Podcast link:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-12/id1644949841?i=1000598505303
Church website link:
https://www.stphilipschurchsc.org/the-great-divorce/episode/2023-02-01/episode-12
Link to Mere Anglicanism Festal Eucharist:
SUMMARY OF LAST WEEK’S CLASS
Who Was George MacDonald, And Why Is He So Important In Understanding Lewis And The Great Divorce?
Some quotations:
TO MR. N. FRIDAMA, who seems to have asked Lewis about the steps in his conversion to Christianity:
15 February 1946
I was brought back (a.) By Philosophy. I still think [Bishop George] Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God is unanswerable. (b.) By increasing knowledge of medieval literature. It became harder and harder to think that all those great poets and philosophers were wrong. (c.) By the strong influence of 2 writers, the Presbyterian George MacDonald and the Roman Catholic, G.K. Chesterton
“All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it.—Surprised by Joy “I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me…took longer.” (172)
PREFACE TO LEWIS’S ANTHOLOGY OF MACDONALD’S WORKS
“In making these extracts I have been concerned with Macdonald not as a writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly Macdonald has no place in its first rank—perhaps not even in its second. There are indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even burn away the baser What he does best is fantasy—fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopœic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man… A myth is a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters. elements in his style. Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius—a Kafka or a Novalis—who can make such a story. Macdonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. [This Art]… is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry—or at least to most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and ‘possessed joys not promised to our birth’. It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are re-opened, and in general shocks us more fully awake thanwe are for most of our lives. The Divine Sonship is the key conception which unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.
I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.
There was no question of getting through to the kernel and throwing away the shell: no question of a gilded pill. The pill was gold all through. The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my ’teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was Goodness. But now that I know, I see there was no deception. The deception is all the other way round—in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from ‘the land of righteousness’, never reveals that elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but sensuous desire—the thing (in Sappho’s phrase) ‘more gold than gold’.
Chapter 9: Stage Setting
Lewis meets George MacDonald: “On one of the rocks sat a very tall man, almost a giant, with a flowing beard. I had not yet looked one of the Solid People in the face. Now, when I did so, I discovered that one sees them with a kind of double vision. Here was an enthroned and shining god, whose ageless spirit weighed upon mine like a burden of solid gold: and yet, at the very same moment, here was an old weather-beaten man, one who might have been a shepherdsuch a man as tourists think simple because he is honest and neighbours think “deep” for the same reason. His eyes had the far-seeing look of one who has lived long in open, solitary places; and somehow I divined the network of wrinkles which must have surrounded them before re-birth had washed him in immortality. “My name is George,” he answered. “George Macdonald.”
“Oh!” I cried. “Then you can tell me! You at least will not deceive me.” Then, supposing that these expressions of confidence needed some explanation, I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantasies (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life. I started to confess how long that Life had delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had come to admit thathis Christendom had more than an accidental connexion with it, how hard I had tried not to see that the true name of the quality which first met me in his books is Holiness.”
CONVERSATION ON HEAVEN, HELL AND PURGATORY THROUGH THE LENS OF CHOICE AND TIME
From the Preface to The Great Divorce:
“I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course–or I intended it to have–a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world.
C. S. LEWIS
April, 1945
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”
Encounters with a variety of Ghosts with various issues
MERE ANGLICANISM 2023: Telling a More Beautiful Story: Lessons from C.S. Lewis on Reaching a Fractured World-
Some Reflections from the Presentations of Conference Speakers
The Rev. Dr. Alister McGrath
Andreas Idreos Professor of Science & Religion, University of Oxford
Longing for a More Beautiful Story: Lewis and the Gospel in Today’s World
Longing/Beauty/Story
“Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”—The Weight of GloryChristianity is a story we can trust and through
Dr. Philip Ryken
President of Wheaton College
Lewis and the scriptural foundation for apologetics today
Lewis as literary critic
Lewis and myth
Lewis and the authority of Scripture
Dr. Peter Kreeft
Professor Emeritus, Boston College
C.S. Lewis as Prophet
Two most important books of the past century: Brave New World and The Abolition of Man
Remember 1) we are strangers and aliens in this world and our true citizenship is in the Kingdom 2) Christ is stronger than any power of this world 3) Divine grace, forgiveness, and salvation are continually being offered to each person 4) What can we DO?Sodom and Gomorrah almost made it—if God had found 10 righteous men he would have spared two great cities. THE most important thing we can do is to LOVE God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and to LOVE our neighbors as ourselves. You CAN make a difference. You can be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Dr. Amy Orr-Ewing
Director, Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics
What we can learn from Lewis about dealing with the issue of suffering in our apologetics today
Suffering of the world and individual creates an opportunity for ministry
Listening and Empathy are crucial
Longing for justice presents a Gospel opportunity
Dr. Simon Horobin
Professor, Magdalen College Oxford
What we can learn from the Narnia books and other Lewis writings about the importance of a beautiful story in sharing our faith
“Narnia: The Monsters and the Skeptics” (Tolkien and Beowulf)
Watchful dragons of the mind and heart
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Eustace: sin (greed) and its consequences, redemption, Truth“It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.”
Dr. Jerry Root
Professor Emeritus, Wheaton College
What we can learn from Lewis on how the imagination informs effective apologetics
Imagination as the organ of meaning
Listening for people’s stories—LISTENING with empathy
Asking questions
Sharing our own story
The Rev. Dr. Michael Ward
Member of the Faculty of Theology & Religion, University of Oxford
Telling a More Beautiful Story: Lessons for the Church from Lewis Today
Story can change our perspective and thus bring new light and hope
Reverence and Beauty and Joy as key components in sharing the story of JesusLewis as the exemplar—quotation from The Horse and His Boy
“
And being very tired and having nothing inside him, Shasta felt so sorry for himself that the tears rolled down his cheeks. What put a stop to all of this was a sudden fright. Shasta discovered that someone or somebody was walking beside him. It was pitch dark and he could see nothing. And the Thing (or Person) was going so quietly that he could hardly hear any footfalls. What he could hear was breathing. His invisible companion seemed to breathe on a very large scale, and Shasta got the impression that it was a very large creature. And he had come to notice this breathing so gradually that he had really no idea how long it had been there. It was a horrible shock.
It darted into his mind that he had heard long ago that there were giants in these Northern countries. He bit his lip in terror. But now that he really had something to cry about, he stopped crying.
The Thing (unless it was a person) went on beside him so very quietly that Shasta began to hope that he had only imagined it. But just as he was becoming quite sure of it, there suddenly came a deep, rich sigh out of the darkness beside him. That couldn’t be imagination! Anyway, he has felt the hot breath of that sigh on his chilly left hand. “Who are you?” he said, barely above a whisper.
“One who has waited long for you to speak,” said the Thing. Its voice was not loud, but very large and deep.
“Are you – are you a giant?” asked Shasta.
“You might call me a giant,” said the Large Voice. “But I am not like the creatures you call giants.”“I can’t see you at all,” said Shasta, after staring very hard. Then (for an even more terrible idea had come into his head) he said, almost in a scream, “You’re not – not something dead, are you?”“Oh please – please do go away. What harm have I ever done you? Oh, I am the unluckiest person in the whole world.”
Once more he felt the warm breath of the Thing on his hand and face. “There,” it said, “that is not the breath of a ghost. Tell me your sorrows.”
Shasta was a little reassured by the breath: so he told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. and then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all their dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the Tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of their desert journey and how they were almost at their goal when another lion chased them and wounded Aravis. And also, how very long it was since had had anything to eat.
“I do not call you unfortunate,” said the Large Voice.
“Don’t you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?” said Shasta.
“There was only one lion.” said the Voice.
“What on earth do you mean? I’ve just told you there were at least two lions the first night, and -”
“There was only one, but he was swift of foot.”
“How do you know?”“I was the lion.”And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. “I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you as you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the baot in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”
“Then it was you who wounded Aravis?”
“It was I.”
“But what for?”
“Child,” said the Voice, “I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.”
“Who are you?” asked Shasta.
“Myself,” said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again “Myself,” loud and clear and gay: and then the third time “Myself,” whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all around you as if the leaves rustled with it.
Shasta was no longer afraid that the Voice belonged to something that would eat him, nor that it was the voice of a ghost. But a new and different sort of trembling came over him. Yet he felt glad too.The mist was turning from black to grey and from grey to white. This must have begun to happen some time ago, but while he had been talking to the Thing he had not been noticing anything else“Now, the whiteness around him became a shining whiteness; his eyes began to blink. Somewhere ahead he heard birds singing. He knew the night was over at last. He could see the mane and ears and head of his horse quite clearly now. A golden light fell on them from the left. He thought it was the sun.
“He turned and saw, pacing beside him, taller than a horse, a Lion. The horse did not seem to be afriad of it or else could not see it.
“It was from the lion that the light came. No one ever saw anything more terrible or more beautiful.”From The Horse and His Boy, by C.S. Lewis
I WAS GLAD
Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, adapted from Ps. 122
I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord
Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem
Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together:
Whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord,
unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the Lord
For there are set thrones of judgment, the thrones of the house of David
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee
Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces
For my brethren and companions’ sakes, I will now say,
Peace be within thee
Because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek thy good.
