The Book That Turns Darkness Into Light

“I have lived through many ages, through the eyes of salmon, deer, and wolf. I have seen the Northmen invading Ireland, destroying all in search of gold. I have seen suffering in the darkness. Yet I have seen beauty thrive in the most fragile of places. I have seen the book – the book that turns darkness into light.”

The Secret of Kells (2009)

Thus whispers Aisling the fairy by way of a prologue to the story. We see her green eyes peer at us through the leaves of the forest. We see the shadows of the Northmen with their horned helmets;¹ we see an old man and a white cat huddled in a rowing boat on a storm-tossed sea as a building blazes with fire on a tiny island behind them. The animation in this film is extraordinary: lavishly stylised, pulsing with jewel-bright colours, and disarmingly flat – I mean, of course all hand-drawn animation is two-dimensional, but The Secret of Kells really leans into that necessity and turns it into a feature. In short, the whole thing looks like a storybook, like a proper, beautiful, fantastical, rather naïve storybook. As I understand it, that’s pretty much what the creators of the film were going for. The plot revolves around the Book of Kells, which is a ninth-century illuminated manuscript of the four gospels in Latin, and so the animation is deliberately designed to imitate the style of that book’s illuminations. As an artistic choice, this was a stroke of genius. Not only does it represent a genuine innovation in animation style – and 2D animation is an art form that needs innovation if it is to survive alongside CGI going forward – but it also binds the film to its subject-matter in a really compelling way. The style feels foreign, surreal, but exactly right and authentic as a medium for the story at hand. In The Secret of Kells, Cartoon Saloon hasn’t just made a film about a manuscript; it’s brought a manuscript to life.²

The old man we saw escaping by sea – need I warn you of impending spoilers? – turns out to be a master illuminator called Aidan, and the burning building behind him the monastery of Iona. Brother Aidan arrives at the Abbey of Kells, where our protagonist Brendan is a novice monk and his stern Uncle Cellach the Abbot, carrying an unfinished manuscript that he managed to save from Iona when the Northmen came. He sets himself up in the scriptorium at Kells to continue working on his great project. “The book is a beacon in these dark days of the Northmen,” he says. He calls it the book that turns darkness into light.

 

The chi-rho page - the one Brother Aidan said would be the most beautiful of all.

Abbot Cellach has no time for manuscripts. He is too busy overseeing the building of an enormous wall around the abbey, which he intends will prevent it from meeting the same fate as Iona and so many others. Brendan, on the other hand, is enchanted by the book, and soon becomes Aidan’s apprentice. An ongoing struggle ensues in which Cellach increasingly restricts Brendan’s permission to work with Brother Aidan on the book, and Brendan increasingly defies him.

It’s a straightforward case of clashing priorities, really. Abbot Cellach wants to keep the people of Kells safe. He thinks the best way to do that is for everyone to drop everything else and work on finishing the wall, and to stay inside it at all times except if they have his express permission to leave. He also thinks that if he can successfully defend Kells against heathen enemies, that’ll convince them of the power of God. “Pagans, Crom worshippers … it is with the strength of our walls that they will come to trust the strength of our faith,” he remarks at one point. He can’t see the point of wasting time writing a manuscript when the Northmen might show up at any moment. For Brendan, on the other hand, the book is so spectacular that it’s worth making finishing it his top priority, Northmen or no Northmen. He risks his uncle’s chastisement and his own personal safety in order to achieve that aim.

Brendan’s prioritising of the book over his own safety is especially clear in one memorable scene where he goes toe-to-toe with Crom Cruach, an old death-god who lives in the forest, because he needs a magnifying glass to successfully execute more detailed illuminations, and the only way he knows to get hold of one is by stealing Crom Cruach’s eye. Brendan had caught sight of Crom Cruach’s eye earlier in the film, when he stumbled across the god’s lair while exploring the forest with his new friend Aisling, the fairy. She pleaded with him to come away because it was a place of suffering; he asked her what she meant by that.

“It is the cave of the dark one,” Aisling explained.

“Crom Cruach?” said Brendan disbelievingly, at which Aisling nodded. “But Crom Cruach’s only a story for children,” he continued, patting Aisling on the head as if she too were merely a child. “The abbot of Kells says that you shouldn’t be afraid of imaginary things.”

Aisling is clearly distressed. “It’s not imagined,” she insists, going after Brendan as he strides towards the cave. “It’s waiting in the darkness, waiting for someone to awaken it.”

“Aisling, you’re only scaring yourself,” Brendan tells her as she huddles with her arms round herself. “The abbot says that that’s all pagan nonsense. There’s no such thing as Crom Cruach.”

It promptly emerges, however, that there is such a thing as Crom Cruach, seeping out of the cave in fronds of darkness and attempting to seize them both. They get away that time, but you wouldn’t have imagined that Brendan would be in any hurry to go back to the place. When he does go back a second time to retrieve the eye, Aisling pleads with him again: “Crom Cruach took my people. It took my mother. You will die.”

No sunny denials of the dark one’s existence from Brendan this time. Instead: “Aisling, if I don’t try, the book will never be complete.” That’s it. That’s his whole justification. The book is worth the possibility of dying. Now contrast the other two attitudes we’ve seen to Crom Cruach. The abbot only isn’t afraid of it because he thinks it’s not real; he’s plenty afraid of things he thinks are real, like Northmen. Aisling, on the other hand, is terrified of it, reluctant even to speak its name, and not without reason. But Brendan, Brendan can face the dark one, because he has something that’s worth the risk. He enters the cave.

And falls into a strange not-quite-physical realm where Crom Cruach is found in the form of a gigantic snake, coiling and knotting around over itself as it makes to devour Brendan. He flees; he falls; he seems to be at its mercy – but then he seizes a piece of chalk. And the lines he draws, Crom Cruach can’t pass. (I told you the animation was disarmingly flat.) He marks out a circle around the death-god, trapping it, and seizes its eye. Blinded, Crom Cruach begins to devour itself. Brendan’s circle has turned it into an ouroboros – the serpent that eats its own tail.

 

An illustration of an ouroboros from a late-medieval Byzantine Greek alchemical manuscript, just to continue our manuscript theme.

Brendan risked his life because of his devotion to the book, and then in a way, it was the book – ‘the book’ as a general concept, the power of making marks on a surface to convey meaning, the power of graphē,³ as it were – that saved his life. What he decided was important enough to be worth facing the danger was what carried him through the danger – and, furthermore, won him his reward.

But Abbot Cellach doesn’t see things like that. He only sees Brendan putting himself in harm’s way because the book is so important to him, and so he bans him from working on it and ultimately imprisons him in the name of keeping him safe. Upon the abbot’s issuing the ban, Brendan quietly protests: “I can’t do that. I can’t give up the book, Uncle.” And he begs him: “If you looked at just one page, you’d see why. You’ve forgotten how important it is. All you want for us is this wall.”

And the worst of it is, the wall doesn’t work. When the Northmen eventually arrive, they breach it. Kells gets burned and pillaged just like Iona or anywhere else. The thing in which the abbot placed all his hope failed him.

But Aidan and Brendan manage to get away with the book. And over the next few years, they finish it. They perfect the book that turns darkness into light. Aidan commissions his apprentice: “The book was never meant to be hidden away behind a wall, locked away from the world which inspired its creation. Brendan, you must take the book to the people, so that they may have hope. Let it light the way in these dark days of the Northmen.”

Now, obviously the film could have ramped up its Christian content a lot harder than it did: the Book of Kells is a gospel manuscript, after all. But I liked that it was subtle about it; it gives me and my little blog room to come in and connect up some of the dots the way I think they should go.

I love the way Brendan pleads with his uncle over the book: if you could just see it, if you’d just look at a single page, you’d understand, you’d remember what matters. It’s not strong worldly defences that will prove the worth of the Christian faith to outsiders; it’s the revelation of who God is. And the most concrete form in which we have that revelation is the scriptures – the book that turns darkness into light. There’s some cool stuff to be found in the Bible about what God says being light: start with “your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” in Psalm 119.⁴ And also consider the following chunk of 2 Corinthians:

In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.⁵

We don’t proclaim ourselves. We’re not trying to convince people of the validity of our faith by showing off that we’re stronger than them; chances are we’re not, not when we depend on worldly ways of doing things – walls, as it were, things like slick apologetics and charismatic preachers and celebrity endorsements – and beyond that, that’s not what they need to see, that we can succeed on their terms. On the contrary, they need to see the light of the gospel. So we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord. So we take them the book and open it and explain why it means hope in dark times. And the burden is on God to reveal himself, not on us to come across as convincing.

If we’re taking this approach, we don’t need to be scared of anything. In dark times and dark places, we have no cause to cower like Aisling, because we have the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, and so we know that he purposes all things for the good of those who love him. Plus, we also don’t need the darkness not to be real in order not to fear it, like the abbot. I mean, sure, there are some things the world fears that we might think genuinely aren’t real (ancient snakey death-gods being a strong example) – but we don’t need them not to be real. We don’t need anything not to be real, because whatever it is, it isn’t so great as to rival our God, and so if he’s for us, who can be against us?⁶ If pursuing the light calls us to confront the darkness, then we can face it like Brendan did, secure in the knowledge that the light is worth it – and that when we decide he’s important enough to be worth the difficulty, our light, our great magnificent Light of the World,⁷ will certainly carry us through the darkness, and win us the reward we’re seeking.

So let’s not look in fear at the Northmen or the Crom Cruachs of the world. Let’s not look to walls, worldly defences, to prove the worth of our faith. Let’s look instead at the book that turns darkness into light. Let’s behold the Light of the World as he has been revealed to us and trust that he is greater than every darkness. And let’s do our best to take the light of the gospel to the people, that they might have hope.

Footnotes

¹ Yes, I know they didn’t really have horned helmets. It’s called artistic licence. Deal.

² Some kind human has uploaded the whole thing to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qydF6WU9YEY. Weirdly enough, though, I had an easier time finding Spanish, German, and Gaelic versions than I did the English one.

³ The Greek term is usually translated ‘writing’, but can just as happily mean ‘drawing’; at its most fundamental, the idea is one of scratching a mark into a surface: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=grafh&la=greek#lexicon.

⁴ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ps+119&version=ESVUK. This time I don’t blame you if you don’t read the whole thing.

⁵ And again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+cor+4&version=ESVUK.

⁶ You’ll have spotted my couple of allusions to Romans 8. One of my musical obsessions at the moment is a Hebrew-language worship song that’s basically just extracts of Romans 8 set to a melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp1JJpAipBU. Why don’t we have this in English?

⁷ That’s Jesus. Obvs. John 8 if you weren’t sure: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+8&version=ESVUK.

Nature and Culture 2: The End

“You can try to push back against the troubles of this world, but trouble is like the tide, and it always returns.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events S3 E7, ‘The End’ (2019)

How to generically characterise Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events? Well, I suppose you might call it something like Victorian-gothic-esque absurdist metafiction with strong elements of social satire. Or on the other hand, you might decide that, at its core, it’s really a coming-of-age story. I’m going to work from the Netflix adaptation rather than the books, simply for ease-of-access reasons.¹ Spoilers ahead.

 

Many thanks to Paperguest at newgrounds.com for this very smart depiction of Count Olaf by one of his less-than-subtle aliases.

One day at the beach, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are informed by family friend Mr. Poe that their parents have perished in a terrible fire. Thenceforth they are passed like so many hot potatoes from one (invariably incompetent if not downright villanous) guardian to another, their footsteps always dogged by misery in the form of the most villanous villain of all, Count Olaf, who wants to kill them and steal their fortune before they are old enough to inherit it. Along the way, they discover that their parents, Count Olaf, and many more of the people they encounter belonged to a secret organisation called VFD: the Volunteer Fire Department. Once, VFD was driven by the noble goal of dousing fires both literal and figurative, but then there was a schism, in which one side decided it would rather be setting the fires than putting them out.²

Throughout the series, setting fires basically functions as a metaphor for doing evil things. The Baudelaires start out with very firm notions of good and evil: some people are noble and some are wicked and you have to figure out who sits in which box. But then things get a bit more complicated than that, as is very neatly demonstrated by a courtroom scene in the twelfth story. Count Olaf is on trial; the Baudelaires make their accusations against the defendant. He hit Klaus across the face; he tried to marry Violet; he poisoned Uncle Monty; he threw Aunt Josephine to the leeches; he conspired with Esmé Squalor and Carmelita Spats; he kidnapped the Quagmire triplets from Prufrock Prep; he murdered Jacques Snicket in the Village of Fowl Devotees; he tried to cut off Violet’s head at the Heimlich Hospital; he threw a brave and noble librarian to the lions. They identify him as the cause of all their suffering. They recall that nobody has ever listened to them before when they have tried to communicate who Count Olaf is and what he’s capable of.

They recall it, and, though their testimony is well received, they begin to worry. What if, once again, their word is not enough to get justice done? They decide to take a gamble; they call Count Olaf himself to the stand to attest to his crimes. And he, well, he turns the tables on them. He makes a series of accusations of his own, whose veracity the Baudelaires are unable to deny. They held Esmé Squalor hostage on Mount Fraught (because Count Olaf was holding Sunny hostage and they wanted to get her back, but still). They helped Count Olaf burn down Caligari Carnival (because they had to in order to get a ride to the Mortmain Mountains where VFD Headquarters was, but still). Klaus caused a series of terrible accidents at Lucky Smells Lumber Mill (because he was hypnotised, but still). Violet stole some keys from a blind man to break into the library at Heimlich Hospital (because that was the only way they would be able to check the records for mentions of VFD, but still). Sunny broke her siblings out of jail (because they were going to be burned at the stake for a murder they didn’t commit – so, ahem, yeah, less grey area on that one, I’ll grant you). And then the pièce de resistance of Count Olaf’s case: the Baudelaires technically killed a man – because Count Olaf thrust a harpoon gun into their hands and it fired when they dropped it in surprise, but still. Dewey Denouement is still dead.

The point isn’t that the Baudelaires are actually on a par with Count Olaf in terms of their criminal resume; the point is that they aren’t quite as innocent as they thought they were. The point is that they’ve done more wicked things than a noble person ought to. And indeed, at the end of The Penultimate Peril, there’s a bit of a culmination of that, because they burn down the Hotel Denouement – and this time it’s not on Count Olaf’s initiative, but their own. They have truly become those who set fires rather than those who douse them.

They burn down the hotel and they escape in a boat, with Count Olaf. Subsequently shipwrecked, they wash up on an island whose community of castaways is provided over by a man named Ishmael (“call me Ish”). Everyone on the island seems to be very happy. They hang out in comfy robes keeping coloured sheep and drinking coconut cordial, their motto is ‘forget your troubles’ and apparently, though the right tidal conditions for leaving the island swing round on an annual basis, nobody ever does. Plus, the islanders are the only people the Baudelaires have ever met in all their misadventures, apart from themselves, who are able to see through Count Olaf’s disguises. I’m sure there are lots of ways in which that fact might be construed, but it strikes me as ascribing to the islanders a kind of untaintedness by the conventions and expectations of the world at large – a simplicity of heart, if you will. If we’re talking about nature and culture, the islanders are about as far to the ‘nature’ end of the proceedings as you can get, and it certainly seems to be doing them some favours.

 

Coconut cordial. On which, keep reading...

But it seems to contain some disadvantages too. There’s nothing to eat on the island except unmarinated ceviche – which is literally just bits of raw seafood – and nothing to drink except the coconut cordial, which the Baudelaires find suspicious on account of both its taste and the slightly mind-numbing effect it seems to have on the islanders. Sunny suggests that the fish might be tastier if cooked, but Ishmael counters that fire is the most dangerous thing in the world, and the Baudelaires can hardly disagree with that. Later, Violet offers to try to assemble a water filtration system from the various bits of flotsam and jetsam that have washed up on the island (which is situated such that a heck lot of flotsam and jetsam washes up there, hence all the castaways), so that there would be water to drink and salt to season the food, but Ishmael, again, argues against the proposal: what if the islanders couldn’t tolerate fresh water after so many years on nothing but cordial, or what if they started fighting about what to drink? The island is good because it’s safe, and it’s Ishmael’s job to keep it that way. Violet replies apologetically that it was just an idea. “Yes,” says Ishmael, “but ideas lead to more ideas, which lead to arguments, which lead to schisms. You remember what got you stranded here to begin with – don’t rock the boat.”

As Ishmael’s comments betray, he knows rather more about the mysteries in which the Baudelaires are embroiled than he’s letting on. In fact, he knows rather more than they do. The Baudelaires find their way to the Other Side of the island, where all the ‘dangerous’ stuff that washes up get sent – which is to say, pretty much everything that washes up. There they find a house in a tree, which has a water filtration system, and food cooked with fire, and books – including a book with their mother’s handwriting in it. Ishmael shows up and tells them that their parents once lived there. He knew their parents, because he was the one who recruited them into VFD when they attended the school of which he was principal (Prufrock Prep again). The organisation was his idea, his project. “When a fire breaks out, the Official Fire Department is there to fight it,” he explains. “But figurative fires need fighting too, and my students were interested in so many things – literature, science, music, theatre, animal behaviour, the culinary arts – and I thought, what if a group of curious, capable young people came together to stand against the ignorance and injustice of this world? We could make it a quieter, safer place. And for a time we did, and then, well, it all went up in smoke.”

You see the nature of Ishmael’s project: these things his recruits were interested in, these were all culture things, all development things, technology things. They wanted to learn and build and create and progress – just like Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, who identify themselves respectively as an inventor, a researcher, and a chef. Ishmael had hoped that VFD might make the world a better place through such things, but the project failed, and he gave up on the dream. He compares the troubles of the world to the tide: you can try to resist them but they always come back. And hence the banning of any technological-cultural development on the island, the logic being that if you can’t confront ignorance and injustice with progress, then all you can do is try to stop it ever emerging in the first place. And that’s how he proposes to keep the Baudelaire orphans safe the way he couldn’t keep their parents safe.

But then everyone on the island gets infected with a deadly fungus called the Medusoid Mycelium, the only cure for which is horseradish or another culinary substitute. The Baudelaires run back to the tree-house to see if they can find any, and a scene ensues that really makes anyone who knows the book of Genesis sit up and take notice. The Incredibly Deadly Viper – who we were introduced to in the second instalment of the series, and whose name is a deliberate misnomer (it’s actually harmless) – gives the Baudelaires an apple from the house-tree, which has been specially hybridised to function as a cure for Medusoid Mycelium poisoning. And just to hammer home the illusion further, in the book, Sunny’s comment on the matter is “Gentreefive” – as in Genesis 3:5, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”³ What’s going on here? What’s Mr. Snicket using the Biblical story for? Well, as you’ll have guessed, that’s a question that I’m going to have a stab at answering.

 

This one’s a rattlesnake, apparently, so probably actually is an Incredibly Deadly Viper.

Let’s start with the obvious: it’s some kind of inverted Fall. In Genesis, the fruit brings death; in The End, it brings life. In Genesis, the serpent deceives the woman, pretending to be her friend when he’s actually her enemy; in The End, the serpent is likewise deceptive as far as its name is concerned, but the opposite way round: it’s pretending to be deadly when it’s actually harmless. And what about the moral effect – the you shall know good and evil bit? Well, Adam and Eve were just totally ignorant of good and evil before they ate the fruit. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, on the other hand, knew good and evil already. They knew noble from wicked perfectly well. It was for that reason that they found it so disturbing that they had ended up doing so many wicked things in pursuit of noble ends – that they weren’t quite as innocent as they’d thought they were.

But compare the islanders. They don’t have any moral choices to make, because Ishmael removes anything that might cause a disagreement such as might throw up a moral choice from the side of the island where everybody lives. For these guys, it’s just herding sheep, and ceviche for tea, and that’s what there is. So arguably, the islanders don’t know good and evil. They just don’t have to. And that was Ishmael’s whole idea, really, wasn’t it? He has, in a way, engineered a kind of reverse Fall. And he wants the Baudelaires to forget their troubles and join him in his little pseudo-Eden.

The prospect isn’t without its appeal. A safe place to be, with no Count Olaf, is exactly what the Baudelaires have been looking for all this time. But staying on the island would mean giving up, just like Ishmael did. It would mean giving up on inventing and researching and cooking – on any sort of technological-cultural activity that might rock the boat. It would mean ceasing to dream and learn and build things better, and instead settling down with some ceviche and coconut cordial and accepting that this static existence is just what there is. And it would mean giving up on the moral standards that the orphans have been fighting so hard – and failing so increasingly – to hold themselves to. I should mention here, Ishmael decides, early on in the story, to leave Count Olaf in a cage on the sea wall to drown. If the Baudelaires really want to forget their troubles and become part of the island community, they have to be OK with that.

So this is what their inverted Fall is: a reassertion of their determination to know good and evil. They won’t settle for leading quieter and safer lives without striving to make the world a quieter and safer place overall – even though trouble is like the tide and can’t be held back. Even though inventing and researching and cooking your way out of problems doesn’t actually stop the onslaught of problems. Even though that onslaught inevitably leads to you making at least some choices that seem more wicked than noble, and you realise that you’re not as innocent as you thought you were, and you find yourself setting fires instead of putting them out. At the end of The End, the Baudelaires don’t stay on the island, as happy as they might feasibly have been there. They get on a boat and they go back out into the world.

The world is fallen. And human technological-cultural activity and progress is going to cause as many problems as it solves. But I don’t think that excuses us from trying to solve the problems. If you want to reverse that development, if you want to take us back to the golden age before it all went wrong, well, how far do you take it? Which inventions and innovations do you allow or forbid? Hybridised medicinal apples? Water-filtration systems? Fire? Every coin has two sides, benefit and danger. Humans are naturally creative; I think that’s a little bit of what sets us apart from creatures that are merely flesh. We naturally dream and learn and build things better than they were before. We naturally seek to meet problems with new and creative solutions, and, you know, that’s how technological-cultural development happens. Which problems should we be forbidden to solve because it might cause a schism or something somewhere down the line?

The world is fallen. And one thing that that means is that our efforts to do good are never going to be perfect; sin will dog our footsteps for as long as we’re in the flesh. But another thing that that means is that we know good and evil, which our first ancestors didn’t before they ate the fruit. And that means that we can realise and recognise that sin is dogging our footsteps. That means we can realise that we’re not as innocent as we thought we were; that we are not by nature noble, that we are guilty of starting and feeding figurative fires. And that means we can come to Jesus, who swapped his innocence for our guilt and paid the price for it, for salvation. And once we’re born again of water and the Spirit, even though sin is still with us, our efforts to do good count. Just as God chooses to forget our sins, he chooses to remember the good we do. Or else how could he promise reward for good works?

So try. Even if it’s messy, and every solution or piece of progress seems to throw up other problems, and you’re never going to get it perfect – all the same, try. To humanity generally, I say let us dream and learn and build things better than they were before. And to my brothers and sisters in the Lord, I say let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.⁴

Footnotes

¹ Here it is if you fancy a watch: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80215880?trackId=200257859.

² I wrote about this element of the story in ‘Verifiably False Doctrinists’, under May 2018 in my blog archive.

³ You might want the chapter open: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+3&version=ESVUK.

⁴ That’s from Galatians 6, if you weren’t sure: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+6&version=ESVUK.