Confessing Evangelical

Last week, the Guardian reprinted part of its original 1977 review of Star Wars. (Note: none of that revisionist "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope" nonsense round here, please. The film's name is Star Wars. Two words. Got that? Thank you.)

The review opens with some lines quoted in the production notes for the film, taken from Arthur Conan Doyle's preface to The Lost World:

"I have wrought my simple plan
If I give some hour of joy
To the boy who's half a man
Or the man who's half a boy"

As the reviewer (Derek Malcolm) points out, that "about sums up the picture, except that it gives some two hours of joy, and will probably also be appreciated by girls who are half women and women who are half girls too".

And talking of Derek Malcolm and Star Wars, one thing that film demonstrates is the power of a good soundtrack (both in terms of music and "peow! peow!" noises). A few years ago, I read a piece in which Malcolm described seeing an early cut of Star Wars, before the music and sound effects were added.

George Lucas asked him what he thought, and Malcolm replied, "You've made a very nice little film. I'm sure you'll make your money back". Then Lucas went off and finished the audio track to the film, and - well, we all know what happened next, don't we?

Bunnie asked for my comments on today's reports about government plans to monitor every car journey made in the UK.

All I can offer you is what I told her - this sucks. I mean, what else is there to say?

For more insightful and incisive comments on this and many other issues - watch this space. :-)

Rick Ritchie puts in a spirited defence of Aslan over at Daylight, in particular defending Lewis' choice of a lion to represent Christ:

Lion and lamb are both symbols of Jesus. But they don't stand for the same things. The lion is royal. The lamb is sacrificial. Is humanity in itself more lionish or lambish? I would argue lionish, even if it is a condescension for God to become man. Likewise, it is surely a condescension for the son of the Emperor to become a lion. But the lion does convey royal prerogatives.

Or, to put it another way, the Son of God became a human being, not an animal (hence Psalm 8's dual reference to humanity in general and Jesus in particular - or rather, Jesus' fulfilment of Psalm 8 as the true man, made a little lower than the angels but crowned with glory and honour, with all things under his feet).

All true, which is why I was not siding wholeheartedly with Gopnik in my previous post on this subject. As I said in the comments to that post, "I remain a big fan of Aslan" - if putting it like that isn't too irreverent, bearing in mind Rick's comments on ectypes and archetypes :-).

Thinking about it further, it's not that Lewis made a bad choice in selecting a Lion to represent Christ. However, I do think (and I think I can be guilty of this myself) that it is possible for Christians to like Aslan for (at least partly) the wrong reasons. Which of us has not at times wished that Christ and his gospel were a little bit more, well, obviously impressive? There is no reason for any Narnian to feel remotely embarrassed, ashamed or defensive about their allegiance to Aslan - the White Witch and her hordes oppose Aslan and seek to defeat him, but they don't question his credentials.

I think it was JI Packer who made the point that the Christian proclamation is not just that "Jesus is Lord", but - more importantly - that "Jesus is Lord". In other words, the Lordship of the incarnate and crucified Son of God challenges not only human lordships, but human concepts of lordship. While Aslan is a wonderful symbol for Christ in many ways, that is one respect in which he is perhaps lacking.

Radio 3's Bach Christmas season is reaching its halfway mark today (see previous post). The RealAudio stream can be found here if you want to hear how it's going (though the connection can be a bit wobbly at times - or perhaps its just my ISP playing up tonight).

Like a test match, it's probably best to dip in and out of this as you feel like it. Even some particularly devoted fans of JSB inform me that they are flagging a bit. But it's undoubtedly a Great Cultural Event™, it will (to be hideously cynical for a moment) do the BBC no harm at all in its Charter renewal negotiations over the coming months, and, as my mum was pointing out at the weekend, at least it's got rid of the jazz for a couple of weeks...

Interesting interview with Richard M Stallman (or "RMS"), founder of the Free Software Movement and lead developer of the GNU operating system that forms the backbone of the system normally referred to as "Linux", on the subject of "Free Software as a Social Movement".

Good background on what motivated the development of the free software movement and how this contrasts with the motives behind "open source" software (see end of post for further comments on the distinction between these terms). First up, RMS's explanation of what "free" software is (formatting added):

The basic idea of the Free Software Movement is that the user of software deserves certain freedoms. There are four essential freedoms, which we label freedoms 0 through 3:

• Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the software as you wish.
  


• Freedom 1 is the freedom to study and change the source code as you wish.
  


• Freedom 2 is the freedom to copy and distribute the software as you wish.
  


• And freedom 3 is the freedom to create and distribute modified versions as you wish.

In other words, it's free as in free speech, not free as in free lunch.

These four freedoms give users "full control of their own computers", and allow users and developers to "cooperate in a community". RMS continues:

Non-free software, by contrast, keeps users divided and helpless. It is distributed in a social scheme designed to divide and subjugate. The developers of non-free software have power over their users, and they use this power to the detriment of users in various ways. It is common for non-free software to contain malicious features, features that exist not because the users want them, but because the developers want to force them on the users. The aim of the free software movement is to escape from non-free software.

Hence the development of GNU, as a free operating system, so as to give users a basic practical freedom: the freedom to turn your computer on and run it without needing somebody else's permission to do so.

If you haven't heard of GNU - the acronym stands for "GNU's Not Unix" - that's because it is usually referred to as "Linux", after the kernel whose development by Linus Torvalds was a key aspect of turning GNU into a workable system, but which was not developed as part of the GNU project. A large part of any "Linux" system consists of GNU software (see here for a full list of GNU programs), so that the overall system is more properly referred to as "GNU/Linux" rather than just "Linux". (Stallman can get quite heated about this...)

Anyway. The point is that this is the major difference between "free software" (as championed by RMS and the Free Software Foundation) and "open source software" (promoted by the likes of Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond). While the two terms are often treated as synonymous, there is a fundamental difference of attitude between the two camps.

"Open source" advocates promote such software as being more "powerful, reliable, convenient, cheap, and fun" than proprietary software - all of which is true, as I can testify after a weekend of being driven to near-insanity using my parents' Windows XP computers - but, Stallman argues, this is missing the point:

Most people talking about [GNU/Linux], though, never mentioned that it was about freedom. They never thought about it that way. And so our work spread to more people than our ideas did.

Indeed, Stallman argues that people should be prepared to "sacrifice some power and convenience" in return for the freedom given by free software - the fact that GNU/Linux systems have been consistently shown to be more powerful and stable than their proprietary rivals is nice, but not the essential point of free software. This is in contrast to open source advocates, whose arguments revolve around more immediately pragmatic issues of cost, power, security and reliability.

RMS also argues that "if you are against the globalization of business power, you should be for free software". Not that this means he is against "globalization" (that ever-flexible term!) as such:

People who say they are against globalization are really against the globalization of business power. They are not actually against globalization as such, because there are other kinds of globalization, the globalization of cooperation and sharing knowledge, which they are not against. Free software replaces business power with cooperation and the sharing of knowledge.

Globalizing a bad thing makes it worse. Business power is bad, so globalizing it is worse. But globalizing a good thing is usually good. Cooperation and sharing of knowledge are good, and when they happen globally, they are even better.

Not surprisingly, Stallman describes himself as "a Liberal, in US terms (not Canadian terms)", adding that:

I'm not for equality of outcomes. I want to prevent horrible outcomes. But aside from keeping people safe from excruciating outcomes, I believe some inequality is unavoidable.

For Stallman's other thoughts - on why it is an imposition on somebody's freedom to send them a .doc file, and on the biggest current threats to computer freedom (secret specifications, software patents and "trusted/treacherous computing"), you'll have to read the rest of the interview.

Edit: It has been suggested in the comments that more explanation of the difference between "free software" and "open source software" would be helpful. The difference is mainly one of motivation and intent, and for most practical purposes the terms are probably interchangeable. Programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org and Apache are examples of software that is both "free" and "open source".

As noted above, "free software" advocates are motivated by the desire to give users and developers of computer software greater freedom, even if this results in a (hopefully temporary) inability to perform some tasks that can only be achieved by proprietary software. "Open source" advocates take a more pragmatic line based on the assertion that the open source method of software development results in better, cheaper, more reliable software - but where proprietary software is better, they will have no principled objection to using it.

As for me, my heart is for free software, but my head suspects that the open source movement has probably done more to popularise free software and bring it into the mainstream. And if actions speak louder than words, my hard-drive (with its non-free software such as Adobe Reader, Real Player and Java Runtime Environment) exposes me as an open source pragmatist rather than a free software purist.

On the other hand, while Richard Stallman may be seen by some as an "extremist" who risks driving away mainstream computer users, arguably in this as in many other spheres it is the "extremists" who create the space in which the "pragmatists" can then operate - in this case both literally (since open source software would be greatly hampered without GNU) and metaphorically (since open source advocates can pitch themselves as the moderate centrists, between the warring camps of free and proprietary zealots).

On a lighter, but still Narnia-related, note, Zoe Williams (of all people) came out with rather a refreshing column on this subject in the Guardian last week. With articles such as Polly Toynbee's recent "huff" in her sights, Williams comments that:

It bothers me that there seems to be no discussion of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that isn't prefixed with "Besides the dodgy Christian subtext" or "Dodgy religious allegory aside". The critical variations are many, the only constant being the word dodgy, as if Christianity were inherently unsound, as if it had, without our noticing, ascended to the ranks of anachronistic wrong-headedness, like Nazism or hissing at single mothers.

(Let's set to one side the obvious point that "Christianity is as inherently unsound as Nazism" is more or less the default Guardian position...)

Williams points out that the Christian parallels that some object to are only going to be noticed by those already familiar with the original biblical narratives. As for the objection that the series "equates raw, physical power with righteousness" (particularly in the depiction of Aslan), Williams observes that:

Maybe it's a crass rendering of the Christian message but, again, surely this is one for Christians to worry about? No one outside the religion needs to worry about its interpretation from within, unless one of its interpretations is "let's blow up all those outsiders".

As for the objection that the climactic battle scene is "reminiscent of the Crusades" (because Peter uses a sword), Williams describes this as "mindless offence-seeking".

As Williams concludes:

The Bible is a narrative blueprint for a lot of western culture - if everything referencing it is dodgy then the nativity is dodgy, a lot of Shakespeare is dodgy, some of The Archers is dodgy, everything is dodgy. To what do we object, then? That CS Lewis's allegories are too obvious? That there are too many of them? That he didn't bother disguising them, as Tolkien did?

Anyone holding to this "dodgy" orthodoxy, especially those who don't explain why, is treating Christianity as inherently underhand. This is unfair to all Christians, not just hardliners. And it is not the time of year to be unfair to Christians. We've pinched their festival. We can hardly talk about "underhand".

Oh, and anyone taking issue at Williams' statement about non-Christians having pinched a Christian festival ("blah, blah, Saturnalia, blah blah, appropriated by early Christians, blah blah") should check out this post on the subject from last year.

A final point that interested me from Adam Gopnik's article on CS Lewis, "Prisoner of Narnia" (see previous post), is his criticism of Aslan as a depiction of Christ. Aslan is, suggests Gopnik, "a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son — not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure":

Beautiful and brave and instantly attractive, he has a deep voice and a commanding presence, obviously kingly. The White Witch conspires to have him killed, and succeeds, in part because of the children’s errors. Miraculously, he returns to life, liberates Narnia, and returns the land to spring.

But as Gopnik points out (with what is actually quite a Lutheran, theology-of-the-cross vs theology-of-glory argument):

[A] central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey.

The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible — a donkey who re-emerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation — now, that would be a Christian allegory.

A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

This calls to mind Revelation 5:5,6: when we turn to look at the conquering Lion of Judah, what we see is in fact "a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered".

Personally, I have some sympathy with what Gopnik is saying here - not least because I've always found the death and resurrection of Aslan (i.e. the "deep magic" and "deeper magic" chapters of TLTWATW) one of the most allegorically clunky parts of the whole Narnia series, and much prefer the more oblique stuff in The Horse and His Boy or, especially, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

DS Ketelby drew my attention recently to an article by New Yorker "critic-at-large" Adam Gopnik, entitled "Prisoner of Narnia: How CS Lewis Escaped". Now, in some ways this is an astonishingly ungenerous and sour treatment of Lewis (drawing heavily on the AN Wilson account of Lewis' life, particularly his sex-life), but there are some good insights in there as well.

First, Gopnik observes how the adulation for CS Lewis among many American Christians (for whom he has become a figure literally "incised on stained glass") may be more counter-productive for his legacy than the general apathy towards him in England, at least outside conservative evangelical circles:

Lewis is defended, analyzed, protected, but always in the end vindicated, while his detractors are mocked at length: a kind of admiration not so different in its effects from derision.

Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the enthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws another right hook at the rationalist that they don’t notice that the rationalist isn’t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends have long since left the building.

A second interesting point made by Gopnik relates to how Lewis' faith informed his writings as a professor of English literature, and in particular how Lewis (in his book, The Allegory of Love) makes "a profound historical argument about the literary imagination" when he describes a fundamental change that occurred in Western literature during the Renaissance. Gopnik writes:

Until the time of Tasso and Ariosto, [Lewis] points out, writers had two worlds available to them: the actual world of experience and the world of their religion. Only since the Renaissance had writers had a third world, of the marvellous, of free mythological invention, which is serious but in which the author does not really believe or make an article of faith.

He then quotes Lewis as follows:

The probable, the marvelous-taken-as-fact, the marvelous-known-to-fiction — such is the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet. Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to. ...

But this triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it. At the beginning the only marvels are the marvels which are taken for fact. ... The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils. ... Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its “third world” of romantic imagining. ...

The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth.

When we sit down to write a romance, then, we make up elves and ghosts and wraiths and wizards, in whom we don’t believe but in whom we enclose our most urgent feelings, and we demand that the world they inhabit be consistent and serious.

This is reminiscent of Chesterton's argument in his biography of St Francis of Assisi, that it took the thousand years of the Dark Ages to cleanse Nature of its pagan associations, so that Francis could then take that same Nature and employ it in praise of its Creator.

The final point from Gopnik's article is a bit more controversial, so I'll save that for my next post - to follow shortly.

Then build yourself a snowman.

Reasons to love the BBC, #3,594: Radio 3 is marking the four hundredth anniversary of JS Bach's birth by playing his Bach's complete works over the next ten days over ten days starting on Friday 16th December. Details, and a full schedule, can be found here. The Radio 3 site also has a Bach Advent calendar, which plays a piece for each day of December.

The Guardian marks the occasion with a G2 special on Christmas with Bach. Articles include:

• Various members of the great and the good, Guardian division - Andrew Marr, Germaine Greer, Alain de Botton and, erm, Suzi Quattro - answer the question, What's so good about Bach, then?
  


• John Butt on The universal musician.
  


• John Eliot Gardiner explains why he embarked on a "pilgrimage" to record all 200 of Bach's cantatas, in Sir John's passion. JEG's recordings of the B Minor Mass - aka "the greatest musical artwork of all times and people" - and St Matthew Passion are essential listening.
  


• Once you've finished listening to the B Minor Mass and St Matthew Passion, the Guardian has a page of recommended recordings/downloads.

I'll see you in, oh, eleven days or so...

Errata: It would be quicker to list what I got right in the opening sentence of this post. Corrections now made - that'll teach me to post first thing on Monday morning, pre-coffee...