A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

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СКАЧАТЬ than we can spare. Like Christianity, psychoanalysis claims to put the human machine right. The philosophy of Freud is in direct contradiction to Christianity, but psychoanalysis itself is not when it tries to remove abnormal feelings connected with moral choices. Christianity is concerned primarily with the choices. A person’s choices through a period of many years slowly turn him or her into a heavenly or hellish creature. This is why one who is getting worse understands badness less and less.

      Marriage, despite modern views to the contrary, is for life. Novels and movies have misled us to believe that “being in love” should be a normal lifetime expectation, whereas it is properly no more than the explosion that starts the engine of a quieter and different sort of love. Forgiveness is much unpracticed as a Christian virtue. To love one’s neighbor does not at all mean making out that he is a nice fellow when he is not; we are only asked to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, and what is very lovable in any of us? The great vice loathed by all when observed in another person yet common to all of us is pride, “the complete anti-God state of mind.” It can subtly reside like a spiritual cancer at the very center of even a religious person. In the Christian sense, love is not a condition of the feelings but of the will. You are not to be always weighing whether or not you “love” your neighbor but proceed as if you did and then you will come to a genuine love. The hope of heaven is not escapism. The failure of Christians to think effectively of another world is a cause of their ineffectiveness in this world. In the attempt to satisfy a deep longing that haunts us, we may try ocean voyages, a succession of women, hobbies, and other things. Yet the longing is from God and only God can satisfy it. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Dependence on one’s moods will allow one to be neither a good atheist nor a good Christian. Faith consists in holding on to things your reason has accepted despite moods that may overtake you and the recognition that one’s own efforts are to be swallowed up in Christ’s indwelling power.

      Both Miracles and Mere Christianity are intended as simple presentations of orthodox views. One section of the latter volume Lewis submitted in manuscript to an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic for their criticism and discovered only minor differences from his own view. The difference between these books and most others, particularly theological, on the same subjects is resident in Lewis’s ability to select the basic issues from the corpus of their vast theological history and to present them in apt analogies, homely illustrations, clear insight, and classically simple diction. His method is proof that a sanctified imagination is a legitimate tool for any Christian apologist.

      One theologian who objected to Miracles did so partly on the ground that Lewis was, as he said, crude in visualizing the Trinity as like a cube of six squares while remaining one cube. But was not this the very method employed by our Lord who seemed invariably to turn to things close at hand as illustrations of holy things—vines, and fig trees, and lamps, and bushel baskets, and even vultures. It was likewise St. Paul’s method when he spoke of sounding brass and tinkling cymbals or the resurrection of Christ as the firstfruits. Indeed it was St. Augustine’s method in De Trinitate and has been the method of great writers ever. Lewis points out that Plato, one of the great creators of metaphor, is “therefore among the masters of meaning.” He holds that the attempt to speak unfiguratively about high abstractions is likely to result in “mere syntax masquerading as meaning” and indeed that metaphor, while not primarily the organ of truth, is the great organ for the depiction of essential meaning either in this world or others.

      6Corbin Carnell, The Dialectic of Desire: C. S. Lewis’ Interpretation of Sehnsucht, PhD dissertation (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1960), 124.

      7Marjorie E. Wright, The Cosmic Kingdom of Myth: A Study in the Myth-Philosophy of Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, PhD dissertation (University of Illinois, 1961), 141.

      8C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 135. Does this sentence contradict Lewis’s charges against some of the vengeful psalmists?

      9It occurs to me that, following the same analogy, Lewis might well have controverted the idea of a vengeful deity in the Old Testament by showing how often the Psalms speak of his mercy.

      10In The World’s Last Night.

      11Chad Walsh, C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, (New York: MacMillan, 1949), 107.

       Chapter 4

      EVERYMAN’S THEOLOGIAN

      Kilby examines a few key concepts in Lewis’s writing: pain, redemption, sanctification, and that mysterious, unbidden nostalgia that gently pulls us toward heaven. This article first appeared in Christianity Today in January 1964.

      The death of Clive Staples Lewis on November 22, 1963, removed from the world one of the most lucid, winsome, and powerful writers on Christianity. We have reason to thank God that such a man was raised up in our time to become, as Chad Walsh has put it, the apostle to the skeptics. “His books exposed the shallowness of our atheist prejudices; his vision illumined the Mystery which lay behind the appearances of daily life,” said one man who turned to Christ from Communism, alcoholism, and attempted suicide. “Without his works, I wonder if I and many others might not still be infants ‘crying in the night,’” said another intellectual who had turned from atheism and Communism to Christianity.

      Sixty-four when he died, Lewis had been converted at the age of thirty after a long span of atheism. He thereafter produced more than a score of books, both expository and fictional, to set forth his conception of the meaning of Christianity. Millions of copies have been read and widely acclaimed by both theologians and laymen all over the Western world. Nearly all of his books are now available in paperback, a good sign of their wide acceptance.

      His best-known book is The Screwtape Letters, a brilliant story in which an undersecretary to the High Command of Hell writes letters of instruction and warning to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter in charge of a young man in England at the time of World War II. Wormwood is in trouble from the beginning because he has failed to prevent his “patient” from becoming a Christian. Screwtape suggests many devices for reclaiming the patient’s soul. He must prepare for the time when the first emotional excitement of conversion begins to fade. He must turn the thoughts while in prayer, from God to his own moods and feelings. When the patient prays for charity, Wormwood must cause him to start trying to manufacture charitable feelings in himself. He must also stir up irritations between the patient and his mother. He must persuade the young man to think of devils as comic creatures in red tights and tails. He must cause the patient to believe that his “dry” periods are signs that God is unreal. The young man must be introduced to smart, superficially intellectual, and skeptical people who will teach him to despise “Puritanism” and love religious flippancy, and he must be persuaded to shoulder the future with all its cloud of indefinite fears rather than live in a simple, immediate dependence on God. He must be made spiritually resentful and proud. If possible, he must be brought to love theological newness for its own sake and to think of the “historical Jesus” rather than the Jesus of the Gospels. The patient’s prayer life must be rationalized so that if the thing he prays for does not come to pass, СКАЧАТЬ