Ken Myers on C. S. Lewis' views on Presentism

Ken Myers, author of the "Contours of Culture" column in Touchstone magazine, illuminates C. S. Lewis' thinking on "Presentism": 


"Lewis laments the mentality of "Presentism," of provincialism in time, that plagues modern imaginations.  

"How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word 'stagnation,' with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called 'permanence'?...Why does 'latest' in advertisements mean 'best'?" 

"Lewis argued that this preoccupation with the present (and indifference  to or suspicion of the past) was a function of living with so much technology

"I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image.  It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones.  For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is clumsy."

"He went on to argue that our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded - that we should live for the next thing rather than treasure and honor the permanent things - was the single aspect of modern life that detached us most thoroughly from all previous ages of history." (1)


This view is particularly pithy when cross-referenced with a letter I read recently while reading Letters of C. S. Lewis. Lewis is responding to a letter from (I am not making this up) "The Society For The Prevention Of Progress" in May 1944:

"While feeling that I was born a member of your Society, I am nevertheless honoured to receive the outward seal of membership.  I shall hope by continued orthodoxy and the unremitting practice of Reaction, Obstruction, and Stagnation to give you no reason for repenting your favour..." (2)

Citation: 
(1) Myers, Ken. Touchstone Magazine: Contours of Culture, "No Time Like the Present". May/June, 2011.  Volume 24, Number 3. Pages 11, 12.
(2)  Lewis, W. H., Editor. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. New York. 1966. Page 204.

My current morning ritual

I wake up in the morning, exercise, perform my ablutions, make coffee, and get ready for Gracie to wake up.  I lay out the coffee thermos, our coffee mugs, chocolate, and then when I hear my wife stirring, I open my office window, and start this music playing on my computer.  When Gracie walks into my office, the stage is set, and I pour her coffee and then we read, pray and talk, while the abnormally cool May morning air reminds us that while we will have to endure an Alabama summer, fall is coming.

This music is amazing to me.  Hope you enjoy it.

Beware of "Presentism"

Timothy George, in "First Things" magazine, March 2011 makes some interesting comments on our tendency toward "presentism".

C.S. Lewis noted: 'We need intimate knowledge of the past.  Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present.' For the present can become imperial, seducing us into imagining that the assumptions that rein today have always defined what it means to be reasonable, sensible, and mainstream.  Against the tendency toward presentism, Lewis observed that 'a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; The scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.'

Citation:
George, Timothy. "Reading the Bible with the Reformers" in First Things Magazine: March 2011. Page 28.

Pancakes all around!!!

Pop quiz.  What familiar foreign phrase in our vocabulary is, when translated, "Fat Tuesday"?

The observance of the Lenten season, in many Christian traditions,  is a time of preparing the heart for the yearly focus on remembering the Passion of Christ.

What does that mean for my family?  This is a period of time that we do a Lenten version of the Jesse Tree.  Each night we read an age-appropriate reading with the children, read some scripture and hang a little picture on the tree, as we recall again why Christ had to come and die.  It is an opportunity (and I try and build as many opportunities into our day, week and year as I can) to teach my family the truths of the faith.  We choose to fast from some particular things in order to spur us to recall regularly our need for His Wonderful Grace.  My wife and I read a different book each year of thoughts on Lent by different authors.  This year, we are reading Bread and Wine-Readings for Lent and Easter, which is a compilation of the writings of several authors, including C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Madeleine L'Engle and many others.  And we will participate with a local Anglican congregation in some of their Liturgical services, which are, for us, wonderful celebrations of the awe-inspiring Gospel of Jesus that we thoroughly look forward to.

Do we "have" to do these things?
No.

Do they make us a little better in God's sight? Far from it.  Kind of the reverse.  They clear our vision a little bit, and help us to see Him in His majesty and mercy.  And we are grateful.

Fat Tuesday is the English translation for "Mardi Gras".  Today is "Fat Tuesday", "Shrove Tuesday", or, as we prefer, "Pancake Day"

Pancake Day?  Yep.  That's how it is referred to in many countries.  The idea behind the tradition is that in many Christian traditions, Lent was a time of fasting.  Depending on time in history and location, the fast was more, or less rigid, and so, because people knew they weren't going to be eating eggs, fat, milk, etc. for 40 days, and since those items would go bad, they would use them up.  And what better way to use up those particular ingredients than whipping up a big batch of pancakes?

How wonderful is that?

So, if you really want to be justified before God, then you had better eat pancakes today. ***

***Sorry, that was a little justification humor.  No man was ever justified by eating pancakes.  I promise.  Even if the pancakes were super-yummy filled ebelskivers!  And even if the Ebelskivers were eaten as dessert after homemade pizza!  Hmmm...I'm looking forward to supper tonight!

Have a Happy Pancake Day!

Blueberry Ebelskivers!

the Cosmati pavement at Westminster Abbey

Stratford Caldecott, on his blog, posted the following picture and commentary about the Cosmati Pavement in Westminster Abbey:





"The pavement was laid down in 1268 by order of King Henry III who had started re-building St Edward the Confessor’s Abbey in the new Gothic style in 1245. The workmen came from Rome, with a man called Odoricus at their head. It is 24 feet 10 inches (7 metres 58 centimetres) square, with dimensions calculated in Roman feet, and consists of geometrical patterns built up from pieces of stone of different colours and sizes cut into a variety of shapes: triangles, squares, circles, rectangles and many others. The basic layout is a four-fold symmetry, but in detail the variations are endless. No two roundels are the same. Of the four "orbiting" roundels one is circular, one hexagonal, one heptagonal and one octagonal. The infill patterns are all different.

The inscriptions that accompanied the design, now damaged, read in part: "If the reader wisely considers all that is laid down, he will find here the end of the primum mobile" and "The spherical globe here shows the archetypal macrocosm."

The round stone at the centre contains colours representing the four elements. It is on this stone that every king or queen of England was crowned."


He also had this link to a BBC documentary that goes into much more detail about the pavement and its interesting history.


Citation:
<http://beauty-in-education.blogspot.com/2010/10/pope-and-pavement.html>. Accessed 23 February 2011

The Beauty of Repetitive Change

C.S. Lewis (Anglican) and G.K. Chesterton (Catholic) are two authors that have often and powerfully influenced my thinking.  Maybe because they both use their initials in their pen name.  Maybe I will start going by D.S. Clark, and see where it takes me.


Here, Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, writes about God's gift of repetitive change, and the dark substitution and perversion of that gift into the need for continuous novelty.

(This is written as if by a demon to his "student" demon nephew) "The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart-an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.  The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.  To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.  And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable.  But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balance the love of change in them by a love of permanence.  He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.  He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.  He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.  This demand is entirely our workmanship.  If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas.  Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer.  Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up." ¹

When I read that, I recognized in myself that incessant need for the novel, and I decided to begin to find, rather, delight in God's rhythms that he has gifted us with. 


Later, I was reading Orthodoxy, by Chesterton, and ran across this passage,.

"A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.  Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.  They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.  For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.  It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.  It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God make daisies separately, but has never got tired of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we." ²

These are some of the reasons that I have begun to return to a more agrarian lifestyle, planting gardens, and trying (rather unsuccessfully, to date) to keep bees and chickens.  Beginning to look for the enchantment inherent in the world God has created.  They are also contributing factors in my family beginning to enjoy the rhythms of the liturgical year.

Citations:

¹ Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1961.

Pages 126-129.

² Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw Publishers. 1994. Page 61.

The Marriage Box

Ann Voskamp writes my favorite blog.  In a recent post, she "re-posted" a letter to Ann Landers which she then commented on.

I think the suggestion in the letter is a great idea, though...not exactly risqué...it is...well...you'll see...read on:

“Dear Ann Landers: Last weekend, we celebrated my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. This morning, they left on a long-awaited trip to Hawaii. They were as excited as if it were their honeymoon.

When my parents married, they had only enough money for a three-day trip 50 miles from home.They made a pact that each time they made love, they would put a dollar in a special metal box and save it for a honeymoon in Hawaii for their 50th anniversary.

Dad was a policeman, and Mom was a schoolteacher. They lived in a modest house and did all their own repairs. Raising five children was a challenge, and sometimes, money was short, but no matter what emergency came up, Dad would not let Mom take any money out of the “Hawaii account.” As the account grew, they put it in a savings account and then bought CDs.

My parents were always very much in love. I can remember Dad coming home and telling Mom, “I have a dollar in my pocket,” and she would smile at him and reply, “I know how to spend it.”

When each of us children married, Mom and Dad gave us a small metal box and told us their secret, which we found enchanting. All five of us are now saving for our dream honeymoons. Mom and Dad never told us how much money they had managed to save, but it must have been considerable because when they cashed in those CDs, they had enough for airfare to Hawaii plus hotel accommodations for 10 days and plenty of spending money.

As they told us good-bye before leaving, Dad winked and said, “Tonight, we are starting an account for Cancun. That should only take 25 years.”

– Loving Daughter in Abilene, Texas“

What a great idea. I need to go find a metal box. For some reason, I think my Grandpa Joe would have loved this idea.

Citation:
Ann Voskamp. "How to Make a Marriage Bed." Online posting. 26 January 2011. A Holy Experience blog post, citing a letter to Ann Landers of unknown origin or date.
<http://www.aholyexperience.com/2011/01/how-to-make-a-marriage-bed/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+HolyExperience+(Holy+Experience)>. Accessed 26 January 2011.

A place for tradition?

Is there any place for the historical nature of the church in the lives of evangelicals? 

"For evangelicals to ignore or to be in ignorance of the great tradition of the church is to have lost their foundational heritage. With its passing, the faithful will have less and less of a place to stand when challenged by pseudo-Christian spiritualities and the confused perambulations of contemporary theology.  An absence of the churches theological past will produce believers who are not sure how to interpret their bibles apart from relative or fashionable opinion or who are not able to position their interpretations within the wider framework of competing claims of new theologies. Despite the information boom affecting biblical study over the last twenty years it is apparent that mere knowledge of the bible does not assist in the critical task of understanding and integration.  Scripture, without the tradition to guide its interpretation can too easily devolve into an insipid spiritualism. Even worse, believers become highly susceptible to repeating old heresies and unknowingly undermining the Christian identity and mission.

The tradition as found in the ancient confessions, the Rule of Faith and the doctrinal theology of the fathers provides truth about God, in fact, primal truth about God.  These sources point us beyond ourselves and ask us to peer out of the confines of the Protestant ghettos we have created into the main street of catholic Christianity. " 

(Emphasis mine.  From Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants by D.H.Williams)

Touché

What would you have said if you were debating this Catholic theologian?  I would appreciate anyone's comments, if you have one.

"Several years ago, I was engaged in a public debate with a Protestant minister.  The event was held at a Protestant church before a mixed audience of Catholics and Protestants.  At one point in the debate, during the cross-examination section, my Protestant opponent posed this question to me:

"Can you give me one example of a tradition that's outside the Bible and is necessary for Christians?" He sat back with a smile, confident that I would not be able to answer his question.

"Yes, I can," I said.  "It's right here." At that I dropped my Bible on the table in front of him with a thump.

No one in the audience moved.

My opponent blinked, apparently unsure what to say in response.

I explained: "The Canon of the New Testament is a tradition, a Catholic tradition, that you as a Protestant follow." I continued, "the books that belong in the Bible, and in particular the New Testament are part of Tradition.  And you accept that Tradition and follow it, otherwise you would have no bible - you simply would have no way of knowing what the Bible is unless you accepted the Tradition of the canon."

This quote was found in a book I picked up at McKay's: Why Is That in Tradition? by Patrick Madrid.  It has been interesting reading.

One pithy quote deserves another

“He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower.” 

William Ralph Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral

Quote was found here.

"As the tradition is grounded in scripture, so also the determination of what is scripture and the requirement that the tradition be grounded in scripture are themselves grounded in tradition."

Richard John Newhaus

Quote found in Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants  - By Daniel H. Williams

A way to cultivate obedience

A quote from C.S. Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost:

"The very fact that pompous is now used only in a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of 'solemnity'. 

"To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in.  

"Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a wide-spread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connection with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar's head at a Christmas feast—all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. ; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity.  

"The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual."

This quote from C.S. Lewis had a profound effect on my moral imagination.  In particular the sentence that suggests that those that are submitting to the details of a tradition are being obedient, not vain. While I do know that a ceremony can be a cause of pride, I also know, from personal experience, that spontaneity can just as easily - perhaps more easily - be a source of pride.


Quote link found here .