What does Veeky Forums think of CS Lewis?

What does Veeky Forums think of CS Lewis?

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A man who didnt have particularly good or solid reasoning but had lovely command of the English language.

Strong prose abilities, nice tips for how to live the Christian life (The Screwtape Letters), pretty shoddy theology ultimately, although not without some great ideas here and there. Enjoyed the Narnia books as a kid.

>“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

(continued)
I've noticed he's very popular with a lot of Christians I know, sort of their go-to one-and-only theologist, sometimes almost an extra Paul or something. The same kind of Christians who love Tolkien with all their hearts. Anyways. Worth reading.

>"Pains he may still have to encounter, but they embrace those pains. They would not barter them for any earthly pleasure. All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door. He is caught up into that world where pain and pleasure take on transfinite values and all our arithmetic is dismayed. Once more, the inexplicable meets us."

He isn't anywhere close to Chesterton, and he's largely irrelevant in terms of theology. But he's certainly a great proselytizer. He makes complex statements sound simple, and makes disdained statements sound like good things. Men like him are at the forefront of any universal religion, and he deserves praise.

Who all should I read instead of C.S. Lewis?

Real shame he was Protestant.

The Holy Bible

Never heard of an author named "The Holy Bible".

In all serious I'm asking for authors of works on religion and literature, not the Bible user.

I'm just saying that George Mueller may be right. You might get more out of just reading and rereading the Bible than reading its interpreters if you're interested in religion.

Yeah, I'm not even a fedora-tipper or anything but I'm really tired of my christian relatives acting like Lewis' Trilemma is some amazing argument for selecting Jesus over various other religious figures, it can be applied to a lot of religions.

But what if he is wrong? Then who should I read?

a more polite version of my opinion on him

If you want a British religious charlatan with good prose and fancy but ultimately ill-founded arguments, go for Chesterton.

Love.

Because he forever BTFO Cathocunts?

I find that connection between Lewis and Tolkien both interesting and not interesting. On the one hand, they were very good friends, and Tolkien was instrumental in Lewis' conversion to Christianity.

On the other hand, one always gets the sense that Lewis stopped where Tolkien proceeded. Maybe because Catholics can always beat up on the Anglicans for being a halfway house of a denomination, but the fact remains. One gets the sense that Tolkien had no fear, where Lewis was a bit bashful. This is perhaps the difference between the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. There is a grandeur to Tolkien's fantasy that isn't in Lewis's fantasy.

>This is perhaps the difference between the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. There is a grandeur to Tolkien's fantasy that isn't in Lewis's fantasy.
Nah dude, Lewis was writing for kids. Tolkien realized the kids would grow up.

Has anyone here read "the great divorce" by him? I'm reading it now and would love to get other user's input

Really deep insight. His arguments are never very compelling, but they are entertaining. A lovely personality.

his preface to paradise loft is good

I've read it twice now. Not as good as The Screwtape Letters, still plenty of food for thought and written very well too. It's interesting to compare the chapter about the girieving mother to A Grief Observered, which he wrote after his wife actually died and he experienced grief for real.

>Yeah, I'm not even a fedora-tipper or anything but I'm really tired of my christian relatives acting like Lewis' Trilemma is some amazing argument for selecting Jesus over various other religious figures, it can be applied to a lot of religions.
And not only that. Someone may in good faith Think that they are Jesus or something.

Also, christianity's religious terminology is deeply flawed compared to dharmic religions.

So the reason that Tolkien is bearable is that he didn't get into theology?

Alvin Plantinga, Heidegger, Jung, Hans Urs von Balthasar

>Also, christianity's religious terminology is deeply flawed compared to dharmic religions.
Your argument would carry more weight if you, you know, actually had the very tiniest inkling of what Christianity's religious terminology actually is.

Step up:
youtube.com/watch?v=oThB-7cPYYE

Thanks christposters. Who should I move on to if I've read Plantinga and can't stand his writings?

1.6 was better.

bump

I honestly think Narnia is a good series to have kids read.

All these heretics lmao

Actual theologians. St. Augustine, John Henry Newman, John Chrystosom, Aquinas, Scotus, Bonaventure, Benedict XVI, Pius XII, Pius X, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Athanasius of Alexandria. 20th century nouvelle theologie is garbage and so is everything protestant.

What do you think about Chesterton

Alduos Huxley's book The Perennial Philosophy

Of course, it's great. That's not a contrarian opinion, or anything

>REEEL THEOLOGY
Fuck off back to /pol/ you illiterate DEUS VULT twathead.

Fuck off to a German Jesuit seminary to suck Kasper's cock, heretical scum.

Upset.
Sorry, I don't read bad theology. Some of us actually want to build bridges instead of leave them to decay. Some of us do not have the audacity to reduce God to something so simple and mechanistic.

You should read CS Lewis anyway, at least a bit of Narnia (Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the best one, fight me) , Out of the Silent Planet and Screwtape Letters.

You only seem to read bad theology that is rightfully being forgotten. Rahner and Balthasar will be only footnotes to the great Catholic theology in 50 years, and only that as confirmation of the superiority of scholastic tradition, teaching us that abandoning it for obscure drivel was the biggest mistake since the Reformation.
And your building of bridges is nothing less than destruction of any positions you may have had.

You're assuming I'm somebody that I am not.
Positions need to be reduced and destroyed. The conclusion of theology is its own death.

The conclusions of nouvelle theologie is its own death.
The conclusions of scholasticim is a coherent system with straight, but deep answers on every subject of the human life which will just keep on giving.

>human life
Theology is about God, not humans. You've just admitted heresy. Eat shit, Hegelian. Your god is a false one.

Summa Contra Gentiles covers roughly 4 subjects, Book one is about God himself, the second about God and the world, the third about the human life in it and the final one on the truths of the faith, all written in the form of answers to questions relevant to humans for their spiritual and intellectual problems. Any good book on God directly translates to the human life.

Humanist, Pagan, Heretic!

I really enjoyed Till We Have Faces tbqh.