SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ESCHATOLOGY OF C.S. LEWIS, PT 1
For some time now I've been noticing a trend in the vidchats on this website, as more and more members are wondering what I mean when I keep saying "the fulfillment is the deception." I've also noticed a similar uptick interest in this topic from general readers of this website's public blogs. As I've already done one webinar on the topic, I thought a more public expansion of what I mean might be beneficial. I have steadily and consistently suggested that people who are interested in the topic should ponder very carefully the eschatology of well-known Oxford don and Christian author, apologist, and man-of-letters, C.S. Lewis. In so many ways that it would be impossible for me to record, he has been mightily influential on my own thinking and approach to things, as he as been on so many others. Indeed, in a certain sense, he was influential in my decision to do a doctorate at Oxford and escape the brain rot and creeping insanity of "men-without-chests" that had taken over the American quackademy, and which was by that time well on its way to conquering Oxford and Cambridge as well, via processes of croneyism and infiltration that Lewis saw up close and personal, and documented so well in many of his books and essays. It is a process of slow infiltration, of the slow co-opting of institutions away from their conceptual core into their revolutionary opposite, while retaining all the projections and images of what they were, until, in a final moment, the sheer insanity and irrationality of it all is finally revealed, and the whole process collapses in an apocalyptic catastrophe brought about, not by God, but by humans themselves. We'll get back to all of this in due course.
But at the outset of this little series, I want to clarify a few things. I will be thinking, more or less, off the top of my head and recording thoughts as they occur to me, thoughts I've had for a very long time, but which I've never recorded. This is, accordingly, a "first attempt" to do so, and the readers who may be interested in this topic and reading this series of blogs will I hope extend patience to me in full recognition that they're reading a "first draft" which I may or may not be inclined or have opportunity at some later date to polish by way of adding more detailed citations, and so on. This is therefore not a scholarly effort, a "final paper". It's a precise, an abstract, not the thesis itself, and it is definitely not going to be a finished product. It is as much an effort to set down those long-held thoughts and allow people to peek over my shoulder as I do so, as anything else.
So, at the outset, where is this going to go? As I envision this little series thus far, I intend to blog briefly about the following:
- The Meaning of "Eschatology
- The Inklings and Others: Lewis, Tokien, and "Eucatastrophe"
- Men without Chests
- Old western man
- The Scientific Magician and Parallel Worlds (with a bow to the renowned theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku)
- In the Space Trilogy
- Dr. weston
- Professor Filostrato
- Frost
- Wither
- Merlin
- In the Space Trilogy
- The Narnian Chronicles: Parallel Worlds and the Communio Sanctorum
- Various Readings: Seven Books and Seven Planets: the Astrological framework
- Lewis, Fedotov, Orthodoxy, and the Fellowship of Sts. Alban and Sergius
- The Veneration of Icons in the Narnian chronicles
- The Invocation of the Saints in the Narnian chronicles
- The Last Battle vs. the Millenialisms: Pre-, Post-, A- (and St. Ignatius of Antioch vs. pre-trib)
- Shift
- Ouzzle
- Tashlan (and Jeff Sharlett's Chrislam)
- Christ, the Temple, Israel, and Anti-Christ
That, more or less, is the outline I've been carrying around in my head since college days, and that is the outline that kept me from converting to all the "bible-based fundamentalisms" that my evangelical friends in college kept trying to get me to accept.
So without further ado, let us briefly address the first two bullet points: Eschatology itself, and then the Inklings, the "Others", and the Tolkienesque idea of "eucatastrophe."
When one studies "systematic" or "dogmatic" theology as it is sometimes called, "Eschatology" gets its name from where it "fits" in the overall structure that is used to expound theology, or as I have put it elsewhere in my various theological books, in the ordo theologiae - the order of doing theology or of thinking it, the order in which questions are asked and answered. (The books in question are Free Choice in St Maximus the Confessor, and my introduction and translation of The Mystagogy of St. Photios, and in the four-volume "tome", God, History, and Dialectic. In those works I stress the fact that theology behaves very much like Cantor numbers in mathematics: the order in which questions are asked or the functions are performed will in part determine the answer that is arrived at. To draw a simple analogy, take the simple equation 3x2+4=x. If one performs the multiplication first, then the answer will be x=10. If, however, on performs the addition first, then the answer will be different: x=18. It depends on where one starts, and much of my theological writing is about the fact that the Western church(es) increasingly start in the wrong place.)
It is within that framework that we must understand eschatology, which means very simply "the doctrine of the last things", i.e., in the systematic exposition of doctrine, that "last things covered in the course syllabus" so to speak. Thus, death, final judgement, the state of souls and persons (not the same thing, once again!) in between death and the final(general) resurrection, the final events of "the end times" and so on are all covered (or rather, jammed together) under the heading of "eschatology". One often gains the impression from studying it in this fashion that the people making the course syllabi didn't know where else to stick all these topics, so they simply jumbled them all together and threw them into a box called "eschatology". And because of this, notice what has happened: these things are "covered" without any reference or relationship to what one would think were the core doctrines of Christianity, namely the doctrines of God (i.e., the Trinity), and of Christ, His incarnation, work, salvation, sacraments, and so on. And as I shall attempt to show, that disconnection of "eschatology" from those core doctrines has proven to be a rich field upon which a whole bizarre circus of corrupt notions - the various systems of "dispensationalism" as we shall see later - has grown, notions and systems that, as we shall see, in their claims to be "biblical" are actually systems that end up denying Christ altogether.
This brings us to our second bullet point: The Inklings "and others", and in particular, the close friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, both of whom were of course "members" of the Inklings, and both of whom embodied Tolkien's notion of the "eucatastrophe" in their works: Tolkien of course in his Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and Lewis in his Space Trilogy(Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and especially That Hideous Strength) and in the last book of the Narnian Chronicles, The Last Battle. The Inklings themselves were the group of men of letters, including Lewis and Tolkien, but also others, such as Charles Williams, who would meet and discuss their mutual writing projects with each other. And the groups had a wider extension of associated people, contemporaries, with whom the Inklings members were also associated, people like well known novelist and playwright Dorothy Sayers, and their influences in such people as G.K. Chesterton or George MacDonald. If there is a theme that unites all these very different writers (and writing styles!) is is an eschatological one: how does one incorporate such nakedly Christian themes into readable and enjoyable fiction, and the answer for all of them was, to some degree, the reincorporation of myth, and what J.R.R. Tolkien aptly called "eucatastrophe." Because of this, all the members of the Inklings "and the others" had in common what the Lutheran scholar John Warwick Montgomery called "this lack of originality". They were all interested in transmitting the old traditional myth of "eucatastrophe" than they were interested in being original. In this, they were much more like the eighteenth century baroque and classical composers than they were the ninetheenth century Romanticists and their confusion of "originality" with "creativity". They were not interested in saying something new and original, they were interested in saying something old, perhaps in news ways, but the substance was unchanging. (John Warwick Montgomery, ed. Myth, Allegory, and Gospel: An Interpretation of J.R.R. Tokien, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and Charles Williams, with Edmund Fuller, Clyde S. Kilby, Russell Kirk, and Chad Walsh, p. 12).
So what is "eucatastrophe"? Simply put, it is a "good catastrophe", something that, on first glance or first pass, seems like a complete and total disaster, when things go from bad to worse, to worse still, and "even worser than that" until it "ends" in disaster and death. the Eucatastrophe is all that, but, just at the last minute, all that "badness" explodes from within, from its own overwhelming putridness of badness, as it simply cannot get any worse, and just dies of its own dead weight. Tolkien put it this way, and very explicitly: "The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy." (Montgomery, op. cit. p. 11).
And with that, we have our first clue as to why most people do not like eschatology, for the story most of its versions tell is not one of eucatastrophe, but merely of catastrophe. It's that old separation of the Last Things from the First Things again, as I hope to show to some small degree and as far as my meager abilities will allow, in the future parts of this little series.
See you on the flip side...
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