Images of the Apocalypse and Intimations of Joy
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.
2 Peter 3:9
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”
Revelation 21:1-4
I read CS Lewis’ essay ‘Transposition’ earlier this week. The main point is about the way that higher things are contained within lower things and lower things beatified when transposed to higher levels. This works when emotions are transposed to the lower level of sensations for example but it also works when we consider religious experience or the relationship between heaven and earth.
It’s that part that really interested me. Consider Lewis’ analogy of a picture drawn using pencil lines and shading like the one below. That picture can represent two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes but it must do so using the same medium of lines drawn on the page. A particular acute angle may represent a two-dimensional spear-head or the side of a three-dimensional cube. If we were to take that flat picture and somehow transform it into a real three-dimensional image the pencil lines would be taken away, as would all the shading, but it would become the thing it represented much more than the flat picture ever was.
Imagine the flat picture was a beautiful garden with a warm sun looking over it. That garden and sun may in some sense convey something of the reality of a real garden and sun but only in some lesser sense. A very good picture might even make the observer feel in some way that he was actually being warmed by the sun or enjoying a walk on the grass.
Imagine further that it were possible for somebody only to know about flat pictures and two dimensions. That person might look at the flat garden picture and, hearing tales of some superior, three-dimensional world, find such a thing absolutely preposterous. There is no other world of three-dimensional objects out there. Why would we need such a thing to explain or fulfil this perfectly good two-dimensional picture world?
That movement from the two-dimensional picture world to the three-dimensional world of objects is Lewis’ analogy for the relationship of this world to the heavenly realm. In the same way that the two-dimensional picture carries or embodies something of the three-dimensional world so our world embodies something of the heavenly realm. But it is only an intimation, a sense of that other world. It is not the thing itself and, having never experienced the heavenly realm, we cannot know how our experience here will be taken up and fulfilled in it. But the fact that we do not know how it will occur or what it will be like does not mean that this transposition is just a fantasy any more than the movement from two to three dimensions.
This, to my mind, is the key quotation relating to transposition and the spiritual realm:
You can say that by Transposition our humanity, sense and all, can be made the vehicle of beatitude. Or you can say that the heavenly bounties by Transposition are embodied during this life in our temporal experience.
C.S. Lewis, ‘Transposition’ in The Weight of Glory, p.111
This perhaps provides a way for us to reconcile two aspects of the New Testament that I have always thought somewhat contradictory. These are the scriptural passages I quoted at the top of this entry.
Here we have two very different visions of the end of the world: one in which the world is destroyed and remade and one in which the world continues but is joined with heaven and renewed through that union. What is going on here?
If Lewis’ idea of transposition is correct then it is not something that can be described to us either in the literal or symbolic language of the Bible (or indeed of any book or language), so perhaps God gave us both as alternative images describing the same reality from different sides.
One of the most vivid comparisons in Lewis’ essay is that of a candle flame ‘which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the sun’ (ibid.). The candle flame in that image is both contained within but also, in some sense, made redundant by the much greater light that floods the room from outside. This is a vision of continuity and discontinuity.
The question of the relationship of this world to the final state of things has perplexed me for many years:1 is it finally one of continuity (ie this world but transformed into a much better version as in Revelation 21) or one of discontinuity (ie not this world but a different one as in 2 Peter 3)? I have thought differently at different times. But I believe that Lewis’ concept of transposition gives us a method for holding both together at once. There will be continuity, just like there is continuity between the candle flame and the light that floods the room or between the flat two-dimensional garden and a real garden or between an architect’s blueprint and the fully built cathedral. But there will also be discontinuity. Upon the lower level, and with only the knowledge of the lower level, it is far harder to conceive of what this discontinuity will reveal itself to be. Go back to the vision of a person who had only ever known two-dimensions. The three-dimensional is a mystery: what could it possibly be like? We can know by analogy that this world is a participation in that heavenly world but we cannot know the essence of that world itself.
This leads me to questions like: Will there be art in heaven? Will there be animals? Will there be pets? Will there be cathedrals? The answer to all of these questions must be “yes” but it’s a qualified: “Yes”, but all of these things will be transposed into that higher key, that fourth-dimension, which we have no conception of now but which we can imagine exists through the analogy of transposition applied to things we are aware of in this life: the candle, the drawing, the blueprint, and so on.
And maybe this is why the New Testament gives us, in a sense, both destruction and continuity: the reality of a transposed version of this world is some kind of indescribable blend of both of these realities.
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