Quote by St. John Chrysostom (Homily on on Eutropius) ~ On Riches

"Riches betray those who make a bad use of them."


~ St. John Chrysostom


Source:

https://books.google.com/books?id=4OZHlo8Ykq8C&pg=PA143&lpg=PA143&dq=riches+betray+those+who+make+a+bad+use+of+them.+st.+john+chrysostom&source=bl&ots=QjC0Exb8rh&sig=h1V4bVyOPzZDI6Y4YCA5jRkzu84&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QmbKVM6ALNe1oQTp1IHYAQ&sqi=2&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=riches%20betray%20those%20who%20make%20a%20bad%20use%20of%20them.%20st.%20john%20chrysostom&f=false

Quote by St. John Chrysostom ~ on insults (Homily II on Eutropius)

True! I was being forcibly dragged away, but I suffered no insult from the act; for there is only one real insult, namely sin: and should the whole world insult you, yet if you dost not insult yourself you are not insulted. The only real betrayal is the betrayal of the conscience: betray not your own conscience, and no one can betray you.





thanks to source:

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1915.htm

St. Paisios ~ Courage and the Hero

... Those who die heroically don’t really die. And where there’s no heroism nothing worthwhile can be expected.
...Death in battle adds greatly to God’s mercy, for a person who dies the death of the brave sacrifices himself to defend others. Those who give up their lives out of pure love in order to defend their neighbor are imitating Christ. These people are supreme heroes. They arouse fear in our enemies. Death herself trembles before them, because they scorn her due to their great love, and attain immortality in this fashion, finding the key to eternity under the gravestone. They enter into eternal blessedness without difficulty.... The warrior takes joy in
the fact that he’s dying so that others won’t have to... Courage is born from much love, kindness and self-sacrifice... A spiritual person can hold back evil and help others. In the spiritual life the biggest coward can attain great courage by entrusting himself to Christ and His divine help. He can go to the front lines, do battle with the enemy, and win! So therefore we will fear God alone, not people, no matter how evil they may be. The fear of God makes any coward into a hero! A person becomes fearless to the extent he unites with God....


St. Paisios



May we all pray for a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ, to the eternal reward granted to the saints and martyrs. With the intercession prayers of the Theotokos, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Demetrios myrrh streaming, St. Paisios of Mt. Athos and all the saints. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit to the ages of ages.

(Red letters are my own)

Apophatic theology "Negative theology"

Apophatic theology

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Apophatic theology—also known as negative theology—is a theology that attempts to describe God by negation, to speak of God only in absolutely certain terms and to avoid what may not be said. In Orthodox Christianity, apophatic theology is based on the assumption that God's essence is unknowable or ineffable and on the recognition of the inadequacy of human language to describe God. The apophatic tradition in Orthodoxy is often balanced with cataphatic theology—or positive theology—and belief in the incarnation, through which God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ.

Contents  [hide]  1 Apophatic descriptions of God 2 History and Development in the Eastern Church 3 See also 4 Sources and external links

Apophatic descriptions of God

• From Scripture
  • No one has seen or can see God (John 1:18).
  • He lives in unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:16).
  • His ways are unsearchable and unfathomable (Job 11:7-8; Romans 11:33-36).
• By saints
  • The true knowledge and vision of God consists in this—in seeing that He is invisible, because what we seek lies beyond all knowledge, being wholly separated by the darkness of incomprehensibility (The Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa).
  • God is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility (On the Orthodox Faith, John of Damascus).

History and Development in the Eastern Church

One of the first to articulate the theology in Christianity was the Apostle Paul, whose reference to the Unknown God in the book of Acts (Acts 17:23) is the foundation of works such as that of Dionysius the Areopagite. The Cappadocian Fathers of the 4th century, exemplars of this via negativa, said that they believed in God, but they did not believe that God exists, at least in the same sense that man exists (notwithstanding the Incarnation). In contrast, making positive statements about the nature of God, which occurs in most other forms of Christian theology, is sometimes called cataphatic theology. Adherents of the apophatic tradition hold that God is beyond the limits of what humans can understand, and that one should not seek God by means of intellectual understanding, but through a direct experience of the love (in Western Christianity) or the energies (in Eastern Christianity) of God. Apophatic theology can be also seen as an oral tradition. "It must also be recognized that 'forgery' is a modern notion. Like Plotinus and the Cappadocians before him, Dionysius does not claim to be an innovator, but rather a communicator of a tradition." [1]
Apophatic theology played an important role early in the history of Christianity. The Three Holy Hierarchs all emphasized the importance of negative theology to an orthodox understanding of God. Later John of Damascus employed it when he wrote that positive statements about God reveal "not the nature, but the things around the nature." In addition, Maximus the Confessor maintained that the combination of apophatic theology and hesychasm—the practice of keeping stillness—made theosis or union with God possible. All in all, apophatic statements are crucial to much theology in Orthodox Christianity; the opposite tends to be true in Western Christianity, though there are a few exceptions to this rule.

See also

• Hesychasm
• Mysticism

Sources and external links

• God and Other Necessary Beings, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Apophatic theology, Wikipedia
• Toon, Peter. Our Triune God. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1996.
• Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. London: Penguin Books, 1997.

Thanks to Source:

http://orthodoxwiki.org/Apophatic_theology#Apophatic_descriptions_of_God

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apophatic theology (from Ancient Greek: ἀπόφασις via ἀπόφημι apophēmi, meaning "to deny"), also known as negative theology, via negativa or via negationis^[1] (Latin for "negative way" or "by way of denial"), is a theology that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God.^[2] It stands in contrast to cataphatic theology.
A startling^{[citation needed]} example can be found with theologian John Scotus Erigena (9th century): "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being."
In brief, negative theology is an attempt to clarify religious experience and language about the Divine Good through discernment, gaining knowledge of what God is not (apophasis), rather than by describing what God is. The apophatic tradition is often, though not always, allied with the approach of mysticism, which focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or the conditioned role-playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer man.

Apophatic description of God

In negative theology, it is accepted that experience of the Divine is ineffable, an experience of the holy that can only be recognized or remembered abstractly. That is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality. As a result, all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided. In effect, divine experience eludes definition by definition:

• Neither existence nor nonexistence as we understand it in the physical realm, applies to God; i.e., the Divine is abstract to the individual, beyond existing or not existing, and beyond conceptualization regarding the whole (one cannot say that God exists in the usual sense of the term; nor can we say that God is nonexistent).
• God is divinely simple (one should not claim that God is one, or three, or any type of being.)
• God is not ignorant (one should not say that God is wise since that word arrogantly implies we know what "wisdom" means on a divine scale, whereas we only know what wisdom is believed to mean in a confined cultural context).
• Likewise, God is not evil (to say that God can be described by the word 'good' limits God to what good behavior means to human beings individually and en masse).
• God is not a creation (but beyond that we cannot define how God exists or operates in relation to the whole of humanity).
• God is not conceptually defined in terms of space and location.
• God is not conceptually confined to assumptions based on time.

Even though the via negativa essentially rejects theological understanding in and of itself as a path to God, some have sought to make it into an intellectual exercise, by describing God only in terms of what God is not. One problem noted with this approach is that there seems to be no fixed basis on deciding what God is not, unless the Divine is understood as an abstract experience of full aliveness unique to each individual consciousness, and universally, the perfect goodness applicable to the whole field of reality^{[citation needed]}. It should be noted however that since religious experience—or consciousness of the holy or sacred, is not reducible to other kinds of human experience, an abstract understanding of religious experience cannot be used as evidence or proof that religious discourse or praxis can have no meaning or value.^[3] In apophatic theology, the negation of theisms in the via negativa also requires the negation of their correlative atheisms if the dialectical method it employs is to maintain integrity.^[4]

In Buddhism

See also: God in Buddhism

Buddhism deals with questions which may or may not be described as theological. Nevertheless, an apophatic approach is evident in much of Buddhist philosophy.
According to early Buddhist scripture, the Buddha refused to answer certain questions regarding metaphysical propositions, known as the fourteen unanswerable questions (the Pali Canon gives only ten). These concern topics such as the existence of atta (self/soul), the origin of the universe, and life after death. The Buddha explains that he does not answer certain questions because they have no bearing on the pursuit of nibanna, and he even goes so far as to say: "A 'position', Vaccha, is something that a tathagatha [i.e., a buddha] has done away with."^[5] On another occasion, he outlines four types of appropriate answers to questions: yes or no, analysis, a counter-question, and putting the question aside.^[6]
In his book The Silence of God: the Answer of the Buddha, Raimundo Panikkar analyzes the fourteen unanswerable questions in the context of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and comes to the conclusion that the Buddha's position can best be described as "transcendental apophaticism," i.e., a position in which the transcendent (in this case, nirvana), is defined through negation.

In the Christian tradition

Both Judaism and Christianity are revelation-based models. God has certain attributes positively ascribed to Himself. The text is said to be inspired. Another way to say this is God represents Himself through the text. For example: Christianity teaches that the Logos (the Second Person of the Trinity) became incarnate. This type of reasoning is known as cataphatic theology.

Examples of apophatic theology are: God's appearance to Moses in the Burning Bush, and the ineffable Name of God (יהוה). Also the theophany to Elijah, where God reveals Himself in a "still, small voice" (1 Kings 19:11–13). And St. Paul's reference to the "Unknown God" in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 17:23) is sometimes pointed to as an apophatic statement.
Tertullian says, “That which is infinite is known only to itself. This it is which gives some notion of God, while yet beyond all our conceptions—our very incapacity of fully grasping Him affords us the idea of what He really is. He is presented to our minds in His transcendent greatness, as at once known and unknown.”^[7]
Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, in his Catechetical Homilies says: "For we explain not what God is but candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him. For in what concerns God to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge."^[8]
The Cappadocian Fathers of the 4th century said that they believed in God, but they did not believe that God exists in the same sense that everything else exists. That is to say, everything else that exists was created, but the Creator transcends even existence. The essence of God is completely unknowable; mankind can know God only through His energies.
Apophatic theology found its most influential expression in works such as those of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor (Pseudo-Dionysius is quoted by Thomas Aquinas 1,760 times in his Summa Theologica).^[9]
In contrast, making positive statements about the nature of God, which occurs in most Western forms of Christian theology, is sometimes called cataphatic theology. Eastern Christianity makes use of both apophatic and cataphatic theology. Adherents of the apophatic tradition in Christianity hold that, outside of directly-revealed knowledge through Scripture and Sacred Tradition (such as the Trinitarian nature of God), God in His essence is beyond the limits of what human beings (or even angels) can understand; He is transcendent in essence (ousia). Further knowledge must be sought in a direct experience of God or His indestructible energies through theoria (vision of God).^[10][11] In Eastern Christianity, God is immanent in his hypostasis or existences.^[12]
Negative theology played an important role early in the history of Christianity, for example, in the works of Clement of Alexandria. Three more theologians who emphasized the importance of negative theology to an orthodox understanding of God were Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and Basil the Great. John of Damascus employed it when he wrote that positive statements about God reveal "not the nature, but the things around the nature." It continues to be prominent in Eastern Christianity (see Gregory Palamas). Apophatic statements are crucial to many modern theologians in Orthodox Christianity (see Vladimir Lossky, John Meyendorff, John S. Romanides and Georges Florovsky).
In Orthodox theology, apophatic theology is taught as superior to cataphatic theology. While Aquinas felt positive and negative theology should be seen as dialetical correctives to each other, like thesis and antithesis producing a synthesis, Lossky argues, based on his reading of Dionysius and Maximus Confessor, that positive theology is always inferior to negative theology, a step along the way to the superior knowledge attained by negation.^[13] This is expressed in the idea that mysticism is the expression of dogmatic theology par excellence.^[14]
Negative theology has a place in the Western Christian tradition as well, although it is definitely much more of a counter-current to the prevailing positive or cataphatic traditions central to Western Christianity. For example, theologians like Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz), mentioned above, exemplify some aspects of or tendencies towards the apophatic tradition in the West. The medieval work, The Cloud of Unknowing and St. John's Dark Night of the Soul are particularly well known in the West.
C. S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, advocates the use of negative theology when first thinking about God, in order to cleanse our minds of misconceptions. He goes on to say we must then refill our minds with the truth about God, untainted by mythology, bad analogies or false mind-pictures.
The mid-20th century Dutch philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, who is often associated with a neo-Calvinistic tradition, provides a philosophical foundation for understanding why we can never absolutely know God, and yet, paradoxically, truly know something of God. Dooyeweerd made a sharp distinction between theoretical and pre-theoretical attitudes of thought; it might be noticed that most of the discussion of knowledge of God presupposes theoretical knowledge, in which we reflect and try to define and discuss. Pre-theoretical knowing, on the other hand, is intimate engagement, and exhibits a diverse range of aspects. Theoretical knowing, by its very nature, is never absolute, always depends on religious presuppositions, and cannot grasp either God or the law side. Pre-theoretical intuition, on the other hand, can grasp at least the law side. Knowledge of God, as God wishes to reveal it, is pre-theoretical, immediate and intuitive, never theoretical in nature. The Bible, for example, should be treated as pre-theoretical (everyday) rather than theoretical in what it contains.^{[citation needed]}
Karen Armstrong, in her book The Case for God (2009), notices a recovery of apophatic theology in postmodern theology.^[15]
Ivan Illich, the historian and social critic, can be read as an apophatic theologian, according to a longtime collaborator, Lee Hoinacki, in a paper presented in memory of Illich, called "Why Philia?"^[16]
While negative theology is used in Christianity as a means of dispelling misconceptions about God, and of approaching Him beyond the limits of human reasoning, most commonly Christian doctrine is taken to involve positive claims:^{[citation needed]} that God exists and has certain positive attributes, even if those attributes are only partially comprehensible to us.

In Greek philosophy

See also: Epoché, Pyrrhonism and Skepticism

The ancient Greek poet Hesiod has in his account of the birth of the gods and creation of the world (i.e., in his Theogony) that Chaos begot the primordial deities: Eros, Gaia (Earth) and Tartarus, who begot Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (Night), and Plato echoes this genealogy in the Timaeus 40e, 41e where the familiar Titan and Olympian gods are sired by Heaven and Earth. Nevertheless, Plato is far from advocating a negative theology. His Form of the Good (identified by various commentators with the Form of Unity) is not unknowable, but rather the highest object of knowledge (The Republic 508d–e, 511b, 516b).
Plotinus was the first to propose negative theology. He advocated it in his strand of neoplatonism (although he may have had precursors in neopythagoreanism and middle Platonism). In his writings he identifies the Good of the Republic (as the cause of the other Forms) with the One of the first hypothesis of the second part of the Parmenides (137c–142a), there concluded to be neither the object of knowledge, opinion or perception. In the Enneads Plotinus writes: "Our thought cannot grasp the One as long as any other image remains active in the soul…To this end, you must set free your soul from all outward things and turn wholly within yourself, with no more leaning to what lies outside, and lay your mind bare of ideal forms, as before of the objects of sense, and forget even yourself, and so come within sight of that One."

 

In other Eastern traditions

Many other East Asian traditions present something very similar to the apophatic approach: for example, the Tao Te Ching, the source book of the Chinese Taoist tradition, asserts in its first statement: the Tao ("way" or "truth") that can be described is not the constant/true Tao.

In Hinduism

Apophatic movements in Hinduism are visible in the works of Shankara, a philosopher of Advaita Vedanta school of Indian philosophy, and Bhartṛhari, a grammarian. While Shankara holds that the transcendent noumenon, Brahman, is realized by the means of negation of every phenomenon including language; Bhartṛhari theorizes that language has both phenomenal and noumenal dimensions, the latter of which manifests Brahman.^[17]
The standard texts of Vedanta philosophy, to which Shankara also belonged, were the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras. An expression of negative theology is found in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, where Brahman is described as "neti-neti" or "neither this, nor that".^[18] Further use of apophatic theology is found in the Brahma Sutras, which state:

Whenever we deny something unreal, it is in reference to something real.^[19]

In Advaita, Brahman is defined as being Nirguna or without qualities. Anything imaginable or conceivable is not deemed to be the ultimate reality.^[20] The Taittiriya hymn speaks of Brahman as "one where the mind does not reach". Yet the Hindu scriptures often speak of Brahman's positive aspect. For instance, Brahman is often equated with bliss. These contradictory descriptions of Brahman are used to show that the attributes of Brahman are similar to ones experienced by mortals, but not the same.
Negative theology also figures in the Buddhist and Hindu polemics. The arguments go something like this – Is Brahman an object of experience? If so, how do you convey this experience to others who have not had a similar experience? The only way possible is to relate this unique experience to common experiences while explicitly negating their sameness

In Islam

The Arabic term for "negative theology" is lahoot salbi, which is a "system of theology" or nizaam al lahoot in Arabic. Different traditions/doctrine schools in Islam called Kalam schools (see Islamic schools and branches) use different theological approaches or nizaam al lahoot in approaching God in Islam (Allah, Arabic الله) or the ultimate reality. The lahoot salbi or "negative theology" involves the use of ta'til, which means "negation," and the followers of the Mu'tazili school of Kalam, founded by Imam Wasil ibn Ata, are often called the Mu'attili, because they are frequent users of the ta'til methodology.
Shia Islam is another sect that adopted "negative theology". Most Salafi/Athari adherents reject this methodology because they believe that the Attributes of God, as depicted in Islamic scriptures is to be literal. But most Sunnis, who are Ash'ari and Maturidi by Kalam use ta'til to some extent, if not completely. The Sufis greatly depend on the use of ta'til in their spirituality, though they often also use Cataphatic theology.

In the Jewish tradition

See also: Philo

In Jewish belief, God is defined as the Creator of the universe: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1); similarly, "I am God, I make all things" (Isaiah 44:24). God, as Creator, is by definition separate from the physical universe and thus exists outside of space and time. God is therefore absolutely different from anything else, and, as above, is in consequence held to be totally unknowable. It is for this reason that we cannot make any direct statements about God. (See Tzimtzum (צמצום): the notion that God "contracted" his infinite and indescribable essence in order to allow for a "conceptual space" in which a finite, independent world could exist.)^[21]
Bahya ibn Paquda shows that our inability to describe God is similarly related to the fact of His absolute unity. God, as the entity which is "truly One" (האחד האמת), must be free of properties and is thus unlike anything else and indescribable; see Divine simplicity. This idea is developed fully in later Jewish philosophy, especially in the thought of the medieval rationalists such as Maimonides and Samuel ibn Tibbon.
It is understood that although we cannot describe God directly (מצד עצמו) it is possible to describe Him indirectly via His attributes (תארים). The “negative attributes” (תארים שוללים) relate to God Himself, and specify what He is not. The “attributes of action” (תארים מצד פעולותיו), on the other hand, do not describe God directly, rather His interaction with creation [2]. Maimonides was perhaps the first Jewish Thinker to explicitly articulate this doctrine (see also Tanya Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah Ch. 8):

“

God's existence is absolute and it includes no composition and we comprehend only the fact that He exists, not His essence. Consequently it is a false assumption to hold that He has any positive attribute... still less has He accidents (מקרה), which could be described by an attribute. Hence it is clear that He has no positive attribute however , the negative attributes are necessary to direct the mind to the truths which we must believe... When we say of this being, that it exists, we mean that its non-existence is impossible; it is living — it is not dead; ...it is the first — its existence is not due to any cause; it has power, wisdom, and will — it is not feeble or ignorant; He is One — there are not more Gods than one… Every attribute predicated of God denotes either the quality of an action, or, when the attribute is intended to convey some idea of the Divine Being itself — and not of His actions — the negation of the opposite. (The Guide for the Perplexed, 1:58)

”

In line with this formulation, attributes commonly used in describing God in rabbinic literature, in fact refer to the "negative attributes" — omniscience, for example, refers to non-ignorance; omnipotence to non-impotence; unity to non-plurality, eternity to non-temporality. Examples of the “attributes of action” are God as creator, revealer, redeemer, mighty and merciful [3]. Similarly, God’s perfection is generally considered an attribute of action. Joseph Albo (Ikkarim 2:24) points out that there are a number of attributes that fall under both categories simultaneously. Note that the various Names of God in Judaism, generally, correspond to the “attributes of action” — in that they represent God as he is known. The exceptions are the Tetragrammaton (Y-H-W-H) and the closely related "I Am the One I Am" (אהיה אשר אהיה — Exodus 3:13–14), both of which refer to God in his "negative attributes", as absolutely independent and uncreated; see "Names of God in Judaism".
Since two approaches are used to speak of God, there are times when these may conflict, giving rise to paradoxes in Jewish philosophy. In these cases, two descriptions of the same phenomenon appear contradictory, whereas, in fact, the difference is merely one of perspective: one description takes the viewpoint of the "attributes of action" and the other, of the "negative attributes". See the paradoxes described under free will, Divine simplicity and Tzimtzum.


Thanks to Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology
 

Three Great Men Died That Day: JFK, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley

On November 22, 1963, three towering figures of the 20th century died. John F. Kennedy is the one that we all remember, but let’s consider the others.

Do you remember what you were doing the day Aldous Huxley died? Or C.S. Lewis? You don’t think so? Well, the odds are that if you were old enough to be laying down memories at the time, you do. Because it was also the day President Kennedy was assassinated.
The indelible experience of hearing the news is captured well in the opening scene of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Odessa File, as the announcement interrupts a song in mid-bar on our German hero’s car radio.
‘Jesus,’ he breathed quietly, eased down on the brake pedal and swung into the right-hand side of the road. He glanced up. Right down the long, broad, straight highway through Altona towards the centre of Hamburg other drivers had heard the same broadcast and were pulling in to the side of the road as if driving and listening to the radio had suddenly become mutually exclusive, which in a way they had.
In this way the shots fired in Dallas echoed almost instantaneously around the world, and plunged uncountable numbers into shock, grief, fear for the future, and reflections on mortality. It was the day of St Cecilia, patron saint of music. Later American singer-songwriter Dion, and after him Marvin Gaye, hauntingly sang ‘Has anybody here seen my old friend John? Can you tell me where he’s gone?’—because John F. Kennedy’s assassination did touch many millions as if they had lost a friend.
But virtually no one on 22 November 1963 realised—and relatively few realise even now—that that day also saw the departure of the two other major figures, who were also world-shapers in their very different ways. The deaths of Lewis and Huxley were mute, private events, only reported in The Times three days later.
Death had moved remorselessly westward to claim his scalps. Lewis died first, in his brother’s arms, a few minutes after tumbling with a crash from his bed at the foot of the stairs at the Kilns, his house outside Oxford, at 5.30pm. He was just a week shy of 65. One hour later—12.30pm in Texas—the 46-year-old President was shot. At the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, Huxley’s second wife Laura, leaving his bedside with his request for an LSD injection, found the doctor and nurses in shock watching the news of the assassination; Huxley died, aged 69, at 5.20pm local time, just under eight hours after Lewis.

Both Lewis and Huxley would have laughed heartily at the thought of the thoroughly worldly John F. Kennedy being translated to celestial glory.

Huxley was quietly cremated in Los Angeles on the Saturday and remembered by friends with a walk at Mulholland Drive on the Sunday. JFK lay in state in the White House and then the Capitol, where hundreds of thousands queued to pay their respects; and he was interred in Arlington Cemetery on the Monday in front of the representatives of 90 nations. With his assassination blurrily smeared onto Abraham Zapruder’s home movie, and photographers capturing his son John saluting the flag-draped casket that Monday (his third birthday), this was—to adapt the title of Lewis’s 1961 book—the most observed grief in history. Lewis himself was buried at Holy Trinity Church near his home on the Tuesday, but the hullabaloo over Kennedy’s death had prevented news of Lewis’s from reaching many friends, and it was a poorly attended funeral . His brother Warnie, apparently unable to face it, was elsewhere, blind drunk.

****

There’s no evidence that Huxley read Lewis, or that Kennedy read either—though his wife Jackie would certainly have read some of their books—but Lewis knew enough of Huxley to mention him in a letter of 1952 as an author of a future dystopia alongside H.G. Wells and George Orwell. The mental worlds inhabited by Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley—an Englishman translated permanently to West Coast America from 1938—were as mutually remote as their social worlds. Yet each devoted his energies to matters of universal concern, and together they form a curious triptych on the mortal condition.

The distinctions between the three men’s worldviews inspired a 1982 fiction, Between Heaven and Hell by Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft, in the form of a ‘Socratic dialogue’ in Purgatory. In this debate, Lewis represents ‘mere Christianity’, Kennedy modern humanism, and Huxley ‘Eastern pantheism’. Kreeft captures Lewis’s voice perfectly—or so Lewis’s friend George Sayer told him. I don’t pretend to know if Sayer was just being diplomatic, but I do know that Kreeft’s Kennedy is so far off-key as to suggest the author had no more interest in capturing character than in providing a plot. A devotee, Kreeft gives Lewis the big philosophical guns, and has him trouncing Kennedy and Huxley pretty comprehensively. I felt a similar dissatisfaction reading Jill Paton Walsh’s far superior philosophical novel Knowledge of Angels, in which the atheist Palinor progressively dechristianises the devout Beneditx and Severo.
If the men who died on 22 November met immediately after death, I agree that Lewis would have wanted to debate socratically. But he would have found Huxley unswayable in his mysticism—if indeed death had released Huxley’s spirit from the effects of the LSD administered by his wife in his final moments. Kennedy might have engaged for a while: he was always interested in philosophical ideas. But pretty soon he would have manfully picked himself up—as he habitually had over a lifetime of severe health problems—and hurried off to catch up with his dear dead brother Joe, or his even dearer dead sister Kathleen, or perhaps (if in a different frame of mind) Marilyn Monroe.

****

But let us return to non-fiction, the knowable world, and frankly earthbound thoughts.
The British historian and journalist Godfrey Hodgson, who read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, is my eyewitness to the events of the day in American history. His 16 books include All Things to All Men, which deals with the Presidency, and his 17th will be about JFK and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson.
Hodgson, who was then the Observer’s correspondent in Washington, D.C., was lunching there with his counterpart from The Guardian. ‘The radio was on, and as we were talking I heard someone say, “The President’s been shot.’ Hodgson jammed himself into a phonebooth for an hour, making arrangements for someone else to fly to Dallas while he covered the situation in D.C.
At Andrews Air Force base he stood beside National Security Advisor McGeorge ‘Mac’ Bundy as Air Force One landed with the newly sworn-in President Johnson and his predecessor’s body. Hodgson recalls: ‘Mrs Kennedy came down at the back of the plane, her pink suit covered in her husband’s blood—as she’d been encouraged by the Kennedy crowd on board not to change. Moments later, Johnson came down at the front of the plane and made a short, dignified speech—“I shall need God’s help and yours”—and just after that Mac stepped forward and handed Johnson a set of manila folders, which I assumed were the White House’s latest take on what was happening around the world.’
Another significant moment happened out of sight. To avoid attention, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother, had concealed himself in a skip. ‘When the plane arrived,’ says Hodgson, ‘he dashed up the steps and went in, and pushed Johnson out of the way and went past him to see his brother’s body and his brother’s widow. Johnson and the Johnson people were considerably affronted by this, so the Johnson people and the Kennedy people started off on terrible terms. The Kennedy people would never refer to Johnson as the President. When they said “the President”, they meant Kennedy.’
The unease in the partnership between the two Democrat clans was already widely known, and now gave rise to one of the earliest of the many conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination. Just the next day, a fellow journalist said to Hodgson, ‘Have you heard the joke: Lyndon Johnson isn’t deerhunting this season—because Lee Harvey Oswald has got his rifle.’ Hodgson is as sceptical as anyone that Oswald could have killed Kennedy alone and unassisted, but remains unpersuaded by any of the alternative theories.
Hodgson also covered the killings of Oswald and Jack Ruby: Kennedy’s death was like a comet trailing others in its wake, right down to the waiter who had served him his last breakfast.

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It was also, in the popular construction, prefigured by the deaths of his elder brother Joe Jr in 1944, when the explosive payload of his plane detonated prematurely on takeoff from an RAF base near Norwich; and of sister Kathleen in 1948, when her private passenger flight went down in the Ardèche in France. In Kennedy: An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek argues that these experiences lent urgency to JFK’s pursuit of power, not to mention women. The deep-set learning difficulties of his sister Rosemary—ultimately lobotomised on their father’s orders—probably made a greater contribution to his capacity for empathy with others less fortunate.
Both Lewis and Huxley’s first bereavements came earlier in life, and surely bit more deeply. By another striking coincidence of mortality, each lost a 45-year-old mother in 1908, to aggressive cancer. Lewis recalled in Surprised by Joy: ‘With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life…. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’ Not quite ten, Lewis was sent almost immediately from his Belfast home to a brutal English boarding school. Perhaps it is unsurprising, therefore, that Narnia should so prominently feature children pitched suddenly into other worlds, as well as a delicious school revenge fantasy (The Silver Chair). And the autobiographical parallel is clear in the scene in The Magician’s Nephew when young Digory restores his dying mother to life with a magic apple—all the more poignant because Lewis himself could not do the same. His modest tombstone bears the line from Shakespeare that had been on his mother’s calendar the day she died: ‘Men must endure their going hence.’
Huxley, 14 in 1908, had been just settling in at Eton when his mother died. Julia Huxley left her son with a deathbed letter he kept all his life: ‘Judge not too much and love more.’ Near-blindness from an eye infection in 1911 cut short his Etonian schooling; a further blow came three years later with the suicide of his brilliant and athletic brother Trevenen. Both of these family bereavements appeared, disguised, in his novels. Huxley said his 1950s drug experimentation was an attempt to retrieve some childhood memory, but Nicholas Murray, author of the biography Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual, tells me: ‘It is more likely that it centres on the trauma of his mother’s early death.’

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Huxley was exempt from military service due to his severe eyesight problems. His response to the deaths of serving friends was anything but religious. Rather, it’s a kind of communitarian version of the now-common pantheist idea that when we die our substance goes back into the cycle of physical life. ‘One way that people survive after they are dead is in the society to which they belonged and particularly in their friends. To look back is a kind of betrayal of the life entrusted to one: one must go forward. The best way of remembering them is not by dwelling on the past but the future.’
Through direct experience in their respective wars, Lewis and Kennedy each became close acquaintances with death. For Lewis, the horror was not a surprise, according to leading Lewis scholar Michael Ward: ‘He arrived on his 19th birthday in the French trenches and the front line. He knew it was going to be awful, so any slight lightening of the gloom he took as an uncovenanted boon.’ But Surprised by Joy describes ‘the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses’. A British shell fell short and obliterated his sergeant; Lewis, knocked out, had an out-of-body experience. ‘He looked down on his own body and the thought arose in his mind, “Here is a picture of a man dying,”’ says Ward. ‘That experience, he said, meant he understood what Kant meant when he talks about the phenomenal and the noumenal self.’
In plainer terms—for JFK’s brilliance was not in philosophy—a wartime scrape with death helped make the future President a phenomenon. During a night operation in the Solomon Islands in 1943, the patrol torpedo boat he commanded was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Despite injury to his already long-damaged back, he performed heroically to bring his crew to safety. To his father Joe Sr, bent on seeing a Kennedy son succeed in politics, it was all capital—as valuable as the multi-million-dollar family fortune that greased the wheels of power. JFK used his PT boat drama as an excuse to publish a book in 1957, Profiles in Courage, which won a Pulitzer and did no harm to his 1960 White House campaign.
Hodgson dismisses the idea that Kennedy’s war experiences gave him any significant surplus of insight or sensitivity, pointing out: ‘In 1960 almost all politicians would have had military experience. A lot of people were being killed in 1944, all over the place.’ But Kennedy’s experiences as a junior officer in the US Navy undeniably gave him a healthy contempt for the military top ranks—cemented in the first year of his Presidency after he let himself by guided by Pentagon ‘intelligence’ into the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Arguably it was this contempt for the top brass, more than anything, which was to save the world from a rain of death.
Kennedy was born in 1917 six weeks after Lenin returned to revolutionary St Petersburg. By October 1962, the world had so changed that Kennedy now faced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in a standoff over Cuba which threatened mutual nuclear annihilation. Huxley told a friend: ‘If only [Timothy Leary] could get into a Summit Meeting and give some mushroom to the two Mr Ks—the result might be world peace through total lucidity and breaking out by both parties from the prison of their respective cultures and ideologies.’ In fact Kennedy and Khrushchev did bend the bars just enough to reach out to each other at the eleventh hour. Just as vital, however, was Kennedy’s 13-day rearguard action against the Pentagon hawks who wanted aerial bombing, invasion, dizzying escalation. JFK was horrified by the prospect of nuclear war; and so (behind a veneer of insouciance towards the deaths of millions) was Khrushchev.

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Kennedy may have had a clearer sense of the horrors of nuclear war than the pacifist Huxley, the war veteran Lewis or most other people in the atomic era. Lewis wrote of the serious young anti-nuclear protesters of the post-war era: ‘Didn’t they know that, Bomb or no Bomb, all men die (many in horrible ways)? There is no good moping or sulking about it’. But Lewis’s realism about death’s inevitability follows from his childhood encounter with it. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he told friends wryly: ‘At any rate we now have less chance of dying of cancer’. On hearing an RAF chaplain vaunting the inner peace Christians can enjoy in the face of death, he countered: ‘No … death is dreadful and we are right to fear it … [It] is not a very little thing and it is horrible’.
Huxley seems to have even less recourse to consolation. On the passing of his friend Lytton Strachey, the Bloomsbury giant who wrote Eminent Victorians, he wrote: ‘How sad, sad, sad it all is; and with such a peculiar pointlessness and meaninglessness, when looked at from without.’ In 1930, the dying D.H. Lawrence stayed at the Huxleys’ home in France; Huxley wrote: ‘How horrible this gradually approaching dissolution is…’—and when Lawrence died he lamented: ‘a very painful thing to see an indomitable spirit finally broken and put out.’
But neither Huxley nor Lewis had any truck with the idea of super-extended life—and curiously each writer used a remarkably similar bestial image to express his disdain. Lewis’s version appears on the opening page of The Last Battle, and his name is Shift. Michael Ward provides persuasive evidence in his groundbreaking book Planet Narnia that The Last Battle revolves symbolically around the planet Saturn, whom Lewis in his 1935 poem ‘The Planets’ had described as ‘the last planet / Old and ugly’. Writing that ‘Lewis in this last tale lets Saturn deal out death in abundance, “bearing all his sons away”’, Ward comments:

As for ‘old’ and ‘ugly’, Shift the Ape is both: ‘He was so old that no one could remember when he had first come to live in those parts, and he was the cleverest, ugliest, most wrinkled Ape you can imagine.’ When Shift reappears in chapter 3 he is ‘ten times uglier’ than before. He tells the bewildered Narnians: ‘I’m so very old: hundreds and hundreds of years old. And it’s because I’m so old that I’m so wise.

Shift’s claim to great age reflects the imprint of Saturn, whose home is that ‘mountain of centuries’ presented in That Hideous Strength: ‘more and still more time.’
But all of Shift’s years have provided him with no wisdom about the timeless verities of Narnian creation; his wrinkles suggest he has simply used low cunning to defer his natural end. He puts on human clothes and human airs; but when death comes to Shift, he isn’t even given the dignity of being called an ape.

‘After that,’ said Edmund, ‘someone flung a monkey through the door. And Tash was there again. My sister is so tender-hearted she doesn’t like to tell you that Tash made one peck and the Monkey was gone!’

Shift has invoked Tash, a vulture-headed demonic power, only because he is too purblind actually to believe in him.
Huxley’s 1939 novel After Many a Summer provides an interesting parallel. I doubt that it is a source for Shift, but Lewis was so widely read that you never know, and there are similarities both superficial and substantial. After Many a Summer tells the story of Jo Stoyte, loosely based on billionaire William Randolph Hearst, who is persuaded by his snake-oil physician Dr Obispo that life can be extended indefinitely. Convinced that the key resides in the papers of the Fifth Earl of Gonister, an 18th-century English aristocrat, Stoyte employs an archivist to comb them for clues. The Earl’s diary records a breakthrough which has prolonged his youth for decades, though the recipe is decidedly unappetising: ‘the raw, triturated Viscera of freshly opened Carp’. The millionaire and his entourage end up at the Gonister ancestral home, flashlights scanning the rooms of a secret basement for the source of a foul stench. And then:

Beyond the bars … on the edge of a low bed … a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy…. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders….

‘A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,’ Dr Obispo managed to say. ‘It’s too good!’ Laughter overtook him…. ‘Just look at his face!’ he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf.

This Shift-like half-clothed ape, skulking in filth with his now equally simian wife, is of course the Fifth Earl, still alive at 201 thanks to the power of mashed fish innards. But Huxley’s scorn for the dream of defeating death is worthy of Jonathan Swift, and the satire is not quite finished. The book ends with the billionaire Stoyte considering the scene with famished envy and, abandoning the last vestiges of dignity, telling Obispo: ‘I mean, it wouldn’t happen at once … there’d be a long time while a person … well, you know: while he wouldn’t change any. And once you got over the first shock—well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course.’ For Stoyte, no price is too high for eternal life: it’s a case of ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’.

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Kennedy’s deep health problems persuaded him he had little prospect of a long life, so he had better hurry and be doing. His spiritual outlook was inherited not from his pious mother but from his worldly father, a Catholic only for show. Privately, JFK felt that this earthly life is all we have. Godfrey Hodgson observes that this may have contributed to his reluctance on the brink of war over Cuba: ‘A man who believes that he will survive death in a nuclear holocaust is going to behave differently from a man who doesn’t. I once asked Mac Bundy whether he thought Jack Kennedy believed in life after death; to which he said, “Of course not, don’t be silly.”’
Huxley’s focus was on this life, too, yet he increasingly sought to penetrate beyond mundane appearances to discover what might lie beneath. From well before his critical faculties became fully formed at Balliol College, Oxford—in fact probably from the cradle—he had set out in the intellectual tradition of his naturalist grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, who first coined the word agnostic. But his 1936 novel Eyeless in Gaza marked a shift towards mysticism: Aldous came to espouse Gottfried Leibniz’s 18th-century view that all great religions are reflections of a ‘perennial philosophy’, and to seek enlightenment on earth.
True to his scientific heritage, though, in the last decade of his life he sought to achieve this by experimentation—with the aid of psychedelics. His 1954 book The Doors of Perception, which recorded this attempt, later became a hit with the Flower Power generation, but Huxley scorned those who used drugs for purely sensual pleasure. After all, his prophetic 1932 novel Brave New World had long before predicted a society enslaved by the drug soma. Notwithstanding his own loftier goals, it is questionable whether mescaline and LSD gave Huxley the enlightenment he craved. Biographer Nicholas Murray says: ‘He envied people like William Blake who had these wonderful visions of alternative realities.’ Perhaps Huxley’s drug experiences achieved little more than mimicking the instant of oblivion that accompanies sexual orgasm, the ‘little death’ as he had called it in Brave New World and in After Many a Summer, where he wrote: ‘Like all the other addictions, whether to drugs or books, to power or applause, the addiction to pleasure tends to aggravate the condition it temporarily alleviates. The addict goes down into the valley of the shadow of his own particular little death.’
Lewis’s view of the meaning of life, in Michael Ward’s words, was ‘probably to love God and love one’s neighbour’. Among his favourite themes as a Christian writer were the afterlife, the hope of resurrection, and heaven itself: The Screwtape Letters ends with a patient going to heaven; most of The Great Divorce is set there; The Last Battle ushers the heroes and good Narnians in through the door. Ward says that all this ‘is unconventional in the depth of the imaginative attempts he makes to visualise heaven. He was a great fan of Dante’s Paradiso, but his own vision of the afterlife is less rhapsodically contemplative, and more active. It’s tasting beautiful fruits and running and never growing tired; being welcomed into the heart of reality and hearing the divine accolade “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and becoming a participant in the divine attributes—theosis, becoming a god, sharing in the divine life and becoming adopted into the divine family.’

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The spiritual viewpoints of the three men are variously embodied in the moon. In Huxley’s Brave New World, inside a Westminster Abbey turned entirely over to worldly pleasure, ‘the sexophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them’. And it occurs in the first reference to the novel’s drug of social control: ‘There is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon’.
But this association between the moon and trippy mindlessness would have seemed to Lewis to miss at least half the picture. Looking at the medieval cosmos in The Discarded Image, he identifies the moon as the very dividing line between us and the divine:

At Luna we cross in our descent the great frontier … from aether to air, from heaven to nature, from the realm of gods (or angels) to that of daemons, from the realm of necessity to that of contingence, from the incorruptible to the corruptible.

In The Silver Chair, if Michael Ward is right, the moon straddles both realms, as a symbol of mutability sinuously embodied by the Queen of Underland, and of the divine immutability which only the Eeyorish Puddleglum can stoically keep in mind.
Kennedy left America and the world moonstruck. He ramped up the Soviet—American space race in 1962: ‘We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ And Americans actually did it. As Ward points out, there is some reason to think Lewis would actually have been thrilled—the word of his gardener Paxford. ‘It was a pity that [he] could not have lived a few more years until the moon landing…. How thrilled [he] would have been if he could have seen the rock and dust brought back from the moon!’ On the other hand, Lewis once wrote that the colonisation of the moon would mean ‘The immemorial Moon—the Moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers—will have been taken from us for ever. Part of our mind, a huge mass of emotional wealth, will have gone. Artemis, Diana, the silver planet belonged in that fashion to all humanity: he who first reaches it steals something from us all.’  The Apollo journey parallels the hubristic Weston’s pioneering flight to Mars in Out of the Silent Planet, which, in transecting the moon’s orbit, violates the boundary between the human sphere and that of the celestial powers. Which is precisely what Kennedy intended by the moon mission of the Sixties: to transform ordinary humans into gods.

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By the time of Kennedy’s moon speech, both Lewis and Huxley were freshly acquainted with death. Like Lewis, Huxley lost his wife to cancer; he said it was like ‘an amputation’. He remarried but was diagnosed with cancer himself in 1960, and then stripped of almost all his possessions and papers in a house fire. Huxley wrote: ‘I am evidently intended to learn, a little in advance of the final denudatio, that you can’t take it with you…. I took it as a sign that the grim reaper was having a good look at me.’ On his last visit to his childhood haunts he wrote, ‘How posthumous one feels’ (and shopping in London he asked, ‘Why do all the manikins look like Jackie Kennedy?’)
In an essay on Shakespeare dictated with great difficulty from his deathbed, Huxley reiterated his belief in the visionary life: ‘The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion which we must take seriously…. Our business is to wake up…. We must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure it….’ But he was still averting his eyes from death, and his biographer says he approached the end in denial. ‘Death is one of the great unknowns too, and you would have expected him to be more curious, reflective, articulate about it. It wasn’t until virtually the day of his death that he realised the game was up.’
In stark contrast to Huxley and Kennedy, Lewis had long ago come to see life as defined by his Christian faith; and death had played a vital role in the process. His most recent biographer, Alister McGrath, reconfigures his father’s death in 1929 as a catalyst for Lewis’s shift to belief in God. The experience of tending his dying father was also strangely premonitory for his son, because the two looked so much alike: Lewis could see how he himself might look on his deathbed.
Lewis’s Christianity was strengthened and refined through further bereavements, including the loss of Charles Williams of the Inklings in 1945, who died during a perfectly routine operation at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. Lewis had gone there to lend Williams a book while on the way to the regular Tuesday morning gathering, at the Eagle and Child pub just down the road, of the Inklings, the literary circle that revolved around Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Williams. ‘I thought he would have given me messages to take to the others,’ Lewis recalled. ‘When I joined them with my actual message—it was only a few minutes’ walk from the Infirmary but, I remember, the very streets looked different—I had some difficulty in making them believe or even understand what had happened. The world seemed to us at that moment primarily a strange world.’ Lewis wrote to a friend at the time, ‘Death has done nothing to my idea of him, but he has done—oh, I can’t say what—to my idea of death. It has made the next world much more real and palpable.’
Lewis’s fraught response to the death in 1960 of his American wife of four years, Joy Davidman—from cancer at the age of 45 just like his mother—was recorded pseudonymously in A Grief Observed, with its famous opening line, ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.’ Ward describes it as ‘a whirlwind of sorrow, fear, regret, anxiety’ but adds: ‘It’s not just raw, unassimilated emotion. Lewis is partly, with an eye to his readers, giving what he thinks is an Everyman’s account of grief.’ It’s the closest Lewis came to losing his faith. ‘He entertains all sorts of dark ideas about God and meaninglessness, and whether his faith is all a house of cards that has come tumbling down. But in part four he’s beginning to recover.’ One of Lewis’s hopes for heaven was to be reunited with loved ones there.
Lewis nearly died of a heart attack in July 1963 and was even given the last rites. Michael Ward says: ‘He came round and half-jokingly said that, having been ushered up all the way to the gates of death, it was a bit of an anti-climax for them to be shut in his face and for him to be sent back.’ But some time before his actual death—from complications from an enlarged prostate—he told his brother Warnie, ‘I have done all that I wanted to do and I am ready to go.’

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How to measure these men, 50 years on? Huxley’s star has been on the wane since his misappropriation by a hedonistic drug culture whose escapism and self-indulgence he deplored even before their zenith in the late Sixties. The English grave he shares with his parents in Compton, Surrey, has been neglected. Most of his 50-odd books, many hugely popular in their time, are now eclipsed by one. Yet that book, Brave New World, remains with George Orwell’s 1984 one of the great dystopian novels of the modern world, and for many the most applicable to a post-Soviet world of vast populations lulled to torpidity by consumer culture.
Lewis is now more than ever a name to conjure with, his Narnia books established as classics (and a film franchise), his works of theology bringing a devoted and perpetually renewed following, his overall work earning him a memorial stone in Poet’s Corner at London’s Westminster Abbey, to be unveiled on 22 November.
And Kennedy, whose grave at Arlington is marked by an eternal flame? Thanks no doubt to his assassination, he divides opinion as much as ever, his Presidency seen by some as the high water mark of liberal democratic hopes, by others as a whited sepulchre. You might say that by thus exposing our differences, he still helps define who we are.
But the manner of Kennedy’s going transfigured him utterly. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention nine months after his death, when his brother Bobby arrived on the podium to introduce a film about JFK, the audience stood and applauded for fully 22 minutes before they would let him speak. Almost overcome, Bobby finally managed to talk about his brother’s vision for party and nation. Then he enshrined him in words from Romeo and Juliet:

When he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Footage of the event is all the more moving in the light of Bobby’s own death, in a pool of blood on a Los Angeles hotel kitchen floor, just four years later.
The idea of the dying god had once struck an acute chord with the young Lewis, who awoke to myth and ‘Northernness’ when he read Longfellow’s words, ‘I heard a voice that cried, / Balder the beautiful / Is dead, is dead…’ He later admitted he had ‘loved Balder before Christ’. In 1931, Lewis was persuaded by Tolkien that such myths were not ‘lies breathed through silver’ but fragments or glimpses of an original truth, ‘refracted light … splintered from a single White / to many hues’. So Lewis was able to reconcile his love of myth with his philosophical acceptance of God, and finally came to believe in Christ. And in Narnia Lewis created his own ‘refracted light’ of Christ, his own myth of the dying god, in the sacrifice of Aslan on the Stone Table—a reconfiguring of Calvary for a world of talking beasts.
Both Lewis and Huxley would have laughed heartily at the thought of the thoroughly worldly John F. Kennedy being translated to celestial glory. But William Manchester, in his 1967 micro-history The Death of a President, argues that Kennedy fulfilled the perennial roles of Balder, Osiris, Adonis and others, including historical figures such as Joan of Arc—betrayed by the French on 21 November, 1430. These are autumnal deaths to expiate the sins of a people and appease the heavens so summer might return. Such myths, Manchester argues, may be vestigial in the modern era, but they remain vital to the cohesion of a culture.
Through his entire political career, and most of all since his presidential campaign, Kennedy had capitalised on his relative youth and vigour and his apparent health, especially in contrast to his aging predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kennedy had in fact read about the myths of the young and sacrificial god in 1960, the year of the presidential campaign, in Mary Renault’s novel The King Must Die. If he had ever paid attention to the thought of posterity, he might just have wondered whether he could end up in Balder’s place. In classic Henry II style, he had turned a blind eye to CIA efforts to bump off Fidel Castro in Cuba, and as a realist he knew he too was certainly a potential assassin’s target.
But of the three who died that day in November, only Kennedy had no time to prepare. Soon, without a security detail covering his tracks and cleaning up behind him, his thoroughly dirty linen was being flung out for all to see. Hodgson recalls: ‘So much emphasis had been placed on how young and beautiful and vigorous Kennedy was, in a conscious contrast with Eisenhower; so it was interesting to discover that Kennedy had at least two and possibly three life-threatening diseases as well as an uncured sexual infection.’
Yet these revelations have done little to dent his myth. At worst, they have only served to polarise opinion. We’ve since seen similar transfigurations in the deaths of Princess Diana and John Lennon, whose considerable sins have been largely washed away by a flood of tears. As William Manchester asserts
What the folk hero was and what he believed are submerged by the demands of those who follow him. In myth he becomes what they want him to have been, and anyone who belittles this transformation has an imperfect understanding of truth.
Youth, beauty, apparent vigour and even the most arguable personal virtues may be sanctified by a sudden and violent death. And the fact that such a man paradoxically took on godhead for a while is proof that we continue to see death not just as an end, but as a doorway to transcendence.

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What does the departure of these three men tell us? It would be difficult to argue that there was some divine purpose behind the conjunction of their deaths; easier, perhaps, to see it all as a wild coincidence and therefore as evidence of a chaotic and purposeless universe. Nor does it tell us whether C.S. Lewis truly went to meet his maker on 22 November 1963, or whether Aldous Huxley, aided by ‘LSD … intramuscular 100mm’ administered by his wife, passed through the doors of perception. What his assassination tells us about Kennedy is infinitely less valuable than what it tells us about our capacity to build myths in the face of mortality. It is surely in their achievements in life that we must really measure these men: the foundation of the moon mission, certainly, but also the writings of Huxley and Lewis which look beneath and beyond the world; and the 13 days in 1962 when Kennedy ensured the survival of that world in which we can continue to read them.
This is an expanded version of a piece that first appeared in Oxford Today, the official magazine of the University of Oxford.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/03/three-great-men-died-that-day-jfk-c-s-lewis-and-aldous-huxley.html