3. The Status of the Soul of the World. Platonic Politics and Narnia

This from the archive of the renegade biophysicist Kurk Wold who disappeared. His papers keep turning up in amazing places as if timed ... As far as can be told this was the fifth or sixth such treatments we must call Duality World

“For the deity, intending to make this world like the fairest and most  perfect of intelligible beings, framed one visible animal comprehending within itself all other animals of a kindred nature”(Timaeus, 1163).

It is unexpected that Platonism would be a  politics when it is also a religion, abstracted somewhat, but religion still of beliefs in pagan entities so called and the finding of these in Christian beliefs and texts. That religion is politics ought to prepare us to see our own time when belief in liberty, truth, rights and all those deconstucts is held more fervently than any revivalists, but facetiously, without an experience base, just as abstracts, hence properly called, demonic. To call Platonism a religion/politics of demons then brings us to the longing for the tales of gold when "the world was young," so called, and its invention of the excellence of fairy was not to doubt, even if it never existed. Lewis believed it more than he could admit, for it is appealing to think trees and animals can talk, that invisible beings are figments of our better selves lost. This Platonism, where the worlds of idea and archetype break through into our mundane, is the crux of Tolkien's upset with Lewis adopting Charles Williams' excursion of The Place of the Lion (1931) as an engineered technique and perspective foisted on Lewis' own fiction, Hideous Strength (1945) and Narnia.  Tolkien felt Lewis had left the more pristine Jack, the Old English view, meaning Aristotle for the platonic, the romantic, the Latinate. The point of course is the loss. 

 Cornelius Agrippa

The half dwarf informant in Prince Caspian is named Cornelius, after Cornelius Agrippa supposed. Jack (C.S.), who was a profane Jack in real life, tells it as if to children, but he addresses adult Platonism in the opening pages of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), but did not openly admit taking it from Agrippa. Those of that name signed here, should take comfort if they seek such, that Agrippa found refuge with a John Reiff, as acknowledged in 1523 at Friburg, where "the physician had a cordial patron in a citizen, John Reiff" (109). The level of heresy this implies depends on whether one takes the first or the last of Agrippa's thought, for Agrippa is a paradigm of the demonic/platonic the way Edwardo Galeano is of the revolutionary/reactionary, rejecting his earlier thought the way Agrippa does his, denouncing the former approaches for, "as early as 1525 and again as late as 1533 (two years before his death) Agrippa clearly and unequivocally rejected magic in its totality, from its sources in imagined antiquity to contemporary practice... in the deceits of devils, according to the operation of wicked spirits presume to divine and prophesy, and practising through magical vanities, exorcisms, incantions and other demoniacal works and deceits of idolatry, boasting of delusions, and phantasms, presently ceasing, brag that they can do miracles." 

What that means is he renounced the demonic, but not what he called the more benign Platonic. Naturally this is disputed by the Opposites, those scholars who doubt the nose on your face because it is not their own, but Agrippa's reputation in dispute among the egg minds is founded on magic even if he left it behind, much as Jack Kemp's life in the U.S. senate is based on football.

Goofy Sword in the Stone

It takes a long time living with renaissance Platonists to take them seriously, which is not fun, or is, depending on whether their thoughts are seen leaking into all sorts of ideas and places. The fun comes partly from finally being able to read and partly to comprehend the thing itself without their nasty (angelic) deceptions to rationalize. It you have not yet learned to read and comprehend like this persevere, it can come. The country of Aslan the Lion, was "of the Waking Trees and visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts" (Prince Caspian (1951) 47). The charm of Lewis' Narnia is that once the premise of fairy is taken life goes on in a terrestrial manner much as it always did with character, adventure and perfunctory intrusion. Lewis the scholar but not the prophet has not changed all the world by overturning everything once believed (as did the Telmarines). Is it because the invisible is ineffable if known, hence remains invisible, and cannot be retold to the known world by the unknown, to the flesh by the spirit? Indeed what need be said for it is a world that simply must be done, not thought, as in the Revelation among the churches, but not among "the race who cut down trees wherever they could and were at war with all wild things" (Caspian, 60), to bring together highly disparate things. At least until Caspian is hit on the head and thrown into their midst of the badger and the dwarves, he is as the modern thrown into the midst of wars of angels of the abyss against the saints and their coming King. In this analogy to other worlds visible and invisible, Caspian's engagement with the animals, badgers, etc. is like T. H. White's Once and Future King; the two are related in more than a species of bestiary. Evidently little trail for this exists, but it could exist for goofy in the Sword in the Stone. For The Book of Merlyn it seems chapter and verse. The beasts became Caspian's friends in this commerce. To otherwise invoke such worlds Lewis would have had to converse with John Dee, his spirits, and Madimi, who admittedly he said were fatuous. When St. John, Ezekiel and Isaiah talked with angels, which would be the counterpart of this invisible, they were overwhelmed.

The anima of nature is like a dance (Davies' Orchestra) , or a huge animal breathing, a ceremony tingling with the life of the "prophetic soul of the wide world." People sometimes think they see the  face of this anima mundi dancing in the sun (C. S. Lewis, English Literature of the Sixteenth Century, citing Chapman, 4). Neoplatonists invented a whole crowd "of beings...theologically neutral," he says (9), who inhabited "the region between earth and moon crowded with airy creatures who are capable of fertile unions with our own species" (Lewis of Drayton, 10). These neutral beings Lewis called 'an even older Narnia" of "strange characters and snaky patterns" (Caspian, 85). That the scholar and the fantastic are one leaves room for all to expose. The first essence of the Elizabethan he says was this explosion of  fantasy, paradox and color which for the next century became an imaginative "efflorescence of forbidden or phantasmal arts" (6) where "Bercilak resumes his severed head" [Sir Gawain and the Green Knight] (8).  

Platonic Politics

Our fate is to witness this Platonic theology applied to politics. The Florentine Platonists, Ficino, Pico, were wholly pious in intent. Ficino, a priest, burned his commentary on Lucretius (11) just because it depopulated  invisible beings from the universe. Theologues had a dream of power to bring the invisible realm to bear upon the political. Knowledge for the sake of power preoccupied Bacon, Paracelsus, Dee, Machiavelli and all European thought. In their megalomania they thought Soul power justified anything because it was "being in proportion superior to the world." Thus they ordered the extinction. Read this either as extinction of the invisible world or of the visible. Why can't the two coexist? Why must they annihilate each other? It is a theological question. You would not believe that the whole purpose of science is to manifest this Platonic spiritual world to the physical, filtered always through its megalomania for power. This purpose of science would call itself the whole purpose of existence. You would not believe that even if I said it in Opiomes, or in HistoPossum, or in the Severed Head. So I won't. If there are three terms, the visible, the invisible, the megalomania, there is also a fourth, the true man who opposes supernatural coitus, cosmic intercourse. I think it is our purpose to find him. Charles Upton takes the chain of being and its loss most seriously in his Cracks In the Wall.

The irony is it took a mere 300 years to undo and then redo all that classical science and myth described in the universe. First to the undo, Lewis says "new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold. This process, slowly working, ensured during the next century the loss of the old mythical imagination." (16th Century, 4). The result of this denuding of forces, planets and nature of their tutelary beings was that pure mathematical science of empiricism that allowed nothing but itself. So how does it occur that after disestablishing myth science would invent even greater myths, that man was god, would recreate life forms long extinct, that artificial intelligence would rule human life, hybrid life forms replace the natural, that life for the elite would be endlessly prolonged (they called this immortality), that ancient existences of spiritual beings would be invoked by corporations and government. 

Is that not remything as an absolute? Wood, Lewis-Tolkien tension here

Through the history of the world the main point, commerce and the commercial, has been obscured by art, beauty, truth, as if these were distractions invented by powers so they could go on about their business. What is their business? The buying and selling of souls in all ways. This is the essence of the corruption that preoccupied the patriarchs and prophets. The buying and selling of favor, religion, blood, children, women, highs, goods and services. So the picture of commerce in Revelation 18 is a summation of all those practices, except of course they have been added too in the 20 some centuries concluding.

Now go to The Fall of Jerusalem 
and Building Jerusalem vs. the Divine Gates