I’ve made it through the history of Christianity and am going to take a bit of a break from it before I look into the resurrection. I’ll go back to C.S. Lewis today.

I’ve been going through The Essential C.S. Lewis which gives snippets of Lewis’ work (with a few entire fictional works included). My library had Surprised by Joy so I went ahead and read all of it rather than just the snippet and am very glad I did. It was extremely helpful to me in understanding Lewis’ relationship between Paganism and Christianity.

As I’ve mentioned several times previously, Lewis was a staunch atheist. He claims the decision to become Christian was closest to being a perfectly free act of anything he had ever done. He wrote: “Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, “I am what I do.” On the imaginative level, he imagined himself as a man of snow beginning to melt and he didn’t like the feeling.

He had long held a theoretical Idealistic “ethic” that “finite and half-unreal souls were meant to “multiply the consciousness of Spirit by seeing the world from different positions while yet remaining qualitatively the same as Spirit; to be tied to a particular time and place and set of circumstances, yet there to will and think as Spirit itself does.” But because of competitive interests, this was difficult. “To prefer my own happiness to my neighbor’s was like thinking that the nearest telegraph post was the largest. The way to recover, and act upon, this universal and objective vision was daily and hourly to remember our true nature, to reascend or return into that Spirit which, in so far as we really were at all, we still were.” What happened when he decided he was a Christian was that now he must not just think about this, but actually do it.” That was the shift.

His most ferverent wish before becoming a Christian was to not be “interfered with”. He wanted to “call my soul my own”. He claims to have been “far more anxious to avoid suffering than to achieve delight.”

Lewis’ first awakening to something beyond himself was through Norse Mythology - which, of course, is paganism. It awakened something in him even though he knew the stories were fiction. He became a Christian because he came to realize that unlike the myths of paganism, the myth of Christianity was a true myth. That’s not to say it was “factual” but rather that the story was based upon a living being and actual occurrences (someone who did something) rather than the figment of someone’s imagination.

But, he continued to hold much regard for the imagination. He said that when he was young and read Homer, he was a romantic. But “this slight error saved me from that far deeper error of “classicism” with which the Humanists have hoodwinked half the world”. When he matured, he continued to enjoy Homer every bit as much without the romantic leanings. In fact, it had even more meaning for him than it did when he was more romantically inclined.

He began to view paganism as a prophetic dream of religion and claimed to be too experienced in literary criticism to view the Gospels as myths. “They had not the mythical tasste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion - those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them - was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognizable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson… yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god - we are no longer polytheists - then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not “a religion,” nor “a philosophy.” It is the summing up and actuality of them all.

Lewis had started out with an idea of the Absolute which, by reading Norse Mythology, moved to Spirit. And later, to “God”. With each step, he claims there was less chance to call one’s soul one’s own.

Of friendship, Lewis said that every man’s First friend is the “alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights….But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle…. When you set out to correct his heresies, you find that he forsooth has decided to correct yours!”

I found this to be particularly interesting… In 1913, when C.S. Lewis was 14 years old, he entered a school called Wyvern College (Coll). The kids in the school were 13-19 years old. All boys. “The Bloods” are the older students who have earned a certain amount of authority and prestige (aritocracy within the school) and “the Tarts” are the “the pretty, effeminate” boys who become “mistresses of the Bloods”. Lewis deals with this arrangement quite casually.

From the book:

The Tarts had an important function to play in making school (what it was advertised to be) a preparation for public life. They were not like slaves, for their favours were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled. Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liason often had some permanence and, far from being merely sensual, was highly sentimentalised. Nor were they paid (in hard cash, I mean) for their services; though of course they had all the flattery, unofficial influence, favour, and privileges which the mistresses of the great have always enjoyed in adult society. That was where the Preparation for Public Life came in. It would appear from Mr. Arnold Lunn’s Harrovians that the Tarts at his school acted as informers. None of ours did. I ought to know, for one of my friends shared a study with a minor Tart; and except that he was sometimes turned out of the study when one of the Tart’s lovers came in (and that, after all, was only natural) he had nothing to complain of. I was not shocked by these things. For me, at that age, the chief drawback to the whole system was that it bored me considerably…

And that is why I cannot give pederasty anything like a first place among the evils of the Coll. There is much hypocricy on this theme. People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable than this. But why? Because those of us who do not share the vice feel for it a certain nausea, as we do, say, for necrophily? I think that of very little relevance to moral judgement. Because it produces permanent perversion? But there is very little evidence that it does. The Bloods would have preferred girls to boys if they could have come by them; when, at a later age, girls were obtainable, they probably took them. Is it then on Christian grounds? But how many of those who fulminate on the matter are in fact Christians? And what Christian, in a society so worldly and cruel as that of Wyvern, would pick out the carnal sins for special reprobation? Cruelty is surely more evil than lust and the World at least as dangerous as the Flesh. The real reason for all the pother is, in my opinion, neither Christian nor ethical. We attack this vice not because it is the worst but because it is, by adult standards, the most disreputable and unmentionable, and happens also to be a crime in English law. The World will lead you only to Hell; but sodomy may lead you to jail and create a scandal, and lose you your job. The World, to do it justice, seldom does that.

If those of us who have known a school like Wyvern dared to speak the truth, we should have to say that pederasty, however great an evil in itself, was, in that time and place, the only foothold or cranny left for certain good things. It was the only counterpoise to the social struggle; the one oasis (though green only with weeds and moist only with foetid water) in the burning desert of competitive ambition. In his unnatural love-affairs, and perhaps only there, the Blood went a little out of himself, forgot for a few hours that he was One of the Most Important People There Are. It softens the picture. A perversion was the only chink left through which something spontaneous and uncalculating could creep in. Plato was right after all. Eros, turned upside down, blackened, distorted, and filthy, still bore the traces of his divinity.