Archive for Christian Writers
Because of my exhausting St. Elizabeth projects, I’ve missed a lot of blog-worthy subjects lately: Paris Hilton’s Bible reading’! The New Atheism! (Now there’s a pair of topics for you). All the latest summer blockbusters! (I hope to see one or two before the summer is over, particularly Ratatouille and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). And speaking of the last, I guess I could still be joining in the speculation over the last Harry Potter book and how J. K. Rowling will resolve Harry’s fate — except that I don’t have a clue as to what will happen to Harry, though I’m dying to find out.
Then there’s the ever-popular subject of the Motu Proprio, in which Pope Benedict XVI has indicated that the Traditional Latin Mass or Tridentine rite according to the 1962 missal will be more widely available. I was amazed by the amount of bloggage over this on various Catholic sites: the subject gets at least three times more commentary than any other, even posts on the war in Iraq. I’m also amazed at the extremism of some of the positions. It ought to be clear to everyone that the liturgical situation is more or less what is was before. The 1970 Novus Ordo, as the Pope is careful to point out, remains exactly what it was before — the ordinary normative liturgy of the Western Rite. So no, the decision does not destroy the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, as some have lamented. And it does not mean, as others are hoping, that the new rite they think is an abomination is on its way out, that there will be no more guitar Masses or liturgical dancers (an apparently mythical creature, which I have yet to glimpse in my many years attendance at NO liturgies).
I was also amazed at the level of ignorance, pride and arrogance in many statements on the liturgy. A large number of people on both sides seem to be bitter and relying on emotion without being able to give an objective account of whatever liturgy it is they abhor. Most of it is incredibly one-sided. Many lovers of the NO seem content to pile up complaints of the worst abuses the TLM was subject to in the past, without admitting its beauties, while Trads are content to complain about the worst abuses of the NO and treat them as typical, while at the same time making no real effort to even understand the purpose of the liturgical reform, even as a platform for criticizing it. We have to move beyond this. The truth is that every rite has its good points and any rite can be celebrated well or badly. And mere emotion or esthetic appreciation connected with a rite shouldn’t necessarily be confused with the genuine spiritual or moral experience brought about by an attentive, loving and above all humble participation in it. Let’s recall C. S. Lewis’ admonition that our primary purpose at any liturgy is not to criticize but to open ourselves to whatever spiritual nourishment is going on. And he was a man who found much to criticize in many Anglican liturgies.
One typical ignorant comment that I have read a lot of lately is that diversity in the liturgy is a somehow a bad thing. The norm, these people believe is that there should be a single text of the Mass, in Latin, the world over, because this uniformity is a perfect expression of the universality of the Church (”wherever you go, to Paris, London, Czechoslovakia, China - there is one Mass, the same Mass, everywhere the same!”). The only problem is that this uniformity of the Mass has never existed. These people seem to believe that “Western Rite” and “Catholic” are the same thing. In fact, there are a dozen or so rites in the Church, including several Eastern rites: some of their liturgies are older than any of the present Western ones. And all those who celebrate these varied rites are Catholic. When one of the uniformity posters had this rather forcibly pointed out to him, his response was basically “those rites involve only a small number of people” — so obviously they don’t count.
I’m writing this because I have just had the wonderful experience of having the true universality of the Church’s liturgy brought home to me at the Secular Franciscan Quinquennial Congress in Pittsburgh, the them of which was the cultural diversity of the Order and the Church. We had many wonderful presentations by Secular Franciscans who were, among others, Mexcian, Korean, Pueblo and Osage Indians, and enjoyed a number of native (non-liturgical) dances, which were wildly applauded.
But the best of all were the liturgies in two rites of the Church I had never experienced before. One was in the Syro-Malabar rite from India, celebrated in English and one of the Indian languages. a liturgy which traces its history back to the community founded by St. Thomas the Apostle. The other was the Byzantine Catholic rite Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, sung almost entirely in English by the whole congregation with a wonderful choir leading us. The liturgist who led us and gave instructions warned us: “we sing fast.” Most of us were surprised at just how fast. But there was nothing irreverent about the speed. The chant was easy to catch onto and melded with the experience of the beautiful and effusive words of God’s love, so different from the N0 liturgy I’m used to, that the total effect was one of golden buoyancy. It really did blow me away. Partly it was simply the fact that the rite was different: those who celebrate it every week must have to struggle with the over-familiarity of the words, just as we often do with the text of the Mass that we are familiar with. But mostly it was the connection with a living tradition of liturgy that preserves its own particular flavor of the one divine liturgy we all celebrate.
Attending these two beautiful and reverent Masses made me more grateful than ever that the Mass is so old, so varied, so much the same, yet so ever new.
Filed under: C. S. Lewis, Liturgy | |No Comments
I’m finally able to begin on what I had hoped to do a month ago — discuss the deeper cultural meaning and impact of The Da Vinci Code. What led up to this book and the film, which have been such an amazing cultural phenomenon? It is based on several things that have been going on for some years — a combination of post-modern skepticism and cynicism, rejection of the notion of an ultimate reality, New Age beliefs, spiritualism and the occult, feminism, wicca and goddess worship. One of the most popular of these threads has been a fixture in our culture for the past 30 years or so — the theories on myth and religion of Joseph Campbell, the high priest of myth in our day.
Campbell rejected traditional religion in favor of myth and metaphor. Jesus is only one of many heroes of myth. His historical existence is not important. The message of his myth, like that of all other myths, can be reduced on the psychological side to the need for individuation and separation from one’s parents, and on the spiritual side, to contact with some vague, nebulous “god” who is little more than a projection of the self. For him, the metaphysical realm is equivalent to the unconcious. Campbell’s theory, based on Freudian and Jungian analysis, was one basis for the Star Wars series. George Lucas has described himself as a follower of Campbell, and Lucas’ films followed Campbell’s Hero’s Journey pattern of rejection of and final reconciliation with the father.
Much of Dan Brown’s thought (if it can be called that) is based on Campbell’s theories. But the focus has turned away from Campbell’s outdated Freudian and Jungian analysis to an often less-noted aspect of his work: his celebration of feminist goddess religion and symbols, and his tirade against male- dominated religion. The book’s author, Dan Brown, says that Campell was a great influence on him. Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon, is a” symbologist.” There is actually no such discipline. It is Brown’s popularization of the idea of the Campbellian expert on myth interpreting its symbols for us. This theory leads us away from any idea that historical and factual reality is in any way important. Toward the end of the novel, Langdon says:
Every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith — acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors . . . Those who truly understand their faiths understand that the stories are metaphorical. (DVC, pp. 341-42).
This is almost unadulterated Campbell. This view is specifically identified with the female. At the end of book Sophie’s grandmother says, with an air of amusement: “Why is it that men simply cannot let the Grail rest?” She says that the mystery of the Grail is more important than the object itself, implying that only men with their logical and factual views want to know what really happened. (If this is Brown’s actual view of women, most of the women I know would laugh at it).
In Brown’s work then, an alternative history is presented, which makes readers feel they are pursuing the truth (and the movie’s poster says “Seek the truth”), yet what has traditionally been thought to be the ultimate goal of seeking the truth — certainty about the truth — is declared to be unimportant, if not outright denied. All trace of a belief in objective historical reality behind religion, much less a transcendent God, disappears. Which makes it all the more amazing that Brown himself goes around saying that the theories about Jesus, the Grail, Mary Magdalene, etc are true and really happened. Evidently he doesn’t understand his own book very well — that is, he completely misunderstood Campbell, even while parroting his theories.
Why has this laughably incoherent book been so popular? Many people still feel a nostalgia for Christianity and desire to be close to the person of Jesus, but they want to do it without having to buy into a Church or a specific doctrine, much less having to believe a divine being who wants them to obey moral rules. Some would say this is because the Church is authoritarian, and that its morality is preached only by the hypocritical. Perhaps, but I would guess that the deepest reason is a simple dislike in our narcissistic culture for the idea of heroism and sacrifice, true death and rebirth. Campbell’s hero not very heroic in this sense: he is still trying to become an individual and break away from his parents. He does not appear to be someone who could give his life for the world in any real sense.
In The Da Vinci Code, modern “goddess religion” attempts to mix with Christianity - but it is a Christianity watered down and stripped of meaning, because it has no use for the divinity of Jesus; it misunderstands or more often completely denies the meaning of Christ’s sacrificial death. As a result, it renders the search for overcoming evil in the world meaningless — not that secularism is doing any better.
Instead, Campbell and his latest fictional incarnation encourage us to find God within us. We simply choose the metaphor that comforts us most. We are navel-gazing gods, while war, terrorism and genocide wash over us.
This is why I’ve been very disatisfied with some of the books that attempt to debunk The Da Vinci Code. Most of them are good at supplying the facts that are obscured by Brown’s fantasies, but don’t get to the root of the actual dissatisfactions with the Church that his readers experience, or the actual world view that the book appeals to. But then, the answers are often hidden from the debunkers themselves, because Christians know so little about their own heritage about myth and metaphor in relation to God.
For instance, Ben Witherington’s The Gospel Code attempts to deal with Brown’s appeal to a longing for a feminine aspect to God. He does this by showing how the New Testament’s idea of God the Father is necessary. Many people with this kind of question will tune him out instantly. He might have done better by pointing out that well before “Sophia” or Holy Wisdom, the feminine aspect of God, was taken over by the Gnostics, she was the daughter and emanation of God in the Old Testament. Both Eastern and Western orthodox Christianity retained memories of Sophia (or, in Latin, Sapientia). In the Middle Ages, spiritual writer Henry Suso spoke of his mystical marriage with Christ as wedding Lady Sapientia. Much of his language was echoed by English anchoress Julian of Norwich, who also spoke of Jesus as our mother. Most Christians themselves are ignorant of this heritage. But it clearly serves to show that “the sacred feminine” has existed in Christianity since the beginning. Our Christian culture needs to recover something of this — but it doesn’t need to buy the bilge Dan Brown is offering to do so.
Most of all, however, it’s Brown’s (and Campbell’s) misuse of the ideas of myth and metaphor that I think needs correcting. If may take a whole book to do so — one I would love to write. At present, there definitely doesn’t seem to be time for that. But perhaps in a few more posts over the next few weeks, I can outline some of the answers to Campbell’s theories of myth. One excellent way to do so is through the works of C. S. Lewis, who wrote extensively on both myth and metaphor. It will be interesting to see who has the better concept of myth in the end.
Filed under: C. S. Lewis, Joseph Campbell, Myths and Mythology, The Da Vinci Code, Writing | |2 Comments
Well, I did it! I accepted the challenge (thanks, Barbara). I’ve enjoyed reading other people’s blogs for so long, and have so much to say myself that I finally had to take time out to set up my personal link to the outside world. I actually started to set up this blog almost six months ago, when I began planning my own website, www.subcreators.com, to be devoted to writers as “subcreators” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s words. Well, the rest of the site isn’t up yet, but I am at least taking the plunge into blogging.
My purpose in writing is to provide a place for my own reflections on the pilgrim’s way of being a Christian writer. This metaphor comes more naturally than any other, since Dante was the first Christian writer who had a profound influence on me - even before C. S. Lewis. And heaven knows Lewis has shaped me profoundly. But I believe that reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in an English translation when I was in the eighth grade stamped me profoundly — though I didn’t realize it at the time — with the image of the writer as on a pilgrimage. For a pilgrim is how Dante described himself, both as a Christian and a writer.
Dante began the journey described in his great work as a sinner with a long way to go before he reached the fulfillment of what God meant him to be as a man and an artist. It was a journey, both literally and metaphorically, from hell to heaven. He begins the first canto of the Inferno in a dark wood “where the straight path was lost,” and travels through hell, the realm of sin, to understand his own fallen nature. When he reaches the beautiful shores of Purgatory, he describes “the vessel of my genius” as setting sail to travel a better sea - the sea of his repentance, of spiritual and artistic purification. And when he at last reaches heaven and the vision of God, he says:
And as a pilgrim, in the temple he
had vowed to reach, renews himself-he looks
and hopes he can describe what it was like-
did I journey through the living light
(Par. 31:43-46-Allen Mandelbaum translation)
I believe that to undergo that purification, so that we can look at that “living light” and return to describe what we have seen, is our goal as Christian writers.
Reading Dante was one of the things that eventually lead me by various strange paths, including library work and a spell freelancing for Catholic periodicals, to get my Ph.D. in Medieval History with a strong minor in Medieval Italian literature. Then, just to make things even stranger, I dropped out of academia to continue my career as a freelance writer, translator, and screenwriter. My desire to write screenplays led me to Act One: Writing for Hollywood, and the wonderful fellowhip, mentoring and networking I found there.
I actually got interested in blogging from Barbara (see above) Nicolosi, whose blog Church of the Masses, chronicles film and Christian screenwriting, and from reading the blogs of several other fellow Christians already online. I’ll be discussing the latest films, Christians in cinema, myth and storytelling, the spiritual path of the artist, the classic Christian mentors for writers: Tolkien, Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and others. Since Jan the Maven has been exhaustively and wittily dissecting the Harry Potter books for some months, and is now promising to write about Lewis as well, and Barbara pretty much has Fannery O’Connor and Emily Dickinson covered, perhaps I’ll vary things a bit by writing more about Dante here. And a little something about my struggles with my own works, of course.
Welcome to the pilgrimage. If you want to come along with me, pick up your staff, your backpack, and start hiking!
Filed under: C. S. Lewis, Christian Writers, Dante, Introduction, Writing | |3 Comments
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