The Soul of Christ, Out of the Body, and C.S. Lewis's Shape of Desire

An intriguing Christological thought that doesn't seem to come to most of us often, if ever. I say this very simply on the basis that I can't recall ever hearing anyone chat about it. But something I was reading today provoked me to think about it. 

We anticipate an "intermediate state" following upon death, i.e., our condition between physical death and the resurrection. (Think of the souls under the altar in Revelation: "How long, O Lord, how long?") It would never occur to any of us to suggest that being in this intermediate state makes a soul somehow less than human. Yes, human minus a part, the body! But still HUMAN. 

Christ Himself experienced the intermediate state. Between His death and resurrection He was still HIM, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, outside the body. 

Paul says of us, "to be outside the body is to be with the Lord." Jesus, the Lord Himself, experienced His own outside-the-body "interim," even if it was the briefest such interim there ever will be (hallelujah!). 

One thing this fact underscores is the depth and totality of the Lord's unity with us in His humanity ("like us in every way, yet without sin"). He went through everything essential to being human, not only to the point of death but to the point of living through "after-death", and right into Resurrection. 

And it is here that some mind-stretching really takes off. What does "Incarnation" then mean in the context of Christ's own intermediate state? Is He, in that state, still "God Incarnate" or is He "God Disincarnated"? In what sense is the disembodied Christ still the Incarnation of the living God? How is Christ dis-enfleshed still God enfleshed? 

To me the only possible, biblically faithful answer requires that we deepen our perception of Incarnation. 

The Incarnation MEANS that God has become one of us, a Son of Adam, wholly human in body, soul and spirit. While becoming wholly human He, Christ, entirely remains the Person of God. His Personhood as eternal God--the Son, the Word, in unity with the Father and Spirit--is in no way negated by taking on Manhood. 

If all this is true, as I am convinced to the core of my being it is, then, however ironic and paradoxical it sounds, Christ in His intermediate state is of COURSE still, and uninterruptedly, "God Incarnate." 

Having once become Man, Christ never ceases being Man. 

Naturally, this means that you need to broaden your understanding of "Incarnate." 

In a simplistic linguistic sense it means "in-flesh" but what God has done in Christ CANNOT be limited or ruled by etymology. 

What "Incarnation" means THEOLOGICALLY is "having become Man." Being Man is no more dependent on being in the body for Christ than it is for us. (We are still human after death.) Being in the body is IDEAL for Man, AS Man (it's what we were made for), and this too is as true for Christ as it is for us. 

But it isn't exclusively dependent on it. 

Why am I emphasizing this so adamantly? Here's why: the dangerous misconception that we must scrupulously avoid is that Christ Jesus, in that intermediate state, in the "harrowing of hell," was simply God Who had de-incarnated, God Who had left His "human shell" behind and gone back to "just being God" again. 

Wrong. 

An idea like that brings you necessarily back to the old heresy that, even in His earthly life, Jesus was just a human body inhabited, not by a human soul/spirit, but simply by God--so that, when the human body died, the God inhabiting it left. This is heresy. It's as much heresy to posit it in the context of Jesus' intermediate state as it is in the context of His earthly life.

Having become a human soul, Christ remains a human soul: before the Cross, after His death, and from the Resurrection on. The "Incarnation" is God having become Man. That leaves out nothing but sin. Man experiences an intermediate state after death and before the resurrection. So therefore did the God-Man Christ. 

God "Incarnate" is God "En-humaned." Perhaps that makes it easier to conceive of the DIS-enfleshed Christ remaining, all the same, 100% God and 100% Man. 

In a particular manner of speaking, even in death, outside the flesh, Christ was not "dis-enfleshed" if we grasp what people like the apostle Paul are talking about when they use the term "flesh." 

"Flesh" isn't only skin and muscle. And, no, it isn't just "the sinful nature," either, though sometimes it conveys that connotation. The word is used quite flexibly in Scripture and you simply must be sensitive to the nuance invested in it by the context. In a very broad sense "flesh" is the CREATED. "All flesh is as grass...." 

God in His ineffable condescension elected to become such ephemeral "flesh," the created, Man.

In that sense Man is "flesh" even when he's DIS-enfleshed, i.e., he remains the created, the contingent, the non-self-generating. 

It is in this sense that I mean Christ in the intermediate state was not "dis-enfleshed", i.e., "dis-Incarnated", i.e., "de-Humaned." Absolutely not. Christ, in that intermediate state, remained as truly the Eternal God HUMANLY "ensouled" as He was before His death. 

Another way of putting it is this: for Jesus, dying and entering into that intermediate state was no mere "return" to anything He, as the Eternal Son, had ever experienced before. 

No, this was something new, unprecedented: the "humanly ensouled" (incarnate) Son entering into the HUMAN post-mortem experience, just as He had entered into the human PRE-mortem experience. 

Needless to say, when it is the Incarnate God entering into ANY human experience, whether pre-mortem, post-mortem, or post-resurrection (which kind of includes it all), that "experience" is going to be worlds-shattering and cosmically paradigm-replacing, its import, consequences, implications and ramifications radiating tsumani-like into every corner of Reality. 

But it was no less a human experience for all that, experienced to the last drop by God.

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C.S. Lewis writes: "Our intellectual desire (curiosity) to know the true answer to a question is quite different from our desire to find that one answer, rather than another, is true. The form of the desire is in the desire. It is the object which makes the desire harsh or sweet, coarse or choice, 'high' or 'low.'" 

In other words, when Indiana Jones goes hunting for the Ark, the form of his desire is the Ark. It's what he wants to find. But when physicists hunt for the the material universe's most fundamental, indivisible component, they want, ultimately, to find out truly WHAT it is, not prove that it's something they THINK it is. 

On the other hand, when you have had medical tests taken on suspicion of a serious disease, your desire is to find out that the disease isn't there. You're not just hoping for "an" answer, you're hoping for "the" answer that will let you get back to life as normal. 
When we look for life's meaning, is our desire to find out WHAT it is, or is our desire to prove that it's one thing and not another?

"The form of the desire is in the desire." In other words, the desire that's motivating us is also, inevitably, even before we've attained it (if we ever do), shaping us--our thinking, our actions, our relationships. Paradoxically, the meaning of the desired answer is in some way materializing in your character and outlook even before you've found it. For good or ill. 

Which is, perhaps, why the question "Why?" is always a salutary one while you're on the hunt. Particularly if you're already sure ahead of time what you want the answer to your question to be. "WHY do I want it to be that? And what does this say about me?" 

"LIE" WHEN YOU HAVE TO

"Here, madam, is a handy-dandy, super-duper, Grade A Deluxe Combination Slicer/Dicer/Chopper/Masher/Mixer/Juicer/Blender for only $49.99, and don't you agree, ma'am, that with just this ONE item in your kitchen you could do what you'd otherwise need six or seven OTHER space-hogging appliances to do?" 

First, I trust you see the tautology. This device, by its very name, does seven different tasks which, one supposes, could also be done by seven separate devices were you to make it a serious point to track down seven devices that each accomplish only one task. So the salesman is in essence saying, "This one device does the tasks of a hypothetical seven separate devices; do you agree with me that that is what I've just SAID?" 

And the poor "pigeon", overwhelmed by both the machine-gun delivery and the apparently unassailable logic, stammers, "Um, er, well, y-yes, I suppose so...." 

So now she's been cognitively coerced into taking the salesman's side. She could hardly help but acknowledge that the man just said what he just said, but the question was so formulated as to make it seem she was agreeing that she NEEDED this device on her kitchen countertop. There's little hope of her escape now. 

Once you've taken someone's side, willingly or not, the fear of looking either fickle or unintelligent, or even like a traitor, takes on its own coercive force. Unless you are exceptionally self-aware, self-possessed, rational and healthily cynical, it is almost impossible at this point to back out. 

There is another fear at work here, too. Or perhaps not so much a fear as a specious moral compunction. The salesman fired the tautology at the poor lady, asking her in essence whether or not he just said WHAT HE JUST SAID, so how could she HONESTLY say "No"? 

A person's conscience kicks into gear. A certain intellectual self-respect and deep taboo against lying take over, so that you get this visceral resistance to telling an untruth: "How can I say to this man that I DON'T agree with what he said when what he said is obviously true? I'll look like a liar, or an idiot!" 

Which of course is precisely what the salesman is banking on. He knows full well that what he just said is rubbish, and he doesn't respect you in the least for answering "truthfully"; all he cares about is that you follow the script right up to the part where you fork over the cash. 

Which is why, in situations like this...and perhaps the more perspicacious of you out there will catch that I'm not just talking about pitches for slicer-dicer-blenders...we must develop a kind of thick skin, an imperviousness, indeed a calloused disdain (callouses ain't always bad; guitarists depend on them), with regard to such manipulative playing on our consciences. 

The thing to say to the salesman...or anybody else...who springs this sort of "Don't you agree...?" line on you is, very simply, "No." And if the con artist splutters in indignation at your blatant denial of the "facts", well...so what? 

As Miss Jean Brodie would say, "It doesn't signify." 

It doesn't "signify" whether the odd factoid he threw into the mix was, on some absurd, puerile level, "true". The proper response is still, "No, I don't agree. I don't even care. I categorically reject this whole pitch."

Even when it feels like lying (which, remember, is how it was set up to make you feel), the right thing is still to say "No." 

Later, upon calm, collected reflection, you'll realize it wasn't lying at all. 

To say "No" to manipulation, whatever shape it takes, is ipso facto to speak truth.

Racist Manifesto?

What would you think of me if I were to draft and publish some kind of manifesto declaring that it was WHITE to: 
cherish the nuclear family
work hard
set long-term goals and sacrifice for them
be punctual
consider intention as intrinsic to guilt or innocence
practice science
consider problems something to be solved
believe in cause-and-effect
set work as a priority before play
value objective, rational thinking
plan for the future
protect your property
make decisions...
???
Really, what would you think?
Do I hear "White Supremacist Racist"?
Do I hear "David Duke could hardly say it clearer"?
I agree.
So how do you explain all this being on a "Whiteness Chart" produced and promoted by the African-American History Museum?
And all these qualities, according to the chart, being...BAD things?
The Museum pulled the chart down after it kicked off a major brouhaha (surprise, surprise).
The Museum pulled it down over the brouhaha. Not because they've changed their minds about it.
This tells you pretty much all you need to know about the agenda behind this movement.
It's not "equality." It's the obliteration of a civilization in the frothing-rabid pursuit of power for power's sake, in the conviction that they, the Left, will be the ones with the guns (the ultimate force of government in their universe) when the smoke has cleared and the earth has soaked up the last of the blood.
https://pjmedia.com/culture/tyler-o-neil/2020/07/15/smithsonian-goes-full-marxist-nuclear-family-science-christianity-all-part-of-oppressive-whiteness-n645176

Family Secrets

One of the hardest aspects of second-language acquisition is when a word in the new language is actually a concept that simply doesn't exist in your native language. Because your brain doesn't, in the first place, contain the THOUGHT, you naturally cannot make sense of the WORD, the way people are using it, what they mean, have in mind, why they're utilizing and applying it.... 

It can be maddening. Especially when you take a leap and end up using it wrong and get all sorts of perplexed stares in return. 

Often you discover, after you've finally nailed down just what they're TALKING about (which, since there's no single word in your language for it, needs to be explained with a whole sentence), that indeed the concept USED to exist in the sociocultural context from which your own language springs, but for any number of reasons the concept, the notion, the convention, passed away and therefore there's no word that conveys it anymore. Since the THING is gone, no WORD expresses it anymore. 

Often, accompanying such a discovery is (at last!) the revelation of WHICH word in your own language USED TO mean the same thing, and why its connotation changed. 

One such word in Russian that has long been a personal hobgoblin of mine is "torzhestvó" along with its adjectival form "torzhéstvenniy." I perceived early on that it was connected with the idea of special events or celebrations or...wait, funerals? I'd hear it applied to happy and sad occasions equally, so that its connotation rather escaped me, beyond the obvious that it related to the ceremonial, the official, the occasion of elevated, formalized observances and quasi-ritualistic motions and manners (manners that sometimes struck me as phony, pompous, pretentious, childishly affected, but more on that below...). The words "solemn" and "celebratory" each seemed to fit at different times, but never simultaneously, since they mean such different things to us in English. 

And it wasn't just a matter of understanding a WORD. There seemed to be a cultural SECRET hiding behind this word, something you only understood if you were born to it.

Every culture, every people with a history, a shared experience, harbors its secrets. Just like every marriage does. Not out of an overt intention to be secretive but because there will be, inevitably, things you understand only because you are part of it, IN it. Indeed, the "secrets" are often flagrantly out there, exposed to view...like Russian-speakers using "torzhestvo"...yet they REMAIN "secrets" because you simply cannot penetrate what on earth they're TALKING about. And though they'd like to explain it to you, they can't. That's the secret of it: "I don't know how to explain it to you; we just...KNOW it, automatically." 

Yes, every people contains such secrets, like every marriage, every family. Indeed, it's what makes them a family. It's a good thing, not a bad thing. 

With time, though, you do begin to penetrate the secrets, and suddenly a whole dimension of the "family" opens up to you, and with it a dimension of yourself you didn't realize was there--since, after all, there are no dimensions of human experience that are excluded by arbitrary rule or national identity from any of us. If they are excluded, it's merely by time, distance and the limitations of our opportunities, interest or imagination. No one has enough time in life, after all, to be member, an "insider", of ALL the "families". 

But to the extent that one is privileged to so penetrate the secrets of another "family" and thereby blend into it, one discovers more dimensions of oneself, because all human experience resonates finally with something in all humans. 

I find, by the way, that because of the inrush of Western, particularly American, sociocultural manners and assumptions, the Ukrainian people are rapidly abandoning "secrets" that used to define them, the things you and I as Americans found enigmatic, bewildering, inexplicable, sometimes even annoying and maddening (which didn't make them wrong). 

The younger generation in particular is embracing the patterns, forms, poses and affectations of the West with an alacrity bordering on compulsive delirium. I can hardly blame them, considering the historico-cultural vacuum life presented them with after the crash of the Soviet Union. Still, though, I can't help wondering what, of any inner substance, all these borrowings and assimilations can produce when the "family secrets" have been jettisoned into the void. 

From what we are witnessing in America, the prospect isn't encouraging. 

But to get back to "torzhestvó," the following passage from C.S. Lewis's "A Preface to Paradise Lost" both confirmed what I had fundamentally concluded about it and threw new light on the matter from the perspective of my own English-speaking "culture" as it extends way, way back. In fact, Lewis is explaining how English once KNEW the concept "torzhestvó". 

English once thought this thought, saw this dimension of life. Now it doesn't. 

If you come away from Lewis's text understanding, feeling, why "pompous" was once upon a time a word summoning pleasant or romantic associations, you got it. If you come away thinking, "Well, that's absurd--why would anybody ever want to be pompous?", you didn't get it. 

(To show where Lewis uses italics I will enclose the word or phrase in asterisks, like *this*. My occasional remarks will be in brackets, like [this].)

"This quality will be understood by any one who really understands the meaning of the Middle English word *solempne*. This means something different, but not quite different, from modern English *solemn*. Like *solemn* it implies the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary. But unlike *solemn* it does not suggest gloom, oppression, or austerity. The ball in the first act of *Romeo and Juliet* was a 'solemnity'. The feast at the beginning of *Gawain and the Green Knight* is very much of a solemnity. A great mass by Mozart or Beethoven is as much a solemnity in its hilarious *gloria* as in its poignant *crucifixus est*. Feasts are, in this sense, *more* solemn than fasts. Easter is *solempne*, Good Friday is not. [That is worth reading twice!] The *Solempne* is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for *pomp*--and the very fact that *pompous* is now used only in a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of a 'solemnity'. To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who *enjoy* them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in [to think Lewis wrote this in the 1940s!], you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in [in a world where "happy" was a rare, glorious occasion that called for dressing up!]. Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a wide-spread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar's head at a Christmas feast--all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the *hoc age* ["hoke A-geh"--"this is how it goes"] which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual." 

From "Above all, you must be rid of..." I find here the most piercing judgment upon our present age. 

Yes, indeed, we ARE so hooked on our knee-jerk, defensive individualism that we lash out at anything that even faintly hints at formality or a diminution of gratuitous self-assertion. 

We're so-o-o-o....AFRAID. The fear is all dressed up in a Halloween mask of In-Your-Faceness, as if shrieking and giving the finger to a news camera, or at a policeman who you know can't respond, were a symptom of substance, character, mindfulness, heroism. That is perhaps THE lie most corroding, shredding, the conceptual structures without which a society plummets into savagery. 

If you're old enough, you may remember how in the old news clips we'd see from the USSR, say, when Nixon was visiting Moscow, we couldn't help but sense their different way of "being" on such formal occasions. It all seemed (to me, at least) rather childishly, woodenly formal and pretentious, overtly and self-consciously ritualistic, as if telegraphing: "Look how perfectly I stand at attention; see how ceremoniously I pass him this cup; watch me now as I OFFICIALLY walk from spot A to spot B...." 

And to us in the West there was something rather comical and embarrassing about it. "Why don't they just act normal?" 

Even when I arrived here, long after the USSR's heyday, I noted this "pompous" approach to events in both secular and ecclesiastical contexts--how suddenly everyone would adopt a pose, an air, a somewhat cringeworthy "officialness", a weird sort of pasted-on "official" smile, chins raised, shoulders back.... You half-expected Brezhnev to walk in and start pinning medals on people. To me it was always excruciating: the obligatory, extremely formulaic speeches, the awkward pauses, the uncertainty over how to wrap it up. When Americans, including myself, were part of the proceedings, we were always polite, but we were generally dying for it all to be over. You know, so we could get back to the "real" and "important" stuff. Americans usually exited such occasions with a barely concealed sigh of relief. Ukrainians exited, beaming. (Much as I remember many theatre casts I was in beaming after a great opening night.) 

Now, as I look back, and in light of two things: a) the changes since, in both myself AND the local scene, and, b) what Lewis discusses above, I see what I couldn't see then. These things were part of the "family secrets." This was their "torzhestvó", their "Solempne"--something we abandoned long ago in the West. It wasn't pompous, as we use the word in English now, precisely because it WAS "pompous" in the old sense, a sense that this people treasured, part of the very contours of their identity and aspirations. There was nothing WRONG with being, for a few moments, "artificial", if you must call it that, and giving yourself to a moment that WASN'T all about you, or anyone else in particular, but about the shared meaning, even to the point of obeying the "hoc age" and transparently, without apology, playing your assigned role according to the script--the ancient, sacred script. For just a moment, we're all part of something wonderful. And we treasure that moment in our hearts, maybe with the help of photos on the book shelf, back in our "real" lives. 

There is, far from a pretentious haughtiness, actually a simplicity and innocence in it. And a joy--perhaps a salutary joy in the midst of a life pervaded with hardship, grief and hopelessness. A life in which your dress--the dress that some might ridicule as tackily gaudy or tastelessly garish--is the single "good" dress you own and you save it just for special events like this, to do your part, to live up to the occasion and not let the team down. As soon as you get home, it goes straight back into the closet again for the next time, if, please God, there'll be a next time. 

According to the kind of "solempne" Lewis discusses above, the most unpretentious soul could be decked out in the world's most precious, priceless jewels, delight in the moment's glory and remain as humble and simple as ever. 

The one line in Lewis's text that best expresses just how much our English sense of "solemnity" has departed from the old sense is where Lewis says that, according to the old meaning, Easter is "solemn" but Good Friday is NOT. 

If you can grasp what he's getting at there, then you get it. And if you get it, then you likely glimpse, a searing glimpse, precisely why Good Friday, the Cross, is not "torzhestvó".

Apologies for White Jesus?

I had a conversation some days ago with an American, "of color" as they say (though I consider myself to be a person "of color" just as much as anyone, the fact that someone recently referred to me as "translucent" notwithstanding!). This man "of color" was fulminating against the "White Jesus" in whose name, purportedly, the Africans were enslaved. Here's what I said to him.
(Since I haven't asked his permission to reprint his name, let's call our American friend...well, Friend. That's what I'll replace his name with where I used it in my reply. As for the reply itself, I have every right of course to repost it; it's my words.)

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How does your White Jesus Complex theory about why Europeans enslaved Africans correlate to non-Europeans practicing slavery--for that matter, to Africans who practiced slavery and abetted European slavery? Or "white" Europeans enslaving "white" Europeans for thousands of years, Christianity or no Christianity? You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that the birth of slavery was concomitant with the advent of Christianity. Which is of course simply wrong. Whatever world that happened in, it wasn't ours. 

I feel no compulsion in the least to apologize for a "white" Jesus. 

In the first place, who would I apologize *to*, and in the second place why would *I* apologize? 

It makes you angry, Friend, that Jesus was portrayed (from way, way back) as a virtual Scandinavian by European peoples who also practiced slavery and exploitation of other peoples. 

Okay, be angry. That's your prerogative. How you'll translate that into constructive, productive, redemptive and transformative influence for the sake of Christ's kingdom is an intriguing proposition to consider. 

Jesus has been portrayed as Asian and Black by peoples guilty of other sins, too. There is nothing new under the sun. 

(Anyway, my faith isn't in a painting. Come to think of it, I don't even own a "Christian" painting. Have never been into "images" much.) 

Nor is the real Jesus guilty for however many ways sinners, unbelievers, "nominal Christians," have exploited and distorted His Name and Gospel. The Gospel is still the answer even to atrocities committed ostensibly in the name of the Gospel. 

We can choose to wallow in the imagined, aggregate resentments and bitternesses of all the wronged and oppressed and exploited and subjugated peoples of all times and places in history (though you did leave a lot of them out for some reason) re-living as it were their lives, pains and griefs all over for them (what, there isn't enough in your own life to contend with?), but...you know...somehow it seems to me that that goes right to the HEART of what the Cross and Resurrection are about. Somehow I think HE has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows a whole lot better, and more decisively, Friend, than you can. Or than I can. 

At some point we stop manufacturing all the lives of past generations within our own virtual experience and we live the one life God has given us to live, and then the judgement. You'll never expiate it, Friend. You will never ever be angry enough or compassionate enough or socially "just" enough to purge and expiate it. Nor are the dead generations asking you to. Their business is with the Creator and Lover of their souls. You can never extract enough repentance from anyone, even if fantastically you could find the right person you're somehow entitled to demand it from on their behalf, to heal what happened. 

And the compulsive, driven quest after just restitution for wrongs done is THE recipe for bitterness. Bitterness is a consuming frustration at the wrongdoer's incapacity (of course!) to undo what was done. Often even repentance isn't enough, when the wronged wants infinitely more than that. 

Only forgiveness, a release from debts, is enough. It's the only thing that liberates the wronged from bitterness. 

The Gospel has always been the REAL "liberation theology," when understood truly.