Most Christians are aware of C.S. Lewis and a fortunate subset have actually read one or a few of his works, perhaps The Chronicles of Narnia or Mere Christianity or The Screwtape Letters. His signature appeal is a capacity to describe experiences outside of our natural world. A drab grey town that’s infinitesimally small and diminishing but ever growing at the same time, where Napoleon lives by himself in an ever-more remote mansion, pacing about and ranting against his enemies. A quiet green wood with pools that are portals to other worlds. Merlin awakened from his tomb in the modern day as a servant of God, wielding angelic power to destroy an evil “scientific” organization directed by a demonically animated severed human head.

Most people call this imagination, and it absolutely is. But it’s much more. Lewis taught Medieval literature at Oxford and Cambridge. He knew what great thinkers throughout history said. Reportedly he had a photographic memory. His true gift was not inventing new concepts but rather translating the great thoughts from the past for us moderns in a way that we can understand and enjoy.

What precipitated this post was reading this footnote in Perelandra where Lewis explains that the idea of angels and demons existing in multidimensional space—a key point in his The Space Trilogy—originated with a 17th century scholar.

The footnote is here, the same as shown in the attached photo, in place of alt-text:

1. In the text I naturally keep to what I thought and felt at the time, since this alone is first-hand evidence: but there is obviously room for much further speculation about the form in which eldila appear to our senses. The only serious considerations of the problem so far are to be sought in the early seventeenth century. As a starting point for future investigation I recommend the following from Natvilcius (De Aethereo at aerio Corpore, Basel. I627, II. xii.); liquet simplicem flammam sensibus nostris subjectam non esse corpus proprie dictum angeli vel daemonis, sed potius aut illius corporis sensorium aut superficiem corporis in coelesti dispositione locorum supra cogitationes humanas existentis. ("It appears that the homogeneous flame perceived by our senses is not the body, properly so called, of an angel or daemon, but rather either the sensorium of that body or the surface of a body which exists after a manner beyond our conception in the celestial frame of special references.") By the "celestial frame of references" I take him to mean what we should now call "multi-dimensional space." Not, of course, that Natvilcius knew anything about multidimensional geometry, but that he had reached empirically what mathematics has since reached on theoretical grounds.

#CSLewis

Friends to the end...

https://piefed.social/c/lotrmemes/p/1903495/friends-to-the-end

"In an instant he realized the truth. That dragon face in the pool was his own reflection. There was no doubt of it. It moved as he moved; it opened and shut its mouth as he opened and shut his. He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself."
- C. S. Lewis, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"
🎨 Pauline Baynes

#BookologyThursday #Fiction #Literature #Fantasy #CSLewis #Narnia #ChroniclesOfNarnia #Monster #Dragon

Kein Aprilscherz. Ab dem 1. April gibt's die Hörbücher in 14 Folgen zu Chroniken von Narnia bei ARD Sounds (vormals Audiothek).
Danke, dafür zahl ich meinen Rundfunkbeitrag gerne.
#ardsounds #hörbuch #chronikenvonnarnia #cslewis

https://www.ardsounds.de/sendung/die-chroniken-von-narnia/urn:ard:show:1127a4b1cb1a95d9/

There's a thesis I'm very slowly piecing together, and it may seem a ridiculous one, hence I throw it open to any and all critics. It pertains to extremist #Christianity: I believe that modern-day hyperpolitical #Christians have, in fact, embraced the philosophical position known as logical positivism.

There are those who may remember that positivism was one of the philosophical bugabears of #CSLewis, whom of course is regarded by contemporary Christian fanatics as a veritable Apostle—but that's rather my point. Such Christians wallow in such heresies as idolatry with such shameless abandon that they clearly have converged around a new set of values, non-Christian values by the standards of older-fashioned Christian scholarship, but which they are endeavouring to cement in place—with military and police force—as the new definition of Christianity.

This novel form of politicized Christianity, a post-modern Christianity, seems to be obsessed with rooting its morality in the physical world, and it claims that its values are wholly consonant with and indeed continuous with the so-called "laws of nature" determined by empirical science. In truth these post-modern Christians freely reject as much empiricism as necessary to make their cases stick—but what's important here is that such Christian extremists loudly proclaim themselves the true guardians of Western scientific and intellectual authority.

They no longer declare their enemies to be heretical and faithless after the fashion of old-style Christianity. They say that their enemies are illogical, and even insane and thus incapable of logic. Thus have the hyperpolitical Christians of today come to sound almost exactly like the hyperpolitical atheists, who also like to declare their enemies to be insane.

@hobbs @joel

Just finishing it now for the second time. Read it for the first time last decade.

Lovely novel, classic #CSLewis.

The scientific parts, being a 1930s novel, are of course quite humorously wrong at times, but it's still a lovely read.