Lit by the fires of the numinous

you cannot divorce lewis’ writing from his christian morality and worldview. you just can't. i'm sorry to everyone who's been duped by this “narnia is just a fantasy story and i can interpret it any way i want” idea because that is just fundamentally untrue. if you don't read narnia through a christian lens you are unavoidably missing the thesis of the work. and you're making yourselves angry over something the author makes very transparent. just don't read it if you can't get with it.

Just the same as his good friend Tolkein.

These are men who have Christianity steeped down into their blood and bones.

Aslan is the most obvious Jesus metaphor this side of Neo literally spawning a cross as he dies.

So, this is hilarious to me.

I read Narnia as a Jewish child. I spent years thinking "Aslan is a pagan god that has followers across the different worlds. This makes perfect sense"

No one primed me to think that way. The story just didn't bring to mind Christians or Christianity.

"Be nice to others because otherwise you'll turn into a dragon" is just the same whether it's a pagan god or the Christian god refusing to help you until you learn your lesson.

"There was a god of the land that couldn't directly help it against evil without first bringing an outside force galavanting the locals into trying to help" doesn't change whether that god is a Christian one or a Pagan one.

"When you become a teen of a certain age, you're no longer a child" doesn't require any god at all.

And of course, you can't forget "be careful who you trust, but its also important to keep your promises" also one that works just as well with a pagan god.

And honestly, it made the Problem of Susan much better. Because until I learned it was about Christianity and not liking feminism, I took it to be about how Susan's spending too much time at parties and not enough time with her siblings.

I feel like on one hand, yeah, if you’re doing a literary analysis of the work, his Christianity is relevant. On the other hand, if you’re a kid reading it, the important part is that you’re engaging in an imaginative story.

We were actually just going through our bookshelves the other day and I was like, Chronicles of Narnia? Feel a bit weird about it being Christian as an adult, but also I’m not worried that it will convert my future children or anything. If the Christian part of it comes up somehow, it could be a good conversation about how different groups of people believe different things, and that’s okay.

Crucially, Aslan isn't a metaphor for Jesus. Aslan is the Second Person of the Trinity in Lewis' Bible AU fanfic.

as an atheist one thing that has always confused me with god is when the same religious people who say that god has no gender would get super pissy if you referred to god as a she…. why is god only a he? you can never convince me that religion can align with feminism

"What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it." - CS Lewis

You go back in time to kill John Calvin and just as you're about to make the final blow he smiles. "Oh, so you're punishing me for something I haven't done yet? Something that's, let us say, predetermined? Kill me if you want but I've already won." You pause just long enough for him to tackle you and grab your gun. God fucking damn it, not again

Now, I'm completely on board with the broader movement to nix Columbus Day, genocidal fuck that he was, but as is sometimes pointed out the goal in boosting that holiday to begin with was to try and throw a bone to then-not-fully-white Italians. So, armed with an understanding of the context of that historical moment, and with our eyes to the future, as we move away from that particular expression of the sentiment, I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about and celebrate some other significant accomplishments of the Italians. The sculpture, the paintings, the architecture. The literature. The astronomers. The pasta. They killed God. or maybe the son of God. Admittedly he only stayed down for three days but that's way more progress than anyone else has ever made on that front. I mean what have you done lately

when we were studying the bible in literature class (so we have the context necessary for later works that reference the bible), i think we were at the book of jonah, and one of my classmates was studying the text very intently, and then looked up and earnestly said "professor, i don't understand the will of god"

the teacher was just like. well sadly i am a literature teacher and not a priest so i can't help you there. but if it helps, many people throughout history had the same problem.

See, my question is, what if a mediocre C student with an Ivy League education has better economic prospects then a state college student with the same GPA that sure would make most of our rhetoric about education into total nonsense.

Obviously the mediocre Ivy student has vastly superior prospects vs the valedictorian at State U. Have you considered that Ivy’s and State U’s don’t have the same curriculum though?

According to a classmate I had at Div School, the Ivies are actually really easy in undergrad because they pride themselves on low failure rates.

I think we can solve several problems at once if we just assume each member of the Trinity has a different fursona

A person is to their three fursonas as God is to the three aspects of the Trinity.

It is not modalism! Fursonas are not like the characters in a play. A man is all of his fursonas even in a fursuit! God is the whole Trinity, even when incarnated as Christ!

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God actually predates Victorianism and Victorian culture was relatively unaffected by the Puritan Calvinist theology that the sermon was preached from.

My friend @apenitentialprayer (who you should be following if you're interested in Catholicism) asked me to expand on my belief that Genesis 3 is an etiological myth for puberty. The following understanding is emphatically not my own, but it comes from my rabbi and I'm not sure whether he published it so I don't have a citation.

Anyway, the basic argument is that we should read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" (הדעת טוב ורע) ha-da'at tov v'ra (Genesis 2:17) in parallel with "[he] learns to reject the bad and choose good" (לדעתו מאוס ברע ובחור בטוב) l'dato ma'os bara u'vahol batov (Isaiah 7:15). In Isaiah, learning the difference between good and bad (more literally knowing the difference; da'at in Gen 2:17 has the same root as dato in Is 7:15 (dato is a conjugation of yada)) is a metaphor for maturing. If we read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" in Genesis 2 in the same way, then we can reasonably infer that the consequence of eating the fruit of the Tree is maturation as such rather than the acquisition of forbidden knowledge.

So, what happens when we do that? Human beings in the Garden of Eden have two things in common with God: immortality and the image in which they are made. When they eat from the Tree they gain "knowledge of good and bad" which we've inferred means aging and (specifically) going through puberty. After puberty humans acquire a third divine characteristic: the ability to create life.

The curses that follow for the man and woman then describe the inevitable consequences that they will face by going from childhood and adulthood. The woman will carry babies and have pain in giving birth. She will desire (תשוקה) t'shukah (the verb is used for non-sexual desire in Gen 4:7 and for sexual desire in Song 7:11) her husband. The man will have to labor to bring for the food previously provided by his Parent (i.e. God). And of course both will die (which does happen to children, but is not an inevitable part of childhood the way it is for adulthood).

(Note that the interpretation that the Serpent is Satan comes from later Christian eisegesis is not actually a part of the myth as presented in Genesis 3.)

I never liked the idea that the Serpent is Satan, and I once took a class in college where the professor proposed that the Serpent was God, who wanted his children to have knowledge of good and evil, so that their choices would be more meaningful.

Just adding this because in combination with this interpretation, I like the idea that God-as-Serpent was encouraging his children to grow up.

Some Gnostic Christians took the view that the god of the Old Testament was a demiurge, an inferior being who created physical matter and life. It was a somewhat evil (or at least misguided) entity, and the Serpent was a higher entity who intruded into its creation to rescue it (an operation that was repeated with Jesus).

That’s also pretty interesting, though it doesn’t feel as provocative and poignant to me as the idea of God & the Serpent as the same being (the appeal of the trickster deity I guess) & it feels a little anti-Semitic/supercessionist too, with the addition of the part about Jesus, so I’m not in love with that either (though the Gnostics do seem really fascinating as a collection — much more diverse than contemporary Christianity). Did the demiurge creator also create the Serpent, or did the Serpent come from somewhere else? And where did Jesus come from, in this interpretation?

(I personally like Jesus pretty well but I’m suspicious of any myth that centers his divinity — a worthwhile message or manifesto or ethical philosophy should stand on its own merit & not rest on the laurels of divinity to give it special consideration — or anything that implies he “fixed” a broken or sinful world/society. Partly because it often has a flavor of anti-semitism, and partly because the world continues to be pretty broken, so obviously it wasn’t that impressive an act of divinity if it didn’t stick. Idk, I think talking about Jesus as being particularly divine, beyond other human beings, makes him less impressive in some ways, rather than more, unless it’s just a way of showing reverence for his particular vision. Although I do like the SRF idea that he’s an incarnation of Vishnu…but I think I mostly like that for the novelty, as someone raised well outside of Hindu traditions.)

Also I just want to say that I’ve been following you for a few years & even though I’m not on tumblr much, I really like your blog & I’m a little jealous of your course of study! You have a lot of fascinating stories & insights to share.

The problem with Jesus as simply an exceptional moral teacher is that... his teachings aren't exceptionally moral. Almost nothing Jesus said that was good is original and almost nothing original Jesus said is good (at least as recorded in the Gospels). In the Gospel accounts he mostly comes off as a bit of an asshole, annoyed that everyone else is too dense to understand his teachings and angry at being asked to work miracles for the undeserving.

Jesus was, if not a divine entity, mostly an apocalyptic preacher whose main message was the imminent end of the world, and we would regard him today as the leader of a cult that was not particularly worthy of respect.

I mean that sounds like a plausible take, I guess — I don’t have enough knowledge of the context or history to know which of the things Jesus said were original. I think the proto-communism/communalism of Acts is pretty cool. I honestly kind of enjoy Jesus being a sarcastic asshole mostly because the evangelical context I grew up in was basically unaware of sarcasm & the contrast between the golden serious idea of Jesus & him calling Simon-Peter as dumb as a rock is pretty funny to me. Makes me a little reflective in this moment because I typically don’t care for that approach to philosophy, particularly ethical/relational philosophy, & I never liked Socrates’s stupid smug jokes at the expense of others.

Most of my attachment to Jesus is as a cultural figure, particularly in the ways queer Christians & liberation theologians have interpreted him. I can’t get away from my own cultural Christianity, and I usually characterize the distance I do want to maintain from mainstream American Christianity by saying that I like what Jesus had to say but I don’t care for the idea that he was any more the son of god than any of us are. Maybe even that isn’t really true though — I’m only passingly familiar with accounts of Jesus himself, and most of the bits I’ve read in the Bible and really mulled over are in Ecclesiastes or Song of Solomon.

Might be time to reassess. I love the idea of portraying Jesus in a contemporary setting as an asshole street preacher predicting the apocalypse and easily dismissed by most people. People who predict the apocalypse are rarely 100% wrong — there’s always a major disaster right around the corner. I just think — if someone has divine abilities, that doesn’t make their words any more credible. It’s like saying that because someone can do magic, they’re definitely also psychic. Or because someone is a genius scientist, they can definitely solve geo-political problems. People do jump to those kinds of conclusions, but they don’t naturally follow, and I’m mistrustful of any logic that links them intrinsically.

I don’t think I’m ready to let go of the progressive Jesus headcanons entirely, because as an aspiring storyteller I think they can be evocative & persuasive & I want to meet people where they’re at, but I guess I need to stop conflating them with the historical or strictly biblical Jesus, which I think I’ve done because of how much the reactionary Jesus headcanons are conflated with those 2 distinct entities. It’s politically charged, disputed territory. I don’t want to cede that ground because I think it’s equally valid to create an image of Jesus as a communist & minority community organizer as it is to create an image of him as a reactionary capitalist enforcing punishment for crimes of survival & sexual difference. Both ideas are projecting a lot of modern constructs onto him & neither of them really work with the source texts gracefully.

I guess what I’m discovering here is that I am in favor of a multitude of inaccurate Jesuses totally divorced from historical context, and also I am curious about the historical context because it informs those inaccurate Jesuses and can make them feel more believable. Not sure how I feel about that. Not sure how you feel about that!

#it’s just that he said a few things that make some amount of sense to me#& I’m not too mad about anything he said that I know about except maybe the thoughtcrime

Most of what people think they like that Jesus said is from the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, and thoughtcrime isn't and afterthought of that Sermon, it's a central pillar. Jesus emphasizes several things in that sermon, one of which is that the standard God demands is perfection. And lest anyone think that they are perfect, he says that even if you've been outwardly obeying all the commandments, internally you still break them.

Progressives tend to focus on a particular theme in the Bible. In the Old Testament that theme is expressed as "God loves the poor, the outcast, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan." In the New Testament it's expanded to "And therefore God hates the rich." In Luke particularly there's a sense that salvation is something the poor have by dint of their poverty. Salvation is something needed only by those who aren't poor.

And as a leftist I don't really disagree with the ideal that wealth is (or can be) immoral. But as a person who lives in a society, I'm not sure that "God hates the rich" is a useful belief that aids one in loving one's neighbor as oneself; certainly the corollary, that poverty is virtuous, isn't true.

The Beatitudes are lovely, but they aren't the only message of the Sermon and they aren't original to Jesus. And a lot of the Sermon's other messages are fanatical apocalypticism, a glorification of poverty, a call to abandon your responsibilities to your family and neighbors, and the idea that you can sin without outwardly doing wrong. In my opinion, the good stuff isn't worth the stuff it's packed in with.

i read CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed one time years ago and i’m still not recovered from it

— A Grief Observed: part i-ii, C.S. Lewis x

I need y'all to understand that he wrote this famous passage in the middle of her brief remission -

A Grief Observed is Lewis' most vulnerable, authentic work and is more worth reading than everything else he wrote combined.

My friend @apenitentialprayer (who you should be following if you're interested in Catholicism) asked me to expand on my belief that Genesis 3 is an etiological myth for puberty. The following understanding is emphatically not my own, but it comes from my rabbi and I'm not sure whether he published it so I don't have a citation.

Anyway, the basic argument is that we should read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" (הדעת טוב ורע) ha-da'at tov v'ra (Genesis 2:17) in parallel with "[he] learns to reject the bad and choose good" (לדעתו מאוס ברע ובחור בטוב) l'dato ma'os bara u'vahol batov (Isaiah 7:15). In Isaiah, learning the difference between good and bad (more literally knowing the difference; da'at in Gen 2:17 has the same root as dato in Is 7:15 (dato is a conjugation of yada)) is a metaphor for maturing. If we read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" in Genesis 2 in the same way, then we can reasonably infer that the consequence of eating the fruit of the Tree is maturation as such rather than the acquisition of forbidden knowledge.

So, what happens when we do that? Human beings in the Garden of Eden have two things in common with God: immortality and the image in which they are made. When they eat from the Tree they gain "knowledge of good and bad" which we've inferred means aging and (specifically) going through puberty. After puberty humans acquire a third divine characteristic: the ability to create life.

The curses that follow for the man and woman then describe the inevitable consequences that they will face by going from childhood and adulthood. The woman will carry babies and have pain in giving birth. She will desire (תשוקה) t'shukah (the verb is used for non-sexual desire in Gen 4:7 and for sexual desire in Song 7:11) her husband. The man will have to labor to bring for the food previously provided by his Parent (i.e. God). And of course both will die (which does happen to children, but is not an inevitable part of childhood the way it is for adulthood).

(Note that the interpretation that the Serpent is Satan comes from later Christian eisegesis is not actually a part of the myth as presented in Genesis 3.)

I never liked the idea that the Serpent is Satan, and I once took a class in college where the professor proposed that the Serpent was God, who wanted his children to have knowledge of good and evil, so that their choices would be more meaningful.

Just adding this because in combination with this interpretation, I like the idea that God-as-Serpent was encouraging his children to grow up.

Some Gnostic Christians took the view that the god of the Old Testament was a demiurge, an inferior being who created physical matter and life. It was a somewhat evil (or at least misguided) entity, and the Serpent was a higher entity who intruded into its creation to rescue it (an operation that was repeated with Jesus).

That’s also pretty interesting, though it doesn’t feel as provocative and poignant to me as the idea of God & the Serpent as the same being (the appeal of the trickster deity I guess) & it feels a little anti-Semitic/supercessionist too, with the addition of the part about Jesus, so I’m not in love with that either (though the Gnostics do seem really fascinating as a collection — much more diverse than contemporary Christianity). Did the demiurge creator also create the Serpent, or did the Serpent come from somewhere else? And where did Jesus come from, in this interpretation?

(I personally like Jesus pretty well but I’m suspicious of any myth that centers his divinity — a worthwhile message or manifesto or ethical philosophy should stand on its own merit & not rest on the laurels of divinity to give it special consideration — or anything that implies he “fixed” a broken or sinful world/society. Partly because it often has a flavor of anti-semitism, and partly because the world continues to be pretty broken, so obviously it wasn’t that impressive an act of divinity if it didn’t stick. Idk, I think talking about Jesus as being particularly divine, beyond other human beings, makes him less impressive in some ways, rather than more, unless it’s just a way of showing reverence for his particular vision. Although I do like the SRF idea that he’s an incarnation of Vishnu…but I think I mostly like that for the novelty, as someone raised well outside of Hindu traditions.)

Also I just want to say that I’ve been following you for a few years & even though I’m not on tumblr much, I really like your blog & I’m a little jealous of your course of study! You have a lot of fascinating stories & insights to share.

The problem with Jesus as simply an exceptional moral teacher is that... his teachings aren't exceptionally moral. Almost nothing Jesus said that was good is original and almost nothing original Jesus said is good (at least as recorded in the Gospels). In the Gospel accounts he mostly comes off as a bit of an asshole, annoyed that everyone else is too dense to understand his teachings and angry at being asked to work miracles for the undeserving.

Jesus was, if not a divine entity, mostly an apocalyptic preacher whose main message was the imminent end of the world, and we would regard him today as the leader of a cult that was not particularly worthy of respect.

My friend @apenitentialprayer (who you should be following if you're interested in Catholicism) asked me to expand on my belief that Genesis 3 is an etiological myth for puberty. The following understanding is emphatically not my own, but it comes from my rabbi and I'm not sure whether he published it so I don't have a citation.

Anyway, the basic argument is that we should read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" (הדעת טוב ורע) ha-da'at tov v'ra (Genesis 2:17) in parallel with "[he] learns to reject the bad and choose good" (לדעתו מאוס ברע ובחור בטוב) l'dato ma'os bara u'vahol batov (Isaiah 7:15). In Isaiah, learning the difference between good and bad (more literally knowing the difference; da'at in Gen 2:17 has the same root as dato in Is 7:15 (dato is a conjugation of yada)) is a metaphor for maturing. If we read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" in Genesis 2 in the same way, then we can reasonably infer that the consequence of eating the fruit of the Tree is maturation as such rather than the acquisition of forbidden knowledge.

So, what happens when we do that? Human beings in the Garden of Eden have two things in common with God: immortality and the image in which they are made. When they eat from the Tree they gain "knowledge of good and bad" which we've inferred means aging and (specifically) going through puberty. After puberty humans acquire a third divine characteristic: the ability to create life.

The curses that follow for the man and woman then describe the inevitable consequences that they will face by going from childhood and adulthood. The woman will carry babies and have pain in giving birth. She will desire (תשוקה) t'shukah (the verb is used for non-sexual desire in Gen 4:7 and for sexual desire in Song 7:11) her husband. The man will have to labor to bring for the food previously provided by his Parent (i.e. God). And of course both will die (which does happen to children, but is not an inevitable part of childhood the way it is for adulthood).

(Note that the interpretation that the Serpent is Satan comes from later Christian eisegesis is not actually a part of the myth as presented in Genesis 3.)

I never liked the idea that the Serpent is Satan, and I once took a class in college where the professor proposed that the Serpent was God, who wanted his children to have knowledge of good and evil, so that their choices would be more meaningful.

Just adding this because in combination with this interpretation, I like the idea that God-as-Serpent was encouraging his children to grow up.

Some Gnostic Christians took the view that the god of the Old Testament was a demiurge, an inferior being who created physical matter and life. It was a somewhat evil (or at least misguided) entity, and the Serpent was a higher entity who intruded into its creation to rescue it (an operation that was repeated with Jesus).