Audio Listing | YouTube Playlist | iTunes Podcast
Epistle
Dear fellow pilgrims,
It was a great joy to be with you all last week as we took a look at The Last Battle through the lens of Advent, with an excursion into Athanasius’s De Incarnatione plus Lewis’s recently discovered “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans.” As I mentioned during class, we will be on break until January 24, when we will pick up with Chapter 9 of The Last Battle. Normally we would resume earlier in January, but this year’s Mere Anglicanism Conference (https://www.mereanglicanism.org/) will take place here in Charleston January 18-20, 2024, and we will be “all hands on deck” as we prepare for that.
I have pasted in below the links to last week’s class and materials, as well as a summary of the class.
As we enter into the wonder and joy of the Christmas season, I commend to you this link to the St. Philip’s Service of Lessons and Carols from December 10 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRie_CSNdK4) and I encourage you to reflect on the words of this ancient hymn which Christians have sung for some 1600 years as we ponder God’s love shown in the miracle of the Incarnation:
Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,
he is Alpha and Omega, he the source, the ending he,
of the things that are, that have been,
and that future years shall see
evermore and evermore.
O, that birth forever blessed, when the Virgin, full of grace,
by the Holy Ghost conceiving, bore the Savior of our race,
and the babe, the world’s Redeemer,
first revealed his sacred face
evermore and evermore.
This is he whom seers of old time chanted of with one accord,
whom the voices of the prophets promised in their faithful word.
Now he shines, the long-expected;
let creation praise its Lord
evermore and evermore.
O ye heights of heav’n adore him, angel hosts his praises sing,
pow’rs, dominions bow before him and extol our God and King.
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
ev’ry voice in concert ring
evermore and evermore.
Christ, to thee, with God the Father, and, O Holy Ghost, to thee
hymn and chant and high thanksgiving and unwearied praises be,
honor, glory, and dominion
and eternal victory
evermore and evermore.
–Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, 4th century
Wishing you all a joyous and blessed Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Further up and further in,
Brian+
The Rev’d Brian K. McGreevy, J.D.
Assistant to the Rector
St. Philip’s Church
142 Church Street
Charleston, SC 29401
www.saintphilips.church
Supporting Files
Video link for last class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK3kCNwbohA
Podcast link for last class: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-12-the-last-battle-and-advent/id1707060670?i=1000638566280Music link from last week:
SUMMARY OF LAST WEEK’S TEACHING: EPISODE 12 The Last Battle and AdventThe Last Battle as Advent Reading (adapted from Jennifer Gregory Miller 12-1—2017)
“The Church’s focus during Advent is remembering or reliving the historical coming of Christ, and preparing our hearts for His Second Coming. It is the eschatological aspect that especially strikes me in the Advent liturgy. Our preparation in Advent is for the end of time, Parousia, when “God will be all in all.” The Last Battle has this eschatological focus, with the story unfolding about the “End Times” of Narnia. It is easy to enter into the emotions of the characters, walking with them during the “end times.” So much of the book echoes the Gospel readings we have been hearing in the last weeks of Ordinary Time and the beginning of the new Liturgical Year in Advent.
“The Last Battle opens up with an animal posing as Aslan. He is the “Anti-Aslan” similar to what we would call the “Anti-Christ” from the book of Revelation. The main characters discover there is an Anti-Aslan and their country is being taken over by an enemy. They suddenly realize they are living in very dark and dreadful times: Suddenly the King leaned heard on his friend’s [unicorn] neck and bowed his head. “Jewel,” he said, “What lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before to-day we should have been happy.” “Yes,” said Jewel. “We have lived too long. The worst thing in the world has come upon us.”
And later the small wood animals that help comfort their King Tirian of Narnia: “Ah, that’s bad isn’t it?” said the second Mouse. “It would have been better if we’d died before all this began.”
“The Gospel verses [of Advent] strike at the “end times”: Woe to pregnant women and nursing mothers in those days, for a terrible calamity will come upon the earth and a wrathful judgment upon this people. They will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken as captives to all the Gentiles; and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth nations will be in dismay, perplexed by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. (Lk. 20:21-28)
“This year’s Sunday Lectionary is Year B. The first Sunday of Advent we heard:
Jesus said to his disciples: “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come. It is like a man traveling abroad. He leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with his own work, and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch. Watch, therefore; you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight,
or at cockcrow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!’“ (Mark 13:33-37).
“Examples of preparation, being alert and watchful are throughout the book. Even if these were sad times, they were not going to relax. As the King and unicorn try to sort out how could their Aslan be so opposite to what he should be, they still had to comply to his wishes:
“He is not a tame Lion,” said Tirian. “How should we know what he would do? We, who are murderers. Jewel, I will go back. I will give up my sword and put myself in the hands of these Calormenes and ask that they bring me before Aslan. Let him do justice to me.” “You will go to your death, then,” said Jewel. “Do you think I care if Aslan dooms me to death?” said the King. “That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.” “I know,” said Jewel. “Or as if you drank water and it were dry water. You are in the right, Sire. This is the end of all things. Let us go and give ourselves up.” “There is no need for both of us to go.” “If ever we loved one another, let me go with you now,” said the Unicorn. “If you are dead and if Aslan is not Aslan, what life is left for me?” They turned and walked back together, shedding bitter tears.
“Later, even when the Anti-Aslan is exposed as an imposter, it doesn’t solve the matter, but exposes an even worse situation:
The King had his arm on the Unicorn’s shoulder and sometimes the Unicorn nuzzled the King’s cheek with his soft nose. They did not try to comfort one another with words. It wasn’t very easy to think of anything to say that would be comforting.
Tirian had never dreamed that one of the results of an Ape’s setting up a false Aslan would be to stop people from believing in the real one. He had felt quite sure that the Dwarfs would rally to his side the moment he showed them how they had been deceived. And then next night he would have led them to Stable Hill and shown Puzzle to all the creatures and everyone
would have turned against the Ape and, perhaps after a scuffle with the Calormenes, the whole thing would have been
over. But now, it seemed, he could count on nothing. How many other Narnians might turn the same way as the Dwarfs?
“Even though we are preparing (or perhaps experiencing) the End Times, it does not need to be gloomy or
fearful or full of anxiety. Christ brings us comfort and strength to endure, just like King Tirian:
And still there was no change in the night or the wood, but there began to be a kind of change inside Tirian. Without knowing why, he began to feel a faint hope. And he felt somehow stronger.
“The story continues with the actual last battle of Narnia in defeat. The great lion, the true Aslan, does return and Narnia comes to an end. With that end, came the Last Judgment…I keep finding myself identifying with the story. {Though] Narnia is a fictional place, and [perhaps] not as complicated as our world, it is easy to find similarities to our world, to our personal relationships, and to our spiritual relationship with Christ (Aslan).
C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle is a great reminder of what that “preparation” of Advent is (as we heard this Sunday, “Prepare the way of the Lord”), and why we need to be “watchful and alert” (from the First Sunday of Advent). Our Advent is not just preparing for an event that has already happened (Christ being born in Bethlehem) but also the event to come, the Second Coming.”
Come Thou long-expected Jesus, born to set Thy people free.
From our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in Thee!–Charles Wesley, 1744
From C.S. Lewis’s Preface (1944) to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation (318 A.D.):
“His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, “Athanasius against the world.” We are proud that our own country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, “whole and undefiled,” when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius – into one of those “sensible” synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.
“When I first opened his De Incarnatione I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece. I knew very little Christian Greek except that of the New Testament and I had expected difficulties. To my astonishment I found it almost as easy as Xenophon; and only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity. Every page I read confirmed this impression. His approach to the Miracles is badly needed today, for it is the final answer to those who object to them as “arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of Nature.” They are here shown to be rather the re-telling in capital letters of the same message which Nature writes in her crabbed cursive hand; the very operations one would expect of Him who was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to “borrow death from others.” The whole book, indeed, is a picture of the Tree of Life – a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence. We cannot, I admit, appropriate all its confidence today. We cannot point to the high virtue of Christian living and the gay, almost mocking courage of Christian martyrdom, as a proof of our doctrines with quite that assurance which Athanasius takes as a matter of course. But whoever may be to blame for that, it is not Athanasius.”
Excerpts from On the Incarnation:
For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But now He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us.
–He saw the reasonable race, the race of men that, like Himself, expressed the Father’s Mind, wasting out of existence, and death reigning over all in corruption. He saw that corruption held us all the closer, because it was the penalty for the Transgression; He saw, too, how unthinkable it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled. He saw how unseemly it was that the very things of which He Himself was the Artificer should be disappearing. He saw how the surpassing wickedness of men was mounting up against them; He saw also their universal liability to death. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that Death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought, He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own. Nor did He will merely to become embodied or merely to appear; had that been so, He could have revealed His divine majesty in some other and better way.
–No! He took our body, and not only so, but He took it directly from a spotless, stainless virgin, without the agency of human father—a pure body, untainted by intercourse with man. He, the Mighty One, the Artificer of all, Himself prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for His very own, as the instrument through which He was known and in which He dwelt. Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.
“The Savior is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men, so that they throw all the traditions of their fathers to the winds and bow down before the teaching of Christ? If He is no longer active in the world, as He must needs be if He is dead, how is that He makes the living to cease from their activities, the adulterer for his adultery, the murderer from murdering, the unjust from avarice, while the profane and godless man becomes religious? If He did not rise, but is still dead, how is it that He routs and persecutes and overthrows the false gods, whom unbelievers think to be alive, and the evil spirits whom they worship? For where Christ is named, idolatry is destroyed and the fraud of evil spirits is exposed; indeed, no such spirit can endure that Name, but takes to flight on sound of it. This is the work of One Who lives, not of one dead; and, more than that, it is the work of God.
“For of what use is existence to the creature if it cannot know its Maker?”
“….it was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our transgression that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help us and to appear among us. It is we who were the cause of His taking human form, and for our salvation that in His great love He was both born and manifested in a human body.”
“How could He have called us if He had not been crucified, for it is only on the cross that a man dies with arms outstretched?”
“He deals with men as a good teacher with his pupils, coming down to their level and using simple means. St. Paul says as much: “Because in the wisdom of God the world in its wisdom knew not God, God. thought fit through the simplicity of the News proclaimed to save those who believe.” (1 Cor. 1: 23) Men had turned from the contemplation of God above, and were looking for Him in the opposite direction, down among created things and things of sense. The Saviour of us all, the Word of God, in His great love took to Himself a body and moved as Man among men, meeting their senses, so to speak, halfway.”
“A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” by C. S. Lewis
(COPY WITH ORIGINAL ARTWORK ATTACHED BELOW)
Strand Magazine, Vol. 112, Issue 672, December 1946 Writing religion for sceptics has made C. S. Lewis a best-seller. His books on Christianity—chief amongthem “The Screwtape Letters”—sell better, and read more easily, than most crime stories. This sermon isa characteristic piece of writing by the Oxford don who has become the most entertaining missionary of our time“When I was asked to write a Christmas sermon for pagans, I accepted the job light-heartedly enough, but now that I sit down to tackle it, I discover a difficulty: are there any pagans in England for me to write to? I know that people keep on telling us that this country is relapsing into paganism; but they only mean that it is ceasing to be Christian, and is that at all the same thing?
“Let us remember what a pagan or heathen (I use the words interchangably) really was. A heathen was a man who lived out on the heath, out in the wilds. A pagan was a man who lived in a “pagus” or small village. Both words in fact meant a rustic or yokel. They date from the time when the larger towns of the Roman Empire were already Christianised, but the old nature religions still lingered in the country. Pagans or heathens were the backward people in the remote districts who had not yet been converted, who were still pre-Christians. To say that modern people who have drifted away from Christianity are pagans is to suggest that a post-Christian man is the same as a pre-Christian man. But that is like thinking that a woman who has lost her husband is the same sort of person as an unmarried girl. Or that a street where the houses have been knocked down is the same as a field where no house has yet been built.
The ruined street and the unbuilt field are alike in one respect, namely that neither will keep you dry if it rains, but they are different in every other respect: rubble, dust, broken bottles, old bedsteads, and stray cats are very different from grass, thyme, clover, buttercups, and the lark singing overhead.
“The real pagan differed from the post-Christian in the following ways. Firstly, he was religious. From the Christian point of view, he was indeed too religious by half. He was full of reverence.
For him the earth was holy, the woods and waters were alive. His agriculture was a ritual as well as a technique. And secondly, he believed in what we now call “an objective right and wrong”. That is, he thought the distinction between pious and impious acts was something that existed independently of human opinions: something like the multiplication table, which man had not invented, but had found to be true, and which he had better take notice of. The gods would punish him if he did not.“To be sure, by Christian standards his list of right and wrong acts was rather a muddled one. He thought (and the Christians agreed) that the gods would punish him for setting the dogs on a beggar who came to his door, or for striking his father. But he also thought they would punish him for turning his face to the wrong point of the compass when he began ploughing. Though his code included some fantastic sins and duties, it got in most of the real ones.
“This leads us to the third great difference between a pagan and a post-Christian man. Believing in a real right and wrong means finding out that you are not very good. The pagan code may have been on some points a low one, but it was too high for the pagan to live up to. Hence a pagan, though in many ways merrier than a modern, had a deep sadness. When he asked himself what was wrong with the world, he did not immediately reply “the social system” or “our allies” or “education”. It occurred to him that he — himself — might be one of the things that was wrong with the world. He knew he had sinned. And the terrible thing was he thought the gods made no difference between voluntary and involuntary sins. You might get into their bad books by mere accident. And once in, it was very hard to get out of them. The pagan dealt with this situation in a rather silly way. His religion was a mass of ceremonies, sacrifices, purifications, et cetera, which were supposed to take away guilt, but they never quite succeeded. His conscience was not at ease.
“Now, the post-Christian view which is gradually coming into existence (it is complete already in some people, and still incomplete in others) is quite different. According to it, nature is not a living thing to be reverenced. It is a kind of machine for us to exploit. There is no objective right or wrong. Each race or class can invent its own code or ideology just as it pleases. And whatever may be amiss with the world, it is certainly not we the ordinary people. It is up to God, if after all he should happen to exist, or to government, or to education, to give us what we want. They are the shop, we are the customer, and the customer is always right.“Now if the post-Christian view is the correct one then we have indeed woken from a nightmare. The old fear, the old reverence, the old restraints… how delightful to have woken up into freedom, to be responsible to no one, to be utterly and absolutely our own masters! We have, of course, lost some fun. A universe of colourless electrons (which is presently going to run down and annihilate all organic life everywhere and forever) is, perhaps, a little dreary compared with the earth-mother and the sky-father, the wood nymphs and the water nymphs, chaste Diana riding the night sky and homely Vesta flickering on the hearth. But one can’t have everything, and there are always the flicks and the radio: if the new view is correct, it has very solid advantages.
“But is it? And if so, why are things not going better? What do you make of the present threat of world famine? We know now it is not entirely due to the war. From country after country comes the same story of failing harvests. Even the whales have less oil. Can it be that nature, or something behind nature, is not simply a machine that we can do what we like with? That she is hitting back? Waive the point. Suppose she is only a machine, and that we are free to master her at our pleasure. Have you not begun to see that man’s conquest of nature is really man’s conquest of man? That every power wrested from nature is used by some men over other men? Men are the victims, not the conquerors in this struggle. Each new victory over nature yields new means of propaganda to enslave them, new weapons to kill them, new power for the state, and new weakness for the citizen. New contraceptives to keep man from being born at all.
“As for ideologies, does no one see the catch? If there is no real wrong and right — nothing good or bad in itself — none of these ideologies can be better or worse than another. For a better moral code can only mean one which comes nearer to some real or absolute code. One map of New York can be better than another only if there is a real New York for it to be truer to. If there is no objective standard then our choice between one ideology and another becomes a matter of arbitrary taste. Our battle for democratic ideals against Nazi ideals has been a waste of time, because the one is no better than the other. Nor can there ever be any real improvement or deterioration. If there is no real goal, we can’t get any nearer to it, or farther from it. In fact there is no real reason for doing anything at all.
“It looks to me, neighbours, as though we shall have to set about becoming true pagans, if only as a preliminary to becoming Christians. I don’t mean that we should begin leaving little bits of bread under the tree at the end of the garden as an offering to the dryad. I don’t mean that we should dance to Dionysus across Hampstead Heath, though perhaps a little more solemn or ecstatic gaity and a little less commercialised amusement might make our holidays better than they now are. I don’t even mean (though I do very much wish) that we should recover that sympathy with nature, that religious attitude to the family, and that appetite for beauty which the better pagans had. Perhaps what I do mean is best put like this: if the modern post-Christian view is wrong (and every day I find it harder to think it right) then there are three kinds of people in the world. 1) Those who are sick and don’t know it: the post-Christians. 2) Those who are sick and know it: the pagans. 3) Those who have found the cure.
“And if you start in the first class, you must go through the second to reach the third. For (in a sense) all that Christianity adds to paganism is the cure. It confirms the old belief that in this universe we are up against Living Power: that there is a real Right and that we have failed to obey it: that existence is beautiful and terrifying. It adds a wonder of which paganism had not distinctly heard: that the Mighty One has come down to help us, to remove our guilt, to reconcile us. All over the world, even in Japan, even in Russia, men and women will meet on December the 25th to do a very old-fashioned and very pagan thing: to sing and feast because God has been born.
“You are uncertain whether it is more than a myth. Well, if it is only a myth then our last hope is gone. But is the opposite explanation not worth trying? Who knows but that here — and here alone — lies your way back? Not only to heaven, but to earth too, and to the great human family whose oldest hopes are confirmed by this story that does not die.”
Collect for Advent SundayAlmighty God, give us grace,that we may cast away the works of darkness,and put upon us the armor of light,now in the time of this mortal life,in the which thy son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility;that in the last day when he shall come again in his glorious majestyto judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal,through him who liveth and reignethwith thee and the Holy Ghost now and ever.Amen.Thomas Cranmer, 1549
