Ancient of Days

My new favorite name for God is “Ancient of Days”.  Am I allowed to have favorite names for God or is that sacrilegious.  Are all His names perfectly holy and I have to like them all the same?  If so, I’m doomed but right now the title Ancient of Days captures the way I am learning to see God perfectly.

Way, way, way back in the day, we sang this song in church called “Ancient of Days”, but the song had no bearing on the name any more than if we’d used the word Jesus or God or any of His other names; it just happened to be metrically pleasing.  But the significance of this name has hit me strongly as I write a paper that has consumed my life for the past three months.

My paper is not about God.  I am writing it for a rhetoric and drama class in which we studied Shakespeare, but my blessed, wonderful professor allowed us to write our papers on anything that interested us, provided it tied back to the class somehow, and I chose That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis.  There are a million things to be said about this fantastic book (the third in his Space Trilogy), but because specificity becomes more important as you progress in your education, I had to focus on a specific area and I chose the use of Arthurian legend.

Because I have written a 15 page paper about this and am tired of picking apart the details of the story, I refuse to give you a summary of the plot other than this: It’s about this evil corporation that is trying to take over the world and this small group of people on the other side trying, with the help of King Arthur’s spiritual heir and Merlin, to stop them.  Does that sound confusing?  I hope I haven’t ruined the whole book for you and now you won’t read it. GO READ IT.   

In working so heavily with both the concept of myth and the writings of Lewis, however, I have learned a great deal about Christ.  The Arthurian legend is filled with Christian symbolism (Arthur as a messianic figure uniting a torn country under the banner of Christ, for instance) and mythology (Holy Grail, anyone?), and Lewis turns this to advantage in his very modern, fairly sci-fi novel.  The idea behind myth, for him, is that it is great on its own, regardless of the manner of telling, because it contains a glimpse of reality.  That reality is defined by Christ and all good myths contain this critical, beautiful undertow back to Christ.  Throughout the Arthurian mythology, you see the constant current of symbolism and the Gospel.  In fact, these under-pinnings in Christianity are by no means limited to “Christian mythology”.  They are universal.

A myth is universal and timeless. Lewis translates the Arthurian legend into a modern setting to demonstrate what a powerful pull on our hearts these heroic legends have, and his point is that they have this pull because they lead to God and we are wired to need God.

The awe we have of Arthur, the once and future king (to borrow the apt wording of T.H. White), is an awe that God deserves.  The story of Christ is myth, but it is myth fulfilled.  The legend of the “dying god” is pervasive throughout history but only in Christ is it realized as history.  By becoming reality, the story does not lose its mythic qualities.  The myth gains the status of truth that is venerable.

Tolkien, in describing fairy-tales, talks about the “eucastastrophe” that is necessary for a good fairy-story, the perfect and near-impossible “happy ending”, but Tolkien carries the analogy to the Gospel, saying, “ But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation had been raised to the fulfilment [sic] of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history.  The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.  This story begins and ends in joy” (On Fairy Stories 65).  

As I read the Bible, I realize this is true.  The stories we were awed by as children but read as rote now that we’re grown regain (with the added fire maturity and greater comprehension brings) their original awe-factor.  God is not just some “being” in the sky with all sorts of power and knowledge.  Jesus is not a cool historical figure like George Washington.  Jesus is Immanuel (God with us!  Think about THAT for a moment), the myth of the dying god realized in infant, child and man form, and God is the Ancient of Days, the undying, unchanging, awe-ful (in the archaic sense) I AM.