Transposition

Towards Building a Re-Enchanted Model of the Cosmos

As we consider how to (and why we must) become re-enchanted, the first place we go is C.S. Lewis.

This is because Lewis has already charted the way. As the saying goes, if you are to correct a problem you must first recognize that the problem exists. And Lewis’s vision was so keen that he accurately assessed our current situation 80 years ago in The Abolition of Man.

Now, many capable people (let’s face it, they’ve also read Lewis) have pointed out the problems of our age—Paul Kingsnorth calls it The Machine Age though I think Tolkien beat him to the punch. Whatever the case it’s a punchy and useful name for a Nemesis—and so I’ll not linger on too long about it, but simply say: Whatever else the Machine Age implies, we can be sure it is fundamentally not a Human Age.

Man (that’s the good plain word we used to use for Mankind, which is another fine word we used to use for the more scientifically-accurate-with-shades-of-political-correctness word, Humankind, which is a currently adequate word that will soon wind up in the dump heap of Insensitive History to make room for whatever new word that will crop up, something like Transhumankind or some such muck. I don’t know, maybe that word is already being taught in schools and TikTok, but I live in the Midwest and we’re typically behind the newest things) is in the process of being abolished. Let the previous parenthetical statement serve as a micro-example of how the Machine Age trains us to abandon traditional words in order to further its tentacled goals.

Read this next part carefully, it’s a little fire-hosey, but I trust you’ll hold on: The abolition of Man—the act, not the book—is the goal of the Machine Age, because how one perceives humanity is based on how one believes the world works. Thus, a “model" of the Cosmos must exist in order to inform everything else. From here we can see how Lewis understood the abolition of man as the end goal, in his lifetime, before all of the hallmarks appeared in ours. The Machine is the model of the Cosmos for our age, so we should not be surprised, though perhaps we’re a smidge disappointed, to discover that Man is just a bunch of little machines living in a big one.

If man is just a machine then at some point traditional ethics (based on the pre-Machine model) go out the window. Man is just another toy. A thing to be improved. Tinkered with. A thing to be used.

I said I wouldn’t linger too long about the Machine Age. Go read (or re-read!) The Abolition of Man.

But I do not apologize. I bring all of that up to point out that Lewis is not only supremely useful in putting his finger on the foundations of The Machine Age, he not only serves as a useful guide to resist it, (as I point out in my piece Read More C.S. Lewis), but I think he has given us a way to conquer it. He’s given us a way to become Re-Enchanted.

I don’t think this is a secret key, nor do I think this is the only way. I do, however, think it is a way and that we ought to be familiar with whatever useful weapon comes our way.

Here. I’m giving you a sword. Look along the blade. See the shining runes?

ᛏᚱᚪᚾᛋᛈᚩᛋᛁᛏᛡᚾ

In modern English that says: Transposition.

In the book The Weight of Glory you can find Lewis’s essay entitled Transposition. In it he gives to us an extremely useful concept showing how Higher systems are expressed within Lower systems and thus providing a key insight into how the Spiritual Realm and the Natural Realm interact.

I beg you read the essay, but here’s the gist: “Transposition occurs whenever the higher reproduces itself in the lower.” An example: Man can experience two highly different emotions, Joy and Sorrow. However both can be conveyed by the exact same physical expression: crying. The emotions are the Higher System. Our physical expression into which the emotions overflow, are the Lower System. Because the Lower System is restricted, it must use the same expression—in this case, crying—for two completely different emotions. Lewis again,

If you are to write a language with twenty-two vowel sounds in an alphabet with only five vowel characters, then you must be allowed to give each of those five characters more than one value. If you are making a piano version of a piece originally scored for an orchestra, then the same piano notes which represent flutes in one passage must also represent violins in another.

Ok. So what does this have to do with becoming Re-Enchanted?

Hold that thought. Don’t hate me.

Let’s see if I can set one more stage. Remember how I said a model of the Cosmos must exist in order to inform everything else? In Lewis’s book The Discarded Image, we are re-introduced to the Medieval Model of the Cosmos. Lewis sets forth how the Medievals (and the Ancients) transposed the Higher Transcendent Reality into the Lower “language” of Natural Reality. Thus, for example, in the Medieval Model, the Stars and Planets are personified as the Heavenly Host which sing, dance, and influence our lives, whereas in our Modern (or Machine) Model the stars and planets are just balls of gas and rock that move mechanistically as cogs in the Universal machine.

In the ancient and medieval world Spiritual Reality was constantly at play with Natural Reality. Every river had a naiad and every tree a dryad. Christians did not do away with this Model, but enriched and deepened it by telling us not to worship the naiads and dryads. Christianity did not erase them from the Model but categorizing them properly within the hierarchy of God’s created order.

The Modern Model came along as a purely empirical (thus mechanistic) model. We might be tempted at this point to think that the problem with the Machine Model of the Cosmos is that it removed the Higher System altogether. But the Higher System is still in place, the Machine simply swapped places with God. The Creator and His angels were out. The Machine and its scientists were in.

When we look at both Models using the concept of Transposition we can glimpse how the Higher reproduces itself in the Lower.

To keep it simple: The Old Medieval Model was one wherein the world was Enchanted. The Spiritual Realities were conveyed in the Natural Language. The Natural was clothed with Transcendent Meaning. Bread is more than just bread. The New Machine Model disenchants. It swapped Spiritual Realities of the Cosmos for empirical mechanisms and declares that the Natural is all there is. Nature is striped of spiritual meaning. Bread actually becomes something less than bread. It is boiled down to merely a substance to feed upon. It can be modified (as any machine) to be better bread. We can take all the nutrients and put it in a pill. Grow a synthetic version in a lab. Do you see how this works?

Your model of the Cosmos has a direct impact on your view of Mankind. In the Old Model, Man is the image of God. In the Modern Model, Man is the image of the Machine. In the Old Model, Man is more than Man. In the New Model, Man is less than Man.

So we come to it. How do we overcome the Machine Age and become Re-Enchanted?

We must create a new Model of the Cosmos based upon that which is solid in the Old Model. And the way we create a new Model is by Transposition. You can do it on purpose or on accident, as your view of the Cosmos will have unavoidable ramifications regardless, but now that you know about it you might as well try to give it a go and seek to adequately translate the Higher Realities into the Lower System. We need to re-learn how to play the symphony on just the piano. In order to move from a Disenchanted Model to a Re-Enchanted Model, we must seek to re-establish meaning. A Cosmos without meaning will inevitably lead to a meaningless (or mechanistic) human existence.

That sounds like a large task. And it is. How do we dispense with the Machine Model and replace it with a new one?

Lewis, again, shows us the way:

The truth would seem … that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes.

We need three things:
1) A sufficient disrelish of the Machine Model. I have that in spades. How about you? The more of us the better.
2) A sufficient hankering for a new one. I’m hankering for one that seeks to recover a supernatural worldview, for one that believes the Natural and the Spiritual participate with each other.
3) Good taste. Listen. If Nature will provide the adequate phenomena to fill out our new model of the Cosmos, then we ought to be on the lookout, like good stewards, for that which it provides in order that we might begin to build a re-enchanted Model. And if it fits many tastes, we might as well have a good one, which I believe we can cultivate through the Medieval Model.

And so to achieve this, we must wield wisely the weapon Lewis handed to us named Transposition. We must seek to re-value our lower, restricted, Natural world with the higher, inexpressible, Spiritual world.

And guess what. We don’t have to start from scratch (after all, we are discussing re-enchantment, not neo-enchantment). The Machine Age is only a blip on the radar of history. Albeit an enormous and currently all encompassing blip, but a blip nonetheless. There are giant shoulders awaiting us to climb aboard. There are wise men like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton that can show us the way. The Medieval Model is a treasure room waiting to be pilfered.

In Prince Caspian, the Pevensie children found themselves in a changed Narnia, one that had mostly forgotten and outlawed the Old Ways. They built a bridge over the Fords of Beruna. Even the good guys weren’t quite sure about Aslan. The children could not re-ignite the old days. They had to deal with the fact that Cair Paravel was a ruin, that even though the Telmarines had tarnished the land, Caspian, a Telmarine himself, would be the king. They didn’t try to do the old thing over again, but they did go back and recover what was true, good, and beautiful (and set to rights the false, wicked, and ugly) within the context they found themselves in. The answer wasn’t to play act as if nothing had happened in the last thousand years. It wasn’t to try to re-create the environment that led to the original Golden Age of Narnia. The answer was to wield again the long unused weapons and gifts found in the ancient treasure chamber beneath the ruins, and to be faithful to Aslan, even if no one else believed in him.

Let’s find ways in our own lives, right now, to begin re-valuing the Lower System with the Higher Realities. You can do it in all sorts of areas, but I’ll leave you with something practical, something you can start to do right now: let’s re-align how we think of Time, Space, and Language.

Time. Go back to the unused Church calendar and see how you can incorporate it back into the rhythms of your life. Pay attention to the rhythms the Machine Age desires us to abide by and take note of what holidays the Machine Age celebrates. Insofar as it is possible, don’t participate with the Machine’s timeframe. You are made in the image of God. You are not a cog.

Space. Examine your home, your yard, your workplace, wherever you live and move and have your being. Not only should you seek ways to detach from the Machine (like yer phone, bro) and try to re-connect with your fellow creature, Nature, but try to beautify your spaces in ways that reinforce a Christ-saturated view of the Cosmos. Fill them with symbols of the Higher Reality.

Language. You can enrich your language by going back and reading old books written before the Machine Age. It’s as easy as opening up that old King James Version collecting dust on your shelf. Also don’t let the Machine Age advocates have the final say on a word they’ve co-opted, and resist using the words they want you to use. Words like Cisgender. Fight to retain or re-establish meanings in your own speech, written or spoken. Coin new words and phrases to express the Higher Realities like a piano chord seeking to translate a symphony.

Again, Transposition isn’t the only way to fight the Machine or to aid in our re-enchantment. But I think you’ll agree that it is rather helpful. Wield it wisely.