The Lighthouse of the Illuminator

The north side of the mountain ran down through high meadows full of small white flowers to a long green headland pushing out into a grey sea. Inquirer had never seen the sea. Mine-Own-Meaning lies well inland, and its people, when they think of the sea at all, think of it as an unusually large mirror. So when he came over the last rise that evening and saw the water going on and on, he stopped dead. It was huge and restless and took no notice of him whatever. It did not give him back his face. It was just there, the way the black letters in the old Book had been there.

Out on the tip of the headland stood a tower, tall and white and plain, with an iron gallery round the top and a great glass lantern-room above that. As he watched, the light came on. It didn’t flicker up the way a candle does. It woke all at once, steady and white, and a long beam went out over the darkening water, and swung round across the land too, and for a moment it fell full on him where he stood.

He told me he could never describe what that was like. The nearest he could get was that it felt as if somebody who knew everything about him had looked straight at him and wished him well.

Then the beam went on, out to sea.

The door at the foot of the tower was open. Inside was a round whitewashed room with a stone floor and a stair curling up the wall, and a man at a table filling a lamp. He looked up as Inquirer came in. He seemed neither young nor old, and Inquirer could never afterwards say what He looked like, except that His face was full of light the way a window is full of light in the morning.

“Welcome,” said the Keeper. “You knocked, at the top of the stair.”

“I did. Mother Supplication said it was You who opened.”

“She is right. She keeps the door, and the asking is yours, but the opening is Mine.” He put the lamp down. “I am called the Illuminator, and I keep this light. I kept it before the Book was written, and while it was being written, and I keep it still. Those who wrote the Book wrote by My breath, and those who read it rightly read by My light. I give no new words; the words are all given and the Book is finished. What I do is open eyes, so that what is written can be seen for what it is.”

Then Inquirer knew Who was standing in front of him, and he went down on his knees on the stone floor as he had on the stair. The Illuminator lifted him up again, gently enough.

“No. You knelt to come in. Now stand up and look. There are things in this tower I show every pilgrim, and I will show them to you. They are the old principles of the road, the friends the Herald promised you. You will meet them in other shapes further on, but you should see them here first, in My light, so you will know them when they come.”

He took a small lamp and led Inquirer up the winding stair to the first landing, where a door opened into a long narrow room cut in two by a wall of glass. On each side of the glass a man sat reading.

The man on the left had no window. He had lit a candle and was bent over a Book in its light, but it was a poor yellow smoky light that threw great shapeless shadows on the walls, and he kept glancing up at them in fear. Every so often he would cry out and point at one and then turn the pages in a frenzy as if hunting for a verse to beat it off with. Inquirer saw that the shadows were nothing but his own head and hands, thrown up huge on the walls by his own candle.

The man on the right had one big window with the shutters thrown back, and the beam of the Lighthouse came through it and filled the room with clear, even light. He read in peace, smiling now and then, or frowning over something, or jotting in the margin. There wasn’t a shadow on his walls.

“What does it mean?”

“Both men are reading the same Book,” said the Illuminator. “Both are careful, and both are sincere. What differs is the light. The first reads by his own light only, his reason and his feelings and the custom of his people. Those are not nothing. They are a real candle, and I made it. But they are fallen, and they throw his own shape over everything, and he spends his days fighting his own shadow and calls it theology. The second has opened his shutters. He reads with the same eyes and the same mind, for I do not take a man’s mind away when I give him light. But the light he reads by is not his own, and so he sees the page and not himself.”

“How do I open the shutters?”

“You do not, not by yourself. That is what the stair was teaching you. They are opened from outside. But once they are open you can close them again, by pride or sin or plain neglect, and then you will find yourself back by candlelight fighting shadows. That is why Supplication told you the stair is climbed every morning.”

Inquirer looked at the man in the bright room. “Does he understand all of it?”

“Look at his margins.”

The margins were crowded with question marks and little notes: Ask about this. Compare Isaiah? I don’t see it yet.

“My light does not do his reading for him,” said the Illuminator. “It makes reading possible. He still has to read. You remember Mr. Mood on his cushion, who wanted My light without the labor, and Mr. Competence, who wanted the labor without My light. The man at the window has both. That is the whole of the first lesson.”

They climbed to the second landing. This room was a long gallery like an archery range, with a target at the far end bearing a single gold mark in the center, and an arrow standing deep in the gold, still quivering.

But the whole rest of the gallery, walls and ceiling and floor, had been painted over with other targets by someone, dozens and dozens of them in every color and size, and into each one an arrow had been shoved by hand. Next to each, in a great many different handwritings, was a small label: The meaning to me. The spiritual meaning. The deeper meaning. The meaning for our times. The hidden meaning. The meaning I received in prayer.

“Who shot the arrow in the gold?”

“The Author, and the human writer with Him, for they aimed together. Every passage in the Book is shot that way. It is aimed, and it has a mark.”

“And all the others?”

“The others were never shot. Somebody walked up and pushed them in. People paint a target wherever they like, stick an arrow in it, and say, Look, a hit. This is the Gallery of the Single Sense.” He touched a plaque by the door and read it aloud. “The true and full sense of any Scripture is not manifold, but one. That does not mean a passage has only one application. One arrow in the gold may teach a hundred men a hundred things about their own lives. But it has one meaning, the mark it was aimed at, and every application has to be drawn out of that meaning, not stuck in beside it.”

Inquirer looked round at all the painted targets and felt his face burn. “I painted a great many of these. At home. I was very good at it.”

“I know. So was most of the world. Come up.”

The third landing opened into a small odd room with two windows, one east and one west, and the Book on a stand between them. As they came in, the beam swept past outside. It came first through the east window and fell on one page, and the page shone and threw its light back across the room onto the facing leaf. Then the beam came round to the west window and lit the second page, and that page in turn threw light back on the first.

“Each part of the Book lights the others,” said the Illuminator. “This is the Room of Scripture Interpreting Scripture. The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture, it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly. The Book has one Author, and He does not contradict Himself. So when a page is dim to you, find the page that speaks more clearly of the same thing and let it throw its light back.”

Inquirer watched the beam go from window to window and page to page for some time.

“That could be abused, though,” he said. “At home the Polishers used to take a verse from one end of the Book and a verse from the other because they shared a word, and make a meaning out of the pair that neither one had.”

The Illuminator smiled, and the room got brighter. “You are learning faster than most. Yes. You will meet that very abuse further on. It goes by several names, and one of them is Mr. Parallel. The rule is that a clear passage lights the same subject in a dim one. It does not mean any two verses that look alike can be glued together. Remember that when you come to the Mirage.”

“What’s the Mirage?”

“A long way off yet. Come up.”

The fourth room was a great round chamber with a model of a building in the middle of it, a huge cathedral perfect in every detail. Inquirer walked all the way round it admiring it, and only then noticed a single carved stone lying beside it that had been taken out of the model’s wall. Someone had set it up on its own little plinth, polished it, painted it bright red, and put a sign next to it: The Whole Truth, According To This Stone.

There was a fine carving on the stone of a hand. On its own it could have been anything, a hand raised to bless or to strike, or waving goodbye.

“Where does it go?”

The Illuminator pointed to a gap in the cathedral wall. The hand belonged to a carved figure of the Lord standing with one arm stretched out over a kneeling sinner. Put back in its place, the hand was very plainly raised in pardon.

“This is the Room of the Analogy of Faith. Analogia fidei. All the teaching of the Book makes one building, and no reading of a single stone may contradict the plain teaching of the whole. If a man takes one verse and makes it say what the whole Book plainly denies, he has painted a stone red and called it the cathedral. A stone has to be understood where it sits.”

“But who decides what the whole teaches?”

“The Book does, read honestly, part by part, with the clear parts lighting the dim ones. Not a council, not a guild, and not a parlor. The church has walked this road ahead of you, and her confessions are a great help to a pilgrim; you will see their hall near the end. But they are maps, not the country. They are true just so far as they agree with the Book.”

He laid a hand on the red stone’s plinth and added something more. “Mark this too. The clear interprets the unclear, never the other way about. Men love to build their doctrines in the dark corners, because nobody can easily prove them wrong there. A wise man builds on the plain places and lets them tell him what the dark ones may mean and what they may not.”

The fifth room was the next to highest. It was very long, and full of the clatter of a great loom, on which a single tapestry was being woven. At the far end it began in darkness, with a few dim threads. As it came toward them more threads joined, and colors, and shapes: a garden, a man and a woman, a serpent, a promise; then a family, a covenant, a nation; a tabernacle and a temple and a throne, a long line of kings and prophets, an exile, a return.

And all through it from the very first ran one bright gold thread, so faint at the start you could hardly see it, growing stronger and stronger until, at the near end of the loom, the whole tapestry drew together and the gold thread rose into the shape of a cross, and an empty tomb, and a Man with His hands held out.

Past Him the tapestry was still being woven, though Inquirer couldn’t see into that part. It was too bright.

“This is the Loom of the One Story,” said the Illuminator. “The Book is many books by many hands over many centuries, but it is one story with one Author, and it unfolds. The early parts are not wrong. They are early. They are seed. The later parts are not new stories; they are the flowering of what was sown. That is what is meant by progressive revelation. Read the early threads as if they were the whole pattern and you will go wrong. Read them as if they had nothing to do with the later pattern and you will go just as wrong. And watch the gold thread, for that is the Lord. Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. He is the scope of the whole. Every part of the tapestry is woven toward Him.”

Inquirer stood in front of the loom a long time. “Does that mean every thread is the gold one? A polisher once told me every tent-peg in the tabernacle was a picture of the nails.”

“No. Every thread is woven toward Him and finds its place because of Him. But a blue thread is still blue. Say every thread is gold and you have stopped looking at the threads. You will meet a man on the road called Types-Everywhere who will show you gold in every tent-peg, and another called Flattener who will tell you all the threads are one color and the pattern never changes. Both of them have stopped looking at the loom.”

There was one more thing in that room. Near the end of the woven part, the later threads, the threads of the apostles, reached back and passed through the earlier parts of the tapestry and gave them colors they hadn’t seemed to have before.

“The later threads interpret the earlier,” He said. “When the apostles explain the Law and the Prophets, they are not taking liberties. They are showing what was there all along. The New is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed. But it was the apostles who were given to do that with authority, not every clever reader who comes after them.”

At the top of the tower was the lamp-room, and Inquirer had to shut his eyes when he came up into it. When he could open them he saw the great lamp. It was not a flame he could look at directly. It sat inside a vast lens of many rings and facets, like the eye of some enormous creature, and the lens gathered the light and threw it out in the single long beam that went sweeping round over sea and land.

“The light is Mine,” said the Illuminator. “The lens is the Book. Without the lens the light would spill everywhere and show nothing clearly; men who claim My light without My Book see only a glare and call it vision. Without the light the lens is cold glass; men who have the Book without My light read it and do not see. Together they make the beam that brings ships home.”

He took Inquirer out onto the iron gallery. The wind was cold and strong, the sea black underneath them, and the beam going out over it.

“Look, and you will see your road.”

As the beam passed over the land the King’s Highway sprang out for an instant, white and plain, running inland from the headland, past a long low building like a monastery, down to a big river, through a country of ruins, past a tower with a clock in it, and on through places he couldn’t make out. Here and there the beam caught a glint of something along it, an armed figure, a gate, a fire, a crowd. Then it moved on and the land went dark.

When it swung out over the water he saw the rocks. Long jagged reefs ran the length of the coast, and the light picked them out one after another. Each rock had a name cut so deep it could be read from the tower, and he read some of them: Root. Anachronism. Proof-Text. Totality. Allegory. Moralism. Isolation. False Disjunction. Nearly every rock had a wreck on it.

“Those are the enemies,” the Illuminator said. “They are on the land as well, in other shapes, and you will meet them there. Here you see them as they really are. Every one is a rock that has broken readers. Some of these wrecks are very old. Some went down last night.”

It was while they were standing on the gallery that the thing happened which Inquirer said he would never forget.

Away down the coast to the south, on a dark point of land, a second light showed. It was small and warm and golden, and it swung back and forth as if someone were waving a lantern. There was a ship out on the water, a small one with lights in all her windows, and she had been steering by the Lighthouse beam. Now she began to turn toward the golden lantern.

“What’s she doing?” Inquirer shouted. “The rocks are right there!”

“She has seen the warmer light.” His voice was very grave. “The men on that point are called the Inner Lighters, and they serve Mr. Felt-Meaning. On dark nights they wave lanterns and tell the ships they have no need of the Lighthouse. Steer by the light within, they say. Steer by whatever feels warm. And the ships that listen…”

The ship struck. Inquirer heard it even from the tower, a long splintering cry and then voices. The golden lantern on the point went out at once.

The Illuminator was already on the stair, and Inquirer ran after Him. There was a boat drawn up on the shingle below the tower. The Illuminator ran it out into the surf and Inquirer tumbled in, though he had never been in a boat in his life, and then they were out on the black water with the beam going over them again and again, lighting the way to the wreck.

I won’t give all of that night as Inquirer gave it to me. It would take too long, and I think it still hurt him. The ship was the Private Revelation. Most of the people on board had been making a pilgrimage of their own to a place they called the City of the Heart’s Own Light. They had been told the Lighthouse was for the unenlightened and that real pilgrims steer by an inner warmth. Some of them refused to get into the boat even while the ship was breaking up under them. They had a feeling, they said, that they would be saved some other way. Some of those were lost.

But a good many climbed in, soaked and weeping and stunned, and when they were all ashore the Illuminator built them a fire and found them dry clothes. Then He opened the Book in the light from the tower and read them one sentence: “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”

“There is My light,” He told them. “I do not give it apart from My Word. Any light that tells you to leave the Word is not Mine, however warm it feels.”

Inquirer sat by the fire in a blanket, shaking, till morning.

When it was light the Illuminator came and found him. “There is one more place I show every pilgrim, and it is not in the tower.”

He led him along the cliff path to the very end of the headland, where there was nothing beyond but sea. On the bare rock there stood a Cross.

It was a plain wooden cross, old and grey with weather and very large. A spring welled up out of the rock at its foot and ran off in a little stream over the cliff edge into the sea. The Lighthouse beam passed over it every half-minute, and every time it did the Cross threw a long shadow back over the land toward the road.

Inquirer stood in front of it. Nobody needed to tell him what it was, or Whose. He had read about it in the old Book in his workshop, with the silver gone. He had read that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. But every time before, he had read it with his own face floating behind the words, and so it had always come out meaning something like Christ died so that I would feel valued. Now he was standing in front of the thing itself, and his face wasn’t anywhere in it. It had nothing to do with how he felt. It was about something that had been done, by Someone else, for him.

He went down on his knees.

What passed between him and his Lord then I can’t write down. He didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. I’ll only set down what he told me about his spectacles.

He said that while he knelt the Illuminator stood beside him, and after a time said, “Now take them off.”

“I can’t. I’ve tried. They’re grown into my face.”

“Try now.”

He put his hands up, and they came away. Not altogether, he said. The rims stayed in his face, and he understood they always would, because no man in this life sees without lenses of some kind. But the glass came out of the rims and into his palm, two discs of deep amber, still warm from his eyes.

The Illuminator took them and knelt at the spring and washed them in the water that came out from under the Cross. And then He did something Inquirer hadn’t expected. He didn’t throw them away, and He didn’t give him new ones. He picked a small stone out of the stream and began to grind the glass, slowly, with great patience, and as He ground, the amber began to thin. It didn’t vanish. It thinned, as mist thins in the morning. When He handed them back at last they were very pale, the palest gold.

“Put them on.”

Inquirer fitted them in. They sat in the rims as they always had. He looked up, and the world had changed color. It wasn’t perfectly clear; there was still a faint warmth over everything, a tint he would spend years learning to recognize as his own. But the white of the Lighthouse was white, and the sea was grey, and when he looked down at the open Book in his hands the letters were blacker than he had ever seen them.

“You will always wear lenses,” said the Illuminator. “Every man does. A man who tells you he reads the Book with no lenses at all, with no presuppositions and nothing of himself brought to it, is either a fool or a liar. The question is never whether you have lenses. It is whether you will let the Book grind them. You have had the first grinding here, at the Cross, and nothing can be ground true anywhere else. But it is only the first. Every honest reading will grind them a little further. Every time the Book says something you did not expect and you give way to it, they will clear a little. Every time you refuse, they will darken again.”

He gave Inquirer the stone from the stream. “Keep this. When your lenses cloud over, and they will, come back to this spring in your mind and to what was done here. You will find that a man who has been forgiven by the Author has no need to make the Book flatter him. He can afford to hear it.”

Inquirer put the stone in his pocket. He carried it, he told me, the whole length of the road, and he showed it to me on the wall: a little grey pebble, nothing special, worn very smooth.

Before He let him go the Illuminator gave him one more thing, a roll of plain parchment with a seal showing a lamp and an open Book.

“This is the Charter of the Road. It lists the friends you met in the tower. Read it when you are confused and you will know who is a friend and who is not. A good many of your enemies will borrow your friends’ names. Mr. Felt-Meaning will talk about illumination and mean his inner lanterns. Types-Everywhere will talk about Christ in all Scripture and mean his tent-pegs. Hold every name up to the Charter, and to the Book.”

Inquirer unrolled it. Written there in a plain, strong hand were these words:

Scripture Alone is the rule.

The Spirit gives the light to see it.

What is necessary is clear.

Each text has one true sense.

Scripture interprets Scripture.

No reading may break the analogy of faith.

The clear interprets the unclear.

Hear the words as their author wrote them, in their tongue and their time.

The Book is one, under one covenant of grace.

Its revelation unfolds.

Christ is its scope.

The New interprets the Old, and the Old grounds the New.

What the Book records is not always what it commands.

“There is a friend for every line,” said the Illuminator. “You have met some of them already, and you will meet the rest on the road in their own shapes. Now go. The road runs inland from here to the House of the Copyists, and they are expecting you.”

“Will I see You again?”

The Illuminator smiled, and the beam came round behind Him and passed over them both.

“Every time you open the Book with your shutters open. I have never been anywhere else.”

So Inquirer picked up his lantern and his Book and his Charter, with the pebble in his pocket, turned his paler lenses toward the road, and went inland from the Lighthouse into the morning. When he looked back from the first rise he could see the shadow of the Cross lying long across the country. It lay over the road, and it seemed to him to be going on ahead.