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osprey_archerAfter a long hiatus, littlerhymes and I swung back for one last crack at C. S. Lewis before moving on in our buddy read. (We’re doing Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising quintet next.) We wrapped up with The Screwtape Letters, which blew the top off my head when I first read it in college. I keep the book on my bedside bookshelf.
I keep it there, first, because it’s so funny. Lewis’s Screwtape voice, the voice of a pompous devil mentor writing to his protege (only protege is the wrong word, isn’t it, because Screwtape wouldn’t lift a finger to protect Wormwood from anything) is pitch perfect in all its particulars; the model, it occurs to me now, for the voice that I adopted in “How to Be a Better Dictator,” except of course Lewis does it ten times better.
Secondly, I keep it at my bedside because so many of Lewis’s observations about human nature are spot on. He’s so good at recognizing the little evasions that people use to convince themselves that their own behavior is good and righteous, the fuzzy-mindedness that allows them to believe six contradictory things before breakfast.
Thirdly, I like to keep the book handy because just when you are sinking mostly luxuriously into the soothing bath of Lewis’s prose, he will say something so completely barmy that you sit up shrieking, “What?” Nothing in The Screwtape Letters comes quite up to the level of the bit in That Hideous Strength where Lewis is all “There are seven space genders! Also, women should give up their dreams and have babies instead,” but generally whenever he gets started on gender you know something about to blow up.
This is a useful quality in a spiritual teacher, because it reminds you not to swallow everything whole. Just because Lewis (or someone else) said it doesn’t mean it’s right! You have to think for yourself, consider the evidence, make up your own mind.
Although Lewis might prefer that I would agree with more of his actual opinions, I think he would also understand that serving as a spur for critical thinking is also a valuable service. He comes back again and again, like Orwell, to the importance of clear thought, precise language, because fuzzy formulations and cant phrases allow people to blind themselves to the true moral nature of our actions—not just when we are perpetrating horrors, but also to the smaller unkindnesses of our lives.
And some of Lewis’s specific ideas have affected my own thought profoundly, most particularly what Lewis calls the Historical Point of View. “The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true… To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.”
The Historical Point of View is closely allied with what Lewis elsewhere (in Surprised by Joy) called “chronological snobbery, the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Or, as Screwtape crows: “Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge,” and in doing so, have made it difficult to criticize any change except by sputtering that the change is a move backwards.
The theory of chronological snobbery took such deep root in my mind that it eventually sprouted The Sleeping Soldier. Some changes are good! Some changes are bad! But a lot of changes are just changes, neither good nor bad. One era may love gingerbread, and another chocolate cake, but that doesn’t mean that gingerbread has been discredited. Fashion just moves on, because that is what fashion does.
littlerhymes and I swung back for one last crack at C. S. Lewis before moving on in our buddy read. (We’re doing Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising quintet next.) We wrapped up with The Screwtape Letters, which blew the top off my head when I first read it in college. I keep the book on my bedside bookshelf.I keep it there, first, because it’s so funny. Lewis’s Screwtape voice, the voice of a pompous devil mentor writing to his protege (only protege is the wrong word, isn’t it, because Screwtape wouldn’t lift a finger to protect Wormwood from anything) is pitch perfect in all its particulars; the model, it occurs to me now, for the voice that I adopted in “How to Be a Better Dictator,” except of course Lewis does it ten times better.
Secondly, I keep it at my bedside because so many of Lewis’s observations about human nature are spot on. He’s so good at recognizing the little evasions that people use to convince themselves that their own behavior is good and righteous, the fuzzy-mindedness that allows them to believe six contradictory things before breakfast.
Thirdly, I like to keep the book handy because just when you are sinking mostly luxuriously into the soothing bath of Lewis’s prose, he will say something so completely barmy that you sit up shrieking, “What?” Nothing in The Screwtape Letters comes quite up to the level of the bit in That Hideous Strength where Lewis is all “There are seven space genders! Also, women should give up their dreams and have babies instead,” but generally whenever he gets started on gender you know something about to blow up.
This is a useful quality in a spiritual teacher, because it reminds you not to swallow everything whole. Just because Lewis (or someone else) said it doesn’t mean it’s right! You have to think for yourself, consider the evidence, make up your own mind.
Although Lewis might prefer that I would agree with more of his actual opinions, I think he would also understand that serving as a spur for critical thinking is also a valuable service. He comes back again and again, like Orwell, to the importance of clear thought, precise language, because fuzzy formulations and cant phrases allow people to blind themselves to the true moral nature of our actions—not just when we are perpetrating horrors, but also to the smaller unkindnesses of our lives.
And some of Lewis’s specific ideas have affected my own thought profoundly, most particularly what Lewis calls the Historical Point of View. “The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true… To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.”
The Historical Point of View is closely allied with what Lewis elsewhere (in Surprised by Joy) called “chronological snobbery, the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Or, as Screwtape crows: “Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge,” and in doing so, have made it difficult to criticize any change except by sputtering that the change is a move backwards.
The theory of chronological snobbery took such deep root in my mind that it eventually sprouted The Sleeping Soldier. Some changes are good! Some changes are bad! But a lot of changes are just changes, neither good nor bad. One era may love gingerbread, and another chocolate cake, but that doesn’t mean that gingerbread has been discredited. Fashion just moves on, because that is what fashion does.
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Date: 2024-02-06 02:28 am (UTC)(The quote I think about a lot is the one about how sin - or, you know, selfishness/generally Being A Jerk - springs from misunderstanding the various forms of "my"— to paraphrase, thinking of "my servants" or "my god" in the same way as "my things, which I can do what I like with." It reminds me of the Terry Pratchett quote: "Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself.")
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Date: 2024-02-07 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-08 02:23 am (UTC)Yes, that one!
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Date: 2024-02-06 02:52 am (UTC)Excellent attitude!
I've literally not read this or really anything of his in many decades because I got so annoyed by his awful attitudes to women, and how very Christian his philosophy is. Might give this a try again.
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Date: 2024-02-07 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-06 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-07 11:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-06 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-07 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-06 11:35 am (UTC)I am now intrigued to know what else resides by your bedside!
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Date: 2024-02-08 12:01 am (UTC)Oh, bedside books, let's see. Right now I've got box sets of The Dark Is Rising and the Anne of Green Gables books, but those are for my current reading projects, not permanent denizens. Long-term occupants include some more C. S. Lewis (Surprised by Joy recently joined The Screwtape Letters), Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty (about her friendship with Lucy Grealy), a selection of Zilpha Keatley Snyder (The Egypt Game, The Headless Cupid, The Changeling), and Joan G. Robinson's When Marnie Was There.
Also a few of Maud Hart Lovelace's Deep Valley books, since I picked them up on my travels, but this will probably not be their permanent home. Oh, and Mary Norton's The Borrowers, which usually lives elsewhere too.
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Date: 2024-02-08 12:34 pm (UTC)I think I remember you posting about When Marnie Was There. I must put it on my tbr list...
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Date: 2024-02-10 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-02 05:16 pm (UTC)You know, till you wrote this, I hadn't realized how much Lewis's views on the topic of history had seeped into me.
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Date: 2024-03-03 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-03 09:47 pm (UTC)In stark contrast, I went to a college where the Historical Point of View was actively undermined. My father (a literary historian) took part in a parent-student seminar while I was there and tried to raise the topic of the historical context of the classic book we were discussing - "tried" being the key word. I don't think he ever recovered from that episode. :)