Lewis CCA Paper

I am currently writing my CCA paper. I forget what the assigned topic is, exactly…something about the morality and religion of Tolkein or Lewis. I’m just writing what I want to, and figuring it will manage to touch upon the necessary things. (It’s sort of hard to talk about Lewis without mentioning religion...)

Some of the lectures were OK, some were a bit boring, and apparently one was rather trite. But there were also two or three incredible ones. Like Dr. Jerry Root's, which I’m taking most of my required quotes from. It's got a really stupid title – “C.S. Lewis as an Apologist” (which isn’t what the thing was about at all). And it doesn’t have the speaker’s digression into coruscating sunrises, or stars, or the braided rings of Saturn, or what-if worlds where the sun has only risen once. But it does have the parts about iconoclastic reality, and problems with transposing the infinite into the finite, and master’s metaphors vs. pupil’s metaphors, and fiction helping to solve the general/particular tension.

And my new favorite Lewis quote: “For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live.” (The Pilgrim’s Regress)

And some more new favorites:

By Lewis:

• “When [a given] metaphor is our only method or reaching a given idea at all, there our thinking is limited by metaphor so long as we retain the metaphor; and when the metaphor becomes fossilized, our ‘thinking;’ is not thinking at all.” (Selected Literary Essays)
  
  
• “The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less as self, is in a prison. My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what other have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books.” (An Experiment in Criticism).

And one by Janet Soskice:
“Our concern is with conceptual possibility rather than proof, and with a demonstration that we may justly claim to speak about God without claiming to define him.” (Metaphor and Religious Language.)

And one by Robert Browning:
“Welcome each rebuff that turns earth’s smoothness rough.”

And a couple by Dr. Root:

• “Fiction, because it is not expected to give hard definitions, is less likely to tempt the reader into thinking its world is complete or full understood. Fiction is able to describe without eliminating all ambiguities. In fact, often it is a rest with a degree of ambiguity.”
  
  
• “Without respect for criticism, faith traditions (and we might add apologetic methods) will tend to ossify and become unresponsive to the way things are.”
  
  
• “All understanding is approximate, and one must constantly be seeking better and better approximations.”
  
  
• “Lewis writes, often enough in his books, that Reality is Iconoclastic. And iconoclast breaks idols. As Lewis uses the phrase, he writes of God, as the iconoclast who seeks to break all false notions we may have of Him. One may pick up a new image of God: after reading a book; after having a late night discussion with a friend; after hearing a lecture or a sermon. These images may be particularly helpful in a given moment for putting many pieces of a very complex puzzle in place. But, if we hold onto these images too tightly, helpful as they might have been, they compete against one’s gaining a growing image of God. The image once helpful now becomes and idol. God, in is mercy, kicks out the walls of any temples built for him, because He wants to give to each more of Himself.”
  
  If reality is iconoclastic, and more complex than any individual might naturally grasp, it stands to reason that understanding will be enhanced in the context of community where opposition is encouraged, and perspective widened by dialectic association with others….”
  
  
• “Lewis himself is quick to remind his readers in many, many places that all human system, paradigms, models, and so forth are destined to become ‘discarded images’.”
  
  
• "In the Great Divorce, George MacDonald appears as a character, and declares ‘Ye cannot know eternal reality by definition.’ The word definition literally means ‘of the finite.’ We define things by virtue of their limitation -- they can be distinguished from other things –- and their function. In other worlds, for a thing to be defined it must be small enough to wrap words around it. In light of this, how can anyone speak of the Infinite? Even Jesus, in the Gospels, preaching about the Kingdom of God, says, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like...’ – he resorts to simile, metaphor, figures of speech, parable and so forth."

Squee.

If all the professors at Wheaton were like this, I would have killed to have gone there. They aren't, which is one of the reason's I'm glad I ended up here at Hillsdale instead.

Brain is going into giddy overload at the moment. Partly because I finally got the transcript, partly because it’s dark and chilled and raining outside (and I want to go splash in puddles and lie down in the wet grass), partly because people up here are cool, and partly because I’m going to my first ever formal dance thing tomorrow.