Ethics of Elfland

Our Lord’s call to love our enemies seems to be impractical, unrealistic and even out of this world. Indeed, it seems to be the ethics of Elfland! However, the ethics of Elfland is more real than the ethics of pragmatism which surrenders to the fallen nature of this world. Our Lord has come to turn the world upside down and show us that our world needs the perception of the Elfs to be seen the right way up.

David does something unheard of among kings at war, he spares the life of his enemy, an enemy that is a King, Saul. An enemy who has come out with 3000 warriors to hunt down David and kill him [1 Sam 26:2-23]. Why did David spare Saul? Well, he did it for two reasons: firstly, Saul was God’s anointed King and, secondly, David had a fear of the Lord and so would do no harm to God’s anointed. Here we have the Kingship of Saul which is seeking to kill his enemy as opposed to the Kingship of David which has mercy on his enemy. Our Lord Jesus Christ affirms the Kingship of David as he calls us to have mercy even on our enemies, whereas our Fallen World follows the way of King Saul which wishes to kill all our enemies.

Now in the Gospel of Luke [6:27-38], we find that Our Lord reveals to us this Davidic type of King. A vision of both Kingdship and Kingddom which is an out of this world vision when he states: “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly.” He then brings to the fore the background to this vision which is thoroughly rooted in an out of this world realism that is both theological and theodical for he both promises and arns us that “the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back.” It is warning and a promise that is metaphysically rooted in the truth that God, like sunshine and rain, because God gives to all things existence and sustains all created things in existence and so pours down his goodness on and his blessings over both the just and the wicked in the story of salvation that makes up the soul of human history, for bewilderingly the Most High is even “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”

However, we may have a number of reactions to this:

we may think, like the old man-of-experience, that this vision is idealistic and is for the young and naive;

we may think, if we are prone to being pragmatic, that this vision is unrealistic and away with the fairies;

or we may think in terms of all is vanity and so perceive this vision to mean that there is no point being good as both the wicked and the just are blessed by God!

But all three reactions miss the metaphysical and ontological point. The Old Man Of Experience is grown old and cynical and believes his experience renders the idealism of youth invalid, infantile and naive. But his experience is but another word for sin and he has grown old in sin and lost that eternal youth of the Holy Spirit we call Grace. The Pragmatic is the one who believes in only what he ses and only what works but in fact he takes the world as it is and thinks it needs no explanation, so he is blind to all the eternal possibilites before him because he keeps his eyes from looking up and instead his eyes are blinkered as his nose is to the grind stone. The one who thinks All Is Vanity has not seen the mercy or the justice of God. He does not see that God wants to give every human being some taste of heaven on earth so they may seek the truth of heaven itself. Even the wicked who will ultimatley choose Hell have had in this life good things and in such a way God has given them on earth what they will deny to themselves forever, namely, in heaven. For God is not cruel, though we human beings all too often are, and wills that the wicked too will know the goodness of God even towards them for the Most High is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”

All three reactions have this in common, namely, they think earth can judge heaven but heaven cannot be judged by the earth. Indeed, the idealism of Youth is an echo from Eden as it is the young that perceive that this world is not what it should be. Their idealism is a primordial protest against evil, injustice, sin and death for they dimly perceive from the corner of their eyes that the world should be more beautiful then it is, but it ain’t!

It is here that the great G K Chesterton introduces us to the ethics of Elfland in his wonderful book ‘Orthodoxy’ when he writes:

Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget. [p.74]