The Shining Barrier: From Pagan Fortress to Sacred Sanctuary - Part 1: The Pagan Barrier
Published on November 14, 2025 by Paul Blake
This is Part 1 of a 3-part series exploring Sheldon Vanauken's "A Severe Mercy" and what it teaches us about protecting love in all our relationships. In this installment, we examine the original "Shining Barrier" and its fatal flaws.
There exists in the human heart a profound desire to protect what we hold most dear. We build walls, not always of stone and mortar, but of promises and principles, around the tender saplings of our affections, hoping to shield them from the harsh winds of the world. It was this very impulse that led Sheldon Vanauken and his beloved Davy to construct what they called "The Shining Barrier" — a concept that would ultimately transform from a pagan fortress of exclusive love into something far more profound when touched by divine grace.
Yet conversely to this, many of us are rather too inclined to sit back and relax expecting our love and relationships to withstand the tests of bitter winters, spring floods, summer droughts, and fall fading without any such barrier. We can learn much from Van and Davey's unwavering commitment to protect love and all that is dear. The puzzling thing is that we can be so fraught with desire to keep or attain a great love, still our actions reveal either a lack of knowledge as to how to do this or maybe at times a cognitive disconnect that we have allowed to develop through our selfish desires.
This disconnect often manifests as a peculiar form of self-worship - we become so consumed with our own emotional needs, our own sense of being right, our own narrative of who we are, that we paradoxically undermine the very relationships we claim to cherish. Like a man who, head buried in the sand of his own self-regard, cannot see that his refusal to compromise or his insistence on always being understood first is slowly eroding his partner's trust.
The irony is bitter: in our myopic focus on protecting our ego, we fail to protect what actually matters. We chase the appearance of love while neglecting its architecture. So, my goal here is to present a key to this puzzle in our relationships. This key seems to be wrapped up in the idea of boundaries — or rather, a Shining barrier.
To understand the Shining Barrier is to embark upon a journey through one of the most poignant love stories of the twentieth century, chronicled in Vanauken's A Severe Mercy. It is more than merely their story; it is a mirror held up to our own relationships, challenging us to examine how we guard our loves, whom we exclude or include, and whether our protective walls serve as shields, prisons, or whether there are no walls — and our hearts are unguarded vaults.
The Architecture of Pagan Love: Understanding the Original Barrier
In Chapter Two of A Severe Mercy, aptly titled "The Shining Barrier (the Pagan Love)," Vanauken unveils the elaborate fortress he and Davy constructed around their love. Picture, if you will, "A walled garden. A fence around a young tree to keep the deer from nibbling it. A fortified place with the walls and watchtowers gleaming white like the cliffs of England." This was no casual metaphor but a deliberate, almost architectural design for preserving love against all threats.
I look at my own life and see so many places where I failed to erect any kind of barrier to the harshness of life. I marvel at the wisdom that these two pagans had in setting up such a barrier. Without such a barrier our relationships are open to be plundered. Yet, can such a barrier even exist in the "real" world? Can it be maintained?
The foundation of their Barrier rested upon several key principles. First among these was the Principle of Sharing — "the secret to love is sharing" as they determined. They rejected separate activities entirely, believing that "if one of us liked anything, the other, in the name of sharing, must learn to like it too." Then came the Principle of Spontaneity, the Principle of the Affirmative, and the Principle of Courtesy (A Severe Mercy, pp. 38-39), each a carefully placed stone in their protective wall.
Most striking of all was their "Appeal to Love" — "What will be best for our love?" This single question became their North Star, their ultimate criterion for every decision. Should one change a troubling behavior, or should the other learn acceptance? The answer lay not in individual preference but in what would strengthen their bond.
As Vanauken wrote, "The Appeal to Love was like a trumpet call from the battlements of the Shining Barrier." 'Tis so common for us I think to lose The Appeal to Love in our dearest relationships. It is for this loss that the modern world finds divorce rates the highest in human history and maybe even one could connect the links to the epidemic of psychological dysfunction that is so pervasive in the west. The lack of even neighborly love and the ability to pour outward in an appeal to others begets restlessness and dissatisfaction in oneself. It is in the giving that we find true happiness.
Yet beneath this romantic idealism lay a darker truth. Their Barrier was born not of hope but of fear. "We looked about us and saw the world as having become a hostile and threatening place where standards of decency and courtesy were perishing and war loomed gigantic. A world where love did not endure." Against this perceived chaos, they raised their gleaming walls, determined to create an impregnable sanctuary for two.
The Fatal Flaw: When Protection Becomes Prison
What makes a wall a prison rather than a protection? Perhaps it is when we forget that walls not only keep dangers out but also keep their inhabitants in. The pagan Shining Barrier, for all its beauty, contained within it the seeds of its own destruction — seeds that C.S. Lewis himself would later identify with characteristic precision.
The most troubling aspect of their original design was its explicit exclusion of children. They agreed upon this not from mere preference but from a philosophical commitment to absolute sharing — Vanauken could not experience childbirth as Davy could, therefore children must be excluded from their union. Here we see the Barrier's first transformation from protection into limitation, from fortress into cage.
As a father I know too well the travesty of this decision. Their focus was altogether one-sided. To give a bit of slack I will mention that they did consider that children could indeed be a great joy, yet they overthought this to the point of folly.
More ominously still, their pact included what they called "the last long dive" — a mutual suicide pact should one die before the other. In a rondeau that Vanauken penned about their sailing together, he wrote of surrendering their days "without a sigh" when death approached one of them (A Severe Mercy, Chapter 2). This was not merely romantic excess; it was the logical conclusion of a love that recognized no authority beyond itself.
"The killer of love is creeping separateness," Vanauken declared, and against this enemy they waged unrelenting war. "Inloveness is a gift of the gods, but then it is up to the lovers to cherish or to ruin." They saw the modern world as conspiring against love — "The man going off to his office; the woman staying home with the children — her children — or perhaps having a different job." All these normal patterns of life became threats to be resisted.
The Idol of Self-Sufficient Love
Yet in their very resistance, they revealed the Barrier's fundamental weakness: it was built upon the premise that their love alone could be sufficient, that two finite beings could create an infinite sanctuary. They had made an idol of their affection, and like all idols, it demanded increasingly extreme sacrifices.
When we worship our relationships themselves rather than recognizing them as gifts pointing beyond themselves to the Giver, we inevitably corrupt them. The pagan Shining Barrier was a temple built to love itself, and like all temples to false gods, it could not ultimately satisfy or sustain.
This is perhaps the most crucial insight for us today. How many marriages fail not because the partners stopped loving each other, but because they demanded that their love be everything — friend, god, purpose, and salvation all at once? The weight of such expectations crushes even the strongest bonds.
Van and Davy's error was not in building a barrier to protect their love. Their error was in believing that their finite love could be its own foundation, its own justification, its own end. They sought to create heaven on earth through sheer force of will and commitment, but heaven cannot be built by human hands alone.
What Lies Ahead
In the chapters of their lives that followed, Van and Davy would encounter something — or rather, Someone — who would challenge everything they had built. At Oxford, they would meet C.S. Lewis and through him confront the claims of Christ. The Shining Barrier they had so carefully constructed would face its greatest test: not from external threats, but from the possibility of transformation from within.
The question that would haunt them, and should haunt us all: Can love be truly protected without being offered to the Author of Love? Can any barrier shine with lasting light unless it reflects the Light of the World?
Continue the series:
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Part 2: Transformation - From Fear to Faith (Coming November 21, 2025) Explore how Van and Davy's encounter with Christianity at Oxford challenged everything they had built, and how divine grace transformed their pagan fortress into something infinitely more profound.
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Part 3: Practical Boundaries - Building Your Own Shining Barrier (Coming November 28, 2025) Discover practical wisdom for protecting your own relationships — what to keep from Van and Davy's vision, what to discard, and how to build boundaries that liberate rather than imprison.
Reflection Questions
Before moving to Part 2, consider these questions for your own relationships:
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What barriers, if any, have you built around your most precious relationships? Are they protective or restrictive?
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Have you made an idol of any relationship? Do you expect it to provide meaning, purpose, and fulfillment that only God can give?
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What is your "Appeal to Love"? When conflicts arise, do you ask "What will be best for our love?" or do you defend your ego?
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Are you guilty of the opposite error — failing to protect your relationships at all, leaving them vulnerable to the erosions of modern life?
Take these questions to prayer. In Part 2, we'll see how Christ's love transforms even the most well-intentioned human barriers.