Metaphor 16- Caricature (The Not So Secret Life of Walter Mitty)

Remember earlier where I wrote about the fact that God’s best and most important happiness was His contemplation of Himself? Do you remember your first reaction to that statement? I’m willing to bet that your first reaction, if you did not already have religious training of a certain kind, was probably something like "Well, how very selfish!"

And you would have been right, had you been talking about any other being than God!

But I then went on to use the metaphor of our own "Walter Mitty" like habitual contemplation of ourselves. If you think about that carefully, you will notice something profound: God’s contemplation of His Person and our contemplation of our person, is an antithesis like matter and anti-matter. If we are in habitual contemplation of our person, then we are not in habitual contemplation of His Person. It is either one or the other. It cannot be both.

Is this seriously a problem? Well, let’s consider The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The story was written by James Thurber, and the movie starred Danny Kaye. Both are intended as humor.

And what was so funny? Well, the basic idea that a Comic Relief character (played by Danny Kaye) is day dreaming that he is the Heroic Protagonist or the Romantic Lead in the movie that is his own mind, while we are watching and realizing just how unfitting it is for Mitty to be having these day dreams.

The roles Mitty day dreams for himself are roles proper to a Heroic Protagonist or a Romantic Lead, not a Comic Relief. There is, if you will, a kind robbery going on here, in which a lesser being is robbing a greater of its proper props and accouterments, which then ends in the kind of comedy that we call caricature. The lesser being, in mimicking the greater has brought out, not the character of that greater being, but a caricature of that greater being.

Okay, so Walter Mitty is a caricature of a Hero Protagonist and a caricature of a Romantic Lead. What’s the harm in that? Simply this. Suppose that Walter Mitty was a person in real life who was actually having a secret life like his (and don’t we know of such a person?).

While performing this caricature, Mitty is engaging, in his mind, in relationships with people he knows in real life, and those relationships in his mind are making those people caricatures of what they are in real life. Suppose that one day, through some science-fictional means, the real people that Mitty had made caricatures in his mind were one day able to see into his mind and see those caricatures of them there? Do you think they would be very pleased to see that?

Some, I suppose, might laugh at it, but they would also probably hold poor Mitty lower in their esteem for needing to caricature them like that. Others would get angry at him for holding a lie about them in his mind like that. And I would think that the female objects of his Romantic Lead fantasies would be "creeped out" enough to call the police.

But the most serious business about Walter Mitty having a secret life is if his secret life included a mental relationship with God Most High in which that Worthy Being was caricatured. There is a technical term for this. It is called idolatry.

Think back a bit to where I wrote about God creating "ex nihilo," or "out of nothing." I likened it to our ability to create things out of nothing in our minds. So if we are having a day dream relationship with God in our minds that is a caricature of Him, then we are are reversing the Chain of Being and making the creature the creator of the Creator. That is the classic definition of idolatry. It is this which forms the foundation for all other ways of thinking falsely about eternal things like God Himself and His wrath.

But before we go on, consider this. What is one way that you can tell whether or not you are dreaming? It is when you pinch yourself. And what’s one way to tell when you are not having a day dream about someone? When they cross you and annoy or hurt you or do something your heart is not expecting them to do.

One of the things C.S. Lewis lamented about the death of his wife in A Grief Observed was that he knew that over time (which "heals") the actuality of being with his wife would gradually give way to his own day dreams about what his wife was. She would go from being able to argue and fight back with him intellectually, to being a mere punching bag for his great ideas.

It is no less with God. It is when we are most in disagreement with Him that He is most real to us. And original sin and eternal wrath are the facts which are most disagreeable to us, but inescapable consequences of His character and attributes.