A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

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      Nevertheless, the Hebrews seem to have been even more vitriolic than their Pagan neighbors. Lewis thinks this might be based on the principle of “the higher the more in danger,” that is, a person with greatness of soul and an abiding conception of right and wrong is more likely to show an ugly fanaticism than a smaller person who is not so much above temptation as below it. Under some circumstances the absence of indignation may be a worse sign than indignation itself. The very elevation of religion is bound to make a religious bad person the worst sort of bad person. Satan himself was once an angel in heaven. Shocking as the cursing Psalms may be, then, it is clear that their composers were people neither morally indifferent nor willing, like some today, to reduce wickedness to a neurosis.

      With these difficulties out of the way, Lewis turns to the great positives of the Psalms. First is the robust, virile, spontaneous, and mirthful delight in God, displayed by the Hebrews. They often felt a genuine longing for the mere presence of God that shames Christians. They had an “appetite” for God that did not let a false sense of good manners preclude their enjoyment of him. They were ravished by their love of God’s law, which they believed to be firmly rooted in his nature and as real as trees and clouds.

      Lewis reminds us that the ancient Hebrews were not merchants and financiers at all but farmers and shepherds. Though their poetry says little about landscape, it does give us weather “enjoyed almost as a vegetable might be supposed to enjoy it”: “Thou art good to the earth . . . thou waterest her furrows . . . thou makest it soft with the drops of rain . . . the little hills shall rejoice on every side . . . the valleys shall stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing” (see Ps. 65:9ff.). The Jews understood better than their neighbors, and perhaps we also, a pristine doctrine of God as creator of nature, one that at once empties nature of anything like a pantheistic divinity and at the same time makes her a symbol or manifestation of the Divine.

      Lewis confesses that when he first became a Christian he was disturbed by the continuous command in the Psalms to praise God. It sounded as if God were saying, “What I most want is to be told that I am good and great.” Even the very quantity of the praise seemed important to the psalmists. Then he discovered the principle that praise is simply the sign of healthy understanding. To ascribe praise to whatever is truly praiseworthy reflects the character of both the thing praised and the one who praises. Praise likewise completes enjoyment, whether of God or a sunset or one’s friend.

      Lewis completes his reflections by three chapters devoted to what he calls “second meanings,” that is, prophetic or allegorical meanings, and the doctrine of scriptural inspiration. Since both these topics are in Lewis’s view related to myth, I should like to give special attention to them.

      As to prophecy or allegory, he cites the famous passage from Virgil that describes a virgin, a golden age beginning, and a child sent down from heaven, also Plato’s discussion of the fate of a perfect man in a wicked world, and says that a Christian reading either of these two non-Christian accounts will be struck by their similarity to the biblical accounts. Now Lewis holds that the similarity in Virgil was doubtless accidental but in Plato only partially so. Plato perhaps had in mind the recent death of his teacher Socrates, a great man who died at the hands of people who feared and despised justice. It was not mere luck but rather great wisdom that enabled Plato to extrapolate from the experience of Socrates the vision of the perfect man who dies as a sacrifice to evil, even though Plato probably had no intuition that such an instance would ever become history.

      Mythology is replete with the dying god, with death and rebirth, and the idea that one must undergo death if he would truly live. The resemblance between such myths and Christian truth has the same relation as the sun and its reflection in a pond. It is not the same thing but neither is it a wholly different thing. The kernel of wheat is indeed, as Christ said, “reborn” after “death.” Because God made wheat thus, it should occasion no total surprise if a Pagan sees there a symbol and puts it into the form of a myth. Because, like all men, the Pagans suffered longing for Joy, even when they were unable to identify its source, they incorporated their unsteady conceptions into myths and, because no myth was ever quite equivalent to the longing, created more and more myths. Myth arises from “gleams of celestial strength and beauty failing on a jungle of filth and imbecility,” as he put it in Perelandra. A “pressure from God” lay upon the Pagan mythmakers. Yet they would have been as surprised as anyone else if they had learned that they were talking a better thing than they ever dreamed.

      If Pagan sources did so well, what of sacred ones? We have two excellent reasons, says Lewis, for accepting the truth of the biblical second meanings. One is that they are holy and inspired, the other that our Lord himself taught it and indeed claimed to be the second meaning of many Old Testament passages such as Isaiah 53, the Sufferer in Psalm 22, the King in Psalms 2 and 72, and the Incarnation in Psalm 45. Lewis confesses that though he once believed the interpretation of the Bridegroom as Christ in the Song of Songs was “frigid and far-fetched,” he later began to discover that even in this instance there might be second meanings that are not arbitrary and meanings indeed that spring from depths one would not suspect.

      As to the inspiration of the Bible, he does not consider the Old Testament as “the Word of God” if by that we mean that each passage, in itself, gives us impeccable science or history. Rather, the Old Testament “carries” the Word of God, and we should use it not as “an encyclopedia or an encyclical” but “by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.” He cites St. Jerome’s remark that Moses described the creation “after the manner of a popular poet” and Calvin’s doubt whether Job were actual history as his own views also. The fact that miracles are recorded in the Old Testament has nothing to do with his view on inspiration. Belief in God includes belief in his supernatural powers.

      Lewis is even willing to accept the Genesis account of creation as derived from, though a great improvement upon, earlier Semitic stories, which were Pagan and mythical—provided “derived from” is interpreted to mean that the retellers were themselves guided by God. And so with the whole of the Old Testament. It consists of the same kind of material, says Lewis, as any other literature, yet “taken into the service of God’s word.” God of course does not condone the sin revealed in the cursing Psalms but causes his word to go forth even through the written account of sin and the sinner who wrote it. We must even suppose that the canonizing and the work of redactors and editors are under some kind of “Divine pressure.”

      One might be at first inclined, says Lewis, to think that God made a mistake in giving us such a Bible rather than a rigorously systematic statement of his truth in a form as unrefracted as that of the multiplication table. But even the teaching of Christ, “in which there is no imperfection,” does not come to us in that manner and is not a thing for the intellect alone but rather something for the whole person. Understanding the true meaning of Christ is not learning a “subject” but rather “steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself.”

      The seeming imperfection in the way the Bible is composed may be an illusion. “It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way—to find the Word in it, not without repeated and leisurely reading nor without discriminations made by our conscience and our critical faculties, to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God’s gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works. . . . Certainly it seems to me that from having had to reach what is really the Voice of God in the cursing Psalms through all the horrible distortions of the human medium, I have gained something I might not have gained from a flawless, ethical exposition.” Even the “nihilism” of Ecclesiastes with its “clear, cold picture of life without God” is a part of God’s Word.

      In view of the importance of scriptural inspiration to many Christians, I take the liberty of submitting here an additional СКАЧАТЬ