Our country heaves in grief.
A righteous anger stirs.
And we've been here before.
On May 24, 2022—not even one year ago—I choked on tears as I listened to coach Steve Kerr literally cry out in bitter rage, calling for leaders to break their addiction to power and do something. We all listened to the Governor of Texas do his utmost to explain what he could only describe as evil.
We find ourselves again in this, the darkest of moments. All anyone can reach for to describe the "why" of what happened at The Covenant School are words like evil, satanic, godless, and profane. Believing or unbelieving, religious or agnostic, it matters not. Every human who looks upon the slaughter of innocents heaves on the darkness. Every human, that is, except those in the media—they are the plastic people.1 The country, once again, has come face to face with an adversary it cannot see, manifested in an act beyond natural comprehension.
Sensing Something from the Beyond
At the end of WWII, C.S. Lewis wrote a sermon for Whitsunday (Pentecost) titled "Transposition." The sermon at Mansfield College, Oxford, addressed the problem of articulating spiritual occurrences (higher) in our natural world (lower).
"Transposition occurs whenever the higher reproduces itself in the lower."2 Lewis explained how we could feel the same sensation in joy as we do in anguish. Beauty makes us sick with longing, and the ugly can make us sick with anguish.
What hits me hard in Lewis’s address is his clear case for our natural reality being influenced by another realm. Though Lewis is writing about the "higher" being the presence of God in the world, I'm expanding it here to include not only the good of the supernatural world but the evil of it as well. Exacerbating the tension is that we feel and intrinsically "know" this higher realm but cannot explain it.3
But we relegate the sense of the supernatural to superstition or gimmick, or we explain it away. It doesn’t have a place in modern consciousness. Instead, we seek to explain the supernatural in terms of science or social science. Instead of acknowledging the holy Other (sui generis) as having a place in our lived experience, we look to public policy or personal health. The Modern Age, which some date as beginning all the way back to Dante,4 shows itself by the rise of the autonomous self and disenchantment: the denial and banishment of the Supernatural and Beauty.5
Sir Roger Scruton explains the banishment of beauty as a by-product of post-modern desecration—a time when self-expression leads to transgression and the profaning of the sacred. The sacred, Scruton explains, is life itself. We live in a time when life, scientifically, is described as mere machine work. And spirituality, as, well, there is no spirituality.
When we reduce life, as a culture, to ones and zeroes, we remove any regard for its self-evident preciousness. But then Shadow rises and reminds us there is something beyond our control and complete understanding that yet influences our reality.
We see this transposition in the quivering chin of Coach Kerr, in the stupefied gaping and stuttering of news anchors reaching to explain the unconscionable evil behind the taking of children’s lives, and in our anger welling up in our eyes.
This is not a simple emotion. It is spirit. And this should tell us something.
It should tell us that law, if nothing else, only makes evil more vivid, as Paul's confusing passage in Romans 7 reminds us. It should tell us that when discussing mental health, we must also talk about intent and culpability.
Do we not pursue law? Of course, we should. Should we ignore mental health? Of course not. But we should be careful to slap the mental health patch on the problem. It is estimated that only a third of mass acts of violence were perpetrated by people with mental health issues.6 This Spectre of Evil, in which we find ourselves locked in a dark room, infests our reality in various insidious ways. Studies show how these evil acts have increased exponentially since Columbine, the advent of social media, and the internet's ubiquity.7 The acts are visual. Easily spread and easily romanticized. Isolation, a by-product of screen time, becomes a breeding ground for “the sickness unto death.”8
The darkness pervades deeper than we hear about in scrolling click-bait headlines. What of the children exposed to this violence at The Covenant School, the survivors? Experts estimate that over 100,000 children have experienced deep trauma related to a fatal shooting at their school. Even as we mourn the lives of the children and adults from Monday’s massacre, consider the ramifications the survivors will endure for years to come.9
A Supernatural Answer
One of Lewis's chief insights in his genre-defying The Screwtape Letters is that Evil moves into human life not through spectacle but through bending the good, subtlety at first. Then Evil sits back and watches humanity annihilate itself.
In my despairing thoughts, our human efforts against Evil feel hopelessly futile. And yet, my shuddering heart calls to mind the ultimate Transposition of the higher into the lower: The Incarnation of the Son of God.
Heaven to earth. What does this mean at a time such as this?
I believe it means the dismantling and eradication of Evil. We inherited the bent self; only Christ can make us new again. Let's look to our human means to limit tragedies like this and remember our trembling chins (see Kerr video) as clues to a reality we can only influence through the gateway of the supernatural: Christ himself.
We can and should act. But we must also believe in our new inheritance as Children of God and live as though we believe it! I can think of three ways to combat a supernatural problem within a temporal world.
First, we must understand that a spiritual enemy must first be fought on spiritual grounds. Such a proposition does not fit well in a society that prizes scientific sophistication and rejects the spiritual. Evenso, we must act for goodness and justice, using reason and imagination, while we fast, pray, and creatively introduce the hope of the Gospel into a culture desperate for meaning.
The words feel like feathers in the wind even as I write this. But it doesn’t have to be so. Christians have taken to virtue signaling on either side of the political spectrum, mimicking the mainstream. I am appalled by Christian leaders and influencers who diminish the offering of prayers for the families of victims.
Prayer is the breath of the Christian. It is the spiritual key, says Richard Foster, into the heart of God. It is a passageway to intimacy with God. In his invitation to prayer, Foster writes:
“For too long, we have been in a far country: a country of noise and hurry and crowds, a country of climb and push and shove, a country of frustration and fear and intimidation. And he {God} welcomes us home: home to serenity and peace and joy, home to friendship and fellowship and openness, home to intimacy and acceptance and affirmation.”10
Joy, peace, serenity, friendship, openness, intimacy, acceptance, and affirmation are the jewels of life every human desires. And God offers it to each person through prayer. Such a gateway into holy intimacy we should never diminish. Instead, we must take it seriously and engage in prayer and fasting to change the world for the glory of God.
Next, we must engage in the arduous work of cultural rehabilitation. The virtuous and spiritual underpinnings of society are derived from leadership, education, and the arts.
But our leadership fails us through corruption, ideological extremism, and avarice; our education system has been co-opted by elites who seek ideological indoctrination instead of a classical understanding of reality; the arts fester in transgressive self-aggrandizement, banishing beauty.
So what are we to do?
We can be and elect leaders who value the education of virtue in our schools. Through academic excellence and the pursuit of virtue in our pedagogy, we can bring balance to a system that is, as a good friend from Oxford describes it, godless. As artists, we can recast the artist’s vision toward beauty and become connoisseurs of the good, consuming and producing art that transcends amusement (“no mind”).
Finally, we must pursue the Beautiful as an affront to the postmodern desecration. I do not apologize for using transcendental virtues as marching orders. Indeed, I am not the first, nor shall I be the last to do so.
In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor ends his reflection on modern secular culture with a deep reflection on the transformative beauty found in the poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins.11 Likewise, in his groundbreaking book on neuropsychology, Ian McGilchrist discusses the importance of imagination, creativity, and beauty as means to think “wholly” as human beings. He regards our modern world as solely embracing left-brained pragmatic thinking at the expense of the right brain, which brings meaning to data and helps us make sense of our lives and the world.12 Finally, C.S. Lewis looked to aesthetic judgment and the training of virtue in the young and old alike as the means to change a world bent on pursuing power and an affront to cultural evil.13
In his essay, “Learning in Wartime,” C.S. Lewis challenges readers to remember that humanity has faced peril and tragedy from ancient times until now. In his essay, he speaks of war. But I believe we can apply his lessons here.
The challenge for us? Don't get sucked into headline scrolling or news bingeing. The day needs you—and your humanity—to pursue the beautiful. By pursuing the beautiful, we contribute to advancing the vision of God in our lives, the lives of others, and society.
Through prayer and living your life, you contribute to present joys. Don't ransom the value of "now" for the uncertainty of the future. Our daily noble pursuits make us human. Tragedy awakens us, helps us see the preciousness of life, and reminds us to live each moment to the glory of God.
We must not shelve noble virtues or reason because tragedy arises. Nor should we take to partisan shouting. Instead, we must become warriors of the good, emissaries of truth, and beauty makers. Beauty reaches through tragedy to work the miracles of salvation and restoration. Beauty is the reaching hand of hope.
Notes & Further Reading
The Plastic People is a phrase I use in my new book, The Beauty Chasers. Here’s the excerpt: “Beware of the Plastic People. They can’t hear the wind. They don’t take time to watch the trees bend in the breeze. They annihilate space with speed and noise. They’re plastic because they kill beauty. They’ve bought into the modern way of thinking about the world. The Plastic People have figured everything out with formulas and predetermined GPS coordinates for life. They’ve shaped our world into a land of bottom-line thinking, pragmatic living, and market-driven achieving. Because, of course, the best way to measure success is whether we can scale something.”
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 1st edition. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001).
The reference here is to Ecclesiastes 3:11. Lewis also discusses this tension in The Screwtape Letters, referring to it as the principle of undulation.
Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), see “Introduction.”
The idea that our modern world struggles behind a veil of disenchantment is not a new idea. Fredrich Schiller introduced it in the Enlightenment in his poem, “The Gods of Greece” (1788). See Sara Lyons, “The Disenchantment /Reenchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularization, and the Gods of Greece from Friedrich Schiller to Walter Pater,” The Modern Language Review 109, no. 4 (2014): 873–895, accessed May 13, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.109.4.0873. The concept was appropriated by Max Weber.
More recently, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor wrote extensively on disenchantment in A Secular Age. Wessley Kort of Duke University summarizes the disenchanted worldview of the twenty-first century and gives three modern assumptions that conspire to disenchant that are worth noting. The first assumption is the alienation of humanity from its nonhuman context. Next is the severance of value and meaning from both the non-human world and, perhaps more importantly, the human world, thus relegating value and meaning to mere conscious construction. The final element of cultural disenchantment is the belief that knowledge and understanding primarily rise from the reduction of things, events, humans, and human behavior to their “simplest components.” This reductionism is accompanied by a cynical perspective of human behavior that views humans as disingenuous in how they present themselves—in other words, people tend to hide their true selves. Kort asserts the Great War (WWI), though an obvious prominent emotional marker within Lewis’s culture, was not at the root formation of people’s disenchantment. Rather, it was the loss of personal meaning disseminated in the philosophical thought of the likes of Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Giambattista Vico, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud.
The culture’s disenchantment stems from a person’s readiness to define themselves by the above assumptions. Such a disenchantment leads to a lack of relational understanding—person to person but, more importantly, person to God. But Weber framed disenchantment (‘Entzauberung der Welt’ or disenchantment of the world) in his now famous lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” (1918) as a good thing. He was grateful for losing religious superstition and celebrated the victory of the rational mind.
“One-Third of Mass Shootings Committed by People With Mental Illness, Study Says,” last modified August 8, 2019, accessed March 29, 2023, https://pew.org/2YJlCHt. “The truth is that the vast majority of violence is not perpetrated by people with mental illness. Statements to the contrary only serve to perpetuate stigma and distract from the real issues. NAMI sees gun violence as a national public health crisis that impacts everyone.”
Ph.D. Thesis: Jazma Mekelle Parker, “Law Enforcement Perception of Social Media as an Influence in Mass Shootings” (n.d.). “Findings revealed that social media tend to influence mass shootings in 4 capacities: as enablers of the conceptualization process of the crime until the final act of mass violence; as facilitators of the individual or personal agenda of the mass shooter; as platforms that harness emerging technology for knowledge building during the planning phase and create operational efficiency for the final act; and as coordinators of group or symphonic terrorism.” N.B. “Although no reliable research has yet established a link between psychological turmoil and killings, the notion remains part of everyday communications (Metzl & MacLeish, 2015).”
I am using Kierkegaard’s words and the title of his most celebrated work, which deals with human despair and sin.
“Surviving a School Shooting: Impacts on the Mental Health, Education, and Earnings of American Youth | Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR),” accessed March 29, 2023, https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/health/surviving-school-shooting-impacts-mental-health-education-and-earnings-american.
Richard J Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), 1.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Taylor describes our lives and places as consisting of a spiritual shape. He uses the term “fullness.” According to Taylor, we grope for this feeling of fullness in our lives. Sometimes we label the feeling as wonder or beauty. (5) On Taylor’s reflection beauty, see Chapter 20: Conversions, 728-772.
See “Preface to the New Expanded Edition,” xxiii in Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, New expanded edition. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
Clive Staples Lewis, The Abolition of Man, or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools, 1. Touchstone ed., A Touchstone book (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 24-27; 88. See also Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Academic, 2021), 82-83.