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Post by hibernicus on Dec 29, 2008 12:02:42 GMT
On one of the Catholic threads Guillaume expressed his appreciation of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, and I suggested starting a CS Lewis thread. I am opening it here given that Lewis himself was a High Church Anglican and that many of his most zealous admirers are Evangelical Protestants; it would also, I think, be interesting to get some atheist views on him. We should certainly give some attention to Lewis as he was one of the greatest thinkers to come from Ireland in the last century. There are IMHO two great problems in discussions of Lewis. One is the sort of cliquishness assoicated with Walter Hooper, in which every one of Lewis's positions is defended, Lewis is treated as the greatest thinker and writer who ever lived, his personal eccentricities and faults are glossed over, and he is treated as the idol of a boys' club. This unfortunately does reflect an irritating strain of cliquishness in Lewis himself. The second is the sort of dismissive reductionism associated with AN Wilson's biography, in which Lewis is reduced to a writer of childrens' stories, his rational arguments are dismissed out of hand, and he is reduced to the helpless plaything of his psychological malformation. There is some truth in the descriptions of his psychological malformation, but anyone who reads Lewis' work with knowledge of his biography will realise that he had a very considerable depth of self-knowledge (how much of Lewis there is in Screwtape, for example, as well as in Screwtape's descriptions of the patient). I may say that although AN Wilson is a very intelligent writer who often says interesting things, he has no regard for truth, and more often than not when he writes about someone or something he subtly denigrates it in order to magnify himself at its/their expense. When he is an atheist he is a disgrace to atheism and when he is a Christian he is a disgrace to Christianity.
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Post by guillaume on Feb 15, 2009 12:19:07 GMT
Hibernicus, we got an Atheist point of view if you read the Wiki page on CS Lewis and the point of view of Philipp Pulman..... ALSO, the adaptation of CS Lewis 5th book, the Chronicles of Narnia, The voyage of the Dawn Treader, will be scheduled. It was a worry for numerous Narnian Fans, as Di$ney dropped the whole Franchise. Thanks Aslan, , Fox is taking over. See : vivificantem.com/2009/02/chronicles-of-narnia-will-come-back.html
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Feb 15, 2009 18:33:02 GMT
Lewis's books were a great help to me when I was recovering from my youthful agnosticism, especially his description of his conversion in Surprised by Joy. I haven't read any of those books in 20 years so I don't know how they would now appear to my somewhat more developed faith and knowledge of Christianity.
The Narnia books are good stories and the imagery is powerful enough, if sometimes laboured. But I think there is more depth in The Lord of the Rings even though Tolkien is not as good a writer and the books have no obvious Christian references. The "Grey Havens" chapter at the end is quite a powerful insight into suffering and sacrifice.
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Post by guillaume on Feb 15, 2009 19:07:57 GMT
Lewis's books were a great help to me when I was recovering from my youthful agnosticism, especially his description of his conversion in Surprised by Joy. I haven't read any of those books in 20 years so I don't know how they would now appear to my somewhat more developed faith and knowledge of Christianity. The Narnia books are good stories and the imagery is powerful enough, if sometimes laboured. But I think there is more depth in The Lord of the Rings even though Tolkien is not as good a writer and the books have no obvious Christian references. The "Grey Havens" chapter at the end is quite a powerful insight into suffering and sacrifice. I sent the whole Chronicles to my nephew, who appears to be my son-god, as I am His God-father, but in France, it is not popular at all. Don't know why. However, it is part of my ecumenism heart, I found Lewis' teaching very interesting and his tells of story just brilliant ! Not to mention his wonderful "English" (as a French men, sounds "bizarre", but I read Lewis in the original, and his English is wonderful),. Some protestants sometimes are quite right. In today's time, Lewis will join the Traditional Anglican Community, or TAC, who are trying to join the Catholic Church.
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Post by Hemingway on Feb 16, 2009 10:36:59 GMT
I read his books as a boy and remember enjoying them a lot. I havent viewed the films yet though. So often the films can be a let down after reading the book. I cant say if its the case with the Narnia films though.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 17, 2009 0:45:36 GMT
The problem with the two Hollywood films (PRINCE CASPIAN more than LION, WITCH AND WARDROBE, because the basic plot of the first is stronger) is that they try to make them more like LORD OF THE RINGS - to give them an epic quality which the plots are too weak to bear. They are aimed at fairly young children, and I think the older BBC dramatisations with their rudimentary special effects are actually better in capturing this quality. BTW PRINCE CASPIAN has in my opinion an Irish subtext - Caspian is fascinated by what he is told are the legends of Old Narnia and when he discovers that the Old Narnians do exist he also makes the terrible discovery that he himself is the descendant of a race of invaders who expelled and massacred them. This can in my opinion be read as reflecting his conflicted attitude towards the Evangelical Ulster Protestantism of his childhood and towards Catholicism (he was a High Anglican who combined that group's awareness of the riches of the Catholic heritage with a sense that it was both disagreeably populist and brutally authoritarian. Nikabrik the Dwarf who wishes to avenge himself on his people's oppressors by invoking black magic to bring back the White Witch might stand in one sense for those IRA men like Sean Russell who assumed that because Nazi Germany was Britain's enemy they should ally themselves with it; in another sense he might stand for Franco, Salazar and their clerical allies like Fr. Denis Fahey- for the theocratic temptation, the belief that the Kingdom of God can be realised through an earthly dictatorship invoking the name of Christ.)
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myk
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Post by myk on Feb 19, 2009 18:26:41 GMT
I read the Screwtape letters about a year ago and found them really thought provoking. Though I didn't like at all the short follow up "Screwtape proposes a toast". I gather it was more a criticism of trends in society rather than an insight into morals and spirituality.
I started reading Surprised by Joy, but it didn't grab me the same way as the Screwtape letters so I didn't get very far with it.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Feb 19, 2009 23:18:30 GMT
I started reading Surprised by Joy, but it didn't grab me the same way as the Screwtape letters so I didn't get very far with it. Try it again. The point where Lewis realises that joy is a faint perception of God was one of my life-changing moments.
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myk
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Post by myk on Feb 19, 2009 23:22:27 GMT
I started reading Surprised by Joy, but it didn't grab me the same way as the Screwtape letters so I didn't get very far with it. Try it again. The point where Lewis realises that joy is a faint perception of God was one of my life-changing moments. thanks.....though I have a stack of books to get through and I can't remember what I did with my copy....it is certainly back in Ireland and I may have given it to someone...
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 20, 2009 12:59:34 GMT
SCREWTAPE is even more provoking once you become familiar with Lewis's biography and realise he was telling the truth when he said that he made a point of only writing about the sins to which he himself was tempted. It is really painfully honest. SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST doesn't have the same close to the bone quality; it's an ageing and somewhat insulated Oxford don waxing nostalgic for the middle-class world of his Edwardian boyhood and grumbling about the advance of social democratic state power and egalitarianism. This trend does have many disturbing features, but Lewis doesn't seem to come close to realising what inspired it in the first place. Lewis's anti-modernism has many virtues, but it has many blind spots and they are particularly conspicuous in the TOAST.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 17, 2012 19:20:20 GMT
The link below is to an article discussing an unsent letter from JRR Tolkien to Lewis criticising Lewis's view (in MERE CHRISTIANITY) that marriage should be indissoluble for Christians but not for non-Christians. Tolkien's central argument is that this is a surrender to subjectivity, that Christian marriage is treated as a sort of positivist enactment rather than representing the deepest nature of creation. (It may also be worth noting that (a) Tolkien's own marriage was often unhappy, for a variety of reasons; Tolkien is not unaware of what can go wrong (b) This discussion or non-discussion took place before Lewis's own marriage to a divorcee, so he is not rationalising a personal situation.) One of the commenters makes the interesting suggestion that this is not just linked to the Catholic/Protestant divide between Tolkien/Lewis, but also reflects a difference of interpretation on the Incarnation; that Lewis's Platonist/docetist inclinations are coming out, that there is a sense that "nature" is not "real" as the supernatural is and therefore doesn't matter so much. Any thoughts? www.mereorthodoxy.com/why-c-s-lewis-is-wrong-on-marriage/
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 13, 2013 12:38:13 GMT
C.S. Lewis is more and more important to me all the time. I was a big fan of The Chronicles of Narnia when I was in my early to mid teens. My copy of The Magician's Nephew was falling apart through overuse. It took me ages to track down The Last Battle but when I did, I was horrified and depressed by one of the girl's renunciation of Narnia-- I can't remember which girl it was. I tried to read the Chronicles of Narnia in more recent years but I found them thin stuff indeed. But as for Lewis's adult writings, I am completely entranced by them-- his critical works no less than his theological works. In fact, even though Lewis is certainly not writing as a Christian apologist when he writes his literary criticism, there is a definite continuum between the two aspects of his thought. His defence of Romanticism at a time when it had become almost a derogatory term is related, I think, to his theory of Joy-- that the sublime was a sign-post to God. This is just one example of how his critical works reflect his theology. I would consider Surprised by Joy to be one of my two favourite books, along with Orthodoxy by Chesterton. Surprised by Joy is one of the books I can pick up and start reading at any page whatsoever, pretty much. Lewis's descriptions of his father and of his tutor the Great Knock are especially delightful. It is the kind of book that is best read while sitting drinking hot chocolate by a window with snow falling outside. It is funny that few writers are more eager to discomfort us than C.S. Lewis ("We Have Cause to be Uneasy" is one of the chapter headings in Mere Christianity), and yet no writer's work is more steeped in an atmosphere of cosiness-- a foggy, pipe-smoke-heavy, public housey, common roomy, walk-around-the-quad-in-a-winter-mist kind of atmosphere. I don't really like his theological fiction so much-- I have read A Pilgrim's Regress, The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, and though some of the images and ideas used in them stuck in my mind, I don't have any desire to read them again. The only one of his fictional works I enjoyed as an adult was Out of the Silent Planet, which I read twice. (The story proper, as opposed to the last chapter which is something of an epilogue, has one of the funniest last lines ever). I read both Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, which along with Out of the Silent Planet comprise the Space Trilogy, but I didn't enjoy those as much-- I think he completely lost the run of himself in That Hideous Strength. The representation of the Devil in Perelandra is, however, wonderful-- rather than the grand, philosophical Satan of Paradise Lost, and all its derivative works over the centuries, he is a petty, beastly figure who tears birds apart for the sheer fun of it. But it's his non-fiction prose I love best. Miracles, I think, is his best work of Christian apologetics, and not Mere Christianity as is often supposed. Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer is also full of insights and inspiration, and is rather unfairly dismissed as a product of failing powers in later life. The various collections of his apologetic essays, such as Undeceptions and The Weight of Glory, are both profound and compelling. Some of my favourites are "Will We Lose God in Outer Space?", "Priestesses in the Church?", "The Sermon and the Lunch", "The Funeral of a Great Myth", "What Christmas Means to Me", "Good Work and Good Works"...but all are good and I regularly re-read them. Lewis said somewhere that theological works served the purpose of devotional works, for him, and I have found the same thing. Lewis's apologetics not only satisfy my intellect but "lift up my heart" in the liturgical sense, though that is not what he is directly aiming at. His criticism is every bit as good as his apologetics. An Experiment in Criticism is a wonderful blast of the trumpet against literary snobbery, and establishes firmly a principle which I think is both true and important-- any work can be "literary" or "serious" if it is READ in such a way. A potboiler novel that is read and re-read and re-read obviously appeals to more than just curiosity or suspense, at least for the reader who keeps returning to it. His works of literary criticism fulfil what I think is the most important function of criticism-- they make you hungry to read or rediscover the works in question. Finally, Lewis's prose is a joy in itself. It is lucid but never dull. His fund of anecdote and inspired parallel never seems to slacken. Reading him is like listening to a witty and wise and much beloved lecturer. Although Lewis probably would have hated such familiarity, it's hard not to feel a personal connection to him-- I am always interested in reminiscences from those who knew him (and there are at least two books devoted to these). As for C.S. Lewis and Catholicism, Joseph Pearce wrote a whole book asking why Lewis never joined the Catholic Church, and why one might have expected him to. (He was not the first author to tackle this question at length.) I both review that book and take up the matter myself in this blog post, if I may be so self-promoting.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 13, 2013 13:22:54 GMT
Maolsheachlann - it was Susan who apostasised.
The late Mgr Serge Keleher gave a talk in the Central Catholic Library about a decade ago where he addressed the question of why Lewis didn't join the Catholic Church. There are several answers. One is that Lewis didn't travel widely and as he rarely left these islands, he never had to confront the realitiy that the Anglicans are not a universal church. Another were the prejudices instilled in him in Belfast as a boy. This is a very hard one to call. Also, Lewis was like a lot of Church of Ireland people high church in theology and low church in liturgy. This meant he kept away from the ritualists who have a marked tendency to cross the Tiber, or to Pope, as it is colloquially put.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 13, 2013 15:49:25 GMT
Askell, I think your first point is the one that I find most convincing-- I'm sure the Church of England seemed a lot more impressive close up, rather than seen from (relatively) afar as we see it. Also it would have been more robust back then, although modernization was already well established. I think Lewis probably would have seen the C. of E. as a branch of the universal church, rather than the universal church itself, as Newman did prior to his conversion.
It's funny that Chesterton was no ritualist either-- neither Lewis nor Chesterton were at all "churchy"-- and yet he took the step that Lewis never took.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 13, 2013 19:22:25 GMT
Actually Lewis was very High in many ways - he explicitly states that he believed in Purgatory (though he thought the Catholic view of it placed too much emphasis on torment) and he confessed regularly to a spiritual director from the Cowley Fathers, who were about as ritualist as you can get. I think the central issues with Catholicism for Lewis are a mixture of serious theological concerns and Ulster (and English) prejudice about Catholicism and neither should be ignored. The central theological objections he gives are Catholic emphasis on uniformity and topdown authority, and a sense that the Pope can manufacture new dogmas by fiat and all Catholics can then be obliged to believe them. He does very much have the Anglican idea that comprehensiveness within the church is a virtue and differences should be tolerated as far as possible. This again is partly a reaction to ULster and the knowledge that Catholics and Protestants were still at war there while the big issue (as he knew from his own experience) was becoming not Catholic v. Protestant but Christ v. unbelief. He once remarked that one of the most depressing things about his memory of Ulster was the number of professing Christians on both sides who would prefer that their child should become an atheist rather than embrace the "wrong" form of Christianity. (Remember BTW Lewis visited his father in Belfast during the violence of 1921-22, when he would have had to go through areas of east-central Belfast where trams were being regularly bombed or shot up. He knew what was under the surface there.) His references to Orangeism and to the Ulster Super Prod type are very hostile, but I also think he didn't want to be seen as going over to the other side - his furious letter when Sheed and Ward began their blurb for THE PILGRIM'S REGRESS with "This book begins in Puritania (Mr Lewis was born in Ulster) is very revealing in that respect.
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