My wife (complementary relationship) reposted a blog by TXRed on her blog yesterday about the updating of hymns and hymn texts/lyrics. I made some comments there more specific to the hymns themselves. Here, I want to link this all back to another post I made back in April about symmetrical vs. complementary.
I think a lot of what the hymns are doing is trying to enforce the political egalitarianism required by the fall into all our relationships. They want to treat all our complementary relationships as symmetrical ones. You can get away with the concept for quite a while — until you try to make us symmetrical with God — and then suddenly you (hopefully) realize that this is a problem, and the root of the whole matter to begin with.
Wait a minute — did I actually say that? Did my logic actually lead there? The attempt to enforce equality is equal to the sin that caused the fall — to be like God? (Thus said the serpent: “You shall be like God, knowing good and evil …”)
C.S. Lewis expressed the need for political equality better than I could in his essay Equality, linked here. Let me post a “short” section of it here and allow you follow the link for the rest:
I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. Whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people — all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don’t think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. To attempt to restore it now would be the same error as that of the Nudists. Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.
But medicine is not good. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values — offers food to some need which we have starved.
We need to take Lewis’s point seriously, and stop trying to live on medicine rather than food. We need to allow the political equality to be a place that frees the expression of all our other inequalities. It will allow us to each find the unique place within the “Circle of Life” that our gifts and desires draw us to.
Some people think living in a hierarchical world means we are held in place against our will to a fate we do not want. They don’t understand the true flexibility of democratic equality, which gives us the best of both worlds — the best, at least, that is possible in the world afflicted by the fall.
At The Rainbow 