There is a bookshop down a cobbled street where, as a boy, I discovered Narnia, Middle Earth, and the Norse, Greek and Arthurian myths as retold by Roger Lancelyn Green. For almost forty years now, I have had a recurring dream about this shop, in which it boasts an extra room - an evocative, lamplit space with an atmosphere of calm and serenity and the faint but discernable aroma of incense.
In the dream, I am looking for the Magician's Book which Lucy encounters in The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, and in particular the story she reads about 'a cup, a sword, a tree, and a green hill.' Lewis describes it as 'the loveliest story she has ever read', and I know it's on the shelves somewhere, but just as Lucy is not allowed to turn back the pages to reread it, so I always wake up before I can find it.
Yet I never feel bereft or cast down afterwards. On the contrary, it feels immensely reassuring to know that such a book and such a room exist. But where? On what level? These are questions I have been mulling over for decades now. Until recently, I have tended to interpret the dream as either a symptom of deep nostalgia or as a shaft of insight into the Platonic reality of the bookshop - its inner form and essence.
Lately, however, I have started to suspect that the dream might be less to do with nostalgic pangs or a static Platonic order and more about a physical reality which will tangibly appear in the world at some point - what the theologian John Zizioulas calls 'a memory of the future.' Again, the level on which this will happen is open to debate, and God alone knows what turns of fortune's wheel we might have to endure or enjoy between now and then. But that the vision will be made manifest and the bookshop will one day look and feel as it does in my dream is something of which I am increasingly certain.
The Holy City, St. John says, will come down from God out of Heaven like a bride adorned for the bridegroom. So it isn't just individuals who will be redeemed and transfigured on the Last Day but the whole material creation, towns and cities very much included - streets, squares, houses, office blocks, shops, everything.
This eschatological understanding, I feel, fits better with the tone and content of my dream than either the nostalgic or the Platonic interpretations. 'Indeed,' as Aslan assures Lucy, 'I will read that story to you for years and years.' It is the dynamic Platonism we see at play in The Last Battle, where the protagonists journey 'farther up and farther in', into the heart of the Great Story we all long to read and hear, 'which goes on forever, and in which every chapter is better than the one before.'
And the meaning of the story is the Author of the story. The Author is the story, the Alpha and the Omega, for in the beginning, as St. John also shows us, was the Word ...
*In what way* may these things come to pass? - That's the big question, isn't it. It may be something like the coming to pass of marriage or having children - which we may have dreamed of and yearned for. The actuality is (at its best) a fulfillment of imagination, and yet different from imagination - because we have become different people than when we were day-dreaming. I think it may be like that - it will capture that exact yearning and bring it to an exact fulfilment and satisfaction; but in ways that cannot at present be imagined.
ReplyDeleteThanks Bruce. I've always been impressed by the emphasis placed in Orthodox theology on the future transfiguration and regeneration of the material world - the idea of the 'Eighth Day.' We don't reflect on this enough in the West, I feel.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how it will come to pass to be honest, but in a sense it has already come to pass - in the future - and it's that future that's propelling us on and drawing us towards it and to God. 'Farther up and further in.'
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