Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 31

But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve: that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way. Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.
It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny—all that was to go. We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no preeminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had preeminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard.

Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here. Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.

Fantastic Literature - E. Stephen Burnett points out how the Bible supports it

Some Christians think that, say, the Harry Potter books have no place in a Christian's reading, because they have to do with magic. The same has been said for books that have some sort of pagan religion, or even, like the Narnia books, minor characters (such as Tumnus the faun) that are based on non-Christian mythology. I recognize that there are some books that I shouldn't read, because of some sort of sinful content, and that some Christians probably have no business reading the Harry Potter books, or maybe even the Narnia books, because of their own personal make-up and experience, which might open them up to temptations that I don't think are particularly dangerous for me. But I disagree with the idea that no Christian should be reading books with magicians or some sort of pagan religion, and certainly disagree with crossing off all fantastic literature.

See here for a post on a series of books that I decided not to continue reading. See here for a post on the work of a particular author who is a self-declared Druid, but whose work is clearly sympathetic toward Christianity. Here is a post, attempting to describe Christian novels. Here is an examination of Christianity, or lack thereof, in the Harry Potter books.

E. Stephen Burnett is one of the authors of the Speculative Faith blog. In two recent posts - here and here - he opened my eyes about two pertinent Biblical facts. First, Daniel, and his Israeli companions, had to be conversant with the literature of Babylon. (See Daniel 1, particularly verse 17.) That literature almost certainly included stories about pagan deities. Second, the Tabernacle, as God directed its construction, almost certainly included materials given to the Israelites by the Egyptians, and most likely some of those materials were related to Egyptian idol worship. (See here for the source of some, or all, of the Israelite gold, and here for the instructions to use gold in the building of the tabernacle.)

Thanks, Burnett. It seems that God-serving people could know about the stories of pagan gods, and that the worship of God could use materials that had previously been related to the worship of other gods. So fantastic literature can also be used to God's glory, and the edification of Christians, even though it contains elements of magic or paganism. I have thought so for a long time, but this confirms it.

Actually, Burnett goes even further, because he thinks he needs to. Some Christians think, and argue, that no fiction, of any kind, is suitable for Christians to read. (See here for documentation.)

Thanks for reading. Read Burnett.

Biblical truths in "Thor," the movie?

A question that readers of fantastic literature should often ask themselves is "does reading about non-Christian religions, the occult, vampires, etc., lead me away from the True God?" Sometimes, I think so. I recently decided that a book, marketed for young adults, and, apparently about fairies living among normal people, was not going anywhere that I wanted to go. I stopped reading it after a couple of chapters. On the other hand, I have read a number of authors who have laid out pagan religions of some sort, and, I believe, found such stories to be uplifting. (See here for more on that subject.)

E. Stephen Burnett has recently posted his thoughts on this sort of subject, with emphasis on the recently released movie, Thor. He concludes that this movie was uplifting, as a whole. His posts are in two parts, here, and here.

The movie was worth watching, and Burnett's thoughts are worth reading.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan: Musings

 Ursula K. Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan was a Newbery Honor winner.

Tombs is a story of redemption. As in the first book in Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, the central character is not yet an adult. She is redeemed by choosing to reject the evil beings that she has worshiped, and served, for as far back as she can remember. The person who places that choice before her is Ged, who was the central figure in A Wizard of Earthsea. Ged is important in this book, but the story is told, in the third person, about Tenar, who was Arha.

Arha means "eaten one." Arha was taken from her parents at about age six, to be the new high priestess of the Tombs of Atuan. She was chosen because her time of birth corresponded to the time of the death of the previous high priestess. The beings she is consecrated to are Old Powers, which are apparently potent evil spirits, immortal, which are centered on some of the localities in Earthsea. Ged encountered one of them in Wizard. There are three religions, intertwined, in The Place, the isolated area where Arha lives, and will live for the rest of her life, if she remains in service to the Old Powers. There is a temple, usable, but fallen into disrepair, for her religious rites. There are also two other temples, to the twin gods, and the god-king, which latter is the emperor of the Kargad lands. The people of the Kargad lands live on four islands, Atuan being one of them. They are fairer-skinned than people living elsewhere in Earthsea, and speak a different language, and engage in worshipp of these gods.

In Wizard, Ged was given an old piece of metal, apparently half of an arm-ring. In Tombs, he has come to steal the other half from the treasures in the labyrinth of tunnels under the temples and other buildings of The Place. He is trapped there. Arha discovers this, and visits him, more than once, in the tunnels. Ged, who has wizardly powers, and has been trained to discover the names of things, tells her her true name, Tenar. Tenar tells Kossil, the high priestess of the god-king, that there is a man in the labyrinth, which is forbidden. (Kossil, by the way, does not believe in any supernatural power or being. She just respects power. So she serves the god-king.) Ged tells Tenar that she has a choice. She can leave him to die, or kill him, Or she can let him escape The Place, and go with him. She decides to go with him, because she has come to realize that the Old Powers are evil:

"Did you truly think them dead? You know better in your heart. They do not die. They are dark and undying, and they hate the light: the brief, bright light of our mortality. They are immortal, but they are not gods. They never were. They are not worth the worship of any human soul."
She listened, her eyes heavy, her gaze fixed on the flickering lantern.
"What have they ever given you, Tenar?"
"Nothing," she whispered.
"They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place; and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped. (p. 106.)

Ged uses the magic of Patterning to join the two pieces of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, and places the whole on Tenar's arm. The whole Ring shows nine runes, one of which had been lost to the mages of Earthsea. It is the rune of Binding, and Ged, and the other mages, hope that its re-forming, and their knowledge of it, will allow a king to rise again over all of Earthsea.

Ged and Tenar escape. The Old Powers, angered, cause the tunnels to collapse, killing Kossil. (Ged has held off the earthquake that the Old Powers have been trying to release, until he and Tenar escape the area.)

Ged and Tenar go to Havnor, the center of the islands of Earthsea, and the book ends. Having summarized the book, I'll muse a bit. (The Wikipedia article on the book has an even better summary.)

LeGuin pays attention to nature in her writing: And Tenar listened to the sea, a few yards below the cave mouth, crashing and sucking and booming on the rocks, and the thunder of it down the beach eastward for miles. Over and over and over it made the same sounds, yet never quite the same. It never rested. On all the shores of all the lands in all the world, it heaved itself in these unresting waves, and never ceased, and never was still. The desert, the mountains; they stood still. They did not cry out forever in a great, dull voice. The sea spoke forever, but its language was foreign to her. She did not understand. (138) And she knows how to describe!

The book is well written. Although her writing is not showy, Le Guin is a master, or mistress, of language. As in Wizard, the book is rich in anthropological insight, in this case about the priestesses and their life and practices. And they are, to Le Guin, and to Ged, who knows the secret names of pebbles, rabbits, and small plants:
He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little thistle growing by his hand. It was very strange. Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. (p.126)

So, in the end, Tenar is redeemed from enslavement by evil spirits, to freedom. We are not told more. But it is probably meant to be a freedom like Ged's, a freedom to act by his own choices, for the good of Earthsea and its people, as he understands it, not guided by any sort of religion.

Thanks for reading.

gods are commanded to worship God

Psalm 97:7 is a remarkable verse: 7 All worshipers of images are put to shame,
who make their boast in worthless idols;
worship him, all you gods! (ESV)

I checked, using the Blueletter Bible's "Available Translations and Versions" for that verse, and the English translations are unanimous -- they all include a command to "gods" to worship God. Remarkable? What does that mean?

I'm not sure. But why should I understand the entire Bible?

Thanks for reading.

Duriez on the fiction written by Tolkien and Lewis

My previous post was on Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, by Colin Duriez (Mahwah, New Jersey: HiddenSpring, an imprint of Paulist Press, 2003.)

I wish to summarize the book in this way: Both Tolkien and Lewis wrote as if they were convinced that the ways of the past were better than the ways of the present.

How does this show up? In many ways. There is no gunpowder, and there are no gasoline engines, in either Narnia or Middle-Earth. That's unless we count some of the machinery of Sauron and Saruman, both clearly evil characters. There are hereditary rulers. There's no newspaper, no radio, no electricity.

But the most fundamental way is that pagan, pre-Christian world-views (as in the Glome of Lewis's Till We Have Faces, or in Tolkien's Middle-Earth) are portrayed as leading up to Christianity, whereas modern views, like those of Saruman, or the NICE, are anti-God. As Duriez put it in his discussion of Till We Have Faces:

An important element in the story, therefore, is Psyche as an ancient anticipation of Christ. Psyche is able to see a glimpse of the true God himself, in all his beauty, and in his legitimate demand for a perfect sacrifice. . . . The novel explores the depths of insight possible within the limitations of the pagan imagination, which foreshadows the marriage of myth and fact in the Gospels. Till We Have Faces, therefore, reveals the imaginative and theological affinity between Lewis and Tolkien, perhaps  more than any other book by Lewis. It is ironic that the novel was written at a time when the two friends had grown apart. (163)

Thanks for reading. Read Lewis and Tolkien.

Cybele's Secret by Juliet Marillier

Juliet Marillier is a self-proclaimed follower of the druid religion. In spite of that, as I have indicated in previous posts, here and here, she has written sympathetically, and with seeming understanding, about Christianity and Christians.

Cybele's Secret (Knopf, Borzoi Books, 2008) is the latest book in which Marillier has touched on religion. In this book, set in Europe centuries ago, the main character is a practicing Christian, although seemingly only in the way many so-called Christians are, namely that they call upon God to help them when they are in deep trouble, but otherwise don't have much to do with Him. There is some mention of Islam, and of a pagan religion, perhaps similar to that of the Druids.

Since the Wikipedia does not yet have an article on this book, I will depart from my usual practice, and set forth a summary.

The book is a sequel to Wildwood Dancing, and, like that book, was written for young people. Paula, the main character in Cybele's Secret, was a minor character in Wildwood Dancing, a younger sister, of the main characters. The entire book is told from Paula's point of view.

Paula and her father have heard that an ancient idol, Cybele's Secret, which was involved in a female-centered religion a long time before the time of the book, may be available for purchase. The father is a trader, and has a buyer. He takes Paula with him to Istanbul, to attempt to purchase the object. Paula, although still a teenager, is scholarly. Istanbul is ruled by Muslims, although non-Muslims are welcome in the city, and there are many of them. However, women are not treated as equal to men.

Before entering the city, the ship that Paula and her father are traveling on meets the ship of a man named Duarte, a reputed pirate. When they arrive, one necessary procedure is to obtain the services of a guard for Paula. She selects a tall, muscular, good-looking man named Stoyan.

Paula helps her father with some of his trading, and even does a little herself, when her father is otherwise occupied. But she finds that she hungers for books, scrolls, and other items to read. Irene, the wife of a high official, has an excellent library, and Paula is allowed to use her library. Irene claims to revere Cybele's secret, and the religion it was part of. During Paula's use of the library, she finds two manuscripts that seem to be about Cybele's Secret, and has some mysterious visits from a woman in a black robe. Paula and Stoyan study the manuscripts, trying to figure out exactly what they mean. Paula comes to believe that this person is her sister Tati, who left the family to go into the realm of faerie with her lover, in the first book. Irene seems to be a good friend, although quite a bit older.

The potential buyers of Cybele's secret, including Paula and her father, and Duarte, with Irene serving as chaperone for Paula, are invited to see the object. It turns out that the object is a fragment -- a large fragment, but not the entire object, just the head and the upper body. Paula's father and Duarte seem to be the most likely buyers. Paula's father is waylaid, and beaten, on the way to a possible purchase, and Duarte buys the object. Paula and Stoyan manage to get on Duarte's ship. At first Duarte is antagonistic to Paula and Stoyan, and they reciprocate. However, another ship puts out from the harbor, chasing Duarte's ship, and Paula gradually comes to see that Duarte is no pirate, but an honorable man, and one who promised to return the statue of Cybele to its place of origin. He seems to be in love with Paula.

The three, using Paula and Stoyan's knowledge of the manuscripts, enter a cave. They are pursued by people from the other vessel, one of whom turns out to be Irene, supposedly Paula's friend, but obviously not really one. The cave is part of fairyland. Paula succeeds in doing several tasks, which means that she, Duarte and Stoyan are given the other part of Cybele's secret. During the time underground, it is revealed that Irene only wants the entire object so that she can set herself up as head of a religion for women in Istanbul. She does not believe in the religion of the Cybele cult.

Paula, Stoyan, and Duarte are allowed to leave the cave. Irene dies there. The three of them come out near an isolated village, which believes that Cybele's Secret will come to them, just as they bring it out. They leave the object there, for the villagers to revere. Their worship seems to be earth-worship, with no human sacrifices.

Paula would evidently have considered herself a Christian. She prays to the Christian God a few times, asking for His help, but does otherwise show any evidence of a deep faith.

The book ends with Paula planning to marry Stoyan, her former guard.

It was an exciting book. Marillier is a good writer. The issues treated, dangers faced, the moral choices, the practice of religion, pagan, Muslim, and Christian, are not as intense as in her books for adults, which, I suppose, is appropriate to the intended audience.

Marillier has been diagnosed with breast cancer, and is receiving treatment. I wish the best for her. The best would be that she not only be sympathetic to Christianity, but that she trust in the Christ of Christianity.

Thanks for reading.

Some thoughts on Joseph

The story of Joseph is well-known. In re-reading it recently, I was struck by some particulars that I had forgotten, or never knew:

1) Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, first ancestors of two prominent tribes of Israel, were half Egyptian. (Perhaps their own children were more Egyptian than Israelite -- we don't know who Ephraim and Manasseh married. We do know that Manasseh had a son, Machir, by an Aramean concubine -- 1 Chronicles 7:14. It seems almost certain that others of Jacob's sons married unrelated women. Judah married a Canaanite woman. His offspring were by Tamar -- Genesis 38 does not make clear whether she, too was a Canaanite, or if he married her.)
Genesis 41:50 Before the year of famine came, two sons were born to Joseph. Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera priest of On, bore them to him. 51 Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh. “For,” he said, “God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father's house.” 52 The name of the second he called Ephraim, “For God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.” (All scripture from the ESV.)

2) Joseph, who had been a steward himself, although perhaps not with that title, trusted his steward:
Genesis 43:16 When Joseph saw Benjamin with them, he said to the steward of his house, “Bring the men into the house, and slaughter an animal and make ready, for the men are to dine with me at noon.” 17 The man did as Joseph told him and brought the men to Joseph's house. 18 And the men were afraid because they were brought to Joseph's house, and they said, “It is because of the money, which was replaced in our sacks the first time, that we are brought in, so that he may assault us and fall upon us to make us servants and seize our donkeys.” 19 So they went up to the steward of Joseph's house and spoke with him at the door of the house, 20 and said, “Oh, my lord, we came down the first time to buy food. 21 And when we came to the lodging place we opened our sacks, and there was each man's money in the mouth of his sack, our money in full weight. So we have brought it again with us, 22 and we have brought other money down with us to buy food. We do not know who put our money in our sacks.” 23 He replied, “Peace to you, do not be afraid. Your God and the God of your father has put treasure in your sacks for you. I received your money.” Then he brought Simeon out to them.

The steward seemed to recognize, and honor, possibly even to worship, Joseph's God.

3) Joseph gave the priests of a foreign god special privilege:
Genesis 47:20 So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, for all the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe on them. The land became Pharaoh's. 21 As for the people, he made servants of them from one end of Egypt to the other. 22 Only the land of the priests he did not buy, for the priests had a fixed allowance from Pharaoh and lived on the allowance that Pharaoh gave them; therefore they did not sell their land.

I find that remarkable. Was this because his own wife was from a priestly family? I don't know.

Thanks for reading.

Till We Have Faces, by C. S. Lewis

I think, and I am by no means alone, that Till We Have Faces is the finest work of fiction by C. S. Lewis, who also wrote the Narnia books and the Space Trilogy. Since those works have considerable merit of their own, Till We Have Faces is pretty good. (See here for the Wikipedia article on the book. Here is an article on the book, and here is another.)

Why do I feel this way? Because the book is well written. Because it is a thorough examination of the life, and character, of a single individual, namely Orual, queen of a fictional kingdom in the neighborhood of Greece, before the time of Christ. Lewis seems to have known that time, and that civilization, well. He believed that pagans were often led toward Christ: There are people in other religions who are being led by God's secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. . . . Many of the good Pagans long before Christ's birth may have been in this position. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: What One Must Believe to Be a Christian. New York: Macmillan, 1952. pp. 175-6. (There is a Calormene who has this experience in Lewis's The Last Battle.)

What is the book about? Well, I don't want to give away all of the plot, but it is about Orual's search for vindication by the gods. She wants them to say that she has done the right thing. They answer, but their answer is much like the answer that God gave to Job, namely Himself. Here are a few quotations from the book.

And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 74. Istra/Psyche, speaking of the Grey Mountain. This states one of the themes of the work of Lewis -- the idea of sehnsucht, sweet desire.

There's one part love in your heart, and five parts anger, and seven parts pride. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 148. The Fox, her teacher, on Orual's attitude (and mine, I fear).

I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 308. Orual's tale is in two parts, the second short. With this statement, she summarizes the results of stating her case that she has not received justice from the gods. How true of Christ this is! He is the only answer.

Thanks for reading.

Paganism and Christianity in Juliet Marillier's fiction

Juliet Marillier, author of fiction set centuries ago, in Europe, claims to be a pagan. She states that she belongs to a Druid order.

I read her Sevenwaters trilogy (Daughter of the Forest, Son of the Shadows, and Child of the Prophecy -- these books won, or were nominated for, various awards) some years ago. I read her Wolfskin recently. Without giving away the plot, I'd like to point out a few things about the book.

First, it presents two pagan religions as if they were real, and gave real connection to a supernatural world. These two are a pagan religion found in the Orkney islands, where much of the book takes place, and a Norse religion. The pagan priestess, in an extreme situation, summons beings from the earth and the sea to help her. The berserker warrior communes with his god in a vision.

The above wasn't a great surprise, both from my previous recollection of her books, and because I knew that Marillier claimed to be a pagan herself. The second thing I point out is that there is a Christian priest, who is presented as if Christianity, too, were real. Marillier says: "A discussion of religion and spirituality creeps into every book I write, because it's important to me. It was especially interesting in Wolfskin, because here we have three different sets of beliefs in potential opposition to one another." Her sympathetic portrait of a Christian was a surprise.

Here's an important passage:
". . . Doesn't your god love even sinners?"
Tadhg regarded her gravely. "Indeed. God is in all of us. Some are clothed in the brightness of the Holy Spirit, and goodness shines from them, a goodness which has its source deep within. Such a sweet wellspring never runs dry. No force or evil can pollute its clear water. But some are weaker vessels, and that small spark of the divine is hidden far within them. It takes a brave man or woman, Nessa, to open up his very being and examine what is there: to lay his soul bare to that burning light. Such a choice is fearful indeed, for one must recognize the fear and anguish, the deceit and duplicity, the lust and the violence, all the wretchedness that mortal man bears in his essential clay. Yet, if a man dare open himself to God's love, his sins are forgiven and the path made new. That is the wondrous truth of which our Lord Jesus told. It is the way of light. . . ." Wolfskin (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2002) p. 149.

C. S. Lewis said, in several of his writings, that paganism wasn't entirely wrong. (He did not propose that paganism was meant to be the way to God -- Christianity is that way.) Perhaps Marillier is a modern-day example of that.

Here's what David C. Downing had to say about this matter (in Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, 2005):
. . . Lewis rejected both universalism and predestination as negations of free will. His position is better described as "inclusivism," the idea that Christ's reconciling work may sometimes apply even to those who are not aware of it. Lewis did not feel that he was being unorthodox in this matter. He refers several times in his letters to Christ's portrayal of judgement in which he welcomes those who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited the sick, saying that all such service done for the least of his brethren is accounted as service done to him. (84-5)

and

In The Discarded Image . . . he spends two pages showing that pagans and early Christians had far more in common than either shares with modern thinkers. Pagan is one of those words . . . that has a specialized meaning in Lewis's books. In common usage, pagan and Christian are practically contraries, the first representing a secular, this-worldly attitude, and the second representing its opposite. Lewis saw no such antithesis; he called paganism "the childhood of religion . . . a prophetic dream" For him, paganism was an anticipation, Christianity the fulfillment. (109)

Added July 28, 2010: 

". . . Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He's not evil; yet he's a magician. He is obviously a druid; yet he knows all about the Grail. . . ." (Dr. Dimble, speaking to Jane Studdock, in That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis. New York: Collier, 1962, p. 31.)

The third aspect of Marillier's writing that I want to mention is that her characters often suffer great hardship, and have to make difficult choices. That's not unique to Marillier, of course. But the main thing I recall about the Sevenwaters trilogy is the excruciating anguish of the heroine, Sorcha, over a long period, as she tries to perform a most difficult task, under difficult circumstances. (This was in the first book.) Marillier's main characters can be heroes, in the definition given by R. A. Salvatore.

The second part of this post is here.

* * * * *

I added the quotations from Downing on April 15, 2008.

On April 2, 2009, E Stephen Burnett wrote an essay, asking questions about how far a Christian author could go in writing fiction which has a God who is significantly different from the Christian God, and whether a Christian could legitimately create a fictional character who is in defiance of God. I posted tentative answers to these questions, which are related to the subject of the post above, on April 13, 2009.

Thanks for reading!

Did/does Baal exist? More on Elijah at Mt. Carmel

A person, choosing to remain anonymous, commented on my recent post about Elijah and the encounter at Mt. Carmel as follows:

You stated that, "Probably being sacrificed, even to a non-existent god, defiled a bull for sacrifice to the God of Israel." My question is in regards to the "non-existent god." Do you think monotheism is a) the belief that only one God physically (or I suppose "spiritually" would be a better word) exists, and that all other "gods" are nothing more than imagined beings, or b) the belief that there is one God who alone is holy, righteous, and worthy of worship, who is greater than all other "gods" and is the creator of all other "gods" just as He is the creator of everything else?

I know that option "a" is the traditional answer (or at least that it has been traditional for most of church history) but do you think there is reason enough in the Bible to consider option "b" as being valid? A couple of points off the top of my head - the commandment "have no other gods before me." Sort of an easy one to stick to if no other gods exist, right? The name "most high God" (Daniel 5.18). If there is a "most high" God, doesn't that seem to imply that there are also "less high" gods? Throughout Scripture the term "god" or "gods" is used as though such "lesser gods" do physically/spiritually exist (Psalm 97.7-9). Perhaps we typically call them angels or demons (2 Cor 4.4 - Satan = "the god of this world") and its just a matter of semantics? What do you think?

An interesting book on this subject is God at War by Gregory A. Boyd.

Thanks for your comment. Actually, I thought, as I posted the phrase "non-existent god," that perhaps I ought to have been more careful and precise, but wasn't. Sorry.

Obviously, what I think on this particular question is of limited interest--I am not an authority in this area. However, what the Bible says about it should be of broad interest. As the commenter points out, the Bible seems to indicate that there really are spiritual beings who have power. Although the Bible also seems to teach that physical idols were totally impotent (for example, Dagon, "god" of the Philistines) that doesn't mean that spirits who might have responded to idol worship might not have existed, and have had some limited power. The New Testament indicates, in Ephesians 6:12, that there are spiritual beings with powers.

In other words, I'm not sure that Baal is or was non-existent. Perhaps some evil spirit, called Baal, inspired Baal-worship, and, for all I know, performed miracles in the name of Baal. If some evil spirit was Baal, then it certainly was impotent in the face of the One God of the Hebrews, and should never have been, or be, worshipped. In other words, if I had to vote, I would vote b.