FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
No bio...
User ID: 157
Inspired by @dovetailing's lovely post on Christianity, let me have the audacity to post on here something I wrote back in 2011 for interested Protestants on a website that I think is now defunct.
Don't anybody blame @dovetailing for this, it's all off my own bat!
To borrow a quote from Chesterton contrasting the suicide and the martyr, and the attitude of Christianity to both (“Orthodoxy”, Chapter V, ‘The Flag of the World’, emphasis mine): “The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's. I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?”
This is a look at why dry bones were and are considered to have a virtue in them that could benefit us (and I’m speaking of virtue both in the conventionally understood sense and the older sense, as when my granny told us ‘there’s great virtue in seawater’ for healing cuts and sores so we should go down and wash any injuries in the sea).
What exactly are relics? You may be interested to know that the Catholic Church classifies them by three kinds:
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First-Class Relics: Items directly associated with the events of Christ's life or the physical remains of a saint (a bone, a hair, skull, a limb, etc.).
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Second-Class Relics: An item that the saint wore (a shirt, a glove, etc.) Also included is an item that the saint owned or frequently used, for example, a crucifix, rosary, book and so on.
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Third-Class Relics: Any object that is touched to a first- or second-class relic. Most third-class relics are small pieces of cloth, but you can touch anything (a rosary beads, a holy picture, and so on) to the first- or second-class relic (and that includes graves and tombs, which is why, for instance, there are customs of taking away clay or pebbles from a saint’s grave for healing or other uses).
Let’s get the lyin’, cheatin’ and stealin’ over with before we move on to the edifyin’. Yes, there were and probably still are a lot of fraudulent relics out there, but it’s too simplistic to dismiss them all as power-crazed clerics inventing fake miracles to enveigle the credulous peasantry and keep them under their thumb for profit and status. An example of this is one that regularly comes up; the liquefying blood of St. Januarius. Briefly, Januarius was a 3rd century bishop of Naples supposed to have been martyred during the persecution of Diocletian. An alleged sample of his blood is kept in a glass ampoule in the cathedral of Naples, where it is brought out for veneration three times a year and undergoes a miraculous liquefaction. His relics are particularly honoured against eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. Scientists and skeptics (the ones who like to spell “sceptic” with a “k” not a “c” to prove how hard-core they are) attribute this to a mediaeval fraud.
Ever heard the term “thixotropic”? It’s why you have to shake the tomato ketchup bottle before the contents will come out. Very simplistically, it’s how a solid(ish) material can become liquid(ish) and flow – and because the bishop tilts and moves the reliquary holding the blood, that is seen as evidence of “thixotropic flow”. The alternate explanation can be found here, where an experiment to replicate the alleged blood was done.
Their view? It’s scientifically reproducible, which means it isn’t a miracle, and is probably a fraud.
Quote from a now-dead link:
Today, a large percentage of the world's population believes that through transubstantiation, bread and wine physically change into the body and blood of the Son of God. Is it not possible that 650 years ago a Neapolitan cleric/alchemist, who might regularly pray to his patron saint, Januarius, accidentally discovered the thixotropic properties of the mixture of molysite and limestone? Might he not believe that the material had taken on the form of the blood of his patron saint? Better to present his discovery as the finding of Januarius's blood and receive acclaim, then present it as the result of an alchemical procedure and receive "no mercy" from Pope John XXII! Furthermore, in 1389, the Duomo of Naples was being built up and many artists from all over Italy were present. The king was then Robert of Anjou, described as an extremely religious person, and a "holy blood relic" was certain to please him.
And you know what? That’s fine. Unless the phial is opened and the contents examined (which is unlikely, but not due to fear by the clergy that their hoax will be revealed – sorry, conspiracy theorists! – but more to religious sentiment regarding desecration of a relic) nobody can say for sure one way or the other. It may have been a 13th century fraud (deliberate), it may have been a pious hoax, it may be an honest mistake, it may be the real blood of a martyr. You may be astounded, shocked and surprised to the point of your hair turning white to find out that the Catholic Church does not demand belief in the reality of relics – nope, not even the Shroud of Turin (which is a whole cottage industry on its own) or the Veronica or the Mandylion. If some experiment in the morning proved that the Shroud was indeed a 14th century fake, this does not mean that every Christian in the world would have to say “That proves the Resurrection never happened!” and have to rip up their Bibles. We don’t believe it because we have ‘proof’ in the form of the Shroud; the Shroud is venerated because (a) we believe in the Resurrection beforehand (b) it can be taken as an image of the Crucified Body of Christ, just like all those crucifixes in churches and paintings and hanging around people’s necks, which we use as a symbol and as a focus for prayer.
For myself, the rationalisation of the skeptic (some anonymous alchemist stumbled upon this reaction in an experiment and took it as a divine sign and decided to make fake martyr’s blood and present it to a notably devout King – who we must take, simply on the grounds that he was devout, as being a credulous idiot and not someone who managed to hang on to a throne in a time and place where politics was hot and bloody and therefore by necessity had to have a brain in his head – for the new cathedral, all done in the best possible taste and who also managed to invent a process that would work for six hundred years while he was at it) is just as much an article of his faith as the Neapolitan peasant who looks to the relic as an omen of the coming year.
That’s not to say that every relic should be considered the real deal; Chaucer’s Pardoner is an example of how they knew, back in the 14th century, that there were frauds and cheats going around:
First I pronounce where I come from, and then I show my bulls, one and all, but first the seal of our liege lord the king on my patent. I show that first to secure my body, lest any man, priest, or clerk would be so bold as to disturb me in Christ's holy labours. After that I then proceed with my tales, and show bulls of popes and cardinals and patriarchs and bishops, and I speak a few words in Latin to give a flavour to my preaching and to stir men to devotion. Then I show forth my long glass cases, crammed full of cloths and bones: all the people believe that they are holy relics. I have a shoulder-bone set in brass which came from a holy Jew's sheep.
Apart from deliberate fraud, there was a fierce spirit of emulation, when churches competed with one another as to which had the best and biggest collection of relics, which meant that we get such examples as the three (at least) heads of John the Baptist, as recounted in this Wikipedia article; after the desecration of his shrine by Julian the Apostate, the remaining relics were scattered and several places laid claim to having the ‘real’ head:
John's skull it is located at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the Monastery of Saint Macarius the Great in Scetes, Egypt, at Gandzasar Monastery's Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, in Nagorno Karabakh, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and San Silvestro in Capite in Rome, and the Residenz Museum in Munich, Germany, (official residence of the Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria from 1385 to 1918). Further heads, no longer available, were once held by the Knights Templar, Amiens Cathedral in France (brought home by Wallon de Sarton from the Fourth Crusade in Constantinople), Antioch in Turkey (fate uncertain), and the parish church at Tenterden in Kent, where it was preserved up until the Reformation.
One of the alleged heads for your edification.
Such competition (what Ellis Peters called in the title of one of her Brother Cadfael mysteries, “A Morbid Taste for Bones”) led to things like the Venetians stealing Santa Claus’s body from Myra in Turkey (or rather, what was left after an expedition from Bari got there first).
You may also have heard or read some form of the jeer about the relics of the True Cross, along the lines that if gathered together, these alleged relics would make forty crosses or a ship or the likes. It seems to have its origin with Jean Calvin who made the comment in his “Traité Des Reliques” that there were enough pieces of the True Cross to build a ship, though it has lost no popularity to this day not alone with Protestants but free-thinkers, materialists, skeptics and atheists of all stripes. Well, we can thank an obsessive Frenchman for a rebuttal of this mockery; Charles Rohault de Fleury, an architect who devoted himself in later years to religious archaeology, and in 1870 published a book (“Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion”) on the fruits of his labours tracking down all authenticated relics of the True Cross, estimating the volume of a cross likely used in the execution of criminals by the Romans, and totting up the sizes of all the relics for comparison. He came up with a result that the claimed relics came to a weight of under 2 kilograms, which isn’t enough to make any kind of a boat, really. From the “Catholic Encylopedia” of 1913:
The work of Rohault de Fleury, "Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion" (Paris, 1870), deserves more prolonged attention; its author has sought out with great care and learning all the relics of the True Cross, drawn up a catalogue of them, and, thanks to this labour, he has succeeded in showing that, in spite of what various Protestant or Rationalistic authors have pretended, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not only not "be comparable in bulk to a battleship", but would not reach one-third that of a cross which has been supposed to have been three or four metres in height, with transverse branch of two metres, proportions not at all abnormal (op. cit., 97-179). Here is the calculation of this savant: Supposing the Cross to have been of pine-wood, as is believed by the savants who have made a special study of the subject, and giving it a weight of about seventy-five kilograms, we find that the volume of this cross was 178,000,000 cubic millimetres. Now the total known volume of the True Cross, according to the finding of M. Rohault de Fleury, amounts to above 4,000,000 cubic millimetres, allowing the missing part to be as big as we will, the lost parts or the parts the existence of which has been overlooked, we still find ourselves far short of 178,000,000 cubic millimetres, which should make up the True Cross.”
I’ve seen a relic of the True Cross (alleged); it’s in Holy Cross Abbey in County Tipperary (a restored Cistercian monastery and church which had a relic of the True Cross from the 13th century but which was destroyed in the 17th century after Cromwell; the relic currently there was presented in 1977 by the Vatican upon its restoration) and it’s more a splinter than a huge chunk of wood. If the other relics are on the same scale, then we’re definitely not talking “enough pieces to make a ship”.
There are even “relics” of very dubious provenance. Yes, the (in)famous Holy Prepuce, which yes, is exactly what the name implies and if you want to know more, you’ll have to look it up yourself here.
Apparently, there was one contender which survived up to 1983 when thieves supposedly made off with it. Further comment is superfluous.
It would seem to be human nature that we can’t resist “improving” upon things, such as the tilma with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There is some insistence that this image is not miraculous but was painted by a native painter; it is certain that there were some embellishments made (e.g. the figure of the angel, the golden rays, the stars on her cloak, other elements added and removed). On the other hand, this is well within the tradition of the “icons not made by hands” (acheiropoieta) in Orthodoxy. However, since there is room for honest error and the effects of enthusiasm as well as fraud and deceit when dealing with relics from the early ages of the church, this is why you’re on safer ground with relics from a more modern era, where they can be historically verified. Like the head of St. Catherine of Siena, smuggled out of Rome by the Siennese in 1380 when the Romans wouldn’t give back her body to be buried in her home town.
Or the head of St. Oliver Plunkett, 17th century Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland, hanged, drawn and quartered in England for treason as part of the fallout from Titus Oates’ “Horrid Popish Plot”, now in the church at Drogheda.
Or the relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (the “Little Flower” which is a sugary sentimental name for a young woman who was as tough as old boots), exhumed due to popular devotion and nearly always on tour world-wide (they’ve been to England as recently as 2009, and visited Ireland both in 2001 – where one of the places they stayed was in Mountjoy Prison – and again in 2009). She even visited America in 1999.
Unfortunately, we moderns are much more squeamish than our sturdy forefathers in the Faith. When they put Padre Pio’s body on display, they had the face covered by a “a life-like silicone mask” (apparently so that he would look like his photographs, which is how the pilgrims expect him to look) which I think (a) misses the whole point of relics (b) could cause confusion with the bodies of the incorruptibles (and “incorruptible” doesn’t mean “looking as if still alive”, anyhow), if people think this is his real face and (c) panders too much to our need for prettification of death.
They did the same thing for St. Bernadette’s body (face and hands), only they had to use wax back in 1925:
A precise imprint of the face was molded so that the firm of Pierre Imans in Paris could make a wax mask based on the imprints and on some genuine photos. This was common practice for relics in France, as it was feared that the blackish tinge to the face and the sunken eyes and nose would make an unpleasant impression on the public.
Darn it, dead saint’s bodies should look like this! (Crypt of Ss. Ambrose – the bishop who baptised St. Augustine – Gervase and Protase).
Okay, we’ve had the fun, now comes the educative bit.
Early altars were built over the bones of the martyrs in catacombs; when the churches came up to the surface, the custom remained, which is why altars have relics in their bases or within the body of the altar itself (in an “altar stone”).
(Part One of Two, remainder below)
What is poetry? Well, I used to think I had some sort of idea and could at least distinguish a poem from ordinary prose when I saw one, but apparently such attitudes belong back in the Ark.
This, to me, is not a poem. But by the canons of modern taste, it sure is one! Some better and more astute critic referred to "chopped-up prose" in the context of modern poetry, and that is what this is (at least, to my eyes). Remove the line breaks, and you have a bog-standard piece for online space-filling. It'd fit perfectly in one of those cooking or hobby blogs where the producer is semi-professional and needs page scrolling to generate income, so they fill up the spaces with tons of reminiscences about Grandma in the kitchen on those summer/autumn/winter days cooking up the recipe, and tons of filler blah, until you eventually get to the recipe or knitting pattern or advice on how to embezzle from your employer.
I'm not expecting modern poetry to neatly rhyme and fit into the patterns of past poems, but I do at least expect a poem. Not a 'pome'.
Irish Linen, by Lane Shipsey
Pure Irish Linen
a phrase from long ago
woven into those plain tea-towels
that smoothed away wet suds
from Mother’s wedding set
Her good linen cloths
were kept to buff glass and china
or left safely in the drawer
while gaudier prints took on the grime
and stains of daily wear
I teased her for it then,
not knowing the grown-up equation
of good with expensive
And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen,
it was a thing you were given
A cloth spun and woven
from flax pulled and scutched
across the border, a fact on which
we did not dwell much, in Dublin
where we never called it Ulster linen
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen
no longer form an automatic cluster
Instead we buy the best fabrics we can muster
regardless of origin
whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
As I said, remove the line breaks and you have a twee, faux-folksy piece of musings suitable for anything from a mommy blog to a chin-stroking piece on Norn Iron and how we down South approach it to a meditation on modern living and/or cottagecore aspirations, applicable for print or online media, traditional or social.
Edition version below and you look me in the eye and insist "No, that is a true real poem", I dare you.
"Pure Irish Linen" - a phrase from long ago, woven into those plain tea-towels that smoothed away wet suds from Mother’s wedding set. Her good linen cloths were kept to buff glass and china or left safely in the drawer while gaudier prints took on the grime and stains of daily wear.
I teased her for it then, not knowing the grown-up equation of "good" with "expensive". And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen, it was a thing you were given.
A cloth spun and woven from flax pulled and scutched across the border, a fact on which we did not dwell much in Dublin, where we never called it "Ulster" linen.
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen no longer form an automatic cluster. Instead, we buy the best fabrics we can muster regardless of origin, whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
This has been a howl into the abyss on behalf of dinosaurs everywhere.
I am goddamn well pissed-off because yet another one of these bloody spam blackmail emails hit a work account this morning, and thus the question posed above.
Why don't ordinary people accept that crypto is THE CURRENCY OF THE FUTURE? Why does it have a bad reputation? Don't they know something something blockchain contracts Satoshi Nakamoto computers something something means it's beans on toast all round?
Well, this is why. This is just another iteration of the kind of thing I see too frequently for my liking, and I'm quoting it in full because it'll be pertinent:
Hello there!
Unfortunately, there are some bad news for you.
Around several months ago I have obtained access to your devices that you were using to browse internet.
Subsequently, I have proceeded with tracking down internet activities of yours.
Below, is the sequence of past events:
In the past, I have bought access from hackers to numerous email accounts (today, that is a very straightforward task that can be done online).
Clearly, I have effortlessly logged in to email account of yours [deleted].
A week after that, I have managed to install Trojan virus to Operating Systems of all your devices that are used for email access.
Actually, that was quite simple (because you were clicking the links in inbox emails).
All smart things are quite straightforward. (>_<)
The software of mine allows me to access to all controllers in your devices, such as video camera, microphone and keyboard.
I have managed to download all your personal data, as well as web browsing history and photos to my servers.
I can access all messengers of yours, as well as emails, social networks, contacts list and even chat history.
My virus unceasingly refreshes its signatures (since it is driver-based), and hereby stays invisible for your antivirus.
So, by now you should already understand the reason why I remained unnoticed until this very moment...
While collecting your information, I have found out that you are also a huge fan of websites for adults.
You truly enjoy checking out porn websites and watching dirty videos, while having a lot of kinky fun.
I have recorded several kinky scenes of yours and montaged some videos, where you reach orgasms while passionately masturbating.
If you still doubt my serious intentions, it only takes couple mouse clicks to share your videos with your friends, relatives and even colleagues.
It is also not a problem for me to allow those vids for access of public as well.
I truly believe, you would not want this to occur, understanding how special are the videos you love watching, (you are clearly aware of that) all that stuff can result in a real disaster for you.
Let's resolve it like this:
All you need is $1450 USD transfer to my account (bitcoin equivalent based on exchange rate during your transfer), and after the transaction is successful, I will proceed to delete all that kinky stuff without delay.
Afterwards, we can pretend that we have never met before. In addition, I assure you that all the harmful software will be deleted from all your devices. Be sure, I keep my promises.
That is quite a fair deal with a low price, bearing in mind that I have spent a lot of effort to go through your profile and traffic for a long period.
If you are unaware how to buy and send bitcoins - it can be easily fixed by searching all related information online.
Below is bitcoin wallet of mine: 1Nx353jT8zZYaqmoMdMr2PRtdixStrDoZE
You are given not more than 48 hours after you have opened this email (2 days to be precise).
Below is the list of actions that you should not attempt doing:
Do not attempt to reply my email (the email in your inbox was created by me together with return address).
Do not attempt to call police or any other security services. Moreover, don't even think to share this with friends of yours. Once I find that out (make no doubt about it, I can do that effortlessly, bearing in mind that I have full control over all your systems) - the video of yours will become available to public immediately.
Do not attempt to search for me - there is completely no point in that. All cryptocurrency transactions remain anonymous at all times.
Do not attempt reinstalling the OS on devices of yours or get rid of them. It is meaningless too, because all your videos are already available at remote servers.
Below is the list of things you don't need to be concerned about:
That I will not receive the money you transferred.
- Don't you worry, I can still track it, after the transaction is successfully completed, because I still monitor all your activities (trojan virus of mine includes a remote-control option, just like TeamViewer).
That I still will make your videos available to public after your money transfer is complete.
- Believe me, it is meaningless for me to keep on making your life complicated. If I indeed wanted to make it happen, it would happen long time ago!
Everything will be carried out based on fairness!
Before I forget...moving forward try not to get involved in this kind of situations anymore!
An advice from me - regularly change all the passwords to your accounts.
Forget all the guff about "I saw you jerking off to kinky porn", this is an old work account that we only keep around because a few sites won't let us change to the new email address. There isn't any camera, mike, etc. set up and do I really need to say nobody here is jerking off to kinky porn during work hours?
Yes, they're trying to reel in people who are panicked and ignorant of what goes on with computers and just have vague ideas they've picked up from news headlines about large corporations getting hacked (such as happened in my own country to the national health service). I know it's trash and I regularly delete these and the more sophisticated invoice scam ones.
But.
This is the experience most ordinary people will have about bitcoin/cryptocurrency, and mostly what it says is true: I haven't the faintest idea how to start tracking these bozos down if I wanted to. They do have secure and untraceable anonymous transactions. Hackers do steal and sell on information.
So long as cryptocurrency is associated with criminals and fraud, nobody is going to trust it or touch it with a ten-foot barge pole. You don't want goverment interference and regulation? Then do something about these guys who are scamming and making money off scams.
Okay! So you may have heard of The Problem Of Susan, a literary critical view of what happened to Susan in “The Last Battle”, the final Narnia book. This has been quoted on Tumblr, I responded to that, and this is a development of my view of the reading.
A lot of people have done psycho-sexual readings of the line about “lipstick and nylons” and gone on about this being indicative of Susan maturing into a sexual being. Naturally, since C.S. Lewis is a famous Christian, this means that as a Christian he heartily disapproved of:
• Sex
• Women
• Women Being Sexual
• Children Growing Up
• Children Losing Innocence About The World
• Children Growing Up To Be Women Who Are Sexual
and probably a ton of other stuff too which I can’t be bothered to go search online for them to tell me he hated. Some people do not like Lewis, Narnia, or Christianity, and have a very dour view of The Problem Of Susan and like to tell us all how, why, and where Lewis is a horrid old Puritan sex-hater. Before we get into this, I want to say: if you don’t like Lewis, Narnia, Christianity or any combination of these, you’re free to do so and nobody can make you like them.
The problem I have with The Problem Of Susan is that it’s a very shallow reading.
First, there seems to be little to no reading of that part of the text as a whole:
"Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?"
"My sister Susan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "is no longer a friend of Narnia."
"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"
"Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
"Grown-up, indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can."
It gets quoted as “lipstick and nylons” and the part about “invitations” gets left out. And there’s latching on to “too keen on being grown-up”.
So what is Lewis saying here, or trying to say? “Growing up is icky, especially if you start liking boys”? To take the reading that he is saying ‘loss of innocence (especially sexual innocence) is bad, adulthood is bad, children should stay children as long as possible’?
I don’t think so. Polly is a grown-up herself, and yet a friend of Narnia. If Susan is now ‘grown-up’, then Peter - as her elder brother - is also a grown-up. But he’s here in Narnia. So if adulthood per se is not the problem, what is?
And here we get the view as expressed by someone in a response to my response:
Uuhh I’m PRETTY sure Susan got kicked out of the gang bc winklydinnkkkllllllllldl :/
Sex is the problem. But is this a plausible reading?
Well, sure. Sexual maturation, developing sexual interest and sexuality is all part of growing up. People have used “nylons and lipstick” as signifiers that Lewis means sex because, well, nylons: lingerie, fetish or at the very mildest sex fantasy fuel. And lipstick means reddening the lips, making them look like the labia, ready for sex.
(Look, if I’ve had to read these intepretations, so do you).
But is there a better reading? I think there is.
So here is the second part of what I think is going on.
Now, if the problem is that Susan is now sexually aware, what about Peter? (And Edmund, and Lucy?) On this reading, if they are still ‘friends of Narnia’ then they must have avoided Susan’s sexual awakening. Peter must be developmentally stunted and have remained a good, innocent, little boy mentally at least.
So for the proponents of The Problem Of Susan, the only mature adult is Susan, who is cast out of Narnia for that knowledge and that choice (Pullman wrote an entire trilogy of books in response about how sexual awakening is the means of becoming adults and independent).
However, I disagree. Let’s segue off for a moment about homosexuality (this was a joke comment in the original post to which I was replying). Lewis was writing in the 50s and was a Christian to boot, he must have had the same repressive social ideas as you imagine a 50s Christian would have, right?
Here’s where I recommend you read his memoir Surprised By Joy, particularly the parts about his early schooling.
Here's a fellow, you say, who used to come before us as a moral and religious writer, and now, if you please, he's written a whole chapter describing his old school as a very furnace of impure loves without one word on the heinousness of the sin. But there are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.
("This means, then, that all the other vices you have so largely written about..." Well, yes, it does, and more's the pity; but it's nothing to our purpose at the moment.)
Okay, looks like this is going to be a long ‘un, so breaking off here for Part One before getting into Part Two
I’ve criticised the take that the Problem of Susan is reducible to the simple (and simplicistic) answer of “Sex”, and here’s why I think that.
Let’s look at the full version of the much-quoted line about “lipstick and nylons”:
"Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
“and invitations”. To drag in another writer, “What’s invitations, precious? What’s invitations, eh?”
Well, they’re exactly what they sound like. “Oh, you mean boys asking her out on dates, maybe?” No. Being asked out, yes, but I mean “invitations to parties and social occasions and grown-up events”.
I’m hobbled by the fact that Lewis doesn’t give us any exact ages for his characters, particularly the Pevensie children (Tolkien would have told us the day and month, not alone year, they were born so we could have worked it out) but we can roughly take it that for “The Last Battle”, Susan is old enough to have left school but isn’t going on to college (that we know of, at least not yet).
So she’s about eighteen or so at a minimum, and looking around online there’s an estimation that she’s twenty-one.
Let’s go with twenty-one: legal age of adulthood, but still young and inexperienced. Polly is a little hard on Susan:
She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.
Which of us has not wanted to be treated as a grown-up and chafed under “you can’t do that, you’re too young” when we’re in our teenage years, caught between no longer a child but not quite adult yet? And mostly we’ve had a simple view of what being grown-up means: nobody imagines “I’ll have to do my taxes and get a mortgage” when they’re contemplating what it will be like to be free and independent and nobody can tell us what to do or eat or wear.
So Susan was eager to be old enough to wear adult clothes and makeup and go to parties and have fun. That’s not a bad thing! The bad thing is if that’s all she wants to do, ever; if her reasons are based on vanity and selfishness. We all like to be admired, so if Susan wants the boys/young men to find her attractive and be interested in her, that’s only natural. But if she spends her time only going to parties, looking for flattery of attention, and trying to be ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ as she gets older, then she’s wasting her potential. I don’t think anybody imagines that Susan as an airhead is a good future for her.
Let me jump back into the memoir to show that Lewis knew about, because he had experienced, adolescent desire. He attended a preparatory school between the ages of thirteen and fifteen:
It is quite true that at this time I underwent a violent, and wholly successful, assault of sexual temptation. But this is amply accounted for by the age I had then reached and by my recent, in a sense my deliberate, withdrawal of myself from Divine protection. ...The mere facts of generation I had learned long ago, from another boy, when I was too young to feel much more than a scientific interest in them.
...Pogo's communications, however much they helped to vulgarise my mind, had no such electric effect on my senses as the dancing mistress, nor as Bekker's Charicles, which was given me for a prize. I never thought that dancing mistress as beautiful as my cousin G., but she was the first woman I ever "looked upon to lust after her"; assuredly through no fault of her own. A gesture, a tone of the voice, may in these matters have unpredictable results. When the schoolroom on the last night of the winter term was decorated for a dance, she paused, lifted a flag, and, remarking, "I love the smell of bunting," pressed it to her face -- and I was undone.
You must not suppose that this was a romantic passion. The passion of my life, as the next chapter will show, belonged to a wholly different region. What I felt for the dancing mistress was sheer appetite; the prose and not the poetry of the Flesh. I did not feel at all like a knight devoting himself to a lady; I was much more like a Turk looking at a Circassian whom he could not afford to buy. I knew quite well what I wanted. It is common, by the way, to assume that such an experience produces a feeling of guilt, but it did not do so in me. And I may as well say here that the feeling of guilt, save where a moral offence happened also to break the code of honour or had consequences which excited my pity, was a thing which at that time I hardly knew. It took me as long to acquire inhibitions as others (they say) have taken to get rid of them. That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.
So Lewis is going to be the last person in the world to condemn Susan for natural part of growing up. What he does want to condemn her for - is going to be developed in Part Three.
Part Three, and if you’ve stuck with me this far, congratulations! “Jeez, will you ever get to the point?” I will, I promise!
So here’s where we have to get into theology (sorry, but it is relevant, I promise) and here is a handy definition:
In Christian theology, the world, the flesh, and the devil have been singled out "by sources from St Thomas Aquinas" to the Council of Trent, as "implacable enemies of the soul".
The three sources of temptation have been described as:
world -- "indifference and opposition to God’s design", "empty, passing values"
flesh -- "gluttony and sexual immorality, ... our corrupt inclinations, disordered passions"
the Devil -- "a real, personal enemy, a fallen angel, Father of Lies, who ... labours in relentless malice to twist us away from salvation".
What proponents of The Problem Of Susan think Lewis is preaching against is the second, the Flesh (lipstick and nylons = sexual maturity and awakening).
I maintain that what he is warning against, in the person of Susan as she has abandoned her family and Narnia, is The World.
“But what’s wrong with liking fun and parties and having a good time and meeting people and making new friends?”
Nothing! And everything, if it turns you into a liar, a traitor, a snob, a sell-out.
And that is what Susan is doing, in her quest to be a ‘proper’ grown-up:
(W)henever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'
She’s lying to herself as much as to the others. She knows Narnia and everything they say is real, but because it doesn’t fit in with the type of person she wants to be now, she’s doing her best to deny it and forget it. She’s convinced herself that it was all just a game and childish imagination, and she’s not a child now. Popular, cool people don’t believe in fairy stories, and she so desperately wants to be popular and cool and to fit in with the right sort of people, the people who throw those parties everyone wants to go to, the invitations she is so eager to receive.
And Lewis knew about that from the inside, too:
He was succeeded by a young gentleman just down from the University whom we may call Pogo. Pogo was a very minor edition of a Saki, perhaps even a Wodehouse, hero. Pogo was a wit, Pogo was a dressy man, Pogo was a man about town, Pogo was even a lad. After a week or so of hesitation (for his temper was uncertain) we fell at his feet and adored. Here was sophistication, glossy all over, and (dared one believe it?) ready to impart sophistication to us.
We became -- at least I became -- dressy. It was the age of the "knut": of "spread" ties with pins in them, of very low cut coats and trousers worn very high to show startling socks, and brogue shoes with immensely wide laces. Something of all this had already trickled to me from the College through my brother, who was now becoming sufficiently senior to aspire to knuttery. Pogo completed the process. A more pitiful ambition for a lout of an overgrown fourteen-year-old with a shilling a week pocket money could hardly be imagined; the more so since I am one of those on whom Nature has laid the doom that whatever they buy and whatever they wear they will always look as if they had come out of an old clothes shop. I cannot even now remember without embarrassment the concern that I then felt about pressing my trousers and (filthy habit) plastering my hair with oil. A new element had entered my life: Vulgarity. Up till now I had committed nearly every other sin and folly within my power, but I had not yet been flashy.
These hobble-de-hoy fineries were, however, only a small part of our new sophistication. Pogo was a great theatrical authority. We soon knew all the latest songs. We soon knew all about the famous actresses of that age -- Lily Elsie, Gertie Millar, Zena Dare. Pogo was a fund of information about their private lives. We learned from him all the latest jokes; where we did not understand he was ready to give us help. He explained many things. After a term of Pogo's society one had the feeling of being not twelve weeks but twelve years older.
…What attacked me through Pogo was not the Flesh (I had that of my own) but the World: the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know. He gave little help, if any, in destroying my chastity, but he made sad work of certain humble and childlike and self-forgetful qualities which (I think) had remained with me till that moment. I began to labour very hard to make myself into a fop, a cad, and a snob.
I would be sorry if the reader passed too harsh a judgement on Pogo. As I now see it, he was not too old to have charge of boys but too young. He was only an adolescent himself, still immature enough to be delightedly "grown up" and naif enough to enjoy our greater naïveté. And there was a real friendliness in him. He was moved partly by that to tell us all he knew or thought he knew.
There’s no harm in Susan either, even as she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She can always come back. Unless she lets herself harden into a caricature of a silly, vain attention-seeker who follows and drops every social fad as it comes into and goes out of fashion, who is always taking the cue as to what to say and think from others instead of her own views and opinions, and who continues to deny reality.
Nobody locked her out or kicked her out. She walked out herself, or rather ran out, rushing to go to that party or function or event or gathering of the real adults.
Well, that’s my take on it, anyway. Take it or leave it as you like.