Celebrating C. S. Lewis
(1898-1963)
Gonzaga Socratic Club
Friday, November 22, 2013
Remembering C. S. Lewis
Lewis was born 115 years ago, but today
we celebrate the 50-year anniversary of his
death in 1963
In doing so, we join celebrations across the
globe, including his home academic
universities of Oxford and Cambridge,
Christian universities such as Baylor, and
multiple news sites such as PBS, The
Guardian, and USA today
Westminster Abbey Memorial
Remembering C. S. Lewis
Lewis is perhaps best known by the general public
for his Narnia series, and therefore as a Christian
author
Several generations of Christians appreciate Lewis
as an apologist, author of books such as Mere
Christianity and The Problem of Pain, and also a
devotional Christian author (The Weight of Glory)
He also wrote science fiction (Out of the Silent
Planet), adult fiction (Till We Have Faces), literary
criticism, and academic literary scholarship
Jesus as Moral Teacher?
Perhaps best known passage is the “trichotomy”
argument from Mere Christianity:
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things
Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would
either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is
a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell.
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is,
the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.
You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and
kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call
Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any
patronising nonsense about His being a great human
teacher. He has not left that open to us.”
Underland in The Silver Chair
The enchanted argument of The Lady of
the Green Kirtle, the Witch Queen of the
Underland, in The Silver Chair: all of our
intimations of a world beyond immediate
experience are merely imaginary
Response of the Marsh-Wiggle
Puddleglum is a declaration of the
Christian in the post-Christian, scientistic,
reductionistic world
Puddleglum, The Silver Chair
“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those
things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and
Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is
that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal
more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit
of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes
me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when
you com e to think of it. We’re just babies making up a
game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can
make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.
That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on
Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m
going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t
any Narnia.”
Fideism vs Enchantment
toward Truth
Puddleglum—and Lewis—aren’t
saying that we should just make up a
world and believe in it. Such fideism is
deluded and unsustainable
We should however be alive to the
enchantment of imagination that can
awake us to and point us in the
direction of Truth
The Pilgrim’s Regress
Dr Forrest Baird
Whitworth University
Griffith Park Observatory
Palos Verde Peninsula
Catalina Island
A. Sehnsucht: An experience
of “Bitter-sweet Longing”
"Though the want is acute and
painful, yet the mere wanting is
felt to be somehow a delight."
A. “Bitter-sweet Longing”
Most desires only pleasures if satisfaction
is nearby.
This desire is better than fulfillment.
If the desire is absent, the desire itself may
be desired—a new instance of the original
desire.
B. Mysterious Object of Desire
"There is a peculiar mystery about
the object of this Desire."
B. Mysterious Object of Desire
People think they know what the desired
object is, but...
Every supposed object is inadequate to
fulfill the desire.
Therefore, the human soul was made to
enjoy some object never fully given in
subjective and space-time experience.
“Siege Perilous” in King Arthur’s castle
C. An Argument from Analogy
We experience thirst, so we conclude…
We are creatures who need water to survive
We experience hunger, so we conclude…
We are creatures who need food to survive
Though there is no guarantee we will get either
We experience longing for something not
available in our natural world, so we
conclude…
We are creatures made to experience
something super-natural
The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader
Dr Jennifer Mills
Communications, Moody Bible
Institute, Spokane
“Well anyway, I looked up and saw the very last thing I
expected: a huge lion coming slowly toward me. And one
queer thing was there was no moon last night, but there was
moonlight where the lion was. So it came nearer and nearer. I
was terribly afraid of it. You may think that, being a dragon,
I could have knocked any lion out easily enough. But it
wasn’t that kind of fear. I wasn’t afraid of it eating me, I was
just afraid of it – if you can understand. Well, it came close
up to me and looked straight into my eyes. And I shut my
eyes tight. But that wasn’t any good because it told me to
follow it.”
“You mean it spoke”
“I don’t know. Now that you mention it, I don’t think it did.
But it told me all the same. And I knew I’d have to do what it
told me, so I got up and followed it. And it led me a long
way into the mountains. And there was always this
moonlight over and round the lion wherever we went. So at
last we came to the top of a mountain I’d never seen before
and on the top of this mountain there was a garden – trees
and fruit and everything. In the middle of it there was a well.
“I knew it was a well because you could see the water
bubbling up from the bottom of it: but it was a lot bigger
than most wells – like a very big, round bath with marble
steps going down into it. The water was as clear as anything
and I thought if I could get in there and bathe, it would ease
the pain in my leg. But the lion told me I must undress first.
Mind you, I don’t know if he said any words out loud or not.
“I was just going to say that I couldn’t undress because I
hadn’t any clothes on when I suddenly thought that dragons
are snaky sorts of thing and snakes can cast their skins. Oh,
of course, thought I, that’s what the lion means. So I started
scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over
the place. And then I scratched a little deeper and, instead of
just scales coming off here and there, my whole skin started
peeling off beautifully, like it does after an illness, or as if I
was a banana. In a minute or two I just stepped out of it. I
could see it lying there beside me, looking rather nasty. It
was a most lovely feeling. So I started to go down into the
well for my bathe.
“But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked
down and saw that they were all hard and rough and
wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before. Oh, that’s all
right, said I, it only means I had another smaller suit on
underneath the first one, and I’ll have to get out of it too. So I
scratched and tore again and this underskin peeled off
beautifully and out I stepped and left it lying beside the other
one and went down to the well for my bathe.
“Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought
to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take
off? For I was longing to bathe my leg. So I scratched away
for the third time and got off a third skin, just like the two
others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at
myself in the water I knew it had been no good.
“Then the lion said – but I don’t know if it spoke – ‘You will
have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can
tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay
flat down on my back to let him do it.
“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it
had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling
the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The
only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure
of feeling the stuff peel off. You know – if you’ve ever picked
the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is fun to
see it coming away.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund.
“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought
I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt
– and there it was, lying on the grass, only ever so much
thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the
others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a
peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught
hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender
underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me into the
water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After
that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started
swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone
from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy
again.”
The Abolition of Man, Prince
Caspian
Dana Mannino
Gonzaga BA graduate, current
graduate student at Dominican
University
That Hideous Strength
Dr Catherine Tkacz
Research Associate, Bishop White
Seminary at Gonzaga University
Lewis’ Space Trilogy
Till We Have Faces
Dr Brian Clayton
Phliosophy, Gonzaga University
“…Do you think we mortals will find you gods easier to bear if you’re
beautiful? I tell you that if that’s true we’ll find you a thousand times
worse. For then (I know what beauty does) you’ll lure and entice.
You’ll leave us nothing; nothing that’s worth our keeping or your
taking. Those we love best—whoever’s most worth loving—those are
the very ones you’ll pick out….It would be far better for us if you were
foul and ravening. We’d rather you drank their blood than stole their
hearts. We’d rather they were ours and dead than yours and made
immortal….The girl was mine. What right had you to steal her away
into your dreadful heights? You’ll say I was jealous. Jealous of Psyche?
Not while she was mine….That’s why I say it makes no difference
whether you’re fair or foul. That there should be gods at all, there’s our
misery and bitter wrong. There’s no room for you and us in the same
world. You’re a tree in whose shadow we can’t thrive. We want to be
our own. I was my own and Psyche was mine and no one else had any
right to her. Oh, you’ll say you took her away into bliss and joy such as
I could never have given her, and I ought to have been glad of it for her
sake. Why? What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which
I hadn’t given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I
wanted her to be happy that way?...Did you ever remember whose the
girls was? She was mine. Mine. Do you not know what the word
means? Mine! You’re thieves, seducers….”
“Enough,” said the judge.
There was utter silence all round me. And now for the first time I
knew what I had been doing….Now I knew that I had been
reading it over and over—perhaps a dozen times. I would have
read it forever,…if the judge had not stopped me. And the voice I
read it in was strange to my ears. There was given to me a certainty
that this, at last, was my real voice.
There was silence in the dark assembly long enough for me to have
read my book out yet again. At last the judge spoke.
“Are you answered?” he said.
“Yes,” said I.
The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it
was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean.
…When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last
to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for
years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over
and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the
gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word
can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we
think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have
faces?
--Till We Have Faces
…We have never told the whole truth. We may
confess ugly facts—the meanest cowardice or the
shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the
tone is false. The very act of confessing—an
infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of
humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts
from your very self. No one could guess how
familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul
these things were, how much of a piece with all
the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner
warmth, they struck no such discordant note,
were not nearly so odd and detachable from the
rest of you, as they seem when turned into words.
--The Problem of Pain, Chapter 4
…But…though Our Lord often speaks of Hell as a sentence inflicted by
a tribunal, He also says elsewhere that the judgement consists in the
very fact that men prefer darkness to light, and that not He, but His
‘word’, judges men. We are therefore at liberty…to think of this bad
man’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact
of being what he is. The characteristic of lost souls is ‘their rejection of
everything that is not simply themselves’. Our imaginary egoist has
tried to turn everything he meets into a province or appendage of the
self. The taste for the other, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good,
is quenched in him except in so far as his body still draws him into
some rudimentary contact with an outer world. Death removes this last
contact. He has his wish—to lie wholly in the self and to make the best
of what he finds there. And what he finds there is Hell.
…I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful,
rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not
mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague
fashion wherein an envious man ‘wishes’ to be happy: but they
certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that selfabandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They
enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are
therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to
obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.
-- The Problem of Pain, Chapter 8
Celebrating C. S. Lewis
(1898-1963)
Gonzaga Socratic Club
Friday, November 22, 2013