BLAKE'S EVERLASTING GOSPEL

‘The Everlasting Gospel’ is not one of Blake’s more famous poems.  It is unfinished; it was, I think, found in draft form among his notebooks.  When I felt stirred to write about it after a cursory reading – a detailed reading is difficult since sections c and d are two different versions of the same material, and we don’t know which one Blake would ultimately have gone with – I found myself in a quandary as to which folder of my essays to file it in.   Literary, or Theological?  I decided on the latter: it is the theological ideas I am focusing on here, not the quality of the poetry. 

 

It is worth quoting the opening stanza in full, since it so unequivocally sets the tone of the poem as a whole:

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see

Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy:

Thine has a great hook nose like thine,

Mine has a snub nose like to mine:

Thine is the friend of All Mankind.,

Mine speaks in parables to the Blind:

Thine loves the same world that mine hates,

Thy Heaven doors are my Hell gates.

Socrates taught what Meletus

Loath’d as a Nation’s bitterest Curse,

And Caiphas was in his own Mind

A benefactor to Mankind:

Both read the Bible day & night,

But thou read’st black where I read white.  

    

     It is tempting here, from the standpoint of 2013, to view Blake as a sort of proto postmodernist.  You see one thing, I see another; you read it one way, I read it the opposite.  The reader creates the meaning: we each have our truth – even when your truth contradicts mine – since all truth is subjective anyway.

     I don’t think, though – in the light of what he writes and draws elsewhere – that  Blake is saying that at all.  Blake thinks he is right, and that his opponents are wrong.  From Blake’s oeuvre as a whole, he thinks the Church has misinterpreted Christ’s message: particularly in relation to  sex.   He’s not content to say that the Church sees it one way, and he sees it another; he thinks the Church has blighted human potential. 

     To get back to specifics, what is Blake saying in these lines?  The first two, I think are uncontroversial enough.  Christianity – along with every other belief system, sacred or secular, known to humanity (my words, not Blake’s) – has differences of opinion.  One thinks immediately of variant interpretations of the Millennium, of Protestantism and  Catholicism, of Arminianism and Calvinism.  One is reminded of John Wesley’s comment to his friend, George Whitefield: “Your God is my Devil.”   

     One is reminded, too, however, of how great a common core of belief there is, despite individual divergences.  When those mentioned above are compared with outright unbelievers, then the differences between them seem to fade.   

     I can go along, then, with lines 1 and 2.  It is lines 3 and 4 that begin to make me uneasy.   Blake seems to be taking the jibe of sceptics – that Man creates God in his own image – and extending it to Christ.  Christians remake Christ in their own image. 

     If Blake is indeed saying this, then hasn’t he got it the wrong way round?  Christians, surely, are meant to remake themselves – even though none does it perfectly – to be like Christ?  Nowhere are we told to remake Christ  to be like us.  If we do, we have lost hold of the Gospel: the real Gospel, that is, not Blake’s idiosyncratic version of it. 

     In Luke 2:40, we are told that the child grew big and strong.  This is the only physical description of the incarnate Christ that we are given.   In that sense, of course, Blake is quite right: we are free to imagine Christ’s appearance for ourselves.  But within limits: of sex, age and race.  When German Nordic supremacists imagined a blue-eyed Aryan Christ, the consensus is that they had lost touch not only with Christianity’s Jewish roots, but with Christianity itself. 

     But my unease with Blake does not stop there.  We might say that Socrates’ looks did  have some bearing on his teaching: his followers marvelled that anyone so ugly could have had such a beautiful mind.  And by focusing on Christ’s looks, Blake seems to me to reduce him the level of just another human teacher, such as Socrates.  Where Christ’s appearance is described is in Revelation: in which Christ describes himself as “the risen one”.  That surely, should be the ultimate focus for Christians: not the Christ who died, but the Christ who rose from the dead; not just the perfect human, but the Second Person of the Trinity.  When we say we have a relationship with Christ, we mean the live one in Heaven; we mean more than our memory of the one who lived and died on Earth.

    From this initial position, Blake proceeds to some mental sleight of hand.  Because we are free – within limits – to imagine for ourselves what Christ looked like, we are also free to imagine for ourselves – Blake certainly does – what Christ said and did.  In practice, we are not.  If we are not told what Christ looked like, we are told what he said and did in considerable detail.  And if some parables are intended for us to tease out the meaning; others are pretty unambiguous.  If you read the story of the Good Samaritan to mean that you should ignore those in trouble and  help only those of your own tribe, then I submit you are not simply giving your own reading – your black to my white – you are actually mistaken.

     Blake would, doubtless, have conceded that point.  The Good Samaritan would not be  at issue.  Although Blake does not spell it out at this point, the black and white he is referring to are different attitudes to sex: the Church finding sex ugly when really it is beautiful.  Thus the Church teaches sexual restriction, whereas Christ taught sexual licence.  We see this in Section e of the poem:

                        Was Jesus Chaste? Or did he

                        Give any Lessons of Chastity?

                        The morning blush’d fiery red:

                        Mary was found in Adulterous bed;

                        Earth groan’d beneath, & Heaven above

                        Trembled at discovery of Love.

 

     Blake seems here to be suggesting that these are open questions.  They aren’t: there are specific answers.  Yes He was, and Yes He did. 

     Bertrand Russell had fun with God’s adultery with the Virgin Mary, but Blake has here beaten him to it by a couple of centuries.  Blake himself, of course, is simply drawing on the old anti-Christian Jewish story that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier.  

    We should note that line 4 of this section is a statement not a question.  The reasoning behind it goes like this.  The Virgin Birth did not happen because Christ was simply human.    Joseph was not his father; therefore, Mary committed adultery. 

     There is, of course, another possibility. The Virgin Birth is incredible only if we know for certain that God is the psychological invention of the sexually repressed.  (Blake got there before Freud as well).  But if there is a Creator God who invented humans – and therefore their reproductive processes – then it is not beyond such a God to bypass the ordinary reproductive methods and initiate a virginal conception.  With such a scenario, adultery is not the issue: human salvation is.  

     I am not sure, though, that Blake’s purpose – as Russell’s certainly was – is to discredit the Virgin Birth.  Since Blake, according to his own account, saw an angel in a tree, we should be wary of trying to write him off as an atheist.  I think he is celebrating, rather, the glory of the sex act in all its manifestations, including the adulterous. Maybe God in reality is a bit of a prude; maybe only God as misrepresented by the Bible.  Either way, Blake has to put God on the right track and get him to see the beauty of sex.  Mary experiences love, and one of the ways in which love expresses itself will be in extramarital union: it’s all about not thwarting the holiness of the heart’s desires and so on.  No wonder Blake has been so popular in the universities of California.   No wonder The Doors, the California  Kings of Acid Rock, took their name from a line of his poetry.

     We might note in passing that when Blake propounded this sort of stuff to his wife she was appalled.  Nor did she want to walk naked in the garden to recapture the morning of the world.  Perhaps she was simply more conscious than Blake was of what the neighbours might think.

    In the next bit of Blake’s Gospel, Christ lays his hand on Moses’ law and throws it away – Matthew’s Gospel, perhaps more authoritative, says something rather different: the opposite, in fact – by showing his approval of adultery.  He does not condemn the woman brought before him to be stoned.  The appendix to John’s Gospel, in which the incident occurs, does not share Blake’s interpretation of the event..  After his forgiveness, Christ says, “Sin no more.”  That does rather change the emphasis.  Blake, unsurprisingly for his line of argument, does not refer to this bit.  It would make Christ judgmental. 

 

                        Was Jesus Humble? Or did he

                        Give any Proofs of Humility?

 

     Thus the opening lines of Sections c and d of the poem.

     The biblical answer to both questions is, “Yes.”   Jesus washed his disciples’ feet.  Jesus refused Satan’s offers of worldly glory.  To say you are God is arrogant only if it is a lie.  If it is true, what else would you say?   

     Blake’s own answers to his questions – in both sections – seem to me to be sheer verbiage.  Maybe that is why there are two sections: Blake was still thinking through the implications.  What he seems to be saying is that Christ’s supposed humility is really pride, when seen from the correct perspective.

     If so, it’s a condensed version of the idea contained in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  The Bible and the Church, fearing energy, creativity etc demonize them and call them Hell.  Hell, however, is really Heaven if only you can see it as it really is.   It was to counter ideas like these that C S Lewis wrote The Great Divorce.    

     For, again, a perspective other than Blake’s is possible.  Those who described Auschwitz as Hell on Earth didn’t have its energy or creativity in mind.  Most of those who experienced it didn’t feel that it was Heavenly, if only seen from the right perspective.   I doubt that Blake himself would have done, if he had been there.

 

Despite all the above, I still love Blake as a man and as a poet.  I always feel sure that his heart is in the right place.  I just wish I could feel more confident about his head.

COMRADE OGILVY: THE MANIPULATION OF HISTORY

His heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen

sole guardian of truth and sanity  in a world of lies.

                                                                                   1984: Chapter 1

 

I spoke to a Romanian once who had taken advantage of Romania’s EU admission to escape to Britain. Why she had left could be summed up in one word: 1984.  For her, 1984 was not a fictional projection of certain trends.  1984 was the reality she had lived through: hence her presence in London. 

Two things about the book staggered her: Orwell’s genius in projecting the mindset of a totalitarian state; and the blithe indifference among westerners to the starkness of Orwell’s warning.                                                                          

The concepts of 1984 have passed into our language, and, indeed , into the realities of our lives.  Big Brother and the Thought Police are now recognised features of our society.  However, although we are currently the most photographed society in the world, telescreens – the two-way televisions that can look into apartments – have a way to go: At the moment it’s a problem of technology:  infuriating for those who would love  to ensure that you are not secretly smacking your children, smoking, or simply enjoying your freedom in the privacy of your own home.  (What might happen when the technology comes on stream may be surmised from the fact that authority – via your Provider – could already have details of every internet site that you have visited.)

But when it comes to our – and America’s – current popular approach to history, the agenda  might have been taken straight out of the pages of  1984: Chapter 4.

 

Winston Smith’s task in the Ministry of Truth is an exercise in daily lying.  Or, as Orwell expresses it, “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.”  The Present is the criterion of judgement: and the Past must be altered to align with it .

Several examples are given by Orwell; one will suffice here.  In February, Big Brother had promised there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration..  That promise is there in the existing records.  Now, in April, the ration is to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.  The existing record must therefore be changed:  After Winston has done his work, any one going back to the February record will find not the promise of no change, but a warning of reductions in April.  With the Ministry’s inability to admit its lies even to itself, this is not the falsification of a fact; this is the correction of a misprint.  It’s the sort of world that politicians must dream of, but that film directors have made a reality.

Today, in America, there are black judges.  In the America of 1866 there were none. This omission on the part of history is rectified in the film Summersby.  Summersby returns from the Civil War having assumed the identity of some one else.  Becoming responsible for said other person’s crimes, he is put on trial for murder, and is found guilty by a black judge.

            You can go back to the records and confirm that there were no black judges at that time anywhere in the States.  In the South, the Judge would have been a slave the year before. Where would he have found the time to train, and to achieve that level of seniority in the legal system? 

             Is this mere hair splitting?   No: the facts in this case really matter.  What of the insult to those Northern soldiers who gave their lives for the abolition of slavery?  For if the South could boast black lawyers in the 1850s – allowing time for the Judge to progress his way through the system – what on earth was the need for the Civil War? 

            Summersby, of course, is only a film.  We can go back to the historical records and establish the reality.  Orwell’s point is much more serious: not a film’s falsification of history, but a falsification of the actual historical record by those who are its guardians.  In the world of 1984, we would re-visit the records of 1866, and now find confirmation of black judges in any state we cared to examine.  And if our memories could not accommodate the alteration – for it is in the individual living memory, as well as in the written record, that the past is recorded – then we would be duly liquidated.

That this sort of process has not happened yet in Britain can be seen from the saga of MPs expenses.  The first call for the public to know the details followed on the confirmation of the Freedom of Information Act in 2005.  In the world of 1984, the House of Commons would have shredded the originals and produced a completely new set: apart from the real records of those deemed unpersons, and therefore fit for sacrifice.

As it was, MPs assumed their right to privacy.  Caught on the hop because of the Act they themselves had demanded, the House of Commons produced a set of expenses that had been subject to redaction.  ‘Redaction’ is a gloriously Orwellian word.  To the average voter, it sounds like ‘reduction’: something to be applauded in the case of politicians.  In practice, of course, redaction is the scholarly term for editing.  Redacted expenses forms meant expenses forms with the incriminating details all blacked out.  The unexpurgated versions, however, were still in existence: and in due course their detail was made available to the taxpaying voter. 

But it is time to move on to the concept of the unperson.

 

In 1984, unpersons are those who have offended by thought, word or deed.  They must be deemed never to have existed, and all references to them must be expunged from the system.

When I compare the way history is taught now with the way it was taught when I myself was at school, historical white males have tended to become unpersons.   If most school kids today seem to know about Henry VIII; that is because of his involvement with six women.  Drake, as far as I can establish to the contrary, is now effectively an unperson.  So, to a lesser extent, is Nelson.

If modern kids have heard of Nelson, it’s probably the Mandela variety.   If they’ve heard of the naval one, it’s probably via the history of medicine: the diseases and amputations suffered by sailors in Nelson’s navy, with Nelson as one example.

            History, obviously, is a subject in which the data increases by the day, and there must be several valid methods of organising it.  If you’re going for the thematic cross-cultural approach, rather than, say, telling the story of your own nation, then the history of medicine seems to me an admirable way of doing it.  I decline to specify that one way of teaching history is better than another, for I am not qualified to judge.  What I do wish to point out is Orwell’s uncanny anticipation of the unperson, before this became established educational practice. 

 

If you omit characters from the historical drama then, equally, you can add new ones.  To keep his superiors happy, Winston Smith duly draws attention to the obscure Comrade Ogilvy.

At the age of three, this paragon of social virtue demanded a machine gun.  At the age of eleven, he denounced his uncle to the Thought Police.  At nineteen he invented a new hand grenade that killed thirty-one unarmed prisoners in its first trial. At twenty-three he died: jumping out of a helicopter to save secret dispatches.

As it happens, Comrade Ogilvy is purely fictional: fictional, that is, even within the fiction, “It was true there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.”  So far so harmless; Comrade Ogilvy is no different from a character in a novel.  What becomes sinister, is when Comrade Ogilvy becomes more than this.  Once slotted into a re-written back issue of a newspaper, Comrade Ogilvy can be passed off as having had actual historical existence:  “He would exist just as authentically, and on the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.“ 

 In 1912, the world was electrified by the discovery of Piltdown Man.  Forty years later, Piltdown Man was proved to be a hoax: a Comrade Ogilvy of biology.  Had his skull been real, he would have provided convincing new evidence of evolution.  In the same way, new discoveries in history may change our always-provisional understanding of the past: provided that they are authentic discoveries, and not inventions inserted into the historical record by those with an agenda.

 In the film Gladiator there is an archer whose armour gives a new meaning to the word ‘breastplate’. Did female gladiators, in fact, exist?  There are none, for instance, in Gladiator’s predecessor, Spartacus.  A female Roman-era skeleton discovered in London at around the same time the film was made is believed by some – the evidence is circumstantial – to have been a gladiatrix.  Was Ridley Scott inventing, or was he paying tribute to the existent unpersons of a former view of history? 

My own view is that female gladiators probably existed as a rarity.  There is nothing culturally improbable about them when one thinks of Greek antecedents – the armoured statue of Athena and  the story of Penthesilia and the Amazons – or the joint Greek and Roman worship of goddesses.   Juvenal’s Satire VI bans female gladiators; although a ban, of course, can be on something that has happened or that hasn’t.   There is a reference to female fighters in the festivities held by Nero.  If Nero did indeed commit incest, as seems probable, then he would hardly have balked at using women for other unconventional purposes. 

The most convincing case for female gladiators is said to be a marble relief from Halicarnassus.  To a non-expert like me it is impossible to tell the sex of the two figures, and the only evidence is the feminine-sounding names.  If they are female then they are swordswomen, not archers; bare-chested (however hard I look, I can see no evidence of breasts), not armoured; and not involved in mixed-sex combat.  To that extent, Gladiator is a distortion of history.

The question is whether the gladiatrix as a species actually was there in the arena, or whether she merely ought to have been there because anything a man can do, a woman can do better: and in trying to decide the issue, authentic history is still stubbornly loyal to the sources it has.  

At the level of popular culture, however, Comrade-Ogilvy syndrome has simply swept the board. And popular culture is what forms popular views of history.  As a result of Kingdom of Heaven, there are those now firmly convinced that a brotherhood of Christians, Muslims and Jews actually existed until the Crusaders happened along and spoiled everything.

 Those who realise that Shakespeare’s Richard II or Henry V or Macbeth are not the Richard II and Henry V or Macbeth of history are not the problem.  The problem is with those who think, for example, that the film Titanic is an accurate depiction of the events, who do not see Jack and Rose as 1990’s anachronisms, and who are puzzled, when they scour the passenger lists, that they can find no trace of Rose.  

 

In the Appendix to 1984, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ it states that “reduction of vocabulary was regarded as end in itself”.   And yet the academic language of our time has been the discourse of postmodernism.  Postmodern writing by a really skilled practitioner has a certain glorious lunacy about it: a monstrous over profusion of nonsense that revels in its own freedom from responsibility to anything.  Only the truly mad are this liberated: to expose oneself to extreme examples of the genre is to feel that the inmates have finally taken the asylum, and locked the rest of us inside. 

            Consider this example from Jean Baudrillard:

Our complex, metastatic, viral systems, condemned to the exponential dimension alone (be it that of exponential stability or instability), to eccentricity and indefinite fractal scissiparity, can no longer come to an end. Condemned to an intense metabolism, to an intense internal metastasis, they become exhausted within themselves and no longer have any destination, any end, any otherness, any fatality. They are condemned, precisely, to the epidemic, to the endless ex­crescences of the fractal and not to the reversibility and per­fect resolution of the fateful. 

            Or this from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gautarri:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis.  The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion:  all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism.  

As an example of the perfection of gibberish, my money’s on Baudrillard’s effort; but it’s a near-run thing.  But as an example of the reduction of vocabulary?   Did Orwell get things wrong?

Not at all.  For the sort of intellectual climate in which such writing can exist, and receive academic accolade, must be one that can slide into the mental atmosphere of 1984: “a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain”. (Chapter 4). 

Talk long enough to a seasoned postmodernist, after all, and you will be left doubting your own existence (if your birth date is not a conspiracy, then it must be a matter of opinion); or whether – given the supposed indeterminacy of language – the conversation you have just had was possible in the first place.

This is the atmosphere that breeds the postmodern view of history – no history, only historians; no fact, only opinions – which in turn breeds the mental indeterminacy whereby 1984’s revisionist take on things can thrive.

  The inventors of Newspeak, having used the confusion caused by Postmodernism to put themselves in power, would then proceed to dismantle it.  Once he had done their work for them, the Party would vapourise the likes of Gattauri: just as they vapourise – when he invents the term ‘quackspeak’ after listening to one of them – the mocking Syme.

“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.” (Appendix).   As a definition of Political Correctness, that could not be bettered; and Political Correctness now decides who are the new unpersons of history. 

“Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”  (Appendix).   To bear that in mind, and to then listen to a typical answer from a politician, is to feel that 1984 has finally arrived.           

                                                            

Is 1984  a despairing book?  Yes, if you look at the final sentence; no if you look at the tense of the Appendix.  There, the language about Newspeak is all in the past.

The dying Orwell perhaps left us with this hope: that if Newspeak should come, one day it would go, and take its perversion of history with it.

However close we are to the world of 1984, for the moment the book is still in print and we are still allowed to read it; and that must give us hope that we may keep it still at bay.   

EXCLUSION FROM SALVATION: THE FATE OF SUSAN

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds

And binding with briars my joys & desires.

                                                        Blake: The Garden of Love

 

With his concept The Anxiety of Influence, the American critic Harold Bloom applied Freudian Oedipal theory to literature.  Each new generation of writers asserts itself by attacking its predecessor: driven by the fear – hence the title of the theory – of not matching up to what has gone before.  Phillip Pullman’s professed hatred of the Narnia sequence is a classic example of the theory Bloom is outlining.  His Dark Materials and Narnia: there just ain’t room for the both of us.  Pullman’s famous demolition essay of 1998, The Darkside of  Narnia, is long on accusation and short on evidence – inevitable, perhaps, when you are writing under word constraints and have to do as much damage as you can under the limitations imposed  – but one particular example Pullman does cite is the exclusion of Susan from Paradise in The Last Battle.

            For Pullman, “there’s the turning away of Susan from the Stable (which stands for salvation)” for her interest in nylons, lipsticks and growing up. So, Susan is excluded because she’s growing up: which process includes an interest in sex.  Lewis is anti- growing up – have we strayed here for a moment into Peter Pan? – and is also anti-sex.

            Such a reading is of a piece with Pullman’s interpretation elsewhere of the Garden of Eden story: eating the forbidden fruit is a necessary act for self-development.  We see, also – in the background – the view that the Church stifles natural sexual impulses expressed by Blake in ‘A Little Girl Lost’ – “Love! sweet Love was thought a crime”; in ‘Sunflower’ –  “the pale virgin shrouded in snow”; or  in ‘The Garden of Love.’.

 Lewis’ view of what you are admiring if you accept Satan’s perspective on things is fully expressed in A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, and he took the stance  of traditional Christianity towards extramarital sex.  But although Pullman makes them so, neither of these issues, it seems to me, is primarily relevant in the case of Susan.

            Susan is turned away from the Stable?  Where, exactly, does the text say this?   In The Last Battle, Aslan stands at the door of the Stable and all created beings are brought face to face with him.  Those who look on him, and love him, pass through.  Those who look at him and hate him, veer off into the darkness.  Susan isn’t one of them: Lewis, had he wanted to, misses a golden opportunity – perhaps I should say a dark one –  to sermonize on what happens to you if you grow up  and discover sex.  Neither does Lewis dwell upon the fate of those who have rejected Aslan..  Unlike Pullman – who in The Amber Spyglass meditates upon the afterlife possibly beyond the boredom threshold of even the death-obsessed ancient Egyptians had they had the opportunity to read him – Lewis closes the issue in a sentence: “I don’t know what happened to them.”  It is perhaps worth stating here that although Pullman sees Lewis as “life hating” and  The Last Battle  as asserting that “death is better than life”  the main celebration in Christianity is not that somebody died, but that somebody rose from the dead.  The Last Battle reflects this emphasis on resurrection.

Why isn’t Susan there in the darkness?  Well, for a start, Susan isn’t dead.  Narnia has come to an end, but that isn’t to say that our world has.  Susan is still alive on Earth..  Ultimately all worlds may merge: but only on the basis of their differing timescales.  

            Why isn’t Susan with the others on the train that crashes?  Eustace points it out by quoting her: “‘Funny you’re still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”   Susan is not with the others because she is an apostate from Narnia.  In that apostasy, the nylons and lipstick are a symptom rather than a cause.    The roots of Susan’s spiritual malaise are shown as far back as Prince Caspian.   Lucy is the first of the children to see Aslan again; Susan is the last.  We are given a sense of her resistance to her conscience.  As Aslan puts it, “‘You have listened to fears, child.’”   This isn’t about puberty; it’s about the seed that falls on stony ground, and perhaps also about the camel going through the eye of a needle.

In Mere Christianity Lewis points out that Christianity – real Christianity, that is to say: rather than Gnostic-style distortions of it – approves of matter.  God likes matter, having created it.  God approved of the human body enough to become incarnate.  The adult Susan in The Horse and His Boy is depicted as a beautiful and healthily-sexed woman.  Matter becomes a problem only when you worship it: ie the materialist view of life.  Insofar as Susan is one of the rich – her wealth being in her looks, which she seeks to accentuate – then it is difficult for her to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 

All this is perhaps best shown in Lewis’ short story The Shoddy Lands.  The narrator briefly gets inside the mindset of a girl who takes advertisements at face value.  He sees the world through her materialist eyes, and hears the voice she either doesn’t hear, or ignores: “‘Child, let me in before the night comes.’”  It is in this sort of area, I think, that we should look for the explanation of Susan’s problems.

 

During his life, Lewis was given to robust responses to his enemies.   Now that he is no longer in a position to do so, his defence must generally rest upon his fellow Christians or his admirers.  In this instance, however, Lewis himself can have the last word: from Letters to Children, published in 1957.  A boy called Martin had written to him asking what happened to Susan.  This was Lewis’ reply:

            The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan.  She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman.  But there’s plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end…    Her own way. 

 

"WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?"

In Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34, Jesus cries out upon the cross,“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

            What are we to make of it?

            The answer will differ, I think, for those who are sceptics; for those who revere Christ as a great human teacher; and for those to whom he was God incarnate.  I shall try to deal with each viewpoint.

When I was a teenager, and enthusiastic about the history of the Royal Navy, I read as many Hornblower books as I could get hold of.  In one of them, while Britain is at war with Spain, Hornblower must assist a rebel leader in one of the Spanish colonies.  The rebel, unfortunately, thinks he is divine; which makes him an uncomfortable ally.

Politics intervenes.  Peace is declared.  The rebel ally becomes the new enemy.  Hornblower attacks his ship, defeats him, and hands him over to the Spaniards.

At the end of the episode, Hornblower visits the Spanish ship on which the rebel leader, chained by the neck like a dog, is denied water.  He consoles himself by saying that, in his divinity, he does not need it. But not before Hornblower - humane Enlightenment sceptic who dislikes priests and religious mumbo jumbo – has seen the flash of sanity in his eyes that shows an individual painfully aware of his own delusions: and  desperately thirsty.

            To the sceptic, the story of Christ may well be analogous.  For Christ, as depicted in the Gospels, makes many hidden and overt claims to divinity.  He forgives sins, which only God can do.  He relates the Scriptures to himself, says anyone who has seen him has seen the Father, claims to have existed before Abraham, weeps that the people of Jerusalem ignored the prophets he sent them, calls himself son of the vineyard owner and the cryptic ‘son of man’ from Daniel etc. 

            But then a moment of sanity intervenes.  On the cross, Christ is invited by those mocking him to come down, and he knows that he cannot.   His cry of agony is his realisation of his own mere humanity. He has deluded both himself and – what is perhaps worse – those disciples who have given up their livelihoods for his sake.  The one who claimed to be the source of living water has been reduced to saying, “I thirst.”

            Any sceptic who has been a conscientious reader of the Gospels  - for, of course, one needs to know what it is that one is rejecting – will be aware that “Eli etc” are not Christ’s final words.  Thus Luke 23: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.”  But that is easily enough explained.  In the delirium of pain caused by crucifixion, Christ reverts to his delusion: after that one brief moment of lucidity.

Those who wish to preserve Christ simply as a human teacher will be unhappy about ascribing him insanity.  They must, therefore, get rid of his divinity; just as the nineteenth-century rationalists, such as Renan or Strauss, sought to salvage something of him by getting rid of everything that smacked of miracle. 

            Where Christ appears to have claimed to be God, the answer is simple: he didn’t really say it.  It would be much easier if all the assertions of divinity were confined to one gospel; but, unfortunately, they are peppered across them all.  That, perhaps, is why proponents of this sort of view do not always agree with each other as to what is an authentic saying, and what is not.  The following satirical extract - S. Petrie “Q Is Only What You Make It” Novum Testamentum 3 (1959) - about the hypothetical source ‘Q’ illustrates the sort of thing I mean:

              Q is a gospel; Q is not a gospel.  Q includes the crucifixion story; it

              does not include the crucifixion story.  Q consists wholly of sayings

              and there is no narrative; it includes some narrative.  All of Q is

              preserved in Matthew and Luke; not all of it is preserved; it is better

              preserved in Luke.  Matthew’s order is the correct order; Luke’s

              order is the correct order; neither is the correct order.

            And so on.  What tends to remain as bedrock is the Sermon on the Mount and the Good Samaritan.  Christ’s ‘resurrection’ means that he is still alive in our memories as an example to be followed.

            On such a view, it would have been much better if Christ had been killed in a traffic accident or died in his sleep: for the cross is both an irrelevance and an embarrassment.

            Crucifixion was serious stuff: for serious criminals, or for those constituting a threat to the security of the state.  No one would have incurred it simply for telling us to love each other.  That’s the sort of platitude you can applaud in the abstract, and then ignore: before getting down to the real-life grittiness of trashing  your neighbour. 

            So when Christ tells those who wish to follow him that they, too, must take up their cross – assuming he said it – does it mean that his followers, too, will cry out at being forsaken: assuming that Christ actually did?

            That cry can lead us to respond in two ways.  One: to keep our mouths shut so that we don’t end up in that sort of situation.  Two: to speak out, but knowing that when we pay the price for doing so we shall be without a friend: human, or divine.

Claiming to be God, but being misguided; or not claiming to be God, but being misquoted.   And then there is another possibility: that Christ did claim to be God because it was true. 

            On such a view, it is no surprise to find Christ unusually knowledgeable about the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.  As a child, he amazes the teachers in the Temple with his questions and answers.  In the desert, he responds each time to the devil with, “Scripture says…”  But apart from having apposite quotations at his disposal, each of them, additionally, is taken from Deuteronomy: reflecting the time when the Hebrew nation  itself was in the wilderness. 

            In John’s Gospel, we are told that that the soldiers divided Christ’s clothes into four piles.  But because the cloak was without a seam – in itself extraordinarily suggestive – they cast lots to decide who should have it.   Small wonder, then, that one who knew Scripture the way that Christ did should have quoted Psalm 22:

                        My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?...

                        My mouth is dry as a potsherd,

                        And my tongue sticks to my jaw…

                        A band of ruffians rings me round,

                        And they have hacked my hands and feet…

                        They share out my garments among them

                        And cast lots for my clothes…

That, I believe, is one  explanation; but I think there is another that goes much deeper.  The infant Jesus is given the sombre gift of myrrh: associated – although not exclusively – with embalming a corpse.  This child – although a survivor of Herod’s assassination attempt - has come into the world to die.  That, in a sense, is true of all of us; but when Christ baffles the disciples by saying the Son of Man must suffer and die he means that  by his actions and words he will determine the time and nature of his own death: at the Passover, as the sacrificial lamb.

            What I mean, of course, is traditional Christianity’s doctrine of the Atonement: that Christ took the sins of the human race upon himself.  And insofar as sin constitutes estrangement, that must have been part of Christ’s ordeal: the moment, as G K Chesterton puts it, when God became an atheist.

            The one who had lived his human life in perfect communion with the Father experienced what it was like to be without him: and hence the resultant cry of agony.