[quote,link] QotD

[piggymouse]

PRISONER OF NARNIA
by ADAM GOPNIK

1. Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the enthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws another right hook at the rationalist that they don’t notice that the rationalist isn’t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends have long since left the building.
2. Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the  lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible — a donkey who reemerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation — now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

Прекрасная статья. favorov, thanks for sharing.

Comments

[nine_k]

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[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Да... Гопник, Гопник, а поляну сечет до горизонта

[yan.livejournal.com]

Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes—the thought not
occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn’t really a
belief but a very strong desire to believe. Несколько наивное суждение, я бы сказал, для знатока Евангелия. Кажется, у Гопника этого какие-то другие общие места, чем у нас.