Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Subtopic (snicker):

GKS is a grump.

DISCUSS!
 

LOLOL.
 

I never said Lewis "sucks". All I said is that I am not particularly moved when I read him, and I gave some reasons why.

As for my grumpiness, alleged and otherwise, Pthbthtbthbth!!!!!!!
 

Lewis did suck.
He was a mama's boy, and a woman hater.
He was a snob and a bully.
He was self centered and jealous of other's success.
He was a proponent of simplistic dualism and a half assed mystic.
I always had a slight or sometimes large discontent after reading Lewis's works. It was as though I had just been snookered into waisting my time on this guy who was supposedly such a great man. I was told by my superior mentors that I must be wrong in my feelings. I had to grow up first, in order to reject him as artificial, shallow, and not worth the candle.
 

He wasn't so much a woman hater as he was a member of a class in Britain who believed - actually believed - that the wonders of human eroticism were a danger to true humanity. His "marriage" to an American woman dying of cancer, and adoption of her children, was in a vein similar to Mohandis Ghandi's decades-long adventures of sleeping with several young women until he purged himself of sexual desire (Ghandi was educated in Britain, and imbibed much of the Edwardian spirit of the abhorrence of fleshly desire, transporting it to Jain spirituality, where it just doesn't really have a place). It was done to prove that Platonic love is far higher and richer than the down-and-dirty love men and women share. I'm really not sure what either one got out of this particular relationship, other than Lewis' intellectual triumph of showing that a man and a woman could exist together without all that sweaty dampness that usually accompanies such relationships.

He really was a shallow man.
 

I found (and still find) the Chronicles of Narnia charming.

I liked the way his theological works pushed a native tendancy for fundimentalism toward universalism.

I found "screwtape" to be delightfully dispicable, disturbing, and fulfilling of my pre-teen fascination with the profane.

But then again, I was pretty much done with everything the Church library had by him at age fifteen...so I might have a different take now at forty.
 

All three of my children abandoned Lewis about 13-15 years of age. They all read the complete Chronicles of Narnia as well as the SF Perelandra Trilogy. Two went on to read several of his "religious" works which are in our collection of books (somewhere). The two that read on became Philospher and then then latter abandoned their disciple. Their current take on Lewis is much more harsh than mine, noting that anytime he came up against an actual philosopher in a debate he lost miserably, especially if that philosopher happened to be a Christian as well.

GKS, it is the space trilogy, where I think he flirted the most with gnosticism. But then again you and I may not even agree on what gnosticism means.
 

Teresa, I think you and I see CSL in just about the same way! I agree with each of your points.

DrLoboJo: Maybe one of the things is that Lewis was a writer, and neither a philosopher nor theologian. So writers tend not to like him because he pretended to be more than a writer, and philosophers and theologians tend to dismiss him as merely a hack.

I like him most because of Teresa's second point in her comment above, since his stuff did that, exactly, for myself.
 

Forget Lewis. Forget Ghandi.
Bring on the sweaty dampness stuff. Nothing wrong with that!
 

Perv.

Kidding. :-)
 

Has anyone on this thread read C.S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" ?
 

Not me.
 

I think I missed that one. Do tell us about it, please.
 

All I know is what I read on the www. His last novel.
"Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold is a 1956 parallel novel by C. S. Lewis. It is a retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, based on a chapter of The Golden Ass of Apuleius. The first part is written from the perspective of Psyche's older sister Orual, and is constructed as a long-withheld accusation against the gods."

"How can they (i.e. the gods) meet us face to face till we have faces? The idea was that a human being must become real before it can expect to receive any message from the superhuman; that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil, or persona."

Just wondered what anyone who read it, thought of it?
 

I have read 'Til We Have Faces, a few times, years ago. I liked it, the odyssee and all, how we evolve and go through the pain, the desert, but keep going -as I've liked most of what he wrote.

There's a progression (I find) in his maturity as a Christian within his writing that I can relate to:
e.g one of his pet sins that he had no patience for was divorce, and God got him to marry a divorced woman, whom he perhaps married for the wrong reason, but ended up loving deeply, emotionally and physically (is it in A Grief Observed that he describes the sweet midnight sex they had from time to time and the beautiful intimacy of it?). (It's the power of Venus that can't be ignored between the sexes, as in That Hideous Strength)

To me, that's exactly how God works - takes the faulty dogma in our lives and twists it into irony, and allow the carnal and sensual an upper hand (Merlin: the Natural)!

The compilation of Lewis' Letters to Children is wonderful - recording his correspondence with children who wrote him when he first published the Narnia books, and I love how seriously he took their questions.

I don't know if I've ever read a more honest book on prayer than Letters to Malcolm, it liberated my way of thinking.

When my fiancé died in 2002, there were three books that gave me great comfort:

Bonhoeffer's "Letters from Prison"

Marion Graefin Doenhof's
"Namen die Keiner Mehr Nennt"

Lewis' "A Grief Observed"

I don't think i could have survived the pain without them.
 

I had forgotten his "Grief Observed". That is worthwile Lewis.

I think I'll find a copy of "Till We Have Faces" and see what that is.
 

It makes me think of the buttonmaker in Peer Gynt who is going to melt Peer down because he was never truly himself, never truly his good self or his badself, but merely a wandering shadow of each neither hot nor cold, neither good nor bad, neither fit for heaven or hell, reward or punishment...

...so he was simply to be melted down into raw material.
 

I seem to recal a thread of something to that effect in something of CSL's. ... Maybe I'm thinking of the guy with a man on a chanin, or a man with a think on a chain or something. I need to reread my CSL ...
 

ER: "Maybe one of the things is that Lewis was a writer, and neither a philosopher nor theologian."

If you play in the sand box, you should be able to put up with the cat's shit.
Hezikiah 32:1
 

drlobojo,

"If you play in the sand box, you should be able to put up with the cat's shit.
Hezikiah 32:1"

I want a copy of YOUR Bible.

LOL!
 

Kermaris said: "(drlobojo)I want a copy of YOUR Bible."

Kermaris as soon as I finish receiving direct inspiration for it, get it written down, and get out of the asylum, I'm going to publish it. I'll keep you up to date.
 

He said mean and untrue things about atheists and scientists.

But I still like the Chronicles of Narnia.
 

He said a lot of true things about being human.