Morning Fire 6.21.18

All answering to the master’s dream they laid

The strong foundations, torturing into stone

Each bubble that the Academy had blown. (Dymer, Canto 1.4)

For now we see through a glass, darkly;

        but then face to face:

now I know in part;

        but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1Cor 13:12)

This morning, by the fire, I read Lewis’ Dymer cantos VII & VIII in preparation for Inklings meeting with my pilot friend who has us reading and discussing Dymer line by line. I’ve read and even taught, or sort of taught, or pretended to teach Dymer. But my friend really wants to get it—to understand each line. It’s tedious, but good—very good.

I’ll settle for two Dymer thoughts this morning:

                1)  An aversion to perfection, or claims of perfection, this side of Glory.  Dymer is the story of our hero’s flight from that “Perfect City” that tortured “into stone each bubble that the Academy had blown”.  Published in 1927, Dymer becomes prophetic of the 20^th century horrors of those perfect political states the “academy had blown”—those communist revolutions in Russia or China or Cuba or Vietnam or Cambodia. We can think of such perfection insistence on a lower scale, of our church, our home, our marriage, our clan. Such perfection claims turn out to be something of our own construal—our wish dreams. We do well to be reminded of the Bible’s relentless “now” and “then”: “Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” For now, we still live out our lives on this beautiful yet cursed earth. Every time we try to retake the garden on our own terms, we meet “the cherubim with the flaming sword guarding the way to the tree of life.”

                2) That Lewis remained Lewis following his conversion. One recognizes in Dymer the Christian Lewis we know from Narniads. There is a continuity of person. When writing Dymer, Lewis was an atheist, or claimed to be an atheist, or tried to be an atheist. The next book he writes, The Pilgrim’s Regress, some six years later, he writes as a Christian with the subtitle: “An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism.” That’s the same jaded romantic we find in Dymer.  As dramatic conversions go, Lewis is certainly dramatic—from atheist to belief in the God of the Gospel. And yet, it’s not as if we find a different person. It’s more like the person who wrote Dymer finds himself in Christ.