Fern-seed and Elephants . . .

I'm taking a brief break from The Narnian and reading CSL's Fern-seed and Elephants, and other essays on Christianity (ed. Walter Hooper). My students are looking for non-fiction to read after reading the trilogy; one has already started The Narnian, and I thought I'd look through a few other things to see if I can suggest something for them.

The first essay in this collection (which was published posthumously) is "Membership"; I thought maybe it would shed some light on Mark in THS, which I think it may. It's an interesting discussion, first read as a lecture in 1945. Its focus is the contrast between membership in the "collective" and "participation in the Body of Christ" (13). Lewis sets up a hierarchy: Body of Christ, "personal and private life," and "collective life" (13).

He references literature to provide examples; he mentions Charlotte Yonge, who has been on my list of authors I want to read -- maybe after I work my way through Dickens. He sees Rat, Mole, and Badger (in The Wind in the Willows) as symbolizing "the extreme differentiation of persons in harmonious union which we know intuitively to be our true refuge both from solitude and from the collective" (16). This is the function of the "mystical body" of Christ, the Church (15).

One sentence did remind me of themes in the trilogy, perhaps especially in THS: "Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality" (18). This seems to sum up the paths both Jane and Mark had to follow too find peace and fulfillment.

Lewis's medievalism and Platonism show up here in a privileging of hierarchy over equality, though he recognizes that "artificial equality is necessary in the life of the State"; he says, "in the church we strip off this disguise, we recover our real inequalities, and are thereby refreshed and quickened" (18). He seems in this essay to value humans only partially correctly; he says, "the value of the individual does not lie in him. He is capable of receiving value. He receives it by union with Christ" (24). I think later in his career he recognizes the intrinsic value of the individual as Imago Dei; still the value is not because of anything the person does but is due to what we are as creatures. He does counter the Platonic influence with a clear statement that our eternal existence will be corporeal, which I think Christians sometimes need to be reminded of.

Then he says, " . . . as organs in the Body of Christ, as stones and pillars in the temple, we are assured of our eternal self-identity and shall live to remember the galaxies as an old tale" (23).

I've said before that Charles Williams' Arthurian poems make me feel like I'm levitating . . . Lewis's prose can sometimes have the same effect. What an amazing description of eternity--outliving the galaxies! While the "collective . . . is mortal," the individual and the Body "live forever" (22).