Lembas, Sacramentality "as such," and Tolkien's non-allegorical use of biblical and theological tropes

Introduction

These thoughts go way back for me, particularly those on lembas. I have had this theory at least as far back as the time when the first trilogy of movies of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was coming out, at which time I was just starting and then doing my MA in theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, because I can remember talking about it to a good friend there who, while not officially disagreeing, did say that he thought that it’s a difficult theory to prove because of the fine distinction and nuance involved.

That fine distinction and nuance is that I think that lembas bread is not an allegory of the Eucharist, as it is often taken to be in Catholic circles, but rather symbolic of “sacramentality as such,” a physical thing that can give more than physical material or physical sustenance.

I’ll not be giving the whole of my thoughts on lembas until the end, after I have gone into the fuller system of this line of thought for literature as Tolkien practiced it, but for here, to sort of whet the appetite and provide a little bit more solid substance at the outset to keep the reader interested and confident that what will follow has some substance to it, I’ll unpack this idea about lembas a very brief bit by contrasting it with one of the “extra scenes” from the extended version of the Fellowship of the Ring film, the first of the original Jackson film trilogy.

I call this scene the “farting Pippin doll” scene because, in it, we find that Merry and Pippin, who are always far too excited about food, have gone and eaten way too much of the lembas they have been given and that is being packed into the boats and are consequently experiencing some intestinal discomfort.

The point of lembas in the books, however, is not the mere material quantity of fillingness. The point there is the aid in action: the wording at one point is something to the effect of that it gives the ability to master sinew, muscle, and bone, which I take to be basically the ability to master your physical being to do what you need to do in spite of psychological factors that work against doing so, like fear. In short, it aids in the virtues of fortitude and courage, rather then sustaining the physical body in the way that normal food does. This is pretty much the definition of a sacrament in Catholic theology, a physical thing (such as bread and wine and the words of institution or naturally occurring water, some action of washing, and the Trinitarian formula) that provides something beyond the physical as an aid to right action or living (in sacramental theology, this is always divine grace).

(Don’t ask me what “sacrament” is or what the nature or role of the sacraments are in Protestant theology because I was never able to figure that one out while a Protestant, which is part of why I became Catholic—in truth, it always seemed to me that the denominations I was in had a strong attachment to the words “sacrament” and “church authority” because to jettison them would seem too strong a break with Christian tradition between the time of Christ and the Reformation [which includes the period of the formation of the New Testament canon] and they did have some utility in managing congregations, but that the words had no real clear conceptual content in Protestant theology.)

(I think the extended scene from the film completely misses the point of lembas, but I also know that it is a decidedly fine point and that one cannot expect a film maker to get everything right, but I do think it was good sense on Jackson’s part not to put the scene in the theatrical version.)

The thing that makes the nuance so tricky with lembas in LotR is that it is precisely through the tropes of an actual sacrament, the Eucharist, that the image of the bread is open to symbolizing sacramentality as such.

So, hopefully having set that up, I’ll introduce the fuller exposition of this post by saying that what has prompted me to write this post (other than that I want to get theories like this that I have had for years out into actual structured and organized and explicated form) is that, in doing a lot of thinking on the issue of Tolkien as literature and the group literary project of the Inklings for the book club that I am in, I have realized that the theory on lembas fits into a larger theory on what Tolkien is doing versus strict and simple allegory.

As I said, before giving any more details on lembas (which will be done as a closer), I wish to get the basic larger literary system detailed. I’ll just note here as one further provision of a possible application to the actual material, that it works, I think, for other instances of biblical and/or ecclesial matters. One key example is the fact that, while elements of the striking of the rock at Meribah in Numbers 21 are directly lifted and inserted into the account of the fellowship coming up to and entering at the back/west door of Moria and the trek through Moria and Gandalf’s fall on the other side, I do not think that this makes Gandalf an allegory of Moses, but rather that certain elements of prophetic identity as such (specifically the prophet’s frustration with the people whom they lead and how this frustration leads them into falls) are among the elements that make up Gandalf as a character. As with what I said about lembas though, what makes the situation hard to discern is that it is precisely the tropes of the Moses story by which this is done.

One last thing to mention in introduction is that philosophy is key to the Tolkien system.

I think that, owing to his Catholic background and familiarity with the tradition of Western philosophy from even an undergraduate education in a classical school like Oxford, he was doing it, even if only unconsciously, even back in the earliest writings of Middle Earth, those done around the end of World War I, even before he began to focus on it consciously around the time he wrote The Lord of the Rings (at least according to his son Christopher in the foreword to the Silmarillion). The important philosophical tenet here is the Aristotelian concept of abstraction, on which I will give some more in the next section, the main section of this post.

Tolkien versus Allegory

So, the core debate here is between Tolkien and “allegory.” Stating the project thus assumes a tension in which Tolkien disliked or had a beef with allegory. As I have mentioned in other posts, Tolkien actually made use of allegory himself in a limited way, particularly, and admittedly (meaning admitted by Tolkien in a letter), in the instance of Tom Bombadil, who is an allegory of pre-fallen nature (see some aside comments in my post on the film Arrival for further). Allegory (like drama, as I have said in another post) becomes problematic when it is taken to be the core literary project and the epitome or highest form of “sub-creation” rather than one possible element to use among others in building or augmenting the main narrative.

I have tried to think through my method carefully here, and I believe that doing the visual first is best, with minimal explication beforehand. One thing that is, however, important to make sure of going into the visual is that a reader remembers the core tenet of Tolkien and Lewis’s thought on myth, one that they inherited from Owen Barfield, which is that myth contains truth that transcends or is beyond mere material, historical factuality. Beyond this, two further things are important. The first is that the ultimate Truth is God, even above (or really as the source of, but distinct from) the supra-factual truth in myths, and the second is that there is one place where mythical truth and historical fact coincided, and that is the Incarnation, life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension of the second person of the Trinity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ.

So, the visual here will outline four things:

1.      Simple allegory using pagan mythologies

2.      Simple allegory using the Christian Bible and the life of the Church

3.      Tolkien using pagan mythologies

4.      Tolkien using the Christian Bible and the life of the Church.

Allegory with pagan

Ultimate Truth (God)

---->     mythic truth

---->     mythological instantiation of mythic truth

(individual gods and events in actual mythologies)

----->    character/event on the current author’s page as direct allegory of the mythological instantiation

(thorough one-to-one correspondence, only difference is past “fiction” versus present coded fiction)

Allegory with Christian Bible/Church

Ultimate Truth (God)

---->     mythic truth

---->     Historical biblical/Church events/persons/institutions as factual instantiation of mythic truth

---->     character/event on current author’s page as direct allegory of the biblical/Church instantiations

(thorough one-to-one correlation, only difference is historical versus coded fiction)

Tolkien with Pagan

Ultimate Truth (God)

---->     mythic truth

---->     mythological instantiation (individual gods and events in actual mythologies)        

---->     philosophical abstraction discovering mythic truth in the mythological instantiation           

(although this can be unconscious)

---->     tropes of mythology events used to graft mythic truth concepts into a new unique character, to include them among other possible in the aggregate whole

Tolkien with Christian Bible/Church

Ultimate Truth (God)

---->     mythic truth

---->     Historical biblical/Church events/persons/institutions as factual instantiation of mythic truth           

---->     philosophical abstraction discovering mythic truth in the biblical/Church instantiation

(although this can be unconscious)

---->     tropes of historical biblical characters/events etc used to graft mythic truths concepts into a new unique character, to include them among other possible in the aggregate whole

First, in explicating this visual some, I have to give credit where credit may be due. Sometime during my years at Franciscan University, the very beautiful and brilliant young Polish professor in the English department whom I never quite had enough of a clue to meet and get to know (it was a bit of a jumbled few years for me) had a sort of literature weekend on campus, not really a conference, just different talks and events going on around campus over the weekend. One of them was a debate between Joseph Pearce and Russel somebody or other about the LotR movies.

During that debate they got onto the topic of allegory and Tolkien’s response to it. I don’t remember them using the specific elements I have used above, and I do think they stuck mostly to the details of biblical elements (characters, events, etc) and the same elements in Tolkien’s text without going into anything about the concepts of mythic truth, philosophical abstraction, or tropes (and these also seem to connect for me with a lot I have studied outside of Tolkien and Lewis, and so it seems more likely that I would alight on them on my own and not from hearing this debate) … BUT I do distinctly remember Pearce holding up his arm at an angle at one point and pointing with the finger of the other hand down from one spot to another in a succession from wrist to shoulder and saying something or other about a descending ladder of sorts on which allegory more properly may be seen as a descending set of rungs or hoops from the biblical to its allegorical instantiations. That’s about the clearest I can remember anything from it, but I may have gotten the whole visual descending in progressive steps from that (although, I do have to add that it is much like the visual structure that I have used in my expositions of chiasm and that originally, when forming the present post, I had just everything in a line with the hyphen-arrows between and then thought “that’s just not visually easy to follow the flow of because it’s all sort of crammed in,” so I also did somewhat happen on this visual schema on my own; I just want to give credit if it is in any way due, and it’s an opportunity to drop in the name of somebody else who has done work on this type of material, Joseph Pearce).

Exposition of the Visual

So, as I said, the philosophical abstraction is a key element in the Tolkien approach. Concrete instances are particular; abstractions are universal. The adjective “abstract” is actually directly taken from the verb “abstract,” rather than being a “different sense.” Something is “pulled out” by the intellect (I think it is the “agent intellect” that Thomas Aquinas says does this, but I am not extremely well versed in this area of Thomas’s application of Aristotelian “abstraction” … but I do know, or at least think I know, that this is the difference between Aristotelian epistemology and Platonic, that, for Aristotle, the universal form is always present only in the particular instance of it and has to be abstracted by the intellect, whereas Platonism says that the form is somehow, if I understand it rightly, accessible to the mind, the nous, apart from the particular instance, available from the “world of the forms”). That something is what I am going to call the abstract form: the form of a savior versus this particular savior.

Without this philosophical abstraction, there is only the particular, say, Christ the savior. In this way of thinking, really, “sub-creation” can only ever be allegory, which is not really a creation. If the abstraction in a Tolkien model, after being abstracted, is incarnated in a new narrative, then this is a true act of sub-creation. But allegorization is not this. It may be used in limited cases such as Bombadil, but I think that what Tolkien would say is that, at the very least, it is never the actual narrative movement (the plot) that is allegorized from the model if the story is to be truly narrative art, true sub-creation (see the final part of this post on narrative).

And abstraction allows the author to pick apart the tropes, figuring our which are accidental and which essential, and choose which to employ to appeal to the core idea.

(Aside: a sort of the same thing happens with a popular form in our times, which is the psychologization of biblical stories, and in my opinion, way off base and not of much use at all as art … we have no access to the drama or psychology of the characters in the biblical texts along anywhere near current psychological/drama lines because they did not have those lines as constructs in their formation of the texts, as the modern lines of drama and psychology have been greatly impacted since Shakespeare … in short such endeavors don’t really bring out anything or have anything concrete in the text with which to connect.)

Some may think it right to deny any art other than allegory, but in this case, we should jettison Tolkien himself and his theory of “sub-creation” itself altogether, rather than pressgang him onto the Procrustean bed and either stretch him or cut off his feet or head to make him fit just so we can say “we have one of the really popular ones on our side.”

To get back to staying on target, there is a second thing that is importantly distinctive to Tolkien’s method, and this is the issue of “tropes.” These are the dressing of the character/event: a staff, a stone to which one was supposed to speak but that one actually strikes with the staff, a golden land and forfeiting entry into it, bread, some type of sustaining, and so on. In allegory, the reference is always to the thing as a whole and the tropes cannot be separated out from each other and used individually. The best example (before I get back to lembas bread) might be Lothlorien as the golden land and Gandalf’s forfeiting entry by falling when he strikes the rock bridge , which he must do (I argue) in payment for having struck the stone door out of anger when he was supposed to speak to it 40 miles ago (the 40 miles of Moria representing the 40 years in the wilderness) and to provide his friends entry into the golden land. All of that fits very well with the model of Nunbers 21, but not all of the tropes are there and the core identity of Israel’s promised land is not there in Lothlorien: for Israel, Canaan was the final place, the final goal, but Lothlorien is only a stopping over place, a place of temporary respite in the quest toward Mount Doom 

And it should be noted too that the LotR instance ADDS something not there in there in the Numbers 21 model: that the prophet ensures his followers entry precisely by his demise outside the land; Moses’s punishment was nothing other than punishment and his identification with the first generation, which must die outside the land because they failed to trust God’s promise of protection and successful entry when the twelve spies returned from scouting the land for 40 days in Numbers 13—it did not aid the second generation in entering the land.

The real content that Tolkien takes from Numbers 21 and grafts into Gandalf in Moses is, rather, that a leader, especially one with prophetic qualities (sent by the Valar like prophets were sent by God … and according to Deuteronomy 34:10, Moses was the greatest prophet ever), bears the consequences of how well he or she leads those in their charge, and when they perform poorly out of frustration and give in to anger and don’t follow directions well, it costs.

The thing that makes it difficult to sort out whether allegory or Tolkien’s method is being done with biblical/Church history material is that it's easier to see with the mythology because nobody believes these days that the mythologies had any historical fact base whatsoever, whereas the Christian tradition does teach that there is a historical base in the Bible: that some original couple actually did something that gave evil a foothold in the world, that somebody named Moses did exist and liberated a people in some way or another from Egypt and had a unique revelation-from-transcendent-God experience on a mountain that provided a content that has been passed down in real ways (whether that be the oral Torah and written Torah in Judaism or Tradition and Scripture in Christianity), that Jesus of Nazareth did historically perform miracles and that he could do so because he was the Second Person of the Trinity in the Incarnation. AND this teaching of historicity in the Bible comes under fire and this situation yields individual believers who are very preoccupied with the historicity question at the same time as being heavily under the influence of materialist thinking and who, thus, cannot process connecting anything "mythic" with the Bible and, so, wind up able to process only allegory and wind up trying to read Tolkien as allegory.

I should note: This happens with text adaptations of classics. I have heard people be critical of, for instance, Pirates of the Caribbean as not "having a text behind it." Personally I think that there are other things that such critics don't like about it but don't like admitting it because it makes them sound Fundamentalist, so they latch onto an "intellectual" sounding argument like "doesn't have a text behind it" to say it's of lesser artistic value ... and so, the word "text" becomes this sort of magical incantation to justify other things. The thing here is not my exasperation with such thinking, but to see that this follows the same pattern as thinking that allegories of the biblical/ecclesial story are better sub-creation than something like Tolkien's work (although this often takes the form of trying to force Tolkien into allegorical models): directly instantiating a historical literary "text behind it" (Austen, Kipling, Steinbeck, Les Mis, take your pick from a million) is viewed as higher art than a new sub-creation out of the various elements abstracted and distilled from a variety of texts and traditions by way of their tropes (melding romance and horror and throwing in a bit of flavoring speech from the book of Job in Pirates of the Caribbean).

Back to Lembas

So, now I come back to my long-standing theory on lembas bread, hopefully having done the necessary support work with the larger theory of Tolkien’s art versus allegory (and using the instance of Numbers 21 as a model for the Moria sequence to flesh out the larger theory). To recall, my theory is that lembas is not an allegory for the Eucharist, but rather a symbol of “sacramentality as such,” a “magical” (in the fictional world) physical element that gives a person an aid beyond the mere physical, that aids virtue (I think that “magic” itself is symbolic of the grace class of things: the good magic of the elves and Gandalf et al being symbolic of grace, and the evil magic of Sauron and Saruman being something of the same class that works in the opposite direction).

Here is the key thing for saying that it is not an allegory of the Eucharist: not all of the tropes are there. Just as the “final goal” element is not there for Lothlorien, lembas has no element of sacrifice, nor of giving of person. Those things would be necessary as parts of the whole for lembas to be an allegory of the Eucharist because allegory only ever builds a relation between the wholes and all the parts have to be there to have the whole. Rather the tropes that are there (bread and supra-physical sustenance/aid) point to the fact that, because they are drawn from a particular sacrament (really THE sacrament), they point to the concept of sacrementality itself (of grace, keeping in mind that I have discussed in another post how Tolkien handles grace as well by the use of courtly love according to medieval models), and having that concept requires the process of philosophical abstraction (whether conscious or unconscious).

(Aside: I don’t know if you even COULD do an allegory of the Eucharist; it would be different than doing an allegory of Christ’s life and death, as Lewis did with Aslan; it would involve consuming the person, which could be done only by cannibalism; and indeed, that is the mystery of the Eucharist, that we consume the person without it being cannibalistic because it is an unbloody and mystical participation in the sacrifice of Calvary; the way that the aberration of cannibalism arises is that: by nature, rituals in pagan culture attempt instantiate a mythic truth, but THIS particular mythic truth can have only one instantiation of ANY kind without becoming the horror of cannibalism, and that is the Eucharist itself).

The Issue of Narrative

This is a bit of a difficult issue to speak of adequately, but here goes. I would argue that only really narratives, meaning plots (“plot” is the original meaning of “muthos” in Aristotle’s Poetics), can be fully allegorical. Elements like lembas can be fully allegorical only if they participate in a narrative movement that has one-to-one correspondence with the model … if they are going to be allegories of the things, they have to do the actions that the things did in the model story. I think this is why Tolkien, while maybe not specifying concretely that narrative art (the creation of a narrative) is the only true sub-creation, pretty much uses them synonymously.

And, in answer to the objection that this would remove painting or other visual art forms from the realm of sub-creation, while it is a bit more speculative and imprecise, I would offer the comments of my friend who originally noted the difficulty of demonstrating my “lembas is symbolic only of sacramentality as such” theory. He is a visual artist whom I have mentioned in another post, and he once described to me the concept of narrativity in drawing and painting, meaning that such visual depictions can be done in such a way as to lead the eye of the viewer through a distinct movement from one element to another … a sort of narrative flow in the construction of the depiction.

Arrival (2016 film) Review

This is one of those stand-alone films that comes around every couple years and simply blows your mind. The film was amazing. I can't decide whether to call it painfully beautiful or beautifully painful. And if Amy Adams is not at least nominated for best actress, I'm saying screw the oscars forever.

Basically at the end of the day, it is not simply that it is well thought-out and executed sci-fi/intellectual content. It goes beyond into a realm of the mystical grit of human experience, much like other definitive stand alones such as Inception and Interstellar by Christopher Nolan (and always have to note Jonathan as his partner).

I don't want to ruin anything with even vague spoilers, but I have to admit from the outset that any discussion at all may unwittingly give away things, such as, "why go to so much trouble to be so circumspect or vague in describing that ... probably a place to look for a twist or reveal, and now that I know to focus there, I see it coming" ... even this bit about "mystical" makes one go "hmmmm ... it's something beyond the mere sci-fi value, so maybe ..." and I am thankful to the person who suggested it to me for keeping their recommendation to the sci-fi level because it made the reveal have that much more impact on me (I think that was intentional on their part, not to even give a spoiler of the type of content that would be coming, for which I am thankful to them).

So, for this post, I am going to say that I think the film is amazing and note a few things either technical or from the sci-fi/philosophical side.

Denouement technique and theme (without spoilers?)

The first is technical and has to do with three "revelations." To start off, "denouement" is the technical term for the big types of "revelation" I am talking about below. By definition it comes at the end of a story, but sometimes the final denouement relies heavily on a major revelation earlier, such as the revelation midway through the first Matrix film when he wakes up in the pod. In Arrival, though, it all comes at the end, and I think it is defined by three simultaneous revelations.

As with all even loosely sci-fi stories, there is a mechanics going on and part of the central action of the denouement is the reveal of that mechanics. Here, I think it is a mark of good technique that it happens precisely at the reveal of who a certain person really is.

Of course, this is also the place where the film goes from sci-fi to human experience. The mechanics that are revealed are distinctly sci-fi and not accurate to our real world or what we have been able to discover about it, but they are not really the core thing of the film (although they are connected to the core in well done films). The core thing  of the film is the third thing revealed alongside the revelation of the mechanics and the revelation of the person ... the revelation of the choice. This reveal actually kind of does an inclusio/envelope around the mechanics/person reveal: it begins in the preceding scene, the explanation by the lake, and concludes in the scene where you hear the choice actually made ("do you want to ...?" ... "yes, I do.").

Other Elements

So, here are some other aspects that I thought were interesting. Ultimately I think they are more than just "interesting" because I think that they meld with the core action of the film, that choice, in a way that takes them up into an artistic whole, but I sort of have to have some term like "[implied: more simply] interesting" to mark them as not the core.

For the most part, they center around the interplay between science and language. And for this section of the post, you kind of have to process through it, and the "versus" part will be discussed at the end because it is the most significant.

Before I get to the main class of these elements, I just wanted to note numerological possiblities: 7-footed (seven as the most "magical" number in Haryr Potter is based on the huge numerological tradition: seven-stage description of alchemical process, seven days of creation, etc) and coming in a group of 12 (12 tribes of Israel and many others).

1.
So, back to the language aspects, the first of those is that they laid the groundwork for what is important about "language" as distinct from science when they had her interrupted class lecture begin with her telling students that they will be discussing why Portuguese sounds different from the other romance languages, which is then pitted off against the heptapod language, which she finds out has no connection to the sounds they emit (which may be language on their own, just not in any way connected to the written). For humans, language is aural before it is visual and the visual system of letters often follows non-logical developments because of the historical impact of things like dialect (and if you want to see how wonky that makes it, check out Gallagher's hilarious live comedy bits).

2.
A second thing to notice is that the heptapod language not being based on sound means that it is not linear, which is because we have to experience sounds one at a time in linear progression (heptapod writing resolves the whole writing looking in opposing directions question of whose linearity you're writing for, i.e. that your own linearity is mirror writing for the other, eh? and you don't have to worry whether you're reading left to right or right to left, like English).

Ultimately, I don't think this kind of language and thought is possible for humans, but that is why this is sci-fi, which makes its points differently than do moral exemplar stories (although they can both operate in the same story, such as the fact that I think this film takes an approving stance toward the choice that was made). The fact is that our experience of time is both linear, unlike the heptapod language, AND cyclical, LIKE the heptapod language. I think that what the mechanical ability given in the fiction of the world symbolizes is the real-world capability of language to make sense of our experience, to see it in a way that transcends (while still including) linear chronological understanding (which takes its most distinctive form in history as a scientific discipline) ... the ability to see meaning.

I also like the fact that their acts of predication happen in circular form, like ring composition, which is a cyclical structure.

3.
The third of the language elements I noticed and thought was amazingly incorporated was the issue of multiple language games. Ludwig Wittgenstien was probably the most prominent philosopher to discuss "language games," and it was probably his most significant contribution to philosophy and what is known as the "linguistic turn" in post-modern thought.

I don't want to give too many spoilers, so I will keep my comments limited to just the revealed action of General Shang. Louise brings out well the potential dangers in using the qualitatively different "language game" of "competition," which is what he does. The point is the qualitative difference between language games and the basic fact that there are multiple possible language games with variant motivational constructs, methods, and outcomes.

This is where it starts to get into the tension between scientific thought and linguistic thought or other forms of thought. Science has a problem with conceiving of a plurality of language games or contextual constructs that are not ultimately reducible to (and thus subject to rule by) scientific discourse as the basic form of human understanding (and I have witnessed it personally in people of a very scientific turn of mind when they try to approach literature and philosophy). This is the mentality of what I call materialistic "scientism" (I alit on this term on my own but I have since seen a number of philosophical writers use it in the same sense), and it cannot process the validity of multiple different language games with scientific discourse being but one among them or the idea that there may be a more primal language game from which all the others derive along different paths ... precisely the "language game" of supernatural revelation (this is my own little side tangent beyond what is in the film), which I like to bring in here as a way to sat that things like the revelations I have talked about above can be a human participation in something larger than humanity, what Tolkien would refer to as "sub-creation." In this understanding of the language of supernatural revelation, creation itself is an act of revelation (not just that all creation contains revelation, which is the concept of "natural revelation" as opposed to "specific revelation," but that the very act of creating is revelatory), or it may be more to the point to say that revelation is a creative act.

4.
So, as noted at the outset of this section, I have saved this one for last, although the pitting of the linear against the cyclical was a forecast of it (but I think that the heptapods and Louise are viewed by the film as melding of the two), as was the mention of "scientism" just above. This last element is that they bring in a linguist and a scientist to address the problem of figuring out communication with the heptapods and that a good bit of the film is taken up with the interaction between the two characters as characters, beyond just their discussion of their different approaches and combined efforts at developing communication with the heptapods.

Where my interest comes in for this is with the work of the twentieth-century philosopher Paul Ricoeur, whom I have mentioned in other posts occasionally and on whose very dense 400-page Rule of Metaphor I did one of my PhD comp exam questions. I'm actually really glad for the opportunity to bring him up. His thinking has played largely for me in discussions of a variety of literary subjects over the years, and particularly recently in some of the discussions I have had in the Inklings book club, and I have always wanted to record my particular thoughts on this core aspect of his thought in this blog, which has become for me sort of a place where I get out not only ideas as they occur to me now but also theories into which I have poured a lot of mental energy over the years, but it always seems like a better idea to introduce things like this in a context of them being applied. So, I was really happy to realize that this film provided me an opportunity to bring it up.

Ricoeur said (he died in 2005) that our experience exists on a fluctuating spectrum between "understanding" and "explanation." As far as language goes, I take these two to be poetic and scientific language, respectively. It is a well-known fact that poetry is prior to scientific prose: all of the ancient mythological epics are written in verse (the Hebrew Bible is, actually, the first major instance of religious prose), and we can see this in the comments of somebody like Tolkien that Tom Bombadil is a more straight up allegory for unfallen nature and that this is evidenced in the fact that he always speaks in verse, in poetic form (Bombadil is one of the few strictly allegorical characters in Middle Earth, according to Tolkien, I believe in one of his letters, which I think Tolkien would see as the reason why he isn't much direct help in solving the problem of the ring, although explaining this would take a lot of work in linking the world of the mechanics within the narrative to theoretical aspects of narrativity itself in a discussion of it in general, outside this particular narrative, but as applied to this particular narrative).

First, "understanding" might be best described as "getting" a joke. The more you have to explain the joke, the less funny it becomes. My take on it is that we start with understanding, with intuitive grasp of what is at the core. But we have an innate drive to explicate, to explain, what it is that we understand in scientific language. I personally think that this drive to explain actually comes from our drive for community. There is also, undeniably I think, a self/ego-driven rhetorical desire that also plays into the impetus for formulation in scientific explanation (the first audience, and always an important one, is ourselves, we want the "understanding" that presents itself to us to show that what we want is what is right and convincing others through rhetorically effective explanation helps us to do this), but I think that, alongside this, there is a genuine drive for community that fuels the drive for communication that yields our attempts at explanation ... a single action (explanation of understanding) with two motivations, an attempt not only to own the understanding for the sake of our own desires but also to share the understanding for the sake of the other's well-being ... and to know that we are not alone ... a basic drive to love and be loved.

As I said, Ricoeur said we exist in flux along this spectrum. We cannot have one without the other and still be human. Pure scientific understanding will wind up being dry to the point of death (people often want a "cut and dried" explanation, but the thing about a human being is that, if you cut and dry it ... it's dead). So, we keep returning to the well of the understanding pole, but then going forth again toward the explanation pole for the sake of sharing, as well as for the sake of trying to see what deeper understanding we might be able to glean from our initial raw understanding.

On that second goal, deepening our own understanding through developing explanation, one of my mentors as an editor, Fr Joseph Lienhard, when he would teach undergrad theology courses and try to talk to students about writing papers for classes, always liked to say, "we write to think." We always think of it the other way round, that we write only to communicate what we think ... but we really also write in explanatory language to try to figure exactly what our first raw impressions were. On the literary side, Tolkien is famous for saying that the opening lines of The Hobbit ("In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit ...") just came to him and that he had to keep writing to find out what hobbits were like. We express in more poetic language originally, but then we try to explain and share through analysis of the poetic language, and then keep that from getting too dry by returning to the poetry as somehow mysterious.

The relation of this to Louise in Arrival should be pretty obvious, but I will bring it out here just to be clear. As I said, our first experience of her as a linguist comes in her opening comments of the lecture that gets canceled, and in those brief lines, she says she will be talking about why Portuguese sounds different from the other romance languages. Sound quality is a performative aspect of language and really only relevant in poetic exposition, at least in Western languages, although we do have a few limited instances of the use of tone for prosaic discourse, but that I know of, not for the indicative mood, which is the proper domain of scientific discourse ... we use the uplift in tone at the end of a line to represent the interrogative mood, but even with that mood, we can rely on word odering: it's not proper writing, but we can tell the difference between "I am to keep going" and "Am I to keep going" even without the final punctuation of question mark or period, let alone the uplift in tone at the end in oral performance. Poetry, however, will rely on sound quality for augmentation of its core meaning ... and not just in mechanical end rhyme.

(Aside for Support: For a poetry course in college, we were assigned to write a short poem relying on sound qualities in words to augment the actual content of the poem, so I did a poem about smoking that started "a scratch on the patch and the sulfur sends smoke," with the gutteral hard "c" and the "tch" sounds mimicking the striking of a match and the "s" and "f" in "sulfur" mimicking the initial flare of the match, and then the sibilants mimicking the sliding flow of smoke, and there is a sort of inclusio formed of that line by the initial gutteral hard "c" and the final gutteral "k," so you can also see sound contributing to structure ... and in a less "this is technically poetry" vein and more in a vein of the poetic and sound-performative qualities used in prose, for the same professor but in a course on 20th-century American novel, we had to read Ralph Emerson's Invisible Man, and there are short passages in that book, especially when he is at the college, in which he distinctly drops out into a "voice" that I would say most resembles a hot jazz trumpet solo, on one case particularly through a recurring "hah!")

The centrality of the tension with science is revealed in their first meeting on the chopper when he reads from her book or article and says that she is wrong about language being the basis of civilization, that science is.

I also like that scene where they both admit to each other that their individual approaches, science -focused or language-focused, can both leave a person single ... it gets to that core drive for community, in this case longing for and lamenting the absence of the particular community or romantic love.

Unfortunately, I have to note that there is a sadness. It is the scientist who thinks the wrong choice was made about the child. The fact that the film seems to approve the choice would seem to mean that it censures the scientist, and this should be to my advantage in my rhetorical arguments ... but I am actually saddened. I'm not pejorative of the film as having done something wrongly or even poorly, for I do think that this happens a lot, but it makes me sad that it happens. As I said, following Ricoeur, we need both, and I wish there could be more agreement than there very often is. And if you have seen the film, you understand the deeper level of sadness in that too.

Conclusion
All in all, this film totally blew me away.  The complexity of the sci-fi and linguistic content was amazing on it's own ground, but when they took it to that core level of human experience and desire by revealing the choice ... that left me speechless. As I said, if Amy Adams is not at least nominated for best actress, I am going to march down Broadway, all 15 miles of it, protesting. Hopefully this discussion/review of the film has not given away too much (I tried very hard to be ambiguous where I needed to be) but also was a meaningful discussion for those who have seen it and and inspiration to see it for those who have not (meaning not so ambiguous that it doesn't count as any discussion of the film at all).

A Tale of Two Narnias: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Magician's Nephew

Intro

So, last night was the monthly meeting of the book club I am in, The Inklings of Pittsburgh, meeting at the Abbey in Lawrenceville, and it was a really enjoyable discussion comparing the first two chapters of The Silmarillion, which is the creation of Middle Earth by Iluvatar as carried out by the Valar, with C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew (book 6 of the Chronicles of Narnia, but book 1 in its fictional chronological ordering) and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (book 1 of the series but book 2 in the chronological ordering). We did Wardrobe in part because it was our Christmas meeting. 

This post is a thought that came to me in reading the two Narnia works, and I think it came to me because it's the first time I have read them side by side and since having done so much literary work in grad school, although I loved them and read them numerous times when I was a kid. Again, as per my usual method, I am going to assume that a potential reader of this post has read the works (or will be interested enough to go read them on their own) just to save space, but I will carry through a nice phrasing that the leader of the book club brought out in the wonderful and well though out set of discussion questions she makes for each meeting, which is that this is two creations of Narnia. The Magician's Nephew obviously has the fictional actual creation of Narnia as its content, but The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is also a creation of Narnia as a fictional place because it is the first time Lewis made that world; it is the real world creation (a literary process by a historical person in our own world) of a fictional world, rather than the fictional creation account of the fictional world (which is what Magician's Nephew is).

So, I pretty much read the two Narnia books all in the same sitting (I had read up to the waking of Jadis in Charn while waiting in the lobby of Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown when I took my mother there for her to see the Andy Williams Christmas show featuring the Osmond Brothers and the Lennon Sisters, but on Monday I finished the rest of Magician's Nephew, which includes the whole of the creation narrative, and then went directly to Wardrobe and finished that all in the same reading as the bulk of Nephew). And I think having the encounters with them be that condensed is what made what I am going to describe stick out to me so strongly. And that is that these are really two different Narnias.

Obviously they are the same world and obviously Nephew seeks to fill in the backstory of the world described in Wardrobe. But I think that what that world is for Lewis as an author differs between the two books. 

Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

In Wardrobe, Lewis's first creating of Narnia, it is a kind of world in which to place many elements that are viewed as "other" in our own tradition, such as centaurs and dryads and a sorceress witch, but I don't think it is as wholly a different world as it is in Nephew. The most distinctive element that shows this is the presence and key role of Father Christmas. Many of the folklore and mythological elements can be "other world" without any problem, just as the presence of elves and orcs in Middle Earth present no problem for it being a holey alternate universe. But Father Christmas is an anthropomorphic representation very particular to Christianity in our own world. If you want to see a true "alternate universe" anthropomorphic representation of  the “spirit of Christmas” or something like it, see Terry Pratchett's Hogfather in his discworld series (a truly wonderful book, but I'm not offering it as an example to say "Lewis was a hack; read this other guy,” but rather to demonstrate the particular facet of Narnia in Wardrobe for which I am arguing here). If Narnia is truly an alternate world, which is sort of required if it, as a world, is to be allegorical of the Christian story, there's no place in it for a character named Father Christmas, since there's no "Christ" separate from the allegorization in Aslan and no institution of a Mass (Christ-mas) for that tradition

(ASIDE: One of the issues here goes further than I really want to in a post of this scope, but just to give a glimpse, it is that, in Wardrobe, the world of Narnia as a whole is not allegorical, only Aslan at the interchange with Jadis are, and this connects somewhat with what I say parenthetically below about the difference between Lewis's and Tolkien's thinking as Protestant and Catholic, and it is interesting that Tolkien's world, which would be more open to allegory because it is a holey alternate universe, is not one-to-one allegory … I think some of the issue here is that, if you’re going to have your character be allegorical, I think you kind of have to have their whole arc be allegorical, but that is a discussion that would have to be well thought out beyond what I wish to do here … again, I am mainly trying to say that the two Narnias, Wardrobe and Nephew, are different, not to judge either of them).

Narnia in The Magician's Nephew

In Nephew, we get a distinctly other world, and I think it is marked in the tropes used. As I will say below, Jadis in Wardrobe is the Christian Devil, but really only in that interchange of killing Aslan. Other than that, her background is monsters from our world's myth/folklore (half jinn, half giant). Likewise, the other bad guys, her minions, are all from our world's mythology and folklore, and that is the main source of tropes. 

In Nephew, on the other hand, Lewis draws on the Hebrew Bible, and not just the Genesis creation accounts. This would be the first time that I have read Nephew since taking a course on the book of Ezekiel (really a directed study with one other doctoral student, directed by a prominent scholar with whom I feel fortunate to have had the chance to study before he passed away, Fr Lawrence Boadt, C.S.P. [Society of St Paul, aka the Paulists]), and so it is the first time in reading Nephew that I would have been able to identify that tree that grows by the river when Diggory throws the apple from the tree in the faraway garden. Ezekiel 47 is the prophet's famous vision of the new Temple with a river flowing out of it to the east, and 47:12 reads, "And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not whither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fruit in every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary" (New Revised Standard Version). 

Obviously this description has resonances with the Genesis creation accounts, but my interest for Narnia lies in the antecedents of the Ezekiel trees of life (which are taken up in the description of the New Jerusalem/Temple in Revelations 22), and these come from other ancient cultures with which Lewis would have at least a passing familiarity. The "tree of life" is a very common trope in ancient near Eastern cultures. Basically it is a very large tree with very large sweeping  branches in which many different birds can nest, representing many different nations/peoples in the world being able to take shelter in it. It is a tree of protection, just like the one in the Narnia of Nephew, and I think that Lewis knew of both that larger "tree of life" tradition in the ancient near East (and probably other historical cultures closer to his home, I am guessing) and its presence in Genesis 2 and Ezekiel 47, and I think he was drawing on it in having that tree by the river as part of his creation of Narnia story.

(NOTE: I think that the Nephew version of Narnia began with Prince Caspian and that, in part, Nephew can be seen as Lewis's attempt to bridge the gap between Wardrobe and Caspian–Horse and His Boy.)

There is one further trope from Genesis 2 that I see in the creation account of Narnia in Nephew, and that is the gold trees that grow from the coins that fall from Uncle Andrew's pockets and from which the dwarves fashion the crowns, as well as the gems that the moles dig up for them to put into the crowns. I think their source is the "good gold" and the gems described in Gen 2:12 in the context of, like Ezekiel, a river, but adding that four rivers flowed from the one and that the land around one of the rivers has "good gold" and gems.

To support the idea that Lewis could be using the gold and gems can as an intentional allusion to a source like the Genesis 2, I'll give a little piece of scholarship that shows how the gold and gems there (Gen 2) were themselves allusions to another part of the same Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly the Judeo part. A scholar named Gordon Wenham did the first volume, Genesis 1–15, of the Word Biblical Commentary series, and he also did a shorter piece called "Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of EdenStory." In that shorter piece, he draws on archeological findings to support the idea that Genesis 2 describes creation as a proto-sanctuary on the model of the Tabernacle constructed by Moses in the wilderness wanderings and the Temple built by Solomon. For instance, one scholar he cites sees the menorah (the lampstand) in the tabernacle as a highly stylized tree of life and bases this claim in the description of it in Exodus 25 and findings of archeology in the near East. 

For my purposes here, which is to show that it is not out of place to think that Lewis is drawing on images from Genesis 2 just as Genesis 2 drew on elements of the tabernacle sanctuary, the importan ones are the gold and the gems. The gold is important because Exodus 25 prescribes that all of the furniture in the tabernacle, such as the table of the show bread, be covered in pure/fine gold (I wrote a post somewhere in the Muggle Matters days on the use of gold and silver in Harry Potter; perhaps I will dig it out some time).

[ASIDE: One of my personal theories (although I am sure scholars have probably written it before me, I just don't know of their work ... but it's not likely that I would come up with a reading of this type that somebody has not at least suggested before) is that one of the "between the lines" explanations for the later division and eventual fall of the kingdoms because of Solomon's sins is that he covered his throne in pure fine gold in 1 Kings 10:19, which is basically to treat politically significant furniture with the same respect as the religiously significant furniture of the sanctuary; indeed, this description comes directly before the description of Solomon's perfidy through marriage alliances with other nations, and thus their gods, in 1 Kings 11].

Likewise, the gems in Gen 2 allude to the precious stones in the ephod of the high priest and that adorn the tabernacle sanctuary as prescribed in Exodus 25 (another key piece of evidence is that Adam's job of "tilling and keeping" the garden is the two verbs used for the duties of the Levites regarding the tabernacle, which really mean something more like "serve and protect" and are really only ever used together for that Levitical duty, except for in Gen 2, but that example goes beyond the ones I am trying to demonstrate in Lewis's account, which are the gold and the gems)

My point in all this is not to present some esoteric theory in which every little detail ties out in the service of a network of exact correlations of an intricate allegory in which so and so was an allegory of Ezekiel the prophet or that there must be another tree somewhere in the "middle" of Narnia that corresponds more directly to knowledge because there were two trees in the garden or something like that. My goal is to show that there is a clear presence of tropes from the Hebrew Bible in Nephew that make Narnia a different project there for Lewis (by which I mean it is a different place because he had some different kind of literary goal in making it) than it was in Wardrobe, in which the tropes are all myth/folklore tropes from other backgrounds in our world and one that shouldn't even be there at all in an alternate world, allegorical work, Father Christmas.

Further Exposition: Who is Jadis?

We had a good little discussion at the book club meeting too of whether or not having the presence of the lamppost explained sort of ruined it, or at least made it lose some of its fun mystery that it had in Wardrobe. I don't necessarily think it entirely does that, or at least not that starkly (although I might think it slightly superfluous), but I do think that noticing that Lewis went out of his way to explain that element makes one notice the things in Wardrobe that he did NOT explain in Nephew, things that are actually more central to explaining the world of Wardrobe, and that this points up that "Narnia" is two different things for Lewis as an author in the two books. 

The biggest single unexplained thing is the "deep magic," which Aslan explains in Wardrobe as having been from the beginning of time. But when we get to Nephew, which is pretty much the beginning of time for Narnia, we see no foundation of that deep magic and Jadis's right to the blood of traitors. We get her in the garden with Diggory, but nothing about traitors is there and no establishment of any type of jurisdiction etc.

We also get no background on Jadis that resembles the account of her being half jinn and half giant. We could sort of extrapolate from the first king and queen in Nephew being a son of Adam and a daughter of Eve that appearing human would be something Jadis wants in order to lay some claim to rule in Narnia, but Nephew presents only her origin as from a unified race other than human because it is from a completely different world from humanity's (Charn), not some mixing of monster races known in human mythologies or folklore. 

Really, in Wardrobe, she is the Christian Devil, and this is purely in the service of the allegory of the atonement of the self-sacrifice at the stone table. In Nephew, she is more the serpent in the Garden in Genesis 3, and these are not univocally the same thing. Ultimately, as for the reality of the event, I believe as the Church teaches that they are the same entity, but on the literary level at the time of the composition of the Genesis 2–3 text, from the side of the human thinking in that text, the serpent represents something almost human because it comes from the creation account of which humanity is the pinnacle, rather than an account of the creation of angels. 

The serpent is still evil in the human thinking at the time of composition, and I am in no way suggesting, nor do I agree with, even from a scholarly standpoint, any of the readings that say that the text of Gen 3 does not view the serpent as bad, but rather as good, such that what is described is not a fall or an entering of evil, but rather a "progression" in humanity in which individual immortality is traded for sexual fecundity, the ability to procreate and build further community. That is simply not the situation of the text before us (maybe some hypothetical text some scholars wish was there, but not the one that actually is). For the human author handling the traditions from which Gen 2–3 are taken, even from the standpoint of a strictly academic examination of the human construction (at least if that scholarly examination is anywhere near honest), the serpent and that event are bad: the temptation by the serpent and the choice of the couple are THE event by which evil, particularly death, enters the created world. But it is not yet the Christian Devil with the angelology that goes into that concept, which is the creation and fall of the angels and one in particular, Lucifer, becoming the central adversary. Likewise, Jadis in Nephew is definitely evil, but she's not yet the Christian Devil we see at the stone table in Wardrobe.

(NOTE: I am not setting out here to answer the question of what exactly the serpent of the original composition is, but the best answers I have heard are along the lines that it represents humanity being led by the side of themselves that is closer to the beasts, rather than leading that side. Gen 2 establishes human leadership in Adam naming the animals, but Gen 3 shows the couple following the lead of one of the beasts. In particular it is the most cunning" [there is a wordplay in the original Hebrew between the couple being "naked" at the end of Gen 2 and the serpent being "cunning" at the beginning of Gen 3], and the serpent is a symbol of wisdom in a number of ancient near Eastern cultures that surrounded Israel, in cults that were more along the lines of nature religions, and so the reversal of following the beast rather than leading/ruling the beast as a bad thing goes hand in hand with following the wisdom of surrounding cultures rather than following the Lord's wisdom and leading them to it.)

Even "the satan" (ha satan, in Hebrew) in the beginning of the book of Job is more of a quasi-human questioner, an "adversary" in a courtroom sense, and as evidence for that claim, I would offer the literary issue of the fact that "the satan" completely disappears and never reappears to be answered by the end of the book. The big finale is God answering Job and then rebuking the friends who thought themselves so wise. I'm not saying this is some sort of magical work in which the serpent was really the friends in disguise or anything cheap like that. I'm saying that the fact that "ha satan" can pretty much just disappear like that and the work still feel complete with God's answers to the human characters (Job and his "friends") shows that the point of "the satan" was a human wisdom question (Job is classed in a certain vein of wisdom literature) rather than the Christian Devil who prowls about seeking the ruin of souls (although, as a Christian who believes in a unity of Scripture that flows from the divine author, God, I think they are connected).

I would say that Jadis in Wardrobe is more strictly that Christian Devil as the murderous, vindictive adversary of Christ/Aslan in the vein of a primarily juridical reading of Calvary. Jadis in Nephew is the serpent in the garden, that core human temptation. And I think that these two versions of Jadis go hand in hand with what I have said about Narnia of Wardrobe and Narnia of Nephew being two different things for Lewis as an author.

[ASIDE: With all due respect to ecumenical efforts (and I do honestly mean respect, because understanding and good will towards those with whom we disagree and a recognition that our own understanding is always incomplete no matter form which side of a debate we com are very important), the reading of Calvary is an unavoidable tension that there will be between Lewis as a member of Protestantism, which tends to heavily emphasize the juridical aspect of atonement, and Tolkien as being Catholic, which emphasizes Calvary as the pinnacle of the Incarnation as a whole].

Conclusion

I would close with just one further idea that came to me in reading the two Narnia books alongside material from the Silmarillion. I don't really have a "point" to make from it; it's more just something I have found fascinating as far as the processes that go on in what Tolkien calls "sub-creation." It is a more well-known and commented upon issue that the first two chapters and the last two chapters of the Silmarillion were added later in Tolkien's process as a sort of frame around a core body of narrative (which the published version even sets apart as the "Quenta Silmarillion") whose composition process began as early as the end of the First World War, 1916 or 1917, making it the earliest compositional work of the Middle Earth material. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia is usually not studied at as deep of a literary level as Tolkien's work, and this is somewhat justified because they are, by Lewis's own admission, aimed at a child audience. But it strikes me that there is a similarity between the two regarding a "frame." Obviously it is only in the single-volume editions that have come out more recently that Magician's Nephew and Last Battle actually frame the other books, but when taken from the perspective of the lateness of the "frame," simply the simple fact that they are the last two works Lewis wrote of the series, meaning that they represent his most matured thinking on the material (notice the pairing of the far distant gardens on the top of great high hills as evidence of the closeness of these two works and their "inclusio" quality as a pair), does present a similarity with Tolkien's later addition of a framework around the Quenta-Silmarillion.