C. S. Lewis' Eternal Painter
Mimesis in a World of Simulacra
There is an audio transcription below the pay-wall at the bottom of the post; reading the whole article is free!
The outlines of the Ghost looked vaguely familiar, but I soon realized that what I had seen on earth was not the man himself but photographs of him in the papers. He had been a famous artist.
- The Great Divorce
So begins one of my favorite of the little adventures in CS Lewis’ phenomenal book “The Great Divorce.” A sometimes chilling envisioning of the Eternal realm, Lewis speculates what heaven or eternity could be like. He is pretty adamant about stating that this isn’t necessarily what he actually believe heaven will be like, nor does he claim to have revelation. Rather, this book is not so much about Heaven as it is about our interaction with the Eternal as a whole. Lewis was much more interested in examining how we as humans would be interact with the great heaven scape, would we pull our heads out of the sand to see it? Would those in eternity be able to appreciate what they were witnessing?
CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce, MACMILLAN PUBLISHING CO., INC. NEW YORK COPYRIGHT (c) 1946, BY MACMILLAN PUBLISHING CO., INC.
In many cases, the answer was no, such as in the case of the Artist, my personal favorite of his little vignette tales. A Spirit (Someone who had spent a lot of time in Eternity, and is thereby solid enough to walk around freely.) This Spirit comes upon the ghost of an old painter.
"God!" said the Ghost, glancing round the landscape. "God what?" asked the Spirit.
"What do you mean, 'God what'?" asked the Ghost. "In our grammer God is a noun."
"Oh-I see. I only meant 'By Gum' or something of the sort. I meant . . . well, all this. It's . . . it's ... I should like to paint this."
"I shouldn't bother about that just at present if I were you."
"Look here; isn't one going to be allowed to go on painting?"
"Looking comes first." "But I've had my look. I've seen just what I want to do. God!-I wish I'd thought of bringing my things with me!"
The Ghost, who is the painter of this scenario, hasn’t yet had time to solidify, and thus become a spirit of the realm. He has yet to observe the True reality because he can only see it. In fact, he is seeing it, he is having the real thing as the Spirit will later point out. Nevertheless because like us with pictures for Instagram, the urge is ever present, we can not observe and soak in because we can only see. So his continued sight but lack of observation prevents him from true observation. He sees the beauty of the potential to paint, not to observe God's Glory. His desire to paint would be folly, for he is “having the real thing” as the Spirit says, so his desire to paint is no good. The Spirit tells him “That sort of thing is no good here” speaking of painting, yet at a deeper level speaking of Mimesis.
So CS Lewis continues
"When you painted on earth-at least in your earlier days-it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came. There is no good telling us about this country, for we see it already. In fact we see it better than you do."
"Then there's never going to be any point in painting here?"
"I don't say that. When you've grown into a Person (it's all right, we all had to do it) there'll be some things which you'll see better than anyone else. One of the things you'll want to do will be to tell us about them. But not yet. At present your business is to see. Come and see. He is endless. Come and feed."
This is the essence of Mimesis, it is the imitation of the true things, the imitation of Eternity. Mimesis is good imitation, one might call it “rightly ordered imitation” which I agree connotes the opposite is also available. What then would we call that?
Simulacrum: An Image, Representation OR an insubstantial form or semblance of something
Simulacrum: A likeness; a semblance; a mock appearance; a sham; - now usually in a derogatory sense.
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary Via Dictionary.net
Indeed, a Simulacrum would be the opposite of Mimesis, it is a wrongly ordered imitation by my own words. In the world today we are flooded by simulacra, pale imitations of truths. The very shadows of Plato’s cave cast before our eyes everywhere we look. From the banal and benign of diet sodas and endless movie remakes to the more dangerous false religions. The Pearl Davis and Andrew Tates of the world, are those greater phantoms that have a bite to them. Moreover the Climate Change activists, the Astrology fanatics, they are all participating in this simulacra. It is an imitation but it is not a true imitation, because it bears in itself an inherent subversion of the truth. This is the inherent criticism of Mimesis that Plato offered of it, although Aristotle disagreed with it. Plato suggests because of the “Forms,” these perfect truths, all imitations come short of that, so inherently imitation is poor and faulty. An understandable reluctance, however, I would tend to side with Aristotle, who says that we are “mimetic creatures.” This posits that imitating the True and Beautiful is the greatest call of the artist. We are humans, and so we will fall short many a time in the true imitation, in the Mimetic! Which brings us back to our Eternal Painter!
The Painter was not very interested, in going along with the Spirit, nevertheless, he condescends to go with him, and so we get this interaction.
The Spirit broke into laughter. "Don't you see you'll never paint at all if that's what you're thinking about?" he said.
"What do you mean?" asked the Ghost.
"Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country."
"But that's just how a real artist is interested in the country."
"No. You're forgetting," said the Spirit. "That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light."
"Oh, that's ages ago," said the Ghost. "One grows out of that. Of course, you haven't seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake."
"One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower-become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations."
This is the snare of the Simulacra, guised, oftentimes as “love of the art” but instead it becomes a perversion. Because the effort is ostracized from the Spirit of Creativity, from the True and the Beautiful, but rarely intentionally.
See, I have called by name Bezalel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. 3 I have filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship, 4 to make artistic designs for work in gold, in silver, and in bronze, 5 and in the cutting of stones for settings, and in the carving of wood, that he may work in all kinds of craftsmanship. - Exodus 31: 2-6
The Spirit of Creativity is the spirit of God, when we desire to create art, we are naturally becoming creative. However, creativity is the Lord's, over and over in scripture we get examples of the Lord being the inspiration for creativity. All other spirits or “gods” powers rest in perversion and corruption. This includes ourselves, when we are painting for the sake of the paint, or telling stories for the sake of the story, this is wrong. As CS Lewis points out, it is really resting on our own reputations, thus creating a simulacra rather than a mimesis. This is because we were taking ourselves out of the eternity that was given to us, we removed our gaze from the picture of heaven and rested it on ourselves.
We are told to subdue the earth, not Worship it, but when we remove ourselves from God’s power, the earth suddenly becomes a more powerful force than our lonesome selves, and so something to worship. This holds true with astrology and its occultish cousins; when we separate ourselves from the Divine Logic of the universe, we must find some other means by which to see. All of these are inherently simulacra because they are not focused on God and his Son Jesus, who is “The Way, the Truth, and the Light.” These other efforts are Plato’s shadows and phantoms, rather than Aristotle’s observations. Far are they from CS Lewis's glimpses of eternal scapes, they are observations of man's own soul. So for a time, they may be convincing, yet with time they will separate, into the perversions that they truly are. So we find ourselves in the phantom realm we are now in, the shadows all around us, are not the real, but the inverse. The nature of a shadow or phantom is that you can’t immediately tell it is false from a distance. Yet when you get close you will see that it was just a mirage, the question will be, what do we do when realize the world we live in is a phantom? How should we respond?
Well, that will be a subject for another time! Or you can listen to the Podcast I did on it!
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Remember that the Truth is out there, not everything you see or believe is a phantom! The truth can be grasped and it can be known, because the Truth came down to us! His name is Jesus and he died for you; that you might know him, and come to salvation through him!
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