Transposition: Human Words Ascending

The Grace of Common Prayer #5

This essay on Transposition is the fifth in an ongoing series titled The Grace of Common Prayer. For previous posts in the series, click these links: Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Introduction

In my previous essays in this series, I explored the communication breakdown between God and humanity that prayer seeks to heal. I argued that prayer is fundamentally a response to God's prior speech, and that Jesus Christ stands as the only mediator between God and Man. Jesus mediates divine and human communication. We examined how prayer is, in C.S. Lewis's words, essentially "God speaking to God,” the eternal Son addressing the Father through us by the Spirit.

Before delving further into how the Prayer Book mediates our prayers through Scripture, I suggested we need to understand three crucial aspects of God's Word, and I offered a musical analogy and wrote the following:

Consider music - not any particular piece, but music as a reality that transcends time and culture. It exists first as pure possibility, as mathematical truth, and as harmony waiting to be discovered. Then in performance, these abstract principles take audible form, becoming something we can hear and experience. Finally, we have written scores through which musicians study, learn, and participate in performing specific works.

Similarly, God's Word exists in three analogous forms. It is the eternal Logos (the second person of the Trinity), the incarnate Word (Jesus Christ), and the written Word (Holy Scripture). The written Word introduces us to and facilitates our communion with the eternal and incarnate Word just as the written score facilitates a musicians participation in a performance of a particular piece of music. The whole process, both for scripture and for music is, you might say, "sacramental."

But what exactly does it mean for Scripture to be "sacramental"? How can written words on a page become a means of grace that transforms us and draws us into communion with the living God? To answer these questions, I’d like to recommend the idea of "transposition,” which is a term C.S. Lewis used to describe how higher realities can be expressed through lower mediums, and how those lower realities can be drawn up into something greater than themselves.¹

In this essay, I will consider the ancient practice of reading Scripture according to the "quadriga" (the fourfold sense) as a form of transposition whereby earthly realities are taken up into heavenly ones, and readers themselves are drawn into the divine life by the work of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. Understanding this sacramental quality of Scripture helps us grasp why prayer rooted in Scripture is so transformative, and why the Book of Common Prayer's saturation with biblical language is so essential to its power. It should not surprise us that Lewis’s reflections on these matters were extraordinarily similar to the theology and practice of the early church.

The Nature of Transposition

In 1962, C.S. Lewis preached a sermon titled "Transposition" at Mansfield College Chapel in Oxford. In it, he sought to answer this question: how can seemingly natural phenomena (like speaking in tongues or mystical experiences) be simultaneously natural and supernatural? The question extends beyond specific religious experiences to the broader issue of how the transcendent God communicates with finite humans through material reality and how we, in like manner, might communicate with God.

He begins with a story from Pepys's Diary (late 17th century) that illustrates his point beautifully:

"With my wife to the King's House to see The Virgin Martyr, and it is mighty pleasant... But that which did please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind musick when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife... and makes me resolve to practise wind musick and to make my wife do the like" (95-96).

Lewis notes three remarkable aspects of Pepys's experience:

“(1) that the internal sensation accompanying intense aesthetic delight was indistinguishable from the sensation accompanying two other experiences, that of being in love and that of being, say, in a rough channel crossing. (2) That of these two other experiences one at least is the very reverse of pleasurable. No man enjoys nausea. (3) That Pepys was, nevertheless, anxious to have again the experience whose sensational accompaniment was identical with the very unpleasant accompaniments of sickness” (96).

This observation leads Lewis to conclude that the same physical sensations can represent wildly different emotional or spiritual states. The flutter in the diaphragm that accompanies both great joy and terrible anguish derives its meaning from its broader context. The higher realm of emotions must use the limited "vocabulary" of physical sensations to express itself. Lewis explains:

"Where we tend to go wrong is in assuming that if there is to be a correspondence between two systems it must be a one for one correspondence — that A in the one system must be represented by a in the other, and so on. But the correspondence between emotion and sensation turns out not to be of that sort. And there never could be correspondence of that sort where the one system was really richer than the other. If the richer system is to be represented in the poorer at all, this can only be by giving each element in the poorer system more than one meaning. The transposition of the richer into the poorer must, so to speak, be algebraical, not arithmetical” (98-99).

He then offers several compelling examples of transposition, including:

1. Drawing: Representing a three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper through perspective, where "an acute angle on the paper may represent what was already an acute angle in the real world" or something entirely different like "a dunces' cap."

2. Music: Creating a piano version of an orchestral piece, where "the same piano notes which represent flutes in one passage must also represent violins in another."

3. Mind and Body: Lewis suggests that "the real relation between mind and body" might be one of Transposition, where the seemingly limited physical brain can respond to the "infinite variety of consciousness" without requiring "one single physical modification for each single modification of consciousness."

4. Physical Sensations and Emotions: This is his central example - how the same bodily sensation (like Pepys's flutter in the diaphragm) can represent entirely different emotional states (aesthetic delight, love, or nausea).

Lewis's point with all these examples is that in true transposition, "the lower reality can actually be drawn into the higher and become part of it (113)." In each case, the richer reality must be expressed through the more limited medium by giving elements in the simpler system multiple meanings or functions. This is the essence of transposition.

Transposition and Spiritual Reality

Lewis then applies this principle to the relationship between natural and spiritual realities:

“Our problem was that in what claims to be our spiritual life all the elements of our natural life recur: and, what is worse, it looks at first glance as if nothing else were there... And the sceptic's conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also exactly what we should expect; for, as we have seen, this is the mistake which an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in every case of Transposition” (104).

The brilliance of Lewis's insight is that he shows how the skeptic's dismissal of spiritual experiences as "merely natural" is precisely what we should expect from someone who only understands the lower medium. Just as a two-dimensional being would see a drawing of a cube as merely a collection of triangles and squares with no deeper reality, so those who recognize only the material world will inevitably misinterpret spiritual realities as nothing more than natural phenomena. Lewis continues:

"The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology never can find anything in thought except twitchings of the grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible" (104).

The key insight is that transposition can only be properly understood from above - from the perspective of one who knows the higher reality. Those who have experienced love know it is more than mere physical attraction; those who know the spiritual life recognize it as more than psychological phenomena.

The Quadriga: Scripture as Transposition

Lewis’s principle of transposition is highly relevant to the way that Scripture functions sacramentally as a means of grace. Likewise, the ancient Christian practice of reading Scripture according to the "quadriga" (the fourfold sense) represents a sophisticated understanding of how the divine reality is transposed into the written word, and how readers are themselves transposed into the divine life through engagement with the text.

The quadriga emerged from the early church's conviction that Scripture contains multiple layers of meaning, all divinely intended. Following Paul in 2 Corinthian 3:6, the fathers affirmed the literal and spiritual senses but then divided the spiritual sense into three: the allegorical, tropological, and anagogical senses. Thus, the quadria includes:

1. Literal/Historical Sense: The plain meaning of the text in its historical context

2. Allegorical Sense: How the text points to Christ and the gospel

3. Tropological (Moral) Sense: How the reader should respond in faith and action

4. Anagogical Sense: How the text points to our eternal destiny and hope

This interpretive framework was not merely an intellectual exercise but a spiritual pathway for transformation. Hugh of St. Victor explains in his Didascalion:

“The foundation and basis of holy teaching is history, from which the truth of allegory is extracted like honey from the comb. If then, you are building, lay the foundation of history first; then by the typical sense put up a mental structure as a citadel of faith and finally, like a coat of the loveliest of colours, paint the building with the elegance of morality. In the history you have the deeds of God to wonder at, in allegory his mysteries to believe, in morality his perfection to imitate” (Didascalion, vi, 3).

The quadriga recognizes that Scripture functions as a transposition of divine realities into human language. The limited vocabulary of human words, historical events, and material objects becomes the medium through which the infinite richness of God's truth is expressed. Just as the same physical sensation can signify either joy or anguish depending on context, so the same biblical text can simultaneously carry historical, christological, moral, and eschatological meanings – again, depending on context.

The Great Transposition: All Things in Christ

The ultimate transposition is the incarnation itself - the Word made flesh. In Christ, the eternal, infinite God takes on the limited medium of human nature without losing his divine nature. Lewis suggests that the concept of transposition can help us understand all spiritual transformations, including the most profound one, which is our own transformation through Christ. He proposes that when we are spiritually transformed from mere creatures into children of God, from natural beings into spiritual beings, we experience a transposition that may involve relationships between qualities that are beyond our current capacity to comprehend. This spiritual transformation doesn't eliminate our humanity but elevates it, just as other instances of transposition don't erase the lower medium but infuse it with higher meaning.

This incarnational principle extends throughout Scripture, as the biblical narrative reveals how figures, events, objects, and institutions from Israel's history are transposed into higher realities through their relationship to Christ. As Augustine noted, "in the Old Testament the new is concealed and in the New Testament the old is revealed." These types and figures always carried within them the potential for their fulfillment in Christ, much as a baby is inherently present in a pregnant mother before birth, though their complete transposition depends on the revelation of Christ in His incarnation, death, and resurrection.

Consider this very incomplete list of types and figures from the Old Testament which, through Christ's fulfillment, are transposed into something greater:

1. Adam, the first man, becomes a figure of Christ "the last Adam" who is head of a new humanity (1 Corinthians 15:45).

2. Noah's ark, once a wooden vessel of physical salvation, emerges as the prefigurement of baptism, our spiritual deliverance (1 Peter 3:20-21).

3. Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac transforms from a test of faith into the powerful shadow of God's own sacrifice of His beloved Son (Genesis 22).

4. Moses advances from historical deliverer of Israel to herald of Christ, the ultimate liberator from sin's bondage.

5. The Exodus evolves from a single historical liberation to the divine pattern for all spiritual deliverance.

6. Manna rises from mere physical sustenance to signify Christ, "the true bread from heaven" (John 6:32).

7. The Tabernacle and Temple shift from architectural structures to eternal realities - Christ's body and the church (John 2:19-21).

8. The Priesthood ascends from a hereditary, temporal office to Christ's eternal, perfect ministry (Hebrews 7).

9. Animal sacrifice develops from ritual slaughter into the foreshadowing of Christ's complete atonement.

10. The Passover lamb grows from ceremonial meal to "Christ our Passover sacrifice" (1 Corinthians 5:7).

11. David, once king of Israel, comes to prefigure the Messianic King who reigns forever.

12. Jerusalem expands from geographic location to "the Jerusalem that is above," our spiritual mother (Galatians 4:26).

13. The Promised Land broadens from physical territory to our imperishable, eternal inheritance.

14. The Law deepens from external commandments to the law written on hearts by the Spirit (Jeremiah 31:33).

15. The Prophets culminate in Christ, no longer mere messengers but pointing to the ultimate Prophet, the Word made flesh.

In each case, the earthly reality is not negated but fulfilled and elevated - just as in Lewis's understanding of transposition, where the lower medium is taken up into the higher and becomes more than it was before. As Jesus himself said, "I have not come to abolish [the Law and the Prophets] but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17). The significance and ultimate meaning of each type listed above is transposed in Jesus Christ.

The biblical narrative reveals a progressive transposition, where each new covenant builds upon and fulfills the previous one, drawing historical realities into the eternal purpose of God. The writer of Hebrews captures this beautifully when describing the relationship between the old and new covenants:

"The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves... It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins... Then he said, 'Here I am, I have come to do your will.' He sets aside the first to establish the second. And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." (Hebrews 10:1, 4, 9-10)

This is transposition at its most profound - the limited, temporal system of sacrifices is fulfilled in the perfect, eternal sacrifice of Christ. The same elements (priest, offering, altar, blood) are present in both systems, but in Christ they take on infinitely greater significance.

The Resurrection: The Key to Authentic Transposition

It's essential to recognize that this great transposition of biblical figures, events, and institutions is not simply a clever literary device or an arbitrary interpretive framework. The entire enterprise depends fundamentally on the historical reality of Christ's resurrection and His authentic fulfillment of Old Testament patterns.

From outside perspectives, these biblical elements would have entirely different meanings. To an ancient Babylonian, the Temple in Jerusalem would be another national shrine, perhaps impressive but ultimately no different in kind from their own temples to Marduk or other deities. To a Roman official, Jewish sacrifices would appear as peculiar ethnic customs, perhaps to be tolerated but certainly not universal in significance. To a modern secular historian, figures like Moses or David might be interesting cultural heroes or political leaders, but nothing more.

Even within Judaism itself, without the resurrection of Christ, these elements would remain partial and incomplete - still awaiting their fulfillment. Apart from the resurrection of Christ, Judaism lives in anticipation, with a hope oriented toward a future yet unrealized.

What transforms these historical realities - what truly transposes them into something of cosmic and eternal significance - is the concrete, historical fact of Christ's resurrection. As Paul emphatically declares:

"If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith... If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins... But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:14, 17, 20).

The resurrection validates Christ's claims and confirms that He is indeed the fulfillment of all these types and shadows. Without this historical vindication, the entire typological reading of Scripture would collapse. The transposition would fail, the lower would remain merely lower, and the promised transformation would never arrive.

Thus, the transposition we observe in Christian reading of Scripture is not imposed from outside but springs from within, from the inner logic of God's redemptive work culminating in Christ. As Lewis might put it, we can only recognize the true meaning of the "lower medium" when the "higher reality" has actually broken through and revealed itself. The resurrection is precisely that breakthrough when the higher reality authenticates the transposition of all that comes before and after.

The Word That Prays in Us: Our Transposition into Christ

The most remarkable aspect of this biblical transposition is that we ourselves are drawn into it. Through faith and baptism, we are "in Christ”… transposed from merely natural beings into participants in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Our limited human existence becomes the medium through which Christ's life is expressed.

Lewis himself recognized this transformative power of Scripture. In the final paragraph of the sermon, Lewis suggests that our earthly experience, with all its limitations, can be transposed into heavenly reality:

May we not, by a reasonable analogy, suppose likewise that there is no experience of the spirit so transcendent and supernatural, no vision of Deity Himself so close and so far beyond all images and emotions, that to it also there cannot be an appropriate correspondence on the sensory level? Not by a new sense but by the incredible flooding of those very sensations we now have with a meaning, a transvaluation, of which we have here no faintest guess (115)?

The Prayer Book as Transposition

We can now consider why the Book of Common Prayer's saturation with biblical language is so powerful. When we pray using the words of Scripture, we are participating in the great transposition of human words into divine communion. Our limited vocabulary becomes the medium through which the infinite God communicates with us and we with Him.

The Prayer Book demonstrates this transposition beautifully in its liturgies. Consider the baptismal prayer over water:

"We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water. Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John in the River Jordan when the Holy Spirit descended upon him as a dove."

Here we see the quadriga in action - the historical events of creation, exodus, and Jesus' baptism (literal sense) are recognized as part of God's progressive revelation culminating in Christ (allegorical sense), while the prayer continues:

"We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit."

This draws us into participation in Christ's death and resurrection (tropological sense) and points to our eternal destiny (anagogical sense). The prayer transposes the physical reality of water into the spiritual reality of rebirth.

Similarly, the Eucharistic prayer transposes the historical Last Supper into our present communion with Christ and anticipation of the heavenly banquet:

"On the night that he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread; and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, 'Take, eat; this is my Body, which is given for you: Do this in remembrance of me.'

Likewise, after supper, Jesus took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, 'Drink this, all of you; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you, and for many, for the forgiveness of sins: Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.'"

The bread and wine, limited physical elements, become the medium through which the higher reality of Christ's presence is communicated to us. As Lewis would put it, they are not merely symbols; the bread and wine participate sacramentally in the reality they signify.

Conclusion: Heaven Descends so we may Ascend

The Prayer Book's genius isn't merely in giving us words when our own fail, though it certainly does that. Its deeper power lies in initiating us into a radical reordering of reality itself. When we pray through Scripture-saturated liturgies, we're not simply sending words heavenward; we're allowing the eternal Word to reshape how we see everything here on earth.

Consider what happens when biblical transposition takes root in a human life: The seminary professor grading papers on Tuesday evening suddenly finds him or herself participating in the divine pedagogy by which God forms souls. The ordinand practicing the liturgy discovers his stumbling words mysteriously joined to the eternal Word that speaks creation into being. The bishop making difficult decisions about church governance realizes he is participating with Christ who is always tending His flock. The seminary donor writing a check sees his gift transformed into an offering that feeds five thousand. The parent watching adult children navigate relationships recognizes in their journey the covenantal faithfulness that God has shown across generations. Even the administrative meeting – that most mundane of institutional necessities – becomes a site where the body of Christ discerns the Spirit's movement, where Wisdom is present as at creation, "rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race" (Proverbs 8:30-31).

This transposition transforms our most ordinary moments. When Scripture's patterns infuse our imagination, marital disagreements become a reenactment of alienation and reconciliation so central to God's story. We don't just face illness – we participate in a death that mysteriously precedes resurrection. Our sins, rather than defining us, become the occasions where grace abounds.

In an essay titled “Is Theology Poetry?” Lewis wrote this beautiful, concluding line: "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else." This is the ultimate gift of biblical transposition - it does not add religious meaning to an otherwise secular life; it reveals what has been true all along: that every molecule of creation, every human experience, every joy and sorrow has always been pregnant with divine significance. Scripture doesn't invent this reality; it unveils it. The book of the Bible is a cipher for the book of nature, as the fathers always insisted.

When we pray in the Word that prays in us, we gradually discover that heaven has never been far from earth. The Word becomes the lens through which we see everything else. Our limited human words, gathered up into the eternal conversation of Father, Son and Spirit, become vessels of communion with the divine, not because we have ascended to heaven, but because heaven has descended to us.

This is why common prayer grounded in Scripture is such an extraordinary grace. It initiates us into the great mystery that the early church recognized: that our fleeting, fragile human experiences are not merely metaphors pointing to divine realities. Through Spirit inspired prayer they are drawn up into those realities, transformed and fulfilled by them. In the most profound sense, the Word gives us eyes to see as God sees and Spirit inspired Words to articulate our thanksgiving. And so we return to prayer, day after day, to become living words in the eternal dialogue of the Trinity, where our limited human expressions are transposed into divine communion. In this light, prayer becomes the means by which we learn to see the world as it truly is: charged with the grandeur of God, waiting to be recognized, named, and redeemed.

1. C.S. Lewis, "Transposition," in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 91-115.