I wish I could state what I believe for certain as regards free-will, predestination, the sacraments and Mother Kirk, as C.S. Lewis called her, but I’m just beginning to be able to think all of these things through for myself, unencumbered by penalty, so just give me some time.
In A Grief Observed, Jack Lewis -I feel like I know him, as if he were my friend- speaks of God in this way, when he is weighing his idea about whether God is either the Eternal Veterinarian or the Eternal Vivisector: “Sometimes it’s hard not to say “God forgive God.” Sometimes it’s hard to say so much. But, if our Faith is true, He didn’t. He Crucified Him.” If any of you have lost a loved one, and want to be moved in a most human way, please read it, if you already haven‘t.
Apparently, Lewis’s Catholic friends were embarrassed by his evangelism and writing, I guess they thought them too unsophisticated, but his writing has enriched my understanding of Christ tremendously. His humanity, his magnanimity, is inspiring to me. With that being said, I just want to begin to end with an exerpt from a writer who was speculating on Lewis’s unrelenting adherence to his Protestanism, in his review of a book concerning that topic:
“Let us begin by admitting that we all assign Christians not of our communion to whatever purgatories we can muster—or at least, this Protestant reviewer (1) will admit it for himself. We have our opinions on where they have gone wrong that can hardly be articulated in a sociable way, apart from what the other will perceive as patronizing and belittling of the kind that Pearce here visits upon Lewis. It is impossible, after all, from a purely Catholic point of view, to see non-Catholic Christianity as anything but systemically flawed and any non-Catholic as what he is apart from sins that blind him to the truth, particularly when it faces him full-on, as it did Lewis, in friends like Tolkien and writers like Dante, Newman, and Chesterton. For those who are interested in a well-researched, well written, and eminently Catholic solution to the riddle of Lewis the Protestant, this book will serve. I put forward here, however, another, non-Catholic, one.In Pilgrim's Regress, we find the principal character visited in childhood by a beguiling vision of an Island in the West. This is accompanied by a feeling of indescribable joy, which, for fleeting moments, penetrates to the heart, and provides the impetus for his pilgrimage through the world and his eventual conversion to the Christian faith. In finding Mother Kirk, as he calls the Church—the Church, that is, as Protestants understand her—he does not finally lay hold of joy, but understands that he has found in her the way to it, even though in her present state she is plain and unimpressive.
In coming to the Faith, Christians like Lewis experience as essential to Christianity what might be called an eschatological displacement, the belief that while this world reflects the life of God and transmits it sacramentally, the Object of faith and hope is realized only beyond this world, where it must always be firmly kept not only by the tellers of tales, but the custodians of the life and faith of the Church. Lewis states this explicitly in Father Wisdom's discourse in Pilgrim's Regress:
I am old and full of tears, and I see that you also begin to feel the sorrow that is born with us. Abandon hope: do not abandon desire. Feel no wonder that these glimpses of your Island so easily confuse themselves with viler things, and are so easily blasphemed. Above all, never try to keep them, never try to revisit the same place or time wherein the vision was accorded to you. You will pay the penalty of all who would bind down to one place or time within our country that which our country cannot contain. Have you not heard from the Stewards of the sin of idolatry, and how, in their old chronicles, the manna turned to worms if any tried to hoard it? Be not greedy, be not passionate; you will but crush dead on your own breast with hot, rough hands the thing you loved. But if ever you incline to doubt that the thing you long for is something real, remember what your own experience has taught you. Think that it is a feeling, and at once the feeling has no value. Stand sentinel at your own mind, watching for that feeling, and you will find—what shall I say—a flutter in the heart, an image in the head, a sob in the throat: and was that your desire? You know that it was not, and that no feeling whatever will appease you, that feeling, refine it as you will, is but one more spurious claimant—spurious as the gross lusts of which the giant speaks. Let us conclude then that what you desire is no state of yourself at all, but something, for that very reason, Other and Outer. And knowing this you will find tolerable the truth that you cannot attain it. That the thing should be, is so great a good that when you remember "it is" you will forget to be sorry that you can never have it. Nay, anything that you could have would be so much less than this that its fruition would be immeasurably below the mere hunger for this. Wanting is better than having. The glory of any world wherein you can live is in the end appearance: but then, as one of my sons has said, that leaves the world more glorious yet.Accompanying this conviction, as one might imagine, is deep suspicion of realized eschatology, precluding identification of the True Church (or the heavenly Narnia, or Britain) with any of its present, earthly forms. This conviction is also at the heart of Protestant ecclesiology, which in its purer form does not arise from mere anti-Catholicism, but from a positive vision of the nature of reality and our manner of comprehending it, a vision far older than the Reformation-era confessions on the nature and identity of the Church in which it came forward with such force. Lewis believed this vision of the nature of things is taught by ancient Wisdom itself.
To the Protestant Lewis was, the temptation to regard any ecclesial form, as faithful as it might be to its heavenly archetype, as the One, True, Church that comprehends heaven and earth, presenting itself as offering in the here and now, especially to disappointed seekers after certitude, the kind of supernal finalities the Catholic Church appears to offer her children, is something to be resisted in every one of the many forms it takes within that Church. What we find here, in the darkened glass of our present existence, are reflections—true reflections, but still only reflections—of glory that leads us on toward it, but cannot fully comprehend that glory or its joy in itself.
One cannot make a perfectly loyal church member, a wholly devoted convert, of any Christian who thinks this way, for he will never take his church, whichever church that might be, with the ultimate seriousness the accredited magisteriums (as they must to be what they are) require. He will always look beyond them for something higher and better, of which their communions are at best only worthy reflections. He will always be accused by the partisans of those churches with malignant individualism, and be classed with the truly malignant individualists, for doing it, even when his deepest love and firmest devotion is for the same City Father Abraham saw afar off, for the Kingdom that is not of this world, for the heavenly Jerusalem of which every earthly Jerusalem is only the barest reflection.
Perhaps he doesn’t speak to all of you in this piece, but this is a close an articulation to what I’ve never really been able to articulate but what has nearly always moved within me, as I’ve ever come across.
xzins, I pinged you too, because I thought you indicated in other posts that you’re a fan of Lewis’s, and thought you might be interested in reading it too.
(1)Author is S.M. Hutcheon, and is reviewing a book by Joseph Pearce, titled “C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church."
It doesn't apply, but I just like the line.
Somewhere way back during the time I was on vacation, the Religious Moderator asked us to wrap up this thread. We are now over 4,600 posts of various positions and I do believe, like Luther and Erasmus which started this, we have all respectfully documented our theological views (over and over and over). I do believe we should respect the RM position and I would request the RM lock this thread so that our positions remain until judgment day or the hard drive crashes; whichever comes first.
Thanks everyone for their contributions and I look forward to pointing out the theological errors on other threads. ;O)