Eustace stuffed his hands in his back pocket, watching his cousin battle with bottles and jars in the Pevensie kitchen.
Old Eustace might have sneered and found something to comment upon, but old Eustace seemed so different, so far removed, that even caterpillars before the chrysalis and butterflies after the chrysalis seemed a poor comparison, and the words of old Eustace barely dipped into his mind before they fled like a gauze-tipped wind. Present Eustace had far more pressing questions, and so he leaned with barely-concealed impatience against the pantry door as Edmund finished lining up the jars of homemade plum sauce and- too slowly- dusted his hands and faced Eustace.
"Well, that's the last of them- for now," said Edmund, grinning. He took a step back, and a bottle eased its way forward from the pack and began its short plummet to the ground. Even as he watched Edmund lurch forwards, Eustace felt and heard the bottle crash, and the rich, dark jam pooled around a small patch of the ground.
"Rats," Edmund grumbled, looking ruefully at his hands. "I was much faster back in Narnia."
"I could fly, in Narnia," Eustace said, his voice a little more dry than he intended it to be. "I did many things in Narnia I can't seem to do here."
Edmund glanced at him. It was a brief glance, but shrewd, and if Eustace could, he would have liked at that moment to melt and disappear into the pantry doors.
"What did you really want to say, Eustace?" he asked, and his words might have been a little sharp and to the point, but his tone was surprisingly gentle. It was a combination that Eustace did not think would work on many people, though it was rather intrinsically Edmund.
He shifted his weight to his left side.
"Well," he began, and paused. "I-" he stopped again and frowned. "It's strange, going to church," he said at last, and it was so different from what he had wanted to say that he felt like hitting something.
"Different?" Edmund echoed, and his voice was thankfully devoid of a knowing tone. "Different in what way?"
"Well-" Eustace frowned at the ground. "You know that I'm not used to going to church, anyhow," he said, and wondered why he was babbling. "I don't know what you and Lucy and Peter and Susan grew up with, and it felt just downright strange when there was that Ash Wednesday service and we were invited to go up and get an ash cross on our foreheads. And-" he looked up briefly and met Edmund's steady gaze before glancing away. "And it seems so different to Narnia," he finished at last, and now that the words were out it was as though a light had been thrown upon a darkened room, and the air cleared a little as he drew breath.
He felt Edmund looking at him, and turned his head so that his face was towards Edmund's, even if their eyes did not quite meet.
"Of course it's different," said Edmund, and his voice carried that irritating strain of how could you think otherwise.
"Well," Eustace snapped, "it doesn't make any sense!"
Edmund was silent for a moment before he spoke again.
"Does it have to?"
"Well- yes!" Eustace exploded. "How can I believe something with any good conscience if it doesn't make sense?"
He watched a dozen things flit across Edmund's face- the light, a moth that had somehow entered the house, one or two unreadable half-emotions- until Edmund spoke.
"The more I think about Narnia, the less I think sense helps me make sense of It," he said, eventually, a curious strain to his voice. "When we all went to check Lucy's story, the wardrobe didn't lead to Narnia- but when I followed Lucy by myself, it did. Where's the sense in that?"
Eustace noticed that Edmund spoke slowly, as though testing the words to his own ears.
"And then- when Lu saw Aslan, when we were all there to help Caspian- and none of us could see him until we were already following- where's the sense in that?"
Eustace did not feel that he could adequately explain the terrible, gaping hole that crawled and reached out and clamped within him.
"If things don't make sense-" he began, and stopped.
That hole was cold and burning, shattering and spraying his stomach with a grinding pain that sounded like Alberta's voice and these stupid childish fancies what proof do you have clinging to outmoded ideas there is less truth in them than in a sensational article than there is in the idea the sun orbits the earth and that was based on observation- and voices he had not perceived began thumping his head, shouting with knocks that felt purple and red and sounded pain.
"It's senseless!" he shouted, the desperate cry tearing at his throat. "And I-" the words, almost too painful to utter, thrust forwards, double-edged spear. "We're- I'm- following- a fantasy! A lie!"
The thumping and knocking and grinding grew, and he leaned forwards, reached ahead blindly for the bench top. For a few, terrifying moments that felt like days, he wondered if he would fall and hit the ground.
"Here," said Edmund's voice, and he felt the cup-shaped coolness fit into his palm. "Here, have a sip."
Slowly, his hand was guided to his mouth. He choked on the water.
"I think- you might want to sit," said Edmund's voice from somewhere near his ear, and he felt himself being steered to a chair.
When his vision cleared, a little, he blinked, wishing the voices and the gnawing hole away until they were but quiet unrests.
"Have you heard of Thomas Aquinas?" Edmund asked, presently, and the question was so unexpected that Eustace blinked.
"Thom- wait- wasn't he Catholic?"
"All Protestants were Catholics, then," said Edmund, matter-of-factly, setting his hands on the table, "unless they were Orthodox. The Orthodox Christians were really the first Protestants, because they protested against the Nicene Creed as it was agreed upon in 325 AD. Well, anyway, Thomas Aquinas wrote a little bit about analogies- which a lot of people have now written a lot about. He's rather famous for it, really."
Eustace looked at him blankly.
"Oh, look-" Edmund stood up and moved about the room, pulling at books and peering under vases. After a moment, he returned to the table with a scrap sheet of paper in tow, and a small, chewed pencil. Attempting not to wince at the state of the pencil, he watched as Edmund wrote on the paper with small, even strokes.
2:4 :: 3:6
Eustace looked at him dubiously.
"You can just reduce that to 1:2, you know," he said.
"Yes," said Edmund excitedly, putting his pen down, "that's just it! They are 1:2- but then they are not. They're not exactly 1:2 or it would just be 1:2 = 1:2- but there's still a relationship, so it's not like I put down a one and a three and then a four and a seven- it's what Thomas Aquinas and scholars in his day called the analogical relationship. It's not the same, but similar, to open our eyes to the real pattern. And he wrote about how we could think about God in a similar way."
"It may just be me," said Eustace drily, after a moment, "but I think you're using the word similar an awful lot."
"Well, that's because that's the point," said Edmund, a hint of impatience creeping into his voice. "Thomas Aquinas wrote that we can't really know God exactly- because his substance and being is so different to ours- but at the same time, he's not completely equivocal, we can know that he is good, that he is existence, that he is wise and just and loving. We can know these things- but the words we use are words that we know- because God's goodness isn't just like our idea of goodness, and his idea of love isn't just our idea of love. But it's in the same vein, because God shapes us so that we reflect him better- and so his point was that we only ever know God analogically."
"Wait," said Eustace, when Edmund drew breath to continue. "I need to think. Just- a moment." He closed his eyes briefly, saw the 1:2, 2:4::3:6.
We can only know God analogically.
"So- analogies-" he stopped again. God's goodness isn't just like our idea of goodness… same vein… analogically. "They're in-between what's equivocal and what is absolute?"
"Absolutely," Edmund said, and Eustace was vaguely relieved to hear the relief in his voice. "And- well, with Narnia- I think… it's like we know the 2:4, pointing our eyes to the real pattern- in its most diluted form, 1:2."
And somehow, perhaps because they were dealing with numbers and formulas and patterns, that awful hole was receding just that little bit more, and he could breathe again, even with that question waiting, waiting to spread its wings, until he could contain it no longer.
"So if it's an analogy- what is it?" he said eventually, and almost chewed on his lower lip. "Which is true?"
Edmund slowly splayed his fingers against the tabletop and lowered his gaze a little.
"I like to think of Narnia as a living parable," he said, eventually, and his voice was so low that Eustace had to strain to catch each word. "Or as some sort of – analogy, that I was a part of. But then I remember- remember being in Narnia- and nothing here felt quite so real as when I was there. And both Jesus and Aslan seem true- it's a similar truth I love in both, though the form is very different. Sometimes I think- feel- that Jesus is that primary cause, the causal agent, the 1:2- but that Narnia is more real than here, and is a symbol of what's to come."
"So- you don't know."
"No," Edmund agreed, voice still low, "I don't know. But I believe-" and here, he raised his head and smiled, "and in cases like this, I do feel that believing is the basis to knowledge. Does that make sense?"
There was a strange lightness singing somewhere inside Eustace's head, soothing out the knocks and thumps from earlier, and a looseness reached in with cool touch to ease his stomach, free his throat.
"No, not really," he admitted. "But I think that's all right."
And the lightness spread as he uncurled his hands from the cup and sat for a while, staring out the window to the brightness of day.
"My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all thou sayest, but thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too, a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even in milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou are the dove that flies." - John Donne (Devotions)