Some strange reflections

Credit: Akoliasnikoff

 

C S Lewis wasn´t really an “orthodox” Christian. He was probably a crypto-Anglo-Catholic pseudo-esotericist paganizer. Which isn´t necessarily a bad thing! His mainline apologetics constituted the exoteric message, his Neoplatonism was the “mesoteric” message, and the esoteric message…well, you probably have to go to Charles Williams or even Dion Fortune for that one!

It struck me when reading JMG´s recent blog post “When Nature Gazes Back” that Lewis believed in an enchanted world, a world in which everything was controlled by personal spirit-beings (both nature and the universe). In other words, Lewis believed in a *pagan* world. It also struck me that Christianity would actually make sense *in this pagan world*! Or rather Lewis´ version of Christianity, rather than the modern Protestant version (shared by liberals and fundamentalists alike) in which the world is disenchanted and even God comes across as slightly deist (even in the fundamentalist version, in which God is a hypercosmic IT technician creating bytes of “information”).

In a pagan world of enchantment, it suddenly makes sense that God could become man – since the world is fundamentally spiritual-material anyway. The Incarnation makes sense if the entire world is already an incarnation of the Divine in panentheistic fashion. The atonement also makes more sense – God´s sacrifice can impact the entire cosmos. The atonement becomes participatory, rather than strictly “legal” (the popular view today). The connection between Christianity and the pagan mystery cults – sometimes hinted at by Lewis – also becomes more logical. The dying and resurrecting god isn´t just an “allegory” for the “resurrection” of vegetation, but an actual pagan god that periodically dies and resurrects with the vegetation (and even *in* the vegetation). Note also the connection to the Eucharist (bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Christ).

Even Judaism was probably much more enchanted than it´s usually given credit for. The Temple in Jerusalem was a symbol of the cosmos, but perhaps not just a “symbol”. In the pagan temples, the priests doing the rituals somehow participated in the cosmic drama. Maybe the sacrifice of a ram in the Jewish Temple was such a participation?

The real question is therefore: Is the world enchanted in the manner above? Do we live in the cosmos of C S Lewis? If we do, Christianity might very well be true in some sense. Note the seeming paradox: Christianity (and/or Judaism) are true if the world is essentially pagan! Personally, I find this very difficult to believe. Certainly, the world isn´t enchanted *now*. Has it ever been so? The world (or at least the physical plane) seem permanently disenchanted. At most, some kind of stern karmic cause-and-effect is in play here. And usually, it´s just chaos. If there is anything enchanted, it´s on a different plane. An astral-daimonic plane, perhaps?

Our plane is one long Kali Yuga.