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What is Donegality in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien?

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What is donegality? Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man represents the “perfect man,” based on the ancient knowledge of ratios and proportions in human anatomy. Leonardo, often called a Renaissance man, depicted something very different from the medieval understanding of man.

His Vitruvian Man is autonomous. There’s nothing around him. He is in the center. In the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, born in 1098, a man is also depicted in the center, except that the space/cosmos he is in is surrounded by the figure of God. The man is literally inside the womb of God.

In the medieval understanding, the man is in the center, and yet he is not. He exists in God’s embrace. The space/womb he is in is part of a Universal Body that has a head, face, hands, legs, and feet. The medieval man was not autonomous. He was loved. Embraced by the personal cosmos.

He lived, breathed, and moved inside the Divine womb. When the baby is inside the womb, they can’t see the mother, but they can divine her motherly presence in all things. She is hidden behind the walls of the world, and yet she is present in everything. The baby literally eats her body and lives off of her — her body is his whole world. The mother is hidden and yet revealed from the inside out.

C.S. Lewis once visited County Donegal in Ireland and was struck by the specific feel of the local landscape. He coined the term “donegality” to describe the unique atmosphere or mood that gives a particular setting or narrative its distinctive character. Donegality is a unique feel of something.

The Chronicles of Narnia is intentionally suffused with a certain donegality so we can recognize the Mother. All its symbolism — the talking animals, mythological landscapes, magical transformation — the whole atmosphere creates an irresistible sense of wonder and and an invitation to ask the main question: “Who?” Who is behind it?

To be born means to go out of the womb and see the mother face to face. But while we are in the womb, we live in her donegality. We see her dimly, as if through the looking-glass. We swim in the cosmos of her Divine Body, eating and drinking her self-revelations.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s worlds, this “donegality” is even more pronounced because Iluvatar, the Divine Source, is mentioned only in the beginning of The Silmarillion. In the rest of the legendarium, he is not mentioned but implied. He is the force behind all forces. An attentive reader divines his Presence in all the peripeteia of the plot. Tolkien plunges us into the donegality of the Music of Iluvatar.

Both Lewis and Tolkien represented a deeply medieval understanding of man. The man is only himself when he is embraced by the cosmos of Divine love. The Divine love puts him in the center and nourishes him until he is ready to see her face to face. When in the womb, he sees her only in dreams, visions, symbols, metaphors, and parables. She is revealed from the inside out.

St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), a Byzantine monk and theologian, taught that even though God is unknowable in his essence, he is revealed in his energies. While in the womb, we cannot see God face to face, but we can know him partially through his energies. God manifests himself through his donegality, the unique atmosphere of the world.

That’s why Jesus said, “He who has ears, let him hear.” Hear what? The heartbeat of the mother, the warmth of her womb, the nourishment of her Body. When we feel embraced, we become ourselves. Divine donegality gives us the energy to be who we are.

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Why Was Barnabas Called Zeus in the Bible?

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Why was Barnabas called Zeus in the Bible? Ever since I read in Acts 14:11-13 how the people of Lystra mistook Paul and Barnabas for Greek gods after seeing a miraculous healing performed by Paul, I have been intrigued. They called Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes — because Paul was the chief speaker.

I could see why Paul would be called Hermes with his ability to wield words and arguments. But why was Barnabas called Zeus? Zeus is the king of the Olympian gods who hurls bolts of lightning. This doesn’t align very well with what we know about Barnabas whose name means “the son of encouragement.”

Between the two of them, Paul qualified more for the role of Zeus with his thunder-and-lightning statements. Yet, the Lystrans must have seen something in Barnabas that reminded them of Zeus, the king of the gods.

Zeus is a complex mythological figure. His father Kronos was known to eat his own children. When Zeus was born, Hera hid the child from his ever-hungry father and gave him a stone instead of the boy. Kronos swallowed the stone without noticing anything. Kronos ate his children not without a reason — he was chronological time. We are all born in chronological time, and we are consumed by it.

Zeus is a moment in time that was saved from being consumed by time. In the Greek lore, Zeus is someone who is above time. He prevails over his father Kronos and becomes king. In doing so he becomes electrified — a Source of divine electricity. People who are above time, shine with heavenly light and joy.

That’s why the Romans associated Jupiter, the Roman equivalent of Zeus, with heavenly joy (gaudium caeleste). He was often depicted as a triumphant figure with a ruddy face. Have you ever met people who are above time? They rule, and they radiate heavenly electricity.

You can read it in their eyes. They tread on earth as kings and queens. They rule over circumstances. They rise above the temporal. They live as if they were eternal. When you touch them, they pass their electricity to you, and you lighten up. You meet them and exclaim, “By Jove, I feel so jovial!”

Maybe that’s what the Lystrans saw in the eyes of Barnabas, “the son of encouragement.” Like a lightning bolt, he must have struck them as someone timeless, someone electrified with divine light, someone contagiously jovial. He was a walking encouragement.

The Lystrans wanted to bring sacrifices to both Paul and Barnabas, but the two men redirected their gazes toward the true Source of light. The light was not their own; they shone with a borrowed light. They were images of the Divine, not gods. And yet, the light shone through them to such a degree that people mistook them for gods. Here’s what C.S. Lewis wrote about this phenomenon:

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship… There are no ordinary people.” The Weight of Glory

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What Does “Little Things Matter” Mean?

What does “little things matter” mean? G.K. Chesterton famously said,

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”

The renowned Georgian pedagogue Shalva Amonashvili counts his life in days, not in years. Born in 1931, he knows exactly how many days he has lived. He says when you count days, days become longer. Counting days helps you notice interesting things about your day — not the duration of time.

When you recognize God in little things, you realize there are no trifles. Everything is a tremendous trifle. If God is anywhere, he is everywhere. If we see him at least in some things, we will see him in all things. He is either everywhere or nowhere. If we don’t notice him in little things, we won’t notice him in big things.

Amonashvili plays a game with his students — every time he runs into someone in the corridors of his school, he asks them, “What happened?” The student answers. Fifteen minutes later, he asks them again, “What happened?” The student shrugs his shoulders, “Didn’t you ask me already? What could happen in 15 minutes?”

Amonashvili says, “Something must have happened. You don’t think God was on vacation these 15 minutes, do you? He must have been creating.”

God is in the business of creating tremendous trifles all the time. The more we zoom in the more we see. The word “happen” comes from Middle English happenen, derived from Old Norse “happa”, which means “fortune.” Every time something happens, we are fortunate. It’s a chance to see big things in trifles.

When my friend calls me from Russia to catch up, sometimes it’s hard to start a conversation from scratch. So, I scratch my head, “What has happened since our last talk? Hmm… not much.” But then I tell him little things like the weather, and what I had for breakfast that morning. Suddenly, I see a hummingbird hovering over my wife’s flowers. How fortunate!

The hummingbird reminds me of something I had read about birds recently. Our conversation opens up into something tremendous. There’s a fortune lurking behind every trifle.

“Teach us to count our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” Psalm 90:12

G.K. Chesterton opens his Tremendous Trifles with a story of two little boys, Paul and Peter who met a fairy. Paul asked to be turned into a giant so he might stride across continents to Niagara and the Himalayas in an afternoon dinner stroll.

Voila! He was turned into a giant. He stood up and strolled to the Himalayas, but… “he found they were quite small and silly-looking.” Then, he strolled to Niagara, and…

“…he found Niagara it was no bigger than the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world for several minutes trying to find something really large and finding everything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down on four or five prairies and fell asleep.”

Peter made the opposite request. He wished to become a pigmy about half an inch high and immediately became one. His small garden suddenly transformed into a huge plain covered with a tall green jungle. He saw gigantic trees in the distance, and even a mountain — a whole wide world full of wonders. He smiled, rose to his feet, and…

“…set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has not come to the end of it yet.”

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Has Communism Ever Been Successful?

Has communism ever been successful? When I talk about what it was like to live under socialism, I sometimes get this reaction from people in the West: “But the USSR didn’t hold a monopoly on socialism. There are many examples of it being successful.”

I asked: “Can you name some?” One person answered, “Many indigenous communities were socialist in nature. And I have been part of spontaneous communities that had everything in common. It was very successful.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t continue this discussion, but later I realized that this answer revealed a deep misunderstanding of the nature of everything ending in “-ism.” There’s a world of difference between “social” and “socialism.” There’s an unbridgeable gap between community and communism. Just like there’s an unbridgeable gap between capital and capitalism.

Things like social justice are good. Taking care of the ill and elderly is good. Taking care of widows and orphans is good. But socialism is vastly different. When we add “ism” to “social” we turn morality into God. Being “moral” becomes the highest priority. It becomes the all-important thing. It becomes an idol.

Community is good. Community is the essence of spiritual life. The Lord’s Supper is called “Communion.” Yet, when we add “ism” at the end, we change its nature. Communism is the worship of the collective. Collective good becomes the highest good. The collective becomes God… or rather an idol.

The nature of idols is paradoxical. They promise a lot but deliver… well, they don’t deliver at all. Was there social justice in the socialist USSR? Deep sigh… No. Did the worship of the collective create healthy communities? Deep sigh… No. The “ism-based” idols produce the opposite of what they promise. The irony of all “isms” is that they deprive us of the very thing they promise to deliver.

That’s why Augustine called sin “disordered love.” What we should love first, we love second; what we should love second, we love first. By loving a good thing in the wrong order we make a good thing into a bad thing.

Capital is a good thing. It’s a resource. When we worship capital, it becomes capitalism where capital becomes the all-important thing. A good thing becomes a bad thing because we love it in the wrong order.

Why is this “order of love” so important? Because of the nature of the human heart revealed in the Decalogue. The first four of the Ten Commandments have nothing to do with morality. The remaining six have everything to do with morality. The first four are about our relationship with the Divine. The remaining six are about what we do (or don’t do).

In other words, when the first four are first, the last six will be second. When the last six become first, the first four will never be followed — as well as the last six ones. True action never starts with action. It starts with our connection to the Source of all action.

When our connection to the Source is primary, all good things remain good. When good things take the first place, they become bad things because they don’t proceed from the Source. We live in a world of disordered love. Disordered love always leads to “isms.” Isms are inevitable when we put action first.

Action is always second. All morality is derivative. We proceed from first to last, not from last to first. When first things remain first, the second things will always be second.

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Why Did Tolkien Like Trees?

Why did Tolkien like trees? Trees are fascinating — they grow upward and downward simultaneously. Their root system, if the soil is deep enough, resembles the way the branches grow.

The tree stretches itself both up and down at the same time. The more grounded it is, the more it stretches its hands to the Sun. The more it stretches its hands to the Sun, the more grounded it is.

The symbolism of the tree is vast and manifold. Ultimately, the tree is an image of who we are. We have two legs to stand firmly on the ground and two hands to reach to the Sun. J.R.R. Tolkien, a great lover of trees, captured this symbolism in Galadriel’s strange gift to Sam — a seed of the mallorn-tree.

Sam was the gardener. He was “down to earth.” A perfect helper for Frodo, he could always return him to sanity. Hobbits represent rootedness. They lived in the roots of the trees where they dug their smials. After living in the roots for centuries, they became rooted in the soil. They were, so to say, the roots of the world.

And yet, Sam yearned to see the Elves. He was rooted and grounded and yet, his hands spread out to the Sun. The more you are rooted, the more you grow. He was down to earth, and yet his soul longed for the lofty beauty of the Elves. The Elves of Lothlórien lived in the trees. That’s where they built their houses with flets. They lived among the branches and the leaves. They were in touch with the beauty of heaven.

Galadriel knew that Shire would soon be uprooted, so she gave Sam the undying symbol of new hope. The mallorn tree was a symbol of both rootedness and loftiness. In it, the hobbits met with the Elves. Sam and his descendants would live in the roots, but they would always look up at the tree top waving in the wind and think of the beauty of Lothlórien.

Galadriel gave Sam the gift of himself. He was the mallorn-tree. Rooted in the soil, he yearned for the skies.

“He [Sam] took the seed in his hand, and looked at it with wonder. ‘This is a gift from the Lady Galadriel,’ he said. ‘A piece of the tree of Lothlórien, a piece of the Elves, and of her grace. A thing that might grow into a living memory of a land that was once so beautiful. I will plant it in the Party Field where the old tree stood.’”

We are all trees. We have a dual nature. We are from the earth, and we are from heaven. We are hobbits and Elves at the same time. We live on the Vine that grows up to the sky. We are its branches. Our roots go down into the earth, and our hands reach up to the Sun. No wonder on many medieval frescoes, Christ was depicted as a Vine with disciples sitting on its branches. We are the Tree as we participate in the great Vine, which is the Tree of Life.

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What is Satan’s Plan for Deceiving People?

What is Satan’s plan for deceiving people? I remember watching a lecture on YouTube by a KGB professor who taught a class on how world elites rule over societies.

He said, “Imagine there is a truth and a lie. It’s a huge mistake to place common people between the truth and a lie and let them decide which is which. The truth will always prevail. It is too self-evident. The way to rule the masses is to always keep people between two lies.”

When you keep people between two lies, they will be distracted enough not to see the truth. They will split into two groups and start fighting each other. Each group will clearly see the lie of the other. Neither will see their own. Human nature is such that people never see problems with their own position but always find fault with the opposite one.

When I heard that, I thought, “How viciously insightful! If it isn’t the very definition of diabolos, I don’t know what is.” In Greek, diabolos means “the one who throws apart.” The devil invents two lies and places people in between them. The more we stare at the lies (which always contain some truth), the more we are drawn apart.

The devil keeps fanning into the flame and polarizing people until they start demonizing each other. When people fight, they are too distracted to see the truth. All they think about is how wrong the other side is. This is the best scenario for ruling over the masses. They will want a ruler.

St. Augustine said,

“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”

According to the KGB professor, it is a grave mistake to place people between the truth and a lie. The truthfulness of the truth is too obvious to miss. It doesn’t need any defending. When you see it, you know it. Seeing is enough. That’s why the devil’s goal is never to let people see it.

Truth is too obvious to miss. When you see it, you know it. It’s not propositional — it doesn’t require proof. It’s experiential — you simply encounter it. When you encounter it, you can either embrace it or turn away. But you can’t help recognizing it. That’s why when the devil tries to trap Jesus into taking sides, he always refuses. Truth doesn’t get polarized.

When people encounter Jesus, they forget about their differences and see the truth about themselves. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?” If Jesus had taken sides, he would have lost. He answered in such a way that everyone was lost. He left them dumbfounded, “Hm… what belongs to Caesar and what to God?”

The issue of whether to pay taxes to Caesar or not was not the real issue. These were the two lies people were placed between. Neither was right. The real issue was that they couldn’t see in their hearts what belonged to Caesar and what to God. If they could, they wouldn’t have been polarized.

When we encounter the Truth, we quickly realize,

“Let God be true, but every man a liar.”

As John of the Cross said,

“In the divine union, all contraries are reconciled, and the soul experiences the peace that comes from the resolution of all opposites.”

The devil creates a strong illusion of seeming contradictions. He places us between two opposites, and we think they are absolute. We don’t see the Absolute. When we encounter the Absolute, all opposites are resolved instantly. We know it by the peace we feel.

“Love… binds all things together in perfect unity.”

Contradictions cease the moment we encounter God face to face. As Meister Eckhart said,

“In the ground of the soul, there is a unity where all opposites coincide in the eternal now of God’s presence.”

Without the vibrant experience of this presence, we will always be between two lies.

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What is the Point of Raising Awareness?

What is the point of raising awareness? When we received an email from our son’s high school requesting our consent for him to attend an “awareness class” for the second year in a row, we refused. My wife wrote them that he had already taken this class last year and that he didn’t need to hear it all over again.

When we asked him what kind of awareness they raised, he told us a bunch of stuff that was not easy to listen to. One might say, “But this is life. The child needs to know all these things to be prepared.”

Like many medieval thinkers, Dante sincerely believed that a person cannot see hell until they have seen enough Paradise. To be prepared to see evil, one must spend most of their time in Paradise.

In Divine Comedy, Canto 28, Dante, speaking of Beatrice, says: “She imparadised my mind.”

Quella che ‘mparadisa la mia mente.

It turns out there is no such word in Italian. Dante invented it to show what Beatrice did for him. She placed his mind firmly in Paradise — “imparadised” his mind. Only with Paradise imprinted deep in our minds are we prepared to face the Inferno.

We knew that the school wasn’t doing for our son what Beatrice did for Dante. They don’t imparadise his mind. The “raising awareness” idol demands that children be placed right into hell to be prepared for hell. There is no preparation for hell in hell. It’s a soul-contaminating mechanism.

The best way to be prepared for darkness is to have enough experience of light. The best way to be prepared for hardship is to have enough experience of joy. The best way to be prepared for the earth is to have enough experience of heaven.

That’s what Franco Nembrini, a famous Italian pedagogue and a director of a private school, told a father who kept telling his son that life was a bunch of bullshit. When Franco asked why he kept telling him that, the father was surprised: “Because it’s true! He must know that.”

Franco paused and said, “I agree. Life is often bullshit. But since, as you say, you are already there, it makes no sense to dive deeper into it. I can promise you that even if you are head and shoulders into this thing, you will see a speck of light if you only look up. Let it be your guide. Go up, not down. If you follow that speck of light, it will lead you out of that thing. Teach your son to look at the stars.”

We have forgotten what medieval thinkers knew instinctively — you must not look at evil until your mind is imparadised. Evil will break you and corrupt you. We believe in raising awareness about hell but not Paradise. Hell does not prepare you to face hell; it prepares you to become part of it.

When we find ourselves in BS, it’s time to look up, not down. One of the best metaphors for the power of looking up is the experience of ancient Israelites in the desert. They were in a bunch of BS of their own making after incessant complaining about eating manna every day. Poisonous snakes came out of nowhere and started biting people.

God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. Anyone who would look up at the serpent would be healed from the snakebites. When you see a bunch of problems down below, the hardest thing is to look up. It’s hard to take your eyes off of your BS. It takes a leap of faith to look up.

The moment you do take your eyes off the hissing snakes at your feet, you are saved. There is no magic here; it’s all common sense.

“The eye is the lamp of the body.  If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6:22).

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What Led to the Birth of the Renaissance?

What led to the birth of the Renaissance? Huge movements that shape the course of history always start in a small group. In the mid-14th century, Europe was devastated by a plague known as the Black Death. According to some sources, one-third of the population of Europe died. At such a time as this, people always face a difficult choice — to despair and “die before you die” or to find a way to continue living while you are still alive.

Such times are unbelievably fruitful in terms of their history-shaping power. They birth individuals and small groups who want to bring heaven to earth in the midst of hell. That’s how Boccaccio’s Decameron was written. In it, ten people — seven women and three men — get together in a secluded villa to discuss a fundamental question: how do you continue living when you don’t know if you will survive one more day?

Scholars say that out of this impulse, the European Renaissance was born. Renaissance is not so much an interest in reviving classical antiquity; it is primarily, a desperate search for Meaning in total meaninglessness. People struggled with the thought: “Life is scary, but to live without meaning is scarier.”

Renaissance was an answer to the crisis of Meaning. It was an attempt to revive the only thing that could revitalize people in times of spiritual catastrophes. Boccaccio noticed that in times like this people lose the will to live. Renaissance began as an answer to a pressing question: where do you find a desire to live when you know you will probably die tomorrow?

That’s how Boccaccio discovered Dante — the “Poet of Desire.” He realized that the Divine Comedy was a better guide from Inferno to Paradise than Decameron. Eventually, he was hired by the mayor of Florence to publicly read and interpret Dante.

Boccaccio delivered his lectures at the Church of Santo Stefano in Badia and the construction site of Santa Maria del Fiore. He would read fragments from the Divine Comedy and explain them to common people who would pass through the site on their way to the market.

In Dante, hell is a frozen lake, Cocytus. It’s a place of no desire. Those in hell have killed their Desire — by burying it or by satisfying it with the wrong thing (the surrogate). The devil (from the Greek “diabolos,” meaning the divider) separates the person from Desire. He does it in one of two ways: either by making the person give up on their desires altogether (renounce them) or by satisfying them with surrogates. Both lead to the death of Desire. We end up frozen in Cocytus.

What revives the desire is the stars. Every cantica in the Divine Comedy ends with the Italian word for stars. The star is a symbol of a burgeoning desire — a desire brought to life by the “Love that moves the Sun and other stars.”

Surprisingly, the word for “desire” in Italian (desiderio) contains the root “sidere” (star). To rekindle Desire, we all need “sidere.” Our Desire comes from the stars — a symbol of being moved by the Divine love. When we don’t see “sidere,” we are deprived of desire — “desiderio.” When we don’t see the stars, we have zero desires. We die before we die.

To avoid the trap of “diabolos,” the divider, we need “symbolon,” the Symbol. Someone or something moved by Divine love. Our desire is born out of the Symbol and satisfied in and by the Symbol.

Renaissance was an answer to the Black Death. People instinctively felt that the only way out of Cocytus was to be moved by the stars.

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Why is Göbekli Tepe Mysterious?

Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, the archeologist Klaus Schmidt made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time — a temple complex Göbekli Tepe datingabout 11,000 years old.

The most striking thing about this discovery was that the temple complex dated before the advent of agriculture and a settled way of life. In other words, several tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers decided that they needed a temple and settled. Why?

In the traditional view of societal development (influenced by Marxism), economic factors always precede and predate culture and religion. Economy is the basis, the structure; culture is secondary — it is the superstructure. Culture and religion always flow out of the economy, not the other way around.

Schmidt came to the opposite conclusion. The main motivation for building Göbekli Tepe was not economy but religion — which was a huge blow to the traditional understanding of societal development. The hunter-gatherers settled because they had acquired some strong religious belief which substantiated building a temple.

This gave rise to the development of agriculture — they needed to feed all those people involved in the construction. And ultimately, this led to the creation of a “settled” way of life. How we live always flows from what we believe, not the other way around. We create an economy around our strongest beliefs, which are usually metaphors.

Metaphor is the structure; how we live it out is the superstructure. The further back we go in history, the more we find vestiges of metaphor-driven consciousness. That’s what Owen Barfield discovered in studying languages: the further back we go in history, the more metaphorical the language gets. Ancient consciousness was metaphoric. Modern consciousness is literal.

Man himself is a metaphor. Before the fall, Adam and Eve were acutely conscious of being vessels of the Divine — images of God. They were icons (“image” in Greek). Looking at each other, they saw God. They were walking metaphors — microcosms reflecting the macrocosm. After the fall, this metaphor-consciousness started disintegrating. Adam and Eve started taking themselves “literally.”

Over time, they started seeing themselves as separate beings — not as icons but as idols. An icon is a metaphor of God. An idol is a metaphor of nothing. It doesn’t show anything beyond the visible. Idolatry is the loss of metaphor-consciousness. Our gaze no longer penetrates the images; it is arrested by the images at the level of the visible and literal. This marks the rise of literalness-consciousness.

Why is Göbekli Tepe mysterious? The children of Adam and Eve always vacillate between metaphor and literalness. When we forget about God, we take ourselves literally. We idealize our earthly existence (economy) over the metaphor (religion). When we get fed up with the meaninglessness of the “literal,” we wake up to our true nature — we are metaphors of God. We experience a shift from an idol to an icon.

The moment we realize we are icons, we start building temples. We see everything as sacred. We take off our sandals for even the ground we are standing on is holy. We reconnect with God and ourselves as The Metaphor.

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Is Winnie-the-Pooh Wise?

Is Winnie-the-Pooh wise? The two most sane characters in literature, Tom Bombadil and Winnie-the-Pooh, are poets.

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” G.K. Chesterton

They are poets to such a degree that they speak in rhyme about everything. They see poetry in everything. Sanity is all about seeing the world as a multi-layered nesting doll for you to open up and explore.

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.” G.K. Chesterton

Poets don’t go mad. They don’t rely on their reason. They don’t try to get the heavens into their heads. They already have the heavens in their heads — that’s what poetry is. The presence of heaven informs their minds, which is the very definition of sanity.

Tom Bombadil is J.R.R. Tolkien’s absolute metaphor for pure poesis — the Divine making. The world was created through poesis — speaking Divine words: “Let there be light. And it was light.” This is poetry at its pinnacle.

Tom Bombadil, who calls himself “the Elder,” was the first one to see the first dust of the universe. He is the pure poesis, the speaking of the world into being. The world is still held together by poetry.

“He [The Son of God] holds everything together with his powerful word.” Hebrews 1:3

Tom Bombadil is unaffected by the One Ring. He is immune to insanity. He is like the awakened Neo in The Matrix who is able to see the code behind the world. The code is poetry. He sees it and speaks it — 24/7. He knows that the world is spun from words. He doesn’t look for words; words look for him.

Winnie-the-Pooh’s head is also in that word-heaven. He famously said,

“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.”

Winnie-the-Pooh is another paragon of sanity. His every sentence is just as silly and whimsical as Tom Bombadil’s and yet they reveal incredible profundity of perception.

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”

Behind his hilarious puns hides a world of meaning. Obviously, nothing is not nothing, it is everything. It is something full of potentiality. It’s the womb of the world. That’s what poets do 24/7 — birth the world into being through speaking. Speaking out of nothing. That’s how God created the world.

Winnie-the-Pooh took words out of Heidegger’s mouth (or the other way around), who said that “nothing” is inextricably connected to being.

His “Das Nichts nichtet” means “The nothing nothings” — nothing is not merely the absence of something but an active force. A poet does nothing every day — because he does everything. Winnie-the-Pooh’s nothing is everything, just like Tom Bombadils silly songs are nothing, and yet they order the Old Forest.

Old Man Willow obeys Tom’s silly song because Tom is Master. He is Master because he knows how the universe is ordered and run. It is ordered and run through words. He goes around his realm, he picks flowers for Goldberry, he talks to the trees — he does “nothing.” Every day. He is too connected to being to waste his time on trifles.

Sanity is art. Sanity isn’t the thing you get; it’s the thing that gets you when you leave the trifles of the world and do the only productive thing in the world — the nothing of Tom Bombadil and Winnie-the-Pooh.

Check out my 3rd book in the Mystical Vision of the Inklings series Daily Spiritual Readings from Literature Classics.