Brass-Tacks Repentance with C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis posted this helpful comment in a letter to a fretful soul.  Clarifying.

"(1) Remember what St John said 'If our heart condemn us, God is stronger than our heart.' The feeling of being, or not being, forgiven & loved, is not what matters. One must come down to brass tacks. If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent & confess it. If there isn't, tell the despondent devil not to be silly. You can't help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ear or any other irrational nuisance. 

(2) Remember the story in the Imitation, how the Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said 'If you knew that all was well, what wd. you, today, do, or stop doing?' When you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. You see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. 'Details, please' is the answer.--"

Citation: The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy(Cambridge University Press, 2007), 962

C.S. Lewis on Why Myth?

In  a review The Lord of The Rings in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature C.S. Lewis writes this about myth's place in our reading and thinking:

" 'But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?"

"The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity."

"We do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves... By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly."

In  Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton explains that he believes in fairy tales.  By the end of that book, I realized that I did too.  If we go through this life without the very real sense that the world around us has the characteristics of a myth, then we are missing the point, perhaps.  The fact that we are "used to it" doesn't make it any less astonishing.  As Lewis says in a letter to a Mrs. Johnson, "The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination.  Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less heaven." And the same is true of all of our existence.

This is why I read myth and fantasy.  To remind me of the truth.

Citation: Quotes from Lewis' review of Tolkien found here <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis> Accessed 1/26/2013

C.S. Lewis on when to pluck out your eye

 C.S. Lewis on one subtle danger in doing a good thing, a thing that we may love and even be called to do:

"...we may come to love knowledge - our knowing - more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us.  Every success in the scholar's life increases this danger.  If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work.  The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived."

Citation: Lewis, C.S. The Weight of Glory. HarperCollins Publishers. San Francisco. 2001. Page 57.

Reflecting the love of Another

C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, articulates a truth that has been slow to dawn on me.

"The Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ life inside him.  He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it."

 The ramifications of this truth has started to cultivate some old, hard ground in my life, and I am starting to see some green sprouts of life popping to the surface.  Delightful to be absorbing some warm rays of His love toward me.  Which is QUITE a different experience than trying to broadcast my own "goodness" toward Him to try and get His attention.

Ken Myers on C. S. Lewis' views on Presentism

Ken Myers, author of the "Contours of Culture" column in Touchstone magazine, illuminates C. S. Lewis' thinking on "Presentism": 


"Lewis laments the mentality of "Presentism," of provincialism in time, that plagues modern imaginations.  

"How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word 'stagnation,' with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called 'permanence'?...Why does 'latest' in advertisements mean 'best'?" 

"Lewis argued that this preoccupation with the present (and indifference  to or suspicion of the past) was a function of living with so much technology

"I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image.  It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones.  For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is clumsy."

"He went on to argue that our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded - that we should live for the next thing rather than treasure and honor the permanent things - was the single aspect of modern life that detached us most thoroughly from all previous ages of history." (1)


This view is particularly pithy when cross-referenced with a letter I read recently while reading Letters of C. S. Lewis. Lewis is responding to a letter from (I am not making this up) "The Society For The Prevention Of Progress" in May 1944:

"While feeling that I was born a member of your Society, I am nevertheless honoured to receive the outward seal of membership.  I shall hope by continued orthodoxy and the unremitting practice of Reaction, Obstruction, and Stagnation to give you no reason for repenting your favour..." (2)

Citation: 
(1) Myers, Ken. Touchstone Magazine: Contours of Culture, "No Time Like the Present". May/June, 2011.  Volume 24, Number 3. Pages 11, 12.
(2)  Lewis, W. H., Editor. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. New York. 1966. Page 204.

Planting theology...

I'm reading through the Letters of C.S. Lewis right now.  It has been a very rewarding read.  So many nuggets of thoughts buried in his letters.  Lewis wrote this,   

 So I lived a week...in one of those delightful vernal periods when doctrines which have hitherto been only buried seeds begin actually to come up - like snowdrops or crocuses.

and I felt a kinship.


Lewis, C.S. Letters of C.S. Lewis. Hardcourt, Brace and World, 1966.  W.H. Lewis, editor.  Page 194. 

Book Review of A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time

by Madeleine L'Engle

I have seen this book for decades, and it always seemed just weird...I guess a combination of the title and the different cover arts that I have seen accompanying it.  But some time back, I read someone commenting on it.  I don't remember who, or what the comments were, but it made me want to read the book. So I did.

My Review: Pretty easy to read.  The plot was interesting enough to keep me going.

This is a science fiction, or fantasy, or religious-alternative-universe type of book. It bears some resemblance to C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy:  A brother and sister looking for their lost father, end up being carried by demoted stars (or something) to other planets, and given the task of rescuing their father from "The Darkness".  They learn some stuff on the quest about truth, and themselves and the nature of "reality".  

Final Analysis: I came away with a few metaphors to add to my thinking, and I'm glad to have read it, if only so that I no longer have to wonder what it is about.  There are sequels, which I probably won't read, unless I happen to hear that they are just too good to miss.

Immortals among us

 Taken seriously, this kinda changes things.

"It is a serious thing," says C.S. Lewis, "to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whome we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."

Citation:

C. S. Lewis. "The Weight of Glory"

Eric Metaxas

How have I missed this guy?  Eric Metaxas recently published a biography on Bonhoeffer.  I have only read one chapter (my friend Mike told me to read a few paragraphs, and I got sucked into the story, thought about "borrowing" the book "accidentally" but thought better of it...)

I came home and Googled "Eric Metaxas", and then wondered to myself, "How can anyone actually do everything that he has done in one lifetime?" I would think that it was impossible, except I am friends with Austin Boyd, who is startling productive himself: husband, father, author, CEO of a company, teacher, ...so I assume that Mr. Metaxas has a similar personality or capacity to focus.

This video is long...but at least listen to the first part...probably the cleverest introduction of a speaker that I have ever heard:

Eric Metaxas on "Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy" from Socrates in the City on Vimeo.

Beware of "Presentism"

Timothy George, in "First Things" magazine, March 2011 makes some interesting comments on our tendency toward "presentism".

C.S. Lewis noted: 'We need intimate knowledge of the past.  Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present.' For the present can become imperial, seducing us into imagining that the assumptions that rein today have always defined what it means to be reasonable, sensible, and mainstream.  Against the tendency toward presentism, Lewis observed that 'a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; The scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.'

Citation:
George, Timothy. "Reading the Bible with the Reformers" in First Things Magazine: March 2011. Page 28.

The Beauty of Repetitive Change

C.S. Lewis (Anglican) and G.K. Chesterton (Catholic) are two authors that have often and powerfully influenced my thinking.  Maybe because they both use their initials in their pen name.  Maybe I will start going by D.S. Clark, and see where it takes me.


Here, Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, writes about God's gift of repetitive change, and the dark substitution and perversion of that gift into the need for continuous novelty.

(This is written as if by a demon to his "student" demon nephew) "The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart-an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.  The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.  To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.  And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable.  But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balance the love of change in them by a love of permanence.  He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.  He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.  He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.  This demand is entirely our workmanship.  If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas.  Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer.  Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up." ¹

When I read that, I recognized in myself that incessant need for the novel, and I decided to begin to find, rather, delight in God's rhythms that he has gifted us with. 


Later, I was reading Orthodoxy, by Chesterton, and ran across this passage,.

"A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.  Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.  They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.  For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.  It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.  It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God make daisies separately, but has never got tired of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we." ²

These are some of the reasons that I have begun to return to a more agrarian lifestyle, planting gardens, and trying (rather unsuccessfully, to date) to keep bees and chickens.  Beginning to look for the enchantment inherent in the world God has created.  They are also contributing factors in my family beginning to enjoy the rhythms of the liturgical year.

Citations:

¹ Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1961.

Pages 126-129.

² Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw Publishers. 1994. Page 61.

A way to cultivate obedience

A quote from C.S. Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost:

"The very fact that pompous is now used only in a bad sense measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of 'solemnity'. 

"To recover it you must think of a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them; in an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in.  

"Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a wide-spread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connection with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar's head at a Christmas feast—all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. ; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity.  

"The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for everyone else the proper pleasure of ritual."

This quote from C.S. Lewis had a profound effect on my moral imagination.  In particular the sentence that suggests that those that are submitting to the details of a tradition are being obedient, not vain. While I do know that a ceremony can be a cause of pride, I also know, from personal experience, that spontaneity can just as easily - perhaps more easily - be a source of pride.


Quote link found here .

Thoughts on C.S. Lewis

This is from a conversation between Gilbert Meileander and Ken Myers.  Mr. Meileander is trying to explain why he thinks C.S. Lewis was and is such an effective proponent for the faith. (from "Contours of Culture" by Ken Myers in Touchstone Magazine - October 2010)

"I think he's (C.S. Lewis) not so much trying to argue anybody into thinking something as he is simply trying to understand what it would mean to believe something, through the enormous gifts he has for illustration and metaphor and story."