Such a Foe As Now Is Entered

A 'Pretty Dark Religion'

I drove my son into town for a church meeting last Thursday -  the same youth group he attends every week.  I usually drop him off and wait the two hours with a good book and a cup of coffee. We'd gotten into a discussion of theosophy jumping, in the way discussions often do, to the rise of spiritualism in the U.K. in the late 19th century. I threw in my own bemoaning of the current state of affairs here and in England - the proliferation of spiritualism, mediums, séances and the like.  Many of the modern offshoots of these early influences were originally exported from New York to England and Europe in the mid-part of the same century. Aleister Crowley came up, and I found myself once again wondering at how he became such an iconic figure in certain circles - still is.

The great error of the spiritist, many of whom believe Christians are naive where these things are concerned, is that they can involve themselves with the 'other side' with relative impunity and even personal advantage.  Many new age witches believe they're perfectly fine where God is concerned if they simply limit themselves to a particular kind of witchcraft.  They have a sort of Harry Potter concept of the duality of existence and magic - that there is 'good' magic as well as 'bad' magic. Or, as they might put it, 'high' magic verses 'dark' magic, and there's nothing really wrong with white magic.  In fact, it is indeed good.

It's not that we Christians don't believe in the existence of an alternate spiritual realm; quite the contrary. It's simply forbidden for us to engage with it in a direct fashion - as if we had some control or could wield it for our own use. Of course magic is real.  Christians agree that, charlatans and Crowley types excluded, the medium and the sorcerer are literally engaged with very real spiritual forces. They are affirmed in the oldest of our scriptures. We, as God's people, are forbidden to consult, entertain or interact with them. The Christian has other means of oracle; we are empowered by the Holy Spirit and His gifts.   And we are simply prohibited from involvement with the other side. Contrary to being naive about the spiritual realm it is precisely our understanding of the existence and the great power and malevolence of many that inhabit that realm that informs our obedience to this prohibition. 

The Judeo-Christian cosmology is simply antithetical to the spiritist's or eastern mystic's understanding  which allows them to explore a world we consider dangerous and off-bounds.  Or, to say it in an expressly negative way - the spiritist's understanding and involvement with the world beyond this one is quite often a naive and dangerous one. Unlike the dualism of modern spiritualism and eastern philosophies that describe complementary, balanced opposites where good and evil are pitted against one another in more or less equal force, the Judeo-Christian cosmology describes God as both supremely good and above all else. God is not half of two co-equal forces but one Almighty God who has no equal.  All others - His creation, for He created all things - come after Him and are by definition 'less than' He is.  We neither worship His creation (via paganism's forms) nor attribute equality to any aspect of it, good or evil.  There is no one like Him.  This complete otherness is, in fact, the very essence of the word Holy.

Evil is not the yang to His yin.  There is no back-and-forth struggle for ultimate victory.  There is no doubt as to who is the more powerful, nor is there any question as to who will emerge triumphant at the end of things.  Lucifer's end is to be bound in chains - not by God or Christ in some final, cosmic UFC tag team championship, but by another angel.  God simply dispatches another more powerful of His angels who “lays hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil and satan” and binds him with a “great chain”.  He is later cast into the lake of fire, most likely in similar circumstances. 

Now, the sticky part is that the devil and his angels are part of the Creator's creation. How and why things have gotten the way they have is not what we discussed; my point was that those malevolent spiritual forces on that 'other side', so to speak, are not at war with God directly. They can't be.  There would be no contest; there is no contest.  He'd simply squash them like some insect.  But they are at war, nonetheless.  They are at war with the creation - their fellow angels and a less powerful and far more naive creature - us.  We are at war with a deadly foe not to be trifled with by the likes of humans devoid of the authority only the Son of God can give. We are not entirely at peace with the other side.  Our enemy is real.

I reminded my son that he was in the middle of a great story - that story includes a great enemy and a battle - a war with forces who hate us and intend to see our destruction, our ruining.  At the least, they want us taken out of the battle.  Michael remarked that, "It's a pretty dark religion, when you think about it."   I was immediately struck by that.  It is dark.  Of course, that's not all it is, and that's not all he meant, but I can think of no other religion with such a darkly defined worldview. To use the term “cosmic struggle” seems to make the whole thing somewhat remote - as if God and His angels are off fighting Lucifer and his angels somewhere out there in some far-flung or otherwise invisible dimension - far away from us. The reality is much closer to home. 

I remembering hearing someone remark once that he thought The Lord of the Rings revealed greater spiritual truths about the war against the saints than most sermons.  The overarching story of the battle against The Dark Lord is obvious, but all the smaller stories - Frodo's wound, Sam's courage, Saruman and Wormtongue, the RingWraiths, Gollum's overpowering by the ring, and his poisoning of Sam and Frodo's friendship, Aragoron putting off of the Ranger and becoming who he was born to be and all the lessons of the fellowship - all of these portray deep, spiritual truths where our own battles are concerned.  These are “the great stories - the ones that really matter”:    

All the truly great stories are one large echo of THE Great Story - the one that matters most.

Happy, but for so happy ill secured

So, tonight as I'm reading Alan Jacobs' The Narnian, and I came across the same sort of idea - this time told in more striking, poetic form - an allusion to Milton's Paradise Lost. Jacobs opens his biography with a chapter given the same title as Lewis' first chapter of Surprised by Joy, which reads “Happy, but for so happy ill secured”.  His footnotes provide the source and much of the quotation below.

 

   In context the narrative depicts Satan in the garden of Eden, his jealousy of God's new creation is evident, and he revels in devilish anticipation of Adam and Eve's disobedience. To Satan, the bliss that they were enjoying was a great illusion, for he would steal it from them.  Their Paradise would soon be lost, replaced with a greater sorrow than any joy they had experienced. Their happiness was ill secured and their garden ill fenced for so great a foe:

When Satan still in gaze, as first he stood,
Scarce thus at length failed speech recovered sad.
O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold!
Into our room of bliss thus high advanced
Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps,
Not Spirits, yet to heavenly Spirits bright
Little inferiour; whom my thoughts pursue
With wonder, and could love, so lively shines
In them divine resemblance, and such grace
The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured.

Ah! gentle pair, ye little think how nigh
Your change approaches, when all these delights
Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe;
More woe, the more your taste is now of joy;
Happy, but for so happy ill secured
Long to continue, and this high seat your Heaven
Ill fenced for Heaven to keep out such a foe
As now is entered

Similarly, the illusion that a secure and loving home life would continue for young Jack was shattered in 1908 with the death of his mother by cancer.  Lewis was only nine.  “With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.  There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”

It strikes me now that Lewis provides this particular allusion - one of spiritual assault - when writing of the end of his idyllic childhood. The death of Lewis' mother certainly changed his father, and this had an immediate and life-long effect on their relationship. Flora died of cancer on her husband's birthday. The same month, Lewis' father and brother also died. Both Jack and Warren, his older brother, note that their father was never the same, and the distance he kept from both boys afterward, especially Jack, was a tragedy for all of them. 

Within weeks of his mother's death, Jack was shipped off to what can only be described as a horrendous private boarding school.  He loses his faith as a young man under what he describes as a 'violent and wholly successful assault of sexual temptation'.  He'd later become somewhat of a 'cad and a snob', a 'blasphemous, sex-obsessed schoolboy' and a confirmed atheist. Not long after he'd entered university, young Lewis would be shipped off to France to experience the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War.  'Such a foe as now is entered' indeed.  

Lewis was nearly taken out, as we say, so many times and in so many ways during his young life it seems like somewhat of a miracle that he went on to become one of the most beloved and influential Christians of the 20th century and one of its greatest defenders.