Allegorical Interpretation

Themes: Art and Imagination, Selections

[For my mum, because I was thinking of her on Mother's Day]

I don’t know how many times my mother read the Pilgrim’s Progress to me when I was young. It was certainly enough that the story has become part of how I process my experience of the Christian life. And that is precisely what it is meant to do! Because of Bunyan, I think of the Christian life as a particular kind of journey, I have fallen into sloughs, been ensnared by Flattery, imprisoned by Despair.

The ‘normal’ fiction that we regularly read engages our interest by opening a window through which we can indwell another person’s world. That experience is often powerfully transformative: we learn to see our shared world from angles that weren’t previously available. Fiction is our ethical workshop. Between the pages of books (or between advertising breaks) we develop shared views of ‘the good life’, we construct characters who embody our ideas of virtue, and then we watch them try to solve our ethical dilemmas. Without this kind of imagining, we would not have society. People who refuse to read novels or watch TV are free-loaders in the world of communal deliberation.
[Fortunately, they are often good at fixing stuff and paying taxes, otherwise the Philosophers of the Future would be forced to enslave them for their own good]

But an allegory isn’t fiction. At least, not in the ‘normal’ sense. Rather than being a window onto someone else’s world, it is a mirror, a looking-glass, through which we indwell our own experience in a new way. John Bunyan doesn’t tell us someone else’s story and invite us to watch and learn, he tells us our own story with a form and completeness which had previously been hidden. The character ‘Christian’ isn’t a figure who is more or less like myself, engaged in activities that are more or less like my own. If I am a christian, he is me. Actually, he is a ‘hyper-me’. He is more real than I am. Christian is me, viewed from a God’s-eye perspective, viewed with the truthful gaze of an ultimate knower. The narrator knows Christian in a way that I wish I knew myself. As I read, Bunyan expects me to interrogate my own experiences rather than Christian’s, and to consider how I am more or less like Christian, and whether my own activities are more or less like his. In reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, I am learning the narrator’s knowledge of myself.

In a ‘normal’ work of fiction, I observe and judge the characters, that’s how I engage in the ethical workshop. But in an allegory, the characters judge me. They teach me the form in which I am to interpret my story, and the norms by which I am to engage in it.

It’s interesting to note that Bunyan’s allegory only works if there is some sense in which every christian’s story, is Christian’s story. It’s an idea that challenges us right at the heart of our ethical and ontological pluralism. For Bunyan, as for the early Church Fathers who engaged in allegorical interpretation of the Bible, we don’t live fundamentally individual existences, given a superficial commonality by the pressures of convenience or environmental and cultural necessity. We are not solitary knowers, we are the unified known.
There is one basic story, the true truth about each one of us, which is refracted and tinted according to our personal, natural, and social topography. That story is the gospel, its character is Christ.

One of my favourite scenes in The Pilgrim’s Progress is the final stage of the journey. Christian and his companion Hopeful are heading up to the Celestial city and are confronted by a final obstacle: a deep and fast flowing river which they must pass through to reach their destination. The image conjures up the Israelites passing through the Red Sea in the Exodus, overlaid with the crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land. It is the river where Jesus commenced his ministry, walking at the head of his people into the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the river where the Negro slaves in America’s deep South stood and prayed that Elijah’s chariot would swing low and carry them home. It is the river of death that leads to life. For them, and probably for us, there is no chariot. We must pass through it.
What I love about this scene, however, is the support which Hopeful gives to Christian as his faith threatens to give way. How many times I have needed a friend like Hopeful! Someone to say to me when I can’t believe, “Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good.” How little did Christian realise that with the hand of a friend, his Father held him tight.

Lord, give us grace to follow.
God, give us the grace to walk home with our friends, rather than ride home with Elijah.

They then addressed themselves to the water and, entering, Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he said, I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all his waves go over me! Selah.

Then said the other, Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good.

Then said Christian, Ah! my friend, the sorrows of death hath compassed me about; I shall not see the land that flows with milk and honey; and with that a great darkness and horror fell upon Christian, so that he could not see before him. Also here he in great measure lost his senses, so that he could neither remember nor orderly talk of any of those sweet refreshments that he had met with in the way of his pilgrimage. But all the words that he spake still tended to discover that he had horror of mind, and heart fears that he should die in that river, and never obtain entrance in at the gate. Here also, as they that stood by perceived, he was much in the troublesome thoughts of the sins that he had committed, both since and before he began to be a pilgrim. It was also observed that he was troubled with apparitions of hobgoblins and evil spirits, for ever and anon he would intimate so much by words.

Hopeful, therefore, here had much ado to keep his brother’s head above water; yea, sometimes he would be quite gone down, and then, ere a while, he would rise up again half dead. Hopeful also would endeavour to comfort him, saying, Brother, I see the gate, and men standing by to receive us: but Christian would answer, It is you, it is you they wait for; you have been Hopeful ever since I knew you.

And so have you, said he to Christian.

Ah! brother! said he, surely if I was right he would now arise to help me; but for my sins he hath brought me into the snare, and hath left me.

Then said Hopeful, My brother, you have quite forgot the text, where it is said of the wicked, “There are no bands in their death, but their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men. [Ps. 73:4,5] These troubles and distresses that you go through in these waters are no sign that God hath forsaken you; but are sent to try you, whether you will call to mind that which heretofore you have received of his goodness, and live upon him in your distresses.

Then I saw in my dream, that Christian was as in a muse a while. To whom also Hopeful added this word, Be of good cheer, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole; and with that Christian brake out with a loud voice, Oh, I see him again! and he tells me, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.” [Isa. 43:2] Then they both took courage, and the enemy was after that as still as a stone, until they were gone over. Christian therefore presently found ground to stand upon, and so it followed that the rest of the river was but shallow.

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Love in Inconstant Times

Themes: Forgiveness, Love, Selections

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
(Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI)

The young love to fall in love in spring. It’s not hard to understand why. One hundred million tons of sap leap into the air, erupting into leaves and flowers. Pulses quicken, sleepers awake. There is an ozone in the atmosphere, like the afterburn of lightning, the smell of resurrections. The intoxicating madness of it all masks the madness of falling in love. It is a seasonal form of Dutch courage, a pull from the whiskey flask before barrelling out of the trenches and into the discriminating exposure of bullets. Spring is when Kings march out to War. Spring is when the froth in his blood just might make a young man risk a blushing rebuff to hear himself say the words, “So…
…”
Or reach across the acres of armrest in a darkend theatre, the outstretched finger of faith, to discover a hand that says ‘yes’. And in that touch, in that minutest square millimetre of epidermis, to discover one hundred million tons of sap rushing, leaves and flowers leaping, suns dying and rising, a hail of bullets and a surgeons knife. And he sits there in the dark with his barest fingerhold on love, and shakes and shakes and forgets to breathe.

Summer is for camping out, for savouring love, watching its colours turn to deep and green, while the land and air rock and uphold you. Summer is full of the self-forgetfulness upon which love thrives.

Later, when the air is hard-edged and the truth is plain, in Winter, we put the games away because we have less need for fun, and more joy of each other. We carry each other’s love around with us: your smell in my scarf, your embrace in the heaviness of my coat, your hand in my pocket. I grow old every winter. We bed the fire down in its hearth and sit by and doze.

But how do we love in Autumn?
It’s my favourite, but the most difficult of seasons. It’s the season least conducive to love. With a great sigh, the leaves relinquish their last hold and fall. Their breath swirls through the streets, early with darkness. Those who can hear surprise themselves weeping. And a man’s thoughts turn to doubting. It’s an acquired taste I suppose.
How do we love in Autumn?
With constancy. In the season of swirling, lovers hold themselves steady. Constancy is a form of attention that resists the autumnal impulse toward introspection by turning our gaze outward onto another. In a loving constancy, we pledge ourselves to a fundamental steadiness in this relationship: to constancy in pursuit (not trying to win a woman’s heart one week and being cold to her the next); to constancy in forgiveness (when a bloke blows hot and cold to you); to constancy of seeking good (not conditional on how you’re feeling or how it is received); to constancy of receiving good (not placing conditions on how we respond to each other, weighing past rights and wrongs before delighting in a renewed attention).

What is the first positive assertion Paul ventures about love in 1 Cor 13?
“Love is patient.”
And what is the last?
“Love never ends.”

Constancy is the very essence of bravery, it makes soldiers into heroes, sinners into martyrs, and ordinary self-absorbed, crummy men and women into lovers.

But I think you can only really be constant in love when you know at the core of your being that what matters most about you is safe. You can’t be constant in love when you are constantly worried about protecting yourself from being hurt by lovers. However, the answer isn’t reckless self-disregard: martyrs aren’t suicides. Rather, they confess to us, along with the Apostle Paul, “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3 NIV). The real you, the one part you can’t afford to lose, is permanently and constantly safe. Whatever you might risk in love, you are not risking that. Whatever regard, or lack thereof, in which you are held; whatever heart-wrenching part of you might be broken when she loves you for a while but turns away; even if it breaks you so completely that it touches all your ability to ever love again – and that could happen – you are safe.

Christians are like most people in the world in that we aren’t really sure Who We Are (in the biggest sense of that question). But Christians are completely unlike other people in trusting that someone else does. Even if I become completely demented and my sense of self is utterly lost to me and others, I believe in Jesus. I believe that he remembers me, that he knows my true name. And when he speaks my name, I will remember myself. Perfect love drives out fear. “We love because He first loved us.” (1John 4:19 HCSB)

One more thing: constancy always needs honesty. Honesty gives constancy its value. Love without truth is always morally questionable. It’s the difference between forgiveness and indulgence. The constancy of God’s love for us is not that he ignored our sins, but that he forgave them. Forgiveness combines constancy-in-love with clear eyed honesty. Without the honesty, God’s love for us would always be morally questionable, or open to the suspicion that one day he might get sick of the lies and stop loving.
I think its the same for us. If constancy in love isn’t accompanied by truthfulness about our pains and delights, we will always be under suspicion that our love is just a sophisticated tolerance, or masochism, or an abuse of the other by preventing their change and growth toward the good. Constancy without honesty always leaves us doubting: if the truth were spoken would we still love the same?
And if we are to be good lovers in an Autumn season, there must be no room for doubts.

For now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror,
but then face to face.
Now I know in part, but then I will know fully,
as I am fully known.
Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
(1Corinthians 13:12–13 HCSB)

 

Image by geraldbrazeil

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