Happy All Hallows’ Eve everyone! Tonight is a good example of why I set this project up as a public blog: otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting down to think on a little Lewis at all tonight! A long day at work and then Trick or Treating with the family means I want to be curled up in bed, but since I haven’t posted since Thursday, I don’t want to let another night slip by.
I’ll try to keep this one short, since I still have more to do this evening. In Surprised by Joy, right after explaining his attraction to the grand argument from Undesign, Jack notes that there is an obvious contradiction between the “Occultist fancies” he had absorbed from his beloved matron and the high, austere, and tragic atheism he had begun to adopt as a matter of philosophy. They would seem to be mutually exclusive propositions, of course. Like many of us, Lewis didn’t take the time to think it all out with perfect clarity and he “swayed” between them based entirely on his mood at a given moment. The one common point between them was that they both pulled him away from his Christian faith, a bit at a time. (65-66)
This tendency to ignore, indulge, or even to embrace paradox was a well established human trait long before Carl Barth systematized it into a theology or the postmodernists idolized it with their self-refuting descent into rhetorical nonsense. I’ve seen it displayed as recently as this afternoon, when I was looking at the news. In a story about the decision by Shorter University (a Christian school) to have its faculty sign a conduct agreement where they renounced sex outside of marriage and homosexuality, a random student contributed this gem of logic to the discussion:
“Who is one person to judge what somebody else does?” said one student, who spoke anonymously to the station. “It’s none of their business.”
And presumably the student made this statement with a straight face. He/she is actually handing down a very obvious judgement against someone else (the school), condemning them for possibly judging someone else! I have trouble understanding how some people’s heads don’t explode from the contradictions they have floating around inside their heads. Perhaps it’s their abnormally thick skulls keep everything contained.
Of course, the point to observe here is that this is, indeed, entirely human. Snark aside, I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of just such an intellectual sin far more often that I would like to admit. To see it in C. S. Lewis, it is a clear and present reminder that, for all his considerable brain and potent imagination, he was as “real” as you or I.
Mere Lewis 