenorian navy that is landing on the shores of the undying lands.

For Tolkien, it is a characteristic sin of Men to cling to life, and it is this clinging which corrupts the mortal but long-lived Numenoreans who try to invade the undying lands – either in the mistaken belief that they will become immortal by dwelling there, or with the intention to compel the Valar to grant them immortal life.

While Men are characteristically tempted to elude mortality – to stop change in themselves – the almost-unchanging Elves are tempted to try to stop change in the world – to embalm beauty in perfection. This Elven sin is related to the first tragedy of the Silmarillion, when ultimate beauty – the light of the primordial trees – is captured in three jewels; and it later leads to the creation of the Rings of Power, which are able to slow time almost to a stop, and thereby to arrest the pollution and wearing-down of Middle-earth.

As well as having an increased lifespan, Numenoreans surrender their lives voluntarily at the appropriate time, and before suffering the extreme degenerative changes of age. This voluntary death (or transition) at the end of a long life is described in the most moving of the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, when Aragorn (the last true Numenorean) yields his life at will to move on to another world. His wife Arwen pleads with him to hold on to life for a while longer to keep her company in this world; however Aragorn kindly but firmly refuses her request:

‘Let us not be overthrown at the final test, who of old renounced the Shadow and the Ring. In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound forever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!’ [7]

Arwen’s fate is tragic, because she is one of the ‘half-elven’ who may choose whether to become Man or Elf; she chooses to become mortal in order to marry Aragorn and share his fate. However, her resolve to accept mortality at the proper time is undermined by her ‘lack of faith’ in Man’s destiny of life after death. In the appendix, she is portrayed as regretting becoming a mortal instead of an Elf; and as having succumbed to the sin of clinging to mortal life rather than accepting mortality and trusting that there is life after death.

"…and the light of her eyes was quenched, and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter than comes without a star." [8]

The half-elven Arwen has failed to embrace the mortal need for courage to underpin all other virtues; and one possible interpretation of this passage is that this has consequences for her fate in the next world.


At Home in the World, or Exiled?

For Tolkien (and Lewis), the sense of exile is a ‘desire’ which implies the possibility of its gratification; in other words, it reflects the fact that Men have indeed been ‘exiled’ from somewhere other than this world.

Finrod makes clear that Elves, by contrast, feel fully at home in the world to which they are tied:

‘Each of our kindreds perceives Arda differently, and appraises its beauties in different mode and degree. How shall I say it? To me the difference seems like that between one who visits a strange country, and abides there a while (but need not), and one who has lived in that land always (and must)’. [9]

‘Were you and I to go together to your ancient homes east away I should recognize the things there as part of my home, but I should see in your eyes the same wonder and comparison as I see in the eyes of Men in Beleriand who were born here’. [10]

Elves therefore care for the world more than Men, and do not exploit nature as Men do, but nurture and enhance the world. And indeed Elves are not truly immortal, since when the world eventually ends, they will die; and to Finrod it seems likely that this death will mean utter annihilation:

"You see us...still in the first ages of being, and the end is far off.... But the end will come. That we all know. And then we must die; we must perish utterly, it seems, because we belong to Arda (in [body] and in [spirit]). And beyond that what? The going out to no return, as you say; the uttermost end, the irremediable loss?" [11]

Partly because of this prospect, the almost-unchanging Elves become increasingly grieved by the ravages of time upon the world, and cumulatively overcome by weariness with their extended lives. Hence the characteristically Elven temptation to try to stop time, to arrest change.

By contrast, Men seem to Finrod like ‘guests’, always comparing the actual world of Middle-earth to some other situation. This opens up the question of Tolkien’s version of ‘the argument from desire’. Finrod thinks that Men have an inborn, instinctive knowledge of another and better world. Hence, he thinks that they never were immortal, but have always known death as a transition to another, more perfect world – not as the prospect of annihilation which Elves face. Thus, he considers the possibility that Men’s ‘mortality’ is ultimately preferable to Elven ‘immortality’.

But even in this world Finrod suspects that the destiny of Men may eventually be higher than that of Elves. He acknowledges that at the time of his debate with Andreth the Elves are the superior race in most respects; but he can envisage a time when mortal Men will attain leadership, and the Elves will be valued mainly for the scholarly and artistic abilities fostered by their more accurate and vivid memories. This projected role of Men will be related to the healing of the world from the evil that was permeated through it by Morgoth.

One possible interpretation of this is that Elves cannot heal the marred world because they are tied to, part of, that world; but that mortal Men may be able to heal it because, although they themselves share the marring of the world, they are ultimately free from that world through death.


Tolkien’s Vision of Heaven

Building on hints by Andreth, Finrod intuits that if things had gone according to Eru’s original plan, there would have been no need for Men. The first-born, immortal Elves would have been the best inhabitants and custodians of an unmarred world, because their very existence was tied to it.

But since the demiurgic Morgoth infused creation with evil at a very early stage, Eru made a second race of mortals – Men – who lived in the world for a while, then passed on to another condition. Because mortals were not tied to the world, they had the freedom to act upon the world in a way that Elves did not. This freedom of Men could be misused to exploit the world short-sightedly; but it could also be used to heal the world, to the benefit of both mortals and immortals alike.

[Finrod]: ‘This then, I propound, was the errand of Men, not the followers but the heirs and fulfillers of all: to heal the marring of Arda’.

Indeed, Finrod perceives that to clarify this insight may be the main reason for their discussion: so that Andreth may learn the meaning of mortality from Finrod, and pass this knowledge on to other Men, to save them from despair and encourage them in hope.

[Finrod]: ‘Maybe it was ordained that we [Elves], and you [Men], ere the world grows old, should meet and bring news to one another, and so we should learn of the Hope from you; ordained, indeed, that thou and I, Andreth, should sit here and speak together, across the gulf that divides our kindreds’. [12]

Andreth suggests that Eru himself may intervene for this hope.

[Andreth]: How or when shall healing come?…To such questions only those of the Old Hope (as they call themselves) have any guess of an answer.… [T]hey say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end’.[13]

Finrod cannot at first understand how this could be, and Andreth herself seems to regard it as highly implausible – a wishful dream. But on reflection, Finrod argues:

‘Eru will surely not suffer [Morgoth] to turn the world to his own will and to triumph in the end. Yet there is no power conceivable greater than [Morgoth] save Eru only. Therefore, Eru, if he will not relinquish His work to [Morgoth], who must else proceed to mastery, then Eru must come in to conquer him’. [14]

The Christian parallels are obvious. Indeed, ‘The Marring of Men’ can be seen as part of Tolkien’s lifelong endeavour to make his legendarium (originally conceptualized as a ‘mythology for England’) broadly compatible with known human history, particularly Christian history [15].

Andreth’s hints inspire Finrod to a vision which offers ultimate hope to the immortal but finite Elves as well as to mortal Men:

‘Suddenly I beheld a vision of Arda Remade; and there the [High Elves] completed but not ended could abide in the present forever, and there could walk, maybe, with the Children of Men, their deliverers, and sing to them such songs as, even in the Bliss beyond bliss, should make the green valleys ring and the everlasting mountain-tops to throb like harps’.

‘We should tell you tales of the Past and of Arda that was Before, of the perils and great deeds and the making of the Silmarils. We were the lordly ones then! But ye, ye would then be at home, looking at all things intently, as your own. Ye would be the lordly ones’. [16]

This, then, is Tolkien’s vision of Heaven, pictured in the context of Arda, his sub-created world.


Myth and reality

The conversation of Andreth and Finrod occurs during a lull before the storm of war breaks upon Middle-earth; and Finrod foresees that the next stage of war will claim the life of his brother Elf Aegnor, whom the mortal woman Andreth loved in her youth and loves still. The fragment ends with Finrod bidding Andreth farewell by reaffirming, ‘you are not for Arda. Whither you go you may find light. Await us there, my brother – and me’. Andreth’s destiny lies beyond the world, and Finrod dares to hope that this is true for the Elves also.

In Tolkien’s legendarium, loss or transmission of knowledge is always a matter of concern. The message we take away from ‘the Marring of Men’ is hopeful. We are called to infer that this conversation has ‘come down’ to us today: that it was remembered, recorded, and has survived the vicissitudes of history, possibly because we modern readers need or are meant to know this.

Just as Morgoth’s marring of the World and of Men is analogous to the Christian account of the Fall of Satan and of original sin, Finrod and Andreth’s intuitions and hopes, Tolkien implies, were vindicated in real history by the coming of Jesus Christ. And Tolkien’s sub-creative vision of heaven, as explicated by Finrod, is meant to be taken seriously as an image of true heaven, in which Tolkien believed as a Christian. It is entirely characteristic that Tolkien’s heaven should have a place for Elves as well as for Men.

Tolkien’s story ‘The Marring of Men’ – though so brief a tale – seems to me one of his most beautiful and profound: a product of deep thought and visionary inspiration. It encapsulates nothing less than Tolkien’s mature understanding of the human condition and the meaning of life. Scholars and admirers of C.S. Lewis, who are unfamiliar with Tolkien’s legendarium, may find a way into his magnificent fantasy by reading it as complementary to Lewis’s great idea of ‘joy’ and his characteristic ‘argument from desire’: Tolkien engaged in developing and completing themes which underpin much of his old friend’s best and most serious work.


1. J.R.R. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring: The History of Middle-Earth, Volume X, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 2002[1993]), pp. 301-366.
2. Humphrey Carpenter (ed.), Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), p110.
3. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p148.
4. Morgoth’s Ring, p. 309.
5. Ibid., p. 314.
6. Ibid., p. 313.
7. The Return of the King (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), p. 309.
8. Ibid., p. 309.
9. Morgoth’s Ring, p. 315.
10. Ibid., p. 316.
11. Ibid., p. 312.
12. Ibid., p. 323.
13. Ibid., p. 321.
14. Ibid., p. 322.
15. This is the subject of Verlyn Flieger’s book Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005).
16. Morgoth’s Ring, p. 319.

*

Providence, intuition, discernment: a spiritual path for moderns?

*

1. Providence

From C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy:

"What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it."


*
 
2. Intuition
 
From Blaise Pascal Pensees:
 
"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
 
*
 
3. Discernment
 
From Father Seraphim Rose: his life and works, by Hieromonk Damascene. Quoting a letter by Fr. Seraphim:
 
"Well, we are all flawed. Perhaps that is the great spiritual fact of our times - that all the teachers are flawed, there are no great elders left, but only 'part time' spiritual teachers who spend part of their time undoing their good works. 
 
"We should be thankful for the good teaching we can get, but sober and cautious.
 
"The lesson to you is probably sobriety. Yes, you should trust your heart (...) what better thing do we have?
 
"Certainly not your calculating mind. (...)
 
"Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov's constant advice to the Christians of the last times is: there are no elders left, check all teaching against the Gospel (...)
 
"I'm sorry I don't have any real advice for you in your grief, unless it's just one word: yes, trust your heart and conscience, and don't do anything to violate them. (...)
 
"The Fathers still speak to us through their writings (have you read Unseen Warfare recently?), and life itself is a teacher if we try to live humbly and soberly (...)"
 
***
 
Putting together Lewis. Pascal and Fr. Seraphim we can see a path through the morass of corruption (which includes ourselves, of course).
 
In the past it was possible to advise the Christian to be guided by those wiser than himself, join a Church (without being too picky about which specific Church), to subordinate his will to that Church, its ministers and its living tradition.
 
Yet now there are no wise; and the mainstream Churches and their traditions (as we perceive them now) have become schools of worldliness - reduced to ethical rules and subordinated to secular morality.
 
Where then can we turn? Where is knowledge that we can trust?
 
*
 
There is an answer.
 
If there is indeed divine providence we can trust experience to provide honest feedback on our choices. We will not be allowed to stray far without warning.
 
(We may choose to ignore these warnings, but there will be warnings.)
 
If we are indeed made in God's image then we have within us trustworthy intuition: a 'heart' which can discern the warmth of right choices and the coldness of wrong choices. We have a conscience which is tormented by wrong paths and peaceful in right paths. 
 
(There will temptations - with pleasure-seeking impersonating love, pride impersonating conscience; with spiritual dryness impersonating coldness of heart - but with love and humility and guidance from scripture and ancient Holy tradition these temptations may be detected.)
 
We have the potential to use our heart and conscience to evaluate and to learn from experience; to discern wisdom when we encounter it.
 
*
 
Where should we look?
 
In a time of corruption we cannot find The Good (undivided, in whole) in the mainstream - neither from among powerful institutions and high status people; nor from professional, technical or bureaucratic sources.
 
We may find goodness and wisdom among the humble, we may find it among the powerless or the persecuted. But not necessarily - and the truly humble, powerless and persecuted are themselves non-obvious; obscured by corruptly-designated proxies.
 
*
 
To experience The Good we must therefore look to the past and to 'fantasy'.
 
We can experience The Good in writings from better times and places, and from imaginative accounts of better times and places. From ancient scripture, biography theology, philosophy, history and literature; and from works like the Lord of the Rings (above all), from Narnia, and (yes!) from the Harry Potter books.
 
*
 
In all of these we can see for ourselves - imaginatively - the benign workings of providence and intuition as exemplified by the moral choices and wrong-turnings-repented of the Good protagonists; and contemplate the consequences of mistaken choices (driven by pride, hedonism and power-seeking) among the wicked.
 
From such vicarious sources we can learn what The Good feels like - we can experience Good (and its opposite), so that we will know them if (or when) we encounter Good (or its opposite) in our modern world.
 
*
 
If we are fortunate, we may encounter The Good among actual people and institutions here-and-now; but if we are not fortunate then we might not encounter The Good except vicariously.
 
*
 
Nonetheless, we should seek what Lewis termed 'Joy', Sehnsucht or enchantment; follow hunches and hints, glimmerings and glimpses; withdraw-from and shun that which chills our hearts and violates our conscience.
 
Interpret what we find in light of the Gospels and the wisdom of the past - and any good teaching we might by fortune receive.
 
And trust to providence and intuition: We will not, ultimately, be disappointed.
 
*
 

The Wind in the Willows

Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, is buried in Holywell cemetery, at the back of what was St. Cross church (now deconsecrated) near-by the Inklings Charles Williams and Hugo Dyson. I saw his modest and all-but neglected grave when visiting, and was moved to tears by the (almost illegible) phrase in the inscription ' who passed the river...'.

The Wind in the Willows is perhaps the oddest truly great book in children's literature. If you try to read it straight through, it comes across as a sequence of heterogeneous and disconnected episodes - some low comedy, some prose poems. There is no real consistency about it, even the animals seem to change size for one part to another (most of the time Toad is toad-sized - but also drives a car and passes himself off as a washerwoman).

But it is a great book, so none of this really matters - our job is to locate in it what is great, not to quibble over its inconsistencies, which clearly don't matter.

This book is one which has touched the heart of many - including AA Milne, Tolkien, and Jack and Warnie Lewis. For a certain type of English person, it is impossible to row a boat on a river, or walk through a snowy wood, or sit by a real fire in a kitchen - without recalling Wind in the Willows. The characters of Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad are archetypes.

The sense of yearning for, but  never quite touching, never quite getting-inside, a rural paradise of beauty and bliss is stronger in this than in any other work - what CS Lewis called Sehnsucht or Joy.

Kenneth Grahame was a very successful banker in the city of London, and the book is a product of that almost desperate wish to escape such a life and place, which most of us have felt at some time, or most of the time, since the industrial revolution. In Grahame's case it led him to write some early examples of neo-paganism (for example in the Pagan Papers essay collection).

If you have not read it, you will need to chose among the many editions - the one I read had no illustrations but was covered in large, black ink blots (it had been my father's as a school boy) - but my two favourite illustrators are EH Shepherd and Robert Ingpen (see below).

The book follows a loose sequence - everybody has their own favourite section (mine are probably the initial river boating, the Wild Wood, and meeting Badger); and I am averse to some of the Toad sections especially his long farcical prison escape adventure - I usually skip these bits.

The various dramatic and animated versions - such as Toad of Toad Hall by AA Milne - are at a much lower level than the book, and I would not bother with them; although it makes an excellent audio-book when read aloud (by a male voice - Alan Bennet seems to be the favourite).

So, if you haven't already - give it a try. It may stay with you forever.

Robert Ingpen's illustration of Badger's kitchen from the lovely 2007 edition

Destroying "enchantment" in the arts

Ever since I became self-aware in my mid teens, I have valued "enchantment" - that magical quality of what I might now call "participation" - which is depth and breadth, significance and beauty. Enchantment is the same thing that CS Lewis called Joy, and Novalis called Sehnsucht - and was something of an obsession for the Romantic Movement.  

I found it first in Tolkien - and realized quickly how rare it was, and how it was altogether absent from most of what most people valued and praised. Furthermore, there didn't seem to be anybody else who valued it as I did - rather, more exactly, there were differences of opinion as to where it might be found, even among those who did value it. 

Finding it was therefore something of a personal quest; and I began to realize that even when I located a source of enchantment, the trend of our times was working against it. 

I found enchantment in the work of the electric folk group Steeleye Span, especially in their supernatural and magical ballads. But after seven LPs of reliably enchanting music - I noticed that in 1975 "All around my hat" was a considerable step down in this respect. It was something to do with a feeling of "overproduction" in the music - which was apparently intended to make it more "commercial", more instantly appealing to a mass audience; and this being achieved by what seemed like excessive messing around with sound and arrangements and (presumably) performance; excessive production-control - such that the delicate bloom of the songs was somewhat rubbed-off. The following album - Rocket Cottage - was poor, and then the band broke up. 

The thing about enchantment is that it isn't usually a conscious goal, but happens as a by-product, as a part of a larger and spontaneously integrated activity. Indeed, it is not possible to get enchantment by making it primary - as CS Lewis describes and explain in Surprised by Joy.

But enchantment can be prevented or destroyed by any focus on almost any specific - it can be pulled-down, but also killed by breaking-up.

So, whereas I quite often found an almost accidental enchantment in many amateur plays and music; I only seldom found it in the work of professionals - especially when they were required to repeat performances, and these became routine. I have never seen a play with enchantment in the West End London theatre, for instance - where actors do long runs of the same play. 

Routine is a killer of enchantment; as is management, "mugging" (exaggeration for effect, as when performers show-off); more generally a striving for entertainment, shocks, horror, laughs. 

A political agenda dominating is maybe the commonest cause of deadly disenchantment. Politics is one of the most disenchanted of all domains. 

Any priority, that is, which arises from outside, and imposes onto the creative process and interaction.

The death of enchantment is a product of separation... Modernity takes an original unity, analyses it into components, treats it as a collection of attributes - and then pursues these singly, perhaps in sequence - or emphasizes on or a few at the expense of the whole.

I have even come across modern attempts - some genuine, others probably insincere - to make enchantment itself an externally imposed priority, to layer it onto works or an intrinsically anti-enchantment aspect of life (such as politics, bureaucracy, mass media, or corporate life) - as if it was some kind of sauce! This never works, but achieves the opposite. 

Enchantment is either integral to the creative process, to Life; or else it is absent   

Now, although enchantment is still discerned and valued by a few people, and can still be found and still arises (but almost exclusively outwith professional and official sources); our civilization lies on the far side from it - the nature and trend of our whole world is systematically and pervasively hostile to enchantment.  

This is apparently what I sensed fifty years ago, back in 1975; although I didn't realize how far the process had yet to go. 

And, as usual, we can't go back. The future of enchantment in the arts, or anywhere, must be something essentially unprecedented; because it can only arise from the large perspective of a lived enchanted life - more exactly from that part or aspect of a Man's life which is enchanted. 

Note: Exactly the same problem of disenchantment happens in churches, and over much the same timescale. There is near zero enchantment in church services, or in any aspect of church life - even when the Christianity is sincere, the atmosphere is as mundane as an office. And probably a majority of serious modern Christians have set their face against many of the manifestations of enchantment - which they reject vehemently as demonic. The truth his the opposite: enchantment is a manifestation of the divine, is indeed Heavenly, and the hope of resurrection. Whatever its intent; mundane Christianity does the work of Satan, quite literally.  

Final Participation is a conscious consecration of this-moment to our eternal resurrected life

For the past decade or so, I have been trying (in multiple ways) to understand the implications of Owen Barfield's concept of Final Participation - as being the destiny and proper aim of our spiritual life. 

Some modern people seem wholly enmeshed in mundane materialist thinking and feel detached and alienated from the living world - trapped inside their own heads. Their only relief is temporarily to forget this in sleep, intoxication, psychosis - and in occasional moments when there is a resurgence of a child-like sense of belonging and involvement. 

These brief times are what Barfield calls Original Participation, because they were our original state of consciousness as young children, and also (it is believed) the normal state of the earliest ancestral Men.  

Original Participation is - pretty much - the same as Novalis's Sehnsucht and CS Lewis's Joy; Gurdjieff's self-remembering, Maslow's Peak Experience, or Csíkszentmihályi's Flow state are psychological reductions of the experience.  

Such moments may be pleasant, indeed there have been times and places (e.g. some of the Romantic movement around 1800, or the 1960s counter-culture... still ongoing) when many people aspired to abandon modern consciousness and return to Original Participation. 

Although this return to the spontaneous, natural, child-like, primitive, here-and-now consciousness is powerful and alluring to many people; it has always failed - and must be assumed impossible (except briefly).  

However it makes a difference how we regard these brief moments. 

If they are regarded as merely pleasant psychological states, then Original Participation can only be therapeutic - like taking a short holiday from the "real world" of mundane materialism.

Yet Barfield asserted that Final Participation was not just a pleasant interlude; but in some deep sense absolutely necessary - necessary if we personally, and our society as well, were to avoid being overwhelmed by evil.   

However, Barfield was vague about how this might be achieved (he usually advised consulting his mentor Rudolf Steiner's work - but Steiner's techniques seem obviously ineffective, and Barfield never claimed that decades of practicing Steiner medications had led to any very significant effect on Barfield's own thinking in terms of Final Participation. 

Indeed, it seems that FP is not really achievable in a lasting and dominant way. 

So we seem rather to be trapped between impossibilities! We cannot go back, cannot stay as we are - yet the destined path forward seems blocked...  

Yet anyone who conceptualizes life as bounded by conception and death will find himself bounded by exactly such impossibilities. We cannot escape the constraints of entropy (and death) and evil. 

But this is forgetting the reality that we are eternal Beings, and this mortal life can be (should be) seen as a finite transitional phase between eternities before and afterwards. 

Furthermore (and here I depart from Barfield, with his ideas of multiple future reincarnations) a Christian sees his eternal future as including resurrected Heavenly life, following after this mortal life.

My idea of Final Participation is that it is the conscious choice to consecrate those moments of Original Participation.     

So that when moments of OP happen; we choose to regard them as sacred. 

In such a "consecration"; the momentary experience of OP is consciously recognized as being of potentially eternal significance to divine creation - and is actively taken-up into ongoing thinking.

This contrasts with, say, the sixties counter-culture response - which is to stay inside those OP moments, and perpetuate them or as long as possible. 

I would regard this as akin to a religiously-contemplative response to Original Participation. Contemplative because it is deliberately passive and self-negating. The moment is primary and we intend to stay with it, dissolve-into it. 

This is analogous to the contemplative kind of meditation where people seek a "blissful" state of consciousness and try to maintain it for as long as possible. 

The ideal is of stasis in perfection.  

But Final Participation is active and creative - hence is is both dynamic - like divine creation; and aspires to join-in-with and influence ongoing divine creation.

And all this is a choice, not a surrender. It is an affirmation of the self, not an attempt to lose the self. 

It is the choice to be a Son of God, a sibling of Jesus; one who want to join with God in the work of creation, and add to to that creative work whatever is unique in himself. 

So, Final Participation is an active self-confidence; confidence that by the "process" of resurrection after this mortal life we can be transformed such as to be able, worthy, and trust-worthy of eternal participation in creation.

Thus, FP is a state of being only achievable permanently (as a normal state) after our death, and only among those who have then chosen to follow Jesus through resurrection to everlasting Heavenly life.  

But Final Participation does have a vital role in this mortal life; because it is when we can add to our resurrected life. 

FP represents our choice to learn from experience in such a way that our immortal soul is permanently transformed.

We are talking about our immortal souls, not the conditions of our mortal lives on earth - so the fact that our modern experiences of participation may be relatively few, infrequent, brief - does not invalidate these experiences... 

FP experiences are of permanent value not because they last a long time; but so long as we choose to consecrate them.

Consecration would go something like this:

1. Original Participation happens. 

2. We recognize that it is happening. 

3. We acknowledge that this happening is of potentially permanent importance to our resurrected Heavenly self. 

This needs to be done when Original participation happens - Now: here-and-now. 

Not put-off until later. 

If we do not do it at the time of Original Participation - it will (probably) not be done. 

However... An intense imagined re-living of the moment, could also be used to consecrate that moment retrospectively. Because then the moment is not merely "retrospective" but a re-experiencing here-and-now - which is perhaps one reason why we may recollect and meditate on such moments... Why they may last so tenaciously in our memories. The experiences may be re-presenting themselves for consecration. 

Maybe, if we do this on principle and habitually; then this will act as a positive feedback and establish a "spiritual reward system" - so that such opportunities will become more frequent? 

The thing is: we modern Men are terribly demotivated, prone to despair - and any spiritual advice that diminishes or delays our gratification seems doomed to fail*. 

Consecrating our moments of Original Participation generates an immediate spiritual reward as well as a hope-full anticipation. 

Instead of OP being a tragic joy; doomed to be short-lived, doomed to be forgotten and lost by age, disease, death... Instead of this; the act of consecration transforms it into a moment of permanent and positive significance.  

As far as I can understand; only a follower of Jesus Christ who lives in confident expectation of resurrection can do this; and it will not "just happen" but must be done by conscious choice. 

All then depends on making that choice. 

NOTE: It may be objected that because Original Participation is spontaneous and natural, it is not necessarily good. This is true; and if an OP experience is not good, then it cannot and shall not be consecrated to resurrected eternal life - so any such attempt will fail. Christian discernment - knowledge of good and evil, God and that which opposes God; is a necessary part of Christian life - and always applies. 

* The mass of people are (quite literally) spiritually-dying of despair, for lack of any genuinely positive purpose in life. It seems obvious that the double-negative (e.g. therapeutic) values that are exclusively propagated, including by nearly all religions (eg religions rooted in avoidance of default divine punishment), including most Christian churches - are simply ineffectual; leading to short-termist this-worldly hedonism now, and ultimate despair eventually. 

Now is the month of Maying... The City Waites

The classic May-day song, by one of my favourite bands of the 1970s. 

For several years in the 70s, I would rise at about five in the morning, and take a walk through the woods on Backwell Hill - even if (especially when) it was a school day. 

I looked forward to this annual ritual because it seemed as if something magical was always just about to happen (and change everything for the better); although it never actually did - except for that magic itself. 

In other words Sehnsucht - although I did not know the concept at the time. 

Some pictures I find inspiring in times of trouble

In times of trouble, grappling with words is often beyond me - but pictures, and particularly the memory of pictures, is sometimes of help; sometimes sufficient to stop the descent and even reframe things in a positive way. I presume that this has always been the case for Christians (except those misguided iconoclasts who have always plagued the religion).

What 'works' seems to be a very personal matter - and certainly is is not correlative with artistic excellence as defined by secular aesthetic criteria (effective religious art often seem kitsch or sentimental or naive or over-obvious by such evaluations)... the point is what gets through to you in times of trouble. Perhaps this is why such art often is very direct.

Furthermore, evaluation of art is always influenced by non-visual, contextual factors - for example a portrait or landscape is affected by the beaty, or ugliness, of its subject matter; and religoous and spiritual art by that context - and how we feel about the particular painter and his intent, the time and place of its production, or the artistic tradition from which it arises.

(The inevitability of non-visual factors is, paradoxically, emphasised by the fact that 20th century attempts at abstraction led to the most literary and theorised art of all time! The result has been an art of near-zero self-explanatory power; where gallery visitors read the labels more than they look at the pictures or sculpures/ 'installations'; where modern art critics are more concerned about politics than aesthetics - and their catalogues are filled with words more than with illustrations.) 

For the past several years I have, again and again - most recently yesterday - found some of William Arkle's pictures valuable for this purpose or function. I offer a few of my proven-favourites, with explanations - on the understanding that this is a personal choice: the point being to inspire you to find some (presumably-different) pictures which might serve you as well as these ones have served me. 

This picture represents Jesus as Lord of this world, The Cosmic Christ; offering his gift to us in the form of a flower.

This next one is a simple but haunting picture of an archetypal businessman, about his business, but with an angelic being sustaining him - and again offering a gift of a larger, greater, truer perspective - to which he can turn and which he can accept at any moment he chooses.

This picture is one of many that Arkle did with a large face of divinity hovering above the mundane world - always present, but nearly-always ignored. The small human figure in the bottom-right is absorbed in reading a newspaper, oblivious of the fullness of what is possible.

 

Another figure hovering above the mundane world - this time a smoky industrial city; and this time the another favourite Arkle symbol/ reality of cupped hands and enfolding arms: this is a very real experience of many Christians with respect to God.

A similar theme, but this time God above an idyllic 'holiday' scene - almost paradisal.In such a situation we are more likely to be aware of the divine presence - but this may be unconscious, and rationally-denied; whereas it ought to be known, and accepted with joy and gratitude.

Here we see a pilgrim, alone, on the threshold and confronting a glorious landscape - which he needed to approach through a dark and sinister foreground.

The following picture of tea things (and several others like it) really stuck in my mind, as showing the divine immanence - God within the everyday objects of our lives - and that nothing real is dead, but is indeed alive, meaningful and part of purpose (even the supposedly inanimate).

And the same applies with landscape - although perhaps we are more inclined to recognise this. This shows a Tolkienian theme of the special quality of distant mountains, and how in heaven we can visit the distant mountains without them losing this 'distant' quality - so that our poignant yearning for their mystery (Sehnsucht) becomes a part of actual, current, conscious experience.

And then Heaven itself - with the heavenly city is the distance; and in this case travelling there really-will be as good as arriving.

For more of Arkle's pictures; visit the recently made webpage, or the (larger) Facebook compendium.


Note: In 1977 William Arkle published The Great Gift - a book of pictures and explanations (and some other writings) which serves exactly this purpose I am talking about; and can still be obtained cheaply secondhand. However, the colour and sharpness of the pictorial reproductions in The Great Gift is far inferior to that of the recently scanned web versions.

The double-edged sword of romanticism

Romanticism began to arise in the minds of Men from about the middle of the 1700s, in Western Europe - and has spread from there. What romanticism arose from, was Man's new awareness of himself and the world.

In other words, romanticism was a development (or an 'evolution') of human consciousness. 

But there was a double-edged quality to romantic consciousness. 

Men became aware of the wonderfulness of nature, and of the achievements and potential of their own thinking - but also of opposite tendencies. 

With romantic consciousness; at times, for moments or bursts, life seemed raised to a higher level. Various names were given such experiences: Sehnsucht, ecstasy, epiphanies, religious experiences, mystical insights, joy, peak experiences... these episodes were noticed, described and pondered for the first time.

There seemed to be a possibility that these best-of-times might be insights into ultimate reality; and might therefore become continuous and permanent - or, at least, frequent and long-lasting. 

Thus romanticism often led to great optimism, happiness, and the sense of potential for a larger and better life and world. 

However; there was the other edge to the sword of romantic consciousness; which was that - in practice - these periods of romantic ecstasy were brief and infrequent, could not be aimed at and achieved directly - and the opposite conclusion soon began to emerge that they were delusional. 

The everyday reality for everybody for most of the time (and, apparently, for some people all of the time) was of mundane consciousness; of life as commonplace, dull, shallow - pointless, purposeless, meaningless...

Society was so heavily-stacked against romanticism, that the most intensely romantic individuals often felt themselves to be 'outsiders' (to use Colin Wilson's term). And, even under the best imaginable social conditions; Man's life is unavoidably pervaded by change, decay, pain and disease

And, no matter what the degree of attainment was achieved; every life is always terminated by death. 

The contrast between what seemed possible, and what was actually attainable, led to existential angst, to a cynicism that often led to despair - and was fought-against by seeking either for selfish hedonic oblivion, trying to blot-out awareness of failure and futility. Or by seeking an end to all conscious suffering in chronically self-destructive behaviour, and by suicide (whether deniably-sought, or actively-committed). 

Romanticism was therefore a mixed-blessing at best, a curse at worst. Yet, because romanticism was a consequence of the development of consciousness, it could neither be suppressed nor ignored. 

Romanticism changed everything... Yet, there was and is no 'answer' to the possibilities and problems of romanticism within the bounds of this world.

On the one hand, we now have many experiences that create yearnings and expectations for a higher form of life; on the other hand, we cannot achieve these yearnings and expectations in our actual lives; due to the many social, psychological and physical (i.e. ultimately entropic) constraints of this world.  

  

The simple answer requires that we take-into-account a personal life beyond this life; and an afterlife that incorporates those romantic experiences of this life. 

In different words; we need to regard the romanticism of this mortal life as learning experiences directed at full attainment in an eternal life to come. 

Then, but only then, can we cope-with and learn-from our own romanticism; and render romantic experiences into a positive and inspiriting development of Mankind. 

I had a little nut tree

*

I had a little nut tree
Nothing would it bear
But a silver nutmeg
And a golden pear

The King of Spain's daughter
Came to visit me
And all for the sake
Of my little nut tree

I danced over ocean
I flew over sea
And all the birds in the air
Couldn't catch me

*

These are the words, as I recall them, of an especially evocative nursery rhyme which (for me) attains to a high level of lyric poetry - and evokes that yearning joy of Sehnsucht.

The decontextualized, uncompromising, unexplained, pared-down quality; is caused (I think) by the tendency of oral transmission and pure memory to focus on the striking imagery - and the rest gets washed away or garbled.

This is what makes the great nursery rhymes, folk songs and ballads so effective - yet the effect cannot be contrived, unless by a poet with a child's gift of directness: William Blake, Stevie Smith for instance.

I feel as if I know exactly what has happened here, and it happened to me! - it is a child's dream of pure escape from a dull, hopeless and desperate situation, into wonder, ecstatic delight and boundless optimism.

*

This version has the lovely tune I knew - with slightly different words. Ideally it should be sung by a boy's voice.

A pair of nightingales

In the dark before dawn it was a pure delight to hear - not just the 'usual' one, but a pair of nightingales - calling across left to right, from tree to tree.

I don't recall ever hearing any such until the past decade; then I heard and saw one nightingale half a mile from my house, in one direction - and then another a similar distance in the other direction. And in the past few years there has been a nightingale singing from within about fifty yards of my backdoor.

It's a lovely song - not better, but more abstractly beautiful, than the virtuoso, fruity-toned, melodious blackbirds.

To cap it - Venus blazing in the south-east almost next-door to a very bright Jupiter - an egg-shaped gibbous moon in the south-west.

The prevalent emotion - other than sehnsucht - was gratitude. Quite explicit - because I now regard such moments as meaning-full, no 'accident'.

The quality of imagination

*

It is interesting how imagination works differently for different people, and for the same person at different times or stages in their life.

I am thinking of what comes to mind when one thinks of a place, person, book, event, or even an historical situation - the last one is the most fascinating, since it is such a large and complex things to 'imagine' (say) the life of a Roman on Hadrian's Wall, or the University of Paris at the time of Thomas Aquinas, or  Concord Massachusetts when Emerson and Thoreau were neighbours. 

*

I personally find that for some things the memory is usually based on a static image, like a photograph; or perhaps more exactly, something rather more like a short segment of video, lasting a few seconds.

So, for the last example of Concord, I have a picture of Emerson's study with its Aeolian Harp; a picture of sitting in the doorway of Thoreau's hut looking out at gentle rain; and a scene of lounging beside a very slow flowing river, in a meadow, on a summer afternoon.

*

But for Constantinople at the height of the Eastern Roman Empire I have something more like a feeling, an emotion experienced here-and-now induced by the imagination of being there.

The actual imagined place is neither a picture, nor a video, but includes a vista of the city in its setting, the impression of light reflected from sea, marble, through windows and from rich colours and gold - set below a solidly blue sky; choral singing and processions with crosses and icons aloft - all bound-up in that kind of entranced yearning which C.S Lewis called joy and the German Romantic called Sehnsucht - but knowingly directed at Heaven.

The specific details of what is imagined are vague, perhaps because they seem more like an inferred explanation of what might serve to induce the emotion, rather than being a causal stimulus of the emotion.  

*

It seems, therefore, that the reason that I have such an affinity for Byzantium is precisely due to the strength and quality of this imagination of the time and place.

What I get from it is a sense of what it would, could or might be like to live in a place which I and those around me considered to be a representation of Heaven-on-Earth - yet which always pointed above and beyond itself to the eternal reality of Heaven itself.

*

To be able to imagine this has (it seems to me) done more to sustain and direct my Christian faith than has a great deal of cold reason.

This is, for me, the reality of Byzantium and a pinnacle of earthly Christian life - and the facts concerning abstractions such as political and religious structures, publications and biographies... these seem arbitrary, uncertain and irrelevant by comparison.


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