Tis Strange Indeed
Weird Christianity and the Cosmic Ransom Trilogy
Happy October readers!
While I’m still in the bullpen, organizing my notes for an upcoming author interview and a rambling essay on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, writers Noah Elkins and D.T. Adams are doing me a solid.
And by doing me a solid, I mean typing, deleting, and typing some more.
Enjoy these musings on the spiritually weird and the spiritually cosmic; with any luck they’ll help you get your All Hallow’s Eve celebration on.
Sampling Weird Christianity
A review of the graphic novel God’s’Dog by Jonathan Pageau
by Noah David Elkins
Some of you Crocodiles may remember a piece I wrote earlier this year about Kanye West and the archetype of the Holy Fool. Yes…by Kanye West, I mean the same one who just dug himself deeper with an ugly, head-scratching rant against Jewish people.
Anyway…in that article, I pulled heavily from the work of Jonathan Pageau, an Orthodox icon carver, YouTuber, and friend of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. This time, I want to look more closely at Pageau himself, and more particularly at his recent graphic novel, God’s’Dog: Monster.
Jonathan Pageau's popularity comes from the work he's done in recapturing the language of ancient Christian symbolism in a way that makes sense to modern people. Like C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien before him, he has one foot in our world and one in ancient Christendom.
Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, the first installment of ‘God's'Dog’ gives us plenty to chew on. The style is similar to what you might find in the Hellboy graphic novels: dramatic, high contrast, and often dark. The first entry has us following a band of heroes led by St. George as they embark on a pilgrimage to the Holy City. Along the way, Pageau brings in several wild and unexpected characters: St. George the Dragon-Slayer, a pillar saint (a type of monastic figure who lives his whole life on a pillar), and of course, St. Christopher. For a little context, St. Christopher is often depicted carrying the Christ-child, and less often depicted as having the head of a dog.
“Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Evangelism By Way of the Strange
We are used to contemporary Christian propaganda...oh excuse me...contemporary Christian art.
To make a broad, though not all-encompassing critique of contemporary Christian culture, much of it is a master copy job. From rave-style revivals, music that sounds like secular music but with Christian words instead, and those t-shirts with the Coca-Cola logo swapped out for the name Jesus Christ, there’s a fond indulgence for slapping our name over something else and upping the cheese factor to a fine, aerosol blend.
But Pageau has found a new fuel for evangelism—the spiritually strange. The kinds of stuff that shows up in the books of Ezekiel or Job; and consequently, the stories and topics many pastors wouldn't be caught dead doing a sermon series over.
Somehow, it’s working.
One of the reasons why the strange is compelling is because it always captures our attention. Think P. T. Barnum's Barnum & Bailey Circus, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or even the crucifixion of our Lord. We can't turn our eyes from the strange, the unexpected, the shocking, and even the abominable.
Another reason is because Christianity is often framed as secularism-lite. If that sounds too harsh, go back a decade and just check out our concerts, merch, music, and messaging. But so long as Christianity remains familiar, relevant (in that cool, hip youth pastor kind of way), and mostly unchallenged, it remains redundant.
The Language of Christianity
Recently, on an interview with Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray quoted historian Tom Holland as saying that he’d be more likely to join the Church if they were more willing to talk about the weird stuff—cherubim and seraphim for example—instead of just sounding like everybody else in the culture.
We don’t often consider this, but it’s possible that the desire to be relevant, to make things palatable, the tendency to talk down to the culture or to imitate it is actually one reason for the decline of Western Christianity. Like St. Francis of Assisi, another famous Christian weirdo, or like the Holy Fools who made a spectacle of themselves so that others might look upward to God, there comes a time to turn our perspectives upside down.
If only to see the cosmos right-side up again.
Because of this, Pageau has been unexpectedly turning the world right-side up for many who walked away from Christianity. Who knew that in this materialistic, scientistic, and ideological age, there could be such interest in Pillar Saints, Dragon-Slayers, and Dog-Headed Men. But Pageau has proven that it is indeed the case, and that there's a whole cave of Christian weirdness just waiting for more creatives to come and mine.
But until then, ‘God's'Dog’ is scratching that itch for me and for countless others who are hungry for the strange and nearly-lost beauty of ancient Christianity.
Authors to Read: The Ransom Trilogy
The Cosmos Through the Eyes of C.S. Lewis
by D.T. Adams
Kidnapping. Interplanetary travel. Alien races. Spiritual beings that rule over each world in our solar system.
Sound like a decent sci-fi novel?
Try three of them.
You might have heard the titles: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. But you might not know that, taken together, the three novels of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy form an epic, three act story that challenges our assumptions about the Cosmos, our understanding of the spiritual realm, and the modern imagination.
People generally don’t think of Lewis as a science fiction writer, and I wouldn’t argue that he was. But while staying true to a genre he loved, Lewis labored to weave interplanetary travel, characters from Greek and British mythology, and a Medieval understanding of the planets and their characteristics into a vibrant panorama of Christian thought and history.
Commonly called the Space Trilogy, (or more commonly, the Ransom Trilogy), the stories follow Dr. Ransom, an English philologist who travels across our Solar System. While Ransom’s first journey to Mars (a kidnapping which kicks off ‘Out of the Silent Planet’) starts off like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, he soon meets a Martian race ruled by an Oyarsa, a spiritual being with authority over the planet. By learning their language and seeing that their world is without sin or malevolence, Ransom realizes that their God Maleldil is none other than the Christian God people worship on earth.
Novels two and three confirm that Ransom’s journey to Mars was no accidental fish-out-of-water adventure; on Venus he struggles to prevent a demon-possessed colleague from corrupting an Eve-like creature (‘Perelandra’). in ‘That Hideous Strength’ he leads a band of human resistance fighters against dark, conspiratorial powers trying to seize control of earth. Of course, Lewis doesn’t make it out to be quite so romantic as all that. In the end, the resistance is an unqualified, rag-tag group of men and women who God selects to be humanity's last defenders.
Many die-hard Lewis fans I’ve known refuse to call these books the “Space Trilogy” out of respect for what Lewis was trying to accomplish. Lewis wanted modern readers to gain an appreciation for the Medieval way of looking at the cosmos. Because of the modern, post-Enlightenment view of space as empty and vacuous, Lewis wanted to bring attention to the fact that God had fashioned the world so that we see things as we do for a reason.
We look up at the sky and, rather than a void, we see greater and lesser lights ruling the day and night. These lights keep time for us, direct the regular advance and retreat of the oceans, and help us navigate the world. Not only so, but they are in the heavens, above the firmament separating us from the throne room of God. The Medieval mind would have seen that the stars, planets, and the moon are all closer to God and His heaven than we are; Lewis wanted us to regain that optimistic enchantment with the heavens.
Furthermore, Lewis wanted Christians, especially, to reject the modernist’s sterile view of the cosmos and maintain the Christian way of seeing. He wanted men with chests to look up and see nothing other than a masterful display of the power and glory of their Maker and to praise Him in response.
But for serious readers of any stripe, and with its rich, contemplative worlds coupled with spellbinding, climactic narrative, The Ransom Trilogy is worth exploring.
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