The Devil goes by many names. Lucifer, Shaitan, the Evil One: these are a few of his Christian and Judaic names. He is called Adversary, the Liar, Old Scratch, the man downstairs. He is called Antichrist, Blasphemer, Heretic. He answers to Illumaniti, Knights Templar, Papism, the Bourgeoisie, the Communist Threat, Anti-Patriotism; in the east he goes by West, and in the west, East. He is called America, he is called Arabia, he is called China, he is called Russia. He is, to put it simply, Evil.

We humans are programmed by millennia upon millennia of scrabbling for survival to think in twos, to make split-second decisions on abstractions of available data. When there is an immediate threat, that response keeps us alive: fight or flight, eat or spit out, kill or capture, attack or negotiate.

The problem is that our species is moving into deeper and murkier waters. These days, thanks to the wonders of civilization, that split-second judgment is only rarely necessary.

And yet we make it anyway. Guilty or innocent, right or wrong, good or evil, for us or against us. Men and women claiming to be leaders shout from pulpits and election stands that there are no shades of gray, and that we will never compromise: as if the only possible response two being faced with two choices is something in the middle and less, and not a third choice and more.

Satan, of course, is behind it all. He’s been behind it from the beginning; can’t you smell the sulfur? The evil in the world is Satan’s doing, and the good is God’s, and us, well, we’re just here for the ride. The only choice we have, the shouters say, is black or white: we will follow God’s plan, or Satan’s.

As you may have guessed from the introduction, Satan isn’t just the Adversary of the Christian church. Satan, or what passes for him, shows his ugly face as the “Enemy” most of our species’ great movements fought against. In any war, he is behind the actions of the opposing force, just as surely as God is behind ours. In any religion, he is behind every belief that is contrary to ours. In any political or philosophical revolution, he is behind the old order of things, while God (or ‘Right’) is behind the new.

The Adversary’s role is to make our decision simple. We are either for him, or against him. Black and white. Pick a side, and remain loyal to it to the end. Obedience without complaint; faith without question; sacrifice without hesitation. It was Satan in the German armies advancing across Poland, whispering in soldier’s ear that maybe the Fuhrer wasn’t as right as he claimed. It was Satan in Luther’s study, arguing that the Catholic church didn’t have a monopoly on truth. It was Satan on Mount Moriah, telling Abraham: forget God, and let your son Isaac live.

This simple interpretation of reality is incredibly attractive. The idea that powers far greater than any of us are warring along clearly drawn lines removes us of any responsibility or need for deliberation. We follow orders, and write off our failings as personal inability to obey. It’s the same idea that draws us to works of fantasy like Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings; the villains are evil, the heros are good, and there is no mistaking the difference. It allows us to simply align our beliefs according to a preset pattern, where every statement can be declared simply ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and every action placed into boxes of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’

But perhaps most importantly, it gives us a peace otherwise impossible to find. When an earthquake strikes and hundreds die, we can rest in the knowledge that it’s somehow part of the Plan, or perhaps the work of the Adversary; either way, it’s a strategem in a war far above us, and therefore is not our responsibility. We can even sooth our guilt at our inaction through prayer, or whatever passes for prayer in the atheistic manifestations of the War.

The Devil has many names, but he also has a secret. He, like the Power on our side, has no power beyond our belief in him. He exists simply as a thing to blame for all that is not good in the world. The Devil has many names, and the oldest is Scapegoat.

There is no grand master plan. There is no War. We are not pawns. We are not even pieces. We are tiny, fragile creatures in a vast and strange universe, who, incredibly, have begun to think. We are afraid of the darkness of ignorance, so, like children, we squeeze our eyes shut and pretend we have the light of knowledge. We look at the complex intertwinings of pain and love and hate and joy and sorrow that is our world, and, because we cannot imagine how to navigate it, we shut our eyes and pretend that from any given point there are only two paths. We invent demons that cause pain because real pain is much harder to kill. We invent angels that heal, because all too often healing is out of our grasp, and we are creatures that thrive on hope. We invent Gods and Satans because wars are much easier to wage when you’re Right.

We do these things not because we are evil, or because we are sheep, or because we are ‘fallen’ from some past greatness. We do them because we are in the infancy of our sentience, and we are terrified of what the future will bring. So: will we live in peace with our eyes closed and our decisions simple, or will we face our fears with our eyes open and seeking wisdom? Real moral choices do have value–nihilism never gave the world much–but they are never simple questions of black and white. They aren’t even gray. In real life, there are no villains, and very few saints. There are no ten-step-paths, rituals, purifications, payments, or incantations to cosmic success. There is no Right side and no Wrong side; there are no sides at all.

There is no us and them. There is only us.

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My licks are crazy, yo.

These brushes with the next degeneration used to require “the youth” en masse, as it is difficult to dirty dance behind a pool hall by oneself – although, after the Star Wars kid, anything’s possible. Sometimes the law intervenes with billy clubs and headlights to disperse groups of public offenders, and occasionally their efforts to “break it up!” are successful, although Officer Krupke tried as vainly to scatter the stragglers around Doc’s candy store as Prohibition cops tried to dry up the Lost Generation.

Gangs continue, and rowdiness lives on in ice cream shops (I suppose?) and theaters, but the youth have changed, radically, since Gameboys and cell phones and iPods have made it into their backpacks: social offensiveness can now take place in line at a barista, absent other members of a clique. The girl with Egyptian-thick eyeliner and suede boots who passes me in the grocery aisle cracks open her mobile phone like an oyster and cups it to her ear just-so, practiced to the point of casual, to hear and deliver all the rage. And because cell phones have bad reception, or have perhaps microwaved our eardrums, she is polite enough to respond with enough volume for everyone in a bread-aisle’s radius to enjoy. I think if I could sum up “modern youth” in one picture, it would be the undulating iPod silhouette, whose electronic savoir faire and groovy community bely the isolation that happens naturally when one crams things into one’s ears.

I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER MYSELF

That was a depressing image. Let’s draw some lines of perspective around it, to be fair. There’s a saying that goes, If you’re a conservative before 30, you have no heart, but if you’re a liberal after 30, you have no brain. I may lose my sanity after 30, then, because I have always cherished strong conservative sympathies, in the most basic sense of that adjective: Don’t Change Things. The new-fangled, up-and-coming, revolutionary, hip, modern, never-before-seen, and unprecedented don’t appeal to me. But, having become familiar with this prejudice, I’ve realized that attraction does not equal merit, and that my liking older things has nothing to do with whether they were qualitatively better than the new or not. To compensate, I like to take a closer look at the “old days” to see what obsolescence I’m not sorry to have missed.

Since I brought up the iPod, and since music is such a big part of Youth Aesthetic, I’ll stick to that, comparing the present garbage that I know to past garbage with which I’m happily unfamiliar. I can remember 10 years back, even 20 years thanks to my dad’s CD collection; and classic rock radio has filled in my knowledge of the 70s and 80s. But I’m not familiar with a lot before then, so I’ll look 50 years back to 1960, the year of Kennedy, Ben-Hur, and To Kill a Mockingbird (the book, not the movie – didn’t you always imagine it earlier? I liked it, so I thought it was older.).

The first big hit I find from around this time in 1960 is a song by Jean Dinning called “Teen Angel.” It reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in February of that year. If you, like me, don’t know what that means, it’s shorthand for, “more people bought or played this song than any other at that time.” Think about that as we continue. In brief, it’s about a girl who dies as she is trying to recover something of sentimental value. Well, that’s unfortunate. It at least gives a clearer account than some of Coldplay’s numbers, so I can admire its honesty, its unswerving gaze at the woes of young teen life. From what I can tell, this song was meant to have the kind of emotional impact currently provided by “Wonderwall” or “Somewhere Only We Know” – tragic, poignant, lacrimose.

I'm smiling because in the end she dies.

That is not the effect it would have today. I told you the story “in brief” because the story in full – hold on, I’ll just copy these lyrics for your amusement:

Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh

(Better than “I Gotta Feeling” so far.)

That fateful night the car was stalled
Upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
But you went running back

Teen Angel, can you hear me,
Teen Angel, can you see me,
Are you somewhere up above
And am I still your own true love?

What was it you were looking for
That took your life that night?
They said they found my high school ring
Clutched in your fingers tight.

[Chorus]

The song that in 1960 was banned from airwaves for being too morbid is about a girl who is killed by a train while rummaging through a car for her sweetie’s high school ring. Girls wept over this song. People bought so many records of it that it outplayed and outsold everything else at the time. I’ve actually called my mother about it, and she remembers it as “kind of dumb.” (Blessed genes!) The rest of the lyrics need not be reproduced; it’s the chorus a few times more with a stanza about no longer being able to kiss.

Totally worth getting mowed down by a train.

What I want to know is why this hasn’t been re-imagined yet as an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s an improbably horrible situation that nevertheless has enough slapstick to be hilarious. And it makes no sense. Was the girl deaf? (Is that why he asks, “Can you hear me?” Now that would be morbid.) Did she not see the train barreling down on her sweetie’s Buick? Or did she jump into it as the train closed in? Was the train engineer blind? And how did this ring get lost in the first place? Maybe “fixing the stalled car” wasn’t the reason it slipped off. Maybe he lost it when he rescued her from the steel deathtrap. But why did the singer need to “pull” her out? That means the car was either flipped or was in imminent peril of squishage: in either case, how did she even get back into the car to attempt the rescue? Maybe it reached number one because of some sweepstakes dedicated to answering these questions.

“Teen Angel” will likely remain a mystery of human creativity. I’m grateful to the passage of taste for eliminating this from classic radio – at least, as far as I’ve ever encountered. As one can find out by listening to 15 minutes of any country radio station, though, time has not destroyed kitsch. Nor has it boiled out sappiness, akin to kitsch, which the probable playlist of that teen angel in the bread aisle would demonstrate. Could Emo be this generation’s version of highschool-ring crazy? If so, the moral of “Teen Angel,” besides, “Don’t climb into a car in front of an oncoming train,” is that some really stupid things will always have an audience.

Moving on. “Teen Angel” hit the top of the charts in early February. It was replaced in mid-February by Percy Faith’s “Theme from A Summer Place,” which remained at the number one position until April, when Elvis Presley knocked it out with his kinetic hips. The musical motif on which the piece is based, written by the great composer Max Steiner, is quite pleasant, and instantly recognizable. I suspect it was just behind Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” as the number to be played ironically over the trailer for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As for the film in which it appeared, I haven’t been brave enough to look for it online; I get claustrophobic when watching chick flicks, and the trailer for A Summer Place hints that it might be the mother of them all.

“Theme from A Summer Place” has some lackluster lyrics itself, but they’re deliberately empty and amusing, since the summer place in question is meant to get your mind off of things. (Note: the instrumental version, not the worded variety, hit the Top 100 in 1960.) This is the kind of music that would be perfect on long rides across the California coast, or up seven flights in an elevator; I associate it with women in neck scarves and thick, silver-rimmed sunglasses and handkerchiefs tied at the chin, e.g., Audrey Hepburn. Ok, change that: i.e., Audrey Hepburn. Here’s the work for your listening relish. Enjoy the stock photography and default transitions.

Is it comparable to anything today? “Pleasant to listen to” isn’t really a category in modern pop: perhaps if I look for a song from a comparable movie, I’ll have an analog. The poster for A Summer Place advertises it thusly: “This is the place where a boy and a girl discover desire, where adult emotions violently explode, where the inn, the guests, and the sensations of the great best-seller come to bold life.” Hot dog.

If anyone can think of a better comparison, leave a comment, but I think “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic is as close as I’m going to come to the postmodern version of “Theme from A Summer Place.” Beyond the fact that the Percy Faith Orchestra has a much wider musical range than Celine Dion, both songs are easy listening, insipid, and mindless, although the former works better on a sunny day than the latter, a good soundtrack for tearful diary entries. And both movies seem to be targeting a female audience between the ages of naïve and emotional (Hollywood gold.)

If things have changed at all between now and the days of “Teen Angel” and “Theme from A Summer Place,” it’s that music is sharper and sadder, more ironic, and often more obscene, without the soupy sentimentality or blithe lilt of yesteryear. In the past, at the behest of popular music, the audience of these sorts of songs (mostly girls) boogied, then cried, then cried some more, then were miserable at their typist jobs (from what movies tell me); today, songs still encourage girls to cry like widows over some unattainable sweetie, but they’ve also become colored by a certain bitchiness, an attitude of, “Screw him, you’re Miss Independent and you’re going to have fun slashing his leather seats tonight.” If this has made women more fun to be around, let me know, because I haven’t noticed. On a parallel track, guys have advanced from Chubby Checker’s 1960 Twist to such fare as the deeply introspective “Shake Ya Ass,” so we haven’t improved, either. In that context, the next generation is worse off now than it was before.

Shake it like it's 1959.

And we’re back where we started: It’s always fashionable to criticize the youth. First, it’s easy – they’re loud and they’re everywhere, so finding a peeve is as easy as finding a vegan bar in San Francisco. Also, since it identifies the critic as a member of an older, wiser, and classier group, it’s extremely gratifying; the youth may be in full force now but you’ve got the weight of every other generation behind you. (All the way back to Adam and Eve or Ardi, depending.) As long as the argument is about maturity, many of these criticisms are valid. Once it becomes about “past versus present,” unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up well, since you don’t need to dredge the streams of history long to pick up netfuls and netfuls of pure crap, much of it as rancid and grotesque as what’s plastered along city blocks or sold at the corner store today.

A gift in parting: “Theme from A Summer Place” with the lyrics. The opening reminds me of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

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While searching for the fabled drunken koudou in far-off Georgia, I happened to meet three lovely young Orthodox women, who were kind enough to show me some of the ancient churches and cathedrals in and around Tbilisi. They also explained the meaning and stories behind many of the icons and murals adorning these churches, and, as they did, I realized something I never had before: that these icons serve as more than a simple visual representation of a saint or deity to pray to. They serve also as a trigger for narratives that have meaning within the Orthodox paradigm; as a reinforcement of faith and purpose within the church. The question that immediately came to mind was this: what is the place of such narratives in the human mind, and the species at large?

When your senses take in some section of reality in sequence over time, your mind constructs that raw data into a narrative; a structure of language and meaning arranged chronologically. This is a memory. Think of the last meal you ate. The memory is organized top down, triggered first by the words “last meal you ate”, subdivided into, say “pizza,” “coca-cola,” and “conversation with friends,” further divided into details and finally branching into the senses themselves; the smell, the taste, the look of the room. Though we do have the capacity to remember the raw sense data, we can’t help but organize that data into labels and narratives. Confronted with something we haven’t sensed before (a new city, for instance), we can’t help but compare it to other cities we’ve seen, and the concept of “city” as a whole. Confronted with something entirely new, we create a narrative and meaning to assign to it.

Any gaps in sense data are bridged by the pre-existing meaning and paradigm already within our minds. This can even create memories of things we never experienced, as demonstrated in the experiments conducted by Elizabeth Loftus, where, when shown doctored pictures, participants “remembered” visiting an amusement park that did not exist.

Stories we hear are treated the same way, though in reverse. The labels and narrative structure enter our minds first, and are then fleshed out with stock sense data. When we remember the story of Crime and Punishment, we don’t remember Dostoevsky’s words; we remember the look of the blood on the axe, the smell of the old woman’s apartment, and the burgeoning terror within our chests as we realize what we (as Raskolnikov) have done. Fortunately for us, our minds “tag” these new memory-stories as external to ourselves. When our minds fail to do this, psychopathy results: thus the mental patients or drug users leaping off of buildings believing themselves to be Superman.

We assign importance to these stories according to what we tag them as. The story of Mohammed’s hearing the Koran from the mouth of an angel, for instance, is tagged as “religious truth” in the mind of a Muslim, as “cultural myth” in the mind of an atheistic ethnographer, and under “pagan lies” in the mind of a fundamentalist Christian. In each case, the story is absorbed, but used differently. The “gaps” in the story are also filled in differently according to different receiving paradigms; the Muslim takes it at face value (the Koran is a gift from Allah), the ethnographer may consider epilepsy, psychosis, or greed for power, and the Christian may immediately cite Satan as the “angel” who accosted Mohammed in his cave.

The stories we tag as history are usually absorbed as little more than data, and brought to bear on applicable questions. The stories we tag as meaningful history (narratives from the War of Independence to many Americans, for example) are integrated into part of our paradigm as part of our national identity: we recall them with pride. With fiction, we tend to identify with a specific character or characters, and our memories are of their experiences. Some works of fiction we tag as simple fiction (used for entertainment or, perhaps, to fuel daydreaming). Others, those that strikes us more deeply, are tagged as “meaningful” fiction. In these cases we remember the experience of a character that touched us as if it had happened to us and, as with our own memories, those experiences may well change who we are. We can read of Odysseus’ brash taunts against the Cyclops and of the events that followed, and, remembering the story afterward, speak more prudently.

The most powerful external narratives (often more powerful than even personal memories) are the religious ones; the ones that are in our minds not only true, but True; eternally meaningful and universally applicable. A human of faith who holds such narratives close defines his or her paradigm by them. To a strong Christian, there is no narrative more powerful or definitive than that of Christ’s death and resurrection. To many Buddhists, the life of Buddha (as told or interpreted by a given sect) serves this role. Even the atheistic communists during Lenin’s rise to power had such religious narratives: the stories of the Proletariat Revolution and the coming worker’s paradise among the most significant.

Interestingly, even such definitive narratives can themselves be interpreted according to the pre-existing paradigm structure: compare concepts of Hell between modern America, Dante’s Italy, and Catholic Haiti to see just one example. Nonetheless, these narratives, once absorbed and interpreted by a personal paradigm, become structural within that paradigm according to the significance assigned to them. They give the holder meaning, purpose, identity, and a place within a community who shares those narratives.

This is perhaps one of the main functions of these stories. Shared narratives create powerful bonds between human beings: soldiers who experience a war together will be bound as friends for life and couples who share meaningful experiences will be bound tighter after the process. Similarly, shared external narratives create bonds between fellow believers, even with fiction–two people who both ascribe great significance to a given fictional narrative will have a bond pre-made and a faster friendship because of it.

Shared religious narratives, held with as much significance as they are, create very strong communities. As I traveled through Georgia, I was struck by the high place religion played among its people as well as its strong cultural identity despite two centuries of rule by Russia. I saw the way Georgian Orthodox believers would cross themselves when passing a church, and the way they would kneel inside a church to kiss the base of an icon, and tried to understand how a country under an atheist dictatorship from 1917 to 1991 could retain such a powerful religious identity.

When Nino, Nino, and Marine showed me around Tbilisi and explained the stories behind many of these rituals and icons, I began to understand. Georgian history, culture, and religion are all inseparably intertwined; its stories of national identity are also stories of the Orthodox faith. King David the Builder, a powerful ruler responsible for the first unification of the Georgian Caucausus, the Christianization of his territory, and the defense against the Selcuk Turks, is also a saint. So too is Queen Tamar, David’s great-granddaughter, the warrior-king Vashtankh of the Wolf’s Head, and the Russian-era poet Ilia Chavchavadze. So when a Georgian kisses an icon of Georgian saint, she is not simply kissing an image; she also is triggering an external memory, a narrative, that networks out through the entire Georgian cultural, religious, and political identity, and serves to strengthen all of them within the Georgian mind.

Rationally, “nations” do not exist at all; the Earth is the Earth, and has been here long before we were here and will be here long after we are gone. The concept of borders, cultures, governments, and states exist only within our own minds; perhaps it is these shared narratives that give us individual humans the cohesion necessary to draw together and, by doing so, create civilization.

To read more about Tim’s search for the drunken koudou in Georgia and the world at large, check out his personal blog:

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To “conform” to the image and action of Christ is to be a true non-conformist, for nothing, absolutely nothing, confounds the world more than Christ’s presence in it. No saint conforms, but all saints obey. This obedience becomes, as the great mystic Simone Weil saw it, like the waves of the sea, or, as Kierkegaard imagined, Abraham saddling hiss ass to take his only son to be sacrificed: neither too fast (for that would smack of zealotry) nor too slow (for that would be playing the martyr) but steadily, deliberately, in perfect obedience to God’s will.

This “obedience” is the motion of God’s active grace. God wills, and saints do. This doing is almost always met by censor, persecution, and contempt, and, understandably enough, the censor, persecution, and contempt is often heaped upon the saint not by unbelievers (for being in Christ, the saint comes for those who are ill, not well) but by the very authorities in whom the body of Christ is said to lodge: the church, those within the church who prefer that the happy medium be upheld at all costs. I will make the following claims for obedience:

1. Obedience is always unprecedented, and original.

2. Obedience is always scandalous in so far as, like its binary opposition, sin, it confounds and angers the moralist and the Pharisee.

3. Obedience is always the motion of a man or woman who, having allowed God to shape him or her to his purpose, does not “act” on his or her own behalf, but moves with and through, and from the action (will) of God.

4. Just as it does not conform, obedience does not rebel, but submits to sufferings, trials, opposition, calumny, disgrace, torture, censorship, and misunderstandings because, as already said, it is the motion of God’s will and cannot be impeded. Embodying the Word, witnessing to the image and reality of Christ, it never comes without accomplishing its task.

5. Like Calvary, obedience is a triumphal march toward salvation that appears to those who cannot see as a death march, a waste of time, a failure.

6. Obedience is humble, yet fearless, submissive yet ferocious, inevitable and certain, yet willing to be confused, pained, ridiculous, even “sinful” (why does your master eat with whores, drunkards, and tax collectors?).

At its sight, the sinner may convert, for it shares this one truth in common with every sinner: conformity is never enough. In point of fact, mere conformity to the outward “righteousness” of moralisms and societal norms is the chief cover for a filthy soul. The one thing a great sinner has going for him is he knows, to his depths, that he is a sinner. The worst thing that can happen to a Christian is that he conform rather than obey, that he be puffed up on his own virtue, rather than brought down upon the body of the crucified one, and raised up with that body. The sinner can smell the phony moralist, the Pharisee, from a mile off. This is why Christ pleaded against the moralist and the Pharisee: because they impede conversion, because they are judgment rather than mercy, conviction rather than redemption, and Christ comes to convert, to forgive, to set free the captive, and proclaim the kingdom of God.

Most importantly, Christ loves the sinner with a love so fierce it makes impotent and flimsy the most violent storms of which human kind is capable. Nothing on heaven or earth is as violent or as ferocious as Christ’s love. Truly in its presence, we lay down our weapons, we lose our nerve, we are brought halt and lame and stupid before the living word, before the new and everlasting covenant.

A man may perform many wonders, preach with the voice of angels, have an understanding of theology beyond all others, and be conformed, not to the image of Christ, but of Satan: for Satan comes as an angel of light, with eloquence beyond all others. Satan knows the law better than all but God, and is its chief prosecutor (the accuser). Satan can grant power in the world, riches, and marvels. He can levitate, read hearts, do all the tricks by which saints are appraised. Satan can even conform, which is why he is a great champion of moralists. The only thing Satan cannot do is obey.

And so when we come to Cupertino, this “stupid” man, this scandal, the oaf, this “ass,” we must not be overly impressed by his signs of sainthood. The greatest sign of sainthood is obedience: not conformity, not moralism, not wonders and miracles in their most apparent sense, but obedience. And this leads me to my last characteristic of obedience:

7. Though obedience is never to be confused with conformity, it is ordinary: salt and light and dirt. It is humble in this sense: that it does not see itself as anything special, or worthy, or beyond the pale, but rather as lowly, unworthy, at the service of all who encounter it. It becomes last in order to be first, dies in order to live, and serves in order to rule.

In all these characteristics of obedience, St. Joseph of Cupertino triumphed, or, rather, God triumphed in him.

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Jupiter, sphere of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Dr. Ward, whose demeanor incorporates British no-nonsense intelligence and Anglican modesty, graciously allowed Drunken Koudou to interview him by phone from his home in Oxford. As a blizzard in Charlottesville made the neighborhood outside my window look like Lantern Waste, I asked Dr. Ward about his book, his thoughts on medieval systems of thought, and the Narnia movies.

Drunken Koudou: Before we get started on other questions, could you talk a little bit about yourself, your work and your life thus far, what else you’ve written, and why you are in your current profession.

Michael Ward: I’m an Englishman, born and brought up in the south of England. I studied English, first of all, here at Oxford, then did a theology degree when I was training for the ministry in the Anglican Church. Then I combined those two degrees, English and Theology, in my Ph.D., which I did at St. Andrew’s in Scotland. That’s when I began to study C. S. Lewis seriously.

I’m an Anglican minister. I’ve been chaplain of Peterhouse in Cambridge for three and a bit years, and I’m now chaplain of St. Peter’s College in Oxford.

In addition to my Planet Narnia book, I edited a book of sermons on Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe. I’m currently editing The Cambridge companion to C. S. Lewis which is coming out later this year. Oh, and I’m Associate Editor of the online poetry service, PoemaDay, which I’m hoping will develop significantly in the coming year.

DK: For the benefit of our readers, in a paragraph or so, and in your own words, what is the premise of Planet Narnia?

MW: The premise of Planet Narnia is that there is a third level of meaning in the Narnia books. The first level of meaning everybody is obviously aware of, and that’s just that they’re good adventure stories that a child of five or six could understand. The second level is not so obvious, and that’s the biblical parallels – how Aslan is in many respects a Christ-like figure, and episodes of the Bible are kind of re-enacted: the gospel story in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; creation in The Magician’s Nephew; and the last judgment in The Last Battle.

Mars, sphere of Prince Caspian

But then the third layer of significance, the fundamental layer, is a much deeper kind of theological purpose that C. S. Lewis had in mind – which was to say something about how Christ is not just a single, solitary, individual figure moving about a neutral stage doing things to people, but that he’s actually the one who makes the stage. He’s the inner meaning of history.

In order to communicate that, which is a rather sophisticated and complex theological point, Lewis turned to the images of the seven heavens, which he described as “spiritual symbols of permanent value.” And it’s out of those seven heavens that he constructed each Narnia book, so that there’s a symbolic harmony between how Aslan is portrayed, the plot he is part of, and all sorts of ornamental details, too.

DK: Have you found that most people you’ve talked to are receptive to this third level? In other words, did you encounter much skepticism when Planet Narnia was first published?

MW: I’ve been absolutely delighted with the response. Of course, I was hoping for a good response, because I think it’s a very persuasive case, but I’d say that the response has been even better than I had hoped. Nearly every Lewis scholar who has read the book is not only persuaded that I’m on the right track, but most of them are saying, this is amazing! How have we not seen this before? Because it makes such good sense of so many otherwise perplexing things about the Narnia books.

DK: While it’s fascinating to see this key in action, one of my questions when I first read the book was whether this in any way might reduce the Chronicles to a sort of codebook or simplistic roman a clef. I don’t think that, but have you encountered this kind of feeling elsewhere?

The Sun, sphere of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

MW: Actually no, I haven’t. Most people respond well – 95% of people do respond very positively indeed. Nearly all of those people think that it doesn’t damage the books in any way – it doesn’t reduce them to some kind of cryptic code or cipher. It enriches them; it shows them to be much more artistic and subtle. It doesn’t limit them to being a set of crossword clues.

While I have sometimes used the term “Narnia code,” as on the BBC documentary about Planet Narnia called “The Narnia Code,” the code in question isn’t a kind of numerological code or a cryptogram – it’s more like a genetic code, I think, like the code of the genes in our bodies. The fact that you can genetically analyze cells doesn’t at all explain the mystery of each human person: it just shows you how the cells are constructed. The end to which Lewis’s planetary scheme is put in each book – that’s a rich and marvelous thing.

DK: This medieval cosmological vision seems like such a rich ground for literature both in terms of content and of technique. Looking at the modern plane of literature, do you think there is a way for young authors today to recapture that kind of vision?

MW: That’s a difficult question. There are some writers who very explicitly have used this symbolic system. There was a novel written a few years ago by a novelist called Neal Stephenson which is called Quicksilver, which is itself built very explicitly out of the Mercury imagery. But I’m not quite sure that I see what you’re asking.

DK: When I look at the medieval vision, I’m struck not only by how everything seems to fit together, but that each thing in its place has such depth and richness of meaning. For instance, if I look at the seven heavens, or something like the even older idea of the Greek elements, I see all of these different personalities and images and associations. It feels like, in the modern era, we have some pantheonic figures like Mother Nature / Gaia, but we don’t really have that sort of comprehensive system in which there are instant associations and symbols that can be drawn from one model. My question is: Is there a way to recapture that way of looking at the world or do we need to do something new within our modern age?

MW: That’s a good question. I think that yes, you’re right in many respects. Those old symbols systems – the humors, the elements, the planets, and so on – most people aren’t familiar with those. In that respect, we’re in a poorer state than we used to be. Having said that, some writers who are well-read and learned in poetry and symbols realize that there are quite a few modern symbols, seemingly modern symbols, which nonetheless tap into much more traditional, ancient ways of thinking.

Luna, sphere of The Silver Chair

So that some people say that Superman is for us what Hercules was for the ancients, and Marilyn Monroe is a modern-day equivalent of Aphrodite. There are ways in which pop culture, even without trying necessarily, replays some of these ancient archetypes and tropes.

But whether it can be done more explicitly is a much more tricky question. Without getting too complex and philosophical about it, I think that maybe we’re not able to apply that kind of detailed or all-embracing set of symbolic systems to things because, well, because we’re postmoderns, aren’t we! We don’t believe in meta-narratives anymore, we don’t have overarching stories that we believe in. I mean, obviously Christians do; but in the non-Christian world, there’s a fragmentation setting in – everybody’s story is as good as everybody else’s, and there’s no kind of objective reality to which we need to conform.

So, I feel that without a major overhaul of our basic philosophical suppositions, I don’t really see that we’re going to get back to, or find contemporary versions of, the ways of thinking that you find in medieval and ancient world views.

DK: While I was in college I saw, and then elsewhere have seen a tendency of young Christians to go back to these medieval models as if they are beyond reproach and sacrosanct – looking back to a sort of Thomistic golden age. What do you think is the proper response of a Christian today to these medieval models?

MW: It’s easy to become a romantic about the past. Lewis himself, sometimes almost self-critically, remarks that he was a laudator temporis acti, a praiser of time gone by. But he thought that was a mistake; he didn’t think that there is any special magic about the past.

A major benefit that the knowledge of history can give us is that it allows us to have something to set against the present. We don’t know the future, but we need something to set against the present in order to give us some kind of anchor and bearings from the fleetingness of the present moment. That’s why Lewis liked studying the past and reading old literature – not because he thought the past was infallible – it’s not at all infallible, and there are all sorts of errors that are to be found in every age, every epoch – but they’re unlikely to be the same errors as those that we’re currently making. They provide a needed and a useful counterweight to our contemporary situation.

Mercury, sphere of The Horse and His Boy

DK: This is more a question of taste, but what is your favorite book out of the Chronicles and why?

MW: I’m torn between The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. If I was forced at the point of a gun to choose, I would say the Dawn Treader, which I think is just ravishingly beautiful, especially the last few chapters.

But The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is, I think, in some ways the better book. It seems to me to be the book that Lewis was born to write. It has a certain kind of inevitability about it. It’s almost a perfect book – it sort of fell ready-made into his lap, I think.

DK: I’m curious, as an American: have you seen any of the recent films?

MW: Yes, I’ve seen them both.

DK: What is your opinion of them?

MW: I don’t think they’re very good, to be honest. They’re not half as good as, say, the recent Lord of the Rings films, either as adaptations or just as films. I mean, I could talk about this for a long time – I don’t how much you want me to explain.

DK: I guess I would ask if you think that the Chronicles lend themselves to film in the same way that Lord of the Rings seems to have, or if you think there is something about the Chronicles that makes them particularly more difficult to adapt to film.

MW: I think that the Narnia books are very well suited to adaptation. I don’t think there’s anything un-adaptable about them. They just need to be adapted well. And I don’t think that the two adaptations so far have been very skillfully done. I don’t think that the adaptors understood their source material.

Venus, sphere of The Magician's Nephew

Half of that may be because there has been this view that the Narnia books were slopped together, that they were a slapdash, hodgepodge, mishmash kind of thing, and therefore the adaptors may have thought, “Oh, Lewis didn’t construct these books with any great care; therefore, it doesn’t matter if we monkey about with them ourselves.” That may be one explanation, I don’t know.

For instance, in the first film, the adaptors, screenwriter, director – they didn’t understand the symbolic quality of the book. They thought, for instance, that the snow of Narnia, the winter, was a winter wonderland, and that it was a beautiful landscape, with lovely snowflakes falling on eyelashes and opportunities for snowball fights and things like that. But that’s just a misreading of the winter. The winter is a curse! And it’s not, except in one brief exception, described as beautiful. It’s a menacing kind of winter: it’s grim, it’s bad. Now that’s why the coming of spring and summer is so joyful. And the filmmakers didn’t seem to fully understand that.

I think they compounded the problem by turning the White Witch into this golden-haired character. In the book, of course, she has a face that is deadly white, and has black hair. There’s no life about her, no color to her at all, because she is a kind of personification of the deathliness of winter, which the Jovial influence in the book is going to counteract. But by giving her golden hair, the symbolism of her appearance is completely undercut. I can’t understand why you would do that; it seems to me to be sort of tone deaf, imaginatively speaking.

DK: Working off an earlier question, what do you see as the task, if any, of Christian authors in the next generation? And by that I mean, Lewis and his fellow Inklings saw the preservation of Western culture, against the abolition of man, as an important work for their time: do you think that this goal should be amended or pursued with equal diligence? Is there a specific objective that Christian authors should have today?

MW: Good question. I think that one of the most pressing problems facing us in the West is a tendency to view our bodies as raw materials that can be cut up and changed to suit whatever we happen to want them to be. We’ve begun to learn that we can’t do that to the environment, that we can’t treat the natural world as so much raw material to be cut up and disposed to suit our own fancy. But we still have to learn it with respect to our own bodies and persons.

If Christian writers can communicate something about the divine nature imaged in man and about the nature of masculinity and femininity, about the nature of the family and about the purpose of sex, and all those very personal, physical questions relating to our own bodies and natures, then I think that that’s a big, big project for a Christian writer to somehow achieve.

Saturn, sphere of The Last Battle

DK: What is your next big project? Are you set to unlock the key to understanding Lord of the Rings?

MW: [laughing] I like Lord of the Rings, but I’m not a great Tolkien scholar, so I don’t think that’s very likely. I mentioned that I’m editing this Cambridge companion to C. S. Lewis, which is my current project, and that’s coming out in September.

There are two other things that I’m working on. One is, I’m writing a much shorter, simpler version of Planet Narnia for a younger, less educated audience – that, hopefully, is going to be out by Christmas. Once those two things, that and the Cambridge companion, are out of the way, then I might get round to writing a proper, deep study of the Ransom trilogy. I’d like to do that at some point. Of course, it’ll be a big project, and will probably take me five years or so: don’t hold your breath.

DK: It’s been a real pleasure talking to you, Dr. Ward.

MW: Thank you for inviting me.

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The Matrix, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999

“Whoa.”

That’s what Neo said in 1999, at the doorstep of the new millennium and, perhaps more importantly for film, on the eve of a new decade. In 1999, the twin towers were still standing, New Orleans wasn’t underwater, and a Democrat had been in the White House for eight years. Even though there were rumblings of the future horrors of terrorism, the 90s were a decade tipsy off the bull politics of Reagan and the demise of the Soviet Union. It was certainly a decade of immense exuberance, if not hope. And at the end of it all, Neo, after escaping a world of bland office tyrannies and edgy nightclubs, took the red pill, floundered out of the matrix, and stepped into the blank space of virtual reality, and said, “We’ll need guns. Lots of guns.”

It’s hard not to see The Matrix as prophetic of things to come. Having been comfortably immune from the bloodshed in Africa, Europe, and Asia under the Clinton administration, in 2001 America was forced to wake up to the reality that some people wanted nothing more than to blow us up. It was a red pill, but perhaps not the one we would have chosen ourselves. Out of the wreckage emerged a Morpheus with a bullhorn, promising to wreak vengeance on these Agents of terror, who could slip out of our knowledge and crosshairs at will, seemingly invincible to traditional tactics. And then Morpheus turned out to be disillusioningly human – even less so, according to the cries outside his house. In 2008, America turned out in force to replace the bumbling warmonger with a political Messiah, “our own personal Jesus Christ.” The next decade may well define itself by whether this Neo can undo the damage before, or, like his predecessors, only disappoint.

The next 10 years of blockbusters seemed also to be encapsulated, spermatic, in 1999. Besides The Matrix, this was also the year of American Beauty and The Phantom Menace. Beauty contained a wryness, an introspection, and an uncompromised look at abnormality that would all continue in independent film over the next decade; The Matrix was a hybrid of shoot-’em-up and existential escapism held together with religious symbology, hinting at future experiments in either violence (Saw, No Country for Old Men, The Bourne Identity) or fantasy (The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Benjamin Button, Avatar); and The Phantom Menace, which enjoyed a level of hype directly proportional to its later criticism, was a fitting precursor to future mindless special-effects movies, near-parodies of spectacle, such as Fantastic Four, Speed Racer, G.I. Joe, and most recently, the critically condemned Transformers franchise.

Inglourious Basterds, Universal Studios, 2009

“Watching Donny beat Nazis to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies.”

The Matrix brought stylized violence to a new level in film, yet it was Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s tale of a dispossessed and enslaved Roman general, that set the trend of violent movies in the decade. After a harrowing fight in the Coliseum, for instance, involving various manifestations of bloodshed, including a charioteer’s bisection, the gladiator cooly informs the emperor who destroyed his family: “I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.” Gladiator, like Braveheart before it, received good press in conservative circles for its illustration of what it means to fight for what you believe; unfortunately, this sort of gung-ho, hawkish elevation of war ignored the revenge motif in both movies that made their heroes interesting characters but by no means role models.

Nor did the terrorist attacks a year later force a re-evaluation of the American approach to violence, but rather motivated Hollywood with a new revenge fantasy, and the guilt associated with it. The genius of the Bourne trilogy lay in its ability to create a nontraditional soldier – a professional American terrorist – whose methods could bring down both terrorist hitmen and agents of American overextension. It hurt all the right people with every resource not allowed regular soldiers, and in that manner it shared thematically with Jack Bauer’s efforts on 24.

Conservative pundits over the next several years were fond of crowing whenever a film critical of the war in Iraq floundered at the box office (Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss), while their liberal counterparts tried vigorously to whip up the kind of anti-war fervor that inspired so many great films based on Vietnam. The failure of these films was surely not due to overwhelming support for American action overseas; rather, what both conservative and liberal ideologues failed to understand was that Vietnam happened in a different country across the globe, but terrorism happened in our midst, which meant that, no matter one’s personal affiliation for or against President Bush, it was always going to be more cathartic to watch enemies of the state get blown to bits than to see their humanity redeemed and ours questioned – as happened, for example, in reality at Abu Ghraib.

No Country for Old Men, Miramax Films, 2007

There were other kinds of violence over the decade that were less obviously related to the war, yet still tapped into feelings of revenge and guilt – Casino Royale, in which terrorism was more global and less Muslim; There Will Be Blood, a drama showcasing a deeply violent soul; No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight, which both struggled with the containment of evil for evil’s sake; and Doubt, in which trust and decency were violated because of guilt. Violence has, of course, always been a dominant element in film and can’t be said to have suddenly appeared during this decade. Yet the approach to it, at once extravagant and personal, was in its own class.

The final word on violence of the last ten years was best said, fittingly, by Quentin Tarantino in his film Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino is no stranger to violence onscreen, directing the Kill Bill volumes and backing the Grindhouse double-feature. In Basterds, all coliseum-goers are on trial – not just the visible bloodthirsty Nazis, but we ourselves, the audience, who are invited to cheer at their bullet-riddled, dynamite-blasted, bat-disfigured demises. One particularly damning moment of the movie comes near the end, when Hitler and Goebbels laugh from a theater box as Allied soldiers are sniped one-by-one in the Nazi film “Nation’s Pride.” We know that there is a plot in place to bomb these German bastards, and so we smirk at what we know will be a fine old explosion, getting ready for some Nazis to get their collective ass kicked Indiana Jones-style – and for that, are not far removed from the Fuhrer’s own bloodlust. “This may be my masterpiece,” says Pitt in the end, clearly speaking for Tarantino. Insofar as he demands we pay closer attention to our cinematic violence, we can agree with him, for now.

Return of the King, New Line Cinema, 2003

“The ring is not safe here, Sam.”

Had Tarantino made a polemic about our obsession with violence in documentary fashion – something along the lines of Redacted or Sicko – he might have earned more philosophic praise but would almost certainly have created a lesser movie. Placing his basterds in the “realistic” context of WWII nevertheless allowed him to play with themes outside the bounds of actuality. In this sense, Inglourious Basterds is as much a fantasy film as Star Wars.

Fantasy has often provided a way to analyze, criticize, and clarify the problems of the present without resorting to familiar (and therefore oversaturated) terminology. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, along with MacDonald’s Phantastes, Lewis’ Narnia septology, and other efforts earlier in the 20th century, crafted several Western mythological systems into diverse stories capable of probing into truth, beauty, uncertainty, and evil. That field fell prey to so many copycats after Tolkien’s success that only science fiction, which could pull from ongoing research and discovery, continued the practice of asking pressing questions in alien territory.

It is perhaps, then, a form of genre revenge, a contrapasso of media, that it was the Jackson iteration of Lord of the Rings that reinvigorated fantasy environments in film, and not, as was expected, Lucas’ tastelessly hyperbolic CGI worlds or the similarly over-the-top and over-stylized action sequences of the latter Matrix films. Lord of the Rings defined the struggle of good and evil indubitably – there was no sympathy for Sauron or his satellites – and clearly, without incomprehensible plodding as showcased by the entrance of the Architect in, again, the latter Matrix films or Captain Jack Sparrow’s hallucinogenic adventures in the latter Pirates of the Caribbean films. Although, like the original books, the film was guilty of inspiring numerous cinematic copycats – the Narnia films, Eragon – it proved that fantasy was not the province of nerds or hippies any longer, but of serious filmmakers. Return of the King’s Oscar takeover in 2004 marked the return of fantasy.

Jackson won most visibly in this area, and deservedly so, but there were others during this decade whose work in fantasy augmented its potential. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, I & II, elevated the weird, tuberous, and colorful in a way not accessible via Tolkien’s Germanic, medieval motifs, while Terry Gilliam increased his offbeat portfolio with films such as The Brothers Grimm. The Harry Potter franchise moved from a shaky, sloppy debut to films that learned how to balance the sheer volume of material in each book against the limits of a few-hour block (thereby taking a page from Lord of the Rings, which accomplished this flawlessly over three movies). There was the comic-book fantasy, too, which deviated along one of two paths: the “hero” blockbuster, wherein a familiar icon such as Superman, Batman, the X-Men, or Spiderman was reinvented for the age of believable spectacle; or the “anti-hero” blockbuster that favored larger-than-life worlds of shadow, grit, and gore and of which 300, Sin City, and Watchmen are the best specimens.

Twilight, Summit Entertainment, 2008

Two movies were produced near the end of the decade that will certainly determine the shape of the fantasy genre over the next ten years. The first, Twilight, an adaptation of Stephanie Myer’s forbidden-love story between human and vampire, planted the angst-ridden image of Edward Cullen into numerous female hearts and as many product placements, completely reversing the model of Anne Rice, who told us that vampires are neither sparkly nor happy, but trapped by death into monstrous lusts and a frozen lifespan. At the end of the 90s, it was sexy to kill bloodsuckers (Blade), ; later, with Underworld and Twilight, it was sexier to be one. The lines of good and evil that had been marked by Lord of the Rings are no longer determinative of the fantasy genre – at least, not while something like vampirism is currently so attractive.

Avatar, 20th Century Fox, 2009

The second movie was Avatar, James Cameron’s epic retelling of, well, other James Cameron epics. Moviegoers were invited to watch something breathtaking, the likes of which had never been possible onscreen before. On the big screen, yes – anyone who had played video games seriously in the last ten years was familiar with the kind of technology at work in Avatar; nor was the 3-D experience much more sophisticated than the Muppets theater at Disney World. Even the story was familiar, and not like a friendly and familiar face, but like that god-awful story your Uncle Merv tells at every family reunion: an ecological fairy-tale version of Pocahontas involving the same tired fight of pitiless industrialists versus free-born natives in tune with the planet. As a director, however, Cameron is unquestionably at the top of his game, seamlessly incorporating astounding visuals, a love story bound to appeal to countless female demographics, and fight sequences that make explosions fun to look at instead of, as in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, oppressive, confusing, and redundant. By doing so, he has, implicitly, issued a challenge to filmmakers everywhere: if I can make this kind of film out of this kind of story, I can do anything. What about you?

The Incredibles, Walt Disney Pictures, 2004

“If everyone’s super, no one will be.”

Ask anyone to name their top ten movies of the last decade, and you will probably hear, among the movies that are supposed to be great but are, in fact, neither much fun to watch nor that rewarding of contemplation (Crash, anyone?), one happy word: PIXAR. The company launched its feature-length animation canon with Toy Story in 1995, followed by A Bug’s Life in 1998 and Toy Story 2 in 1999. By that point, it had established a solid presence as a creator of excellent children’s films. Many reviewers found themselves, ecstatically, recommending the films for all ages; by the beginning of the 00s, a PIXAR film was sure to receive a blurb like “for the whole family” or “great fun for parents, too!”

Over the next decade, PIXAR did more than retain that reputation, which it did absolutely. More significantly, it showed that it could produce films that were not only great fun for everyone, but could be considered serious artistic endeavors. The pinnacle was Wall-E in 2008, which came close to achieving what only Beauty and the Beast has ever done: receiving an Oscar nomination as an animated film for Best Picture. Wall-E is not a “preachy” film, although it has been called so; it is instead a steady, curious, and sometimes sober reflection on the potential for consumerism and materialism to literally make us aliens from Earth. Some conservative reviewers criticized it for buying into myths of global warming and the green movement, little understanding that Wall-E is as much about what has already happened to American society as it is about what might happen after a Wal-Mart apocalypse: we are fat and bored now. Wall-E’s only innovation was to put us into orbit.

The tale of Wall-E and EVE managed to take the dreary visions of An Inconvenient Truth, I Am Legend, or 28 Days Later and re-make them for a younger audience – or rather, a more inclusive audience. So, too, The Incredibles made a fun and emotionally compelling superhero movie; Finding Nemo put a road trip and a father-and-son drama in a vibrant, beautiful ocean; Ratatouille showed children the joy of cooking; Up, the joys, and griefs, of growing old. Few production companies have given the last decade so various and so excellent an assembly of films. Fewer still, if any, can boast of also being an animation studio.

That caliber of entertainment demolishes the idea that what appeals to children must be insipid, simple, or banal, or that what makes great film is violent and dark. There is darkness in every PIXAR film, but as a shadow in a world of light, as something to be fought or redeemed, and never giving the last word.

Wall-E, Walt Disney Pictures, 2008

—

Looking back over the last decade, one is overcome by the amount, variety, and impact of films both foreign and domestic. So much could still, without question, be said about this decade: about Clint Eastwood’s streak of compelling dramas; about the blossoming subculture of independent film; about Slumdog Millionaire, The Last King of Scotland, A Beautiful Mind, The Departed; about Scorcese, Shyamalan (oh, how the mighty are fallen!), Howard, and Lynch; about Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck and Meryl Streep and Don Cheadle and a host of others. But while all these were significant and will certainly be remembered, they were, I think, less significant for the decade than the perfection (and abuse) of CGI, the rejuvenation of fantasy film, the elevation of violence, and the solitary shining star (or mere desk lamp) of PIXAR. The 00s were either a Saturnalia, excessive and violent, or saturnine: grim, honest, reserved, introspective, and above all, uncertain. It was a decade of revenge against the heedless optimism of the decade before. What it will mean to us in ten more years is a story yet to be plotted: a corpus of films yet to be directed, created, enjoyed, and remembered.

[This article was written with the invaluable assistance of Tobin Duby.]

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In Zen there is the concept of mushin (Japanese, “mindlessness”), primarily a form of martial arts training whereby the mind/body “unknows.” It is not far removed from the concept of an athlete being “in the zone” and achieving “flow.” At such times, movement is effortless. Basketball players “see” the court. For baseball hitters, the ball seems to slow down. They can “see” the pitch, get the sweet part of their bat in it, and everything falls into place.

Those who strive for mushin repeat an action thousands of times until they no longer have to think about it. It becomes muscle memory. It ceases to be effort. Ideally, mushin leads to a breakdown in the boundaries between the body and its motions. There is no body. There is no motion. There is mushin: flow. It is most apparent in what Howard Gardener in his theory of multiple intelligences would call kinesthetic, or visual/spacial intelligence. Warriors who achieved “flow” in ancient Greece were said to be in the state of arete (Greek, “excellence”) – they were thought to be possessed by a god, who fought within them. They were, for all intents and purposes, no longer there. The more frequently this happened, the greater the warrior.

This idea of arete had its counterparts in Celtic and Nordic battle fury. Cú Chulainn, the great Irish hero of the Tain, was said to have grown to enormous size. His eyes bulged beyond human limits. His face and body took on epic proportions. This phenomenon, in less exaggerated form, has been observed in contemporary soldiers. “Beyond the call of duty” often translates into a state of battle fury in which adrenalin and endorphins appear to refute the usual physical limits. The Colt .45 was developed to assure that American soldiers could bring down Filipino troops who, in such a state, were often able to keep fighting after being shot by lesser caliber bullets. Any intelligence in its pure form – “pure” meaning that it does not act in accordance with willed effort or thought – can easily be perceived as much a form of stupidity as intelligence. In point of fact, we might say that mushin is the event threshold in which the binary of intelligence/stupidity breaks down.

Usually, great effort goes into being effortless. “Making it look easy” takes a lifetime of training, but not always. We all know the stories of housewives who have lifted cars from the bodies of their children. We have all experienced mushin when we have driven to work, and not remembered the drive, or the route we took. So much in life depends on a sort of habitual “unknowing.” Men and women train for decades to experience in meditation the willed equivalent of this effortless state: the driver, the drive, and the path do not exist. One is, and that translates into a thirty mile commute.

To speak of Gardener’s multiple intelligences, a current fad in education, is to speak of properties that are usually not isolated. In every kinesthetic act, there is almost always some degree of the other forms of intelligence at work. Any “pure” form of intelligence can be seen as a sort of savantism—an extraordinary reduction. A math genius may be an emotional (intrapersonal) idiot. In point of fact, it probably will greatly aid and abet his or her career, at least in terms of results, if his or her mind is so limited. While we strive for balance, we reward remarkable imbalance with fame, fortune, and hero worship. Very often, the athlete who can sink a three pointer from thirty feet out on a consistent basis may be deficient in all other respects, and, so, when he gets caught shoplifting, or shoots his lover, we are dumbfounded. How can a person with such extraordinary skills, with all the millions of dollars those skills have earned him, throw it all away? This is the comedy of human contradiction: we take a reduction we have aided, abetted, and encouraged, then take that reduction to task for not being expansive, for not having the ground sense of the normal.

We are fond of saying that there is no such thing as “normal,” but this is not true. While there is no precise equation for normality, there is always an approximate sense. If not, we would have no idea of anything being out of sorts. Normal is, most likely, a balance of different types of intelligence, a balance by which none of the intelligences sticks out to any extraordinary degree, either by word, deed, or temperament, for good or for ill. Occasionally, a normal person might rise to an occasion – accidentally sink a jumper from fifty feet out, hit a ball perfectly, have a good day playing the piano – but this is not likely to happen with any frequency.

To be “good” at a task is not the same as being talented; and to be remarkable, a “genius,” is an order varying not only in degree, but in kind from being either good or talented. In a sense, genius is always a form of stupidity in so far as it breaks down the binaries between effort and grace, between the striven-for and the God-given, natural, or genetically predisposed. It is not a willed act. The “pure” form of any intelligence puts the others in the shade. It sticks out. It is grotesque, unearthly. It can not even be said to belong to the person who is possessed by it. Here, we may borrow the term charism. One possesses talent and ability, but one is possessed by genius and charism. It is something beyond normative event thresholds: the mutation, the aberration, the freak.

Sometimes this “mutation” changes the course of whatever field of intelligence it enters: Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan with sport, Beethoven with music, St. Augustine with theology. Most of the time, as with most natural forms of mutation, nothing much changes. It appears; it reminds us that something exists beyond our understanding, that there is in the midst of our knowing, a great mystery, one which is not always entirely pleasant to our sense of normative reality, one which is not always welcomed, and may even be ruthlessly persecuted, disparaged, repressed. This “thing” can arise at birth, or it can suddenly occur through a trauma—a brain injury, a moment of crisis in a life that triggers an adaption or extraordinary maladaption. Certain forms of “conversion” share a common thread with brain damage.

It is, in the language of mystical oxymoron, the “stupidity” that is wise, the folly of God. Brokenness makes things whole, damage leads to perfection. It is in this light that I wish to meditate on the life of St. Joseph of Cupertino, a man, who in every one of Gardener’s multiple intelligences, could be said to have been severely lacking. He was, in effect, very stupid, an embarrassment to his family and himself, a man with certain traits similar to the Russian tradition of the Holy idiot, or to Issac Bashevitz Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool.”

All the contemporary learning disabilities: dyslexia, ADHD, mild autism, aspergers, impulsivity, seem to have been visited upon him. If he had been born in our era, in this time of labeling and drugging, Joseph might well have been ritalined, aderolled, and prozaced into something resembling the norm. Besides being stupid, he had, as with many cases of brain damage, a violent temper. He was no fun to be around, and yet, and yet, before any of his famous levitations, something in that age of faith, something that allowed for the mystical intimacy between the lowly and the royal, inspired ordinary people to realize they might have a saint within their midst: this broken, and failed, and stupid and utterly annoying oaf was the embodiment of Christ on earth. They began to surmise this before Joseph took a single flight above their heads, before he levitated in front of the pope. With such a saint, the man is not what people see—but the God made manifest through the man. It is on this form of charism, and on the nature of grace (gratis) and its relation to damage that I wish to dwell.

To be continued.

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As I have been thinking in terms of peace, non-violence, self-abnegation, and God, I have uncovered a visceral lust for power (libido dominandi) which is inexplicable and coolly impersonal. This could be explained in simple psychological terms, honestly: as I consciously explore the unknown depths of my mind, my unconscious desires burst forth forcefully from below the surface. Or, as I suppress certain elements, they emerge all the more viciously. These unholy impulses manifest themselves in violent bouts of rage without an object, lust for demonic power without purpose, and a poison I didn’t know existed.

I’d been reading St. Benedict and Thomas Merton about the struggles of self-emptying and thought of them as somewhat overblown, but they are not. The more I seek to empty my Self, the more I find needs to be cremated. Every so often, the stench is overwhelming. Other times, the horror is so poignant that I almost declare, “It is me! It is me!” to the corpse I unearth.

None of these corpses are me, but my false-ego. In fact, my true Self is not what I consider to be me. My true identity is in God. Yet the faces I recognize disturb me. It is not just the anger or the egoism that rushes at me that is disturbing, but the dreadful familiarity of it all – and the recognition of my reflection in every grim face. Kenosis is a dangerous activity, for it is like digging out a graveyard: as the shovel sinks into the soil of one’s Self, one finds that it is not a plot of good earth to be turned effortlessly, but a black quagmire filled with corpses and will-o’-the-wisps. It is no singular being but a graveyard of entities, each dead. My “I” is, in fact, no one at all.

The process of emptying myself is not one of ignoring myself, but encountering myself head-on: to turn my mind inward against itself in order to be open to God. The faces I see are horrific because they are mine. Each of the contradictory wishes, hatreds, and lusts for dominion are revealed if I manage to dispose of any bodies at all.  We are each a villain with a thousand faces.

In Jungian terms, I uncover unconscious elements always alive under the surface. This is not psychosis, where the border between conscious and unconscious is obliterated; nor is this neurosis, where the border between the two is lowered.  Kenosis is the Self turning against its whole being, so that one looks past consciousness and unconsciousness to the universal ground which supports all things. One faces one’s Self and declares, “This is not me.” It is the task of Christ to send one’s myriad demons out into swine. Facing oneself is facing the maw of hell itself, for what burns in hell is the false self opposed to God – the chaff we should have burned off in life.

Only when our last mask is torn away do we find our true faces, which are so strange and wonderful that they will not seem like ours at all, and yet that novelty and wonder will be permanent.  This is constant progress (epektasis, “stretching forth”) an infinite process of drawing nearer to the Source; this is Union with God (theosis) which is something ever to be perfected.

There is a great danger in emptying – not of seeing the face of God, but the face of the Devil himself: You. As morbid as that encounter may be, what is worse is that we often choose to put on the old man once again like finding a favorite sports coat: “Oh, but doesn’t this fit wonderfully?” And as the Kingdom of God is within us, so too are the Powers and Principalities: we wage war against Legion within our souls. We stray terribly when we think it is our duty to force the righteous to be more righteous. It is our task to care for the sick and to see that we have been cured before we infect others!

There is no such thing as arriving when it comes to emptiness. Only a perpetual (almost monastic) effort can place us where we should be. But all of this is asceticism (askesis, “exercise, training”), a practice which has been much slandered, partially due to the extreme nature asceticism took historically. But asceticism is nothing more than training towards righteousness. Moderation is itself training against extremes – something asceticism forgot at one point! Any moral structure is ascetic: it involves training to follow certain regulations. Self-abnegation is only accomplished by saints, and even they would likely say they are too selfish.

The final peril of self-emptying is seeing your face and loving it. This is why some of the greatest monsters can come out of a false determination. If my wish is only to have greater selfish knowledge, then I will find a death mask and wear it proudly as if it were the face of God Himself! The danger is not that we will reach perfect emptiness, but that we will believe we have arrived. By thinking we have arrived, all possibility of progress withers.  In order to find the face we had before we were born, we must lose the face we know and seek one that is radically new.

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