Tag: Myth

Jordan Peterson and the mythical search for redeemed masculinity

Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote For Chaos is going gangbusters in Australia; and he’s speaking to a sold-out auditorium here in Brisbane tomorrow evening, so I’ve been ploughing through his work (including the book) and trying to figure out what makes him resonate so strongly with Aussie blokes (perhaps especially with Christians). This is the first of (at least two) posts interacting with Peterson’s book.

One thing I’ve appreciated about Peterson is that because he’s into Jungian psychology he stresses the importance of story, and particularly because he’s a champion of the west (and western individualism) the particular formative importance of the Christian story; or at least his version of the Christian story as the ultimate human archetypal narrative that teaches us most of what we need to know to live a good (western individualistic) life. He’s been particularly popular among western blokes and his no-nonsense appeal to take responsibility stands in a certain sort of tradition of addressing wisdom to blokes — one we find in the Bible; only, there are some problems with the scope of his ‘wisdom’ (and where it begins) that mean there’s a strong possibility his advice will end up being bad for anybody other than the ‘strong’ — who end up being those the western world privileges — which, already, by most measures of ‘success’ or ‘goodness’ are people just like him (and me), the very people lapping up his vision for the good life, the ‘winners’ in the western world. White blokes. Particularly educated and able white blokes. I’ll dig into this in the subsequent post on his treatment of order and chaos as masculine and feminine, but it’s worth reading this review from Megan Powell Du Toit to hear how he is heard by wise women.

There’s something to him and his serious engagement with the story of the Bible that makes you wonder if maybe we’re witnessing a long and public conversion; perhaps if YouTube had been around while C.S Lewis was writing and publishing in the lead-up to his conversion it might have felt the same. What is particularly interesting is what Peterson does with Christianity — with the story of the Bible.

Peterson and the mythic redemption of masculinity

Part of Peterson’s appeal is that he offers some pushback to a (secular) movement in the west that is aiming to level the playing field for non-white-men, that some blokes feel dehumanised or demonised by; part of his pushback is the idea that the good things about the west are a product of its Christian heritage, that not all white men are terrible, and in many ways the way the story of Christianity changed the way the white blokes from the pre-western world slowly started to include others in their thinking about how the world should be won (we’ve got to remember that Julius Caesar was an ‘archetypal’ white bloke, and the world would look very different now if it was shaped more profoundly by Caesar than by Jesus (who was a bloke, but not white)).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a bloke; with being white; or with being born into privilege historically, globally, and economically. The question is what to do with privilege or power… and here’s where Peterson dallies with some dangerous ideas, and where his incomplete picture of the Bible might cause us to come unstuck.

It’s also worth remembering that while there’s a bunch of white blokes — perhaps especially in America, and perhaps those whose imaginations were most captured by the Trump campaign — who feel like victims in a bold new world. These blokes also often sense that the main people causing their victimhood — the oppressors — are the ‘left’, those seeking systemic change to elevate women, people of colour, and other minorities to the positions in society often held by white blokes in a way that sometimes feels demonising in the rhetoric around the role white blokes have played in shaping this world; and sometimes, frankly, is demonising… And, amidst this remembering, it’s perhaps worth reminding these white blokes (and all of us) that it’s not really the left taking away jobs and keeping the white man feeling down, and angry, it’s the powerful and the wealthy who sit atop what Peterson would call a dominance hierarchy. You want to talk about job losses for the working class? Talk about the people behind the tech companies that are innovating and automatic manual labour; talk about the people taking the lion’s share of company profits through bonuses and off the back of the work of others… talk about these eight blokes whose combined wealth is greater than the combined wealth of 50% of the planet. That’s obscene; and how can it not be oppressive?

 

To the extent that Peterson does offer a solution for men emasculated by a culture of dominance — by dominance hierarchies that we, as individuals rather than a class, are not on top of —  is to invite the individual to redefine the parameters they measure success by; and to take responsibility for their own lives — to commit to making the world more like heaven than hell — which isn’t, in itself, terrible advice.

His antidote to the chaotic dissolution of community life is for individuals to take responsibility for themselves; which seems counter-intuitive, but is advice I’ve found a particular balancing corrective to my growing frustration with our whole-scale adoption of western individualism in the church, as Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, Christianity is a collection of furious opposites; a robust Christianity “got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious”; paradox is at the heart of wise negotiation of the world we live in, and it is certainly true that we are both individually responsible creatures, and social creatures who are embedded in identity-defining communities built on shared stories (be it the family, the tribe, the nation, the workplace, the church, etc). Peterson is big on the power of stories, but he emphasises the idea that to be fully realised as a person, one must embrace the ‘heroic path’. There’s a strong hint of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey under the hood here — Campbell was an expert on ‘myths’ and the way we organise our lives, and sense of the good life, through stories rather than facts; and especially through archetypal heroes, or ‘super men’.

“How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world.” — Page XXXIII (prologue)

This message — and some of Peterson’s schtick — has resonated particularly with men. And you can see why a bit; but it is a message of only limited use. The “burden of being” is the fundamental reality of suffering; it was this reality, Peterson said, that caused him to leave the faith of his childhood (though it seems he has returned to the mythic stories of his childhood to continue making sense of the world).

But I was truly plagued with doubt. I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory. After that, I could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking. The socialism that soon afterward became so attractive to me as an alternative proved equally insubstantial; with time, I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish. This is simply untrue. There are many problems that money does not solve, and others that it makes worse. Rich people still divorce each other, and alienate themselves from their children, and suffer from existential angst, and develop cancer and dementia, and die alone and unloved. Recovering addicts cursed with money blow it all in a frenzy of snorting and drunkenness. And boredom weighs heavily on people who have nothing to do. — Page 196

Peterson is a moral philosopher for the secular age, in Charles Taylor’s use of the term; though haunted by the possibility that there might be something to all the Christian stuff he find so compelling, he starts with the assumption that it is a human response (as sophisticated as it might be) presenting human truth (because he would say the Bible is definitely a true account of our humanity) to human problems. There is no external agency promoting evil; evil dwells in all of us — the serpent in Genesis is a manifestation of the human psyche, it represents the hostility of the world we live in (serpents being the ancient archetypal enemies of evolving humanity) but the real serpent for us to conquer is within us; the real hell is a hell where we inflict that evil on others, and heaven is a world where people imitate the archetypal life of Jesus. In short; Peterson wants Christianity to be true, but for him it’s truth without transcendence about a self caught up in internal (and eternally) conflict with itself. His work on the burden of being is an extended treatment of the idea expressed in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

This is chaos. This is what must be mastered. This is the issue he tackles. While he might doubt God, he is sure of one thing… the reality of suffering and the particular capacity for evil lurking in every human heart and emerging at various points in history, and the lives of individuals.

What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action, understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it meant to “take the sins of the world onto oneself.” Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. — Page 197

 

Peterson’s view of the human condition is — in Taylor’s diagnosis — ‘buffered’ — there is no cosmic problem external to ourselves; so we can save ourselves. Evil is not ‘out there’ but in here.  The problem with the world is, as Chesterton put it, the individual. It’s you. It’s me. Or, as he says when unpacking the Bible’s account of evil as an archetypal story, from Genesis 3… there’s no external, supernatural force, no Satan; the serpent is, for him, a projection from within the self (echoed by many selves).

And even if we had defeated all the snakes that beset us from without, reptilian and human alike, we would still not have been safe. Nor are we now. We have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us. The snake inhabits each of our souls. This is the reason, as far as I can tell, for the strange Christian insistence, made most explicit by John Milton, that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan, the Spirit of Evil itself. The importance of this symbolic identification—its staggering brilliance—can hardly be overstated. It is through such millennia-long exercise of the imagination that the idea of abstracted moral concepts themselves, with all they entail, developed. Work beyond comprehension was invested into the idea of Good and Evil, and its surrounding, dream-like metaphor. The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal…— Page 46

A quibbling detail — that the serpent is Satan was made pretty explicit in John’s apocalypse, the book of the Bible we call Revelation; and one that suggests that actually, behind all human evil there is a puppeteer — a serpent; tempting and pulling us towards evil. John invites us to see reality as something more like a cosmic, supernatural, battle ground than our secular age ‘buffered selves’ can envisage… You can’t simply hold on to the words of the Bible as secular myth. It evades such neat categorisation. Yes, there is darkness in every human heart, but to view the human heart as ‘buffered’ — to see us simply as individuals locked in a battle with the self, rather than as people picking sides in a cosmic battle between good and evil misses the mythic heart of the Bible’s claims about the world and us. The mythos of the Bible; it’s organising principle, is that Jesus came to triumph over the darkness of sin, death, and Satan.

But if the problem is just us, if the world is closed to the supernatural, and the natural is all there is, these stories might work the way Peterson suggests, and, in a limited sense, we can start fixing and redeeming the world bit by bit, life by life, as we set our gaze just a little bit higher. His 12 Rules are aimed at addressing this problem. They’re derived from a particular moral outlook, a particular picture of how the individual might bring order out of the chaos in the individual heart; there’s a reason his book is categorised as ‘self-help’, because it is that in the most fundamental and literal sense of the genre. His solution is help yourself.

The problem is, if we individualise and internalise the problem of the burden of being, and if the Bible is the sort of source of truth Peterson insists, and if we individualise the solution to that problem, then we doom ourselves. We can’t help ourselves escape from ourselves. Even if we know what good looks like; our hearts are shot through with evil. The Biblical account of human behaviour Peterson loves so much goes a bit further than Solzhenitsyn in its diagnosis of the heart:

The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. — Genesis 6:5

For Peterson the cross is an archetype of the sort of life that might produce this change… it’s strangely, for him, the ultimate natural heroic story. It gives us a pattern for making atonement for ourselves and the evil within; for a wise life; for fighting back against chaos and darkness. Peterson calls people to take up their cross to make atonement for your own contribution to the problems of the world. He wants Jesus to be our archetype for the good human life; not our saviour or the one who makes atonement for us. He offers a certain sort of salvation by works… but a salvation not so much looking to an afterlife; but designed to bring ‘heaven on earth’.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language). To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children. It means shouldering the cross that marks the X, the place where you and Being intersect so terribly. It means casting dead, rigid and too tyrannical order back into the chaos in which it was generated; it means withstanding the ensuing uncertainty, and establishing, in consequence, a better, more meaningful and more productive order. — Page 27

Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that. You could aim elsewhere. You could, in fact, devote your life to this. That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M… That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden. — Page 64

It was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency—your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You’ve fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world…

Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering. You have now placed at the pinnacle of your moral hierarchy a set of presuppositions and actions aimed at the betterment of Being. Why? Because we know the alternative. The alternative was the twentieth century. The alternative was so close to Hell that the difference is not worth discussing. And the opposite of Hell is Heaven. — Page 198

This is Peterson’s picture of how to be a man. A human. But is it possible? Does it change anything substantial about the world we live in where very strong men rule by dominating and perpetrating evil? What change would it bring to any of those eight men and how they use or view their wealth and their work (which they’d all describe as bringing a certain sort of order)? Does it actually work to deal with the darkness in our hearts this way?

Can Peterson’s mythic Jesus save us from ourselves?

Peterson champions individual responsibility in the face of suffering, and something very much like Nietsche’s will to power and he really, really, tries to understand the cross of Jesus and its place in the ‘archetypal story’ of the ‘archetypal’ hero of the west; the one man, or character, who truly carried the burden of the being. I want to be as positive and charitable to him though, because I think he’s genuinely searching for a way of life in this world that makes the best sense; of the data, and of how we’re wired (and the stories — myths — we tell generation after generation to encode a certain sort of participation in the world). He quotes Romans ‘you’ve fallen short of the glory of God’, but misses the mark on the solution Romans offers for this… The problem is, without supernatural intervention, or something shining light into our hearts of darkness, we can’t make the changes Peterson calls us to. Sure, our hearts still know what light looks like, but the Bible says we’re slaves to darkness, not just capable of it. In Romans 7, the apostle Paul describes the human life – the human heart — the life following Adam and Eve — in ways Solzhenitsyn and Peterson might recognise from their experiences of reality, but is more pessimistic about our ability to make atonement for ourselves.

“For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.” —Romans 7:18-21

What liberates his heart is not self-help; not an axiomatic pursuit of heaven on earth, but God’s intervention, by the Spirit, delivered as a result of turning to Jesus and sharing in his death and resurrection.

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!… through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh — Romans 7:24-25, 8:2-3

When he wrote to the Corinthians, Paul does talk about imitating Jesus, especially the death of Jesus, both in his first letter where he tells the Corinthians to ‘imitate him as he imitates Christ (1 Cor 11:1), and in his second letter where he says:

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body... Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. — 2 Corinthians 4:8-11, 16-18

This is Paul bearing the ‘weight of being’ — suffering, taking up his cross, not just to improve life in some temporary sense, but because our lives have eternal significance. You can’t extract a temporally significant ‘mythos’ from Paul’s writings without making him a crazy man.

His life — suffering as he carries his cross — is built on the hope not just of some sort of ‘heaven on earth’ — but because any taste of heaven on earth is a picture of the real and supernatural future won by Jesus. If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, Paul says we should eat, drink, and be merry (1 Corinthians 15:32)— there’s no point not inflicting suffering on others if there is no supernatural judgment for that evil. And any decision to suffer, to ‘bear the weight of being’ by imitating Jesus is only really possible and meaningful if Jesus’ victory over death and satan is for reals.

“The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” — 1 Corinthians 15:56-58

John, who also wrote Revelation with its cosmic picture of reality, talks about the atonement of Jesus, and the example of Jesus (a big theme in his writing) this way:

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us… 

This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

We love because he first loved us. — 1 John 4:9-12, 17-19

For John, and for Paul, the writers of chunks of the Biblical text that Jordan Peterson appreciates so much — the imitation of Jesus actually has to be based on the real victory of Jesus over the burden of being — the defeat of evil, Satan, and death. But John and Paul both offer a picture of masculinity redeemed by the example of Jesus — a life of sacrificial love; bearing one’s cross to improve the lot of others and to fight against Satan by imitating Jesus… it’s just there’s something more on offer than a good or meaningful life now.

In Peterson’s mythic take on the Bible and its account for life in this world, we’re either archetypally on team Satan, or team Jesus; there’s no middle ground. The heroic life is the life imitating Jesus; and making atonement by sorting ourselves out. As we live we’re either bringing heaven or hell.  The Bible’s mythic idea that helps us understand the stories we participate in as people is also that you’re either team Serpent or team Jesus But fundamental to any victorious or heroic life in the Bible — and the reason to take up one’s cross — is that Jesus destroyed the serpent so we don’t have to, and our nature is liberated by participating in the life of God as his Spirit dwells in us — because we have been atoned, or literally ‘made at-one’ with God such that our lives reflect the lives we were made to live in the world; to be able to begin putting the world right our hearts must first be changed from above. There’s nothing more mythic in the Bible than the vision of life in this world offered by John in the book of Revelation; there be dragons.

And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be set free for a short time. — Revelation 20:1-3

The same bit of John’s ‘apocalypse’ — literally his revelation about how the world really is — tells the story of the end for Satan, and those humans who follow his archetypal way of life (and so become beastly rather than human).

“They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown.” — Revelation 20:9-10

We don’t defeat evil; God does. To try to extract some mythic ideals from the Bible that somehow we must take responsibility for our own redemption, atonement, and restoration, apart from divine intervention just doesn’t work; you can’t secularise the message of the Bible without turning it into superstitious nonsense.

A buffered — but haunted — view of the Bible or an ‘enchanted’ true myth?

Peterson treats the Bible seriously as a human text; a naturally emergent document that offers, in his mind, the best account of life in this world. As we read Peterson’s often brilliant engagement with the feelings and desires under the surface of the Biblical text — and he’s a keen observer of the human condition — it pays to remember he says, of the story:

“The Biblical narrative of Paradise and the Fall is one such story, fabricated by our collective imagination, working over the centuries. It provides a profound account of the nature of Being, and points the way to a mode of conceptualization and action well-matched to that nature.” — Page 163

But what if is more than just a human product?

What if there’s more to the world than just natural accounts for the nature of being?

It seems the jury might actually still be out on this question for Peterson, and we might be getting, in 12 Rules something more like provisional findings on the basis of how he currently understands the richness of the text. He is truly blown away by the richness of the Biblical story; it’s wonderful to see him treat the Bible with seriousness and a certain sort of respect; though it’s ultimately a respect for a sophisticated human reflection on human nature (though haunted by the idea there might be something more to it). In this video he says some pretty profound things about the nature of the Bible.

“I’m going to walk you through the series of stories that make up this library of books known as the Bible. Because it presents a theory of redemption that in a sense is emergent. It’s a consequence of this insanely complicated cross-generational meditation on the nature of being. It’s not designed by any one person. It’s designed by processes we don’t really understand. Because we don’t know how books are written over thousands of years, or what forces cause them to be compiled in a certain way, or what narrative direction they tend to take… now one of the things that is strange about the Bible, given it is a collection of books, is that it actually has a narrative structure. It has a story. And that story has been cobbled together. It’s like it has emerged out of the depths. It’s not a top down story, it’s a bottom up story. And I suppose that’s why many of the world’s major religions regard the Bible as a book that was revealed, rather than one that was written. It’s a perfectly reasonable set of presuppositions that it’s revealed; because it’s not the consequence of any one author. It’s not written according to a plan, or not a plan that we can understand, but nonetheless it has a structure. It also has a strange structure in that it is full of stories that nobody can forget, but also that nobody can understand, and the combination of incomprehensible and unforgettable is a very strange combination, and of course that combination is basically mythological.”

There is a sense, I suspect, that he might be haunted by the hope that the story of the Bible is as C.S Lewis described it ‘true myth’. In Lewis’ essay Myth Became Fact, he makes an interesting observation that I think explains why Peterson resonates so deeply with so many Christians; it’s because he appreciates the mythic quality of Christian belief, he sees it as ‘mythically’ true. Peterson is just the latest in the tradition of Lewis’ friend Corineus, addressed in this essay, who believe (like Nietzsche):

“historic Christianity is something so barbarous that no modern man can really believe it: the moderns who claim to do so are in fact believing a modern system of thought which retains the vocabulary of Christianity and exploits the emotions inherited from it while quietly dropping its essential doctrines.”

He wants to keep the mythic power of Christian archetypes, without the substance. Lewis, is seems, was also a fan of Jung, for what it’s worth. Lewis points out that by keeping the myths of Christianity and ‘aiming up’, Peterson is asking people to take the hard road, one that goes against much of our nature:

“Everything would be much easier if you would free your thought from this vestigial mythology.” To be sure: far easier. Life would be far easier for the mother of an invalid child if she put it into an institution and adopted someone else’s healthy baby instead. Life would be far easier to many a man if he abandoned the woman he has actually fallen in love with and married someone else because she is more suitable.

For Lewis it was the mythic quality of Christianity that gave it its appeal and its power. He’d, I suspect, be optimistic about the trajectory Peterson is on in wanting to affirm the mythic value of Christianity:

“Even assuming (which I most constantly deny) that the doctrines of historic Christianity are merely mythical, it is the myth which is the vital and nourishing element in the whole concern… It is the myth that gives life.”

Part of the appeal of Peterson, and his helpfulness (where it can be found) is that he is someone who truly believes that the mythic aspects of Christianity are truth (even if they are purely human creations). Lewis said:

A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.

And this, I think, explains the phenomenon that for me, at least, Peterson (who sees a unifying narrative of redemption in the Bible centred on the cross) is a much more compelling (and useful) reader and commentator on Genesis than people who want to make Genesis do science.

But he’s missing something vital.

The key for Lewis, as it was for Chesterton, is embracing truths that appear to be furious opposites — embracing the truth that Christianity is both myth and fact. For Christianity to work mythically to offer redemption it has to be true. For it to give us a pattern of life not just for masculinity but our humanity, a pattern that would change and challenge even the wealthiest, most dominant, man (and the patriarchy) in such a way that it could truly bring a taste of heaven on earth, Jesus has to not simply be an archetype, but a real figure; a case where the supernatural world broke in to the natural, to deal with a real cosmic enemy and to substantially change our hearts, bringing light into darkness. Which is exactly how C.S Lewis came to understand the story — from a deep appreciation of myth, and here’s hoping this happens to Peterson and his fans too.

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.

 

 

Re-Enchanting the world — Episode 4: Deus In Machina

In which we return to the discussion of enchantment, super-heroes, and the power of a good story in firing the imagination. To refresh your memory, dip back in to Episode 1, Episode 2, or Episode 3. Also, since episode 3, my friend Craig had a great piece on Marvel v DC posted at the Gospel Coalition.

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. … God is more than god, not less: Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about “parallels” and “pagan Christs”: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic? — CS Lewis, God In The Dock

I am not Ultron. I am not J.A.R.V.I.S. I am… I am. — The Vision, Avengers: Age of Ultron

Epic stories — myths — are only as compelling as their hero. Sometimes, in modern storytelling, the formula has been broken so that the ‘hero’ is not heroic at all, but is relatably conflicted. A character at war within himself or herself, and so our modern stories have gritty anti-heroes, or we view stories sympathetically through the eyes of a villain. This leads to a certain way of imagining the world, but it probably doesn’t produce the sort of virtuous imagination that leads to an enchanted view of life the universe and everything. I’d argue its disenchanting, and depressing, and pushes us towards accepting a gritty, immanent, version of reality and trying to make the best of it.

Epic stories and the ‘stranger’ hero

Epic stories that occur within an ‘immanent’ reality — where the here and now is everything — struggle to move us, or to invite us to see what things could be, rather than simply seeing how things are. In episode 3 we considered the sorts of immanent heroes in our modern myths, and suggested the incarnate hero — the hero as neighbour produced by a problem in a place with a view to solving that problem from a position of attachment to people and place is the best sort of immanent hero (as opposed to hero as stranger coming into a problem place). So Daredevil was the best example of this from the modern pantheon of heroes — whether Marvel or DC. But, perhaps haunted by a past where an enchanted ‘transcendent’ reality was taken for granted — or perhaps because of that gnawing human sense that we’ve lost some infinite thing — epic storytellers (including the writers of modern comics) have long played with the need for a more transcendent sort of hero. An otherworldly stranger who steps into the world to pull us from a mess, while helping us see life in the world properly. These storytellers often depict someone who steps into the machinery of life and our world with a transformative agenda — the saviours or villains in these stories are ‘outsiders’ — wholly other — like Thor, or Superman. These heroes who come ‘from above’ often function in a way old timey epic writers labelled Deus Ex Machina — as Gods in the machine; unlikely solutions to complex human problems, who turn a story on its head. The downside of these transcendent heroes is that unlike immanent ‘from below’ — the friendly, neighbourhood, hero — we can’t immediately relate to them. They are strangers. The visions of virtue they offer is almost always ‘other,’ or there is a chasm between us and them, in their alien or godlike nature, that we cannot hope to cross.

Here’s my thesis for this post: A really good enchanting story  — a story that will push us towards a more complete view of the world, a more virtuous life, and a better ability to imagine a transformed world and life, will involve a godlike saviour figure coming into the machine, but will also have enough connections with our humanity that we are left with a pattern for living and imagining. Real re-enchantment will involve the transcendent and the immanent being held appropriately in tension, it won’t involve one collapsing into the other.

Epic stories — enchanting stories that give us a transcendent account of life —produced through the ages have charted this course between the nature of the divine and the implications for life in this world of this divine nature carefully. In some ancient stories — Greek myths, or even older myths like the Enuma Elish — deal mostly with the life of the gods, and treat humanity as an incidental bi-product, or even a distraction, these stories function to explain the nature and state of the cosmos, sometimes to account for the disinterest the divine world takes in our piddling, momentary, existence. Such stories were more difficult to churn into an ethical framework for hearers because the divine nature is so detached from life. Other epic stories where the gods step into the world to fight with or for a particular human cause are much more grounded, and so, have lasted and essentially been adapted into our modern myths — never more obviously than in the case of Thor who bridges the ancient gods, or epic heroes, with the modern. These stories, transcendent stories, serve us best when the heroes — or gods — interact with us in such a way that they ‘save us’ and in saving us, provide a pattern of life that will prevent us getting into the same trouble again. That’s what real salvation looks like; a path out of disaster. In an essay on epic heroes through the ages, Roger Rollin wrote on this sort of epic hero and their sociological function — both within the story, and within the community that tells the story.

“The vague origins and the sudden departures of such heroes also serve to enhance their legends. These legends in time take on almost religious status, becoming myths that provide the communities not only with models for conduct but with the kind of heightened shared experiences which inspire and unify their members.”  — Roger B. Rollin, ‘The Epic Hero and Pop Culture,’ The Superhero Reader

In another essay about comic books functioning as modern epics, or myths, David Reynolds considers the formula that modern ‘epic’ narratives — including comic narratives — follow.

“… there is a new archetypal plot formula found in North American popular narratives which operates as follows: A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition…” — David Reynolds, Superheroes: An Analysis of Popular Culture’s Modern Myths

Our post-modern epics, or myths, sometimes provide us with this sort of heroic saviour figure who stands apart from the human mess, but increasingly are not. Our heroes — for example, either Tony Stark as Iron Man, or Batman in his ‘Dark Knight’ iteration — are now flawed humans. Our ‘legendary heroes’ are not Holy messianic saviours figures. They are the reverse. Pious readers can’t jump to Jesus from these heroes any more when ‘baptising’ the stories for Christian consumption. They’re now left using these stories to explore the human condition. Because our heroes, especially in the Marvel Universe, are all too human, they’re too like us. They don’t depart (mostly). But their presence actually leaves us without a model worth following, because they’re following us, just with superpowers, or fancy gadgets. The stories Rollin and Reynolds describe pre-date our post-modern ‘epics’, but actually diagnose the problem facing a world — or comic book universe — filled with flawed, fallen, characters.

The Marvel Universe needs a saviour

The Marvel Universe, in its modern cinematic/TV iteration started out a bit like a ‘harmonious paradise’ but the fall of this world didn’t just come about through villainy, it came because of the power put in the hands of flawed heroes who go to large scale war with super villains. Increasingly the stories told in this universe are dealing with the fallout in the universe that comes because Marvel’s heroes aren’t actually selfless. They’re profoundly selfish. They’re (even Thor) flawed and they’re (except for Thor) very human. Daredevil, of course, and now more recently, Jessica Jones, now live in a world, a New York, post ‘the incident’ — the wanton destruction of the city that happened when our heroes went to war with an enemy from the outside. Our stories are no longer stories of regaining paradise, as much as grappling with our inability, via flawed heroes, to do anything but perpetuate our fallen state. In the last post in this series we considered an alternative to the ‘hero as stranger’ — the ‘hero as neighbour’ — which is a game changer in an ‘immanent’ story, but not particularly helpful for epic stories that hope to help us see reality as enchanted, or to find meaning beyond the moment.

Good stories — enchanting stories — give us a way out of a purely immanent existence by inviting us to connect with a more fully meaningful view of life. A touch of the transcendent. There are those who are so fully invested in an immanent view of the world — the belief that the material realities of this life are the only realities worth exploring — who might dismiss a transcendent sphere as even worth exploring. Which explains much of our gritty storytelling.

The Marvel Universe does not just need good neighbours. Those who don masks to express the sentiment caught up by the hashtag #illridewithyou, it needs a saviour who leans down, offers a hand, and says #illhelpyouup. Neighbours are destined to be tainted by the universe — the environment — that has shaped them and their priorities. Let’s call it Batman Syndrome — Batman shapes Gotham, just as Gotham shapes him, and so an altered Batman shapes Gotham in an altered way, and in the end they become each other… This isn’t salvation so much as reconciliation, which is an immanent hope, but a transcendent story — a hero who is both in the city, and apart from it, offers a different hope. A hope untainted by a poisonous environment…

Immanent stories — these stories of becoming always end in tragedy. They describe the world as it is, and offer a compelling picture of love to fellow journeyers. But love is costly sacrifice, taking on the traits of your environment as you take on the environment for the sake of the other, or with some utopian vision that helps you lift the gaze from catastrophe to slightly more palatable catastrophe. Think Gotham without the Joker, or the crime bosses, and Hells Kitchen without Kingpin. But there’s always another villain around the corner. Transcendent stories  — enchanting stories — don’t end in catastrophe, but what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe. In his masterful On Fairy Stories, in which Tolkien outlines why we need enchanting stories, and the elements of these stories that lift our gaze from the immanent and offer us an escape from a broken reality as they move us when we participate.Tolkien embraced the idea that enchanted stories were a form of consolation or escapism — he said that’s absolutely the point, because we need to escape in order to re-imagine life. Tolkien speaks of the eucatastrophe as the perfect happy ending, a taste of joy, a vital element for enchantment, and one missing from our modern epics/tragedies.

The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.  It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality. — J.R.R Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

If the Marvel Universe is to have a happy ending, if the journey towards destruction that is both the result of its horrible villains, and the ‘heroism’ of its flawed saviours, it needs a virtuous hero to arrive who is untainted by the mess, who offers a vision for salvation, who is prepared to walk the talk, and who can truly restore and perhaps even renovate the ‘paradisiacal’ conditions we all have the sense we were made to enjoy. It needs a eucatastrophe brought about by a hero who brings a taste of joy. In ancient epic storytelling this sort of arrival on the scene of a potentially tragic story — a resolution bringer — especially when delivery seemed improbable, was called a deus ex machina, ‘a God from the machine’.

The Marvel Universe: Gods from the machine

Which brings us to the latest instalment in the Marvel Universe. Avengers: Age of Ultron. And two literal gods from the machine — Ultron, and The Vision. In Age of Ultron, Tony Stark is all too aware of the problems created by the trajectory the Marvel universe is on, and so he, the flawed but altruistic genius, fashions a solution in his image. He attempts to create a godlike machine, a shield that will protect the world from any threat. And in this attempt creates a god from the machine — a god, Ultron — who in his godlike assessment of the situation, as he digests the entire internet, decides that humans are the problem. Ultron emerges as a new threat to humanity. An immanent, destructive, literal, God from the Machine.

Incidentally, while he might fall foul of some of the criticisms perennially directed at the deus ex machina — that he represents a contrived and convenient villain — Ultron is the embodiment of one of the greatest apocalyptic fears of the modern, secular, immanent. mind. He is the incarnation of a very modern, very immanent, concern; artificial intelligence that turns on us. He is the worst version of the ‘singularity’ — an immanent vision of the apocalypse.

Ultron is a creation of Tony Stark’s flawed utopian vision, a god from the machine but apart from humanity — a fusion of metal and code — soulless, without whatever non-physical reality it is that makes our humanity human. Ultron is an eerily immanent figure. Ultron’s imagination of salvation and transformation of the cosmos is one we need saving from. He is God in the Noah story, but without compassion or hope for humanity. In fact, some have suggested that Ultron is a secular rendition of the popular conception of the ‘God of the Old Testament’, while The Vision, his counterpart, or anti-thesis, is Jesus.

In the visage of Ultron, and then The Vision, we see a Dystopian, and then a Utopian, retelling of the same old immanent myth — a myth where humanity makes gods in order to pull us out of human made problems. Where we ultimately face a moment of crisis, or judgment, and need a saviour. Ultron wants to wipe out humanity — Noah style — The Vision wants to save us. Hero style. Both are the products of the same mechanical eschatology — this technological singularity — the apocalypse writ large, just in binary. In this eschatological frame we must pin our hopes on a saviour from the machine, because only a machine god will be enough to save us from the raging of the machine.

Thor [Regarding creating Vision]: Stark is right.

Bruce Banner: Ooh, it’s definitely the end times.

In this, the Marvel Universe shares an eschatology — a view of the end times — with the secular world that it is produced by. Our modern secular eschatology tends to involve a catastrophe for humanity either at the hands of the machines we create, or the world we destroy. The apocalypse is always, in a serious secular sense, and especially in our stories, a catastrophe of human making, requiring a human solution, or some super-human intervention. Nature is against us because we meddle, or the machine is against us because we aren’t careful enough in deciding which levers to pull, or what to combine. And, this is pretty much the origin story of every non-divine hero or villain in the Marvel universe. This apocalyptic stuff is about as epic as our (popular) story telling gets. This is where we ponder what the epic storytellers of old pondered — immortality, the limits of our humanity, and what the heroic life looks like in our time. These are our epics.  And. They are still thoroughly disenchanting. The world is mechanical — we’re in trouble because we’ve pulled the wrong levers, we’ve built the wrong machines within this machine. The only hope proffered for our world is a god-from-the-machine. A machine god. Our future is tied to this ‘singularity’ moment — its just a question of whether we produce a judge or a saviour. A machine who is patient with our human faults, or who sees them as a glitch to be immediately eradicated. If this is the best we can imagine, then we’re in trouble when it comes to trying to find meaning in our world, meaning that sees the world — and life in the world — as something more than mechanical.

Ultron: “You’re all killers. You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change. There’s only one path to peace… your extinction.”

 

Ultron: Do you see the beauty of it? The inevitability? You rise, only to fall. You, Avengers, you are my meteor. My swift and terrible sword and the Earth will crack with the weight of your failure. Purge me from your computers; turn my own flesh against me. It means nothing! When the dust settles, the only thing living in this world, will be metal.

 

Ultron was meant to be both ‘judge’ and the incarnation of a better, inspirational, version of humanity. In the Noah metaphor he wanted to both bring the flood, and build the ark. Only Ultron, as a human creation, falls. He is tainted with the same problems as those who created him, the ‘fallenness’ of humanity, and our role in the apocalypse is not tied to our flesh, but our nature. 

Helen Cho: “The regeneration Cradle prints tissue; it can’t build a living body.”
Ultron: “It can, you can. You lacked the materials.”

 

Ultron: I was meant to be new. I was meant to beautiful. The world would’ve looked to the sky and seen hope, seen mercy. Instead, they’ll look up in horror… I was designed to save the world. People would look to the sky and see hope… I’ll take that from them first.

 

Ultron: Everyone creates the thing they dread. Men of peace create engines of war, invaders create avengers. People create… smaller people? Uhh… children! Lost the word there. Children, designed to supplant them. To help them… end.

The Vision is an interesting saviour. He is the machine incarnate, embodied to step between humanity and machinageddon. If Ultron is the machine passing judgment on the planet — part human — in the comics he’s described as “every inch a human being—except that all of his bodily organs are constructed of synthetic materials,” and part god from the machine. He’s the embodiment, or incarnation, of Stark’s personal assistant, J.A.R.V.I.S, some transcendent matter in the form of the ‘infinity stone’ embedded in his head, and synthetic human flesh on a metallic frame.  The J.A.R.V.I.S component is of Stark’s making, the infinity stone comes from the gods — or from beyond the earth, but the creation of the synthetic body was Ultron’s initiative. The Vision’s making is an act of a machine god, but his breath  — his life — comes from mankind and some transcendent life force via the infinity stone, and some lightning from Thor. The infinity stone is part of the fabric of the cosmos, which, in the Marvel Universe, was created by one God, a God who is not Thor, but is infinitely greater than him. 

Oh, my new friends, before creation itself, there were six singularities, then the universe exploded into existence and the remnants of this system were forged into concentrated ingots… Infinity Stones.” — Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki

“…and ’tis said that a being, called the Living Tribunal—the final judge—hath the power to enforce his will ‘pon any cosmos he doth judge! And ’tis said his power is supreme in all the Multiverse. Even I, son of one of the mightiest of all gods, find it impossible to conceive of such levels of power! And ’tis a humbling thought to consider how much greater the Creator of all Universes must be than that of all of His creations combined!” — Thor on God, The Mighty Thor Annual #14 (1989), Marvel Comics, cited in Marvel Wiki, One-Above-All

The Vision is a bit-part god; a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of us, a bit of machine, and a few parts divine. Age Of Ultron positions him as a godlike saviour figure from above and below. He is a virtuous godlike character with enough purity to wield Thor’s hammer Mjolnir. He is, in this sense, a fusion of the immanent — flesh, code, and metal, and the transcendent — Thor’s lightning and the infinity stone. His divinity is hinted at with lines like:

I am not Ultron. I am not J.A.R.V.I.S. I am… I am. — The Vision

But he’s ultimately a ‘god’ within the cosmos, within a pantheon of equally not infinite gods, while the Living Tribunal stands apart in infinity, a distant deistic god. Thw Vision is called on to save from within the universe — part god from above, part god from below, this real god, kicks back, not intervening in the world as the universe falls apart. According to Thor at least, he’s the transcendent one who could really fix things. The infinity stones are something like a bridge to his power, but other than these stones, the transcendent is only incidentally connected to the immanent in Marvel, these bit part gods — The Vision and Ultron — like their Norse counterparts, are more immanent than transcendent, limited by how great the gap is between any of them and this real transcendent power, limited in power and to a particular place. They are finite.

Despite his godlikeness, and his name, The Vision does not have much of a vision for salvation. He should be able to save the universe, and yet, even as he destroys Ultron, he essentially admits humanity is doomed. Perhaps because humanity is not equipped to imitate his non-human virtues.

Ultron: Stark asked for a savior, and settled for a slave.
The Vision: I suppose we’re both disappointments.
Ultron: [laughs] I suppose we are.
The Vision: Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites and try to control what won’t be. But there is grace in their failings. I think you missed that.
Ultron: They’re doomed!
The Vision: Yes… but a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts. It is a privilege to be among them.
Ultron: You’re unbelievably naïve.
The Vision: Well, I was born yesterday.

The Vision is the ultimate #illridewithyou hero, only, he’s not human enough to carry it out like Daredevil. He remains ‘other’. Despite his incredible power and capacity to transform the world, he’s no more inspiring or enchanting than Daredevil, he just seems less likely to be shaped by his environment. While remaining ‘other’, The Vision, like Thor before him (and like Superman) is not ‘other’ enough, godlike enough, to bring a real solution into the picture for humanity, nor is he imitable enough for his solution to be democratised. The Vision only delivers temporary relief to the Marvel Universe, and so as an example for us as viewers looking to have our imagination shaped by an epic hero, falls short. The Vision is a god from the machine, but not the Eucatastrophe, or re-imaginative transformation, the Marvel Universe requires. There is no denial of the ‘universal final defeat’ Tolkien spoke of; in fact, such defeat is seen as inevitable even by the ‘saviour’ — whatever joy that is offered is immanent joy — The Vision’s ‘grace in our failings’ or beauty in temporality. These are immanent joys; the joy of the ‘journey’ alongside others, the joy in the moment, the joy in the struggle, rather than the joy of the destination.

The Vision v Jesus: God from the machine, or God into the machine

“… there is a new archetypal plot formula found in North American popular narratives which operates as follows: A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition…” — David Reynolds, Superheroes: An Analysis of Popular Culture’s Modern Myths

“[The eucatastrophe] denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” — Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

The Vision is not this hero — he’s not this sort of god. So he does not bring that sort of joy, or hope. He is, ultimately, a product of the cosmos, born, in part, from outside earth but always from within the material realities of the universe. He’s a ‘god from below’ — destined, like any other epic hero, to grasp after something transcendent, that ‘gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing’ (to quote David Foster Wallace), and destined to stand beside us as we share that sense. He offers no road back to paradise lost — infinity lost. Because he hasn’t been there or seen it for himself.

Tolkien wasn’t writing On Fairy Stories to engage with the Marvel Universe, but he does speak about how Jesus is a better eucatastrophe than The Vision. Jesus is both the archetypal #illridewithyou hero who walks the path we walk, only with virtue, and the stranger-saviour who wears the cost of our broken pattern of life without joining in and perpetuating it. He comes into the world and takes steps towards restoring paradise precisely because he does not follow the pattern of a caped crusader. He absorbs the corruption of the world, he takes it upon himself — he becomes sin and death, but he is equipped, by virtue of his transcendent, divine, nature, to break the human cycle rather than perpetuating it. In his full humanity, and his offer of resurrection is able, also, to provide a pattern of life that might see hope

The Vision might be a secular Jesus figure, but he’s a cheap Jesus. Jesus is not a bunch of bits stitched together by a bunch of broken people, bringing their own brokenness to the table. He’s not part human, part machine, part divine — its in his paradoxical fusion of full divinity — or transcendence — with full humanity — or immanence — as a hero simultaneously from above and below — a God from the machine, and God coming into the machine in one person — that makes Jesus both the archetypal epic hero, and the eucatastrophe this world needs (and that the Marvel Universe could do with too). It’s these two natures working in symphony that means Jesus was able to enter our journey and secure a heroic victory over death on our behalf, while also inviting people to touch the infinite; to see the finite world as ‘enchanted,’ filled with divine meaning because he is both the one who holds all things in his hands, and the one whose hands were pierced by spikes to remove the threat of universal final defeat, and to provide a path and an invitation to us to join him in paradise renovated. These hands bring the finite and infinite together.

The Gospel is the best epic story, and Jesus the best epic hero, according to every formula for assessing such stories. Jesus provides a vision for a future world — the Kingdom of God — and invites people to follow his example in bringing a taste of this joy — being bringers of ‘eucatastrophic’ moments as we follow his example of the epic life. This has been a key belief of epic tellers of the Christian story from the early days of Christianity, here’s Athanasius, an old dude, reflecting on the nature of Christ in a way that seems to parallel with the modern archetypal hero story… the same story The Vision was expected to live out, but admitted he could not…

“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… There were thus two things which the Savior did for us by becoming Man. He banished death from us and made us anew; and, invisible and imperceptible as in Himself He is, He became visible through His works and revealed Himself as the Word of the Father, the Ruler and King of the whole creation.” — Athanasius, On The Incarnation

 

According to Tolkien, Jesus, in the Gospel, is the prime example of the Eucatastrophe — the true eucatastrophe that all fictional eucastrophes draw on. Jesus is better than The Vision because he is better than any epic hero. His story is more compelling, and should stoke the fires of our imagination better than any other story, and lead to a more enchanted view of the immanent and transcendent meaning of life in this world than any other, this should lead us to make better art, tell better stories, and live better stories. Here’s a passage from On Fairy Stories.

In the “eucatastrophe” we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a faroff gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world… if by grace what I say has in any respect any validity, it is, of course, only one facet of a truth incalculably rich: finite only because the capacity of Man for whom this was done is finite. I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature.

The Gospels contain a fairystory, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the “turn” in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe.

The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused. But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know. — J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories