https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=L-LyDs9keS8
this vague notion of progress that he sets up where nobody really knows. Everybody knows that they’re being on the right side of history and everybody knows that they’re working towards this great progressive thing, but nobody knows what it is. And it’s like, is that still like that today? You look around us and we notice people talking about progress and being progressive and you know, this is the future. And, but you ask them what that means, they just stare at you blankly, because they have no idea where it is that they’re heading. This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone. I am speaking with Annie Crawford. Annie is a scholar who has studied CS Lewis. She teaches Beowulf. She teaches all these things in classical high school. She’s also written quite a bit and she is going to head up a class on CS Lewis and the Ransom Trilogy for us. Something that I’ve also read recently. You know, it seems to be kind of in the air. Everybody’s talking about it. Everybody is buzzing around it because it seems like it points to a lot of things that are happening now in terms of, let’s say, the shape of the world, but also in terms of the re-enchantment and a return of more cosmic thinking. And she recently wrote an article for us on gender and cosmology about CS Lewis, which you can check out on the Symbolic World blog. And so, Annie, I’ll let you also introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and what sparked this class that you’re going to give for us. Yeah. Hi, Jonathan. Thanks for having me. So I’m from Austin, Texas, and I have homeschooled my three daughters. And I think I’ve always been interested in CS Lewis very much. She played an important role in my own journey toward coming to understand the world and what it means to be human. And as I’ve homeschooled my girls, we’ve just been learning together, diving deeper and deeper into the tradition. And then as I’m educating them, seeking around me, who else we can invite into this work of integrating education and discipleship and reviving what I call a sacramental understanding of the world. And so when the girls were older and I had a little bit more time, I continued my studies formally by working on a degree in cultural apologetics at Houston Christian University, which that degree really focuses on the work of CS Lewis. CS Lewis is really seen as a founder of a new approach to apologetics, a new approach to helping people understand, not just having arguments for certain beliefs, but offering, helping to make the Christian view of the world meaningful, helping people understand the meaning of it. And as I. Have been doing that work, I found your work at the symbolic world and really feel that what you’re doing and what CS Lewis was trying to do are very complimentary. And so in the symbolic world community on Circle, people were just discussing, as you said, Lewis is in the air, the Ransom Trilogy, especially post 2020. There seems to be a lot more attention being drawn towards the Ransom Trilogy. And so in the symbolic world community, there was just interest in, you know, discussing these books in depth. There’s a real hunger to it. The symbolic world community is really a phenomenal group of people from all over the world, people who are eager, insightful, thoughtful, reflective. And so I thought, well, let’s just get together and let’s study CS Lewis together. And there was so much interest and such a desire for depth that it really became a class. And so as you were launching the new Beowulf class, we thought, let’s make this an official class and really dive in deep together to study these important books, which I really think have been given to us for such a time as this. I also read the Ransom Trilogy recently and I was really struck, especially that hideous strength of just how much insight Lewis seemed to have had about where the world was going. You know, and also this this strange organization that he sets up, this kind of evil secret organization. There’s something about it which rings so true about things that we’re seeing in the culture now. First of all, in some ways, this vague notion of progress that he sets up where nobody really knows. Everybody knows that they’re being on the right side of history and everybody knows that they’re working towards this great progressive thing, but nobody knows what it is. And it’s like, that’s still like that today. You look around us and we notice people talking about progress and being progressive and, you know, this is the future. But you ask them what that means, they just stare at you blankly because they have no idea where it is that they’re heading. Yeah. Well, it really is a retelling of the Tower of Babel, which you’ve done several videos on. And what strikes me and what you’re saying is I see the Tower of Babel as our attempt to gather up meaning and reach into the heavens. But if we’re not properly receiving meaning from above, then our efforts to reach up with our own meaning are going to be aimless. There’s not going to be a clear telos or a clear aim because we are seeking independently to do that from the bottom up. So that sense of, you know, we’re going somewhere who knows exactly where, I think is very much part of the meaning of the Tower of Babel motif. Yeah. And there’s the whole idea of the head in the… By the way, this is going to be full of spoilers. So if you don’t want spoilers, don’t watch it. But we’re not going to be careful about the spoilers. So you should have read it anyways by now. So this whole idea of this head, right, this kind of disembodied head that is the head of their organization is like massive brain. You know, it’s really interesting to see how, you know, this was written one of the 40s. Is that when it was written? Yeah. So in the 1940s, having this insight about what really for us would be AI and, you know, this idea of this disembodied intelligence and also the tendency to worship it, right, and the tendency to to create a God. There’s some of the some of the dialogues that are so close to what the trans humanists are saying now, this idea that we’re going to make a God. You know, we’ve heard that recently from the head of Google in that interview with Elon Musk, where he said we’re going to build a God. It’s like everything you believed in the past, it wasn’t true back then, but we’re going to make it true by creating this perfect, this like weird, perfect intelligence and also this joining of humanity into this. He doesn’t use the word singularity, but it feels like that’s what he’s he’s kind of pointing to. Yeah, I mean, his insight is phenomenal. So let’s look at the gender question, because that’s one of the things I was really happy to see your article because I was struck by a sentence in the text and I tweeted it at some point where C.S. Lewis says gender is more primordial than sex or something like that, like gender precedes sex. And that’s something that modern people, like even modern conservatives, were getting annoyed with me because they want to collapse gender and sex together. But C.S. Lewis doesn’t do that at all. So maybe tell us a bit about this idea of gender and how C.S. Lewis treats it as a cosmic force. Yeah. And I think, you know, how you’re saying that even conservatives get confused, I think that shows us how much the sacred view of the world really has been lost, that even people who say they believe in God really are functional materialists in many ways or functional dualists. They don’t understand how heaven and earth fit together because that knowledge, that cultural knowledge has been lost. So I have the quote right here that you’re talking about from C.S. Lewis, and I think this is from Paralandra. He says gender is a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity. That’s key. Fundamental polarity, which divides all created beings. And so it’s not that hard to understand if you were. Even a materialist should be able to understand it. It’s not it’s actually not like a woo woo statement at all in any way. Right. Well, you know. Sometimes what we want to see blinds us from seeing what is there. Right. So, you know, if you have a. Symbolic view of the world or sacramental view of the world or even a pagan view of you, the world, you know, that the fundamental polarity is heaven and earth. Right. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And, you know, you talk about this all the time in your work, that the heavens being the realm you could see it, think of it as like St. Paul says in Colossians, invisible, invisible, the realm of meaning, the realm of form. That’s the heavens that is made to fit with and be manifest within the earth. That the fundamental structure of reality is a marriage between heaven and earth, where God is spirit and he is prior. He is the Logos who speaks the world, the cosmic mountain into being. And that is, as Lewis is saying, the fundamental polarity. That forms all things and that is repeated in all things in that fractal level, that fractal repetition. Right. And so sex is the biological adaptation, the fractal repetition of that cosmic polarity played out on the physical level. And, you know, and I think sometimes what people again get concerned about is the way that there’s a false polarity, a false dualism talked about in our culture, right, where we say, well, if we separate gender and sex, then we’re separating the meaning in a way that makes them arbitrary. And that’s what I think people get concerned about. But if you understand that even on the cosmic level that Lewis is talking about, it still has to do with generation. Gender has to do with genesis, genitals, generation. It’s still the mode in which life is created. Reality is begetted. And so that even if we acknowledge the cosmic level of gender as somewhat different from the physical level of sex, still the connection is not arbitrary. Yeah, I think that’s the biggest thing. This is something that I talked about with with Richard Roll in our last discussion, which is that this is really where you see how people struggle to understand a basic symbolic understanding of reality, which is that just because there are different levels of a pattern doesn’t mean that those are free floating. And so if you separate sex and gender, doesn’t mean that now sex can be one thing and gender can be the other. It’s like, no, it’s actually a connection of different levels of participation in the same pattern. And even if, for example, let’s say the customs that we have about how to dress as man or woman, how men present themselves, even though that’s variable across cultures, first of all, it’s not infinitely variable. That’s nonsense. It’s variable to some extent. But then even though it’s variable, the polarity still is universal. That is, you know, for example, like there are cultures where men ornament themselves and women ornament themselves less, let’s say. And that’s something in our culture, which is the opposite. But in that culture, men ornament themselves and women don’t. And the polarity is still present. And there’s still this sense of this is how men act, this is how women act, and this is how they come together. And it’s not, like I said, and it’s also not, it’s never free floating and arbitrary. It’s never like it could be anything. And that’s it’s difficult for people to understand that. But that’s, you know, it’s like we believe that all the time. Like we think that there are different species of dogs, but we nonetheless recognize that, you know, this species of dog and this other species of dog is still a dog, even though there’s variation in the species. But for some reason with humans, if we see that, it’s like we feel like our whole world is threatened or that it’s going to blow all the categories. But variation and pattern is just how it actually how it functions in terms of in terms, especially in terms of cultural cultural participation. Yeah, it’s also about about how C.S. Lewis represents it, because he I mean, I think it’s a little scandalous the way he does, because he literally uses pagan gods as his image to represent this. Yeah, it is scandalous. And a lot of people criticize Lewis, even Christians, for being misogynistic in the way that he portrays gender. And I think that’s part of what calls me to this topic, especially as a woman, I do feel like perhaps it’s a little less scandalous if maybe I talk about it. But so in terms of him using Venus, goodness, there’s so many directions we could go. Let’s talk a little bit maybe about his worldview, the bigger picture that then we can situate the discussion of gender in. So Lewis has what he would call what I call a sacramental worldview, which I do think is synonymous to what you talk about with a symbolic worldview, because it really is this idea that what what visible reality is, is a manifestation of invisible spiritual form, right. And a symbol is a locus where meaning from heaven comes and is embodied within a visible form. And that’s the same as a sacramental worldview. Sacrament means a visible sign of an invisible reality. And I think some people get confused about sacrament because you think, well, no, a sacrament is a baptism or some kind of particular religious point of contact between heaven and earth. But I think one way that’s helpful to be clear on this is to separate between what the two books that the tradition would call the general revelation, the book of nature, the meaning that is spoken throughout all creation and invisible to all men and then special revelation where heaven meets earth in particular ways, Christ, the church, Eucharist, baptism. But but there are just different levels of the same thing. Yeah, right. Of heaven being manifested on earth. And I think this can help us understand Lewis’s love of the pagan and that he that the pagan world had access to general revelation just like everyone else. And pagans could read the meaning of the world through the things that are made. And Romans 1 makes this clear within scripture that the nature of heaven, of the divine, is evident through the things that he’s made. And so the pagans looking at the cosmos, at gender, masculinity, femininity, they’re going to be able to see deep fundamental spiritual truth through general revelation. And but being cut off from cast out of Eden and perhaps under the rule of suspect rebels from the divine council. Right. You want to go so that the pagan tradition is going to be a mix of truth and distortion. And so that’s going to be Lewis’s view of of the pagan world. And what he wants to do is say we can and this is what the Church Fathers did when Jerusalem met Athens. Right. This is what Justin Marder did is we’re going to sort through the inheritance, the insights from Rome, from Greece, and sort through and take out what is true and what is good. And that’s going to be the way that we transpose, translate the Christian special revelation that has been seen. So that’s just what Lewis is doing in his portrayal of gender. He’s saying, let’s look at the cosmos, let’s look at the tradition and let’s use that as a way of translating, helping us in a modern age understand what sex and gender is. And so that’s kind of the framework in which he investigates this theme. Where would you like to go from there? Do you want to talk about the gender structure of the book? Yeah, we can we can talk a little bit. I mean, what interests me is also how he he structured the two books, the two first books as basically this kind of male world and this this this female world, and then how he culminates it into the figures of these angels, which ultimately reveal themselves to be a kind of purified version of what the ancient gods were. In some ways, his take on it is is quite strong, which is that he seems he says something like the Virgin of Mars and Venus that we have on Earth have been twisted by by the evil one. And because our own, let’s say, angel has twisted all these these stories and twisted all these images, but there is in some ways a refined version of these. So it’s not like he’s saying it’s this is why I’m saying it’s scandalous in the sense that he’s not saying there’s Mars and then there’s St. Michael, right? They say that’s the way that I would more tend to have a I would tend to do it myself. I would say there’s St. Michael and there’s Mars and St. Michael is the true martial spirit and the one that is aligned with God. Mars was a kind of twisted version of it. But what what T.S. Lewis does is he basically makes it the same figure. He says there is Mars and Mars is an angel that that that worships God. And the Virgin that we get on Earth is twisted by the devil. That’s what I that’s what I find. I find it interesting because I feel like, you know, I’m I’m I’m impressed at how far he’s willing to go despite being a very orthodox, small orthodox Christian and everybody seeing him as as, you know, someone who is a apologetics person for Christianity even today. So I don’t know if you had any thoughts on that. Yeah, I I do think it’s important to remember that T.S. Lewis is not a saint and he’s not right about everything. And that, you know, I was listening to your talk on subtle bodies, actually, and thinking about that. And so sometimes it’s hard to tell what Lewis is doing for the sake of story, for the sake of, well, this is one way to portray it within a sub created world. And when he’s trying when he’s maybe proposing that he really thinks this right. So that would be to me the question of how are we then in Lewis’s cosmology to fit together an understanding of St. Michael and Mars. And so it’s hard for me to know where sometimes he’s been using tropes and images for the sake of the story and where he’s really maybe experimentally exploring what he thinks, you know, a real cosmology. And one thing that concerns me about some of the things he says is he plays with the idea of maybe there’s seven genders or there’s, you know, he just loved the medieval model so much. And he got I feel like he would get so excited about these symbolic structures that, you know, there’s the seven planets. And if two of them are gender, then, you know, maybe are there seven genders and should we understand gender in some kind of bigger way? There’s a dialogue called Unreal Estates where he’s kind of talking about science fiction with two other friends. And in it, he says, has anyone successfully portrayed three genders in their fiction yet? And those things to me are red flags that concern me because I really do think. Because of what’s going on now. Well, yeah, that, you know, in terms of the the just chaotic loosening of gender categories and the fact that what gender is, is a fractal representation of heaven and earth. I mean, you don’t get that’s the fundamental relationship between God and his creation, between creator and creation, between Christ and his bride. There is a fundamental duality. Yeah. And to say, well, maybe the duality is sevenfold, I think is really dangerous. Dangerous. Well, you might be surprised to find out that, for example, St. Maxx is the confessor, who I talk about a lot. He talks about three genders in the way he talks about it. He says there’s masculine, feminine, and something which you could characterize as I think he uses the term extreme. And the idea is that there’s something, it’s something like masculine, feminine and exceptional. And in his third gender, he puts that which is above and that which is below. So basically, eunuchs are the third gender in the loose way that you understand gender with understand eunuch, which is like, anybody who doesn’t really fit, it’s like whether something happened to them or they’re born weird or whatever it is, like, whoever doesn’t totally fit is like, is that. But then there’s also the monk. The monk is a third gender because he’s not engaged in sexuality and is there is trying to transcend gender. So it’s actually trying to interpret Christ’s very strange text, which is, he says there are eunuchs that are accidentally eunuchs and there are eunuchs that are eunuchs that I think like for the glory of God or something like that. So I would say that that’s probably I prefer that structure myself, because one of the problems with absolute duality is that there really are things that don’t fit, like they just are. And so you don’t you struggle if you don’t have a category for the monster, or the exception, or the king or something which is beyond the normal structure of of of kind of of duality, then you then you you run into problems and you try and you try to make the world the world perfect, you know, so I would say the best way to see it, at least for me is to understand that there are three genders and that the third gender is is undefinable. You could say is not is not is is the exception is the thing that doesn’t fit in the normal right, the normal categories. Anyway, can I can I try to propose a way to maybe resolve that I do feel like saying three genders is going to be confusing, particularly in our context. But I do think there’s a way to fit in the third category. So let me let me try and like, because if you think of gender again, as meaning Genesis, the way in which we generate new life, I mean, not what it is heaven and earth meet, right. And then that begets new life on a fractal level, right. So you have Adam and Eve, man and woman, they participate in a certain way with the generation of new life. And that new life itself is a fractal representation of heaven and earth, right. And so the reserving gender for that language for the way in which new life is generated, right. And so if you have someone who doesn’t fit that duality, let’s say, I feel like calling it a third gender. Well, I can see how from some perspective, but one is there’s in this world, there is distiliology, there is the effect of the fall, there is the lack of function, right. And, and so people who don’t fit because of something gone wrong. That’s one particular category. And it’s really important to, to be willing to acknowledge that because it’s by recognizing the distiliology that we can then in love and care seek to restore to proper order, right. So if someone is born without, let’s say, an arm or a leg, we recognize that as distiliological as not as missing the full function and form of what it is to be human. And by recognizing that, that’s how we know to care about that person and to help supplement to restore them to the fullness of order as much as we can. But then I think there is also one way people don’t fit the duality or that category is because of the fall because of distiliology. But another way they don’t fit is because of transcending to another level. Yeah. Right. And so I think that, and this might be the monk, this would be the eunuch, this would be the person who’s going to transcend that generative duality on the biological level, because they’re going to participate in it on a higher level, right, that they’re going to more fully and directly participate in the marriage between heaven and earth, it’s going to generate new spiritual life. And so I think that’s another way those who don’t fit. So there’s the distiliological, and then there’s those who transcend, who kind of move up a fractal level to a different meeting of heaven and earth. And I just hesitate to call that a third gender. You’re saying they’re all the same. No, and I think you’re absolutely right that it’s wrong. It’s dangerous to just, it’s dangerous to not to be able to distinguish in that category between that which transcends above and that which falls out below. And I think you’re right. I say that all the time, right? I talk about this too. It’s like, you know, in scripture, there’s the separation of waters, there’s the waters above and the waters below. Ultimately, they come from the same source, but in reality, like in practice, they’re not like they are the opposites. You know, the water that is below is mara and bitter, and the water that comes from above is sweet and is, you know, and is, and is, let’s say consumable. And so I totally agree with you. But just so you know that it is the idea that there are three genders is something which is not completely alien of Christianity, that it’s there, you know, and trying to figure out how to deal with that, that problem of some people transcending above and then, like you said, some people kind of falling out from from below. So so so back to to to CS Lewis, he he ends up presenting in that hideous strength, like the end of hideous strength is almost like it’s almost like a caricature, like the way that it ends and that it’s like everybody gets married, like everybody gets, you know, everybody gets married, even the animals and everybody is like getting everybody is is is unit unit unifying heaven and earth. You know, I was actually I read it a long time ago, but I reread it like a month ago. And I was just surprised at just how much he put in there, like just how how far he was willing to go in his in his analogy. Well, you know, it’s like a Shakespeare play on steroids. That’s right. Yeah, that’s what you know. It’s a tragedy if everyone dies and you know, it’s a comedy if everyone gets married, even the animals. Yeah. And he was very he seemed very conscious about that, like he was very conscious that he was in some ways pushing the pushing the limit because you can hear the animals and everybody is is like, is is getting married. So yeah, but you do have representation of that person who transcends the physical, you the level of sex, right? Because Ransom himself is, in a sense, a eunuch or a monk or a mystic. So you do have, I mean, the key character, in a sense, the hero who himself transcends that duality on the material or physical familial level in in order to participate on the heavenly level. And he literally is ascends into heaven at the end of the book. Yeah, and it’s important also to explain that in a way that also helps people understand how you transcend, which is that he doesn’t transcend his gender by becoming confused, that he doesn’t he doesn’t manifest confused gender. In fact, he manifests a refined version of gender, a kind of hyper gender, where he becomes a kind of hyper masculine, not in the ridiculous way that we think of that on YouTube now. But in some ways, he becomes a kind of purified version of a man, you know, and there’s even that scene where the the I forget the name of the characters, but the woman, the the wife, you know, she’s attracted to him. And it’s like, but she’s attracted to him in a in a strange way, where in some ways, it’s almost like it doesn’t make her want to sleep with him or anything. But she’s attracted to him in a way that makes her think of her husband ultimately, like kind of brings her back to her husband. But he becomes like this model of masculinity that reminds her, you know, that she’s a woman, let’s say like something like that. And, and that’s also, I think the way that even in terms of monastics, you see that in the monastic life, there isn’t this sense of like, confused gender, but rather the monks become very masculine, you know, and they kind of have a beard and they have a kind of discipline and they have a sense of their masculinity, but it ends, ends in them transcending ultimately, the physical, the physical aspect of the of just of just their, their bodies and the same with nuns too. Like, if you look at the traditions of nuns, how they would get married with Christ, like there’s this very feminine aspect of how, how nuns would exist in their, in their monastic life, but in the same way they’re called to kind of transcend the, so, so it’s different from the way we think about it now, which is you hear people now talk about transcending gender, but, but they, the image of that is a confused gender, right? It’s like a hermaphroditic idea, but there’s a difference between mixture and transcendence. Those are not the same. Right. That’s a good way of putting it. If you know this idea of the cloud of unknowing above the waters above and the waters below, I think that’s a really helpful framework. This is kind of an aside for the discussion of psychedelics. Yeah, exactly. Right. There’s a way of opening up to the beyond, the unseen in a way that disintegrates the mind actually. And then there’s a way of transcending into the, the mystic, the cloud above that does not disintegrate the mind, but it is a proper ascent where we do not turn over, I don’t want to say the word control because I don’t mean control, but full integration of the consciousness. Yeah. And CS Lewis has a really great image of that, you know, in the great divorce, for example, where he represents heaven as hyper real in some ways. Right. It’s like, he’s not, he doesn’t have this kind of floating thing. It’s as if the more you transcend the identity, the realer it actually becomes. It’s not a, it’s not a, it’s not a, that’s what, that’s the difference between Christianity and some forms of mysticism, which is that we don’t believe that as we are united with God, that we lose our uniqueness, but rather the fact that we are unique creatures in God becomes more and more bright as we come closer to the light that made us. And so, and I think that CS Lewis, some of the images he has in the great divorce are really powerful to, they’re obviously they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re imagistic. You know, we have to be careful how serious we take them. Even he warns us about that in the great divorce, but you know, this idea of like the blade of grass that cuts, right? Like the sense that, that reality, that the colors are so intense and that the, the reality is so solid that it would, it’s almost dangerous to a normal person because of how real it is. Right. It’s it, Lewis loves to play with flipping things on its head, which I believe he really gets from Dante, right? This is Dante-esque. So Dante, you know, in the medieval cosmology, and you talked about this with Richard Rowland in your last podcast, there’s the earth is at the bottom, this, you know, the center, but it’s a bottom. And then as you move out from earth at Mount Purgatory through Eden, up into the heavens, out into the third heaven, which would be the throne room and abode of God, what happens when Dante finally gets there is that the whole cosmos flips inside out. And all of a sudden, the throne of God, the revelation of Christ, the yellow rose of the church is the center, and earth is the periphery. Earth is the outside. And it’s this kind of spatial inversion, which I think Lewis loved and that he saw it also in Plato, right? Where we think these material things are the most real, but they’re really, in a sense, shadows in the cave. And as we move out toward God and toward reality, there’s a reversal, and those are the really solid, firm things. And so Lewis is always, I think he really felt that the modern imagination had been inverted, and he’s continually working to try and flip the way that we’re understanding things. Yeah. But maybe to… Go ahead. Maybe you can talk a bit about that, because you said that the whole trilogy is also modeled after in your impression. It does model after the Divine Comedy. And so it’s something that I didn’t perceive as simply. Maybe you can tell us how you see that. Yeah. So the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, opens with a pedestrian in midlife on a journey in a dark wood. Right? And so you always want to pay attention to the opening, the beginning. And so Lewis here is very much evoking the archetype of the everyman on a journey. And it also hearkens to Pilgrim’s Progress, but I think it also alludes to Dante. But rather than starting in Hell and then progressing through purgatory up to Eden, Eden’s at the top of purgatory, right? And then into the heavens, I think what you have is a three-book structure that reverses it as Lewis takes his hero, his Pilgrim, into heaven first. And then from the heavens, a vision of the heavens, he moves to Paralandra, which is really paradise. It’s a new Eden, right? Which would be at the top of purgatory. And then from that Eden, he descends to Hell. And most, by the time we get to that hideous strength, most scholars recognize the Dante-esque illusion and imagery. There is one scholar, David Downing, who actually thinks that the antagonists who participate in the NICE are actually revealed to us in order of the circles of hell. And so you start with kind of the virtuous pagans who would be like the best scholars, but they’re kind of inept and ineffective. And then you’re moving and moving and moving until you get, I mean, think about this, the treacherous are the worst, and they’re the ones literally munched on by the mouth of Satan. Okay. Well, how are the treacherous punished at the end of that hideous strength? And you’ve got this false head we talked about. And then they’re munched on by, I think, the bear, right? So that there’s- Yeah, the animals come in and eat them, basically. Yeah. Right. So I really do think you have that kind of a retelling of the divine comedy, but in a way that’s inverted for a world that’s become inverted. Right? So when Dante was writing, he could assume that his readers knew what heaven was, that they believed in a heaven, that they understood there is a highest good at which we aim. And if that can be assumed, then I can start by talking about sin. By the way, we miss the mark. We miss that highest transcendent aim. But modern, we don’t believe in a highest aim. We don’t believe in that highest good or that heavenly aim. And so then we don’t understand what sin is, because to turn one way is just as good as to turn another. And so, you know, what I think Lewis realized he need to begin with, if he’s seeking to revive a renewed understanding of a sacramental or symbolic world, is he has to start with what was obvious, and then he has to start with what was obvious to everybody. There’s a heaven. And so he starts his pilgrim by taking him into the heavens and baptizing his imagination, where he expects to find the emptiness, the alien hostility of space. Instead, he discovers the beauty, the ecstasy of the heavens and the light and the glory and the joy. So that’s my proposal for how the Ransom trilogy is a retelling of Dante’s divine comedy. But with a flipped structure for a flipped world. I mean, that when you say it, I get I think that’s right. I hadn’t I hadn’t totally understood it because I was not seeing the structure. But now if you if you flip it and you see that that’s exactly what happens because he goes to he goes to to Eden. You know, and then even in the second book, he goes down into like hell. It’s weird, like he goes out. He has he has a little like goes down to hell, and then he goes up the mountain. And then he comes up to the to the marriage between Adam and Eve, ultimately, like at the at the end of the of the book. And he has that kind of basic structure in there as well. But if you think of the whole structure like that, yeah, yeah, that makes that that makes a lot of sense. And so one of the there there are a few more things that I’m that I’m questioning. One of the things that really shocked me a little bit, and in some ways, it’s what made me write the made that video on the subtle bodies was the way in which he describes the angels, you know, and and and it’s like, I think that I have to I have to be careful because I think it is also possible that we have to see it from within the sub created world, right? We have to see it from within the world that he tried to create. But because it’s just so people listening know what I mean is that he describes the subtle bodies of the angels really as kind of like made of light or made of this translucent material. And and because we have Ghostbusters, right, because we have like Slimer that you can kind of see through and but then he leaves a trace of slime all over where he’s going. And we have this but CSOS would have known about ectoplasm and about Edgar Cayce and about this idea of subtle, the way that subtle bodies were interpreted as just basically material bodies that are less that are that are less physical, but are still physical in that weird way. I was a little worried about the way he described those bodies because I felt like like it could lead people to a kind of misunderstanding about what it is that we’re talking about when we talk about these subtle bodies. So I don’t know if you’ve had thoughts on that. Yeah, I do because I I really see what you’re saying. And so I did a little bit of research and I found a letter that Lewis wrote to children. So one thing I love about him is he people wrote him all the time and he did his best to respond to everybody even to children. And so there’s a collection of Lewis’s letters to children that you can get that are really delightful. So some children wrote to him about angels and his portray of angels. And here’s what he said to them. The view that angels have no bodies of any kind has not always been held among Christians. The old idea early middle ages was that they had bodies of ether as we have bodies of gross matter. The opposite view, your view, was one of the great scholastics Albert Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, etc. Of course, I just took for the purposes of a story that one that seemed most imaginable. So I think this is what you’re saying. Well within a story, story is like poetry. It uses the forms that sensory images in order to construct meaning. So in a sense, that’s what you have to do. In that sense, I totally agree because after I made that critique, I was thinking about it myself. I just published a graphic novel with the man with the head of a dog. And so I don’t think that Saint Christopher was the descendant of a canine. And I don’t think that, but I think the best way to represent whatever he was and the way he presented himself is that way because he’s a monster in some ways. And so then after that, I realized I’m being critical to C.S. Lewis and the same critique could be applied to me, which is like, what did he really believe that Saint Christopher is a half man, half dog in the kind of gross sense. So I think even reading that letter helps me to see that he definitely had a sophisticated understanding that he was representing in the story. Yeah. Well, there’s a little bit more. There’s more to the quote though. Okay, go for it. Yeah. So, I mean, that’s part of the difficulty is we see right now, but through a cloud darkly, the only way we experience heaven is through its manifestation, right? In the visible. Okay. So he says, I have no scruples about this because religiously the question seems to me of no importance. I got to think about that more. I’m not sure the questions of no importance, but then here’s his last line. Anyway, what do we mean by matter? So that’s what I find really interesting and kind of what I was playing with and wondering and kind of wondering what you think. This is just testing a theory is that Lewis more than trying to use like say ectoplasm or I think he was kind of trying to tap into images that come from quantum theory. Okay. Because there’s this one passage where he’s talking about, you know, the difference. I think it’s one of the sorens who are like the philosophers and out of the silent planet. He talks about speed. And so we experience these things as solid because we live at a slower level, whereas the Aldila they move so quickly. And I might be getting this wrong, but some of what I wonder is, you know, Lewis was an idealist before he became a Christian. Okay. So he’s going to be maybe biased towards an idealist understanding, which is opposite of the materialist. So rather than dragging the angels down to the level of the material, I wonder if he’s playing with the idea in light of quantum theory of the fact that what is matter anyway, isn’t it all form elevating matter into the realm of form just slowed down. Yeah. Does that make sense? Maybe. Yeah. That is possible. But I think it’s funny because now when you talk about this whole discussion on speed and stuff, again, it’s like, I’m kind of cringing of I cringe a little bit about those types of discussions. And it’s mostly because my own, I think it’s because of my own allergy of when I grew up, you know, I was in a world where people were trying to constantly give scientific explanations for the Bible and for spiritual things. And they ended up just constantly stepping in massive holes that they could never that they couldn’t dig themselves out of. And that’s why I like I always worried about people who talk about that quantum stuff, because it’s like, you don’t know what that stuff is. And that stuff’s meant to change at any moment. And so if you make your description, like descriptions of things based on that, you are you’re you’re you’re a little bit of it in danger. You know, it’s like I remember people telling me things like angels are another dimensions. And I was like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, you mean that scientifically? Are you sure you want to you want to push down that road? Like, are you sure that’s what you want? But anyway, so I mean, I have to say, like, those are the little parts of that that really that were kind of I didn’t I struggle with. But, you know, obviously, CS Lewis was was clearly had insight, amazing insight. The last thing I want to bring up with you and ask you what you think about is the whole Merlin situation. You know, that is that I think of the in the that hideous strength is to me the most fascinating part of the story, which is how CS Lewis perceives Merlin as a character and the way that he uses trickery. Like, you know, I’ve kind of joked about this idea of the the trickster or the joker, you know, the fool that that brings the king back. It’s something that Matt here talks about also quite a bit in his thinking. But it seems like CS Lewis did that in the book where he brings back this very strange figure to kind of bring about even more chaos, which then which then sets things right. So I don’t know if you thought about Merlin in the in that. Yeah, it’s it is one of the more controversial parts of the book and one that I don’t feel is that I have my head around as confidently as I do maybe say the way he’s using gender. But I do think the best way that I understand it is. If you go back in time, Lewis was very influenced by Owen Barfield, right. And I even think that idea of speed that he is getting that from Barfield’s poetic diction and saving the appearances where Barfield’s theory basically is is in the beginning, we perceived things as holes. So whereas now as moderns, we separate the thing and the meaning, the sign and the meaning, whereas in maybe our original unity, we experience thing and meaning as the same. And Lewis, he alludes to this in the language. So there’s this old solar language which Merlin speaks, which Ransom learns. And it’s he says it’s pure language itself. It’s where the sounds and the the words themselves are not like our words are arbitrarily connected to the meaning. Right. Old solar is where you basically speak pure symbolic language. And he talks about how the words fall like great stones, just a really beautiful passage. And so that earlier on, our consciousness was a unity and it started to separate subjects and object started to separate. I start to know my thing as separate. We start to separate everything. And for Barfield’s theory of language, this is kind of you talk about this, that that was an inevitable. But that the way forward is a reuniting. And I really do think this is important. And Lewis’s vision is that the old sacramental view of the world was full of meaning and purpose and order. And you talk about this, it’s still phenomenologically true. It’s still the way we experience the world phenomenologically. OK, now we have this objective way of knowing through science and analysis and coming from the outside. And we feel like they’re at odds, but they’re not. They’re not at odds because Christ, the logos in him, all things hold together. All you know, and that and this is David Bentley’s heart and beauty. David Bentley, Hart’s argument and beauty of the infinite, which is phenomenal. I think the best answer to postmodernism I’ve ever read, except it’s almost unreadable for most people. So we really need someone to do a popular version of this book. But, you know, because it’s all love and grace, the logos guaranteeing and creating so that our subjective, meaningful experience of the world fits together with the objective way that the world is structured, that the logos in me resonates with the logos in the world and that there is a connection. These do fit together. So Barfield and Lewis thought that, OK, we had an original unity where we didn’t and they separated. And then that’s going to, it’s a little bit Hegelian, give us a greater synthesis where we’re able to know both the subjective and the objective and reunite them in a higher level unity of being and perception. And Barfield talks about that in terms of speed. He kind of imagined, and so not speed, maybe a physical motion, but speed of perception that, and this would be the higher consciousness where our speed of perception is able to know both and integrate them at the same time. So that’s the way I understood Lewis looking at this idea of speed, that the angels have that higher, their speed of perception and being, whereas ours is slower and we experience thing as separates. But then to connect to Merlin, right? So his idea that as the world is moving from this original unity towards separation, Merlin stands at kind of a transition point and that in that process of separation, there would be unities between humanity and nature that were not illicit, but that as we’ve become, as we’ve started to see ourselves objectively and separate from nature have become illicit. And so, and this is just the idea that he’s playing with. And he talks about one of his characters say that as the world, if you think of this in terms of your idea of the center and the margin, the world and its history in a sense unfolds this way. We began with a primal unity in Eden, and as he is moving forward, there’s a fragmentation and a separation that is happening. And that, so he’s bringing back Merlin from a point in that process where he could still enact a certain task that has become illegitimate for us based on where we are at in the unfolding of history. I’ll just say, I do think it’s speculative. And in a world fascinated by the occult, I feel like this is similar to the problems people have with like Harry Potter, right? She’s playing with certain ideas and powers in a way that with our world, who is fascinated with the idea of tapping into the cloud of knowing below, can be maybe misleading or confusing. Yeah. One of the things about Merlin that were fascinating to me was, I had read that a long time ago, like in my early 20s, even I think late teens, early 20s. And so there were some parts of that I didn’t remember. And so rereading it now, that Merlin part really stood out for me because I’m working on rewriting a story, which is in the Merlin legendarium. It’s a romance called Silence, where there’s, I did a video about it. But in that story, Merlin appears and Merlin is the one that restores order in the end. But the way that he does it is through laughter. He laughs, he laughs, he mocks everything. He laughs at everything. And he laughs at all these things that look like scandals or that look like you shouldn’t be laughing at them, like let’s say a funeral or some tragedy or some beggars. And he just laughs at them. And at the end, he kind of reveals the secret of why he’s laughing for them. And what it does is it restores everything in its proper place. And there’s something about, and I was wondering if, first of all, C.F. Luce had read that text, but then I realized that it’s there also in other texts, like in Jeffrey Monmouth’s poem about Merlin, where Merlin kind of plays that trickster role, but a trickster that restores the world in the end through a kind of, yeah, and that’s what happens in the Hideous Strength because there are some narrative tropes that he uses that he weren’t necessary, but that are almost there to kind of bring confusion to a brink, where Merlin is there in the NICE, but he’s actually not him. He brings someone else and that person is Merlin, but he’s the other guy that is a translator, but the translator is actually Merlin. And so there’s this like, everything is confused and nothing is what it seems. And then through that, he brings about like the liberation of nature and the kind of the return of this. He almost brings about a kind of flood basically that destroys the NICE. And so it’s kind of weird. It’s fascinating because he, in some ways, C.S. Luce presents Merlin. He says that great Atlantean magic, which that is like, that’s code, that’s code word for pre-flood, like pre-flood world. And so he’s a remainder of the pre-flood world and that in some ways plays the role of what those ancient magicians would have done, which is to bring about a flood. But I think about like the idea of the Nephilim or the giants, like their excessive magic and their kind of weird science and technology basically brought the flood about. We don’t know exactly how, but that’s how we brought about the flood. And so Merlin does that, but to the good, ultimately. It’s weird. Like it’s this whole weird flip thing where he brings about basically flood, but it’s the salvation of the world. So I just thought like it was such a profound story trope. And I was like, how did he, I mean, I guess he was reading also all these medieval texts, but I was really surprised to see because it does sound controversial, but it seems to me that there’s something about it, which is if we’re going to bring the world back to, if we’re going to make everything make sense in the end and everything’s going to come together, then it’s like he undoes the pre-flood world, uses it to basically solve the problem of the end of the world, and then brings about the final marriage, like the final heavenly Jerusalem. Anyways, I’m still thinking about this, but I was really surprised at how insightful his use of Merlin was because it seems weird. Like it’s so surprising. Like why is Merlin in this space trilogy of all things? It just looks like at first you’re like, what is this random weird thing that it starts with the science fiction thing in space and it ends with like a sorcerer destroying this weird secret society. But I think, yeah, I think he had very deep insights about how things play out. Right. Well, that connects to what you’re saying about the AI. What we think that science, again, the Tower of Babel is raising up. Science is building up powers that we think come from science. But then when the mask is revealed, there’s powers and principalities at work behind. So I love the way that he uses science fiction as a genre. He thought it was the locus in the modern world where the imagination was still open, right? Where there was still an openness to discovery, to new. And so he uses that genre again, to, you know, to he’s always flipping things on its head to return you to an openness to powers and principalities and spiritual powers. And I agree with you. The first time I read it, I thought what is going on? It took me several reads and I think everything you’re describing makes a lot of sense. And I just need, it’s just a part I haven’t meditated on, but you do note Merlin is a big man. So in terms of that connection to Atlantis and to the Nephilim, he is portrayed as a giant. But he’s also dangerous. He’s like, why don’t you kill? I think he proposes to kill whatever transgression. And he’s just like this wild, dangerous thing that you don’t really want around you, but that ultimately ends up. And what it makes me think a little bit, because this whole tradition of Merlin being the son of the devil or being the son of the dragon or something, it makes me think about something Father Stephen DeYoung has helped me to understand, something I’ve had intuition about for a long time, which is how the Church Fathers talk about how the demons ultimately, without knowing, they’re going to end up playing a role in service of God. It’s not, we’re not justifying that. We’re not saying that they’re right and that what they’re doing is good, but that God is ultimately in control. And through a mysterious way, they play the left hand of God. They kind of, without even wanting to, they end up playing this role in divine providence that will end up bringing about the final restoration. And it just seems like Lewis had insights about that, like very deep insights about that. And that’s why at first when you read it, you’re like, why is Merlin in this thing? And then slowly it starts playing out, but I haven’t figured it out completely. I’m still, you can see I’m still working through it right now, but I think there’s something, there are things to be meditated upon and how he uses this character in that way. Right. I love what you say about laughter because very much in the medieval world, you had a very well-ordered world, right? And all things were to be in harmony with the order of the cosmos, the song of the cosmos, and we’re to live in that order and that harmony. But things, because we’re fallen and things get out of order, they get out of tune, they get distorted out of proportion. And for the medieval, that’s what laughter does, is it pokes that distortion, it pokes that disorder. And that’s actually a kind, gracious way to bring back humility and order to that which had become disproportionate out of tune. And I just, I love that view of laughter. I very much, raising my own girls, we talk about the importance of being able to laugh at yourself and that being able to laugh at yourself is the gentlest way to become aware of your weaknesses. And so I love that Merlin plays this, so he is this interesting figure. And I wonder, okay, so Lewis is using Merlin to look at how do we deal with the end of the world chaos, where all is moving towards confusion, where things are turned upside down. And so you very much do have that doppelganger, like that shadow figure. Again, I love Harry Potter, Snape plays this role, you can never tell if he’s good or bad. Yeah, that’s right. Right, until the end. And Rowling also does this, where it’s actually Voldemort’s own spell that kills him. Right, where it’s actually playing that trickster, so as to allow chaos to collapse in on itself. Yeah, that’s what that’s definitely what you see in that hit is strength. It’s basically, it’s like, you know, everything, the NIC basically like just collapses on its own and in its own thing. And there is this return of nature, you know, the idea of the animals coming, it really is a flood. Although I think there’s mostly fire in the way how it’s destroyed, but it is that image of like just nature. It’s like if you if you distort reality, nature comes back howling, like you can’t distort natural order for too long. At some point, it comes back. And when it comes back, it’s not going to be nice to you. You know, and that’s just, that’s as true about something as big as the NICE in this story. But it’s also true that if you decide to eat junk food all the time, like if you try to distort order for too long, it’s like at some point, your reality comes crashing back, you know, and that’s something that I see very powerfully. And it fits with C.S. Lewis’s basic idea about how in some ways hell is locked from the inside and how, you know, in The Great Divorce, he has the most powerful vision of how hell is basically you getting what you want. And that, you know, and so it and that it’s not just this arbitrary thing, but it’s just the playing out of the of the of the of the patterns that you’re involved with. So, yeah, right. Which you see with the antagonist and that hideous strength where what they wanted was to turn themselves over to the macros, the demonic powers, you know, and that that’s what they get. But it’s revealed for what it is, right, which is a collapse into, you know, total total disintegration. And, you know, what I do think, you know, we think about Merlin and those end of the world spaces at the margin and the confusion and the chaos. How do we live there? What I wonder is, you know, I don’t know that we’re being offered. I don’t know. So I really want to know what you think. I don’t know that we’re being offered Merlin as a model for our own. I don’t think so. I think I think I don’t think so. I think that I think maybe it’s the role of some people to play that to play that. But I think mostly if you look at the way it’s set up, it’s like the people, you know, the people on ransom side, they basically just wait like they they basically keep themselves pure. You could say they they work, you know, they stay together, they help each other. They kind of create this little world of holiness. And then it’s like it’ll play out. Merlin basically will do what he has to do. And he ends up working for us without us totally understanding why. And it ends up happening. And so I think that, you know, I think that it is the role of some people to play that. But Merlin is destroyed also, by the way, in that in that act. He’s not he’s not saved, you know. Right. Yeah. So I definitely think ransom and his community is the model and, you know, to to live faithfully in natural communities. Right. They they properly husband and steward their garden, their nature. They have rightly ordered relationship with themselves and they faithfully wait for the salvation of the Lord to appear. And like you’re saying, you know, some someone might be called to be the Merlin figure, but woe is me. I mean, it’s not good. It’s not good for Merlin. It doesn’t end well for him. And that’s the right way he runs to his own destruction. Yeah. And so maybe that’s how you say, but still, nonetheless, that’s what happens. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, Annie, this has been a great conversation and I want to encourage everybody to look into the description. You will find a way to to either sign up for her class or at least get put on a waiting list so that once everything, all the details are set up, you can sign up and look forward to more of these where, you know, we’re trying to really bolster the symbolic world community. We’ve got some, we’re just discovering all these, these pearls and these amazing people that are part of it and that want to get involved. So you can also get involved by signing up on the website and any thanks. Thanks for all your effort. Thanks for the article and thanks for putting so much of your heart into this. Yeah. Thank you, Jonathan. This has been really fun. Hey everyone. Thank you for listening to my conversation with Jonathan. If you want to join in and continue the discussion, follow the link in the episode notes to sign up for our symbolic world class on CS Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy. We are about to wrap up Paralandra, but there is still time to jump in for that hideous strength. 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