Cruciform

"And the angel showed me, flowing from the throne and the Lamb and God the water of life, situated in the midst of the street at the heart of the city, along with the flourishing of the tree of life".

Revelation 22:1 & 2.

So this week we were provided with a debate between the likes of Francis Collins and Richard Dawkins on the validity of MRNA vaccinations, the worth of evolution, and the question of the existence of God. After finding common (woefully predictable) ground on the first two, the debaters came pretty close to some level of consensus on the possibilities of the third, at least until Mr Dawkins began to refute the "total nonsense" of the miraculous aspects of Christianity, and especially the notion of something as ridiculous as the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus being the actual cornerstone of a relationship with God.

After floundering on morally-related issues, Collins merely affirmed what, presumably, he believed, which was clearly unsatisfactory for Richard Dawkins.

So that's that, then - nothing more to say.

Enter the latest work - The Truth and the Beauty - by one Andrew Klavan.

Mr Klavan has produced a work on the English Romantic poets that will stop you in your tracks. Whilst he's not right on everything (his Reformation history and his analysis of Science Fiction could do with some refinement), his central theme and the manner in which he unpacks this is a magnum opus for the 2020's.

Which brings us to the Cross.

In the central chapter of the book entitled The Gate to the Garden, the author examines the material of the joint work by Coleridge and Wordsworth in the original publication of Lyrical Ballads. In his concluding section on Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he makes the following observation:

Aside from the beauty of its language and the nightmare brilliance of its imagery, the genius of the poem lies in the way it locates the Christian mythos in the imagination of man. The senseless killing of the 'Christian soul' of the albatross with the crossbow; the fickle passions of the crew like the mob outside Jesus' trial; the interior change of mind that reveals nature through love; the love that frees the mariner to pray so that the body of the bird that hangs around his neck like a cross falls off; the redemption of the dead - it is all as Coleridge was showing us that even if Christ had never died, the truth of His life, crucifixion and resurrection would still be the shape of our perceptions because it is the logos built into nature.

The Gospel is the underlying reality of reality and would be murkily apparent in the interplay of nature and our imaginations even if it has not been revealed clearly in history and scripture.

That, to borrow from Paul's statement to the Philosopher's at Mars Hill, is indeed what all men everywhere are seeking to 'feel their way towards', which is why so much of what is best in art and rime, whilst not blind to our troubles, also seeks to point us to the need to reach for the good, to hope for the day of redemption.

It is indeed sad when the notions which we deem best blind or block us from growing in such a splendour.