An interesting and well put together article. I wanted to ask a couple of things of you. Firstly your comment that C S Lewis "as an Ulsterman, instinctively associated the Church with evils too ancient, and too deeply rooted in their collective past, to ever allow them to look at it without a subtle, underlying disgust". I'd be interested in knowing where you encounter this "subtle underlying disgust" in Lewis' writings. Some of his writings contain ideas which point towards a Catholic theology, but in the Anglican Church he was returning to the church of his youth, the Church of Ireland having the same mixture of high and low church as its english sister church
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CS Lewis' mature theology is not Anglican, but unmistakeably Catholic. He speaks of the Eucharist in unmistakeably Catholic terms ("Next to the Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest reality accessible to your senses") and confesses that he believes in Purgatory. That being the case, the question "Why are you not a Catholic" has to be asked. Lewis himself was asked it, and he spoke vaguely of things that had changed in the Catholic Church since the Middle Ages, but never came up with any specifics. In a man so willing to take on any and all comers when debating religion, this is a very remarkable attitude indeed. Tolkien, who was Catholic, felt that he could perceive a certain underlying Ulster prejudice in his sometime friend - "the ulsterior motive", he called it. And you have to remember that Lewis lived through the upheaval of the Irish revolution and civil war. Lewis described himself all his life as an Irishman, and the Ireland of his childhood, the Ireland he speaks of in Surprised by joy and elsewhere, was a
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It seems that Lewis's views of prayer expressed in Letters to Malcolm were pretty Protestant, and indeed one detects a disturbing Platonism in some of his writing...
The Platonism in Lewis' writing is not exactly concealed (check the Professor's refrain, "It's all in Plato" in The Last Battle), and nor does it seem to me at all dangerous - unless you reckon St.Augustine and Pope Benedict XVI dangerous. Platonism is, if not connaturate to the Christian religion (Irenaeus of Lyons and Thomas Aquinas, to quote only two giants, were not Platonists), at least a "recognized party". And I think that the essay you quote pushes the issue of Lewis' "barbs" against Catholicism much too far. For instance, about the passage about devotions to Saints, what Lewis has to say is nothing more than what many Catholic reformers have said down the years, indeed what the Vatican itself has backed by outlawing a number of outlandish devotions and derubricating several unhistorical saints. (If only they had got rid of the euhemerized pagan goddess St.Bridget!) As for the relevance of Tolkien's dislike of some features of Lewis' thought, while I appreciate (and indeed mentioned) the importance of "the ulsterior motive
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I remain unconvinced over Lewis and his ulsterism. To ascribe a negative prejudice to his decision, or rather non-decision, to become a Catholic seems to assume that the Anglican Church could not accomodate his beliefs. More than any other the Anglican Church is a broad church, containing as it does functional athiests right through to high-church 'catholics' whose differences with the Catholic Church are minimal. If a return to the church of his youth accomodated his beliefs, then why would he change
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I take your corrections about Irish history, the more so as I have written my article on Fascism exactly to challenge the same kind of politically motivated rewriting of recent history of my own country which you decry. My basic point was, I know who and what Fascists are - incredibly, I have even had Fascist friends. So I regard Mr.Goldberg's thesis as an imposition. About the Black and Tans, I generalized from the life history of William Joyce, the man who became Lord Haw-Haw, who certainly was an Irishman, fought in WWI, and became a Black and Tan. All his later politics were dictated by his embitterment in the years that followed the war. My point was not that Lewis would ever have become a Black and Tan - I agree that his upper-middle class background would not have agreed with becoming a cheap pseudo-soldier - but that he came from a group which essentially had their own country taken away from them about 1922. Lewis described himself as an "Irishman" (not an "ulsterman", a definition he associated with sectarianism) to
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I have finished the essay you linked me to. Considering that I have just finished a long polemical essay, I hope you will forgive me if I don't tackle the whole of it in a systematic way; but I am afraid that the more I went into it, the worse it seemed to me. He misrepresents Narnia (where the Fall was partly averted, unlike our world, as everyone who read The Magician's Nephew ought to know) as being exactly like our world, and therefore having the same relationship with the Second Person of the Trinity. He does not connect Lewis' mention of Aslan "coming and going" with his devastating account of spiritual dryness in The Screwtape Letters, which is what Lewis obviously meant: that is, that there are times when we subjectively feel incapable of perceiving the presence of God in any way. The Narnia stories, after all, were very much written for children, and Lewis was not going to deliver as desolating and frightful a description of spiritual loneliness as he did elsewhere; but there can be no doubt that, by the "absence" of
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I have long maintained that the collapse of political language into "left" and "right" has done a great deal of harm, both theoretical and practical. Practically, it left a remarkable number of progressives vulnerable to Marxist popular-front blandishments. Theoretically, it has left us without any words for those who want to change society in a direction other than (that currently promoted by those who call themselves) the progressive.
As for "fascist", it is notoriously slippery a term in English -- Orwell wrote that it had become meaningless as long ago as 1947 -- but in the context of this post it is clearly restricted to the specifically Italian origins of the term.
I think in general the description of left and right is still useful in terms of support or opposition for the sources of traditional authority - e.g. a moderate or conservative person will be respectful towards existing authorities, symbols and realities of power, and precedent; while a person who is qualified as a left-winger will show a desire to alter or replace them. In fact, I argued elsewhere that in the USA the defintions are in some ways becoming more rather than less relevant, because of the formation of a definite class of hereditary aristocrats
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Assume arguendo that the U.S. is developing a class of hereditary aristocrats. Are the people fighting this development in the name of popular sovereignty and equality 1) left-wing, because they're fighting against aristocracy, or 2) right-wing, because they are attempting to preserve existing authorities and symbols against those who would alter or replace them?
More generally, "traditional authority" is rarely one-sided. This is especially true in the modern era when recent concoctions set up against what used to be traditional have been around long enough to have some historical standing of their own. But it's also true in the past, e.g. the element of government by law and collective consent in medieval Europe which dwelt uneasily with the element of hereditary aristocracy.
Concerning fascism, I'd given up on it as a tool of analysis long ago, but you almost persuade me that it's a useful category.
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Marxist popular-front blandishments. Theoretically, it has left us without any words for those who want to change society in a direction other than (that currently promoted by those who call themselves) the progressive.
As for "fascist", it is notoriously slippery a term in English -- Orwell wrote that it had become meaningless as long ago as 1947 -- but in the context of this post it is clearly restricted to the specifically Italian origins of the term.
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1) left-wing, because they're fighting against aristocracy, or
2) right-wing, because they are attempting to preserve existing authorities and symbols against those who would alter or replace them?
More generally, "traditional authority" is rarely one-sided. This is especially true in the modern era when recent concoctions set up against what used to be traditional have been around long enough to have some historical standing of their own. But it's also true in the past, e.g. the element of government by law and collective consent in medieval Europe which dwelt uneasily with the element of hereditary aristocracy.
Concerning fascism, I'd given up on it as a tool of analysis long ago, but you almost persuade me that it's a useful category.
Reply
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Most of these also feature long and interesting comments sections.
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