Well, no. The Harrowing of Hell is a definite part of Tradition, and it was Our Lord Himself who saw Satan falling as lightning from Heaven and spoke of the everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels. I am the last person in the world (if you had followed some of my online rows!) to want a Christianity purged of Hell and Divine anger. I just think that particular expression, at that particular time, is out of place. It is as if to say: This is all that I, as Savìour, have come to do. But it is not. By rising from the dead, Our Saviour not only defeated Hell and Death, but above all opened wide the gates of Heaven. That, if anything, should be what "It is finished" should be used for, if it is removed from its natural place in the story.
You know what it reminds me of? There was that pretty dreadful song, "We are the world", at the time of the great movement to help the victims of famine in 1985. The song, I think everyone will agree, stank on ice, although giants like Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Ray Charles lent it a class it did not deserve. One line said: "As God has taught us, by turning stone to bread..." The thing is, this is nonsense. It is not God, but the Devil tempting Him, who promised to turn stone to bread. God multiplied bread and fishes in the two feeding miracles, but did not turn stone to bread; indeed, he used the two as a sign of opposing and incompatible things. ("Which of you, if your son ask him for bread, would give him a stone?")
What I am saying is that here you have the mental fingerprint, so to speak, of someone who has no familiarity at all with Holy Writ, quotes from hazy memories because he feels that it is required in that particular situation, and gets it wrong. As for the rest of the film, they had the sense to stick fairly closely to Lewis' original, and (in spite of some deadening in the sacrifice scene, which again shows insensitivity to the properly Christian content of the story) they just proved how well C.S.Lewis wrote it in the first place. Well done to them for doing it, but it is, on their part, no more than professionalism. It is Lewis whom we should praise.
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Date: 2005-12-22 08:49 am (UTC)You know what it reminds me of? There was that pretty dreadful song, "We are the world", at the time of the great movement to help the victims of famine in 1985. The song, I think everyone will agree, stank on ice, although giants like Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Ray Charles lent it a class it did not deserve. One line said: "As God has taught us, by turning stone to bread..." The thing is, this is nonsense. It is not God, but the Devil tempting Him, who promised to turn stone to bread. God multiplied bread and fishes in the two feeding miracles, but did not turn stone to bread; indeed, he used the two as a sign of opposing and incompatible things. ("Which of you, if your son ask him for bread, would give him a stone?")
What I am saying is that here you have the mental fingerprint, so to speak, of someone who has no familiarity at all with Holy Writ, quotes from hazy memories because he feels that it is required in that particular situation, and gets it wrong. As for the rest of the film, they had the sense to stick fairly closely to Lewis' original, and (in spite of some deadening in the sacrifice scene, which again shows insensitivity to the properly Christian content of the story) they just proved how well C.S.Lewis wrote it in the first place. Well done to them for doing it, but it is, on their part, no more than professionalism. It is Lewis whom we should praise.