By D.S. Cook for Apostoic Venn.
In sitting down to write an article about a video game, I’m aware of a few possible outcomes. I will present them now as a dialogue between the Goon and the Sage that each want a part of my psyche. This seems authentic to my whimsical mood at the moment.
Goon: If you write about video games, those who admire your wisdom, education, depth of philosophy, and cultural insight may encounter disillusionment, as they learn that you are a childish player of games.
Sage: Ah, but first you must convince me that any such admirers exist. I fear that they are as rare as honest politicians.
Goon: They could exist.
Sage: Then you must further convince me that the applause of phantoms should steer either my desire to write, or the subject of my writing. I await your demonstration with bated breath.
Goon: But you will show the world that you sometimes waste your time, and that your nose is not perpetually in a book, as all noses of self-proclaimed peddlers of wisdom should be.
Sage: Excellent. Let them see that both my labor and my leisure are given to the same noble end: forging resilience, training character, and learning to speak and act rightly amid great adversity. Should my play not serve the same Master as my work?
Goon: You will provide a disincentive to those with no interest in video games from reading more of your work.
Sage: Convincing men to read more of my work has never been my ambition. If I could pen one single piece that caused every reader to close my site forever and open the Word of God instead, it would be the only article I ever need write. Failing that lofty aim, if I could at least drive them toward the Stoics and rebuild a society governed by reason and self-sacrifice, I would have dug a respectable hole for the Gospel to fill.
Goon: You will never convince anyone to pick up the Bible, or even the Stoics, by talking about Dark Souls.
Sage: Hold my beer.
The Tale of Sam and Dan, Our Descent into Lordran
I will tell you the tale of Sam and Dan, keepers of the Apostoic Venn Blog and Podcast, who in a rare hour of reprieve from familial duty laid down their pens to enjoy the good and terrible gifts of God.
“Dan,” said Sam, “Whilst your family is away, let me awaken you to the wonders of the games that have forged in me a greater perseverance for doings both hard and good.”
“Sam,” said I, “I like not clothing sewn in a nudist camp. Nor do I take such counsel from any man who has never conquered Dark Souls.”
“Dan,” replied Sam, “I haven’t the fingers to number the logical fallacies I have just heard.”
“Sam,” said I, “stuff it. You have thumbs, have you not? Prepare them!”
And thus, with much ground coffee, and soon to be ground teeth, we downloaded the seamless co-op mod and found ourselves imprisoned together in the undead asylum, in the bleak kingdom of ash and darkness known as Lordran. “I have but one rule for your first playthrough” I said as we made our way through the dank halls to the first area. “You go first.”
Sam scoffed. “It seems to me Dan that you know where the traps are and wish to laugh at me as I get plastered by them.”
“See Sam, it’s just that sort of clear perception that earns your half of the Apostoic income.”
”There isn’t any Apostoic income.”
”Entirely beside the point.”
And Sam got flattened by the boulder that rolls down the flight of stairs outside the cell block, a worthy lesson that this sort of distraction, thoughts engaged in what has never yet happened, will only keep you from playing well in the moment. I cackle, just before missing my rusty parry and losing half my health to the weakest enemy in dark souls, he who presumably rolls the boulder and ambushes noobs and rusty veterans alike.
Over the next two weeks while my wife was away to her homeland with kids in tow, Sam and I battled and slogged our way through the game of Dark Souls. If you are unfamiliar, it is a game in which the difficulty, certain death, and unfairness are the attractions. There are more difficult titles now, but at the time of its release a more punishing experience had been enjoyed by few players. My brother-in-law refuses to play, professing hatred for a mode of escape and relaxation as brutal and unforgiving as the life from which he is meant to be resting. I keep returning to Dark Souls for that very reason.
You see, Dark Souls is a practice ground, an insidious schooling in precisely the matters to which our publication has long paid homage: Stoic endurance and Christian perseverance. The game asks its players the same questions that the world asks every progressing pilgrim to walk the narrow road. Will you be broken by hardship or be forged by it? Will you persevere until the end, or let the weight of your failures and the darts of Beelzebub slowly hollow you out, rendering you impotent and stationary, clutching your souls like the servant clutched his one talent, merely waiting things out until Christ returns? The man who sets out to turn his talents into many more will face many deaths along the way; of self, of lusts, of folly, of sins, and must surpass many trials before he crosses the final white light at the end of his time. In this way too, the Chosen Undead of Dark Souls must inevitably die and die again along his belabored struggle to kindle the world’s dying fire. Perish we did, and not a few times.
Come along with us then, and we’ll analyze some of this meaning together, carelessly disregarding whether the lessons we take were those intended by the developer of this game. Sometimes, people are right incidentally.
The Bonfires of Lordran: The Blood of the Martyrs and the Sabbath Rest
There are many terrors in Lordran, and as many wondrous and eye-popping moments. Of these, none served us better than the simple bonfires, a few bones tossed together and kindled with the life-giving fire. The bones are those of the martyrs, the other undead who have made this trek before you and lost their lives at this stage in the journey, skipping ahead to glory through the trials to which you are destined. Their fire warms you, provides you a small safe-haven along the way, and a reminder that “there’s still the shire” for now. However far reaching the enemies of Christ have grown, there still exists a place where they cannot touch you. In the peace of your own soul, a fire fed by the blood of the martyrs and the knowledge of a final victory that has already been won.
Whenever we were temporarily thwarted, or seemingly annihilated by the barbs and blades of the evil ones, we would find ourselves again at the nearest bonfire, sit ourselves down amid the comforting crackling of the martyrs’ bones, and rest. Here, I think, is a blatant Stoic wisdom in the form of a game mechanic. Only at the bonfire can you level up, use what you’ve learned to make yourself stronger, repair your weapons and armor and lay plans. Most of all, it is here that you will decide which burdens to carry forward, and which to leave behind. It is not within your power to command the horrors ahead to lie down in peace and let you pass. If you have defeated some of them, others will simply rise in their stead. You cannot bid the traps to disarm themselves, or the poison floor to stop its painful, tickling gnawing of your health. But you can choose to rest, to recover, to strategize, and to return to the grind a little wiser than before.
For the Christian though, the bonfire represents a greater thing. It is nothing else than a Sabath rest, planted every 7 miles along your nigh-impossible journey. Whether successfully navigating the valley of the shadow of death, or being defeated by it and having to start again, we are not invited but mandated a cease from striving for a moment. Remember who kindles the fire, rebuild your faith in your ultimate invincibility when He is always there, and then rise again. Elijah collapsed beneath the broom tree, begging the Lord to take his own life. His trouble was too great to bear. But he was awakened by an angel bearing bread and water, a life-line to stand up and do one more day. “Arise and eat. For the journey is too great for you.” Jesus was not too divine to take rest, often withdrawing to isolated and lonely places to pray to the Father who commanded it in love. Kindled upon the bones of the martyrs, and the body and blood of the Martyr Himself, the Sabbath bonfire will both mend your wounds and prepare you to make another try. Beset by your own sins? Rest and make another try. Beset by the enemies of God? Rest and make another try.
In our own playthrough, these Sabbaths became lightly sacred. Sam and I would sit, one of us usually uttering colorful blessings on the latest unfair ambush, sip our coffee or beer, and laugh at the ultimate inability of the enemy to put us down for good. Cracking jokes at the latest folly that caused the other’s pain, we’d plan the next probably foolish charge. Up we’d get, and on we’d go. Each return to the fire was growing sweeter than the last, not because the path ahead was growing easier (the difficulty only spikes, you asylum-dying plebs), but because we were growing harder in both skill and holy stubbornness.
Thus the bonfire trains what our recent parable on the three men and the pit sought to illustrate. The man who uses the pit as his ladder is the one who learns to rest well between labors, and to use every thorn as an opportunity to grow a callous. The Sabbath does not erase the trouble ahead of you. But it does give you an indispensable reprieve, to catch your breath, to encourage your brother in arms, to bandage your hands, be purged of your sins. It reminds you, by the bones of those who wait under the throne crying “Oh Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?", that while you may be temporarily snuffed, the life-giving fire of Christ never shall be.
Death and Its Hollowing
But what is it that necessitates the shelter of the bonfire for the bloodied traveler? Death, and its necessary precursor, sin. In this land, death will visit again and again. It is not a gentleman that knocks just once, or refuses to overstay its welcome. It is a relentless, inevitable companion, visiting often and early, strewing your hard-earned souls upon the ground with each ambush. We who wear flesh are not unfamiliar with the never-ending threat of error in the real world and the consequences it brings. And, to those who know the effect of unrepented sin upon the soul, there is a slow deadening that occurs. Every time you give a little ground to a sin that besets you, and make peace with its claim over you, your conscience deadens a little more. Give in indefinitely to the temptations of even small sins, and soon you will find that you no longer notice them. You are given over to them, they fade below your consciousness, and ready you to reap their just reward while hypocritically asking God why bad things happen to good people. In Dark Souls, your sins are the mistakes you made in the last encounter, those errors in judgement that just splattered your remains against the ramparts of the demon ruins. Make the same mistake again; die before you reclaim your lost humanity, and hollowing sets in, costing you in total health, damage, and abilities. Stack this up enough, and you will be a shallow husk of what you might have been, had you not allowed sin to dominate your actions.
A Stoic sermon is preached from every hollowed corpse that litters the landscape. Memento Mori! You are forced to face it. Remember that you will sin. Remember that you will die, that hard won progress toward your next level can be lost with one bad choice in a split-second reaction. Yet, like the Stoics, the game doesn’t leave you in that place, but demands a choice at each failure. Will you rise again? Will you dust yourself off, repent your misdeeds, and get back on that narrow path? Or, will you quit the game, retreat from the uphill battle, and fade monotonously into irrelevance? Will you stop fighting against your sin and allow yourself to go hollow? Marcus Aurelius would have approved this hard messaging. “The obstacle is the way,” he would say. The process of failure itself is the honing ground for unstoppable warriors; unstoppable not because they win every skirmish, or even most of them, but because they refuse to be put down for good.
An even greater resonance is found here for the Christian, however. We too are undead men walking. Made alive in Christ, yet still carrying the old man who must daily be put to death. And like the Chosen Undead we will go hollow, if we do not return again and again to the source of true life and humanity, the burning bones of the First Martyr, the First Undead, whose death and resurrection eternally kindle the bonfire.
The martyrs too rest under the throne. They wait. They have progressed beyond hollowing, but still groan for yours, crying for their God to rise in righteous retribution against the enemy that makes you stumble. Do not waste their lamentations. Don’t you dare go hollow.
The Sun-Praising Fool
It would be a great oversight to pass over a certain character in the world of Dark Souls. Solaire, the simple-minded sun-worshipping knight is an optimistically ridiculous and lovable character, who we first meet pontificating upwards at the shrouded sun. He doesn’t seem to notice the darkness and decimation around him, as he cheerfully talks about his quest to become like the Sun himself. Decked out in bright colors and shiny metal, complete with a jaunty red plume, “Praise the Sun!” is his jovial greeting to friend and foe alike. His first assumption is always friend, not foe. Solaire makes no demands when he freely offers you his help and companionship, cheerfully fights by your side against the worst of the worst, and seems to do it all with a childlike joy, as if everything is great and not filled with many-limbed terrors. Solaire never really denies the horror of the realm he is in, but instead, seems to consider it beneath noticing when there is a Sun to be busy praising, even if he can’t call it his own just yet.
Here is a man of whom Marcus Aurelius would be proud, and to whom the book of Philippians would never need to be written. He practices joy in absolute defiance of his surroundings, because praising and seeking the sun is enough for him, and none of his circumstances prevent him from either while he draws breath. Like Paul and Silas in the Philippian jail, he makes me recall Habakkuk saying “Though the fig tree should not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.” In a world gone hollow, Solaire does not find it necessary to follow suit.
This sun-praising fellow preaches his own sermon as you play through his various encounters: that joy is not the absence of suffering, but the seeking of the Sun in the midst of it. In Dark Souls, or in the more punishing levels of real life, we could go hollow. Or, we could, like David, Paul and Silas, Habakkuk, and Solaire, salute the world’s most visceral challenges with a cheery “Praise the Lord!”
Sadly, we missed a step in a quest and failed to save Solaire. Rest in peace, ya wonderful weirdo.
The Mechanics of Mortification
If you’ve stuck with me through my thoughts on the bonfires, hollowing, and the Sun-praising guy, I’d ask you to stick around just a tad longer. We have to address the mechanics of the game itself. Dark Souls does not hold your hand, or coddle you gently through a series of pre-determined wins. No quest markers will guide you along, no difficulty settings to be lowered to make you feel powerful. You move forward, you die, you move again more cautiously, learn the patterns, and die. You try again. We didn’t lose many souls, as I’ve got lots of experience in this realm, and Sam was no slouch as a new player. Those few times we did lose them were crushing losses. But, our thumbs got quicker. Our patience deeper. We reminded each other of the Apostoic motto: “suffering with a smirk”, and grew more committed to it through the bonding of a Dark Souls run. Most importantly, the harshness of the game itself did not turn us away, but simply served to make us more determined to conquer it. The holy stubbornness of the believer.
Again, the Stoics would approve. Seneca used to counsel Lucilius to go out of his way to place himself in inconvenience and discomfort, so that when the real trials came, he would be a bastion of resilience. Epictetus taught that it is your opinion of the difficulty, not the difficulty itself, that torments you. Dark Souls forces you to change your opinion and love the hardship. If you can’t do that, the victory of the environment is already assured.
This truth has so much more potency for a Christian believer. We put to death the old man at our baptism, being born a new creation and raised up with Christ. Yet we have a thousand small deaths still to face as we battle the corruption of our nature until we are fully restored to true humanity in the new heavens and the new earth. With the Apostle Paul, we can say… or should be saying: “I die daily” and “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you.” But better than these are the words of John. “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father: Jesus Christ the righteous.” Dark Souls asks the player the same question the Holy Spirit asks the believer. Sin took you down. Are you going to stay down?
The Fire and the Coming Dark
Here I must bid my partner Sam to stop reading. I know the ending of this game, having been through this journey once every few years since its release in 2012. He is on his first run, and I am enjoying it all over again through his eyes. But we have not yet finished. Sam! Go do something else.
At the conclusion of the delightful slog of death and difficulty that is Dark Souls, the player confronts a final choice. You can link the fire and become a Lord, binding your own soul to the power that prolongs the world in its current state of decay for another cycle, keeping total annihilation at bay for the few sane undead that still persist here. Or, you can refuse, and let it go out, ushering in an age of total darkness and destruction, to be followed by a rebirth into a new world for new humans to inhabit.
The truly pagan Stoic might see an honest acceptance of cycles in this choice. Everything dies and is made new, you discover. By clinging to the shadow of a life that you have, you can prolong the world’s current suffering together with its little bright pieces. Or, rather than raging against what must inevitably be, you can love your fate, let the end of things come, and make way for future lives.
Not so for the Christian. We live with no resignation to inevitable darkness, nor do we seek to prolong the principalities and powers of this earth so that life can continue as we know it for a little while longer. The falseness of this ending may leave a bad taste in your mouth as a believer. For me, it does the opposite. Its very bleak falseness reminds me of the truth, and reminds me to rejoice in the unshakeable hope in the promises of God that every follower must cling to. For the true Sun has already stepped into this darkness and death, conquered it from within. and is even now preparing a new heaven and a new earth where no bonfire will ever be needed again. While we trudge through this plane, our perseverance is not some hopeless but noble shield wall against the inevitable blackness, but a living participation in the inevitable victory of the One who declared “I am the light of the world.” (John 8:12).
In this land, the light will eventually fade. In the real world, the light will inevitably conquer. Our victory was assured before we began, not by our steadfastness and perseverance through sin and death, but by His. The cheat mode has been turned on for us. We cannot lose.
So laugh in the face of the world’s wickedness and pain. Take your licks knowing that nothing can actually hurt you. Suffer with a smirk, because it is the enemy of the light that faces inevitable doom. Your victory is written on the stone table, an older magic than the white witch can comprehend.
Thanks for reading. Nerds.
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