Unconfessions and Literature Part 7: Of the Dragonish Sort

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confession, French Revolution, King David, morality, sexual sin

He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself…he realized he was a monster cut off from the whole human race. An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he had always supposed.^[1]

Alas Eustace comes to himself. He sees the reflection and we are delighted with his providential journey to Aslan who alone removes those dragonish scales with his razor sharp claws:

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt…Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much I was very tender underneath now that I had no skin on – and threw me in the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone.^[2]

Post-modernity is not only religious tradition unhinged from reason, but it is truth unhinged from the absolute, sex unhinged from the moral order, and language unhinged from meaning. How are dragons to lose their scales in such a world?

Hamlet’s conundrum is our own. The Greek undercurrents of Shakespeare’s masterpiece have meaning in the same way as does Prometheus and Narcissus in our modern epoch. The Greeks are bearing gifts if we clear the dullness of our understanding. Like the prodigal son, Hamlet is narrative poetry without a proper ending. He left Horatio to tell the story and Christ has left us.

Only through the imagination, that sees the need of bread to have nothing to do with physical hunger; that can see a boy as a dragon, or trees that talk; can we make the proper confessions. Like the unexamined life….the unconfessed life is a life less than what we would hope and an extremely dangerous undertaking.

The End.

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

[2] C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Unconfessed Life and Literature Part 6: Of Mirrors, Pictures, and Other Such Reflective Tools

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confession, French Revolution, King David, morality, sexual sin

The days of Bauman’s candid confessions are over. Post-modernism is not only about going through the looking-glass but about holding forth a different sort of mirror; the reflection of Greek Narcissus in which one is not obsessed with self – but of the reflection of self. This portends many dangers for civilization for as long as persons, relationships, and cultures hold up, not a mirror of their true state, but an imagined state in which there is no need for confession because they are right with the moral order – then all is well. If we fail to give them affirmation of their acts as morally right—then we risk our very lives (and life is made up of many things including our livelihoods as bakers, photographers, and such).

Oscar Wilde

Deceiving ourselves is a risky business as Oscar Wilde points out in The Portrait of Dorian Grey for the painting takes on a life of its own, as the real Dorian continues in his youthful twenties for decades. He discovered the pictures strange power after breaking off his engagement to his fiancé when she declared she could no longer be an actor. He was only attracted to what her talents could offer his narcissism. Sweet and sincere in her love for Dorian, she wants nothing more than to leave acting and make a life with him. Once he perceived that she could add nothing to his self-image, he disposed of her at once. Upon arriving home, he sees the likeness of himself in the painting to appear cruel. The portrait is reflecting truth that cannot be tolerated, so to the attic it goes.

Oscar Wilde’s character goes on to live a life of hedonism, as prescribed in a yellow book given to him by Lord Henry, a demonic influence encouraging Dorian in decadence. He hides the painting in the attic where it continues over the years to grow hideous and ugly with each act of selfishness done by Dorian. At age thirty-eight, he shows his secret to the artist who painted it, at which point he is pleaded with to repent of his sin and destroy the painting. Instead, he murders the messenger, and hides the body. Loathing what he had become, Dorian finally destroys