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Matthew

Gandalf is confronting the traitor Saruman whose slick justifications of his treachery hinge on what would appear to be innovations: Saruman split the wholeness of the white light into many colors. 

“White!” [Saruman] sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.” “In which case it is no longer white,” said [Gandalf]. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” 

In season one of this podcast on episode nine, I talked about the etymology of the word diabolical and its surprising opposite, symbolical. Just quickly, diabolical means divisive and symbolize means to join. For instance, the objectification of a human being – where we divide the dignity of someone’s personhood from their body, say in slavery or pornography, or even perhaps rudeness, interrupting, and talking too much – this objectification reduces a person to a useful implement, rather than acknowledging them as a dignified whole person.

On the other hand, Chesterton says, “Thinking is making connections”. Now, he doesn’t mean anything fanciful or inventive, as if thinking were fabricating connections. Chesterton is talking about something more like discovering or recognizing indwelling interrelatedness and resonances of meaning in the world. There really is something going on here, and when we stop to carefully consider, to think, we may begin to pick up on patterns, to hear subtle symphonies always sounding from the depths of God’s Creation. Thinking for Chesterton is a species of listening.  But going back to the two words diabolical and symbolical, you could say Chesterton is identifying thinking as a symbolic practice – it is a rejoining of what man has put asunder. 

In our skeptical age, one lesson of skepticism worth learning is that it is very healthy to be skeptical of our skepticism. Doubt surely comes, and is itself worth doubting. As Charles Taylor points out, we’ve given up the ghost by reducing all of reality to mere material, love is merely the clashing of chemicals, morality merely the sum of legalistic constructions, mind is only matter, and beauty and bodies only skin-deep – whatever breath they once drew no longer has any connection to the wind or spirit mentioned by Jesus to Nicodemus in John 4. The post-modern human has been almost entirely un-inspired, dispirited, disenchanted, hollowed out. The ghost is gone, and only a shell remains. But, again, Taylor points out that we remain a haunted people, maybe, he says, because there really is a Ghost (and a Holy One at that). 

That haunting sense of a presence beyond the merely material calling to us to doubt our doubt relates back to what Gandalf says to Saruman. But how? Saruman has an instrumental view of the world – it’s just matter to be used for whatever ends prove most expedient. Gandalf knows better – the world is bestowed as a gift, and as with any gift, the intentions of the giver saturate its existence with the presence of that giver’s heart. In this way, all things gather in themselves a radiance from the One who is the ‘Light of light’. Saruman’s wisdom has been diminished by his choice to ‘break’ the light. He wants not to receptively participate in the radiance, but to possess it. For those who have eyes to see, God’s invested radiance in the things he has made is there for the beholding. That’s why this practice of beholding, commanded by John the Baptist, is crucial for us, since, when we behold we look not just at but into a thing. If we look only at Jesus we may see a potentially historical figure who, if not a mere fabrication of human embellishment, was at least a notable moral teacher. But to follow through with the Baptizer’s request is to truly perceive the radiant reality of the “Word before all worlds” manifesting in Jesus – to behold the Lamb of God, or to say with the soldier at the cross, “Surely, this is the Son of God.” 

And isn’t this a more beautiful way than Saruman’s? Saruman’s way is pragmatic, but it is not beautiful, because it breaks things asunder. Tolkien may be encouraging us to consider carefully what things are, not just what we can do with them.  It follows that Saruman is ousted from the council of the wise, and in the end his only companion, Wormtongue, murders him. On the other hand, Gandalf shepherds a fellowship, and in the end presides over a wedding. Gandalf the White is always at work to heal splinterings in the world. That is the way of wisdom, and it comes from an attentiveness, a beholding of things which allows him to perceive the radiance in them. For us, that radiance draws our gaze, through created things, all the way back to Creation’s origin in Christ, the Father, and our haunting Holy Ghost. 

Some have taken Gandalf’s comment to Saruman as an anti-science statement. I don’t know that it’s anti-science, but it is against the absolutizing of science as a primary index of reality. Science is helpful and good, but its nature is to analyze, that is, to break a thing into parts. But a case-in-point of the Haunting mentioned earlier shows up in our phrase: a thing is more than the sum of its parts. For instance, the moment you dissect a frog to get at its parts, you’re dealing with something less than a frog. A frog is at its froggiest when it is hopping and croaking happily in a pond. That gets us closer to what a frog is. Science has much to offer with regard to how a frog’s parts function, but it has almost (maybe absolutely) nothing to say about what a frog really is. Science doesn’t have the means at this point to behold any reality beyond the material. When a scientist does comment on the ontological or significant, he or she does so as a human, not primarily as a scientist. She must borrow from another realm of perception to symbolize upon the diabolized frog some transcendent meaning. 

All that to say, we are a people with an overactive analytical habit. Interestingly, I’m reading now a book about recovering from trauma called “The body keeps the score” by Bessel van der Kolk, and it’s a very helpful science book. But what’s fascinating is that the result of his analysis is that we need to stop dividing people into brain, mind, and body. The diabolical reality of trauma is that it hacks us into pieces. If we hope for healing, we must recover the fact that we are a complex whole – we need a second, safe womblike context in which our unravelings can be reknit. The frog must be put back together again. We’ve summed up the parts, everything’s materially there, but we sense this “something more” remains dissociated.  

Maybe the frog, once kissed by the beholding gaze, could, if not become a prince itself, at least reveal the sign of the Prince of Peace? Our fine froggy fellow may be one lumpy green loop in the long cursive signature of God himself. And the peace our prince brings is not an abstracted acceptance of the way things are, but rather it’s Shalom – the life-giving cohesion of all things as all things are lovingly, rightly wedded in Christ.  

That wedding is the climax of redemptive history. The At-one-ment Christ offers is not the buddhist eradication of desire and distinction, as individuality dissolves like a drop in the ocean of the All. The oneness Jesus promises is shalom, where everything becomes fully itself and whole, finding its rich and right correspondence to everything else – its place, its meaning. That’s what happens when relationships are healed. You’ve seen this before? When people live in brokenness, misunderstanding reigns and each of us is confused and hurt by the other. Compassion brings a blurred person into focus, forgiveness allows the muddy water to settle, and the reconciliation Jesus accomplished on the cross clarifies the distinctive radiance of individuals shadowed by sin. 

It’s an apocalypse like every sunrise is an apocalypse; that Arrival ignites the earth, waking it to the incandescence of recognition. The lamp slips out from underneath the bushel and we laugh with the joy of a child playing peek-a-boo. This whole world is a complexity of interwoven light and logos, “shining like shook foil” where each thing, “deals out that being indoors each one dwells”, where every created thing “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye it is – Christ, for Christ plays in ten thousand places.” 

And one day, the analogy will be fulfilled by its reality. The sun will bow to the Son and call it a day. When he appears, we too will finally and truly appear. We will see his face; he is true, and we are like a dream, a story half-remembered in a restless sleep. That day, he will behold us and, seeing in us the truth he spoke into being, we will each be a word – sweet as honey on his lips – a word that is finally coming true.