The difference between thinking and imagining
Today at Mass we recited the Nicene Creed, which is a longer and more complete summary of what Christianity is about than the shorter and much more common Apostles' Creed. The creeds are, like Christianity in general, a mixture of history and philosophy (maybe theology would be better). In them we hear things that are not much questioned, like He "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried." That's pretty straightforward and even an atheist could consent to it without feeling compromised. But then there's stuff like this: "He descended into Hell; the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty."
It's on that second quotation that a lot of moderns falter, snickering that such a story might be acceptable in a time in which the earth is thought to be flat and most of the population was too poorly educated to think about it very critically. How are we to take it seriously, they ask, when we know that hell is not a few miles under the ground? Or heaven and the stars only a few miles up? Another might object that although it's possible for a clever person to explain away the difficulties by claiming an allegory here and a metaphor there, the creeds themselves would not exist to be explained away if people at the time did not really subscribe to a kind of superstitious, flat earth kind of thinking. Since that is so, the argument goes, no amount of cleverness can overcome that initial error. Some of them then go on to create things like Jesusland. How ducky for them.
C.S. Lewis tackled this issue in an essay titled "Horrid Red Things" (which appears to have gone on to become a chapter in his book Miracles). He gives us as an example a little girl who thought that poison was poisonous because it contained "horrid red things." As she gets older and (hopefully) wiser, she comes to know that poison does not contain horrid red things. It would be wrong, however, if she then came to the conclusion that poison is not poisonous.
Working from this example, Lewis writes:
In the same way an early peasant Christian might have thought that Christ's sitting at the right hand of the father really implied two chairs of state, in a certain spatial relation, inside a sky palace. But if the same man afterwards received a philosophical education and discovered that God has no body, parts, or passions, and therefore neither a right hand nor a palace, he would not have felt that the essentials of the belief had been altered. What had mattered to him, even in his simplicity, had not been the supposed details about celestial furniture. It had been assurance that the once crucified master was now the supreme Agent of the unimaginable power Power on whom the whole universe depends. And he would recognize that he had never been deceived. The critic may still ask us why the imagery - which we admit to be untrue - should be used at all. But he has not noticed that any language that we attempt to substitute is open to the same objections... On such matters we can make our language more pollysllabic and duller: we cannot make it more literal.Lewis ends his essay with a caution: this method of thinking about religious images applies only to things that have never been sensed by anyone (assuming the mind is not a sense organ). It is advice about understanding theological relationships and how they may be expressed. It is not an attempt to do away with the miracles recorded in the Bible. I make the distinction by saying this sort of thinking applies to things metaphysical, not physical. Elsewhere Lewis wrote that the Old Testament contains many wild stories in which it may not be wise to treat every event as literal. He suggests that they do, however, prefigure the New Testament miracles, which have a different tone to them. Turning water into wine, for example, is something that happens everyday in vines and wine barrels. Bread (wheat) is multiplied by farmers working their fields. From these examples, compared with some of the older more far fetched sorts of story, Lewis observes two things about Gospel miracles and why he finds them credible. First, Christ sped up a process that he created and propagates every day. Secondly, and more importantly, the changes are not random and meaningless like bread from a stone would have been. Water into wine is easily understood, as are bread from loaves, as less of a change and more of a perfection of an existing thing. The Gospel miracles are, as is Christ himself, both sign and signifier. And what they are and signify is mercy and renewal.
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