C.S. Lewis Archives - Rest and Trust

September 1, 2023September 21, 2023

What is a Name According to the Inklings? A Label or A Portal into Being?

What is a name according to the Inklings?

When Frodo stabs a Ringwraith at Weathertop with his sword and cries out in Elvish, “O Elbereth Gilthoniel!” he doesn’t know what he is doing. Later, Aragorn explains what happened at that moment,

More deadly to him [the Witch-king] was the name of Elbereth.

But why is the name of Elbereth (Varda) so deadly to the Witch-king? Isn’t it just a sound?

It turns out, it’s not. In our divided consciousness, we tend to separate the name from its bearer. We do so subconsciously because modern consciousness perceives everything in fragments. We think that the name is merely a sound, and the thing it denotes is a physical object that exists separately from its name. But that’s not what we find in the Inklings.

In Tolkien’s legendarium, the Elvish languages seem to represent the one proper language, or “language as it should be.” It is the primal proto-language not yet divided by the curse of Babel. It proceeds from the consciousness that perceives the world as a Whole, and in it, words are always one with what they name. In fact, words contain what they name as in a “house.”

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger spoke of words as “the house of being,” not labels or tags on things. He said,

For words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.

So, what is a name according to the Inklings? It is a portal that ushers the invocator into the invisible realm concealed behind the sound.

For the Inklings, the name and the named are one. The named one is IN the name. The Lord of the Rings was written from a different consciousness than ours as Tolkien himself seems to indicate – it was the consciousness of participation, not separation. Tolkien said,

I have long ceased to invent… I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself.

For a participated consciousness, there is no difference between the name of a thing and the thing itself. The thing exists in its name. That’s why words always effect what they name. The name is not a denotation; it’s an invocation. That’s why Elbereth was really there at Frodo’s call. There is no other explanation for Frodo’s survival – if Varda wasn’t there, Frodo would have been consumed by the Darkness. But she was there fully present in her name.

What was the theology of St. Gregory Palamas?

Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox monk of the 13th century, came up with curious teachings about uncreated divine energies present, as it were, in the invocation of the divine name.

For him, the Name was not merely an empty sound or a denotation but a living symbol that ushered the invocator into the power behind the sound shape. The true name has the potency to awaken, revitalize, and reveal meaning.

Incidentally, Tolkien’s Middle-earth started with a name when the author came across the name of Earendel in an old Anglo-Saxon poem. Reading the first few lines of the poem produced in him “a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words.”

An early 20th-century Russian theologian Pavel Florensky (the founder of Onomatodoxia) was keenly aware of the power of words to engage the invocator into sacramental communion with Logos. According to Florensky, true words do not just communicate; they change. The message is not just information; it is transformation.

At the dawn of the Soviet era, in post-revolution Russia, one of the ways the new regime sought to “create the new Soviet man” was by changing the language and vocabulary.

They literally changed the grammar, spelling, syntax, morphology, and vocabulary of the Russian language to expel certain words and supplant them with a new vocabulary introduced by Bolshevik party ideologists. A whole body of abbreviations and contractions was enforced which, according to Florensky, sounded more “like a splinter in the tongue.”

This practice was, in his vernacular, “linguistic deformity,” the “mangling of words through deliberate disfigurement.” The maimed lexicon of the Soviet machine had its purpose – reducing reality to something less than it is to obtain control.

Who are our modern-day language-makers? They are not poets, monks, or myth-makers. They are technology gurus and people with divided consciousness. So, our language gets inundated with technogenic expressions like “He can really push my buttons,” as if we were devices.

All reductionism is ultimately aimed at gaining control. For example, when we “name names,” we reduce a person to a caricatured controllable state. It is a will to dominate.

Just as Mordor’s black speech by its very sound summoned the reality of domination and oppression, so the reductive language of our day brings with it a less-than-human lifestyle.

The purpose of fragmented language is quite deducible from its effect – the loss of wonder. The ancient Lethe was wonderful; “water resources” are not. They are manageable, to be sure, if that’s what is desired. And often that’s exactly what is desired.

The world has shrunk in our contracted language. Most of it we can’t see because our consciousness often sets limits to our perceptions. We don’t see the giant behind the world. The world doesn’t loom large for us. To reverse the curse, we need to reverse the language. How do you do it?

C.S. Lewis said,

“And if true verse but lift the curse, they (words) feel in dreams their native Sun.”

The art of naming, the art of coining true metaphors, will do the trick.

As we find proper words, our speech will regain its fiery Pentecostal power. The curse will be lifted, and we will tremble at the sound. We will wake up.

April 26, 2023June 5, 2023

The Effect of the “Distant Forest” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle – Whispers Amplified by Imagination

As I got off the phone with an old friend this morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being under some spell.

He had shared a video with me from 12 years ago when we were much younger, my daughter was 10, and my son was 6.

We had a picnic around a fire, cooking hotdogs, chatting, and enjoying a warm summer evening in Siberia.

As I watched my daughter’s cute chubby face chewing on the hotdog and my son’s frantic hopping and jumping over the fire, I teared up.

“This is Paradise,” I thought. “Why didn’t I see it then?”

“Paradise,” echoed my friend on the other side of the conversation.

“Hmm…,” I thought to myself after I hung up. “Why is it that we tend to see an experience as ordinary when we are in the middle of it? And when there’s some distance between us – whether it’s time or geography – it transforms into something else.

Why didn’t I see all that before? It was an ordinary evening. Yes, I enjoyed it very much, but now I almost see it as a doorway into some inexplicable magic. A picture of another world.

Is my memory playing a trick on me, so am I imagining something that wasn’t there?

Or maybe it’s the other way around – my memory shows me something that was there, but I was too close to it to see it for what it is.

“You can’t recognize a person’s face when you are too close to it,” said the Russian poet Sergey Esenin.

But how do I know that my memory is not deceiving me?

Owen Barfield said in his poem The Tower:

But many times, the secret-breathing world
Whispers to thee, yet whispers with a voice
Which memory shall warehouse as a shout.

This world is breathing secrets, but we often don’t hear its whispers until something amplifies them for us into a shout.

Our memory is that shout that amplifies the whispers that we didn’t hear.

But what are those secrets that we tend to overlook because we are too close to reality to recognize its face?

January 30, 2023January 30, 2023

The Great Dance in C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield

When I first read C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra years ago, I was a bit confused at the end. Especially, when I got to the part about the Great Dance, in which “there seems no centre because it is all centre.”

As Ransom was listening to the Eldils delivering long speeches about the nature of the Great Dance, I thought these speeches sounded more like doxologies than explanations – as if the speakers didn’t care about making anything clear but rather were weaving songs of praise out of thin air.

And then, Ransom actually SAW their speech turn into SIGHT. The speeches of the Eldils became The Great Dance before his eyes:

“He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties.”
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

What a strange ending, I thought. But somehow, at least in Ransom’s mind, it was a fitting resolution to the plot.

November 7, 2022May 1, 2023

From Image to Imagination – Transcending Modern-Day Idolatry in Owen Barfield’s Fairy-Tale The Silver Trumpet

In his 1925 fairy-tale The Silver Trumpet, Owen Barfield expressed mythically what he would later expound philosophically in Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry:

The life of the image should be none other than the life of imagination.

In other words, without imagination images are dead. Imagination is their lifeblood. Their substance. Their content.

When we look at the phenomena and confuse their appearance for what they represent, we take life out of them. The images are lost. They have been turned into idols by our refusal to see through them.

The moment I say: “The appearance of the tree equals the tree,” I am making an assumption that there’s nothing else to the tree than meets the eye. This mental concept is no more than an assumption (I don’t really know if the appearance of a tree equals a tree).

But I choose to see the tree through a non-participatory lens. In doing so, I refuse to go from an image to imagination.

I refuse to transcend the images with imagination (properly speaking, with faith as the ability to see the invisible). I refuse to go beyond the symbol to what it symbolizes. I take a sign for the thing it points to.

In The Silver Trumpet, this curious relationship between an image and imagination is captured in the relationship between Prince Courtesy and Princess Violet.

October 18, 2022April 11, 2023

Who is Tulkas? The “Expecto Patronum” of Tolkien’s Universe to Fight Off the “Darkness of Unlight”

Who is Tulkas in The Silmarillion? What is the symbolism behind this myth?

C.S. Lewis once defined a good myth like this:

The narrative is more of a net whereby we catch something else.

The story itself may be quite ordinary – a sculptor carved a lady out of a block of stone, and it became alive (Pygmalion and Galatea).

Persephone was kidnapped by Hades, and her mother Demeter prevented all plants from growing until Hades was commanded to let her go for some months out of the year.

There’s nothing extraordinary in the story itself. Yet, we feel there’s something behind it.

Elizabeth Browning put it like this:

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.

It’s how we choose to look at the common bushes that determines whether we see them burning.

According to G.K. Chesterton, such is the function of our imagination:

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

And such is the function of mythopoetry – a genre that allows us to look at ordinary things through the eyes of Faerie and discover a world of extraordinary meanings behind them.

The key to entering Faerie is inside each and every one.

In Owen Barfield’s philosophy, this change of lens happens when a person allows their state of consciousness to be shifted by a line of poetry. And then they follow the call ringing through “this verse that lifts the curse” and enters the perilous realm of Faerie.

The cosmogonic myths of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion are of the same nature – they are an invitation to enter through the door of the external story and into the invisible realm behind the story, which is the land of Meaning.

One such myth is the myth of Tulkas the Valiant.

How did Tulkas beat Melkor?

Greatest in strength and deeds of prowess is Tulkas, who is surnamed Astaldo, the Valiant. He came last to Arda, to aid the Valar in the first battles with Melkor. He delights in wrestling and in contests of strength… he is tireless. His hair and beard are golden, and his flesh ruddy.

Who is Tulkas? Why did he come to Arda last to aid the Valar in their battles with Melkor? And most importantly, why was Melkor so afraid of him?

So came Tulkas the Strong, whose anger passes like a mighty wind, scattering cloud and darkness before it; and Melkor fled before his wrath and his laughter, and forsook Arda, and there was peace for a long age.

Of all the Valar, Melkor hated Tulkas the most.

There’s a spiritual and mythical significance to this. Tulkas is hated with bitter hatred because he represents the laughter of Iluvatar in the Great Music.

September 27, 2022April 3, 2023

How Owen Barfield Saved The Appearance Of Princess Violetta In The Silver Trumpet

Once upon a time there were two little Princesses whose names were Violetta and Gambetta; and they lived in Mountainy Castle. They were twins, and they were so like each other that when Violetta came in from a walk with her feet wet, Gambetta was sometimes told to go and change her stockings…
The Silver Trumpet

So opens The Silver Trumpet, a fairy-tale written by Owen Barfield in 1925. It was his first published book and the first fantasy book ever published by the Inklings. According to the author himself, he felt that in all his books he was “saying the same thing over and over again.” But what is this “one thing” he was saying over and over again? And how did he say it in The Silver Trumpet?

The Silver Trumpet is a mythical depiction of what Owen Barfield would later unfold in his other works and, in some way, a prelude to what seems to be the overall message of the Inklings — the world is God’s music clad in matter. In Saving the Appearances, Barfield points out that we live in the world of unsaved images — images that have been taken literally and turned into idols.

The images (or appearances) we observe around us are so much “like” the things they represent that we have a hard time distinguishing between them. We take a representation for the reality behind it. For us, the image and the thing it represents look alike, almost indistinguishable — like the two little princesses, Violetta and Gambetta, who were so like each other that even the Queen had a hard time distinguishing them.

The Queen used to be so fussed and worried by the confusion that, what with one thing and another, she persuaded the King to appoint a special Lord to distinguish between them [the princesses]. And he was called the Lord High Teller of the Other from Which.

The Lord High Teller of the Other from Which was the only one who noticed the difference between the two princesses. But it was not in their appearances but in what transpired through the appearances.

Moreover, he “knew a thing or two about the magic power of names,” and so he found a way to tell the two princesses apart — by changing their names. By calling them Violet and Gamboy he brought out into the light of day what was otherwise invisible — the princesses were “as different inside as a Church and a Booking Office.”

In Barfield’s mind, the two little princesses who were almost identical in appearance represent the confusion of the modern mind about observable phenomena. We tend to equate appearances with the reality they point to. This anthroposophical dilemma Owen Barfield would later explore in Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry.

September 27, 2022March 7, 2023

The Third Theme of the Music of Iluvatar – a Mighty Echo of Owen Barfield’s “Final Participation”

If there is one connective tissue between the fantasy imaginations of the Inklings, it is the theme of our participation in the Divine Music – the Music of Iluvatar.

The worlds of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield are born in Music and governed by Music.

In Tolkien’s legendarium, the Ainur descend into Arda, the created Realm, as individual themes of the Music of Iluvatar to behold their unique part becoming incarnate in the visible elements of air, earth, water, and other substances.

Enamored of their part in the celestial symphony, the Ainur follow this “music-made-flesh” into Arda and dwell therein because each yearns to participate in the Divine Thought.

They didn’t yet know how the Music would end – the only thing they knew was that the discord of Melkor would somehow be resolved by the coming of the Second-born to whom Iluvatar gave “strange gifts.”

The Third and final theme in the Music of Iluvatar announces the coming of Men in a soft, slow, and immeasurably sorrowful theme, from which its beauty chiefly comes.

How does Narnia start?

C.S. Lewis’s Narnia also begins in Music, the Song of Aslan, which is “the deeper magic” of his fantasy world – the magic of growing that opposes the black magic of domination.

Aslan sings his world into existence, and all the stars join him in the Song.

Owen Barfield’s The Silver Trumpet is a metaphor for the Music from the invisible realm that awakens us from the spell of unconsciousness when we hear the call. Its call is irresistible and shatters all man-made idols, or the “unsaved images,” so our transformed consciousness can commune with the Music.

August 30, 2022February 24, 2023

How Nature Helps Us to Dissolve Ego Without Fighting It

How do you dissolve Ego without fighting it?

What you resist persists.

All attempts to fight ego will ultimately strengthen it.

What you focus on gets energized. Ego cannot be suppressed; it can only be transcended.

How do you dissolve Ego without fighting it?

It dissolves by itself when we no longer need it for our sense of self. It gets bigger every time we feel we need it for the survival of our Self.

It melts away when we encounter a loving Presence and lose ourselves in Wonder.

This year, I felt it most acutely at Lake Tahoe – the place we go to for a short break from the stifling heat of summer in Houston.

June and July were oppressively hot and humid this year. As the muck intensified, I was yearning for vacation. When I am tired or feel stuck in the rat race of life, Ego shows its ugly head.

It’s hard not to think about yourself when you feel you lack something.

I tend to get irritated, impatient, frustrated, demanding, anxious, and perfectionistic. I may look calm, but I churn inside.

What are the signs of true humility?

C.S. Lewis said:

True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.

But how do you think of yourself less without thinking less of yourself?

How do you diminish yourself without demeaning yourself?

How do you hush your Ego down without putting a gag in its mouth?

How do you harness your Ego without resisting it?

Can you just talk it into quieting down without making it into your enemy?

It turns out, the art of humility – thinking of yourself less – cannot be achieved through willpower. But it comes naturally when we are smitten by Wonder.

The Greek word for “beauty” — kalos — has the same root as the verb “to call” — kaleo. Beauty calls. Kalos kaleo. The true function of Beauty is to call – to call us out of ourselves by the magnetic pull of Wonder.

As I stood by the quaint jewel of the Sierra Nevada, Echo Lake, I was smitten by its turquoise-to-azure waters set against the backdrop of gorgeous snow-topped mountains with their granite arms outstretched far and wide around the Desolation Wilderness in the most exquisite embrace.

I felt dwarfed, quieted, struck dumb, and ecstatic all at the same time.

I couldn’t think about myself at that moment – and I didn’t need to.

I forgot myself entirely – I was one with the Whole.

I was diminished but not belittled. And I felt great.

All the irritation, impatience, frustration, anxiety, and perfectionism were gone. I was pulled out of myself, soaking in the ecstasy of the moment.

The Greek word for “ecstasy” (ekstasis) literally means “to stand outside of or transcend oneself.”

June 21, 2022May 31, 2023

What Led Anakin To The Dark Side – Can “Good” Lead to Evil?

Like any true myth, the story about Anakin Skywalker turning to the dark side is compelling in its overwhelming persuasiveness. What led Anakin to the dark side?

C.S. Lewis once wrote in a letter to Peter Milward that a good myth is

“a story out of which varying meanings will grow for different readers and in different ages.”

And then he added that a myth is not really dependent on the words in which it is told or the art form in which it is conveyed. It’s not the narrative itself that makes the myth convincing but something much more elusive.

“The narrative is more of a net whereby we catch something else.”

What led Anakin to the dark side?

What I caught in the net of the Star Wars myth is HOW Anakin was led to the dark side — it happened, oddly enough, through his inordinate desire for something good.

As a young boy he swore a solemn oath at his mother’s grave: “When I grow up, I will become strong and will never let my loved ones suffer and die.”

This oath marked his transition to the dark side long before it happened in chronological time. At that moment, a bargain was struck in his soul for the possession of a loved one in exchange for breaking God’s law.

At that moment, he made a decision for himself to never ever part with his loved ones again, no matter the cost. The perfectly good desire — to protect his loved ones from death — turned in him into a demonic possession when he put it on a pedestal.

As Tim Keller said, an idol is a good thing turned into the ultimate thing.

An idol is usually a good thing that we make ultimate. We say, “Unless I have that, I am nothing.”

Why did Anakin choke Padme?

When Anakin had to choose between losing Padme — fearing that she might die in childbirth — or turning to evil to “save” her from death, he chose evil. It was his desire to “save” her at all costs that led Anakin to the dark side. For him, the dark side became a means of saving his loved one. He chose evil to achieve what he thought was the ultimate good.

Ironically, this led to Padme’s death. He choke the one he wanted to save with his own hands. When we turn a good thing into the ultimate thing and try to get it at all costs, we lose that good thing — destroy it with our own hands.

Such is the harsh logic of idolatry. We are captivated by some version of good and turn it into the “summum bonum” — without noticing it. And then everything becomes a means to an end, a sacrifice offered on the altar of this god.

A wise man once said that a myth is something everyone knows without being told. This “story” lives in humanity’s collective unconscious, and we all instantly recognize it once it is put in the form of a narrative.

May 4, 2018May 4, 2018

How to Be a Friend to Your Own Child

No doubt, there is a time when you need to be a parent to your children, but there comes a time when you can become their friend. Being a parent is about exercising control, being a friend is about letting go of control. Being a parent means you attach a child to yourself, being a friend means you let them go so they can come back to you of their own accord. The paradox of parenting is that you bind a child to yourself when they are little, so that you can let them go when they grow up.

When I think about my relationships with my kids, I have to come to grips with one thing – if I wish to be their friend, not just a parent, they must choose me for a friend. Unlike parents, friends are chosen, not given. And this has to be a free choice on their part, with no compulsion, coercion or manipulation on mine. Such is the nature of friendship – it’s a free choice, not out of necessity or obligation, but because a person’s soul resonates with your heart and mind.

C.S. Lewis wrote: “I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself.” Friendship can only thrive when someone’s inner world is attractive to you in and of itself. It’s true that my children are 100% dependent on me, and I could have forced them to “be my friend”. But that’s not what I want. I don’t want to say to them: “Be my friend, or you will regret it.” Friendship, unlike parenthood, is the opposite of dependence. Continue reading “How to Be a Friend to Your Own Child”